by Aja James
So Clara started making plans about a week into Annie’s stay at the orphanage.
She received the letter just this afternoon granting her placement date. Because of her connections through the orphanage and having dealt with the system all her life, she’d gotten the approval much sooner than any other petitioner might.
Annie was to come live with Clara!
And during their homestay together, a counselor would come check in on them from time to time, while Clara filed formally for adoption.
It was a brash, tremendous, life-changing thing to do for a single young woman of twenty-five years, with steady, albeit lower-middle income.
But Clara felt she had to.
From the first moment Clara laid eyes on Annie, she’d felt that the little girl was hers. They belonged together.
She kissed the top of Annie’s head and smiled with contented bliss.
Finally! She’d have her own family. A home for her heart. With Annie.
She cuddled closer to the little girl and sighed with happiness. The day after tomorrow, she could take Annie home with her. There was so much to look forward to!
Clara froze.
She didn’t know what alerted her. There was no sound to be heard. But the air had abruptly gone chill in the room as if an icy fog had seeped through the seams of the door.
Hackles rose on the back of her neck. A mother’s instinct to protect, perhaps. Or a prey’s sense of being hunted.
As Clara’s eyes narrowed at the darkness that surrounded her, the shadows that the moonlight cast through the unshielded windows seemed to move sinuously, even though there was no corresponding movement outside.
Before her very eyes, the shadows slowly drew together, coalescing into the shape of a man.
Chapter Two
The man whose name was not really Eli (though he’d probably call himself by this moniker until he got his memory back, assuming that he would) stayed in the shadows of the orphanage, out of sight, while Clara went inside and locked the doors.
He was glad he’d followed her this night. The woman attracted the bad sort of attention like a fat rabbit attracted starving wolves and hyenas.
First, he’d dispatched the two drunken teenagers who’d followed her to the bus station with a gentle pat on each of their backs. Truly, he had no idea how he was able to make them double over in wheezing fits, gasping for breath, when he’d barely touched them.
Then, he’d made certain the leery middle-aged man sitting in the second row of seats on the bus stayed sitting there by giving him a good hard look when he had gotten on board, before heading to the back to sit behind Clara.
Finally, he’d bared his prodigiously overdeveloped canines at the tall, burly guy who was walking toward Clara from the opposite direction on her way to the orphanage. That, combined with the malevolent glint in his eyes probably scared the guy off, saving Eli from having to “pat” him too.
Eli didn’t know where all this rage and violence within him were coming from. Or how he could so easily fell others with a flick of his hand.
He was supposedly a psychiatrist, for crying out loud.
Dr. E. Weisman.
He lived in the penthouse of a luxurious high-rise in Central Park South, Manhattan. His wardrobe and accessories were comprised of only high-end labels, and apparently, his taste in everything was impeccable, if minimalistic.
Shouldn’t someone with such a background, who lived in such an environment, be more civilized?
But in fact, Eli might well have the psychological profile and aptitude of a professionally trained killer.
And he wasn’t en par with Russia’s Alpha Group, or U.S.’s Green Berets, or France’s GIGN—he was infinitely more potent, more lethal.
Inhumanly so.
He knew it. Every cell in his body knew it.
He just didn’t know what to do with this knowledge, and how it fit into the vast void that was currently his life.
There was no reason for him to loiter around outside while Clara slept, as surely she was doing now, twenty minutes or so after she went in.
All the lights were off, save a dim glow in the hallway windows. Eli knew, because he’d done a three-hundred-sixty degree check of the three-story building.
Still, he stood beneath the window that must be Clara’s, for he’d tracked her easily through any and every unveiled opening in the building, even in the dark. In fact, his vision was somehow keener at night than it was during the daytime. And he was wired with energy at night; lethargic at best, comatose at worst, during the day.
He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, gazing like a lovesick mooncalf up at her window. He felt pretty foolish doing it, but he couldn’t seem to leave.
And then, just as he made up his mind to retreat to his apartment, he froze.
Lowering the cadence of his breathing and sharpening his senses, he fixed his gaze on Clara’s window.
Someone was in her room. Clara was in danger.
One moment, the need, the instinctual drive, to protect Clara shot through Eli’s system like a bolt of lightning, and the next his body unraveled into a nebulous cloud.
No, not a cloud—he became one with the very air around him.
He was the wind that traveled swiftly up the side of the building, directly beneath Clara’s window, sifting like tendrils of smoke through the miniscule seam between the window casing and bricks.
Mere seconds later, he was inside of Clara’s borrowed room, just in time to confront a black-robed man, whose lower half of the face was covered by the same black cloth that covered the rest of him.
And then, the shadows in the room heaped upon each other until two more men took form alongside the first. All three identically outfitted.
Equally threatening.
Again without conscious thought, Eli took solid form as well, standing between Clara’s bed and the three intruders.
Out of the corner of his eye, within the fraction of a moment, he took in Clara staring at them with wide eyes. Silent and tense, protectively curled around the little girl he’d seen with her before at the park, only a few red curls visible from within the shelter of Clara’s arms and the quilt that covered them.
“Master,” one of the intruders said.
Eli looked at him. Was he addressing Eli?
“He is no longer with us,” another one said underneath his breath, in a language that was not English, nor any other currently spoken language in the world, but which Eli understood perfectly.
“Take him out,” the third ordered flatly in the same lost language.
And then they were upon him.
The three intruders dissolved instantly into shadows again and swarmed Eli from all sides at once.
Eli huffed a short breath, more from surprise than pain, when something long and sharp stabbed into his lower abdomen close to his hip, so deeply, the object protruded out the other side.
As if the wound awakened a dormant beast within him, his body went into autopilot.
In a narrow splinter of moonlight, he bared his teeth in a silent hiss. Then, he, too, evaporated into air.
Unlike shadows that could be tracked with the naked eye, Eli became something that was all but invisible. With a single-minded focus, he deflected the assaults coming at him while making counter attacks of his own.
The intruders were armed with various weapons—swords, daggers, stilettos, chains; Eli had only his hands and feet. As he fought them, he was an emotionless, unfeeling machine, but also instinctual.
He moved without thought and deliberation. Instead of taking a millisecond to calculate the various combat maneuvers, his moves were so intuitive they weren’t consciously processed before he made them.
He was wired to kill.
In his amorphous form, he seemed invincible. Swift and deadly with his own attacks but impossible to pin down by the other fighters as they attacked in turn. Even though they were shadows themselves, Eli knew how and where to hit them to infl
ict maximum damage.
Soon, the three attackers crumbled one by one to the floor, gasping for breath and paralyzed with pain, back in their corporeal forms.
Eli took solid form again, now holding one of the assassins’ swords.
“Master,” the first one who’d spoken rasped again.
Eli gave him one brief look before efficiently and cleanly severing the intruders’ heads from their bodies one after the other. His movements were so fast, the blade of the sword so sharp, not even a drop of blood hit the ground as the three intruders disintegrated into black ashes.
The sword gleaming in his hand, Eli turned to look at Clara, who stared unblinkingly with saucer-sized eyes back at him.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
He held her gaze stonily. Calm. Breathing evenly. Not the slightest winded from the mortal combat of the past few minutes.
Utterly emotionless.
No remorse for killing three living beings, whatever they were. No sense of victory. Nothing.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered.
*** *** *** ***
Okay, so the man (the primitive slut in her wanted so badly her vagina throbbed) was not only a stalker but a professional killer as well.
Serial killer, by the looks of it, given that he’d executed three men in rapid succession.
And some sort of demon?
With two very sharp canines.
Who could disappear into thin air.
Who saved her and Annie from armed and deadly black-robed assassins that turned into shadows.
Clara decided optimistically to focus on the last thought, rather than the string of disturbing realizations that came before it.
Thankfully, Annie slept through the whole silent massacre. She was still breathing deeply, snuggled against Clara’s side.
“You’re bleeding,” Clara murmured, still halfway in shock, her stare riveted on the wet, dark stain soaking through the bottom of Eli’s shirt and the top of his trousers. The blood flow was so copious, he was starting to drip steadily onto the floor.
Her comment seemed to remind him of a wound he’d forgotten was there. He uninterestedly looked down at himself, pressed two fingers to the area, coating them with fresh blood, and rubbed the viscous fluid into his skin analytically, as if he’d never seen blood before.
If it had been Clara who received such a terrible wound, she’d be screaming and bawling in pain by now, but Eli didn’t seem to feel it.
“We have to take you to the hospital,” she said urgently, her shock finally wearing off, replaced by worry.
Wasn’t his inability to feel pain a marker of the gravity of his condition?
“No,” he uttered in that deep, smoky voice. “No hospitals.”
“You can’t leave a wound like that to heal by itself,” Clara whispered furiously, concern for his wellbeing vibrating in her voice, making her entire body shiver with stress.
“We have to see if any of your internal organs are damaged. And if we don’t stop the bleeding soon, you’re going to pass out, go into shock, or worse.” This she said with increasing panic, making even her whisper end on a shrill note.
He pierced her with his wolf-like, double-lidded, eerie green gaze.
“No hospitals,” he repeated. “No one can know but you. If I am still in physical form, I will not die from this.” He didn’t know how he knew this; he simply knew it.
“But…” Clara flailed for words as her brain overloaded with the ramifications of what she’d witnessed.
In the end, she accepted the truth, however unbelievable: Eli wasn’t human.
Therefore, no hospitals. No police. No alerting anyone else.
“What can I do?” Clara asked with some desperation.
Surely there was something she could do to help him. He’d risked his life to save her and Annie.
“I need to rest,” he said, his eyelids dropping to half-mast as if he was in too much pain or too weary to keep them open.
“Somewhere without windows. Somewhere close by.” Because he wasn’t sure how far he could walk given his waning strength.
“Okay,” Clara nodded and tried to focus on what she could do, instead of all the things she couldn’t.
Like magically making him better again.
She carefully eased away from Annie and got out of bed. Without thinking, she reached for Eli’s hand and grasped it tightly in her own, as if trying to tether him to her. Keep him amongst the living.
With her.
She led him quickly down the corridor and three flights of stairs to the basement of the orphanage where they stored various supplies, cleaning instruments and products, washers and dryers.
He dripped blood onto the floor the entire way, but otherwise, he gave no signs that he was injured. His gait was as smooth as always; he all but floated down the steep stairs, albeit at a slower glide.
Clara made a mental note to mop up after him and clear away the piles of black ashes in her borrowed bedroom as soon as she got him settled. She wondered whether the sword he wielded was still there, and if so, what she was going to do with it.
Well, at least he bled.
Bleeding seemed to make him more real. He said something about not dying, despite the wound, because he was still in his physical form. She’d have to trust him on that and hope he was right.
She had the strangest notion that it would break her heart if he suddenly vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.
Once inside the basement, he scanned the seven-hundred-square-foot, low-ceiling space efficiently and headed to the very rear, a particularly pitch black notch surrounded on three sides by sturdy old book shelves. Close to the ceiling on the wall was an ancient clearstory window that probably hadn’t been opened for decades, the glass yellowed with time, the metal shutters rusted.
He sat down on the cold, hard ground and leaned back against the shelves, closing his eyes.
Clara knelt beside him, anxious and worried sick.
Was he going to be all right? Could she trust what he said? Should she call for help? What if she made the wrong decision?
What if he died?
She moved as close to him as she could, because she could no longer hear his breathing.
As she reached out to the side of his throat to feel his pulse, he startled a gasp out of her by grabbing her wrist.
“You should go,” he rasped, eyes still closed. “I just need a few hours to store enough strength to leave here.”
“Isn’t there anything else I can do?” she asked desperately. She knew that she needed to go clean up and stay with Annie in case the little girl woke up.
And frankly, she was loathe to leave Annie alone after this. What if there were more of those shadow assassins?
What did they want? Who had they been after? Clara or Annie? Or Jaimie? It was Jaimie’s bedroom, after all, and Clara had only borrowed it this night.
If there were more of those things, Clara didn’t know what she could possibly do to deter them, given what they’re capable of, but she’d protect Annie with her life if necessary.
At the same time, she wanted badly to stay with Eli, even though she knew that her mere presence couldn’t make him heal any faster.
At her innocent question, his eyes opened suddenly and his lips curled back to reveal two long, sharp, gleaming canines.
She watched like a field mouse hypnotized by a bird of prey as he stared fixedly at her neck, his pupils dilating to swallow his irises entirely.
“Thirsty…” he breathed shallowly as he rasped out. “Hurts.”
She didn’t know to which “hurt” he referred, but somehow she understood that he wasn’t talking about his stab wound.
And then the most ludicrous thing came out of her mouth unbidden, because if she’d processed the question through her brain first, she wouldn’t have spoken out loud for fear of being institutionalized on insanity charges:
“Do you want to drink my blood?”
*
** *** *** ***
Through a haze of pain, mostly borne of prolonged thirst and starvation, Eli nodded.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that “drinking blood” was not normal, but he was beyond caring at this point.
What was one more bizarre quirk amidst all the others that he’d discovered about himself over the past half hour?
Like being able to evaporate into thin air. Understanding long-dead languages.
The ability to kill without remorse.
He’d known since “waking up” several days ago that he had prodigiously well-developed canines that extended and retracted based on his emotions and needs. He didn’t know what they were for until now.
Until Clara asked—offered?—whether he wanted her blood.
He wanted it more than anything.
He wanted her.
Awkwardly, she settled astride his lap, trying not to disturb his wound, and also trying to make her posture as platonic as possible, despite sitting right up against an erection he didn’t even know he had.
She couldn’t miss it, the way she scooted close enough to him, facing him on his lap, so that she could bring her throat to his mouth. The steel pipe of his sex was leaping against its fabric confines to get her attention like an eager lap dog barking excitedly at its master.
Eli was excessively glad he’d stared at her neck in hunger instead of her wrist, because then she wouldn’t be lusciously wrapped around him like a warm, soft, sweet-smelling barnacle.
With her arms linked loosely around his neck, her face inches away from his, she whispered, “How does this work? Is it going to hurt a lot?”
He had the irresistible need to reassure her, protect her even from himself.
“You don’t have to do this,” he stated firmly, not caring about the consequences to himself.
“I want to help you,” she murmured, and did it again—wet her lips in anticipation.
She wanted to feed him.
“I can make it feel good,” he promised darkly and watched a flush bloom up her throat and face at his words. “You’ll only feel a momentary sting.”