was all locked up in the cockpit. Literally. Anti-terrorist measures worked
equally well against vampires.
She looked again at the doctor, still surprised he could sleep so
easily. But he was right—his blood smelled strange. She hadn’t noticed
it at first. But his skin had tasted odd, and now she could sense the
vague, tangy odor. She wouldn’t want to risk taking a whole meal from
him. The effects might very well be deadly—even before Lucien or
Julian killed her for doing it.
Still, in spite of the smell and the danger, his blood called her. Not
so strongly she couldn’t ignore it, but constantly. She wondered why.
She hadn’t felt it in the Underground. Maybe because she’d been hooked
up to the IV, receiving whole blood. The plasma drinks weren’t as
satisfying.
She was experiencing another new reaction to the doctor, too. He
aroused her. Just looking at him lying there, sleeping with his glasses
still on, she felt her body responding. She hadn’t responded sexually to
a human in a very long time. Usually she only wanted their blood.
That urge was harder to resist. Shifting in the seat, she leaned
toward him, sniffing the spot under his ear, above his pulse, near where
she’d licked him before. It was her favorite place to smell on any
potential sex partner. Even vampire males carried a certain, vaguely
different odor there that she enjoyed.
The doctor’s was particularly nice. Almost sweet, but a masculine
sweetness. She touched the spot with her lips. Then, not entirely
sure why she did it, she lowered her mouth to his and kissed him.
She knew the moment he woke because his lips opened under
hers and one hand rose to cup the back of her neck. He pressed her
close, his tongue pushing against hers, his body hardening under her.
She answered his sudden passion, enjoying the heat of his mouth, the
small pulses there, the taste of him.
Finally, she drew away. “Dr. Greene,” she said, “what’s your first
name?”
“Jarod,” he answered. “Why are you kissing me?”
“I’m not at the moment.” She looked down at his lap, just to see
what had transpired there. He definitely had responded positively to
her advances. She reached to trace the line of his arousal, but he grabbed
her hand.
“No,” he said. “Not here.”
“Why not? Haven’t you always wanted to join the Mile High
Club?”
“Not really.” He pushed her back a little, studying her face. “Why
is this happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“Probably a doctor-patient, father-figure rescuer, transference
thing.”
“I take it you’re not a psychologist?”
“No, nor do I play one on TV. But my point is that we need to be
careful. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want you to hurt me,
either, particularly since you have sharp, pointy teeth.”
“No quick flings in your world?”
“Occasionally. But I’m not sure I’m up for that. Not with you.”
“I’m hurt.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You’re right. I’m not.” She smiled and traced her finger down
his nose. “So shall we see what happens? If our . . . mutual attraction . . .
wears off in a few days, we’ll just pretend it never happened. And if it
doesn’t . . .”
“If it doesn’t, then we’ll talk. Or something.”
“I vote for the ‘something.’” Disappointed, but not angry, she sat
up. “When do we land?”
He looked at his watch. “About an hour.”
The SST landed in Paris, where they boarded a private jet. The
jet was sun-tight, all the windows welded shut and painted black.
“From the Italian enclave,” Lucien told Jarod as they took their
seats near the front of the plane. “They use it to shuttle to other parts
of Europe from time to time.”
“Do they have any information on Ialdaboth’s enclave?” Jarod
asked.
“Enough to know they don’t want to get involved at this stage.”
His expression gave Jarod no clue as to how he felt about that.
Taking a seat next to him, Lilith said, “Smart decision. They’re too
close geographically.”
Lucien half-turned in his seat across the aisle from them to look at
her. “What do you know about the Italian enclave?” he asked.
She looked away. “Only how many of them we’ve killed over the
past three hundred years or so.”
Lucien nodded. Jarod looked at his watch. At this time of year, at
this latitude, they should reach Bucharest before sunrise, with a comfortable
margin. He looked at Lilith, who was rubbing her forehead.
“Are you all right?”
“Headache,” she said.
He put an arm over her shoulders, and she looked at him in surprise.
He gave her a half smile. Watching her rub her forehead, he
wondered what she looked like naked. Somehow, even though he was
her doctor, he’d managed not to discover the answer to that question.
In Bucharest, the human pilot of the jet escorted them to a house
near the airport. Lilith, still fighting a headache, watched as the pilot
spoke in Italian to Lucien, who nodded and passed him a handful of
Euros.
“We stay here,” said Lucien. “It’s sun-tight and shielded from the
locals.”
“Human or vampire locals?” Sasha asked.
“Both,” said Lucien.
Jarod laughed. “A vampire safe house.”
“Something like that.”
Lilith hoped it was true. It was unavoidable, of course, that they
would end up far too close to enemy territory, but now that they were
actually here the idea made her nervous.
“Will they be able to sense you?” Jarod asked her.
“I don’t know.” She winced at the sound of her own voice.
Jarod, ever the doctor, looked concerned. “Headache still?”
“More than that.”
“Tell me.”
“Later.”
That Ialdaboth might sense her had occurred to her, of course,
and she wondered about the wisdom of their mission. She should have
drawn maps for Lucien and Julian and stayed in New York, where she
felt at least partially safe. Here she was too close to old memories, old
ways of thinking. She could almost hear Ialdaboth breathing behind
her. She couldn’t exactly sense him, but she couldn’t swear that he
couldn’t sense her. If he could, they might be dead by morning.
“He doesn’t know we’re here,” Lucien announced abruptly, and
Lilith realized he’d addressed her.
“Stay out of my head,” she snapped, without thinking, then flinched,
anticipating punishment.
But Lucien only smiled. “I’m not in your head. You’re projecting.
You might want to stop.”
“How can he not know we’re here?” she countered.
“I know things he doesn’t. You’d never get him to admit it, but
there are things to be learned on the path I chose. If you remain a
demon, you close yourself off to a great deal.”
“He would say the same about your path. That you
closed yourself
off.”
Lucien nodded. “He would be right. But right now, what I know
trumps what he knows.”
The others, Lilith noted, had followed the conversation with interest,
and William voiced the question she guessed was on everyone’s
mind. “So we’re safe here?”
“Until nightfall tomorrow,” said Lucien. “Lilith, William and Sasha,
you need to pick out sleeping quarters. Dr. Greene, I saw you sleeping
on the first leg of the flight. Are you up to keeping me company?”
The doctor nodded. Lilith looked at him, and he smiled encouragement.
Reluctantly, she followed the other two vampires up the stairs,
to the second story bedrooms.
There were four rooms, and so no arguments. She sat on the bed
in her room and put her head in her hands.
Daylight approached. She still had some time, but not much. And
inside her head it seemed a thousand voices battled for her attention.
All voices from her past, all demanding her soul. It belonged to them.
She had stolen it. Blasphemed, by joining her fate with that of those
who had denied their fate, who refused to accept their demonic nature.
The Damned Ones. The Children of the Lie.
The voices screamed and whispered, cajoled and demanded. She
pressed her fists against her temples and screamed.
Four
“So, was this house supplied by the Italian convocation, too, or—”
Jarod broke off as the scream shredded the air. Lilith, he thought,
freezing for a shocked split-second before tearing up the stairs, with
Lucien on his heels.
But when he shoved open Lilith’s door, Lucien was already there,
sitting next to her on the bed, holding her wrists as she struggled against
him, clawing the air, clawing toward her face, her eyes.
Jarod stood transfixed, staring. Lilith’s screams hadn’t stopped,
but tore at him as if her hands and her long nails were slicing into his
belly. Behind him, vaguely, he heard William and Sasha come in to
stand and stare with him.
Lucien was getting nowhere. Lilith fought him with every breath,
howling and spitting into his face. Jarod knew, as surely as he knew his
own blood type, that their mission was teetering on the edge of disaster.
A moment later, with equal certainty, he knew what to do about it.
He crossed the room fast and pressed his wrist hard against Lilith’s
mouth.
She bit down, hard, and he went almost to his knees with the pain.
Lucien grabbed him, propping him up. “I hope you know what you’re
doing.”
“Me, too— Ah, shit—” He clutched Lucien’s shirt with his free
hand, twisting the cloth in his fist until, abruptly, the pain disappeared.
Lilith’s mouth clutched at him, suckling, and he could feel the blood
draining out of him, as if she were pulling it out of his heart.
“If she takes too much, you’re a dead man,” Lucien muttered in
his ear.
Suddenly, Lilith let him go, falling back against the pillows, a thread
of blood tracing its way down her cheek. Lucien grasped Jarod’s wrist
just below the wound, squeezing hard, but the flow had already become
sluggish. Within moments, it stopped, congealing around the twin
wounds.
Jarod wrenched free from Lucien’s grasp and turned his attention
to Lilith. She was still breathing too fast, and when he peeled back an
eyelid he saw black, dilated pupils. She slapped at his hand.
“Stop it.”
“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching for her other eye.
She looked at him, obligingly showing him the other dilated pupil.
Both were gradually contracting to a more normal size. “No. But I’m
better. The voices have stopped.” Her gaze shifted to his bloodied
wrist. “How did you know?”
“I’m a hematologist,” he said.
“That’s a stupid answer.”
“It’s the best one I’ve got.”
She shifted on the blankets, slowly, as if her body were too heavy
to move. “I’m so tired.”
He bent close to her. “Just go.” His lips brushed her cheek. “Rest.
We’ll see you at dusk.”
With that, nearly an hour too soon, she shifted into silence, her
breath gone, her face still. With his thumb, he wiped blood from her
mouth, then straightened.
For a moment, he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone with her. But when
he turned, it was to face Lucien’s far too serious expression, and behind
him William’s surprise and Sasha’s smirk. Jarod’s face went hot.
Lucien assessed him, then turned to the others.
“Get out of here,” he said. They obeyed, heading toward their
own rooms. “So what the hell was all that about?” he went on when
the others were gone.
“She’s been acting weird ever since we got here,” he replied. “I
think she’s too close. They have some kind of hold on her.”
“And the blood?”
“Not just any blood. Human blood from your biological line. And I
doubt it’s a permanent solution.”
Lucien waved him toward the door. “That would suck for you.
No pun intended.”
A half-hour later Jarod sat stretched out on the couch, sipping
milk. Whoever had supplied the safe house had known they would
need human food. He’d found bread and a package of pastrami, and
he’d polished off two sandwiches. His body was starving for protein.
Lucien had watched in silence, apparently not in need of nourishment
himself. At first Jarod had found being stared at disconcerting,
then realized Lucien wasn’t really paying any attention to him. Half the
time, he sat with his eyes closed and his head cocked to one side, as if
listening. The rest of the time he stared absently into space, and Jarod
came to realize that the eyes that occasionally seemed to point in his
general direction weren’t actually focusing on him. Once he made a
face at him, just to see what would happen. Lucien gave no indication
he’d noticed.
Yet as soon as he set down the empty glass, Lucien said, “Do you
think she’ll need blood again in the morning?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“So how does it help?”
“My blood’s related to yours, somehow, on a genetic level.”
Lucien nodded reflectively. “Natural reproduction.”
“That would be my guess.” Since Lucien and the other First Demons
were fertile, they could have left any number of descendants
scattered throughout the world. The blood ties wouldn’t be as strong as
those between blood-made vampires, and the offspring weren’t immortal,
or even vampires in any sense, but the echoes were still there,
even after twelve thousand years of dilution.
“Something like the way Lorelei’s genetic marker came to be.”
“Yes, but that was some kind of cross-breeding between your
blood and either Ialdaboth or Ruha—” He broke off, realizing he was
boring himself. “It’s not important, though. What’s important is that we
figure out what to do about Lilith.”
“I think we’re going to have to get her out of her
e.”
“But you need her.”
“I don’t know that I’ll need her once we find this cave. And I
might be as likely to find it as she is.” Lucien shook his head. “I’m not
sure what to do, frankly.”
This admission surprised Jarod. He’d though Lucien had a well-
laid plan, with all contingencies considered. Then he realized the protovampire
was looking directly at him, eyebrows raised in expectation.
Jarod blinked. He was supposed to come up with a plan?
“Not necessarily a plan,” said Lucien. “Just some advice would
be good.”
“Don’t do that,” Jarod muttered.
“I’m sorry. I thought you said it out loud.”
“No, I didn’t.” He scrubbed his forehead with both hands. “The
information she can supply is vital. But her links to Ialdaboth and the
others may endanger our mission. My blood—somehow—reduces that
danger by muting the bonds. But I can only spare so much blood.”
“Are you prepared to die for the cause?”
“Not really. Besides, if she bleeds me dry, what do you do the
next time she goes loopy?”
Lucien nodded. “And we have no lab facilities here to see if there’s
another way to neutralize whatever’s in her blood that ties her to
Ialdaboth.”
“His blood is what’s in her blood. I’d guess she’s a first- or sec-
ond-generation blood-child of his.”
Jarod saw Lucien’s eyes go distant again, looking straight through
him to a point on the back wall. He resisted the urge to turn around to
see if he could figure out what Lucien was looking at.
“We need to keep her here as long as we can,” Lucien finally
said. “I’m not sure where to find the cave, but I think between the two
of us we could suss it out. Plus we might need her, if we run into a
situation where we need to get by Ialdaboth’s guards, or pass through
some part of his convocation’s sanctuaries.”
Jarod shrugged, looking at the bite marks on his wrist. Some bruising
had spread around them, but the edges were white and clean. “I’ll give
her what I can.”
Lilith dreamed. Deep in the daytime Sleep, she saw Ialdaboth’s
face.
What makes you think you can leave us so easily? What makes
you think our control over you is gone simply because you ran
Knights, Katriena - Vampire Apocalypse Book II.txt Page 4