Skinwalker by Faith Hunter Page B

her features. “May I be allowed to offer healing, or do you wish to chastise her yourself?”
    Crap . I tensed. Leo lifted one corner of his mouth at my faint motion and speared me with his eyes. I stared back, though I didn’t meet his gaze. Black eyes, coffee-and-milk skin, dark hair falling in soft waves to his shoulders. French lineage, maybe. Aristocratic and elegant. His photos lied. In them he looked ordinary. In person the vamp was drop-dead gorgeous. The drop-dead part would have been funny if I didn’t feel like an insect about to be stepped on.
    His smile widened, as if he read every thought in my head, from gorgeous to squashed. “If she dishonors me again,” he said, “I will kill her, rogue vampire to be contained or no.” He held his injured hand to Katie. She did something behind the curtain of her hair and I smelled vamp blood. A moment later, she stood and raised her bleeding wrist to Leo. He took it in one hand and pulled her to him, the motion exposing the side of her body as the robe fell open. The whites of his eyes bled red; the pupils expanded black as he vamped out. He put her wrist to his mouth, bit, and closed his lips around the wound. And he sucked. But his eyes were on me.
    I felt the pull of his mouth as if he drank from my wrist. Heat blossomed in my belly. Beast rumbled a growl I just barely controlled. Leo chuckled deep in his throat, drinking. I couldn’t help myself. I slid my fingers around the hilt of the vamp-killer. Those red-as-blood, black-as-death eyes followed the motion. And then looked into my own eyes. I resisted everything I saw there. Everything he made me want. Son of a freaking sea lion. This guy was good. Powerful as the devil himself. I looked away, at the floor, knowing he saw it as weakness.
    I felt the cross grow warm and tucked the silver icon in my back pocket, hoping the glow didn’t attract Leo’s attention. No one knew why vamps reacted to Christian symbols and the symbols to them, and I didn’t figure that now was the time to ask.
    Moments later, Leo pushed Katie away. He raised his left hand, inspected the mostly healed skin, and wiped the blood smear from the corner of his mouth. And licked it. He was laughing at me. I could see it in his eyes. He was also testing to see if the sight of a vamp drinking would shock, repel, or excite me. Beast was interested, from a strictly predator standpoint, but that wasn’t the emotional reaction Leo was watching for.
    Katie knotted the belt of her robe, her eyes glittering behind the veil of her hair. “You may go,” she said softly to me. “Report back before sunrise. You may speak to the girls then.”
    I was dismissed. And Katie was ticked off. I nodded once and backed down the hallway. In the office, the bruiser was attaching an archaic-looking, Y-shaped tubing from a girl to Troll. The right blood type was the redheaded girl with emerald eyes, Rachael. From her place on the couch, recumbent, she stared at me, expressionless. The bruiser followed her gaze.
    I put Troll’s weapons on the huge desk, noting that the center part was darkly tanned leather, worn and distressed. “Troll will need these,” I said. “Tell him thanks.”
    â€œTroll?”
    I tried to smile and found my mouth didn’t want to. “Tom.” I pointed to his patient. His expression altered with amusement and he pointed at himself. “You’re Bruiser,” I said.
    â€œI have a name,” he said. “I’m George Dumas.”
    I looked him over. Six-four, weight lifter, but not to bulging excess; rather, he was slender and toned, brown eyes and hair. Clean-looking with a sculpted nose, long and sort of bony. I had a thing about noses and his was primo. Not that I would tell him. “So what,” I said, not sure why I was being rude except that I didn’t want to express an interest in someone who might become an enemy. His eyes widened