SURVIVAL

by Karen Payton Holt

  Connor kept his eyes fixed on a point over the mantelpiece. Every time Julian spoke, he came to a stop there. It was easier than trying to track his pinball machine circuit of the room.

  Julian recognized Annabelle the moment Connor reminded him. “The fact that Serge also knows Annabelle just makes this sanctuary idea dangerous and reckless. After all the work we have put in? For Lord’s sake, Connor, the dust in the new eco-shelter tunnels has barely settled.” Julian said the words, even though, staring at Connor’s set expression, he knew it was no good.

  “She needs help. Yes, she was part of Serge’s game in court.” Connor’s eyes glinted with steely resolve. “If we don’t help her and give her a chance at freedom, then we are no better than him.”

  “Very well. Go,” said Julian, “talk to Rebekah. If you can persuade her…” He snorted.

  When he reached the door, Connor turned around. “It’s been weeks now. I’m beginning to think we were right the first time. The vampire was nothing to do with the attack. He was just traveling through and Rebekah’s scent in the woods drew him in. It was a lure, after all. We just caught one more victim than we expected.”

  Julian summoned a smile. “It’s certainly looking that way.”

  “It explains why Serge is riding me so hard. He stinks of frustration.” Connor smiled tightly. “With all his guardsmen lying dead, it fits.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open. Serge is not that good of an actor. If he knows anything, he will gloat.” Julian threw Connor a jaundiced glance. “As for this girl, you better get going, talk to Rebekah, and get yourself back here.”

  Connor nodded sharply and burst into movement.

  As the breeze of his departure whisked the papers on his desk, Julian resigned himself to a long night. The only good thing to come out of this was that he had no difficulty resisting Annabelle’s aroma. It was sweet, and, clearly, his taste was more spice. Leizle-flavored, in fact. So, having a human girl thrown at him did not always result in obsession. That’s good, isn’t it?

  With a human-like sigh, he entered the sitting room and turned to look into the girl’s face. Her hair was blond underneath the grease, and a circle of azure blue in her eyes stopped the black pools of dread flooding her gaze.

  I doubt Connor will be rushing back from his talk with Rebekah. It’s going to be a long night. Making the best of it, Julian offered water, and, since his newfound association with humans called for him to expect the unexpected, he offered tinned peaches.

  “Vampires don’t cook, I’m afraid,” he said. “Sit down, Annabelle. Doctor Connor will be gone quite a while.”

  “I’m fine.” However, her trembling legs said otherwise.

  “Please, sit down, you look tired.”

  The rhythmic sound of panicked breathing rushing in and out of her lungs caught his attention and held it. After nearly two-hundred years of indulging in the real thing, like an alcoholic with fifteen years on the wagon under his belt, he was not immune to temptation. Resisting the pull of the adrenalin-scented pulse throbbing in her throat clutched at his tendons, stiffening his movement.

  “I’m going to my study for a moment, but please, relax. Sit.” He smiled as best he could, and then, he was gone.

  Inside the book-lined room, this time, he locked himself in. Resentment rumbled a growl inside his throat. “Rap-sleep,” Julian muttered, giving himself an order.

  Usually, he had the freedom of the lone wolf, but today, he felt more like the wolf tucked up in grandmother’s bed waiting for Red Riding Hood to cross his path. Damn Connor. His ordered existence was shot to hell. I can’t even schedule my sleep cycles anymore; why the hell can’t he clean up his own mess?

  Rap-sleep. He could resist Annabelle, but the tension burning in his tendons told him that could change if he didn’t rehydrate the brain center where desire and anger vied for release. I’m irritated with Connor, so anger would most likely win, but that girl would survive neither one.

  He took three vials of blood from his pocket, only two of which were human, although, as principal of the vampire council, his allocation was twice that. He shared Connor’s distaste for it, now, although they had never spoken about it. The intensity of his feelings blindsided him when he admitted why he felt that way. Leizle. I wish I didn’t know where she was now. Resisting my own Red Riding Hood would be so much easier if I had no clue where grandmother lived.

  Julian heaved a silent sigh, enjoying the feeling of air expanding his intercostals and easing the pressure inside. He closed his eyes as if taking unpleasant medicine, and downed each vial of blood in quick succession.

  Lying out on a couch, he prepared for the rush of sensation. Pain was part of being a vampire – an inevitable side-effect of the compulsion to feed – but he did not have to let it control him. Julian’s muscles locked down, primed, but not allowed to release the energy as propulsion and to act out his dreams.

  What he hadn’t expected when his eyes closed was that Leizle would be the dream he had to resist. Her grubby and dirt-streaked face, as he had seen it countless times over the last two weeks, appeared like a siren call. As the old eco-town was being de-constructed, he felt compelled to seek her out, watching over her without her knowing it.

  He was there to supervize the dismantling of the eco-town pipework. Securing tarpaulin fabric around each numbered and tagged bundle was a four-man job which he could do alone, with an arm tied behind his back. And that was how he felt most of the time. He was tying ropes into knots and yanking on them until they were tight. He didn’t expect to feel like ropes had wrapped around his heart, bitten in, and bound him to her.

  He grinned in his sleep. He could have performed every task at the eco-shelter unaided, but Connor and he left some jobs for human hands, to occupy them. Like therapy offered in a mental ward, taking everything away would have left them bouncing off the walls. Funny, how I always ended up helping out on her shift.

  “But no good can come of it,” he whispered.

  The contorted muscles of his rigid face showed anguish as hydration forced burning tendrils into his capillaries. A red-hot migraine washed through his cerebral cortex, hunting out the rap-sleep center inside his brain, and as the pressure increased, his dreams of Leizle pulled him through it. In his mind, wish fulfilment raged as she ran her hands down his torso and plucked at his pants. His body flushed as her warm fingers closed around him.

  When his eyes opened, he clung to the waves of pleasure, and, as they ebbed, he groaned. Dragging his palm down over his face, he swung around and sat up. The physical discomfort, before he mentally washed his body in a cold shower of common sense, made him grin.

  “Damn it, she’s only seventeen,” Julian muttered decisively. No good can come of it.

  As a young man in Georgian England, he had been disgusted by Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and had lobbied in opposition. He could remember his satisfaction when, in 1807, he stood on the dock, knowing that the slave ship he watched setting sail from Liverpool was the last. I valued freedom then, but I lost sight of it. Human farming was merely another form of slavery but, two-hundred years on, his humanity had dulled to a faint echo.

  “Until Leizle.” She has made me ask questions again.

  But one thing he did know. I will not take away freedom she has yet to discover. He could not talk about love and feelings. He did not even kiss his mortal wife until they were already married. So I’ll leave her be, to become a mother, a wife, and be all she should be, without my hand chilling her bones. Every element of human and vampire existence was in turmoil. Like the sides of a tossed coin, who knows who will end up on top?

  In the sitting room, on the other side of the hallway, when she realized Julian really was gone, Emily sank back into the cushions. Alone for the first moment in the longest time, she, too, was fighting demons. She feared that Connor may not return, and that his woman would talk him out of the rescue plan. Whoever she is. Serge made it clear that there is someone. Her mission could
be over before it begun.

  If I fail, I won’t be allowed to return to the farm. Serge’s protégé, the general, was a vampire with deceptively soft features, wavy black hair and a psychotic air. He planned to follow the scent trail of her primed, unwashed body. Leaving nothing to chance, they also expected her to lay a physical trail en route to the human nest. Emily’s gut told her that the general’s idea of retribution would be far worse than Jonathan’s anger.

  The general’s face when his muzzle rubbed over her skin, the snake-like flicker of his tongue collecting her taste, and his bruising grip as he stared into her terror-stretched eyes, were all burned into her consciousness. Blinking would have meant losing sight of him for a moment, and she finally understood the frozen terror of prey, petrified, and not knowing from where the strike would come. Fear agreed with her on this. His clutches would tear me apart.

  <><><>

  The square mile known as the City of London, north of the River Thames, was the heart of the hive, and few vampires, because of their daily trips to the blood dispensary, gave a thought to settling on the south bank.

  Vampire traffic extended from the west, where the human farm was situated, to the London docklands in the east, where vast warehouses stored the food shipped in from other hives as part of a bartering system. The super-tanker nomads were pallid brethren looked down upon by terrestrial vampire communities, but, as a vital link between Europe and Britain, their contribution to the dietary variety of the humans was invaluable.

  Their presence on the streets always caused a ripple of discomfort as they headed into London to visit the hospital and collect the dues for their bounty in human blood quotas. On his way to see Rebekah, Connor noticed the thirty-strong crew skirting Hyde Park. He was grateful for the disruption to the clear thinking of the hive members who watched them closely, as though the nomads carried a disease they were frightened of catching.

  He made a quick diversion across the park and hit the sidewalk running.

  His head ruled his heart as he zigzagged back and forth across the river, covering his tracks and keeping his ears and eyes open as he covered the miles which would eventually take him to the suburb of Clapham.

  Connor finally crossed Vauxhall Bridge and hurtled along the streets until he stood in darkness on the sidewalk outside the safe house, savoring the moment when he would see her face. She was so close he could almost taste her. He flexed his ribcage to take in a deep draft of air. Annabelle, Julian, and the past hours, were overwritten in one entrancing beat of the heart he loved. He closed his eyes and filled his senses with Rebekah.

  He smiled as her slow breathing and even pulse told him she was sleeping, as he knew she would be. He contemplated waiting for her to wake, but he could not do that. Before he had time to decide, her peach flushed complexion filled his thoughts and galvanized him into action.

  Gliding up the wide stone steps and closing his hand on the outsized Victorian doorknob, he entered with effortless stealth. The thick strip of pale carpet glowed like a guiding path running the length of the hallway, and the mirrors caught a fleeting glimmer of his ethereal presence when he whisked along it. Bypassing the sparsely furnished kitchen, he arrived in the reception room at the rear of the house where solid oak floorboards were too hefty to creak. And they provide another barrier for sounds and odors. Connor lifted an appreciative brow as he took in the row of thick moccasin slippers. It was reassuring to see complacency had not crept in. Greg drilled it into them all, silence at all costs.

  Apart from the motorcycles, that is. Thanks to Connor, the group knew when it was safest to travel. Vampire dawn came before the real dawn, and after they had finished working overnight, planting and harvesting crops to feed their human cattle. It was the moment when night was ending, and the sky was rose-tinted with promise, but early morning mist diffused the sun’s rays and made it safe for vampires to enjoy the muted colors of the daylit world without care.

  That was also when a few vampires drove cars, slowly, reacquainting themselves with the wonder of what was once considered efficient transportation. They drove cars down memory lane at twenty miles an hour, just for the fun of it.

  However, motorcycles they rode at hair-raising speeds, pushing themselves to a limit which they could never reach. Their heightened senses were merely stirred to amusement, assured, that if they collided with a tree – not that their preternatural senses would ever allow that to happen – it would be the tree that disintegrated. They would walk away from the gnarled wreckage unscathed. It was also when the humans, with care and imagination, could slip through the net.

  He instinctively razed his glance across the grubby window panes facing out over the potholed unkempt lawns, and satisfied himself that Rebekah’s motorcycle was hidden from view inside the overgrown summer house at the bottom of the garden.

  Connor crossed to the square hatchway cut into the floor, and moments later, he was inside the basement.

  Looking down at her sleeping form, he anticipated drowning in the warm pools of her eyes, willing the delicate lids to open and reveal her inner thoughts to his hungry gaze. I’ll immerse myself in her joy before I tell her about Annabelle. Selfish, but I want her heart to sing before I have to weigh it down with my words.

  Where Rebekah laid out on one of the beds with the basement hatch closed, only the moonlight filtering through the grimy glass in the sidewalk-level window saved it from pitch black. London had a different rhythm to the eco-shelter, passing an evening reading and talking here was out of the question, once darkness fell there was only sleep or... making love. A half-smile tugged at Connor’s lips at the thought.

  He sat on the wooden bench and rested back against the wall, tracing his fingertips absently over the fist-sized ‘missing lump’, the puzzle piece of which he had gouged out and ground to dust in his palm the night he first met her.

  Was it only weeks ago? And yet, the last twelve decades were a gray landscape of experience compared to the technicolor world in which he now existed. He watched her chest rise and fall, and timed his own pretend breathing to hers. Panting helped diffuse the insanity clamoring inside him, and in the battle of thinking and feeling, thinking gave up the fight. Love. Strange that he recognized it, because he never got to experience it during his twenty-four mortal years; Lavinia was an unfulfilled hope which had remained locked inside him – a beacon of his own humanity that he had loved her enough to leave her. But now? I have it for an eternity if I want it, if Rebekah wants it.

  He had embraced the relaxed state of revival sleep when still outside on the sidewalk. He had downed his daily dose of human blood, although his nose wrinkled in distaste that it came from a captive human, and at the taste. Until Rebekah, he had never tasted blood which saturated him in desire. A vial of blood was like water to her mulled wine. But, I have fed, and I’ll be able to resist biting a little easier.

  He gauged his control. The searing pain swelling his tissue and wrenching his stomach when he drew in her honey-thick scent were only terrible today. His fingers ached to touch her and his body sang in anticipation, so at last, he slipped into her bed and pulled her back into his chest. As she sighed, he sucked the candied breath in and locked it inside like a smoker taking a hit.

  “You’re cold,” she mumbled. Reaching back to run her fingers through the silken mass of his hair, she smiled sleepily. “I knew you’d come.

  “Well to be fair...” He kissed her shoulder and ran his chilled palm over her stomach. “You’re toasty warm.” He chuckled. Any guilt he felt at covering her in goose bumps was chased away by the moist pool he found when his fingertips dipped between her thighs. “I could get some friction going if it would help,” he murmured against her neck, and smiled when she turned and lifted her face for his kiss.

  Closing his lips over her soft mouth, citrus scented venom flooded his throat and he growled. Sinking deeper into revival sleep, he moved his palms over her contours, stroking her thigh and savoring her enveloping warmth as he eas
ed himself inside.

  “Or maybe I’ll just steal a bit of your heat,” he said as his body thickened to fill her, driving the air from her lungs on a sigh as he moved. If his life had depended upon him coming up with a sentence which made any sense at that moment, he would gladly have died.

  <><><>

  Rebekah sat cross legged on the low trestle bed, facing Connor. The trailing hem of her silk shirt covered her modesty, but the ivory skin of her slender, naked thighs were almost Connor’s undoing. The shaft of light from the high level window slanted across her face, casting dark crescents over her cheekbones as she studied the crackers which she demolished with gusto. Her blond feathered hair was a burnished halo, and Connor gathered every image and stored it inside his mind as adoration.

  He was deliciously distracted by the way she licked butter from her thumb. Her warm brown glances were laced with satisfaction he had put there, and his regret that he could not be with her in their final moment was transitory. I still feel her pleasure resonate through the fibers of my body.

  Shaking his head to clear it, reluctant to let the real world in, Connor finally drew in the breath he needed to speak of Annabelle. “Rebekah.” He waited for her to look at him. He knew she was replaying their time together, in part, because it flooded his own mind every time he caught sight of a new bruise, and because her erratic heartbeat swelled whenever she smiled.

  “I found a girl. She needs somewhere to hide.” Leaning forward, he captured Rebekah’s free hand and folded her fingers into his. “She needs your help.”

  “Found her?” A frown tugged at her delicately arched brows. “Where could you have found her... did you find her?” she said quietly. Withdrawing from him, her lashes veiled her eyes and her fingers stiffened until he let them slip from his grasp.