Guarding Valentina [Paladin Protection Agency 3] (Siren Publishing Classic) Read Free

her.
    “It’s only water. How much could it—yeow!” She yelped in surprise at the burning sensation that flared up and then faded as quickly as it had come. “I thought you said that was just water?”
    “Holy water. Father Patrick’s special blend, in point of fact. It has the power to purify that which has been tainted by the undead.”
    “So that hurt because your friend Christoph left me with a neck full of vamp venom?”
    “Something like that, yes. But let’s be clear here, Christoph is no friend of mine. He’s more like my current assignment. Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t seem too well informed for a group that managed to kill off an entire nest of Christoph’s fledglings. I’m going to guess you’re new to this sort of thing.”
    Before she could answer him, several sets of headlights appeared on the road, heading toward them at high speed.
    “It would appear your friends have arrived.”
    Before she could say a word, he brushed a quick kiss to her lips, and then his voice whispered in her ear, “I’ll see you again soon, luv.” Then he was gone. Between one heartbeat and the next, he vanished. Her lips still tingled from the kiss he’d given her before he had disappeared, the only proof he’d ever been there at all.
    “This is going down in the books as my worst day, ever,” she groused as the headlights closed in, and she had to squint against the glare to see anything at all. She could make out the shapes of people piling out of the vehicles and running toward her as she slumped back against the wall and finally holstered her weapon.
    “Val! What the hell happened?” She could hear her team leader’s voice over all the others as they swarmed around her.
    “I only left him for ten minutes. I swear.” She glanced over to where others were carefully marking off the area around their fallen comrade. “I think we’ve got a big problem, Sin. It was a vampire, a really nasty one.” She lifted her gaze to meet Sinjin’s worried gaze. “And he isn’t finished with us yet.”
     
    * * * *
     
    He shouldn’t have kissed her. Aedan watched from the shadows as Val’s teammates helped her into one of their oversized SUVs to wait for law enforcement to arrive. Hell, I shouldn’t have been that close to her, period. Christoph was one of the least psychically gifted vampires on record, but even he might have been able to detect Aedan’s presence at that paltry distance. Aedan had certainly been able to sense him . All dhampir could detect and track vampires. It was one of the preternatural abilities they were born with, along with increased speed, strength, and varying degrees of psychic ability.
    It was that last one that usually got him into trouble. He had just enough talent to catch the occasional glimpse of someone’s thoughts, nothing more. It was easy to tell when someone was bluffing at poker, or if the pretty girl at the end of the bar was looking for a night of uncomplicated fun. The trouble was, he wasn’t gifted enough to determine when the pretty girl in question had a jealous boyfriend in tow. That was usually when Aedan fell back on his other abilities, the ones that let him fight his way out and then run before he was caught by the inevitable police presence.
    He’d been following Christoph from a careful distance, trying to figure out what the vampire was up to. Revenge was clearly on the agenda, but the when and the how were far from clear until Aedan had watched through his binoculars as the vampire had gone after the solitary Paladin operative. It had been over before he could intervene.
    What the dead man’s teammates didn’t know yet was that Nick had been bled almost to death before he’d been dropped. He’d been bled, and then some of that blood had been returned to him in an obscene ritual that had twisted Aedan’s stomach into knots of nausea. He’d never been present for the creation of a vampire before, and he hoped like hell he never had to see