But that was the venom doing a number on me. Never mind that Alex was sexy as hell that night, being all protective of his club and his customers. And even now, watching him fume at the thought of Octavius kissing me was a helluva turn-on. His hands fisting on the bar, flexing muscles in his forearms up to his rolled sleeves and beyond. His broad shoulders tensed, so very male. Seeing his reaction had my heart doing double time and muscles low in my center turning liquid hot.
“Drugged you? Drugged you how?”
I gave myself a quick mental shake, trying again to stay on topic. “I…I think he spiked my drink.”
Come to think about it, that might have something to do with my current amorous mood. Their venom worked like some sort of date-rape drug…except I didn’t really mind. Then again, it could be all Alex.
Alex cursed under his breath, pushing from the bar, scrubbing a hand over his face then paced back to me. “Sounds like something Octavius would do. He’s territorial. Likes to mark what he sees as his. His scent on you is a kind of mark, a claim. Asshole.”
“Right.” Couldn’t argue that. The guy had used his mind tricks and venom to try to get me alone. Was he really planning on turning me? I didn’t want to think about it. “He told me about Bess.”
Alex’s gaze snapped to mine, his angry fidgeting stopped. “What did he say about her?”
“Only that she was killed and that you were so upset about it you wouldn’t see him.” I dropped my gaze, traced the rim of my glace with my finger. “I think he kind of blames you.”
He laughed but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “He would.”
“What happened?”
After a moment’s thought, Alex gestured with a nod of his head toward the tables that lined the far wall. He walked around the inside of the bar, and I grabbed my orange juice and followed along the outside. We met at the hinged section of the bar top.
“Her name was Elizabeth,” he said as we settled into an intimate table for two. “She hated the name Bess, but everyone was using the nickname back then and Octavius was only ever concerned about what he wanted.”
“Octavius said she turned him.”
“She did, though it was well before I was born.” Alex tipped his chin at the bar and raised a finger when the other bartender nodded back. “He’d stayed with her fifty years when I met them.”
“Wow, they really must’ve loved each other.”
Alex snorted. “Love had nothing to do with it. When a vampire turns someone they’re responsible for the fledgling for the first thirty years. It takes about that long for the sire’s mark to fade from the fledgling, and for their venom to be fully replaced by the fledgling’s own. The responsibility quickly becomes a burden. No one—no one sane—stays with their sire longer than those first thirty years.”
A thin, statuesque woman dressed the same as Alex and the other bartenders, white button shirt and black slacks, placed a glass filled with deep red liquid in front of Alex. He gave her a half nod. “Thanks.”
“Is that blood?” I had to ask. Couldn’t help it.
“No. Bloody Mary mix. I love this stuff.”
Too weird. “So Octavius was what, like a stalker?”
Alex finished his swallow nodding. “In a way. They’d had an infatuation before she turned him, but it was far more to Octavius. He’d become obsessed with her and it only got worse after the change. Later on she realized she’d seen signs, but her loneliness kept her in denial. I couldn’t blame her. An eternity walking outside the world, bearing witness to humanity but no longer a part of it, can be maddening.”
I looked around the nightclub, customers bumping shoulders, tables filled, people standing two deep at the bar. “Doesn’t look too lonely to me.”
Alex followed my gaze. “Things are different now. Back then our kind were spread far and wide with no easy way to keep in touch. We are not a pack species but we do feel the need for companionship from time to time, however brief. Now, with telephones, TV, the internet, communication is instantaneous and air travel can have us with others of our kind in a matter of hours. Back then you could go centuries believing you were the only one left.”
I finished off my orange juice and Alex pointed to it with a questioning raise of his brows. I shook my head. “I take it, Octavius never felt the need for alone time?”
“No. He never weaned himself from Elizabeth and she didn’t have the strength to turn him away. She became cruel with him, even physically abusive at times in trying to end his obsession with her. But even her unabashed hatred wouldn’t deter him. His attachment to her was turning her into someone, some thing, she couldn’t bear to be.”
“You sure?” I had to ask. Alex’s version was the exact opposite of Octavius’s. One of them was lying. I wanted to give Alex the benefit of the doubt, but that may have been my hormones talking.
His brows pinched tight. “Of course. The night we met, Elizabeth was trying to commit suicide in an attempt to ultimately, finally, escape him.”
“How?”
His lips sealed, and he glanced away. After a moment he sighed. “Guillotine. She couldn’t reach the lever though and when I asked her if she’d like my help, she cried yes, and then rushed into my arms sobbing.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t imagine the level of desperation that must’ve taken. “But if it was so easy to get lost back then, why didn’t she? I mean, why didn’t she just sneak off? I can’t believe in fifty years there wasn’t a single moment she couldn’t have slipped away without his notice.”
Alex’s gaze swung back to mine, a weariness I hadn’t noticed before darkened at the corners. “He would’ve found her. A vampire is always and forever able to locate their fount. Another safeguard for the fledgling.”
“Is your…sire still, y’know, walking the earth?”
Alex shook his head, staring at his tomato juice. “No. She succumbed to her loneliness before I could help her.”
Our table was on a raised level that ringed the nightclub along the wall. I watched as a couple sauntered toward the table nearest us on the lower level. The guy made eye contact with both Alex and me.
Alex nodded. “Todd,” he said.
Todd lifted his chin back at Alex—a very guy-type greeting. The woman he was with didn’t even glance our way, her long chocolate brown hair curtained around her face, brushing her slender waist. Her dark blue dress that wrapped tight around her body and tied at her side made her legs look like they went on forever. She struck me as pretty, too pretty for a guy like Todd. I have no idea what she was doing with him.
He wasn’t scary ugly or anything, but he had spiky platinum blond hair, little brown eyes and his head looked too small for his body. It was probably the overly broad shoulders. He looked like a weight lifter and the extra muscle was probably what made his head seem small. Or maybe it really was small. Who knows?
It didn’t matter. My mind was busy with other things. As they slid into the half-circle bench seat, my thoughts filled with images of a woman hounded, pushed beyond her limits, where her only escape was death.
I turned my focus back to Alex. “How’d you get her away from him?”
He shrugged. “Like you said. One night when Octavius was out, I had her gather her things from our villa in Paris and we left.”
“Did he come looking for you? Did he find you?”
“He found us.” Alex finished off his Bloody Mary mix and leaned back in his chair. “Elizabeth and I had moved to a small apartment outside of Naples. For nearly two months we lived in freedom, without someone constantly looking over our shoulders, controlling who we spoke to, where we went, how we interacted with humans. We’d even begun to believe Octavius wouldn’t follow, until one night we came home from an evening swim at the beach and found him sitting on our bed.”
“Our bed? So…you were lovers?” Yeah, I know, bigger picture and all, but a girl likes to know.
Alex nodded. “We’d become very close. Until that night Octavius was able to hold fast to the
fantasy that he and Elizabeth were meant to be. That night he knew he’d lost her long ago.”
“So what, did he just leave?”
His brows hiked high beneath the swag of his blond bangs, a ghost of a smile played for an instant across his lips. “No. He tried to kill her.”
“You stopped him.”
“Yes, but the fight was long and bloody. Octavius had insanity on his side. A sane man has moral limits, pain thresholds. Insanity freed him of such things. In the end though, we left Octavius near death on our apartment floor. Elizabeth…” He looked away, his eyes suddenly glistening with unshed tears, his chin quivering.
A deep breath and he collected himself. “Elizabeth was so damaged by Octavius’s relentless pursuit, she took a knife and cut…and cut off his testicles. She told him if he ever dared follow her again, she’d leave him with nothing to prove himself male.”
“Ouch. Holy smokes, Alex, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what the two of you must’ve endured.”
He didn’t look at me. He just kept talking. “Elizabeth was never the same after that. We never saw Octavius again, but I think when she cut him, she cut out a piece of her soul as well.”
No doubt. The creep had made her as crazy as him. “Wait. Octavius said he found you after Elizabeth passed away. He said you wouldn’t see him.”
Alex shook his head, perplexed. “No. I never heard from him again after that night.”
Another lie or a half-truth? Hard to know with Octavius. “How long did you and she have with each other before she died?”
“Twenty years. And she didn’t just die, she was killed—murdered. We spent the next twenty years in each other’s company but we were never the same, never truly together the way we’d been before.” The tall female bartender from earlier appeared at our table suddenly, replacing our drinks. Apparently someone always had their eye on the boss.
Alex cupped his hands around the fresh glass on the table, aimlessly caressing the sides with his thumbs. He took a quick drink. “It was my fault. I didn’t know how to help her, how to bring her back from the darkness in her mind. I let the distance between us grow, let myself become careless. I knew they were hunting our kind. We’d already lost a few friends who’d joined us in the years after we’d escaped Octavius. I only left her for an hour. Long enough to book passage on a ship bound for the Americas. I had to get us out of Europe, away from the vampire hunters sweeping the continent. I thought she was safe. I was wrong. Good Lord, I was so wrong.”
“Vampire hunters. They staked her through the heart.” I knew now that part of Octavius’s story was true.
Alex nodded, his gaze downcast, his chin quivering again. “I left Europe that night. Never returned. And until you mentioned his name, I believed I’d left Octavius there as well.”
“Maybe you did, but he’s here now, and he’s brought friends. Or made them.”
Alex’s gaze snapped to mine, all evidence of tears gone. “What do you mean?”
“His restaurant, Sinners, it’s full of vamps and they’ve all got the same tattoo. Matches his ring.”
“Tattoo? Where?”
“On the inside of their wrists.” I pointed to the same spot on my own unmarked wrist to show him.
“His fledglings. It’s his mark, unique to his venom.” He leaned forward to rest his arms on the table. “The ring is from another time. Used long ago when our kind kept human servants.”
“Used it how?”
A wince flashed across his face. “We used the rings to mark those who we claimed as ours. There’s a button on the side that releases a sharp edge along the design of the ring. We’d dip the ring in venom and press it to the human’s wrist, hard enough to pierce the skin. It worked much like a tattoo with just enough venom trapped under the skin to pull blood to the wound. The mark was quick and permanent. Even if the person was turned later on, the mark never faded.”
“Where’s your ring?”
“Gone,” he said. “There came a point I wanted nothing to do with the past, with the life I’d led. But a ring like that, something so uniquely connected to me, I couldn’t simply toss it in a river or down a canyon, and trust it would never be found. So I donated it to be sealed in a time capsule nearly seventy years ago. When the capsule is opened, I’ll place it in another. Safely hidden and out of reach in plain sight.”
I could tell by the way his chest puffed and his chin lifted he thought himself oh-so-clever. The idea was good, unless things went wrong.
“You sure? I mean, if someone got hold of your ring and some vamp venom, they could fake your mark.” I could see him making the same connections I had. “Make it look like you’d drained a few of your customers and left them for dead.”
He shook his head. “No. The mark of the murder would still show at the wound sight. Their venom would pull it to the surface. Besides, the ring is sealed beneath concrete. I watched them pour it.”
“You have another explanation for how your mark got on the necks of those women?”
After a few seconds of contemplation he said, “No. But that doesn’t make yours any more possible.”
“Whatever. There should be some kind of record of that sort of thing. A list of items, names of donators. I can check. Make sure your ring’s listed. What building was it?”
“The Cathedral of Learning.”
“Seriously?” The Cathedral of Learning is one of Pittsburgh’s most famous buildings, the centerpiece of the University of Pittsburgh campus.
He nodded then took a sip of his tomato juice. “I donated the ring in the name of the Edmunston family.”
“Which was you,” I said, to be clear.
“Yes, but at the time I thought it best to remain indistinguishable given the fact I planned to still be around when they opened the time capsule.”
“Right. Good thinking.”
Alex took another sip of his juice and I did the same, my gaze drifting over the club goers. Unintentionally I found myself staring at the couple in the near lower table, Todd and his date. They were huddled close now, she whispering in his ear, her hand on his lap beneath the table, he with his arm around her back holding her close…to his neck. She was feeding. Now I understood how Todd had snagged such a pretty woman. My gaze slid to her arm and lower to where the tablecloth moved with her strokes. Todd rocked his hips, shifting closer.
Octavius’s venom stirred to life through my veins, warming muscles low in my womb. I swallowed hard, tried to ignore the sensation. “Octavius said that vampires equate feeding with sex and vice versa.”
I saw Alex follow my gaze from the corner of my eye. By now Todd had all but given up on modesty, rocking his hips so hard the table shook from the effort.
“There’s a…connection. Yes.”
The lower, rough tone of his voice made me look his way. His eyes seemed darker, more intense, and the way he stared at my mouth made my chest tight. “Connected, how…exactly?”
He licked his lips, glancing at the couple and back again. “We can feed without having sex, but the desire’s always there.”
“Can you have sex without feeding?” Just asking the question sent a delicious pulse through my sex muscles, my mind flashing on thoughts of his penis growing hard, filled with my blood.
“Yes,” he said. “Though it’s not as…satisfying. It’s easier for a woman. The infusion of blood aids the nerve endings, heightens sensation. But for a man the fresh blood makes things…firmer. Feeding is a pleasurable sensation for both vampire and donor. That pleasure translates easily to sex.”
I scooted to the edge of my chair, leaning on my forearms across the table. “So are you, uh, feeding on anyone…exclusively?”
His cheeks flushed and a smile swept across his lips. “No. I’m not. And on that note, I think I should get you home before Octavius’s venom has us both doing something we might regret.”
I glanced at the couple again, my mouth dry, my palms moist. Yeah, I knew a lot of what I was feeling was the effect o
f vamp venom. But the connection I felt with Alex, like we’d known each other for years, was a chemical reaction all my own and no amount of sobering up would diminish it.
“Right. And when this stuff wears off I’ll make me a quick snack for you. Uh, I mean, I’ll make you a quick snack.” Subtle is sooo not my middle name.
Chapter Six
A faint tingle still tickled along my lips and down the center of my tongue, like I’d rubbed a finger of Bengay over the sensitive flesh—only minus the nasty taste. My finger and toe tips were the same way as well as the most intimate parts of my body. The last is what had me staring at Alex like a nympho at a porn star.
“Thanks for the lift,” I said. “Not sure I had enough money in this stupid little purse to afford another cab ride.”
He lifted his chin in a half nod, eyes on the road, then glanced at me and back again. “No problem. Besides, the purse matches the dress, right? Uh, nice dress by the way.” He glanced at me again just as the cab of his pickup lit with a passing streetlight, a quick flash, enough that I could see the male appreciation on his face before it went dark again.
I kept watching the handsome lines of his face by the green glow of the dashboard, my body warm and tingly with need.
“You said Cook Road?”
I nodded then realized he couldn’t hear a nod. “Yeah. That’s it up there on the left. Third house. The one with the wide steps. Don’t you remember? I mean, you just broke into the place the other night.”
I lived in a big brownstone that’d been divvied up into four apartments with a common hall and front door. Pretty nice actually, if not small and overpriced.
I think he blushed, a smile sweeping across his face as he looked at me sideways. “Yeah. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was pissed ’cause I thought you were the one setting me up. Kinda just went on instinct. Followed my nose.”
“You smelled your way here? I smell?” Ugh, not good.
“No. Well, yes. But no.” He pulled the truck into an open spot a few up from my apartment door, bumped the gearshift into park and turned off the engine. “I followed my scent on you. Remember, I licked my thumb to try and rub that mark off your neck?”
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