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  Wasteland Rogue

  Brenda Williamson

  When gorgeous vampire Rye is left for dead in the postapocalyptic wastelands, she’s at the mercy of the sexy man who saves her. With her life in the balance, she voraciously drinks his blood. And while it heals her, his blood also triggers her inherent carnal lust.

  The moment Sevrin finds Rye naked in a ditch, he’s intrigued. After letting her gorge on his blood, he experiences strange, spellbinding sexual urges. Then he tastes the succulence of her lips and he’s lost to the need thrumming between them.

  As Rye and Sevrin embark on a steamy journey, indulging in every need, they also race to stop a villainous corporation from developing a poison that could wipe out the remainder of mankind.

  Inside Scoop: This apocalyptic world is a rough and sometimes untamed place. Rye deals with some hard times, including sexual assault, before this vampire gets her lustily ever after.

  A Romantica® paranormal erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

  Wasteland Rogue

  Brenda Williamson

  Chapter One

  Rye Sanborn woke from her unconscious state to the stream of cool moisture rolling down her hot back. A prickle of pain in her flesh and the scent in the air suggested it was her own blood gliding along her feverish spine.

  Blurry-eyed and semi-coherent, she gazed at a glint of light reflecting from an object wavering in front of her face.

  “Ah, the vamp bitch is awakening, I see.” The croaky voice of a man drew her attention.

  Who was he? Why did she feel satisfied by her situation when it all looked wrong? How had she gotten there?

  Rye’s head throbbed. The familiar opaque red tint to her vision scared her. She blinked rapidly, attempting to clear her eyes of the crimson gossamer but to no avail. Without clear sight, she’d have to use her other senses and they too were not working in a normal manner.

  A blade of metal, oddly shiny and very thin, mesmerized her. From the man’s tone and the menacing way he wielded the item, she surmised it was important. She forced herself to focus.

  Her throat burned with a dryness she had trouble swallowing past. “Who are you? Where am I?” she sputtered.

  He moved just far enough to be out of her line of diminished sight. She heard his heavy breathing to her left. She tried turning her head but lacked the strength. Nor did she understand the stiffness in her neck or the dull ache in her joints.

  The shadowy image of her abductor moved in front of her. He continued to wave the unusual knife-shaped object near her face.

  “It’s called a straight razor,” he explained, using a foreign word for the unfamiliar gadget. “Some brainy fellow traded it for a sack of allium.”

  Allium, a blood poison her species avoided at all costs. Was it near her? The apocalyptic wars had devastated most continents, leaving little plant life. Allium was the worst of all surviving vegetation. Had he forced her to ingest it? Her racing heart said no. Allium would slow it—stop it—kill her.

  “He told me,” the man continued his story as if she cared, “that centuries ago they had these special bladed knives made just for scraping off whiskers. The crazy things people invent, huh?” He laughed a coarse, cackling sound, apparently finding amusement in his words. “But then, every generation has its quirks. If the Century Wars hadn’t happened, no telling what fandangle objects we’d be seeing people use.”

  Rye didn’t want to discuss the ancient tool. Nor did she care about the antiquated grooming habits of men. Especially since the man before her obviously didn’t believe in engaging in any kind of hygienic care. The stench of his body odor made her gag.

  “I gave it a try, though.” The man continued rambling on about his gadget. “Nicked me a dozen times until I sharpened it. Now it’ll skin a big ol’ lizard with the ease of a few swipes. Also slices flesh real good too.”

  Even though the man had her tied and cut up, he was somehow important beyond that. Unfortunately, comprehension failed her. Withdrawing into herself, she pushed all her energy toward healing instead of dwelling on the new wrinkle in her life turning it to feces.

  Foremost, she had to improve her cognitive skills. In her decimated world, self-survival was the norm. Since her parents’ death, she had never had someone to rescue her from the evils she encountered. If confronted by trouble, she had to be the strong, reliant one. Even Shay relied on her. A sliver of a dream always followed her that maybe she’d meet someone to cherish and protect her.

  For a second, she let the idea of that someone corner her thoughts. He’d be handsome and strong, forgiving and loyal. Most of all he’d be a kind and loving man whom she belonged to heart and soul. Yes, she’d like that.

  Rye grimaced with pain as her abductor slashed the fantasy from her thoughts. The razor, as he called it, cut sharply into her flesh. The sting faded across her collarbone. As she relaxed, her vision began to clear. Then she saw his arm rise.

  The scent of blood on his sleeve grabbed her attention. It wasn’t hers and it wasn’t lamian. It was human. From the earthiness, it was old. The potency still motivated her senses.

  Corpuscles of red rushed into the pupils of her eyes. Human blood triggered the trait of making a lamian see red. What direct purpose it served remained a mystery but she believed it had something to do with telling the two species apart.

  How long had she been unconscious? Where was she? Surely they hadn’t crossed the Mississippi Canyon.

  She tried concentrating on the other smells around her. Thick with dust, the musky air suggested they were still in the Missouri Wastelands. Had they traveled far from the Taum Sauk Mountains, north maybe, where she had heard allium grew in abundance? Fear of coming in contact with the poisonous plants had always been the best reason for her and her sister, Shay, not to travel too far from Taum Sauk when they went scavenging.

  Shay. There was an importance in her sister’s name.

  Rye cringed at the sting in her upper arm. Other spots on her skin also burned with pain. This wasn’t the first cut. Her torturer had carved others on her back, her belly and her legs. Nevertheless, it would take more than a few stabs of steel to kill her. However, the bloodletting had taken its toll, draining her of the required energy to fight back.

  While Rye wasn’t a weak-kneed child or a sniveling human, she still had a strange, unexplainable earth-shattering fear immobilizing her mind. Hung by her wrists, she helplessly listened to the constant drip of her blood landing on the floor. When had her abductor started his methodical carving of her flesh? How did she sleep through that first slash or the subsequent slices he had made into her regenerative body?

  Zapped with a burst of memory, she quickly drew a morsel of information from the hazy fog around her thoughts. It led to the reason her sister Shay was significant to her imprisonment. Rye had let the man grab her. It made her sick to remember why.

  Once a year, she and Shay traveled down from their safe and peaceful place in the Taum Sauk Mountains. After the snow melted and the weather warmed, they journeyed to the rim of the wasteland. There they salvaged supplies left behind in abandoned shelters. Tools, clothes or whatever trinket caught their interest was theirs for the taking. During their last outing, someone had gotten the better of them by locking her in the mineshaft and kidnapping Shay.

  After Rye’s escape, she had relentlessly gone from one vacant camp to another, hoping to find her sister or the man who took her. Desperation drove her to the point of making herself vulnerable to capture. Not such a great plan in hindsight but it had become her last resort.

  “I want you to die a slow death, you bloodsucking bitch.” Her abductor hissed. His spit sprayed her face.

  Did he have a grudge against females in general or her specifically? She d
idn’t recall crossing paths with him before. While she could be mistaken, she thought she’d never forget him after today.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, curiously.

  Tears mixed with the blood as she thought of her sister having to endure this lunatic’s tortures. Was this what happened to Shay?

  “I want all your kind to die,” he answered almost cryptically.

  Nevertheless, she got it. It wasn’t her or females in particular who he loathed but her species—lamians.

  Homo lamias had evolved during the two-hundred-year span following the near destruction of all life forms in the Century Wars. And while Homo lamias and Homo sapiens were quite similar, they did not socially mix well. Humans often disliked her kind, mostly because humans were a dying breed.

  “We didn’t do anything to you,” she argued, although she didn’t expect to change his way of thinking.

  After the Century Wars had ended, the ecosystem had broken down. Floods from melting glaciers and scorching heat from the sun had made parts of the planet near intolerable for any living creature.

  Survival had become a struggle as food sources vanished. Many parts of the world became uninhabitable for humankind. The soil, unable to sustain plant growth, forced people to dig below the surface. Where they once mined for minerals, metals and gems, they turned to searching for food in the subterranean caverns. They harvested roots and fungi and eventually decayed bodies. The changes prompted nature to create a new breed, one tolerant of hardship. One enduringly self-sustaining.

  Since her abductor complained more about his miserable life and how all lamians needed destroyed without offering up his personal reason, she was afraid that directly questioning him about Shay might provoke him into acting rashly. She didn’t want to waste time on idle chatter but it seemed the best course if she was to get any answers to where Shay was.

  “Did someone in particular upset you?” she asked, encouraging him to keep talking.

  “The whole fucking world upsets me.” His raspy voice oozed with pure anger. “A thousand years ago, humans were the majority and vampires a myth, a horror story to tell children.”

  “We are not vampires.” She held back her anger. “You should think about letting go of those childhood terror tales your parents made up to scare you. We’re not undead minions of an evil higher power.”

  She whined through clenched teeth at the sharp jab of the razor in her left buttock.

  “You use magic to heal yourselves by feasting on humans.” He moved in front of her and waggled his odd weapon in her face as he spoke. “Your males gorge themselves on the blood of children, while females like you seduce men for breeding.”

  “They’re just stories,” she said, not letting the danger he presented keep her silent. “We’re the result of progression, you fool. Homo lamias evolved from Homo sapiens to survive the changes on Earth. The inevitable development started long before you or I were born. Those stories of us eating humans are exaggerations of fact. If anyone is guilty of gorging on human remains, it’s humans. They’re the ones who went looking for nourishment beneath the soil and ended up devouring corpses in graves long before Homo lamias came into being.”

  “Maybe that’s so, but you eat the living, drinking all our blood. You want us gone from—the—face—of—the—Earth.” He repeatedly stabbed her in the belly, punctuating his last words.

  Rye jerked from the pain when he yanked the knife from her gut. Nausea churned within her butchered belly. She coughed and blood spewed from her many wounds. Again, the idea that her sister had also gone through this brutal persecution made her want revenge.

  Regardless of her incapacitation, she thrashed toward the low-life scum of the earth before her and spit out her wrath with a low snarl. “I’m going to kill you.”

  Blood from her mouth spattered his face. Red droplets clung to his scruffy whiskers. He wiped the back of his hand over it, spreading the stain down his beard. His cold gaze locked to hers. He seemed to study her in silence. Had her bravado stunned him? She didn’t dare to hope it scared him into releasing her.

  He proved it hadn’t when he grinned. “I like red,” he sneered, circling her slowly while dragging the knife across her skin so the thin cut tickled instead of hurt. “But I like coin more,” he said, suddenly stabbing her in the back.

  She cringed, fighting off the natural reaction to yell. If she did nothing else, she’d deprive him of hearing her cry out.

  When he flattened his hand against her spine, the contact startled her. It was the first time she felt his touch—his flesh upon hers. Suspended by ropes tied to her wrists, she couldn’t move from his caress smearing blood over her skin. She strained to get her footing but her toes slipped in a puddle of liquid. She imagined it was her own blood on the hard floor. Although hanging from her arms left her little stability, she managed to get her weight back on her toes.

  Anger pushed her to do whatever was necessary to find Shay, even if that included keeping up the semblance of a normal conversation with the man until she grew stronger.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, returning to her first question when she became consciously aware of her environment.

  “Not that it should matter but they call me Hamner. You remember that, bitch, when you take your last breath. Hamner is the one who caught you. Hamner is the one who outsmarted another vamp.”

  She flicked her head back, sending straggly locks of her hair away from her eyes. From the moment she had heard the splatter of her blood on the floor, she knew she had to be somewhere that had a firmly formed base instead of dug-out dirt. The surroundings seemed structured too—not carved Earth or chipped-away rock.

  Nothing in the dark, dank space made her think of any mining shafts in the wasteland where she had foraged or taken refuge. She swung her head to move the dirty stands of hair away again and her body rocked into a wall. The flat coldness suggested cut stone.

  She remembered the one time her father took her to a sizable human encampment. Ozar-Columbi sat to the northwest of Taum Sauk. The people there didn’t impress her. Stingy with their wares, they displayed a greediness that had made her feel they cheated her father for each of his purchases. She figured out then that humans didn’t like lamians.

  After her father had died, she had taken on the role of supporting herself and her sister, Shay. She’d taken to scavenging instead of bartering to avoid humans. She’d found deserted camps abundant along the northwestern rim of wastelands. With no one around, she and Shay had everything they needed without giving anything up or facing the prejudices against her breed.

  Once more, Hamner’s rough hand traveled over her quivering skin. His fingers skated through the blood and raked through the open lacerations in her flesh. Oddly, it felt good. That sensation slowly removed her thoughts from reality. It gave way for insanity to begin claiming her mind.

  Rye took a deep breath to stave off the darkness circling her consciousness. Since arguing with the lunatic wasn’t getting her anywhere, she had to try something else before she grew too weak to attempt getting free.

  “Ple—ease, let me go,” she sobbed, feigning frailty as if she were a human. “Whatever I did to you, I’m sorry.”

  He instantly moved away. Was her ploy working? She heard the clink of metal to glass. Had he stopped to take a drink, maybe consider his next course of action?

  Dehydration was causing hysteria to swell within her. “What are you doing?” she asked, impatient for his decision.

  Without answering, his coarse touch resumed. The perverse caress traveled around to her chest. He kneaded her right breast, painfully rough. Bile rose, burning her sore throat. She swallowed hard, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her vomit. It wasn’t until now that her thoughts turned to the possibility he had raped her.

  Then he stopped his strange molestation. “You want to drink this, don’t you?” he asked.

  From a gap between the matted fibers of her filthy hair, she saw his hand. In the cen
ter of his palm lay a puddle of her blood. Thus far, she had struggled to ignore the appealing scent of human blood on his shirt, mostly to no avail. Inhaling sharply, she let the iron-infused smell rush up her nostrils. Hunger pangs thrummed the inside of her ravaged belly. Lamians didn’t need to eat but blood had a revitalizing quality that drew them to it to fill their inherent need.

  Her feeble pulse quivered, revving from the anticipation of a forthcoming energy. A tremor rolled through her. Veins pulsated uncontrollably, anxious to savor the renewing nutrients. Finally, the scarlet in her eyes parted to give her an unobstructed view of what he offered.

  “Here, have a taste.” Hamner pressed his hand over her mouth and nose.

  She never considered refusing. Stubbornness wasn’t a viable reason to deny what she required. Spite would get her nowhere. Pressing her lips to his palm and sucking quickly, she greedily slurped up the blood. The awful stench of Hamner’s dirty flesh sickened her. Did he have an aversion to water—to cleanliness?

  The metallic content of her blood coating her taste buds improved her vigor. Then his hand moved away. Her vitality waned. She hadn’t ingested enough to make up for what she had lost. With so many slices and stab wounds, she needed much more than Hamner had offered. Before long, she would enter an unconscious state of hibernation.

  He had said he considered her a vampire and that he wanted her dead. Why had he not lopped off her head or burned her? Why take his time? What was his reason? Would she live to find out? If she did, she’d be more mercifully swift in killing him.

  “I think it’s time to go for a ride.” He moved behind her.

  It was all she could do to stay awake, let alone keep her brain from malfunctioning. Intense hatred remained a strong motivator. Unfortunately, Hamner had reduced her to as vulnerable a state as a lamian could experience. His arm went around her middle as he cut her wrists free of their bindings. She slumped over, unable to lift her head. She hated that she had no control over her body.