I rained kisses on his cold face, my lips tracing his strong jaw, his eyelids, his forehead. He kissed me back, finding my lips with his, and I could feel his hunger for me. His kiss was fierce, almost savage, as if he was a starving man at a feast, but I gloried in it. He nipped at my lower lip, then moved his mouth across my right cheek and in to my hair, his breath soft in my ear.
We held on to each other for a moment, my heart racing in my chest, my breath short. The absence of a heartbeat in his chest didn’t bother me in the least now. I could feel the comforting movement of his chest as he dragged in air and that was enough for me. I was not going to let him go, no matter what he said to me.
He must have heard that, because his arms loosened and I slid slowly down the length of him, his desire for me evident. With a siren’s smile I looked into his eyes, and he grinned ruefully as he cupped my bandaged left cheek with infinite tenderness.
“I never said I didn’t want you. I can’t fight you anymore, Anna, I don’t have the strength, but now is not the time to play.” He dropped a light kiss on my nose and stepped away from me, leaving me feeling strangely bereft.
“I’m not leaving you, I just need a little space right now. You wear your emotions on your sleeve like a neon sign.” He moved to one of the sofas and sat down, stretching his longs legs out and lacing his hands behind his head. He watched me sit down across from him, his eyes following my every movement.
“You watch me like I’m prey.” I said, because there was such hunger in his eyes.
“I’m a predator.” He said simply, with a slight shrug of his broad shoulders. I worked that over in my mind, but then I recalled something that Harley had said to me on Saturday, and his words didn’t bother me so much.
“You’re still trying to scare me. I was told you’re non-practicing.”
He gave a bark of laughter, shaking his head.
“I guess you could say that. If you’re referring to the fact that I don’t feed on humans, then you’re correct. I haven’t done that in almost 200 years.”
“How old are you?” I asked. I was incredibly curious about him, and I wanted to ask a million questions. This wasn’t usual first date stuff though, like what are your parents like and do you have any siblings. His eyes drilled into me, and I knew he was trying to read my thoughts, but I was throwing up my wall. A look of frustration crossed his features, and he sighed.
“Do you really want to know? It might shock you. I’m not a romantic hero on the silver screen, Anna. I’m real, I need blood to live, I can’t be out in bright daylight, my eyes,” he gestured nonchalantly at them, “my eyes give me away as something not human.”
“I prefer your natural eyes over those contacts, and I need blood too, or else my brain stops working and I die.” I replied, deliberately twisting his meaning.
“I need to drink blood, Anna, do not trivialize it.” He stood abruptly, pacing about the room, moving slowly, gracefully. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, a frown on his smooth forehead. I watched him pace, knew that he was fighting a battle within himself, but I didn’t know what he was fighting with.
“I’m one hundred seventy-four years old, or rather two hundred and seven if you take into consideration the fact that I was thirty-three when I was turned.”
I did the math quickly in my head. He was born in 1800. Wow.
He stood with his back to me, so I couldn’t read his expression, and his mind was closed to me. I couldn’t read Harley’s mind, let alone his. His shoulders were slumped, his head hanging down, his very bearing that of a man defeated, but I had no idea what he could be defeated by.
I must have let my guard down because he heard that thought.
“I’m defeated by you. I’m two hundred years old, have lived in solitary like a man in Coventry for so long now, and then I see you one day, walking into my office, resume in hand, and you’ve haunted me ever since. You’re in my dreams when I sleep; the smell of you surrounds me every waking hour.”
He spoke softly, his words touching every part of me.
“I tried for the most part to keep away from you, knowing it was wrong. You’re human, you deserve someone like you, who can grow old with you and give you children. You don’t deserve my kind of love.”
He turned to look back at me, and I was amazed to see his real eyes looking back at me. My amazement must have showed, because he grinned at me, the seriousness of his words temporarily put to the side.
“I have my case with me, and if you like my eyes so much, who am I to deprive you of seeing them?”
“I didn’t see you take them off.”
“I can move very fast, remember?”
I stood and walked toward him, the grin slowly fading from his face as I drew closer. When I was standing in front of him, so close that I had to crane my neck to look up at him, he brought his hands up and framed my face with them, his long fingers sliding into the hair at my temples. I let myself get lost in his eyes, the white-blue warm instead of frosty, black lashes ridiculously long for a man.
“I deserve every ounce of love that you can give me. I don’t know what private hell you’ve lived in all these years, lonely years from the sound, but you deserve a little happiness, Gareth.”
“I love the sound of my name on your lips, especially when it’s not said with frustration.” he said, tenderly placing a kiss on my forehead, his lips lingering there in a caress. I closed my eyes and leaned into him, placing my hands on his hips.
“It’s like a benediction to what soul I have left. Say it again.”
Wow, these nineteenth century men knew what to say.
“Gareth.” I whispered it, putting in the sigh of contentment that I experienced from being in his arms, his fingers massaging my scalp, his mouth tasting my skin, breathing in my scent. We stayed like that for what seemed forever, my head resting on his chest, his cheek resting on the top of my head.
“Please don’t leave me. I couldn’t take it, now that I just found you.” I begged, tightening my grip on him. He sighed, his chest moving with the force of it, and he gently set me away from him. Holding me at arm’s length he looked at me, his eyes serious.
“I won’t leave you, Anna, I promise. You’re everything that I want, everything that I could ever hope to have in this damned life of mine. You’re the reason I’m going to fight harder than I’ve ever fought before.”
I frowned, not sure what he was talking about, but somehow I knew it had something to do with the break-in at the lab, and the break-in at my house. I started to ask him, but he placed a finger on my lips.
“We’re both in danger though Anna, and that’s why I came looking for you. When it was just me, I could keep him away, but he knows about you now, and he knows how to find you. If anything else happened to you, I couldn’t bear it.”
“The other vampire?” I asked calmly and he nodded, a grim look in his eyes.
“I assume your friends told you about him?’
“Yes, Harley told me the first day I met her that it wasn’t just you that had been watching me in the beginning.” I moved back to a sofa, suddenly weary. He sat beside me, on the edge of the cushion, taking one of my hands in his, as if he couldn’t let me go.
“This is a lot for you to take in, I understand, but you said this was what you wanted. I’m committed; there is no going back for me.” His voice was gentle, but there was a hint of steel in it. I smiled, rubbing a hand over my eyes.
“You couldn’t get rid of me now if you tried. It just is a lot for me to take in. In the span of less than two weeks, I’ve found the love of my life, who’s a vampire, two new friends who turn out to be witches, and a stalker that also happens to be a vampire. On top of that, I have been shot at and my house broken into, oh and apparently I’m a sensitive, or a medium, or whatever. I’m dealing with a lot of shit here.”
He muffled a laugh, and I could see my words pleased him.
“Love of your life, hmm?” he asked, bringing my hand up to place a ki
ss on the palm. I squirmed a little; I was never good at this part, and how do you tell someone that you’ve known only a short time that they’re the love of your life?
“Well, anyway, tell me the full story. What do the lab and my work have to do with the danger we’re in. What is so important that someone would kill for it? I know it’s something more than professional gain. Who is this guy?”
He saw my squirm and could probably feel my awkwardness, so he humored me and changed the subject.
“He’s a very powerful vampire, one who’s most likely the oldest in the United States. He doesn’t like what I’m doing at my laboratories; he thinks I’m trying to find a cure for vampirism.”
“And are you?” The concept intrigued me, but I couldn’t fathom how you would cure something like that. Then again, I didn’t know anything about it, other than what I had seen in movies and read in books. To the best of my knowledge, no human knew what made a vampire a vampire.
He took a bit to answer the question. I took the moment to study him, the strong back, graceful curve of spine, strong arms, large hands that held mine gently, as though he could break me, and I guessed he could; he was probably preternaturally strong. He was in profile to me, so I studied his face, the broad forehead, the long, straight nose, strong chin. It was a face that I had come to love so quickly, and one that I would never forget.
“I have looked for a cure or a reversal process for many years now, not just in this century but the last also, hiding it under the guise of XP research. I wasn’t given the choice to take this life,” he spat the word out as though it was poison on his tongue, “and I have lived with it for too long. And I think we’re close, I think that’s why Padraigan was keeping tabs and how he knew when the time was right to get into the lab. I think that he’s been watching you, but I don’t know why he was watching you. How did he know what you were working on and I didn’t?” His voice trailed off softly, his eyes far away.”
“But why me? Why would he know to keep tabs on me? I’m a low man on the totem pole. He needs to shift his attention to Richard, he’s the team leader.” That was horrible of me, I know, but I didn’t want some ancient asshole following me around.
“I think that he was keeping tabs on you because he knows it would get to me. I don’t know how he found you so fast; for the first six months you were there I was able to shield you from him by staying away from you and showing no interest. The minute I do, it’s almost as if he has someone inside the lab that knew I had taken an interest.” He leaned back against the cushion next to me, our shoulders almost touching. I leaned my head on his shoulder, half turned into him. He was cold, but it didn’t bother me. For all my thinness, I was a furnace. It was odd to be close to someone who didn’t generate heat, and my mind started to wonder, incredibly, to how it would be when we did make love.
“Trust me, you won’t be cold then.” He laughed, shrugging the shoulder my head rested on.
“I really need to keep practicing throwing up my wall. Ok, my thoughts did get a little away from me.”
He slid his gaze to mine, a grin playing about his mouth.
“When did you know he was the one doing this?” I asked, turning the matter back to the subject at hand and away from my embarrassing thoughts.
“I knew for sure when I saw the calling card left on your desk.”
“I knew you recognized it. I could see it plainly on your face.” I admonished gently.
His grin faded and his face grew serious.
“I couldn’t tell you, and I certainly couldn’t tell the police. How could I explain to them that a vampire was behind all this?”
“Why hasn’t he tried to gain access to the research before now? Especially if he did have someone in the lab keeping tabs on things? If he’s taken such a sudden interest in the lab, it must be that he thinks we’re getting closer to a breakthrough.” I was getting excited at just the thought. What if we were close to a breakthrough? What if I was closer to an answer than I thought? What if Gareth’s secret division was closer than he thought? When you’re lost in the work, sometimes you couldn’t see the forest for the trees until you were smacked in the face by the enormity of it. That would be fantastic, and unprecedented.
“We’ve had successes before and it never bothered him, mostly because they were just topicals and they are still a long way from being brought forward for approval, but I think that we might be drawing close. In addition, he knows how I feel about you, so he probably thinks that he could use you as a pawn.”
For a moment the whole whirlwind of our relationship was put aside. Topicals?
“What topicals have been developed?”
I didn’t know of anything that had come through for approval to the FDA, and usually if a discovery was made, it was not something that was kept under wraps in the lab. Plain old celebration was usually enough to spread the word in the confines of the lab. The preparation to get them ready for human trials was like building a city; there were so many details that had to be attended, every “i” to be dotted, every “t” to be crossed.
He reached into his pocket and brought out his case for his contacts.
“These are not just to hide the true color of my eyes. They have UV protection engineered into them, and they cover my entire eye, not just the iris. Most of the myths surrounding my kind are just that; myths. But some things are true and one is our aversion to sun. I can be out in the day on heavily overcast days, and of course when it rains, but sometimes the weather is such an unpredictable thing, and the sun can catch you unawares no matter how hard you try not to let it. So I wear these and we developed a new sunscreen just before you came to work at the lab, but of course, it’s in its infancy, and I’m the guinea pig.”
“That’s dangerous.” I hated the thought of him putting his life in danger, but he gave me a sideways glance that held laughter.
“One of the other true myths is our regenerative powers. I heal very fast, so any damage that an untested sunscreen might do to a human barely registers on me.”
“I wasn’t talking about what that might do to you, but what the sun would’ve done if it had failed.”
He turned to face me, and grinned. It was dazzling in that spectacular face and the sight of it made my mind and everything in it a blank slate. He reached out and touched my cheek, his fingertips skating along my jaw.
“It’s nice to have someone worry about me after all these years. It’s a little odd.”
His voice was like warm honey, smooth like scotch.
“Where are you from? I mean, originally. You have a Scottish accent.” I asked, leaning my cheek in to his hand. I loved the cool, smooth feel of his palm and despite what you would think; it didn’t make me feel cold at all.
He turned away again and nodded, as though answering a question. Did that mean he was Scottish?
“I am Scottish, didn’t just my name tell you that?”
“Well, yeah, and your accent, but where in Scotland are you from?”
“I’m originally from Dalmally, in Argyll. It was small then and not much bigger now.”
I had no idea where he was talking about, so I hoped he would go into more detail, but he stayed quiet, holding my hand still and looking out one of the windows at the falling snow. It had been snowing steadily now all morning and I wondered if we were in for a blizzard.
I nudged him with my knee, and when he looked back at me I gave an encouraging smile, urging him to go on. He sighed, and spoke in a low voice, turning his face towards the window again.
“My family were crofters, tenant farmers, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted the sea. When I was fifteen, I left and sought a berth on a ship. I spent a few years at sea, but in time it lost its allure. It was not much of a step up from slavery and I missed my family, wanted a home. I came back ashore when I was 30, which then was considered middle age almost, and looked for something to do that kept me close to the sea, but not on a ship.”
“Were you a captain? Did
you have your own ship?” I tried to picture him at the helm of a sailing ship, but I couldn’t see it, as romantic as that would have been.
“No, I never made captain. I was too much of a smart ass. I didn’t take orders well at all, and even the freedom that a captaincy offered was not enough of a pull to make me keep my mouth shut.” His voice held a note of the sarcasm that must have kept him in trouble.
“So, what did you find on land that kept you near the sea?” I prompted when he didn’t go on, nudging him again. He nudged me back, but didn’t continue. I came off the couch and knelt in front of him, tilting my face up to his. He looked down into my eyes, brought a hand up to brush hair off my forehead. He liked to touch me, and I loved it, which was something I never liked in the past. I was not a touchy-feely person.
His eyes were sad again, and I wondered if thinking about his past was very painful for him. He had said that this life was something that he hadn’t chosen and I was forcing him to bring up memories that were probably something he repressed.
“That’s enough personal history for now.” When he saw that I was going to protest, he went on. “I will tell you more later, when this isn’t so new. It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone about it, and it is a little painful.”
“Then I won’t ask anything else ‘til you’re ready. What do we do now?” I asked, still looking up at him, still kneeling at his feet like a sycophant. He took hold of my elbows and pulled me up as he stood, wrapping me in a hug.
“We do nothing.”
“No, I meant about this guy Pendragon.”
His chest moved in a chuckle, the sound deep and pleasing.
“It’s Padraigan, and we do nothing, for now. He might be keeping tabs on you and the lab, but I’m now keeping tabs on him. He won’t be able to get near you, because you’ll be at my place and I think you’ll be taking a vacation from work, effective today.”
He said it so smoothly, so sure of himself that I almost nodded agreement before what he said registered in my mind.
“What?” my voice held a note of wariness, as if I didn’t comprehend what he was saying, but oh, I was comprehending just fine.
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