Chapter Thirty-Two: Slayer

Evan

The look of pure concern in her eyes stabbed into me like a knife to the chest. The wound closed as I dragged my thumb across my hand, but she had already seen.

The damage had been done.

“I never meant for you to see me like this.” I gazed at her with pleading eyes, quietly begging her to understand.

Before now, she’d seen me as a domineering presence—always careful, and always in control, but by the very nature of the vampiric curse, there was an inherent weakness.

One that made me look and feel truly pathetic.

“What—what’s happening?” She asked with a furrowed brow as she extended a gentle hand to touch me, only for me to flinch away. “Evan?”

“I should have known this would happen, sleeping away from my coffin.” Shaking my head, I moved as far away from her as I could in the bath, water sloshing around us. “But I haven’t needed nearly as much blood since I met you, so I thought I’d manage until you recovered enough.”

“Your coffin? What does that have to do with—”

“Sleeping in a coffin is like a stasis,” I explained, unable to look in her direction. “A vampire doesn’t need blood while they’re in stasis, unless they’re critically injured and using it to heal.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before we went on this trip?” Her voice was dripping with concern and disappointment, and as much as it stung, she wasn’t wrong to feel that way.

Realistically, it was a hell of a lot of danger to put her in without warning her. If it weren’t for the reclaimed remnants of my soul giving me the will to fight my hunger, I’d have drained her by now.

“I thought I had it under control.” The excuse sounded flimsy, even to me.

“So, you need blood.” She was quiet for a moment, like she was deep in contemplation. “What happens if you don’t get it?”

“Nothing, if I have anything to say about it—”

“—And if you don’t?” She interrupted, her voice deadly serious.

This wasn’t one of our scenes. I wasn’t her Dominant right now, I was her lover. Her fucking asshole of a lover who didn’t give her the whole truth before diving head first into a dangerous situation.

I hadn’t felt this way since the eighties.

“I could . . . I could go into a frenzy.” My voice was quiet, sincere, my shame laid bare before her. “Helaine, you should go to the el camino, wait for me there while I—”

My eyes shot open wide when the aroma of her blood filled my senses, and I sucked in a hissing breath of air when my head snapped up to look at her, cutting into her palm with the serrated edge of the cake knife.

“—What are you doing?” My mouth felt unbearably dry, and all I could focus on were the rubies of blood dripping down the meat of her palm, tainting her pale skin.

“Drink,” she commanded, extending her hand to me. “You need it.”

I wanted to tell her, ‘no.’ I wanted to climb out of the tub and walk away so I wouldn’t risk hurting her. The last time I bit her I took too much, and I wasn’t even frenzied at the time.

She hadn’t had enough time to fully recover.

But I couldn’t stop myself. Whether it was her voice or her blood, she held power over me.

She gasped when I grabbed her by the wrist, drawing her close so I could drag my tongue along the wound she made on her palm. My eyes fluttered shut from the sheer tantric bliss of her blood.

My lips pressed against the now-sealed wound of her palm, and she cried out as my fangs pierced the skin of her wrist. Her body went limp against me, and she clung to me desperately as I held her in my arms.

“Evan.” My name echoed through my skull in her voice, but I was too far gone to answer, until her fingers wove through my hair and she tugged so sharply that I couldn’t help but release her. “The door.”

It took me a moment to come back to my senses, but sure enough, I could hear the doorknob rattling, like someone was trying to pick the lock.

“We need to go, now.” With a taste of her blood, my head was clearer, my senses sharper. Whatever was on the other side of that door wasn’t good for either of us.

I helped her out of the tub and we raced to pull our clothes onto our wet bodies. When I heard the click of the door though, I knew there wasn’t time. I shoved Helaine into the adjoining closet, covering her mouth and leaning in close.

“These people will kill you if they even suspect that I bit you,” I warned her. “Stay here, and don’t make a sound.”

“Evan—”

I silenced her with a kiss before shutting the door, turning around just in time for the intruders to burst in. There were three of them, and there was only one way out of this room.

Normally, three experienced slayers against an underfed vampire in an enclosed space would have good odds, but they didn’t know I was protecting something very dear to me.

And they looked young—couldn’t be out of their thirties. Not so young that they’d be sloppy, but just old enough to get arrogant, I hoped.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I warned them, very much aware of the stakes on their belts. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Your entire existence is wrong,” the tallest one hissed before lunging at me. “You blood sucking freak.”

He was easy to dodge, but I didn’t just need to survive, I needed to lead them out of here—away from Helaine.

They’d only need to look at her and they’d put two and two together. Whether they assumed she was a victim or not, they’d kill her just to prevent the risk of her changing.

As if I would ever do that to her.

With inhuman speed, I rushed the two by the door, hissing with pain as one of them lashed a silver chain around my wrist.

But it worked to my advantage—even as my flesh sizzled and burned under the chain, I used it to drag the slayer out of the room with me in a mad dash down the mercifully empty halls.

He wasn’t willing to let me go, and I wasn’t willing to let any of them lay a finger on Helaine.

To the surprise of the man holding the chain, I stopped suddenly, turning around in the blink of an eye and using his own momentum against him, letting him impale himself on my hand.

I pulled his still-beating heart out of his chest, locking eyes with the two who had followed him. Sinking my teeth into the heart, the blood tasted mundane, inferior in comparison to the hellish elixir that flowed through Helaine’s veins, but it still nourished me, and it did the job of making the other two rush toward me.

To my death or theirs, and I’d had a lot more experience than them.

“This didn’t have to happen,” I taunted them, encouraging them to follow me further down the hall. “I was minding my own business.”

“A vampire’s business is never a good thing.” One stabbed at me with a wooden stake, but it was easy to dodge him, and he left himself open for me to grab the back of his neck and whip him down the hall like a rag doll.

I couldn’t blame them for fearing me, and those like me, especially those who hadn’t regained a portion of their soul.

We were monsters, well and truly.

But knowing that didn’t mean I’d just lie down and die.

I let one of them land a punch—it didn’t do much, but it let me in close enough to grab him by the neck and slam my forehead into his, sending him crumpling to the floor.

What I didn’t expect was searing pain in my back when the last one hit me.

“Silver knuckle dusters,” he taunted as he hit me again, the spiked flares on the knuckles digging into my skin like a hot knife. “Perfect for monsters like you.”

He didn’t seem to notice her creeping behind him, but my heart sank when I saw Helaine.

‘Run,’ I tried to will her in my mind as the slayer rose his fist to hit me again.

But she didn’t run. Instead, she pulled a red silk rope from behind her back, tossing it around the man’s throat and tightening it behind him.

“You should’ve left when he gave you the chance,” she snarled, not so much as flinching as he tried to pry the rope off, digging his nails into his own neck in desperation as she strangled him. She jammed her knee into his back, pushing him down further as a dark aura began to swirl in her eyes. “I won’t let you take what’s mine.”