Crouching on the floor, I pressed my back against the wall and wrapped my arms tightly about my knees. I took a number of deep breaths, not opening my eyes until I’d managed to suppress the wave of panic that was threatening to consume me. Hysteria wasn’t going to help me find my way out. Able to breathe a little more steadily, I cautiously looked around.
The room was enormous. It probably had as much square footage as the entire ground floor of my house, and it was bathed in candlelight. Not from fancy wall sconces or massive candelabras hanging from the ceiling. The huge pillars of red wax that stood on the floor were bigger than any candles I’d ever seen. I estimated each one to be at least five feet tall and thicker than my thigh. I couldn’t see how many there were in total, but they seemed to ring the perimeter of the room, flickering and shimmering as their multiple flames danced. It took only a moment for my eyes to adjust to the illumination. And then I wished they never had.
The room contained a single piece of furniture. A bed. A four-poster eyesore better suited to a Roman orgy than a modern home. Unable to help myself, I found my eyes drawn to the bedpost closest to me. Twining figures elaborately carved from dark, shiny wood were engaged in various acts of copulation. Bathed by the flickering candlelight, the figures appeared to be writhing sensuously, giving themselves over to complete abandon. Heat flushed my face and I assumed the other three posts were carved in similar fashion.
I shifted my gaze to the bed itself. I had a strange feeling of relief when I saw the linens were black and not the red of my fantasies. I have nothing against black satin sheets; they can be just as erotic as red, but I don’t think these were actually sheets. It looked more like yards and yards of the glossy material were draped across the mattress, twisting around the limbs of the occupants, with the excess pooling in a black spill on the thick white carpet.
I put my hand over my mouth to stifle any inadvertent sound I might make, because you didn’t need a college degree to figure out what was going on. The urgent slide of fabric, accompanied by soft moans and excited inhalations, were descriptive enough. I was grateful, however, that the two lovers were so deeply engrossed in each other that they hadn’t realized they had gained an audience of one. I wanted to look away. Truly I did. But some awful voyeuristic inclination took hold of me, making that impossible.
The woman was on her back, her long hair a splash of pale moonlight spread out across the dark fabric beneath her. Her hands were over her head, her wrists held easily by her lover, immobilizing her arms. She raised her legs, wrapping them around his waist, cradling him against her sex, and I noticed, in a purely feminine observation, that her finger and toenails were both painted vivid scarlet. I doubted her lover had detected such a detail. His attention was completely engrossed by the voluptuous swell of her breasts, which were bared for his admiration.
Arching her back, the woman undulated and rolled her more than generous assets across the smooth surface of his chest. From the way she was lying, I could see her face. With closed eyes and a glow of anticipation highlighting her delicate bone structure, she was the embodiment of pure ecstasy.
She pushed her hips up against him, and I saw her mouth turn into a moue of frustration as his superior strength kept her firmly in place. It seemed to me she was upset by his resistance. Putting his lips to her ear, her lover murmured softly. In response she gave a moan of ecstasy, and I watched as her skin flushed pink and her tongue danced across the curve of his collarbone.
My embarrassment changed into something else as my internal flame soared, fanning out to brand my chest while licking its way across the inside of my skin. I knew that it was wrong to keep watching, and that shame would consume me later, but I couldn’t look away if my life depended on it. There was something fundamentally mesmerizing about the couple on the bed.
The man lowered his head, his lips against the white column of her throat, and he was pulling her skin into his mouth, sucking slowly. Something about his movements seemed odd, almost as if they were forced, and it made me turn my attention to him. The woman was unknown to me, so it was obvious Katja meant for me to see the man. I felt the breath catch in my throat, because only one person I knew had hair that particular shade of white.
Everything stopped. It was as if I had come across a terrible multicar accident, and even though I didn’t want to look at the mangled bodies, I couldn’t stop myself from doing just that. Knowing every shattered bone, every open wound, would stay with me for the rest of my life, I still could not look away. And with this mind-set, I stared at the man on the bed.
Because of the angle at which he had positioned himself, his face was concealed from me, but there was no mistaking the power in his upper body. A power that was disturbingly familiar. I watched the muscles bunch and flex in his arms and shoulders as they supported his weight. And then he moved. Sitting up, he gathered the woman to him, twisting his upper torso so I could see his broad back. The hand that I had clamped over my mouth tightened, and then released.
Katja had made a mistake!
This man before me now was admittedly similar enough in build and coloring to make my heart trip over itself, but he wasn’t Gabriel.
Katja had screwed up big-time.
How could she have made such a fundamental error? The only thing I could think was that for some strange reason she must have assumed I hadn’t actually seen Gabriel totally naked or that I would be so distraught I would accept this imposter in his place.
As if!
Gabriel’s body was completely unblemished, and this guy was not only tattooed, he was viciously scarred. Damaged, puckered skin made two angry lines that curved down each shoulder blade, as if someone had taken a knife and cut something out of his back. Only what, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I found the scarring strange . . . and troubling.
The tattoos were something else altogether. Running down the length of his spine, they began somewhere up in his hair and disappeared below the black, silky fabric wrapped around his waist. The design was large and complex, each individual symbol linked to both the one above and the one below. It was a moment or two before I realized that what I was looking at were markings similar to the symbols I had inked in the small of my back. Aleksei had said I had Gabriel’s name tattooed on my back in the Old Tongue. Was that what I was looking at here? More words in a language I didn’t know?
Before I had time to ponder this further, the couple on the bed moved. The woman was now also sitting up. Wanting to face him, she pouted when he swiveled her around, pulling her so her back was flush against his chest. I held my breath. If she moved her head just a little more to the right, she would be able to see me.
Christ Almighty! I had no idea when I’d gotten to my feet, but not only was I now standing, I’d also taken several steps closer to the bed.
One powerful arm went around the woman’s waist, keeping her in place, while the other swept her hair free from the left side of her neck. Something glinted as she lifted her arms, making her heavy breasts ride higher on her rib cage. Both of her nipples were pierced with small silver rings that flashed in the ambient light. She stretched, reaching over her head and behind her for her lover. I wasn’t that surprised to see that her belly button was also pierced.
Repositioning her arms back in her lap, the man put his lips against her ear, whispering. I saw her eyelids flutter as she surrendered herself to him completely, becoming liquid within his embrace. My own arousal manifested itself in an explosion of wetness inside my panties.
Leaning forward, the man buried his face in the curve of her neck, his hair fanning across her shoulder and falling like a silken scarf over her skin. Strong fingers cupped her chin, tilting her head over until her ear was pressed against her shoulder. Stretched taut, I could see the thick vein running beneath the surface of her throat.
Putting his mouth against it, he began sucking the flesh erotically, making the woman respond with a moan of lustful greed. She didn’t care what he was doing; she just didn’t
want him to stop.
I was soaked. Drenched in my own need, I could feel perspiration trickling between my shoulder blades. My breasts felt full and achy, my nipples hard, and my internal flame a hair’s breadth away from total conflagration as desire spiked through me.
I knew that if I were to slip my hand inside my jeans and touch myself I would climax immediately. Any Peeping Tom inhibitions that I might have felt had long since vanished. I should have been mortified by my reaction, but I wasn’t.
I thought I knew what was coming next, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Pulling his head back, the man opened his mouth wide. I blinked and stared . . . and blinked again, unsure of what I was seeing. Horrified disbelief overtook me as I watched two long canines drop from among his upper teeth. Brilliant white and razor sharp, they glistened, and just when the realization hit me that what I was seeing was real . . . he struck.
Puncturing the soft skin of her throat, his teeth found the life-sustaining artery, and I watched, aghast, as a fountain of blood erupted from her neck like a crimson gusher, splattering over her pale skin.
Screaming, she tried to reach for her neck in an effort to stanch the wound with her hands, but she was locked in place by the strong arm clamped across her upper body. Blood poured out of her at an alarming rate, a direct response to the frantic pumping of her heart. In a pure moment of complete disassociation, I suddenly knew what the phrase arterial spray meant.
She struggled against her lover, legs kicking frantically as her fight-or-flight instinct took over. It was useless, and she was unable to break free of his embrace. Staring at him, I saw his expression was one of clinical curiosity as he watched her blood flow down her neck and chest, and over the arm that was securing her. Dark and glossy, it pooled like an oil slick on the satin sheet.
My impending orgasm came to an immediate screeching halt as my brain frantically tried to interpret the information being relayed by my eyes. Tried and failed. The breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding suddenly escaped in a gasp loud enough to make the woman on the bed turn her head and lock her eyes with mine.
Unable to reach out with her hands, she opened her mouth. I’m sure her brain told her she was screaming as loud as she possibly could, but all that issued was a soft, wet gurgle, followed by a trickle of blood that bubbled over her lower lip and ran down her chin.
Falling to my knees, my stomach contracted violently, expelling its contents. The sour burn of bile coated the back of my throat as I kept heaving, caring nothing about the mucus and half-digested particles of food that splattered in my hair. Tears streamed down my face, and I felt like my gut had been shoved up against my backbone. I lifted a hand to wipe my mouth, and it shook violently, as if I had some terrible affliction.
“Rowan?”
The silken voice, edged with sexual overtones, that had seduced me the first time I’d heard it was unmistakable. The world as I knew it imploded. Unless Gabriel had a twin, one who could match the exact timbre of his voice, Katja had made no mistake. The bitch’s arrow had found its mark.
Some sort of weird noise jumped out of my mouth. It was the word “no” jammed in a repetitive loop. I got to my feet, stumbling in my haste to get away from him, needing to get out of this damned room. Turning, I crashed into the wall.
“Rowan!”
There was no liquid silk this time. Instead, his voice was a whiplash that forced me to stay on my feet as I ran my hands over the smooth panels of silk. I almost cried when I found the door, my fingers curling around the handle as he spoke again. This time I froze.
“Rowan . . . what are you doing here?”
I pressed my forehead against the paneling, willing my hand to tighten its grip on the smooth lever and pull the door open. If I could do that, then I would always be able to tell myself it wasn’t him, convince myself it was someone else after all. Someone who just bore an uncanny resemblance to Gabriel, but was not really him. That’s what I should have done.
So why didn’t I? My brain was on my side, telling me desperately that this was a mistake. It wasn’t Gabriel I had seen on the bed, his body pressed tightly against that woman’s as he butchered her. It was a trick of those huge floor candles. Someone who wore his face, had his voice, who even—a familiar scent replaced the stench of my own vomit—smelled like him. But it couldn’t be him. Please, dear God, don’t let it be him.
And even as I prayed in my head that I was mistaken, I knew it was not a lie.
He called my name again as he did when I was asleep. Able to reach me inside my dreams, he would pull me back to semi-wakefulness and slide himself inside me.
I couldn’t answer him. My larynx contracted and refused to function. All that came out of my throat was a guttural moan, a wild, painful sound, like that of an animal with a paw caught in the cruel teeth of a steel trap. I was slipping beyond reason.
“Rowan . . .”
The huskiness was threaded with sorrow. I should have pulled open the fucking door and run! Barreled my way into the hall and kept heading down it until I found a way out of this mausoleum that fronted as a house. Then I could have spent the rest of my life coming up with some rationalization for what I had seen, all the while denying it was him.
But I didn’t open the door. Instead I turned around and stared at Gabriel.
Standing no more than an arm’s length away, I was strangely thankful to see he was wearing loose-fitting black silk pants, which meant there was a possibility he hadn’t been having sex with the woman on the bed. No matter what it looked like. What was wrong with me? That should have been the least of my worries.
I’ve just watched my boyfriend commit murder, but on the plus side, I’m pretty sure he is still faithful to me.
Caught by the glow of one of the huge floor candles, his body smoldered, a sheen of sweat making it glisten in the light. He was the embodiment of male physical perfection, a statue created by one of the Italian masters and brought to life. Except I’d made a mistake. His skin wasn’t unblemished. Golden illumination revealed the outline of my mouth just below his clavicle—the scar I’d given him when he’d taken my virginity. Seeing it dashed to pieces any doubt about his identity.
Forcing my eyes away from him, I looked over at the bed. With the last of her waning strength, the woman was trying desperately to crawl toward me. It was difficult to know if she was begging for help or trying to warn me. I watched the blood from her wound slow as her blood pressure dropped, and in the space of a few beats from her dying heart it became not even a trickle. A soft hiss of air escaped her lips, carried on a wave of pale pink froth. She stopped moving and fell forward. I was grateful her hair hid her face.
I was in a room with a dead woman and . . . something else.
I felt Gabriel move closer to me, and I turned to look at him. His mouth appeared stained, as if he had gorged himself on some forbidden, succulent fruit. Sweet juice, overflowing his mouth, colored his lips and chin and chest. Only I knew it wasn’t true. He held out his hand to me and parted his lips, letting my name fall in a rush of regret. The light caught the pointed tips of fangs that had not yet fully retracted, and I knew this was what Katja had wanted me to see.
And the voice in my head piped up, the familiar singsong words now expanding their litany.
You know who I am . . . you know what I am . . . you have always known . . .
Silently I screamed back my denial.
Yes, you know this to be true . . . you were there to bear witness to what I became . . . to what I am now . . .
No! Impossible! Not this . . . never this.
Say it . . . say what you know to be true . . . admit what I am . . .
I don’t know what you are!
Yes, you do . . . I am Fallen . . . I am Gabriel . . . I am vampire . . .
I don’t fucking think so!
The voice in my head began to scream, but as I took a shuddering gasp of breath, I realized the screaming wasn’t in my head. Now my fingers obeye
d me, gripping the door handle and yanking it open to reveal Katja leaning against the opposite wall, a look of supreme satisfaction on her face. The desire to slap her was strong, but I couldn’t contradict instinct. My brain was too busy telling my legs to keep moving as I ran from the nightmare standing behind me.
CHAPTER 30
The hallway seemed at least a mile long. As my legs drove me forward, I risked looking over my shoulder—and ran full tilt into Aleksei, who seemed to materialize out of thin air. I suppose I should have been grateful that he caught me before I bounced off him and really hurt myself, but feelings of gratitude weren’t at the top of my list right now. In one of those odd, surreal moments, I realized this was the second time I’d bounced off a vampire—and yes, I had no doubt that’s exactly what Aleksei was. As was Katja, the debonair Vladimir, and, I suppose, the wholesome-looking guy with the Kansas accent.
Spinning me around, Aleksei locked his arm across my upper body, holding me to him. The position was so eerily similar to what I’d just witnessed, I shuddered, but if the big guy noticed my reaction, he chose to ignore it. Instead he kept his gaze fixed on the open doorway at the far end of the hallway.
It’s funny how the mind will behave when faced with a situation that’s just too whacked-out for normal reasoning. It will still record the events as they are presented, but somehow it processes everything that is relayed to it by the senses through an alternate channel of comprehension. This is usually because what is being observed is breaking every fundamental rule of trust and belief. All that you believe to be normal and safe has been torn to shreds. The dark improbability you always suspected existed, but never wanted to acknowledge as fact, has risen to claim a part of your soul, staining you forever.
A Vampire's Promise Page 27