Jack only had to lead her a short way down the hallway before he gestured grandly to a simple wooden door. Siobhan stepped inside, into a small but clean, orderly, and up-to-date bathroom. It smelled like lemons, which wasn’t her favorite smell, but it was better than what she smelled like. The door closed behind her, and after a few moments of fussing with the shower controls to figure out how to get the water to warm up, she stripped out of her clothes and left them in a heap on the floor.
She stepped beneath the shower’s spray, and the water ran brown and red down her shoulders and chest, carrying blood from her hair away and down the drain. She watched it swirl away with a sick sort of fascination.
Cautiously, she reached up to probe carefully at the back of her head, but her scalp was whole and un-split, and the bone beneath felt just like it always had. Just as cautiously, she trailed her fingers down her back as best she could, feeling the bumps of her vertebrae. They all felt normal. None of them felt like they were out of line.
She had been dying. She hadn’t just been hurt in the woods; she had been dying.
She fumbled for a bottle of shampoo and washed her hair carefully, as if at any moment, the back of her head would split open again. It never happened, but she did need to wash her hair three times before the foam finally washed away white instead of rusty brown.
As she turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, she contemplated the dilemma of her clothing, until she noticed a slip of paper on the floor. It had been slipped under the door, and it simply had an arrow drawn on it, pointing toward the crack under the door, with the word ‘CLOTHES’ scrawled in red pen.
Siobhan balled up the paper and tossed it into the trashcan, and then opened the door just enough to stick a hand out and pull the pile of clean clothes in. Closing the door once again, she inspected the pile. The clothing was…unique.
There was a pair of underwear but no bra. Granted, looking at the shirt, she wasn’t sure a bra was really necessary. It was form fitting once she pulled it on, with broad straps trimmed in black lace, which also overlaid most of the deep purple fabric. It laced up the front rather like a corset, and much of the midsection of the garment was made of black leather.
It did a rather decent job of holding everything in place, though she suspected that wouldn’t be the case if her breasts were less modest in size. The pants were just as form fitting as the shirt, made of soft, black material that stopped at her knees. The skirt—deep purple with black lace along the hem—was short in the front, so that it barely came to her mid-thighs, while in the back it came to a point in the middle of her calves.
She turned toward the mirror over the sink to inspect herself, only to stutter to a halt, staring. Her eyes had changed color. Not just a little, but entirely. Once green, there was now a red ring around her pupils that steadily bled out to black around the outer edges of her irises.
She snatched her boots up from the floor, tapped the worst of the dirt off into the tub, and tugged them on. She threw the bathroom door open, cringing at the noise it made as it met the wall, and then she hollered, “Jack!”
He leaned out of what Siobhan assumed was another guestroom, his brows furrowed in mild irritation. “Why are you yelling?”
“What happened to my eyes?” Siobhan demanded, pointing at her face with one finger as she stomped one foot on the tile.
He held his gloved hands up in a pacifying motion. “It’s part of becoming a vampire,” he informed her in a tone that was trying for soothing.
“You said you were a vampire. You made no mention about turning me into a vampire,” she snapped, her hands closing into fists at her sides.
His eyebrows rose. “What did you think I was getting at?” he asked, incredulous. “You were dying. Not just hurt, actually dying. And now, you’re not. I’m pretty sure you noticed.”
“You—you don’t just do that to someone without asking!” Siobhan stammered, her hands flexing fitfully.
Jack rolled his eyes, his expression the epitome of unimpressed. “If I’d asked in the woods, you would’ve assumed you were hallucinating. Seriously, your options were ‘die’ or ‘vampire.’ I went with the option that involved not dying.”
Siobhan’s mouth worked soundlessly, save for the occasional half-formed syllable, as she tried to come up with a rebuttal. When that failed, she scowled down at her boots…and promptly burst into tears.
Though it hardly seemed possible, Jack got even paler. He closed the distance between them, jerking to a halt just within arm’s reach. His hands fluttered for a moment as he decided what he was supposed to be doing in that situation, before he grabbed one of her shoulders and started leading her away.
Siobhan followed him without a fuss, scrubbing at her face with the back of one hand as she did.
He led her to the end of the hall, down a winding flight of stairs, through a kitchen, and into a lounge. He steered her toward an L-shaped couch and sat her down on the jutting side of it before he began backing toward the large doorway again. “Coffee or tea?” he asked, though he sounded more like he was talking to an incensed scorpion than another person.
“Coffee,” Siobhan mumbled in reply, and Jack darted back through the door.
She could hear him rustling through things in the kitchen, soon followed by the sound of a coffee pot percolating. By the time he was came back into the lounge with a mug in each hand and a carton of cream under into his elbow, Siobhan had managed to get ahold of herself once again. She accepted a mug as it was handed to her, and the cream when it came next, and she poured it into her coffee until it was pleasantly bronze.
She handed the cream back to him afterward, and he sat down on an armchair across the coffee table from the couch. For a slightly awkward moment, they sat in silence, sipping their coffee.
Finally, Siobhan asked, “So, what happened?” though her voice was directed more towards her coffee cup than to Jack. “Who, or I guess what, attacked me?”
“An angel,” Jack answered, since he seemed allergic to the idea of beating around the bush in the slightest.
Siobhan stared at him. “…An angel,” she repeated slowly. “Aren’t those supposed to be…I don’t know, the good guys?”
“In theory,” Jack returned, swishing his mug in a circle. “If you stay on their good side.”
“And I got on his bad side?” Siobhan asked, her voice rising slightly, caught somewhere between confused and offended. “I didn’t do anything!”
“Not you, specifically,” Jack assured her. “Just…people. As a whole, people have gotten on Heaven’s bad side.”
Siobhan’s eyes narrowed as she scowled at him in confusion. “That makes no sense,” she informed him. “Why would Heaven turn on us?” She wasn’t even going to get into the argument of whether or not Heaven was real. She had been rather firmly on the ‘not’ side of that fence, but after getting nearly killed by a seven-foot-tall man with wings, she was willing to rethink that opinion.
Jack sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one knuckle. “Angels don’t really…learn, I suppose. They’re unaging. Unchanging. They’re about as close to truly immortal as you can get. Unless they are killed, they aren’t going to die, and killing one is not an easy task. So, there’s no reason for them to really adapt to the world as it changes.”
“Okay…” Siobhan sighed slowly, her scowl narrowing slightly. “What does that have to do with me getting almost murdered?”
“As far as Heaven is concerned, what was sinful at the beginning of humanity’s time is still sinful now. There’s no nuance. There’s no room for anyone to grow or change.” Siobhan’s eyes widened, and Jack nodded once, knowingly. “Right. And so Heaven has decided that everyone on this rock is beyond saving and needs to be exterminated. Like termites in the floorboards.”
“And they can’t be reasoned with?” Siobhan asked, drawing the tip of one finger in a circle around the edge of her mug.
“Maybe?” Jack shrugged. “On a one-on-one basi
s, if given enough time, I guess. But in the time it takes to reason with one angel, the others would not actually stop with the extermination, so there just…isn’t enough time for reasoning with them to be a plausible fix.”
“Why haven’t they done anything before now, then?” Siobhan asked, before she lifted her mug to drain the last of the lukewarm liquid within it.
Jack’s eyebrow shot up. “They have,” he answered. “I mean, I get that you live in the middle of nowhere, just based on where I found you, but are you completely disconnected with the rest of the world?”
She fidgeted sheepishly on the couch. “I go online,” she protested.
Jack offered a long-suffering eye roll and a world-weary sigh. “There are reports the world over of bodies being found dead, as if they’d fallen from a great height,” he explained. “People are baffled. Sometimes they’re found in places where you could plausibly say it was a suicide, but most of the time, they aren’t.”
“So they just…drop people,” Siobhan said. “Is that all they do?”
“Most of the time,” Jack replied, shrugging one shoulder before he finished his coffee and set the mug down on the table. “Sometimes they get more violent, but just dropping people is quick, easy, and effective. Regardless, if they get a bit more creative, the deaths are usually attributed to animals.”
Siobhan wrinkled her nose at the mental image. “Fun.” She glanced at Jack’s face again, her own head tipping to the side in curiosity. “What were you doing there?”
“I do what I can to keep track of angel sightings,” he replied. “When they fall so close, I try to catch them before they get too far away.”
“Catch them and do what?” Siobhan asked, baffled. He had rather made it sound like getting rid of them was not a simple task, and he didn’t particularly seem to want to offer them any help.
He lifted his hands and clicked his tongue as he pantomimed snapping an invisible neck. “Vampire,” he reminded her. “I’m stronger than a regular human. Faster, too. I can handle an angel.”
“Any angel?” Siobhan asked dubiously, her eyebrows rising.
“A principality,” Jack corrected, glancing away. “An archangel if I have a couple friends with me. A seraph is out of the question, but a seraph is…a special case.”
“What’s a seraph?” Siobhan asked, shifting to cross her legs.
“Think…” Jack trailed off as he searched for the best way to describe it. “Think of them as Heaven’s generals. They’re nasty, but we only catch glimpses of them now and then. If principalities and archangels are chess pieces, the seraphim are the ones playing chess.”
“Ah.” They lapsed into silence after that, until Siobhan slowly asked, “You make it sound like fighting angels is something all vampires are doing, but why do you care?”
Jack looked at her askance, as if she had just asked him why the ceiling tasted blue. “We were all human once. We all had friends and family that were human. We didn’t all forget that once we turned. Most of us still have friends that are human, even if most of them don’t know we’re vampires. We lose all of that if we decide ‘fuck it, the angels can have it.’” He snorted and rolled his eyes.
“Besides, if humanity is sinful, then we’re probably doubly damned, considering the whole ‘drinking blood and turning other people into what we are’ thing, so it’s not like the angels will just cheerfully tip their hats at us and let us carry on if we leave them alone.”
Siobhan blinked at him. “Why do I suddenly feel like an ass for asking?”
“Because you were kind of an ass for asking,” he confirmed pleasantly. “I’m the magnanimous sort, so I’ll just attribute it to growing pains.”
Siobhan rolled her eyes and finally set the empty mug down. “How kind,” she deadpanned. “My heart’s just grown three sizes.”
They lapsed into silence again, until at last Siobhan asked, “So…where are we?”
Jack jerked upright, in a manner that seemed to convey ‘shit, how did I forget that?’ “We’re in the manor of the Vampire Lord Regina,” he answered. “About…seventy-five miles from your little cabin, probably,” he guessed. He stood up and stretched, his arms reaching over his head until his back cracked, and he motioned for her to stand up. “Come on. There’s still a lot to show you, and we may as well get it over with.”
CHAPTER TWO
“What is a vampire lord?” Siobhan asked, baffled, as she followed Jack down the hall until they came to the basement door.
“The oldest of the old vampires,” Jack answered as he began to lead the way down into the basement. “Mostly, they help keep things stable. Offer guidance if there’s something that could threaten vampires as a whole. Decide on punishments when they have to, if a vampire has done something drastically awful.”
There was a door at the bottom, and he pushed it open. It opened into one enormous room, with a four-poster bed surrounded by bookshelves on one side and something like a home theater on the other side. In the middle, dividing the room in half, there was a single, high-backed chair with ornate arms and legs and padding that looked like it had been embroidered with real gold.
A rug so ornate it nearly made Siobhan dizzy was spread out in front of it, with a couch and a quartet of armchairs spread out around the opposite side of the rug. Unconventional though it was, it was rather clearly an audience chamber.
There was a woman sitting in the ornate chair, one leg crossed delicately over the opposite knee, a white stiletto heel that consisted mostly of mesh dangling from her toes. She was watching the doorway impassively, as if she had been waiting for them to step through, regardless of how long it might take them to show up.
Siobhan had no doubts that the woman watching them expectantly was Regina.
There was something almost alien about Regina. She looked human at a glance, though her acorn-colored skin looked as if the sun hadn’t touched it in a lifetime. But there was no way to tell how old she was. Her features were young, and her face smooth and unlined, but her eyes were ancient, as if the bronzed blue orbs had looked into the depths of the universe and come back changed.
Her hair was black and as straight as a ruler, with two long sections framing her face and the rest of it coiled on top of her head in a slightly paradoxical looking weave of braids and held in place with a series of opal and pearl combs. She wore a pale blue gown, the halter top held up with an elaborate twist of minuscule silver chains that looped around the back of her neck, and the skirt was slit up to nearly her hips on both sides.
There was something about looking at her that made Siobhan feel tiny, no matter that her smile was gentle and that she was hardly any bigger than Siobhan.
“Is this your guest, Jack?” Regina asked, in an alto voice as smooth as oiled glass. “I was beginning to wonder if she would ever wake up for me to actually meet her.”
Siobhan looked sharply at Jack, but before he could say anything, Regina informed her pleasantly, “You’ve been sleeping here for just shy of four days now.”
Siobhan sputtered for a moment, but all she actually managed to say was an incredulous, “Sorry, what?”
“Changing from a human to a vampire isn’t the quickest process on its own,” Jack explained, slightly sheepish as he said it. “And it takes longer when there’s healing involved. As we already determined, you were dying at the time, so, lots of healing.”
Siobhan groaned and hid her face in her hands, until she remembered that she was standing in front of someone Jack had called a Lord, and she cautiously looked up again, looking at Regina in much the same way a rabbit might eye a coyote.
“I’m Siobhan MacLeod,” she offered quietly, linking her hands together behind herself and looking at the floor.
“No need for that,” Regina offered. “They call me ‘Lord,’ but it is a title, and nothing more. It means I am older than most, but reverence is not a necessity.”
Siobhan nodded meekly, but she still couldn’t bring herself to quite look Regina in
the face. Like looking in the mirror in a dark room, she expected to see something twisted and strange looking back at her. What did “older than most” mean, then?
“You were attacked by an angel?” Regina asked, polite and curious. “Remarkable, if so. You’ll be the first victim of an angel attack to be successfully turned.”
Siobhan nodded quickly, just a quick downward jerk of her head. “He crashed in the woods behind my house, and I went to see what it was.”
“Did he have two wings or four?” Regina asked, leaning her elbow on the arm of her chair and propping her chin up in her hand. “It’s helpful for us to know if an angel is a principality or an archangel, so we can get some idea of how much manpower it will take to kill them.”
The Vampire's Bond Trilogy: The Complete Vampire Romance Series Page 2