Heart and Soul (10 page)

Baring her teeth in a smile, Leandra said, “No. You’ll tell me now.” Then she caught the girl’s wrist, pressing her fingers to the pressure points on the inside and used her hold to flip the girl’s arm up, putting pressure on the shoulder joint. It sent the girl to her knees, and while she was squawking from the pain, Leandra reached in and grabbed the information she needed. “Thank you, Morgan. That was all I wanted to know.”

She let go and stepped back, laughing as Morgan surged to her feet and tried to rake her nails down Leandra’s face. Under the bubbling anger, Leandra got a sense of the girl’s power. Holding still, she waited until the girl was nearly on her before she flexed her own power. Morgan went flying back, striking her head against the wall with a resounding thunk.

Those pretty green eyes rolled back, and she groaned, reaching up to touch her head.

Leandra waited until Morgan’s eyes cleared, and then she said, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, little girl.”

Morgan’s eyes flashed with hate, but she stayed on her ass, with her back planted against the wall.

The door opened just then, and Leandra watched as Agnes, leaning heavily on her cane, stepped inside the room.

Her eyes looked a little dull, and her skin had an odd gray cast.

The old witch didn’t look very well.

Agnes was vaguely aware of the others, but her attention was caught by the girl in front of her.

It was like looking through a mirror.

A distorted mirror.

Agnes hadn’t seen her reflection until she had started to age a bit, probably sometime after the seventeenth century. But she could remember what she looked like. Through the eyes of her lover—the memories of her husband had dimmed a bit, but looking at the girl, it was like she was seeing herself through Elias’s eyes.

But Agnes hadn’t had that sense of evil clouding the air around her. What she felt coming from the girl was cloying, noxious; it was as though the very air around her had been tainted by the evil inside her.

Glancing up, she met Eli’s eyes. “Nasty bit you have here, lad.”

Eli’s mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile. “Aye. I have hopes that Malachi will take her off my hands and turn her over to the Council for me.”

Leandra stood across the room, her hands tucked in her back pockets. The look on her face was of bored indifference. But what Agnes saw in Leandra’s eyes said something else.

“Our guest’s name is Morgan,” Leandra said. “But she doesn’t seem interested in talking with us. A little rude, if you ask me.”

“Who’s the fossil?”

Agnes smiled a little at Leandra and then she turned her eyes to the girl. And she was just a girl. Probably the same age Agnes had been when Elias . . . Agnes forced those thoughts aside. “Morgan, is it?” she mused as she started to circle around the petite blonde.

Morgan smirked. “At your age, don’t you think you should get a hearing aid?”

With a faint smile, Agnes replied, “Oh, I hear just fine.” Her other senses worked fine as well, including her sense of smell. “I smell blood on you, girl.”

A nasty smile spread across Morgan’s face. “Not enough. At least, not yet.”

Agnes had lived a long, long time. She knew what evil was, had faced it, fought it. But it was rare that she had met one who reveled in the very essence of evil the way this girl did.

“She’d broken into a house,” Jonathan said quietly. “I trailed her there. Thank God I got there in time. She was in the boy’s room.”

Narrowing her eyes, Agnes moved a little closer. “Was he harmed?”

“No.”

Morgan curled her lip in a sneer as Agnes neared. She shoved off the wall, flipping her heavy fall of blonde hair back behind one shoulder. “What are you going to do, old woman? Send me to bed without dinner?”

Chuckling, Agnes said, “Dinner is the least of your concerns, child.”

“Or yours,” Morgan whispered just before she lunged.

The others were moving, but the girl was quick.

However, Agnes wasn’t as helpless as she looked. Moving to the side, she struck out with her cane as Morgan tried to swerve and catch her. She caught the girl between the legs with the cane, and Morgan landed on the floor on her belly. She tried to shove up onto her hands and knees, but Agnes flipped her cane and swung the hooked end down. The curving piece of wood struck Morgan right at the base of her skull, connecting with a sickening thud.

The girl collapsed to the floor without a sound.

Lowering her cane to the floor, she turned and started to slowly make her way across the room. On her way out the door, she murmured, “She will be a bit of a problem.”

 

 

LEANDRA LAY ON HER BELLY, BREATH WHEEZING IN and out of her lungs. Mike sprawled across her legs, his head resting in the dip of her spine. She could feel his breath caressing her skin as he sucked in air with breaths as ragged as her own.

“You left the door unlocked,” he muttered against her skin.

“Did I?” she asked blearily. She didn’t remember. It had been a long, tiresome night, and she’d ended up heading for bed before sunrise. She remembered leaving Eli and Jonathan once Malachi arrived. Remembered heading to her bedroom on legs that shook from exhaustion.

Remembered going to bed—that was clear.

And then feeling his hands on her, the heat of it bringing her awake as she moaned in arousal.

He brushed his lips across the upper curve of one buttock, and Leandra shivered. He pushed to his knees, and Leandra felt the fire leap to life inside her, even though she ached inside. But instead of bringing her to her knees, and pushing inside, he crawled upward to lay on his side, pressed against her. She could feel his cock, warm and wet, against her hips.

Draping one arm over her back, Mike sighed. Between the heat of his body and the lethargy left from his touch, she felt sleep closing in around her. But before she fell completely under, he trailed his fingers down her spine and asked, “Who is the girl Jonathan brought in?”

The fog of sleep was suddenly gone, leaving her thoughts clear. A shiver rushed down her spine as she remembered looking into those soulless eyes. “Trouble,” she murmured. “The girl is trouble.”

“Is she as young as I’ve heard?”

Leandra pushed up and rested her weight on her elbows, staring at the soft green patina of the aged bronze bedstead. “I don’t know how young you’ve heard she is, but she’s young. Just a kid.”

“Jonathan found her getting ready to kill a little boy.”

Leandra lowered her lashes. “I know.”

Mike rolled onto his back, and she shivered, chilled by the sudden loss of his body heat. “Killer kids.”

Killer kids . . .
It was a phrase that had appeared often in news headlines over the past few years. It left a sick ache in her belly. She’d been seventeen the first time she’d killed a man. It had been one of the Scythe’s soldiers—a werewolf recently changed, one still learning control, and one who didn’t care that she’d said no.

She’d killed him, and even though it had been justified, it left a mark on her soul.

Leandra knew without a shadow of a doubt that Morgan had killed, and more than once. But it hadn’t left any sort of mark. Morgan hadn’t suffered through guilt and regret. She didn’t have the ability. It was almost like the girl was incomplete.

Missing her soul.

“Eli doesn’t want to deal with her. Because of her age, it’s likely he won’t have to. I think she’s more the Council’s responsibility,” Leandra murmured. “With both Malachi and Agnes here, perhaps they can handle her.”

Mike was silent for a minute. “Agnes doesn’t look too well. She looks . . .” his voice trailed off, but Leandra knew.

“She looks tired,” she finished for him.
More than tired . . .
The words echoed in her head, but Leandra shied away from them, away from the knowledge of what she had seen when she looked at Agnes just the other night.

Rolling onto her side, she stared into his dark gray eyes. “I’ve never seen her look so tired before. But she can handle Morgan. She could do it blindfolded, with one foot in the grave.”

A smile curled his lips. “I imagine she could.” He closed the distance between their faces, his mouth covering hers. “But I don’t think I want to talk about them anymore.”

Mike pushed her onto her back, wedging his knee between her thighs. “Not what I came here for,” he whispered.

Sliding her hands up his arms, Leandra curled her fingers around the hard bulge of his biceps, her nails biting lightly into his skin. “What did you come here for?” she asked. Then she hissed out a breath as she felt the blunt head of his cock pressing against her.

“You—always you,” he murmured. Mike pushed inside her without another word, his cock cleaving through the swollen tissues of her pussy until he was completely buried inside.

Leandra whimpered in her throat as the head of his cock nudged the mouth of her womb. His sex throbbed, jerking inside her sheath. She was so damned sensitive, each little movement was like a silken, teasing caress. Whimpering, she brought her knees up, trying to lock them around his waist.

Shifting, Mike caught her legs behind her knees, drawing them up and hooking her legs over his arms. Leandra cried out as the action forced her wide open. His weight crushed into her, and she couldn’t move. “Look at me,” Mike rasped.

Her lids felt weighted down, but she forced her eyes open, staring up into his eyes. The black of his pupils seemed to bleed outward, and the striations of gray began to glow. It was like watching the moon move behind the clouds at night. Blood roared in her ears. The pulse in the hollow of his throat drew her eye, and she felt her fangs begin to throb in their sockets. As blood hunger ripped through her, her fangs dropped out. They began to ache, pulsing in rhythm with the vicious need that had centered between her thighs.

Mike shifted her a little more, bringing her knees up higher and draping them over his shoulders, forcing her thighs wide around his muscled form. He slid one hand down the back of her thigh, cupping the curve of her ass. He slowed his thrusts, going from deep and hard to slow and shallow.

Leandra felt the light touch of his fingers stroking her sex where she stretched tight around his cock. Then he moved lower. Her cream slicked his finger, and she whimpered as he began to press against the tight pucker of her ass. She flinched, her muscles locking instinctively as he probed.

“Open for me,” he rasped. His voice was little more than a deep, hoarse growl. Something, an erotic sort of magick, rolled from him, and Leandra felt her body relax under his. Even as his cock throbbed, lodged half inside her sheath, her body relaxed, yielding to him as he pushed his finger inside her ass.

A ragged scream escaped her as he started to shaft her again, slow, deep thrusts that slowly increased in speed until he was slamming into her. All the while, he moved his finger in tandem, stroking her, easing the tight clasp of her muscles.

Mike’s eyes glowed as he stared down at her, watching her face with avid, greedy hunger. He lowered his head, kissing her roughly. He circled his tongue around her elongated fangs, nipped at her lip. Leandra couldn’t breathe; although she didn’t need oxygen anymore, the pressure still built in her lungs, and she could feel a scream trapped in her throat.

“Come,” he growled against her ear. Then he lowered his head and raked his teeth down the arched line of her neck. That hot, erotic little pain finally released the scream, and as she screamed, it seemed to free the orgasm building inside. It hit like an earthquake, ripping through her with cataclysmic force. The blood pounding inside her veins boiled like lava, and her heart pounded so hard, she thought her chest would explode.

Just as she felt the convulsions racking her body start to ease, Mike growled, pushing up so that he knelt between her thighs. He wrapped his hands around her ankles, holding her thighs wide while he stared down, watching as he pushed inside her.

“So pretty,” he muttered, sliding one hand down and stroking the roughened tip of one finger against her clit. “Pink and brown . . . and
wet
. . .” he growled on the last word, bringing his finger to his mouth and licking it.

She felt his cock jerk inside her, and then the hot, wet jets of semen as he began to come. Mike’s head fell back, and through the fringe of her lashes she saw his throat work as he shouted out her name.

As he started to sink down against her, Leandra lifted her arms, wrapping them around his neck and cradling him to her breast.

Somewhere deep inside her heart, she felt the beginnings of hope.

 

 

AGNES SAT OUT IN THE COOL NIGHT AIR, STARING AT the sky in the east as it began to lighten with the coming dawn.

Inside, she heard the sounds of people settling down for the day, while the others began to rise. The vampires would be readying for sleep, as well as some of the shifters that preferred night to day. Lori was sleeping, exhausted from dealing with the troublesome guest.

Yes, Morgan was that and then some.

She carried a cloud of death with her.

Death was something that Agnes had long since grown accustomed to. There wasn’t a Hunter alive that hadn’t been touched by it. Scarred by it.

But this felt different.

It was her own death she saw when she looked into Morgan’s green eyes. Morgan’s hair was a bit lighter than Agnes’s had been when she was younger. Agnes’s hair had been a warm, honey brown, while Morgan’s was more blonde, streaked through with shades of platinum, gold, and golden brown.

But the differences in color of hair and eyes were minor things. Looking at Morgan was like looking in a mirror.

A mirror of Agnes’s past.

An evil one.

“You are not looking well.”

Agnes barely sensed Mal’s arrival, but that wasn’t anything new. Glancing up from the padded rocker somebody had kindly placed on her balcony, she met Mal’s dark, worried eyes and smiled a bit. “Just getting tired, love.”