by Tanja Neise
“The... The...” Tears were shimmering in her eyes, which moved me. Her gaze jumped jerkily to Liv: “This proves that you are Margaret after all.”
Her mind, driven by grief, was seemingly looking for an anchor. She didn't want to admit that she was alone in the world.
Olivia, who’d been silent the whole time, now weighed in on the conversation. “Why would that be an indication that I'm your sister?” She spoke with our prisoner in a loving tone. There wasn’t even a hint of an indication that she didn’t respect Anne.
Meanwhile, the slender, dark-haired woman sobbed. “I was in London then. Margaret was always on the estate, never allowed to leave. Who else could Raphael have saved but her?”
“Did they look for her?” Liv wanted to know.
Anne's head hung down limply. Her hands moved to her chin and supported it. “No. Officially, Margaret never existed. And when I continually asked about her, they wrote it off as an orphan's cry for help. To them, I could only have invented her, in the way children invent imaginary friends.”
In disbelief, I questioned her statement. Who kept their child secret? “Why didn’t Margaret officially exist?”
Anne didn’t look up, and answered very quietly. “I think he did research on her, but I can't prove it. I’ve never found anything in his papers that proves this theory.”
I reflected, revived my memories of that day. The little girl who’d been in my arms had indeed been redheaded. But there were quite a few red-haired women. Why should Olivia of all people be this Margaret? We were also here in America, while Rumsfield's estate had been in England. Next to me, Dark cleared his throat.
“Boss?”
“Yes?”
“Can I talk to you for a second?” He pointed with his chin to the window front. I followed him as he made his way over there, but I didn’t let Anne out of my sight for a second. Who knew what she was capable of? I couldn’t leave Liv there unprotected. “What's the matter, Dark?” I hissed. I couldn’t imagine what was so important that it had to be clarified right here and now.
Dark looked to the ground. I had rarely experienced the man speechless, which immediately put me in a state of alarm.
“Dark?”
“Boss. You haven’t completely got your abilities back yet.” This was not news to me. I knew that myself. But the fact that he’d just addressed me in a very familiar tone surprised me. I didn't really mind, but it was unusual. When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Well, if you had, you would certainly have noticed something about Miss Morgan’s smell.”
Impatiently, I asked, “And what?”
Instead of answering, he raised his hand to explain. “When I first saw Olivia, it was a shock to me. I couldn't explain it to myself. I first blamed it on a sleepless week, but I experienced the same sensation during the second and third encounters. I’d recognised immediately that she wasn’t vaccinated. And then I noticed the smell of a vampire on her.”
A growl rose up my throat. All eyes in the room were on me. Even though we’d previously been speaking quietly to each other, the women could now recognise the tension that lingered in the air. The jealousy that was seething inside of me was eating its way through my guts. So I asked, whispering: “Whose smell?”
“Your smell, Mr Tensington.” Dark's gaze was fixed on me, which reinforced his statement. He’d returned to using the more formal tone with me, which showed that he was in control again. “I asked Skyla and she agreed.” Skyla was a vampire who also lived in Seattle and worked for Centrodynamics. She and her partner had met me before and I classed her as trustworthy, which agitated me even more.
I looked at Olivia, who was watching me intensely. I just wanted to sweep her up into my arms and tell her that everything was fine. But it wasn't. “What does this mean?” I was at a loss.
Dark didn't seem to be feeling any better. “If only I knew. But I don’t think we should ignore Miss Rumsfield's theory that Margaret might be Olivia. This Sir Rumsfield may not have been afraid to use his daughter for research. Perhaps even with the blood of a vampire he was holding captive.”
The words hovered ominously between us. But no matter how I spun it, I couldn’t discount Dark's statement.
Olivia Morgan
Something was going on. Robert and Dark were whispering to each other and they kept looking at me or at Anne while doing so. Something about the way they were looking at me put me on edge. Anxiety took a hold of me, and I prowled around like a captured animal. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand a word of what was being said.
“Liv?” Robert's soft voice made me prick up my ears as he was suddenly standing beside me. I hadn’t noticed that he’d come over to me. I looked at him, questioningly. “Come with me!” And I followed his demand without asking why I should go with him; my curiosity plagued me far too much to say no.
His study was bathed in a dim light, giving the room a cosy ambience. We sat down on the sofa, which sank slightly under our weight. Our hands touched. The soft humming that echoed through my body made me shudder. God, this man had such a profound effect on my insides. I truly burned for him as soon as he was in my immediate vicinity. No, even if he wasn’t with me, my thoughts turned to him.
“What is it?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, it seems to be more complicated than we thought.”
“In what way?” Couldn't he just speak plainly? Impatiently, I slid back and forth on the piece of furniture.
Soothingly, Robert put his hand on my thigh. This soothed my thoughts about the complexity of the situation, but sent my body into vibrations that were anything but reassuring.
“Let me try something, will you?”
I nodded.
Carefully he came closer, put his nose to the crook of my throat and inhaled my scent. It was so erotic that a whimper escaped from my mouth. My heart began to race. Not with fear, because I trusted him completely. He wouldn't bite me and suck me dry like the bloodsuckers had done in my nightmares. No, I wanted to touch him and be touched by him. Here and now. I snuggled up to him, drove my hands through his full, dark hair. Robert moaned at my neck and drew me into a passionate embrace. Our lips found each other and depicted the tornado that raged inside us. We bit each other gently and our tongues danced a wild dance.
“Liv,” Robert whispered into my mouth and paused.
“Mmh?”
“We need to talk.” I could clearly hear his unwillingness from the words. I could see that he felt the same as I did. It was as if our souls had found a rhythm and were now communicating with each other on a different level.
I reluctantly detached myself from Robert, leaned my forehead once more against his, before I pulled away. I couldn’t talk right at that moment; my emotional life was in too much turmoil, so I left it to him to begin.
“I wanted to thank you first of all.” Confused, I looked at him. “For giving me your blood.”
Ah, so that’s what this was about. “No need to thank me. I’ve already said this. My innocence, my blood – it’s all yours.” I, myself, noticed how standoffish my voice sounded at that moment, as I certainly couldn’t hide my disappointment that he’d interrupted our kiss for this. But he didn’t take it any further.
“I haven't taken blood for over forty years,” he quietly enlightened me.
That irritated me a little bit, so I forgot the interrupted kiss for a moment, and concentrated on the conversation. “And how did you survive?”
“Human food,” he put simply.
Until now, I’d always assumed that vampires needed blood to survive. I’d never heard that any of them had stayed alive without it for so long. That was what made the vaccine so powerful. Many of the vampires had simply starved to death because they had no food source.
He looked at me penetratingly. “I am a very powerful vampire, and in view of my position, I was offered ways of nourishing myself from several others. You must know that this is a very intimate affair, which is why I felt honoured. But I threw
up every time. I just couldn't tolerate it.”
“And my blood is different?” My brain was rattling, but I didn't understand the connection.
“Yes, it is.” A smile scurried over his face. It had been a fleeting glance, making me wonder briefly whether I’d seen right. “Dark drew my attention to something that had been hidden from me thus far.” He paused again and I almost burst with curiosity. “You smell of me.”
Confused, I looked at him and didn't know what to do with this information. “Aha. And that means?”
“It means that you carry my blood in you. And it explains why I reacted so acutely to you.” Again, he waited while I feverishly tried to put what I had heard into context. But I didn't succeed, so I simply remained silent.
“Not only did I not drink blood for forty years, I also didn’t have sex.”
I opened my eyes wide and looked at him intensely.
“You are the first, in a long time, with whom I’ve had the desire at all to... let's say... to play around with.”
Until that moment, I’d assumed that he felt something for me, too, but these words indicated something else. For me, sex with him had been something very special. Apparently not for him. I would never have come up with the idea of talking about this magical moment between us with these words – playing around. They didn't fit at all. I smelled of him. That's how he’d noticed me, and just wanted to play around with me. Great! “Well, that’s good for you; then I’ve broken the spell and you can play around with whomever you want in the future.” I got up, shaken by emotions, but Robert's hand immediately grabbed me and held me back.
“It's not just the blood, Liv. You mean a great deal to me. You really, really do. But the blood connects us. Rumsfield must have known what to do to connect a human with a vampire. A bond is sacred to us. It has nothing to do with the bond of marriage between human beings – with us, it’s forever.” What, please, did Rumsfield have to do with me and my blood? A fire was burning in his eyes, which showed how many emotions were blazing up inside him. What I heard and what I saw in him frightened me, and at the same time the little girl in love rejoiced inside me. She was happy about the confession of the man sitting beside her. Looking forward to spending a lifetime alongside the vampire. A lifetime? And what would happen afterwards? Would he then look for a new one?
“I took a book off the shelf earlier, when I was looking for some kind of distraction, and a few pictures of you fell out. I assumed they were relatives, or good fakes,” I told him, without knowing exactly what I was trying to do.
He smiled, understandingly. “Yes, any normal person would think that at first.”
And before I could bite my tongue, something slipped out of my mouth that was more than embarrassing. “Who was the blond woman with the pink lipstick?”
But instead of taking away the jealousy he could certainly hear, he became very serious and said, “She's not someone we should talk about today.”
My heart contracted painfully, and jealousy as hot as lava spread through me. “Why not?”
He sucked air in between his teeth. “Because she is a walking nightmare. She looks like an angel and acts like the devil. Her name is Sabrina.” He seemed so bitter and angry that I was satisfied with it for the time being, because it showed me he felt nothing for her but disgust. “Jealousy is not necessary.”
I looked at him in horror; I felt totally caught out, which made him smile. The gloomy mood that had suddenly spread between us gently vanished. But I said nothing about it. Every word would have been an admission I wasn’t capable of at that moment.
“What do you know about your family?”
With this question, he brought me back to reality and at the same time pulled a rug out from under my feet. It tore open old wounds that I had pushed far from me, and which were now coming to light. It had been so long ago that I could hardly remember it. Until now.
“Liv,” he continued, as I didn’t answer.
“I can’t really remember.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Anne Rumsfield
When the two lovebirds had left the living room, I looked around the room more closely. It was very masculine and revealed a clearly-structured lifestyle, without unnecessary frills. The open kitchen looked as if it needed to be used. I was probably close to reality with this assumption. If Tensington even ate human food, he certainly didn't use the kitchen himself. But right now there was a seductive smell of fresh garlic and herbs in the air. Something Italian had recently been cooked here. My treacherous stomach gave a loud growl. I hadn't eaten anything decent since I’d arrived in Seattle. No wonder I was hungry.
Meanwhile, Dark was looking at me attentively and he had certainly noticed that my body was making such tell-tale noises. I needed it to keep quiet. Unfortunately, I’d let down my guard for that short period of time, which annoyed me enormously. One should never show weakness and, thanks to my behaviour, I had clearly revealed too much vulnerability.
Perhaps I shouldn't apply for field work in the future. I wasn’t the right person for something like that. Until now, I’d been one of the best, but I seemed to have surpassed my limits. Unfortunately.
“Are you looking for something?” Dark's deep voice echoed dangerously quietly through the room. For a moment, I’d forgotten that I was in the lion's den.
My eyes met his and I was scared. The intensity with which he looked at me struck me abruptly, and made me gasp momentarily. I needed a moment to collect myself. “Yes. I'm impressed with your security system and am looking around because I'm searching for weak spots.”
“They don't exist,” Dark uttered, with a snarl to make sure I understood. His eyes remained fixed on me.
“There's always a weak spot.”
“Not in this loft.”
I looked at him disparagingly, and breathed in sharply. On closer inspection, he was a good-looking man – the dark aura that surrounded him, his haunting eyes, and his body made him look like he did sports all day long. I knew this appearance was due to the vampire DNA, but I couldn't help but notice it. He was interesting because his intellect also made me curious. I wanted to find out more about his programming style. At Centrodynamics, I’d got into so much shit, thanks to this guy. I wanted to know how he’d made it so that I couldn't even get into his system. I could still feel the defeat in my bones, even more than the fact that I was his prisoner at that moment.
I wouldn't let him fool me, or be seduced by his attributes. “Listen, Dark. I know you're very sure of yourself, but believe me, every bit of programming has a back door somewhere and that's always a weakness.” The moment I said it, the penny dropped. I looked at him in disbelief and he grinned cheekily in my face. “You didn't programme a back door?”
“No.”
“But then nobody can get into the system anymore, and in the worst case that would be more than stupid.” I waited briefly, but apart from this arrogant grin he gave me nothing. “Tell me,” I demanded, but he only broke into a very sympathetic laugh. Into a laugh that shot me in the guts and made my knees weak, which infuriated me. I clenched my fists because otherwise I would’ve been tempted to attack him. Since I wouldn’t have had a chance, it appeared to be the only way to channel my indignation. My fingernails gouged painfully into my flesh.
But he noticed how much that made me angry and grinned, amused. “Oh, honey, I seem to be having an extraordinary effect on you.”
“Don't make any such assumption,” I hissed.
“I don't have to convince myself of anything. I can smell it. I can see your heart beating violently. Your body is well trained and your fat percentage probably amounts to less than ten percent, whereby I can see your veins, and they're pumping your blood through your extremities hard and fast right now. Which is very seductive for me. You, or should I say your body? Anyway, everything about you radiates lust. Lust for me. And your smell attracts me, like honey attracts a bear.” The way he spoke his words – deeply and quietly – my kn
ees were on the edge of trembling. There was a promise in each of them. An erotic promise.
Robert Tensington
“Liv, are you British by birth?” My skull was almost bursting from all the information I was trying to piece together. The more I twisted and turned it in my head, the more I realised that there was only one answer. Olivia had to be the girl I once carried from Rumsfield's house. She was the one I’d saved, as incredible as that fact was.
“Yes, this is one of the few things I can say with certainty about myself and my past. Otherwise, it's like there's a thick, fat blanket over what happened before I got to my parents – the Morgans.” Liv seemed dejected, which I could understand very well. Who didn't want to know where their own roots were?
I looked deep into the eyes of this woman who was connected to me in a quite unexpected way. She was so beautiful. Her heart was so pure. Everything in me said I should claim her as mine. I wanted her badly. Only her. I knew that it was mainly my blood in her veins that was responsible, but there was more. Much more. That pleased me and at the same time frightened me. It made me frightened of losing a loved one again, as I so often had in past centuries. But that was another topic; after all, we had a serious problem. We had to find out how Anne and Olivia were connected.
“I think Anne Rumsfield might be right,” I said, carefully, as if Liv were a porcelain cup and what I said was the famous elephant that could trample her.
“What do you mean?” She didn't seem shocked. She was brave, and that's exactly how she looked at me, too.
“You could actually be her sister.” If so, then I would at least have an explanation for how my blood could have got into her body. Just not why. Why would Rumsfield have done something like that? What did he want to do with it? Did he want his daughter to become a vampire? I simply knew too little about genetic research. Neither in the human nor with us vampires. And certainly not concerning what Rumsfield had had in mind. Maybe he had wanted to create a kind of super race – a human with the advantages a vampire had. Or vice versa. After all, I couldn't deny that I was different from other vampires. That still seemed to me to be the most appropriate answer.