Golden Vampire

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Help me, Jesse. Don’t fight, just this once. Let me be your protector.

  When Lance glanced down, Jesse’s brown eyes were open, and trained on him.

  “Think back, Jesse, Find me.”

  The suggestion repeated in her mind with a stifling accompanying heat. Jesse’s skin felt damp in a way reminiscent of having broken through a long-running fever. Her body ached. Her head ached. Beyond the sound of Lance’s outlandish directive and the strange information about Nadia and the wolves, and something called a blood moon, Jesse again heard the cry of a wild animal in the distance. An unsettling sound. Gothic.

  She was in a castle, in a foreign country, in a room belonging to the past. Unsure of how she had ended up in a vampire’s arms, she stared at the ceiling, searching for a way to gather what was left of herself.

  The silky blues of the elegant decor were like a backdrop of clouds, hovering. The fire’s wave of heat escalated when she found her right shoulder tight up against Lance’s thinly clothed chest.

  “You know me … Go back, Jesse … Find me.”

  “Hell with Nadia,” she managed to say. “Tell me who you are. Really.”

  She got that they were tenuously connected by a bond she hadn’t figured out. He’d left enough hints about this, all of them cryptic and uninspiring, without actually telling her anything useful. Part of his game in keeping her from Elizabeth Jorgensen? No bite, no bloodletting, just a bit of hand-holding, a few heart palpitations and a show of decreased mental acuity on her part, while Elizabeth might be dying, dead already or worse.

  This vamp’s mission seemed to be a purposeful attempt to keep her from her goal. She swore she heard time ticking down toward the warning: too late.

  “How am I supposed to know you?” she demanded, straining against his arms, the spell finally broken.

  He set her down carefully, seeming to consider a reply.

  “I brought you here to protect you,” he finally admitted. “In the city, as I said, the others would easily have found you.”

  “Like they found someone else before me, I suppose. Someone named Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, though not quite the same.”

  “Stop with the runaround! Explain, so I can get on with what I should be doing right now. You must see how important this is!”

  “Very well.” He was looking at her so strangely, and in a fashion that turned her insides. Meeting his eyes again, right then, would be a slow form of suicide. But again, she wanted to look up. Cold was settling in now that he’d set her on her own two feet.

  “Then point the way, and I’ll go get her,” Jesse said. “Please. You have no idea …” Her sentence failed, as explanations about her own past always did.

  “You can’t go,” Lance said. “I can’t let you go.”

  Jesse frowned, then turned for the door. “Now you sound like Stan.” Before she reached the exit, Lance was there, in front of her.

  “Either kill me, or get out of my way,” Jesse said.

  “You can’t go where Elizabeth Jorgensen is,” he repeated adamantly.

  “Why? Is it a private club? Fangs necessary to get in? For all I know, you might be the king of the monsters.”

  His hands were raised to slow her down. “Night has fallen. You’ll get nowhere on your own.”

  “The blood moon thing? Nonsense. As if that should mean anything to me.”

  “It will mean something as soon as you set one foot out the front door.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are not who you think you are, Jesse. You are not like anyone else, in fact.”

  “Compliment accepted. Now get out of my way.”

  “Shall I help you remember?” he said. “I’ve held off, knowing you don’t want to go back there.”

  “Back where?” she couldn’t help asking, anger keep ing her tone level.

  “To the balcony.”

  Unconsciously, Jesse reached for her shoulder.

  “I fixed the arm,” he said, “knowing you’d need it if you persisted in this fight.”

  As if his suggestion brought some of the pain back, Jesse rubbed her upper arm. “You made me imagine I’d been hurt.”

  His silence, minus any argument about her remark, forced the one question she’d been avoiding past her lips. “How? How did you fix my arm?”

  “Our mouths touched—”

  Jesse jumped in, drily. “You’re saying vamps have Novocain in their fangs, and that you numbed the pain?”

  “Not Novocain, Jesse. Blood. It always comes back to blood.”

  The room went deathly silent and winter-cold, all former warmth a mirage. Jesse forgot to breathe until her lungs heaved, pleading for oxygen.

  She went back in memory to that balcony, felt the prick of his teeth, gagged on the influx of an aluminum scent, and tasted copper. The rush of an icy wind assailed her as she hung over the side of the building, dangling from a damaged arm separated from its shoulder socket. The vampire had pulled her up, placed his arms around her and his mouth against hers …

  And she’d awakened as good as new.

  No. Oh, no. Jesse blinked, raised her eyes, her anger transforming into pure disbelief.

  “It all comes back to my blood,” he said, the ex pression of empathy way too lovely on his unearthly beautiful face.

  Chapter 14

  Lance watched Jesse’s pink lips quiver, wanting to kiss those lips to stillness, as he might have been able to do as a man. The rest of her face was frozen in shock.

  “My blood has made you stronger,” he explained. “At the same time, that small transfusion has rendered you irresistible to others whose existence is ruled by thirst. Giving you that gift was an action I didn’t take lightly.”

  Jesse didn’t speak, looked faint, Lance thought, as she backed up a step, blown there by what she’d heard. Shocked to her very soul.

  “If you go out there, the others will be waiting. If you return to the city, they will find you eventually. Your only recourse is to leave Slovenia. Soon.”

  He had driven a metaphorical stake into her with this confession, as he’d known he would. Her eyes had taken on a cast of wildness.

  “A gift,” she said. Just that, her breath insufficient for her to continue.

  “I gave you blood,” he said. “Now, you must stay here until I get Elizabeth back. If she is—”

  “Alive,” Jesse whispered.

  Lance nodded. “When this is over, and with or with out the Jorgensen girl, you’ll have to go back to the States.”

  “Or what?”

  The comment was so like her, Lance thought. Stub born to the end.

  “Or,” he said, “you will have to decide what you want to be.”

  “Haven’t you already taken that choice from me?”

  “I’ve enhanced your perceptions, offered you a chance to survive this mess. Only that, and only a chance.”

  She backed up another step to lean against a chair.

  “You have not been turned, Jesse. You’re not one of—”

  “I’m not one of you? What does swallowing the blood of the undead make me, then?”

  “Better able to do what you want to do, on the path you’ve elected to follow.”

  “Oh, God. I’m going to be sick,” Jesse said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  Suddenly, her head came up. She staggered sideways a step before yanking her spine straight. Maintaining a tight hold on herself, she asked, “What do you mean about deciding what I will be?”

  “You can’t go back, Jesse. I can’t take the blood back, and it doesn’t go away. Once inside you it disperses, interacting with the other cells it comes into contact with. You can deal with this and move on. You can—”

  “Never!” she whispered. “I will never become like you! Not if I have any kind of choice!”

  Anticipating this, Lance said, “I did what I did to protect you.”

  “You just said you’ve made it easier for vampires to find me, and that if there are mons
ters around, I’m toast. You told me there are hundreds, if not thousands, of the walking dead, including yourself. If you found me so easily in the city, after one, what—glimpse?—what’s to say they won’t find me anywhere I go, and that I’d be safe anywhere at all? And you found me before we’d met on that balcony. Before you had …” She blanched, hesitated. “Before …”

  Both hands went to her stomach, then immediately to her throat. Lance knew what was coming, what had occurred to her for the first time.

  “How did you find me?” she gasped. “In the first place?”

  “I made inquiries about a helicopter, and the people in it.”

  He watched her think about that, knowing she’d soon find the flaw. She’d taste it. She was precariously close to the edge of reason. He had to slow her down.

  “The blood works both ways,” he explained. “It will be easier for you to find them as well.”

  “What if I don’t want to find them?” she shouted.

  “If that’s the case, why do you carry a wooden stake in your bag or pocket? Why do you even know about silver bullets and not looking into a vampire’s eyes? How were you able to recognize me? These things have hunter written all over them. You have hunter stamped on your heart.”

  “I …” It was obvious she couldn’t make the thought work right. She started over. “I don’t want to find them,” she whispered. “I didn’t really want to find any of you.”

  It was a confession, earnest, truthful, surprising, telling. Lance’s heart slowed, as if it had received a direct blow from which it couldn’t quite recover. This was the part of Jesse she had refused to face, the aftermath of those memories she had repressed. And it wasn’t what he had expected.

  The anger in her tone had fled, replaced by a hint of utter hopelessness, for which he alone was the cause. A curious sensation of heaviness came over him. Allowing the silence to lengthen, not sure how to proceed, Lance waited out the questions she didn’t ask, and the one specific charge she hadn’t yet made. Over that silence, he heard the whir of a helicopter, and his heart died a second death.

  If she hadn’t wanted to find the vampires at all … then his last gift had been for nothing. Could he have misread her so completely?

  “Stay,” he said to Jesse. “You’re safe here. I can—”

  “Keep me from doing my job?” she interrupted, her voice strained thin. “Stop me from doing what I can to help other people? Make me even more special?”

  Lance tried one last time to make her understand. “I am a Guardian. My task is to protect the Blood, and in doing so, watch over those you call monsters. I can get Elizabeth back tonight, when you are safe. At least I can try.”

  “Go to hell,” she said as she passed him, heading out of the room, toward the sound of the chopper’s blades she shouldn’t have been able to hear, but had. Toward the ride she knew would be waiting for her outside, and a blood moon that might end everything.

  “I’d rather die for a cause,” she declared in a throaty voice, “than be anything like you.”

  Jesse ran, expecting Lance to appear around every curve, but no one stopped her.

  She ran as much from herself as from the creature who had manipulated her. He said she had swallowed his blood. If so, she’d done so unknowingly, unwillingly. Still, what did this make her? Not a vampire, she sup posed, if she hadn’t died, but no longer completely herself, either. No longer completely human.

  What was the name for a human carrying around a sampling of vampire blood?

  Halfling?

  Hybrid?

  Something else nagged, barely able to get past the importance of the other stuff. It was the idea of having known Lance Van Baaren prior to seeing him in that field. She’d been bothered by a feeling of recognition after first laying eyes on him—an almost bone-deep feeling of familiarity. Lance himself had hinted at a former meeting several times in their brief acquaintance. He’d made a point of it, in fact.

  He hadn’t told the truth about his inquiry of the chopper. Not the whole truth, anyway. This creature messed with her for a reason only known to himself, yet he insinuated his cousins were greedy?

  She couldn’t think, needed air, as she continued to grope for meaning. Sick, wanting to retch, Jesse hit the stone railing hard in her downward flight from the opulent room, and bounded on, too stunned by her thoughts to register the interruption. Painlessness had become a drag on her soul, possibly another freaky remnant of what Lance Van Baaren had done to her. Maybe she didn’t feel anything for the same reason her arm had miraculously healed. Ingesting the blood of a demon.

  Reaching the cavernous entryway out of breath, facing the gigantic oak door that led to her escape and was carved with his family crest, Jesse leaned a shoulder against the chilled wood, daring to stop there.

  The helicopter hovered above with a steady hum. She also heard the piercing cry of another wolf, out there in the night. But those things paled in comparison to the intimacy of her name being whispered passionately from the lips of the creature on the stairs behind her. An evocative whisper that went straight through her with a piercing flare of heat.

  “Jesse.”

  No. Don’t call me.

  The heat was a charade, had to be, and as false as his world. A dead man couldn’t give off or offer warmth, even though this one seemed to be wrapped in fire.

  Without meaning to, Jesse turned to square off with her tormentor—golden, haunting in all his vampiric glory. Not only lord of the castle, but the keeper of secrets.

  With her internal alarm switches tripping violently, Jesse said, “I’ll bring them all. The whole freaking city’s worth of law enforcement, if I have to. They will know where that village is. Someone will know.”

  “And you will lead them.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Then you’ve learned nothing here.”

  “I’ve learned more than enough.”

  “Control it, Jesse,” Lance advised gently, softly, though Jesse felt every word from where she stood as though he’d breathed his warning into her hair.

  “Stay in control,” he said.

  Funny, Jesse thought. He assumed he knew so much about her, yet didn’t know that control was exactly what she’d been attempting for years to maintain. He wasn’t aware of how horrifying it was for her and every last fiber of her being, to be joined in any way to one of the creatures she despised.

  Not only had she lost her self-control and her wits by coming here, and by daring to hope he’d help her, she’d now lost another portion of her soul as well. There might not be anything left. She was sinking, breaking up, losing her form. Something dark slithered around inside her.

  Just one more thing. Have to know.

  “What will it do to me? Who will I be?” she asked, daring Lance Van Baaren to answer truthfully, testing him as much as herself.

  “You,” he replied. “Only more so.”

  A terrible understatement, Jesse realized, while knowing that she’d found the truth she sought.

  “It’s why I heard the wolves and the chopper through all this stone?”

  He nodded.

  “And why I came here? Your blood in my veins gives you an advantage over what I do?”

  “I did not call you. You came for reasons of your own.”

  “Answer my question, damn you!”

  He nodded again, and she found his presence as electrifying as always, even knowing what he was and what he had done.

  “I can call you, if I choose,” he admitted.

  “I’ll have to comply?”

  “You now have a choice, and the means with which to resist.”

  “Truly a two-sided gift, then,” Jesse said, wondering if such a gift worked both ways. If she’d be able to call him if she chose to.

  “Can they call me? The others?”

  “No.”

  “Then your blood truly is special in some way?”

  “Older, undiluted and unique in that it’s now a part of you as wel
l.”

  “Why me?” was what slipped out of her next, and again the most important question of all. It wasn’t that he’d found a kindred spirit, as he had told her in the city. Either he had chosen her for another reason, or everything that had happened was merely an example of how sick random coincidences worked.

  There had been no real explanation as to why the monsters had chosen her parents to maul, leaving little Jesse for dead. And now, she just happened to get this job in Slovenia, on the other side of the planet from Los Angeles, and had found Lance running in a meadow. Had being dealt a near-death blow by the bloodsuckers in an L.A. made her recognizable to them somehow?

  Another thought came. Had she ever really recovered? Did she carry the scent of death in each breath she continued to take?

  More flashes of light filled her mind, like the turning patterns of a kaleidoscope. Images shuffled by quickly, appearing, then distorting, sucking the life out of her muscles.

  Widening her stance for balance, Jesse threw up her hands to ward off what was coming her way.

  Bloodred alley. Panic. Ugly smells of thrashed, torn flesh.

  A descent into darkness, interrupted by light.

  Not the beam from a cop’s flashlight, but from …

  The presence of an angel.

  The suddenness of this image was peppered by a sentence of remembered words. You know me.

  You … know … me.

  We have met before. Go back. Find me.

  More images came from the tunnel of time.

  Hands peeling her from the grimy pavement, and brushing away the tangle of hair and wetness from her face.

  Strong male arms holding her.

  Light eyes seeking hers.

  Her own mouth opening, shouting, “Help them! Please!”

  Warmth closing over her when she was so very cold.

  A whispered command she wanted to obey. “Live, Jesse.”

  More lips on her neck.

  Brutal pain. Oncoming darkness.

  Then the insistent, startled voices of police officers on the scene, stunned by the sight and unable to move.

  Those pictures faded abruptly, leaving a stain in their wake. A red stain, outlined in gold. And there, among the gold, was a pale face, bathed in light.