To Crave a Blood Moon (6 page)

“You won't fit.”

She looked at him again. “I see that. What are we going to do, then?”

He dragged a ragged breath into his constricted lungs, battling her presence, battling the inner demon she awakened. “Do?”

“Yes, what's the plan?” She took a step in his direction, bringing her sweet scent closer.

“The plan,” he gritted, sidling further away. A humorless smile twisted his mouth. Strange for him to fear
her
so much. He was stronger. More powerful. Experienced in ways this mortal—or witch—never could be. And still, she struck fear in the shadows of his heart. He would not become all that his mother feared and reviled.

“The plan is for you to keep your mouth shut. For you to stay on that side of the room and keep the hell away from me. Become invisible,” he demanded. “And just maybe you'll live.”

And maybe he wouldn't become the very thing he loathed and hunted.

Ruby watched the dark shape of the man over the tops of her bent knees. She flexed her fingers around her calves, locking her arms tighter, as if they were the only thing holding her together, keeping her from splintering apart.

Dark anguish rolled across the room like billowing smoke, stoking the core of her with a feeling she could not quite absorb… could not understand. Her stomach ached as it did whenever bombarded by too much emotion. Only it usually took a large group or crowd of people to affect her. Over the years, she had learned to block out individuals and small groups. But the feelings he emitted were too… much. Too intense. Too overwhelming.

She dropped her head against the cold stone wall at her back. Stay away from him? Right. Fat lot of good that did. She
felt
him. Every strange, twisted emotion roiling inside him. Feelings that reminded her of the beasts upstairs—lycans, he claimed. And yet not. Different. Less frightening but—crazy as it sounded—equally dangerous.

The strongest emotion he emitted was fear. Acerbic and nonstop, the bitter tang of it coated her mouth. Instead of making him weak, it only made him more dangerous. Unpredictable.

Before she could reconsider, she whispered into the still of the room, “Why can't we talk?” Because she needed to talk, needed to connect with someone amid this nightmare.

His bowed head snapped up. His eyes glittered at her from across the shadowed distance. Even in the darkness, she was careful to train her gaze on his bearded face. A handsome face, she thought. It was hard to tell. She knew he was naked, but in the darkness she could at least pretend not to know.

“What do you want to talk about? What can you possibly say that I want to hear? Want to share your sad story with me? Well, forget it. Everyone's got a sad story, and I don't need to hear yours.”

She bit the inside of her cheek at his scathing tone and glanced away. His accent was faint, the intonation
indecipherable but nothing she had heard in these parts. He wasn't Turkish, though. She felt sure of that. The harsh rasp of his breath filled the stretch of silence.

Inhaling, she faced him again. “You've clearly been down here awhile.” She swallowed. “Like it or not, we're all we have right now.”

He laughed, the sound terrible… the humor within him foul and awful. “I
don't
like it. Before, I just had
my
neck to look out for. Now I have yours, too.”

Indignation swept through. “By all means, let me relieve you of your obligation to look out for me.”

His lips curled back from his teeth to reveal a flash of straight white teeth. “I'm just that kind of guy. Call me old-fashioned.”

She snorted. “I'm used to looking out for myself. I have no expectations that you're going to rescue me.”

“As you said, we're stuck here. Together.” A deep sigh rattled loose from him. “Hell.” His arm lifted and she squinted into the gloom as he dragged a hand through his short-cropped hair, scratching fiercely at his head. “Very well. Why don't you tell me about yourself?”

Wariness rippled through her. Even as he asked the question, she sensed he didn't want to know anything about her. He didn't want to know her. Caginess and dislike seeped from him. “Suddenly you're interested?”

He sighed again, and she felt a new emotion rise. Something resembling desperation. “To pass the time, sure. Go ahead. Talk. Tell me how you came to be here.” He hesitated. “Tell me who you are.” His desperation reached across to her, a toxic fume. Urgent and grim. So much that she felt inclined to appease him.

“My name is Ruby Deveraux.”

“You're American. What are you doing in Turkey?”

She rubbed her aching temples. “It's complicated.”

“We've got time.”

“I volunteered to act as a chaperone for a group of foster kids. They got a grant for this trip but needed chaperones that could pay their own way…” her voice faded. Those details weren't important.

“You've got to be kidding,” he muttered. “You're some sort of damn Mary Poppins?”

“I'm not—”

“Right.”

“Hardly. I just…” she paused for breath. “I was a foster kid. After my mother died. This is something I wanted to do. It's not my job or anything.”

“Oh, not a job. You're a true altruist, then. Yeah. Not Poppins at all.” He made a low, animal-like sound in his throat. “So what do you do when you're not escorting lost little souls through Europe?”

“I own a catering business.” Work she loved, a vocation she could do in the safety of her home, private,
alone, hidden from the world except during the brief time she emerged to deliver her food. And cooking made her feel better, connected to the mother who loved her as no one else had. The best moments of her life were of them in the kitchen. Baking cookies, fresh fruit cobblers. Crawdaddies in the sink. A big pot of gumbo on the stove.

“What kind of food?”

“Down-home. Southern. Barbecue. Some fusion. I'm not classically trained, but cooking is something I picked up from my mother and kept at after she died. After high school, culinary school just made sense.”

“And how old were you when your mother died?”

“Fourteen.”

“And you were in foster care after that?”

The skin of her face tightened at the memory of those years. “Yeah. Only four years. Not like some kids stuck in child services all of their youth.” She swallowed down the tightness in her throat as she recalled Amy and Emily.
Amy
. She jammed her eyes closed against the pain. Amy wasn't stuck in foster care anymore.

“What? What is it?”

Her stomach cramped, recalling the pain, the horror of Amy's death. “I came here last night looking for—” She stopped at the strangled, unrecognizable
sound of her voice. “Looking for two girls—” She buried her face in her knees, freezing the burn of tears in her eyes, refusing to let them fall in front of this stranger, refusing to let her emotions out. Keep them in. Funny, considering all she ever did was fight to shove out the emotions of others.

“Let me guess. Dead.” The coldness of his voice felt like an injection of ice in her veins. “They were dead the moment the pack had them in their sights. You should never have followed them here.”

She shivered at his coldness. “They were my responsibility.”

“Your mistake then, to ever let them leave your care and come here.”

His words fueled her temper. And partly because she believed them. “How do you know so much about it? You don't appear to be doing that great yourself. If you're here, I'm guessing you screwed up somewhere along the way, too.”

Who the hell was
he
anyway? Her jaw clenched. While she had disclosed a great deal about herself, she knew next to nothing about him. “Who are you? How did you land in here?”

Silence held for several minutes… and there was still that desperation humming in the cold air, strumming through her nerves. And underneath it, always danger.

His voice sounded hollow, wearied. “No. You talk to me. Tell me more about you.”

“Can't I at least know your name?”

In the shadows, he shook his head. “It won't end there.”

“Where are you from?”

His sigh floated on the air. After some moments, he answered. “I was born in Spain, but I don't live anywhere. I have apartments in Barcelona, Vienna, Dublin. No home really.”

“Wow.” His life sounded exciting. Completely opposite from hers. Travel. People. Adventure. “You must do well for yourself to live that way.”

“Well enough.”

“What do you do?”

He cleared his throat. “Little of this. Little of that. I work on different… assignments.”

“Sounds interesting. Contract work?”

“You could say that.”

“How'd you get here?

“Enough questions,” he snapped.

Fingers squeezing around her calves, she demanded, “Why?”

“Trust me. You don't want to know me. I'm not the kind of guy sweet little Southern belles need to know.” A thread of warning hung in his words. The dark rumble of his voice made her shiver, and she
didn't doubt he was right. But what choice did she have? She was stuck here with him. She needed to get to know him so she would not feel so terribly alone in this nightmare.

For a while, neither of them spoke. Strange emotions stirred from him, reaching her across the distance. A gnawing ache that made her rub her own belly in hunger. “You're starving,” she murmured.

He laughed a dry, broken sound. “You can tell that, huh?” He stretched his broad torso and held his arms wide, his skin flexing over ridged muscle and his flat, washboard belly. He looked a bit thin, with a lean ranginess that reminded her of a starved wolf. She winced at the comparison, remembering last night again.
Werewolves
. She wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it herself.

“They don't feed you down here?”

“That's not part of their plan for me.”

She tensed. It was the first time he owned up to knowing any specifics. “And what is their plan for you?”

Their gazes locked, clung. Instead of answering her, he asked, “Who will miss you, Ruby? A boyfriend back home?” His gaze flicked to her bare ring finger.

She fidgeted where she sat. “No one.”

“No one? Come. I don't believe that.” And again
she felt that spike of desperation, a jump in the room's temperature, a sudden blast of need from him. He needed to hear she had someone—a clan of family waiting eagerly for her return. His dark eyes glittered with light across the distance. A chill chased across her skin, puckering her flesh.

“Well. There's Adele. My best friend. She'll freak when I don't make my plane.” That was putting it mildly. “She's supposed to pick me up at the airport.” The redhead would probably be on the phone with the U.S. Consulate. Their meeting in a grocery store years ago had sprung an unlikely friendship. Somehow Adele had known, had recognized that Ruby needed a friend in a town fond of gossiping about that peculiar Deveraux girl. She ran the back of her hand against her nose, muffling her sniff. Adele would care if she went missing. No one else.

The moon sat higher. Silvery light streamed through the window, casting her companion in a chalky luster. Her gaze skimmed the muscled calves stretched out before him. Strange that she carried on a conversation with a naked man so calmly. But then it seemed unfair to feel any embarrassment over his lack of clothing. He couldn't help the situation.

“You look exhausted. Get some rest.” He closed his eyes then, but she was sure he did not sleep.

She felt his alertness. Sensed it in waves on the
air. In the cording of muscles and sinew in the long stretch of his legs. The guy was built. Even halfstarved.

She sensed his tightly coiled tension, his readiness.

Only what was he waiting to happen?

She must have slept after all.

Deep night swallowed the cell in its bleak maw. She rose from the cold ground, her palms pushing her up off the floor. Moonlight filtered into the room. Tiny motes and particles danced in the moon's glow. Silence hummed around her. A sudden noise scratched the air—a rough moan cut short, as if someone muffled it, bit back or swallowed the sound.

“Hello?” She rose to all fours. If she knew his name, she would have used it. He huddled in the far corner, a hunkered, shaking shape. Pain flowed from him into her, lancing as a fire-hot needle poking all over her body. She had no hope to block it. At this intensity, it broke past all her shields.

She started to shake from the force of it. Blood tickled inside her nostrils and she sniffed fiercely. “Are you okay?” Was this death she felt? God, please, don't let him be dying.

She crawled toward him, her voice gentle as she placed a trembling hand on his shoulder. The skin
felt smooth, warm—hot beneath her fingers. “What can I do for—”

He turned, moving so quickly he was a blur in the shadowed cell, his eyes a gleaming flash. She crashed to her back on the floor, her head hitting with a painful smack. Hard male body surrounded her, naked flesh burning through her clothing.

She managed a choking sound.

“What are you doing? I told you to stay on your side of the room.” His face dipped until his beard rasped against her cheek and neck, the hot whisper of his breath a warm mist against her flesh. “God, you smell sweet.”

She shuddered, lungs contracting as his tongue swept over her throat in a deep, savoring lick.

She whimpered as though stung.

His presence, his
touch,
paralyzed her. Emotions bled into her, an unwelcome infusion she could not block, try as she might. The same black ravaging hunger she felt from the monsters last night consumed her. Which made no sense. He wasn't one of them. He couldn't be. He didn't possess their freakish eyes. The full moon had been in the sky for hours now and hadn't turned him into one of them. So why should he project their same dark hunger?