“Get,” she repeated between clenched teeth. She started to charge toward the animal, made fearless by her volatile emotional state. Movement caught her attention out of the side of her eye, however, and she paused. Her mouth fell open in amazement when she saw that close to a dozen wolves surrounded her in a half-circle. Each of them stood utterly still, their moonlit eyes fixed on her.
A hand spread along the side of her neck, long fingers stretching into her unbound hair. He jerked her against his long, hard body, her belly thumping against his groin. Heat and the odor of aroused male filled her nose, the impact of the scent sending her body into a strange combination of fight or flight and lust so powerful it struck her awareness like a slap to the face.
“Get your filthy hands off me,” she growled at Saint, outraged that he had the nerve to touch her with the women’s essence still on him.
“Why do you run? You know perfectly well I’d never harm you.”
She laughed mirthlessly. “I obviously don’t know the first thing about you.”
She saw his light blue eyes gleam in the moonlight, reminding her of the wolves that surrounded them. His nostrils flared when he inhaled. “You’re right. You know nothing about me, lovely, or you wouldn’t be having infantile fantasies about us sharing a romantic interlude in the darkness.”
His eyes flashed; his head moved slightly as he inhaled again, clearly catching her scent. For some reason, the primitiveness of his actions made her want to respond in kind, made her itch to press her body against his hard length, to claw at his back until he came down over her in the fragrant grass…to force him to take what was his.
The thought made her flinch away from him.
“You’re an animal,” she hissed.
“Yes.”
She started. He sounded so sure…so sad. Tears scalded her eyes.
“I’ve always known you weren’t like other people, just like I’m not. I didn’t mean you were an animal because you’re different. I meant it because you called me here tonight knowing perfectly well how much you were going to hurt me. You wanted to make sure of it, you bastard.” She jerked violently out of his hold. “That’s why you’re an animal, Saint.”
“Better I hurt you this way than to turn your foolish fantasies into reality.”
She went up on her tiptoes, shoving her face as close to his as she could get. “It was your fantasy as well, you fucking hypocrite.”
For several seconds they just stared at each other, Christina trying to catch both her breath and her splintering control; Saint holding himself preternaturally still.
“You won’t harm those women,” she stated fiercely.
“I never harm. I take, but only what’s freely given.” His gaze dropped down over her. “And not always that.”
The image of him swam in a world filled with tears.
“Just stay away from Aidan and me, you son of a bitch.”
As she ran blindly through the night, she was too overwhelmed to even notice that the wolves had disappeared.
Saint watched Christina run away. Her vitessence—her vibrant lifeforce—popped and snapped around her, shining brilliantly in his vision. That he could actually see her hurt and disillusionment like a human would see something as tangible as the sunrise made his pain exponentially more vicious.
His frozen stance belied a nearly overwhelming need to race after her. This was his life—always the mandate to restrain, ever the requirement to battle his hunger, to vanquish his need.
He sensed Fardusk standing near his right shoulder. “Have the others escort the women off Whitby’s grounds.”
“Have you become as mercenary in your feeding as your clone, then?” Fardusk asked.
Saint turned slowly. Fardusk’s face looked as though it’d been carved from rock in the blue-tinged light of the moon. He experienced the admonishment from the revered chief of the Iniskium like acid splashing on a raw wound.
“I have given them pleasure. I haven’t shortchanged them,” Saint said bitterly. “Why don’t you just say what you’re really angry about?”
“It was beneath you to trick Christina in that way. She deserves better.”
His muscles convulsed with repressed emotion. He’d known Fardusk now for over five and a half centuries, and never once had his companion chastised him. This despite the fact that Saint was more deserving of Fardusk’s condemnation than any other. Saint had been the one to rob Fardusk and so many members of the Iniskium tribe
of their mortal lives, after all.
“She deserves much better,” Saint hissed. “What would you have me do? She is life; I am the walking dead. Christina is the fullness. I am the void. Would you have me drain her of every ounce of her vitessence, only to make her like me?”