Blood and Kisses(32)

A half an hour passed. A lone man left the Tomb. A Kodak employee by the look of the badge he’d forgotten to remove.

Seconds later, a redheaded woman in a short red dress came out. She ran after the man, high heels clicking on the pavement. She put her slight hand on his arm and smiled. The man gallantly offered her his arm. Gideon searched the man’s mind. He had gone to the Tomb out of curiosity after seeing it on the news. Divorced, he was nearing retirement and had wanted some companionship. Gideon pulled back to focus on the woman, but before he could do so he detected that the man knew Thalia. He’d hired her to follow his former wife.

Suspicious, Gideon swiftly probed the woman and discovered another wall, but this wasn’t a witch.

A thrill of triumph raced through him.

He had found his quarry.

Akos led the man around the corner into the alley where he’d assaulted the young man earlier. A creature of habit? Or bait for a trap?

Gideon decided not to wait to find out. He dived out of the sky and hit Akos, knocking him off his feet before he could do more than sink his teeth into the older man’s neck and take a sip. Gideon landed and revealed himself. Akos snarled, shifted into his true form and leaped to his feet. The mortal gasped and backed up against the wall. “What the—”

“Stay there!” Akos commanded. Completely at the mercy of the powerful compulsion inherent in Akos’ voice, the man froze, unable to order his muscles to move. “As for you,” Akos continued, gesturing with both hands, “come and get me.”

“My pleasure.” Gideon swept an elaborate bow before his adversary, hoping to enrage him.

Akos growled, his face warped with rage and hate, and launched himself at Gideon. He sidestepped faster than human vision. Akos’ momentum took him to the opposite wall. He ran up the uneven surface and flipped over to attack again, but Gideon was ready. His fingers bit into Akos’ shoulders. The other ancient grasped Gideon around the neck in return and tried to choke him. With a yell, he broke Akos’ hold and lifted them both off the ground, taking a struggling Akos high into the dark sky and into the clouds, away from mortal eyes.

He leaned toward Akos and pierced his neck with his fangs, taking his ancient blood. He immediately spit it out. Gods. It was bitter. His mouth burned.

Poison.

The blood Akos had stolen from Thalia’s friend, untainted by the Claiming, would have tasted sweet. Akos had already taken a life.

The rogue began to laugh. The sound rang through the clouds, amplified by their moisture. Still laughing, he grew beneath Gideon’s hands, shape-shifting into the form of a huge black dragon with sweeping bat-like wings. Gideon lost his grip on his now immense opponent. Akos threw him backward, bowling him over.

As he rolled through the atmosphere, Gideon started to shift into a large dragon. Time to fight fire with fire.

But before he could finish morphing, Akos was there. He stabbed Gideon with his massive, razor-tipped claws, tearing a deep gash in his scaly chest.

He tumbled, disoriented for a moment in the wispy white cloud, unable to discern up or down. Bleeding, he regrouped and flew above the dense clouds, wings beating rapidly, their powerful up and down drafts molding the clouds into new fantastic forms. A blast of orange flame singed one pumping wing, the iridescent blue of a peacock feather in the bright moonlight. Akos emerged from the snowy cloudbank like a shark leaping from the waves. He made another pass.

Gideon twisted and rolled, eluding the blazing missiles. He summoned fire from deep within his belly and blew a stream at Akos.

Akos dodged, ducking and weaving among the clouds. The shot went streaking into the night sky like a meteor, hissing as it cut through a cloud, evaporating the water droplets in its path.

Gideon’s enormous wings cut through the thinning air as he flew higher to get above his enemy. Akos gave chase. They careened through the sky, darting over, under, and through the clouds, pulling a trail of vapor behind them. Two leviathans locked in mortal combat. Their flashes of fire lit the clouds like sheet lightning.

Tiring, Gideon’s heart thundered in his chest. His huge lungs gasped for oxygen. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. He was bleeding heavily, and the energy he’d received from his emergency rations was almost depleted. He had to take Akos down while he still had the strength to finish him. It meant risking being seen, but what choice did he have?

In a breakneck maneuver, Gideon wheeled around and wrapped his leathery wings around his enemy’s large body. They plummeted toward the earth, a two-ton stone.

With a sound like thunder, the pavement deformed as they hit the ground, and the adjacent buildings shook.

Shaking off the force of the impact, Gideon blew fire in Akos’ face. The rogue twisted his lizard-like head away on his long neck, and the fire blackened the wall of a nearby building. His head snaked forward and he buried his long teeth in Gideon’s flexible neck.

Gideon cried out with agony as Akos’ poisonous, dagger-like teeth, slipped beneath tough scales and punctured muscle and bone, slicing through his jugular. Incapable of maintaining his dragon form, Gideon staggered back, blood flowing from his neck and chest, poison invading his blood stream.

Akos shifted back to his human body, his face stretched in a smirk of triumph. “At last, I’ll be rid of you.” He looked around. “There’s only one thing missing.” Headlights flashed. An engine rumbled. He turned back to Gideon, crowing with satisfaction. “Ah, here she is now.”

A late model sedan screeched around the corner. Its headlights shone like a spotlight, throwing a grotesque silhouette of Akos on the wall of a nearby building. The shadow shrank as the car raced nearer.

Akos looked over his shoulder, his smirk dissolving as he realized it wasn’t going to stop. He screamed as the car plowed into his back, knocking him to the ground and crushing him under its wheels. The passenger door opened and Thalia leaned out, her face white in the reflected light. “Come on!”

Gideon hesitated. He wanted to end this now. But he was gravely wounded and Akos, fueled by the Claiming would not be easily killed. If Gideon stayed to finish him now, it might be the last thing he did. He slid into the car. “Let’s go.” As he put pressure on his wound, he realized the persistent feeling he’d forgotten something had disappeared.



Thalia checked the rearview mirror. Akos squirmed on the wet pavement, and she knew he was healing his broken body with every passing second, but she’d stopped him temporarily.

Seeing Akos standing over Gideon, she’d reacted without thinking. For a second, she relived the nauseating crunch as the metal bumper had hit solid flesh and bone, and the thud as the rogue’s body had been taken under the tires.

To be on the safe side, she watched Akos until he was no longer in view. Then she looked across the bench seat at Gideon. He was hurt bad. Much worse than the last time. The skin of his neck had been laid bare, revealing the muscles and ligaments beneath, but it was the blood gushing from his neck that told the true story. If she couldn’t get him blood, he had only minutes to live.

“Take me back to the alley where we found Akos,” he gasped.

She didn’t ask why and turned the car around like a professional moonshiner running from the revenuers. He put a hand on top of hers on the steering wheel. “Slow down. We can’t attract attention.”

She nodded grimly and brought their speed closer to the speed limit.

“How did you find us?” Gideon’s face was ashen, and he was beginning to wheeze. The car reeked of blood as more of the precious fluid darkened his clothes.

Thalia struggled to concentrate on driving while her heart felt like it might explode. “Locator spell.”

She pulled up to the curb and jumped out, leaving the engine running. “The police—” said Gideon, hoarsely.

“Will see nothing I don’t want them to see.”

She muttered the last word of a spell she’d worked in the car as she’d frantically raced to his side. She felt the magic flow from her, could see it color the air.

People nearby were about to experience missing time. She grimaced and hoped none of them thought they’d had an abduction experience.

She yanked the rusty passenger side door open. It groaned in objection. She clutched Gideon’s arm and half-dragged him out of the car. A sick pressure squeezed her heart, tears blurred her vision. Tottering under his weight, she managed to help him into the alley.

An older, gray-haired man stood there, frozen, a look of surprise on his homely face.

“Who is this?”

“Akos’ bait,” he whispered, pulling the man to him with one arm. He sank his fangs into the man’s thick neck and drank.



Gods, he hated having her see him this way. When he fed, the beast was never more than a hairsbreadth from the surface.

Gideon stepped out from Thalia’s supportive hold and turned his back on her so he couldn’t see her.

The rich, warm blood spurted into his mouth, urging him to drink deeply, to take his fill. The blood rushed to his head like the finest champagne. The pleasure of feeding dulled the pain of his injuries. His wounds began to heal. Still he drank. The man moaned, and Gideon came back to himself. He wrenched away, panting. He’d come very close to taking too much.