Late afternoon brought rolling thunder clouds to block out the desert sun. Jas walked out of the unusual twilight mist with a sword strapped to his back. He met the golden apparition, and they clasped forearms, the greeting of ancient warriors. Aiden eyed the long Katana sword strapped to Jas's back.
"You are not seriously bringing a sword to a gun fight, are you?" he asked softly.
"If it is the sword that brought down Brushogen, then yes," Jas replied with a dark smile and cold eyes.
"The invincible artist-warrior made of ink?" Aiden blinked in disbelief.
"A vampire," Jas assured him. "This sword was forged specifically to defeat him and others like him. It also destroyed a vampire calling himself Huitzilopochtli, founder the bloodthirsty Aztec culture in Central America, as well as many lesser vampires in Oceania."
Aiden held out his hand, and asked with much reverence, "May I?"
Jas hesitated only momentarily before sweeping the glittering blade out of its sheath. He laid the handle in Aiden's hand. "I had planned to give this to the Prince as a parting gift before I met the dawn. But now that I have found my life mate, it will eventually be passed into the keeping of our children." A smile quirked his mouth. "In all my centuries, I never thought I would say that."
Aiden hefted the sword expertly. The crafting was truly that of ancient masters. His senses detected strong magic inlaid in every fold of the steel, the steel folded a thousand times for strength and flexibility. The metal itself was of unprecedented purity, each element in the alloy in precise harmony with the others, similar to the Damascus steel of the ancient world. He handed it back gingerly, all the power in the blade was making his fingertips tingle. "Impressive. Yet, you are unknown," Aiden stated, daring Jas to explain himself.
"That is the goal of every Carpathian," Jas replied evenly, "to remain unknown."
"Why have you not made yourself known before now?" he persisted.
"Because I knew awkward questions would be asked of me as soon as I showed my face," Jas countered with a small smirk.
Aiden smiled and bowed his head in respect. "Shall we?" he asked, gesturing in the direction of the city.
----- ----- ----- -----
Maddie's eyes opened. Jas was gone. She couldn't reach him. The thread that connected them was drifting in a void. Something horrible had happened, she was certain.
Where is he?!? she demanded telepathically, sending a vicious set of snapping teeth along with the question.
A weak thread of gold power reached out to her. He was taken...
With those three words, Maddie emphatically knew so much more. This hunter was mortally wounded, abandoned in the desert. He was so weak, he could not even open the earth to hide from the inevitable dawn.
Maddie got up from the bed, dressed quickly, and pounded downstairs to her garage. She shoved a helmet on her head, gloves on her hands, and walked her dirt bike out of the garage. With a brisk kick, the bike roared into the street.
She felt cold, numb, and brittle as she furiously navigated the streets. Soon she was blazing through the desert, the connection she had made to the wounded hunter acted like a lodestone, guiding her to the fading Carpathian. He had been dumped north east of the Wash, a cats-cradle of dry riverbeds created by flash floods. The stoic storm clouds still covered the moon, the dark light easy enough to pierce with her improved night vision and more than matching her mood.
When she found him, he was so covered in dust and sand that she'd almost mistaken for a rock. Only the waves of excruciating pain radiating off him had given him away. She stopped her bike and looked down at the pitiful form in the dirt.
"You need blood," Maddie stated flatly. "I'll give it to you on one condition."
What...condition? He mentally grunted, unable to muster enough breath for speech.
"You will finish converting me."
I cannot...that is for Jas—
" Jas could be dead!" Maddie screamed, hot tears pricking her eyes as she admitted it to the stranger. "I can't feel him anymore. So either you convert me, or I leave you here and walk into the dawn. Pick. Your. Poison."
NO! a panicked, distinctly feminine cry echoed in Maddie's mind. Don't leave him!
"Can you hear your life mate," Maddie bit out. "I can hear her. She knows you are dying, and I'm the only one who can save your life. So, the deal is: I'll give you enough blood so that I can get you back to the city where you can feed properly. And then you are going to convert me. I'll have the whole day to rest up before I destroy whoever took Jas from me." She projected icy grief to the hunter, making it perfectly clear she didn't care about her life, his life, his mate's life—didn't care about any life at that moment. All she wanted was to either find Jas or avenge his death. The weight of her mourning astonished the seasoned hunter.
Maddie felt his consent and knelt beside him. She took out her keys and used a pocket knife key chain to cut her wrist. She barely felt it as she pushed the opened vein to the hunter's patched lips. Weakly he drank the blood. For safety, she monitored him emphatically. When sufficient strength had returned, she pulled her wrist away. He caught it, brought it back to his lips, and courteously licked the wound closed. She felt him detach his spirit from his body and heal his own wounds, staunching the blood flow, from the inside out.
"I am Aiden Savage," he whispered as he pushed himself up. His arms were shaking with exhaustion.
"I don't care if you're fucking Marilyn Manson. Lets go." She grabbed his arm roughly and pulled him to her bike. "Hold onto my waist. And tell your life mate to shut up. I'll make sure you live at least through this day."
They drove west, and found a resort. Maddie pulled up to the service entrance of the main hall. Aiden dissolved from behind her and streamed into a cracked window as a thread of mist. Maddie waited, the cool desert night air barely touching her. She could feel her heart turning to stone. Over and over she mentally reached for the familiar warmth of her life mate, only to find blank space. She tried every path possible, and a few she wasn't sure were supposed to exist. She reached for his conscious mind, his empathic connection to her—all came back with the same miserable, numbing result.
Aiden was behind her again. She felt enormous strength pulsing off him. He had taken more than enough blood to replenish him from the night staff of the resort.
"Save your strength and don't bother shifting until we get closer," Maddie told him.
"Let me drive," Aiden commanded smoothly.
She leveled a scathing look at him, her emerald eyes flickering with cold blue flames in the night. She didn't say a word. She didn't budge. Aiden was both intrigued by her abilities manifesting and alarmed that she had so much power with only an unfinished conversion. Finally, Aiden mounted the bike behind her and chastely placed his hands on her shoulders.
She took the bike down Kyle Canyon road to the mountains. They drove for another hour, Maddie staunchly shielding her mental screams, and Aiden quietly ignoring the stark grief that radiated from her. They wound up the road into the mountains for the better part of an hour. Finally, Maddie pulled into a small turn out. Aiden quickly dismounted and Maddie walked the bike into the bushes. She finished covering her bike from unlikely prying eyes and walked back out to Aiden.
"Lets do this," she said.
"Are you sure you do not wish to wait for Jas to return?" Aiden asked as a last ditch effort. "I will find him. He will return to you."
"Don't give me false hopes," she snapped bitterly. "I'm an empath. I know that you were taken by surprise, that you don't know how to get back in. I can feel your pain. I know that you're still terribly wounded and one day in rich earth won't heal you entirely. If Jas could reach me, he would have. Any flicker—no matter how small—I would feel it, and I would wait for him. But there's nothing. Without him, I am nothing."
"The conversion is painful," he warned her.
"It couldn't be more painful than this," she assured him.
"My life mate is not in favor of this plan."
"Let me talk to her." Maddie held out her hand. Aiden took it gently, but she barely felt it.
You should wait, the feminine voice from before insisted. She shared a few images from her own conversion. Without a life mate for an anchor, the pain can destroy your mind.
Maddie said nothing, but opened her mind and heart to the strange woman hundreds of miles away. Stark loneliness rolled from her, through Aiden, and broadsided the woman on the other end. The crushing nothingness went on and on. Colors were fading, emotions and sensations were disappearing, everything good in the world was being sucked into the empty void consuming her heart.
Aiden dropped her hand, breaking the chain of darkness to his life mate. For the first time, he faced a female who held the same curse as the males of his race.
"Convert me. Give me the strength to avenge my life mate before I face the dawn. Don't condemn me to wait endlessly while I starve to death because I've already taken two steps into your world. Honor our union enough to do this," Maddie begged.
Aiden nodded, more to himself than anything. He bit his wrist and held it out to Maddie.
"Take freely what is offered, sister, that you and your life mate may be reunited," he said formally.
Maddie took it and drank. She barely tasted the powerful blood. She simply embraced the offering as a means to an end. Gently, Aiden disengaged her mouth and sealed the wound himself.
"We need to find a cave before the conversion starts," he said urgently.
"Whatever," Maddie said. "Take me wherever. I don't care."
Aiden reverently picked her up and flew into the mountains. Maddie didn't notice the twists and turns of the tunnel paths. He set her down in the middle of a dry cave carved from red stone.
"I never thought I'd have to endure a conversion twice," Aiden said softly as he sat down, his head in his hands.
Maddie turned a cold gaze on the worried hunter. "I only asked for your blood because you were the only one of your race in the area. Don't think it's because your anything special."
You don't know what you're getting into, the female voice protested. For a Carpathian man to see any woman in pain—especially one of his race—is a hard thing.
"Then get out," Maddie snapped. "Both of you."
"We will not leave you alone," Aiden said. "To do such would be unforgivable."
Maddie clutched at her painfully cramping stomach as she tried to argue. "I'm not—in the mood—for forgiveness." She fell to her knees as the pain overtook her. It burned, blistered, ate away at her insides. She screamed as the pain swelled until she couldn't feel anything but pain. Not the hard cave floor, not Aiden's soothing hands. She couldn't hear the ancient healing chant. She couldn't see beyond the bursts of red and white light behind her eyelids.
She convulsed, arching backwards so that Aiden barely caught her head before it smashed. Then she lurched forward so suddenly that he lost his grip and she slammed her shoulder into the stone floor. She rolled away from Aiden to vomit in one corner of the cave. She tried to crawl, but collapsed, her muscles shaking with the pain.
Aiden's heart went out to this strange woman. That she was so determined to avenge her life mate was both commendable and frightening. Fortunately his life mate Alexandria was there to help him should the burden.
Our women are supposed to be the light to our darkness, he told Alex despairingly. Yet the darkness is welling up inside her. I do not want to hunt her should she turn vampiress.
A super focused beam of light is a destructive laser, Alex reassured him. If Jas is still alive, she can do no other than find him. If she cannot find him, she will greet the dawn. There is no desire in her to live without him. I'm sure I would feel the same way in her shoes.
I hope you are right, Aiden replied fervently.
The pain was building up in Maddie's body again. Just as she felt the sun send it's first rays over the desert through the weakening storm clouds, she screamed, both physically and mentally. Her anguished cries reverberated through the mountains and down into the valley. Many of the residents of Las Vegas shivered in the early morning light without knowing why.
Mercifully, Aiden sensed it was safe to send her to sleep. He did so with a quick order and laid her deep in the soil of the mountain. Then he retired to the richness of the earth, somehow wary of the destruction Maddie would wreak on her first rising as a fully fledged Carpathian.
