Eamon set the glass down and his glance darted around the room. The feeling stopped as quickly as it came. The fear wasn’t his. He reached out to Lauryl. It wasn’t hers, either. She was off somewhere looking for her “dinner”. Irina. He switched his focus and her desperate and staggering fear overwhelmed him.
He tried to connect with her but couldn’t. He snatched the phone up and dialed her number, each ring lasting an eternity. After seven rings, he threw down the phone and reached out again. Irina’s thoughts overran his, coming at break neck speed in her ancient east Slavic, and not Russian. Eamon desperately forced his way into her mind, but the only things he could get from her were fervent Russian Orthodox prayers. Eamon reeled with a horrendous, searing pain in his chest. His back arched and he cried out. The pain disappeared and he rubbed his chest with the sickening knowledge that something was happening to Irina. He frantically reached out to her again. He heard her call his name in his mind and then she was silent. The sensation of a knife slicing across his neck stunned him. His knees buckled and he crumpled into his desk. He pushed at the papers, trying to steady himself against the pain. And then it vanished. Irina was slipping from his mind and from him.
Eamon grabbed the phone again, his hands shaking, and dialed his attorney Grant in New York City. “Go immediately to my house and check on Irina! I think what you’ll find there will be just the remains of her.”
The last words were difficult for him to say. He hung the phone up before Grant acknowledged him.
The last bit of Irina disappeared. Five hundred years was now gone. He dropped his head back and closed his eyes. One of his companions, his lovers, his vampires was now dead. He didn’t know what to do.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Holy Crap, What’s Wrong
The image of Irina when they first met her in Paris back in 1439 flashed through his mind.
Decked out in the mink trimmed silks and brocades of Novgorod, her dark hair was crimped, curled, and interlaced with pearls the size of grapes. Ropes of the same pearls hung from her mink cap. He remembered thinking how her hair and the mink were exactly the same color and the pearls provided the only contrast. The most memorable of all was how her liquid blue eyes memorized every move he made. Her French was appalling and her clothes, although sumptuous, were provincial at best. Nevertheless, she wanted him more than the air she breathed.
“Upir,” she had purred in his ear. “I want to give myself to you. Make me yours.”
Those words still echoed in his mind the same as if she said it last night. Five hundred years were gone. All he had left were the memories he had of her. But it wasn’t the same. A huge gap was now in his psyche and he had no one to fill it.
He poured himself another drink and sat down. Lauryl should be home soon. She wasn’t the one who could fill the gap. He knew that. Each night she went out, he worried that some shrewd hunter would kill her. Fortunately, over the years, the population had come to see vampire hunters as insane. Most of them were, but some weren’t. A few were from hereditary lines of secret hunters. Clans trained from generation to generation to hunt and destroy vampires. Those, by good fortune, dwindled to almost nothing over the years. Every so often, they would experience a rebirth of interest and even become more mainstream. In the nineteenth century, certain families of hunters even sold vampire killing kits complete with garlic, a cross, a Bible, magic potions and of course a stake and hammer. In Eastern Europe and Germany, this was a stroke of marketing genius. Unfortunately for those who bought them, these kits were nothing but a collection of superstitions packed in a travelling valise. They were harmless to a vampire. The worst it could do was anger the vampire tormented by the items. The hunters knew that, too. They weren’t going to give up their business to amateurs. They would be the only ones who knew the secrets of tracking and killing a vampire.
Eamon closed his eyes and reached out to Lauryl. She remained in the process of finding her victim. Right now, he didn’t want her out by herself. He concentrated on her again.
I’d like you, please, to come home to me, he whispered in her mind. There is something wrong.
To his surprise, she didn’t argue or complain. She simply said okay. That was unusual. He took another drink of scotch and thought about Irina again. He rubbed his chest and wondered if whoever killed her had tried to stake her. That had to have been quite a surprise to the hunter when he or she saw that staking only slowed a vampire down. However, the hunter knew how to finish the job. He couldn’t understand how Irina had allowed herself to get into such a dangerous situation. Was she distracted? What could have distracted her to that degree? Could it have been the girl she planned to turn? The one she said she had marked to be her new companion? That was a hunter’s trick. They would lure the vampire to a false sense of security by offering themselves to them. It was dangerous though. The hunter could lose his life instead if the vampire was hungrier than normal, treacherous, or just enjoyed killing humans. If the vampire discovered the hunter’s identity before, their death would be slow, painful, and creative.
The phone’s vibration ended Eamon’s reflection. He pressed the TALK button. “Yes, Grant.”
“Um, well Eamon, are you sitting down?”
“Grant, is she dead?” he asked, closing his eyes. His shoulders tensed and his grip on the phone tightened.
“Yeah, they both are but not in a way that I would expect.”
“They?” Eamon asked. He opened his eyes.
“There’s another woman here with Irina. She’s…like Irina.”
“Meaning that she has been decapitated as well?”
“Uh huh.”
“Interesting.” Eamon stared out the window at the ocean. “Is there anything there that would give a clue as to the other’s identity?”
“No, I checked before I called you. She either didn’t bring anything or the killer took it.”
“Check around their bodies,” Eamon said as he rubbed his eyes. His eyes stung as tears formed in them but he forced them away. “And see if there are any odd markings or writings.”
A few moments passed while Grant checked. “Nothing,” he said.
“Then this isn’t a real hunter. This is just a rogue. He must have followed the girl to Irina.” Another crazy person with a large knife, he thought. He sighed and dropped his hand.
“You know what to do, Grant. Call the Cleaner and take care of it.”
“You don’t want to come back here?”
“No,” Eamon said. He hesitated before continuing and the tears returned. “I can’t. The Cleaner will know what to do. Just take care of it,” he said before hanging up. He threw the phone over on the desk and dropped his head down to his hands.
Irina, you didn’t deserve that, he thought. The Romanov curse seems to have finally caught up with you, my beautiful love. No matter how far removed you were from them.
He lifted his head when he heard the front door open and close. The sound of Lauryl singing, in a loud and very off key voice, echoed in the hall. She knocked on the study door and walked in, still singing. When she saw the expression on his face, she stopped mid-step and mid-song.
“Holy crap, what’s wrong?”
“Irina is dead.”
She tilted her head and blinked a few times. “Oh, God.”
“Yes.”
Lauryl walked over and knelt in front of him. She put her hand on his. Her soft, warm hand offered unexpected comfort. “Oh, God, Eamon. I’m so sorry. When? How?”
He looked into Lauryl’s green eyes and his fingers curled around hers. For the first time, he saw something similar to concern for him. Part of his centuries-old facade cracked and the alien emotion of grief flickered across his face. He cleared his throat and paused while he mentally shoved back down the lump of emotions threatening to surface.
“Tonight. She and a friend were killed together. A hunter tracked and killed them.”
“Damn,” she said.
Eamon looked thoughtful for a mo
ment and shrugged. Tonight wasn’t the night to have an emotional breakdown. “Now I only have one other vampire in my line,” he said.
“That’s a weird thing to say. Not at all what I’d expect from someone who just lost a longtime friend,” she said.
“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll understand.” He forced the earlier sadness out of his mind and refocused.
“Can’t you just be sad? Can’t you let yourself feel that?”
“No, I can’t. I’m not human, Lauryl, and I haven’t been in quite some time. Human emotions are uncomfortable for me.” He stood and walked over to his desk. “I don’t want to discuss this.”
Lauryl stood up and put her hands on her hips. “You loved her and you can’t at least say ‘I’m sad that she’s dead’?”
He shook his head and further stuffed down his emotions. “Why do I need to say that?”
She walked over to him. “Because it’s true and you feel it.”
Eamon’s brown eyes shifted more amber, silently warning her to stop pursuing whatever she was after. “Let this go. I told you, I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
Her brow furrowed. “You wonder why I don’t like you? This is a perfect example. You can’t even try to show some kind of grief for Irina. Or maybe I should say you won’t show it.”
“No,” he said, wrestling back the emotions he didn’t want to hemorrhage from him. He did feel the agonizing loss. It wounded him to his core. Each word was an effort for him and his chest felt like there was a massive hole in it. Then to have her harass him over what she thought was a suitable display of grief was almost intolerable. He wasn’t about to show weakness to her. She was hard enough to control without her seeing he was still vulnerable to the human frailty of emotion. That would have to remain concealed.
“I’m done talking about this now. I’ll close by reminding you that this is the perfect illustration as to why you must be careful when you are out. Something like this could happen to you.”
Lauryl stared at him, waiting. She threw up her hands and spun around. She walked to the door but didn’t turn around.
“You know, I could have felt bad for you. I was trying to be sympathetic to you, but you made even that impossible. I’m going back out, since you don’t need me or can’t admit you need me.”
“To where?”
She hesitated a moment and turned back to him. “To eat with an old friend,” she said.
“Enjoy it because we’re leaving for New York tomorrow evening and then to London indefinitely. So tell your ‘old friend’ good bye.” Eamon’s anger flared, but he concealed it before it showed. He knew she was feeding from the doctor and more than likely doing more.
Lauryl’s face darkened with anger and her eyes narrowed. She shook her head, flipped him off and left.
And be thankful I don’t kill that old friend because that’s precisely what I want to do right now, he thought.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Stupid Spy of Eamon’s
London only made Lauryl’s attitude worse. She sulked around their Holland Park house in the posh Kensington area and only perked up on nights she went out to feed. She treated feeding like a wonderful, complex game. She considered it exciting to adopt different names and personalities when she went out to find blood. She took great care in it. She thought Eamon would have been pleased at how she had adapted to, and even excelled at, her vampire life. He wasn’t. He didn’t acknowledge it at all. And that disappointed and angered her. He continued on as he had before, treating her like an employee instead of a companion.
She scanned the crowds on the sidewalk of Wardour Street. The sidewalks were full but no one caught her eye. The mix of food smells that drifted from the restaurants distracted her for a second. The aroma of curry, a favorite from when she was human, tickled her nose and brought a smile to her face. The spicy scent piqued her hunger and she focused on the humans again. The same Tuesday mix of tourists and young professionals made their way in and out of the bars, enjoying the balmy spring night. Her smile melted into a frown. If she had to eat another self-important stockbroker or German tourist, she’d scream. If things didn’t pick up, she’d head over to Berwick Street to hang out in Vinyl Junkies. At least there the music was good and she’d probably find someone more interesting to eat. Then, she saw him.
He wasn’t anything special. He had shoulder length, chestnut-colored hair and pale skin that bore acne scars from long ago but she couldn’t take her eyes off him. The man leaned against a light pole and put his hands in his pockets. His clothes were fashionable. Oxford Street or Milan maybe. Definitely not custom like Eamon’s. When he smiled, a deep dimple on each of his cheeks appeared. It was infectious and soon a smile was on her face. Their eyes locked as if they had known each other for ages. She was looking at another vampire.
He looked like any other male in London but to her, he may as well have had a giant sign that said VAMPIRE in big red letters. After standing in stunned silence for a moment, she walked directly to him.
“Hello there.”
“Hey,” she said. She’d never met a vampire besides Eamon. Well, Irina, but she was one of Eamon’s vampires so she didn’t know if she counted. This person was the first vampire stranger.
“Out for a bite, are we?” he asked.
“Yeah, I am” His energy became more and more enticing. The cozy warmth exuded from all parts of him. She reached out to touch him but just before she did, the warmth vanished. She couldn’t feel anything at all. It was as if he wasn’t there anymore.
“What happened?”
“Oh that,” he said. “That’s just an old trick I know. Knox Swinton.” He extended his hand to her.
She shook it. “Lauryl Mellis-Rutherford,” she replied, mumbling the Rutherford part.
“Sorry, I didn’t get the last bit.”
Lauryl squared her shoulders. “Rutherford. Lauryl Rutherford.” After she said it, she glanced over her shoulder, as if she were saying something dangerous. The people walking nearby were oblivious to the two of them.
“That’s what I thought you said, but I wanted to make certain I heard you correctly. So you’re out for a stroll and a bite then?”
“Yes, I prefer to eat alone.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it.”
“No!” She grabbed his arm. “That’s not what I meant.”
Knox looked down at her hand on his arm. “What did you mean?”
“I meant that I eat alone not that I wanted you to go. You’re the first vampire, other than my maker, I’ve ever met.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, we don’t mix with other vampires. You’re the first I’ve been able to talk to.”
“I wouldn’t like you out on your own meeting strange vampires. You’re far too enchanting.”
“I don’t like my husband to come with me. Actually, I don’t like my husband to do anything with me.”
“Really?”
“He’s an asshole and I hate him.” She bit her lip and wondered if she should be talking to this vampire. He could be one of Eamon’s spies. London was probably crawling with people on Eamon’s payroll. Lauryl narrowed her eyes at Knox. “Do you know my husband?”
“Not personally. I know of him. What vampire doesn’t?”
“Do you work for him in any way?” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Paranoid, aren’t we?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Knox smiled and his blue eyes shimmered. “No, I don’t work for him.”
“Good.”
“Tell me, how long have you been a vampire?” Knox asked.
“Why?”
“I’m simply curious.”
“About a year. How long have you been a vampire?”
Knox took her by the arm. “Walk with me.”
As soon as he touched her, she could feel his markers again. He was announcing his presence to any other vampires in the area. “How do you do that
?”
“I told you. It’s an old trick I know.”
“I think it’s more than that. You can make yourself almost invisible.”
They stopped in front of a pub with a red door. The sign read Waxy’s Little Sister. Two women bumped past them and walked in.
Lauryl frowned. “What are we doing here?”
“You’re hungry aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Well, nothing better than a pub to fix that.” He opened the door for her. “After you, dear.”
She hesitated for a moment and then entered. The bartender looked at the two of them and nodded a greeting. The place was quiet. In fact, it was too quiet. Not at all like what she thought a pub would be. No football hooligans smashing chairs and drinking yards of ale. It was quiet and cozy and tourist free. Music played and the random murmurs of humans as they discussed their days filled the air. The aroma of espresso mixed with ale made for a soothing combination. They went upstairs to the sofa bar and settled into a corner spot.
“So are you going to tell me how old you are?”
“I’m twenty-six,” Knox said and watched the girl serving a group who chose not to use the dumbwaiter.
“You’ve only been a vampire twenty-six years? I doubt that.”
The girl walked over to them and tucked her tray under her arm. She had freckles and a blond bob haircut. Her low-rise jeans revealed a slight paunch with a little, gold navel ring.
“Get you two something?”
“Tracy, meet a new friend, Lauryl,”
“Nice to meet you,” Lauryl said.
“American. Brilliant. Want anything from the bar?” Tracy asked.
“Guinness for me and whatever she’s having.”
“I’m good for now.”
Tracy shrugged her shoulders and left to get the beer. Knox relaxed into the sofa. “I like beer. Always have. It’s a friendly drink.”
“I guess.” Another couple walked in and found a seat close to them. Lauryl gave them a quick nod and turned back to Knox.
Life in Moonlight: The Primigenio Tales: Book 1 Page 12