Much Ado About Vampires

him over to the nearest butt-height rock. “You were skewered clean through. Those sorts of wounds simply do not stop bleeding. Now, you sit here, and I’ll go find someone to help you. Try not to move around.”

He dug in his heels midway to the rock, his expression alternating between incredulity and annoyance. “You don’t want to listen to me, do you?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said, tugging on him as gently as I could. “You’re in shock. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m simply doing what’s best for you.”

A little ripple of surprise claimed him. You’re . . . tending me?

If you want to call it that.

No one has ever done that. No one has cared.

Well, sheesh, you’re hurt, badly hurt, and although I may not want to have sex with you again —

You do, though. I can feel your interest in me just as you can feel mine in you.

—although I may not want to have sex with you again, I’m not so callous that I’ll let you die here. Or come close to dying again.

Why not? You think I’m a murderer and abuser of women.

“I never said you abused a woman. I just said you killed one.”

“One day we will discuss why you had a vision of my past, but for now, allow me to relieve your anxiety by showing you this.” He pulled open his shirt.

Instinctively I flinched at the blood on his belly, but then I realized that, rather than looking at a great big gaping hole, I was seeing blood and nothing more.

“You . . . I saw the sword. What . . . ?” I touched the spot on his stomach where the sword had pierced him. There was an ugly red line there, hot to the touch, with dried blood flaking off around it, but no open wound.

“Dark Ones have regenerative powers.”

I spread my fingers out over the wound, noticing that his eyes lightened a little in color from a dark forest green to jade. “You’re hungry again.”

“I lost blood. That happens.”

“You should feed—”

“No. You’ve given me too much blood already.”

“I feel fine now,” I said, waving my arms around in the air as if that proved my point.

Querida, as you found out, to a Dark One, the act of feeding can be highly arousing. Do you really wish for me to bury myself in your body again?

The words, spoken with such intimacy, caused my body to go up in flames. For a few seconds, I was about to tell him to go ahead; then the good part of my brain, the smart part, shoved the inner devil aside and took over. “I’m happy to give you more blood if you need it, but there will be no more sex, Alec. That was an aberration, nothing more.”

He said nothing, but I could feel him thinking plenty. He just didn’t let me see what it was he was thinking.

I walked along beside him as he rebuttoned his shirt, heading once again to the north. “So, about this Tool thing. I don’t like being evil. How do I make it stop?”

“You’re not evil; you’re simply a conduit to Bael’s strength. That’s all the Tools are—they have no abilities of their own; they simply allow others to tap into his power.”

“So you used me to access the English dude’s power to destroy his own demon?”

Alec’s expression was bleak, surprisingly so, considering that he had just defeated someone who I assumed was going to make mincemeat of us both. “Yes.”

“Why aren’t you happy about this?” I asked, nudging him in the side. He wrapped an arm around me, pulling me up next to him. I ignored, for the moment, the fact that I felt extremely secure snuggled against him. “This is a good thing, isn’t it? I’m not evil. You got rid of that mean chick, although why she wanted to hurt me is totally beyond me. Assuming she wanted to hurt me. Maybe she wanted to take me out of the Akasha?”

“She’s Bael’s right hand. I can assure you that for whatever reason Bael desires your presence—and I assume it’s because he put two and two together, and realizes what happened to the Tools—it is not going to be something you want to experience.”

I shivered at the dark images in his head. “That doesn’t explain why you’re not happy about taking down his evil henchman.”

Alec sighed again. He seemed to be doing a lot of that.

“I can’t help it. My life has suddenly become fraught with things to sigh over,” he said, his grip around my waist tightening. “I’m not happy because if you are now effectively the Occio di Lucifer, it means every being with half a brain is going to want you.”

I stopped and glared at him. “Just because we had sex half an hour after I first saw you doesn’t mean I’m a raving nymphomaniac!”

“Want you to use you, Cora,” he interrupted, pulling me back up against him. “Or, more properly, to use Bael’s power.”

Horror skittered along my flesh as I understood what it was he meant. I had a vision of evil being after evil being lining up to use me as some sort of a demonic power source, blasting the world with innumerable cruelties. “Oh, shit.”

“And lucky me,” he added, his voice as grim as his expression. “It appears you have chosen me to protect you from them all.”

Chapter Six

“You know, this doesn’t look like hell.”

“That’s because it’s not Abaddon. It’s the Akasha.” Alec strolled beside me as we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing slightly along the smooth walls and stone floor.

“Yeah, but that greeter person told Diamond and me that this was a place of perpetual torment, and that sounds like hell to me. However, this”—I waved a hand around at our surroundings—“this just looks like any old office building. I don’t see anything tormentish about it.”

“Try opening one of the doors,” he said, nodding to one as we passed it.

I paused. “Why? Is something ghoulish going on in there? Are people being dismembered? Tortured? Eaten by fire ants?”

He crossed his arms and nodded toward the nearest door. “Open it and see.”

“All right, but if it’s something gross, I’m aiming at you when I barf up my breakfast.” I opened the door and looked in, braced for the worst.

A group of a half-dozen people sat around a long table, papers scattered across its surface, which was also littered with half-empty bottles of water, and a rainbow of highlighters. Crumpled paper spilled off the table onto the floor, leading in a trail to a whiteboard covered in several different styles of handwriting.

“We are agreed, then, are we not,” said a man in a business suit at the head of the table, “that examining the cost savings that will accrue from our cutback on the performance-related functions will make good any and all productivity shortfalls we experience this quarter ? ”

A woman shook her head and tapped at the table with one of the highlighters. “I believe that if we realign our organizational aims to better benefit the enterprise, we can absolve our office of the clearly unsustainable redundancy of not only the expense claims, but of the external consultants, which I think we all agree will lead to the downfall of this and other management teams within the venture.”

“No, no, no!” a third man said, hoisting his pants up over his beer belly as he rose to his feet. “If we form a task force to investigate the benefits of a mentor program—”

“Good god,” I said softly, closing the door. “It’s worse than I thought.”

Alec nodded. “Middle-management committees. Still think this isn’t a bad place?”

I shuddered. “We have to get out of here.”