by Zoe Winters
Vampires had a soul, but it wasn’t very pretty. And while humans could hide their inner darkness from a mirror, vampires could not. After many centuries he’d grown uncomfortable looking into the reflection of his own eyes, seeing only the shadow of humanity under the surface of the demon.
Linus was already sitting in a booth at the back, watching the door, waiting for him. Anthony took an unnecessary breath and made his way to the table.
The other vampire was an inch shorter than Anthony, but broader. He too wore all black. He was olive complected, with his short black hair slicked away from his face. They looked like mafia hit men about to go out and whack someone. They needed a new vampire uniform.
Linus looked up from his plate of half-eaten waffles and sticky syrup.
“Anthony.”
Anthony slid into the booth across from him, looking disgusted. Why Linus ate was anybody’s guess. A petite brunette wearing a short pale blue dress, apron, and a silver name tag that read, Tina, appeared with a full pot of coffee.
Linus placed his hand over his cup. “I’m fine, thank you, dear.”
She turned to Anthony. “And for you, sir? What can I get you?”
“I don’t think what Anthony wants is on your menu,” Linus said.
The waitress blushed, assuming sexual innuendo.
He shook his head. “Nothing, I’m fine.”
When Tina had retreated out the back door for a cigarette break, Linus leaned in closer. “I thought you were feeding when I called.”
“I said, ‘something like that.’ If I had been feeding, do you think I’d take a call from you? You’re important but you aren’t that important.” Anthony impatiently drummed his fingers on the table. “So what do you want?”
“Can’t competitors have a friendly meeting before the big tournament? These are fantastic waffles, by the way. You should try some.”
Anthony just stared at him.
He pushed his plate aside and sipped the coffee. “Fine. I’m offering to make you my second-in-command, if you withdraw your name from the competition.”
“No.” Anthony stood, wondering if he could catch Tina out back before she finished her cigarette.
Linus placed a hand on his arm. “You know I’ll win. You can live and be at the top of the new order, or you can die.”
Anthony raised an eyebrow. “Or I could win. Or one of the forty-something other competitors could win. But you only see me as competition, otherwise you wouldn’t be requesting my withdrawal. I think I’ll take my chances.”
He removed his arm from Linus’s grip.
“Don’t be so glory-happy. I’m creating a brave new world with or without you, my friend.”
“We stopped being friends a long time ago. I expect not to see you again until the tournament.”
He’d left Charlotte alone without her memory for this. Linus was barking mad. Vampires had cleaned up their act over the past several centuries. A bit less killing and mayhem. A lot more discretion. For these new efforts, no one hunted them.
They’d done so well at becoming well-blended shadows that no one even believed in them anymore. Under the current order, vampires cleaned up their messes. If they killed, they made damn sure it looked like an accident or a human cause. Otherwise, they wiped memories. The few that couldn’t follow those rules were hunted by other members of the coven and eliminated.
Now, after a century, it was time for a change of the guard. Linus wanted to take them back to the former reign of terror. He wanted big, beautiful messes where his menagerie of found mistakes would be commonplace, where people knew what lurked in the shadows and their fear flowed even faster than their blood.
Anthony managed to catch Tina before she went back inside. She found him attractive, so it was easy to flirt with her and get her away from witnesses. He didn’t have to enthrall her. Even in today’s age, women still trusted beautiful monsters because they couldn’t believe anything evil could ever be wrapped up so pretty.
Fortunately for Tina, she’d been led away by Anthony and not Linus. Linus had no problem killing the humans. Sometimes he kept them for awhile, but it usually ended in their death when he got bored. Anthony fed, erased memories, and moved on.
He couldn’t be sure exactly why he did it, except that disposing of bodies was more work, and wiping memories was far cleaner. With the recent exception of Charlotte. After centuries of not killing, he’d grown accustomed and lost his taste for it. He was, perhaps, a domesticated breed now.
Like modern humans, the hunt had been conditioned out of him by the necessary way of life. Humans didn’t usually hunt their food anymore either. Most didn’t even grow it. Instead, they went to the store and bought lumps of red or pink, wrapped in plastic with a bargain price sticker and a USDA-approved label. It was as far removed from a living animal as it could possibly be.
A small group of vampires didn’t believe in taking from human necks. Some of them fed from animals, while others got their blood from blood banks. There was much about their way of life that hung in the balance. Gregory, a proponent of the bagged-blood group, was competing in the tournament.
If he won, would Anthony become an outlaw to continue the hunt? He believed that he would. But he didn’t think a vampire subsisting on bagged blood could win. It wasn’t alive. There were no emotions. No vampire living on that swill could hope to be strong enough to win, let alone defeat someone as savage as Linus.
He led Tina away from the diner, down the road toward a nearby abandoned park. He felt her growing trepidation so he took her hand and smiled at her. She relaxed, and they continued on.
When they reached the park he let go of her, and her fear came pulsing back. He smiled, this time letting her fear flow over him like a summer breeze.
Emotions were like flavors. Fear, sadness, anger, lust, happiness. He’d caused and fed from each of them and tonight he craved fear. Perhaps he was as bad as Linus.
After all, he opposed Linus’s way––his new order as he called it––not because it was immoral, but because Anthony believed it could upset his own way of life. He didn’t want to have to hide in dank crypts like in the bad old days.
It was nice to be able to live in one place for awhile and enjoy the fact that no one would try to stake you in your sleep because no one believed you were more than a fanciful myth. Now Hollywood was on his side since vampires had risen to the status of sex symbols.
Tina started to run, but he knew this hunting ground well and was far too fast for her. He caught her and clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle the scream.
A favorite human pet’s happiness or sadness was far richer than a stranger’s. He inhaled her warm fragrance and sank his fangs in deep, savoring the taste of her. When he’d drunk his fill, he sealed the bite marks with his tongue and licked the tears from her face. “Shhhh.”
As strange as it seemed, a vampire’s bite wasn’t painful unless pain was a flavor the vampire enjoyed. Pain was an acquired taste, and lucky for Tina, Anthony had never acquired it. He read in her mind the confusion over the lack of pain, the fact that she was still alive, and her internal debate over whether she was going crazy.
“No, you’re not crazy.”
He released her, and she edged back from him, looking around her, gauging distance and her chance of escape.
“Don’t bother. You can’t outrun me. I’m taking you back to the diner.”
She raised her hand to her throat, unable to believe there would be no scar. “You’re not going to kill me?”
He shook his head. “More trouble than it’s worth. I’ll erase your memory when we get back.”
They were walking back to the diner when she asked the question few thought to ask him. “Is this the first time, with me?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Oh.”
He didn’t know why he said what he did next. “When you’re happy you taste like strawberries. When you’re sad, like peaches and cream. Tonight, you tasted like caramel
apples.”
An involuntary shiver. “You’re really a fan of fruit.”
He chuckled. “No, that’s just you. You’re always fruit.”
When they got back to the diner, they stopped by the trash cans where Tina had smoked her cigarette. She took another one now and lit the tip.
“Don’t go anywhere alone with Linus, the other man that was with me in the diner. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let him touch you.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t think it’s too much trouble.”
She nodded, as the realization that he was probably saving her life sunk in. “But I won’t remember . . . ”
“I’ll let you keep a healthy fear of him.”
As Tina went back to work, Anthony wondered if he would have moved her into his apartment if he’d given her amnesia instead of Charlotte, why he’d never drunk from Charlotte before the previous night despite fantasizing about it, why he’d hated her fear despite loving the taste of it, and if killing her wouldn’t be far less trouble than keeping her alive.
He stood by the window, watching the waitress as she kept a good, safe distance from Linus. He’d done the best he could. If Linus killed one of his favorite snacks, he killed her. Anthony wasn’t in the business of saving humans, though the redhead in his penthouse belied that fact.
He cared what she thought about him, that she’d feared him. He’d never wanted that from Charlotte.
***
The dog slipped from Charlotte’s room to greet Anthony when he came in. The animal’s earlier fear had been completely erased, no longer registering the vampire as a threat. Stupid dog. Then he heard her. She was trying to be quiet, but of course his ears picked up the soft crying.
“What’s wrong?” he said when he reached her bedroom doorway.
She looked up, her face red from her distress. “I’m insane.”
“What?”
She held a thick old-fashioned book in her hand.
“My journal. One of the last entries I wrote something about Dayne being a sorcerer and Greta being a werecat. But that stuff isn’t real. If I get my memory back, will I be crazy again?”
Anthony let out a tired sigh. He didn’t need this on top of the tournament. When he’d searched her mind to erase it the night she’d tried to help Greta leave the city, why hadn’t he thought of something like a journal entry? She’d known about their world for several days before he’d gotten to her. He should have searched her apartment for any remaining evidence, but he hadn’t. And now the mess was larger.
“I don’t feel crazy right now. So how can I be crazy with my memory but not crazy without it?”
Anthony stared hard at her and lifted the interior monologue running through her head. She was second-guessing her crazy status because earlier she’d thought he was a vampire. He sifted through her thoughts about his kitchen and lack of mirror to the point she’d dismissed it all. He moved to sit on the bed and wrapped an arm around her, considering his options.
He could kill her, but then he had Dayne and Greta to contend with if she went missing. And as simple as he wanted that solution to be, he couldn’t seriously entertain the idea of a world without Charlotte in it. He could erase her memory again, but that might do greater damage.
Who was he kidding? She hadn’t lost her memory through natural means. It wasn’t just going to come back on its own. If such a thing could happen, his entire kind would be endangered.
There was no known way to return a memory. So he was back to killing her. Perhaps he could convince Dayne and Greta it had been a mercy killing, or that Linus had gotten to her. They’d known Linus was a risk. It was the entire reason Anthony had brought her to his penthouse.
She was practically already dead. He felt as if he’d taken more than her memory. Except for the outburst at the store, this wasn’t the sassy smart-assed Charlotte he adored. He couldn’t restore her. His fangs itched inside his gums, begging him to finish her, to not leave a mistake sitting around, something that would fit in Linus’s twisted menagerie. Or something Anthony might keep himself out of weakness.
Her head was on his shoulder, her tears wetting his shirt. She didn’t know he weighed the value of her life as his fingers stroked absently through her hair. He thought of all the ways he could do it. He could drain her quickly or he could snap her neck and never have to hear the thoughts of betrayal go through her mind again, thoughts he’d suffered through the first time he’d drunk from her.
He could just give her to Linus.
As soon as the idea entered his mind, it was met with such revulsion he thought he might vomit. Why did she affect him this way? What made her so different that he couldn’t kill her and make easy work of a complicated mess that had arrived at the most inopportune time?
“Shhhhh.” He had no other choice. “You’re not crazy.”
She looked up. “But . . . I wrote those things . . . and earlier . . . I thought you were a . . . Oh my god, you won’t believe how crazy I am. The thought actually entered my head that you might be a vampire.”
“I made a mistake.”
The strange admission stopped her crying for a moment as Anthony got up and went to the closet. He pulled out a large mirror and took down the Botticelli print. “Close your eyes.”
Charlotte looked at him, hesitating for a moment. Then she did what he asked, and he exchanged the print for the mirror.
“Keep them closed.” He took her hands and led her to face the reflective surface, holding her back firmly against his chest. “Open them.”
Chapter Seven
Anthony wrapped his arms around her, and immediately Charlee felt the peaceful calmness she was beginning to associate with him. Safety. Comfort.
The feeling was short-lived. Upon opening her eyes, her first instinct was to scream. Anthony’s hand came over her mouth to silence her, and she bit down. Still, he held tight.
His eyes met hers in the mirror. “Do not do that again.”
She nodded and whimpered against his hand. Something dark and twisted, black with silver waves, rippled over his skin. His face was demonic; his eyes glowed red. His teeth were wolf-like. She saw the wicked-looking claws resting against her cheek but only felt the softness of his fingertips.
She turned in the tiny amount of space he’d given her to look up into his face. When she did, she saw Anthony. Beautiful face, crystal blue eyes, long blond hair. She whirled back to face the mirror and was greeted again with the demonic visage. If she looked hard, she could still see Anthony. But the demon overpowered his reflection, making it clear he was more monster than man.
“If I remove my hand will you promise not to scream?”
She nodded, and he took his hand away from her mouth. “Which one is real?”
“Both. The human face you see is more or less what I looked like as a human. Just a bit more perfect. The other is what joined me when I was turned. People see a flicker of it before a bite. My eyes glow and my fangs come out, but only the mirror reveals the whole picture.”
She felt suffocated, as if there was no air left in the room to breathe. “Why do you keep a mirror in the closet?”
He held her gaze with his. “Because I used to love the look on your face right now.” He bent his head while Charlee watched his reflection and trailed his tongue lightly over her throat. He murmured against her skin, “You’ve got to calm down. You smell so fucking good.”
She closed her eyes and leaned against his shoulder. Her thoughts flitted back and forth like a schizophrenic butterfly torn between terror she might only live a few more minutes and an odd certainty that wasn’t the case. The hand that had been over her mouth moved to stroke through her hair.
“You’re lucky I’m not hungry.”
Charlee blushed as he stepped away from her. She’d stood in the arms of a predator without the will to even scream once he’d caressed her throat with his tongue. It seemed an unnecessary added perk. He already had too many advantages. She swayed on her
feet, but before she could collapse, a chair was slipped beneath her.
Anthony turned the chair to face him and made himself comfortable on the bed.
“You’re the reason I can’t remember my life.” The words came out dull and flat when she said them, a statement of fact, as if she’d mentioned a bill she’d gotten in the mail or a bank statement. “Can you fix it?”
Anthony looked down at his hands. “No.”
“So that’s it. It’s just gone then. It’s like I was born yesterday.” She tried to think what that meant. No hope of remembering the past, only being able to move forward. A clean slate if she’d been bad, but a waste if she hadn’t been. Somehow she doubted there was much she wanted wiped away.
“Yes. That’s right.”
She’d known the answer before he said it, but still the loss washed over her. Family, friends, memories she’d never know. Did she have parents? Brothers? Sisters? Where had she grown up? What was her childhood like?
Greta could help put some of the pieces together and lead her to others who could fill in the remaining gaps, but none of it would ever belong to her. Not really. It could be anybody’s story and it wouldn’t make any difference.
“I’m sorry.”
Charlee looked up. He did look truly remorseful. She couldn’t resist stealing a glance at the mirror for a second opinion, but the demon’s eyes revealed much the same as Anthony’s human face. Guilt and regret.
“Why?” If vampires erased memories, surely they did better and more localized jobs of it. No one else seemed to be running around with amnesia. Not that she’d had much of a chance to see the city, but Dayne and Greta had at least behaved as if her circumstances were peculiar.
“What you said about the last pages of your journal about Greta . . . A few days after that, you tried to help her escape town. You failed, and I was called in to erase your memories of the preternatural world. Later Dayne asked me to siphon drugs from Greta’s body. Her blood affected me, twisted my desires.” He looked away as if unable to stand the scrutiny and judgment behind her gaze.