Raven Walks (23 page)

He kissed Abi with the tenderness he had
promised would be hers, and she felt her heart crack in two as her
sister wrapped her legs around him and he pushed further on top of
her. Unlike the raw passion of the first time, something Gina had
come in on much to her surprise but had been too stunned to turn
away, their lovemaking now was slow and deliberate as they savored
every single sensation. Every kiss, every touch, every stroke.

Though she wanted to run far away, Gina’s
feet seemed rooted to the floor. She watched Hunter’s hands run the
length of Abi’s body, and when his fingers paused over the wounds
on her sister’s neck a tear slipped from Gina’s cheek.

As much as it hurt to know Hunter had chosen
her, at least she was alive still to be chosen.

And wasn’t that why they were here? The
purpose for their very existence?

She thought of how she had pined for Stephen
last night while Hunter slept, their bed still mussed from their
own lovemaking just hours before.

The truth was she had cheated on Hunter many
times, in thought if not in deed.

And her betrayal was far worse, because she
longed for that which they were bound to destroy.

So she looked on as punishment for her sin,
deserving every single crack in her heart with every stroke of
Hunter’s body into Abi’s.

As his tempo increased with their urgency,
tears coursed down Gina’s face. She heard their moans and their
whispered words and each felt like a dagger into her chest. Had
they proclaimed their love to one another, Gina was certain her
heart would have literally exploded.

And as her whole soul ached from watching
them together, Gina sort of wish it would have.

But Gina stayed where she was as Hunter
fucked Abi harder and more ardently. Abi cried out as another
powerful orgasm overtook her, and Hunter responded by grunting his
way to his own climax and spilling himself inside of her yet
another time.

Gina waited only briefly for the remorse that
seemed never to come, and as Abi and Hunter kissed deeply she
understood instantly she had been replaced.

Probably from the moment Hunter first slept
with Abi all those years ago.

So this was it, Gina thought to herself.

She truly was alone.

Her sobbed hitched in her throat, and that
was when Hunter finally glanced toward the door. The minute he saw
her tear-stained face, he scrambled away from Abi and sprinted
toward the door, still hard from their lovemaking.

Abi grabbed for the towel and followed as
Hunter chased Gina down the hall. “Gina!” he cried out. “Gina...
baby, I’m sorry!”

“Gina!” Abi chimed in, as suddenly filled
with regret as the man she had just made love to. But it wasn’t the
sex she regretted. She knew that Hunter had very well saved her
life by showing her how to love again instead of the dance with
death she had attempted with the vampires who had tempted her
so.

And somehow she knew that Hunter didn’t
regret being with her either.

It was the pain they both saw in Gina’s face
that prompted them to chase her, both still naked, down the
hall.

“Gina, please!” he cried out as Gina flew
through the door and out on the grounds. Both Abi and Hunter
stopped at the door and watched helplessly as she sprinted across
the lawn and headed for the obscure road that would take her back
to town.

A road that, now that she was alone, put her
at greatest risk for the deadly dreaded Creature.

She was now vulnerable and by herself, and
she didn’t give a damn.

Abi watched on, silently wringing her hands
while Hunter tugged on his boots. “I’m sure she’ll be back,” she
said, but even she wasn’t convinced.

“If you think that, then you really don’t
know your sister,” he said as he grabbed a shirt from the bed he
had just hours before shared with Gina. He felt sick that he’d hurt
her like he did – for the second time.

“Then I’m coming with you,” Abi decided.

He glanced where she stood, wrapped in a
robe. “You’re safer here,” he curtly replied as he turned away.

“With a couple of vampires that are dead
during the daylight hours?”

He brushed past her. “Look at it this way,”
he said, “the Creature is just as dead. You’re safe until the sun
sets.”

She grabbed his arm. “Will you be back by
then?”

His eyes were steely blue as he stared down
into her face. Her eyes glistened and he could clearly tell she was
terrified. The one thing that their frolicking had proven was that
she realized how close she’d come to willingly giving herself over
to the undead. He had saved her, and she was petrified of facing
the vampires who clearly had a hold on her without him there to
pull her back from the brink.

She knew she wasn’t that strong.

Gina clearly was.

“I don’t know,” he told her honestly. Her lip
quivered. “I’ll try,” he promised in a low voice before he turned
and headed out the door.

He berated himself over and over again as he
hopped aboard his motorcycle. What had he done? How could he have
made the same mistake twice? He still remembered the first time
Gina walked in on he and Abi in the throes of passion – the night
she returned for her father’s funeral and found them naked and in
each other’s arms in Abi’s room in their family home.

There had been no excuses to give. There was
no way he’d have insulted her intelligence. He really had been
comforting Abi and it had gone farther than he had intended, but
that was just the way things were when he got anywhere near Abi. He
needed her. And even seeing the woman he had loved from his
freshman year wasn’t enough to chase those feelings away.

Instead it had chased Gina away – back to
Europe and into the arms of the most dangerous rebound guy she
could have possibly found. A vampire long dead, who wanted nothing
more than to ensure Gina was with him forever.

Worse, Gina seemed perfectly okay with the
idea.

The thought still made Hunter shudder at how
close she had come.

He supposed it was karma to find her making
love to Stephen the night he had gone to apologize and beg for a
second chance.

He managed to step into the room at the exact
moment Stephen was going to sink his long, sharp fangs into her
sweet-smelling, virgin neck.

Hunter had rushed the monster and tore him
off of Gina, and the vampire reacted accordingly. He flung Hunter
up against the wall and nearly knocked him unconscious from the
force of the blow. All Hunter could remember was peering out of
barely opened eyes as Gina rushed to his side, naked and blurry and
scared.

Who saved who remained a mystery. All he knew
was how she looked when she told Hunter that she was in love with
Stephen, and no matter what he did or didn’t do she planned to
follow him where ever he would go... even if that meant to the
grave.

Hunter sped along the dirt road, racing for
town, scouring the swamp land around the road for any sign of red
hair.

He had worked hard to regain her trust so
that he could save her from that evil, cursed fate. How was he ever
going to make it right again? He did the one thing to the one
person that would have severed their bond forever.

And he knew it when he took Abi in his arms
that morning.

It was a bitch loving two sisters, especially
when he was addicted to one of them.

He had naively thought he could return to New
Orleans and face Abi again without losing his composure. But he
knew from the first time he looked at her face in that club it was
a losing battle.

That was the real reason he told her that he
and Gina were married. He’d hope it would be the barrier she needed
to keep far away.

He should have known that the way he felt
when she was near Raven or Constantine, he was fooling no one.

But he made love to Gina last night anyway,
knowing that Abi was fucking two vampires just a few rooms away. If
she noticed that he was more desperate, more demanding, more
forceful, she never said anything.

He had to prove to himself yet again that he
had chosen the right sister. But the harder he fucked Gina, the
more he saw Abi’s face.

When he had thrown Abi against the wall that
morning he was doing it to punish them both for a lust they could
neither deny.

But when they made love on the floor, it was
gentle and it was sweet... and it was everything he had wanted for
more years than he could remember. He knew as he did it that he
would have to face Gina and tell her the truth, but he was hoping
to put that off until after they had killed the Creature.

He was terrified that she would run off and
do something self-destructive.

Like give herself to a vampire.

Fortunately she had been drinking holy water
for enough years that any that dared to touch her would find much
more than a conquest. With any luck their skin would peel from
their bones and their bones would then turn to ash.

That was their theory anyway – they had never
put it in practice. It was the idea of a man named Walter, who had
saved them both from vampire clutches and taught them to become
hunters.

It was also Walter who told Hunter to follow
his heart to Gina, that she needed to be loved by someone who would
never let her down. It was the only way to purge her vampire lover
from her heart for good.

Walter would strangle Hunter for what he had
done, especially knowing that Gina had run off into the swamp with
a shattered heart, heading straight for a Creature unlike any that
they’d ever dealt with before.

She couldn’t charm this Creature, couldn’t
use her feminine wiles like she had done in the past. It only
wanted to destroy anything and anyone who had anything to do with
Raven.

After that electrifying kiss at the club, she
had painted a huge target on her head.

It was evident that Raven wanted her, proven
by the way he wouldn’t let her go even when it physically hurt him
to hold on.

Hunter gulped down a throat full of regret
when he realized Raven had sacrificed more than Hunter had been
willing to.

Worse, Hunter was painfully aware that Gina
had never fully gotten over Stephen. For Raven to show her that
kind of determination to be with her must have been intoxicating to
a woman who had only found that once before.

And it wasn’t with Hunter.

His lips set into a firm, thin line as he
raced along the country road, praying to find Gina before any other
vampires did.

***

Abi watched the sun set from the veranda
facing the back of Raven’s plantation. It peaked through the
drooping arms of the sleepy willow tree until it finally sunk
somewhere in the swamp. A tear slipped down Abi’s face when she
realized that Hunter had not yet returned.

The love she had felt just this morning
deflated just like a balloon. The wind picked up as darkness fell
in shadows around the old plantation, and Abi quickly retreated
within the safety of the house and locked the door behind her.

Constantine entered the room, buttoning his
shirt as he did so. “Good morning,” he quipped with a good-humored
smirk.

She just smiled and couldn’t manage a reply.
He took notice but said nothing as he went over to the bar to pour
a drink. “So where are the rest of the day dwellers?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. It
seemed like so much had happened in such a short time, she wasn’t
even sure how to make sense of it all. Finally she said,
“Gone.”

“Gone?”

She turned to see Raven as he entered the
room. He was shirtless, wearing leather pants, and Abi immediately
wanted to turn away. She felt something inside of her drew to him
like a magnet, or more like a moth to a flame.

She knew that he was no good for her, but yet
just looking at him made her want to surrender to him in a way
she’d never surrendered to anyone.

With her life.

“Gone,” she repeated.

Raven fetched a bottle of water from the bar
where Constantine stood. They both looked at her expectantly,
waiting on her to explain why.

She just wrung her hands and looked away.

“Dammit, Abi,” Raven said with a growl. She
knew he had read her thoughts and knew the gory details of what she
had done. “Weren’t we enough for you?”

She touched her throbbing neck. “Too
much.”

Constantine tossed back his drink. “Fine. Let
them fend for themselves. I never felt comfortable with those
hunters here anyway.”

But Raven was angry. “We all agreed to stick
together.”

“You agreed,” Constantine pointed out.

“Safety in numbers, remember? These are
hunters. Their whole reason for existence is to track and kill
monsters like this Creature.”

“Like you and I,” Constantine added.

“Like all of us,” Raven replied as he turned
his gaze back on Abi. “Once wasn’t enough?” he asked as he
approached, referring to her affair with Hunter. “Tell me. What
more do you have to prove?”

She squared her jaw as she looked at him.
“It’s not like that,” she insisted. “I love Hunter. I always
have.”

“Good luck with that,” he said as he toasted
her with his bottle. “Or has it escaped your notice who he went
chasing after? How many times is this now?”

She looked away.

“Leave her alone,” Constantine said as he
went around the bar and went over to where she stood. “It’s not
like you ever had to live up to a sibling.”

Raven just laughed. “This again, Constantine?
First Nina. Now Demetri? How else have I wronged you? Let us count
the ways.”

“What’s he talking about?” Abi asked
Constantine, who glared at his master, trying to subdue his
anger.

“Our sordid history,” Constantine told her.
“I had a perfect sibling too. Demetri was strong and powerful and
everything his sickly brother could never be. But I didn’t need to
be either to win the heart of Demetri’s wife, did I?”