War of Hearts(33)

Her expression was granite as she placed her empty plate on the sideboard and walked back to the bed. “I’m tired. A vampire tried to rip my heart out today, so I intend to sleep.” She looked him directly in the eyes. “I don’t have any plans to kill you tonight, Wolf Boy, so catch some z’s too.”

Despite the flare of irritation he felt at the ridiculous nickname, Conall also felt more than a flicker of amusement. “But you plan to kill me eventually?”

She was silent a moment and then answered, and his instincts told him she was being honest. “I don’t know. What I do know is that there’s someone else after me and you’ve saved my ass twice. I can’t get rid of you, so I may as well make use of you.”

Her words caused a stirring somewhere they shouldn’t. Poor word choice on her part. “Make use of me?” His voice was gruff.

She flicked him a casual look as she kicked off her shoes and got into the bed, fully clothed. “Bodyguard.” She reached up and switched off the lamp at her bedside.

Surprised, Conall snorted. “And here I thought you didnae need a bodyguard.”

“Me too. Until a vamp punched a hole in my chest.” Although she tried to hide behind levity, he heard the slight tremble of uncertainty in her words.

“Is that the closest you’ve come to death, lass?”

“No,” she whispered, the duvet rustling as she turned her back to him. “Death and I are old friends.”





*



Despite her assurances, Conall refused to sleep. Instead, his mind returned him to the events of the night, to the moment he’d tracked Thea’s scent to the theater, when he walked in and saw the vampire punch a hole through Thea’s chest as the others held her captive. Panic unlike anything he’d felt suffused him, and he’d acted on savage instinct.

One minute he’d been at the theater door, the next he was across the room, claws and teeth out. He’d swung his arm toward the vampire’s neck with the force of an axe, pouring his rage into it.

He could still feel the moment his claws severed through skin, muscle, and bone, the impact juddering up his shoulder and into his teeth.

It was Conall’s first vampire kill, and three more had followed. Guilt didn’t come to him, however, as he laid staring at the hotel ceiling, listening to the almost imperceptible sound of Thea breathing.

Conall had vampire acquaintances, a few he even considered friends. They were based in Glasgow, though like most vamps, his friends liked to travel. Although Conall knew many vampires had no qualms about killing humans, they tended not to. A quick bite here and there was usually the extent of the damage they caused. But the older they got, the less empathetic many of them seemed to grow toward humans. And there were always the psychopaths among any species.

Mostly, vampires and werewolves kept their distance from one another. It was instinct. Some believed the reason for the natural discord was rooted in their origins, but then Conall didn’t believe in the origin stories.

It was his opinion that vampires were generally arrogant, superior fuckers who thought they were better than wolves and that was the cause of their natural discord. Moreover, wolves tended to have more respect for human life because they too were mortal.

Still, Conall had never been moved to kill one before this evening. But killing those vampires had been easy as a possessive, protective instinct roared through his body at witnessing Thea’s capture.

It wasn’t because of Thea.

Seeing her close to death had made him realize how close he was to losing his last hope to save Callie. He turned his head on the pillow to stare at Thea in the dark.

Aye, that’s all it had meant.

Being able to last longer on little sleep than a human was a major advantage when you didn’t trust your companion not to kill you. Conall forced himself to sit up in bed, worried that the soft sounds of Thea breathing would lull him to sleep. Grabbing the phone Ashforth had given him off the nightstand, he downloaded a word search app Callie had gotten him addicted to and kept his brain awake with the distraction.

Minutes from dawn, Conall noticed the change in Thea’s breathing. It stuttered and hitched, and he looked over at her, frowning. After a few seconds of nothing, just when he was about to turn back to the phone, she began to whimper.

He immediately suspected she was trying to trick him and silently swung his legs off the bed. As he did so, Thea made a garbled, choking sound, like she was in pain and holding it in. Hovering over her, Conall realized it wasn’t a trick when he saw her hair sticking to her temple with sweat.

She’d screwed up her face in anguish in her sleep, her pretty lips pinched together in pain.

“Jesus,” Conall muttered as she began to writhe. He reached out a hand to her shoulder to shake her awake. “Thea, wake up. It’s just a dr—”

The room transformed into a blur of its muted colors and his breath was abruptly knocked out of him. The feel of Thea’s warm body straddling his to the floor disoriented Conall until she wrapped her hands around his throat and began to choke him.

There was a glazed look of fury in her dark eyes as she squeezed.

Realizing she was locked in her nightmare, Conall rolled them. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it took most of his strength. Her grip on his throat loosened as he flipped them and he grabbed her hands, pinning them to the floor at either side of her head. “Wake up, Thea!”