Bond With Me

Read an Excerpt

Bond with Me

Dorchester Publishing

Chapter One

Prowling past the queue of waiting humans, Brends Duranov scented hope, anticipation and outright desperation seeping from the waiting mob of would-be revelers. Cross that plush velvet line, take the first step inside the club, and who knew what could happen? Humans believed that his Goblin ability to make a wish come true was worth any price.

Brends knew better.

The hot interest, the even headier cocktail of their individual souls, teased his inner addict. What he wanted-what he needed-was lined up and waiting for him. All he had to do was stretch out a hand and choose. Pick a female and make her his dark offer: bond with him, swear to serve his every desire, and receive one favor. She could name anything at all and he'd deliver. All she had to do was serve him, in bed and out, letting him drink of her soul through their bond. He'd taste all the light and goodness she had stored inside her soul, until she was drained and lifeless-or insane.

The fantasy was that in serving him, they served themselves.

That's what those females standing on the other side of the paltry velvet rope were really waiting for. That was the chance for which they'd come, why they'd put on their four-inch heels and were staring at him with those needy eyes.

He scanned the crowd, looking for one human in particular. She'd stalked him at the club for the last three nights. Her honey-and-musk scent was just as much of a turn-on as the thought of her long, supple fingers stroking his cock. He could feel himself hardening even now.

But the woman was nowhere to be found. And suddenly he had no appetite for anyone else. He wasn't bonding with anyone. Not tonight.

She didn't want him.

"My liege?" The bouncer closest to the door looked startled at the pause in Brends's long, sure prowl toward the front doors of G2's. He'd never stopped before. The women waiting in line pushed closer to the rope.

He growled something that must have passed for a greeting, because the bouncer held the door open so he could pass through it. He jabbed the elevator button almost hard enough to punch through the brass panel, cursing silently. It was just as well the unknown female had wised up and left his club the hell alone. He couldn't afford to make the same mistake twice.

When he stepped out of the private elevator, letting the doors glide smoothly shut at his back, the thumping beat of prog music hit him like a blast between the eyes. He quickly moved to the quieter VIP section and the corner table reserved solely for his use. Tonight someone was there waiting: the male who'd called him here. His sire.

Zer was a soldier first and foremost, a tall, broad-shouldered shadow whom humans gave a wide berth. No one crossed Zer. A band of black tattoos circled his thick wrists, and his jet-black hair was bound back in a long queue. Even at rest, he looked ready to pounce. Zer never let down his guard, never relaxed. He didn't believe in mercy. Probably had never received any himself, if the nicks and scars on his face were any indication. He nodded a curt greeting in Brends's direction. His movements held the lethal grace of a snake, a cobra poised to strike.

"You've seen the newspapers?" Zer tossed the question out casually, as if he and Brends had been parted for minutes rather than months. Rumor had it that Zer had been tracking down a rogue Goblin who didn't want to be sent to the Preserves.

Near-immortal, the longer a Goblin lived, the harder it became for him to ignore the raw hunger for emotions that constantly tormented him. The man survived by judiciously feeding that thirst by bonding with a willing human, but the beast locked away inside him was a predator who yearned to devour the very soul that sustained it. Sometimes, the beast overpowered the man, and other times, the man Changed for reasons of his own.

When Michael pushed them out of the Heavens and down into the human world, he'd taken the time to rub a little salt into those wounds. Not only had he ripped off their wings, leaving a psychic wound that no amount of time could heal, but he'd stripped them of their softer emotions as well. Since they'd acted like beasts, he'd said, they could live like beasts. They'd experience hunger, pain, fear, rage, the keen desire to hunt and track and tear. He'd condemned them to a lifetime as feral predators-but with an inescapable hunger to be more. And the only way to get that "more" was vicariously. Bond with a human, and the Goblin could feel everything that human felt. Or rather, the Goblin preyed on the human's emotions, drinking them down like a vampyr did blood. Sooner or later, the human had nothing left. Most of them went mad.

Now the human papers had been reporting savage Goblin kills along the eastern edge of the empire, and public sentiment was turning against them. Any rogue Goblin who couldn't control the Change and his thirst for human souls had to be dealt with. Quickly. No surprise their sire had taken on the job himself.

A dancer shimmied dangerously close, the sweet, powdery scent of her perfume teasing Brends's senses. She smelled good. Good enough to eat. Tonight's hunger was worse than yesterday's. The itch to drink deep from a human and savor the complex taste of a soul slowly changing from light to dark was almost impossible to ignore. Brends had spent centuries ignoring the thirst, however; he'd survive one more night.

Still, the hunger put him on edge, made him tenser, terser than usual, so he wasn't in the mood to exchange small talk with his sire.

His sire had called. Brends had come. Now he just wanted the damn bastard to get on with his business so he could return to his office and see if she had decided to come after all.

Hell, the plans he had to make her come. A small smile quirked the corner of his mouth. If she gave into her curiosity-and instinct told him she would-she wasn't leaving his club until he'd had a good, long taste of the secrets she was keeping from him. What he hadn't decided was where he would start. Would he tease her, tantalize her mouth, her neck, her breasts until she begged? Maybe he'd get straight to the point, spreading her creamy thighs and lapping at that juicy sex like she was dessert and he was a starving man.

Zer coughed. "When you said you would meet with me here, I thought your terms included listening."

Hell. He forced his attention back to the male sprawled across from him, nodding his head in curt apology. A knowing glint appeared in his sire's eyes. Zer knew how long Brends had held out, refusing to take a new bonded. Had to know just how hot and demanding the thirst riding him was.

The bastard was enjoying every minute of it.

"We've had a situation on our hands for months now. We've been losing human females, but now we're losing brothers-and not just to the thirst, either. They're going out to fight, and they're not coming back. Someone has finally got his shit down and he's killing our kind." Zer steepled his fingers over his broad chest, trying and failing to look like the chance to kick some serious ass didn't delight him. Shit, none of them liked losing their brothers-and Brends knew that they would exact every bit of revenge for their deaths that they could-but you didn't survive by mourning your dead and hiding in the past. What you did was fight back. Hard.

The pleasure faded from Zer's face. "There was another death just this week. We've got a rogue with a taste for blood on our hands here. He keeps killing, and we won't be able to keep it quiet."

"If the killer's one of ours who's gone rogue, we'll take care of it. We always have. MVD knows that." Not to mention that MVD, the human policing unit, wouldn't be equipped to deal with a rogue. Last time they'd tried, there'd been a sudden number of openings in the unit. And not due to a rash of retirements, either. While Brends didn't particularly care one way or another if the human population declined, this kind of mess had a bad habit of biting one on the ass if left unchecked.

So he'd clean it up. Big deal. He'd tracked hundreds of rogues; this one wouldn't be any different. It was bad policy to interfere with MVD investigations until you were damn sure of your facts. There was always fallout from stepping on MVD toes, even though Brends would have been perfectly content to settle matters by slitting a few throats. The solutions that had worked two thousand years ago were too brutal by today's standards, so he'd give diplomacy a whirl first. See what he could dig up.

"It could be another paranormal," Zer suggested. The Goblins weren't M City's only paranormal residents-just the most visible. There were vampyrs, banshees and any number of other dark creatures.

"But you don't think so."

"This one's killing for the pleasure of it." Zer drummed his fingers on the table. "There's a pattern here, but we're not seeing it."

"So let's review," Brends suggested. "His first kill was a tourist. We always figured wrong place, wrong time, just another human who stuck her nose where it didn't belong."

"Old M City family, that second one," Zer observed. He traced a pattern around his fingers with the blade. One wrong move and he'd be missing a digit, but Zer never made a wrong move. A good male to have at your back, and that was why so many of them had followed him all those thousands of years ago. Why they still did. When you looked into Zer's eyes, you believed. You had to.

"She knew M City. She had a human husband."

"Stocks and bonds." Zer nodded. He already knew this information. They both did, but some patterns weren't obvious at first glance. Talking it through helped. "Loaded even by most standards. If she wasn't tucked up in their town house, she was ferried around by limousine. Private planes."

Not bad protection for a human. Nowhere near as good as what Brends provided, but it should have been adequate. "And yet they found her three miles away from her bodyguards. In a negligee."

The press had had a field day with that one. The red negligee had been very expensive, very scanty and very bloody. Someone had ripped the socialite open from sternum to pelvis. Unfortunately, humans had been first to the scene for that one and the pictures had leaked before the Goblins could do anything.

"Then two more."

"That we know about."

Brends turned the facts over in his head as he scrolled through the collection of gory crime-scene video playing on the slim silver vid-player Zer tossed him.

"They're all human."

Zer shot him a look. "Obviously."

"And all female."

"Yeah. Ages?" Zer had clearly been down this avenue himself. More than once.

"Nothing too close-all within a ten- to twelve-year range of each other. No similarity in their appearance, either. Blondes, brunettes, hell, the bastard even threw a redhead in there."

The only obvious similarity was in the coroner's report: the same blade had been used to gut the women. The coroner had noted the distinctive edge.

"What about the weapon? Can we trace that?"

They could try, but M City was ass deep in illegal contraband. Finding one knife would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. More important was the kind of strength it had taken to pull an edge like that-hell, any edge-through a human body. The murderer had split those bodies clean open like a hunter gutting his kill. He'd severed bones. Then repeatedly stabbed the chest cavity.

"Sick bastard."

"Yeah." Brends poured amber-colored liquid into a glass. "So he's probably one of ours. He's got the blade. He's got the strength. I'll take care of it."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Bond with Me by Anne Marsh Copyright © 2010 by Anne Marsh. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---