Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The rules were simple:
1. Get the cargo.
2. Drive, avoiding all major checkpoints that couldn’t be bribed.
3. No stops at hotels or in cities.
4. Don’t look in the trailer.
Atticus made it about two hours before he decided to break rule number four.
Knowing that Junger was a regular, if sleazy, businessman had lulled him into a false sense of security. Atticus had guessed he’d be transporting some weird sex thing, or art Junger wasn’t supposed to have, or illegal parts to a foreign vehicle, or some special synth ingredient he wanted smuggled in so he didn’t have to pay high EVP taxes on it.
Until the hand-off, his money was on the sex thing.
He kept glancing in the rearview mirror of the RV. The sight of the trailer never revealed anything new, but every time he looked at it, the hair on the back of his neck stood up.
He knew better than to poke his nose in other people’s shit. That was the quickest way to get it on your face.
But the longer he drove down the desolate stretch of road that wound like a gray river through the desert, the harder he found it to ignore his gut. He lived by his word. He suspected he’d probably die by it, too. But did his word mean shit if he was suckered into something he didn’t consent to?
And didn’t his word to stay safe, to not jeopardize his family, mean more than an agreement with a shitty old man like Junger?
Atticus checked the time on the glowing dashboard console. The sun would rise soon, and he’d have to pull off. He’d need to pull down the blackout shades on the windows. The sun wouldn’t kill him — not for a while, at least, since only the infirm and babies were at risk of immediate death — but burns hurt like a motherfucker, especially when it was delivered by the vicious animal that was the desert sun. Even in the fall, it was a bitch.
He’d have to pull off. He’d have to rest. He’d be stuck in the tin can of the luxury, compact RV all day. It wasn’t a prospect that bothered him before, but now that he had no idea what he’d gotten himself into, he found the idea of being stuck in the desert with the mysterious cargo not quite as appealing as before.
Atticus checked the time again. He had about an hour left.
If I pull off and just take a quick peek, I’ll be fine. It was stupid to have this much anxiety over the contents of a trailer. Even if something extremely illegal was inside, he’d almost certainly seen worse. The annoying part would be handling the fallout if it turned out it was worth breaking his word over.
He shook his head. He’d been out of the game too long if something like a little illegal cargo could rattle him this bad.
A wry smile tugged at his lips. If part of this little break from estate security life had been about discovering if he really missed the criminal world or not, he supposed that question had been answered.
He glanced in the mirror again, then looked at the time.
Hissing through his fangs, he scowled at the road, scouting for a good place to pull off and keep out of sight of any traffic. Not that he expected there to be much, but the last thing he needed was a long-haul trucker asking questions.
It was smart for a number of reasons to give him an RV and a trailer. Not only was it completely self-contained and left no money trail, if anyone pulled him over, he could say he was just camping in the desert. It wasn’t technically a lie, especially when he found a spot to turn off and tuck the RV behind a scraggly hill.
The vehicle bumped and rattled over rocks and the divots leftover from monsoon floods. He grunted every time it lurched, his knuckles gone white around the steering wheel, and hoped that whatever was in the trailer wasn’t fragile.
It was a relief when he finally cut the engine. Releasing his seatbelt, Atticus sat for a second to really, really be sure he wanted to do this before he sighed again, checked that his bolt gun had a full battery, and opened the door.
His boots crunched on the loose, sunbaked topsoil as he made his way around the back of the RV. He scanned the trailer again. Nothing was weird about it.
It looked a bit like the ones used to haul expensive equipment, or a very rich man’s dirt bikes. That didn’t exactly explain the units on the front and roof, but who knew what weird shit rich people got into when they started buying toys.
He’d made a lot of money over the years, but he’d never fallen into the trap of buying dumb stuff. Murder paid well, and Harlan was a ruthless investor and shrewd businessman. He’d taught Atticus and Adriana how to handle their money responsibly.
Atticus could buy whatever he wanted. Trouble was that he didn’t want much — a nice house, a fast car, and maybe a woman who didn’t mind being bitten every night. He was a simple man with simple needs.
Or maybe not. If it really was so simple, why couldn’t he be satisfied with what he had? It sure as shit would have kept him out of whatever mess he’d stepped into.
Shoulders back and arms loose, Atticus carefully slipped his gun free of its holster and clicked off the safety. Somewhere a little too close for comfort, a coyote’s screaming howl erupted, putting his fangs more on edge.
He hesitated at the back of the trailer. The cargo was only to be accessed in case of an emergency. Junger had been very firm on that point. If there was a crash, an attack, or if for some reason the trip lasted more than seven days, he was allowed to unlock it. If not, then…
This could be a colossal mistake.
His jaw firmed. It already felt like a mistake taking the job. How much worse could he do, really?
A lot. He could do a lot worse, actually.
Atticus hesitated. He didn’t want any blowback from his stupid decisions to hit Harlan and Zia, his adopted father’s anchor. They were starting a family. He didn’t want it to hit his sister, either, who already had to live her life smothered in secrecy because of a random genetic quirk.
So he didn’t open the lock right away. Instead, for reasons he couldn’t even explain to himself, he knocked.
Two quick raps on the metal door, then he stepped back, gun raised. At first, nothing happened. He felt like an idiot. Of course nothing happened. There was no one there. It was an equipment trailer, not a?—
Bang! Bang!
His shoulders tensed. Blood drained from his face as the knocking continued, the rhythm growing faster. It sounded like someone was trying to beat their way out.
There’s a person in there.
His first instinct was to lunge for the door and release whoever was locked inside, but he’d long ago learned that acting on impulse often led to mistakes. A good killer used their head and their gut in concert, not one or the other all on its own.
Keeping his gun high, he barked, “Who’s in there? Give me a name.”
There was no response, just more pounding. The beat was erratic, like the person inside was desperate but could only maintain it for so long before their arm got tired or their hand hurt too much. He knew from experience that pounding on a locked door for long periods of time could hurt like a bitch.
“Stop knocking and answer me,” he demanded. But there was no significant breakup in the beat, so he guessed that whoever it was inside, they probably couldn’t hear him.
Fucking fuck. Atticus hissed and lowered his gun just enough to start fiddling with the lock. He wasn’t super great with technology, so it took him a second to figure out all the steps it required to unlock it.
There was a series of flashing lights, some beeps, and then the smooth grinding sound of heavy bolts sliding across metal. The knocking stopped.
Raising his gun again, Atticus grasped the large metal latch on the door and yanked. He stepped back quickly, allowing it to swing open, and leveled the barrel of his gun at opening.
A waft of scent rushed out. Clean skin. Something a little waxy. A heady, sweet, earthy sort of scent he couldn’t place but immediately made his mouth water.
And inside the darkness of the trailer, untouched by moonlight, were a pair of reflective eyes.
He almost forgot about where he was, that he had a gun in his hands, when a face, pale as a porcelain doll’s, came into view around those eyes. A sloping forehead ran into a pert nose and dark eyebrows. Proud cheekbones made an already round face a little bit rounder. A soft, small mouth crowned a narrow chin.
Her skin was unnaturally pale and looked even more so in comparison to the red circles painted onto her chin and forehead. Her lips were painted, too.
She was huddled on the floor of the trailer, most of her body obscured by a long white dress and — he did a doubletake — a mind-boggling fall of raven black hair. Small hands, also painted white with red circles on the backs and tipped with red polish, curled defensively around her knees.
Her shoulders moved with her rapid breaths, and when he looked back at her face, he found her expression rigid and her eyes so wide, he could make out white all around.
Her gaze flicked to the gun. Before he could figure out how to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth, she asked, “Are you my groom?”
Atticus dropped his arms immediately, pointing the gun at the ground rather than the— His stomach rebelled so hard, he worried he might actually get sick right there in the dirt.
A blood bride. I was hired to bring Junger a blood bride.
Looking back, the job being about a weird sex thing would have been vastly preferable to this. He didn’t fuck around with blood brides, not when the very concept was a threat to his sister. In another world, she would have ended up exactly like this woman: dolled up to look like an acolyte of the goddess Grim, tossed into the back of a fucking trailer, and dragged to the other side of the continent to become some sleazy businessman’s broodmare.
He’d always found the idea of people wanting a pure vampiric bloodline deeply gross. Even if Adriana hadn’t been born with the gene that allowed her to produce offspring with another vampire, he still would have found it disgusting.
But there he was, complicit in the very practice he’d worked all his life to save his sister from.
His throat had closed up. He couldn’t speak or even make a noise. All he could do was stare at the woman in horror, his gun aimed at the dirt and his shoulders so stiff, it felt like the muscles had turned to stone.
But the longer he remained silent, the more unsettled she became. He could see it happening, but he was helpless to stop it. Her eyes bounced between his and the gun, then to the wide expanse of the desert behind him.
Shock hadn’t just robbed him of his ability to speak. It also made him painfully slow.
That was the only explanation for why he lunged for her a second too late.
The bride sprang out of the back of the trailer. Swathed in all that fabric, barefoot, and dragging nearly her full height in hair, one wouldn’t think that she’d be so quick, but damn if she didn’t smoke his ass.
Instinct revved to life. The drive to hunt prey was, when provoked, one of the most intense in vampires. The only urge that came second to it was the craving to find an anchor, a mate to sip from and breed.
Atticus holstered his gun. His mind shut down as he followed the streak of white across the rocky desert ground. His vision tunneled. Nothing else mattered but the shape of her back, the whip of her hair over her shoulder, and that lush scent he drew into his lungs with great, heaving breaths.
There were no real thoughts running through his mind. Just impressions. Needs.
He saw only her. He felt only his need to catch her. He needed to make sure she didn’t damage her bare feet on the ground. He needed more of that scent. He needed to get them both out of the open before the sun hit the horizon.
That last need was the one that brought back a sliver of rationality. His heart seized as he risked a glance at the sky. It was already beginning to turn a deep, navy blue.
Just as fast, his focus was back on his runaway. Panic burned through him as he watched her fly over jagged rocks, toward nothing but more desert, less shelter. If he lost her, if he couldn’t get them back to the RV in time, there was a good chance she could be hurt. If she escaped him completely, she could die.
“Stop!” he bellowed, knowing good and well that it was a stupid thing to say to someone who had no reason to listen.
She didn’t stop, but she stumbled. Hard.
Atticus cursed as he watched her go down. He was a bit too far away to see why, but he thought she might have stepped on something. Gods only knew what was out in the desert. It wasn’t just jagged rocks, but bits of old barbed wire fence, the detritus left over from the war, broken glass, and rusty nails.
Alarm pushed him to go faster, the fastest he’d ever run before, despite the fact that she was struggling to stand.
He was on her in seconds.
She shrieked when he skidded down beside her, one leg outstretched and the other bent to hold his weight. His boots sent a cloud of dust and grit into the air. He slapped his hands onto the ground to stop his momentum and ended up nearly on top of her as she scrambled backward, trying to crawl away.
“Stop,” he grunted, trying and mostly failing to not snarl at her. She didn’t stop, of course, so he was forced to grab one of her ankles and drag her back to him. “Just fucking listen for a second! I’m not going to hurt you!”
She fought like a hellion there in the dirt, with her little red claws and her bleeding feet. He would have been impressed with how many blows she managed to land if he weren’t counting down the minutes until sunrise — and also hard as steel behind his fly. The urge to subdue her with his weight and drive his aching fangs into her throat was a great, throbbing need in his mind, blocking out nearly everything else.
Atticus cursed and fought to grab both her wrists with one hand. Once he had her, it wasn’t too hard to pin her down. She was as fine-boned as a bird. It took barely any effort at all to hold her still as he straddled her middle, using his much greater weight to stop her thrashing.
“Hey. Hey!” He didn’t like having to shake her, but when she kept trying to angle her head to bite his arm, he didn’t exactly have a choice. Even knowing she was most likely venom neutral, it went against instinct to let another vampire bite him. That was a damn quick way to end up frothing at the mouth.
Urges tangled in his mind, twisting him up into knots. The desire to bite her was a roiling, living thing in him, but it ran up against the natural instinct to avoid biting and being bitten by another vampire. Atticus had to shake his head hard to clear it as he pressed his weight down on his captive.
Big blue eyes, almost too big for her face, stared up at him. They looked liquid in the weak pre-dawn light. Her ceremonial makeup was hopelessly smeared. Dust caked her dress and her hair. Her chest heaved, and when she parted her lips to suck in panting breaths, he caught sight of the daintiest, prettiest pair of fangs he’d ever seen in his life.
It wasn’t just the run, nor the surge of panic that made his heart pound when he ground out, “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I’m trying to help you. If you run here, you’ll be dead in a few hours. There’s no shelter, no caves. No nothing. You’d bake in the sun.”
Rather than reply to his very sound argument against running, she wheezed, “Are you my bridegroom or not?”
“No.” It pissed him off that she assumed he might be the kind of trash who’d buy a bride. Not that it was fair, knowing what his involvement looked like, but he couldn’t help but be a little offended.
Those dark brows drew together, wrinkling the smudged crimson circle painted on her forehead. “Then who are you? You’re not— I never saw you in the crypt. You’re not an acolyte. I’d remember.”
Crypt? A headache pulsed behind his left eye. So she isn’t just dressed up like an acolyte of Grim. She might actually be one. Good gods.
He’d heard stories of some crypts getting into the extremely lucrative blood bride business, but it was stomach-turning to actually come face to face with it. Atticus wasn’t a religious man, but even he felt a little uneasy at the thought of what Grim would think of her own acolytes selling people off to be bred. The goddess was known for her mercy and her celibacy. Somehow he found it hard to believe she’d be down with blood brides, no matter what bullshit the vampiric zealots pushed.
Atticus didn’t dare let his captive go, but he did ease a bit of his weight off her when he answered, “I’m your— I was hired to be your driver. I had no idea that you were— that the job was for a blood bride. Fuckin’ swear.”
She blinked those huge, liquid eyes at him. They looked so innocent. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who had just tried to beat the shit out of him. “They told me my groom was in California. Are we there already?”
“No.” Unease tickled the back of his neck. He glanced up. “C’mon. We need to get back to the RV.”
Hauling himself off her, he used his grip on her wrists to leverage her up onto her feet. He realized his mistake almost instantly.
The bride made a low, animal sound of pain as her knees buckled. Too late, he remembered her bloody feet. Crouching to sling one arm behind her knees, he swung her up into his arms with a hissed, “Shit!”
Her eyes were screwed shut and her lips puckered, but she didn’t complain as he hustled back the way they’d come. The world was growing dangerously light around them. Some vampires could handle sunlight better than others. Atticus wasn’t too sensitive, but he suspected the bride was when she tucked her head into the curve of his neck, hiding her eyes.
His pulse jumped. There was also the possibility that she just wanted to do it. That was a compelling thought.
Or maybe she’s just in pain, idiot.
Feeling a little slimy and a lot guilty, Atticus cleared his throat and asked, “You got a name?”
Her breath was hot on his slightly sweaty neck. “Of course I do.”
“You gonna give it to me or what?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Good question. It didn’t really matter. He was deep in the shit now. It would have been the smart decision to say he wanted to know nothing about her, reducing his liability as much as possible. But he wanted to know. And really, there was no chance he was going to be able to put her back in the trailer and forget about her. Whether she gave him her name or not, he was going to help her.
“I’m Atticus,” he offered, his voice rougher than normal. That was saying something, too, since his smoke-scarred throat really did a number on his voice. “Atticus Caldwell. You can call me Atty, if you want.”
She was quiet as he crossed the last few yards to the RV. He had to nudge her to open the door for him, but eventually they made it safely inside. A good thing, too, since the sun began to crest the horizon not a minute later. Carefully setting her on the bed in the far back, he hunched a bit and moved as fast as he could to pull down the blinds over the windshield and windows, plunging them into comforting darkness.
He stood there for a moment, his hands gripping the headrests of the driver and passenger seats, trying to collect himself before he faced her again. It wasn’t an easy thing when her sweet scent began to fill the small cabin, mixing with the intoxicating tang of real, warm blood.
He’d heard that venom neutral vampires gave off a different scent than normal. Most vampires were repelled, sexually-speaking, by the scent of each other. It was some evolutionary thing. Since they couldn’t procreate and could kill one another with a single injection of venom, it made good survival sense to build in a disgust mechanism to one another. There were exceptions, but very few that he knew of.
Frankly, he’d always assumed the venom neutral scent to be a myth. Adriana had never smelled any different to him than another vampire, but she was also his baby sister, so maybe he never stood a chance of noticing that sort of thing.
The bride, though…
If he hadn’t seen the bride’s fangs or the green, night-glow reflection of her eyes, he would have sworn on every god’s name that she was human. Deliciously, potently human.
Atticus tried to breathe through his mouth, but that didn’t help. All it did was paint her scent on the back of his tongue, which made the gland in the roof of his mouth pulse and his aching cock begin to leak in his pants. One touch and he’d go off like he was fourteen and getting his cock sucked for the first time again.
There were so many levels to why that was messed up, he couldn’t even begin to pick through them all.
He needed to get himself together. He needed to grab his medical kit out of his backpack. He needed?—
“Carmine.”
Atticus turned his head so fast, the world blurred. “What?”
“That’s my name,” she explained, nervously smoothing her filthy hair behind her ears. They were just a little too big for her face. Cute as shit.
“Do you have a last name, Carmine?” He had a bad feeling knowing her family name wouldn’t help him find her people, but he had to ask.
She looked everywhere but him when she answered, “No. It’s just Carmine.”
“Why?”
“They don’t give us names.”
And just like that, the arousal that twisted him up so badly disappeared in a puff of smoke. Atticus turned the rest of his body to face her. Speaking slowly, so he didn’t let on to the rage that was beginning to rise inside him, he asked, “And why is that?”
Carmine stared down at her battered feet. A grimace flashed across her face for a split second before she locked it down. “Because we’re supposed to get new ones anyway.”
“When you become your bridegroom’s anchor,” he finished for her, flat and furious beyond words.
“Yeah.”
Atticus squeezed his eyes shut. I’m going to fucking kill Junger.