Free Blood-Bonded by Force by Tracy Tappan

scent.”
    Emotion pushed into Thomal’s throat and his fangs thrust down. He nearly choked on the howl tearing up from his chest. The primal urge to rip the door off its hinges and hunt down that woman, sink his teeth into her again, rose rampant in his blood. Shoulda ripped your throat out . Another wave of near-seizures steamrolled over him. “It’s really messing me up, man.”
    “I know.” Arc scooted forward on his knees. “Get me out of this crap and I’ll help you.” Somewhere along the way Arc’s jeans had been hiked back up to his waist. When had that happened?
    Thomal shook his head, but not about the key. “We don’t know where Raymond Parthen’s new operation is,” he said hollowly. “And we’re not going to find out where he keeps his Topside Om Rău holed up any time soon, Arc, not with a man as smart as Parthen.”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “I’m never going to see her again.” Ten days without Pändra’s blood and Thomal would go into a blood-coma. Ten days… Sweat dripped from his face and fell onto the table, droplets attracting, clinging, congregating into small puddles. “I’m going to die, Arc.”
    There. He’d said it out loud, and, yeah, it was too damned real.

Chapter Ten

    Topside: Clairemont Mesa, San Diego, same night

    Detective John Waterson cuffed up the sleeves of his denim shirt as he scanned the crime scene photographs spread over the Formica table in his kitchen. They were scattered together with sheets of notes he’d taken over the last year about the serial abductions of young, beautiful blonde women, plus the spare notes he’d made about the crime handed off to his occult crimes unit earlier today: the kidnapping of Elsa Mendoza. Even though the Spanish girl didn’t fit the serial abduction case in most ways, there had been a starburst pattern of blood on the wall of her home.
    Same as in Tonĩ Parthen’s room at Scripps Memorial Hospital when she’d gone missing back in January, the first women to get kidnapped in this bizarre case.
    John drew in a slow breath. Had it really been almost a year ago since Tonĩ had first disappeared? The last time he’d seen her—a little less than a year ago—she’d been in the company of a man with black eyes and hair and large black teeth tattoos along his forearms: a description that fit the perpetrators of the serial abductions. When John had tried to question Tonĩ about her miraculous reappearance in San Diego, this asshole had punched John into Sandman’s Land, then absconded with Tonĩ for good, denying John the chance to get some answers…and to date Tonĩ.
    Yes, after months of chasing the gorgeous doctor of hematology—ever since they’d started working crime scenes together—he’d finally convinced her to go on a date with him. A date that was supposed to have put them on the path toward marriage, kids, a house in the ’burbs, vacations spent camping or skiing: the whole blissful enchilada. John flexed his jaw. Teeth-Tattooed Asshole had cheated John out of that, and now it was John’s main purpose in life to crush the man. And find Tonĩ.
    John stared down at the photos again as, behind him, his apartment-issue refrigerator whirred into a higher gear and his coffee maker grum-grum-wheezed in the process of brewing some freshly ground Columbian. Sane people wouldn’t be drinking coffee at this hour, but the only things his finicky system seemed able to tolerate these days were nicotine and caffeine. Not exactly the diet of champions. It was amazing he hadn’t keeled over, yet.
    He was betting on any day now, though.
    It was probably time to go on medical leave, but the hell if he was dropping this case before he’d solved it. Eight women total had now been taken now: Tonĩ, the first, then two in April, four in June, and now Elsa Mendoza.
    John wrote down the names of the women who’d been taken in June: Marissa Bonaventure, Hadley Wickstrum, Kendra Mawbry, and Ashling Lafferty. This group was