Bad Blood (Cora's Choice #3)
Bad Blood
Cora’s
Choice – Book 3
by V. M. Black
Aethereal Bonds
Swift River Media Group
Washington, D.C.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.
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Cora Shaw’s Story
Cora’s Choice (90 to 130-page novellas)
Book
1 –
Life Blood
– FREE
Book
2 –
Blood Born
Book 3 –
Bad Blood
Book 4 –
Blood Rites
– Coming June 17, 2014
Book 5 –
Blood Bond
– Coming July 2014
Book 6 –
Blood Price
– Coming August 2014
The Alpha’s Captive (45 to 64-page novelettes)
Book 1 –
Part One
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Book 2 –
Part Two
Book 3 –
Part Three
– Coming July 1, 2014
Book 4 –
Part Four
– Coming August 5, 2014
Book 5 –
Part Five
– Coming September 2, 2014
Stand-Alone Short Stories
Heaven’s Price
– Coming June 24, 2014
I
got out of the dead car and stepped into the biting winter night. My stomach was knotting so hard I had to force myself to stand up straight, shivers wracking my body even as I turned to face down the three SUVs that came bouncing up the dirt road toward me.
My
hunters.
I wasn’t going to escape them this time.
I held my ground. It wasn’t bravery—there was just nowhere else to go. I was out of gas and out of luck. My belly roiled with cold and terror, but I tipped my chin up, determined not to give them the satisfaction of seeing my fear.
The SUVs stopped a dozen yards away.
The idling of their engines was the only sound I could hear above the chattering of my teeth.
A
man emerged from the driver’s side of the middle vehicle. His wide shoulders were thrown into silhouette by the blazing headlights as he closed in on me.
The people who had been chasing me all day had won.
I didn’t know who they were, and I didn’t know why they wanted me dead, but they were going to get their way.
It was stupid.
I
was stupid. I’d gone half crazy, trying to figure out how I was going to live in the new world that had been thrust upon me when the answer was simple. I wasn’t going to live at all.
But
I wouldn’t go down without a fight. Staring down the approaching man, I formed a fist around my keys, the only weapon I had. The cards on the keychain cut into my palm as I forced the ends of the keys to stand out in points between my fingers.
“Hello, Cora.
Merry Christmas.”
The words
shot through me with a force that rocked me on my feet. I recognized that voice, and instantly afterward, I recognized the presence, the one that I’d been too terrified to sense. Not my attackers.
Dorian Thorne.
The vampire.
He’d come to get me.
I heard a sound, a cry, and I realized that it was mine. I ran forward, half-stumbling with cold, flinging myself against his chest. His heady influence enveloped me like a drug, the darkness of him taking my breath away, even now.
My savior.
My fate.
It was all his fault.
The only possible motivation anyone had for coming after me was my connection to Dorian. And he hadn’t warned me, much less protected me.
“You bastard!”
The insult tore from my throat. “You absolute prick!”
I hauled my hand back—the one without the keys still clenched in it—and hit him with all of my strength.
He made no move to avoid it, didn’t catch my hand even though I knew that it would be trivial to his vampire-fast reflexes, nor did he flinch when I made contact with his beautiful cheekbone.
Dorian simply took the strike, then
wrapped his arms around me even as I kicked and struggled, holding me against him as I worked out my fear and fury, screaming out at him, at my attacker, and at the world that had driven me to this desolate, freezing road and nearly to my death.
“You’re safe now,” he said.
“I have you, and you are safe.”
I had the sense that he was trying to convince himself of the truth of those words as much as he was reassuring me.
The burst of adrenaline-fueled energy left as quickly as it had come, wringing the last strength from me. I went limp, hanging from his hold, shivering taking control of my body again even as I panted with effort.
“
Safe? You’re the one who nearly got me killed,” I said. “I was going to die, and it was your fault.”
And now here I was, back in his grasp in a quite literal way.
Safe from my pursuers, perhaps—but not safe from him.
H
e was the one enemy that I didn’t even have the will to fight—the one I couldn’t even name an enemy without a pang that said that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I’d only been able to want to strike him because he let me.
Dorian
lifted me effortlessly into his arms. I made a faint protest. But his chest was solid, a certainty amid the day’s chaos and confusion. Safe and certain, the way a prison’s bars were….
“I know,” he said, carrying me toward the second of the three long black
Escalades that were idling on the dirt road.
“
You were supposed to save me.” It was a stupid and illogical protest—what did cancer have to do with inhuman attackers?—but it was true. Everything that had happened in the last week had been because he had promised a cure to the cancer that was killing me.
He had
delivered on that promise—at least as far as I could tell. But he hadn’t told me that the cure would work by changing me into something not-quite-human or that it would blood-bond me to him forever. Not that I would have changed my mind about it, since my alternative was death.
But t
here didn’t seem to be much of a point in my cure if my new connection to him would paint a target on my back. Dead was dead, whether it was from cancer or a murderer.
“I know.
Believe me, Cora, I know.”
Dorian’s
voice was full of suppressed force, a cold fury that rolled off him in waves. I looked up at his face, really looked, and I saw lines of worry carved deep into his unnaturally perfect features.
He had be
en scared, I realized with abrupt clarity. He had been almost as scared as I was.
Scared of losing me.
He ducked to set me in the passenger’s seat before I had time to process that realization. The leather was so deliciously warm against my frozen body that I couldn’t even summon horror at the thought of my bloodied shirt pressed between me and the seat.
I knew he wanted me.
Needed my body and my blood. For my part, it was impossible to resist his attraction—his vampiric influence meant that any merely human scruples went out the window as soon as he turned the force of his will on me.
I craved him
because I must. But did the idea of losing him frighten me?
I wasn’t sure.
“Let me see your injury,” Dorian ordered.
Of course he’d noticed it.
He noticed everything.
“It’s healed already,” I said, but I had no choice.
Shoving my keys in my pocket, I turned in the seat so that my back faced the open door.
Dorian’
s hands on my back sent tendril of heat curling through me even in my half-frozen state. He carefully pushed the shredded remains of my hoodie and t-shirt up my back, sliding his hands across the smooth skin beneath.
I knew what he saw there:
Faint silvery marks, the only evidence of how the creature’s claws had slashed me in the attack. Any human would have needed to seek medical attention immediately after such a wound.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t fully human anymore.
“She ruined my hoodie,” I muttered. “It was my favorite. And probably my pants, too, and I’ve had these since high school.”
“I will buy you another,” Dorian said flatly.
“I’m not four years old. I don’t want another. I liked this one.”
Unaccountably
, I felt tears prick my eyes. I hadn’t cried once the entire time I thought I was going to die, but now, at the thought that my UMD hoodie was shredded beyond repair, I had to clear my throat and blink hard several times.
Stupid.
Dorian pulled the edge of my shirt down again. He hooked an arm around my chest for a moment and pressed a kiss into my hair. I leaned back against him, closing my eyes, my body wakening to his touch.
“I will
not lose you now.”
His words were so soft that I thought for a moment I might have imagined them.
Then he stepped away and swung my door shut. Bonelessly, I sank back against the seat, wishing that he hadn’t let me go.
Wishing I were truly free.
Dorian circled around in front of the headlights to swing into the driver’s seat behind me. There was, I noticed, some kind of short shotgun strapped to the console between the seats.
“My car,” I said weakly as Dorian put the
vehicle into gear. My Gramma had given me her Focus when I got my first off-campus job in college. I couldn’t just abandon it, even if it had probably been totaled in my escape.
“I will send someone for it.”
The other two SUVs started moving, echoing Dorian’s flawless three-point turn that got us facing back the other way.
Back toward D.C.
“I’m not sorry I hit you,” I said as I buckled my seatbelt. “You’re the reason that…thing tried to kill me. You have to be.”
“I am sure I deserved worse.”
There was no hint of irony in Dorian’s voice.
I studied his profile, high forehead and aristocratic nose balanced by a long jaw.
His expression was unreadable.
I said,
“I thought I was a goner when I realized I’d lost my phone. How did you find me?”
His eyes were fixed to the bumper of the SUV in front of us, the elegant plans of his face
thrown into high relief by the light of the reflected high beams. “I had a GPS tracker installed on your car. As a precaution.”
“Oh,” I said.
Because that was totally a healthy, non-stalker-y thing for him to do.
I considered objecting to the invasion of my privacy, but under the circumstances, I decided I couldn’t really get upset about it.
Whatever his reasons, he’d been proven right.
But I realized
I’d expected him to explain he’d found me through some kind of vampiric superpower. The reality was somewhat anticlimactic.
“It will be months
or years before our bond is refined enough that I will be able to use my sense of your distress alone to locate you,” he added.
Well, then.
“You just let me know when that happens,” I said. Because I needed an even bigger case of the screaming meemies around him. “So who the hell just tried to kill me?”
“I don’t know.
” He seemed more tightly contained than he usually was, the intoxicating influence of his presence extending only a few inches from his body. It seemed thicker, though, dark and seething. The thought of touching him like that frightened me.
Scared or not, I wasn’t willing
to let his answer go. “Seriously. You have so many enemies that you can’t even hazard a guess and who would want to kill your—your—” I didn’t even know what the word was for a once-entirely-human who had been changed by bonding to a vampire.
“Cognate.”
“What?”
“We call
you a ‘cognate.’”
“Fine, your cognate,” I said.
“Yes. Unfortunately, I do have that many enemies,” he said calmly. “And so do you, though you should be inviolable to most. And not one of whom should have even known that you exist. Not yet.”
The sound
s of a muted exchange behind me made my gaze flick up to the rearview mirror. We weren’t alone in the car. There were four hulking silhouettes in the middle and back rows of the SUV. At least one of those men exuded a variation of the sensation that I had always associated with Dorian. Another vampire. And I suspected that the other vehicles each had their own squad of heavies inside.
So
Dorian had been able to assemble this group in a matter of minutes to come riding to my rescue. Which meant that he was expecting trouble, or at least prepared for it.
That
realization was hardly reassuring.
“
If you can’t say who, then how about what? What was the creature that attacked me?” I asked. It didn’t even occur to me that he might not know.
“
A djinn.”
“Gin,” I repeated blankly.
“What?”
“
Another word for them is genie—but no, not like you’re thinking.” His voice was calm, reasonable, as if he weren’t discussing made-up things. “A djinn is much more like what you imagine a demon might be in your popular culture. They are very strong—stronger even than a single vampire, though not as fast, so they frequently hire themselves out as mercenaries.”
My look must have still been
incredulous. All I could think of was Disney’s
Aladdin
and the
I Dream of Jeanie
reruns I’d seen once when I was sick. But he shook his head.
“You know the kind of child who likes to pull the wings off flies?
Who burns ants with a magnifying glass just to see them writhe? That’s your average djinn, but with people. No bottles. No wishes. If they were human, you’d call them psychopaths.”
“
So she was hired to kill me,” I said slowly as the front SUV in our motorcade led the way back onto a paved road.
“Yes
.”
I
shuddered. “I guess it’s a good thing whoever it was chose someone who liked to do their work up close. If they’d hired a man with a gun, I wouldn’t be here now.”