“Don’t. Fucking. Touch. Me,” I growled through gritted teeth.
Fingers skimmed my arms, ducking inside my jacket and traveling down to my waist. He looped his thumbs into the belt loops on my pants and jerked my hips so they were flush with his. His lips grazed my neck, and my brain kicked me. If my mouth worked, so did my fangs.
I bit him in the ear.
Mayhew tried to pull away, but this time I held fast. He let go of my waist and dug his fingers in my hair, his lips grazing my own ear. The whole time he hadn’t once cried out in pain, which was astonishing given the fact I had inch-long fangs buried in the soft tissue of his earlobe.
He nipped at my diamond earring stud, tugging it with his teeth, and whispered in my ear, “If you want to play that way, I can show you how much pain the human body can withstand without dying.”
My fangs retracted almost instantly. The words hadn’t been a threat, they’d been a promise. And judging by the hardness pressed against my thigh, that promise excited him.
“What do you want?”
Mayhew licked the shell of my ear, and I fought against the urge to gag. The words he was whispering weren’t English. I wasn’t a master of archaic languages, but if I had to make a guess, I would say he was speaking to me in Latin. It sounded old and stuffy enough.
Undeterred by my attack, he started exploring with his hands again.
“You’ve come to make me an offering,” he said, finally uttering words I could understand.
“I’d rather chew on my own eyeballs than make any kind of offering to you.”
He leaned back and met my gaze, looking puzzled. “You shouldn’t be fighting me.”
Oh, God, this kept getting worse. The last time someone had frozen me he had been the most powerful witch I’d ever met.
Oliver Mayhew didn’t smell like magic.
I sucked on my teeth. His blood was too thick, too bitter. I didn’t know what it was, but Mayhew wasn’t human.
The good professor didn’t quite know what to do with me. He seemed to be debating whether or not he should release me or carry on with his dirty business. I didn’t want him touching me, but he had to understand letting me go wouldn’t be in his best interests.
He kissed me.
Also not in his best interests.
I bit down on his lip hard, ignoring his earlier promise of sadistic experimentation. Again my mouth filled with his strange, noxious blood, but I didn’t release my bite. It felt like swallowing crude oil. The moment his blood hit the back of my throat, I gagged, choking on the burning sensation. As soon as I stopped biting him, he forced his tongue into my mouth.
My limbs began to tingle, as though I’d rested funny and every part of my body had fallen asleep and was only now w
aking up. Before I could react, something cold like a sharp inhale on a below-zero morning was pulled out of my lungs, leaving me gasping for air. Then everything went black.
Chapter Twenty-Two
There was a crick in my neck when I woke up.
An ancient-looking man with deep wrinkles and a permanent scowl was staring at me. He held a broom handle in one hand and presumably had just finished poking me with it, judging by its angle and the sore spot on my ribs.
“Guh.”
“This ain’t no goddamn Super 8, lady. We got ’em goddamn dorm rooms for a reason.” It looked like he wanted to give me another prod. I appeared to have fallen asleep in a classroom. Where was I?
“What time is it?” Rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms only made everything blurrier.
“It’s one in the goddamn morning.”
“No, that can’t be right.” But then again, what time was I expecting it to be?
The obliging old man jammed his watch in my face. Unless his Timex was way off, he was telling me the truth. What the fuck? I tried to remember something, anything from earlier in the night, but I drew a blank.