When Wicked Craves Read Online Free PDF Page A

consciousness, Nick felt rather than heard the sirens that screamed out, announcing a total lockdown of the facility. It didn’t matter—they’d successfully vaulted the bump in the road, and his plan was back on track. He’d done his homework and knew how the automatic lockdown worked—the doors slamming shut, the vents sealing tight.
    The very vents they were now racing through as they headed toward the exhaust grid that opened into Los Angeles’s Red Line subway terminal. They were, in fact, almost there now. He couldn’t
see
it—the senses exist as part of the body, and he was currently operating without flesh—but he could
vision
it.
    That exhaust terminal, a fourteen-inch mesh square, was designed to be sealed by a steel cover that slammed into place as soon as lockdown was instituted. Nick had no doubt the system worked as designed. And that was why he’d entered the building through that very portal, then transformed from mist into flesh inside the cramped tunnel. Now, when the steel door tried to seal, it would fail, the mechanism blocked by the insertion of a small metal rod that left a gap of approximately one-half inch between the metal flashing of the vent and the perpendicular steel seal.
    Half an inch was more than sufficient for mist to slip through.
    Swiftly, surely, he maneuvered them through the tunnels, and then—
yes
—through the small gap until they were soaring beneath the streets of Los Angeles, racing a speeding Red Line train, finally, gloriously, free.
    They’d made it.
    Thank the gods—and thank Sara—
they’d actually made it.
    Of course, the security team would register the breach and they would send agents to rectify. But it no longer mattered. They’d escaped the building, and the guards wouldn’t find them. Not tonight. Hopefully not at all.
    Too bad rescuing Petra had been the easy part. Now, the work really began.
    But even the knowledge of all that lay ahead couldn’t dampen his spirit. Within his consciousness, he smiled. Hell, he grinned like a fiend, his entire being overwhelmed by the euphoria of the moment—of the rescue, of having beaten a system that was supposedly unbeatable. Of simply winning. And even though he and Petra weren’t cohorts—even though he’d pulled her from the execution floor for his own purposes—he wished that she could feel it, too.
    Petra.
    He could feel her, entwined with him, their beings mixed and meshed, an awareness of her running through him that seemed almost erotic. She might have no understanding of how her consciousness was reacting, but it
was
reacting. Strange that a human could retain any level of awareness in the mist. But she did. He could feel it.
    Excitement. Fear.
    Not arising from the dissipation of her body, but rather from the twining of their two beings. This wasn’t touch, and yet it was intimate. Complete. More personal than sex, more erotic than a kiss, and as her consciousness moved through him, he felt the fear turn to understanding—there was no danger here. No flesh in which the curse could mount.
    As the fear dissolved, the melancholy took over, a dark pit of sadness that turned his thoughts gray and slid like oil into the wisps of his being. This was it, he realized. This was as close to intimacy as she’d ever been, her touches limited and always, always protected by a barrier of tightly knit cloth.
    She longed—by the gods he could feel the longing pulsing through her, her yearning so keen it conjured his own memories of Lissa, the only woman for whom his own need had been so intense it bordered on pain. Now they flooded back—memories he’d worked hard to push aside and that now sent desire coursing through him. Desire, and also the pain of loss.
    He forced his mind to focus not on Lissa or himself, but on the girl. Her need cut through him, so desperately did she want that touch, that intimacy, and for a moment Nick felt shame that he so often took what women willingly gave. He’d been trying to