“I’ve been to Magikal Childe,” she said. “They told me what to say. You can’t come in anymore.”
“Magikal Childe?” he said, baffled. “On Nineteenth Street? I’ve passed that place a million times. What is it, anyway?”
“A witchcraft store,” she said.
“Oh, come on, Tessa,” he said. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”
“They sold me this,” she said.
In her right hand, the small white hand that drew such beautiful pictures, the same hand that touched him with so much love, she held out a gnarled and twisted splint of wood. Foreign words were inscribed around the handle. At one end, it was engraved with a diamond pattern for a better grip. The other end tapered down to a sharp point. A stake.
“Tessa,” he said again, hurt and bewilderment coloring his voice.
“Also, this,” she said, showing him the small gun she held in her other hand.
“That won’t do you much good against a vampire,” he said.
“It has a silver bullet in it,” she said. “In case you travel with a werewolf.” She looked a little abashed. “Is Levon a werewolf?”
“No.”
She set it down on the table. “Well. I’m out twenty-five dollars, then.”
Minutes of silence stretched interminably on as they faced each other across the threshold, at a loss for what to say.
“So, they sell stakes at Magikal Childe?” he said, mainly to break the awful yawning silence.
“Oh, yeah, they had a whole boxful. It’s made from some tree that only grows in the Carpathian Mountains.”
“That makes sense,” he said. “I bet you can get one in every souvenir shop in Romania.”
“What do you think the words mean?”
“Um…my parents went to Transylvania and all I got was this lousy stake?”
She smiled. His heart lifted a little. “Tessa,” he said. His voice was soft and yearning, suffused with apology. “Any chance I could come in? Can we at least talk about this?”
She shook her head no.
He sighed. “Well then. I guess I’d better be going.” He passed his hand over his head. “Would you mind?”
Tessa stooped down, picked up his hat and gave it to him. As her arm crossed the threshold, he seized her wrist, yanking her through the doorway. She bounced against the opposite wall with the force of it, and then he had her, pinned against the cheap wooden paneling in the hallway.
“I believe this is the fellow with whom you have issues,” he growled.
The angles of his cheekbones seemed higher and sharper in the light of the hallway. With growing horror, she stared up into his eyes, watched the whites turn a bloody red, the irises clear to a hue the color of ice. She realized she was still holding the stake, and she raised it now in a halfhearted attempt at self-defense. He bent his head, directed his attention towards it. When he spoke again, she could plainly see fangs.
“Of course, a weapon isn’t going to do you any good unless you use it properly,” he said harshly. He grabbed her wrist, flexed her arm up and positioned the stake so that it was pointing at his chest. “And, in all fairness, it doesn’t actually work unless you put a little pressure on it.” Savagely, he hauled at his tie, tore open his shirt. Tessa tried to squirm away, tried to let go, but he was relentless. “No no,” he said firmly, training the tip of the stake against the scar over his heart. “You may as well kill me. I won’t survive losing you.”
He gritted his teeth and thrust himself onto the sharp point.
Explosive, blinding pain. It was as if a fire had erupted inside his chest. The pain is your penance, the old Archbishop had said.
“Oh,” he said. His eyes flew wide; blood welled up, skidded down his chest. He swayed. Hastily dropping the stake, Tessa’s arms went around him for support. Rafe keeled over, his hands over his heart.
“Are you all right?” she said, worried.
“God, that hurt,” he said. “Let’s never do that again.”
She got him a wet dishtowel. While he pressed it to what should have been a minor puncture wound but was instead a wicked, star-shaped burn, she stood a safe distance away, watching; however, he noticed that she did not retreat to the sanctuary of her apartment.
The door of the building opened and closed, admitting another resident. In true New York fashion, he barely glanced at them as he passed between them, intent on reaching his own place down the hall. Tessa said nothing, let him pass without a word, and Rafe noticed that, too.
He handed her back the dishtowel, tried to button up his shirt, but it was useless, the buttons were missing. He gave up in frustration.
“So,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He saw anger in her face, shock, and disappointment. Love, betrayal and hurt. What she had seen him do behind the restaurant had shattered something finite inside of her, and he saw now that it might not be possible to make whatever it had been whole again.
“What did you think I do at night, Tessa?” he said, suddenly bitter. “I’m a vampire. I live on blood.”
“I knew that,” she said. “I guess I thought you bought it or something.”
“I do,” he said. “I always pay for it. In one way or another. Or I take it from the willing; there are plenty of them, too. Those women mean nothing to me, Tessa. They’re dinner, that’s all.”
She winced, turned her face sharply away from him. The wrong words. She put her hand to her forehead as if it ached. “Have you ever…um…tried anything else?”
“Like what? It’s not like I can become a vegetarian.”
“I don’t know…animal blood? You can probably get that at a butcher, right?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never really had to think about it before.”
She sighed. Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “I don’t think…” The angled eyebrows, so much like Sofia’s that it hurt, danced together, danced apart. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” She pulled herself away from the wall, retreating back towards the safety of her doorway.
Her words pierced his heart. Without her, he was lost. “Please, Tessa,” he said. He opened his arms wide, pleading. “I wish I could take it all back, make it like it was before. But I can’t. We can only go on from here. You can shut me out and find yourself another Lucian, or you can stay here, with me, and we figure this damned crazy thing out together.” He saw her back stiffen; he had struck a nerve. His voice grew husky with longing. “Come on, sweet girl. Give me a chance to make this right. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
She turned on him, her eyes flashing with anger. “All right, then. Bite me.”
He recoiled. “What?”
“Bite me,” she said vehemently. “I’m a woman too, just like Poppy, just like all those other women. I want to know what it feels like. Bite me.”
He shook his head, backing away from her. “No. No, that’s not…that’s not love, Tessa, it’s something else…” he trailed off. He was thinking of Janina on the stretcher, thinking of the endless parade of others he had left gray and mottled and lifeless in countless alleyways and doorways and piazzas and passages and courtyards all over Europe, a gray parade that stretched far beyond the horizon, and he involuntarily slid away from her, his back against the wall. “I might hurt you…no, Tessa, anything but that.”
She strode purposefully across the corridor, unbuttoning the white floaty nightgown until it opened up, slipped down her shoulder, and she took his face in both of her hands and pulled it to her neck.
“Go on,” she said fiercely. “You bite everyone else.”
The blackberry scent of her perfume. The touch of his mouth against her soft white throat. The feel of her pulse beating beneath his lips.
In his ears, there was a roaring sound, like a hurricane, an avalanche, a forest fire. Shaking with desire, he pushed the hair from her neck. Grasping her shoulders, he pressed his fangs into a soft, throbbing place below he
r jaw, just breaking the skin. Blood welled up in two tiny puncture wounds. He put out his tongue, tasting the sweet, salty richness of her, and knew he had never loved anyone more.
Her body, moving in the circle of his arms. Her hands, moving over his chest. But something was wrong; she was pushing him off, wriggling away from him. Crying out in horror.
Rafe blinked, his reverie broken. No, it couldn’t be. She couldn’t judge him on that, it was too soon, she hadn’t given it a fair chance. In an instant, his eyes switched back to normal, his fangs receded back into his jaw.
“Tessa?” he said, reaching out to touch her, to reassure himself.
But she stood just beyond his reach, her lovely breasts rising and falling under the nightgown with each breath. The look she bent on him was filled with disgust, not desire; he had miscalculated, it had been a terrible mistake.
She was so beautiful standing there, he thought reflectively, her face grave and pale, her wild hair a river of life, adjusting the nightgown that was falling so fetchingly down one shoulder. She was so beautiful to him as he was losing her forever.
In desperation, he tried once more. “Please, Tessa. Let’s just go inside. I’ll swear I’ll make it up to you. I swear I’ll—”
He faltered when he saw her stoop to pick up the stake. Pinching it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, she carried it to a chromed trashcan between the elevators, popped open the dome, and dropped it inside.
With that done, she returned to her doorway. “Please don’t come back here anymore,” she said. The door closed softly behind her. He could hear the tumblers click as she turned the key in the lock.
Midtown. The slumbering guard never noticed as Rafe slid past him and took the elevator up to the twenty-second floor.
At two in the morning, the lights were all off in the offices of Anastasia magazine. Rafe was guided down the corridor by the blue light of the computer monitors.
She sensed him long before she heard him. “Quelle surprise!” he heard her call cheerfully when he was still well outside her office. “Come in, my darling,”
Rafe swept in, shut the door behind him with a bang.
Seated behind her desk, she could smell his grief roiling the air before he entered the room. She came forward to greet him the French way, a controlled peck on each cheek, taller than him in her heels. She had dressed for the occasion in a floor-length strapless gown made from a raw silver silk that looked well in the light of the moon; her breasts rose round and full over the bodice that barely constrained them.
“She saw me,” he said, his voice breaking. “Tessa saw me while I was… when I was in the middle of…” he couldn’t finish the sentence. He threw himself into one of the chairs in front of her desk, covered his eyes with shaking hands.
She leaned over further, bringing her breasts that much closer to his face. The flames in her eyes leapt higher. “Tell me, my dear,” she said confidentially. Her words poured over him like warm syrup. “Does she still love you, your little art student, now that she has seen what you really are?”
“I think I’ve lost her,” he said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. He heaved a ragged sigh, a deep, wet, painful sound. She laid long white fingers on his shoulder, glistening like bone.
“Why,” he burst out. “Why did you take her there? You know I’m there all the time.”
“So much sturm und drang,” she cooed, sitting on the edge of her desk. “Why don’t you just make her one of us and be done with it?”
He looked at her with real amazement. “We’re damned, Anastasia, and it’s got nothing to do with God, or hell, there’s something wrong with us, something missing, something elemental. Something human. Look at you, your bloody magazine. You prey on women’s insecurities, telling them they’re not young enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not sexy enough for their man. Certainly not rich enough to buy the clothes in your fashion layouts.
“We don’t create, we destroy. We stalk innocent human beings, sometimes for fun, sometimes to stay alive. Tell me, Anastasia, what is so fucking superior about that? Why on earth would I bequeath an eternity of that on anyone I loved?”
“And what is it about being mortal that is so damned noble?” she retorted. “Left to the fates, your little girlfriend will squeeze out a few paintings, marry that cute boy whom you hate so much, discover she does not have the cojones to make a living in art, move to the suburbs, surrender her freedom to a couple of squalling progeny. She will spend her days driving the squalling progeny back and forth from doctor appointments and soccer practices and obsess about what the neighbors think and whether the curtains match the couch. He will cheat on her with his students. She will worry about getting old and fat and gray and ordinary. And who knows what silent killers are lurking in her gene pool, just waiting for the right time to strike?
“We live above it all, above the strife and doubt and chaos of humanity, taking the best it has to offer in every generation.” She smiled at him seductively. “Tell me, my darling. What could be better than that?”
Rafe looked out the window for a moment before answering. Blue and white and yellow lights from the building across the street spilled across his face, coloring it with regret.
“I would have liked the chance to drive my squalling progeny to soccer practice,” he said wistfully. “And in her later years, if she asked me if I still loved her, even though she might be older and grayer and softer, this is what I would say: ‘My own sweet girl, you are exactly the same today as you were the day I fell in love with you.’”
Anastasia stiffened, glided back behind her desk. She looked out her window at the skyscrapers, sparkling like jewels in the night.
“I took her to Florent,” she said. “I sent Poppy to the back of the restaurant where I told her a car would be waiting, I directed our petite jeune fille to that little alleyway where I knew she would see you together.”
Rafe stared at her in disbelief.
“I am so tired of all these lies. If you had been honest with each other from the start, none of this would have happened.”
She leaned across her desk. Her big, round eyes bored into him.
“And let me tell you something else, my dear Raphael. As long as we are on the subject of honesty. If you hadn’t been so busy playing house, you might have saved your precious Sofia. If you were so bent on getting her out of Poland, you should have started as soon as you found her. Why did you wait so long, anyway? Were you afraid she would leave you once she found out what you really were?”
With a roar, Rafe leapt to his feet, grabbed her around the throat with both hands, driving her backwards until she smacked against the window with an audible crack.
Behind her, the magnificent light show that was New York City after dark. Tall buildings lit up like Christmas trees, the great red and gold arteries that flowed from the South Street Seaport up past the George Washington Bridge, the bridges that joined Manhattan to the rest of the country. Stealing a glance at the pavement twenty-two stories below, Anastasia appeared to be frightened for a moment; then she opened her mouth and managed a merry laugh.
“What are you going to do, my dear?” she said, amused. “Throw me through a window? Imagine that splashed across the cover of the New York Post! How will that help your little art school?”
His eyes, gone glacial with fury, faded slowly back to a despondent gray. With a snarl, Rafe flung her down on the chaise lounge and stood over her. His hands balled slowly into fists.
Under the scrutiny of those eyes, the same beautiful eyes that had first attracted her attention so long ago, Anastasia felt triumphant. Right now, he looked like he wanted to kill her, and she liked that, she liked it very much. On the lounge, she propped herself up on her elbows, her knees parted, yards of raw silk hiked up around her hips. The fire in her eyes leapt higher. Her magnificent breasts trembled with excitement. The tip of her tongue moved in a greedy circle around her red lips.
“You’re still sucking the l
ife out of me,” he said, as he stalked out of her office for the last time.
Driven, the wind lashing at his coattails, Raphael Sinclair made his solitary way towards Gramercy Park. An orange and white smokestack loomed up from the middle of the tarmac, spewing clouds of sewer steam into the air, obscuring the street. He could have taken one of the numerous yellow cabs trolling down Fifth Avenue, but he couldn’t wait, he couldn’t sit still, he had to keep moving.
With one broad brushstroke, he’d lost all the things that mattered to him most. His beloved school, his nicely ordered life. Tessa. As his mind raced over the details again and again, he thought of how little effort it would have taken to do things right; made the time to get to this meeting; stroked that donor’s ego; made a discreet donation to a patron’s favorite charity; taken a certain well-heeled dowager out for dinner. Listened to Giselle. Heeded Levon’s warnings, one by one.
The only thing he wouldn’t have changed was the girl. She made his long and empty life worth living again, for a little while.
He turned down Twenty-first Street, past the fence standing sentry over Gramercy Park. Home was right ahead of him now, a home filled with masterpieces, with burnished woodwork, original fireplaces, fretwork and moldings. A spectacular showpiece of a home, but hollow at its heart, with a hollow man holed up inside.
As he drew closer, he noticed that someone was waiting for him under the portico, a girl, thin, with long hair, and his heart gave a little leap.
“Tessa?” he called hopefully.
The girl poked her head between the columns of the portico. “Hi, Mr. Sinclair,” she said.
His heart fell. He trudged up the stairs to the entryway, took the key out of his pocket. “Hello, Allison,” he said, struggling at polite conversation. “Isn’t it a bit late for you to be out?” He glanced at his watch. It was just turning four o’clock.
“Oh…I’ve been having a hard time sleeping,” she said. She was thinner and paler than he remembered, her eyes sadder, her shapeless mouth more desperate. She looked more like a vampire than he did.
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