by Мишель Роуэн
I was still frowning. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
He sighed. “I don’t know why I even bothered trying to help you. It’s obvious you won’t last.”
“What do you mean I won’t last?” I was weak and scared and still almost completely convinced this was all just a bizarrely vivid dream, but I could still feel insulted.
He counted on his fingers. “Your sire is dead. You seem to attract hunters like a magnet. And you know absolutely nothing about vampires.”
I frowned at him and crossed my arms. “I’ll have you know I know loads about vampires. Anne Rice is one of my favorite authors.”
Thierry grimaced. “That will get you far.”
I felt a rise of anger chase away my fear. “I don’t need anybody’s help. I’m fine all by myself. I didn’t ask for you to bring me back to your”—I looked around at the sparse decor—“subterranean love nest, mister. And for another thing—”
White-hot pain exploded through my entire body. I clutched at the side of the couch and tore at the smooth leather with my French-manicured fingernails. “Oh, God. Oh, my God,”
I moaned in agony. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re dying,” he said matter-of-factly. “But it should be over before dawn, so don’t worry.”
“Dying?” I yelped. I was starting to believe him. Another wave of pain hit me and I doubled over and slid down to the floor. “Help me,” I managed, fear slicing through me like a knife through butter. “Why are you just standing there? Do something!”
“I can’t do anything more.” His handsome face was blank. “I gave you the blood. I can’t drink it for you.”
The pink-tinged water sat innocently on the coffee table as I suffered next to it. After another burst of agony I grabbed the cold glass, brought it to my trembling lips, and glugged the whole thing down. The pain stopped immediately. It was like Gatorade-for-vampires. I lay on my back on Thierry’s hardwood floor and stared at the ceiling for a couple of minutes. Then I pushed myself into a sitting position and took in a long, deep breath while I tried to compose myself.
“More?” Thierry offered.
“No, I’m good.”
“You should go home now. It’ll be dawn before too long.”
I nodded with a firm shake of my head. “Can’t go out in the sun anymore, right? I’ll be burned to a crisp?”
He almost looked amused with me. “Is that from the school of Anne Rice? Sunlight is not good for vampires, correct. You’ll feel your strongest at night. During the day the sun will make you feel weaker and it will seem at times overbearingly bright, but I promise that you won’t burn up.”
“Really? Well, that’s good to know.”
“If it bothers you too much while you’re still new, I suggest you try to travel about the city using the underground tunnel system; what do they call it here in Toronto? The PATH?”
“And how long will I be considered new?”
“Fifty years or so.”
“Oh.” I thought about that. I’d be considered new till my seventy-eighth birthday. I’d be as old as Uncle Jim, who recently said a final good-bye to Canadian winters to move permanently down to Florida. “So it’s true that vampires live forever?”
He frowned. “We don’t die of the usual human ailments and we essentially stop aging from the point we are sired, if that’s what you mean.”
Interesting. Completely implausible, but very interesting.
“So how old are you?” I asked.
He took the empty glass away from me and returned it to the kitchen. Through the open doorway I could see him rinse it under the sink, and then place it neatly into a stainless-steel dishwasher before he answered me.
“Old.”
“How old?”
“Well over six hundred.”
My mouth dropped open. “Wow. I mean, you look good for six hundred. I would have thought you’d be all crusty and falling apart by that age. That’s amazing.”
He looked away with an odd expression on his handsome, noncrusty face. “Yes, amazing.” There was zero enthusiasm in his voice.
“I guess it’s just going to take me a little while to get used to being undead.”
“Un-what?”
“Undead. An animated corpse. A vampire.” I shrugged at him. “Duh.”
He looked exasperated with me. “Are you breathing?”
I frowned and concentrated to make sure I was still inhaling and exhaling. Yup.
“Of course I am.”
“And, is your heart still beating?”
I put a hand over my chest. There it was, the steady thumping of my heart. A little erratic, but still beating. “Yeah.”
“And my heart, does it beat?”
I frowned at him, then raised a hand to press against his very firm, very warm, and very male chest. It took me a moment before I remembered why I was touching him. Oh, yeah, the heart thing.
I nodded. “Yes.”
He took a step back from me and my hand fell to my side. “So what does that tell you?”
“Not undead?”
“Correct.”
I stood up. Considering what I’d endured tonight, I felt okay. “I guess I’ll go. Can you call me a cab, or”— I tried to smile and actually succeeded—“or can I turn into a bat and fly home now?”
He studied me for a moment. “I’ll call you a cab.”
He made the call, and we waited in uncomfortable silence for ten minutes. I was a little disappointed about the bat thing. That would have been cool. Hands down, this was the weirdest dream I’d ever had. Even weirder than the one in which I’d married a hobbit and moved to Mars. Too bad, too, because this Thierry guy was majorly cute in a sullenly suicidal way. Maybe I’d seen him in a magazine at the hair salon the other day and he’d been burned into my subconscious for later use. But it was definitely a dream. I mean, vampires? Hunters? My blind date being shish-kebabbed and then vanishing into a little puddle of goo? Puh-lease. Total “dream city.” I was just surprised it hadn’t occurred to me while all the drama had been in progress. I could have saved myself a lot of unneeded, wrinkle-causing stress.
When the cabdriver finally showed up, I stood up from the sofa on my shoeless feet and realized that my ankle no longer hurt. Guess it wasn’t a sprain, after all. I picked up my purse from the floor and grabbed my coat that Thierry had carefully placed on the back of a chair to dry. He’d taken it off me while I’d been sleeping. Even damp, my silk dress wasn’t see-through, so I had decided not to make a fuss about it. I smiled at Thierry. “Thanks for all your help. Even though I’ll wake up tomorrow and know for sure this has all been just a dream, at least it’s been a very interesting one.” I started to move past him, but he grabbed my arm.
“You’re not dreaming, Sarah. You must take this very seriously. Things are different for you now, whether you like it or not.”
I shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”
“But you are. With the hunters around, you must take your safety into consideration. You’ve already seen tonight what they consider fun and games.” He felt around in his pockets and produced a business card. “Take this.” He pressed it into my palm. “Go to that address tomorrow evening for help in starting your new life.”
I slid the card into my purse without even looking at it. “Thanks, Thierry, really. Take care of yourself, okay?” I wanted to say: “Don’t go killing yourself,” but figured that might be a tad rude.
His intense silver eyes flashed at me. “You too.”
He held the door open, and I made my way out and into the back of the taxi.
“One-eleven Ashburn Avenue,” I told the driver, and he pulled away from the curb. I turned around in my seat. The door to Thierry’s high-end townhome was already closed, and the lights in the front windows went off. I’d probably never see him again. I pulled the business card out of my soggy purse.
MIDNIGHT ECLIPSE TANNING SALON.
Must be the wrong one , I thought, and
shuffled through the contents of my bag. Hairbrush, wallet, lipstick, tampon. But there was only the one business card. Midnight Eclipse Tanning Salon was the place to go to start my new life? I shrugged inwardly. I was going to Mexico next month. Now that I thought about it, it would be nice to get a base tan before I left.
Chapter 3
"So, how was your date?”
I raised my head to look at Amy Smith, my best friend of the past four years and personal amateur Cupid, and attempted to lift an eyebrow at her, which, I hoped, said: “Get the hell away from my desk.”
I had a headache that quite possibly would kill me in a matter of minutes. But a little death headache was no reason to use up a precious sick day from my job at Saunders-Matheson,
“Toronto’s foremost marketing and promotions agency”—at least according to our Web site. I usually reserved my sick days for when I felt really good.
I was the executive assistant to the “Saunders” part of the company name. Amy was assistant to “Matheson,” and was the reason I had the job in the first place. She’d put in a good word for me when the previous assistant had a nervous breakdown three years before.
“Wow,” Amy said. “You look like shit.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I guess it was a good date, then? Not much sleep to be had, you little vixen, you?” She giggled.
If I’d been feeling 100 percent myself, I probably would have stood up, wrapped my hands around Amy’s I creamy white throat, and throttled her within an inch of I her dumb blond life. As it was, I just tried to look like a woman on the edge of sanity. It wasn’t difficult.
“You have to be kidding me. That guy was a total loser.”
“No way.” She shook her head. “He drove a Porsche. A red one.”
“Hate to break it to you, but I think we’ve been wrong all these years about that. Cars do not make the man. He was a loser who got me drunk on double margaritas and then abandoned me in the middle of nowhere.”
Amy frowned, an expression I rarely saw on her hyper-positive face. “He abandoned you? What a jerk. Okay, forget him. I have another guy who’d be perfect for you.”
“Hold on there, matchmaker. Where are you digging these guys up from, anyhow? Besides, you’re single, too. I think it says something that you don’t want to keep any of these catches for yourself.”
Amy gave me a look that could only be summed up as “duh.”
“Because, Sarah, they’re perfect for you. Not for me.”
“Jerks are perfect for me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I really don’t.”
Amy was the most positive-about-true-love girl in all of Toronto, and there was nothing I could say to convince her otherwise. She went out with at least ten different guys a month looking for “the one.” She was certain her perfect soul mate existed out there somewhere, and by God, she was going to find him. Me—I used to be the same way, but now I was a little more realistic about romance. Lately my perfect soul mate was my Visa card. We regularly had lots of fun together at the Eaton Centre—my favorite mall.
I hadn’t had a steady boyfriend since before I started working at Saunders-Matheson, when I’d been dating a cute out-of-work actor. Which worked out perfectly since I was also a cute out-of-work actress. The perfect boyfriend—even though he was a bit of a mooch—until he got a part on a soap opera in Los Angeles. I came home one day to receive a quick dumping via the answering machine. Throwing the answering machine out of my window on the tenth floor did nothing to change the situation.
“So,” Amy continued, holding out her hand to inspect her new set of pink acrylic nails, “if it was such an early night, then why do you look like that?”
Despite the fact that any sleep I did get was filled with this crazy dream where I was a vampire, I didn’t feel like I looked that bad. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember even glancing in a mirror all morning. I’d woken up so late I barely had a chance to get dressed and out the door into the ridiculously bright sunshine. That’s because vampires don’t have reflections. I frowned deeply at the thought. I wasn’t a vampire. It was a dream, dammit!
“Do you have a compact on you?” I asked.
Amy plunged a hand into the pocket of her pink jacket and produced a Cover Girl pressed powder. “Here.”
I opened it up and tentatively peered at the tiny mirror. For a very long time. She was right. I did look like crap, with dark circles under my eyes and everything. But the fact that there was a reflection, however crappy, eased my paranoid mind. It was just a dream, after all. Officially.
“Oh, no. Bitch from hell just arrived.” Amy snatched the compact away from me and, without another word, scurried back to her desk on the far side of the cubicle-filled room and disappeared behind her computer. My boss had been at her Friday-morning breakfast meeting with whatever client was most important that week. Anne Saunders. But you can call her Ms. Saunders. Not Miss, not Mrs. Ms. She eyed me as she exited the elevator and passed my desk, but said nothing, not even a curt good morning. I could tell she was on the “Sarah looks like crap today” train. I wasn’t one to normally let her lack of people skills get to me. Doing Ms. Saunders’s odd jobs, sending her e-mails, picking up her dry cleaning… it would have to do until I figured out what I was supposed to be doing with the rest of my life. Or won the lottery. And that was going to happen any day now. At least I had my fabulous trip to Mexico to look forward to. It would be the first time I’d ever been out of Canada in all my twenty-eight years of life. Unless you counted shopping over the border in Buffalo. My passport photo made me look a bit like my aunt Mildred, but I couldn’t complain. Pi?a coladas and a nice dark tan would be coming my way ASAP. Dark tan. For some reason the phrase “Midnight Eclipse” popped into my head. Oh, right, the tanning-salon business card Thierry gave to me in my dream. Vampires and tanning salons ? I shook my head at the thought. Sure, that made loads of sense. I headed to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and realized I hadn’t even had my morning caffeine fix yet. Weird. It was usually the first thing I thought about when I got to work. I must have been more out of it than I thought.
Then I went back to work. Well, back to my current game of solitaire, anyhow. A couple of minutes later my phone buzzed.
“Sarah, I’d like to see you in my office. Stat.” Ms. Saunders’s words were brisk. Then she hung up.
Stat ? What is this—ER? I quit my game of solitaire, pushed back from my desk, and made my way through the maze of cubicles, which contained everyone from graphic designers to copywriters to administration schmoes like me. I opened the door to my boss’s fancy, glassed-in office and peered inside, squinting as the light from her windows glared angrily in my eyes.
She looked up from her phone call and beckoned me inside with a curl of her finger. I entered the impossibly bright office and stood there feeling uncomfortable and hungover. After a moment she slammed the phone down with a “Get it done or don’t do it at all!” Yup, she was a real charmer.
She looked at me. “Sarah, please have a seat.”
Her voice was immediately calm and controlled. I’d seen her make this transition before. One moment yelling at an employee, the next being as sweet as pie to a walk-in client. She met my gaze directly, without blinking, a habit of hers that was unnerving to say the least. Those not able to compete in these staring contests rarely lasted long in her company. I was usually a champ, but my headache from hell was making things a little more difficult than normal. I looked away and rubbed my temples.
“Something wrong, dear?” she asked, beaming a perfect—almost too perfect—smile of expensive porcelain veneers.
“No.” I sat down in the chair across from her desk. “Late night.”
“You mustn’t miss out on your beauty sleep. A woman’s looks are one of her greatest assets in the business world, you know.”
My smile held, but I did glance at her desk calendar to make sure we hadn’t just time- traveled back fifty years.
She shuffled through a stack of mail and some papers on her desk. “Sarah, I know I’ve been unforgivably late with your review this year.”
Oh, crap . That’s what this was about? I was going to have an impromptu job review with zero time to prepare? Just super.
She noted my look of dismay. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it as pain-free as possible for you. I think you’re doing a stellar job. Normally, you also look top-notch. I’ll overlook today since it’s the only time I remember seeing you look less than”—she eyed my outfit—“pulled together.”
I’d procrastinated on my laundry a few extra days this week, and because I’d woken up so late I absently reached down to smooth out the navy blue skirt I’d found balled up in the corner of my bedroom. Hey, it smelled clean enough.
“My recommendation is to keep up the good work. I’m changing your title to senior executive assistant, and giving you a three percent raise effective next payday. Congratulations.”
Wow, three percent. I could move up that early retirement plan to age seventy-five now, instead of eighty. Lucky me.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very generous.”
“You’re quite welcome.” Ms. Saunders nodded and grabbed a gold-plated letter opener to begin attacking her stack of mail. I turned to leave. Didn’t want to outstay my welcome.
“Damn it!” she exclaimed, and I turned back around. She winced and nodded at the letter opener that she’d dropped to her desktop. “Damn thing slipped. I’m probably going to need stitches now. Can you be a dear and fetch the first-aid kit for me?”
She held her left index finger and frowned at the steady flow of blood oozing out. A few small drops of red splashed onto the other letters spread out on the desk. I felt woozy. And suddenly dizzy. I blinked. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer standing by the door about to leave. I was crouched down next to Ms. Saunders’s imported black leather chair, grasping her wrist tightly… and sucking noisily on her fingertip.
I shrieked and let go of her, staggering backward. I grabbed at her desk to keep from falling, but I dropped on my butt, anyhow, taking most of the contents of the top of her desk with me.