Death’s Sweet Embrace Page 5

  “What do you want?” Kitt screamed into the emptiness.

  Her voice startled the human woman; she stilled, and then started panting again even faster. Kitt crawled, watching all around as she felt blindly for her cell phone. Just as her fingers brushed against the hard plastic, someone landed behind and slammed her forward, to lie facedown in the snow.

  Black leather-clad legs in five-inch heels kicked the phone out of reach, then circled while Kitt struggled to gain her feet. Another mighty kick, this one to Kitt’s abdomen, stopped her from rising and sent her onto her side nursing what she suspected were broken ribs. She curled into a fetal position, trying to suck air into her lungs, and saw the attacker for the first time as her ribs cracked back into place and healed. Broken bones weren’t an issue for a Bestiabeo, the true name of her race.

  The female who kneeled beside Kitt’s human patient was straight out of a 1980s heavy metal video, complete with leopard-print halter top, tight leather pants, heavy makeup, and a teased blue-black perm. Kitt wondered if she’d hit her head harder than she thought until the female turned to her.

  “You shouldn’t have interrupted my pets’ playtime,” said the time-warp metal queen as she rubbed the back of her fingers across the human’s cheek.

  But there was nothing tender about the rock-chick’s gesture. And another thing Kitt instantly knew was that the female was Aeternus and not a dreniac like the others. There was no dreniac scent or any sign of death-high addiction, but there was something seriously wrong behind those dark eyes. Lunacy or perversity, she couldn’t be sure which.

  As Kitt dived for her phone, the Aeternus hauled the human up and wrapped her long crimson-painted fingers around the frightened woman’s chin. “Uh-uh-ah . . . smash it against the wall or I’ll snap her neck.”

  The terrified victim’s eyes pleaded with Kitt to obey. She had no choice and rammed the cell phone against the bricks with all her weight and frustration. It shattered into dozens of pieces of black and gray plastic and green circuit board.

  “There’s a good little pussy cat,” the rocker chick crooned as she caressed the human’s cheek again and smiled widely. “But you’re much too trusting.”

  With a quick flick of her wrist, the crunching snap of the human’s breaking neck reverberated off the walls of the surround buildings. Kitt stood stunned—unable to believe or comprehend what had just happened. As the woman’s lifeless body crumpled into a heap, shocking anger ripped through Kitt’s gut, triggering the onset of transformation.

  She tore at her clothes, trying to remove them before the change ripped them to shreds, but the change was happening too hard and too fast because of her rage.

  Within less than a few seconds, a new all-time record for Kitt, her full felian senses were primed and ready for attack. Bloodlust rose as she pinned back her ears and hissed. She crouched and leapt, but the Aeternus swatted her aside like a bug.

  She hit the wall with her paws and pushed off to land back on her feet, then crouched again, tail flicking. The metal queen crouched too. Using all of her parahuman strength, Kitt launched herself again and managed to swipe the Aeternus’s face with her front paw and scrape across her gut with hind claws.

  The metal queen’s expression grew murderous. The wounds started to close immediately, but blood still ran down her cheek, dripping on a shredded leopard-print top already soaked crimson from the claw marks on her chest.

  “You’ve ruined my favorite outfit, bitch,” the insane Aeternus screamed.

  Kitt crouched low and stalked forward on her belly, gathering the strength in her legs. Then she sprang, this time aiming for the female’s throat. The force of the impact threw them both to the ground. The Aeternus flipped and gained the upper hand by straddling Kitt and pushing back her head. Kitt struggled to free herself, but the Aeternus had a grip of iron and soon her throat was stretched beyond comfort.

  She desperately tried to twist out from underneath, striking out at her with her claws, scrabbling to gain footing on the concrete pavement, but the Aeternus’s grip tightened. Kitt’s neck felt like it was going to tear open. Panic and darkness crept up her spine with the certainty she was going to die.

  When the dreniac’s grin grew wider and much more confident, Antoinette had the feeling that being there might not be such a good idea. This lair was his territory—an entirely unknown factor to her—and where he held the advantage.

  She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and a female melted out of the closet, grinning like a fool on smack. A soft scrape signaled someone else as another female climbed out from behind a sofa.

  Three of them.

  Bed springs creaked off to the left and a couple appeared in the doorway of the next room.

  Shit . . . five. Not great odds.

  The female at the bedroom door wore only a man-sized heavy metal T-shirt, and leaned against the male in a pair of jeans, his lean, wiry torso covered in tattoos.

  She shouldn’t have been so cocky . . . But dreniacs don’t live in communes. Ever.

  And yet here they were. She’d heard of two or three teaming up for a short time, but they often fell out quickly, usually with fatal outcomes for at least for one of them. Dreniacs didn’t know how to play nice with others. From the stench in the room, this lot had been living here for weeks.

  Carefully, she backed away a couple of steps so she could keep all five within her periphery—and hoped to hell there weren’t more of them. She raised the sword before her and tried to figure which one or ones would attack first.

  “Where’s Joaquin?” the female who had come from behind the couch asked.

  Antoinette guessed Joaquin was the headless male back in the alley.

  “This bitch wasted him and Tiggy, then came after me,” Pennywise said, confirming her suspicions.

  “No!” The despondent female turned her haunted, hate-filled gaze on Antoinette.

  Bingo!

  Within the time it took to tense for the attack, the dreniac female flew at her with a hollow wail. Antoinette braced back on her left foot, and just before the enraged female reached her, she sliced low and brought the blade back up a little higher. The razor edge found little resistance as the katana’s blade sliced cleanly through the dreniac’s body. The female fell to the floor with three ugly wet splats. The head rolled a little, rocked back and forth, and stopped, facing away from her; the legs kicked and twitched a little at Antoinette’s feet, and the torso oozed dark dreniac blood onto the carpet.

  The others stood staring at the pieces, stunned into silence. All except the guy with the tattoos—he just tilted his head and looked at her with amusement.

  Antoinette wasn’t about to wait for them to regain their senses. Keeping momentum, she continued, striking the female on her right through the throat, then, with a twist, freed the head from the dreniac’s shoulders.

  The last remaining female turned and ran into the bathroom, locking the door with a snick. It wouldn’t keep Antoinette out for long . . . but she did still have two males out here to deal with first.

  Pennywise circled around behind her, while the tattooed guy smiled and moved right. There was something familiar about him: his sunken cheeks were covered in a light beard; dark circles ringed his eyes. And even though he had the typical appearance of a dreniac junkie, something about him pricked the back of her mind.

  Antoinette tried to keep both males in sight without giving them an opening to strike. Pennywise came for her but broke off at the last minute. A distraction. Giving Tatts-guy enough time to grab a weapon, a sword much like her own—and the way he was twirling that blade, he knew how to use it. The stench rolling off him meant he’d already fed tonight, so he’d be sharp.

  “Well, well, well. The great Antoinette Petrescu is one of us now,” Tatts-guy said.

  “I’m nothing like you,” she spat, wondering how he knew her name.

  Pennywise stopped and looked at her in openmouthed surprise.

  “Not yet, but give it
time. Patience was never one of your strong suits,” Tatts-guy replied. “Wait until the hunger gets to be all you can think about, when it eats away at you.”

  “Been there, done that—”

  “Bought the T-shirt.” He finished Antoinette’s quip while twisting his sword around in the air. “You really don’t recognize me do you, Antoinette?”

  “Sure I do—you’re just the same as every other dreniac piece of shit I’ve ever put down over the years.”

  “I’m hurt. After all we shared in Reno. Though, I guess it was a few years ago,” he said, raising the tip of his sword.

  Shit, it couldn’t be.

  Her eyes dropped to his left shoulder. And there it was, almost lost in the intricate skin art: a tattooed caricature of a grinning skull with vampire teeth, a sword speared through the top so the blade showed through one eye socket, and a rose wrapped around the pummel.

  “J.J.?” She breathed his name in disbelief.

  He’d been a year above her at the Petrescu training school, even though she was five years younger; and she’d had a bit of a crush on him, more because of his abilities than any real desire for him. But some years later they’d crossed paths again while hunting the same dreniac. He’d been very human—but then again, so had she. “What happened to you? You were one of the best.”

  He smiled. “That’s right, baby. Remember that weekend? I was turned two days after you left me sleeping alone in that hotel room.”

  After she’d bagged the dreniac and the bounty, she’d given J.J. a consolation prize: a weekend of drinking, partying, and sex. It’d been a brief interlude for a couple of Venators—but whatever they’d shared then wouldn’t stop her from taking him out now that he was a filthy, murderous dreniac.

  The whole time J.J. had kept her talking, Pennywise inched closer. She saw him out of the corner of her eye just before he lunged from the left, forcing her to sidestep into the bedroom. She didn’t have room to swing her weapon and could only kick out, landing her foot in the middle of his chest, sending him crashing back into the wall.

  Sentimental feelings didn’t stop J.J. from thrusting his sword at her either. She leapt back just before the tip entered her gut and slammed the bedroom door on him hard, trapping his forearm and forcing the blade to drop from his hand. She slid her toe under the fallen weapon and flipped it up, catching it midair with her left hand.

  Now she had both weapons. She spun them with a flick of her wrist. Nice. Both blades had perfect balance, not surprising since they were made by the same master.

  Why had she never thought of using two blades before? Because it hadn’t been practical then; she’d needed one hand for her gun. But now, now it felt . . . right.

  Pennywise ducked left, picked up a beat-up metal coatrack from just inside the bedroom door, and swiped at her head. Antoinette leapt backward over the furniture and shoved the bed forward with her foot. It crashed into Pennywise’s knees, his bones crunching with the impact as he fell on the dirty gray bedcovers. He started to rise almost immediately, his bones popping as they began to heal. She had time to cross her arms behind his head, each sword placed on either side of his neck.

  Then before he had a chance to spin around on her, she uncrossed her arms and the blades sliced through bone and sinew with ease. The body fell forward as the head dropped to the bed and rolled, landing with a dull thud on the floor. Dark dreniac blood sprayed across the bedcovers and up the opposite wall. She doubted they’d be getting the deposit back on this room.

  Antoinette shoved the bed out of the way and moved into the outer room. The door to the suite was open and the room empty. J.J. had run. But there was still one more thing she had to do.

  She kicked in the bathroom door and found the girl crouching in the bathtub, shaking violently and crying.

  “Please,” the girl said, holding her hands up, tucking her chin into her chest. “Please don’t kill me.”

  Now that the others had been taken care of, Antoinette realized the girl’s scent wasn’t tainted. And she was terrified, her raised hands shaking and tears coursing down her cheeks, dragging mascara into black smudges. This didn’t mean J.J. hadn’t already embraced her, for if she had taken the eternal kiss, then she was still doomed.

  “Did you take his blood?” Antoinette asked.

  “What?” The girl’s trembling hands dropped a little.

  “Did you taste blood when he kissed you?”

  “N-n-no.” The girl completely lowered her hands and looked at Antoinette. “I don’t think so.”

  She leaned closer to the girl. J.J.’s dreniac scent was all over her, but Antoinette still couldn’t tell if she’d been embraced. The best thing to do was take her in and watch if she went into the transition. Then if need be, she could be taken care of.

  “Stay here,” she told the girl and went back into the bedroom, closing the door behind her before taking out her phone.

  Chapter 6 - A Beastly Rescue

  The Aeternus female tightened the grip on Kitt’s jaw and panic screamed in her mind as her head was pulled further back. Kitt’s limbs trembled as they started to change back to human form, but she fought it. If she transformed, she’d lose much of her felian strength and abilities. Can’t change back. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to quell the panic and stay in cat form.

  The strain on her neck reached unbearable agony, cutting off her airway. She reached up with partially transformed, fur-covered human hands to break the iron grip. But the Aeternus shifted her hands to Kitt’s evolving human forehead.

  Just when she felt her body and mind couldn’t take the lack of oxygen, something slammed into them both, breaking the hold. Air rushed back into her lungs as she scrambled further away from her assailant while gulping air into painful, screaming lungs. Furious sounds of fighting added speed to her escape. When she was far enough away, she glanced over her shoulder at the large black mannish shape grappling with the Aeternus.

  Her eyes had changed back to human along with the rest of her and didn’t have the energy or the mental capacity to switch back to felian form. She could barely feel the falling snow on her naked skin as she watched the battle before her.

  The humanoid black form snapped elongated jaws, tearing at the Aeternus female with ferocity. Kitt searched for her clothes and glanced at the fight going on behind her. For a single instant, the shape came out of the snow and into light. Her breath turned to ice in her chest, freezing her vocal cords as well as her ability to process oxygen.

  Raven. Her dark warrior.

  His head and jaws were lupine, his body human shaped, covered in thick black fur, and he still wore jeans. He’d retained the best of both forms—the strength and speed of the wolf and the dexterity and balance of a human. To have halted the transformation that far advanced took an incredible amount of power and control.

  Kitt located her clothes: the shirt had lost several buttons, her new slacks, the ones she’d stressed over getting mud on, were completely shredded, and her underwear was useless. Then she noticed her abandoned thick coat on the ground beside the human woman’s body and slipped it on.

  Raven’s claws sliced and teeth snapped. The female Aeternus gripped the fur on either side of his face and head-butted him right between the eyes. He staggered back, shaking his head as a growl slowly built and erupted from deep within the half-human, half-wolf creature. He launched himself at the female, hitting her with enough force to propel them both to the ground, and managed to twist her under him. Finally, he had the upper hand.

  Antoinette dropped to the alley floor not far from the tangled heap of limbs and fangs. It was enough of a distraction for the feral female to shove Raven off and speed off down the alleyway.

  Raven skidded to a stop beside Kitt as he reverted to human form. “Are you okay?” he asked, touching her face, turning her arms, running his hands up her calves as he checked for any damage.

  “Yes,” she croaked.

  Her wounds had stopped bleeding; cut
s, scrapes, and gravel rash healing quickly.

  “Get her back to the Bunker,” he said to Antoinette, stripping his jeans as he changed to full wolf form. Then took off after the escaping female.

  Antoinette tilted her head and frowned. She squatted beside the human woman’s body and placed two fingers on the side of her throat feeling for a pulse. “What happened?”

  “She came after you left,” Kitt said, slowly gaining control over her trembling. “And just murdered the woman, in cold blood. Snapped her neck without a second thought.” Kitt pulled her thick coat tighter.

  At least the snowfall was slowing. The male human’s body was crusted with snow and ice. She’d failed to save either of them.

  Antoinette pulled out her cell phone. “I’m going to call this into base for Oberon to deal with.”

  “Did you get him?” Kitt asked.

  “What?” Antoinette said in the middle of dialing.

  “The dreniac . . . Did you get him?”

  She answered with the same killer grin, though this time Kitt was glad for it. After witnessing what that cold bitch did to the woman, she was happy that Antoinette was on their side.

  Oberon was there to meet her and Antoinette when the door slid open. Kitt must’ve looked a sight, dressed only in her knee-length tan coat. His face turned to stone and he pulled her against his big body.

  “Kitt, I’m so sorry.” His voice hitched slightly as he guided her down the spiral stairs.

  “It wasn’t your fault.” She hugged him more for his sake than hers.

  “How could you have put her in such danger?” he growled at Antoinette.

  Kitt pulled away and looked up at his thunderous features glaring at Antoinette.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have left her alone.” Antoinette hung her head.

  “Don’t you dare blame her—I insisted she go,” Kitt said, her own anger surfacing. “How was she to know an insane bitch waited in the shadows?”

  “She wasn’t there to hunt dreniacs and shouldn’t have gone into that alley,” Oberon said.