She knew it was only a dream. Her semiconscious mind understood that this phantom lover seducing her now couldn't be real. She'd never been with a man. Had never felt a questing, hungered mouth on her body. Not even on her lips. She couldn't. Her reality was too fragile, too constricted by fear and shame.
But not now.
Not like this, when she was dizzy with arousal from a dream she couldn't bear to leave. With sleep and pleasure enticing her to stay, she reached down to touch the part of her that was melting, alive with sensation. Her fingertips were his tongue, silky and relentless, kissing and stroking her in all the right places.
She pictured broad shoulders between her legs. Smooth skin and lean, hard muscle rubbing against her nakedness.
Surrender, let it all go. The low voice spoke inside her mind, the encouragements he murmured being so seductive she could feel his hot breath skating against her enlivened flesh. I want to see you, taste you, all of you. I want to make you scream my name.
But she didn't know his name, logic that tangled in the gossamer threads of the dream. She pushed away the intrusion of her conscience and sank further into her fantasy. She had no choice but to surrender, because the pleasure was coiling tighter now, her skin tingling, every inch of her on fire ... on the verge of disintegration. She writhed on the bed, unable to take much more. And then his voice was beside her ear. His mouth was wet and warm against her neck, his voice a deep vibration she felt all the way to her bones. Let me taste you, Tavia ...
"Yes," she whispered into the darkness of her bedroom. "Oh, God. Yes."
She felt his mouth open on her neck, his tongue and teeth pressing down onto the tender flesh, piercing it. She cried out at the pain of his sharp bite, shock and pleasure exploding at once and sending the flood within her crashing over its banks.
She was drowning in the dream now, helplessly adrift as her phantom lover rose up to look at her where she lay beneath him.
It was him.
The man from the police lineup. The shooter from the senator's party. The steely-eyed, deadly menace whose face had haunted her from the moment she first laid eyes on him.
Poised above her now in her dream, his gaze was no less cruel, still unflinching, devoid of mercy. His lips were parted, and his broad, sensual mouth - the mouth that had given her such pleasure - was slick and dark with blood.
Her blood.
The realization raked through her as startling as a blade against her skin. He smiled then, beautiful and terrifying, baring the pearly tips of razor-sharp fangs ... "No!" Tavia jolted to full wakefulness at the sight of them, her horrified scream raw in her throat. She sat up, panting and shaken, even while her body still thrummed from release. A knock on her bedroom door had her scrambling to cover herself.
"Tavia, are you all right?" the older woman's voice called through the closed door. "Is anything wrong?"
"I'm fine, Aunt Sarah. Nothing's wrong."
There was a hesitation, but only for a moment. "I heard you cry out in your sleep. Not another night terror, was it?"
No, something even worse, she thought. The night terrors had never started out so pleasantly, only to turn so hideous in the end. "It was nothing, really." She somehow managed to keep the distress from her voice. "I'm okay. Please don't worry. Go back to bed."
"You're sure? Can I get you anything?"
"No, thank you." Tavia closed her eyes in the darkness of her room, trying to forget the disturbing dream that was still ripe in her mind, still alive on her skin and in the pounding rhythm of her pulse. "Good night, Aunt Sarah. See you in the morning."
More silence as her worried aunt and caretaker waited outside her room. Then, finally, "All right. If you say so. Good night, sweetheart."
Tavia sat there for a long moment, listening to the sound of retreating footsteps and the soft creak of her aunt's bedroom door down the hall.
She swung her feet to the floor. Padded across the carpet to the cold tiles of her bathroom. Her face was pale and stricken in the medicine cabinet mirror. She slid the glass panel open and took out one of the monstrous pill bottles - the one Dr. Lewis prescribed to combat the anxiety attacks that had plagued her most of her life.
Tavia shook out one of the big white capsules and tossed it into her mouth, washing it down with a quick swig of water from the bathroom tap. Better make it a double. She'd never had a better reason to take the maximum dose. She swallowed the medicine and another mouthful of water, then headed back to bed.
Twenty minutes and she'd be under a heavy, medicated drowse. She climbed under the covers and waited for the powerful meds to obliterate all thought of the man who'd invaded her dreams like the dangerous criminal he'd proven himself to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ENFORCEMENT AGENCY hangout in Chinatown looked like the aftermath of a war zone. Mathias Rowan, current director of the region for the Agency, struggled to ignore the dull throb of his emerging fangs as he stepped farther inside the private club to survey the carnage. Blood covered everything, from the floors and walls, seats and tabletops, to the raised platform of the stage - even the damn ceiling was foul with the stuff.
"Hell of an hour to call you down here like this, Director Rowan, but I thought you needed to see for yourself," said the Agent beside him.
It would be dawn soon, no time for any of their kind to be away from their Darkhavens with the sun about to rise. But a thing like this could not wait. A thing like this - such reckless, unspeakably savage anarchy - jeopardized all of their kind.
"I contacted you as soon as my team and I arrived to discover the situation, sir." The Agent's polished shoes crunched in broken glass and scattered debris as he came to a pause beside Rowan in the silent, corpse-littered establishment. "The humans were all dead and the place was already vacated when we got here. By the look and smell of the place, I'm guessing it's been over for several hours now."