Hans slit the guy’s throat open with enough force that it slashed through the bitemarks, and tore the evidence away. I had to cover my mouth with my hands.
Watching someone being butchered was a world away from seeing their blood being sucked by a vampire – bizarre, but true. I retched as I watched Hans wipe the knife clean with a handkerchief, then slip it right back inside his jacket.
“It’s all right, Katherine. I know this is difficult.”
I was shaking my head, trying to believe it.
He got to his feet and put his hands on my shoulders, still gloved and no doubt still wet with blood.
“Katherine, listen to me. The guy was nothing but a vile, corrupt excuse for a man. He was going to beat you, do you know that? After he’d raped you, of course. And plenty of innocent people after you. I’ve just saved plenty of people from a nasty fate.”
I was still shaking my head, with my ears ringing.I couldn’t. I just couldn’t handle it.
“Youcan,” Hans said. “Do you really want the truth of it? Do you want to feel the mentality of the vile excuse for a man lying on the floor there? Trust me, it’ll do you some good.”
I squeaked as the killer of a vampire took my head in his hands and placed his thumbs against my temples. His eyes stared into mine.
“Let me show you.”
The thoughts came pounding into me one after the other – visions of robberies, and fights, and rapes, all from the dead man’s point of view. It wasn’t just visions that came to me, either. I felt the malice in the guy’s memories as he committed his crimes…
And then came more.
Hans.
I felt the vampire’s thoughts as he bit the evil man’s neck and took his life from him. I felt Hans’ pain for the people the guy had hurt. Hans’ belief in righteousness and saving the guy’s future victims from suffering.
It felt good. At odds with the man he’d just destroyed.
I tried to gain hold of myself when Hans pulled away, but I was trembling in shock.
“See?” Hans said. “He wasn’t ever going to change his ways. I just did the world a favour.”
I nodded. “I saw.”
“Good.”
We stared at each other. His mouth was still wet and bloody as the body of the man lay next to us, but that didn’t matter. The charge of the magnetism came back between us. The fizz of need, and my pride at the creature in front of me.
I could see him in his cross fronted robe, protecting the pilgrims as they travelled. A knight. A warrior. A protector.
Hans wasn’t evil. Just brutal.
My soul cried out for his, because it was obvious to me then that he still had one.
The beautiful, vampiric Hans Jacob Weyer had a soul.
A beautiful soul.
My words were a whisper, my body trusting itself.
“Kiss me, please…”
Hans kissed me with passion, and depth, and hunger, and I kissed him right back with the same. I tasted someone else’s blood, but I didn’t care. It felt erotic in the most insane of ways. Maybe because that was so much a part of Hans and his life. I was sharing the taste of his ways.
He hitched me up and I ground against him as he kissed me, back in the memories of the alleyway when he’d first shown his true colours.
“We have to stop,” he hissed between kisses. “We have to get away from the body.”