“After several hundred years of solitude a man may find his mate, yet once he does all the knowledge, power, or skilled command of his vampire gifts are useless.”
He paused, staring into space.
Jessie counted five pulses of the muscle just below his eye.
“He is as helpless to win her heart as he would have been had he met her as a human.” He looked down at his open hands. “It’s cruel. Now that I think about it as a man and not a scientist, I once again appreciate the conundrum.”
“Who?”
He smiled and gave a short chuckle. “The vampires I’ve watched struggle with adapting to their mates. I certainly did not ever poke fun at their misery, but I thought they were foolish not to reason out the answers to their problems.” He gave a little shrug. “Of course, it’s much easier said than done.”
“Does every vampire have a mate? Is it like being married? Are their divorces?” Quickly the idea that vampires were like movie stars, marrying for a quick fix or due to some crazy moment of infatuation rather than true life-long love danced through her mind, and she smirked at the idea of a vampire magazine spinning tales of vampire passion.
“Does every human marry?” he asked.
“No. But some marry several times.” She sat on a stool.
“Not vampires. Generally, it’s a once in a lifetime experience.” He cleared his throat. “This explanation might make you nervous to hear.”
“Try me.” What could possibly make her worry more than what she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours? “You’ve already told me I’m your mate. Is there anything weirder?”
“Vampire mates become—”
She bolted up from the stool. “Dear God! You’re not going to turn me into a vampire, are you?” Holding the stool between them, she backed toward the door. “You’re right. That does worry me. I don’t like it.”
She reached behind her, searching for the handle while dragging the stool. “I want to have a say in my destiny. That is not the ending I want for me. I’m not doing that.” Releasing the stool, she waved her hand between them. “This just is not going to work. I’d rather go back home and get on with the rest of my life even if it’s shorter lived than I planned.” She grabbed the stool again and dragged it with her toward the door.
Ricard tipped his face forward and looked over his glasses at her. He did not move from where he stood. “No. We do not turn our mates to vampires. That is not a fear you should consider.” He glanced toward the calculation on the board. “An illogical conclusion on your part.”
Jessie’s back stiffened. That was not the first time anyone had called her illogical. She’d been hearing that for years. First from her mother and father, both of whom were trained to think of everything in logical, concise terms, and in all honesty, probably did not have the genetic capacity to be illogical. Then, there was Joshua, whose nickname for her was Illogi instead of Jessie.
Ricard’s lips quirked to the left, and a slight smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Did I say something that bothered you?”
She would not take the bait. Baited was how an emotional woman spent most of her life when living with brilliant scientists and the boy wonder, who had obviously inherited their brains.
“What, pray tell, do vampire mates become, if not vampires?” She placed the stool down and slid onto the seat, holding her chin high and her back perfectly straight.
“She becomes the entire world to a vampire. She becomes his reason to live.”
“Well, that’s certainly much nicer than the alternative.” It took great effort not to squeal when hearing those words, especially when Ricard focused directly on her. His gaze meeting hers held hunger, need, and above all love.
Every muscle in Jessie’s body tightened with excitement. To ensure she didn’t do something stupid like jump up from the chair and tackle him to the floor she gripped the stool with both hands, crossing her legs and locking her ankles.
There was no way in hell she would allow her illogical, excitable, emotional side to turn her into a gushy moron. She had to control herself.
“It is shocking how this effect occurs. It’s instantaneous.” Ricard’s gaze trailed from Jessie’s face down her body all the way to her crossed ankles.
The heated touch of his attention nearly made her behave like a lovesick teenager. She gave a slight nod and even slighter smile, then spun the chair around in what she hoped appeared to be a careless whirl.
I have a mission. Avenge my family. That’s first. Fall in love, maybe, someday, later. Not now.
When she spun back toward Ricard, he stood in the exact spot, still watching, still smiling. That look of controlled passion made her feel for him. She sensed his desire to touch her and his desire to protect her, and once again she was impressed by his self-control. So impressed that some little demon-like desire niggled in her chest, encouraging her to tempt him.
Insane? Yes! Why would she taunt a vampire who so clearly wanted her yet fought to keep her safe? Why in the world would she want to risk her own safety with a man who drank human blood?
Had she lost her damn mind? Did she secretly want to die because she had no family left? That had to be it. She had to have some weird death wish. She laughed out loud at the idea. “Preposterous.”
“I know. I agree, but it’s true.” Ricard paced again. “There is a strange desire.” He paused with his hands balled to fists. “Is it the instinctual drive? Yes, that must be it. Nature wants what it wants. To be free.” His eyes widened, and he nodded. “Yes. The fierce, innate power within wants to explode, to make its presence known.”
He clenched his jaw and his arms drew in against his ribs, fists still squeezed tight.
“To take what he believes…no, what he knows without question, rightfully belongs with him. The one thing in all the world that makes an incomplete being whole.” He nodded again.
The deep purple of his eyes brightened to a bluer hue. Around him heat churned, and Jessie would have sworn his thoughts literally consisted of their own energy.
“But, why? Why, if he knows that she is the balance of his soul, why can he not simply bring her to him? Why can’t he with all his power, make them into one?” His hand came up before his eyes, fist opened as though to hold a ball.
Watching this man lost in his thoughts, desperately trying to reason out what Jessie thought sounded an awful lot like how love worked, drew her to him even more.
“This unseen and inexplicable drive to have, to force, to create something is all-consuming except for the counterforce that foils.” His hands came to his head, fingers combing into his hair in an aggressive massage.
Jessie leaned forward, prepared to go to him, should he need her.
“That power, like an urge controlled, no fueled by the universe…it’s thousands of times more dynamic than he is. It compels him to stop, to protect, to acknowledge that she…she…her love…her acceptance is superior to any compulsion or will of his. She holds the key, the answer to his question.” The pacing resumed. “It’s confounding!”
A strange desire to give him the answer he sought came over her. More than anything else she wanted to sooth his troubled mind.
“Why are you confused?” she asked.
“It makes no sense. I understood it before, or I thought I had.” He paused, turning to face her. “Logically, I understood, of course. Anything in logic can be explained and comprehended. From the most complex to the simplest problem, if one uses logic, one can explain anything.” He shook his head. “But this…” He pointed his finger in the air. “…this makes no damn sense.”
Jessie stifled a giggle. She may have wanted to help him, but he was adorably baffled, and that fact made him even more attractive.
“You find this amusing.” He reached for a marker and faced the white board.
“Yes.” She didn’t bother to hide the smile.
“I suppose it is amusing.” He turned and winked. “Though, from my position it’s far mo
re confusing.”
Chapter Eleven
Over the centuries Ricard had seen hundreds of vampires find their mates. He marveled at the transformation. Partly jealous, partly drawn from a scientific perspective, but entirely intrigued, Ricard had always wanted an opportunity to study the concept of vampire mating.
Be careful what you wish for was a proverb he understood far too well.
The desire to have Jessica was so strong, so intense he was amazed he was able to think of anything else.
He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her. He wanted to bite her, to make her, his, and to drink from her. The thought of tasting her was almost enough to push every other thought from his mind.
The force that held him at bay came from within him. It was almost tangible and quite possibly, if he were holding Jessica, it could be described as entirely tangible.
Protection. The drive to protect what was his, even if that meant protecting her from him. That was the force. He could no sooner hurt her in any way than he could pull the sun from the sky.
He had long ago forgotten what being mated felt like. He’d forgotten how out of control, yet controlled, a mated vampire was. The throes of passion, love, possession were far more powerful than anything other than the bloodlust that consumed a newly turned vampire. Though, even that might not be as powerful.
An innate function of his entire being was to protect his mate. He now remembered why vampires went insane without these women. The mere thought of anything happening to Jessica, made him sick to his stomach. It also made him want to kill.
Hundreds of years had passed since he’d grown numb to this feeling, a fact he was more thankful for than he’d remembered. Now, having it rekindled, having the woman who balanced his soul sitting so close to him, caused every thought he had to turn toward protecting her.
Finding an open area of the white board where late in the evening he had worked on the calculations from Joshua’s blood samples, he listed each member of Jessica’s family, beginning with her parents. “I heard what you said this evening.”
She hopped off the stool. “What was that?”
“That you wanted Rollins to pay.”
“I do. He and Tyrone killed my brother. They drove my father insane. God knows what they really did to Mom.” She came to the board and grabbed a marker, adding the dates of birth and death under each name.
He stopped writing and turned. “Please make one promise to me.”
With a purple marker poised below her mother’s name, Jessica looked up at him. “Yes. I promise to let you help.”
He squinted, hoping she’d take that promise one step further.
“Oh, damn it.” Her hand dropped from the board and she turned to face him.
He may have been trying with all his might to remain focused on the current problem, but having the one woman he’d gladly kill himself to save standing only inches away and batting her brown eyes while she tried not to make a promise they both knew she was going to make, made it nearly impossible.
“Don’t make me do it,” she said.
He let a smile crack his lips, though didn’t let it go too far. His fangs had descended, and he didn’t want to scare her into never flirting with him again.
She wore a pink long sleeve t-shirt that left not one bit of question as to where any of the curves on her body were. Faded jeans clung nicely to her hips and ass. Black sneakers rounded out the ensemble.
Crazy curly tubes of brown and red with hints of gold shot out in every direction, and each time she moved her head even a quarter inch several bounced.
He ached to touch one but thought better of it. The last thing he needed to do was give into to his desires and take advantage of her when she needed him.
“Promise you won’t go after Rollins or near Panthera without a good plan that we work on together and both agree is safe.” He tried to word the promise so she’d be backed into a corner and unable to go after the madman on her own.
“If that’s what it will take to make you stop worrying, I’ll do it, but you have to promise you’re going to help me avenge my family. I’m not going to slink away and hide. I want Rollins and all of Panthera to pay.”
Heated desire burned around Jessica. Her need for vengeance practically glowed and took on a life of its own. It impressed and worried him. The last thing in the world either of them needed was to be fueled by rage. Not only was it bad to make decisions in the heat of the moment, but it was a terrible idea to be possessed by such wicked hate.
“I understand what you want and why, and I promise. We will avenge your family. But, hatred must never consume you.”
Ricard worried of the impact of something so fierce and negative on her, on him, and on their bond. Together a mated couple was far stronger than any individual. Mated and filled with hate could take them down a very dark path.
“It’s hard not to be consumed with hatred. My whole family is gone.” She looked back at the board, brought her marker up and wrote a third date under each name.
“What is that one for?”
“It’s the date each one first fell sick as I remember it.”
Above the names Ricard wrote the date of the fire that destroyed Panthera and by extension all of Central City. “There’s something in the chronology of this situation.”
“Yes. Mom’s illness began exactly one year before the fire. Her death occurred four years later.” Jessica drew a line, titling the column “symptoms.”
Beside Patricia’s name she added weight loss, nausea, white skin, light sensitivity, loss of appetite, hair loss, abdominal pain, mood swings.
“Dad continued working, though I think he spent most of his time trying to find a cure for Mom versus any other cancer. Then, he died nearly a year after Mom.”
Beside Matt’s name Jessica wrote paranoia, fatigue, weight loss.
“The age difference between Joshua and me was almost ten years. He had only one or two fragmented memories of Mom and not many good ones of Dad.” She kept writing, but Ricard felt her sadness over this fact. “I always tried to tell him our dad was a good man, but…Josh rarely saw Dad have a good day. By the time Josh could retain memories of Dad, life had descended into a paranoid hell.”
“The end must have been awful for each of them.” Ricard had seen his own father die. The plague had taken his mother before he knew her, and his sister and a brother. Ricard and his older brother moved away with their father, but very few people in Barcelona escaped the plague. It was only a couple more years before his brother succumbed, and afterward his father.
No matter how long a man lived, he never forgot watching his father suffer and die.
“Terrible.” Jessica wrote weakness, loss of appetite, inability to walk, nerve pain, nausea, abdominal pain, skin ulcers, gastric ulcers and hair loss on the board near Joshua’s name. “Josh contracted TB first, almost a month after Dad died. Then he had polio, both of which Mr. Rollins attributed to the city being dirty and lack of immunizations of the small children, which at the time I didn’t know enough to question. Now, I realize there is no way on earth my parents did not vaccinate my brother.” She turned to look at Ricard. “Do you know how guilty I’ve felt about this? I always thought I hadn’t taken good enough care of him, and that’s why he became so sick.”
She squeezed the marker hard, then punched the white board. “Damn it! I swore to my dad I’d keep him safe. That’s the last lucid conversation we had. The very last thing he said to me that made any damn sense was, ‘Promise me you won’t let anything happen to Joshie,’ and I swore I’d protect my brother, swore on my life.” She screamed and punched the board again. “And look what happened.”
“You know it was never anything you did, right?” Ricard placed a hand on her shoulder. “You and Joshua were manipulated by very powerful men, devious monsters.”
“Yeah. Well, no. I kept taking him back there for more treatments. Then they diagnosed him with MS.” Her head dropped against the white
board. “I served him right up to them.”
“You were a child, raising your brother and misled by two evil men who even your parents, brilliant scientists, trusted. You cannot blame yourself.”
“But I do.” She turned from the board and leaned into Ricard’s arms. “I do.”
For several minutes Ricard held Jessica as she cried. Her overwhelming guilt bore down on him and only made his anger at Tyrone and Rollins deepen. In their sick search for a way to create a manmade vampire they managed to destroy an entire city and terrorize the family of the woman he loved.
There was no way he’d let her wallow in self-hate or guilt. He’d teach her to use those emotions as fuel to get answers and put an end to Panthera and Tyrone’s experiment.
“Jessica, I’ve always suspected your mother did not truly have cancer,” Ricard said. He’d tried to broach the subject with Matt more than twenty years earlier, but his friend and colleague would not hear it.
Matt refused to listen to reason. He refused to consider his wife had become one of Tyrone’s earliest victims.
“Me, too.” Jessica looked up and swiped tears from her cheeks. “In the end my father was driven nearly mad with guilt that he hadn’t found a cure for her. He couldn’t make sense of her illness and what he’d found in the tests.”
“He refused to share the results or any samples. He didn’t want us to help him,” Ricard said, handing her a tissue and giving her some space.
“He believed Dr. Tyrone would do everything he could to save Mom. We all did, even Mom.” She shook her head. “In the end he rambled for hours about her symptoms and test results. He’d lose himself staring into a microscope at slides of her transformed cells.”
“I’d heard his last few years were very difficult.”
“Difficult is an understatement. He spent every waking moment questioning the possibilities and debating the hypothesis that Mom had been purposefully hurt by someone.” She sighed and her shoulders drooped as if the weight of the memories crushed her.
A Vampire's Purgatory (Romance In Central City Book 8) Page 6