Dark Promises(50)
“I am not cleaned up yet.”
“I want you to go to ground with me inside you. When you wake next rising, I promise you will be clean.”
She wasn’t certain what to think about that, but she did know one thing—she knew exactly why he wanted her to kiss him. Gary was gone from her mind just as he’d been when Aleksei had taken her body the first two times. Kissing Aleksei did that and she didn’t want to think too much about what that said about her.
8
Trixie Joanes was in trouble. Not a little bit of trouble, but a lot. The kind of trouble that could get one dead very fast if they didn’t make smart decisions. She was fairly certain the mountains were probably hiding like a million vampires, but her vampire-hunting kit—the one she’d gotten off the Internet—was really difficult to lug around.
The entire box was large and weighed a ton. It was awkward and when hiking up in the mountains—which was tough enough—impossible to carry. So really, what good was it? A big wooden box, with all kinds of content, that when sitting at home in her living room looked really cool, but when she was trying to haul it around with her, hiking up a seriously high mountain, well, whupping vampire ass was out.
She’d been hiking for hours, running when she could, which, truthfully, wasn’t very often. She was going uphill. She wasn’t built for speed. She was a woman with a woman’s body. In shape, but still, she had curves. Real womanly curves, not some stick figure that was all the rage.
“Seriously.” She muttered the word under her breath as she avoided a field full of rocks and tried to find a place that was safe to sit down and rest. She really needed to rest. She’d gone up the mountain instead of down for a variety of reasons, none of which, at that particular moment when she was sucking in air to try to give her burning lungs a break, seemed logical.
She spotted a smallish boulder back in the shadow of the mountain that rose behind it like a specter. She could just sit there for a few minutes. She didn’t want to be out in the open where her traveling companions might spot her. They would have found her missing the moment they got up. She could only hope they thought she’d gone back to the village instead of up the mountain, but she was fairly certain Denny Jashari could track anything in the mountains.
Trixie had no business in a foreign country running with a pack of hyenas pretending to be good people when they clearly weren’t. If any of her girls had made such poor decisions she would have boxed their ears and brought them home for a good ass whuppin.
She sank down on the rock and dropped her back to the ground, considering for the millionth time whether or not to dump her vampire-hunting kit. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in vampires anymore—she’d been convinced that monsters actually existed—she knew she wasn’t two steps away from the loony bin—but quite frankly, she just couldn’t conjure up enough energy to care. She didn’t have to worry about monsters there on the mountain, she had to worry about them maniacs.
She didn’t like to travel and yet she found herself in the Carpathian Mountains, somewhere near Poland, or the Ukraine, or one of those countries where she didn’t understand a word anyone said. The only reason she would leave her home and her own neighborhood was her beloved granddaughter—Teagan.
Teagan did like to travel and she was always getting herself into scrapes. Mostly, she got out of them because she was extremely smart, but this time . . . Well, she needed her grandmother whether she thought so or not. Teagan was in love. With a foreigner. Trixie knew all about the human trafficking and sex trade going on with young, beautiful, susceptible girls like Teagan. She had to stop her from making a terrible mistake. Well, now, her first priority was to save herself and if she did, it would take a lot of luck. She should have known better than to get mixed up with a bunch of fanatics.
Trixie looked cautiously around her, trying to get her bearings. She’d snuck out of the camping area on the pretext of gathering wood for a fire. She’d just kept going. Her traveling companions were totally whacked. Bonkers. As in insane. They might as well have been bible thumpers who spouted everything but the bible. Seriously whacked.
Teagan was Trixie’s. Her special girl. Her sun in the morning and stars at night. No one was going to harm Teagan. Not some horrible stranger who charmed a young, inexperienced girl and probably was trying to marry her to get into the United States, and not the whacked-out vampire hunters who didn’t know the difference between a vampire and a human being.
Totally bloodthirsty. Trixie didn’t mind whupping ass when it was warranted, but she was discerning. Her traveling companions were not discerning. She scrubbed her hand down her face, trying to fight exhaustion. She’d been hiking most of the day and the sun was about to set. She’d gone up the mountain, not down, because something compelled her to go toward the highest peak and the mist, rather than go back down.