people, both Carpathian and human, killed. He could have no trace of her in him or on him. He needed to shed the scent of her beloved horses as well.
Marguarita blinked several times, shock and pain in her eyes. He’d put that there, but he couldn’t comfort her. He couldn’t be part of her. She was not yet Carpathian and she didn’t understand the way their world worked. She looked around her, as if coming out of a dream, dazed and confused. He couldn’t blame her, his entire body felt as if it had been going up in flames. He’d been very lucky he was so tuned to danger.
The horses reared and pawed the air, slashed at their stall doors and screamed a protest. Marguarita turned toward the horses, her face going pale.
Her breath caught in her throat.
He reacted instantly, jerking Marguarita around to face him, half shaking her, his fingers biting into her shoulder like a vise. “Do not try to follow it. It is vampire. The undead has spread his tentacles out and is reaching for you even now through the very animals you love.”
“You will trigger the alarm that tells them to seek shelter. They would be in my way and witnessing a battle will only make them fear me more.”
The tears spilled over and fear shimmered in her enormous eyes.
He gave her a little shake. “You will do as I tell you without question. I will take you to the house quickly.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her feet from the ground. “You will stay there until I come to get you, no matter how long that takes. Do not speak to me. Do not connect with me. I expect your obedience in this.”
He felt the urgency consuming him, the one that told him the battle was close. He had to weave safeguards over the houses and stables to prevent destruction of life and property, which vampires were prone to do just for fun. Most of all he had to banish every trace of Marguarita from his mind and body, from his heart and soul. There could be no hint of her where the enemy could catch even the faintest of scents.
He flew with dizzying speed, masking them as he took her into the house. He went right on through to the master bedroom; the walls were the thickest there and shoved her into a tight little alcove against the wall. “Do not move. If you do, Marguarita, there will be severe consequences.”
She drew up her knees, nodding, wrapping her arms around her knees to hold herself tight. Her face streaked with tears, but the fear in her eyes was all for him, not for what he might choose to punish her with if she disobeyed.
Zacarias couldn’t think about the taste of her breath, or how she felt pouring into his mind, he had to shut down completely and become empty, a warrior alone and without anything to lose. He turned his back on her and hurried out to weave his strongest safeguards over every building on the property. It took strength and stamina to hold such strong weaves in the face of the approaching vampires.
He inhaled the night. Three of them. Ruslan would not send his best on the first outright attack, but he would send seasoned vampires. They were coming from three directions, trying to box him in and pick the battlefield. Zacarias wanted them far away from his woman and everything she loved. He took to the air, streaking toward the far end of the De La Cruz ranch, where the rain forest met the clearing, where Ruslan had tried to infiltrate with his poisonous plant and set a trap to aid his advancing vampires.
A game of strategy then. Ruslan was a master at strategy and he would do his best to manipulate Zacarias into a trap. This attack would be the opening gambit to test his strength and resolve. He had stayed too long in one place so Ruslan would assume, since he hadn’t moved on, that Zacarias had been mortally wounded in the battle in Brazil. It would have been reported that there were droplets of blood in the air. Ruslan’s hounds would have followed that blood trail to Peru, to the De La Cruz hacienda. Ruslan would be thinking his recovery was slow and that he was vulnerable.
Zacarias was vulnerable, but not for the reasons Ruslan believed. He made certain that he removed all scent from his body, and all traces of her from his mind. Loneliness hit hard, nearly unbearable, now that he knew what it was like with her inside of him, filling him up. Without her connection to him, the world went gray and dull. Everywhere he looked, the vivid color was gone. The bright vibrant greens of the rain forest, the bursts of brilliant colors of flowers winding up the trunks of trees, even the hues on the lacy ferns all had disappeared to be replaced by a dreary gray.
Resolutely, he turned his mind away from Marguarita. It took a great deal of discipline to do so. Lifemates needed one another. Once those threads were woven, they were unbreakable, and his mind would forever seek to touch hers. Add to that the need to see in color, the ability to feel only when she was connected to him, and he felt tremendous need. Fortunately, he was an ancient warrior, and his priority above all else was Marguarita’s safety.
He turned his back on the human structures, homes that meant so much to them. He had never understood before. He was a nomad, continually moving for self-preservation, not even allowing his brothers to know his resting places or his secret lairs. He had dozens throughout South America, places he could retreat to and rest in when necessary, but now, he understood what a home was. Not the structure. Not the place. The woman.
He took to the sky, a thin stream of vapor, drifting with the slight breeze, riding the drafts, feeling his way, searching for the exact location of his enemy. In the distance, he could see a single black cloud churning madly, heading toward the pasture where the herd was bedded down for the night. Angry red ropes of lightning lit the edges of the black, turbulent cauldron.
He marked the cloud, but remained a distance from it. Ruslan would have coached his vampires. He would warn them of Zacarias’s personality. He was a fighter and unlike Ruslan, he didn’t hesitate to face his enemy. The master vampire would have told his pawns that Zacarias wouldn’t run, that in fact, he would go straight for trouble. The giant storm cloud, looking so very evil in the otherwise clear sky, was merely a calling card to draw him out— and a rather weak one at that.
He sent an illusion streaking toward the cloud, a mere replica of himself that was more air than substance, but he was embedded in that vague shape, just as a master was in all illusions. He felt the puppet of himself hit something unseen, something solid and sharp. His illusion shredded. Instantly he grew one long nail and tore a laceration in his wrist. He called a soft breeze and shook droplets of blood into the wind, sending it out over the battlefield he’d chosen, that smooth field where Ruslan had so carefully arranged a trap with his foul plant.
His blood was powerful. He was ancient Carpathian, unquestionably one of the most powerful hunters alive. The scent of his blood would draw the vampires like hounds. They would sniff those droplets and the power contained in a single drop of blood would be a prize to fight for. They would also transmit triumphantly to their master that Zacarias was indeed wounded and that they had scored the first coup with their simple trap. Ruslan would believe that Zacarias was still hurt, but he would know the ruse of a storm cloud had not drawn him out.
He hovered over the field, allowing the breeze to take more droplets of blood into the air and scatter them wide. It was a call that would be irresistible. A newly made vampire would have already crawled out of the bushes to try to find a precious bead and lap it up quickly before it was taken from him. The fact that there was no stirring right away told Zacarias that Ruslan had sent experienced fighters after him.
Instincts rose. The primal hunger for the fight. He lived for it. Knew the rush as intimately as he did the kill. He waited with endless patience born of a thousand such battles. It took seven minutes and the first of the three vampires showed himself. The brush just inside the rain forest nearest the fence withered, turned brown and shrunk away from the unnaturalness of the undead as he parted the long fronds and peered into the field.
Zacarias had seen this one before, only a few years earlier, or perhaps it was more—time passed now and meant nothing—but even then, before the Carpathian had turned, Zacarias had known he was already lost to honor. Zacarias had avoided him, as he did all Carpathians. He was a hunter, no friend to any of them. He didn’t want to know them before he killed them. This one was no more than five or six hundred years old and someone turning at that age was beneath even contempt. What could possibly drive a Carpathian who had not suffered the full ravages of time to turn away from honor?
The vampire raised his nose and sniffed the air, drawing the potent scent of ancient Carpathian blood into his lungs. His tongue flicked out greedily, his nostrils flared. He grimaced, showing the rotting, pointed teeth, already blackened and sharp. His name had been something to do with the forest—Forester, or something close. It mattered little. Before, Zacarias thought of him as
