Chapter 7
The advantages of being an old vampire were few. Being able to tolerate the light filtering through the tinted windows next to him came in handy at the moment, Lance decided. Not having to return to safe ground every twelve hours was another nod in his favor.
He couldn’t imagine having to repose in dirt, under ground, or inside a coffin like the lesser beings he sometimes thought of as the spin-offs. And he had intuition enough to realize that the sensations beating at him as he watched Jesse exit the hotel were more than mere hunger.
He was able to follow Jesse this morning because his Guardian status elevated him so far above Jesse’s monsters as to be another race altogether. Yet in her eyes, he remained a freak.
Because of his blood in her veins, he had a connection to her that meant he could easily find her, keep an eye on her, as he’d tried to tell her last night. This was an aspect of guardianship he had not anticipated, but one that currently suited him. The perks of a blood bond between them made the disadvantages of being what he was almost worthwhile at the moment.
A weak cop was a dead cop, he knew. If Jesse wasn’t in law enforcement, she had a similar profession. Beyond that, she was filled with a longing for revenge that would see her set up as a hunter, though it was obvious she knew little about the creatures she sought. He didn’t need to examine this particular assignment of hers, and what could happen to her if she pursued it. He could see the outcome easily enough.
Wrong job this time, little one.
Then again, why should he care?
Here he was, in the city, acting like Jesse’s jealous lover by waiting to see what she might do next; knowing as surely as he was beginning to know her that Jesse would be scenting the direction of the abducted girl as she sat in the car. The honing of her senses was a gift he had provided her with, though he’d offered it so that Jesse would at the very least see her monsters coming. The problem with such a gift was that it had also brought him closer to her.
He hadn’t planned for this unusual side effect.
Had he?
He felt her thinking, heard her breathing, knew how frightened she was. The pull she created in him had become stronger than his vow of self-imposed exile, and serious enough to make him step outside the car, in a crowd, if he had to.
Today he would approach Jesse and try to make her see reason. She might view things more clearly in the daylight. He needed to convince her to leave before the others found her. Jesse was intelligent and, hopefully, logical. She’d have to realize she needed his help without his tipping her fear right over the edge of the abyss. But he had to be careful. Jesse Stewart carried around a blight on her soul, much like a chip on a shoulder, only deeper and much more unsettling.
Perhaps rightly so.
Staring at her car, feeling her presence inside it, Lance easily discerned her turmoil. With empathy, his own hands fisted. Would she realize her senses were on overload this morning, and that something inside her was different? Did she feel him there, watching?
If her car turned left, he thought, he’d feel somewhat relieved. A left turn would take her to the people waiting for her at the government offices. He’d try to speak to her there, in some hallway or another. If she turned right, she’d be trespassing in the city’s danger zone. She might find her wretched vampires a dime a dozen there, and he’d be forced to point out her vulnerabilities yet again.
His guardianship had indeed, it seemed, stretched in scope. Not only was he watching the vampires, but the humans as well. A willful hybrid female loose in this city would make his task all the more difficult right out of the gate.
All vampires knew of him instinctively, of course. Up against him, they would perceive his position of power, his superior strength and will, even if they were ignorant of his history. Knowledge of him ran in their veins, no matter how diluted their blood had become, although this didn’t mean a contemporary gang of them wouldn’t try to take him on if the stakes were high enough. Stakes like cornering a hybrid female who smelled like food.
There weren’t many female vampires, since they were far outnumbered by lusting males of the species with little or no self-control. Females were in high demand. The vampires in this city would be after Jesse in a heartbeat. As no doubt they had been after the Jorgensen girl.
It might already be too late for Elizabeth Jorgensen. But he was Jesse’s only hope. If there had been others like him here, things may have been different.
There had been others, once upon a time, Lance reminisced. He’d had friends until they had dispersed around the world in search of their own destinies. Perhaps they were also, for all intents and purposes, as monklike as himself. Celibate, lonely, monotonously continuous, disgusted by the way things had turned out and secretly desirous of company.
Were those things the reason he had become interested in this female, blood bond or not? Someone he had touched, twice. Gotten close to. Not entirely human.
Last night he’d wanted so much more from her than a sparring partner. Last night he had wanted everything. All of her. He had wanted to be a man, proving to her that he could act like one. If Jesse hadn’t ever hosted his blood, that scenario may have had a chance. Then again, if he wasn’t what he was, he’d never have known her at all.
It was a dangerous attraction. He was all too aware of that fact. He could manipulate the blood bond if he chose to. He could force her to his side. If he asked it of her, she would tilt back her head and offer her scarred neck to him.
Though he had never drunk from a mortal, with Jesse, the temptation hovered like a continuous rush. A long-dormant thirst lay twisted throughout his being.
His attention jerked back to the street, drawn by movement. He sat forward. As Jesse’s car drew away from the curb, her heartbeat thudded beneath her pert, pink-tipped breasts, trapped by frilly white lace. He perceived this as though her life’s pulse had indeed become his own. As if her spark had reignited his own flicker of life. The awareness, the closeness, the intimacy of being so close to a flash of life kept his attention riveted on her car.
Then he tightened his grip on the steering wheel, nearly breaking the wheel in two. “Damn her hide,” he whispered as her car made a sharp right turn.
Chills drizzled down Jesse’s back as she stared out at the passing buildings, attempting to get her thoughts back into some sort of reasonable order. The chills just wouldn’t let up. She felt cold from the inside out, and somehow, as she jostled her thoughts toward Stan’s side of the car, her attention kept being pulled past him to the window.
A white van cruised by. Relieved to note that the driver of the van wore a hat and a uniform of some kind, she let out a sigh. The driver had red hair and wore glasses. Not her concern.
So, where was he, then? Her new nemesis. In some dark basement, recouping his strength? If tucked away, why then did she sense his presence? His nearness ran across her nerve endings, doubling the chill factor, presenting as anxiety run amok. She actually felt his gaze, even though she couldn’t see him, knowing he was close by.
None of this made sense, really. Maybe it was just her imagination running overtime.
The sky was a dark, dull gray. Jesse turned her focus to the people on the sidewalks. Compared to Californians, Slavs seemed muted personalities in their black, navy and charcoal layers. Although the clothes were chic enough, the drabness of the city carried over on the busy walkways, making her long for the colorful glare of L.A. The hot pink of sunburned skin. The bright hues of sun and sand and ocean.
She craved a warmth she barely found these days.
Exhaling a stuttered, surprised breath, Jesse glanced past Stan again, her attention virtually yanked that way.
She saw it. A dark shadow slipping between the buildings.
Her pulse exploded, as if that shadow had been some kind of incendiary device. She knew exactly what it was, and what it meant.
“Pull over!” she snapped so curtly that Stan jumped on the seat. “Here!” she directed, and the driver did what he was told without question.
“I’ll be a minute,” she said, addressing Stan’s inquiring gaze. “I have to make a personal call. Need privacy. Wait here for me, Stan, please.”
Out of the car before the driver could step out to open the door, Jesse hopped to the curb. Hugging her coat tightly to her, and with her boot heels clacking loudly on the concrete, she approached the place where she’d seen the shadow and whispered in horror the word “alley.”
Terror gripped her. There were so many reasons not to go into this alley. Too many to count. The atmosphere in there virtually rippled with the monster’s presence. The air seemed to buckle. Cracks between the buildings in old cities provided plenty of dark spaces for night-loving creatures to infiltrate, and one such creature had melted into this one.
A tingle ran through Jesse’s body. She went to full alert, with the outer layer of her skin covered in ice crystals. This wasn’t her golden nemesis, she knew from the vibe. A cousin, maybe.
A murky space like this would suit a monster nicely. Near to a busy street, this would be a perfect spot for a filthy bloodsucking fiend to pick off a meal. Maybe even a senator’s daughter.
And my family.
The tingling in her limbs became an insistent buzz she likened to pressing on a booby-trapped doorbell. A vampire had gone into this alley and she had to follow, though terrible, unspeakable things happened in places like this one.
Hell, she wasn’t even sure if she could actually go in there. Already, the familiar vertigo was taking her for a spin.
Inhaling the fetid air, Jesse looked hard at the open ing, trying to decide what frightened her the most, the monster or its hiding place. Damn, though, if she wasn’t angry this morning, and anger was calling the shots. One tall piece of velvet-voiced, arrogant vampire scum had already gotten the better of her. She refused to upgrade that number to two. Not today. The tall vamp had told her they had Elizabeth Jorgensen, and one of them had scuttled into this hole.
Confront your fears.
The space between the buildings was narrow. Swal lowing a blasphemous oath, Jesse squeezed through, entering a hazy world of moist stone and grimy asphalt.
She was in. A couple of steps in, anyway. The odor of the place hit her like a billy club in the face—awful, more nauseating than the leather in the car. But she had to face this alley. She had to start somewhere in addressing Elizabeth Jorgensen’s kidnapping, and would begin by confronting her own personal fears.
Every fiber of her being demanded that she enter this alley, knowing what had gone in before her. She’d avoided this moment for years, had panicked more times than she could recall. After last night’s show of weakness, however, her ego needed a boost.
Time to move on.
Make a leap.
Jesse took five more steps. As the hazy light from the street dimmed, she became even more certain of the presence of a creature inside. Her pulse rocketed. She heard nothing over the thundering of her own heart.
Maintain control.
But maintaining was difficult when the dank odor confronting her was disgustingly that of mold, mildew, age and grime. Fighting off a gag reflex, she inwardly chanted, It’s only an alley. Alleys aren’t alive, only the things that roam in them.
There was no room for cheating on this test. All six senses were required to catch a beast, and all six were necessary to face down old fears. She had gotten this far. Only a few more steps remained.
“I can do this.”
It was a long, narrow space, four shoulders wide and looking more like a tunnel to hell. As far as Jesse could see, there appeared to be no break or turn. No trash cans lined the asphalt. There were no visible doorways.
“So, where are you hiding?” Jesse murmured, flexing her fingers inside her coat pocket like a gunslinger cracking knuckles before a showdown.
The buzz in her body had intensified with each step, and now centered in her hands and feet. Her right cheek twitched. She felt it, all right, here somewhere in the periphery, its feel wrong in the dank darkness.
Encapsulated in the alley’s dimness, Jesse paused. Her nerves continued to tap out a warning. A test, she told herself. A beginning. Pass this one and go directly to Boardwalk.
“Can I do you something?”
The thing had the audacity to address her, and in a voice teeming with unrepentant hunger and a heavily accented Eastern-European sprawl of syllables.
“Just an alley,” Jesse whispered, her fingers closing around the wooden stake she’d brought with her today, in case just such an occasion as this one presented itself. “Not a gateway to hell.”
“Well?” the creature pressed. “Cat got your tongue?”
Did it assume its lure had worked, that it had gotten some poor unsuspecting soul to follow it inside? The hair on the nape of Jesse’s neck raised. Her nerves were red-hot, despite the chill. This vampire gave off the stench of moldy parchment paper, saturating the close, damp air.
Although fear edged her ability to speak, Jesse forced herself. “What,” she said, “are you doing here, in the daylight? Has your watch stopped?”
Her surroundings oscillated in a crest of frigid air. Movement. The vamp had relocated to her right in that fishy way they had of suddenly appearing where they were least wanted without actually taking a visible step. Maybe, she reasoned, because they were neither dead nor living, the laws of nature no longer applied.
Nasty thought.
Drawing the stake out of her pocket, Jesse jumped toward the opposite wall. Her head felt light, her body moved between cold and hot. But it was too late for retreat. The thing had a bead on her and was no doubt waiting to pounce.
Up.
With a shocking bit of insight, Jesse looked up, managing not to hurl the coffee she’d ingested. The freak was there, above her head, hanging by its hands from a drainpipe. Like a bat.
Run, Jesse’s warning system screamed, though she knew she couldn’t escape this meeting, important on many levels.
“I wasn’t sure about the bat part,” she remarked, drawing on the false sense of calm cops had to adopt in life-and-death situations. Focus was everything. All senses had to remain on alert while adrenaline slammed through her.
Incensed, perhaps unused to its breakfast talking back, the vampire dropped to the ground in front of her. Landing with barely a sound, it straightened its gaunt body.
The thing was short, maybe five-six, tops, and all bones. A walking cadaver. Its white face shone like a circus clown’s, its eyes black holes of nothingness. As discomfiting as those things were, they alerted Jesse to the exact spot where his withered, useless, unbeating heart would reside.
Down and to the right.
The vampire hissed, bared its teeth and moved in another blur of speed. But Jesse’d had enough of being paralyzed. Elizabeth Jorgensen was waiting to be found. Stan waited in the car. The wooden stake in her hand awaited a target, and she just happened to have one. If she didn’t do this now, she might never have the nerve.
She scrambled to the side, anticipating where the vamp would end up, without thinking. Spinning on her heels, she breathed in more stagnant air, perceived a softer hiss in the silence and straightened with an adrenaline rush that made her hair stand on end.
The freak was on her before she blinked.
Terrible sucking sounds came from the vicinity of its mouth. A drip of hot, sticky saliva hit her chin as it whirled. Jesse swore, ducked again and lunged to the side. She rose to her full height, with the stake positioned in her hand, its sharp point facing out.
“Elizabeth Jorgensen,” she said as the vampire grabbed hold of her coat. “You know the name?”
“Death to all foreign bitches,” the vampire snarled.
“Not today,” Jesse hissed back, driving her body forward with the gathered momentum of nerves working well beyond their limitations.
“Elizabeth …” she said again, without finishing the sentence.
A startled gasp came from the beast, then a curse uttered in a foreign language. Both those things were followed by a sudden burst of frigid air.
Silence fell.
Jesse stood, stunned, stake still poised in her hand. Pure unadulterated fright closed her throat as the smell of decay turned into the smell of ashes.
The stake wavered, though she maintained her grip. She stared into the dark, anticipating that the monster might rise again, not quite believing that a vampire could be killed by the force of thought alone. Because the tip of her stake hadn’t touched it.
So what just happened?
“That was quite a show,” a deep voice reproved, jamming her attention in another direction.
The velvety voice did not belong in the darkness of an alley, but in a bedroom. Soft-spoken, low on the register, exceptionally rich, it floated to Jesse as if on a stray breeze, bringing a familiar heat.
She spun, stake poised. A hand caught hers as she bumped into something solid, teetered sideways, then quickly regained her balance.
God, did she have the strength for round two?
“Although,” the smoky voice went on, “this creature was new, and too hungry to control himself.”
Jesse stood, frozen. So, he had been watching.
“How does it feel?” her nocturnal companion asked, stepping closer to her, his wide shoulders outlined by a ray of passing overhead light. “Being so close to a kill?”
“I didn’t kill anything,” she said.
“You hold a weapon.”
“For self-defense.” Jesse couldn’t keep her hands from trembling uncontrollably. The truth was that she hadn’t been prepared for one vampire, let alone two. Especially this one.
“But you would have killed him?” the golden vampire asked, his tone unemotional, smooth.
“If I had to.” And it would have removed one parasite out of how many? Hundreds?
Thing was, she hadn’t touched the gaunt monster.
“You did this,” she charged, her attention on the creature whose face seemed to glow eerily in the alley’s dimness.
“I didn’t want such a thing on your conscience,” he admitted.
“I was doing fine on my own. I had questions for it.”
“And if it didn’t answer? I wonder if you were you planning on keeping a death count? Painting notches on the side of Stan’s helicopter, perhaps?”
Jesse had to blink. In that one brief second, the vampire disappeared, glowing aura and all. Rounding on a premonition, she found him behind her.
“Now, that’s just creepy,” she said, holding the stake rigidly in both hands. “And the stake is still sharp.”
“I’m afraid I am not so new, or hungry,” he said.
Again, shadows coalesced in the space where he stood, as if filling in a deficit. As if he was an illusion after all. A dream. Some kind of terrible fantasy.
His voice, coming from Jesse’s right, brought with it another shot of adrenaline. Jesse couldn’t possibly have been any more alert. She pivoted and the stake bumped against his chest. He did nothing to restrain her this time and just stood there, quietly watching her with eyes she knew were light blue and deadly dangerous.
Her fingers quivered on the stake. She had a thought to drive it home, sink this big splinter into the place where the vamp’s heart should have been, but wasn’t. Nevertheless, she did not apply pressure. She didn’t so much as poke a hole in his immaculate black overcoat, distracted by the scents of leather and wool—calling cards that didn’t speak loudly of the word undead.
For the second time in just a few hours, she noted how something indecipherable hid behind those scents that she was unable to pin down. Indecipherable and intimately familiar.
Her thighs picked up the quiver. Deep down inside, all the way to her bones and extending to the ultrapersonal, unmentionable spaces in between, her body reacted to this vampire’s scent with longing. Unwelcome. Sexual. Vile.
She groped for an answer to this new puzzle as her stomach churned. He had to be doing this to her—making her perceive him in a different light. Vampires were notorious for this sort of thing. Then again, this one was out in the daylight, too, so it was pretty obvious she hadn’t gotten some facts straight.
Furthermore, it didn’t help that golden boy beside her didn’t in any way resemble the other creature in the alley. He was way too solid and completely fleshed out. His bearing was regal, superior. Power radiated from him, carefully maintained and cultivated. Did vampires have kings and princes, or was he merely older and more experienced than his cousins?
Maybe he had recently fed on some poor unsuspecting soul, in order to look the way he did.
Thinking to take a step in the opposite direction, instinct warned that it was questionable whether she’d be able to get back to the car. Her feet weren’t responding.
“Get away from me,” she ordered.
“I believe you may be in need of further assistance.”
“Not from you.”
“Do you think you can make it out of this alley on your own? You are tilting on your feet.”
The richness of the vampire’s voice made Jesse’s knees weaken further. Such a mesmerizing voice also went against nature, surely?
“I’m fine,” she declared.
“I’m holding you up,” he corrected.
He was holding her up. His shoulder was touching hers. The acknowledgment of his nearness produced a current of electricity that sparked through her body like a loose live wire.
“Are we to fight today? Here? After all?” Jesse planted her feet in a wider stance and drew back. “Now that I have the use of both arms?”
“No fight. I told you I’d help and I meant it. I’m an ally, Jesse, not the enemy.”
“How many times do you have to hear my answer on that subject?”
The vampire followed when she backed up a step.
“Damn you,” she swore as he took a firm grip on her shoulder, the unexpected heat from his fingers streaking through her skin beneath her coat sleeve, waltzing along overextended nerve fibers.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
As the demand left her lips, and in an exact contradiction of her thoughts, she leaned toward the warmth. Toward him. Automatically. Insanely.
Gritting her teeth, unable to comprehend why she might break her own rules, she allowed her focus to travel up. She found his mouth closed, with no evidence of vampire trickery confronting her at the moment, and no sign of fangs. His lips were full and closed tightly in his pale, chiseled face. Was the set of his mouth meant to insinuate concern?
Anomaly, big-time. A beautiful predator.
An urge so foreign hit that Jesse rocked against it. The urge was to touch him, explore, delve into his warmth. Those thoughts were more frightening than the idea of dealing a gaunt vampire a final death blow. No matter how long it had been since she’d felt completely warm or comforted, this was a false sense of those things. Trusting a vampire would be the epitome of the word mistake.
“Like you’d let me walk away from this,” she said.
“Of course I will,” he returned, as a flash of memory hit Jesse, there and gone in another passing bit of overhead light. This memory centered on his voice. She might have heard his voice before last night, in another dark place.
Where?
More memories struck with the force of an un anticipated blow. Recent stuff. This vampire had carried her to the bed, leaving a lingering perception of him as manly and strong. Leaving her with the inconceivable idea that he would be a capable, virile lover. If he were human.
Sacrilege!
Yet surely he’d had his mouth on her body. She could almost feel it there now, whispering along the curve of her neck.
Ignoring the urge to swipe at her throat, Jesse continued to hold up her hands as she retreated another pace. The vampire had to be exerting some sort of mind control, and she was caving,
because the desire she was fighting was not to kill him, but to get closer to him; to tilt back her head and expose her neck. Her scar throbbed in anticipation, as if this would be a good thing. Her heart beat out a frantic refrain.
Stop! God. Stop!
“You won’t be able to help anyone after I’ve put this stake in you,” she shouted, in spite of the fact that the stake was now dangling from her fingers.
The memories were becoming jumbled. His face. His scent. Those things wrapped around her like an invisible blanket of uncertainty. Where had she heard his voice? Why did she want to trust him, when she knew better?
“You’re making me weak,” she charged.
“You’ve had a fright,” he said. “Weakness is normal.”
“Who are you?” Jesse realized she had only moments of strength left before she crumpled in a heap. She wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to kill this vampire; that fact had become obvious. The alley was closing in on her. Without her mission to kill the vampire, the alley became a living, breathing entity, with this creature at the center of her personal storm.
She had to work for each new breath.
Instead of taking further advantage of her weakened state, the vampire maintained the small distance sep arating them. Jesse saw the street beyond him, and couldn’t make herself move toward it. Blackness was settling over her. Too much nerve burn. Anxiety out of control.
Alley … Red … Blood.
She was dead. Just like her parents. Her time had come.
Concentrate. Separate the threads.
Put everything in perspective and in its place.
“Jesse?” the golden vampire called, his voice skimming the perimeter of the blackness closing in. “It’s all right. Today, it is all right.”
What was he talking about? The world was turning inside out, taking her down with it.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” she said weakly in a repeat from the night before. Raising the wooden stake took every bit of strength she possessed. She concentrated on the length of wood as though it were the focus of her life.
“We’ve been through this, Jesse. The thing you chased in here knew nothing of the Jorgensen girl. He was little more than a pathetic scavenger, unlike the others who have taken the girl. You’re not ready to face those others. Let me help you to the car.”
“You really know who has Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
“When you’re ready to accept my help, I’ll provide the answer. You’ll know where to find me.”
“You’d keep that information from me, possibly at the poor girl’s peril?”
“On the contrary, I’ll tell you everything when you’re ready to do something about it.”
The blur of the golden vampire’s sudden movement merged with the blur of Jesse’s surroundings. He pried her fingers from around the wooden weapon and tucked it back into the pocket of her coat. Then he dared to take hold of her again.
A stab of sensation, like hot coals on vulnerable flesh, accompanied his touch on her elbow, at once painful, scintillating and suggestive. His heat was disarming. Jesse’s muscles contracted. She drew in an unfulfilled breath.
“You undressed me.” She tried desperately to compartmentalize the growing desire to give her trust to this beast, fending off the idea that she’d end it all here, at last, with a creature like the ones that had brought her parents down. Not dropped from the roof of a building, but confronting a vampire on her own two feet.
“Your clothes were wet and your arm useless,” he said by way of an explanation for his behavior.
“This arm?” she shouted, lifting it. “You made me think so, but here it is!”
He did not reply.
“You had no right to touch me in that way. In any way at all,” she said, knowing she had to get to the car before the desire to give in to him became reality. No matter how loudly she shouted, his flame was calling hers, somehow. She was arguing, but wanted to stop. She was icy on the outside, while her insides burned … for him.
“You are stubborn. Not making sense,” the vampire pointed out. “Without my help, you’ll get nowhere, and may wind up dead.”
The monster was benevolent now, and speaking with true earnestness? Doubtful. This had to be another trick. Of utmost importance was for her to remember that this was a vampire, not a man. A dead thing, not a suitor. Never an ally.
Never a lover.
This was a monster, not a savior. A thing composed of dead flesh molded to resemble a man … although he felt like a man.
“Why don’t you want to hurt me?” She was torn by the rise of conflicting emotion, and in need of answers.
“Can it be something as simple as sensing a kindred spirit in you, Jesse?”
On your lips, it’s sickeningly provocative.
When the vampire inched closer, his golden curls fell across his features like wings of sunlight in the dark alley. Strong arms encircled her, while Jesse’s arms again hung uselessly at her sides.
Kill … him!
The directive dispersed as Jesse closed her eyes. The throb in her neck increased as wave after wave of longing, sexual, personal, made her shudder as the blackness of her surroundings faded to gray, to beige, then to white. Not the white walls of a room in an asylum—God no, not that—but the blistering whiteness of a singed soul. A damaged soul. Hers.
And in the white weightlessness a face appeared. The very pale face of an angel.
In distant memory, Jesse felt a prick. A coppery taste slid through her. A rush of liquid filled her mouth, thick, awful, difficult to swallow. She shook her head to negate the memory … and found herself waking, pressed tightly to the vampire in an unwanted embrace. A puzzling funnel of vagueness beat a path through her mind, blackening everything, including a good chunk of her former resolve.
This is wrong. All wrong.
The heat was addicting. In a perverse way, his arms felt strong and secure. The old wound on her neck blazed, and Jesse wanted to tear at her neck with her hands as she used to do, so long ago, in that white place.
No one there, back then in that hospital, had been able to douse the fire, she recalled. For years, she hadn’t allowed hospital personnel to touch her. She had wallowed in the coldness of sorrow, mindlessness and regret, with her insides taken over by the flames.
She’d eventually found a way to calm those inner fires, a feat accomplished through the struggle and honing of her willpower. But she’d never been able to stand intimacy of any kind after that night in the alley. Intimacy led to sadness, pain and loss. The fire presently singeing her neck was a reminder, a throwback to everything that had come before. If she didn’t move quickly in the direction of the street, she’d be unable to control what might happen.
“Lesson one,” the vampire said, his tone dragging her back to him. “A hungry vampire can be ruthless. However, they are not all young and inexperienced. Rarely do they travel alone.”
Jesse’s stomach roiled. Beyond the scent of leather and wool lingered an odor of ashes that had once been a monster. A creature unlike this one beside her, maybe, but how many definitions of monster could there be in a dictionary of the undead?
“Yes, and here you are,” she choked out.
The golden head shook. Jesse thought she heard him sigh. She swore she felt a hand on her face, not leather-covered, but bare. Not the cold grip of death, but warm. In this vampire’s fingers the familiar fires lapped, just like the fires of old, as if he wielded power over them, and thus over her.
She had to look up.
Had to.
She had to see exactly what she was up against.
Uttering a groan of shock, she met the intense blue gaze suggesting this vampire could drink her up by the meeting of their eyes alone. Large, beautiful eyes, topped by long, gold lashes. Endless, fathomless pools of blue, with something darker swimming behind.
Around her, the alley’s dark edges disappeared as more fire, red, hot, molten, came on. Her chest imploded in an internal blaze of heat. Moisture gathered on her upper lip and between her legs.
The chilled air in the alley met her overheated skin with a hiss. Jesse swayed when she heard it. The word run rose from the furnace as if some external source had better sense than she did and would encourage her to get away from him, from this.
But the warnings came too late.
His eyes.
Blue eyes.
His face. So pale, and …
Familiar.
The vampire’s hungry stare held her a breathless captive. His mouth, hovering above hers, moved to form words she’d have to heed, but he didn’t speak. Instead, Jesse’s fleeting impression was that he was about to kiss her again. Or more likely, he’d bite her with the lethal set of canines his kind possessed.
He might prefer his meals struggling.
So then why, her mind asked, hadn’t he bitten her last night, when he’d had the chance?
Her lips trembled with the strain of her internal fight versus her external motionlessness. She knew with certainty that he was going to touch her mouth with his, and that she was helpless in stopping him.
When his lips, with a blistering imitation of tender, did that very thing, Jesse tensed against him, unable to assert herself, cocooned in an immovable body for what seemed like an eternity before his fire swept her up.
Untethered, and without her anger to ground her, she thought her feet left the earth. It felt to her as though she and the vampire rose upward, above the grim alley.
His lips rested lightly on hers—hardly a touch at all, really—but she hadn’t been mistaken about this last night. There was breath in him.
Breath in the dead thing.
Again Jesse thought to struggle. She was of a mind to use the wooden stake and get rid of his perfect golden carcass once and for all. Yet with the pressure of his mouth came a series of strange sounds that crippled her.
She heard flapping noises, reminiscent of banners or flags whipping in the wind. Behind her closed eyes, flashes of color accompanied the sounds: bright green, brilliant blue, electric red, and a gold that was a near-perfect match to the vampire’s halo of hair.
Pungent odors arrived, very different from the wet pavement of the alley and smelling more like straw or moist grass over muddy earth. Nothing like city smells.
The vampire’s supple lips feathered over hers without resting in any one place, and the fact that she stood there became a reminder of his superior will. Jesse’s reluctance slipped another notch. No one had ever kissed her, breathed on her face, dared come this close. Was this the kiss of death? Would she give in to that, too, if he asked it of her?
The meeting of their mouths brought something else with it besides turmoil. Despite the confusion and the immediacy of his closeness, Jesse heard a voice. Far off in the distance, seeming to come from the vampire’s mind, a voice shouted, “Help them!”
Her ears rang with the stark terror in that plea until she was sure she was going to be sick. The earth seemed to revolve …
The golden vampire, the creature who held her and whose mouth had trespassed against hers a second time, quickly drew back. He turned his head to look beyond her, leaving Jesse gasping, and wondering if maybe he also had heard the voice and the panic in it.
Without the vampire’s kiss, the mesmerizing inferno fizzled. Her surroundings spiraled out of control, making her a leaf in an eddy—twirling, twisting, sinking beneath the outermost levels of herself.
Green. Blue. Gold. Green. Blue. Red. Faster and faster the flashes of color and light spun … until they merged into a bleak, muddy gray. When the spinning slowed, the gray world drained, as if it were made of paint, now wet and dripping down the alley’s walls. Light went out. Darkness returned.
Jesse was aware of her feet again on solid ground, felt the crunch of grit beneath her shoes. She blinked back tears, afraid to face what had just happened.
“Jesse.”
Stumbling back, she hit the wall of the closest building. Her breath whooshed out, but she held on because she was still breathing, still alive.
“Who was that?” Her voice was throaty. “Who called?”
“Your car is waiting,” the beautiful, complex thing beside her announced, failing to address or acknowledge either her question or what had just passed between them. Stranger yet, his voice rang with audible sadness.
Was she supposed to speak? Hell if she could. She could barely stand, lost in the sense that she was still dreaming, and dreaming him. She was lost in the realization of just having defiled her parents’ grave by finding anything redeeming here.
“Come,” he said, holding out his hand for her to take.
What she needed was air, along with the reminder to continue to breathe. She needed a wheelchair and a more cooperative pair of legs. She needed to chant her mantra about control and mean it. She had picked up on something in the vampire’s tone that she had missed before. A lilt. The slightest rolling of syllables. This vampire had a French accent that echoed softly in her mind. That accent meant something, was important somehow. It seeped into her consciousness without taking shape; another piece of a puzzle she couldn’t grasp.
“Stan will be worried,” he told her, his hand still raised.
“Stan?” Jesse massaged her temple with shaky fingers that felt as surreal as the rest of this. God, Stan would be more than worried. How long had she been in this place?
“Can you walk?” the vampire, the enigma, asked.
“I can run,” she replied.
The smile he offered her was tinged with concern as he dropped his offered hand and stepped aside. His graceful movement sent another round of shivers through Jesse, and she knew unequivocally that she was screwed. This vampire had gotten to her twice. He’d had his mouth on her twice, and her body had responded to him favorably, bypassing her brain altogether.
She had allowed him to get close. She had been bent on destroying his kind and had been mesmerized by the beast’s glittery bag of tricks. He was right. She wasn’t ready to tackle a vampire. She had a lot to learn.
“Go, then,” he whispered to her. “But remember what I’ve said.”
Before she could tell him to jump off a tall bridge, before she could get hold of the weapon in her pocket, another voice called out, breaking the silence as raggedly as if the air and the spell that had bound her in place had been slashed with a serrated knife.