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

by Dani April

  “I’m sorry, Marty,” Peter said. “But if you care about these men, and I can sense that you do, then you must end your relationship with them. You’ll be doing it for them, but you’ll also be doing it for yourself.”

  Somehow Marty knew that as cruel as his words were, they were utterly true. “I already almost killed one of them,” she admitted.

  “We’ve already taken care of that,” Owen said with hope in his voice. “I analyzed her blood and came up with a solution. I started mixing some of her blood with blood type B-negative from the blood bank at the hospital. That keeps Marty’s hunger under control and allows us to have more of a normal life.”

  Peter smiled indulgently. “I tried that old trick for a while myself. The problem is, the vampire’s system builds up immunity to it after a few months. Unfortunately, if Marty keeps drinking that concoction of yours, she’ll starve to death. In order to live, you’ll have to go back to drinking human blood, Marty.”

  Marty knew the familiar old hunger had started building inside her again. She had been trying to deny its existence. Now Peter’s words only confirmed what she knew to be the truth.

  She picked up Owen’s hand. “Can you wait for me down in the lobby?” she asked him.

  “No, I can’t,” he protested. “I’m going to stay here with you.”

  “Please, Owen, I would like to talk with Peter in private for a few minutes before we go.”

  She watched as Owen and Peter exchanged a glance. Peter seemed to give a nod that it would be all right, and reluctantly, Owen rose from the couch. She got up with him and gave him a hug.

  “I’ll be okay,” she told him. “I won’t be long. Just give me a few minutes with Peter.”

  Owen excused himself, and Peter saw him out the front door. Marty waited and stared down on the city lights. When Peter returned to her, his mood had grown serious.

  “There are millions of people down there with those lights,” she mused. “But I wonder how many vampires are walking among them.”

  “Very few.”

  “I have to give up my human boyfriends, don’t I?” she asked and was resigned to the inevitable answer.

  “You must if you care about them, Marty,” he told her. “They are infected with the vampire blood running through your veins and will never give you up voluntarily. You have to be the one to make them leave you.”

  “This just keeps getting harder, being a vampire I mean. Those men are the only good things I have in my life, and you want me to just get rid of them.”

  “I’m sorry it has to be like that. I wish I could tell you another way.” He took a sip of his champagne and seemed to inspect her. “There is something very mysterious about your case. I wish I could put my finger on it.” He drained the last of his champagne and held out the glass. “I want you to catch this quickly, Marty.” He dropped the glass from his hand. She reached out to try and stop its fall, but it was too late, and the glass fell on top of the thick carpeting on the floor, not breaking but merely bouncing before rolling to a corner beneath the drapes of the window.

  Marty couldn’t imagine what the test had been all about and told him as much with her stare.

  “Vampires have extraordinarily fast reflexes,” he explained. “They can move as fast as a bullet if they choose.”

  “Do you still doubt my story, Peter?”

  “No,” he said but seemed puzzled. “Most likely you haven’t developed your full powers yet because you are still a young vampire. In time, you will have many powers including stealth, speed, and the power to hypnotize human beings with a glance of your eyes. Your physical strength will become overpowering. Very old vampires can even learn to hover off the ground and fly in the air.”

  “And I’ll learn to kill people,” Marty said bitterly.

  “Vampires do kill people,” Peter acknowledged, “but they don’t have to. I was a warrior and killed on the battlefield, but never once took a human life when I was a vampire.”

  “How were you able to control the lust for blood and sex?”

  “By never allowing myself to get close to a human being emotionally.”

  “And that’s why you want me to get rid of my boyfriends?”

  “I’m sorry. I know it is difficult because you’ve already come to care about them.”

  “I’m alone, Peter. If I lose my men, I’ll be back to where I started, and I think I’d rather die than live like that again.”

  “When I was a vampire, I spent most of my time with a female, vampire companion. She had been my maker, and I was with her until she died. I drank human blood to stay alive. I got it by having one-night liaisons with women I didn’t know and would never see again. I made sure I only took enough of their blood to keep me alive but not so much that I would cause them permanent harm. It was all made easy because I did not know these women or have any emotional connection with them. It was just sex and then blood drinking. I was able to hypnotize them so they would forget. The next morning, the woman merely thought she had spent a night in a stranger’s bed. She may have felt a little weak, but thought that was from her passion. I had caused her to forget everything else. After it was over, I never saw any of those women again, and they couldn’t even remember what I looked like.”

  Marty had never felt so depressed in her life. “It sounds like a terrible way to live.”

  “Both human beings and vampires will do whatever it takes to stay alive. They share that much in common. However, it was easier for me because I had a companion who was my own kind. I am truly sorry you have to be alone, Marty.”

  Marty felt a lump in her throat but nodded. “I’ll do what you say. I’ll make sure my boyfriends leave me and go far away where they won’t ever be able to find me again.”

  “I’m happy to hear you say that.” He went to pull out some papers from a briefcase on top of the table. “I donate money to several hospitals in the area. I have the numbers of their administration offices listed here. I’m going to arrange for you to get blood from them, so you won’t have to steal anymore. They will be expecting your call next week.” He handed her the pamphlets of his hospitals.

  Marty knew he was trying to be nice and help her, but all she could do was frown. She was too dejected.

  “I know the blood from the donor banks in the hospitals isn’t too appetizing,” he admitted. “If you want, you could always find a man for a night and…”

  “I think I prefer the blood from the hospital to meaningless one-night stands with strangers.”

  He was silent for a moment, but she could tell their talk was not quite yet over. It was as if perhaps he had more to tell her, but was waging an internal debate whether he should say anything else. Then he gave a sigh and seemed to reach a decision.

  “There may still be a way for you to find your maker. That is, if you still want to, considering he has abandoned you all of these years.”

  A glimmer of interest flickered through her. “How?”

  “There is a large nest of old and very powerful vampires living in San Francisco. They hold an assembly once every summer. This year’s assembly will be held in a few weeks at a mansion on Nob Hill.”

  “Will they help me?”

  “Vampires, as a rule, are not very helpful, even to their own kind.” It seemed from his expression as if he didn’t like to talk about them. “A great many vampires from all over the world will be there, and there’s a good chance your maker will be one of them.”

  “Then I’ve got to go to San Francisco.” Marty became adamant. “I don’t care if my maker turns out to be the devil himself. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I just want to be able to look him in the eye and ask him why he has brought this curse upon me.”

  Peter took out a pen and wrote down an address and a date on one of the pamphlets of hospital information. He gave it to her but looked grim. The subject seemed to make him very uncomfortable.

  “Thank you, Peter.”

  “Be careful, Marty. There will be many ancie
nt vampires at this assembly on Nob Hill. These creatures have forgotten what it is like to be human, and their powers have grown beyond comprehension. They are dangerous.”

  “But they are my own kind. Since I have to let my men go now, those creatures are all I have in the world.”

  “Vampires are not social creatures, Marty. You will only be going there to find your past history, and not to make friends. You will be in grave danger every minute you spend inside that mansion.”

  “Even from my own kind?”

  “Vampires don’t only kill humans,” he told her sadly. “They often kill each other. You will be a stranger in that assembly and far from welcome. If things go wrong, your life will be forfeit.”

  “I don’t care if they kill me,” Marty told him. “I am going to San Francisco. I’m going to find the secrets in my past.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next two weeks were the hardest of her life. The men fought her on leaving. They came up with a million good reasons why they should stay, and she wanted to believe them all. However, she remained strong and knew she was doing it to save their lives from her bloodlust. In the end, she prevailed, and she was left alone again in the house.

  The following week, she turned in her resignation at the hospital. It was time to leave. She had worked there for five years, and if she stayed longer, people would start asking questions that she could not answer. She had a little money saved up, but in a few months would have to go out and look for a new hospital, one where no one would know her. Fortunately, the health-care profession was easy to find work in, and so she would be all right.

  Derrick and Aaron had returned to their road trip, Owen had returned to his life as an up-and-coming doctor at the hospital, and poor Barry had probably just returned to the streets. Marty lost touch with them all. Whenever they wrote to her, she tore up their letters unopened. She deleted their e-mails and text messages and would not answer or return any of their phone calls.

  She began taking blood from the hospital Peter had set her up with in the city. The blood tasted terrible but at least gave her the nutrients to stay healthy. Her lack of energy was caused by emotional depression and not from any physical ailment. She felt too drained of life to even give vent to her tears, and she developed insomnia. She stayed awake all night, and in the day, she laid awake under the floorboards, not able to get any sleep.

  Her full memory of her life as a human had returned to her, but she could still not remember any specific event that led to her being turned. She wondered if she had done something bad in her life and deserved to be punished as she was now. Every waking minute, she was haunted by thoughts of her four men. They had parted on bad terms. She had to arrange it like that to force them out. She had told them she did not care for them and could never love them. In order to get them to leave her, she’d had to lie to them.

  “I am a vampire,” she had told Derrick. “You are a human. If you stay, I will kill you the next time we have sex. Vampires don’t really love humans, they just drink them. Now get the fuck out of my home.”

  She had told each man a variation on the same theme, and they had reluctantly left. Her last good-bye had been said to Owen on her final night to work at the hospital. Since he was normally calm and dispassionate about life, he could understand her position better than the others.

  “Will you be okay?” he asked her.

  “I’ll survive,” she told him honestly. “What about you?”

  “I’ll have a hard time to stop thinking about you, Marty, and I’ll never forget you. If you ever need anything—and I mean anything at all—you have my number and know how to find me.”

  She gave him a last kiss. “Thank you, Owen. You were wonderful.”

  When she got back home from her final night at work, Derrick and Aaron were waiting for her outside. She had to threaten to call the police in order to get them to leave her alone. At last, Aaron was able to convince Derrick to turn around and not look back. Marty slammed the door behind them and was alone inside the house just as she had been before.

  She had not told any of them about the approaching meeting of the vampires in San Francisco because she knew they would have been worried about her and would have wanted to come with her, and that meeting was not going to be a welcome place for human beings. The men had already helped her enough. From that point on, she acknowledged she was on her own in her quest to find her maker.

  She stayed in touch with Peter over the course of those weeks, and he helped arrange the travel plans for her. When a vampire traveled, they had certain concerns, and Peter was an old pro at this and helped to smooth out everything. There was an after-dark flight from LAX to San Francisco, and she already had booked a seat. When she got to San Francisco, Peter told her where to go to seek protection from the sun. He owned an old apartment building that had a basement completely below ground. The basement was closed off, and no one had been down there in years. He gave her keys to it and told her to make herself at home as long as she wanted, even informing her that he had used the space himself when he had been a vampire, and he thought she would find it to her liking.

  Marty wondered if perhaps she should just move permanently to San Francisco. If it was a hub for vampires as Peter said it was, then she felt she belonged there. She asked a realtor to stop by her house after dark one night with the intention of putting it up for sale. She hated to make this decision, because she had been so happy in the house when she was growing up and then again just recently when she had shared her brief but wonderful time with the men. But that was all in the past now, and the happy memories would just haunt her if she stayed any longer.

  “This is a lovely old home,” the real estate woman said as she was touring around the place with her. “My mother used to live in the house just down the street when she was growing up and always said this neighborhood was her favorite area in the community.”

  Marty smiled because she knew the exact house the woman was talking about. “I think I knew your mother. She was Mary Jane Cormick, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, she was,” the woman looked rather odd.

  “We were friends a long time ago. She was a few years older than me.”

  Now the woman looked even stranger. “Dear, I think you have my mother confused with someone else. My mother is eighty years old.”

  Marty smiled. “How is Mary Jane?”

  “She’s living at a retirement home in Arizona with my father.”

  “That’s nice. I’m glad she had a good life.”

  Marty signed the contract to have the woman show the house while she was away in San Francisco. She had made the decision to get out and start her life—that is, her vampire life—over again. This old home felt too empty to live in any longer. She began packing up her things and tried to push the past out of her mind and concentrate on her uncertain future.

  Knowing the four men had made her strong, and now, even though she could never see any of them again, she was determined to carry on in the spirit they all would have wanted. She had been fighting her destiny for years, and she was going to keep fighting until she found the answers she was looking for.

  * * * *

  “Where to, ma’am?” the cab driver asked her as she climbed in the backseat. He had already helped her to load her luggage in the trunk, and she had just said good-bye to her old house.

  “I’m going to LAX.”

  “What time does your flight leave?”

  “Ten.” She settled in and watched the sights pass her by outside. The sun was setting earlier now, and she had plenty of time to spare.

  When she arrived at the airport, the skycap came out and took her bags to check them onto the flight to San Francisco. She checked her watch nervously and hurried through the terminal to get her boarding pass and find the departure gate. The terminal was not busy since it was almost nine in the evening, and she was able to easily make her way.

  As she was walking the concourse in search of her gate, she fe
lt the rough hand of a man on her shoulder, stopping her. She turned around to confront the rude stranger.

  “Surprise,” Barry said when she turned around to face him.

  She was truly surprised to see him again. Even though she wasn’t supposed to feel anything for him now, she could not help herself and had to smile, looking up into his face.

  “My God, Barry, what are you doing here at the airport?”

  “I sold my truck, and I just bought a ticket.”

  “You bought a ticket?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

  “San Francisco.”

  In spite of how she was supposed to feel, having him there at that moment meant more to her than she could have said. Back at the house, she’d had the strength to force him to leave her for his own protection, but out here at the airport all she wanted to do was throw her arms around his broad shoulders and give him a hug.

  “How did you know I was going to San Francisco?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Okay, you can hate me now,” he said but was also laughing. “I remembered your e-mail password, and you never changed it. The airline sent you a confirmation last week about this flight.” He held his face out sideways for her. “All right go ahead and slap me now.”

  “That’s probably exactly what I should do.” She reached out for him abruptly, and he flinched, thinking he was going to get a good one across his face. Instead, she pulled him down to her and gave him a kiss on the lips. “You know you’re crazy, don’t you?”

  “I know.” A smile had overtaken his gorgeous face.

  “You should have forgotten about me by now. You should be out trying to find a job and a new place to live. If I was a decent person, I would tell you to get on with your life and go out and find a nice girl who can have a future with you.”

  He gave her a hug. “But you’re not going to tell me that, are you, Marty.”

  “No,” she admitted. “Because I’m not a person at all. I’m a vampire, and right now I’m so happy to see you I think I could fly like one of those really old vampires.” She held onto him and didn’t want to let go. “You’ve really been keeping tabs on me all this time?”