Or as a warning.

“Can you stay awhile,” she begged. “Please. And I haven’t forgotten the rules, I promise.”

He didn’t remain with her. He never did. Before her very eyes, the ghost disappeared, as if he had never been.

With a curse, she lay back down, the loneliness she lived with like a tangible weight on her. The apparition was just another reminder that there were two worlds for her, the internal and the external—and whereas that was true for everybody, on a night like tonight? With a man she wanted out on the lawn, and a stalker who could be anywhere?

It all seemed so irreconcilable.

Then again, maybe she’d fallen asleep already, and this, like so many other things, was just a bad dream.

 

As Daniel sauntered across the scruffy grass, he expected to hear his name called out at any second. He could practically hear the husky syllables, the need, the gut-clenching sexual frustration, in Lydia’s voice.

Kind of ironic, this satisfaction he took in getting her hot. Because it was also a cudgel for himself.

He couldn’t remember feeling this juiced over a woman. Ever. But that couldn’t be right. There must have been someone else, lurking in his past, another woman who got through to him like this, eating him alive with his own sex drive.

Pausing, he looked back at the house. The windows on the second floor were black. Was she up in her bed yet …

Jesus, why the hell had he left?

“Because you’re not a complete asshole, that’s why,” he said out loud.

There were things she didn’t know, things that would change the way she thought about him.

To keep from kicking himself, he took a little stroll around the traps he’d set up. Nothing was out of place, the balanced sticks and precisely arranged pieces of bark on the ground undisturbed.

Inside the tent, he untucked his gun and stretched out, keeping the weapon in his hand. Using his arm under his head as a pillow, he stared up at the nylon roof.

The sounds of the night surrounded him, the hoots of an owl, the tender-foot of a deer on the left, the rustle of a raccoon over the ground, all signals telling him there was nothing within a fair radius of him. And of Lydia.

Closing his eyes, he rearranged his body, crossing his ankles and tightening his grip on his gun.

Funny weapon, a gun. It was handy in so many situations. But it was limited, too. Sometimes it was best to get up close to your enemy. Do things the old-fashioned way.

As the past came a-knockin’, he shook his head like his memories were a person looking for a conversation he didn’t want to have. The good news? He had a powerful distraction he could offer up to his mind.

Although like all things, it came with its own complications.

When he pictured Lydia staring up at him with those golden eyes of hers, her lips parted, her face flushed with anticipation, his erection reinflated instantly. And demanded attention.

Maybe putting her front and center wasn’t the best plan.

Especially with his cock now trapped at a bad angle in his combats—and of course, as he went to rearrange things, the contact of his hand over his fly was enough to make him hiss through his teeth. With a rough jab, he tried to ease the constriction, but the more he pushed at the rock-hard ridge, the more the thing pounded with its own heartbeat.

Resolved to ignore the dumb handle, he repositioned his arm under his head and closed his eyes like he was slamming shut a pair of vaults.

Yeah, nope.

All he could think of was the feel of her under his mouth, the way his arm had fit around her waist, the grip of her hands on his shoulders, in his hair.

He lasted a good five minutes.

After which he was unzipping things, and pushing his hand inside—

“Fuck.”

Gritting his teeth, he stroked himself, his memories of that woman like a blowtorch to his blood, the heat raging to the surface, his upper lip curling back. Up and down, harder … faster … he was rough with his shaft, but like he gave a fuck? He’d have beat the thing with a hammer if it would have gotten him the release he was suddenly panting for—

The razor-sharp image of his finger popping free of her lips made him lose it. He barely had time to snag a T-shirt and cover the head of his arousal before he came—

At the last second, before the orgasm totally overtook him, he had the good sense to release the hold on his gun. Otherwise, with all his straining, he was liable to shoot himself in the fucking foot.

Or somewhere else that wasn’t going to grow back.

With a groan and a rolling of his hips, he let himself go—and as the ejaculations pumped out of him, he didn’t stop. It was like Lydia was some kind of erotic stimulant, the memory of her against his body giving him a stamina that couldn’t be drained in just one release. In two.

In three.

The entire time, he imagined that he was filling her up, releasing into her, pumping off so that her sex got filled.

And all the while, he knew that it was a fantasy that was going to come true.

God save them both.

YES, XHEX THOUGHT, she was going back to the Colony.

As First Meal was breaking up in the dining room, and members of the Brotherhood household were dispersing, she stepped out of the mansion’s grand front entrance with John Matthew right beside her. They were both heavily armed, but they were not going into the field. For one, she wasn’t a Brother and she didn’t fight for the race like that—and even if she was and she did, mated couples were never allowed to engage together.

“Are you ready?”

When she asked the question, it was directed at herself. And when John Matthew nodded in a decisive way, she felt like he was answering for them both. Taking his hand, she pulled him in close, and he dropped his lips to hers for a lingering kiss.

I am with you, he mouthed as the cold spring wind blew into their faces. Always.

“I do not fucking deserve you.”

Yes, he signed. You do.

At that, they dematerialized, both moving in a scatter of molecules even farther north and west, to the flat planes on the far side of the Adirondack Park mountain range.

She felt like she was going into the mouth of Hell.

The Colony had been established because symphaths had not been welcome anywhere near vampires for generations—and for good goddamn reason. Her father’s side of her bloodline was a devil-in-no-disguise. Members of the subspecies were sociopaths with special powers, utterly unconcerned and unconnected to pesky little things like morals, empathy, compassion.

And yup, her brother fit right into that toxic soup.

Re-forming next to a pond that looked like an ad for rural living, she found John was already in place, two deadly guns in his hands, his narrowed eyes scanning the bucolic setting.

The fuck it was a place to relax, though. Despite the bench by the weeping willow and the picnic tables by the bike trail, it was no municipal anything—and nothing you wanted to even pass through, much less cop a squat and hang out at.

But this was the point. It was a trap to bring humans in, a bait so that a switch could happen and toys could be gathered: The entrance into the underground labyrinth of the Colony was that shed over there, a mere thirty yards away. There were about a half dozen of these new outposts spread around the four-hundred-acre area, each camouflaged by the same kind of nothing-going-on-here, stay-awhile snow job. In this particular case, the flimsy, nondescript building by the public bathrooms had a set of stairs, and there was a reason there were no locks on anything, no warnings, no discouragement of human exploration.