Chapter 15
Sprinting outside into the night, Jesse felt her heartbeat swerve way off-line, felt her mind go numb.
Immediately captured in the brilliance of a spotlight, she stumbled to a stop and looked up, her ears filling with the sounds of the noisy helicopter—sounds that were, for the moment, as confusing as all the rest.
Don’t go into shock.
Hold on.
She wasn’t cold, didn’t feel the brisk bite of the wind or anything else, other than the vampire’s gaze on her back.
She refused to acknowledge what stood behind her. The mere thought of him upped her internal heat levels, saturating her chest, her stomach, her legs with lingering flames. This wasn’t an attraction born of anything natural. His hold on her arose from the actual physical phenomenon of hosting his blood.
How far back did their relationship go? All the way to that alley, and the event that had kicked off every round of action since then? He had been there, with the other vampires? She had believed him to be an angel?
Go back. Find me, Jesse.
She’d found him, all right, and wished she hadn’t.
The urge to retch returned as the chopper landed twenty feet from where she stood. The spotlight remained on her, nearly blinding in its intensity.
She didn’t walk forward. Her legs weren’t behaving. She felt the particles of Lance’s blood inside her, now that she’d been made aware of them, although that, too, seemed impossible.
“Jesse.”
Her skin rippled in response to the way he said her name, in spite of her brain knowing the score. He followed her, hoping what, to convince her to stay? Give her more bad news?
To apologize for her parents?
He actually wanted her to believe he’d saved her life. And maybe he had, either by accident or on purpose. Saved her for what, though? Her parents had died gruesomely at the hands of his kin. She would have welcomed death every minute since then, in return for their lives being saved instead of her own.
“I will get Elizabeth,” Lance said.
Jesse glanced over her shoulder, and said vehemently, “Over my dead body.”
Haven’t you done enough? what was left of her soul admonished.
“No favors,” she added, her voice breaking up. “No more favors.”
Someone stood beside her, smelling faintly of after shave and engine oil. A big hand gripped hers, pushed her torso over double and pulled. Seconds later she was in the helicopter, with Stan, who was bundled up in a hooded jacket that covered his head, jumping in beside her. Before her second choked breath, they were lifting off.
She saw Lance standing there; a lone figure not even remotely dwarfed by the size of his fortress. A creature without a need for an impenetrable castle at all, given what he was, except perhaps for the reason he’d offered. A respite from the chaos of the world.
Lance Van Baaren. Vampire. Guardian.
Guardian angel.
Hers?
The world on the ground, with Lance at its epicenter, spun as the chopper banked. Smaller shadows emerged from the forest, racing toward Lance as if he was also the center of their universe. Unable to make those shapes out, Jesse thought wolves.
She’d bitten her lip again, and tasted blood. Not sure she’d be able to utter one more word to anybody, including her pilot, Jesse leaned back against the seat. She wanted to be down there, facing this, and also wanted to put as much distance between herself and the vampire as possible.
Like distance mattered anymore.
Lance Van Baaren had been there, with her. In that dark alley. Amid the carnage. He’d bitten her torn and bleeding neck, topping off the pain with more than a little of his own. Saving her? Hell, he was now a part of her, as a tangible explanation for all those rumors about psychic abilities, her uncanny reputation for tracking the bad guys and smelling the wrongness of a site. God! Were those the gifts he’d referred to?
Is this how they had recognized each other?
“Blood to blood,” she muttered, understanding the meaning of this, at last. It was a fatal attraction. She carried him around with her.
A groan bubbled up from her throat as she wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her hand. Static came through her earphones when Stan placed them on her head. The world continued to spin, taking her with it, because she wasn’t Jesse Stewart, and had never been.
Stan was saying something in a worried tone that broke through her internal chatter. She had to say something. This is what she lived for, she reminded herself. Helping others. If she gave in now, another innocent soul would be lost.
Gritting her teeth to get a grip on the dizziness, Jesse tuned in to the man beside her.
“I take it that didn’t go so well,” Stan said.
And Jesse almost laughed.
Lance stared at the helicopter as it disappeared over the trees, taking Jesse from him, unenlightened and running.
Not completely unenlightened, he amended. Still, in this case, half an explanation was worse than none.
Jesse knew she wasn’t quite human. She was registering how long she’d been this way, skirting the edge of the darkness she harbored. She may already have plucked a fragment or two from those balled-up, suppressed memories. Her reactions were easy to imagine.
The rational part of his mind warned that it was inexcusable her pilot had overheard much of what had passed between Jesse and himself. Personal things. Intimate things. Having Stan know about him, and where he called home, made for one person too many in the loop. Lance considered this as his heart rate continued to accelerate … alongside Jesse’s.
She was an explosion waiting to happen. Her inner darkness had risen to extremes, and there was nothing he could do about it. She would mistakenly imagine him a part of that darkness, when his objective had been the opposite.
There wasn’t much time before Jesse’s return with the militia, if her pilot had already called them. If Jesse dared to use outsiders at all, that is, being aware of the deals this government made with vampires in the past. Given Jesse’s abhorrence at hearing that news, and with what she might be thinking about him and his part in her past, she might go after Elizabeth Jorgensen alone.
Lance felt real anxiety at the thought of Jesse finding that village. He scented fanged demons on the wind that very moment, heading his way. Not all of them. Not all twelve. A few of Jesse’s monsters would remain in that village to welcome her when she arrived.
There was something else on the wind. Something nasty that he couldn’t quite identify. He stood there, searching the sky, consumed by extraordinary feelings of loss, as the rounded edge of the unholy moon rose above the mountains.
“Blood moon.”
The night truly was cursed. He should have known better than to tell Jesse anything tonight, but she’d been so blasted hungry for the truth kept hidden from her. She needed to be made aware of the danger to herself.
Lance dropped his gaze, scenting damp fur and animal saliva. The wolves were coming in, heeling to the beast wielding the greater power. Himself. Such hadn’t always been the case. Immortals and Weres had once been enemies, vying for blood and meat, until he’d helped them in the mists of the past by protecting one of their own from slaughter.
Twenty wolves charged toward him, snarling for more of the flesh Nadia fed them. Vampire flesh, snared in the traps set out for the crazed ones who crossed his land.
The traps and the wolves would take care of a few of Jesse’s enemies tonight; the fanged foes scenting her helicopter, her footprints in the snow and on his own clothes. Beneath this particular moon, the outcome seemed dim for anyone ignorant of the real ways of the world.
Nadia would seal the doors, but Jesse was no longer behind them. Jesse was out there somewhere, hurting, angry and despising him. He’d seen in her soul her willingness to sacrifice herself for the Jorgensen girl. He had witnessed the twisted sort of strength she possessed, one she now knew to be based solely on a gift coming from outside herself.
Jesse was tied to those demons she hated, and there had been no time to explain to her the differences. In point of fact, he was a demon. A vampire. Immortal. Lance Van Baaren was, as Jesse had so aptly put it, one of the walking dead.
“But it is the differences in emotion and intention that set me apart, just as those things set one human being apart from another,” he whispered to Jesse. “The only thing left is for me to prove this to you, and in return make you hate yourself less.”
And hate him less.
If he wasn’t to have her, intimately, helping her was the least he could do.
“I would change everything if I could,” he went on, as if she could hear his confession. “I would toss it all, give everything up, for the chance to be with you. As a man.”
Chances were, however, and in the meandering ways of fate, that by taking it all back, by never having given her the blood strong enough to overcome her wounds, Jesse wouldn’t be here at all. She’d have died in that Los Angeles alley.
The wolves, their shiny pelts as black as the night, their huge muscled bodies wired by oncoming moon light, nipped at his legs, hungry for action. Lance heard Nadia behind him, speaking to the pack as only she was able to do, with a chilling howl that echoed across the valley.
He heard the distinct sounds of Nadia’s imminent transformation from her humanlike form—the pulling flesh, the snap of bones—and again glanced up at a moon that was as much his housekeeper’s as it was his.
“There are more things on this earth than you realize,” he said to Jesse. “Nadia, for instance.”
Turning back to his sanctuary in time to see Nadia finalizing her alternate shape in the doorway to emerge with brilliant gray fur covering her glossy muscled hide, Lance knew that though he would have help from unimaginable places, he’d have to act fast or lose Jesse to the darkness, for good.
Jesse glanced over at Stan’s hands, visibly shaking on the controls as much as hers were in her lap. From beneath this hood, he said, “You are okay, Jesse? He didn’t hurt you?”
The question should have been: How had he not? By giving her the blood enabling her to survive a savage mauling … by making her endure the death of her parents as well as the stint in an institution … by frightening the daylights out of her and then giving her blood again on that hotel balcony … Lance Van Baaren had played God with a mortal soul in crisis.
He had been present at the worst moment of her life. He had heard her plaintive call for help. What were the odds of that, and of finding him here? How did things like this happen at all?
And then what? The vampire who’d bitten her when she was a child had now found her alive and kicking, and felt guilty for being the source of her specialness?
She was sick, shaking and on the verge of tears. Angry didn’t begin to describe her feelings. As the vampire had explained it, she’d been enhanced, supersized, upgraded, for her own good. Not by any interference or workings of an angel, but by those of a predator who just happened to look like an angel.
A fanged angel.
And there was no taking a blood donation back.
Although she wanted to shout for Stan to get her on the ground where she could be sick in private, she didn’t ask. No one would benefit if she curled into a ball and cried. Stan had heard too much already. His posture was haggard, jumpy. She was obligated to answer his questions, with a vampire’s blood in her veins.
“Not hurt. Shaken,” she managed to say.
Take con trol.
Think.
Remembering everything said in that meeting was beyond her. The microphone taped to her chest was a good one. Even through the thickness of her coat, voices would emerge clearly enough. Some of that information should have been kept secret for the sake of Stan’s sanity. Look what it was doing to hers.
Stan said, “Well, that’s a relief. Jeez, Jesse. And FYI, I don’t get it. If that creep says he can get Elizabeth, why hasn’t he done so already? I heard some of what he said to you.”
Without waiting for a reply, he barged on. “I’ve spotted that village, three leagues from here. That’s what he said, three leagues. There’s only one like that, and you’re not going to like the looks of it. So, who do we get to charge in there? Who do we call, if it isn’t already too late?”
Stan brought up a valid point, proof positive of two heads sometimes being better than one. If Lance Van Baaren was a Guardian, and a sort of benevolent immortal, as he’d said, why hadn’t he already picked up the girl? Why make her seek him out, holding that promise over her head? He hadn’t mentioned a trade, and he had let her go, just as he had done twice before.
Make that three times before.
“We can go back to the city and get help, or we can radio this in, have reinforcements on the way and fly over there now, ourselves,” Stan persisted. “What’s it going to be?”
The honest truth was that she didn’t know how to answer Stan’s questions. She’d been wallowing in self-pity-coated fright.
There was no one to talk about this with, except Stan. If she didn’t get her act together and move ahead, she’d be the cause of another girl’s downfall.
“Sheer numbers of law enforcement might do the trick,” she said with wishful thinking. “Overwhelming numbers.”
Then again, each individual brought in to witness this peculiar set of circumstances was never going to forget it or sleep soundly again. She was the poster girl for that fact.
And the big, bad, ugly news turned out to be that she wasn’t quite human, after all. She was composed of bits of both worlds, thanks to an early rendezvous with a wicked, wingless angel.
Just how unique am I?
Do I possess the skills necessary to get us out of this?
There was no doubt about her connection to Lance Van Baaren, or about believing him. Up in the air, as far as she and Stan had already traveled, vibrations of the provocative immortal reached out to her as if his arms were actually that long. Deep within her veins and arteries, fueling her muscles and her thought processes, he lurked. His blood moved inside her like a caress, luring her back to him, calling her, if not with his voice, then with his very existence.
A hospital can drain me, then provide another trans fusion of cleaner blood, assuming I’m not saturated to the cells.
More wishful thinking, since there was no time to even consider such a thing.
So, how much to tell Stan? She didn’t know how to confide in anyone, had never trusted another person. Yet keeping it together meant she had to do both now.
“Something happened to me back there,” she began, her thoughts halted when the spectacular brilliance of the biggest moon she had ever seen hit her eyes. A terrible light, irreverent, unholy, if Lance had spoken the truth about that, too.
“Blood moon,” she muttered.
When Stan nodded, Jesse swung her attention to him. “You’ve heard the term?”
“Sure. I’m from Kansas, where it’s called a blue moon. Used to have something to do with the harvest, but it’s really just a nickname for the second full moon in one month. Doesn’t happen too often.”
“Why call it a blood moon?”
“Supposedly, in science fiction anyway, the theory goes like this—if you’re a werewolf who shape-shifts during the full-moon phases, having two full moons in one month makes the second shift a pain in the ass. Literally. The second moon brings up anger, pain and all sorts of other corrosive shit, making even a nice easygoing werewolf jump off the deep end. Too many of those happenings, and the moon takes on the color of the blood shed in her name.”
Looking sideways at her, Stan added, “So the stories go. And not that I read a lot of science fiction.”
Jesse steadied her voice with a hand on her throat. They were speaking about supernatural fantasies here, things right out of fiction and nightmares. “What about vampires? How would a moon like that affect them?” she said.
Stan shrugged. “I imagine it might be the same if the moon rules their thirst in some way.”
“You know about the thirst?”
“Our puffy-shirted pal explained it pretty damn decently, don’t you think?”
Right. Stan had heard that. He’d been privy to her own comments in that castle as well, whatever the hell she’d said.
“So, a blood moon is like lunar catnip,” Stan added, “for werewolves and vampires.”
Jesse grimaced.
“Van Baaren is a vampire,” she said. “A real one.”
“I get that.”
“Do you believe it?”
“You convinced me.”
“No qualms? You just believe what you’ve heard on that receiver, simple as that?”
“It was right in your face, boss, and on that micro phone. Not to mention that I just saw a pack of wolves running toward that place. Why would this happen, if not for some kind of supernatural reason?”
“Nadia feeds them.” Lance had told her that.
“Or else they may have been trying to get away from that big moon,” Stan proposed.
“That’s absurd.” Jesse resisted the urge to look behind her, over the trees, experiencing an honest-to-goodness desire to go back to Lance that, she reminded herself, was comprised of
nothing intelligent, and was only due to the foreign blood in her body.
His blood.
Blood was intimate. She and the vampire had been as intimate as two beings could be without a sexual exchange. His teeth had thrust into her … breaking skin, sharing fluids. Was biting a human the equivalent of an orgasm for a vampire?
Jesse stared at her hand, dropped from her throat to her lap. He was there—in her fingertips, her palm, her wrist. She felt him as surely as if he held her hand. She felt him in her stomach, her hips and her thighs. There, a part of her. Inside her. Like a lover.
“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “Just about as absurd as believing a bunch of vampires are holding Elizabeth Jorgensen in a remote village where no one lives anymore, except for them.”
“Shit,” Jesse whispered, not daring to think about the other body parts feeling Lance’s presence, like the untouched recesses of a messed-up virgin cop’s womb.
“Shit? You got that right,” Stan said. “And we seem to be stuck knee-deep in it.”
Jesse swiped at her lip as if the speck of blood still clung there. The accompanying scent of aluminum resisted removal. The chopper seemed to be filled with blood-laced air. She easily smelled Stan’s excitement, too. Beneath his hooded parka, he had started to perspire. Moonlight, smelling like clouds and storms and stardust, reflected off her portion of the windshield.
“Theoretically, if there were vampires in that village, how many soldiers do you think we’d need to get Elizabeth out?” she asked, resting her head against her window to cool her cheeks.
“Your hundred ought to do it.”
“I doubt if there are a hundred cops in the city.”
“And not that many silver bullets on the planet,” Stan said. “So, how else can you get the drop on a vampire?”
“Expose them to sunlight,” Jesse said, wondering if that was true. Lance had walked into an alley in the daylight. He had stood in his front yard that afternoon, facing her, and hadn’t been burned.
Again, she was unsettled to note how she’d registered the differences between Lance and the term freak.
Not a lover, damn it! More like a parasite!
“Cut off their heads,” she added to the list. “But who’d actually be able to do such a thing?”
“Stake through the heart,” Stan contributed, then sighed. “Like sharp wooden stakes are available at every hardware store in Slovenia in the middle of the night.”
Jesse entertained the same notion Stan had been about to add to his comment. Beneath a blood moon, were all bets off? With those unspoken words, and the light bouncing off her window, her head took on an uncomfortable fuzziness. Luckily, some reasoning made it through.
“All of those things, including dousing them with holy water, may be fiction,” she said. “Yet there has to be a trip switch. Some way to turn them off. Why are vampires allowed to exist when they’re so difficult to get rid of, and mortals are so easily taken down?”
“Vampires were taken down once,” Stan reminded her. “They were born people, right? Maybe a second life is charmed by tougher skin.”
“Except they are no longer alive, so the word life doesn’t apply. Still, they move around and talk, how? What animates them? It isn’t right.”
Neither was it plausible for a human to sustain vampire blood in their veins and live to find out about it.
“No one said life was fair, or even easy, did they?” Stan suggested, going philosophical.
Indeed, Jesse wanted to agree, no one had ever said that, because everyone knew better once they got into the rhythm of it. Cops especially had this figured out.
“We’re talking about vampires, Stan.”
Stan nodded. “I didn’t get to see the fangs. I’m assuming you did. And you aren’t prone to lying.”
Not until now, by making you think you’re sitting next to a regular human being. Someone like yourself.
“So, we’re confronted with a fresh ball game here. A new slate. The world has gone mysterious, and we have to adapt,” Stan concluded. “Like in an X-Files script.”
Jesse wasn’t so out of it that she didn’t notice he’d said we. She wanted to hug Stan for that, and planned to do so if they made it out of this alive. Even if the odds of that happening weren’t astronomical.
“Boss?”
She turned her pounding head.
“You said you were doing this for someone you loved. What exactly did you mean by that, if you don’t mind me asking? I mean, we’ve drifted way beyond anything being too bad to talk about, haven’t we?”
Maybe Stan was right, but was it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Already she tasted
the residue of darkness on her tongue that was connected to her secrets.
Test the waters.
Tr y.
“Vampires killed my family,” Jesse heard herself say, “then almost killed me. I’ve met these monsters before, Stan. I’ve seen what they can do.”
Although Stan didn’t immediately respond to her confidence, his hands threatened to break the controls in his grip.