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  Then she said the last thing he expected, and the only thing Marley McRae would say in a situation like this: "Fuck you, then Sabian. Your ass hurts if you think I’m going to just accept anything. Go ahead and kill me, because I’d sooner have that than have any man, monster or not, tell me what I can or cannot do. Never again."

  He bared his fangs and clenched his claws into daggers that cut into the palms of his hands. "You have no idea how dangerous this is. Please don’t provoke me, Marley. I don’t want to hurt you."

  He began walking back toward the couch, but stopped when she next spoke.

  "I'm afraid of you, Sabian, but you can't bully me. So you get pissed, and kill me. Or you get thirsty, and kill me. It’s all the same in the end, and if you’re right, I’ll be back anyway, so back off."

  Sabian was shaking, and a low, rumbling sound was working it’s way free of his chest. He closed his eyes, unclenched his fists, and began to slow his breathing. Rage made him want to rip, tear, and most of all, it made him want to feed. In that moment, he wanted to shred her clothes from her body, violate her in a hundred different ways while he slashed into her throat and gorged himself. Her blood above that of all other humans would satisfy this beast she’d brought to the surface. She just had no idea what he was capable of, and he didn’t know if his love for her could quell the fiend within.

  He would have to leave.

  "Have it your way, then," he managed to say. "I can’t do what I need to do like this." He looked at her like a carnivorous beast about to eat fresh kill (not far from the truth), and said, "But believe me, it will be done. We will be together. God help us all if anyone, you included, tries to get in the way."

  When he walked out her door, his movements were slow and deliberate. Sabian closed the door softly behind him, contrary to the rage his entire repertoire of body language betrayed. He disappeared into a white washed night scented by a city full of chimneys venting a thousand smoldering fires.

  Someone would die tonight, and he would be the agent of horror. Someone had to pay for his wrath. Someone would die soon, and in violence.

  Better someone than his Marley.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Audi TT railed around the corners of the Poudre Canyon, Run to the Hills blasting from the speakers. Anya tried to lose herself in the sensation. She needed blood. Correction, she needed more blood.

  She had seen every last sickening kiss and caress, the entire time waiting for Sabian to sense her just outside the window. How had he ignored her energy? Was it deliberate? Anya didn’t think so.

  Which was that much more enraging.

  She shrieked up the canyon, wild and reckless as the wind of the blizzard. She had so much to do before dawn when she would need to be safely tucked away from the sun before it's rays seeped over the mountains.

  Anya couldn’t believe Sabian actually wanted to stick his dick inside that whore. Not so long ago, all that you're mine and I'll not tolerate the stink of another on your flesh stuff was meant for her.

  She was a filthy, poverty stricken teen when he’d first found her at the turn of the Twentieth Century in Russia, but she wasn't stupid. Sabian was a god, one who told her every day she was beautiful, precious…and delicious. When he’d fed from her the first time, she knew she'd never be the same. She was essentially broken, corrupt, unfit for any other man. Anya was singularly obsessed from that first bite—she would become like Sabian, and spend eternity with his blood bathing every inch of her body.

  But that was a hundred years ago, and he'd been done with her before he'd granted her this gift of immortality. Too late, Anya learned of his devotion to Marley, only back then the name was Tatiana. For Sabian, Tatiana was the perfect soul, bonded forever to him.

  Not that Anya wasn't, but instead of bonded, she was shackled.

  She couldn’t remember now if he’d ever explained this life fully before changing her. To watch Sabian, one would never guess the scorching thirst, the isolation, the prison of night. Sabian sure as hell didn’t have to give up the sun, and before her embrace, it never once occurred to Anya that she might.

  Sabian's every word was another expression of the little death he died every day yearning for his rotting soul-mate.

  And it really was that dramatic.

  All the time. Every fucking day.

  Anya finally shut him off, stopped listening, existed only for his touch and his blood. She belonged to him, yes, but the sacrifices she made seemed out of balance for the payoff.

  "Fucking prick," she said with only a subtle Russian accent. She’d been in the States as long as Sabian, always on his heels.

  She could hear the wretch in the trunk coming around, moaning and kicking at the back seats. This one was pitiful, desperate for attention with her stupid pink-streaked hair and eighties clothes. Anya lived through the eighties in America, and other than the opulence and gusto, there was nothing else noteworthy about the decade, especially not the fashion.

  Young Samuel would be mad when he found out what she’d done, but Anya needed a release. Perhaps he’d see in time that she’d done him a favor. The human would have figured out Samuel wasn’t who he said he was, and that would only make things more complicated for everyone.

  "Shut up!" she yelled over the music and the sound of the road. If blood still circulated as it did before the change, her head would be pounding, but forever suspended in death, pain offered no comfort of distraction, no fuel for the fire of her jealousy.

  Anya pulled the little black sports car off the two-lane highway into one of the many turnouts for slower cars to allow the risk takers to pass. It was one in the morning, and very few cars shared the canyon with her. She pulled the parking break, took the keys out of the ignition, and all man-made sounds went silent. Even her guest in the trunk was still.

  Anya listened to the wind. The snow whirling around her face provided a visual distraction from the memory of Sabian’s lips on that harlot’s mouth, of his teeth in flesh that wasn't hers.

  Anya savored the violence of the storm. She thought about the enormous boulders strewn this way and that all over the landscape and riverbed. She, too, was a force of nature.

  The noise started up from the trunk again, and Anya was ready to be through with her chore. Plus, she was thirsty and feeling evil. Perhaps the evening could be salvaged with enough inventiveness. She might just get avant-garde, perhaps even artistic.

  She threw the trunk open, and Jenna looked up at her through mascara-smeared eyes; the girl was hideous. More than that, to Anya, she was desperate. Fucking humans, always trying to assert their worth, make their marks on the world. Didn’t this insignificant pest know she had nothing to offer? Didn’t she know how contrived her makeup and hair were? Couldn’t they, just once, know their place and provide what they were meant to provide—warm blood and entertainment?

  Anya’s body had needs, and they didn’t all revolve around blood. Time to play.

  It took Sabian an hour to clear the most traveled part of the canyon. There was comfort in the mountains. There was comfort in blood.

  Sabian ran through the steep forest of the Poudre Canyon. His feet barely touched the earth. Ice had formed over much of the flowing water of the Cache la Poudre River, but there were some areas sheltered by massive boulders that still allowed a trickle of current to be seen. The snow fell heavier as elevation thinned and cooled the air, and wind ruled the landscape.

  A sample-sized meal wouldn’t suit his needs tonight, so Sabian risked feeding in the secluded high country where there was no populace to shroud the death in anonymity. Rocky Mountain wildlife gave him a wide berth as he passed; their instincts and senses told them what many humans chose to ignore—he was a predator of the most sophisticated type, and they were lucky. Their blood didn’t offer what Sabian was looking for. He wanted all out oblivion. Only human terror could provide that brew.

  Gunner Dixon owned one of the mountain cabins that peppered the canyonside leading to Cameron Pass. Ther
e were no neighbors for a mile in either direction—part of the charm he and his ex-wife Lurlene found in the cabin. They were looking for privacy and the aspens and pine trees that stood sentinel from the porch all the way to the riverbank provided plenty.

  Gunner was an early riser. Most old-timers were, at least the ones he knew. When he’d gone to bed last night he thought he might get up and take a mosey down to the Poudre for some ice fishing. Well, not ice fishing proper because he couldn’t really waste the day away sitting over the hole drinking his PBR, but who needed a hole?

  Well, even Gunner had to admit there was something to be said for a hole in a man’s life.

  He huffed a dark chuckle. Thirty years younger, and the sound would have meant danger. Fucking Lurlene. She showed promise in those first couple months, otherwise why would he have married her? But it didn’t take long for Gunner to realize she was mostly shrew with a little bit of cunt thrown in for spice. His brother Moses warned him about tying the knot at the tender age of sixty-two, but his brother’s advice had always been about as useful as a dildo in a convent.

  "Gunner," he’d said. "You’ve been a bachelor for sixty-two years. Things change when a woman moves in. How are you going deal with it when she wants your socks in the basket or the seat down?"

  Gunner remembered laughing at his little brother, a youngster at the age of fifty-nine. What did Moses know anyway? He’d been with his wife since he was seventeen, and therefore wasn’t qualified to give advice; Moses and his wife Belinda were freaks of nature lasting so long. Lurlene wasn’t just any woman, or at least he’d thought at the time, but it turned out Moses was at least part right. She tried to change Gunner, but he was rusted in his ways, stuck for all time like the old lawn tractor parked forever behind the new cabin. Came with the mortgage. Gunner considered it lawn-art.

  Bachelorhood was never all it was cracked up to be in the movies. There weren’t women and booze and parties running rampant. Well, maybe booze. He’d only had sex with four women, and could count the times on his two hands (unless he included those two hands as partners, then the number was in the thousands).

  Lurlene was hot to trot, fuck-happy like a pet store rabbit. She was also younger than him at sixty years old, and for whatever reason (he preferred not to go there), knew ways to please Gunner that blew his mind and left him cross-eyed. It was during the after-fog of her talents in bed that they’d decided to get hitched and trade his little cabin in Rustic for this one on which he now owed a mortgage.

  Fucking bitch.

  The divorce papers were signed a mere nine months after the nuptials. It only took Gunner five to figure out all they had was the ugly-bumping, and nothing else.

  Gunner let her take everything she could legally get her hands on, but he would have gutted her like a cleaned trout if she tried to get the cabin. It was hard to say who won. He had the cabin, sure, but it was nearly bare, save the huge bed with mirrors on the ceiling they bought themselves as a wedding gift. That and his gun racks. It was also furnished with the envelope that came once a month in the mail asking him to give over ninety percent of his pension.

  He looked out the window and saw the effects of the blizzard moving through his yard and heading toward Fort Collins. He wouldn’t be fishing today, no way. Gunner was happy he had the propane tanks filled the week before. It would have been a bitch to go out and gather firewood in this, and the cabin was so cold he thought his nipples might poke holes in his undershirt.

  He was sipping his coffee, nothing in particular on his mind as he looked out the window when he saw the blur flash through the trees. Leaning closer, he strained his eyes to make it out, but only succeeded in fogging up the glass.

  Get your gun, he thought. He kicked Cleo on his way to the study where they were racked. She was an old basset hound he’d called his best friend since ‘96. Cleo was an old timer, just like Gunner, and enjoyed sleeping in contrary to the early-riser stereotype of his geriatric cohorts.

  She lifted her head and looked at him through tired, sad eyes for just a moment before her long floppy ears pricked up and the hair on her back stood at attention. Cleo was growling at the master bedroom French doors by the time Gunner came back.

  "Good girl. Tell ‘em, Cleo."

  Sunrise was imminent, and Gunner squinted into his backyard, gun at the ready. He chambered a round with an exaggerated ch-chak, hoping for an intimidation factor.

  Gunner didn’t know what kind of human sludge would come all the way up here in a near white-out blizzard to pilfer, but someone was out there, he was sure of it. He just couldn’t see the cunt-sucker. Cleo felt it, too.

  "Get outta here you sum-bitch, ‘fore I shoot off your pollywog!" Cleo woofed in solidarity.

  Gunner’s neck-hair began to dance and his balls smarted. Cleo stopped barking, but whined as she panted at the door, each steamy huff obscuring more of the window. Gunner couldn’t see or hear anything over the windy white, but his danglers told him the threat was right on top of them.

  A floorboard creaked behind them, and Gunner spun around to see a man standing in the doorway of his bedroom.

  "No!" said Gunner, who dropped his rifle and put his hands out in front of him. "Get thee back, devil!"

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. The figure was wet and steamy from the blizzard with electric blue eyes that pierced Gunner’s brain. And the teeth! Holy Jesus, the devil's teeth hung down like vampire fangs!

  And this devil was smiling at him!

  "To me," said the intruder, and his voice was velvet. Those eyes gnawed at Gunner's survival instinct. He didn’t want to move and was dang sure his brain was telling his feet to stay put, but he saw the devil gliding closer to him. Only the devil wasn’t moving, he was.

  When Gunner was alongside the big bed, the devil nodded at him, and Gunner heard it say clear as a cowbell smack in the center of his head, "Lie down."

  He wondered if this was what it was like to be abducted by aliens, helpless and paralyzed in the green light of the tractor beam while your mind screamed and twisted in on itself to get you free.

  When he was settled on the bed, the devil said, "I’m going to kill you shortly."

  Now it wasn’t just his balls that ached, but his own pollywog opened the floodgates, and Gunner pissed himself right there in his own bed. He started to whimper. Shit fire, he sounded just like Cleo.

  "Of course," said the creature, "I’m sorry about this, but I’ve had a difficult night, see, and you’re going to help me cope. It’s nothing personal."

  The devil moved onto the bed with him, and that’s when Gunner decided he would strike up a conversation with God. Or should he address Jesus? Sermonizers seemed to think the two men were one in the same, so he took his pick and began praying.

  The devil was on all fours, hovering above Gunner, still smiling that wretched smile. Gunner thought he saw something glinting off those fangs, dripping right out the middle, and not drool, mind you. The devil leaned in, and gave him a sniff.

  "Almost there. Perhaps just a little more." He took the pinky nail of his right hand to Gunner’s neck, and carved until a gash three inches long, but only a fraction as deep bisected the old timer’s throat. Fresh blood spilled, but the violation wasn’t enough to kill Gunner all by itself. The inspired fear was, however, and the scent of Gunner’s terror was the gunshot that kicked off the race.

  The devil clamped down where Gunner’s skin was split in two, and waged his assault.

  Gunner, terrified, was partway through confessing to a litany of sins he thought God might already be privy to when the devil released his throat, flipped him onto his stomach, and tore his teeth into Gunner’s back, right about where his kidneys might have been. Gunner didn’t know it, but the creature's aim was true and gave him access to the very spot adrenaline was being manufactured and dumped into the mountain man’s blood flow.

  It was excruciating, but it wasn’t long before (to his panic) Gunner felt his cock stiffen and a gurgled moan passed h
is lips. Lurlene in all her splendor couldn’t have compared to this. Had he not been smack in the middle of a real life horror flick, Gunner would have let loose the juice within the next five seconds, it felt so goddamn good. Instead, the devil flipped him over onto his back again.

  "Now, all of it!" Those teeth were stained red and Gunner realized it was his own blood dripping from the corners of the devil’s mouth.

  As consciousness flitted out of grasp, Gunner’s eyes focused on the image in the mirrors above his bed. He saw the entire show as the devil opened his jugular, so ferocious Gunner was nearly decapitated. And in the end, Gunner Dixon did let loose the juice, spasming with the ecstasy and pain of the libation he offered the Beelzebub ravaging his arteries.

  He floated up and away, his last thought one of disappointment. He’d never changed his will, and Lurlene was going to get the cabin after all.

  Bitch…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Agents Solis and Teichmann sat across from each other in an all-night diner in Loveland, a town about fifteen miles south of Fort Collins. Teichmann was chomping down a slice of apple pie. Fucking predictable.

  Solis had been partnered with the rookie for eight months and already he knew more than he cared to about the big German. Of course, calling Teichmann a German was about as accurate as calling Solis a Mexican. Ethnically there was some truth, but both agents were good old-fashioned, all-American men. They loved sports, the Fourth of July, and especially in Teichmann’s case, apple pie. It was almost boring.

  They ate in silence, looking past each other at the few other patrons. It was three in the morning, and Solis wondered what their stories were. Seriously, who the fuck wanted to eat in a dump like this in the middle of the night when only the deer and truckers were on the road?