Golden Vampire

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Anxiousness jerked him back to Jesse’s question, and her thoughts surrounding it. “Tell me what you want.”

  The truth, he knew, would shock them both.

  Jesse sagged a little. Her eyelids fluttered. Now was not the time to tell her everything. She’d need whatever strength she possessed. If he took her defiance away, she’d be rendered so much weaker.

  Nevertheless, her eyes pleaded with him for the knowledge he possessed, for answers to the questions she had temporarily misplaced. He easily saw down into her soul, and wanted to touch her there, in the spot where she hurt the most.

  “Your presence is a temptation,” he said, and watched his confession ripple through her.

  “We have met before,” he continued, loath to go deeper into it, and at the same time needing to see her connect with her fading strength. “You know this. Your soul knows this.”

  He heard Jesse’s thoughts clashing, sensed the blackness within her moving in agitation. She didn’t want to think back, he concluded. She didn’t really wish to remember the circumstances surrounding the tragedy that had shaped her. The black spot she harbored was likely nothing more than a cloud of forbidden memory tucked away in a safe place.

  He wasn’t sure what to do about this theory. He didn’t know how much a part of her the blackness had become.

  “I can’t explain things to you now. Time makes no exceptions for dire necessities,” he said. “I had hoped to tell you more about yourself, but they know you’re here.”

  “They?” Her voice was throaty.

  “The monsters,” he said.

  “How do they know? What do they want?”

  “Blood,” he replied, his expression as grave as hers, he supposed. “They want blood.”

  Jesse’s eyes were wide, the skin around them ashen. She had taken on the pallor of those she despised.

  “You told them about me? Nadia did?”

  “They have nothing to do with me, nor I, them. The helicopter alerted them to your presence. Your scent is a further lure.”

  She shook so hard that he leaned closer to her, his hips against hers. This gesture of protection gave him pleasure. She was again in his arms, and vulnerable. The blood within her was hot and eager. Her body both reviled and wanted what he had to offer. Her mind reached out to him, pleading for answers.

  “What they want is you,” he said, his face level with hers. “We all want you, Jesse. I’m sorry.”

  The vampire had her pinned to the wall with his arms on either side of her shoulders. His chest crushed hers. His thighs overlaid hers.

  He had just apologized for this closeness and the approach of more monsters. The strangeness of the moment stunned Jesse. If she let her guard down, she’d be dead. If she abandoned her hard-won principles, nothing was left.

  “Why me?” she asked after several seconds had passed, rephrasing the question she’d posed to him already, sensing a shift in his bearing and hearing whispers she couldn’t decipher that hadn’t come from inside her own skull.

  “You’re a female. A potent one. We can scent you from a distance. Tonight, after dark, it will be easier.”

  “It’s not dark.” Jesse didn’t glance toward the curtained windows to make sure the statement was correct because she sensed the sun going down. Darkness was falling inside of her as well as in the periphery, beyond these walls.

  “Soon the light will be gone,” he said.

  “And things that go bump in the night will what, take over? Scurry out from their hiding places? That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s life.”

  “Or the utter lack of it. The exact opposite of life, in fact.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Lance conceded. “Yet here we are. Things other than the known ones exist. For good or ill, we share the space.”

  Jesse winced. “What about Elizabeth?”

  “I will try to get to her. You can remain with Nadia. They can’t get in here.”

  “Bite your—” Her retort broke off abruptly.

  “You would provoke a vampire?” he asked, his muscles corded with the tension she remembered from their balcony duet.

  “What else is there to do with one?” she countered with an absurd defiance.

  Fearing how he might answer that question, Jesse tugged her hand free from behind her, without the gun. There was no room to get the weapon out of her waistband, and at the moment, Lance’s weight against hers was both dreadful and comforting.

  Calling up her disintegrating anger, she shoved at his shoulders. The more she fought him, the more of his scent she took in. His treacherous pheromones were the reason her legs felt watery and her blood pressure had skyrocketed. He was doing this. If he wanted to play house, she either had to get to her gun or go for the stake in her pocket. She had to do something.

  “Any female?” she said. “They can scent any female? You said potent. What does that mean? Is it my anger that ticks them off? Can they smell emotion? Anxiety?”

  “Yes,” he said, his tone low.

  “Which one of those?”

  “All of them.”

  “So, they heard the helicopter, put two and two together, knowing someone was dropped off, and now they can smell fresh meat up here? That’s how you found me in the city? That’s not ridiculous?”

  “It’s unusual, and the truth.”

  Her voice dropped an octave. “Elizabeth wasn’t enough for them? What does that say about her condition?”

  “You assume that greed is a vice that belongs only to the living,” he whispered in her ear.

  Twelve. He’d said twelve vampires had Elizabeth Jorgensen. God.

  “You told me there are hundreds of them. In the world, how many?”

  “Thousands.”

  Jesse’s mind twisted against the possibility that she could indeed have brushed up against them in a crowd, on a street. Not just in an alley, but anywhere and everywhere.

  “Different,” she said. “How are you different from them?”

  “I was put here to watch the others.”

  “To protect them?”

  “I was to keep them from happening. Things got out of control. The populations exploded across all lines. My strength alone wasn’t sufficient.”

  “Are there others like you?”

  The features of the face beside hers furrowed, showing that the answer to her question troubled him deeply. “Six others,” he said.

  “Six, total, to keep watch on all the rest? How many of those six are nearby?”

  “None.”

  Jesse’s legs finally gave way. She felt them go, as if her bones suddenly just dissolved.

  Chapter 13

  She didn’t fall.

  Falling would have been infinitely preferable to being held in Lance’s arms like the weakling she had never been.

  She was being cradled against his chest like a damsel in distress. He was looking at her as though waiting for her to come up swinging. But her mutinous body sank into the curve of his arms as though she belonged there. For one second, an infinitesimal, useless amount of time, she wanted to give up, give in and see where this moment took her. She’d fought for so long. She was tired.

  “I didn’t drink the tea,” she choked out through a dry throat. “But I can’t stand up.”

  “You’re not poisoned,” Lance said. “Neither is this any indication of weakness. It’s a system overload. A rewiring that’s finally amounting to something.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Put me down.”

  “All right.”

  He didn’t put her down. He closed his arms tighter around her, almost a reflexive move, Jesse thought, feeling him tighten in surprise.

  Panic struck again. She had to get free, get out of this situation. She’d stake this vampire, put herself and him out of their misery—as soon as her wits returned.

  But the panic she was experiencing, her mind warned, wasn’t about devising a way to kill this magnificent creature who might have been aroun
d since the Middle Ages, for all she knew. The panic, she realized, came from being held in his arms, being near him, where some part of her felt as if she belonged.

  Jesse snapped her head back so that she could see Lance’s face. Her skin flushed hot, then hotter when she found him staring. There was no way to reach the weapon in her pocket, although he was looking at her as though she was about to become dinner.

  “Not happening!” Her protest was vehement. She didn’t move one single limb in a struggle to break his hold. Her chest rose and fell, heaving for breaths she didn’t find, as the last remnant of a meeting with a vampire continued to burn a pathway along her neck. Putting both hands up to soothe the fire, Jesse swore she heard the whoosh of blood moving through her arteries. She thought she heard the same thing in his.

  Afraid of losing her grasp on reality, Jesse fought to call up her anger. Anger overshadowed fear, and was the most important discovery she’d come across in that institution some people called a hospital.

  Stay angry. Control the fear, the uncertainty, the anxiety, by wanting to fight the cause of those things.

  She parted her lips to shout at the creature holding her. No shout emerged. A mouth, his mouth—equally as blistering as the flames covering her throat—kept her from making a sound by covering her lips and soaking up the cry.

  Another memory hit Jesse as their bodies connected in this way. A white memory, appearing out of the dark, brought up a face—vague, blurry, unidentifiable—surrounded by light. In her mind, and with the maddeningly exquisite slickness of the vampire’s kiss, she again heard the murmur of spoken syllables, seemingly tender whispered words of comfort, or something close to that.

  Once again, she tasted copper, gagged, shut her eyes against the intrusion. Bits of phrases repeated in his voice. “Opening up to possibilities … A rewiring …”

  He was trying to tell her something she was too confused to get, purposefully making cryptic explanations that were difficult to comprehend.

  What the hell was going on?

  His mouth … his taste … was familiar!

  It was the third time in twenty-four hours he had kissed her.

  She tasted sinfully good. So good that his original purpose for kissing her began to fade. If Jesse screamed, the wolves would hear. Their attention would turn from where it belonged.

  That was why he’d prevented her protest by placing his mouth on hers, when he hadn’t meant to invade her privacy in this way. But … he found her lips parted by that unspoken protest, and as electrifying as the weight of her body in his arms.

  He slipped his tongue between her teeth, and his own fangs extended. His body stiffened. His craving intensified. It wasn’t only the bloodlust twisting him. He wanted Jesse in the way a man wanted a female—stretched out across cool sheets, with his naked body pressed to hers, on top of hers, inside of hers. He desired to meet her, skin to skin.

  He envisioned writhing, and uttered oaths of pleasure. Hot sweat, and hours, days, months, to explore her depths, over and over, time after time, with an immortal’s unending stamina.

  Keeping Jesse here was a necessity. His thirst became a sharp, insistent demand, crowding his insides, rising to the surface of the dark pool of control because the cravings hot-wired into him were primal enough to overwhelm the rest.

  Stay, Jesse.

  She tasted of fear, blood and repressed memories. His nerves jangled in recognition of the first two items on that list. Young vampires fed on fear, counting on it to drive any semblance of rationality from their minds. Fear was a turn-on to those who drank the blood of others. The excitement accompanying the confrontation of fear was an adrenaline rush that fueled the vampires’ show of supernatural strength.

  His fangs accidentally raked Jesse’s bottom lip. The drop of blood she had exhibited from an earlier hour joined the one his slipup created, sending the texture of Jesse’s lushness careening through him.

  Below his waist, he swelled, as if there had been no hiatus in the lusting of the flesh. The pressure inside his chest flagged all sorts of reasons why he had to either put her down or get on with it … whatever it was to be. Bite her? Take her to those sheets and make love to her, with time being of the essence to someone else in need of saving? With trust on the line?

  The wolves had come, preceding the monsters, announcing the monsters’ deadly intentions toward what he held so dearly to his breast. His thirsty brethren would soon be on their way. God help us, we are greedy bastards.

  The wolves were already baying at the rising moon. A blood moon, round, full, requiring sacrifice. The second full moon of a winter month. A rare occurrence. Here, where so many vampires walked freely, it was a night of undue greed and rampant terror.

  Who will that sacrifice be?

  Jesse gasped for a breath she wasn’t able to reach. Lance kept his lips pressed to hers, absorbing her struggle, sensing that one small speck of her spirit wanted to give in to him.

  Love and hate—extremes that were on Jesse’s list of unacceptable emotions.

  He ran his tongue over the tiny scratch his incisors had made, and swallowed. Small internal explosions made him groan. It took a lot of blood to turn a human into something else. Then again, Jesse Stewart hadn’t been a normal human being for quite a while.

  No conscience. That’s what Jesse charged. In the heat of passion, he had to concede, conscience was sometimes overruled. If a vampire killed too many times, its conscience withered and died, unused, forgotten, left behind. But what about sins of the flesh?

  Purposefully inciting negative emotion in humans was a tool he’d never used to further his own agenda, though he considered it now. He could show Jesse what they were, and what awaited her by his side. If he did such a thing, though—took away her will—he’d be one of the monsters, and as selfish as most others in the twenty-first century.

  Jesse wanted to kill him, take him out, in honor of what others, loosely related to him, had once done to harm her. At the same time, she was drawn to him with a palpable hunger of her own. Her blood, mingled with his, predicted the attraction, sealing it in place.

  Conscience?

  In order for Jesse to remain as she was now, a hybrid missing any true link to immortality, she must not be allowed one more drop of the ancient blood. Already, she’d become unsteady, and also more aware. She heard the wolves.

  One slip of my teeth against your fine neck, and you would never be hurt again … he thought. Therefore, the urge to speak to her came as a complete surprise. The fact that he could remove his mouth from hers, in spite of his body’s objections, was another.

  “Yes.” Lance spoke carefully. “You know me.”

  Jesse’s face went ghostly. Dark circles, like shadowed half-moons, underscored her eyes, those shadows echoed in the sound of distress she made.

  “You are strong,” he continued. “But that strength is sapped by the holes in your past, the things you refuse to see.”

  He rocked her in his arms. “Do you understand?”

  How can you understand?

  “Think,” he said. “Think back, Jesse. Find me, so that you can trust me.”

  He wanted to meet her willingly, wholly, rather than in sectioned-off pieces. She’d been hurt badly, but hadn’t he been through all the trials of life and punishment, as well?

  The body he held quivered while his heart pounded out her heart’s crazy, staccato beats. Her eyes remained closed. Clearly, she didn’t want to remember any of the details that might help her face her own demons. She wasn’t ready to relive the pain.

  Did he want to make her?

  Outside the castle walls, a wolf howled again—a harrowing sound that echoed through the trees and down the mountainside. The wolves weren’t his enemies, but his watchdogs, warning of the night about to fall. Darkness would soon wipe out the starlight. A blood moon would light his doorstep.

  “Nadia manages the four-legged beasts that roam the darkness in packs,” he explained. “They look to her to sup
plement what winter kept from them. Their presence allows my attention to focus elsewhere. Their reward for such an unusual fellowship is as simple as a regular meal.”

  The wolf howled again. It, too, scented Jesse, from her footsteps in the snow.

  She was listening for something else. Who did Jesse assume would come to her rescue? Were their conversations, transmitted through the tiny speaker taped to her chest, enough to bring help from her camp? What form would that help take? Did they mark him as the enemy?

  “Nadia’s family was killed by vampires,” he said. “She came to me for protection, knowing what I am.”

  He was telling her these things to justify his character, so she’d not believe him a threat, when he was one.

  “Tonight is special,” he said. “A blood moon is thirsty, and requires fresh blood to round out its fullness. It’s an old legend with some basis in truth.”

  His remarks seemed to stir Jesse’s uncertainty. Her anger began to root, its taste that of burnt acorns, grainy and slightly acidic. The anger rose through her like a cyclone, whipping up a new strength she had yet to recognize.

  Lance’s need to possess her multiplied. Having Jesse in his arms made him seem, for a small span of time, the savior she’d once believed him to be. A far cry from her more recent evaluation of his character.

  Thirst. Hunger. Outrageous cravings. I’m composed of those things, too.

  He had wanted either to prepare Jesse or spare her that side of himself. He assumed she’d be safe if locked away. He’d planned on giving her to Nadia, then going after Elizabeth Jorgensen alone. He would get the girl, or what was left of her, back.

  Then … Jesse. The hybrid who had turned his world upside down, compromised his retirement, and brought back his hunger for lust and love, long-dormant emotions. She had accomplished all of that in so short a time, gotten under his skin, when it was, in actuality, the other way around.

  If he were to prove his trust, too much time had been wasted already.