by Maren Smith
This is strange for me. This desire for willing compliance from someone who should be nothing more to me than another night’s supper.
Grudgingly, I lower my hand. Even more grudgingly, I use no mind control at all as I tentatively ask, “Do you want to see my teeth?”
Her gaze flicks to my mouth again.
Oh, this is different. The last time I deliberately showed my teeth, the Bastille had just been stormed, and it was done to scare the piss out of some poor Frenchman right before I savaged him with enough bites to sweeten his blood to that intoxicating level that we all so ache to taste. I truly, truly had been far more intemperate in my youth than I am now.
Not yet sure just how big of a mistake I am making, I bare my fangs as non-threateningly as is vampirically possible.
She stares, her normally expressive face quite masklike. I’d be quite proud of her if only it weren’t so very important to me to know what she is thinking right now.
Her soft gray eyes come back to mine. The very smallness of her is lulling. I am absolutely taken aback by the foreign and yet undeniable need now whispering so seductively in my ear that someone so very small and slight… a combination of enchanting and bedeviling… ought not to go through life without a protector.
As if there has ever been a point in my life when I fit such an absurd definition of that word.
I have to put distance back between us, before I do something stupid. Pushing back off the door, I give her her space.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asks.
Retreating to the sink, I cover my unease with another smile. “No. In fact, I believe we’ve already had this discussion. I am going to attend your—”
Wounds gets lost in the bang of the bathroom door hitting the wall, and then she’s off again, tiny feet beating a hasty retreat back down the hall for the front door.
I could kick myself.
“Round two,” I say, trying not to be annoyed.
I chase after her, but she’s got enough of a head start on me now that she actually makes it around the corner toward the garage. She’s trying to leave the same way we entered, most likely with one of my cars in her possession.
I duck through one kitchen archway, fully intending to zip through and cut her off at the garage door.
Being able to move as fast as we do has its perks. For instance, who doesn’t want to move faster than anyone else in the room? Few people admit, though, such speed also has its drawbacks. For instance, when all of a sudden, the heavy marble bust of a young Roman man swings out in front of me, there is simply no time to stop.
My darling puzzle hit me face first with my own statue, not only breaking my nose, cheek, brow and possibly eye socket, but also knocking me flat on my back. A lesser vampire might have lost consciousness. I am not lesser, and I would sooner hand her my subservient ass on a gold-gilded platter than ever to admit I just lost a few seconds.
Just as soon as I get my wits back, I’ll be sure to tell her so.
Chapter 6
Aleron
If there is anything sadder than a nine-hundred-year-old vampire rolling around on the kitchen floor, holding his nose while his bones slowly knit themselves back together again… well, I can’t think of what it is. It might be the pain, but my head is actually ringing. My own blood fills my mouth. It doesn’t taste sweet. It tastes annoyed.
Concussion, I think, as I drag myself up the nearest cabinet just so I can get my feet under me. All those protective fond feelings that plagued me earlier are now gone, thank God. Which is good for me, and bodes poorly for her shapely ass the minute I get my hands on her.
Staggering as if at a level of drunkenness I can’t even achieve anymore, I grab the walls of the archway just so I don’t fall all over myself as I fling around the corner, fully expecting to find her cowering there. Possibly ready now to hit me with the table.
I stumble as the room keeps spinning, but she isn’t here. The table is empty and the door to the garage is still closed.
All right. I’ll admit it, she’s addled me, but I really don’t think I lost more than a second or two of consciousness.
Did I?
Almost dreading what I’ll find, I manage to grab onto one of the six drifting doorknobs before wrenching the door open. The garage is dark, right up until the motion sensors detect me. The bay doors are closed, and all my cars are there. She isn’t out here.
My staggering step is growing more stable as I reenter the house. A quick glance across the living room shows me not only does the front door remain locked, but the yard lights haven’t activated. My ears perk. Whispers of movement tell me she’s returned to the bathroom, where she no doubt thinks herself safely locked inside. It’s well past time, I think, for me to show her just how unsafe she is from me right now.
With every step, my balance returns to normal. Retreating to the kitchen sink, I wash the blood from my face and gingerly touch my nose. Bones tend to take longer to heal, but like bullet wounds, longer is a relative term. The tenderness is already starting to diminish. The worst is still around my eye, where I’m sure there might be some slight bruising.
Letting Merris stew in whatever anxieties she might have over the consequences her rash actions have spawned—because, oh yes, there will be consequences—I head down the hall. I’m more than calm as I walk past the closed bathroom door. I sense her pressed against the other side, listening.
Have no fear, my darling, you will have my attention soon enough.
Continuing on to the master bedroom—which is nowhere near secure enough for me to sleep, but which seems plenty secure enough to house my clothes and toilette—I take off my jacket. Ruined now, of course. Even were it not stained with the blood from my temporarily broken nose, there are still three bullet holes in the back.
Ungrateful minx.
My shirt is ruined too. Both go in the trash. My pants I set out for Consuela, my housemaid who is scheduled to arrive in—I consult my wristwatch—less than four hours from now. I pen her a quick note with listed instructions regarding my uncooperative houseguest, which I leave in the kitchen. Sunup is now in forty-three minutes, damn it. Still plenty of time for me to address matters.
I clean up, change into fresh black trousers and a neatly ironed white shirt, and then I venture into the very back of my walk-in closet. Opening up both cabinet doors, I briefly consult the implements of pain I sometimes enjoy employing whenever I find a submissive capable of taking them. There are worse things at my disposal than just a pair of gloves.
Crops and canes hang neatly on hooks along the inside of the door. I sort through my collection of restraints. Softy that I am, I choose a pair more than capable of holding her, albeit padded ones that won’t damage the tender skin of her wrists. I skip the ropes and go straight to chains, which I then padlock to a sturdy wrought-iron post at the foot of my bed. I make sure the length is long enough to reach the toilet in the master bathroom, but nothing that she might use to get herself into trouble while trying to escape.
Because, of course, she’ll try. She’s a puzzle, not an idiot.
I double check the sturdiness of the bedframe. It’s massive, a four-poster draped in thick velvet curtains meant to block out the light, and made of wrought iron not wood. It’s heavy as hell. Given enough time, a vampire or a shifter might break out of it, but not a human. She simply won’t be strong enough to break the chain or bend the iron bed frame. Padlocking the cuffs together, I then lock them to the end of the chain. I also turn down the covers for her, bringing a first-aid kit from the bathroom to the bedside table—complete with antibiotic and bandages so I can care for her like a proper host. The room is now as ready as I can make it for my darling little troublemaker.
Almost.
Back into the closet I go, where I also skip the severity of my modest collection of rods, ignoring the heavy leather straps and the wickedest of my floggers in favor of a small wooden paddle with a slapping end no broader or wider than the palm of my hand.
I really am getting soft to consider so paternal a retaliation, although I doubt she’ll agree with that assessment once I have her secured across my knee.
Patting the paddle against my palm, I am decided. I roll up my fresh shirt sleeves, close up the cupboard, and head back to the kitchen long enough to collect a screwdriver with which to dismantle the bathroom doorknob. I’m just closing the drawer when I hear a knock at the front door.
At this time of morning?
I step back out of the kitchen, take one look at the flashing red, blue and white lights splashing up against my living room walls, not to mention the two uniformed police officers regarding me through the open windows with wary concern.
My darling puzzle. I cast the closed bathroom door a seriously annoyed frown. I really am going to spank her now.
Slipping both paddle and screwdriver into a back pocket, stifling a sigh, I cross the living room to answer the door.
The horizon is gray and only growing lighter by the second. According to my watch, I’ve less than twenty minutes now and now I have not only two officers on my front porch, but parked halfway down my driveway about a hundred yards from the house, I see an ambulance and a firetruck. Now, I’m seriously, severely annoyed.
“Good morning,” I say, mildly.
“Morning,” one officer politely returns.
The other is a man after my own heart. He skips the pleasantries entirely and goes straight to the meat of the matter. “We received a call from this address reporting a possible kidnapping. Mind if we come inside?”
“Yes.”
The officers exchange looks.
“I understand a warrant should first be involved.”
“Sir, we received an emergency call from a woman who says she is being held at this address. Now, we’re going to need to ask you to step outside so that we can search the house.”
I really don’t have time for this. Ill-placed fondness may have spared Merris, more than once now, but I have no such feelings for anyone else on my lawn.
“You don’t need to come inside,” I say, tapping both their minds with mine. “There is nothing going on at this address.” Nothing a stern caning won’t fix, anyway. “You were the victims of a prank. I’m very sorry you came all this way for nothing. Drive safely, officers, and if you would, kindly ask the EMTs not to hit the saguaro cactus on their way out the driveway. It’s older than all of you put together, and I admire that.”
Letting go of their minds, I retreat back into the house and close the door. I already know how this happened. Still, needing to see the evidence for myself, I walk back across the living room to the short hallway near the garage entrance, where the marble bust that has been my hat rest since I bought it in 1760-whatever now lies broken in three pieces on an equally broken stone tile floor. There is nothing else on the floor amongst the pieces or, indeed, atop the Victorian marble-top table where I habitually leave my wallet, my car fob, and my cell phone.
All three are gone.
I’m pretty sure Merris has them.
Out on the front porch, the officers are coming back to themselves.
“Fucking crank calls,” one grumbles as they head back to their squad cars.
“Don’t hit the cactus!” the other shouts to the EMTs.
A few minutes later, my walls stop reflecting their flashing lights. A few minutes after that, everyone leaves. After so many years, I feel the approaching sunrise like a physical thing, humming its warning inside me. I don’t have time to deal with her. I especially don’t have time to deal with my bathroom door.
Shot at or not, I never should have brought her to my home. Certainly, I never should have let myself come to like her and why I still do, after my bust, my floor—my face—I have no idea. But there it is, that incredible fondness that right now feels a little like anger and a lot like tolerance, and which propels me across the house to where a single locked door now stands between me and the source of my most recent insanity.
The door jamb splinters all around the latch when I kick it in. I should think anyone stupid enough to call the cops on a vampire and then steal his personal effects would, at the very least, have had the good sense to hide. It wouldn’t work. I am so in tune with her, I think I could find her anywhere, but Merris doesn’t know that. She also isn’t hiding. Standing at the sink, she hugs my cellphone to her chest and stares back at me with those big gray eyes of hers, and a look on her face that says she kind of expected this outcome.
“How exactly,” I ask her, propping my shoulder against the now ruined jamb, “do you think I should deal with this?”
“You’re going to kill me,” she replies without hesitation. “Jez was found with marks like mine on her neck.”
My eyes go to her neck. The bandage is not as I originally put it on her. It’s crooked, the tape wrinkled. She must have peeled it up long enough to look underneath.
“Did you kill her too?” For the first time, she’s not angry when she accuses me. I find I’d almost rather that she was. Despite what she’s done—the police, the attack, the incredible annoyance of the whole escape attempt—I find myself poorly equipped to deal with her sadness.
The temptation to reach out and quickly tap her pain away so neither one of us need feel it is very strong. A more sympathetic person might know what to say in situations such as this, but I… I don’t have a lot of practice with sympathy.
“I did not harm your sister the night she died. The marks put on her were not mine.” Although that did beg the question—whose marks were they? Because when she came upon me on the dance floor of Club Toxic, ranting and clawing at herself, there were no marks of recent feeding to be seen. Nor were there any when I tried to coax her out of the alley later that night.
Someone might have fed on her, but it was not me.
Had that same someone taken one look at Merris at the club tonight and panicked, mistaking her for her twin? Vampires have little need for bullets. Unless shifters or humans are involved, few of us bother with guns at all. We are weapons, and we are much quieter and deadlier in most cases than bullets could ever be. But if the vampire who murdered Jez passed the task off onto a mortal helper… ah now, I think my puzzle has just deepened.
“You’ve been trying to help me,” she says softly.
“Yes,” I agree, out of character though it might be for me.
Her shoulders slump. “And I hit you in the face with a statue. Did I hurt you?”
No vampire anywhere would be so stupid as to let a human know they could hurt him. And then there’s me.
“Only a little.”
“Did…” She winces. “Did I break it? It wasn’t… someone you knew, an old friend or something, was it?”
“Well, he’s modeled my hats for about three hundred years.” I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted that she thinks I’m that old. I steal a glimpse of myself in the mirror. No, I look good. Every inch of me a man in his physical prime—stronger and faster than I ever was before I was turned.
My internal clock is humming, ticking down the seconds to a sunrise that could, in a flash of fire and ash, change all of that if I don’t get my handsome ass downstairs. I should already be there, but I have a problem and I’m looking at her. Based on what she’s already done, I’m not about to trust her up here by herself all day long while I’m sleeping.
Nor can I take her downstairs with me. The entrance is secret, and lined with more locks than a vault in the Federal Reserve, but all of those locks open from the inside. I definitely can’t trust her to wander about down there, not when I’m comatose and defenseless.
I have no choice and no time left for arguments. Plan A it is. The note I left for Consuela will simply have to do. “Come, I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
I could gain her cooperation faster if I simply tap her mind and compel her, but just the thought of it tastes sour to me. Besides, when I leave the bathroom, she is still repentant enough to follow me. Or maybe she’s just that tired.
After all, she’s been out with me all night, and the only sleep she’s had were those few minutes when I knocked her out.
“Wow,” she says, when I take her to my master bedroom. I can see it in her eyes though, she thinks I mean to sleep with her here. “Um…”
Her worries make for a convenient distraction. I move fast, blurring to the bed to grab the chain and restraints before she has even noticed them. I have her right wrist locked into them before she can react, and her left one secured before she can do more than jump back with a startled yell.
She stares at her captive wrists, the thick black leather of the padded cuffs hugging her hands together. Whatever lingering remorse she feeling over her earlier troublesomeness vanishes.
“What?” she says, holding out her wrists for me to see. As if I’m not directly responsible for it.
“I’m sorry.” I’m surprised at how pained I honestly am. Just… not pained enough to let her go. “There is simply no time to arrange for anything else. I will return at sundown.”
“What?” she says again, eyebrows arching high. “Wait! You can’t leave me here like this!”
Through the bedroom curtains I can see the entire horizon lighting up in shades of orange and yellow. I’m out of time.
“Try to sleep,” I tell her, retreating from the room and closing the door behind me.
“What?” she shouts, and I hear the rattling of the chain as she runs after me. But I’m running now too, and by the time I hear my bedroom door bang open—if I see so much as a crack in my wall plaster, I truly will spank her when I awaken—I am already in the garage. The secret access looks like a floor-to-ceiling peg board full of tools. It’s sandwiched between two massive tool boxes and unless one knows exactly where to poke it, it won’t open. One also has fifteen seconds from accessing the door to disable the fingerprint scanner or the vault door at the bottom of the stairs will shut and lock.
Coolness envelops me with every step I take. The darkness is almost black, but my eyes adjust quickly until the peg board above swings gently shut, locking once more into place. A soft light comes on when I set the security alarm inside the room. The vault door shuts, the multitude of clicks as the many locks engage is one of the most comforting sounds I know.