Carpathian 09 - Dark Guardian

for revenge.
    His gaunt face was slashed with crimson lines; around his neck was a ring of ruby blood. Where his eyes had been were empty, lifeless sockets, bloody pits ravaged by the destroyer.
    Even as the vampire launched himself at her, hatred and loathing issuing from his throat, malice in every line on his face, Lucian quietly materialized in front of her, a solid form, immovable, impenetrable, as still as the mountains around them. It happened so fast, the vampire had no time to turn, no time to counter. It impaled itself on Lucian's outstretched hand.
    Jaxon turned her face away from the awful finality of that scene, but the sucking sound and the shrieks would echo for a long time in her head as Lucian extracted the heart of the creature and tossed it some distance from the body. There was no hatred or anger in Lucian, no remorse or guilt. There was no contempt or disgust or feelings of any kind that Jaxon could detect. He simply carried out his responsibility, separate from his emotions. It took her a few moments to realize he had not had access to emotion for centuries, and in battle his mind simply functioned as it had for over two thousand years.
    Jaxon was so exhausted she could barely stumble her way to the rocks, where she could sit and escape the river of poisonous blood soaking the ground. She didn't want to see the vampire's body as it flopped and writhed on the ground, forever seeking its pulsating heart. She kept her face averted as Lucian gathered energy from the skies to direct straight to the heart so that it incinerated the organ into fine ash.
    She felt the heat from the white-hot ball of flames sweeping the ground to cleanse the earth of poisonous blood, knew the exact moment it destroyed the body.
    The wind scattered the ashes and took the noxious odor far from them. Lucian walked over to her and sat down so that their bodies were touching. "It is done."
    Jaxon heard his voice, soft and gentle as always, and when she looked up at him, his features were the same, beautifully masculine, rugged, perfect. Still, Jaxon felt his exhaustion, the hunger beating at him that he kept at bay with his strict discipline. It was there in his mind. She also found the reason for his delay in getting to the surface. The vampire had devised a trap, crude but effective. As Lucian had raced through the tunnels hollowed out by the vampire, a pack of rats had rushed behind him, attacking, biting, sent to slow him. As he fought them off, the tentacles shooting above ground had swarmed over and around him, pinning him in the earth long enough for the viper to inject a compound of poison into his system.
    Jaxon gasped, her heart slamming hard at the explosion of pain she discovered in his memories. It was a lethal poison, a complex mix the vampire had manufactured that moved with speed throughout the nervous system, causing excruciating pain as it ate at the cells, gobbling them up as it replicated itself. It had taken Lucian a few minutes to slow the poison, analyze it, and manufacture the antibodies necessary to drive it from his system.
    "I can't believe you were able to do that," she said, awed. "How can anyone do that? Drive the poison out of his own body?"

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    "It is not unusual for our people to do such things. Sometimes it is done by pushing the poison out through the pores. This was more like a battle—indeed, in the midst of a battle—because the poison was a combination of several very lethal compounds. Rather extraordinary for a vampire to concoct. I am sorry I had to disconnect, but you would have felt the pain, and that I could not allow." His arm circled her slender shoulders. "Besides I knew you would handle things aboveground until I was able to reach you."
    "You monitored me even though I couldn't tell what was happening to you," she said with some annoyance. "That's how you helped me, isn't it? How come you know what I'm doing when we aren't merged together? I ask just in case the information comes in handy someday—for instance, when I get tired of your arrogance and decide to have a flaming affair. Or better yet, when I want to make certain you aren't running around on me." She was running her hands over his body to assure herself he was fine.
    His hand cupped her chin so that he could look into her enormous eyes, eyes that held a hint of the fire within her. "You seem disturbed, honey." His voice was a drawling,