“Ahhh…” Sebastian sucked the air through clenched teeth and mumbled. “A moment, please.”
“Is…is it Scarlet?”
It could be no one else.
“Where is she?” Sebastian whispered quickly.
“Um…I don’t know. I thought she was at Gary’s tonight.”
“I have a feeling—” Sebastian stepped out onto the cement floor, his hand pressed over his chest. His heart could slip out and fall to the ground, shatter like a clay pot “—that she is not.
Chapter Sixteen
Spain, 13th century
“You must return before sunrise.”
“Or else what?” Esmarelda sat a dutiful pupil near her husband’s feet. The transformation had worked. She was now like Adriano. A vampyre. A creature of the night, a beast.
None of the labels mattered. For now she would be with Adriano forever. And forever they would far outlive and surpass the superstitions and fears of the castle inhabitants.
“I’m told the sun will burn our flesh,” Adriano said calmly in his deep, soul-stroking voice.
Esmarelda felt she could listen to him speak forever. Watch his lips move with each word, subtly forming his instructions, returning images of his kisses to her mind…
The touch of his finger beneath her chin startled Esmarelda out of her reverie. “Are you listening to me, my lady? You must heed my words or you shall never survive.”
“Forgive me. I was listening, I just—”
“Than what did I just say?”
Say? Before she started dreaming about his kiss, or after?
“Esmarelda?”
“Something about the sun,” she said, coyly drawing her finger down the black hose on her husband’s leg. “Oh, I know all the rumors and folklore, husband. Sun and garlic and wooden stakes made of the ash tree, they can all kill a vampyre. And now I possess great command of my mind, am able to move inanimate objects only by thought. Creatures of the forest will heed my commands. We’ve been talking since midnight. It’s almost sunrise. I do so wish we could spend the remainder of the morning in each other’s arms.”
He feathered a kiss along her hairline, lingering like a hummingbird near her ear. “Very well. Tomorrow I shall teach you how to take blood without your victim being the wiser. And after that there is something very special. I call it borrowed body traveling. But for the last hour of darkness…” His hand cupped her breast and one finger wandered to tease her nipple. “We’ve better things to do.”
***
Los Angeles, present
Scarlet kicked a pebble across the stone rooftop of the mausoleum and waited for the tiny rustle as it hit the ground below. It chinked, signaling her it had hit one of the tombstones instead of falling to the moist earth. She walked to the edge of the roof and fell to her knees. Before her the moon hung a silver ball suspended in the purple night sky.
The mausoleum held special memories for her. All right, maybe not so special, more like strange. This was the place Sebastian had first taken her after changing her to a vampire in hopes of instilling his family history on her and teaching her the few vampire skills he knew. Later, when Francesco had been set on killing her, Sebastian had hidden her inside the mausoleum in the very coffin he had used to travel to America. The idea of being closed up inside a dark, dusty stone box had terrified her then. Now, the peace and sanctity beckoned a welcome retreat from her confused thoughts.
Visions of the diary had come unfounded this time. They’d assaulted Scarlet as she walked aimlessly away from the city. Like a waking dream she had almost been able to reach forward and touch Adriano as he leant forward for a kiss to his beloved.
And the answers were finally beginning to show themselves. This mind control Adriano had spoke of. And the borrowed body traveling. It sounded so exciting! Scarlet felt she teetered on the verge of a fantastic discovery. Her entire being tingled with anticipation. But the diaries were at home, and unless the images came to her again, she would not know the next entry.
“Tell me, Esmarelda. You must tell me,” she pleaded to the cool night air and the crickets harmonizing below.
There was more to the vampire life. She now knew it. Much more even than Vince’s dark cravings for the life of innocent mortals.
“Oh, Vince.” Her head spun with the blood of the boy. Her first kill, so unknowing and unaware of what her true intentions had been.
And afterwards… Vince would have taken her had she not kneed him and scrambled away across the blood-wet rooftop. She had been so close to giving in. To betrayal.
“No,” she whispered.
But she could not deny she had gone to the Decadence of her own free will. She followed Vince to the rooftop, and no one had pushed her to kiss him after taking the boy’s life. Subconsciously her body had gotten exactly what it craved. Though the actual receipt of said desires was not what she had expected.
“Forgive me,” she whispered into the wind. Tears rolled from her eyes. “I love you, Sebastian. You know I do.”
“Caw!”
“Whoa!” Scarlet spun around, and nearly fell from the roof. One foot slipped over the side of the mausoleum but she pawed the roof and pulled herself back up. “What the heck?”
A huge raven sat calmly examining her struggles, its yellow eyes glowing phosphorescently in the night. Scarlet reached out for the bird but it reared and backed away, not even spreading its wings for flight. Its claws cracked across stray pieces of twig and loose stone.
“Don’t want me to touch you, huh? Well, fine. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Like…on the rooftop? Oh!”
An invisible gut-wrenching blow to the stomach pulled Scarlet’s head down to her knees. Forced into a ball, she rolled to her side, moaning as an unexpected pain engulfed her body, rushing up to her temples at a screaming pace and inhabiting her thoughts with darkness.
The seizure took hold of her body with such force she felt sure it was actually happening to her. Cradling her body in shaking arms, Scarlet opened her eyes, trying to see the trees and the sky but she was blind to all but the pain. A flashing thought that this was a nightmare, a remnant of the boy’s life still clinging for one last breath, hit her.
She felt hot drool slip over her numb lip. An electric wave shocked repeatedly through her spinal column.
There were people standing above. Boys and girls, men and women, towered like giants from her point of view. They stood curiously watching, some taunting and clutching their stomachs as laughter spewed from their mouths. Others merely laid a hand aside their jaw and shook their heads woefully.
She tried to reach out but her fingers curled into tight claws around her body. “Help…m-me,” she muttered.
The spell shattered. The sound of her own voice brought her back to reality. Scarlet lay flat on the roof of the mausoleum, her arms stretched to her sides, her legs splayed out.
The raven spread out one wing and repositioned it with a soft flutter to its body.
“My God,” she whispered. “That poor boy. Seizures. He was an epileptic. Ohhh.” She curled into a ball, burying her face into her hands. “I can’t do this again, Vince. I don’t like this. It’s not right. He was too young to die.”
“Caw,” the raven agreed.
***
Scarlet filed through the countless dozens of dancing and gabbing bodies populating Rico’s mansion, surprised that Vince hadn’t mentioned the party earlier. She would never find him in this tangle of people. But she couldn’t go home to Sebastian yet. She hadn’t worked up the courage. And she needed to talk to Vince. To end things. He had to know their relationship could go no further than friendship.
And a small part of her still felt she had the power to somehow rescue Vince from the troubled path he had chosen.
What a night for a party, she thought, feeling not in the least the party urge after experiencing the boy’s nightmare. Blake’s band was set up just inside the patio doors and he and two others—vampires, she presumed—were playin
g a loud, obnoxious piece. She wondered what the neighbors thought, knowing Brentwood was mostly older, rich people who preferred a good symphony to a screaming rock song.
Vince was nowhere in sight, which Scarlet thought strange because he would never give up a chance to sing.
Brushing past two men whom she was surprised to sense, were vampires, Scarlet started down the hallway that led to the studio. The only place she could think Vince would be. There were a good amount of mortals mixed in the crowd. She knew that as a giggling woman faltered in the hallway and braced herself against Scarlet’s body before staggering back into the main room. Pure mortal. No telltale vampiric shimmer. Awful smelling perfume.
As she drew further down the hall, an uneasy foreboding fell over her, not unlike the heavy feeling she had when she had come down this way with Vince before. She was sure it was the people who caused it. Each so alive and vital, dancing and partying and drinking without a care or worry, none aware a handful would be chosen by the family as the evening’s festivities.
She passed by a door on her right, open to reveal an interior of decadent black and red. The room’s luxuriousness was fuddled with the loud peel of heavy metal screaming. A peek inside found no signs of Vince. But that looked like Rowdy’s curls crushed against the breasts of a woman across the room.
Scarlet walked on, leaving the loud music behind. She began to feel a strange beckoning. As if invisible fingers stretched out to her, begging her to follow. It pulled her farther from the noise, down toward the end of the hallway where she found herself standing in a T-turn, knowing she had gone too far, but also knowing she should turn right instead of left.
She glanced back toward the main room. No one noticed her standing alone so she slipped down the narrow unlit passageway, rifling through her coat to find the lighter she always carried. There were no electrical lights or candelabras this way but enough light still faded in from the main hallway.
Scarlet followed her instincts and the strange feeling of sadness that beckoned, taking a few turns and avoiding adjoining hallways until she finally stopped atop a stairway of rough cement.
The cool air that crept up the cracked steps was strangely enticing, much like the enveloping chill that tempts you into the refrigerator on a hot summer day. The horrific worry over the night’s encounter with Vince had left Scarlet. But the sadness lingered, a silent whisper floating in her mind, inhabiting her muscles and pulling her down the steps.
As she neared the bottom step a flick of her lighter proved there to be a door ajar. It was cold to the touch. A stagnant odor wafted outward, sharp and strong as it curled inside her nostrils.
Knowing she was snooping, that she had no right to be doing this, Scarlet stepped back up the stairs until she could see floor level. There was no one down the lengthy hallway she had come. The heavy pounding music vibrated like a breathing entity coursing through the walls. Without a second thought, she turned back and stepped down to the door.
The door was thick, almost six inches of stone, but she was able to slip between the crack and into the room.
A powerful blow hit her in the gut. It wasn’t a physical blow. More like a sensory assault. A stench captured her olfactories and twisted them into a coil. Rotten decay, a sour sickness, forced her gut into a whirlwind. Scarlet staggered forward through the total darkness, her feet stepping on some matter that seemed to ooze away from her, and reached blindly for anything that would steady her.
There was a buzzing, very minute, but she noticed its presence as she gagged and attempted to fumble for the lighter. From behind, scraping of stone across stone alerted her. Scarlet turned just in time to hear the door close in an echoing thunder.
“Shit!” She stumbled backwards, swallowing vainly in an attempt to keep the contents of her stomach where they belonged. Again she stepped on something that seemed to ooze away as she felt the cold stone door. There was a wooden handle. She pulled with all her unnatural vampire strength, but it wouldn’t budge. “This is impossible. I should be able to open this.”
With shaking fingers she dug into the depths of her pocket and felt the lighter. Closing her eyes tight, she flicked the tiny instrument and felt its heat warm her hand.
Scarlet opened her eyes and scanned the room, finding she was drawn to what lay all over the floor. She screamed and jumped forward, clambering for the opposite side of the tiny vault.
Her stomach gave up half way. When she could only gag, she staggered to the far side of the room where she felt the cold iron that manacled yet another door.
With eyelids shut tight, she held the lighter before her, daring not to look. Her nose vividly painted what was strewn about the cold floors of this hideous basement room she found herself locked into. Forcing herself to breathe deeply, she concentrated on calming her fears before flicking the lighter. It glimmered dully before her, blinding her for a second, until she moved it lower.
There were bodies everywhere, recklessly tossed about and left to decay. A garbage dump for the family’s victims.
Daring to glance quickly from one body to the next she saw all stages of decomposition, from bones and ashes to glistening white pallor and bloated yellow and green flesh. She saw now what the minute buzzing was. In one corner where it seemed the freshest kill had been laid, a handful of flies buzzed about the flesh-torn eyes of what had once been a lovely red-haired woman.
The sight of plump white maggots birthing from the woman’s nostrils caused a new wave of panic. Scarlet’s thumb slipped off the lighter wheel. Feeling behind her, she pressed her cheek to the rough wood door and felt around for the knob, finding a square opening nose level. She thrust the lighter through the opening and saw, to her relief, no bodies in the adjoining room, only thick darkness and bare floors.
She felt at the padlock. It was thick and cold but the rusted mechanism gave easily with a fervent twist from her powerful hands.
Chapter Seventeen
Spain, 13th century
Flames set the midnight sky afire with a wash of red fury. Esmarelda could feel the heat pressing upon the fur of her cheek as she neared the castle walls. She quickly released the body of the she-wolf she had borrowed and resumed her own. A hasty thank you was lost in the wind. The wolf scampered away with one last glance over the wreckage.
The north wall had been smashed in and crumbled to the ground while the interior wooden structure burned to cinders before Esmarelda’s eyes. There was no one about. Not a stray animal, nor a villager fleeing the raging fire.
“Why?” she whispered as she sped faster across the rocky land toward the blazing structure. “Where have they all gone?”
And then a realization hit with the blow of a hammer to the stake. The villagers had finally taken revenge.
“No!” Esmarelda scrambled over the fallen castle wall, her skirts catching and pulling her down into the simmering rubble. “Adriano!” She screamed until her throat was sore, but her voice could not be heard over the roar of the wicked flames.
The fire snapped and hissed at her as she picked her way through the piled fieldstones. A beam from the great hall fell from the ceiling in a crash before her. Esmarelda fell back across the stones, her back catching the fall in a stinging crunch.
Pray God he is not inside, she thought. Please, let him be safe!
She had risen early this evening. Adriano had a habit of sleeping well close to midnight before he rose. Esmarelda had traveled for what she figured had been dozens of miles, so delighted she was that the wolf’s strength afforded her swift earth movement. She hadn’t even fed. No, the early evening hours had been spent dashing through the forests, racing across the open plains, reveling in her freedom, her utter lucidity with the world. In the wolf’s body, all senses were heightened. Sensations she’d always felt she knew became new and exquisite. The forests brewed with an abundance of textures and flavors and sounds. Flowers were no longer one color, their petals burst forth in three dimensional shapes and smells.
And then s
he had felt a sharp chill pierce her heart. Something was wrong. The smell of smoke led her home to the castle. Home to a horrific sight.
“I must find him!” she screamed into the raging blaze. “Adriano!”
***
Los Angeles, present
“Hey Rico,” Vince waved the master of the house down as he passed by. “You see Scarlet?”
Rico settled onto the suede couch next to Vince, finding the man quite drunk. Not from alcohol either, he was extremely drunk on the blood the family provided for every party they held. Rico had watched Vince gorge on two beauties earlier in the entertainment room before wandering down the hallway after the curious little bitch.
“Can’t say that I have seen her,” he lied. “You two have a date tonight?”
Vince shrugged and cast a sheepish grin towards the ceiling. He was wasted, totally high on adrenaline. “Nah, Rowdy told me he thought he saw her. Can’t imagine why she’d come here after— Ah, well…” he trailed off, his head falling happily to Rico’s shoulder.
“If I see her I’ll let her know you’re looking for her.”
Vince floated his cloud in seventh heaven. “Cool.”
***
Once inside the inner room, the scent of rotting corpses permeated the hole in the door, but it was noticeably less vile. Scarlet breathed deeply as she stepped toward the center. The only thing in the room was a massive stone sarcophagus, which had been bound tightly with the use of thick chains whose links were the size of her fist. Eight streams of the linked metal ran from bolts in the floor, over the coffin and back down to the other side where they had been securely bolted, for years possibly.
Seeing the flame simmer to a low orb, Scarlet knew with a shake of the lighter she had little butane left. She looked around. There was a small window near the ceiling where three iron bars sifted beams of moonlight across the floor. She glanced back toward the door. As long as the corpses were on the other side, she felt safer. Not in the least comfortable, but she really had no choice.
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