Raven Walks Read online

  It was painfully obvious that was the ongoing theme of her life.

  So she was grateful to be with an old friend, a mentor, someone who had always given her everything she needed right when she needed it...including a big, warm bear hug that lifted her feet off of the ground.

  “I’ve missed you,” he told her and she knew he meant it. She could see it in his green eyes. His short black hair and neatly trimmed goatee were smattered with gray now, but he still had a boyish glint in his eyes that could always make her smile.

  “Ditto,” she responded. “I hope it doesn’t make me sound green to say how glad I am that you’re here.”

  He just chuckled. “You couldn’t sound green if you tried. You’re just human.” Then, with a pointed look. “Right?”

  She gave him a reassuring smile. “Right.”

  He invited her into the room where his suitcase lay sprawled on the bed, and books were stacked on his table.

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Technically I didn’t find anything out. I had to leave that up to my new assistant.”

  “Another one?”

  “You know how it goes,” he said. “Huge turnover rate.”

  It was a nice way to describe the casualties that came with their chosen profession. That’s why he never got close to the people he trained to hunt. The risk was too great that he’d lose them in the line of fire.

  He glanced at her mussed red hair and her eyes that spoke volumes about the heartache she would not voice and he realized despite his best efforts, she had gotten in. That’s why he was already in route before he even got her text that morning.

  Learning that Hunter had betrayed her, again, was the only real excuse he needed.

  But when his young assistant Tanner had sent the requested information to him, he knew he had made the right decision.

  She wasn’t prepared to face a vampire-witch.

  As far as he knew, she wouldn’t have even known something like that existed.

  “So tell me,” she said as she took a seat on his bed.

  He sat in a chair by the mountain of books.

  “Apparently Argos was a warlock in Greece around the late 1700s, when your friend Raven used to live there. Legend has it he was in love with Constantine’s sister-in-law, a woman named Nina, and that when he instructed her how to raise Constantine from the dead they burned her alive at the stake.”

  “But Constantine wasn’t really dead,” Gina supplied.

  “After the body of Constantine, and reported vampire Raven Crowe, disappeared from the town, that’s when things got very interesting. Demetri, brother of Constantine, bribed Argos to go to Romania to find the master of all vampires to kill him and thereby destroy the lineage for revenge.”

  “What could he possibly bribe him with?”

  “Nina’s ashes.”

  “Super,” Gina remarked as she tried to take it all in. What would a lovelorn warlock be able to do with some ashes? She didn’t have the time to dwell on it.

  “Well a vampire has a little safety mechanism when someone comes to kill them. As you know.”

  “Turn them so that they cannot kill you or they risk dying themselves.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So he was converted to a vampire by the most power vampire lord in Romania?”

  Walter nodded. “Problem was he was already a two hundred year old warlock.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s a mutant. He wasn’t a human, therefore doesn’t share a vampire’s human traits. He can cast spells, he can regenerate, he can create magic that can fill in all those evolutionary gaps in vampire DNA.”

  “So the reason that he’s all degenerated...”

  “My guess is he’s trying to overcome that little aversion to the sun.”

  “Great,” she said with a sigh and lay back on the bed. “So how do I kill him?”

  Walter got up and walked over to the bed. He sat next to her. “You mean how do we kill him?”

  She sat up again. “I wish I could say I don’t need you,” she told him honestly.

  He just gave her that famous half-smile of his. “Wish I could say I didn’t need to be needed,” he told her. She smiled at him and he put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry about Hunter,” he said, broaching the difficult discussion carefully.

  “Yeah, I wanted to apologize for dumping that on you like I did. It was an impulse. I shouldn’t have – ”

  He put a finger to her lips. “Shh. Don’t you dare apologize. He’s the one who needs to apologize.”

  She shook her head as she got up and began to pace. “No, I knew coming back here was a big mistake. He’s in love with her. He’s been in love with her for years. It was an unfair test I knew he couldn’t pass.” She paused and looked at Walter, for the first time in a long time being honest with herself. “And I think deep down I didn’t want him to.”

  That didn’t bode well. “What are you saying?” She couldn’t respond and she turned away. With a sigh Walter stood to his feet and came to face her.

  “You can’t go back to the way you were,” he warned her softly. That was the decision she made to turn her back on the vampire life she had once dared to consider. Which is why he made damned sure she made it. He had lost enough to those bloodsuckers, he couldn’t see losing this strong, feisty, independent, lovely young woman to it as well.

  “Who says?” she asked, a tear hovering at the corner of her eye. Ever since she had allowed herself to remember Stephen and the love they shared, she had second guessed everything.

  Truthfully, from the moment Raven’s lips had touched hers she had second guessed everything.

  “They’re the enemy, honey,” he simply said. “They steal lives, and what they don’t steal they corrupt.”

  “Not all of them,” she argued softly. He didn’t know them like she did. To him they were the thieves that took his wife and child. Beasts. Monsters.

  But they weren’t all like that – and no one knew that better than she did.

  He took her arms in his hands. “All of them,” he insisted.

  She looked up into his eyes and he brushed away a tendril of her hair from her face. “If only you could see what I see when I look at you,” he told her. “You’d know you’re too precious a life for that curse.”

  She had to scoff with a disbelieving laugh. That wasn’t how she saw it at all. It made her sacrifice to take out this Creature even more important. Everyone was set up where they needed to be, most importantly Hunter with Abi at last.

  As usual Gina was the odd piece out that never fit anywhere.

  “How do you expect to win a battle if you don’t believe you deserve to survive it?” he asked her in that same low voice, his hands still circling her arms, his eyes still locked in her own.

  “You tell me,” she said. “You’re the expert.”

  He couldn’t argue. He just pulled her into his arms for another hug. “I don’t know yet. But we’ll figure it out.”

  She let him rock her in his arms, but when she felt him stir against her she had to pull away.

  She knew that Walter had always cared for her deeply, in some ways transferring all of the feelings he had for his dead wife and child into a person he could love safely from afar.

  And truthfully she had done the same with him at first. He was a handsome, brave, funny, sexy man who kept it all under a cool veneer that attracted many women who wanted to figure him out. Gina never needed to; she understood him from the start.

  She also knew why he pushed Hunter to be with her. So that he could deny his own attraction to her, avoid getting close and ultimately avoid getting his heart-broken again.

  Here they stood, all these years later, and she found herself feeling the same thing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It was her turn to put her finger to his lips. “Shhh. Don’t you dare apologize.”

  He smiled and rested his forehead on hers. His eyes fe
ll to her lips and she could feel the kiss hover between them. It was a sweet moment that was interrupted by a loud bang against the window.

  Both Walter and Gina wrenched apart, and when he sprinted to the window she was close behind him, ready to spring into action if necessary.

  He tore back the blackout drapes only to find a limb from a nearby tree leaning against the glass, having been blown over by a huge gust of wind that now whistled right outside the door. They both had to laugh as he double checked the bolt on both the window and the door.

  “Occupational hazard,” he said as he retrieved a bottle of water from his briefcase. He brought her one where she sat back on his bed.

  She took it but hesitated for a moment. She finally looked at his face as he sat next to her. “You didn’t start giving me this to keep vampires away from me, did you?”

  He looked away as he drank from his own bottle. “Gina...”

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “You did it so I would have no choice but to stay away from them.”

  He turned to her then. “I’m not going to apologize for trying to keep you safe.”

  “But did you want me safe... or did you want me for yourself?”

  It was suddenly a question she felt deserved an answer.

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? With me those two aren’t mutually exclusive.” He looked down again. “I just wish that was enough for you.”

  She said nothing as she placed the bottle by the bed untouched and took him into a loving embrace. She didn’t bother telling him that she had no intention of protecting herself from vampires. To end this reign of terror she had to get as close to the enemy as she could get.

  Gina left that hotel room certain of what she had to do.

  Even more than that she was unafraid to do the very dangerous thing she set out to do.

  In her life, now more than ever, there was no room for fear.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Gina

  When darkness once again fell over New Orleans, Constantine and Raven made their way to Sebastian’s club. They hadn’t found Gina, but at least they knew Abi was now safe where the Creature would never find her.

  That was the one thing they could all agree on – human, vampire and hunter.

  They also agreed that the best way to draw Argos out in the open was to be seen, together, as though nothing at all was wrong. It would stir his wrath, and they were willing to do that if it meant they could have a final showdown with him once and for all.

  They would spend every night there at that club from dusk until dawn, taking up residence in one of the rooms there in the back, and staying together – no matter what.

  Raven had wanted to scour the city for Gina, but there was no real way to find her. She knew how to block them from finding her, so it would be a futile waste of time that would inevitably endanger others.

  They had to count on her persistence to find and defeat the Creature herself, to draw her back to them.

  So the fact that she walked through the door early that evening shocked neither vampire.

  It was the way she looked when she walked in that made both of their jaws drop.

  Her bright red hair was teased high and tinted copper just like Abi’s, her glasses were gone and her makeup was thick. Gone was the rock and roll t-shirt, replaced instead by a corset that pushed her voluptuous curves up for display. She wore a long black skirt that was slit up the side, showing more of her creamy white skin than she’d likely exposed in years.

  “Well at least she can’t complain that anyone mistake the two of us,” Raven remembered Abigail say, and if they squinted, they would have mistaken her easily for her sister. Raven had to wonder if that was on purpose. They watched her approach them purposefully. She leveled her eyes on them in a way that made both of their pulses skip a beat.

  Huntress, indeed.

  And, in one very vivid, heart-pounding moment, Raven discovered something he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t considered before. Every encounter exploded in his mind as the puzzle rapidly filled in. That the mystery redhead who walked into this club all that time ago, who turned him on this path to find his one true equal, hadn’t been Abigail at all.

  It had been Gina from the beginning, he realized with a start. She was the one who had the mysterious indomitable spirit that both made him want to master her and be her slave.

  She slid in between where they stood at the bar and motioned to Xavier, the blue haired Goth vampire who now tended bar full-time. “Whiskey,” she told him, putting him off his game also with the intensity of her gaze. “Straight.”

  Raven took note of her drink choice but said nothing. His eyes were just as deep and intense when she turned to face him. “I see you’re still alive and well.”

  He just grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”

  She said nothing as she turned to Constantine, who still regarded her a bit skeptically. “How’s my sister?”

  He leaned closer to her, his arm spread along the bar so that she had to reach over him to get the drink Xavier brought to her. “Gone,” he said, the near smirk on his face almost daring her to take that vague answer any way she chose to.

  Given that Hunter was nowhere to be seen, Gina correctly assumed that he had taken her to a place of safety. One where the Creature would never find her.

  If she’d have been dead nothing short of death itself would have prevented Hunter from seeking his revenge.

  And she would have felt it. No matter how they had tried to severe the ties between them, they were still sisters.

  She never dropped Constantine’s gaze as she threw back her whiskey in one gulp. Disco strobe lights filled the club as a dance remix with a strong sexual beat thundered from the dance floor. She put the glass back on the bar. “Care to dance?” she asked him and only after the briefest hesitation he reached out to take her arm.

  Though it tingled and bordered right up to unpleasantness, it didn’t hurt or shock him like before. He glanced over at Raven, who watched the scene with interest. With an imperceptible nod, he gave his blessing for Constantine to follow Gina out on the dance floor.

  She snaked her hands up either side of his neck and pressed her full breasts against his chest as she stood close within the circle of his arms. Like little tiny pin pricks, electricity danced over his skin where ever her body happened to touch, but instead of feeling discomfort, he found his body responding to her unusual chemistry. He grabbed her by the waist with one arm and pulled her close, using his knee to part her legs so that he could grind her against his body to the seductive beat of the music.

  She followed his lead without breaking the intense stare between them, and as all the lights danced and changed around them, he could feel the tiny sparks that seemed to jump from her body to his as he led her across the floor in a fast, sexy dance where they each seemed to attempt to take control.

  Her hands trailed all up his back, up over his shoulders and into his hair, tugging it back to expose his own neck to her snake-like tongue as he danced over his skin. His eyes clouded when she clamped her mouth over his neck and took a nip from his long scarred skin. He grabbed a handful of her hair in return to tug her head back so that she could see his fangs grow over his lips.

  She did not seem surprised or scared by it, and in fact she smiled at him and ground her body closer to his.

  Raven understood in an instant that she had figured out what made Argos choose his victims, and she was deliberately putting a target on her back by seducing his protege. The only missing piece of the puzzle thus far.

  But why had she stopped drinking the holy water that might have ultimately saved her from the beast if she was attacked? Technically she probably could have given the illusion of seducing the both of them, and been a lot safer having done so.

  When her eyes traveled over Constantine’s shoulder to scope him out in the crowd, Raven heard her unspoken call to him. Her eyes bored into his with a command that would not go unheeded. She glanced down over his frame, fro
m the bare torso only covered by his open black leather jacket, to the tight leather pants that grew even more restrictive as he watched her sexy dance with Constantine.

  Raven responded by striding on the dance floor. When they spun past, he took his place behind Gina, which pushed her closer toward Constantine. He and his master shared a look that needed no words to define. They had been here before – a supple human between them, whose only purpose was to fuck them both.

  Constantine grabbed Raven’s strong forearms as they pinned Gina between their rock hard bodies. She felt the evidence of both of their passions, which made her lean her head back, eyes closed, and unwittingly offer her clean virgin neck for them to see.

  Raven’s fangs sprung from his mouth as his eyes grew dark with the intensity of his lust, and he – like Constantine – grew harder and more aroused by the vibrating sensation of her skin against theirs. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her head to the side to reveal the soft, sweet skin of her neck to Constantine.

  He groaned as he bent forward and ran his mouth along the curve of her neck. His lips tingled as he tasted her on his tongue, like touching the tip of a battery. His fangs scraped against her but did not penetrate. For some strange reason he felt himself reluctant to take her right here on this dance floor even though that seemed to be her original intent.

  Instead he lifted up, his hand replaced Raven’s in her hair and he offered up the other side of her neck to his master.

  Raven mirrored his actions on the other side of her neck, and she felt herself reach the threshold of what temptation she could bear. Not only did her pussy ache to be filled with them, her neck burned to be possessed by their fangs as they sucked her blood at last.

  She had been there before, at the door of death, because of her deep abiding love for a vampire lord she couldn’t bear to lose.

  But now it was pure animal lust in between these two powerful vampires who were playing her body like a fine instrument.

  Raven’s hands went to her waist while Constantine’s cupped a breast in either hand. Gina lay her head back against Raven’s shoulder and whispered into his ear, “Touch me.”