The Vampire Affair

by Livia Reasoner

  The stake flew straight to its target. The flames enveloping Escobar spurted higher and brighter as the vampire turned to dust and the blaze consumed that dust.

  Two of the overlords were dead, but Michael felt no satisfaction in that. A numb horror gripped him as he swung once again toward Jessie and Rendell.

  But Rendell was gone, and Jessie lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  Michael leaped toward her, calling her name, praying that she was still alive. He knew it was too late to save her, but at least he could say goodbye.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Takahashi lunging toward him and swinging a Samurai sword. He twisted toward Takahashi and reached for another of the stakes at his waist, but even as he did so he saw that he wouldn’t be in time to stop the vampire from lopping his head off.

  Instead an automatic rifle roared practically over Michael’s shoulder. The high-powered slugs rang off the sword’s blade and knocked the weapon from Takahashi’s hands. The bullets swept on up Takahashi’s arm and stitched across his chest, slowing him with their impact even though they wouldn’t prove fatal.

  Before the Japanese overlord could regain his balance, though, Atticus Cole lowered the rifle he had been firing and stepped forward to slam a stake through the vampire’s heart. Takahashi fell apart. Cole turned to glance at Michael, who gave him a curt nod of thanks. For comrades-in-arms in this long war, that was enough.

  Jessie moaned, yanking Michael’s attention back to her. He sprang to her side and knelt to cradle her in his arms as gently as he could. His heart thudded painfully in his chest as he saw how pale and weak she was.

  Her eyelids managed to flicker open, though, and she whispered hoarsely, “M-Michael…?”

  “I’m right here, Jessie,” he told her as he leaned over her. “I’m right here.”

  “M-Max and…Clifford…alive…in dungeon.”

  Even under these horrific circumstances, Jessie was more concerned about them than she was with herself. She wanted to give them every chance of being rescued.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll go get them and take care of them,” he promised her. He turned his head and called, “Top!”

  Atticus Cole was at his side instantly.

  “There’s an entertainment room in the basement,” Michael told his second-in-command. “Video games, big-screen TV, things like that. They call it the dungeon.” He remembered that bit of irony from the plans and diagrams he had studied. “The vampires are holding Max and Clifford there.”

  Cole nodded. “We’ll go down and get ’em. Fight’s over here, anyway.”

  Michael glanced around and saw that Cole was right. Three of the overlords were dead, and so were all the acolytes and followers who had been in the conference room. A couple of his men were down, too, and most likely would never get back up. Michael felt a wrenching pang of regret at that, as he always did whenever one of his fellow warriors fell in battle.

  The only one who had gotten away appeared to be Jefferson Rendell. Michael would have cursed the luck that made that possible, but he didn’t have time. He turned his attention back to Jessie.

  “Michael,” she said, gazing up at him with those incredible eyes. “It burns…it burns so much…my insides feel like…they’re on fire.”

  He smoothed her midnight-dark hair back away from her face. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “That’ll go away, real soon. It won’t hurt much longer.”

  “I’m so sorry. I guess I wasn’t…ready to fight…after all.”

  “You did fine. I’m proud of you.” Tears stung his eyes, and he could barely force the words past the huge lump in his throat. His pulse hammered crazily inside his skull. This couldn’t be happening again, it couldn’t, it just couldn’t! If there was any justice and mercy in the world—

  But that was the point, Michael realized as bitter acceptance flooded through him. There was no justice and mercy. There was only blood and death and eternal war. For a time he had seen flickers of something else, a hint of light, a hope that someday the killing might stop and something better, something warmer and more tender, might take its place. But that hope had been ripped away from him.

  He leaned closer as Jessie whispered something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He brushed his lips over her forehead and said, “What is it, darling? What did you say?”

  “I said that…” Her breath was as light and insubstantial as a fading breeze against his face. “I love you….”

  Grief squeezed his heart. Tears rolled down his face. “I love you, too.” He choked out the words he had believed he would never say again, and saw that the blood had stopped flowing from the wounds in her neck. It was almost over.

  Her lips parted and a long sigh came from her throat. Her eyes, barely open to start with, closed now. Michael’s guts twisted. He wanted to scream and cry and shout at the universe, but he knew none of that would do any good.

  Jessie was gone.

  For now.

  And that impermanent death was the worst thing of all.

  One of the choppers soared up into the black night and flew east toward the ranch, numbering among its passengers several men wounded in the battle, along with Michael, Clifford, Max…and one other.

  Although Michael tried not to, he glanced at the blanket-shrouded shape lying on the floor of the helicopter a few feet away from him. He would have given anything, even his own life, if it were him lying there instead of Jessie.

  Atticus Cole and most of the Brandt family forces remained at the castle, mopping up after the raid. Cole would have to answer questions from the authorities, too. The place was isolated, but not so much so that a fierce firefight and several explosions would go unnoticed. Michael had a story prepared for Cole to give the sheriff’s deputies when they showed up, though: the management of the resort had put on a big fireworks display for their guests. If the deputies insisted on searching the place, they wouldn’t find anything to contradict that story. Michael’s men were that good at covering up the evidence of their grim work.

  “I wonder what happened to Rendell,” Clifford mused. “Atticus hadn’t found any sign of him by the time we left.”

  “I can’t believe the son of a bitch got away,” Max said.

  Michael leaned his head back against the curved fuselage wall behind him and closed his eyes. He had no trouble believing that Rendell had escaped. Fate had conspired against him again. But this time, at least, he had been able to recover the body of the woman the Englishman had murdered.

  Which just made it that much worse, of course, because now Michael was going to have to destroy Jessie all over again.

  Max and Clifford hadn’t said anything about that, but they had to know what had happened. They had seen the red-rimmed puncture wounds on her neck with their own eyes before the blanket was wrapped around Jessie, and once you’d seen the mark of the vampire, you never forgot it. They knew that what gripped her wasn’t a true death at all, only the cessation of life for a period of time while the infection worked its evil on her and transformed her into one of the unholy creatures.

  The chopper reached the ranch a short time later. Michael had already called ahead for ambulances to meet them there. They waited next to the landing pad, flashing lights extinguished, siren silent for the moment.

  Numbly, Michael watched as Jessie’s body was unloaded from the helicopter onto a gurney and transferred to one of the ambulances. “Take her to the clinic,” he told the attendants, who were Brandt family employees.

  “To the morgue?” one of the men asked.

  A snarl twisted Michael’s lips. His hand shot out. He stopped it, though, before the fingers closed around the man’s throat in a viselike grip. “No,” he rasped as he slowly lowered his arm. “Put her in a private suite.”

  The man nodded hastily and backed away, obviously aware that his insensitive question had almost bought him some big trouble. “S-sorry, sir,” he managed to say. “We’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry.”

 
; A bitter laugh welled up inside Michael, threatening to sear his throat. He suppressed it before it could escape. The time for worrying was long past. Other than the fact that three of the vampire overlords had been destroyed, along with a host of their followers, tonight’s raid had turned into a worst-case scenario. Rendell had escaped, and Jessie…

  Clifford took hold of Michael’s arm and turned him away from the ambulance. “Come on,” the older man said. “Let’s get cleaned up, and then we’ll go back to Dallas.”

  Michael nodded. “Yes. Max, go in that ambulance, too. You need medical attention.”

  “I’m fine,” the big man protested.

  “Go,” Michael repeated, then added in a lower voice, “Keep an eye on…things.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure, Michael.” Max nodded in understanding. Michael wanted someone to watch over Jessie’s body and make sure that it reached the clinic safely.

  Once the wounded men had been transferred to the other ambulances and the vehicles pulled away, Michael trudged into the ranch house and walked directly to a large bathroom on the second floor of the ranch house where he started stripping off the black battle gear. When he was nude, he hesitated before stepping into the big walk-in shower. It brought back too many memories of making love with Jessie under the hot, cascading spray of that other shower. Memories of her hands on his flesh, her mouth beneath his, her moan when he’d driven her over the edge. Incredible though it was to believe, that passionate encounter had taken place only about twelve hours earlier. It seemed days ago, even weeks.

  To stem the flood of emotion, he turned the water as cold as he could stand it before stepping in. The sudden pounding chill of the icy water took his breath away. He ducked his head underneath it. This was like stepping into an ice cavern in the Arctic, he thought. He hoped that it would numb not only his body but his soul as well, and wash away the pain he felt.

  But he realized in a matter of seconds that wasn’t going to happen. No matter what he did, he couldn’t ease the raw ache that threatened to tear him apart inside.

  When he had withstood the water’s frigid battering for as long as he could, he shut it off and stepped out of the shower. He toweled himself dry so briskly that he almost rubbed his outside as raw as his insides were. Pausing in front of the mirror, he ran his fingers over his jaw and felt the rasp of the beard stubble there. He didn’t take the time to shave, though. Grooming no longer mattered. Maybe he would grow his hair and beard long and become a hermit. If he avoided people completely from now on, then maybe no one else would get hurt because they’d been around him. Maybe it was time to give up the long, bloody crusade and let someone else carry the weight for a while.

  But only after he finished the tasks that had fallen to him, he reminded himself.

  Only after he took care of Jessie.

  As Clifford drove, Michael watched the cars as they passed and thought that people had no idea how lucky they were. Ignorance was a blessing when you didn’t know what was really out there in the darkness, waiting for you. When you didn’t know that there really were foul creatures who existed only to drink human blood. Better to consider them only a myth, a handy boogeyman that cropped up in books and movies, because to know the reality meant that you would lie in bed at night trembling with fear and fighting back screams of terror.

  Yeah. Lucky bastards. The truth didn’t set you free; it shackled you with chains of horror. The sort of chains that would bind Michael Brandt’s heart from now on.

  Lights began to appear on the horizon, stretching as far as the eye could see from north to south. That was Fort Worth, and beyond it was Dallas. Michael paid no attention to the increasing traffic or the brightly lit havens of humanity that soon lined the highway. Weariness gripped him, but he didn’t shut his eyes for fear of what he might see in his mind’s eye. The sight of Rendell sinking his fangs into Jessie’s neck was etched indelibly there.

  He dulled his brain, drifted off into some cold, bleak landscape populated only by himself. No ghosts here, although he sensed them screeching and twittering around the edges of his mental wasteland. He ignored them as best he could, and finally blessed silence fell.

  Incredibly, exhaustion took over and he actually dozed off, starting awake again only when Clifford stopped the Jeep in the parking lot in front of the nondescript, almost windowless three-story brick building where the clinic was located. Trees helped shield the place from the street, and no signs announced its name or purpose. That anonymity was deliberate.

  Michael took a key card from his pocket and swiped it through a reader by the door, then punched in a code on an adjacent keypad. The lock clicked open. He and Clifford went inside, and Michael was aware of the soft hum of a security camera’s servomotors as it followed them.

  An armed guard and a white-coated doctor met them at a security station at the end of a short corridor. The doctor didn’t have to ask who Michael was there to see. He said, “Right this way, Mr. Brandt.”

  They went through another door with access provided by a key card and numerical code, then up to the third floor. In stark contrast to the sterile atmosphere on the first floor, the hallway here looked like one that might be found in a luxury hotel, with thick carpet, subdued lighting and expensive prints on the walls.

  The room Michael entered when the doctor opened the door was more of the same, furnished like a luxury suite—except for the state-of-the-art hospital bed surrounded by banks of monitors and other medical equipment.

  Those monitors weren’t beeping and flashing like they would normally be when they were hooked up to a patient. No green lines traced their jagged trails across the face of the displays to show a vivid physical representation of a beating heart. Instead the machines were disconnected, the lights were dimmed and a silence hung over the room. The silence of death.

  Or undeath, as the case might be.

  Michael paused just inside the door to gaze at the woman lying in the bed. Jessie lay on her back, a crisp white sheet pulled up to her neck. Her face was almost as pale as the sheet, a study in sharp contrast, framed as it was by her raven hair. A bandage had been taped over the wounds in her neck, but Michael knew they were there whether he could see them or not. They wouldn’t go away until…until the change came over her.

  He couldn’t allow that to happen. He had known Jessie Morgan for only a few days, but the connection between them had been so white-hot and intense that he knew she wouldn’t want to suffer the curse that had been inflicted upon her. She would prefer the oblivion of death and whatever waited on the other side to an unholy existence as a creature of the night, bringing nothing to the world but more misery and destruction.

  Michael drew a deep, shuddering breath and stepped closer to her. He was unaware now of Clifford, the doctor and the guard following him into the room. All that existed for him was Jessie. And his loss.

  He clawed at the sheet, pulled it back so that he could reach her left hand and clasp it in both of his. She had been dressed in a pale blue gown and under other circumstances would have looked incredibly innocent and lovely. He lowered his head and squeezed his eyes tightly shut against the hot tears that sprang into them as he thought about what he had to do.

  The procedure was simple, really. He had to cut off her head and then burn it and her body. That way she would never complete the transformation into a vampire, which took anywhere from twelve to seventy-two hours; it was impossible to predict how long, since each case was different. Jessie would be truly dead, along with any hopes Michael had had for their future, including the possibility that she might be carrying his child. Desecrating her body in that manner would be one of the most difficult things he had ever done, but doing nothing, allowing her to complete the transformation, would desecrate her soul.

  First, though, he had to say goodbye.

  He held her hand tightly in his, bent over her and brushed his lips across her forehead. Her skin still held just a hint of warmth, a reminder that not so long ago she had been a liv
ing, vital woman…intelligent, passionate, contrary when she wanted to be, full of life and hope and joy. He had been annoyed by her, attracted to her, drawn to bring her closer to him when all the while he had known it would be smarter to keep her at arm’s length. Finally, he had admitted to her—and to himself—that he was in love with her. But only when it was too late.

  Now all of it had been snuffed out in one horrible moment. Michael’s eyes closed again on the hot tears and his body shook as he fought to keep some vestige of control over himself. He wouldn’t let her down again.

  “Goodbye, Jessie,” he whispered. “I love you so much, and I’m so sorry for what happened…and for what I have to do now. But we’ll be together again someday, and I hope that you’ll forgive me.”

  He kissed her again, this time on the lips. Only a few times had he been blessed to taste those lips while she was alive. So much had been taken from both of them, so many pleasures they would never share, so many memories they would never make.

  Michael wasn’t sure how much time passed before he finally straightened, placed Jessie’s hand at her side and gently drew the sheet up again. He turned to the others and said in a voice devoid of warmth or feeling, “Take her down to the basement.”

  “We can handle this, Michael,” Clifford said quietly. “You don’t have to—”

  “Yes, I do,” he interrupted. “It’s my responsibility. My job. She wouldn’t be…like that if it weren’t for me.”

  “You didn’t ask her to get mixed up in this war,” Clifford reminded him. “Maybe this isn’t the proper time or place to point this out, but she forced her way in, Michael. She bullied you and blackmailed you, made you feel guilty because of what happened to her friend—”

  “Don’t you think I could have gotten around all of that if I’d really wanted to?” Michael didn’t turn to look at the woman in the bed. He didn’t have to. Her image would be in his mind and in his heart forever. “I let her in because I wanted to. Because I liked her. Because I was drawn to her. That makes it my fault. That means it’s up to me to make things right now, or at least as right as I can.”