Dark Storm (38 page)

“Good evening,” Dax greeted. “I trust there were no incidents while I slept.”

Gary shook his head. “Everything was quiet. Were you able to find the flowers? To bring enough back so that we can plant them in the Carpathian Mountains?”

Riley laughed at the eagerness in his voice. “We brought you back an entire sack of seeds and roots as well as the flowers intact. I packed them in the soil so they should make the trip, although how you’ll get them through customs I don’t know.”

“I have friends that will do that,” Gary said. “I just need to get the flowers to them. They know how important it is. They never have trouble getting anything they want.”

Dax looked up, his gaze pinning Gary’s. “Carpathians? Your friends are Carpathians?”

Gary nodded. “Yes, they provided us with weapons and gear for this trek. They’re our emergency contact. They were waiting to hear from us,” Gary said. “We need to make it to a clearing …”

“You called them already? When did you do this?” Dax asked. His voice was very low. Smoldering. The last word ended in a long, slow hiss.

Riley stiffened, her heart skipping a beat. He sounded … scary. Gary seemed to be used to the sudden change in Carpathian males. He didn’t blink.

“We knew they would already be looking for us. As soon as we could get a call out to let them know we were alive, we did. We called at sunset.” Gary shrugged casually. “They’ll be sending a helicopter to pick us up. They’re aware of the injury to the professor, and they’ll deal with the others as well.”

“What did you tell them about me? About Mitro?” If anything, that low voice, warm as molasses, dropped another octave lower.

“That you were with us, of course, and that a dangerous vampire was on the loose.” Gary removed his glasses and looked Dax straight in the eye. “I exchanged blood with you voluntarily. Would you be more comfortable reading my mind? You can get the information a lot more efficiently.”

Dax shook his head. “I appreciate that you would allow me to invade your privacy, but until I need to ‘see’ who we’re talking about it isn’t necessary. This is more than one Carpathian hunter?”

“The De La Cruz brothers,” Gary explained. “They were sent to South America centuries ago. Did you know them?”

“We had lineages, not surnames. I do not recognize such a name. Show them to me.”

Gary pictured the images of the De La Cruz brothers in his head in the best detail he could muster. It had been centuries since Dax had been in the Carpathian Mountains, so it was reasonable that he might have missed the hunters sent out by Vlad.

Dax slipped past the barrier in Gary’s head to study the images. A black scowl added to the uneasy feeling in the pit of Riley’s stomach. She didn’t understand how Gary wasn’t affected by the tension in the Carpathian hunter.

Unexpectedly, Dax’s multifaceted eyes flicked to her face. She felt the impact instantly. At once warmth poured into her mind. She had the sensation of arms surrounding her.

You’re connected to me, Riley. He is not. He reads what I want him to read.

She studied Dax’s face. There was no black scowl, no expression whatsoever. Gary had no cause to be concerned that anything was wrong because Dax appeared to be matter-of-fact.

What’s wrong?

I am a hunter. I have to hunt my own people. I see shadows of darkness where others do not. Mitro had a lifemate and that did not stop him from choosing evil. I do not want to take you into an even more potentially dangerous situation.

Dax directed his attention to Gary, but shifted his body subtly, so that Riley felt his warmth enveloping her. The energy that had felt so intense, much like the volcano’s pressure building in the ground, was gone.

“I recognize only one of them. The one you think of as Zacarias.”

Gary frowned. Dax’s tone was still low, and as mild as ever. The darker energy was gone, yet Gary caught something of Dax’s misgivings. Riley found it strange, but Dax had been in his mind and maybe left an echo behind of his earlier irritation.

“I know he’s considered very dangerous, but if you’re worried he may turn,” Gary said, astute enough to know Dax’s main worry, “Zacarias has a lifemate. He is safe as long as she lives.”

Riley glanced up at Dax. He didn’t change expressions, but she knew Gary’s assurance hadn’t swayed him in the least.

Jubal came up to them, Gary’s pack in hand. “We’d better get moving,” he said with a nod of greeting to Riley and Dax.

“We’d better leave then,” Dax said, effectively terminating the conversation about the other hunters, “if we’re going to make the clearing in time to start transporting people to safety. How big is the helicopter they’re sending?”

“I don’t know, but I doubt it will take all of us on the first trip,” Gary said.

Riley crouched low and sank both hands into the soil, feeling for the vampire. He had been making his way steadily toward the river and leaving, in his wake, death and destruction. Nature shrank from the abomination that was the undead. Around her, the world faded, leaving her in another environment where she could hear the whispers of the rain forest. The trees spoke, grateful for her presence, willing to share information.

The uneasiness that had plagued her earlier was gone—a dark dread that seemed to be a part of her ever since her mother had died. Now, with her hands buried in the comfort of the soil where she was once again close to Annabel’s spirit, she realized that terrible dread was the vampire’s blood calling to hers.

Horrified at that sudden revelation, she jerked her hands from the soil and sank back onto her heels, shuddering with distaste. An ice-cold frisson of revulsion slid down her spine. She had known she was connected in some way to Mitro, but she thought the connection was in the earth, the soil, not in her own body.

What is it,
sivamet
?

The warmth in Dax’s voice, as it poured into her mind, helped to steady her.

I need a minute.
She couldn’t look at Jubal and Gary. They’d helped her so much, stood by her, and all the time, her blood called to the vampire.

“You two take the others and start out,” Dax ordered. “We’ll catch up.”

Jubal glanced down at her, but Dax shifted, gliding in front of her without seeming to have moved. Jubal looked up at the Carpathian, and something flickered in the depths of his eyes that instantly had Dax coiled like a snake ready to strike.

“You okay with that, Riley? Catching up with us?” Jubal asked, in spite of the gathering tension.

“Yes, thank you Jubal for asking,” she answered.
Gary and Jubal have looked after me all this time, Dax. There’s no need to get upset because he shows concern for me.

I have never been questioned before
, Dax said.
I find it difficult to be in the company of anyone other than my lifemate for prolonged lengths of time. I have never spent this much time with others, and it is wearing.

Riley hadn’t considered that. Of course it was difficult for him, he’d spent centuries alone. Even before the volcano, he’d been a hunter of vampires, spending months, even years on his own with no one around. The world was a changed place for him. He had fought for hundreds of years for the protection of his people and then, while he was locked in a volcano, his species had nearly gone extinct.

Jubal lifted his hand and walked away in the direction of the river, shepherding the others to follow Miguel. The professor was carried out, the remaining porters taking turns with the others as they made their way steadily into the rain forest. Within moments, the trees and foliage had swallowed them.

Dax waited until they were gone before crouching down beside her. “Arabejila’s blood runs strong in you. Mitro believes she lives, which is to our advantage.”

She nodded her head. “I understand that, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t only the earth telling me where Mitro has been. I can feel my blood reaching for him.” She took a deep breath, forcing herself to look him in the eye. “It’s disturbing. I want my blood to call to you, not him. It makes me feel dirty.”

Dax gathered her into his arms.
“Hän sívamak,”
he whispered tenderly. “My beloved. My blood and your blood are forever connected. Our hearts, our minds and our souls are inseparable. As for Arabejila’s blood, as we traveled together, we often were forced to exchange blood. Her blood is why Mother Earth accepted me and granted favors to me. My connection to Mitro is not as strong, but it is there.”

Riley slipped her arms around his neck. “You always know the right thing to say to me to make me feel better. Let’s go find him, Dax. The sooner we find him, the faster we can get on with our life together.”

15

T
he wind picked up, swirling through the canopy, blowing storm clouds into a churning, riotous mass of spinning dark threads. Lightning forked across the sky, a wicked fork of electricity, lighting the canopy for a brief moment. Thunder rolled, a great boom, shaking the ground. On the heels of the thunder the low moan of the wind rose to wail and then once again died down.

Riley wiped sweat from her face. It was hard to breathe with the ash still clinging to the leaves and flowers. Her boots felt horribly heavy and she made a note to herself to purchase lighter ones next time. Her mind was a little hazy, the hike almost surreal.

Fate had made a terrible mistake. For Riley, tramping through the rain forest at night was an exercise in courage. She tried not to connect with Dax, afraid he’d see how afraid she was of every shadow. Her heart beat so loud she feared Jubal and Gary would both hear it. She wasn’t certain how she got to be the lifemate of a Carpathian warrior, who seemed to have all the courage in the world, when she was afraid of the shadows.

Riley cast a quick look around her at the others as they tramped through the dense vegetation. No one else seemed to be feeling as if at any moment they were going to be devoured by a pack of crazed jaguars leaping out of the shadows. It wasn’t as if she was completely crazy—the coughs and grunts coming from a short distance away told her at least one, mostly two jaguars paced along beside them.

She tried to control her breathing as best she could, but with every step she took, apprehension grew stronger and her chest grew tighter. The jungle seemed much denser, Miguel and Alejandro struggling to hack a path and keep them all on the much-faded trail. The more miles they covered, the more the dread inside her grew and the harder it was to keep the pace the guide had set.

Her night vision was amazing, her restless gaze following the thousands of insects forming a moving carpet under their feet. Everything seemed overly loud to her, especially the persistent drone of insects, and even the bugs took on a sinister quality to her overactive imagination.

Birds screeched in warning to one another, a constant, alarmed communication, unusual for nighttime. Above their heads was continual motion, the flutter of wings, the swish of branches as monkeys leapt from branch to branch as if they, like the jaguars, were following the travelers.

Tree trunks covered in black spikes seemed to leap out of the shadows at them. Oversize leaves, split into razor-sharp fronds, reached for them, driven by the wind. The dread seeping into her made her stomach churn. The sound of the machetes slashing through the screaming branches and foliage only added to her frayed nerves.

Riley and Dax had caught up with the others quickly. He’d simply shifted into a giant bird and taken to the air, carrying Riley until they were close enough to join her fellow travelers. To make better time, Dax took over carrying the professor. He could go for miles without breaking a sweat. She resisted looking over her shoulder at him. He was close, but with the weight of a grown man in his arms, he couldn’t be leaping into action if someone went crazy with a machete or the monkeys ambushed them.

Gary walked directly in front of her. She caught him twice looking over her head, back toward Jubal. They exchanged a knowing look that made her shiver. Okay, she wasn’t entirely losing her mind; they both felt the danger, too, they just reacted better. She put her hand in the pocket of her light jacket, assuring herself the Glock was there should she need it.

Your fear is beating at me, yet you do not allow me to share your mind. What is it?

His voice was always so calm and reassuring.

We don’t make any sense.
She would have glared at him if she wasn’t so busy looking in the trees for an imminent attack. Sometimes being so utterly calm was annoying.

Match your heartbeat to mine. Your heart is beating too fast,
Dax ordered.
In what way don’t we make sense?

Smug male amusement was
much
worse than calm. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder to glare at him. He wasn’t even breathing hard, while her lungs were burning. He was all muscle and hotness, and her body felt like lead. He didn’t seem to mind that at any moment he might have to pitch the professor into a spiny tree to save the day like some comic book hero.

Comic book hero? Is that how you see me? I must have a cape.

His laughter filled her mind, raw and masculine and unexpected. She found herself smiling just because he was. He’d managed to find his way into her mind when she had been so certain she was closed off to him. He could make her laugh in the worst of circumstances. Ignoring the gathering anxiety pressing down on her, she deliberately began to conjure up an image of Dax in pink tights, a long tunic and a pink cape.

This is what you wish me to wear?
He sounded perfectly serious.
It is much like the Inca garb. The color might clash with my skin tone.

Riley burst out laughing.
Clash with your skin tone
? she echoed. Small beads of sweat ran down the valley between her breasts. She had to rub more out of her eyes.
What in the world does Gary have going on in his head? You got all your information from him.

Jubal as well. He has sisters.
Once again he sounded smug.