Appetite of a Vampire [Vampire Love and Lust 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Dani April

  “Yeah, I just hope the neighbors don’t mind all the hammering.”

  Marty laughed. “I think the neighbors know we’re a little weird by this time.”

  He was kissing down the back of her neck and sending shivers down her spine. “Want to fool around before the sun goes down?” he asked her.

  She reached back and shoved him away. “As nice as that sounds, I don’t think I could concentrate on it right now. Some of these websites are so hard to navigate they’re driving me crazy, and I want to finish this up before I go to the hospital tonight.”

  He lay on his stomach and watched her move her finger around the touch pad.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asked.

  He just blinked up at her from his position on the sheets.

  “Why do you want me to find Robert so bad?”

  “Mostly because you do.”

  She turned around, cross-legged on the mattress, the computer sitting on her lap. “But there’s something more to it than that,” she goaded him. “If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to read your mind and find out what it is anyway.”

  “The other guys think it will be bad for us and our relationship with you if you find the vampire. I don’t see it that way, personally.”

  “Why are you different?”

  “If I was the other guys I’d probably feel the same way they do. Derrick and Aaron have money and are going to start a business of their own. Owen is a doctor, so he pretty much has the rest of his life mapped out for him. Then there’s me.” He looked down at the sheets self-consciously. “I don’t have money or a career. I don’t even have a family outside of this house.”

  “Barry, I…”

  “No, let me finish.” He looked back up at her, and there was passion behind his words. “I want you to find that vampire so he can teach you how to make other vampires. Then I want you to make me a vampire.”

  “Barry, even if that were possible, it’s not something you would want.” She reached out and touched his shoulder.

  “But Robert loved you, right?”

  “I know he did.”

  “And he made you into a vampire, didn’t he?”

  She could see where he was going with this, and was at cross-purposes in this conversation. “Barry, I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.”

  “Why? I am in love with you.” He threw his fist down against the mattress. “I know you’ve never said the words to me. I guess I just keep hoping that you’ll want to keep me around.”

  Her hand was still on his shoulder, and she rubbed him gently. “I care about you a whole lot, Barry. You and the other men are the only people I’ve had to call as family since my dad died. I just think our futures are going to lie along a different path at some point.”

  “So I take it that’s a no on turning me into one of you guys?”

  She tried to think of a good reason to answer him with and ran her hand through her hair in frustration. “We still don’t know enough about why Robert turned me when he did. I’m sure he had a good reason. I don’t think one can just go around and turn everybody into a vampire. It’s not any fun. It’s like a disease. Believe me, you don’t want to be one.”

  He reached out and took her hand from her and held it out. “I’m not mad at you, Marty. Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s your choice whether you want to turn me or not. But you know how much you have wanted to find Robert all this time? How he has been the reason behind everything you’ve done?”

  “Yes, I know.” She had to give into him. He knew her too well by this time to try lying to him.

  “That’s how much I want to become a vampire with you. I just want you to know that. It may not change the way you feel or make you want to do it. I just want you to know that about me, that’s all.”

  She only got to hear part of what he had to tell her. She had just pulled up the page of her college for nineteen sixty-five. There were class photos arranged alphabetically. She pressed the link for the photos under the Fs for Fair. Only one page in, she saw a murky black-and-white picture appear on her screen. As bad as it was, she knew at once she was looking at the face of the man she had loved, and the man she still loved. The face of Robert Fair was staring back at her from the LCD screen on her lap. He was young and had a carefree yet sure gaze in his eyes as he stared into the camera.

  “This is him,” she told Barry.

  He moved the computer around on her lap until he could stare into the face of Robert Fair as well. “So that’s what a vampire looks like.”

  She touched her breast and laughed. “This is also what a vampire looks like, silly. You talk like you’ve never seen one of us before.”

  “I’m sorry.” He handed back the computer across her legs. “I guess I just never think of you like that.” Then he had a thought and reached back for the computer. “If he’s in there then I’m pretty sure you’re in there, too.”

  “Don’t, Barry. I don’t want to see myself.”

  “Too bad, because I do.”

  He made quick work of the website, and when he had found her photo, he was proud to turn the screen back around for her. At first she didn’t even want to look down the length of her legs to the bright light of the screen. Then she chanced a single glance, and what she saw haunted her. There was her face staring back from the screen at her. She looked just the same in this photo as she would in five minutes when she climbed out of her hole and went upstairs to look in the mirror. The only difference was the girl in the photo was outside posing for a group photo with her class of future nurses. And the date beneath all of their smiling faces read “June 1965.”

  It had been a long hunt for Robert Fair. The hunt was almost over.

  Chapter Twenty

  The university had a large library. The reference section was in a back wing on the first floor. All the publicly available records on former students were housed back here. Since the library closed at eight in the evening and the sun stayed out so late because it was now summer, Aaron and Owen had volunteered to go to the library during the daytime hours and research Robert Fair for Marty.

  As they entered the front door, Aaron removed his sunglasses and stuffed them in his shirt pocket. He asked the librarian behind the front desk if it was possible to find the documents they were looking for and, if available, where they might be found. She smiled at him and politely directed him back to the reference section. Owen followed after Aaron down the long aisles of bookshelves. When it came to Marty, Aaron had to even laugh at his own behavior.

  “Our hot, little vamp has us all wrapped around her finger,” he commented to Owen, keeping his voice hushed out of respect for the other patrons. “She’s got us out looking for another man for her.”

  “I don’t mind,” Owen quietly responded to him. “At this point I’d do anything for her.”

  They walked through a set of double doors into the reference section. Another librarian greeted them, and Owen took charge. “My name is Doctor Bradon,” he explained to the librarian. “I’m here to do research for a patient of mine.”

  She showed them over to the filing cabinets containing honors and awards for all of the schools’ current and recent graduates. Owen cleared his throat. Aaron absently looked at some photos on the wall of the school’s football team.

  “The particular student we’re looking for may have been infected by a virus and may have infected my patient. However, I’m afraid this is not a recent case. The last year this student would have attended classes here would have been nineteen sixty-five.”

  The librarian raised an eyebrow at the doctor but ushered the two men down an aisle to where the classes from the sixties were still housed. It was far in the back. When they arrived, the wall was littered with old school newspaper clippings detailing campus protests and student views on the nuclear arms talks that had dominated the national news of the long ago era.

  The librarian left them alone, and Aaron settled into a chair in front of a desk littered with fi
les that had not yet been sorted. He realized they might have a long day ahead. They were looking for a single piece of information in all the endless millions of words around them.

  “You know, I’m used to women doing things for me.” Aaron pulled open a filing cabinet and started combing through it. “I think I must be losing my mind here.”

  “Marty isn’t an ordinary woman,” Owen reminded him.

  “I know.” Aaron sighed. He had never really cared about any of his other women in the past. Now he was feeling emotions he was unprepared for. “The little bitch has gotten inside of me. I couldn’t get her out of my mind now even if I wanted. Let’s do this thing. Let’s find this bastard she’s looking for and hope that he doesn’t murder us all to get her back when we do.”

  “I think it’s important that we find him. If he is the carrier of the virus, I would like to talk with him, too. We might learn how we can help Marty through him.”

  “But, doc, is there really any help for Marty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not like she’s really sick. She’s beautiful and has the energy of a horse.” He smiled and thought of some of the nights he’d spent with her. “Maybe there’s nothing to cure. She’s a vampire and a wonderful, supernatural creation. When it comes right down to it, our Marty is just about perfect the way she is now. Don’t tell her I said that, either.”

  Owen laughed and flipped through a separate row of files, looking for that single name. “It’s just a virus she has been infected with. The problem is, there is no medical record I can find of this virus ever having existed before. That’s why it’s imperative we find Robert Fair, since he also may be a carrier.”

  “Do you think he’s even still alive, doc?”

  “Well, if he has the same symptoms as Marty then I think he probably still is living.”

  “If Marty became a vampire just because she had sex with him, or because he bit her, then why haven’t any of us become vampires? That’s how a virus works, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m really out of my league here. I’m not even her doctor anymore. I gave that up when I became her lover. But I’m still trying to approach this case from the perspective of medicine. For instance, when I got her family medical history from her, I discovered that her father had severe bouts with anemia when he was younger.”

  “You think her dad did it?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. What I’m trying to say is that there could have been a family history of blood abnormality. Unfortunately, her mother died while giving birth to her, and Marty doesn’t know anything about her, so that side of the family tree is a dead end.”

  “Here we go,” Aaron said, digging out a folder. “Mr. Robert Fair.”

  He cleared off the table and placed the folder in the center. Both men came over and viewed it as if it was buried treasure they had just unearthed. Aaron opened the folder and dug through the sheaves of paper inside with abandon.

  “He was a member of the drama club and apparently was in a play the winter before it all went down. He was the leading man in the play, and it looks like he won an award for his acting.”

  He dug out a photo of Robert Fair being presented with a plaque by his drama teacher. Owen ignored it, not caring what the young student looked like. Instead, he flipped through some more pages until he got to some readable material.

  “It says here that the spring of sixty-five was the last semester he was enrolled at the university.”

  “Bastard probably took off after he impregnated Marty with his vampire venom.”

  “But that fits with Marty’s story. She said he entered the draft that summer.”

  “Are you sure you buy that, doc? That was the story he gave to Marty. Seems to me like it was a convenient excuse to leave and never come back. Maybe he just wanted to have some fun, and fuck her a few times, and be about his business. He looks like the kind of bastard who would do something like that. She thought she was in love with him, but you know chicks. They can never judge a man.”

  “Wait a minute.” Owen pulled the sheet with the photograph out of Aaron’s hands. “This is something we can use. It says he had a brother who was supposed to come and see him get the award.”

  “Marty said she never met any of his family.”

  “Well I don’t see the brother mentioned in any of these.” Owen flipped through the photos taken on the night Robert Fair got his award. He stopped on the last one and stared at it. “This is Marty. She still looked beautiful all the way back then. It says Robert’s girlfriend, Miss Martha Williams, a student at the school of nursing, was onstage with him when he got the award.”

  Both men stared down at the picture of Marty. Aaron felt his heart do a summersault. It had been so long ago, and she hadn’t changed a bit. She even wore her hair the same. She looked radiantly happy. Robert Fair was holding her hand in his, and, to Aaron, it seemed like he had a self-satisfied smirk on his oh-so-handsome face. He looked like the cat who was about to eat the canary.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of chasing down Robert Fair,” Aaron told Owen. “He disappeared into the haze of ’Nam almost fifty years ago.”

  “Correct,” Owen agreed. “But if he’s a vampire as we suspect, he may go by other aliases. Let’s see if we can find any other Fairs living around the city. If we’re lucky, one of them might be him. We’ll start with the name of Thomas Fair. The article claimed that was the name of Robert’s brother. Who knows, perhaps Thomas and Robert are one in the same. That would certainly explain why Marty never met any of his family.”

  Aaron agreed, and they trekked back through the library to the public computers kept up front. Both men got on a machine and began searching the various databases of city directories for the name “Fair.” Aaron hated computers, and the search took him and Owen most of the morning with little to show for the effort.

  Just before they were about to break for lunch, Owen called him over to his monitor. He had something. “Thomas Fair seems to have led quite an inconspicuous life for all of these years. Perhaps for his own reasons that isn’t an alias the vampire uses very often. However, there is an article in the Business Times that mentions him, and that article was dated just a few weeks ago.”

  “So Marty’s vampire lover is still alive and well and living in the big city.”

  “Only this article isn’t about Thomas, it’s about his son, Thornton. He is, apparently, quite the successful business mogul in town. He owns a series of nightclubs all across the country. He just opened up a new one downtown in the city called “Rulers of the Night.” The article says it’s an ultramodern dance club of the future. It’s been packing them in every night.”

  Aaron shook his head. He didn’t want to listen to anymore. “Aren’t we getting off track here, Owen? We’re wasting our time now chasing phantoms. I mean, first we started with Robert, then we moved to Thomas, and now we’re onto Thornton. Maybe it’s all a dead end.”

  Owen pulled Aaron back down to look at the monitor with him. “Far from a dead end, my friend. We’ve reached the successful conclusion of our search. We’ve even got the address of his nightclub.”

  The photo on the computer was of Thornton Fair, but as soon as Aaron saw it, he knew he was looking at Robert Fair. The only problem was, he still looked just as young and vibrant as he had back in nineteen sixty-five. The man might have changed his name, but his appearance had remained attractive and cocky for all those many years. Aaron knew no one but a vampire could accomplish that feat.

  * * * *

  Derrick staggered across the floor of Marty’s living room. He was angry as hell and made more so because he could not get anyone else to see his point. The veins on his forehead stood out, and he wanted to hit somebody.

  It was about an hour before sundown. None of the men had slept with Marty in her hideaway that day, giving her some much-needed alone time. Now all four men were gathered in the living room, waiting for their little vampire t
o wake up. They had big news to share with her.

  The four men had become close friends over the last couple of months that they had shared Marty together. There was camaraderie among them. Marty had forged a tight bond between each of them that made them not just friends but family.

  All families had disagreements from time to time, and this family was having one now. Derrick found his viewpoint left without any support from the other three men. Even Aaron, who had been his friend ever since college, incited his anger now for the position he had taken.

  When Derrick spoke, it was in a raised voice. “You want us to send the woman we all care about alone into the den of a monster, and you expect me to feel good about that?”

  “Man, you don’t have to feel good about it,” Barry told him. “She won’t be alone, either, because I’m going with her.”

  Aaron patted him on the shoulder, trying to get his friend to calm down. “I don’t know if this is the right thing or not, but it’s what our lady wants. We have to let her have the chance to decide for herself from here.”

  “Bullshit!” Derrick exploded and moved away from the other men before he really did take a swing at one of them.

  From beneath the floor over by the fireplace, there was a knocking. Marty had evidently heard their raised voices, and they had woken her up. Now she was banging on the floorboard to get them to pipe down.

  “Let’s discuss this in the other room,” Owen suggested, and they moved quietly over into the den where Derrick found he was still just as furious with them all.

  “I want to try and discuss this rationally with you,” Derrick told them, attempting to bring his temper to bay. “We all care for Marty very deeply.”

  “I love her,” Barry said unapologetically.

  “I think I’m probably in love with her, too,” Derrick admitted. “The first time I met her I thought she was a monster. The reason for that and for every other ounce of hell that woman’s been put through is this evil creature who owns the disco downtown. Marty is not a monster. Thornton Fair is.”