by Barb Hendee
Maggie looked startled.
Tonight, Simone had taken special care with her emerald green dress and black eyeliner. She moved up onto the stage like a cat, stood near the microphone, and nodded to the pianist.
The slow notes began.
Simone had come to learn that society did not become more progressive in a straight chronological time line. In her view, the 1930s had been much freer than the 1950s. The music of the thirties was far richer and more passionate than the light sounds of the fifties.
She began to sing a sultry piece from the thirties called “Body and Soul.” It was one of her favorites, and she knew exactly how to pitch her voice.
The lyrics told of someone sad and lonely, pining for a lost lover.
For two verses, Simone sang with a sweet but sorrow-filled tone, as if her heart was breaking. Then she gripped the microphone and leaned into it, exuding the power of her gift, moving her body slowly to the music while lowering her voice to a softer pitch, filled with longing.
She sang of how her life was a wreck, and how she would surrender herself to her lover, body and soul.
The last note rang through the room a long time, and then the mesmerized audience burst into applause. She smiled again, as if her ability to hold the crowd spellbound was nothing, and she walked off the stage. The look on Ethan’s face filled her with more pleasure than she’d felt in the last twenty years. His eyes were glassy and hungry. He seemed to have to forgotten Alice sitting beside him.
Simone needed more.
“What are you doing?” Maggie asked as soon as they got home that night.
Simone shrugged. “Nothing. I just wanted to sing.”
Maggie didn’t press the point.
Seattle nights were long and dark in the winter. Simone’s next move was to send a private message to Ethan, inviting him to join her for tea at five o’clock. This was the test, to see whether he’d meet her alone.
If he didn’t, the game was over.
But she believed he would.
He showed up right on time, a mix of hunger and guilt washing over his face the instant he saw her. She just pretended they were two friends, meeting for tea. Afterward, they both went home to get dressed for the evening, and nobody knew they’d even met. But after that, the game got easier.
Ethan and his father owned a company that engaged in something called “property development.” Simone let him talk about this at first. She tended to steer him away from talking about Alice, trying to create the illusion that he was a single man courting an exciting girl.
They continued to meet just for tea at first, and then later, they both started canceling plans with Jessica and Maggie—making a variety of excuses—and Ethan would send Alice off with his aunt for whatever entertainment had been planned.
After this, they met in little dark restaurants. Simone thought carefully about how Kristina had handled Pierce, how she’d managed to win the game, and Simone came at Ethan from the opposite direction.
She subtly expressed pity and concern over how someone like him could have ended up married to anyone so simple, so unsophisticated as Alice. How would Alice ever be able to entertain the kind of businessmen that Ethan would be dealing with as his company grew? As she did this, she exuded the power of her gift, making him envy her, making him envy her life.
One night, he pinned her to a wall and kissed her so hard, he cut her lip. She didn’t care. He tasted of smoke and mints, and his hand felt good against her back. She stopped him from going further than the kiss, but finally, after all these years, she was swept away by a romance that made her feel something.
This was what had been missing.
He promised he’d leave Alice and marry Simone.
Then Maggie planned a night at the symphony, and Simone knew this was an opportunity for the final win.
She made excuses that she had another engagement and told Ethan that if he’d meet her at the Ashbury motel, room five, she’d give herself to him freely.
He agreed immediately.
Simone sent a note to Alice, asking her to come to the motel, room five, at eight o’clock.
Please, my dear, come alone, and don’t tell anyone. I have something important to tell you.
Regardless of her simple demeanor, Alice was not stupid. She must know something was wrong with her husband, and she considered Simone her best friend here in Seattle.
Ethan arrived shortly before eight o’clock. He always came in his own motorcar. Simone had given the motel manager a fake name and paid him in cash.
“Let me make sure the door is locked,” she said.
Instead of locking it, she left it cracked.
But when she turned, his eyes were on her, and he was kissing her wildly before she reached the bed. She kissed him back, feeling the excitement build. He wanted her more than any other woman in the world.
A gasping sound broke their kiss, and Ethan jerked his head toward the door.
Alice was standing there, staring at them in disbelief.
The look on her face brought Simone the sweetest sensation she’d ever experienced, far sweeter than Ethan’s kiss.
“Oh, Alice,” she said, “I’m so sorry. It’s nobody’s fault. It just happened.”
Ethan’s breathing was ragged, but he didn’t take his hands off Simone. “I was going to tell you, Alice. I was going to tell you tonight.”
Even with his wife standing there in horror, he made it clear that he’d chosen Simone. She wanted to laugh and sing.
She’d won.
She would never lose again.
Alice turned and ran.
Ethan took a step after her, but Simone held him.
“Give her some time,” she whispered. “She’ll just go back to your aunt’s. Stay with me.”
When he looked back down, hunger filled his eyes. He kissed her again, and she drew him to the bed. She let him run his hands all over her body, and she reveled in this closeness to someone who was clean and handsome, who smelled of smoke and mints and cologne—not some filthy bum from the waterfront.
She pushed him back and nuzzled her nose into his neck, hearing his sharp intake of breath.
Then she drove her teeth into his neck and felt him buck beneath her. She held him down, gulping in mouthfuls of his blood until he weakened. She saw images of horses and his father, a few fleeting scenes of Alice, and then she saw what she wanted—memory after memory of the past month, and all of Simone: Simone singing, Simone smiling, Simone’s slender backside as she walked away, Simone sipping wine and tilting her head. All of his most important memories were of her.
And she was beautiful.
His heart stopped beating.
She looked down at him, sorry it was over. But she was more filled with life than she’d felt in her entire undead existence. What a glorious way to feed.
But this night wasn’t finished.
There was a price for everything, and now she had work to do.
Ethan always drove his own car, and he always kept a full can of gas in the trunk.
Simone peeked outside and saw no one. She wrapped one of Ethan’s arms around her neck and half dragged, half carried him to the car as if he was drunk. Once she had him inside the car, she drove to Jessica’s town house, where she knew Alice would be weeping alone.
Maggie and Jessica were both at the symphony. They wouldn’t be back for hours, but Alice could not be allowed to speak to either of them.
She couldn’t be allowed to speak to anyone.
Simone used Ethan’s keys to let herself in, but once the door was closed behind her, she pulled the string of beads from around her neck and called out, “Alice?”
A sniffling sound reached her, and Alice came from the kitchen, her face red from crying, her eyes shocked at the sight of Simone.
“What are you doing here?” she spat.
At least she had enough spirit to be angry.
Simone never answered. She walked straight across the room and whipped th
e beads over Alice’s head and around her neck, jerking them back tightly and twisting. Alice fought and gagged, but only for a second. Simone was filled with life force and strength. Using both hands, she twisted with enough force to break Alice’s windpipe, listening to the last choking sound.
Only one task left now.
She dragged Alice’s dead body to the car and slid it into the backseat.
Simone drove toward the waterfront and turned down a dark, deserted street—she wasn’t sure which one. When she saw an aging brick building ahead, she hit the accelerator and slammed the car straight into the wall. The impact jarred her, and she hit her head on the steering wheel, but she was pleased with the result of her actions. The entire front of the car was smashed.
After sliding out the driver’s-side window, she went to the trunk and found the gas can. She doused the front of the car with gasoline, lit a match, and set it on fire.
It exploded into flames.
She watched it burn for a while. Then she slipped away and disappeared.
But before falling asleep that morning, she went over and over the sweet events leading up to Ethan’s final kiss, to the smell of his clean neck, to taking her time to drain him, and to his many memories of her face.
She had won.
She couldn’t wait to play again.
chapter 8
“No!” Simone heard a masculine voice shouting on the edge of her awareness.
She tried to open her eyes.
Where am I?
She had just been falling asleep, still glowing with the warmth of Ethan’s blood and the lingering taste of his sweet memories, and now she was facedown on a rug.
Somebody nearby made choking sounds.
Philip.
The previous events of the night came rushing back, causing her to panic. Had he seen all of that in her mind? If so, he knew almost everything about her.
“What did you do?” she cried, sounding shrill and not remotely sultry, but she didn’t care.
He turned his head toward her, and she saw the hunger in his eyes again, wild and brutal. When he opened his mouth slightly, she could see his eyeteeth.
He pushed himself up to all fours, and she was afraid of him. It was an odd feeling. Quite foreign.
“No more,” he whispered.
He had seen it. He’d seen it all.
But then he said something that surprised her even more than the events of the past few hours.
“I’m sorry.”
Her fear faded, and a kind of anger replaced it. He had somehow reached into her mind and forced her to relive much of her life while he watched. She was more distraught that he’d seen her years with Mother and Daddy than anything that came later.
“How did you do that?” she asked, slowly sitting up.
He didn’t answer, and then she wondered what made him pull away from her memories. He could have kept on through the following decades.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked.
He just looked at her, his eyes still filled with hunger, his red-brown hair hanging forward over his cheekbones. “I couldn’t keep on . . . the way you hunt.” He choked again. “The way you hunt.”
Then suddenly, she understood him. He didn’t care about anything she’d done in her past. He didn’t care about her family’s humiliations or her own shabby treatment of Maggie. He cared about only one thing.
She knew what he wanted.
“You like how I hunt?” She crawled over to him.
The sky outside was growing lighter.
She let her gift seep out, engulfing him, making him envy her, and he didn’t tell her to stop.
His eyes glinted, and she wanted to rejoice. She took in every line of his face, the solid shape of his collarbone, the sinews in his hands.
She had him.
For some reason, he’d not been hunting in the way he needed . . . the way he wanted.
“Stay with me today,” she said softly in his ear. “Sleep here today, and we’ll go hunting tonight. You can show me how you hunt. I’ll go anywhere. We can feed on anyone you want.”
His body was tight and poised, like he wanted to lunge at her. But he didn’t.
He just nodded.
Mary hovered in the dim shadows beneath the staircase, watching Philip with Simone.
She didn’t like this house. She didn’t like even being in here. The place reminded her too much of her Aunt Lorraine’s: cold and sterile. The couches were leather—stretched over chrome frames—and the coffee tables were glass. Not a spec of dust would dare exist here. Not a centerpiece was out of place. Every painting and sculpture looked as if it had been chosen to impress guests, rather than because it was interesting or even pretty. The rooms were artificial and staged.
Mary hated places such as this, but she held fast and stayed.
She watched the events play out from the moment Philip entered the house.
Why had he come here alone? Why wasn’t Eleisha with him?
Mary saw the whole episode of Philip turning on his gift, making Simone try to crawl all over him. But she kind of understood that . . . as he seemed to be proving his own power.
Then she just hovered in the shadows for several hours while they sat on the floor, locked together. She knew they were probably in some kind of mental contact, but this left Mary completely out of the loop, and she was getting worried that Philip still hadn’t asked Simone many verbal questions. Mary would need to make a full report, and not much of what was going on between them would be of any use to Julian.
At one point, a ringing sound came from Philip’s coat—where he’d dropped it near the door—and it took Mary a few seconds to realize he must have a cell phone in the pocket. It rang six times. Neither Philip nor Simone even reacted to the sound. They seemed lost inside each other.
But then . . . when they broke apart and starting choking, Mary forgot all about the phone, and she focused entirely on Simone’s face.
Philip wasn’t using his gift anymore, and Simone still wanted him. No, she more than wanted him.
She was crawling toward him like a cat.
“Stay with me today,” she said, her voice like honey. “Sleep here today, and we’ll go hunting tonight. You can show me how you hunt. I’ll go anywhere. We can feed on anyone you want.”
When Philip nodded, Mary wished she could chew on her own lip just to think more clearly. Something was very wrong here. Still floating near the stairs, Mary began to realize that Simone would do anything to get what she wanted. And for someone like Simone, the possibilities were endless.
Mary had nothing concrete. She had no facts. She had no specific events or useful conversations to tell Julian. Then it hit her that he’d already gone dormant for the day—as northern Wales was seven hours ahead of Denver.
She’d have to wait for him to wake up.
But he needed to get here as soon as possible.
Mary blinked out.
As dawn grew closer, Eleisha sat on the floor of their hotel suite.
Where was Philip?
Although she’d been stunned by his decision to go alone, she did understand his reasoning . . . and she even knew he might be right.
Philip had once been a lot like Simone. Eleisha had not.
Granted, communication wasn’t exactly Philip’s strongest suit, but he might be able to handle this situation better—simply by virtue of knowing the right things to say. But still, Eleisha hated sitting here, waiting, doing nothing, and he was really pushing his window of time before the sun rose.
She’d tried to pass the night as quickly as possible: reading, watching television.
Then she’d given up all attempts to distract herself and moved to the floor, keeping her eyes on the door, listening for the sound of him coming down the hall.
Finally, in desperation, she dug into her bag and took out her new cell phone. It felt unfamiliar in her hands, and so small. Opening it, she pushed a button that displayed a short list of names. Then she pressed PHI
LIP and put the phone to her ear. In all the time she’d known him, she’d never called him on a phone. She’d never had to.
Upon hearing the first ring, she tensed, hoping he would answer and scoff at her, telling her not to worry so much, that he was in the lobby on his way up.
The line rang six times and then went to voice mail. The voice wasn’t even Philip’s, just some cold digital words telling her to leave a message. She hung up, dropping the phone back into her bag. Then she returned to staring at the door again.
The minutes clicked past.
The sky outside was drifting toward dark gray.
Suddenly, her cell phone rang—well, it didn’t actually ring, but rather it burst into Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Was that what Wade had programmed?
She jumped a little, startled by the unexpected sound. Then she grabbed the phone from her bag, opening it quickly, and put it to her ear again.
“Hello.”
“It’s me,” Philip said.
For a few seconds, Eleisha couldn’t speak. She was too confused. The sky was growing lighter.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I need more time. This is taking longer than I expected. I’ll call you tonight.”
He sounded strange. Cold.
“What do you . . . ?” she asked. “You’re sleeping there today?”
“I’ll call you tonight.”
He hung up.
Eleisha just sat there on the floor, staring at the silent phone.
Julian’s eyes clicked open just past dusk. Cliffbracken Manor was dark and quiet.
He hoped Mary would come to him tonight with a report.
He’d slept in his pants, so he pulled a sweater over his head and then walked downstairs to his study.
Even with the windows completely covered, he could feel the darkness outside deepening. He lit some candles and began paging through a book lying open on the table, The Makers and Their Children , looking for any possible reference he might have missed to a vampire named Simone or some variation of the name.
The three fat candles burned brightly, and he turned another page, well aware he was wasting his time, as he knew the book by heart, but he needed to do something.