Page 19 of Reaper's Revenge
My eyes are barely open, watching through my lashes as she pauses long enough to approach the couple. She removes a bowl from under one of their legs, then returns to the kitchen island to dump its contents into the pitcher. The red in the glass fills up, and the sight hits me like a sledgehammer.
She truly is draining the people beside me.
She’s drinking their blood as if it’s water.
I’m silently freaking the fuck out inside, knowing I’m next and could be dead at a moment’s notice. Veronica truly is a psychopath. My heart is hammering so quickly I can hear the pounding thumps in my ears, but I can’t allow her to know I’m lucid. I need time to think, as well as time to catch her off guard to escape.
She drinks a few hefty gulps of blood before wiping her upper lip with the back of her hand. She rambles on, grumbling, “He should’ve been expecting this. I taught him better, showed him how we eat the humans, and express our will whenever the feeling hits. He’s turned too soft in my time away, but no more. I’ll drain the bitch in a few days once I finish off these two old sods’ blood, then she’ll be out of our way for good. He’ll see reason eventually, they all do.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess she’s used to talking to herself. The woman isLooney Tuneswith a capital L. How in the fuck am I going to get out of here, and what on earth is that smell? Like copper, but mixed with something sweet. Cinnamon and honey? I swear it’s that, but then I catch another inhale and it’s not those scents at all. What is it? My eyes eventually follow my nose, landing on the dead couple.
Is the delectable scent their blood?
My mouth waters at the thought.
Chapter Fourteen
Reaper
I can’t believe I lost her. I pushed my motorcycle as much as I could, but the little sporty car Veronica was driving was able to get a decent lead on me, and then they were justgone. Now, I’m stuck with no idea as to where she could’ve taken Athena, and worried about my woman as she’s in the middle of her change. She has no idea what her body is doing right now. I didn’t get the chance to have the talk with her, and now she’s left without my guidance. I know she must be confused, her mind conflicted with everything her body is telling her.
Then there’s Veronica. I can’t believe out of all the years I’ve searched for her, she appears out of nowhere. I’m so angry with myself for being unprepared, I could claw my flesh from my bones and still not be satisfied.
“She’s gone!” I roar as I pace Prez’s office.
My brothers stand out in the hallway, listening in, as there’s not enough room in here for them, not that it’d be in their best interest to be in a confined space with me at the moment. It’s one of the main reasons we go to the café to have Church. We’ve also gotten spoiled being waited on while we discuss club business and snack on rare steaks.
Bones and Mayhem wearily watch as I continue to yell, “Veronica has her, and now she’s in danger. I can’t believe I made her a mark in all of this. Used her as bait, to the very woman I’ve been hunting for decades. How could this have happened, and no one picked up on it?”
I grab the closest thing to me, an end table next to the two-seater couch Prez has somehow managed to shove in here. The small table is no match for my fury as I toss it at the wall across from me with enough force that it splinters apart. Mayhem quickly ducks his head out from the doorway as wood flies everywhere.
“Damn it!” I bellow loud enough that a framed picture falls to the floor, the thin glass pane shattering. I follow it up with a mighty roar that’s full of so many emotions my brothers can feel my heartache and the overwhelming sense of loss practically bleeding from my pores.
Bones stands, hands extending out in front of him as he calmly placates, “Easy, Reaper.” My gaze flies to him, ready to rip into him, but he continues before I manage to let the words fly past my lips. “This is good and bad. We know Veronica’s in the area, so you finally have the lead you’ve been searching for-for all these years. As for Athena, she’s in the middle of her change, so she’ll feel lethargic, but her bones will be getting stronger. She’ll be faster, her senses more in tune to help her survive.”
“I know what the change does,” I respond on a frustrated growl, hell, we all do, having lived through it.
I run my hand through my hair, my other fist tightly clenched to the point I’ll probably break my own fingers if I don’t ease off a touch. “However, none of it will help her if she doesn’t drink. How is she supposed to know any of this without me there to guide her? She’ll fall into bloodlust, making her attack someone if there’s a human near her, and if not, she’ll fucking die without consuming human blood.” Every time the thought merely crosses my mind, a pang of despair like no other wracks my body to the point I feel like I’m dying already.
“I continue, “She knows none of this. Only that her body is fighting itself, driving her to become everything her sweet innocence balks against.”
Mayhem finally enters the office, standing in the doorway. He leans back against the trim, crossing his arms, silent as Prez sighs. “She’s a good girl, Reaper. Smart. Athena will figure it out, and once she’s strong enough, she’ll get away.”
I glare; his words are not enough to pull me out of my tirade. “How? She can’t go outside in the middle of the day or she’ll burn to death. What if she’s trapped somewhere without cover? She’ll be lost to me forever, burned up into a stinking, rotting corpse. My fuckingmate, brother. She’s my mate and I’ve just found her.” My insides feel like mush, as if every bone inside of me will crumble to nothing if something like that were to happen to Athena.
Bones moves the rest of the way around his desk, tugging me in. His arms wrap around me in a firm hug, reminding me of when I was a teenager. “It’s going to be okay,Son. You’ll get her back, and you two will figure everything out from there.”
“What if it never happens? What if she’s lost to me forever? You know what it means to have a mate. I won’t survive it. The need to be with her will drive me to my death.”
He releases me, nodding. “I know. Mates are rare, and the tether to them is unlike anything anyone has experienced with another person. None of us here knows how deep that bond is, so we have to go off of what you’re experiencing.”
I already know as much, especially with him. He’s my father, but alsonotin a sense. We’ve been brothers in the club longer than he had the chance to be a parent. I’d slept with Veronica decades ago, and she’d changed me against my will. At the time, I was distant with Bones, still upset over the loss of my mother. Veronica had sought him out soon after I’d gone through the change and turned him as well. We never had the chance to have a typical father-son relationship, so it was easy at the time for me to push him away.
I’ve always blamed myself because if I hadn’t fallen for her charms, Bones never would’ve become a vampire. He wouldn’t have been forced to live out eternity without the woman he loved. Unlike me, he didn’t have the mating bond with my mother, so his love for her didn’t kill him. It’s a twisted trick: live forever missing the people you’ve loved, or find your true mate, and if they perish, go mad with grief, to the point it kills you.
Once Veronica was finished with me, I’d avoided everyone I knew as much as possible. I’d gone through the change and learned how to feed on people, killing the beggars and crooks in the back streets of London. Not long after, however, Bones hunted me down, showing me he’d been turned into a vampire as well. That’s when we decided to come to America, needing to distance ourselves from everyone we knew there, for good.
It wasn’t until years later of drowning in my anger and self-loathing, that we came across our first brother, Lucky. At that point, I finally felt confident enough to start my search for Veronica, hell bent on getting my revenge. Years would pass before we stumbled upon another vampire whom we could call brother, and then eventually, the motorcycle club.
