When she felt the luxurious covers being pulled over her body, it was all over. The last thing she remembered before slipping into the deepest sleep of her life was the sound of her room’s door closing and the feeling of the smallest bit of blood on her neck. He had nicked her with his teeth.
CHAPTER FOUR
It would be almost impossible to describe what it was like to be bored in the way Reagan Morgan was bored. When people thought about boredom, about that feeling of having nothing to do or see that could capture their imaginations, they thought about it in the short term. Of course they did. Whether they knew it or not (and most people knew it and refused to acknowledge that they did; people were terribly frightened by their own mortality), they always thought about their feelings in the short term.
What other choice was there? When a person lived for such a short amount of time, there was no option but the short term to be had. Not so for Reagan. Short term was something that didn’t apply to him any longer. It hadn’t for quite some time, although that had taken some getting used to.
Even after the threat of impending mortality had been removed, it took a while for that fact to sink in. He was no longer injured by the things that would have hurt him before. The way he looked when he was turned, that was the way he would look for the rest of his immortal life. He would not age. He would not grow sick and die. Nothing would change. Nothing. Nothing would change.
It was the most seductive idea, at least in the beginning. People were obsessed with vampires, and all things immortal, for that matter. There was a perpetual love affair with things that could not die. People were drawn to them. People were afraid of them and, at the same time, they longed to join their ranks. Reagan supposed he hadn’t been much different back when he was still a human. It was honestly hard to remember.
He hadn’t been a human in over two hundred years, and recalling the things he had thought and felt in those days was like trying to see through a fog so thick it was almost solid. And really, what was the point? That life from so long ago didn’t belong to him anymore. It had nothing to do with him whatsoever. He wasn’t that person. He wasn’t any person at all.
Reagan had been thirty-two when he had been changed into a vampire. Thirty-two years on the earth as a flesh and blood man. He had the vaguest idea that he had been an unhappy man, and that his unhappiness had been part of the reason for his turning.
He had come from a broken family, with a father much too inclined to drink. There had been little money in the household, and sometimes no money at all. Not that their abject poverty had put a stop to the excessive drinking. Nothing in the world would do that.
When Reagan’s mother had begun to nag, complaining that there would be no food for the family and very soon no roof over their heads, his father had come up with a solution that suited him just fine. He left. He walked out the door to the taverns the same way that he did every day and never returned.
Reagan’s mother did her best to keep their hovel of a household together, but what was she to do? She worked as a cleaner, a washerwoman, any kind of odd job she could find, but the thing about money was that there was never enough. She and Reagan’s baby sister finally succumbed to one of the sicknesses that was always sweeping through the poverty-stricken parts of the Americas. After that, there hadn’t been much for Reagan in the way of solid ground to stand on.
He had been adrift and the elements he had begun to take up with were unsavory to say the least. He was down on his luck in the worst way a man could be when a much older, incredibly wealthy man had seen him drunk on the street. He had asked the driver of his buggy to pull over and had taken Reagan into the buggy and off to his secluded mansion.
The man had been of indeterminate origin, and he had been beautiful in a way Reagan had never encountered before. Reagan had gone with him without giving it much thought. It wasn’t like he was giving much of anything up. There wasn’t much of a life to leave behind. And the man who seemed bent on adopting him had so many nice things. His name had been Alexander, and he was strangely beautiful.
Reagan had never thought of a man as beautiful before and it wasn’t sexual when he thought it now. It was just a fact; as cut and dried as saying that the sky was blue. He moved into Alexander’s house and lived there as a kind of companion until Alexander had revealed his true self.
He was beautiful because he wasn’t human. He was a vampire. It had been difficult to believe but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. He had revealed himself and offered something that could not be refused. He had offered immortality, the most sought after thing in the world.
It was a decision he should have given real thought before making. It was something that would change the course of his entire future, one of those things that would alter everything in an irreversible way.
Reagan had been reborn as something entirely inhuman. Some would say he was a monster. Some would say he was as close to a god as a man could get walking around on the earth. Personally, Reagan had gone through periods of time where he believed he was both.
And now? Now he was just bored.
His was the kind of boredom that had the potential to span over centuries, too, making it far more dangerous than it would be for a living man. Lately, he had started to think that he might not last another few centuries. Not every vampire did. They were immortal, for the most part, but that didn’t mean there weren’t ways to end them.
Some of them were more permanent than others. They could, for example, walk out into the sun. It wasn’t like in the movies where it would kill them immediately. They could be in the sun for short periods of time and under the cover of heavy clothing and hats and sunglasses (all of which made them look like they were terribly important, or at least like they believed they were). If they went out uncovered, though, if they went out uncovered and remained that way for a long time, they would turn to ash.
That was the most finite way, the most violent way. But there was another way. It was the way that many of the elders had gone. They would hide themselves away in deep, dark places where they would not be discovered. They would crawl into these holes and there they would stay. They would not move, would not speak. They would sit and as they did, year after year after year, they would slowly turn to stone. He had no idea how many of the ancient ones were buried in far off places where it was unlikely anyone would ever find them.
He knew there were more of them than there should have been. There were enough of them that, had the general public been so infatuated with the concept of vampires, they might not be so quick to jump on the bandwagon. Because the thing is, despite the fact that vampires are supposed to live forever, Reagan does know of more than a handful who are older than him.
The rest of them? They all seemed to have vanished into thin air, out into the sun or down into the ground. There was a weight attached to the gift of life eternal that was, in the end, more than many could bear. Reagan had it better than some. He wasn’t alone, at least not entirely. There were some vampires who flew solo and those were especially susceptible to the psychological dangers of being a vampire.
Reagan had a family of sorts, sometimes called a clan. His family was made up of a sister (not by the blood of life but by the blood of death) and four other vampires who had joined up along the way. Two of those four were mates, both coupled together for close to thirty years. His sister, Melania, was not mated but she also has no desire for one.
Reagan often thought that if it weren’t for him, she would be one of the solo vampires. Sometimes he thought it would be better for her – and for him, too. She was intensely attached to him, almost in a needy way, and quick to anger when she didn’t approve of his decisions (which was often). He knew that it would be best if he could be like her, one of the vampires who doesn’t need or want anyone else, and he’d tried to be that way.
It wasn’t him. One of the worst things for Reagan, aside from the aching boredom, was the loneliness. Imagine that, he’d thought to himself on many an
occasion, the monster wishes he had someone special. There was one girl, almost a hundred years ago now, but in the end, she hadn’t been the one he had been hoping for. She had been the only human he’d ever turned, almost immediately followed by turmoil leading to the termination of the relationship.
After that, he swore to himself that he would not turn another person, no matter how much he wanted her. He hadn’t been a god-fearing man in life, but in his everlasting death it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t his place to play god. It was another thing his sister found totally ridiculous about him, but hey? Siblings were like that with each other, right? Besides, Reagan was pretty sure that the thing really troubling Melania was fear.
She could see him losing his lust for life. Things had gotten better when the family had moved from Louisiana (where both Reagan and Melania had been born) to Las Vegas, but it hadn’t lasted. Even the glitz and glamour of a city like Las Vegas couldn’t be the only thing keeping a person going. Even flashy emptiness was only empty at the end of the day. He knew that Melania was watching him and that she was worried.
In all honesty, she should have been. His thoughts, so even, and one might say downright upbeat for most of his life, had been turning increasingly darker. The idea of walking into the sun didn’t so much appeal to him, but there was something so peaceful about the idea of sequestering himself in a place where he would not be disturbed; a place where he could patiently wait to turn to living stone.
It had been increasingly on his mind and eventually (probably sooner rather than later), he was going to do it. He would have been in the process of getting his affairs together, had there really been anything to do, but one of the perks of being a two-hundred-year-old vampire with endless supplies of cash at your fingertips was that it was easy to go off the grid. He had been off for a while now, and once he decided to disappear himself, he would be able to do it easily and so that nobody would ever find him. That was the plan, that was, until he smelled something intriguing.
Intriguing? It was more than intriguing, it was intoxicating. It was mesmerizing. It felt like an explosion inside of his head unlike anything Reagan had felt in a long, long time. It had been such a long time, in fact, that at first he didn’t recognize the feeling for what it was. Although he was an intelligent being, his mind had been dulled by years of underactivity and, yes, boredom.
After a moment, however, he realized what the feeling was. It was excitement. He was excited by the scent he had picked up and by what it might represent. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, two hundred years had taught him not to do that as well, but it was enough for him to shelve the idea of disappearing. It caused him to shelve every idea, except for the one that told him he had to find what the source of that intoxicating scent was. He had to find it. It felt like the only thing that mattered.
When he saw the girl he would later come to know as Ella, he felt his excitement increase. Seeing her made things feel more real. He was no longer chasing an unknown smell, a bit of seduction in a town built on just that very thing. This seduction had a face, and it was a beautiful face. She had a timeless kind of beauty, and perhaps the most appealing thing of all, she didn’t seem to have the slightest clue.
She smelled sweet because she was sweet. Sweet and afraid and totally out of place. Every movement of her body made that clear, from the way she gripped her drink tightly and with both hands to the way she struggled to balance on her high heels. Reagan couldn’t take his eyes off of her.
Despite his unearthly beauty he was very good at blending into his surroundings, which was exactly what he did then. He hung back in the room, watching her drink one glass of champagne after another, clearly becoming far more intoxicated than she was used to being. He watched as she stumbled out of the bar, smiling slightly to himself.
Something about it was endearing to him. It made him want to take care of her, which was something he hadn’t felt in quite some time. He also watched the two criminals who were watching her, watched them exchange pleased looks with each other before following her on her wobbly trek. Although he could sometimes read a person’s thoughts (a skill that was sporadic and unpredictable), he didn’t need to be able to do that in this case. He knew what they were thinking just by looking at their ugly, pock-marked faces.
The predator in him came out, and he followed behind the gentlemen quietly, only making himself known to them when he was ready. He had rescued the girl, he supposed, rescued her and taken her up to her rooms where she would be safe. He hadn’t even cared when she had thrown up all of the alcohol on his shoes. True, they were expensive shoes, but he didn’t care about that, didn’t care in the least.
He had two dozen pairs just like them and he would have let her throw up on each and every one of them just for the pleasure of walking her to her room again. She was highly intoxicated and would undoubtedly remember nothing of their talk together, but that didn’t matter to him either. He knew it would not be their only time to speak. He would make sure of it.
He knew her scent now as well as he knew the look of his own face (and yes, all of those myths about vampires having no reflection were completely absurd) and would be able to find it anywhere. He would do so, the very next night. He might have even walked her into her room and watched over her as she slept, had he not had other business to attend to. He knew that humans would consider something like watching a person sleep to be “creepy” but for him, it was just natural.
Her very humanity terrified him. The fact that she had almost been brutalized by those men terrified him, as did the knowledge that she could easily get sick again in her sleep and that kind of thing could kill a person. So yes, he would have sat there through the remainder of the night to make sure that she was safe, but he had important things to take care of. There were scores that needed to be settled, and he was going to settle them.
Men like the ones who had been manhandling Ella down the hallway were a menace to society. They were the kinds of men who made a career of this kind of bad behavior. He could see their whole pasts unravelling inside of his mind. They had grown up in bad households in even worse neighborhoods, practically raised to be criminals. They had started with the small stuff, shoplifting, messing with cars, but they had graduated to crimes that were aggravated and eventually moved onto rape.
Ella wouldn’t have been their first, and she certainly wouldn’t have been their last. They had developed a taste for it, and the more comfortable they were with it, the worse it would get for the victim. Leaving the two of them to go about their business was the same as condemning the women of Las Vegas to a life in which they would always be potential victims.
It wasn’t like he was a vigilante or anything, not like he hadn’t left truly terrible people to go about their business undisturbed. When you lived for as long as he had, you began to understand that one person’s evil could only do so much to the world (with the exception of the really bad ones, your Hitlers and such). It wasn’t that he thought these men were exceptionally bad, but they had attempted to take something Reagan wanted for himself.
Whether they knew it or not, they had, and he would not let that stand. They had intended to brutalize Ella. And, after all, he had to eat, didn’t he? For the most part, Reagan did his best to stick to animals (when they were available). It was amazing the things one could find in the Nevada deserts. That being said, he still enjoyed feeding on human blood time and again, and when he did that, he always chose someone bad; a rotten apple, so to speak. These two were most definitely rotten apples, and he was going to enjoy them. He might even play with his food some before he ate, just to make things more interesting.
It wasn’t difficult for him to find them. His nose for a scent was the same as the way some people had eidetic memories. He made his way back down to the hallway where he had first confronted them, tracking them easily from there. It would be difficult if he found them in a busy, largely populated area. They were unlikely to come with him willingly, and there was only s
o much he could do with his ability to blend.
He would find a way to work, if he had to, but he didn’t relish the idea. Luckily, it was a worry he need never have bothered with. The men he was looking for weren’t in one of the swanky bars that peppered the bottom floor of the Venetian, nor were they at any of the casino game tables. No, when Reagan found them, they were hunkered down behind a building, sitting next to a set of dumpsters and drinking out of containers flanked by paper bags.
Of course, they were. In retrospect, it would have been shocking to find them in any other circumstances. He smelled them before he saw them and came upon them quietly, taking his time. There wasn’t anything the men would be able to do to stop him, but he didn’t feel the need to hurry, either.
He could feel their darkness. It was like an aura he could taste, and it was hanging all around the area they occupied. On second thought, maybe this wasn’t a place to linger, after all. Just meeting Ella had provided a light in his life and it made him want to get this shit over and done with. He wanted to think about her, not the men who had wanted to harm her.
“Hello, gentlemen. I believe we have some unfinished business to attend to.”
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