by Maren Smith
There is nothing in this man’s movements that suggest he fears anything as he caresses his hands up the woman’s legs to her knees—
…his hands caressing the straps of Jez’s dress off her shoulders, baring her to the waist… I flinch from the vision in my head and stare at the man instead as he keeps the woman’s legs splayed wide and bends to suck the salt off her panty-clad mound.
He spots me just before his mouth touches her, and he stops.
Do I look like I hate him? I try to mask how fiercely I do, but the instant absence of all expression on his face as he stares back at me is startling. This is the man who killed my sister, though I haven’t any proof. If I want him to pay for what he’s done, then somewhere deep inside me I have to find the courage to walk over there.
Finding him was only half the battle.
Now I have to get him to confess.
Aleron
Someone sired a companion out of one of my past suppers.
That was my first thought, but even as the shock of what I’m seeing sings through my veins, I know what I’m looking at can’t possibly be my needy little Jezebel. Jez is dead. Dead in ways not even we can come back from. I know because I went to the hospital to see her. After the way she was found, I had to be sure. Sadly, I did not arrive until well after her autopsy. I can only assume her body had already been released back to her family. All I could smell was the unmistakable odor of embalming fluid seeping from her pores.
I don’t often pay attention to the passing of humans, but Jez was… different. Not special, not really. But considering how I left her and the state in which she was found, perhaps one might call it a needling sense of guilt pricking at my conscience for not insisting when she refused to let me take her home.
I’m not the only vampire who views Club Toxic as his own personal hunting ground, and Jez is—was—not the only unwitting victim here. She is, however, the only one I’ve personally known to pay with her life.
I didn’t know Jez had a sister, much less a twin, but the longer I stare, the more certain I am that’s what I’m seeing. Her body and face are perfection. She is every bit as slim as Jez—small in waist and breasts, a little thicker in the hips and thighs. Curved instead of bony, exactly as I prefer. Even her golden-brown hair seems identical, pinned up as it is in curls atop her head. When released from that prison of bobby pins, I know the tresses will be just long enough to wrap around my capturing hand.
She’s made up her face just like Jez would, but there the similarities end. Around the eyes… the shade of her lipstick—something isn’t right. She has painted herself to be a seductress, but hers is an unpracticed hand.
Her mouth isn’t smiling either. The piercing gray of her eyes is hard, holding no welcome for me.
No, this is not Jez. I am certain of it before I even test the air, picking my way through all the smells of this room until I find the alien allure of her scent.
I forget about my drink. I lose all interest in my date, although that’s hardly new for me. My interest has been aggravatingly fickle for centuries now. Nothing holds it for long, but this… Oh now, this is holding it nicely. She’s come for me, this lovely young woman with my Jezebel’s face. She hates me too, something I find both curious and amusing. She’s a puzzle.
I like puzzles; there are so few new ones left to excite me.
Sitting on the table between us, tonight’s supper frowns. Following my stare, she glances once over her shoulder and then turns her pout back to me.
“Give me a few minutes,” I say, patting her hip. “If you hurry, Izzy might yet pour you a drink. Tell her I said you could have anything and to put it on my tab.”
My would-be supper is not mollified, but I have dangled the carrot that is me before her hungry eyes for a very long time now. She wants her night with me too much to blow it with a tantrum, although she is anything but gracious as she rolls off the table and stomps to the bar.
I’ve already forgotten her. Bring forth the puzzle. I beckon ‘Jez’ to me.
Mine is a small, round table surrounded by half-moon booth-style seating. I am in the center, with as little of the room hidden behind my back as possible and within each reach of anyone who might decide to sit with me. She doesn’t look at all tempted by my offer, but she inches closer until she’s standing before me. Her gaze doesn’t leave mine; she barely blinks.
“Pretty as I am to look at, I doubt you came here simply to stare. Come,” I invite again. This time, I even move, sliding left to give her as much room on the right of the booth so she’ll feel safe and perhaps even think she’s out of my reach. “I don’t bite,” I lie with a ready smile.
I can smell her reluctance. I can practically taste her anger. That it’s directed at me is as obvious as it is baffling, but what I don’t smell and don’t taste is fear or lust, and oh, how that does enthrall me. It’s been some time since anyone has approached me without exuding one of those two emotions. I am far from the oldest vampire... dare I say alive? But even so, one does not get to be as old as I without learning to read the human animal as easily as if it were a printed book. She’s angry. She’s hurt. She wears my Jez’s face, and I’m not a fool.
I truly do love puzzles, so I’m quick to put these missing pieces back in their proper places. Her anger suggests she blames me for what happened to her sister, but if she knows me to be capable of murder, then her utter lack of fear is intriguing. Also, why me? She can’t possibly have even the smallest clue who and what I am, or even as angry as she is, I doubt she’d approach me the way she has. She even sits down when I give the table a cajoling pat. No, she’s not afraid of me at all.
I like that.
I also like her smell. Like her sister, her scent is attractive to me. She’s never been here before, or I’d have known it. I’d like to think my eye would have picked her out before now. Her neck is fully exposed, and there are no healing marks that I can see. If someone else has supped from her, then they found another place to do it from, and my lazy cock stirs at the thought of where I might find the marks.
“Can I get you a drink?” I offer, flagging a club servant with a mostly empty tray. “Water? Coffee? The bar’s closed, but I’m sure I can get you something.”
“No,” she says, slowly. “Thank you.”
Angry, but still polite. Her voice isn’t quite a mirror of Jez’s, but it’s very close. A little more alto, perhaps. A little huskier. A bedroom voice, they call it. Old and jaded I may be, but I’m not immune. Probably because I haven’t yet fed tonight.
Over at the bar, my darling, sulky, thoroughly pissed-off ex-supper is just petty enough to turn her tasty flirtations on another vampire. I don’t know his name, but he’s only too happy to pick up where I left off.
He steals her away from the bar, throwing a smirk my way. I can imagine what he whispers in her ear, as he leads her off in the direction of the Dungeon.
That’s mildly annoying. My fingers drum the table once, but that’s all right. I have my puzzle, and with all the willing meat to be found in this place, I doubt if I’ll go hungry for long.
Answering my hail at last, a bar servant comes to my table. “We’re past last call, Sir.” She tries to keep her eyes properly averted, but her gaze keeps stealing back to my companion. I know what she’s thinking. From the corner of my eye, I can see rumor spreading among the submissive cast. They recognize Jez. They can also read a paper every bit as well as I, but they aren’t vampires. They don’t know what I knew the minute I could smell her.
“Are you sure you don’t want something?” I ask, but the waitress is already retreating, racing back to the bar to spread ‘Jez’s’ miraculous resurrection tale into another corner of the room. I’m glimpsing discrete glances from other vampires now too. The rumor is spreading through the shadows like wildfire.
Lifting her hand, she puts the drink she’s been carrying on the table between them. I haven’t seen her take even the tiniest sip. If she really were Jez, last call or not, sh
e’d have been on her third by now. That girl did so love her vodka.
“I have one,” she says. “Thanks anyway.”
Still polite, still with that glint of fury that her tattle-tale eyes cannot begin to hide. She’s not clever in that way. She doesn’t know how to lie.
Mayhap I should teach her. At the very least, I think, my puzzle and I should have a little fun.
Merris
He sticks his hand out as if to shake mine, and it’s all I can do not to leap right over the top of this table, grab him by his designer-label jacket and scream in his face. Why her? Why Jez? And why, as I sit here, staring at him, fighting desperately not to just fall apart because I’m shaking so hard, do I feel his hands touching me the way my dream says they touched my sister? My hair is pinned up, but I feel the caress as he bares the back of my neck. The strength of his arms pull me back on his lap, holding me against his strong chest. Needles in the glove he wears on his other hand prick and scrape as his fingers steal in between my thighs. There’s pleasure in his touch, pain of the pinpricks, and the most unbearable wanting in the flick of his tongue against my skin right before he covers the vein on the side of my neck in a suckling kiss…
My heart thumps against my breastbone, startling me out of my dream-memories and back into the here and now.
“Aleron,” he says, his hand still outthrust and waiting for mine. “Whom, may I ask, do I have the pleasure of conversing with?”
I confess, I have no idea what to do now. From the moment I had that first awful dream, I feel as if I’ve been running on instinct, grief, and very little sleep. I know his face. I now know his name. The man who killed my sister sits right across this table from me in a crowded nightclub that reeks of conflicting perfumes, sex, sweat and booze, and I can’t prove a God damn thing.
A part of me wonders if I ever really thought I’d find him, much less the first time I gained access to this club. I have nothing prepared. He’s asking my name, and the only thing I can think to say is, “You know who I am.”
I don’t take his hand, I don’t want to touch any part of him. He notices and yet he’s not offended. If anything, his amusement grows and he stands. Leaning over the table, giving me all the time in the world to yank away if I truly want to, he takes my hand anyway. Raising it to his lips, his eyes as black as a shark’s, he kisses the backs of my fingers. My hand doesn’t crawl the way it should. Instead, my fingers tingle where his lips have been.
He sits back down, licking his lips as if he can taste me on them, and I can tell he likes the flavor.
“I don’t, actually,” he corrects with a smile. “But I do know who you are not. My Jezebel has been buried for weeks now. I know, I visited her in the morgue, and I know the location of her grave.”
My anger almost escapes my iron-clad will to suppress it. I’m shaking so hard I can’t breathe. “You lying bastard.”
The words almost choke me, my throat is so tight with anger and a rising swell of tears. I blink furiously to keep them back. I absolutely refuse to let him see me cry.
“True.” His smile softens, but only just a little. “On both counts, although my mother did deny it. However, I did go to the morgue, and I do know where she is buried. And,” he picks up his drink as if to salute her, “I know you are not her. Though I do believe everyone in this room thinks otherwise.”
I couldn’t care less about anyone else in this room. “Jez was my sister.”
“Your twin,” he adds, and it’s all I can do not to slap the smirk from his face. “Yes, the likeness is flawless, but still, you are not her. You could give me your name, if you like. Or would you prefer I give you a new one?”
“As if I would answer.” I can’t imagine the circumstance in which that would happen.
His smile broadens. “Would you care to make a wager on it?”
“Would you care to make a wager?” he whispers in Jez’s ear…
My head spins. For a moment, the nightclub recedes into blackness, and all I can hear is him murmuring those words into Jez’s ear, soft as a lover. All I see is the glide of his gloved fingers following the curve of my sister’s mons down between her legs. Chains clink—her hands are bound in manacles high above her head, pulling her taut onto her tiptoes. A bar between her ankles prevents her legs from snapping shut, and yet, her gasp as the tiny spikes embedded in his gloves prick and scrape her most sensitive folds sounds wanton, not agonized…
I flinch as the room snaps back into the loud and crowded present. A dull thump of unwelcome arousal pulses once between my tightly pressed legs. I refuse to let myself feel that of all sensations. Fine. Let him know who I am.
“Merris,” I say.
Let him know exactly who’s coming for him. For what he’s done.
“Merris.” He samples the flavor of my name the way he’d sampled the taste of my skin, seeming to find it to his liking. “I am very sorry for your loss.”
Liar. He says those comforting words without the slightest hint of sympathy. I think he must be incapable of it. His eyes look dead.
Sliding closer, he edges around to my side of the booth, lowering both his voice and his head as he inquires, “Just allow me to say, darling Merris—”
I want to kill him.
“—although I know you’re not likely to believe me—”
Not a word that comes out of his murderer’s mouth.
“—I did not kill your sister.” His eyes stay locked on mine, completely untouched by the warmth of his smile. “All those angry little accusations I see lurking inside you. Did I know your sister? Yes, I did. Did I play with her? Oh, absolutely. Did I speak with her the night she died? Yes. Do you want to know what I did? What she said? What happened to her as far as I know it—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, so help us all?” His mocking smile dims. For the first time I think I glimpse a touch of sincerity as he says again, “I did not kill your sister. But if it’s answers that bring you to me, then ask your questions. Whatever they are, I will tell you what I know.”
I know better than to trust a thing he says. The promise of a liar is worthless. And yet, in the shadows of the nightclub, to my foolish tear-filled eyes, he seems so sincere. And suddenly, I feel nothing but tired.
Blame it on the grief, the alcohol I hadn’t yet started drinking but probably would before the night was out. Certainly, blame it on my lack of sleep, but I shake my head, and then I agree.
“Fine,” I say, determined—at least for a while—to believe this man, Aleron.
It’s not the first mistake I’ve made tonight.
And it won’t be my last.
Chapter 2
Aleron
She’s not going to believe a word I say, but that’s all right. I have been many things over the course of my very long life. Right now, it suits me to be a man of my word.
What can it hurt? She has tickled my fancy with her intrigue, but while I do believe I’ve now solved the puzzle of her, I feel oddly disinclined to end the game quite yet. I might still get a supper out of this. Besides, while I am not to blame for Jez’s death, a part of me does wonder had I forced her surly, pouting, diminutive self into my car that night, would she still be alive? But I did not force her. I left her where she was, an adult capable of making her own bad decisions. Unfortunately, like most cities, Tucson is place of predators. After I left her, someone more dangerous came along.
That was not my fault.
I refuse to scourge myself over the death of a being who was doomed to die anyway, practically from the moment it drew its first squalling breath. Jez was always fated to die.
So too is her lovely, angry sister.
Tender-hearted fool I am not, but for just a moment, I find myself feeling for her. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable thing. I haven’t felt for anyone in ages. This must be one of those melancholy moments I so often hear about from my contemporaries. The ones in which they remember the loss of those they once loved. Family members, sweethearts, lovers, children if
they had any before they were sired into this new life. Death after death. Year after heartless year, because that is the fate of mortals and immortals alike. They drop like flies into the abyss of memory, and we watch them go until we at last become immune to the sting.
For the sake of my stinging emotions, I decide to humor the girl. I know very little that can help her, but she has tracked her angry way to my table and for that, perhaps, she deserves some answers. And I… well, I’m going to give them to her because it amuses me. But after my cat and mouse is done and I’ve shared with her what little I know, I’ll wipe her mind. I won’t steal her memories of her sister or the pain of her loss, but I will send little Merris home. I no longer remember what the appropriate length of grieving time for mortals should be, but the last thing the vampires of Club Toxic need is an angry human on a mission, poking around our hunting ground.
That’s how vampire and witch hunts get started. And frankly, they still sell vampire hunting kits on eBay.
Pushing her drink away with a shaking hand, she folds her arms on the table and leans toward me. I see a storm full of challenge churning in the soft gray of her eyes. The flesh of her breasts plump above the low cut of her clubbing dress too. They are small, a proper handful. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them.
“The whole truth?” she echoes.
“So help me God,” I assure her. Even with these few inches of empty air between us, I feel the seductive heat emanating from her living body. I hear the steady beat of her pulse too. The minute leap of pale skin at the side of her neck shows me exactly where the artery lies. I can almost taste the sweetness of it.
“Why her?” She tries so hard to swallow back her anger so her voice doesn’t quaver as she asks the first question. “What made you choose her?”