Golden Vampire

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “In return for not noticing the missing people, the vampires were to stay out of the city.”

  Against her bloodless face, Jesse’s arteries stood out like veins of blue marble. The ruby droplet on her lip had turned as black as the night to come, and that speck called to him with a voice of its own.

  Staring at her lip, feeling his own blood jump in response, Lance carefully held himself back from the quick rise of the forbidden thirst that gnawed at his insides.

  “You told me they were all over the city,” she said. “The vampires.”

  “Vampires, like everyone else, sometimes renege on a deal if it suits them. They weren’t the only ones to change direction. The city officials did not always honor their own agreements. After many people went missing, complaints started coming in. The officials faced a public outcry.”

  Jesse’s gaze rose further, seeking truth.

  “Vampires were humans once,” Lance continued. “Every one of them, at one time, walked and breathed and made choices, for better or worse.”

  Tearing his attention from her lip, Lance swept his gaze over the rest of Jesse’s face. He said, “People are both good and bad, liars and saints. A vampire’s personality changes when it dies and reawakens to its shocking new world with the ravages of hunger upon it. As in all worlds, there are decent creatures you call monsters, and real ones.”

  He waited for her to either say something or challenge his own place in that world he had so briefly described. She didn’t do either.

  “Vampires reanimate, creating more of their kind, whether by accident or on purpose,” he went on. “Each time a vampire creates another vampire, the blood in their veins further dilutes, so that every new generation of vampires has better odds of veering off balance and forgetting former alliances. And so on. The original blood of an immortal is ancient. The form it has taken in the ‘bloodsucker’ population is what drove me here to this castle’s remoteness in the first place, away from all of that, not toward it, as I had vowed.”

  It was the reason he and the others like him had been created—for overseeing those others stumbling accidentally upon immortal life. Culling the good from the bad. A divine executioner’s task. Yet there were only seven blood brothers in the beginning, and only seven today if they had all survived. Their creator had died after giving birth to the Seven, drained of the blood she had willingly given to them—blood that was royal, beyond the limits of the history of civilization, and preserved in the vascular bundles of himself and the other six of his true brethren.

  Some of that blood now swam in the capillaries of the woman across from him.

  Has it brought you here, Jesse?

  “There are hundreds of the creatures you call vampires in this part of the world alone,” he said.

  “Liar,” Jesse repeated weakly, the light of defiance dimming in her eyes.

  He needed to tell her more. Explain enough to get her moving. Tell her that guarding against such fanged hordes, worldwide, was a pathetic plight, and how his vow had enlarged over time into the necessity of helping the mortals those monsters came into contact with. But the thought of his blood mingling with hers, inside her, coupled with his own rising thirst, was a seduction, a thrill akin to puncturing a nerve. He wanted to make love to her, and merge their bodies. She alone was brave enough, strong enough, for a tryst with his soul. Maybe his loneliness would finally be abated with a woman who was no mere woman at all.

  You would know the truth if you looked, Jesse. Don’t you know you’re special?

  “Please,” he said. “Come inside.”

  She didn’t move.

  Come, Jesse, he sent to her, tapping into the bond that had shown up on her lip as a crimson jewel. A bond she had not even begun to acknowledge, at least on the surface.

  She took a step, holding back as best she could, uncertain as to why her foot had moved.

  Come.

  She took another rigid step, her expression stricken with understanding. She knew what he was doing.

  With a sideways shift and a slight bow from the waist, Lance moved aside, leaving the doorway to his castle clear.

  Chapter 10

  A bombardment of sensory input rushed at Jesse as she stepped across the castle’s threshold, best summed up in stunted, singular adjectives. Ancient. Cold. Freaky. Frightening.

  Chilled to her marrow and beyond, she was too frozen to shake warmth back into her cramped muscles as she soaked in the details of her surroundings. Her nerves were on full alert.

  She stood in a vaulted hall composed of bare stone walls and stone floors, all that rock probably whitewashed at one time and now aged to a gray patina. Funny color, she thought, for vampires who can’t stand silver.

  She had expected years’ worth of dust and piles of rubble, and found neither. The place was empty. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in sight. No paintings, rugs or drape of fabric warmed the place, providing an inkling of someone in residence. That’s because someone wasn’t.

  Something was.

  In testament to that, she saw no windows in the great hall—no big surprise—though light slanted downward in ribbonlike streams from somewhere high overhead. Candles hung from sconces attached to the walls around her, if not exactly mimicking hazy daylight, then producing a similar effect. The result of all this dim, drafty bareness seemed as imposing to Jesse as the castle’s fortresslike facade. Neither of those things compared with the problem of facing the creature who reigned here.

  As her unearthly host walked past her, Jesse rode out another chill. She remained just inside the hall with her back to the door, ready to run if the need arose. Working to quell her rising panic over being alone with this creature in his windowless lair, she studied more details of this vampire prince and his nightmarish palace.

  As on the first time she’d laid eyes on him, he wore a white untucked shirt, this time over dark, loosely fitted pants. He wore the black knee boots. Once again, he seemed impervious to variations in temperature, and even more inhuman for it, up close.

  The icy breath Jesse had been holding hurt her throat. A nerve-racking, sharp stab of anxiety dissected her emotions—no help at all in warding off her body’s continuous quaking.

  What would this creature do now? Would her life continue or not? Facing those possibilities, she had to admit, reluctantly, that the bastard across from her was nothing short of stunning.

  The bleak gray surroundings made him stand out even more than usual, and quite exotically, as if a set designer had created this scene for him to star in. The black pants, white shirt and unblemished ivory skin, when contrasted with the starkness of the silver-gray room, made him seem almost colorful, and definitely the center of attraction. His blond curls that she’d likened to a halo gleamed here just as unnaturally in the candlelight.

  Jesse swallowed her fear, refusing to address the disturbing words gathering at the back of her mind. If only he were human.

  “It has been a long time since I told a lie,” he said, halting on a stone step, expecting her to follow as his bare, long-fingered hand reached for the carved banister of a stairway leading upward and out of sight. “At one time, I was heralded for my honesty.”

  “Then what happened?” Jesse parried, her gaze riveted to the swinging movement of his hair against his collar as if some hidden clue remained clouded by all those curls.

  She allowed her attention to drop to the open neck of his shirt and the show of more taut skin, and fielded the urge to run her hands over him to prove to herself that he was what he was. More disturbing, a snap of heat accompanied the thought of having been up close and personal with him, twice.

  Hypnotism? Mind control? Pathetic. Dangerous. Was she merely picking up on what she supposed his thoughts might be? The intensity of his stare brought up another word. Devour.

  Keep it together. Don’t give in to whatever he’s doing to you. Fight.

  The vamp above her on the stairs smiled wearily, as though he had indeed read her mind and w
as sorry getting close wasn’t going to be a possibility. His expression seemed to hold more than a hint of sad ness.

  Jesse shook off the shiver of apprehension working its way through her body. The vamp’s appearance had to be some sort of glamour. Nobody was this perfect. There was a better-than-decent chance this creature’s looks had been artificially generated. He could, in fact, be a hundred years old and sleep in a coffin.

  Jesse continued to avoid his eyes, knowing the possibilities awaiting her there, and fearing them. The loss of her will could not be condoned. She had to be careful.

  She began to flip through her mantra.

  Losing control is not an option. I’ve fought too hard to maintain, to lose it now. Stay on top. Don’t give in.

  Mid-mantra, her stomach turned over with the desire to chuck it all and look into his eyes. Stand up to him. Show him that someone would dare. All cops and law enforcers looked into the eyes of their adversaries to assess whether anybody was home. Avoiding this vampire’s gaze was wearing on her. Her body, quite apart from her mind, wanted to address this—which meant that anxiety was chipping away at her reasoning powers. She needed to move, work, fight, get somewhere.

  This is what they did. Lure with their looks. She knew this.

  The cavernous room seemed to echo a whispered Beware.

  “It’s actually quite comfortable upstairs,” her host said, breaking the silence Jesse only then realized had lengthened as he turned to take several more steps with his perfectly proportioned legs.

  He moved as lightly as if his body were composed of clouds instead of muscle, though she could see the muscle beneath his white shirt. He was a thing of grace and brooding angles, just as she’d first noted in the meadow. A brilliant, if toxic, collection of ingredients, so flagrantly like a man in shape and substance.

  “What? No dungeon?” Jesse quipped.

  “Oh, there are several dungeons. I doubt if you’d be comfortable there, though. And as I’ve said, you are my guest.”

  “I brought protection.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “How do you know, just to be clear?”

  “I can smell what’s in your bag and tucked at the small of your back, just as I can smell your fear.”

  “What does it smell like?” she asked.

  “The metal?”

  Jesse shook her head. “The fear.”

  The vampire turned toward her fully, his hair falling in silky curtains around his face. Jesse caught a breath, then chastised herself for it. The rawness of his energy reached out to her, just as if he had extended a hand. The room virtually expanded with his presence, pushing outward so that the air moved in and around her. If she closed her eyes, she thought, she’d imagine him beside her, breathing on her neck.

  Her scar pulsed in reaction to the thought. At least that small bit of herself recognized him for what he was. Monster. The same kind of monster that had branded her in the first place.

  Putting a hand up, Jesse stopped with her fingers halfway to her throat as a flash, like a hidden-camera lightbulb, lit her mind so suddenly, she winced in the dim gray hallway.

  White shirt. Halo of fair hair. Energy.

  Those concepts rode the fringes of her subconscious, telling her this creature was familiar. Not being able to place how she knew him was driving her insane. She’d felt this every time they’d met. But maybe that, too, was a false sense of security he’d planted in her mind so she would follow him up the staircase. So that she’d trust him, as he asked.

  God. Extra caution was required to separate the threads he was weaving, lest she be caught in his web of deceit.

  “Iron,” he said, his smile slightly dissolved. “Fear smells like iron. Also like the ozone of an impending storm.”

  “You think I smell like that?”

  “Yes, only better.”

  “You smell like this place,” Jesse said.

  “How so?” he prompted, surprise lifting his tone so that it echoed off the bare stone.

  Tossing the flip reply that had been on her tongue, Jesse went for truth instead. “Yours is the smell of rocks and the lighted wick of candles.”

  Even those things didn’t fit him precisely. She tried to be more specific. “Leather and pale skin …” Her description trailed as another flash went off in her mind, highlighting a memory that may or may not have been real this time; one that was, as always, partially hidden, elusive and dangling just beyond her grasp.

  She couldn’t be sure about what was real. She’d seen this creature in the alley that morning, so picturing him surrounded by darkness wasn’t a stretch. What, then, about the red haze in this jagged bit of memory? The very deep crimson aura around him that triggered her anxiety alarms?

  “I’ve encountered smells like those before,” she concluded. “I can’t place or describe them exactly.”

  “Do they bother you?” he asked.

  “Shouldn’t they? I suppose you’re causing this? Instilling a false calm so I’ll be caught off guard?”

  “I’m doing nothing of the kind. Well, perhaps I am, in a way. I’d prefer, however, to think that anything I’ve done is to prevent you from being caught off guard.”

  “Why do you care about what happens to me?”

  “Caring is what I was created to do. Although I may have forgotten about my task for a while, you’ve managed to bring it all back.”

  Caring? Was he serious? Beyond that, was he trying to make a point? If so, she didn’t get it. Vampires took lives. Vampires didn’t care about anything other than their next meal. Yet this vamp was suggesting that bloodsuckers had feelings, morals. What a crock! In no possible universe could a being with the ability to care have done to her parents what had been done to them. No way in hell.

  Still … some part of herself, some chip that had detached from the more reasonable parts, wanted to understand what was going on, really. She wanted to make sense out of all of this. Was he going to help her find Elizabeth Jorgensen, or did he have another motive for getting her here?

  Did the fact that she was still alive mean anything?

  Concentration was important, and she was having a hard time keeping hold of hers. She was slowly losing the ability to focus, aware of self-control inching away. She wanted to explore the familiarity angle. She needed the time to think and gather herself together, and didn’t have that luxury. Darkness was a couple of hours away. She’d planned on being in and out of here before then.

  “You’re willing me to be at ease?” Her hand finally covered the scar on her neck, though holding it didn’t do much good in keeping the ache to a minimum.

  “Are you at ease?” her host asked.

  Her silence lay heavily between them.

  “Then I’d be incompetent, if that’s what I was going for, don’t you think?” he concluded.

  “Why am I here, since you’re going for honesty?”

  “You want to know about Elizabeth Jorgensen. I’ve found out where she is, and you’ve come to ask for my help in getting her back.”

  “Have I asked for your help?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  Jesse’s anger rekindled. “Yes. That’s why I’ve come. Not to be your guest, your dinner, or to waste time. Finding Elizabeth is what I was created for.”

  “I know that, too,” her host conceded in the same gentle voice he’d used that morning to try to soothe her. “We’ll get to that. My housekeeper makes a good cup of tea,” he said, turning from her, heading upward. “Unless you’d prefer something stronger? My housekeeper is not like me, in case you’re wondering. I don’t, nor have I ever fed from her. I have not made her my minion. You can ask her if you like. Her name is Nadia.”

  “How will I know she’s not …”

  “You will know, I promise. I can also assure you that we’re not in the habit of drugging anyone by way of a teacup or wine goblet. The dungeons are completely out of the question, being that they are in disgusting need of repair.”

&n
bsp; The vampire actually grinned over his shoulder at her after saying that. It would have been a heart-stopping grin, too, Jesse noted, coming from a full mouth like his—an intriguing mouth that not only hid the wrong kind of teeth, but a mouth that had recently rested on her mouth. Except for the fact that her heart had stalled one too many times lately. Heart-stall twice in two days was unacceptable, unnatural and taking things too far. This time, she had hoped to be prepared. It was too late if she wasn’t.

  “You seem unconcerned about time being of the essence,” she said.

  He stopped and turned back. “No one is more aware of that fact than myself. However, a plan is needed, don’t you think? Details? I promise we’ll get to it as soon as you’ve gotten to know me a little better.”

  “Is Elizabeth Jorgensen resting?” “No. I am certain that she is not.” The vampire was not going to give in and she couldn’t make him. If Elizabeth was dead when they got to her, Jesse was going to take it out on this creature. That was a promise she made to herself.

  Rolling her tense shoulders, she hoisted her duffel bag and put one foot in front of the other, walking warily toward the staircase, heading toward him. If she didn’t look up, maybe she’d be all right, at least for a while longer.

  One step up, and Jesse hesitated with her hand above the banister his hand had skimmed, afraid to touch anything having to do with her host. The place was probably booby-trapped. Although her fingers were trembling, she gripped the railing anyway, and hauled herself onto the next step.

  He was watching. His attention was like heat; the hot and creamy kind that accompanied passion and slipped between your legs. The kind that made women come unglued if they weren’t careful … and the sort of intimacy she’d avoided so far. Which made this particular show of the vampire’s power to lure all the more sinister, and stopped her from reaching for her parka’s zipper. There was nothing remotely normal about her attraction to him. It was disconcerting that she’d tuned in to his sexuality. It had to be true that vampires exuded special pheromones that could dial right through an unwilling victim’s defenses. The Dark Seduction that lead to total surrender.