“You’re still here.” Mild surprise tinged his voice.
“Did you really think I would leave?”
He brushed her hair from her cheeks and swiped away a lingering tear with his thumb. “You’re stubborn, exasperating and defiant. If I’d been a vampire when we met, I’d have done my best to break you.”
She laughed, but the sound was thick and held no humor. “I’m flattered.”
“I still can’t contact Hester.”
“Could it really take this long to find a cure?”
“I’m beginning to think there may not be one, or perhaps the Draconus is just keeping her from returning to teach me a lesson.”
Zoe raised a brow. “Are you that important to him?”
“He’s that important to himself. I don’t think I need him, anyway. I’ve decided not to bother with Lambert’s game.”
Zoe’s heart thudded. For a moment, she wanted to throw herself into Julian’s arms, but the look of defeat in his eyes stopped her. “There’s a but coming…”
He nodded. “I’m going to fight Lambert. Human against vampire. I’m not going to get caught up in trying to trick him, or find out what he thinks he can offer me. I’m just going to destroy him.”
“Okay. Then let me come with you.”
“No. I want you to stay here. I know I told you to go home, but I want you here where you’ll be safe for now. Wait here for Hester, please.”
“If you succeed, will you come back to me?” She knew the answer already, but she had to ask.
“The best thing I can do for you, Zoe, is to leave you alone.”
She nodded and walked into his embrace. “You can do that later. Right now, I want you, one more time.”
Julian led Zoe upstairs to her room. There he guided her to the bed. The candles that had flared to life when they entered the room dimmed as if they knew what was coming.
In the soft glow, her skin was coppery, her hair rich gold and her eyes green as polished emeralds.
He bent over the bed and kissed her as she settled against the pillows. She tasted salty, her lips, her skin. He’d left her alone too long—should have repented his sin before she had a chance to cry herself out.
He should have damned his own weakness and walked away from her for good, but instead he chose to revel in it, just once more.
“Julian…” She whispered his name when their lips parted, and he hushed her.
“Don’t. Just lie still. Let me touch you.”
Mischief played in her eyes and at the corners of her lips. Her faint smile became a gasp when he tunneled his hands under her shirt and pulled the garment up over her head. She wore nothing underneath.
He feasted on the sight of her and watched her body respond to nothing more than his intent to possess her.
“If I were a vampire, I’d take you quickly,” he said, his voice low. “But you’d remember it differently. You’d think I was an expert lover.”
“I already do.” She sighed when he reached down to stroke her jaw, then trailed his fingers to the button of her jeans. Her skin pebbled at his touch.
He smiled. “I have to work a little harder as a human, but I’ve come to enjoy the challenge.”
She held his gaze while he stripped off the rest of her clothes and his own and joined her on the bed. He gathered her in his arms, reveling in the smooth glide of her skin as she twined her legs with his.
“I’d say you’re certainly rising to that challenge,” she said, sultry and sweet.
He loved the hint of wickedness in her eyes. “Oh…wanting you is easy. The hard part is not losing myself completely, keeping from baring my soul to you.”
Her smile faded, and she grazed his jaw with her knuckles, arching toward him. “Isn’t it nice to have one, though? Even if you have to protect it?”
He kissed her deeply, taking all he could from the contact. When he finally pulled away, she lay panting, her body flushed and warm for him. “For now,” he said, “yes, it is.”
Hours later, Zoe woke to find Julian watching her. He seemed entranced, lost in thought as he brushed strands of hair from her face.
“Morning?” she sighed, still hoping that perhaps he would let the fateful deadline pass.
“Not yet. It’s time for me to leave.”
Her heart froze. Nothing was going to change his mind. “You don’t have to go.”
“You were the one who first told me I did.”
“That was before…before I fell in love with you.”
He paused, and his gaze was so intense that she had to look away. “Don’t let yourself believe that you love me, Zoe, please.”
“I can’t change how I feel.”
He stiffened under her touch. “One day, you will.”
She refused to dwell on that thought. “What if Lambert does have the cure? Will you take it?”
He held her gaze for a long time, then lowered his lips and kissed her hard. Her body responded, tightening, aching for him, but her heart stilled.
“The price he’ll ask will be too high, even though I’d do almost anything to get my life back.”
She nodded. “What about a new life?”
“Zoe…”
“No. The choice should be simple.” She sat up, pushing his hands away. “You can stay here with me and be human. You don’t need all those things that Lambert took from you—the vampire friends you don’t really trust, the enemies around every corner just waiting for you to fall so they can pick up your pieces. What do you need that for?”
“Zoe, it’s what I am.”
“No, it’s not. You’re human now. You have a soul, you have a heart. Those things are worth more than some shadowy empire of the undead.”
He laughed, but the sound was cold. “I like the sound of that. I’ve always wanted a shadowy empire.”
“And if you don’t turn, then you’ll come back and do what?”
“If I don’t succeed tonight, Lambert will probably kill me.”
She got off the bed, pulled on her shirt and fumbled with her jeans in the half light of the single candle that had flared to life when they began talking. “Please don’t go, Julian. Please.”
“I have to.”
“I’ll wait here for you to come back.”
“I won’t be back, Zoe. Not the Julian you think you’re in love with. As a vampire, all I’ll do is hurt you. I don’t want to see that happen.”
“Then don’t. I know in your heart you can’t hurt me.”
“Once I’m turned, I won’t have a heart anymore.”
He might not have his own, but he’d have hers. She swiped at the tears that burned in the corners of her eyes and knelt beside the bed. “Please.”
He took her hands in his and kissed them. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“Julian.”
He rose, dropped her hands and headed for the bedroom door. Silhouetted in the threshold, he looked dark and dangerous, every inch the vampire he longed to become. “Take every precaution to keep yourself safe, Zoe. And if you should ever see me again—run.”
He disappeared, leaving Zoe huddled next to the bed. She felt frozen, as if her lungs had stopped working. She couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to, and worse, she couldn’t force the tears to fall. Perhaps this was what it felt like to be a vampire—cold, lifeless, always a moment away from feeling a maelstrom of emotions that would break you if you let them free.
Safe in his enclave and surrounded by his newest servants, Enoch Lambert watched the clock. He had no doubt Julian would come to him, prepared to fight if not prepared to bargain.
And in the end, Enoch would get what he’d originally desired. It had never been Julian’s loyalty he sought, though he’d toyed with that fantasy often enough. No. He’d stood in the younger vampire’s shadow too long to be fully content with a mere shift in power.
It was Julian’s surrender he craved, his undoing and, if need be, his complete destruction.
In a few short hours, the vampire w
orld would change irrevocably, and Enoch would finally steer the course he’d planned so long ago.
Chapter Fourteen
Julian had a little over two hours to rethink his decision. The traffic between Ocean City and Baltimore was nominal at this hour, and Hester’s car—she’d left him the keys to her vintage Impala—flew like lightning. More than once he wished for a delay, anything to slow his inevitable progress, because his own ambiguous thoughts just weren’t enough.
He wanted Zoe. He wanted to be the man who came back to her and swept her into his arms. He wanted to be free of his demons, powerful and secure, sure of his place in the world and fully able to give her everything a human woman would want for the rest of her life. But it was Julian the vampire who possessed all the things he needed to make that life—the money, the business, the confidence to tackle any obstacle, even one as formidable as Lambert. He had to choose between life as a homeless, penniless human or a soulless vampire, and damn if it wasn’t the most difficult decision he’d ever faced.
A sharpened wooden stake lay on the passenger seat, and Julian’s gaze fell to it every few minutes. His only recourse was to kill Lambert, knowing full well that, once free of their sire’s influence, Lambert’s underlings would take him out before they set to fighting amongst themselves over who might inherit their master’s power.
It wouldn’t matter, though. No one would be as cunning as Lambert or as dangerous. When Julian got his fangs back, he’d have it all for the taking. If he survived, of course.
He should have been humming with energy, eager to reclaim what belonged to him. Why then did he feel like he’d left everything of value that belonged to him back in Hester’s bungalow?
Each mile that ticked by brought him farther away from his one remaining weakness and closer to complete desolation.
Yet he drove on.
She would have followed him, but damn him, he’d left her car and taken her keys—even the spare one she kept in the magnetic box in the wheel well. Double damn him.
She would have cried, but there were no tears left. She felt completely dried out inside, almost hollow. The only thing left was a hard ball of anger at Hester. The one person who might have been able to help Julian hadn’t come through for him.
When the witch did show up, she was going to get an earful from Zoe, but how much longer could she conveniently stay away?
“Where did I put that book?” she asked aloud, drying her eyes on her sleeve and hauling herself up from the couch in the sitting room. Hadn’t she seen a witch summoning spell when she’d flipped through the pages of Hester’s spell book the other night?
She found it in the kitchen where she’d hidden it amid the witch’s collection of very unmagical vegetarian cookbooks.
She flattened the book out on the kitchen table and began leafing through, deliberately skipping the section on goblin summoning. The spell she’d seen was near the end of the book and took up only half a page. Beneath the heading To Summon a Witch by Name was a list of what looked like simple kitchen ingredients. Salt, star anise and sweetgrass. A white candle and a blue stone.
Zoe considered for a moment while she scanned the page. She was no witch. Would the spell even work if she tried it? What if she screwed it up and a goblin appeared? She recalled the time she’d tried to make tomato Florentine soup and ended up with something that peeled the Teflon right off her best sauce pot.
She shrugged. Damn the torpedoes, it was worth a try.
The ingredients proved simple enough to collect. The place was rife with candles of all shapes and sizes. A fat pillar from the coffee table would probably work just fine. The blue stone proved to be a bit of a challenge. The rocks around the bungalow were all in shades of sand with a few black ones tossed in here and there.
A deep blue piece of sea glass from her collection would have to do. It was hard as rock, anyway. Next, the spell called for five star anise set at five points around the candle and the stone and ringed with a circle of salt. Two blades of sweetgrass crossed over the stone would complete the setting. Lighting the candle, reciting a few Latin couplets and calling the witch’s name five times would—should—bring the spell to fruition. At this point, she had nothing to lose by trying.
She set the sea glass on the table next to the candle and turned toward Hester’s pantry. The upper shelves held small, meticulously labeled glass bottles of every herb known to man and a few Zoe didn’t think one could find at a gourmet food shop, such as snake scales and dragon’s blood. Where did one get those anyway? Probably the Internet.
The last bottle on the highest shelf proved to be sweetgrass, and as Zoe pulled it down, the one next to it toppled also. She caught it just in time. This second bottle was the only one not labeled. The dark amber liquid inside looked like honey, but the scent that lingered on the fat cork stopper was perfumy…like mild pine with a hint of citrus.
Zoe uncorked the bottle and breathed in the strangely familiar aroma. Julian. This was the scent he’d been wearing the day they met. The day he’d been doused in Lambert’s devamping potion.
Recorking the bottle, Zoe crossed the kitchen and set the potion down with the other spell ingredients. Now she understood why Hester hadn’t returned.
Fairmont was dark and desolate when Julian made his first circuit of the place. The old golf course and country club had been slated for demolition, eventually to be replaced with yet another shopping mall, but financial concerns had halted construction some months ago. Enoch had put a bid in on the place, planning to turn the densely wooded property into a vampire stronghold. Julian could have put a stop to the construction, but secretly, he’d liked the idea of having an enclave for his kind, a place where none of his brethren would need to rely on the pretenses that helped them navigate the human world. It meant giving Enoch a small bastion of power, a token rule in his kingdom. Now he realized it was just the base of operations for Enoch’s new empire.
Julian had an hour to kill, and he needed to know the territory, so he left Hester’s car near the back gate, hidden from the main road by sweeping old willows. With the stake clutched in one hand, he walked along the winding paths toward the abandoned country club’s main buildings. He was ready for Lambert. Ready for anything.
Hester didn’t arrive in the usual way when she finally did return. She didn’t walk through the front or the back door of the bungalow. She merely materialized in the middle of the kitchen, right where Zoe had expected her.
The red-headed witch looked at the circle of salt and star anise Zoe had assembled, and her mouth dropped open.
“You summoned me?”
“It wasn’t hard.” Zoe shrugged. After a few sparks and a puff of brown smoke, she’d gotten the strange incantation right. Later on she’d take time to be properly shocked that she’d actually performed some witchcraft, but right now she was just mad.
She crossed her arms over her chest and flicked her gaze to the potion bottle on the table. “We need to talk, Witchy Poo.”
Hester’s silvery blue gaze followed Zoe’s, and her full lips contracted into a thin line. “I see you’ve been snooping, Nancy Drew.”
Zoe held up the glass vial. “This is the potion Lambert used on Julian, isn’t it?”
Hester mimicked Zoe’s stance, and somehow it looked better on her. “Aren’t you clever? You figured that out all by yourself.”
“You’re working with Lambert to destroy Julian.” Zoe raged inside, but logic told her to be just a little bit careful. If Hester could defang a vampire, what could she do to a human?
“No. That’s not it at all. I’m working to keep Julian alive.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “By taking away everything he has?”
“That wasn’t my intent. The Witches’ Council keeps tabs on the vampire hierarchy, and the Draconus learned that Enoch Lambert was planning a systematic takeover of Julian’s holdings. It was Lambert’s plan to stake Julian, and when I heard this, I went to Lambert and offered him another solution.”
“Make Julian human? Why? Now he’s vulnerable. What if he gets killed?”
Hester’s lower lip quivered quite convincingly. “That wasn’t part of our agreement. I contracted with Lambert to defang Julian rather than kill him. They’ll spar a bit, but no one will get hurt.”
“You’ve already hurt him. You lied to him. And you haven’t been searching for a cure all this time, have you?”
“No.”
Zoe’s heart thundered at the witch’s blatant confession. “You love him, Hester. That’s obvious. Why would you want to see him reduced to nothing?”
Now a bright tear slipped out of the corner of Hester’s eye. She shook her head, her auburn mane flowing over her shoulders. “I do love him, but as a vampire, he could never love me back. I thought if he were human, he might. I hadn’t counted you in the equation. It never occurred to me he’d bring you here. I thought he’d just come to me for help, and I could protect him, convince him to stay with me.”
Zoe chewed her bottom lip. “I can’t even do that. He won’t stop until he gets back what he’s lost.”
“I just didn’t want him to die.” Hester’s tone had become pleading. The beautiful witch looked lost and very much alone.
“So you made him mortal.”
“Immortality isn’t healthy. He’s better off this way.”
“I agree, but I don’t think you can convince him of that. Can you turn him back?”
Those smoky eyes flared. “Are you serious? Don’t you get it? As a vampire, he’ll have no use for you. If you care about him, he’ll exploit those feelings. He’ll toy with you until you don’t even know yourself anymore. And then he’ll probably drink you dry and throw away the scraps. At least this way you have a chance to keep him.”
Zoe’s throat constricted, and tears threatened again. How could she admit to Hester that she’d already lost him? “If you don’t turn him back, he’ll keep looking until he finds someone else who will.”
Uncross My Heart Page 15