Much Ado About Vampires

“So here’s the thing, de Marco: You want Dale’s Occio, you can have it . . . just as soon as you get Alec and Diamond out of the Akasha.”

“I am not an Akashic removal service!” de Marco snarled, his black eyebrows pulled down to form a unibrow. I was tempted to tell him it wasn’t a good look for him, but felt he wouldn’t be receptive to such criticism. “You owe me, mortal, not the other way around. You will hand over the Occio now.”

“Or what?” I said, buffing a fingernail on my jeans.

“Or I’ll make you sorry you ever drew breath,” he snarled.

“Hello? Who has the eyeball of Dale? That’s right, I do, and that means you can’t hurt me.” I fervently prayed that was true.

Ulfur weaved a little, like he might pass out. Noelle looked startled.

Maybe it wasn’t true.

De Marco seemed to swell again, then let out a scream of sheer frustration. “One.”

“Huh?” I stopped edging toward Noelle, who was in turn sliding covertly away from de Marco.

“One.” His nostrils flared. “I will have the Guardian summon one more person, but that is it.”

“But . . . I have two friends there.”

“Then you will choose between them. Now!”

I swallowed back a little zing of fear at the look in his eyes. He didn’t strike me as being too mentally stable. “Um . . .” I thought frantically. Diamond, I should tell him to get Diamond out. She was my friend . . . of a sort . . . and she didn’t do anything to deserve being banished to the Akasha. I would get Diamond out.

Leaving Alec behind.

Alone.

With no one to feed him.

And worse, he would know I hadn’t cared enough about him to rescue him, too.

But he was a murdering vampire and, by his own admission, had betrayed his friend. He had accepted the punishment meted out to him. He was resigned to being in the Akasha.

“All right,” I said, sending a little prayer that Alec would understand why I had no choice but to pick Diamond. “I’ve decided.”

“Give the name to the Guardian, and let us be through with this!” de Marco snapped.

“Noelle, would you please summon . . . ?” I looked at her. She looked at me, waiting. I thought of Diamond. My inner devil wept and called me all sorts of names.

No one had ever tended Alec’s wounds.

“Summon Alec Darwin, please,” I heard someone say, and to my astonishment—and inner devil’s joy—it was my mouth that spoke the words.

Chapter Seven

Alec stared at the spot where, seconds before, Corazon had stood. He narrowed his eyes. He put out a hand to touch nothing but empty air.

She wasn’t there. Just like that, she was gone.

Someone must have summoned her.

“Good riddance,” he said defiantly, not wishing to admit to the hurt that spiked through him as sharp as a dagger. It was annoyance, not pain, he told himself. She was simply someone put there to torment him, and he’d be damned if he gave her the power to hurt him.

She had left him, just left him, without so much as a backward glance, or one last jab at his appearance. She hadn’t even called him a murdering bloodsucker before she left, dammit, and he was beginning to be fond of the way she caressed the words in her mind.

“Very well,” he said aloud to no one, gritting his teeth and looking around for a new spot in which he could almost die. “So be it. She’s gone. I’m here. That’s all there is to it.”

But it wasn’t all there was to it. Cora was out in the mortal world with no one to protect her, no one to keep her safe from anyone who might want to use her.

“I don’t care,” he told the nearest rock, stomping off to find a new resting spot. “She’s not my problem anymore. I don’t mind at all never seeing her again, never smelling her, never watching those hips that know how to make me hard with just a little twitch, never letting her suck my tongue almost out of my head, never making her hum with ecstasy. I don’t need her or her blood. I’m quite happy being miserable here on my own.”

He kicked a rock, defying it to dispute his words, knowing he was a fool, but in too much pain to care.

She had left him.

He spotted a rock that he felt would suit as a spot where he could perch and be even more miserable than he already was by admitting that her defection had, in fact, hurt him as deeply as anything could, but just as he was approaching it, the world shifted, gathered itself up, and punched him in the gut.

“Alec!”

He was groggily aware of a voice that seemed to sing in his veins, a scent that wrapped itself around him, gentle hands that turned him over and touched his face.

“Sorry,” another female voice said. “I told you it was harder to summon beings of a dark nature. I don’t think I could have done it if you hadn’t been here to provide a connection to him.”

“Are you all right? Alec?”

He opened his eyes to find Cora’s exotic, mysterious eyes filled with concern as they peered at him. “You didn’t leave me?”

“No,” she said, a smile curling those delicious lips.

He couldn’t stop himself. He slid his fingers into her hair and pulled her down to him, his heart singing with the pleasure of tasting her again, of plunging into her sweetness, of feeling her respond to him with a little shiver of excitement.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here? A Dark One. How very interesting.”

A man’s voice interrupted his pleasant contemplation of just how quickly he could get Cora into bed so he could make her hum like she’d never hummed before.

“You did not tell me you were a Beloved, woman,” the man continued.

There was something about his voice that had Alec leaping to his feet, a startled—and breathless, he was smugly pleased to note—Cora shoved behind him.

Two men stood watching him—one he recognized as being the lich who had ties to his friends Kristoff and Pia, but the other . . . “Who are you?”

“I am de Marco. You are known to me,” the man answered, his eyes narrowed as he raked Alec over with a look that had him instantly annoyed. “I make it my business to know Dark Ones who cross my path, and you are friends with that irritating reaper, are you not?”

Do you know him? Cora asked.

No. But he seems to know me.

I don’t think that’s a good thing, Alec.

I suspect you’re right.

“Yes, this is going to work out well,” de Marco said with a fat smile. “Ulfur, take the Dark One to our guest rooms. You, Beloved, you will now give me the Occio.”

Alec? Cora asked, pressing against his back.

Yes, we run. Right now.

She didn’t want to debate the subject; she just turned on her heels and ran for the door. Alec anticipated the shouted order that the man de Marco gave, and, with a look of apology, slammed his fist into Ulfur’s face as the latter attempted to stop them. He grabbed the hand of the other woman who stood there, hauling her after him with the assumption that she was not a part of what was going on.

“Who are you?” he asked as he shoved her through the door, slamming it shut on de Marco’s face.

“Noelle. I’m a Guardian. Is Cora really your Beloved ? I’m a Beloved, too, although the Dark One who I was supposed to save found someone else, and—”