Holly raised her brows. “I get that Shane felt like he owed you…but why was that? I mean, if he’s some all-powerful vamp—”
“He’s the strongest vampire I’ve ever met.” And he’d come across more than his share.
“Then how did you convince Shane that the guy actually owed you?”
He remembered a battle on sand that burned, and blood that formed the only river around them.
Before Eric had joined the FBI, he’d been an Army Ranger, working in the Middle East. “I met him on my second tour,” he said, voice soft. He didn’t usually talk about his Ranger days, not with anyone, even Holly. “Detonations were going off all around me. Screams were filling the air. And I thought I was going to die.”
Holly didn’t speak.
“There was a school up ahead. So small, right in the middle of that freaking desert. I could hear the children crying out from inside.”
She flinched.
And he kept remembering. “Shane went to help the children.” He could still hear the explosion. “I don’t even know how the hell he got there, or why he was there, but when the detonation went off, a detonation that should have killed those kids, that fucking insane vamp was right on top of it.” Absorbing the blast.
Nearly getting torn apart.
“Fire can kill a vamp.” And Shane had been willing to run into fire for Olivia. Don’t give her that much of yourself, man. “I helped him.” An exchange of blood in a place where he could feel the cold touch of death. “We both made it out of there.” And Eric …he was mostly alive now because of that change.
Mostly.
“You’re his friend.”
He was. “Yes.”
She walked toward him. Tipped back her head. The smile that crossed her face was sad. “What do you think your friend will do to you if Olivia Maddox dies?”
He already knew. Shane was protective of his allies, but his enemies…he showed them no mercy. “He’ll kill me.”
Chapter Ten
“This isn’t what I expected,” Olivia said as she walked into the lush apartment that overlooked the lights of Seattle. Night had just fallen, but the buildings all around them glowed with illumination.
Shane shut the door behind them. “Let me guess…were you picturing some kind of medieval castle, maybe a dungeon, some restraints?”
Her cheeks flushed.
“Been there, done that.” He stalked toward her. Brushed his hand over her cheek. “Would be willing to do it again in a heartbeat for you.”
She caught his hand. “I don’t understand you.”
His smile flashed, and it was a predatory grin. “That drives you crazy, doesn’t it? Your whole deal is that you have to understand the monsters. But maybe you can’t figure out what makes us all tick. Maybe there are some things you’ll never know.”
His body was so close to hers, and the sensual awareness that he sparked within her just wouldn’t lessen no matter how many times she tried to calm herself down.
Riding with him in the car had been close to torture. He’d filled that small space. Dominated it. Every time he’d shifted even a tiny bit, she’d been hyper aware of him.
“I want to know about you.” And she did. This man had left the FBI behind, and he’d come with her. He kept protecting her, looking out for her. No one had done that before. After she’d lost her mother at eighteen, Olivia had been on her own.
I don’t feel like I’m alone anymore.
He rolled his shoulders, but didn’t pull away from her. “What if you don’t like what you learn?”
“You’re the white knight, the guy who keeps rushing to the rescue.” Not the monster she’d thought. “What’s not to like there?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been feared, rightfully so, for centuries.”
She tightened her hold on him. “You were born a vampire.”
“Do you understand what that means? The bloodlust, the hunger—they were with me, always. I grew up thinking it was normal to track and hunt prey…prey that was human.”
She didn’t let go.
“My father thought it was great sport to hunt humans. Of course, it was more challenging to go after the werewolves. And they tasted better.”
“Shane…”
“That’s what my life was. Death and pain. I was a monster. I am a monster. There are sins on my soul that can never be erased, no matter what I do.”
Atonement. “That’s why you work for the FBI. You’re trying to make up for what you’ve done.”
Now he did pull away. He strode toward the window. Stared out at the night. “A part of me always knew…what I was doing, what I was…it was all wrong. But when someone calls you a fucking god, hell, the power rush you get is too strong to deny.”
He put his hands on the glass window pane.
“We ruled the world then, until I looked around and saw it was a world full of death and pain. The children begged for mercy, the women fled, and the men were in agony.”
She shook her head, trying to shove away the images that his words pushed into her mind.
“My father was the leader. The most powerful vampire in existence, and he didn’t expect an attack to come from the one he trusted above all others.” His laughter held a cold, bitter edge. “Maybe that’s why I was able to take his head. He trusted me too much to expect a betrayal.”
He’d killed his own father? She hurried forward.
He turned to her. “You’re supposed to back away when a man makes a confession like that. When he tells you of the bloodlust and the death, you should be afraid.”
She was. Her breath felt cold in her lungs. “You haven’t hurt me.” Not once.
“Not yet,” he said, his jaw tightening. “My father wanted me to be just like him. There was a village that was trying to resist him, trying to fight back against us. They called us devils, and my father wanted to show them what hell was truly like.” His eyes were cloudy with memories. “I saw the children there. Terrified. And I saw my bloody past…it had to stop.” His lips thinned. “So I stopped it.”
There was pain there, filling the air all around him.
Then he smiled, and it was a chilling sight as his fangs flashed. “I could tell you good things, you know. About how I’ve saved lives. Stopped killers. But the scales never really balance, and I’ve always known, deep inside, that my father was right.”
“Shane…”
“I am just like him. I have the same darkness. It pushes me. It calls to me. It tempts me.” He paused. His eyes narrowed. “Or it did, until something else tempted me more.”
He tempted her. Danger, darkness, a vampire with a past so bloody and tortured. But he tempted her.
“My earliest memory,” she heard herself whisper, “is of being trapped by blood and fire. The fire was closing in on me and the blood…it was on my hands. My feet. I was screaming, but there was no escape for me.”
He didn’t speak. It was his turn to listen.
“I always knew something bad had happened to me, but I never could break through and figure out just what it had been. When I asked my mother, when I’d tell her about the nightmares that would never stop, she’d just whisper—”
Olivia broke off because now her mother’s whispers made a strange sense to her. And they left her chilled.
“She’d wish that I would have peace,” she finished, voice breaking. “And that the darkness would leave me alone.”
Only it never had. The darkness had been a living, breathing thing inside of her. Whispering sometimes, twisting insidiously within her. And she’d sought out killers, others who must feel that same darkness because she’d wanted to control herself.