“And what have you done . . . ?” He trailed off, a sudden blurring of his vision and a lightheaded spinning in his head whisking away his concentration.
What had they been talking about? The gauze Riker held to his chest grew sticky and wet. Every breath was like breathing water.
“Dammit.” Nicole leaped across the distance separating them and lifted his palm from the wound.
“Riker? I’m going to need you to lie down.”
She sounded so authoritative. So strong. He’d think it was hot if he didn’t hate her. And if he wasn’t about to bleed to death.
As if his body was in tune with his thoughts, the scent of his own blood became overpowering, and a trickle of warmth began to stream down his torso.
“know this, human. I will die before I allow myself to be taken.” Suddenly, every breath was a firestorm of pain. He gasped, choked on his own blood. “Looks . . . like that . . . might happen.”
“You’re not going to die.” She didn’t sound very convincing. Hell, she’d probably slit his throat the second he lost consciousness.
He sagged against her, felt her easing him backward. “If poachers find us . . .” He inhaled a raspy breath, trying to find the words to tell her about the tunnel leading to another exit at the back of the cave. Instead, agony ripped him apart.
He felt her hands on his shoulders. “Riker. Stay awake.”
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. “I know . . . you hate us.” Desperate to convey his urgency, he searched blindly for her hand. When he found it, he squeezed, and for the briefest moment, he took comfort in the fact that she squeezed back. “But please . . . when you get back . . . let Neriya go.”
The pain took him.
Chapter 8
Nicole’s chest was tight as Riker went limp and passed out. He’d suffered what appeared to be a deep puncture wound between his fourth and fifth ribs, but it took a lot more than that to put down a vampire. The problem couldn’t be the boric acid; she’d lied about that. Oh, she’d dosed him with it, and it was lethal to vampires, but she’d only given him enough to lay him up for a few miserable days.
His medical condition wasn’t her concern, though.
Her only concern was getting home alive, and with him incapacitated, she had a shot at it.
She hurried to the cave entrance, pausing in the early evening shadows thrown by the surrounding trees and rocks. How far would she make it in the dark, especially given her lack of appropriate clothing? Even if she didn’t die of exposure, night was the domain of vampires, and clearly, these woods were crawling with them. If not them, hunters and poachers.
The memory of being chased by the men, some of whom had fangs and other body parts hanging from their belts and necks, sent a chill up her spine.
They’ll only chop me up for body parts. If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead when they start. But you? It’ll be a while before they put you down.
Riker’s matter-of-fact words put a damper on her eagerness to leave. Maybe she should wait until morning.
She cut a tentative glance over her shoulder. Riker lay on the ground, drenched in darkness, a pool of blood spreading around him. Vampires could lose far more blood than humans and still recover, but it usually took massive trauma to lose that much. With the rapid way vampire blood clotted and wounds sealed, even the loss of a limb or a severed artery rarely resulted in death. But Riker wasn’t clotting.
So what? He kidnapped you, threatened to kill you, and . . . saved you from poachers. Snort. He’d saved her from poachers so he could kill her himself after he got what he wanted.
Neriya.
Who was she? Why did Riker want her so badly that he’d begged Nicole to release her if he died? He’d actually been desperate enough to use the word please.
She had to wonder how hard that had been for him.
A howl broke in the distance. A wolf, maybe? Another howl joined the first, this one much closer, and Nicole’s heart skipped a beat. Bad enough that she was stuck in the middle of the wilderness with vampires and poachers. Now she had hungry wolves to worry about.
What if the howls weren’t wolves? What if that was how the poachers signaled one another? Yet another howl, this one so close she jumped, rang through the forest. Oh, God, she wasn’t going to make it even a mile before someone or some thing caught her.
Reluctantly, she turned back to Riker. Lying there unconscious and with a trickle of blood streaming from the corner of his mouth, he still managed to strike fear into her heart, but without him, she didn’t stand a chance.
Calling herself all kinds of crazy, she crossed the distance between them and crouched to light another candle. Under the cast of the flickering light, she peeled back the soaked gauze covering Riker’s wound. Blood and air sucked in and bubbled out of the puncture with