A woman with milk white skin and hair the colour of snow approached him, the crowd parting to allow her through. Her starlight coloured robes flowed ethereally around her, revealing more than they were concealing. She looked like a ghost. Payne stood his ground, his vampire senses sparking high alert, and steadied himself. Every instinct said to roar and scare her away.#p#分页标题#e#
Phantom.
He had never seen one before but he had heard that a phantom’s touch could make a man incorporeal. A phantom too. It was the only way for one such as her to mate. She needed to make her male as intangible as she was. When he had first heard that, it had sounded as though it might be fun. Then he had learned that once a phantom, always a phantom. The male never got his corporeal status back and was destined to roam the world as a hollow husk when the phantom cast him aside. No way was he signing up for that.
Her palest silver eyes slid to him and she held her hands out.
Payne reacted on instinct, his eyes darkening to crimson and his pupils turning elliptical. He bore his lengthening fangs at her and growled. She halted and even moved back, but she didn’t leave. She stared at him and her white lips moved. No sound left them but he heard her words in his head.
Unfortunately, he didn’t understand most of them. He caught fae words for ‘fated’, ‘bond’, ‘blood’ and ‘death’.
Before he could ask her in English what she had said to him and what it meant, she swirled into smoke and disappeared. He looked around at the people now staring at him, his skin crawling from their attention and the way they were looking at him as though the phantom had just announced his death sentence. He let his fangs recede and his eyes change back to dark grey, and then singled out one of the witches who had stopped to stare.
“What did she say?”
The woman frowned at him, turned her back and went about her business. Just great. It seemed their looks of horror were because he had flashed his vampire nature. No one else had heard what the phantom had told him and he was damned if he could remember what she had said to repeat it to them.
He didn’t need this shit on top of everything else.
Payne stared at the street sign and decided to go left. He was feeling in a sinister mood after all.
He reached another crossroads and was in the process of deciding which route to take next when a huge cloud of sparkling grey dust exploded into the air off to his right. People ran from that direction, pushing past him. He braced himself and frowned over their heads. There was a shape in the dust, small and curvy, and she wasn’t alone. Four larger shapes surrounded her.
That didn’t seem like a fair fight to Payne.
He ran towards the fray and broke through the dust. Storeowners screamed at the fighters, some of them ferrying their wares inside where it was safe and others standing in front of them, physically protecting them.
The female he had seen through the cloud of dust stood her ground before him, feet spread shoulder width apart beneath the hem of her drab black dress, the long chestnut waves of her hair tangled in the pieces of straw sticking out of it. Grey dust sparkled across her backside. She must have hit whatever had exploded and sent the dust into the air.
Four large males stood opposite her, each of them hunkered low, assessing her.
They were witches too, judging by the coven emblem stitched onto the breast of their loose white shirts and the fact they were all wearing matching dark brown trousers, like a uniform. Payne raised an eyebrow at the elaborate lacing down the front of their shirts, and on their trousers. Where had their coven bought their outfits? Or when for that matter? They looked like something straight out of the eighteenth century. Although, the female of their species didn’t exactly dress in modern attire either. His gaze slid back to her, slowly taking in her dull black dress, trying to pierce the material to see what curves it concealed.
One of the men shuffled, bracing his feet shoulder-width apart on the cobblestones, preparing to attack.
What did they want with the female?
Her heartbeat was frantic. Frightened.
One of the males lunged at her and she turned on the spot, threw herself forwards and rolled towards Payne. She found her feet just a few metres in front of him and her eyes widened as they met his. Smudges of black ash dotted her pale face but Payne didn’t notice them.
She was beautiful.
Entrancing.
Her silvery eyes sparkled like stars.
The male grabbed her from behind and leaned back, lifting her feet off the floor. She unleashed a low growl of frustration and landed a series of devastating blows on him. Her foot slammed into the man’s left knee, hobbling him, and then she jammed her elbow into his face, right into his eye. Payne winced when the man howled and dropped the petite firecracker and she turned and landed a hard kick to his balls. The man hit the deck, clutching himself and groaning.