Captured Sun

by Shari Richardson

  Astral Publishing Books are published by

  Astral Publishing

  120 Oak Road

  York, PA 17402

  Copyright © 2011 by Shari Richardson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  ISBN: 978-1461007951

  First Astral Publishing Trade Paperback Printing: April 2011

  Printed in the United States of America

  Other Titles by Shari Richardson are available via Astral Plane Publishing

  http://astralplanepublishing.com/

  Mourning Sun: The First Highland Home Novel

  About The Author

  Shari Richardson holds a master's degree in English Education and has spent much of her life teaching students the joy of reading and writing. Her love of writing began when she was in elementary school and has carried through her entire adult life. Shari lives in Pennsylvania with her two Chihuahuas.

  Acknowledgments

  This second book in the Highland Home series required a lot of encouragement and hand holding from several very good friends. My sincere thanks and love go out to Rick and Felicia for indulging my paranoid issues about whether or not my readers would love Mathias and Mairin.

  To the readers, thank you so much for loving them as much as I do. Enjoy the next installment in their tale.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents......................................................................................... vi

  Chapter 1...................................................................................................... 1

  Chapter 2.................................................................................................... 16

  Chapter 3.................................................................................................... 30

  Chapter 4.................................................................................................... 43

  Chapter 5.................................................................................................... 51

  Chapter 6.................................................................................................... 64

  Chapter 7.................................................................................................... 72

  Chapter 8.................................................................................................... 81

  Chapter 9.................................................................................................... 92

  Chapter 10.................................................................................................. 98

  Chapter 11................................................................................................ 113

  Chapter 12................................................................................................ 126

  Chapter 1

  The alley was dark and dank. The stench of alcohol and decay overpowered the other less pleasant scent which rode the air. Death, whether it was new or ancient, had an unmistakable smell and death waited in the shadows.

  The young man walked slowly. His steps wove in and out of the tumbled garbage cans and boxes behind the bars and restaurants. He whistled briefly, a nameless tune with little difference from one note to another. His glassy eyes looked into the shadows he passed, but did not see. Music thumped loudly when one of the doors on the main street opened, disgorging a raucous group of men. The young man turned to watch the others and missed the movement which brought his death.

  Death reached out of the deepest shadows and pulled the young man into its embrace. The light never touched its face and the young man never made a sound. On the street, the group of men laughed and shoved each other, oblivious to the end of a life only yards away from them. When Death had finished its meal, it dropped the body and slipped deeper into the darkness. A newspaper fluttered across the alley, fetching up against the dead man's body. The headline screamed death as though to articulate the horror the man could not. The newspaper's date meant it was too late.

  ***

  My eyes snapped open. "Dammit," I whispered.

  "What was it, Mairin?" Mathias' voice slipped out of the darkness like a silken caress. I felt his arms tighten around me, but I shrugged him off.

  "In a minute," I hissed. I could already hear Mom padding down the hall from her room. When the hall light flooded my room, Mathias was gone.

  "Mairin?" Mom called.

  "Nothing mom. Just a remnant of that movie we watched last night."

  "I told you not to watch that horror crap before bed," she said, sitting on the edge of my bed. "You know it gives you nightmares."

  "I know, Mom. I should know better," I laughed. "I'm OK, though. I'm going right back to sleep."

  She kissed my cheek. "OK, baby. I'll see you in the morning."

  Mom might always know when I dreamed, but in the last several months she had stopped pushing me so hard to tell her about every one of them. I had to remember to thank Elise when I saw her next. She'd told Mom that forcing me to share every dream was making it harder for me to deal with my premonitions. Since then, Mom asked quick questions and let me share what I wanted to without fighting me. The trouble was I had stopped sharing my dreams with her at all.

  How could I tell my mom that when Mathias, the man I loved, had come into my life, I'd begun to dream of his memories? I guess that wouldn't really be so hard to explain except that Mathias' memories were of the death and destruction he'd wrought as a vampire. That wasn't something I was willing to share with Mom.

  Now that I knew the monsters were real and could see them every day, I struggled with deciding how much to share with my family and how much to keep to myself. Was I saving them from the terror or putting them in danger? I didn't know and Elise wouldn't tell me what I should do. "Free will," was her favorite epithet.

  More recently, the killer in the shadows starred in my night time wanderings. For reasons I had yet to understand, these dreams came so close to the actual events that I could do nothing about them. When the dreams came too late, sharing them with my mother was to share the agony of being unable to stop the killing. It was hard enough to share these premonitions with Mathias. His frustration was sometimes terrifying in its intensity. I couldn't imagine inflicting that kind of pain on my mother too.

  When Mom was gone, I got up and pushed my door closed. I jumped as Mathias stepped out of the shadows behind it.

  "Don't do that," I whispered.

  "Sorry," he said, smiling. "Nightmares from a horror movie?" He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  "Better that than trying to explain that the same faceless killer is still draining people in alleys," I said. "It's really getting exhausting coming up with excuses and lies for my mother. How does she always know I've had one of these dreams?"

  "Perhaps it is her gift to know her daughters so well and be to able to live a happy life despite the constant chaos her daughters seem to dwell in."

  "What a horrible gift to have to have," I said.

  "I do not think it so horrible, my heart. Your mother seems to be a happy woman. She loves you and your sister. She loves and is loved by her partne
r. None of that seems so bad."

  Mathias sat at the head of my bed and pulled me against his chest. I sighed and leaned comfortably into him. The electrical current of his skin against mine soothed my thundering heart and I could feel sleep toying with me again. Maybe Mathias was right. My mom did seem pretty happy and she sure was good with all the weird stuff that seemed to follow me and my sister around. It would be so much harder on me if I had to work harder to keep my mother in the dark about the weirdness that was my life.

  I pressed against Mathias' chest and he curled his arms around me more closely. It had been several weeks since I'd slept soundly through the night. My inability to sleep and the resulting crankiness on my part had been what had convinced Mathias to put a dent in his normally rigid moral code which forbade any improprieties. He'd begun slipping into my room after my mother and Tawnya had gone to bed and holding me through the night. His presence meant I was able to sleep, but it also put my nerves on edge. I found myself reaching for him in ways he would not allow and then being hurt by his rebuffs, gentle though they were. I knew his reasons for keeping our physical interactions limited, but knowing didn't change my hormones.

  The arrival of this faceless killer had made sleep nearly impossible. The killer's arrival in my dreams and in my world had wrought desperately depressing changes to what had otherwise been a really great summer. The killing in East Hampton was putting a strain on the tenuous peace between Mathias and the werepanthers. Though they had not yet accused Mathias of being the killer, I knew they had increased their surveillance of his habits. Mathias complained that he couldn't take two steps without tripping over a cat. When the werecats and the vampire butted heads, it put pressure on me and my sister, Kerry. Kerry's romance with Xavier, the de facto head of the panthers, meant she was torn between her allegiance to her boyfriend and her bond with me.

  I knew the killer wasn't the man I loved, and not only because he spent almost every night at my side. My dreams had shown me the changes Mathias had made in his eating habits and he'd confirmed them when I'd gotten up enough courage to ask him about them. He didn't hunt random victims in back alleys. He chose his meals from donors who belonged to private clubs. I wasn't particularly pleased that he met nameless women in a club in the city to take blood from them, but it was certainly better than the alternative.

  "What are you thinking, my love?" Mathias asked, burying his nose in my hair and breathing deeply. I shivered, enjoying the intimate nature of the act. Little gestures like this one never failed to make my heart race and remind me how much I loved this man. It was likely that love which gave me the courage to ask my question.

  "Why won't you let me be your...your donor?" I asked. It was a question I had delayed asking for several months.

  When my body had been healing after an encounter with a demigod in the spring, I'd understood why Mathias went to his clubs. Not only was I trying to heal, be he still had only a tenuous hold on the blood lust he fought each time he fed. In the ensuing months, though, my body had healed and his control had grown so that he no longer had to fight his nature to leave his donors alive. Yet he still didn't come to me when he needed to feed. He went to strangers to take from them something so personal and intimate and I wanted to know why he wouldn't take blood from me.

  Mathias stiffened, his arms clenching convulsively around me so tight I gasped.

  "Mairin, no," he said. He relaxed his grip, but did not release me. "I've told you how hard it is for me to take blood from donors without letting the thirst take over. I can do it now only because my donors hold no interest for me. I know I will not take their lives so the connection I allowed to build between me and my previous victims is not there. I can take the blood, pay them and walk away before I taste it."

  "You didn't answer my question," I said, pressing him when I knew I shouldn't. I was jealous of those nameless women. Jealous of the connection they had with Mathias. A connection he would not allow me to have.

  Mathias drew in a deep, slow breath. "Do you not understand my love for you, Mairin?"

  "I know you love me. I love you, too."

  "I...How can I explain," he mused. "Perhaps if you think of it this way, it will help. If you had to know each creature you consumed, not just in passing, but to the depths of its soul, could you eat without guilt?"

  "No," I said. "You know I stopped eating meat last spring because of that," I said. When I'd realized what a hypocrite I was by eating what others had killed while condemning Mathias for taking responsibility for his own food, I'd found I simply couldn't eat meat any more.

  "Now imagine you had the choice of consuming only a tiny bit of a food you craved in the deepest parts of yourself or sitting down to a full-course meal without guilt. Which would you choose?"

  "Probably the first one," I admitted.

  "And if you knew that the first taste of that food you craved most would mean you would forget yourself and become a ravening monster, one who would kill the one thing that makes your existence bearable, would you risk it?"

  I trailed my fingers up and down Mathias' arms. Could I do what he did? Take just a taste and turn away? I I knew my food intimately, could I taste it and leave the rest?

  "I guess not," I said.

  "Mairin, my donors give me food. They are no more to me than the man who hands you the food you eat at a restaurant. But you, you are everything to me. If I were to lose my focus and...and kill a donor, the guilt would be enormous, but not so much as to destroy me. To allow you to offer me blood is to consciously put your neck under the guillotine and depend upon my reflexes to be fast enough to stop the blade once it begins to fall. That is not something I am willing to do."

  "I wish I had more to give you. I wish I didn't envy those women," I whispered.

  "Do you envy the cows your family consumes? There is nothing in those donors to envy, my love. It is you who holds my heart, not them. As for what you give to me, who could offer me more than the care of my soul, the light of my existence and the love of my eternity?

  Mathias pushed my hair away from my left shoulder and lay his lips against the soft spot between my neck and shoulder. The shudder that rolled up my back made me sigh and press more tightly against him. I could feel him smiling against my skin.

  "Why do you always choose that spot?" I asked.

  "Because it is where I can hear your heart and smell the blood rushing beneath your skin." He pulled back, letting me settle more comfortably against him. "It is where I must deny my baser instincts. That I could take your life from that place makes it that much more intimate and precious to me. You see, I'm still selfish to my core. I still wish to enjoy the bouquet without tasting the wine."

  I turned and lay my head against his chest, curling my arm around his waist. "Oh," was all I could think to say. Mathias always answered my questions, but sometimes the answers were not what I would have wanted had I known them before I asked the question. I knew he struggled every day to refrain from harming me, but I didn't realize he purposely put himself in a position from which he had to restrain himself or kill me.

  "Mairin, I will never hurt you," he said, brushing his lips over my hair. "You do not have to fear that."

  "I'm not afraid of you, Mathias," I said. "I just forget sometimes what it means for you to be with me."

  "Being with you means I can be as close to human as is possible for me. You are my reminder of what it was like to be human, to be worthy of this life."

  "But you have to deny so much of yourself to be this close to me. I can't be worth that."

  I looked up into his beloved face. His dark eyes were hooded now, a frown creased deeply between them.

  "Mairin, you don't understand...I don't know how to help you understand. You've seen the worst of what I am through my memories, through your dreams, and yet here you willingly lie in my arms and with my heart in your hands. Anything I deny myself when I am with you is replaced ten, no one hundred times by the gift that you are. I was a careless and soul
less monster before you came to me. I killed because I was too lazy to learn not to. You helped me see the value in living a life without death. I can never repay you for that gift."

  My heart thundered in my chest, as it always did when Mathias became so impassioned. "I don't think of myself that way."

  "I know, my heart. That is part of why I cannot help you understand."

  "You give to me just as much, Mathias," I said, raising up on my knees and taking his face between my palms. "Before you, I was a shadow, a wraith with no real value. But you see me, all of me. You help others see me. You made me whole and solid, a part of this world instead of separate from it."

  I lay my lips gently against his. I wished for the deep kisses I saw others enjoy. I wished to taste his lips, his tongue, but we had compromised with this gentle touching. Mathias' razor sharp teeth held the venom that would make me immortal and he refused to tempt fate by allowing me to kiss him in a way that might risk contact with those poisonous teeth. If he'd had his way, we would observe the mores of his time. A stolen kiss from time to time, chaperoned dates, and a kiss on the back of my hand. I had pushed for and convinced him that we didn't have to be quite that puritanical, but there were still things he refused to budge on.

  He turned his face slightly to trail his lips down my neck. Desire curled lazily in my belly. I traced my lips along his jaw, snaking my tongue tentatively between my lips to taste his skin. I shuddered, groaning with frustration as Mathias gently pulled back.

  "You are ever so fetching when you are pushing me to the edge of my control," Mathias whispered.

  My breath began to come in short pants and I threaded my fingers into his thick, silky hair. Mathias kissed my neck once more before pushing me gently away.

  "You need to go back to sleep," he said, helping me lay against him again. "Your mother will be upset enough with me for allowing you to watch horror movies."

  "I think she'd be more upset to know you were still here," I said. I lay down, curling into Mathias' body as closely as I could.