That made her gasp and him grind his molars.
What a fucking sight, his female arching and twisting, her breasts swaying, her fingers going to her mouth.
As she sucked them deep, he entered her properly, the smooth, hot, tight hold submerging his whole body in white-hot lust. Planting his palm by her head, he bent over and started pumping. He went so hard and so fast that Ehlena had to lock a hold on both sides of the padded top to keep herself in place.
The orgasm was fast for her, but it was faster for him. Almost immediately, he came, but he didn’t stop. There was no locking in—instead, he kept up the rhythm, the slapping sound of him pounding into her a metronome of his need for his female… his desperate, fucking need to mark her, to go to this place of passion with her. Ehlena was, and always would be, his one true home, his solace and his harbor.
Devotion was not a characteristic of symphaths.
But he was half vampire, after all.
A bonded male.
“Rehvenge…” his shellan moaned as she torqued beneath him. “Take my vein.”
Tilting her head to the side, she offered him her throat—and he wanted to say no, but only because he wasn’t going to want to leave her if he started in with the feeding.
“Please, Rehv—take my—”
Baring his fangs, he struck without any conscious thought, and oh, fucking hell, the rush of the taste of her, her blood going over his tongue, down the back of his throat, into his gut. And the power that came with it. On a sudden surge, his hips swung against her even harder, and he started coming again.
And then so was she.
Beneath them, the exam table, which was rated for a weight load of four hundred pounds, started groaning, and when a clapping sound started up—metallic this time, not flesh against flesh—he wondered what the hell it was, what had come loose.
Not that he cared. The only thing he cared about was his Ehlena. Fuck, he was coming another time—
The alarm that went off was shrill, and his eyes shot over to the origin of the intrusion. The computer. It was coming from the—
All at once, in mid-suck and mid-thrust, his brain clicked into high gear. And Ehlena was right with him.
“Someone’s coming in on an emergency,” she said, the words vibrating under his mouth.
With a curse, he released his lips and licked the puncture wounds, capturing a last taste of his female. Then he lifted himself and caught a last, vivid image of her, undone and open, his cock buried deep inside of her, the insides of her thighs gleaming from all his come.
Then he snapped to attention, withdrew, and helped her sit up. After she wrenched her bra across her breasts and fastened it, he pulled down her top, and as she slipped off the exam table, she kicked her bottoms off and went to the built-in desk.
Punching a code into the keyboard, there was a pause and then the alarm silenced and the screen scrolled up with text.
“Who is it,” he asked as he took out a handkerchief and wiped down his erection.
He had to grit his teeth as the sensations shot right into his balls, but he didn’t allow himself another release. He needed to know who was hurt and how—
“John Matthew.” Ehlena looked over at him. “And it’s bad.”
Rehv closed his eyes. “Goddamn it.”
Shoving the handkerchief into one of the deep pockets in his mink, he pulled his slacks up in place. “I’ll go get you fresh scrubs from the locker room while you wash up. And I’ll call Xhex while you prep the OR.”
She captured his hand before he went for the door. Her eyes were wide and anxious. “I love you.”
With a nod, he pulled her in close. “You’re going to do all the right things, you, Manny, and Doc Jane. He’s in the best hands.”
The next thing Rehv knew, he was out in the corridor, and for the briefest moment, he couldn’t remember which direction he was supposed to go in. As he took out his cell phone, things clicked into place and he headed to the right.
As he strode for the locker room, he initiated the call.
And prayed Xhex picked up.
* * *
Dead.
They were all dead.
As Blade stopped in front of the bank of ten-by-ten-foot cages, he stared through the fine steel mesh that was installed over the steel bars. Two males and a female, all hanging by ligatures, their flimsy hospital gowns limp as their limbs, some of the feet still twitching above the drains in the tile floor.
Each of their heads were cocked slightly to the side, as if he had called their names and they’d heard the sound. All of their eyes were open and blindly staring at him.
“Help… me…”
At the plaintive entreaty, Blade looked across the lab space. The setup was what he’d come to expect, the work stations of computers, monitoring equipment, vials, and test tubes ringing the space, an examination table with restraints in the center of the facility, the overhead lights bright white and glaring.
The man he’d just shot in the chest was slumped by a drain next to where the experiments were performed. Where those vampires had been cut open, prodded, injected. Where the suffering had been so acute.
Convenient, really. The blood would just drip down into the plumbing system.
“Help…”
“You realize,” Blade drawled, “that expecting a rescue from the person who shot you is not logical. And may cause me to provide you further attention.”
He refocused on the cages and the steel mesh. Vampires couldn’t dematerialize through that alloy of iron and carbon, and he wondered how long it had taken the humans to figure that out. It had to have been a rate limiter that was solved pretty damn quick. Those rats without tails were inferior in every sense of the word, so to keep their subjects captive, to work on the males and females, they would have had to sacrifice quite a few of their own kind before they were successful at imprisonment.
Walking closer to the bodies, he knelt in front of the middle one, his hand going down to sweep robing out of the way—except he wasn’t dressed in his blood-red drape. Not tonight. For this mission, his clothes were formfitting, and upon his back, he bore a heavy pack that had not slowed him down in the slightest.
He lowered his head in a measure of respect. The female had been in her prime, at least going by age—but she was in bad condition. She had been starved of at least blood and perhaps food, leaving her arms and legs without muscle. Ulcers marked her skin, the raw patches red and infected. Sections of dark hair had fallen out on her head.
The other two were in similar conditions, but the female was what bothered him the most.
She was just like his sister in so many ways.
An image of Xhex flashed into his mind’s eye, and he replaced the stranger hanging by her throat with his own kin.
And then… another memory. From the Colony, a good twenty-five years before. He was looking out the window of one of the shill buildings, the structures that had been built and maintained to look like homes so the humans in that isolated upstate town would not become suspicious.
His sister was being driven away in a van. Against her will.
Funny that “symphath” and “sympathy” shared so many letters. Because the former had none of the latter—
A tickle in his eye made him blink, and as his vision got blurry, he wiped at the sensation with impatience. Looking down, he saw a red smear on his fingertips.