The Huntress. Lisa Childs

I’ve never seen you before that.”

      Unless she wasn’t the human he was certain she was, unless she’d known him centuries ago. But when he’d kissed her, he’d felt no fangs.

      “No,” she said. “You haven’t seen me. But you don’t think I look like someone else—someone you knew twenty years ago?”

      He released her now and stepped back, horrified by the conclusion he’d jumped to. But she couldn’t be implying she was his daughter. She was older than twenty; he’d realized that during his lecture—that she looked older than the other kids in class, probably thirty or so. Some of his tension eased away. “You think you look like someone I used to know?”

      She nodded. “A former student of yours—my sister. Everyone always said that I resembled her so much I could have been her clone.”

      Dread tightened the muscles in his stomach as he realized whom she was talking about. But for her sake, he couldn’t make the admission she wanted to hear. “I’ve had a lot of students over the years.” More than she could know. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember your sister.”

      “You didn’t even ask me her name,” she pointed out.

      Because he knew. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t remember anyone looking like you.” Her sister hadn’t; her hair and eyes hadn’t been as bright or her body as strong. “What’s your name?” He’d heard it before, but he couldn’t pull it from his memory now, twenty years later.

      “Eve Williams,” she replied. “Her name was Jennifer. Jennifer Williams…”

      He shrugged as if the name meant nothing to him, as if the woman hadn’t either. But Jennifer had been special—too special to deny the request she’d made of him.

      Eve’s lips twisted as if she struggled to contain all the things she wanted to say to him. She uttered only one bitter question for him. “So you don’t remember the name of every woman you’ve murdered?”

      He swallowed a curse and an automatic denial. Her sister was dead to her, and he couldn’t deny that he was responsible for that. But yet he had to defend himself. “I am not a murderer.”

      “I know what you are!” she said, her voice rising with anger and fear and disgust.

      He shouldn’t have kissed her and risked her feeling his fangs. “I can explain…”

      She shook her head, tumbling waves of that pale hair around her shoulders. “No! You don’t explain. You lie. I’ve heard your lectures and they’re nothing but lies.” She snorted. “Claiming that vampires are myths, that they don’t exist.”

      “They don’t,” he said, doing the very thing of which she’d just accused him.

      “Then you don’t exist,” she taunted. “And as much as I wish that were true, it isn’t.”

      Stung, Andre clenched his jaw, feeling as if she’d just slugged him.

      “If you didn’t exist, my sister would still be alive. But you’re here and she’s…” Her voice cracked with emotion. “…not.”

      Her pain reached inside him, clenching his heart. “Eve…”

      “You killed her!” she accused him again. “You’re a monster.”

      “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he warned her. “So you shouldn’t be talking…” Because she risked someone overhearing her and realizing that she knew about the secret society.

      “No,” she agreed. “I should be doing what I tracked you down to do.”

      Zantrax wasn’t where he’d been teaching when he’d met her sister. “It couldn’t have been easy for you to find me.” In the past twenty years, he’d guest-lectured at too many colleges and universities in too many cities for him to recall every one. Or even half of them. And every few decades, he added another I behind his name and pretended to be his own descendent. He was currently Andre Vossimer XI.

      “I was determined,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. But despite the rage, her pupils dilated with the attraction that shimmered between them like smoke rising from hot ashes. With a little stoking, the fire could burn again. She blinked, breaking their locked gazes. She obviously wasn’t going to let him stoke anything…but her rage.

      “I take it you didn’t track me down to kiss me in an alley,” he said, amused now by his own arrogance. He’d thought she was infatuated with him when she was really infuriated—and with damn good reason.

      “You kissed me!” Her voice rose with the vehemence of her denial. Maybe too much vehemence?

      He stepped forward and closed the distance between them again. Then he lowered his head to hers, and their mouths only a breath apart, he reminded her, “You kissed me back.”

      She shook her head even as guilt dimmed the brightness of her eyes. “No…”

      “Want me to prove it to you?” he threatened, his lips just brushing across the silky softness of hers. “I’d love to kiss you again.” He’d love to do more than kiss her. But making love with her wouldn’t change her mind about him, about what he was and what he’d done.

      Only one person could tell her the truth and make her believe it. But Andre had made that person promise to never talk to Eve again. Guilt overwhelming him, he stepped back again. But she followed him, her soft body close to his—tempting him to finish what he’d started when she’d first joined him in the alley.

      But she hated him. Believing what she did, she had to. Did the passion burn so hotly between them that it surpassed her rage or fueled it even more?

      He had his answer when she leaned forward, and something hard and sharp pressed against his chest. He recognized the tip of a stake. “You’re not going to kill me,” he said, unable to suppress a smirk from lifting his lips. “Not with that.”

      While she was tall, she wasn’t strong enough to fight him off and pound a stake into his chest. Few humans were, or would be, as he’d explained in his lecture, if vampires actually existed. He traveled around to prove that the myth of vampires was just that: myth.

      “I know what you are,” she said. “And I know how to kill you.”

      The point of the stake shifted against his chest, and cold metal penetrated his thin cashmere sweater. “What’s this?” he glanced down at the makeshift weapon she held.

      “A gun,” she explained. “All I have to do is pull this trigger to send the stake through your heart.”

      A gasp of surprise slipped through his lips.

      “I paid attention in class, Professor.”

      He suspected she wasn’t talking about just his class, though. While he mentioned that if vampires were real, humans wouldn’t be able to kill them, he hadn’t given tutelage on how to kill the “mythical” creatures.

      Her eyes glinting with anger and resolve, she warned, “I know exactly how to kill you.”

      “But can you do it?” he asked. “Can you pull the trigger and take a life?” His gut told him no, not if she was anything like her sister. But he didn’t know Eve; maybe she was nothing like Jennifer.

      “That’s why I tracked you down,” she explained. “To take away your life like you took away my sister’s.”

      Again he couldn’t deny his responsibility. “You don’t want to do this,” he advised her. “You’re not a killer any more than I am.”

      “I know what you are,” she said again. “But you don’t know what I am.”

      “Eve Williams.”

      “That’s who I am. Not what,” she pointed out.

      Human. But he dare not