FF (March 2013) L.L. Raand - The Lone Hunt

Book 4 of Midnight Hunters

A world of violent passions and inhuman hungers explodes as ancient taboos and primal desires collide.

Wolf Were Alpha Sylvan Mir wants nothing more than to keep her pregnant mate Drake safe in their secluded stronghold, deep in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, but enemies, political and praetern, force her into battle. Sylvan must confront the Vampire Chancellor Francesca, a one-time lover, about her part in a recent attack on Mir Laboratories—a confrontation that will test Sylvan’s alliance with the Vampires and lead to war. Francesca’s enforcer Michel, with a secret sexual conquest in Sylvan’s Pack and a Were centuri newly-turned Vampire, Lara under her command, may have divided loyalties, too. Lara, born to fight in service to the Were alpha, finds herself caught between two worlds, belonging to neither, and her unexpected obsession with an enemy Alpha puts ancient loyalties to the test. In a world where humans and praeterns conspire for the ultimate power, violence is a way of life...and death.

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Sample

Chapter One

Lara stalked the human servant down the silent corridor into the depths of Liege Jody Gates’s lair. Hunger forced a flood of feeding hormones into her mouth. Her canines lengthened and throbbed. Her clitoris tensed in anticipation of having Zahn Logan, head of security for the Night Hunters—Jody’s Clan and one of the most powerful Dominions in the world—helpless beneath her. Lara envisioned the blonde submitting to her, imagined inducing the arrogant human to writhe in the throes of bloodlust, of driving her to orgasm with her bite. Her predator instinct surged. She growled, her wolf rising, eager for the claiming.
“You should cage that wolf,” Zahn said without turning, her stride nearly as sensuous as the glide of a Vampire. “You dishonor your master with your lack of control.”
“I am no one’s slave.” Lara leapt, her claws slicing the back of Zahn’s tight black T-shirt before the human twisted aside, surprising her with her speed and agility.
Zahn spun to face her, the blade she carried in a sheath strapped to her muscular thigh now in her right hand. Silver glinted in the double-edged weapon—a Were killer. “I will feed your Vampire with pleasure, but your wolf will die on my blade.”
Lara crouched, her wolf eyes glinting amber, her bones and muscles sliding, shifting, morphing. “I will take what I want, when I want it.”
“No,” Zahn said softly, “you won’t. You are more than Were now. You are Vampire.”
Lara shuddered, caught in the dark swirls of Zahn’s russet eyes. Her nipples tensed, and tawny pelt streaked down the cleft between the rigid columns of her abdominals. The deep glands surrounding the base of her clitoris filled and she wanted to fuck. Fuck and feed. Instincts laced with pain and mindless need. “Get away from me.”
“No. I do not fear you.” Zahn smiled, her mouth twisted in arrogant challenge. “I want to feed you.”
“Why?” Lara growled, her vocal cords thickened with the change.
“Because I can. Come with me, Warlord.” Zahn turned and walked on. Her flesh was scored with shallow pink gouges beneath the torn black shirt, but she was nearly healed. She wasn’t immortal like the ethereal Vampires she served, but her raw power and sexual allure were nearly as potent.
Warlord. The word cut through the frenzy clouding Lara’s senses. She had once been centuri, one of the elite guard protecting the wolf Were Alpha. Now she was a Vampire’s general, the commander of an army on the verge of war. She had lost her Pack, her station, and her honor when she had died and been resurrected as a Vampire, but she could still fight. She could still kill the enemies who had taken everything.
Lara gathered her will and forced her wolf to withdraw. She would not let Zahn witness her loss of control, would not let Zahn have the satisfaction of goading her into sex frenzy. Zahn might be faster, stronger, more resistant to injury than an ordinary human, but she was still human. And Lara would not let a human hold power over her, even when the human offered her blood and sex, all that she now craved. “You will not need your blade, Capitaine. It is your blood we will spill.”
A fine shudder ran through Zahn’s muscular body. The pleasure of the Vampire’s bite was magnified a thousand times for those of her line. She had been born to answer a Vampire’s call, the urge to sustain her master’s lineage with the unique chemicals in her blood a primal instinct. And Lara was of her master’s blood. She ached to feed her. She slid the blade into the leather sheath with a flick of her wrist, so fast only a Praetern could have followed the motion. “Come, Vampire. Take what I offer.”
Lara was beside her in an instant, her claws pressing into Zahn’s lower back. She smelled Zahn’s need, rich and verdant. She sensed the beat of her heart, strong and seductive. “Hurry. I want you in my mouth.”
Zahn’s hands trembled as she opened the door with a key she withdrew from a pocket in her leather pants. Lara followed her into one of the many chambers in the underground stronghold where Gates and her consort, and Gates’s Vampire soldiers, spent the daylight hours guarded by their human servants.
The dim room was warm and windowless. A large bed filled the space, centered on the wall opposite the door. Silky dark-chocolate sheets covered the surface, and a row of matching satin pillows was piled against the mahogany headboard. A royal blue brocade settee, angled in one corner as if waiting for a third participant to arrive, was the only other piece of furniture. The room held no dressers, no night tables, no armoires. Just the bed and the empty settee. A space for feeding—for blood and sex and pleasure-pain. Lara’s thighs tensed as her wolf surged again, long denied but still strong. Still eager to hunt.
Taking a breath, keeping a short leash on the prowling predator raging to chase, to capture, to take, Lara closed the door behind her and forced herself to wait while the human walked to the side of the bed and methodically began to disrobe. As humans went, Zahn was attractive—as elegant and beautiful as any of the Vampire guard who answered to her, although Zahn was blond, and most of Gates’s Vampires were black haired and blue eyed. Strange that a human should hold such a lofty position as head of a Dominion’s security forces, but Lara did not know all the political nuances of the Vampire world in which she suddenly found herself. Wolf packs were controlled not by politics, but by power alone. The Alpha ruled through sheer force of will, cunning, and physical dominance. Before she was turned, Lara had succumbed on occasion to the seductive thrall of a Vampire’s power and experienced blood ecstasy herself. Like many Weres, she enjoyed the intense pleasure accompanying a Vampire’s bite, but she had always distrusted the Vampire alliances that shifted as easily as a battle won or lost, where trusts were betrayed for fleeting advantage. She walked on the side of the Vampires because she had no choice. She was one of them now, and better to fight where she had a place than to die a slow death every day among the Weres, where she no longer belonged.
Lara locked the door.
Zahn stripped off her tattered shirt and turned to Lara, her high breasts gleaming in the slanting glow of lights tucked away, unseen, in corners. Her nipples were two tight, dark disks on the pale flushed beauty of her breasts. Her muscled abdomen rose and fell in shallow bursts. Her arousal skated over Lara’s tongue and flooded her throat with pheromones. Lara’s canines jutted, elongating, scraping the tender inner surface of her lower lip. She tasted her own blood, subtly changed. A metallic undertone tingled in her throat. Her sex glands bulged, full and ready, forcing her engorged clitoris to extrude. The red haze of bloodlust curtained her vision. It would be easy, so easy, to surrender and take what had been offered. The host had come willingly, agreeing to feed her, making no demands, giving no restrictions.
She was free to take—to plunge her canines into the etched column of Zahn’s throat, to drink her ferrous-rich blood until her cells were empowered, until her sex throbbed, full and potent. Until she was satisfied.
“You should have a second,” Lara said. Her wolf rose to the call of blood just as her Vampire parts thirsted, and she could not hold her back completely. Zahn was not safe without a guard of her own if Lara lost control.
“I need no second.” Zahn unstrapped her knife sheath and tossed it onto the brocade settee, out of reach, a deliberate show of confidence and superiority. “I can meet all your needs.”
Lara leapt and dug her claws into Zahn’s naked shoulders, forcing her down onto the bed. She straddled Zahn’s hips, pressing her torso to the bed with extended arms. She didn’t draw blood yet—once she did, she wouldn’t stop. She dropped her head over Zahn’s face, the curtain of her own chestnut hair framing Zahn’s high cheekbones and arched jaw. The pulse of Zahn’s blood beneath the unblemished skin of her throat was a siren’s call. She flashed her canines and Zahn gasped. “You don’t know what I need.”
“You’re wrong.” Zahn gripped Lara’s black BDUs and tore them down the length of her thighs on both sides.
“Am I?” Centering her hand on Zahn’s chest, Lara raised up enough to pull off the shreds of her pants. Her sex throbbed in time with her heart, driving all thoughts save one from her consciousness. Take her. Take her. Lara rumbled a warning.
“Yes,” Zahn whispered, sweat beading in the hollow of her throat. She reached between them and peeled the leather from her hips. Bowing beneath Lara, she angled her hips and rubbed against Lara’s lower body. She was wet, her flesh hot and open. Fingers digging into the hard muscles of Lara’s ass, she arched her neck, exposing the great vessels that pulsed vibrantly beneath the surface of her slick skin. “Take my blood. Take my body. I am ready.”
Lara snarled. This human sought to control her by offering what made her weak. She needed blood. She craved sex. She ached to lose herself in the taking. And if she did, she would give up what little power she still had. She gathered Zahn’s wrists in one hand and pinned her arms above her head, the skin beneath her fingers as delicate as porcelain against the rich chocolate sheets. As strong as Zahn was, she was stronger—she could rip her throat open, tear her heart from her chest, bleed her dry. Slowly, body quivering with the effort to control her bloodlust, to contain the sex frenzy, Lara lowered her head until the points of her canines indented Zahn’s skin but did not break through.
“Beg me,” Lara whispered. Don’t let me kill you.
Zahn struggled for sanity in the cloud of pheromones seducing her senses—rich wolf Were stimulants flooded her blood, Vampire thrall enticed her very cells. Every inch of her screamed for the Vampire bite that would transport her, for the Were body that would release her. Never had she ached so much to be bitten, to be drunk, to be filled. To be fucked.
“Oh God.” Zahn groaned and wrapped her legs around Lara’s hips, forcing her tense clitoris against Lara’s. “Please. Bite me. Fill me. I need. Oh God, I need.”
Lara’s eyes glowed the amber of her Wolf shot through with flame as she drove her Vampire canines into Zahn’s throat, releasing the erotostimulants that turned pain into pleasure, transformed sacrifice to scorching satisfaction. Zahn cried out and orgasmed, her sex throbbing against Lara’s.
Lara swallowed, her cells expanding with the rush of life, her clitoris taut, swollen, pounding for release. She thrust her hips and slipped between Zahn’s drenched folds, sliding easily into her cleft, lodging there, tight and hot.
Zahn thrashed, another orgasm crashing through her. She scored Lara’s back with her nails, the distant pain a grace note to the agonizing pleasure. Lara thrust and swallowed, thrust and swallowed, taking life with every swallow, releasing her essence with every thrust, the victus thick and rich with borrowed life. She shuddered, close, so close to the final shattering release her wolf craved. Her skin burned, her breath tore from her in tortured sobs. She couldn’t empty, couldn’t find the ultimate satisfaction without—
Lara’s need called to Zahn as her masters’ had called to those of her line for millennia. She tightened her grip on Lara’s shoulders and jolted upward, sinking her teeth into Lara’s shoulder, breaking the skin, drawing blood.
A shaft of pain arrowed into the deepest reaches of Lara’s sex and she exploded, her glands emptying, her clitoris spasming in the depths of Zahn’s flesh. Zahn sucked at the bite she’d made and came again.
Lara pulled her head away, yanking her shoulder free from Zahn’s mouth. Zahn moaned, nearly unconscious, deep in the thrall, mindless with pleasure. Lara’s clitoris still pulsed under Zahn’s, a tender knot forming mid-shaft. Zahn’s bite had triggered her wolf’s instinct to join. “No!”
Lara staggered to her feet, Zahn’s blood and hers running in rivulets down her chest, over her breasts, matting the dusting of pelt down the center of her abdomen. Somehow Zahn had known what her wolf needed. What she needed. More than blood, more than sex. A joining that could never be hers. Empowered with Zahn’s blood, her wolf did not recognize the truth. She would never mate. Weres mated for life, and she was already dead. Lara threw the sheet over Zahn, paced to the door, and flipped the lock.
With sunfall still an hour away, she should be tired, but she wasn’t. She was Vampire, but she was Were, and she needed more than blood. Needed more than the bite of the human she did not want. She spun around, pulled the door open, and bounded into the corridor, her wolf breaking its chains at last. Her vision grayed into the sharp lens of the predator. A human guard. By a door at the end of the hall. She smelled sunshine beyond that door. Beyond that door a staircase led to the outside, led to freedom. Naked, covered in blood and sex-sheen and victus, she leapt the length of the hall toward the guard. His eyes widened and his dark face turned ashen, but he stood his ground, his automatic weapon still holstered on his thigh. Brave man.
“Step aside, Human, or you will die.”
“I have orders that no one leaves until moonrise, Warlord,” he said, his voice raspy.
“You will obey me, soldier, or you will die this day.”
“The sun has not yet fallen. Zahn ordered—”
Lara grasped him by the neck and tethered him to the wall, his feet ten inches off the floor, his face less than a breath from hers.
“I am the Warlord of the Liege’s armies. I am your master. You take your orders from me.”
“Yes, Warlord,” he wheezed through the thin column of air she allowed him to suck in. “But the sun—”
“I am not afraid of the sun.” She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did. The daylight was not her enemy. “While I am gone, you will see that no one approaches Liege Gates’s quarters. No one enters the Liege’s chambers except Zahn until I return. Not for any reason. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Warlord.”
“Open the barricades.” She let him down, and he nearly fell but regained his feet and snapped a salute, fist to chest.
“Yes, Warlord.”
He punched numbers into a keypad, pressed his palm to a plate on the wall, and stared into a retina scanner. Locks ratcheted open and the reinforced steel door slid soundlessly aside. She bolted through, up the stairs, and into another long corridor. A soldier at the far end held another door open as the last shafts of sunlight flickered outside, refusing to surrender to the night. For the first time since she’d been turned, Lara felt her Wolf ascend, body and spirit, and she let her come. By the time she soared through the camouflaged exit and out into the street, she was in full pelt and ready to hunt.

Chapter Two

“I feel fine,” Chris said, looking as if she was about to jump off the examining table. “I need to get back to the labs.”
“I’ll decide when you’re ready to return to duty.” Drake folded her arms in front of her chest and deliberately moved into the young lieutenant’s personal space. Chris, naked except for her jeans, st