Angel's Pain (13 page)

Her hand trembled. Why was it taking her so long? She was a vampire; she could crush his larynx in the blink of an eye. Just squeeze, dammit.

And yet she didn't. She couldn't. Her hand shook harder, and then she relaxed her grip, jerking her flesh away from the disgusting contact with his and turning her back on the broken old man lying in the bed.

“You can't do it, can you?” Reaper asked.

She couldn't look at him. “Only because I'd be doing him a favor.”

She brushed past him and walked out of the room, then out of the house.

 

An hour later they were back in the Land Rover, heading northeast. Briar had asked Reaper to let her drive this time, and he'd had no objections. She probably needed the distraction, he thought. She had reverted to the quiet, morose, almost clinically depressed state in which she'd been living during those first couple of weeks after Gregor had tortured and tried to kill her. Once Crisa had joined their ranks, she'd begun a slow emergence from the darkness. But this episode with her stepfather seemed to have plunged her back into the depths once more. Briefly, he hoped.

“I'm sorry, for what it's worth.”

“Sorry for what?” she asked, not looking at him. The headlights of passing vehicles painted her face in streaks of pale blue and luminous white. He watched her in the changing hues, but her expression never changed. It gave him no clue to what was going on within.

“For all of it. Whatever he did to y—”

“He raped me. Repeatedly.”

“And you never told?”

“Who would I tell?”

“Your mother?” he asked, watching, probing, sensing the spike of emotion that didn't show in that brief moment before she squelched it.

“He told me he'd kill me if I ever told my mother. Told me she would never believe me, anyway. Told me she would hate me for it. Told me it would kill her. That was the main thing. When he told me it would kill her. 'Cause in the end, I was pretty sure it had.”

He tipped his head to one side. “She died, your mother?”

She nodded, bit her lip as if to keep herself from saying anything more.

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen. She had pancreatic cancer. But I didn't know from shit, you know? I figured she must have found out my secret. And that it killed her, just like that bastard said it would.”

He nodded slowly. “That would make sense, I guess, to a fourteen-year-old.” He looked at her face, watching its every nuance. “You know it wasn't your fault, right?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “And the fact that every man I've ever known has treated me in exactly the same way really doesn't mean a damn thing.”

He frowned hard, sensing she was finished with the topic, but he wanted to know more. “What happened to you after she died?”

“I lived with her mother, my gram, until she died, too, a year later. Then I was sent back to Stepdaddy Dearest. Or that was the plan. I had other ideas, though. I took off on my own, and I've been on my own ever since.”

He nodded slowly and was preparing his next probing question in his mind when she said, “I would have done it, you know.”

“Done what? Killed him?”

“Or forced you to, if you'd tried to stop me. I wouldn't have hesitated to use that trigger word on you to take him out.”

“That would be about the worst thing you could do to me.”

She lifted her brows, turned her head toward him momentarily. It was the first time her expression had altered in any way. “The worst thing I could do to you? Come on.”

“No, it's true. If you racked your brain for years, even if you knew everything there was to know about me, my history, my secrets—”

“You have
more
secrets?”

“Even then, you couldn't come up with a single action that would be more of a betrayal, or that would ensure I never forgive you, than to use that trigger word to force me to kill someone.”

“Why? You hate killing that much?”

He shifted in his seat, slanting her a sideways glance and wondering how the tables had turned so thoroughly. He'd been probing her psyche, and now she was poking around at his.

“I don't hate killing. I won't mind killing Gregor a bit. What I hate is having control of my own mind, my own body, my own actions, taken from me. It's like…” He searched his mind for something to compare it to, something she could understand. And then he hit on it.

“It's like rape.”

He thought she winced a little.

“I did it once already,” she said, after a long moment of introspection. “I used the trigger word.”

“You used it to save my life. And your own. You had no choice.”

She nodded and refocused on the road, but not before he thought he glimpsed a shadow of relief in her eyes.

“If you'd used it this time, to make me kill that old man, that would have been different. Especially when all you had to do was ask.”

Her brows crinkled, and she turned her head toward him, her eyes searching. “What do you mean? You'd have killed him for me if I'd simply asked you to?”

He nodded.

“
I
couldn't even kill him. He's in a coma, helpless, sick and in pain.”

Reaper shrugged. “He hurt you. He deserves to be sick and in pain, and he deserves to die violently. I do think he's suffering more by being alive, though. Lingering like that.”

She nodded, but her eyes were stunned as she aimed them back at the road. “So why would you have killed him for me?”

“It's what I do. Doesn't bother me all that much when it's someone who needs killing.”

She frowned. “I can't believe it. You seem like such a…I don't know, a white hat. You don't have any ethical problem with taking someone out like that? With playing God?”

“Why would I?” He drew a breath, sighed deeply. “I'm an extremely moral man, Briar. But I don't see things the way other people do. Never have, not as a mortal and not now. I look at it like this. If a person has a cancerous tumor growing inside them, they cut it out. Mankind is one body, and the individuals make up its parts. Bastards like Gregor, like your stepfather, they're malignancies. They need to be removed for the greater good.”

She narrowed her eyes. “‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,' to quote Mr. Spock.”

“Or to quote the Bible. ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.'”

“A principled murderer.” She shook her head slowly.

“Who'd have thought it?”

“I don't murder. I execute. There's a difference.”

She nodded, then said, “So what happened to Rebecca was what you'd consider murder, then?”

“Yes.”

“And who would you condemn for that crime?”

“Myself. And I have.”

“But you weren't in control. It's like you said, someone took charge of your mind and your body without your permission.”

“Doesn't matter. I was the weapon.”

“Yeah. Well, when I see a shotgun get the electric chair, I'll agree with you.” She drove for about a mile without a word, and then, out of the blue, she turned toward him and said, “What did her body look like?”

“Whose body?” He gaped at her. “Are you talking about
Rebecca?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Rebecca. When you came out of your rage and found her dead, what did she look like?”

“I'm not going to talk about this.”

“Oh, come on. I'm interested, I really am. And you've been trying to draw me out for hours now, so here I am. Coming out. Death fascinates me. So tell me what she looked like.”

He lowered his head, closed his eyes. “She was lying on the floor.”

“Face up or down?”

“On her side.”

She nodded. “What was she wearing?”

“A skirt. A long white skirt with flowers embroidered around the hemline. A white tank top. A pair of flip-flops.” He closed his eyes.

“Flip-flops? Still on her feet?”

“Yeah.”

“And this skirt, was it torn? Bloodstained?”

He shook his head while she rushed on. “How was her hair when you found her?”

“God, don't do this. I can't—”

“How was her hair?” she demanded.

He took a steadying breath. “In a ponytail.” Then he lowered his forehead into his palm and whispered, “No more, okay?”

“Okay. But all this death talk has made me hungry. Can we hunt?”

He closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them again and focused on her. Could she truly be as cold and bloodthirsty as she was pretending to be? “We've still got stores in the cooler in back,” he told her.

“I was hoping to sink my fangs into something warm and wiggling, though.”

“You want to kill someone tonight, Briar? Is that what you're saying? Because you had your perfect chance back there with your stepfather, and you blew it.”

She shrugged. “I want to kill something worth drinking. I'd have puked if I'd tried to swallow his filthy blood.”

“Or maybe you know that I'm starting to see through the mask you wear, and you're trying really hard to put it back into place.”

“Is that what you think? That I'm really good, deep down? That I'm just pretending to be a bad girl?”

“That's what I think.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

He shot her a look. Without warning, she jerked the wheel and drove the Land Rover right off the road, onto the shoulder, then jumped it across the ditch and sent it bounding up the slight rise on the far side, until she reached a flat point a hundred yards from the road, where she finally stopped. She yanked off her seat belt, then turned in her seat and undid his, as well. And then, gripping the hair at the back of his head, she swung a leg over him, straddling him, knees on the seat on either side of him. She used the handful of hair to drag his head up to hers. Her mouth took his, open wide and hungry. And her hips arched, pressing her hollows to his bulges, and making him ache for her the way a drowning man would ache for a breath of air.

Jerking her head up, she stared down into his eyes, and hers were blazing. “You don't really want to believe I'm good, deep down, do you, Reaper? Come on, admit it. It's the bad girl you're hot for, and you know it.”

“Bad, yeah. Not inherently evil, though.”

“No?”

“And you're not. You're not, Briar.”

“Oh, I am. And since you won't let me go hunting tonight, I'm just going to have to prove it.”

And with one quick motion, she tipped his head back, and then she lowered hers. Her mouth closed on his neck, wet and seeking, opening and closing, sucking and caressing. He didn't fight it. God, it was too good for him to want to fight it. No man alive would have fought it. She wouldn't hurt him. She wouldn't. She could threaten all she wanted, but he knew her. He'd glimpsed her. She was no different than he was, deep down.

He lifted his chin up a little more. “Do it,” he challenged. “Go on, do it.” And as he said it, he reached between them and undid his pants. The sound of the zipper seemed to excite her even more, because the next thing he knew, she had scrambled off him, kicked off her jeans, and then returned to her former position. She sank over him without even a second's hesitation, already wet, and he knew, as much as she might deny it, that she wanted him.

He also knew that she felt the same things he did. The mysterious attraction, the longing to know more, to get closer. But he wanted more from her. He wanted to see some hint of emotion in her eyes.

She rode him, and he drove upward into her, over and over, as she kissed his jaw and his neck. Lips near his ear, she said, “Be sure to let me know when you get there, cowboy. I'm gonna make it good for you.”

He wanted to tell her it was about her, that
he
wanted to make it good for
her
, but she was driving him beyond the ability to speak, and then, when his breath started coming more quickly, and she bounced up and down harder and faster, she felt it. He didn't even need to tell her.

She bent her head to his throat and sank her fangs in deep, so deep he felt them scrape bone. And she continued to thrash him with her body as she sucked the blood from his jugular. She drank and drank, and fucked and fucked, and he started to get dizzy, started to get weak. He'd already exploded inside her, and now his vision was getting blurry and darkness was starting to close in around the edges.

Drawing a ragged breath, he whispered, “Enough, Briar.”

She lifted her head. Thank God. For a second there he'd thought she might have been about to drain him completely. Eyes glowing red, she stared down at him and whispered, “It's enough when I say it's enough.”