“You almost gave in tonight.” The realization hit him like a medicine ball to the chest. He’d been stunned. He’d been angry. Now, he couldn’t choose between the two. He flushed hot, then drained cold with each numbing beat of his heart.
“I was upset. I was confused. He’s very good at taking advantage of that. Very.”
Jarvis tried to tell himself the heavy-lidded look to her eyes was because dawn was minutes away. He didn’t buy it. She was reliving Dillon’s seduction in their bed right after…
“You almost gave in.” It was flat. He couldn’t make his vocal chords work. He’d meant it to sound like the accusation it was.
“I didn’t.” Too soft to be a real denial.
“You wanted to,” he prodded. He needed to hear it. He needed the anger to overcome the numbness that was spreading from the imagined blow outward.
“Before the queen took away whatever she took from him, he was…different…more human and hurting. He seemed to understand how I felt.” She wasn’t explaining for his benefit. She was working through it for herself. He might as well be invisible. Her entire attention was on the damn rose petals in her hand.
“You wanted to give in.” He pushed her to say it even though he realized his numbness was actually dread.
“I didn’t,” she assured the bruised petals. She didn’t look up.
“You wanted him,” he pushed again.
“There was a moment…but not enough to give in, to give up.” Finally, she looked up. Her eyes looked as bruised as the rose petals, more gray than blue. He wasn’t hurting her, he assured himself. It was her feelings for her family’s murderer. Those feelings had bruised her soul.
“So you went from wanting him to wanting me in how many seconds flat?” He did sound like a jilted lover, but he no longer cared. She had lain with him, taken him and allowed him to take her and all the while…
“Actually, I went from wanting and needing you to being rejected to being really, really wanted by the devil himself to almost dying and then wanting you. Don’t make it sound callous and simple.” The rose petals were closed up in her fist and her full, angry attention was on him. By now, he didn’t care.
“No. Not simple,” he agreed.
“Will you ever trust me?” Her voice sounded angry, but something else as well. Hurt? Confused? Frustrated?
“You admit to wanting Dillon. We’re getting ready to face a vampire queen who wants to recruit you as her successor and you’re playing footsy with her right hand man.” He had no patience left. He paced off a few steps, then turned back.
“I’m not playing. This isn’t play. It’s complicated,” she said in an urgent, brittle tone.
“Yes. It is. But we can simplify it very, very quickly.”
***
He pulled on his jeans as he spoke. Holly didn’t try to stop him as he went out the door. It was time for the sun to rise and even heartbreak wouldn’t keep her awake. She wouldn’t toss and turn and wait for the phone to ring. She wouldn’t formulate apologies or arguments in her head for hours while she couldn’t sleep. There were times when being a vampire was a huge advantage. For an entire day, she would forget that they’d had a major lovers’ quarrel before they had technically, officially fallen in love. Dillon was right. Winters would always doubt her. Dillon was right. The thought followed her into her dreams.
Chapter Seventeen
Winters drank bitter coffee from a Styrofoam cup outside a Donut Hut. He didn’t feel like chocolate or powdered sugar or, heaven forbid, strawberry jelly, but he sure as hell could use some caffeine to clear the cobwebs from his reasoning.
He had just slept with a vampire. To be honest, he had made love to a vampire. He couldn’t remember if he had said it or not, but he had meant it with every kiss, every touch, every move of his body against hers.
What was he thinking?
Dillon must be laughing in his grave somewhere out there. He had trained and killed and trained some more. He hadn’t swayed from the blade in over a year of grimy, dust-filled nights. Now, when he faced the strongest vampires he’d ever faced, he had lost his head.
Holly.
Winters gulped and the bite of strong coffee burned all the way down to his gut.
Tonight, they would hunt for the queen. They were just north of Charleston, South Carolina, a city filled with old cemeteries and restored historic houses that saw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Last summer, Holly and her mother and sister had been among the tourists. It had been the last stop on their family history tour.
He couldn’t picture a crazed vampire queen strolling on The Battery near the Citadel or living in the colorful block of houses nearby that made up Rainbow Row.
He could picture Holly there. He could imagine Citadel cadets trying to catch her eye. He could imagine the warm, sea breeze in her curls.
He could imagine too damn much. That had been the problem from the start. After tamping down his emotions for a year, maybe they had bubbled up through no fault of his own. If it hadn’t been Holly, it would have been something else that knocked him off balance and into the darkness he fought. Or maybe he could tell himself that as much as he liked.
It wouldn’t change the fact that he was in love with one vampire and jealous of another. It wouldn’t take away his fear of Holly being taken away.
Caffeine wasn’t doing the trick. His thoughts were jumbled and unfocused and every time he thought about Dillon his breath quickened and his hand reached for his blade.
The battle would clear his thoughts. He would be thinking very clearly by tonight when he used blade and gun to do his job. And he wouldn’t waver. Not even for Holly.
He didn’t believe the resolved bravado, not for a minute. What he’d shared with Holly had been more intimate than anything he’d ever shared with anyone before. If it hadn’t been for the rose, he’d be watching her sleep right now and she’d be cradled in his arms. He’d be watching her and counting the hours ’til sundown when he could wake her with kisses and much, much more.
Was he willing to let the vampire freak stand in the way of that? Damn Dillon and damn his rose.
He gulped more coffee. He should damn himself for not being able to stay angry with her. It wasn’t quite noon and he was watching the clock, impatiently waiting to see her again.
Damned? Maybe so.
Chapter Eighteen
Dillon was gone.
Holly woke bereft. At first, she attributed her emptiness to the events of the previous night. You didn’t have a night filled with rejection, loss, pain, death, passion and conflict and wake feeling refreshed like all was right with the world.
She loved Jarvis Winters and he had walked out. Reason enough for a gloomy “morning” after.
It wasn’t until she rose and showered on automatic—because she was so not going to dwell on memories in the shower—and started to brush her teeth that Holly froze mid-brush stroke.
Dillon was gone.
The realization opened a bottomless chasm right at her feet to leave her toes hanging, unsupported, over the edge. She actually swayed as if she could tumble down into a limitless freefall. Her stomach dropped as if she was already sinking through empty space.
Falling…falling…falling…
Holly dropped her toothbrush and gripped the edge of the bathroom countertop. She ignored the splash of minty foam on her fingertips. She closed her eyes against the emptiness, against the drop, against the echo of water down the drain.
Gone.
Her link to Dillon had become stronger than she had known. At the edge of her perceptions, it had strengthened until what was once a tenuous thread had intertwined and braided into a steel cable of connection.
And now, it was severed.
Holly shakily rinsed and spit and wiped off the countertop. She hung up her damp towels and used one arm to brace herself while she combed out her hair with the other. She didn’t meet her eyes in the mirror. She didn’t want to see the pain or loss or…empt
iness. She went about the motions of life even though she felt less alive than she had since the change.
How could she miss his presence? He had destroyed her family. He had brought darkness and despair to her. He was the reason Winters hadn’t held her while she slept.
Or was he?
Winters had used Dillon as an excuse to express the distrust he already felt for her. A love affair between a vampire and a vampire hunter was doomed before it even began.
Holly walked out of the bathroom carefully and slowly as if she walked on a high wire suspended in the air. She sank down on the nearest bed, grateful for its support.
What had happened to Dillon?
Even as she tried to regain her equilibrium, Holly wondered.
Had her tie with her Maker been severed because of her intimacy with Winters? She didn’t think so. She had drifted off to sleep without Winters, but she hadn’t been alone. It was a revelation. All this time, when she’d thought she was on her own, Dillon had been there. Slightly at first, and then more and more over time.
Now, he wasn’t.
Holly remembered the kiss on her forehead, the rose and his whispered promise. Forever. She remembered being carried to the hotel and her cheek against impossibly warm cement. Stone cold, but not dead.
And that, perhaps, was her greatest clue to what had happened to Dillon.
The queen might be done with Holly, but Dillon wasn’t.
If the queen had expected her right-hand man to kill Holly and if he had rebelled, if he had managed to disobey her at the very end, the queen would be furious.
Dillon was unbelievably powerful and dangerous and lethal, but he feared the queen.
Holly knew what she had to do.
She sat up straight. It wasn’t easy, but she managed. She forced herself to take a shaky step or two back from the abyss. Her heart thumped with irregular, sluggish beats. Her lungs felt as if they were only taking in about half the oxygen she needed. She felt as if she would fall down if she stood up and tried to walk outside, but she stood anyway.
She didn’t know where Winters was, but he wasn’t here and that was a good thing. If Winters witnessed her saving her Maker for the second time, he’d never forgive her.
***
Holly no longer had even a ghost of a thread to physically follow, but she did have speed and night sight and heightened perceptions. As haystacks went, Charleston, South Carolina, was a doozy of one and her Maker was as silent and cold as a needle in one, but Holly didn’t give up.
She wouldn’t find Dillon on a joggling board in some pretty walled garden in the Historic District. She could certainly imagine him as a man, courting a hoop-skirted girl to distraction. She could imagine him as a vampire, not courting so much as carrying away. She stuck to the cemeteries, traversing row upon row of forgotten graves. She got over her discomfort about where to step in the face of her driving need to find her Maker.
Finally, in one overgrown graveyard, half-flooded by swamp water, she found a vampire. If you could feel triumphant and repelled all at once that’s what she felt.
The creature held a mass of soggy bones in its arms as it crooned a guttural lullaby. The bones were obviously those of a child, so tiny and pitiful, but they were also very, very old. Stripped bare of everything except sodden, disintegrating rags, the bones must have been a hundred years old and yet the vampire sang them to sleep again and again and again. The earth beside the disturbed grave was worn with deep runnels where the creature’s knees must press night after night after night.
Holly watched as the female vampire laid the bones into the grave as if it was a baby she placed in a cradle. She shuddered in disgust and pity as the monster kissed the small forehead of the skull. She braced to fight as the creature whipped in her direction.
The mother vampire was a horror of matted hair and ancient rags. What once must have been an elaborate dress hung in strips of filth that barely covered flesh blackened by dirt…and other things. Its eyes were sunken and its teeth a stained nightmare revealed as it hissed in her direction.
Then it was off.
Through brackish water and trees dripping with Spanish moss, Holly followed. She was glad she didn’t have to fight the thing over the bones of the child it must have loved in life beyond anything she herself had ever felt. The thing disappeared into the trees, but Holly didn’t despair.
The creature bore little resemblance to Dillon’s suave and handsome self, but Holly sensed her Maker. It was an almost imperceptible scent or aura or flavor, but she perceived it. She grasped it, holding the essence of it tightly, and followed.
The vampire mother ran through the flooded forest as an immortal beast used to the muck and mire. Holly stumbled and sloshed and fell, but she followed. She became soaked through and through with stagnant, February-chilled water and mud that smelled of rotten decay, but she followed.
It was probably stupid. It was in no way smart. But Holly couldn’t allow Dillon to remain at the mercy of a queen who had no mercy. If he had rebelled at the last moment to save her, if he wasn’t fully on the queen’s side, then he might be her best chance to save her mother.
It wasn’t love or loyalty or pity. It wasn’t passion or his promise of forever. Holly still rejected it. She still rejected him.
She stumbled into a clearing. The vampire mother was gone. A tiny sliver of moon illuminated the remains of an antebellum mansion that would never ever be renovated and placed on a quaint garden tour. All along the river, for every plantation that had survived war and reformation and the steady march of time and progress, there were many more that hadn’t.
This one definitely hadn’t.
Constant river flooding had reclaimed the grounds as swamp. A good portion of the house had been claimed by the flooding as well. The entire foundation sagged on one side as if it supported a giant cake that had melted in the sun. Only the moldering, vine-covered ruins looked less like something to eat and more like something being eaten with rot from the inside out.
Holly wanted to turn back. The damp smell of decay hit her like a slap and she wanted to turn back.
Was this to be her kingdom? Was this the Raveneaux legacy? Something told her that Jayne had expected something a little more Cinderella and a little less Wes Craven. Holly gagged. For this, her family had been ruined and ripped apart? For this, her life had been stolen?
She almost turned away, but a faint call froze her in her mucky tracks.
Not Dillon.
Her mother?
***
Jarvis Winters wasn’t a vampire or a superhero or a freaking bloodhound for that matter, but he was determined. He didn’t know how he followed Holly especially when for most of the night she’d been a strawberry-scented blur.
Thankfully, the quagmire of rain-soaked ground slowed her down.
He watched, undetected in the shadows, while she watched the vampire with the bones. He had his knife out and in his hands, but he let the creature race off into the night so that he could remain hidden.
Because really, where was Holly going and what was she planning to do?
He had nursed one cup of coffee after another all morning. He switched to extra-caffeinated cola energy drinks in the afternoon. By Holly’s wake up time, he’d been hyped up for confrontation, mayhem and destruction. Or just really hot make-up sex.
He’d been headed for their room when Holly had walked out. She had looked…messed up, disoriented and more than a little bit like a robot on a mission. He had lost every bit of desire and regained every bit of suspicion.
And he’d followed. Somehow, he’d followed. He caught on to the cemetery theme pretty quickly which had enabled him to hook up with her again and again through the night. At least, he told himself that. Truth was, he didn’t lose her much and he doubted his perceptions had been boosted by mere caffeine. He hadn’t lost her as often as he should have considering she was practically flying around Charleston and the outlying areas and he was stuck with driving the Fairla
ne. He hadn’t lost her because somehow he knew where she would be.
He didn’t feel like going there. He didn’t feel like examining that…tie. So, he simply followed.
Until he lost her in Yoda’s backyard.
It happened just after the strange vampire stopped playing with bones long enough to notice at least part of its audience. It happened when Holly ran after the thing into the darkness.
Winters lost her just like that.
The tie was gone or weakened or snapped.
Winters damned the muck. He damned the ooze. He damned his concern for her as it pounded in his head even as his feet slipped in the mire.
Had Holly, the woman, finally disappeared? Had she run off to become like the creature they’d been watching from the shadows? Had he thrown away the opportunity to hold her for her few remaining hours of sanity?
Winters trudged in the direction he thought she had taken, buoyed by the occasional broken branch or footprint in the mud.
***
Holly crept closer to the hulking, rotten house. At one time, it had probably looked like a haunted mansion, but now it just looked evil and warped and decayed. Not so much haunted as tainted.
She didn’t want to touch any part of it. Still, she did. She found her way around to the side that hadn’t sunken into the swamp and she pushed into a room. Night sky shone through the ceiling and there wasn’t much left of the floor, but at one time it had probably been the kitchen. There was a crumbled hearth and several rusted iron pots. And to the left was the yawning mouth of a doorway that opened onto stairs leading down.
Holly inched her way over to the stairs. She didn’t gasp as cobwebs caressed her face. She didn’t make a sound. The crooked staircase led down into a black so dark that even vampire eyes couldn’t penetrate. At least, not her vampire eyes. She had no idea if some other vampire was waiting and watching from the pitch black shadows.
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