Zero to Love (18 page)

“I know where two of them are. You had the third. Where did it go?”

“They stole it months ago.”

Fury spiked in Monroe’s core. “The Free Wills.”

Aric dropped his chin to his chest in a solemn nod.

“For what purpose?”

“I can only think of one reason, my friend.” Aric raised his gaze again, the dark blue depths glowing with a silent plea. “To take the human’s daughter and keep her quiet. To keep us from being able to hear her and…to find her.”

Monroe’s heart lurched. He lunged across the space for the door.

“I should have told someone who was close to her, but I could trust no one in her family,” Aric begged.

Monroe stood in the doorway, more than ready to make an exit. “No one can trust them, Aric. She has only me now. Have a care for yourself—your mind is too precious to lose.”

With the warning that the Free Wills might come after Aric too, Monroe stormed into the street. His leg muscles coiled to run, but he walked at a clipped pace toward his SUV. He had to get to Magda’s father. And then to the airport where he’d board the next flight for the island of Sicily—to Vincent Brunelli.

* * * *

Monroe trailed Giovanni near enough that the man knew it. He looked over his shoulder repeatedly and at one point made a call to Elijah to tell him to stick with the plan.

Looking more closely at her father was paying off.

The sunshine burned off the smog, creating prisms of light that tricked the eye. Objects loomed up suddenly as if Monroe threw them in Giovanni’s path. At least that was what he thought.

Monroe smirked.

Giovanni tossed a look over his shoulder and quickened his steps. His shoes pounded the sidewalk. Other pedestrians spied Monroe and detoured across the street. “What do you want from me, scum?” Giovanni asked.

Amusement stretched Monroe’s smirk into a full-blown smile. “You know that Magda has feelings for me.”

At that her father spun, fists clenched near his pockets like a cowboy prepared for a gunfight in an old western. His voice shook. “No daughter of mine has feelings for a Mindchanger.”

Monroe locked gazes with Giovanni and probed him deeply. The first glimpse was just as he expected—surface memories of Magda’s recent years. But when he probed deeper in search of information about Giovanni’s wife, he came up against a soft barrier.

Giovanni jerked his head to break their connection, but Monroe didn’t allow it. He took a step closer.

“Please leave us alone. Me, my son, my daughter. All of us.”

“It’s too late. Magda’s a target, and I need every bit of information I can get in order to protect her. You know why she’s a target?”

A halo of light flared in Giovanni’s mind, a star in a blank night sky that Monroe followed—again to the soft barrier.

One hard shove, and he’d be in, but Giovanni’s mind was weak. To force his way might break the man. The best thing to do was cajole the information from the depths of his brain.

“I won’t give you anything, you son of a bitch,” Giovanni said through a clenched jaw.

Monroe’s determination grew. “I have to protect her.”

“That’s my job—her brother’s job.”

“You’re not doing a very good job.”

Giovanni’s control wavered. Some of the tension in his shoulders was replaced with defeat. “Until you took from her, she was totally safe.”

Monroe smiled. So the man believed he could drink from her.
If only I could.

Giovanni took a bold step forward. “You drank from her and opened her mind up to them again. Now they’re after her. Elijah is doing everything in his power to keep them off her trail. You fools don’t bother to hide her the way we do.”

Monroe plucked the idea from Giovanni’s mind and turned it over on his tongue. He could devour it and fill himself, but it tasted acidic, saturated with fear and bile.

He rejected it and let Giovanni go. That soft barrier in his mind wasn’t worth pushing down at this time. The man was simply protecting Magda. Even the secret society Giovanni and Vincent had created against Mindchangers had only been established to protect her.

You can’t have her. She’ll never love one of your kind
. The angry thought in Giovanni’s mind snapped Monroe’s control.

He curled his feelers around it and yanked it free, swallowing it in one swift gulp. In its place, he sent a new thought—one that Giovanni would never realize wasn’t his own.

She belongs with me. Only I can protect her.

Giovanni gave an absent nod and turned to continue down the sidewalk. For a moment Monroe watched him go, aware that the genes Magda’s father possessed weren’t remotely close to the DNA chain in Magda. If Monroe had looked more closely at him sooner, he would have gathered the biggest clue to Magda’s mystery.

Her father wasn’t Giovanni Brunelli.

Chapter Twelve

Sensation rippled over Magda. The hum—the drone—split her head and made her want to scream.

Not just scream, but shriek out of control.

She yanked open the front door of her house. Keefe was there on her front step, staring at her. “Make it stop. Please make it stop.”

He shook his head. “I’m not a beekeeper. I can’t.”

“Where are they?” She shot a frantic glance around her lawn. Keefe and Toliver guarded the front while the other two were out back. It had been this way for two days.

Toliver moved forward, his blocky body invading her space. She took a step back and came up against the wall of the house. “They’re nowhere near, Magda. You hear them?”

“What are they?” The itch sank deep into her blood, making her crazed with the need to stop it—to help them.

“Mindchangers, frozen after their minds lock up on too much food,” Keefe said.

Toliver grinned. “They’re gluttons.”

“What do you do to help them?” She scratched her arms, digging her nails in to get relief, but there was none. That eternal drone went on and on and on.

Keefe and Toliver exchanged a look. “We don’t do anything. That’s Monroe’s job,” Keefe said.

“He eats up the stray thoughts and unfreezes them. He’s a beekeeper,” Toliver explained.

Beekeeper
. The word dropped into her consciousness, filling her with an awareness.

Whatever was happening to her, she was different. Other humans couldn’t hear that.

She took a hasty step forward and flattened her palms on Keefe’s chest. “Am I a beekeeper?”

He blinked down at her, his dark eyes probing her in a way that might have been erotic if he could feed. Just as Monroe had fed from Elise.

“I don’t honestly know what you are, Magda,” he said after a silence.

She edged toward the door again, prepared to hurl herself into the house and get away from the entire Mindchanger race. This was her fault for submerging herself in the underworld. Maybe she should return to the university, to Nick and normalcy.

“I’m so thirsty,” she whispered.

Toliver gave her a gentle shove over the threshold. “Go and drink, sweetheart. You’ll feel better once you do.”

The overwhelming thirst took over her brain, and she forgot momentarily about the drone. She rushed to the kitchen and gulped apple juice straight from the jug. She’d long ago given up on trying to sip from glasses. The idea was to get as much inside her as fast as possible. Until she did, she could think of nothing else.

She sank to the floor in the kitchen, cradling the juice. Her mind blanked, filled only with sweetness and numbers.

After several minutes she came back to herself. The trance lifted. Terror replaced thirst. In the back of her mind she recognized how lucky she was that her brother and father weren’t home. They’d been gone all day, saying they had something important to see to. But this was all wrong. Her father and brother had always been overprotective of Magda. Why weren’t they here now, fighting off the Mindchangers they hated?

She jumped up and ran to the door again, whipped it open. “Keefe. I don’t like this.”

He placed a hand on her arm, soothing her. “I know, Magda. It’s going to be all right.”

“I need…I need someone.”

“Who?” Toliver asked, a crease between his long brows.

Keefe turned. “Her.”

“Me.” Amy appeared around the hedge a split second after Keefe must have heard her. The woman grinned at Magda, her dimples the most delicious things Magda had ever seen.

The Mindchangers let Amy pass. Magda grabbed her by the coat and hauled Amy into the house. Amy slammed the door behind them, her gaze glinting with something Magda wanted to get closer to.

A rush of instinct took over. When Amy twisted her fingers in Magda’s hair and drew Amy’s mouth to hers, Magda groaned. The dark anxiety in her core dissipated slightly as the woman flipped her silken tongue against Magda’s.

This was off. Odd. Wrong, but not because Amy was the same sex. No, that wasn’t it. It was wrong because she was fucking in love with Monroe, and kissing anyone besides him felt wrong to the marrow of her bones.

Still she couldn’t make herself stop. The craving was too much, and Amy quieted her mind.

Magda let herself drift in a sea of sweetness and sensation.

More roving hands joined Amy’s. Soft hands caressing Magda’s arms, breasts, belly, between her thighs. As tender fingers circled her clit, Magda burst in a blinding orgasm that left her mind and body humming.

The woman strummed her fingers over Magda’s wet folds again and again, drawing long moans from her that felt just as good as the aftershocks of her release.

The dark pull of someone’s lips on her breasts sent a shiver of pleasure through her. She continued to moan, her sounds growing louder.

Her mind blossomed with numbers and more—things she had no idea how to control or even name.

Through a fog she looked up into the faces of Keefe, Hale, Adams, and Toliver. Hunger stood out on them from the sharp lines of their cheekbones to the way their fists curled.

Magda waved a hand. “Take from them, but not too much. Drink.” A half dozen women surrounded her, and they paired off with the Mindchangers to provide food and pleasure.

Soon every chair and sofa in the living area was draped with a half-nude couple. Keefe’s leather pants bunched at his ankles as he supported a laughing blonde in his arms, lifted her, and impaled her on his cock.

Magda’s desire spread. She grabbed a delicate African American girl and pulled her until she lay across Magda’s lap.

Staring into the dark, lust-crazed eyes, Magda asked, “What’s your name?”

Sara.

“Sara.”

How she knew this information, she had no idea.

Magda tangled her fingers in Sara’s curls and drew the woman’s head down. The first brush of Magda’s lips across Sara’s yanked a sigh from the woman. She went boneless in Magda’s hold.

After countless minutes of tongue-dueling kisses, Sara broke free and dropped to her knees before Magda. Her heated touch on Magda’s inner thigh was a jolt. Did Magda want this?

Holding her gaze, Sara lowered her mouth to the juncture of Magda’s thighs and parted her lips over Magda’s pussy.

Hips bucking, Magda drowned in the ecstasy of a woman’s short, wet flicks of her tongue over Magda’s slit. Sara found her clit and sucked on it gently until Magda writhed off the sofa. She stared into Sara’s eyes, entranced by what she saw there—devotion, passion, and the need to give.

Those findings in the depths of the human female’s eyes were more erotic than the sight of her dark skin against Magda’s pale white.

Magda started.
Human female?
Why would she think of Sara this way when Magda was a human as well?

Sara ran her forefinger through Magda’s soaking folds and sank it deep into her sheath. The first pulsations struck Magda, and her pussy clenched around Sara’s finger.

Never breaking the connection of their gazes, Magda clasped Sara’s head and drew her deeper. Sara finger-fucked her and lapped at her clit, moving faster as Magda’s orgasm rushed over her.

With a cry, she came. Hot juices spilled over Sara’s finger. She pumped it in and out wildly. The waves of release continued to crash over Magda. They went on forever, and Magda drifted, lost in sensation and the darkness of Sara’s eyes.

Finally, Magda looked up at the sound of flesh smacking flesh. Adams faced away from her, providing a view of his nude form. He pinned a tall brunette against the wall. Over his shoulder the female met Magda’s eyes.

And held.

Held.

Magda shuddered and came back to herself. What was happening?

She felt around her, trailing her fingers over the silk of her bedspread. Above her the golden ceiling reflected early-morning light.

Who put me in bed?

She sat up, mind racing. It felt like seconds before that she’d been on the sexual playground downstairs, and now she was alone in bed.

Burying her face in her hands, she detected the lingering scents of the women she’d touched—Amy, Sara, Kayla… More names flitted into her consciousness. Had anyone but Sara revealed her name out loud?

She knew more than their names—addresses, relationships, their goals in life.

“What’s happening to me?” Her voice sounded as a soft sob.

The smell of female was evidence that the orgy had taken place even if she tried to ignore the satisfied feelings between her legs.

“Monroe…” She hated that he’d gone away from her, had chosen Elise to drink from. She also hated that these trances took over and she couldn’t fight her cravings. When Monroe had found her kissing Elise, had he felt the same as Magda had watching him feed from the woman?

Monroe was hers—her zero-nine. She needed those numbers on her tongue.

Her throat seemed to crack with thirst. After stumbling to her feet, she crossed her bedroom—still totally nude—to her dresser. The walnut surface was covered in bottles of juice and soda.

She uncapped one and drank. Uncapped the second and guzzled. Feeling slightly more stable, she went to the window and threw it open. A dark head popped into view among the bushes. Apparently the orgy was wrapped up, and Keefe was manning his post again.

“I need to talk to you, Keefe.”

“Be right up.”