A Vampire's Claim (32 page)

Exasperation crossed her features, taking away the sadness and worry, pleasing him. “You have a lot of gall, bushman.”

“I’m doing you a pretty big favor. After saving you in the desert, besides. Not that I’d bring any of that up to have my way.”

Her blue eyes softened on him in a way he liked, and her chuckle, though genuine, was strained. “Fine, then. But sure as I agree to it, you’ll survive just to see if I’ll live up to my side of the bargain.”

“You bet your arse.” He grinned wickedly. “Literally.” Leaning down then, he feathered his lips over her cheek even as his hands eased down from her waist, curved over buttocks, squeezed enough to make her sidle closer in to him. Oh, yeah, she was responsive there. It was enough to make him hard again, their recent coupling notwithstanding. “I have some fantasies stored up.

Not only about taking you there. I like to put a sheila over my knee and spank her good, get her all pretty and red before I do it.

Use my hand. Sometimes I think about a belt.”

Tina had never been into it that rough. The occasional smack for playfulness, but he was careful enough about restraining his baser urges so she hadn’t been subjected to the needier, rougher side of it. Dealing with his unnaturally sized organ was more than enough to ask of any woman. But he saw the light flush in Danny’s cheeks, the parted lips and considering light in her eye. It made him swear under his breath. God, he wished it was three days from now already. And that he was sure he’d survive. But it would be a hell of a fantasy to die with, all said and done.

“You come back to me, my arse is yours for the taking. Once.” She gave him another exasperated look. “Food and sex. That’s the value you place on your life.”

“Not sex, love.” Nipping her nose, he fought the surge of emotions the return of her teasing brought to him. “Sex with you. You being willing to give over to me, even the one time.” As her eyes became more serious, he shook his head. “No, don’t. I do understand things. About vampires, humans. But for one time at least, it will be just you and me. Give me that, and you’ve given me more than heaven can offer. I won’t be lying down and giving up.”

“Okay,” she said at last, quietly. “Come back to me, Dev. I would miss you.”

“If I don’t”—he curled a mental hand around the pleasure of those words, and held them to consider later—“you take care how you handle Ruskin. You’ve got intelligence, love, but your lust for his blood almost took you into foolishness last night during that fencing match. Don’t bother to deny it. Plan it out as carefully as you did with Ian. More, because now Ruskin knows how devious you can be. And get yourself some backup if you can.”

She gave him a simple nod, not a mildly indignant comment about her ability to do her own strategizing. That alone told him she was still too worried. “When I get back, I will have that spanking,” he added, wanting the spark back in her eye. “You gave me the third mark without my say-so. Everyone will agree there needs to be
some
penalty for that.”

A flash of fire in the blue, another toss of that lovely hair, and her hands went to her hips, raising her breasts. God, she was a gorgeous thing. “You can spank me if you can hold me down, bushman. For that,
you
better bring backup.”

14

D
ANNY was in the blackness of her room, missing the first rays of the sun stabbing over the horizon. She knew Charles would have his men out, ensuring Dev left with nothing but that meager amount of water.

She’d had people in her employ devoted enough to be third-marked servants. Some had even asked for it, in some subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Dev hadn’t asked, and even before she’d marked him, he’d been acting as one.

She’d always been curious about other vampires and their third-marked servants, but she hadn’t investigated it too closely. She didn’t have family or friends in the vampire world she trusted enough to say some of the things she’d said so easily to Dev in the past few days. Up until now, she’d picked up snippets about that aspect of a third-marked servant, but never anything like this, which would have made her interested in having it for herself far sooner.

Now she wondered, because of the way she’d left it with Dev this morning, right before dawn. She’d heard his thoughts, been shocked by his intuitive understanding of her, even better than she seemed consciously to know herself. She considered herself happy, well adjusted, but she was also consummately shielded. Not unexpected for a vampire, but maybe even more than most her age. Perhaps that had been her mother’s doing. She stifled a snort at the attempt to apply academic psychology to her family dynamics. Those three or four times during her life she’d chosen to attend a university had been educational. Far better times than this moment, for certain.

She couldn’t stand it anymore. Throwing on her purple velvet dressing gown and tying the sash, she moved swiftly out of the back bedroom, into the front rooms, to the study. It had a heavily curtained window that provided a view of the west side of the station, with the additional protection of the porch overhang. Fortunately the house was quiet. Ruskin appeared to be in bed, all his stockmen out of the house.

Daring a slit in the curtain, standing well clear of the possibility of sunlight, she saw through the crack that there were some stockmen milling about the yard, but no sign of Dev. No, there he was. She could see him, already striding about a quarter mile from the fence line. He wasn’t even glancing back, no more concerned than if he’d finished his beer at Elle’s and was heading back into the Outback. She saw the men scowling about it. One of them had taken up a rifle, apparently with the thought of scudding a few bullets at his heels to give Dev something to be anxious about, but one of his mates wisely put his hand on the barrel, made him lower it. Charles didn’t like his sport tampered with, and if Dev was wounded, there’d be hell to pay. Even knowing that, she found her fist clenched on the fabric, murderous thoughts churning through her head until the muzzle was lowered.

There was nothing she could do to help him. Except touch him with her mind, which, if done at the incorrect time, could distract him fatally. But she could be inside his mind without his knowledge, stay with his thoughts. Returning to her bedroom, locking the door securely, she lay down, closed her eyes. Nothing would happen until nightfall, and she could find him then. A third mark was good for hundreds of miles, though not thousands. Unless his new mark had given him black wings to fly, in truth, he should still be in range then.

Dev was rather surprised the stockmen didn’t take a potshot at him. They were certainly armed to the teeth, as if they expected him to put up a mighty resistance. No wonder they were a bit out of sorts when he thanked them for the water and headed out the front gate.

He circled around and headed up into the hills, but first he pushed his luck, staying within range of their guns and their attention as he squatted over a mudflat, studying the patterns left by the feet of lizards and rabbits, even a few emu. He checked out the landscape, seeing where there might be dry water channels that could help conceal a man as he headed back in toward the homestead. If he survived the next two days, Lord Charles had made sure the final challenge would be the most difficult. If they couldn’t catch him out in the bush, all they had to do was line up at that fence and wait to shoot him, since he had to walk across the open ground to the gate.

He perused the sky, figuring what the weather was likely to bring him. Then, using a stick to dig into the ground, he rolled up balls of light gray mud and stripped off his shirt to carry them. When he at last rose and resumed his hike, it didn’t take him long to reach the first series of rocks and gorges. The red mountain range was laid out almost like a toy stone castle, kicked over by a giant petulant child. The hills into which the station had been built were an elevated, rolling plain, followed by another series of rocky red hillocks, some grouped together, some separated by shrub and sand. There were jagged pillars and rounded marble formations scattered throughout the terrain. Once he moved into the shaded side of one such grouping, which concealed him from the station, now a small block in the distance, he took a deep breath, cleared his mind and considered what was facing him.

Laying down the shirt, he spread it out to reveal the balls of mud. One rolled out and trundled into a crevice between another cluster of rocks. He noted cracked pieces, sheared off by wind and weather, perhaps even by the odd ricochet of a bullet when the men went hunting.

Picking up one of the clay balls, Dev closed his hand on the coolness, felt the pastelike consistency. Fifteen years he’d spent with the tribe who had shared his raising with his mum and dad. A tribe that walked this land still, in even more remote regions than this.

He knew how to find water and food, so that wasn’t a concern. His challenge was going to be that pack of vampire children, with their superhuman ability to track, scent and find him. If he cut across the thick wire grass he saw stretching between him and the eastern series of rock hills, the tracking part at least would be more difficult, because it would spring back up as if he’d never been through.

Charles liked his sport, so Dev suspected he was being given the light of this day to get enough of a head start to provide a minor challenge. But after that, if Dev eluded him, Charles’s sense of fair play, weak at best, would dissipate. He’d use those heavily armed blokes to track him during the day, the children to keep him on the run at night, leave him exhausted.

It was time to work on not leaving a trail. Or rather, leaving a deceptive one. Squatting, he began to work the ball of mud into his flesh. His face, his chest and shoulders, a sun covering and also a way to blend. As he performed the task, he studied those broken rocks, their shape. Lifting his gaze to the ranges, he considered the types of trees he’d find there.

After the war, he’d walked with the clan again, for a time. The Elders had told him he had to let the world back into his soul . . . he had to feel the earth beneath him, the weight of the sky and fire of sun above. The movement of winds, however slight. To know the world provided. The world understood. There were some things that could not be explained, but the world was an ancient being that understood all pain, was fertilized with tears. He had to know that, accept it. He had to heal, or he would become a tool of demons.

He couldn’t explain to that tribesman, perhaps was ashamed to, that he’d polluted his own soul. He’d taken all the blood and pain, jammed it in there over the top of that young, fun-loving bloke he’d once been. He’d buried him alive, screaming, beneath the weight of everything that used to be his life. That Devlin, his soul, was buried in a sealed casket he couldn’t open.

A simple idiot who’d loved a girl with long sable hair, courted her in the simple, sweet ways, and been blessed with a fine son with his green eyes and Tina’s sweet mouth. He’d taken them to the picnic races that the remote stations occasionally arranged to give them all a chance to be a community. Working the sheep, he’d stopped as often as he could manage during the day for a drink of lemonade from Tina’s hand, to see what young Rob had created out of rocks and sticks, small fortresses with soldiers and a pennant of a dry leaf.

What you will not do, the world will force upon you. That is its way, as well.
He recalled the Elder’s words, right before Dev chose to leave their company.

It’s already done its worst to me. It knows where to find me when it wants to have another round.

It figured it would take its next shot through the cruel but irresistible touch of a blond vampire with blue eyes. Shaking his head, he rose, picking up several of the rock shards he’d studied. They’d make good spear points, and he’d find branches or sturdy stalks up ahead for the shafts. Charles had insisted he keep his large hunting knife in a spirit of fair play, but of course his stockmen had known that for the joke it was. When he’d made it clear he expected his weapons and pack in the same order when he returned, they’d had a good laugh, though it was the mocking kind. Mockery usually covered the fear, however slight, that he might be back to reclaim it.

Count on it, mates.

A tool for demons might be exactly what was needed here. While the Elder had given him the switch for that murderous rage within him, the meditative stillness to keep it from bursting free, Dev knew how to let the rage forth when he needed it. Since he was likely going to die in the next couple days, the ability to rein it in, reclaim a civilized sense of himself, wasn’t all that important, right?

Shouldering the bundle of clothes, he proceeded toward the mountains, a darkly tanned man with red hair, now naked but for the smear of gray-white mud on him. At a distance he looked remarkably like one of the aboriginal dwellers of the area. The ones that had sent him away, sensing there was something broken in him that wasn’t safe to be near, not if the right trigger was pressed.

At dusk, he was well into the steep gorges, craggy peaks and varied forest terrain of the low mountains, which were good for wild horses, sheep and cattle. By the time the red gorges and peaks started turning purple, evidence of the impending sundown, he’d made himself several spears, using torn strips from his shirt and grasses to position the tips. Planting the weapons at key points he scoped out for his first night’s strategy, he moved swiftly, mindful of Danny’s words about the speed of vampires. He’d disseminated his scent here and there, down into a gorge, up through a thicket of trees.

A sharp crack. Gunfire. He dropped low and froze, close to a low patch of scrub. An exuberant starting gun, perhaps? Danny would do wise to dismiss most of this lot, send them off to other places once all this was resolved. Men needed things to do to keep them out of mischief, and these had had the scent of blood in their noses too long. ’Course, she’d indicated Ian was an overlord. What did an overlord do? Probably like a feudal landowner, she’d resolve squabbles, take tithes . . .

He smiled inside, but remained motionless. At least until the rabbit wandered into his reach, missing his presence due to his stillness and wind direction. He caught the creature by ears and mid-body, avoiding teeth and sharp claws. Running his hand over the soft fur, he gave thanks and an apology at once. “You don’t deserve this, mate.” In a quick motion, he snapped the creature’s neck, making it painless and quick, but he couldn’t look as the life died out of the brown gaze.