The monster was benevolent now, and speaking with true earnestness? Doubtful. This had to be another trick. Of utmost importance was for her to remember that this was a vampire, not a man. A dead thing, not a suitor. Never an ally.
Never a lover.
This was a monster, not a savior. A thing composed of dead flesh molded to resemble a man … although he felt like a man.
“Why don’t you want to hurt me?” She was torn by the rise of conflicting emotion, and in need of answers.
“Can it be something as simple as sensing a kindred spirit in you, Jesse?”
Don’t say my name!
On your lips, it’s sickeningly provocative.
When the vampire inched closer, his golden curls fell across his features like wings of sunlight in the dark alley. Strong arms encircled her, while Jesse’s arms again hung uselessly at her sides.
Kill … him!
The directive dispersed as Jesse closed her eyes. The throb in her neck increased as wave after wave of longing, sexual, personal, made her shudder as the blackness of her surroundings faded to gray, to beige, then to white. Not the white walls of a room in an asylum—God no, not that—but the blistering whiteness of a singed soul. A damaged soul. Hers.
And in the white weightlessness a face appeared. The very pale face of an angel.
In distant memory, Jesse felt a prick. A coppery taste slid through her. A rush of liquid filled her mouth, thick, awful, difficult to swallow. She shook her head to negate the memory … and found herself waking, pressed tightly to the vampire in an unwanted embrace. A puzzling funnel of vagueness beat a path through her mind, blackening everything, including a good chunk of her former resolve.
This is wrong. All wrong.
The heat was addicting. In a perverse way, his arms felt strong and secure. The old wound on her neck blazed, and Jesse wanted to tear at her neck with her hands as she used to do, so long ago, in that white place.
No one there, back then in that hospital, had been able to douse the fire, she recalled. For years, she hadn’t allowed hospital personnel to touch her. She had wallowed in the coldness of sorrow, mindlessness and regret, with her insides taken over by the flames.
She’d eventually found a way to calm those inner fires, a feat accomplished through the struggle and honing of her willpower. But she’d never been able to stand intimacy of any kind after that night in the alley. Intimacy led to sadness, pain and loss. The fire presently singeing her neck was a reminder, a throwback to everything that had come before. If she didn’t move quickly in the direction of the street, she’d be unable to control what might happen.
“Lesson one,” the vampire said, his tone dragging her back to him. “A hungry vampire can be ruthless. However, they are not all young and inexperienced. Rarely do they travel alone.”
Jesse’s stomach roiled. Beyond the scent of leather and wool lingered an odor of ashes that had once been a monster. A creature unlike this one beside her, maybe, but how many definitions of monster could there be in a dictionary of the undead?
“Yes, and here you are,” she choked out.
The golden head shook. Jesse thought she heard him sigh. She swore she felt a hand on her face, not leather-covered, but bare. Not the cold grip of death, but warm. In this vampire’s fingers the familiar fires lapped, just like the fires of old, as if he wielded power over them, and thus over her.
She had to look up.
Had to.
She had to see exactly what she was up against.
Uttering a groan of shock, she met the intense blue gaze suggesting this vampire could drink her up by the meeting of their eyes alone. Large, beautiful eyes, topped by long, gold lashes. Endless, fathomless pools of blue, with something darker swimming behind.
Around her, the alley’s dark edges disappeared as more fire, red, hot, molten, came on. Her chest imploded in an internal blaze of heat. Moisture gathered on her upper lip and between her legs.
The chilled air in the alley met her overheated skin with a hiss. Jesse swayed when she heard it. The word run rose from the furnace as if some external source had better sense than she did and would encourage her to get away from him, from this.
But the warnings came too late.
His eyes.
Blue eyes.
His face. So pale, and …
Familiar.
The vampire’s hungry stare held her a breathless captive. His mouth, hovering above hers, moved to form words she’d have to heed, but he didn’t speak. Instead, Jesse’s fleeting impression was that he was about to kiss her again. Or more likely, he’d bite her with the lethal set of canines his kind possessed.
He might prefer his meals struggling.
So then why, her mind asked, hadn’t he bitten her last night, when he’d had the chance?
Her lips trembled with the strain of her internal fight versus her external motionlessness. She knew with certainty that he was going to touch her mouth with his, and that she was helpless in stopping him.
When his lips, with a blistering imitation of tender, did that very thing, Jesse tensed against him, unable to assert herself, cocooned in an immovable body for what seemed like an eternity before his fire swept her up.
Untethered, and without her anger to ground her, she thought her feet left the earth. It felt to her as though she and the vampire rose upward, above the grim alley.
His lips rested lightly on hers—hardly a touch at all, really—but she hadn’t been mistaken about this last night. There was breath in him.
Breath in the dead thing.
Again Jesse thought to struggle. She was of a mind to use the wooden stake and get rid of his perfect golden carcass once and for all. Yet with the pressure of his mouth came a series of strange sounds that crippled her.
She heard flapping noises, reminiscent of banners or flags whipping in the wind. Behind her closed eyes, flashes of color accompanied the sounds: bright green, brilliant blue, electric red, and a gold that was a near-perfect match to the vampire’s halo of hair.
Pungent odors arrived, very different from the wet pavement of the alley and smelling more like straw or moist grass over muddy earth. Nothing like city smells.
The vampire’s supple lips feathered over hers without resting in any one place, and the fact that she stood there became a reminder of his superior will. Jesse’s reluctance slipped another notch. No one had ever kissed her, breathed on her face, dared come this close. Was this the kiss of death? Would she give in to that, too, if he asked it of her?
The meeting of their mouths brought something else with it besides turmoil. Despite the confusion and the immediacy of his closeness, Jesse heard a voice. Far off in the distance, seeming to come from the vampire’s mind, a voice shouted, “Help them!”
Her ears rang with the stark terror in that plea until she was sure she was going to be sick. The earth seemed to revolve …
The golden vampire, the creature who held her and whose mouth had trespassed against hers a second time, quickly drew back. He turned his head to look beyond her, leaving Jesse gasping, and wondering if maybe he also had heard the voice and the panic in it.
Without the vampire’s kiss, the mesmerizing inferno fizzled. Her surroundings spiraled out of control, making her a leaf in an eddy—twirling, twisting, sinking beneath the outermost levels of herself.
Green. Blue. Gold. Green. Blue. Red. Faster and faster the flashes of color and light spun … until they merged into a bleak, muddy gray. When the spinning slowed, the gray world drained, as if it were made of paint, now wet and dripping down the alley’s walls. Light went out. Darkness returned.
Jesse was aware of her feet again on solid ground, felt the crunch of grit beneath her shoes. She blinked back tears, afraid to face what had just happened.
“Jesse.”
Stumbling back, she hit the wall of the closest building. Her breath whooshed out, but she held on because she was still breathing, still alive.
“Who was that?” Her voi
ce was throaty. “Who called?”
“Your car is waiting,” the beautiful, complex thing beside her announced, failing to address or acknowledge either her question or what had just passed between them. Stranger yet, his voice rang with audible sadness.
Was she supposed to speak? Hell if she could. She could barely stand, lost in the sense that she was still dreaming, and dreaming him. She was lost in the realization of just having defiled her parents’ grave by finding anything redeeming here.
“Come,” he said, holding out his hand for her to take.
What she needed was air, along with the reminder to continue to breathe. She needed a wheelchair and a more cooperative pair of legs. She needed to chant her mantra about control and mean it. She had picked up on something in the vampire’s tone that she had missed before. A lilt. The slightest rolling of syllables. This vampire had a French accent that echoed softly in her mind. That accent meant something, was important somehow. It seeped into her consciousness without taking shape; another piece of a puzzle she couldn’t grasp.
“Stan will be worried,” he told her, his hand still raised.
“Stan?” Jesse massaged her temple with shaky fingers that felt as surreal as the rest of this. God, Stan would be more than worried. How long had she been in this place?
“Can you walk?” the vampire, the enigma, asked.
“I can run,” she replied.
The smile he offered her was tinged with concern as he dropped his offered hand and stepped aside. His graceful movement sent another round of shivers through Jesse, and she knew unequivocally that she was screwed. This vampire had gotten to her twice. He’d had his mouth on her twice, and her body had responded to him favorably, bypassing her brain altogether.
She had allowed him to get close. She had been bent on destroying his kind and had been mesmerized by the beast’s glittery bag of tricks. He was right. She wasn’t ready to tackle a vampire. She had a lot to learn.
“Go, then,” he whispered to her. “But remember what I’ve said.”
Before she could tell him to jump off a tall bridge, before she could get hold of the weapon in her pocket, another voice called out, breaking the silence as raggedly as if the air and the spell that had bound her in place had been slashed with a serrated knife.
Chapter 8
“What is this?” Stan queried, marching into the alley with the brown bag still clutched in one hand. “Some sort of cell-phone hot spot?”
Stan. Wearing a scowl and his wrinkled suit jacket. Just about as far removed from vampire challenges as could be imagined, and seeming to Jesse like a knight in shining armor as he waded noisily through the dark, dead silence.
“Stan.”
“You expecting somebody else, boss?”
Jesse stumbled forward, using the wall for support. “He … I—” Reaching Stan, breathing a sigh of relief, Jesse turned her head to gaze back at the alley—to find that it was completely empty.
Her heart gave one last thud.
“Jesse, I think we should go. You don’t smell that? It stinks in here,” Stan said.
“Yes. Go.” Her tongue felt thick.
“Shall I ask what’s up now or later?” he said.
“Later.”
Crinkling the empty bag, Stan looked around for a receptacle. Unable to find one, he shrugged. “I would have figured piles of trash. Like a dump.”
He followed Jesse to the street, walking as slowly as she did, scuffing his feet. “Sorry I ate the muffins,” he said. “You shouldn’t have left me alone with them, because you look hungry.”
Hungry? She couldn’t make sense of the term. But her treacherous body had seemed to hunger for the man … no, the creature whose lips had trespassed against hers.
“Can’t eat,” she said, tasting him, the handsome vampire, knowing he hadn’t gone and that he was watching. His closeness rode her skin like a nonexistent breeze.
I know you’re here, she thought.
“Yes, well, you’re probably famished, all the same,” Stan insisted, unaware of her panicky inner dialogue. “The bakery is two doors down. So what if we’re a bit late to the gathering? They can’t start without you.”
How long? Jesse asked herself. How long was I in that alley?
She was so unbelievably stupid.
Choking back a cry, she jumped when Stan encouraged her forward with a supportive hand on her back. Stan, serious-faced now, steered her into the press of people on the sidewalk, where he waved for the driver of the car to wait before maneuvering her inside an open doorway.
She allowed Stan to guide her, needing time to regain her sanity.
Oddly enough, her stomach growled at the sumptuous smell of freshly baked bread, though she still felt queasy. Stan sat her down on a stool in a room glowing faintly with fluorescent lights and lined with floor-to-ceiling windows. The lights buzzed softly overhead. Anxious, Jesse searched the street through the glass.
“Be right back,” Stan said, heading for the counter to order. Then he pulled up a stool and sat down beside her. He removed a silver object from his pocket, which he carefully set down on the table between them.
Her satellite phone.
“You left this in the car,” he said, placing a croissant on a napkin beside the phone and inching the napkin toward her. “I’m thinking you couldn’t have made a call without it. So, do you want to talk about what’s going on?”
Jesse stared at the phone. Telling Stan she had to make a call had been her excuse for going into the alley.
“Okay, eat first,” Stan said, thanking the waiter for the coffee just delivered. “You’re looking pale.”
Jesse had to pick up the croissant, but didn’t know how she’d swallow after being such a fool. It was a miracle she had made it out of the alley alive. If she’d been killed, Elizabeth Jorgensen didn’t stand a chance of being found. She’d taken an unnecessary risk. She should have known better.
“Let me see,” Stan began, eyeing her inquisitively. “Not the minibar, and not the hotel maid or the lack of chocolate on your pillow, so let’s talk about the dream, shall we, boss? Is the dream what’s eating you?”
Stan deserved the truth, of course. He was an ally and unenlightened. He might be in danger riding shotgun on this one. Also, she knew she had to talk because it was clear she couldn’t be trusted on her own. Someone else had to know about this vampire in case she veered off track again. But her past was locked away tightly and not open for inspection. She wouldn’t know where to begin, even if she could have.
“He’s here,” she said.
Stan took a moment to process her cryptic remark, but catching on didn’t seem to be a stretch. “Are you saying that Mr. Poofy Shirt is actually here, in this city?”
“Yes.” She found no relief in the answer.
“For real? He was in our hotel, in person? Not a dream?”
“Yes, to all of those.”
Her hand flew to her neck. No punctures. That made two times he’d touched her without leaving a mark. He wanted to help, he had said.
No f-ing way that’s going to happen.
Stan’s eyes narrowed. “He was in that alley, maybe?”
She grunted a yes.
“That’s why you went into that stinky hole? After him?”
Jesse’s reply stuck in her throat. Stan might think she’d gone off the deep end if she admitted to anything so absurd.
He let out a thoughtful sigh and tapped the table with the fingertips of his right hand. “To what do we owe the honor of his presence? Filing a complaint maybe about the chopper breaking in on his privacy?”
“He followed me here.”
Stan’s eyes widened. “Okay. That’s not good.”
“You have no idea.” Her words were whispered.
“Why did he follow you? Is he a stalker? Do we need to tell the authorities about this?”
“I’m not sure what they can do.”
“We know where he lives. We can tell them.”
&nb
sp; “Again, I’m not sure how much it would help.”
After a sort span of silence, Stan said, “There’s something else you’re not telling me.”
Jesse looked into his creased green eyes. Human eyes. Fleshy, and expressive. “Yes,” she conceded. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not going to say he’s a vampire again, are you?”
She mulled over the end results of an honest reply.
“Well, are you?” he persisted.
“Not unless you want to hear the truth.”
Stan sighed again, thoughtfully. He’d be trying to rationalize this. The coffee cup he’d just twirled clattered on the table as his big hands stilled. “Puffy Shirt is a vampire, like in the movies. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Yes. You can go home if you want to. You can believe it or not, but in either case, he knows something about Jorgensen, and he is dangerous.”
She waited for a big blowup. None came. Stan showed surprise over the fact that she might suggest such a thing as him leaving in the middle of a case. Seeing this, Jesse’s heartbeat slowed slightly. Her pilot was going to give her a chance to explain, and what would she say?
“What does he know about the girl?” he asked, skipping over the other stuff, maybe not believing the vampire theory, but sensing trouble from some angle and getting right to the point.
“He said that Elizabeth has been taken out of the city, as a hostage. He said a nasty bunch has taken her.”
“A nasty bunch of what?” Stan’s forehead furrowed, then he said, “Jeez.” Several seconds later, he spoke again. “Why do you think he’s a … what you said he was?”
“I’ve been reading up on them. I’ve made it a point to know about them.”
“What would make you read up?”
“There are things in my past that you don’t want to know about.”
“I don’t doubt that’s true, boss, but I need to know something, don’t I, if I’m to believe this. If we’re in danger in more ways than one, as you’re suggesting.”
Jesse nodded, swallowing back a knot of fear. “I had an experience with creatures like this once before, when I was young. The experience hurt me.” More words of explanation wouldn’t come. “I don’t know why this one followed me or provided the information on Elizabeth Jorgensen, but he has had two opportunities to kill me, and didn’t.”
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