The Possession

by Jennifer Armintrout

  The vampires sent to fix the door woke them. Cyrus held Mouse, who clung to him in mortal terror as the two creatures respectfully retrieved the broken door and carried it up the stairs. They apologized in advance for the noise they would make.

  Cyrus expected them to bow and scrape as they exited, such was their cautious demeanor. Angie had most likely put the fear of God—or, more aptly, the fear of Angie—into them.

  “They’re gone,” he whispered to Mouse when the vampires had trudged noisily up the stairs. “You don’t have to fear them.”

  It felt like a lie the moment he said it. Hadn’t he proved himself useless in protecting her?

  If she connected his words with his shameful failure before, she didn’t give it away. She let go of him by increments, easing into her space on the narrow bed. They lay in the quiet darkness for a while, listening to the low voices of the vampires working at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, a mechanical whirring or rhythmic pounding shattered the calm, but Cyrus was so tired he could have slept through it.

  He didn’t, though. Polite or not, he wasn’t stupid enough to trust the creatures. Not when they had such easy access to prey.

  Mouse apparently didn’t trust them, either. Though Cyrus had thought her asleep, her voice surprised him. “It’s still night?”

  “You haven’t been asleep long.” A nagging protectiveness in his head reminded him she should get her rest. But a selfish part of him was relieved she stayed awake. He liked talking with another person, something he hadn’t done enough of during his former life, and he feared the changes that were about to come.

  Oh, he’d probably be turned into a vampire. As much as he wanted to stay human, if his father demanded otherwise he could do little but object. The deed would still be done. But he would make certain that Mouse never met the fate his past wives had. She would never be a vampire, and therefore would never be food for his father’s insatiable craving for souls. That, he would not abide.

  “What were you like, when you were one of them?” The question was startlingly familiar.

  The memory brought hot shame to his face. “I told you.”

  “You didn’t answer. You tried to scare me. I’m not scared of you now.” As if to prove her words, she reached up to brush the hair from his eyes.

  He didn’t want to admit the truth, but he wouldn’t taint their new bond with lies. “I was trying to scare you. But I told you the truth. I’ve done…horrible things.”

  Her eyes, clear and honest, searched his face in the darkness. “Why would you do those things?”

  It wasn’t a question he’d bothered to ask himself. The first answer that came to mind, the one most likely to be true, was monstrous, but he had no other reason to give her. “Boredom?”

  The fear and disgust he expected never registered on her face. “You killed and tortured people because you were bored?”

  He made an affirmative noise in his throat. “And lonely.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Her frown evolved into a quirked smile. “Of course you’d be lonely, if you killed everyone around you.”

  “Not everyone. There were some I tried to keep.” He tightened his arms around her. “Now that I have you, I don’t remember why I wanted to keep them.”

  “I like that.” She laughed quietly and nestled her head against his chest. “You have me. It’s nice to belong to someone.”

  After a long silence, she looked up. “What were they like?”

  He didn’t want to talk about them now. It seemed wrong, somehow, as though he lived a double life. In a way, you have. It was a different life, but he couldn’t forget it. If he forgot his past transgressions, he might forget how to be the man he was now. And he liked that man.

  “I had a wife.” He chuckled at that understatement. “I had many wives. Ten, I think. After five, it becomes hard to remember. And then there were others, ones I didn’t marry.”

  “Did you love them?” There was an unspoken qualifier at the end of her question, punctuated by the quaver in her voice.

  “I didn’t love them more than you.” It was a frightening truth. He’d mourned them all, but he’d come to expect losing them.

  The workmen, apparently finished with their job, shut the door with a reassuring bang. Cyrus thought of locking it, but since it hadn’t kept out intruders before, he didn’t see the sense in leaving the comfort of the bed.

  “Did you make any vampires?” Mouse fidgeted as though embarrassed by asking.

  He was about to answer, “What would it matter?” Then he realized the reason for her interest, and he couldn’t believe his stupidity. Of course she wondered.

  “I would never make you become one of them.” He sat up, dragging her with him. He knew the tight grip he had on her arms must hurt her, but he couldn’t let her go. She had to understand his devotion was not dependent on his humanity. “Tell me you trust me.”

  “I trust you,” she said hesitantly. “You wouldn’t make me one of them.”

  “Tell me you love me.” It was suddenly vitally important to hear it from her, without explanation or dissection of their motives.

  “I love you.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I do.”

  They made love again, frantic at first, with fierce kisses as they tumbled violently across the bed. Once he was inside her, though, wrapped in the reassuring warmth of her body, the urgency melted away.

  Leaning above her on his elbows, he stared into her face. “Tell me again.”

  She wet her swollen lips and pressed them close to his ear. “I love you.”

  She repeated it over and over, and he let her.

  No one had ever said it to him before.

  Chapter 15

  The Key

  If not for Carrie’s extensive library of medical textbooks, Bella wouldn’t have survived an hour past sunrise.

  And that was saying something, considering how close Max had cut it to sunup. He’d skidded sideways to the curb in front of the apartment just as morning washed down the street in a deadly wave. He’d dragged her body from the passenger seat with little care and bolted to the shelter of the recessed doorway.

  Not soon enough, he thought ruefully, sponging antiseptic over his charred shoulder. His tissue had already begun to heal, and vampires were largely unaffected by germs or bacteria, but the cool liquid took some of the sting out of his burns.

  With a worried glance to the unconscious werewolf on the couch, he set aside the gauze pad and bottle of solution and reached for one of the open medical books on the coffee table. He’d managed to stop the bleeding from the wounds Nathan had given her, but werewolves healed more slowly than vampires, almost at a mortal rate. Some of her injuries would need stitching, a task he didn’t look forward to.

  At least she was asleep. It would spare him the inevitable womanly shrieking he’d endure if she was awake when he did it.

  If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit his real fear came from the thought she might see him pass out when he first tried to jab the needle through her flesh.

  Taking a swig from the flask of Scotch Nathan thought he’d hidden well, Max rose and approached Bella’s unmoving form.

  Asleep, she didn’t look half as bitchy as she did when she was awake. But that could have been the blood loss. “Okay, we got clean towels, we got this fishing line stuff, we got a…” He swallowed a tide of nausea. “We got a needle and these sterilizing wipes. I think we’re good to go.” He hadn’t been able to find the weird pincers thing the guy was using in the picture to hold the needle, but how hard could it be to just use fingers?

  Kneeling beside the couch, Max reached for her ankle. If she’d been conscious she probably would have driven a stake through his heart for daring to touch her. She was lucky she’d decided to get mortally injured when he was in a charitable mood.

  The leg of her leather pants lay open to her knee in much the same pattern her flesh did. He grabbed the bottle of Bactine and squirted it liberally int
o the jagged wound.

  “Kill off anything that decided to move in,” he said, then felt like an ass for bothering to explain himself to a half-dead werewolf.

  He flipped the curling edges of the fabric back for better access to the injury, then decided the pants would just have to go. Then he felt like a pervert.

  First, he tried to be civil about the process, patiently but impotently struggling against the leather with kitchen shears. When it seemed he was more likely to slip and stab himself or her than actually cut the pants, he gripped the ruined fabric and yanked, splitting them to the waist. With another tug, her leg was bare from hip to toes.

  God help him, she wore black lace panties.

  He took another swallow of Scotch to fortify himself and hopefully burn the devil out of his sinful soul. There she was, practically dead and not even his own species, and all he could think about was the way her tan skin stretched over her smoothly rounded hip.

  Clenching his teeth, he pulled her uninjured leg free and tossed the ruined garment aside. Bracing her foot against his chest, he peered at the book. No matter how many times he studied the illustrations, he would never be ready. So he ripped the sterile packaging off the needle and threaded it with nylon floss, took a deep breath and went to work.

  His stitches started out clumsy and uneven, but he soon fell into a rhythm of pinching the flesh closed, piercing the edges and pulling the thread taut. Once wet with blood and the sweat from his hands, the needle slipped from his fingers often—the reason for the pincers in the illustrations became painfully clear—but as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t doing a bad job of things. He became so absorbed in his task, a plane could have crashed into the living room and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Not bad.”

  He jumped at the sound of her voice, and she hissed as the needle scraped torn flesh.

  “Don’t startle me!” He wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand and glared up at her, but he couldn’t maintain his anger when he saw the state she was in.

  Her usually golden skin was ashen, and sweat beaded on her forehead. Her mouth clamped in a grim line and she held her body rigidly still.

  “I thought you might like some positive feedback.” Her voice rasped as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of gravel, but she gave him a tight smile with pale lips.

  “You don’t look so good.” He concentrated again on the task at hand, trying and failing to ignore her stifled cries of pain as the steel passed through her skin.

  Through uneven breaths, she gasped, “You can thank your sainted friend for that.”

  “Because you’re injured, I’ll let that slide. Along with the fact you tried to kill me earlier this evening.” He jerked the thread a bit less gently than necessary to punctuate his statement, and watched from the corner of his eye as she gripped the couch until her knuckles went white. “You lost a lot of blood. When I’m done here, I’ll get you set up on a transfusion.”

  “You know how to do that?” she asked, surprise apparent in her strange, lilting voice.

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m a vampire. We’re experts in getting blood into people.”

  “I know you knew about getting it out of people.” She rubbed her neck, looking vaguely shocked to find it bandaged. “But he only bit me once.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like the taste of dog.” Max pushed the needle through her flesh again and winced at the pained sound she made in reply.

  “You are making it hurt more on purpose,” she accused. If she hadn’t sounded so helpless, he would have shown her what it would feel like if he intentionally hurt her.

  Instead, he handed her the Scotch. “Do you need a break?”

  She tilted her head back to drain the flask. After she wiped her lips, she adopted a determined expression. “Get it over with.”

  To distract himself from the few yelps she couldn’t hold in, and to distract her from the pain as much as he could, he asked questions. “So, how did this happen?”

  “I took your girlfriend’s tip and checked the cemeteries.” Bella clenched the back of the sofa as though she was going to climb away from him.

  “Relax. It’ll be harder to finish this if I have to chase you around the apartment to do it.” He took a deep breath and rolled his head to ease the stiffness in his neck. “And Dahlia is not my girlfriend.”

  “Well, it was a good tip.” Belle grimaced ruefully. “In theory. I thought I had him. He seemed lucid, until I realized he was not talking to me, but to a person who was not there.”

  “He was talking?” That twisted Max’s guts. If Nathan had simply gone insane, there was no help for him. Only one facility existed to deal with vampires who went south of reason, and the Movement probably wasn’t going to welcome a marked vampire in.

  She nodded, blowing out a shaky breath. “For a while. Then he completely changed.”

  “Into a vampire?” Max tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, coupling the motion with a flash of his feeding face.

  Her eyes flared, a spark of anger lighting her pupils. “Do not do that. And no, he was still human looking.”

  Max looked doubtfully at her shredded leg. “He did this to you in regular Nathan form?”

  “He managed to do the leg with the bolt I fired into him.” She shrugged. “It was not my night for aiming.”

  “Should have quit while you were ahead.” The wound was nearly closed. All that remained was to tie off the floss. “Still don’t believe he’s possessed?”

  It took her a moment to answer. “I do not like to concede that I was incorrect—”

  “Flat-out wrong.”

  She pursed her lips. “Incorrect. But yes, I do believe you. When he attacked me, he was not in control of himself.”

  Max carefully lowered her leg to the couch. “From where I stand, I think you have two options here.”

  “I cannot wait to hear them.” She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.

  The defiance on her sweat-streaked, pale face brought a crooked grin to Max’s lips. If she was well enough to be a pain in the ass, she might not be in such bad shape, after all. “The first one is you can either hook up with me and help figure out what’s going on with Nathan—”

  “And be renounced by the Movement.”

  He resisted the urge to growl at her; it might be considered foreplay to her kind. “God forbid that happen. I mean, they’re only going to kill me. What will they do to you, fire you?”

  “Point taken.” She narrowed her eyes. “Continue.”

  “Or you can stay here until I can get the situation under control. It’s up to you.” He rose and stretched, giving his gently phrased threat a moment to sink in.

  It didn’t have the effect he’d hoped for, though in hindsight it had been stupid of him to think she would bend easily.

  “Do you think you can keep me here against my will?” She glared at him. “You have to sleep sometime.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the handcuffs he’d tucked there. He’d found them in Nathan’s closet while looking for the first aid kit, and while he didn’t want to speculate on why they’d been there in the first place, he was glad to have found them. Her eyes widened as he dangled the shining restraints from his forefinger. “I’ll even let you pick where I lock you up, baby.”

  “I will tear you apart,” she threatened, the last of her words turning into a growl as they escaped her throat.

  “Bad dog,” he admonished, twirling the cuffs around his finger. “You’re not doing anything of the sort. At least, not in the state you’re in.”

  He’d expected, hell, even looked forward to, the venom she should have spewed at him, but she only closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with a weary sigh. “You are right. I cannot fight you. Yet.”

  “So, I take it we’re going with option number two?” He sighed. “Remember, it was your choice.”

  “And remember, there is still one night of the full moon. I mig
ht forget the code of my people, just this once.” Her tone was pure hatred poured into words.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, honey. Max Harrison is not going out as dog food.”

  If looks could kill, the one she gave him would have been a wooden stake. “I would not eat you. Your flesh would taste like carrion.”

  “You wound, lady,” he mocked, laying his hand over his heart.

  She held her wrists out resolutely. “Close to the toilet, please.”

  Max returned the cuffs to his pocket and went to examine the shelves on the far side of the room. “I won’t lock you up until I’m ready for some shut-eye.”

  “What are you going to do in the meantime?” She didn’t seem all that interested. In fact, it sounded as if she was trying to pick a fight.

  Max wouldn’t give her one. “I’m going to start going through Nathan’s books, and try to figure out what’s happening with him. And if the possession has anything to do with what the Soul Eater has going on.”

  “The Soul Eater?” She spoke his name with the requisite awe all Movement assassins who hadn’t tangled with the man himself displayed. “Does your friend have ties to the Soul Eater?”

  Max pushed back a book on medicinal herbs. “Uh, yeah. Nathan is his fledgling. Don’t you guys do research over there anymore?”

  “I do not question. They gave me a kill order and the instructions to complete it immediately.” She at least sounded a little ashamed at having missed that particular detail.

  “Well, if you’d bothered to ask me, rather than shoot on sight, I could have filled you in. The Soul Eater is trying to become a god, and we’re thinking that has something to do with the fact that his son has just returned from the dead and his fledgling has gone schizo.” Max waited a minute for his words to sink in before adding, “Now don’t you feel foolish for trying to kill me?”

  “Does the Movement know what is happening?”

  “Not that I know of. They had us on the plane before we could figure it out ourselves. The Oracle told Carrie.” Another book on herbs. Either Nathan was a total pothead or he really put a lot of faith into the whole New Age thing.