Private Demon

Thierry discovered that he could not take his mouth from hers.

His wife had never liked to kiss, preferring to use her mouth more directly when they were intimate. Thierry used human women for blood only; loving his Angel had kept him from taking more. Oh, there had been moments. Women so beautiful they seemed to glow beneath his hands. But he had been a man of his word, and after rising to walk the night, he had clung to his marriage vows as the last of his honor.

Now he clung to this human woman, helpless, suspended in her passion.

The hands on his chest curled tight, and her thin body trembled, moving her against him in small, shivering waves. At last he felt her pulse slow and found the strength to tear his mouth from hers, panting with the heat and life she had given him, feeling the hateful ravenous beat surge up inside him, the killer within that demanded this and more and everything she had—

"Enough." He pushed her back, holding her as she swayed.

Had he taken too much? He could feel the old, forbidden madness grinding inside him, demanding the rest of her. How simple it would be to give her rapture as she enthralled him. There was more to be had from her than the blood in her veins. Her trousers were flimsy; he could have them off her in seconds. No one would stop them or see them here. Like this, she would refuse him nothing.

Like this, he would kill her. "Enough."

"No." As lost in l'attrait as Thierry was in her kiss, she reached for him again. "More."

In that moment he nearly put her on her back, for there was nothing in this world or the next he wanted more than to bury his cock and his teeth in her flesh.

"Chérie," he whispered, desperate now. "You must stop or I will not. Stop, please."

Her hands fell to her sides, and she looked down at him, her eyes wet. "Please."

It was good that he was insane, or she would drive him to it. "You must leave me now," he told her, dragging in air as he fought for control. "You will forget me."

''I will forget you." A single tear slid down her cheek. Another chased it to her chin.

"You will go home and sleep." He stood and brought her to her feet with him. There was blood on her lips, and he bent down and quickly licked it away before it could drip on her blouse. The second taste of her nearly undid him. "In the morning, what you remember of this will seem like a dream."

"A dream." She smiled a little. "Remember."

He buttoned her blouse and put his arm around her to guide her to the edge of the alley, it took everything he had to remove his hands from her, He looked for oncoming traffic and anyone who might see her. The street was deserted, she police gone. He found her keys in her pocket and pressed them into her hand. "Go now. little cat. Drive straight home. Sleep." He couldn't help adding, "And dream of me."

She nodded and walked to her car, moving like a small robot. By the time she drove around the block l'attrait would disperse, but its lingering effects would ensure that she followed the instructions he had given her She would dream of him, but he would never see her again. That was as it should be.

His savior turned her car around to drive away. Thierry would have retreated into shadows again, but he could not. Not when he saw the vanity plate on her front bumper.

JEMA'S BENZ.

"Hold still."

Dr. Alexandra Keller planted one hand between Arnaud Evareaux's bare shoulder blades to keep him from rising from the exam table. With her other hand, she adjusted the overhead lamp shining down on the lower half of his torso. Mysterious bumps of various sizes bulged beneath Arnaud's otherwise flawless skin. Two light scents, much like lavender and parsley, tinted the air.

"It burns," he complained.

"It should." Alex selected a small bump, lanced it, and quickly dug out a metal pellet shaped like a small freshwater pearl. The scent of parsley became more intense. The pellet made a clinking sound as she dropped it in her discard tray. "Next time you decide to go trespassing in the moonlight, pick a property whose owner doesn't shoot first and ask questions later."

Arnaud turned his head to give her a one-eyed glare. "I would have pried them out myself, had the coward not shot me in the back."

She plied her scalpel again. "Given the scatter radius, Arnie, if the coward had shot you in the front, you'd be prying this stuff out of your groin." She smiled as Evareaux groaned and closed his eyes. "Or I would."

It took another thirty minutes to remove all the buckshot from Evareaux's lower back and buttocks, but his Darkyn physiology healed the lance wounds almost instantly, so once the last pellet hit the tray, all Alex had to do was sponge him clean and hand him his clothing.

"I mean it, Arnaud," she warned. "Stay away from those farmers' daughters. The next one might blast you in the face."

"You were able to heal the master's injuries," he said as he stepped into his pressed trousers.

"The master had his face beaten off. He didn't have little bits of metal lodged in his brain." She went to the sink to wash up. "So how long have you been part of the garden gang?"

"I have served the master for six hundred fifty-four years." Arnaud sounded huffy.

"What sort of talent do you have?" She didn't think he'd tell her, but the Darkyn had mental abilities that gave them some form of power over humans. Cyprien could erase memory, while his seneschal could compel humans to do things physically. According to Cyprien, every Darkyn's talent was different and unique to the individual.

Alex had a talent, too, but she didn't like hers.

"My gift is none of your business," the vampire told her, his voice growing colder.

"Is it something more embarrassing than me picking shot out of your ass'" When he said nothing, Alex's lips twitched. "Okay, we'll let that be your little secret. How long have you been a vrykolakas?"

He fiddled with his tie. "I was cursed after the master returned from England."

She stripped off her surgical shroud, bailed it up and tossed it in the dirty linens hamper. "You were not cursed. You were infected with something that caused your DNA to mutate." She saw his expression. "God does not hate you, Arnaud. If He exists." Personally, she wouldn't put money on it.

"I violated my holy vows." He shrugged into his jacket. "I became a creature of the night who feeds off the blood of the living."

Alex thought of her brother, John, a Catholic priest more devoted to his God than his only living family. John had lived more piously than the pope. She pulled off the mask hanging from her neck.. "What did you do before that?"

"Excusez-moi?"

Alex rolled her eyes. "What did you do to earn the Almighty's wrath before you became a blood-feeding night creature?" Arnaud appeared confused, so she added. "You'd have to do something pretty rotten, right? So what was it? You were a Templar. A priest with a big sword. Did you forget to polish your armor? Skip some rosaries? Play hooky from the last Crusade? I need some details here, Arnaud."

"You do not understand." He made the same gesture that Cyprien did whenever Alex got on his nerves. "You are only a child among us." He stalked out of the treatment room.

"Wait, I wanted to ask you—Damn it." Alex kicked her instrument cart, sending it flying across the floor to collide with the table. Both fell over and made a gratifying amount of noise. The Darkyn were really starting to piss her off.

Moments like these made Alex miss her former life as a busy, successful reconstructive surgeon in Chicago. The patients she'd treated took a lot longer to heal, but she'd been able to make a difference in their lives. Okay, so she hadn't had the world's greatest relationship with her brother. When they were kids, John had protected her, cared for her—hell, he'd been her whole life. It was only after becoming a priest that he'd tossed her away and gotten sucked into the church. We might have settled things between us, she told herself. Eventually.

Until Michael Cyprien had sent his men to kidnap Alex and bring her to New Orleans, and the world had turned upside down.

Most of what had happened in the six months since that fateful day in the garage at Northeast Chicago Hospital still seemed surreal to Alex. Cyprien had snatched her because she was one of the few surgeons in the world fast enough to successfully operate on him. He had abducted her, and then convinced her to restore his face. After the surgery was when things had gotten out of hand, and Cyprien had nearly killed her in a mindless lust for blood. Alex had later woken up back in Chicago with no memory of what had happened. In time she had learned that Michael had saved her life by giving her his own blood, but in the process he had also infected her with it.

To top off everything, they'd fallen in love with each other.

Alex bent down and began picking up the instruments from the cart, now strewn like bizarre confetti around the fallen table. The office she was using at night to treat the Darkyn belonged to a dermatologist who practiced there during the day. He was one of the many humans who served the vrykolakas, but he wouldn't want to see his treatment room looking like a biker gang had ridden through it.

"I don't want to be a vampire," Alex muttered. "Vampires are snotty. Vampires are pigheaded. Vampires are chauvinistic, narrow-minded, idiotic cave trolls."

"You forgot inconsiderate, thick-skulled, and high-handed," a low, deep voice said from behind her.

She smelled roses but didn't stop working. "That too." Once she had filled a basin with instruments that would now have to be sterilized again, she turned to face her lover. "Did he tattle on me, or was it the noise?"

"I woke up and you were gone."

Michael Cyprien was the epitome of the tall, dark, handsome man. Only the strands of white hair framing his face reminded her of their first meeting, when his head had been reduced to a blind mass of horrific scar tissue and healed-over pulverized bone.

"Next time I'll remember to say good-bye before I leave for work." She made a mental note to give Arnaud a barium enema when he came in for his follow-up. "I'll ask Phillipe to look into a punching bag for my office."