“Huh. Good point.” She looked at him for a moment then realized he wasn’t looking back. Not directly, anyway. Her eyes narrowed. “Can you guys give us a minute? I need to talk to Liam about something.”
“No problem,” Sofie said, picking up the first aid equipment and scampering off. She knew that tone all too well and wasn’t about to argue. Macbeth was quick to follow her.
Jack, however, just had good survival skills. “I’ll go see about that body.”
Finally, they were alone. “Okay, what’s wrong?” she asked, mindful of her arm as she shifted in the chair.
He stared at her with his perfect poker face across the table, eyes blank. “What do you mean?”
“Get off it, Liam. You know exactly what I mean. Since I woke up you’ve been acting weird. Are you angry that I got shot or something?” He pressed his lips together, clearly holding back a few sharp retorts.
“That isn’t it.”
“Then what is it, Liam? Tell me before I start making wild guesses and pissing you off.” In a blur of movement he was out of the chair and by her side. She could clearly read the frustration in his eyes as he searched for the right words.
“You’re the most willful, maddening woman I know. But despite that I’ve grown fond of you. I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t die on me.”
She blinked at him. “Well,” she said quietly, at a loss for what to say in response. “Likewise.” Jackie stood up and, a little awkwardly, rested her head on his shoulder. She couldn’t see his expression but she guessed he was surprised. After a moment his arms came around her. They stayed still, just like that, for several minutes. This comfort thing wasn’t really natural to either of them, although it felt dangerously good. It was a relief when Liam finally pulled back.
“Let’s go see about that dead body, shall we?”
Jackie grinned. That was more like it. “Sounds like a plan.”
Chapter Seventeen
SINCE HER ENCOUNTER WITH a bullet, Jacquelyn hadn’t called him and Liam hadn’t called her. No body had been found on her property so the shooter must have gotten away. He had people looking into the incident, searching for men in Crawley’s acquaintance that had recently suffered from an animal bite. Nothing had come up so far but it was only a matter of time.
Liam let that train of thought die as he looked blindly at his environment. Jack’s large apartment with only splashes of warm colors and modern furniture wasn’t where he’d expected to contemplate his own mortality. The last few days had been like some unreal blur. As though summoned by his own inner turmoil, his sire, Marguerite, had appeared in Los Angeles. For as long as he’d known her she’d come and gone like the wind.
The dysfunctional pattern of their relationship first began in 1453 when she’d found him in Dublin trying to drown the memories of the Hundred Years’ War in a rundown tavern. That same night she turned him, claiming boredom as her reason as well as a weakness for his eyes. He could at least respect she’d never pretended a Fascination for him. Their connection had been purely superficial and soon after she’d taught him how to survive she grew bored, vanishing without a word.
After that they fell into a routine of sorts. Every few decades she’d make an appearance and sleep with him as long as it amused her before inevitably finding the constraints of the local vampire society too dull to bear. He’d long grown used to the routine, even appreciating its casual intensity. Liam had never been one to claim that sex with vampires and humans could be equally satisfying because it generally wasn’t true. Two vampires had no reason to hold back when any damage was quickly healed. They could keep going all night and even through the day if the sun wasn’t present to weaken them. It was in their nature to destroy when they were in a state of passion. A greater measure of control was necessary not to break a human partner by accident. It was the primary reason why he’d set a law in place after he took power that fledglings had to wait at least five years before sleeping with a mortal. He was no fan of unnecessary deaths.
After many years taking satisfaction from human flesh, sleeping with his sire should have been a relief. Somehow when he’d buried himself in Marguerite and pressed his mouth against her perfect skin, Liam hadn’t found satisfaction. He’d missed the feel of rough scars and the scent of horses.
“Who is she?” Marguerite had asked once they’d finished, her luscious blonde hair flung across his bare chest.
“There’s no one,” Liam had lied, unconvincingly.
“I don’t believe you, darling. Let’s hope she has the patience to put up with you.” The idea still made him want to laugh. Neither he nor Jacquelyn was particularly gifted when it came to patience. They drove each other mad.
While Marguerite had stalked through his city, Liam felt wary of even reaching out for Jacquelyn’s emotions. He didn’t once speak her name although the attempt on her life weighed heavy on his mind. He would check his phone repeatedly and often suffered the amused smirk that curled over his sire’s face when she caught him. It made his skin crawl in a way it never had. Before Jacquelyn he’d thought Marguerite’s disdain for humanity tiresome but now, with a human lover he cared for, he’d found himself looking on her with genuine alarm. If she discovered he’d grown bored with her attentions due to a human woman, Liam wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t try to kill her.
Death had stayed ever on his mind for the past week. A rash of fresh murders accompanied his sire’s arrival, enough to alarm the council into ordering an investigation of her hotel suite. There had been no evidence of a connection but what they did find had been so much worse.
A severed hand, bound and locked in a silver-lined jewelry box, had twitched to life when exposed to the open air. Liam hadn’t been there to see it but, given Marguerite had killed five of the vampires who’d come to search her belongings before they managed to restrain her, that was for the best. He heard from the few survivors of the hand’s skeletal nature, the way it struggled for freedom. He didn’t need them to tell him how thoroughly it had stunk of decay to understand the nature of the thing.
His sire had carried a piece of the Fount into his city. From the founding of Los Angeles it had been agreed by every vampire in residence that no sympathizers of the old order would be tolerated. There had been enough war and dying over finding scraps of the only born vampires. They might have been the originators of their entire society but Liam hoped never to live to see them return. His sire had long been of the opposite opinion. She’d spoken of their restoration like a favored dream, whispering in his ear of the power only they could grant their children. He wished now he hadn’t written it off as fantasy.
They only had one punishment for those who remained loyal to the Fount. Marguerite had been incinerated, along with the hand, and buried in another silver box in the desert. While the hand would one day reconstitute itself, his sire would not.
Liam rarely thought about his death. He’d lived so long that the concept had become more and more distant. Immortality had a way of tricking vampires into believing they were above the rest of the world, that rules didn’t apply to them.
“And then you die and the rules suddenly matter. Unless you’re the Fount, death is always coming,” Jack had bluntly stated in response to the similar thoughts Liam had spoken out loud. Now he nursed his glass of scotch and tried to figure out what he was waiting for where Jacquelyn was concerned. Both of their lives were dependent on the whims of fate. Each day that he stayed away from her and tried to muddle through his feelings was a day lost.
His phone rang and he let out an irritated growl. Couldn’t he ever get a little peace from worldly interruptions? He swiped accept and pressed the annoying plastic to his ear.
“Liam, it’s Sofie. We need you out here.”
“What is it?” he asked, already in motion and out the door. A string of possible disasters quickly zoomed through his head, all of them involving Jacquelyn’s all too mortal body. He tried to feel her and encountered a
n all-encompassing numbness.
“I can’t do this over the phone. Please, just get here fast.” And she hung up.
The first thing he noticed when he pulled up to Jacquelyn’s house in his silver Aston Martin Vanquish was how unnaturally quiet it was. No horses stirred, no dogs barked. He could only hear Sofie pacing back and forth in the kitchen. So she hadn’t lied. Something had happened out here that had left his solid, unshakeable Jacquelyn unable to cope. He hurried out of the car and flew up the steps to the front door. It barely took a second for Sofie to open it to his first insistent knock. Her eyes were red and her skin looked blotchy.
“Tell me what happened,” he demanded. Sofie hadn’t given him nearly enough information and so he’d spent the ride over speculating on what had hollowed Jackie out to the point it was difficult to tell if she was even still breathing. He was unused to that kind of stress. It made him edgy.
“Francis had a stroke a few days ago,” she whispered. “Today we had to put him down.” Sofie felt like a total slob next to Liam. He was intimidating in his dark designer suit and shirt while she looked pathetic in her comfort clothes. Light purple sweat pants and a shirt with a rubber duck on the front didn’t make her feel particularly impressive. She thought about Jackie and the haunted, broken look on her face earlier that day. Her clothes really didn’t matter. It was just another way for her to feel inferior. She hadn’t been enough to make Jackie feel better. It used to be that they only needed each other. Now there were these men scampering about their lives and nothing was simple anymore. She almost wished nothing had changed.
“Is Sarah…?”
“She was pretty devastated,” Sofie told him, her heart warming to him for bothering to ask. “Jackie spent hours comforting her. She’s asleep now.” Liam nodded and then took a deep breath. Coconut scrub, horses and mud. He could smell all of them coming from the bathroom down the hall.
“I assume she’s locked herself in the bathroom,” he murmured.
Sofie didn’t have to ask whom he meant. She sighed, shaking her head. “She’s there but the door isn’t locked. She’s just not responding. I think she’s blaming herself for all this. The incident last week put a lot of stress on Francis’s system but, honestly, I was surprised he even lived this long. You should have seen him when he first came here, Liam. He was a walking corpse. His arthritis was killing him. He was starving. He’d had an infection go septic before he’d even gotten here and that devastated his health. Jackie did everything she could to make his last few months worth living. But I can’t get through to her,” Sofie said, turning to look at him. “I think you can.”
He raised a brow. “And why is that?”
“There are some things she has to tell you,” Sofie replied, carefully choosing her words. “And I think that right now is the only time she might be willing. In fact, right now I think she really needs to tell you.”
“I’m not following your logic.” Liam knew he didn’t open up when he was in pain. That was last time he would ever want to share his darkest secrets.
“It’s not losing Francis that’s really hurting her right now,” Sofie tried to explain. “It’s an old ghost come back to torture her. She needs to talk about it but not with me. I’ve already heard it and she won’t repeat herself. She needs you.”
Shylock’s sad eyes were fixed on Jackie’s still body. He had been with her for the past hour, ignoring the cool bathroom tiles and staying curled up on her bare feet. She was staring at nothing. Occasionally her hand would move over her abdomen and she hummed something under her breath that sounded like a lullaby. Shylock didn’t understand any of that. He only recognized the pain of a fellow abused animal.
“Jacquelyn.” The dog’s ears twitched toward the familiar voice. The scent of death filled up the bathroom as a vampire entered. Shylock recognized this particular vampire so he remained unshaken, only letting out an inquisitive whine. His mistress also reacted to the voice and she turned her head slightly to look.
“Liam,” she murmured. “What brings you here this evening?” Jackie couldn’t quite bring herself to feel anything at the moment, not even surprise at Liam’s appearance. The pain she’d felt all day had given way to a numbness that was all the more devastating.
“Sofie told me about Francis.” He watched as she closed her eyes, her right hand tightening around something that looked like a horse’s tail. “Jacquelyn.”
“I’m not in the mood to talk,” she told him, opening her eyes slowly to look down at the piece of Francis’ tail hair the vet had given to her as a keepsake - something to help them remember. How was she supposed to explain that she would never forget the first animal to die in her care? “I feel old, Liam.”
“I know that feeling,” he said. Liam had never thought he would ever see Jacquelyn this devastated. The fiery temper, the spine made out of hard diamonds, everything that made up the woman he knew had faded away, leaving an empty shell.
“You’ve killed people, haven’t you?” she asked suddenly.
His first instinct was to avoid the question but he couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled condemnation in her eyes. “Yes.”
“Did you notice that the life just seems to drain out of their eyes in an instant?”
He had seen that very thing countless times. Liam stared at her blank expression only a few seconds before firmly gripping her hand. “Jacquelyn,” he said with a voice that reflected each and every year he’d lived on this earth. “Talk to me.”
She let out a shuddering breath. Emotion flickered into her eyes. Pain. “Macbeth knew first. He started barking at the crack of dawn and wouldn’t shut up until I’d come outside. Francis was…” Her voice cracked and she had to wait before trying to speak again. “He was moving in circles, like he couldn’t turn right anymore. Like he couldn’t even feel his right side. I called the vet but there wasn’t anything anyone could do except wait. He couldn’t - ” Her throat tightened painfully and she had to stop as the last few days ran through her mind. Francis couldn’t lean down to eat so she handfed him. There was so much terror in his eyes. Horses were prey animals so when they hurt it opens up a whole new world of frightening possibilities. Anything could attack and he would be defenseless.
The last few nights Jackie found Sarah out of bed and talking to him. She would tell him everything her father had told her about heaven. It seemed to help dim the fear in his eyes so she didn’t have the heart to interrupt until she could tell Sarah was about to fall asleep.
Jackie took a deep breath, concentrating as hard as she could on remaining calm as she continued. “Everything was worse today. Everything. He was going to die in a lot of pain so I called his owner. She gave her permission to put him down.” Jackie pressed a hand to her face and clenched her teeth, fighting the tears that wanted to come. She’d watched Francis die. She’d watched him hit the ground, lifeless. She’d watched and she couldn’t do anything. She was helpless. Again.
“I’m sorry.”
Jackie pulled back from the aching wound in her chest that wanted to swallow her whole and clutched at Liam’s hand instead. “Me, too. For a lot of things.” There was a pain in her throat, in her heart, in her bones. And his eyes were staring into her, asking the question she would always try to avoid.
“Jacquelyn,” he said, putting a gentle hand over the scar on her womb. “What happened here?”
She got in another deep breath, knowing she’d need it, before she answered. “My scar isn’t from a C-section. When I was eighteen I had a hysterectomy.”
Liam blinked. “What?”
Jackie smiled but there was no humor in it. “Izzy and Sofie reacted exactly the same way. After all the blood I’ve given you, I thought you might notice that my estrogen and testosterone levels are a little off. I can’t produce them naturally anymore. I have to take pills or have injections.”
Of all the possibilities that had run through Liam’s head, this had not been one of them.
“Why?”
“I was about ten weeks pregnant when I found out. There was this guy at my father’s ranch. He was a year older and the opposite of the people who’d raised me. Daniel was warm and friendly and giving. I’d been in love with him since I was sixteen but we waited until after I turned eighteen before we… sealed the deal, so to speak. He proposed about that time, too. God, I was young.” She wasn’t looking anywhere in particular when she tilted her head back. She was just remembering a young woman. A woman Jackie had lost somewhere along the way. “I was young and very much in love. We were going to get married once I graduated. He insisted I go to college even though I didn’t really want to. I wanted to work, to make a home for the two of us. That was all I’d been raised for.
“My mother wanted someone to look after her in her old age,” she explained to Liam, whose disbelieving look at the idea of Jackie as a housewife was obvious even to the blind. His face almost made her smile. For some reason it reminded her of what she’d heard Izzy’s mother once say. She said she hadn’t raised her daughter to keep. Her mother was exactly the opposite. She’d had children to take care of her. Leaving the nest wasn’t an option.
“And your father?” Liam asked. He couldn’t picture any of this in his mind. The Jacquelyn he knew couldn’t have emerged from this sort of background. If submissiveness had been trained into her since birth, where had her stubborn nature come from?
“He didn’t speak much. He stayed out of the house as much as possible, working with the horses and avoiding mom. I didn’t understand him then. I probably never will.” She sighed. “I got off track. Mom found out I was pregnant. I was stupid, leaving the test in the garbage and all. She always went through our trash. She said she didn’t like secrets. That was the first time we ever fought. She ordered me to get an abortion and I refused. I was eighteen so she couldn’t make me. I can’t even describe how much I wanted that baby. I knew it would be hard raising a child when I was unemployed but Danny would help. I had absolute faith in him. The thought of a little boy or girl that we’d made growing inside me… I was ecstatic.” Liam could imagine that all too well.
Animal Instinct Page 16