Golden Vampire

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  She glanced up accusingly. Her brutally handsome host shook his head.

  “You are merely opening up to the possibilities,” he said.

  “What possibilities would that be?”

  He was a master of the “concerned” expression. In fact, if it were possible for him to look paler, at that moment, he did. Was his wary demeanor insinuating that he didn’t know about the oddly erotic sensations he caused in her? That he wasn’t toying with her on purpose, or causing these unwanted feelings of arousal?

  Maybe …

  Looking up at the vampire—at the set of his features and the way he stood there, Jesse knew suddenly that he really didn’t want to kill her, and that he actually expected to help her with this case.

  It was as if she had tasted light—that same light she’d sampled that morning when his lips brushed hers. If truth had a texture, this was it, soft, and not too bitter—though this new awareness wasn’t altogether free of the need for concern, because the light was rimmed in scarlet.

  “I don’t think I like you having such an advantage,” she said. If this creature wasn’t planning on biting her, drugging her or tossing her into a dungeon, there was something else he wanted from her in return for his help. He expected something. And it would be a whole lot better if he looked more like the gaunt freak she’d tussled with that morning, instead of himself.

  “If you’re so expert at mind games and in tweaking other people’s perceptions of you, what do you need me for?” she added. “Why not just go and get Elizabeth Jorgensen, yourself?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  No, she wanted to shout. She didn’t want the Jorgensen girl taken from vampires by another vampire. The thought of how Elizabeth might react to such a thing made her shudder. But she would have accepted it, all the same, if this vampire proved to be as good as his word. The end result was the prize here. The Jorgensen girl’s safe return.

  “You said I’d need to learn a few things in order to get Elizabeth back. Why don’t you just tell me what I need, so I can get on with that?”

  The vampire’s hint of a grin, whether sad, amused or condescending in origin, showed very white teeth, two of those teeth slightly longer and obviously sharper than the rest. Fangs.

  Jesse rode out a wave of shock. She had wanted the truth, had asked for it, and the truth is what she was getting, from between lips that had rested on hers. Possibly she’d find out what other secrets he held if she looked into his eyes. She just wasn’t stupid enough to try it again.

  But she wanted to.

  He was doing something to her, all right. Fangs. Pheromones. Remote castles. It was scary stuff, and no matter what he had to offer that he hadn’t yet mentioned, she was in trouble by remaining to find out. The heat of his nearness hadn’t gone, despite the evidence of his species. He was affecting her, big-time, and looked like a god up there on the stairs. A god with a bite.

  Her fingers tightened on the banister. She didn’t so much as turn her head to look at the door. Because of Elizabeth Jorgensen? Because she had her own point to make—of being able to handle this, of standing up against forces of nature so far beyond human reckoning as to be completely alien? Because she did not fear death, and every moment of the last twenty-odd years had been borrowed?

  “There is a fire upstairs,” he said. “I will explain everything to you there. Come,” the lord of the castle urged, and Jesse imagined she felt his gaze slip through her wavering veneer, again.

  Her gaze rose a few centimeters. Not to his eyes. If the creature’s pheromones could get to her from several feet away, his eyes would possibly seal the deal.

  Or those fangs.

  When he turned, Jesse followed, drawn upward as if drafting in his wake, hating every step she took and dreading what she’d find in the upper reaches of his domain. If he had information, she needed him, even though each step she took distanced her from the exit, and escape.

  She had finally gone insane. Around the bend. Setting one foot inside this place had pretty much confirmed this. As she eyed the vampire’s wide back and the way his shirt fluttered so softly over it, and as she watched the silent sway of his gleaming curls, she found herself hoping with all her might that Elizabeth Jorgensen was alive. She hoped to God that all this wasn’t for nothing.

  Rubbing the uneven ridges of her scar with nervous fingers, trying to ease her growing fear, Jesse realized that she should have brought the army. She really should have.

  “Stan,” she whispered, without tapping on her chest to make sure her pilot was listening, wondering how much he had already heard. “Are you there?”

  There was just no energy left to regret the fact that no reply from Stan was possible through a one-way transmitter.

  Death. Lance remembered dying, sometimes relived his final breath of fragrant springtime air. He would never be free of the memory of the moment he had ceased being human and had been reborn to the Blood. Vivid were the associations of leaving the known plane of existence, and the pain accompanying the event. The excruciating trauma of exchanging one kind of existence for another.

  He wanted to tell Jesse he was not the un-dead, as people tended to think of his half-crazed, distant relations, but no longer living on the human plane of existence, either. He was unable to die again, except by the most extreme means, while he also had all but lost the will to continue.

  He could mention that he was no longer privy to the variances of the seasons, illness, dark, light and love, having long ago surpassed all but the latter of those things. What kind of female would understand the turns his life had taken, and where it had led?

  There had been only one female of his breed that he’d ever known. His creator. Yet look what she had done, and what had been taken from him.

  Not long after his change, and the demise of his maker, he had adored the fair Gwen. Though in the end, Gwen represented nothing more than a wisp of life he had no right to grasp on to when he had become so very much more than that.

  Now, here he was, contemplating removing Jesse from her world and everything she knew, when other lives were at stake. Vibrant Jesse, serious Jesse, hell-bent on setting the world to rights, had a mysterious hold on him. The woman who looked at him with the little girl’s eyes.

  “Help them!” little Jesse had pleaded in that alley so long ago, her face a bloody mess as she screamed for him to aid her parents. She had not wanted help for herself. She’d had no thought for her own safety.

  “Help them!”

  Those memories drifted in the stairwell as he climbed, with Jesse behind him. It seemed that Jesse would still give up her safety for the benefit of others, which made his own current needs selfish by comparison. Nevertheless, he knew something of the woman behind him now. He’d seen how desperately she wanted to be saved. She knew it would take someone so much stronger than herself to rescue her. Someone able to cope with the issues coiling through her.

  She was wired to her pilot through a microphone she’d just whispered through, as if Jesse believed Stan might actually be able to help her here. Stan, against an impenetrable fortress that had withstood armies of angry invaders for more years than Stan could probably count in decades on his fingers and toes. One swarthy pilot against a Guardian of the Blood?

  It was inconceivable that Stan could help her, though Lance envied the pilot Jesse’s trust. Stan was able to get close to Jesse. He had probably touched her, watched her eat, heard her laugh.

  Did she laugh? She who presented such a solemn exterior? He’d seen no lightness in her, though he had looked deep. A great swirling emptiness lay where hints of light should have shone. Sarcasm had replaced humor. Drive had replaced some of her fear.

  What would the pilot do if he knew everything about his boss? Lance wondered. If Stan found out what was inside her, would he turn away and sprint for the hills?

  If he told Jesse the truth, she might wonder if she’d be worth saving. If she realized that she was, in essence, closer to the monsters tha
n she’d ever dare to imagine, and only had to bleed to see this … that knowledge might hasten her self-destruction.

  Sacrifice. He nearly said the word aloud. Jesse was offering herself up without knowing all the rules of the game. The rules attached to life itself.

  Jesse, the fighter.

  I was once like you.

  She would see it all, know the worst, if she went after Jorgensen. Pitting her against the vampires she despised might send Jesse spiral-ing further into herself. He had to help her. He owed her that much.

  He was either going to be her guide, her lover, destroyer or executioner. Decisions were just minutes away.

  Those minutes seemed like centuries.

  Chapter 11

  The place her host had chosen for her to see was a shocking contrast to the hall beneath. High up in the castle, at least a hundred stairs above the hall, the room he led her into was a sumptuous cavern of scrolled paneling and pas-tel-hued fabrics, reminiscent of what she might have expected from Louis XIV.

  The elegant, if slightly worn, richness, was too much to take in and process after the stark hallway. Too much of a surprise. Jesse felt terribly out of place and way too current in her bright orange coat. Especially when confronted with the next past-life throwback standing in the middle of the room.

  A woman stood there, seemingly carved of the same marble as the vampire, until she lifted a hand in greeting. Dressed in an amber-colored floor-length dress reminiscent of some other age, the woman’s steel-gray hair was worn pulled back from her face, ending in a thick braid that fell to her waist. Small-boned and fragile-featured, she bore the lines and creases of being well past fifty. Big eyes of an unknown color trained on Jesse. She was smiling.

  After a first rush of relief over actually finding another person in the castle, Jesse’s wariness doubled. This could be a trick, after all. The woman might not be human.

  “Sit,” her host invited, gesturing to a chair placed beside the largest fireplace Jesse had ever seen, one that took up a good portion of an entire wall. Inside the hearth, a red-orange fire roared with the mesmerizing lull of wood smoke and physical warmth.

  “So,” Jesse said to her host, ignoring the woman and the fire for the time being, although she badly wanted to know who the woman was, and also desperately needed to thaw. “You do feel the cold.”

  “I remember the cold. The fire is for Nadia, and for you.”

  So, this was Nadia, the housekeeper. Not a vampire, her host had said, and yet she also had an unworldly air of otherness.

  Jesse nodded to Nadia, carried her duffel bag to the chair and dropped it on the floor. Then she turned her backside to the flames. Next to Nadia, on an end table, sat a tray with a teapot and three cups—which meant that both Nadia and her vampire employer had anticipated they’d be a trio for a while.

  “Refreshment?” her host asked, as if they were at an afternoon tea party. And truthfully, at any other time, Jesse thought, she’d have killed for some steaming tea to take the edge from a standoff like this one.

  Moving with wiry grace, Nadia poured tea into all three cups, and handed one to Jesse. After taking a cup from the tray for herself, Nadia sat down on a blue settee in a swirl of amber fabric.

  “You don’t drink tea?” Jesse asked her host, without touching hers.

  “It’s not my drink of choice,” he replied.

  Because he was partially hidden in the shadows of a corner, Jesse dared to look straight at him while considering his reply.

  “Especially not when I’m uncomfortable,” he added.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable?”

  “You are,” he conceded, surprising her again. She hadn’t expected any hint of weakness on his part, nor the tables being reversed on the discomfort factor.

  A damn vampire enigma.

  “The only woman I’ve been around for some time is Nadia,” he explained.

  “Woman, or mortal?”

  “Female, we’ll say.”

  “Yes, I can see where that might be a problem for you,” Jesse agreed calmly enough, though the china cup in her hand was rattling against its saucer, a dead giveaway of the quakes going on inside herself.

  “Can we get on with it?” she said. “Let’s start with who you are. I know what you are, so you can skip that part.”

  Her host bowed his head in acknowledgment of her parry. “My name is Lance Van Baaren.”

  “Van Baaren, like the coat of arms on the front door?” She recalled the carved artwork, scratched and weather-beaten.

  “The same.”

  “Just so you know, I’ve known of the existence of your kind for a long time, and also that I’d bump up against one of you someday,” Jesse said.

  “None of this negates the fact that you can’t save Elizabeth Jorgensen on your own. It’s completely foolish to think so.”

  “And if you’re going help me, please explain why we’re still standing here.”

  “Elizabeth Jorgensen is three leagues from my door. She is being held in a village that has death attached to it, and where people no longer care to live.”

  “By live, do you mean literally or figuratively?”

  “Only the undead trespass there now. The sort of undead you despise.”

  Jesse suppressed another spike of apprehension that threatened to tip the cup and saucer in her hand. Elizabeth was close. Three leagues was hardly any distance at all. What were they waiting for?

  She tried to cool her reactions. She had to be extra careful now. Her unusual host would soon tell her what he expected in exchange for this round of information.

  “How are those undead different from you?” she asked, feeling antsy, holding back.

  Her question drew another rustle of fabric from Nadia. Jesse’s sideways glance found the attractive woman’s lips upturned in what looked to be a private smile—suggesting she found Jesse’s question amusing. But Nadia, like her employer, didn’t care to enlighten. Van Baaren’s housekeeper took a delicate sip of her tea without looking up. Her hands weren’t shaking.

  Jesse pondered how she quickly might reach the gun in the holster tucked into the waist of her pants without drawing more attention to herself, and whether the vampire might be persuaded to hurry things up if threatened. She bet he wasn’t intimidated by much, nor too often.

  “I swear to you,” her enigmatic host said, “that you can drink the tea.”

  The rich, strong smell of steeped leaves floated up from her cup enticingly. Rich and strong—the same description she’d apply to this vampire. Noting those similarities, a flush of warmth crept up Jesse’s neck, more untimely embarrassment than anxiety related.

  When she looked up from the cup, Lance, the vampire with a name, was three feet away with his hands resting on the back of Nadia’s couch. Althought Nadia did not flinch or otherwise appear worried, Jesse worried for her.

  “Why would a vampire go against his own, in order to help me?” Jesse asked.

  “Ah, we’re back to that. You thinking we’re the same.”

  In an addition to his statement, Jesse thought she heard him whisper, “I helped you once before, remember?”

  But had she imagined those words? Did she imagine the flush that she knew tinted her cheeks? Or the heat of his nearness? These things should have been warnings. Red flags. Stern reminders that vampires were not to be compared to mortals, and never to be trusted. Vampires might have been people once upon a time, as this one had told her, but they were as far removed from the human state now as was possible.

  Lance. She didn’t like that he had a name. Thinking of him as Lance, instead of the vampire, made it harder for her to see him as a monster. Seeing him here, in this beautiful room, was confusing.

  No longer caring if the tea spilled, Jesse placed the cup on the seat of the chair beside her. She slid her hand up under her jacket to brush the handle of her gun, feeling better when she found it. The stake was in her pocket, the gun loaded and handy, but she had already witnessed the extr
aordinary speed this creature possessed. One wrong move, and by the time she’d have a weapon in the open, he might be on her.

  “I told you,” he said, reading her unspoken thoughts. “I do not feed on mortals.”

  “No? What do you feed on?” Her hands continued to shake. Her knees felt incredibly weak for all the show of bravado she was attempting to put forth. No negotiations in the past had prepared her for this.

  “Do you want to quiz me? Waste more time?” he asked. “If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done so by now.”

  “With Nadia as a witness?”

  “Nadia has been here a long time, of her own free will, and has never witnessed anything of the kind.”

  “Is that true?” Jesse asked the woman. Demanded, actually.

  “Yes,” Nadia said. “This is true.”

  “Why are you here?” Jesse asked her.

  “Lord Van Baaren took me in when I had nowhere else to go, and offered kindness. At first, I stayed to repay his kindness to me. Then I stayed because he needed my help and my company.”

  Jesse’s stomach knotted. Lord Van Baaren! The vampire was a nobleman?

  Leaning back against the stone of the hearth for the support her legs no longer provided, she said to Nadia, whose neck was visible above her gown and showed no puncture marks, old or otherwise, “You know what he is?”

  Nadia said, “Of course I know.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “I have been here a very long time and have been treated like family when my own family was killed in the same village of which you speak.”

  Jesse frowned. “The village where the missing girl is? What happened to your family?”

  “Thank you, Nadia,” Lance said, before the woman answered, and Nadia again got to her feet, as if his thanks held some secret, coded command for her departure. She smiled at Jesse sadly before heading for the door.

  Jesse watched her go without being able to do anything about it. What was she supposed to say? Run, you idiot? The same command she should be heeding, herself?