“The vampires, the world over, meet once a year. It’s called ‘the Conference.’ They chose to meet here this year. They meet here every couple of years or so, because it’s an out of the way place, and safe from most curious bystanders. So the hotel will be practically filled with vampires,” said Tommie, her mouth twitching into a smile again as my heart began to beat faster—not from attraction, but from fear. “The thing about the Conference, of course,” she whispered, leaning closer to me as she grinned wickedly, “is that there are going to be many vampires here who aren’t really like us.”
“Like you,” I breathed.
“Let’s just say they don’t have the same values as us. And they don’t look at humans the same way.” Tommie smirked and reached out between us. Her fingers were at the curve of my neck, then, drifting down, touching feather soft, until they circled the bite marks in my neck. I shuddered under that touch, the ache growing brighter beneath my skin. “But don’t worry,” she said, removing her fingers. I was breathing so quickly I was panting. “I’ll help you,” she said then with utter nonchalance. “If you want me to.”
“That’s…very nice of you,” I managed, glancing back up to her eyes. They were considering me, and for a moment, I saw a flicker beneath them of something I couldn’t quite place.
“I’m…very tired,” I managed then, beginning to back away. I ran into Jane’s table with my thigh, and she muttered something dark at me as her piles of cards for the game shifted and merged together. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and then I was across the room and out the door before I could say or do anything else.
The corridor was blessedly empty. I walked along it quickly, unhappily noting that the sun had slipped below the horizon.
Did I feel safe at the Sullivan Hotel?
Not really.
Then…why did I stay?
I didn’t know. I did know. I…wasn’t completely sure.
(Yes I was).
I practically ran the rest of the way, up the flights of stairs and down the hallways, until I reached the room of my best friend. I pounded on Gwen’s door, then. She hadn’t been in her room any of the recent times this last twenty-four hours that I needed her. She needed to be there now. I needed to talk to her. Not about vampires. Not really about vampires.
Gwen answered the door, her long, frizzy brown hair up in a towel, and her naked body sheathed in a bathrobe, her fingers on the knob pruned. I guess I’d gotten her out of the tub. Her eyes were wide as she looked me up and down, and then she was grinning just as widely as she practically pulled me into the room.
“Why did you get so dressed up?” she practically squealed. She smelled like orange and lavender, one of her favorite flavors of bath salts. “Are you seeing someone?”
My stomach twisted in pain as I shook my head. Did I want to be seeing someone? Yes, yes I did. But…
“Anna,” I whispered, then, and the joy and exuberance seemed to fade almost instantly from Gwen’s face.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I told her, gripping her shoulders with tight fingers. All of the fear of what might happen in the next few days, of all the vampires who “might” not have the Sullivans’ values, even my fear of Mags, took a back seat to the feeling I’d been trying to quell this entire day. And failing to. “Kane…” I trailed off as I saw the light come back to Gwen’s eyes. I went to her bed, sat down on the edge of it, shoulders curved forward as I sighed. “I’m pretty attracted to her,” I admitted, then, in a whisper.
“Wow,” said Gwen, cinching her robe a little tighter and going to sit down on her rocking chair. It was a sweet little antique one that gave a squeak each time she rocked. “I didn’t think it’d be her that you fell for,” she admitted, then.
“What?” I asked, blinking. “Gwen, I shouldn’t even be falling for any of them. Anna—”
“Died over six months ago,” said Gwen gently, patiently, as she’d said a million times before. “And it’s only natural that you’d be attracted to a gorgeous woman. These feelings aren’t anything you should feel ashamed of, Rose,” she said, leaning forward with another squeak. “I knew Anna,” she whispered then, her eyes wide as she breathed out. “And she’d be furious at you if she knew how you refused to get on with your life after she was gone.”
I buried my face in my hands. I was starting to forget how Anna looked when she smiled at me—just me. I was starting to forget how she smelled, the soft scent of her. In this place, I was starting to forget those beautiful little details that I wanted to impress on my memory forever. Was this right to forget them? I wasn’t forgetting Anna, and I would never forget Anna. I’d loved her with everything that I was.
But…wasn’t being attracted to someone betraying her?
Gwen seemed to sense my thoughts, for she got up from the rocking chair, leaving it rocking without her, and came across to sit on the bed beside me, a fragrant arm around my shoulder. “Honey, Anna loved you very much, and you were great together. But she’s gone. You’re not. You’re alive, and you have to keep living, okay? And this is really, really great—I’m glad you’re attracted to Kane. What do we think—is the feeling mutual?”
I considered Kane’s smoldering gaze every time she glanced my way, the way she looked at me across a crowded room, like she could see to the deepest parts of me. But I didn’t know. She was an intense, beautiful thing. Maybe she looked at everyone like that. I wasn’t special.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. The way she’d saved me after what Mags did replayed itself in my mind, the way she glanced down at me with those perfect blue eyes…but wouldn’t she have saved anyone?
What Mags did…
I shivered.
“Hey,” said Gwen, then, squeezing my shoulders. “You seem a little preoccupied…and not about Anna,” she said, holding up a hand when I began to protest. “Did something happen?” Concern made her brows furrow and she squeezed my shoulders again tightly. “Are you okay?”
The way she was holding so tightly to my shoulders made the now even smaller wounds on my shoulder/neck pulse with a sharp ache. I swallowed, shook my head. “No,” I told her, lying to my best friend. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“I didn’t see you today at the front desk, but Kane said she’d been training you…” Gwen said, trailing off, searching my eyes, questioning. “But I didn’t get training when I was hired here.”
“Well,” I said helplessly, staring down at my hands in my lap. I didn’t know what else to say. I’ve always been a terrible liar.
“But,” said Gwen, with an impish smile, changing the subject smoothly—she knew when I didn’t want to talk about something, “I noticed that we’re both off the schedule tomorrow. It was sweet for Kane to make certain we got a day off together. So you know what that means!”
“I couldn’t possibly guess,” I muttered, weak with relief that she hadn’t pursued her line of questioning. Once Gwen gets it into her head that she’s going to find something out, she always does. Always.
“We can head into town! I didn’t really get to show you Eternal Cove—a drive through in the middle of the night doesn’t count at all. It’ll be wonderful! We can do a little shopping, get a latte—have a girl’s day, all to ourselves!”
Gwen’s enthusiasm was practically catching, even though—admittedly—the idea of shopping wasn’t ever on my list of things I wanted to do. I hoped we’d get a chance to survey the magnificent rocky coastline—not a sales rack. “That would be really nice,” I told her, then, feeling grateful that even though I was tremendously out of my depth, I still had my best friend to see me through all of this. She was so supportive, unfailingly and constantly supportive, and she’d seen me through so many other rough patches. Especially these last six months. I turned to her and hugged her tightly, and she grinned at me.
“Okay, so tomorrow morning, we’re heading into town. Sound good?”
“Sure,” I told her, rising and stretching. She stood, too, holding her robe closed over h
er heart as she considered me.
“Are you sure there’s nothing else you wanted to tell me?” she pried gently. I shook my head—a little too quickly—and turned toward the door.
“I’m just tired,” I told her, the wounds on my neck throbbing with ache. “I’m going to turn in early.”
“Okay—knock on the wall if you need anything, okay?” She indicated the wall that stood between our rooms. I nodded and left, thoughts already a million miles away.
I promptly ran into Tommie.
“Whoa!” she grinned as the door shut behind me. She held onto my shoulders—I’d smacked into her hard—and looked down at me with a bemused grin. “Do you always assault people?” she chuckled, rubbing her jaw where my shoulder had hit her.
“I’m so sorry!” I murmured in horror, gazing up at her bright, flashing eyes, and her incredibly handsome features. Despite myself, my heart began beating a little faster.
“I just came to see if you were all right,” said Tommie, one brow up. “Are you?”
All right from what? The almost-drowning this morning? The fact that the vampires I’d now realized I was living with had wanted to vote on if I could stay or not? The fact that Mags had appeared at that “meeting” seemingly just to threaten me?
“I’m fine,” I lied again. Remember, I’m a terrible liar. Her brows rose even higher at that, and then she was grinning at me, shaking her head a little as she shoved her hands into her pants pockets, her sharp, shoulder-length black hair seeming to curve toward me.
“I also came to see if you were hungry. What with the vampire blood coursing through you and all, I figured you might be.” Her head was a little to the side, the brim of her fedora pushed back on her forehead so her eyes could appraise me. My breath caught as she bore the full weight of her intense gaze down on me.
“I could eat,” I told her, the words hanging between us.
“Great. There’s pizza down in the kitchens,” she said, tossing her head toward my room door, but not actually at my room—in the direction of the kitchens somewhere in this sprawling house, I realized.
“Oh.” She stood there considering me—I hadn’t realized she’d wanted to go with me (though why I didn’t realize it is beyond me—I was thinking of too many other things). And I didn’t want to go with her to the kitchens. The reason that moved through me so quickly I almost didn’t feel its absoluteness, was that I didn’t want to chance Kane seeing me with Tommie.
It was absurd. I was attracted to Tommie, but surely she wasn’t attracted to me. Kane wouldn’t think anything if I was with Tommie, and what if she did? I wasn’t Kane’s, and Kane certainly wasn’t mine. I was intensely attracted to Kane, wanted to get to know her better, wanted to be merely in her presence, but that didn’t mean anything.
I realized my fingernails were digging into the palms of my hands as I considered what Tommie had just said. Her eyebrows rose as I wondered what I should say in return. I waited too long.
“Hey, it was just a question—no hard feelings if you’d rather rest,” she shrugged, turning smoothly on her heel as she began to stalk back down the corridor.
“No, wait!” I said, too quickly. My heart screamed “no” at me as I swallowed and nodded. “Yeah, pizza—that’d be great,” I told her with a gulp and a lie. “Just let me get a sweater?”
What are you doing, Rose? What are you doing? It pounded like a litany in my heart as I unlocked the door to my room with my skeleton key, taking one of my favorite light brown sweaters from the little closet beside the door. The curtains in my window were open, and I saw how dark it was outside, the clouds close and not even a hint of stars in the heavens.
I wasn’t doing anything. I was going to get food in the kitchens with someone who’d wondered if I was hungry, one of my employers. There was absolutely, positively nothing else going on. And even if I did find Tommie attractive, it wasn’t like how I found Kane—this wasn’t like Kane at all, what I felt for Tommie. It was simply light interest, and nothing more.
But if it was so innocent, why did I feel guilty as I excited my room, as I slipped the key into my coat pocket, and Tommie gave me an appreciative, almost wolfish grin? We walked down the hallway together, guilt making my heart beat faster.
I kept wishing that it wasn’t Tommie beside me.
I kept wishing it was Kane.
“Do vampires eat pizza?” I asked her as we found our way to the spiral staircase. We began to descend.
She laughed at that, casting me a sidelong glance as she took off her fedora and ran long, graceful fingers through her short black hair before replacing the hat. “No,” she admitted with a grin, “but we have other human staff members here and we like to get pizza for them on Friday nights.”
So it was Friday. And that was right—I hadn’t met the other staff members because the last two days had been a blur of vampire related activities. I sighed and touched my fingers to the banister as we hit another landing and kept going down.
“The kitchens are actually in the basement,” she told me when we reached the first floor. So we took one more curl of the stairs down. The basements themselves didn’t exactly look like my vision of a basement. They were completely finished and just a little more chill than the floor above us. We walked down the tiled hallway (no longer red and black, but some pleasing Tuscan-colored gold and brown) and entered the industrial sized kitchens. The sprawling white-walled room was well-lit and looked like a cooking show could break out alongside its restaurant-quality ovens at any second. Tommie crossed to the walk-in fridge and came out with a gigantic box of pizza, about half as long as she was tall. The pizza inside was covered in foil, and she drew up two stools to the side counter as she set it out. I took out a piece, put it on a paper plate, gotten from a stack of them, and set it to re-heat in the only slightly small appliance: the microwave.
As I did these actions, going through the motions, I could feel Tommie’s gaze on me. When I glanced back, over my shoulder, she had her chin in her hands as she considered me with flashing green eyes.
“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious as I leaned against the counter.
“Nothing—you just remind me of someone I used to know,” she said, her head to the side as she gazed into my face. “Anyway,” she said, leaning back on the stool and hooking her elbows onto the counter space behind her. “There must be something about you,” she said, her mouth twitching at the corners as she tried to suppress a smile. “Kane did want you to stay.”
At that, the butterflies I’d been trying to quell in my heart began to flutter against the insides of my ribs again, pushing, poking and prodding with feather-soft wings of hopefulness. “Why…why do you say that?” I asked, licking my lips and trying to appear nonchalant. I failed at that as she chuckled at me, shaking her head, her hair swishing around her chin as she narrowed her eyes.
“She said she wanted you to stay,” said Tommie, one brow up. Her grin widened, then, as the microwave beeped, startling me. “Say…do you have a thing for our fearless leader?” The last two words didn’t exactly sound like a compliment as she practically snarled them out. I paused at that, but opened the microwave door and took out my tasty conquest, blowing on the piece of pizza that made the paper plate bow out in the middle. I set it down beside Tommie and perched on the edge of the stool.
I wasn’t used to telling people my problems or my past, but I had just found out that Tommie was a vampire, so I figured it might be best to, in this at least, be truthful. And, perhaps convince myself that I perhaps didn’t actually have feelings for Kane. “I…I don’t,” I lied, swallowing. “It’s because…I mean, I’m still dealing with the fact that I lost my girlfriend six months ago,” I told her, chewing on my lip a little as I glanced down at the plate. “To a drunk driver.”
“Huh,” is what Tommie said, and when I glanced back up at her, she didn’t have the patented, sympathetic, brows furrowed and frown that most people adopt when you tell them that your partner was killed.
It seemed like she hadn’t even heard me. She was looking at me a little…hungrily.
I stared at her with wide eyes, and she blinked, seemed to realize she’d been staring. She shook her head a little.
“Well,” she said a little bitterly, pushing up her hat again as she sighed and leaned a little harder against the counter with a grimace, “I guess that would make two of you of then. Kane lost her partner, too.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly going cold. Why did I have ridiculous, intense and painful jealousy that just, all of a sudden, seemed to be consuming me? It was too quick and sharp and far too potent. I swallowed, clenching a fist under the table as I stared down at my soggy pizza.
“Her name was Melody,” said Tommie, drawing out the name with a languorous tone as I stared at her. Another shiver moved through me. She leaned her elbows on the counter and glanced sidelong at me with a frown. “She was…she was beautiful, I’ll give you that. There was something about her, about her smile. It unnerved you, I guess, how good she was—she’d go out of her way to help you. Once, she helped me…” Tommie shook her head, glancing my way, her tone—all at once softening—turned hard and malicious again. “It was just all this unbelievable soul mate romantic crap between the two of them, Kane and Melody. They were inseparable—were desperately in love. True love, they both said. Kane loved her a bit too much, if you ask me—it was practically obsessive,” she muttered, rolling her eyes and glancing at the overhead fluorescent bulbs with narrowed eyes. “So they were incredibly in love, but they still lost each other. Kane lost her a long time ago, a tragic death. So, since then, she hasn’t dated or, hell, slept with anyone since in memory of her, like some twisted, tragic loyalty. Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s just…it’s sick.” She glanced back down at me, her mouth turning up at the corners again as she laughed at it. “That kind of stuff should be put in books and stay there. It’s not realistic. Kane loved the woman, okay. Whatever. But after she loses her, turning into a chaste puritan or some shit in her memory? I don’t get it. While I’m here, I’m going to enjoy life’s little pleasures.” She looked pointedly at the plunge in my dress that my sweater wasn’t exactly covering. I pushed my half-eaten piece of pizza away, drew my sweater more closed over my chest. I’d suddenly lost my appetite.
Meeting Eternity (The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1 Page 10