Night Play (Dark-Hunter #6)(8)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

"Don’t think about it, hon," Tabitha said as she popped the sealed top off the beer with her bare hand and handed it to Bride. "We never see the signs we don’t want to see. You know? Look on the bright side, at least your guy didn’t leave you because you were nuts."

"You’re not nuts."

Tabitha gave a disbelieving laugh at that. "Yeah, right. Amanda aside, only fruits and nuts come out of my family tree. But hey, at least we’re entertaining."

Bride gave her a chiding stare. "Does Mina know you say that?"

"Mina? She’s a bigger loon than I am. Have you seen her collection of ancient vampire-killing kits? I swear she’s the one who made that anonymous bid at Sotheby’s for that turn-of-the-century vampire-slaying kit."

Tabitha placed an entire doughnut into her mouth and swallowed it whole.

Bride wrinkled her nose at the action. "Please tell me how you stay so skinny eating the way you do. I barely eat half a Pop-Tart and I gain thirty pounds. I swear I’ve seen you eat more tonight than I eat in an entire week."

Tabitha licked the sugar from her fingers. "You sound like Amanda."

"Why would she say that? You guys are twins and she’s every bit as twiggy as you are."

"Yeah, but she’s a good fifteen pounds heavier than I am and she hates me for it. I don’t know why you guys complain, at least you two have boobs. I have the body of a twelve-year-old boy."

Bride scoffed. "Any time you want, I’ll trade you."

Vane growled at that. The last thing he wanted was a skinny mate. There was nothing wrong with Bride, and if he were in human form, he’d show her exactly what those lush curves did to him.

Unfortunately, he needed her girlfriend to leave first.

"Is something wrong, boy?" Tabitha asked as she came over to him.

He trotted over to Bride.

Tabitha gaped at him. "Well, I’ve just been dissed by Benji. Jeez. I think you’ve picked up a lifelong friend here, Bride. Just wait until he finds out your dad is the if-you-love-them-neuter-them king."

Vane cringed in spite of himself.

They wouldn’t dare "Shush, Tabby, you’ll scare him." She looked down at him as she stroked his chin. "But you’re right, he hasn’t been fixed."

And he damned well wasn’t going to be, either.

"Maybe I should take him over to Dad’s tomorrow and have him look him over."

"You going to keep him, then?" Tabitha asked.

Bride lifted his head so that she could look him directly in the eyes. "What do you think, Mr. Wolf? You want to stay with me for a little while?"

She had no idea. If he had his way, he would be a permanent addition.

Chapter 3

Vane stood outside the bathroom in human form while Bride took a shower.

Tabitha had left a short time ago after threatening one last time to hunt down Bride’s ex and hurt him.

If Vane ever laid hands on the bastard, there wouldn’t be enough left of him for Tabitha to bother with. Not that he should feel that way. After all, if Bride hadn’t been on the outs with the man, she wouldn’t have been his tonight.

And he might never have known that she was his mate.

But that was human rationale and human rationale had no place in his animal world.

"I’m not human," he breathed, feeling the profound pain of that statement. At least he wasn’t fully human.

No one, not even him, was really sure what he was.

He was a cursed hybrid who belonged to no real group. Half Arcadian, half Katagaria, Vane had been born in the native form of a wolf pup only to find his native form changed to human once he hit puberty.

He flinched as he recalled the day he’d changed over. The terror of it. The fear. The confusion. All of his life, he’d existed solely as a wolf, and then for a few months, against his will, he’d been locked inside a human body and unable to transform back into a wolf at all. His new body had been alien to him.

He hadn’t known how to eat as a man, how to survive or to cope. Even walking had been difficult at first. He’d been assailed by human emotions and feelings.

Human sensations.

Worst of all, he’d been weak. Helpless.

Nothing had ever been more degrading to him than to realize he couldn’t fight back. That he was completely reliant on his brother for survival.

Every night he’d prayed that come the morning he would be an animal again, and every morning he awoke to the horror that he was a man.

If not for Fang and Anya, his pack would have killed him. Luckily, his brother and sister had shielded him from the others and had helped him hide the fact that he was no longer a pure wolf.

For centuries he had hidden from everyone, even himself, the fact that after his puberty he held a human heart.

How could such a change even be possible?

Yet here he was: a living contradiction. A living impossibility.

And he was mated to a regular human.

Vane clenched his marked hand. He couldn’t hide the truth of his physical being from the Fates. They had known what he was and they had sought to bind him to a human woman.

Why?

Life as a hybrid was hard enough. The last thing he wanted was to father children who would be even more outcast than he was.

Would they be human or Were-Hunter?

And all those arguments telling him why he couldn’t mate with Bride didn’t amount to anything when the human heart inside him craved the woman on the other side of that closed door.

Even now he could imagine what she must look like in there, nak*d. The water sliding against her pale skin as her hands slid over her body, soaping her thighs, her The wolf in him demanded he kick it down and claim her.

The man in him just wanted to hold her close and protect her.

He’d never been so torn. So confused.

So damned horny!

Vane trailed his hand over the cool silk pajamas that Bride had pulled out of one of her boxes and left on the chair beside the door. They held her unique scent of strawberry potpourri and woman. He lifted the top and inhaled the richness of her as his groin burned and strained.

It was all he could do to not go to her in the shower and take her again. But it wouldn’t accomplish anything other than to terrify her.

She was human and knew nothing of his world. She knew nothing of him.

A wave of hopelessness consumed him. He didn’t know how to court a human female.

Not to mention that his being mated to her didn’t really affect her at all.

She could leave him and live a nice, normal life with another man. She could fall in love with anyone and bear that man’s children.

Leaving her to that end would be the decent thing to do. By the very laws that governed his people, he couldn’t force her to take him as her mate. His own parents were proof of that. For three weeks his father had kept his mother chained against her will. He’d brutally tried to force her into accepting a Katagari male as her mate.

No amount of violence had worked.

His Arcadian mother had refused, even after she’d learned she was pregnant.

To her, all of the Katagaria were animals who should be slaughtered without compassion. Vicious even by Katagaria standards, his father had never tried to show her any other side of himself.

Then again, his father had never had a more tender side. Markus was violent at best, lethal at worst. Vane and Fang both bore enough scars inside and out to prove that.

So the three-week window of mating opportunity had closed for his parents and left both of them frigid and sterile. Since then his parents had lived in open warfare with each other’s people.

And with their own children.

"Don’t look at me with that bitch’s eyes, whelp. I’ll rip your throat out." In fact, his father had spent the whole of Vane’s life trying not to look at him. The one time Vane had met his mother, she had made her own position clear.

"My base form is human and that alone is why you and your Katagari brother are alive. I couldn’t bring myself to kill you as helpless puppies even though I know I should have. But now that you’re grown, I have no such compunctions. All of you are savage animals to me and if I ever see you again I will kill you as such."

Honestly, he couldn’t blame her for that, given what his father had done to her. He had never expected kindness from others and so far he hadn’t been disappointed. Except with the bear clan. He still didn’t understand their tolerance of him and Fang. Especially Fang, who couldn’t protect the bears or work for his keep.

Why would they take them in when their own wolf clan would kill them if they found them?

Vane let out a deep breath as the reality came crashing down on him. He was living under a death sentence with no pack to help protect or raise his young. No pack to shelter his mate. He couldn’t expose Bride to the danger that was a daily part of his life.

No matter what the Fates decreed, he couldn’t have a human mate. Bride would never accept him and his world. She didn’t belong to it any more than his mother had belonged with his father.

They were different species.

His job was strictly to protect her until his mark was gone. Then she would free and he "I’ll be a f**king eunuch," he growled under his breath, hating the very idea of it.

But what else was there?

Keep her in chains like his father had done his mother? Beat her into submission? None of that would work. Besides, Bride was his mate. He couldn’t find it in him to hurt her in any way. Unlike his father, he understood what "protective" meant.

Vane had spent his entire life guarding Anya and Fang. Taking their pack’s and their father’s abuse for them. He wasn’t about to hurt the one person the Fates had designated for him.

He heard Bride turning off the water. Flashing back to wolf form, he forced himself not to go into the room where he would meet temptation.

But then, he didn’t have to. Bride came out a few seconds later with a towel wrapped around her.

He ground his teeth at the sight of her standing there with the damp towel clinging to every curve of that damp, voluptuous body. Worse, the towel was too small and left a large gap of succulent flesh bared to his gaze.

She dropped the towel to the floor.

It was all he could do not to whine, especially when she bent over to sort through a box of clothes for her underwear.

Bride started at a strange sound from her new pet. Turning, she saw the wolf staring at her with an intensity that was extremely wild and disturbing.

A tremor of fear went through her. "You’re not going to attack me, are you, boy?"

He came over to her with his tail wagging. He jumped up unexpectedly and licked her cheek, then bounded back to the other side of the room.

Well, that was weird.

Frowning, she grabbed her panties and pulled them on, then quickly dressed in her pajamas. They were a bit tight, which was why they were in storage. Her mother had given her a whole new wardrobe two years ago when she had gone on a liquid protein diet that had caused her to drop twenty-five pounds. It had worked, but within a year every ounce of the weight had come back plus another ten pounds.

Bride sighed and put the matter out of her mind. Screw Taylor and his diets.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, she was destined to be a round Irishwoman, and no amount of anything would ever change the fact that she was chromosomally damaged.

"I should have been born in the fifties when it was fashionable to be pudgy."

Sighing, she went over to the couch to sleep. The wolf came over to her and stuck his nose close to her own.

"Sorry, kid," she said, patting his head. "No room for you tonight. Tomorrow we’ll get a real bed, okay?"

He nuzzled her face.

"You are good company, aren’t you?" He seemed to like it best when she stroked him just under his chin. He closed his eyes and wagged his tail as she gently scratched him there. "So what am I going to name you?"

She thought it over, but only one name hovered in her mind "Don’t be stupid," she said to herself. It would be ridiculous to name him after a one-night stand.

And yet "Would you mind being called Vane?"

He opened his eyes at that and licked her chin.

"Okay then, you’ll be Vane Two. Vane for short, though."

Bride reached over her head to turn off the lamp, then snuggled down to sleep.

Vane sat in the dark, watching her quietly. He couldn’t believe what she was going to call his wolf form. If he didn’t know better But no, she didn’t have any sort of psychic powers. Maybe she had just liked his name.

He waited for her to fall sound asleep before he changed to human form again and made sure all her doors and windows were locked. Once he was certain she’d be okay for a bit, he flashed from her apartment back to his room at Sanctuary.

It was pitch-black here, too. He opened the door and headed to the next room, where Fang was staying. As he’d been since the night Vane had brought him here, his brother was in wolf form, lying comatose on the bed.

Vane sighed wearily as he crossed the room.

"C’mon, Fang," he said, moving to the bed. "Snap out of this. I miss you, little brother, and I could really use someone to talk to right now. I have one serious problem on my hands."

But it was useless. The Daimons had taken more than his brother’s blood.

They had stolen his spirit.

The shame of what had happened to Fang was more than the wolf could face. Vane understood that. He’d felt it himself when he’d found out he was human.

There was nothing worse than being attacked and not being able to fight back. He flinched as memories assailed him.