Cloak of Deceit: An Alex Moore Novel by Gwen Mitchell Page B

in his voice. “So we can’t take blood without sex?”
    “Well…no. More like we can’t have sex without blood.” Julian caressed my fingertips gently, as if to soothe me. “The two are linked and the drive is too strong to resist. When we get sexually aroused, our craving for blood heightens. That’s why Cody bit you. He was new and didn’t have enough self-control to deny his instincts.”
    “Oh.” I felt my cheeks flush as I remembered the more-than-usual state of arousal I’d been in when Cody had bitten me. It was damn close to being drugged. “It works the other way too, doesn’t it?”
    Julian nodded, looking as though he was bracing for my reaction. “Pheromones. They’re meant to relax the donor — to protect them, really — so they don’t struggle.”
    Which explained Julian’s apparent lack of a love life. “Hi, I’d like to go to bed with you, but I’ll need some blood first,” probably wasn’t a very effective pickup line. Though I had to admit the thought of tasting Julian’s blood — of biting and being bitten — didn’t disturb me at all. In fact, it was a total turn-on if I didn’t think about it too hard. Even the small taste of Julian’s sensuality I’d sampled felt like I’d only been playing with matches before and now I’d stumbled on the whole forest fire.
    And it gets even better?
    It would definitely be worth opening a vein for. I smiled over at him and squeezed his hand back.
    He relaxed into his seat, lacing our fingers together.
    My next words tore from my chest as something struck us from the side and sent the Jeep spinning. There was an explosion of white in my face. The seatbelt jerked tight. Centrifugal force kept my skull plastered to the headrest. Horns blared, coming from all directions at once. We hit something else, and my head snapped forward. My body jarred and rattled until it felt like my bones would fly out of my skin. Instead of stopping, we spun the opposite way.
    Trails of lights streaked my vision, strings of red and white.
    The tires screamed over the wet pavement.
    I squeezed Julian’s hand and the handle of my door bracing for another impact. There was a loud crunch, followed by the sounds of metal twisting and glass cracking.
    We rolled upside down, tree branches and mud assaulting us from all sides. Forest branches creaked with the pressure and finally snapped as the weight of the Jeep bore down on them. We stopped turning over, rocked back and forth for a few seconds, and then slammed to the ground with a final thud .
    The engine was still running with a sickening whine. The cabin of the Jeep filled with the scent of burning oil.
    Coughing, I pushed the deflated airbag out of my face and unbuckled my seatbelt. I rubbed my itchy eyes as smoke filled the cab. “Julian?”
    “Shh.” He reached over and covered my mouth with his hand.
    I blinked, but kept quiet as he took his hand away and turned the engine off. We were surrounded only by the hushed sounds of the drizzly forest, the whoosh of the highway a distant undercurrent.
    Then I heard something else, and the hair all over my body bristled. A whistling wind came from the direction of the thick trees on the hillside, a rustle and crack of branches moving with it.
    I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. All my words choked back down with fear. I grabbed for Julian’s arm, beseeching some explanation for the threat closing in on us.
    “Force Agents.” He said it like a curse, and dove with lightning quickness into his pile of weapons in the back of the Jeep.
    Petrified to absolute stillness, my ears focused on the sound coming down the hillside in our wake, getting louder. The Grigori . “What do we do?”
    Julian shot forward and grabbed me firmly by the shoulders, forcing me to look into his face. “We do whatever we can. If you have to, use your powers.”
    “But, I thought—” The rest of my argument was lost as he shook me.
    “Forget that. They already found us.