The Stone of the Eklektos

by Britney Jackson

  Erik shifted uncomfortably. “I can feel your…uh…pity. It’s weird.”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled awkwardly. She turned her gaze toward Kallias. “What about you? Why do you do it? Is it a redemption thing for you, too?”

  He just stared back at her. “No.”

  “What would he need redemption for?” Erik scoffed. “He has been starving himself since the beginning. He’s almost as boring as you are, virgin.”

  Rose chose to ignore the immature vampire. “Then, why?” she asked Kallias. “If you don’t want to be evil, just don’t kill humans. You don’t have to risk your life by fighting other vampires. You’re not killing humans. They are.”

  “What, then?” Kallias asked. “Stay home and pretend it’s not happening? Do nothing when I have the power to stop it? How is that any less evil?”

  She nodded in understanding. “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ Edmund Burke,” she quoted. “So, that’s what it is, then. You became a vampire, but you didn’t lose your sense of ethics. You’re just trying to be good in the only way you know, as what you are.”

  His jaw tightened, but he said nothing. He just stared at the floor.

  “You’ve done your good with me,” Rose said. “Just hand me over to Theron. I can’t let anyone die for me. I’m just one person. I’m not worth it.”

  He shifted toward her so fast that it startled her, causing her to fall sideways on the couch, catching herself on her hands before she fell all the way onto her back. His face was suddenly so near hers that she could have kissed him, just as they were, without moving, except he didn’t exactly look open to the idea of kissing right now. His brown eyes were dark and narrowed with anger, his face tight with barely controlled rage. He seemed beautiful and terrifying all at once.

  “Do. Not. Say. That,” Kallias said in a soft growl, enunciating each word.

  “What?” Rose sputtered, stunned by his strange behavior.

  “You are worth it,” he said, even softer this time. “Don’t say you’re not.”

  Rose just stared up at him, not sure how to respond. His entire body faced hers, and he leaned toward her, practically on top of her, so close that his lips brushed hers. He never broke eye contact with her or moved away from her. He just stayed there, close to her, staring into her eyes. His anger seemed to have evaporated, replaced by an emotion that seemed more intense, more vulnerable.

  “Leave, Erik,” he said without looking away from her.

  “Yep. Got it,” Erik said a moment before they heard the door close.

  Rose felt as if the intensity of his gaze had somehow managed to stop her heart. Everything felt frozen, transfixed. Part of her was afraid of the intensity, of the emotions that she felt for him and of the ones she suspected he might feel for her. That part of her wanted to look away, to pretend she didn’t feel what she was feeling. But the other part of her, the bolder part of her, refused to look away.

  Kallias braced his hands on the arm of the sofa behind her, his knees now resting between her legs, his body hovering over hers. “I know that what I’m saying pisses you off, and I don’t care,” he said softly, almost apologetically. “Because I won’t let you die. I can’t. Because I would rather see you angry than see you dead. I promised that I would protect you, and that is what I will do.”

  “Why?” Rose asked breathlessly. “Why do you care so much?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. He lifted his hand to touch her face.

  She shivered as his fingers brushed against her cheek. “I’m trying to argue with you, but all I want to do right now is kiss you,” she said without thinking. She blushed, shocked that she had voiced that embarrassing thought out loud.

  His lips curved slowly into a smile. “Then, why aren’t you kissing me?”

  Rose leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. His fingers trailed down along her jaw as he returned the kiss. Unlike the previous kisses that they’d shared, this kiss began slow and tender. Rose still felt that intense, all-consuming passion between them, but it was restrained, buried underneath another emotion, a scary, vulnerable emotion that she didn’t want to analyze too much. His tongue caressed hers gently and seductively, turning her entire body to putty. She moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck, which was, in hindsight, not a great idea, considering those arms had been holding her up, but she wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment. She fell backward onto the couch, lying fully on her back.

  Kallias chuckled at her as she fell back, the soft sound vibrating against her lips, but to his credit, he still managed to not break the kiss. He braced one hand on the other side of her to hold his weight, and he leaned down, still kissing her. He moved to rest his body fully between her legs, and Rose gasped as she felt him press against her. She moved her hands to his hair and kissed him harder.

  Kallias groaned against her lips and deepened the kiss, his lips molding to hers with so much passion and force that they left her lips feeling sensitive and bruised. He pulled away from her lips, and tilted her head back, trailing his lips down her neck as he did before, lingering at the most sensitive spots. Her breath came in short pants as he kissed her neck. Kallias found the spot he’d teased earlier, the skin just above her carotid artery. He heard the blood coursing through the artery, felt it pulsing rapidly beneath his lips. Its sweet, powerful scent intoxicated his senses. He could almost taste it. He grazed his fangs against her neck.

  She moaned at the intense sensation of those incredibly sharp teeth.

  As he began to lose control of his hunger, he pressed his fangs to her skin and applied the gentlest of pressure. His stomach and throat burned. His hunger-crazed mind reminded him that it would be so easy to sink his fangs into her neck and taste her, consume her, bond with her… He could already feel the skin beginning to give way under the sharp fangs. “Shit!” he gasped, pulling back.

  Rose stared up at him as she tried to catch her breath. He had his head turned to the side, away from her, and his eyes closed. His skin looked paler than she’d ever seen it, sickly pale. He panted heavily, his fangs bared, like an animal.

  Pressing her palms against the couch, she lifted herself, not quite sitting because he was still hovering over her, but not lying down either. “Is it hunger?”

  His eyes snapped open, and he turned his head to look at her. Because she’d raised herself into a half-sitting position, their faces were close again, almost touching. Rose nearly gasped as she saw the wild and feral darkness in his eyes. An instinctual tremor traveled down her spine, warning her of danger.

  His head tilted to the side as he stared at her hungrily. “It is so difficult to control it with you,” he admitted, his voice low and husky, more heavily accented that usual. He moved his head to her neck, his nose and lips nudging sensually at her neck as he inhaled her scent. He grazed his fangs against her neck.

  “Would it hurt?” she breathed. “If you fed from me?”

  “No,” he murmured against her neck. He trailed his lips upward. His lips brushed the shell of her ear as he whispered, “You would be writhing in pleasure.”

  Her breath caught in her throat at those words, followed by a tremor of overheated longing that traveled through every limb of her body like a shockwave, finding its destination at her center. Instinctually, she tried to clench her thighs together, but it was impossible with his body lying between her legs. “I should be terrified,” she stated. But she wasn’t. Terror was the opposite of what she felt.

  “Yes, you should be,” he agreed, his voice no more than a soft growl that vibrated against her skin. “You have no idea how much I want to taste you.”

  Rose moaned as his tongue traced the pulse of her artery. “You won’t.”

  He grazed his fangs against the skin again. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because you would never hurt me,” she answered confidently.

  He pulled back. “I would never…could never hurt you.”

&n
bsp; Rose stared at him, her chest tightening at the raw honesty visible in his brown eyes. She realized that, at this moment, she was seeing him in the most vulnerable state she’d ever seen him. His skin looked pale from hunger. Although he held himself over her easily enough, she noticed that he was shaking, his lips trembling ever so slightly. And he was being so honest, so vulnerably honest.

  The foreign longing that ached in her chest, the one she’d been ignoring for days, only increased as she saw this side of him. She shouldn’t feel what she was feeling. She didn’t want to feel it, but it was becoming harder and harder to deny that she was falling for him, much too quickly and much too hard.

  Kallias lifted himself onto his knees and moved off of her. He moved to sit on the other corner of the sofa, as far away from her as he could get without leaving the sofa. He hung his face in his trembling hands as he tried to regain control of the painful, overwhelming hunger that surged through his veins.

  Rose leaned forward. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  His voice muffled by his hands, he said, “Don’t come any closer.”

  She swallowed. “Okay,” she whispered.

  After several moments of tense silence, Kallias lifted his head from his hands and looked at her. The dangerous, feral spark of hunger was gone from his eyes, replaced by pain that twisted at every feature of his face. “I’m sorry, Rose.”

  She shook her head, a gentle smile curving at her lips. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” he muttered, looking away.

  Rose sighed, “Can I ask you something?”

  He laughed softly, “Yes, for the billionth time.”

  “Shut up,” she muttered, suppressing a smile. “I’m just curious… If all of your family were military, what made you decide to become a Philosopher?”

  He rested his elbows on his knees, clasping his large, rough hands together, as he stared thoughtfully at the floor. He shrugged his shoulders. “Above all else, my father believed in strength. As a man of politics, he believed that a people demonstrated their strength over another people with an intimidating military. As an individual, he believed that an individual demonstrated their strength over another individual with brute strength. People like my father are cruel and walk all over people they believe to be weaker than themselves. My brothers followed in his footsteps. They were all unkind brutes. But I was always different from them. I was intelligent. I enjoyed learning and debating ideas. My father thought that made me weak, but he never understood that it was that very thing that made me so much more skilled at combat than any of them. They relied solely on brute strength, and I relied heavily on strategy. I believed you were the most effective when you used your mind and your body.”

  “If you were a better fighter, why choose a different career?” she asked.

  He sighed and looked at her. “Because I saw what it did to my father, what it would eventually do to my brothers. They believed that brute strength could solve anything. They were basically bullies, preying on anyone weaker than them. I hated it,” he said through clenched teeth, “the way my father would abuse people and treat them as if they were less of a human. I didn’t want to become like him. I didn’t want to become a brutal, violent, abusive monster like him, like my brothers. So, I chose a career that involved no violence. I always had a great admiration for those who dedicated their lives to learning and teaching. So, that’s what I did. I thought by doing that, I could be different and better than them.”

  She nodded in understanding. “You wanted to break the cycle.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I was such a naïve fool. Look at me. I am more of a monster than my father ever was. I thought I could escape it, but…I can’t.”

  Rose leaned forward and looked him directly in the eyes. “That is not true. Despite the fact that you’re a vampire, you choose not to prey on those weaker than you. You choose not to hurt others. Every night, you choose to fight your demons. You choose to be different. So, you are different from them.”

  He stared at her, stunned by her words, confused by how they made him feel. With this woman, this human, he felt things that he hadn’t felt in a long time, and that was bad. Very bad. “What are you doing to me?” he breathed.

  Rose frowned, confused by the strange question. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he muttered, standing up and walking away from her.

  Disappointed that he was pulling away from her again, Rose stood and followed him, determined to keep talking to him, to keep trying to understand him. He stopped at a bookcase near the door and pulled out a book that appeared to be written in Spanish. He began thumbing through it. She stood in front of him and crossed her arms stubbornly. “Do you know why I love to read?”

  He looked at her curiously. “Because it’s entertaining?” he guessed.

  “Because anything can happen in books,” Rose corrected. “I fell in love with reading when I was a child. My life was so terrible, so full of despair that it didn’t even seem worth living. Things were never going to get better. No one was ever going to love me or care about me. Who wants to live like that? When you begin thinking like that, giving up seems like a good option. But then, I started reading, and I started believing.” She smiled and continued, “In books, you can overcome anything. Good can defeat evil. People can change. Life can get better. The good guys can slay monsters and save the world. A little girl can grow up in the worst of circumstances and still not become bitter or cruel because of it. Love can win, and hate can be extinguished. Books taught me to believe in things.”

  “You were reading fiction,” he sighed. “You can’t apply that to real life.”

  “You can learn things from fiction,” she argued. “Hope, light, faith…”

  “I stopped believing in those things a long time ago,” he muttered.

  Her arms fell to her side, and her face twisted with sympathetic pain. “Kallias, everyone needs to believe in something. Don’t you believe in anything?”

  He returned the book to the bookcase and stared at her for a moment.

  “Yeah,” Kallias said. “I believe in you.” He turned and walked out of the room, leaving her standing in the middle of the library, stunned by his answer.

  19

  The Stone

  The pen fell from her hand and hit the desk with a sharp clang. Her hand remained poised over the notebook, frozen the way it had been before she had read that last line. She stared at the scrolls, not really seeing them, a cold wave of dread washing over her, as she realized what this meant. This was bad. Really bad.

  Rose shoved the scrolls aside, no longer taking care to be gentle with the ancient documents. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, but it did nothing to dull the throbbing headache that had been bothering her for hours, no doubt caused by the lack of sleep and the tedious hours that she had spent translating those terrible scrolls. Her stomach turned with nausea, but she figured that the sick feeling in her gut had less to do with the headache and more to do with the deep sense of dread building inside of her.

  No doubt, Kallias would kill her for this, if Theron didn’t kill her first.

  “Can’t sleep?” asked a tired, familiar voice behind her.

  Startled, Rose spun around in the office chair so quickly that she nearly tipped it over. Kallias stood in the doorway, leaning tiredly against the doorframe. A pair of black sweatpants hung low around his hips. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt, leaving his muscular torso bare to her gaze. His hair hung around his face, disheveled, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. Looking at him, a stranger might have thought he looked perfect, more attractive than any movie star or model, but Rose, on the other hand, noticed the slight differences in his appearance, the things that told her that he at least felt less “perfect” than usual. His skin looked paler than usual, and just beneath his deep brown eyes, the skin had turned purple.

  She frowned worriedly. “You look…tired.”

  He slu
mped heavily against the door. “I’m supposed to be sleeping.”

  She scowled at his posture, worried that he would fall. “Why aren’t you?”

  “I hear you awake,” he murmured. “Your heart beat…your breathing…”

  “Sorry,” Rose sighed. “I tried to stay quiet. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  He rubbed his hand across his face, as if he could wipe off the tiredness. “You didn’t wake me. My body wants to sleep during the day, whether there is noise or not. It isn’t the noise. It’s you. I can’t sleep knowing you’re awake.”

  She blinked, shocked that he had admitted something like that so openly. He was apparently more forthcoming about his emotions when he was half-comatose from sun-induced drowsiness. “I needed to get some work finished.”

  “You’re upset about something,” he argued sleepily. “What happened?”

  Rose turned to cast a nervous glance at the old, cracked parchment scrolls piled in the corner of the desk. She sighed as she tried to muster up enough courage to speak. “I need to tell you something. And you’re not going to like it.”

  That seemed to shake him out of his semi-comatose state for a moment. He placed his hand on the doorframe and pushed himself to stand in a more upright position. His heavy-lidded, brown eyes studied her for a moment, and then he shuffled toward her, obviously too weak to be up walking around. He slumped onto the edge of her bed and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He rubbed his face tiredly again and then looked up, directly into her eyes.

  “What is it, Rose?” he asked, his voice already rough with irritation.

  She swallowed nervously as it suddenly occurred to her that she probably should have waited until nightfall, when he was more himself. “I was in Greece a couple of weeks ago, before any of this started, for a short study abroad trip. During the tour, this strange man approached me.”