Right. It’s not Wilde. I don’t have secrets.
Everyone does.
Okay. A secret: I write space opera stories 4 fun & post them as ebooks.
Under A.S. Blaise?
Course not. I’m Sophia Katamides.
Doesn’t sound like a pen name.
That’s the point. Don’t tell my secret 2 anyone.
Lips sealed.
Thanks for sending blue sox yarn 2. Love alpaca.
Glad U like.
How’d U know I sleep in bed sox?
Just 1 more thing to take off U.
Stop it!
“Put that thing down,” Alec Reynard said.
“You said you wanted to talk to us,” Colin Foxe said.
James had forgotten where he was. Stupid of him, after all the sneaking around it took him to get to the bar where immortals hung out in L.A. He’d even come in through the secret door on the roof that was meant as an escape route, not the celebrity entrance. He got hostile looks for being here, too. His living his life in the spotlight was tolerated, but his own kind didn’t want that spotlight coming anywhere near them. He understood.
Athena was put off by this aspect of his life, too. His dear, shy woman didn’t know the half of it yet.
He tapped out to her, Gotta go.
James reluctantly put the phone down on the table, screen down. He missed her already.
“Sorry,” he said to the two other Primes with him. He flexed his hands. “Between texting and emails my fingers are getting more of a workout than my fangs lately.”
He didn’t mention the Facebook posts, the tweets, and the Skyping, and the regular phone calls. He’d been spending as much time as possible in communication with Athena, but it was not enough. Social media couldn’t replace a touch, a taste, a psychic connection that would only become real when their bodies touched.
Colin Foxe took a drink from his beer mug, then asked, “What’s up?” He looked around the room full of vampires and werefolk. “You homesick, Jimmy?”
“Who’s the mortal you were texting?” Alec asked. The Reynard Clan Prime looked James over carefully, with his eyes and his psychic senses. “You’re bonding with her,” he concluded.
“I’m trying,” James said. “She lives in Missouri, I’m stuck here. It’s driving me crazy. Literally, I think.”
“Are you stalking her yet?” Colin asked. “I did that to my bondmate because I didn’t figure out that’s what was happening to us.”
“Cyber-stalking, maybe,” James said.
“Why’d you ask us to meet you?” Alec asked. “Something about your bonding,” he guessed.
Colin and Alec were the only two bonded local Primes James felt he could talk to about his complicated problem. He liked Alec, the no-nonsense ex-Delta Force operator who now worked for the same security firm Mimi did. He was close with Colin Foxe. James and Colin looked a lot alike—well, the vampire gene pool wasn’t that large. Colin had even been his stunt double on a SWAT team action film. Colin was a real SWAT officer, and James didn’t need a stunt double. He couldn’t tell the company insuring any film he worked on that. Living his secret life used to be fun, if a little lonely, but he got no pleasure from it since meeting Athena.
“She needs to know the truth,” he said. “She’s having enough trouble coping with the celebrity life in a fishbowl thing. She’s really, really shy. I have to protect her.”
Alec chuckled. “I know how you feel. We all want to protect our bondmates. The problem with modern women is that they don’t always appreciate our instinct to take care of them.”
“Amen to that,” Colin said.
“One of the problems is that protecting her might mean leaving her her privacy.” He drained the beer in his mug.
“You can’t do that,” Colin said.
“I know.”
“Have you tasted her?”
James’s fangs ached at the question. It was a deep, needy, erotic pain. “No.”
“Well, you could try to keep away from her,” Alec said. He sounded dubious.
“Not possible,” Colin said. “I know.”
“But you’d tasted Mia before you tried breaking up with her,” James reminded Colin. “Maybe I could—”
“Go crazy wanting her and cause a scene that ends up splashed all over the media? Oh, no you don’t,” Alec said. “You’ve promised never to do anything that might lead to your real world. Bonding is tricky. You can’t go through it, or try to escape it, out in the open.”
“I don’t want to escape it, even if I think maybe I should try. I hadn’t realized I wanted a mate until I met her.”
“That’s how it works,” Colin said. “It’s a real pisser.”
Alec gave the younger Prime a harsh look. “You fought it, and so did I,” he admitted at the look Colin gave him. “I was ill—you were just a jerk.”
“I admit it,” Colin said. “I got better. What do you want from us, Jimmy? We aren’t going to try to talk you out of bonding, if that’s why you asked us here.”
James shook his head. He’d picked up the phone without noticing. He saw it in his hand and put it down again. “Athena doesn’t know the truth about me. She barely knows the movie star stuff. She certainly doesn’t know why I do what I do. Well, my mum’s started emailing her—but all Athena knows is that she’s head of a large Irish family. Which is the truth, but—”
“You haven’t told her you’re a vampire,” Alec concluded. “Do you want us to do it for you?”
James hands curled into fists. Jealousy raged through him for a moment. After he got himself under control he spoke to the grinning Alec Reynard. “You know very well I don’t want any other Prime, or mortal male, going near her.” He leaned forward. “Your bondmates are mortal.”
“Mine’s grandmother is a Clan female,” Alec said.
“Mine’s from a vampire hunter family,” Colin said.
“But both believed they were mortal when you met, yes? Neither of them knew about Primes, or werefolk, or hunters, or anything else about the supernatural world when you met them, did they?”
Alec and Colin looked at each other and shrugged.
“No,” Colin said.
“No,” Alec said. “My Domini had to give me her blood to save my life before she believed anything she’d been told about vampires.”
“I don’t know how to explain it to Athena.” He had the phone in his hand again. He put it down, so hard it bounced on the table. “Not the way we communicate now.” He explained to his friends about her telepathic shields, about how he had to wait before he could see her again. About how he needed to tell her the truth. “It’s an itch in my brain, in my nerve-endings—a connection I have to make with her. Was that how it was with you and your mates?”
“It was,” Alec said.
Colin nodded. “You want us to tell you how to tell her?”
No Prime wanted to be told anything by another Prime. The arrogance was natural. You found ways to work around it.
“Some advice would help,” James said.
Alec laughed. “You’re an actor. She’s a writer. You’ll figure it out.”
###
When the phone rang, Thena knew it wasn’t James. They had an agreement that mornings were hers to get writing done. It was 11:45 AM.
She hit the Command and S keys on the computer keyboard to save her morning’s work, and grumbled as she checked the caller ID on the phone screen. She couldn’t ignore a call from her family. Well, she could, but that would cause a chain reaction resulting in calls from every parent, sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, godparent, grandparent, great aunts and uncles and—
“Hello, Aunt Maria,” Thena said.
“Thank God, you’re safe! It took you so long to answer the phone I thought—”
“What’s the matter? What do you mean? I’m fine.”
“The vampire hasn’t bitten you yet. Good.” Aunt Maria breathed a heavy sigh. “I’m not too late.”
Aunt Maria was
a psychic medium, but she was anything but crazy.
Thena took the telephone handset out to the front porch. She sat on one of the many chairs lining the porch, and looked out across the hilly, wooded landscape. Sheep grazed in the pasture to her right, watched over by the fierce gray and white spotted llama called Sheep Mother. A calico cat slept on one of the other porch chairs. Two of the farm dogs were stretched out by the steps, soaking up sunlight. It was all so bucolic, so normal.
“What about vampires?” she asked her psychic aunt.
“You know how visions usually don’t just come to me, right?”
“Yes. You have to look at something, like a photo. Or touch something connected to whoever you’re reading.”
“Right. I see things by being connected to them. But not this time. I had a dream—a waking dream—and you were in danger in it. The vampire was sucking your blood and—”
“You do know there are no such things as vampires, right?”
“Of course I know that! But that doesn’t mean this one isn’t real! He certainly believes he’s a vampire!”
“Who?”
The moment she asked, Athena knew she didn’t want to hear the answer.
“That Irish actor. The one in your movie.”
Thena swallowed a sudden painful lump in her throat. “James Wilde.”
Jimmy. Her Jimmy.
No. Not hers at all. But they were becoming friends, of a sort. She hated anyone, even a relative, trying to warn her off a relationship with him—even if Aunt Maria didn’t realize that was what the images she’d seen meant.
“I do not believe in vampires, Athena, but I know when to believe in what I see. He’s a vampire, and he wants you. Don’t let him anywhere near you.”
Athena’s head was hurting—like burning ice cracking her skull open.
“Yeah...okay....” she mumbled. She just barely managed to find the off button of the handset before everything went dark and she went away for awhile.
###
The ringing of the phone woke Thena up. The sound was come from her lap. She wanted some aspirin and to be left alone. She was just barely aware of who she was and where she was and that she wanted James.
“Go ‘way.”
But the phone kept ringing.
She picked up the handset and looked at the caller ID screen. Her headache disappeared.
“Hello, Jimmy!”
“Afternoon, love. How goes the writing?”
She loved the rich, deep, velvet lilt of his voice. Of course, sometimes his Irish accent was so thick he sounded like Brad Pitt in Snatch, but she loved the sound even if she couldn’t always understand what he was saying.
She had noticed that her brain seemed to understand him even when her ears were going Huh? It was one of the many odd facets of their relationship.
The image of James in fangs and an opera cape intruded on her thoughts, but this ludicrous image was followed by a genuine pang of fear. Aunt Maria didn’t make mistakes. She’d been adamant about James being a vampire. Symbolism, but—
But it still left her shaken, suspicious. What did this man really want with her?
She spoke cheerfully. “Not too much done today. How goes the acting?”
“What’s wrong?” James asked.
“Have I mentioned my crazy family? Never mind. How’s filming going?”
“Do you want me to tell you how we changed the ending of your book?”
Even though she heard the teasing in his voice, she still almost shouted, “No!”
“You still don’t want to come to the premiere?”
“I don’t want to see the movie.”
“You wouldn’t have to watch. We could hold our phones in front of our faces and text each other the whole time the film’s playing. We could sit in different parts of the theater if you like. Avoid each other on the red carpet. It’ll be the most fun date of our lives.”
She laughed. Cynically. Even though there was a part of her that reveled in the notion of dating James Wilde. No, it was the idea of seeing Jimmy again that appealed.
She got back on subject. “How is your day, James?” Can I have a look at your teeth, please? Feel any urges to drink blood? She kept those stupid questions to herself.
“Something’s bothering you? Why are you upset with me?”
“I’m not. Really.”
He was silent for a few seconds. “We’re almost finished with principle filming. I’ll be free to fly to you soon.”
Yeah, right. “You say that to all the girls.”
“I do. But with you I mean it.”
She was sure he meant it to every woman he said it to, at the time he said it. “You’ll be free to go on to your next project, you mean. What’s up after Orphan?”
“You’re a mind reader! Let’s talk about my next project. Our next project, if I can get you to help with the script.” Before she could point out she knew nothing about script writing, James said. “It’s about vampires.”
“Oh, thank God,” Thena breathed.
“You like vampires?” He sounded downright eager.
“I don’t know anything about vampires. Except modern ones sparkle, right?”
“I do not know a single vampire that sparkles.”
“Know a lot of vampires, do you?” She was a little worried about the answer, even though she knew it would be a joke.
“I live in Los Angeles, sweetheart. They’re everywhere. But they don’t sparkle. Well, maybe if they’re wearing a lot of bling.”
“You don’t have to sound huffy about it.”
He laughed. “Point is, I have a treatment for a vampire script I want us to develop.”
“Bleh,” she said. “I’ve never understood the appeal of vampires. They’re the walking dead. They drink human blood. They sleep in coffins. Blood drinking rotting animated corpses have got to smell really bad.”
“I think you’re talking about zombies, love. Except they eat brains instead of drinking blood. Drinking blood is sexy—Bram Stoker taught the world that much about vampires, at least.”
“Do you really want to play a vampire? Won’t wearing fangs be uncomfortable?”
“That sort of thing is mostly done CGI these days. But I doubt I’ll mind wearing fangs.”
“Is this a monster movie? Are you playing the vampire? Or the vampire hunter?” Thena knew she was sounding a bit disdainful about it—a woman who wrote action adventure novels had no right to be a snob. Horror was a perfectly respectable genre, but she wasn’t sure she could write it.
“Maybe a bit of both,” he said. “There are good vampires and bad vampires.”
“In this story?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I don’t get that.”
“Let me give you the background. Don’t take notes or anything,” he added. “Just think about what I tell you. Let it simmer.”
“So, this is a secret vampire project?”
“For now. Ready? Here goes. Vampires evolved alongside mortals. They’re a different, but close enough to interbreed, branch of the human tree. Vampires aren’t really immortal, but they can live for several hundred years. Vampires are the apex predators, which means there aren’t very many of them. And they do drink mortal blood, but they don’t have to kill mortals. I’m not saying they don’t, but they don’t have to. They can’t turn mortals into vampires, either. Well, there are special cases where mortals can be turned, but it’s very rare and that won’t be dealt with in this film.”
“Saving it for a sequel?”
“Exactly. The vampires are divided into three different cultures. There’s the Families, which are the most numerous. They basically just want to blend into the background and live their lives. There’s the Clans. The Clans have this noble calling to protect mortals while remaining hidden from the mortal world. It’s all very romantic and posh. The Tribes are the bad guys. They’re the ones who’ve given vampires a bad name over the centuries. There aren’t a lot of Tribe Primes left—”
“Primes?”
“That’s what male vampires are called.”
“What are the females called?”
“Females.”
“Not very imaginative.”
“Noted. We’ll work on that. Where was I, love? Oh. There are more males than there are females among the vampires. Partly it’s biological, more males are born than females. But it’s also because the mortal vampire hunters deliberately went after females back before the truce. They were trying to keep vampires from breeding.”
“Because you’re born and not made?”
“Exactly.”
He didn’t notice how she’d phrased the question. No doubt because he was already into the role of this vampire Prime character he wanted to play.
“What about sunlight and garlic and stakes through the heart and all those other things that kill vampires?”
Primal Call Page 4