I swallowed the knot in my throat as sensual awareness danced along every nerve. He leaned very, very close, his eyes ensnaring mine, and whispered, "How was that?"
"Um." I licked my lips. "Not bad."
His gaze dipped to my mouth and for an almost pulse-pounding moment, I thought he might kiss me. Then he blinked and seemed to realize he was sharing my personal space. He backed up a few steps.
"Stay out of the forest, Eva. It's not safe." He frowned, his black brows dipping ominously. "You could've gotten hurt."
"That's kinda ironic coming from you." It was a low blow, but he'd put me off-kilter. It wasn't like me to verbally punch at people, and I felt bad the minute I said the words.
"I can never, ever pay enough penance for what I did," he said. "I'm sorry, Eva, a thousand times sorry."
"Lorcan…"
He shook his head, stalling my apology. He rose a few feet into the air and hovered. Aw, man. I loved the sensation of zipping through the air. I really regretted that he probably wouldn't take me up again. "Eva?"
"Yes?"
"You don't have to exercise."
"Because I'm a vampire?"
"No." A smile ghosted his lips. "Because you're svelte and cute."
He shot into the sky and flew away. I wished I was part of the Family Ruadan, which was the only vampire sect with flying abilities. Lorcan was part sidhe. As half fairy, he could fly and any vampire Turned by him or his children could fly, too.
Me-oh-my. Tingling from his compliment, I stared at the sky and wished for his return. So much regret between us… so much possibility.
I'd been killed, brought back as a vampire, and heck, I had the same problems, same feelings, same joys and sorrows as a human. My diet was different, and I worked at night, but really, how much had changed for me? Life was for living, not grieving. That's what my mother taught me. She also taught me that holding a grudge weighed down your own heart.
Jess kept trying to incorporate Lorcan into the Broken Heart community. Not many of us had helped her. Not even Lorcan. He felt too guilty about what he'd done to ever be part of Broken Heart. Plus, he was feeling a little too sorry for himself.
Jessica had shown me some of the books he'd written—in many cases by hand—and he'd sketched and painted, too. He was a wonderful writer, but just as serious with his words as with his countenance. Was he afraid to laugh? Was he afraid that if he smiled or chuckled, the Turn-bloods he'd accidentally made would lynch him?
Forgiving somebody for the wrongs they've done you was more difficult than trying to catch a ride on a moonbeam. But it was far more difficult to forgive yourself: I knew this from experience. How many times had I wondered about the kind of mother I was? The kind of life I was giving Tamara? When she was born, I was single, unwed, and barely out of high school.
Yeah, self-forgiveness was a real bitch.
My mother, who'd never remarried after Daddy died, made her living as a waitress. She got me a job at Ralph's Restaurant, a little mom-and-pop place off the old Route 66. Waiting tables and reading books and playing mommy—that's about all I did for the first ten years of Tamara's life. I couldn't afford day care, but Ralph made sure Mom and I had different shifts so one of us could be home with Tamara. Then Mom got sick—and, well, life went from tolerable to terrible in a split second.
My mother taught me as much about dying as she did about living. I think she would've gotten a big ol' kick out of being a vampire. I shook off the old memories. No use being a Sad Sally, as Mom would say. Can't buy beans with an ounce of regret. I smiled. That was Mom's way of saying I could look at the past all I wanted, but I couldn't change it.
Exhaustion poured through me, sudden and heavy. Sunrise was near. My body went kaput the second the sun hit the skyline. I opened the French doors and closed them behind me. My old bedroom looked bare and lonely. My stomach clenched when I realized that soon the house would be gone. Razed and forgotten, like so much else in this town.
I left and hurried down the stairs. In the hallway, I pounded on Tamara's door. The wall of music went down half a notch as Tamara adjusted the volume.
" 'Night, baby girl."
"G'night."
The sad, beautiful sounds of Evanescence entranced me. I thought about Lorcan. How haunted he was… how beautiful, too. Not to mention clever. He had avoided answering my question. What had he been doing in the woods? And why wasn't he surprised to find the lycans there?
Chapter 7
Help. I need help. Please, someone help me. HELP ME!
I woke up, shoving off the covers as I scrambled out of bed. If I'd still reacted like a human, sweat would've poured off my brow and my heart would've pounded furiously. Though I had no bodily reactions to prove it, I was seriously freaked out.
Foreboding lodged in my stomach like bad chili. Cramps radiated from my midsection as cold streaked through me. Dry-mouthed and scared, I tried to shake off my duress.
I needed some nosh to settle my stomach and my nerves.
I dressed in a pair of faded jeans, a purple T-shirt with librarians do it by the book scrolled in gold, and a pair of purple flip-flops. The gold rose found its way onto the purple T-shirt. Was I a sucker or what?
When I got upstairs, I used my vamp senses to check on my daughter: slow, even breathing and steady heartbeat. She had never been a "morning" person, so I often made myself scarce until she'd had breakfast and a shower.
I went to my desk to search for my Consortium-issued cell phone. Not in the charger. Crap. The backpack. I had dropped it during my run-in with the hungry lycans. I'd have to go back and find it, but I sure wasn't going back alone. I used the library's phone and dialed Jessica's number. It rang and rang and rang until the voice mail came on. I left a brief message. Jessica rarely carried her phone and even when she did, she forgot to turn it on or kept it on silent.
Who else could I call? Jess was the unofficial leader of the Broken Heart Turn-bloods and she was hitched to Patrick, who was vampire royalty. If he didn't have an answer, he'd know how to find one. I had never called Patrick directly. I liked the guy, but he was intimidating. I felt too much like a peon around him and the other Masters. I didn't have a high school degree. I'd traded that for Tamara. I was a voracious reader, though. I devoured everything from literary classics to romance novels to celebrity autobiographies. I loved to learn—I just didn't have any fancy paperwork to prove it.
Pacing through the dusty shelves of the first-floor library, I still felt unnerved, though I couldn't remember an actual dream. Only those frantic words instilled with pain reverberated in my mind. I hadn't ever had telepathy with humans, much less with animals. The vibes I got off most creatures were fuzzy images and simple emotions. I thought of the starved lycans romping around in the woods. Had I been dreaming of them and simply added words to those terrible images I'd glimpsed?
I was starting to feel really dumb and paranoid. Maybe the nightmare and my strange agitation were a delayed reaction to last night's adventure. After all, I'd almost been monster chow. Then I'd been rescued by Lorcan. I wondered if Lorcan had told Patrick about the beasts.
I wasn't in the administrative loop—as evidenced by the letter stating that my job and my home were no longer mine. Following on Lorcan's coattails in the Consortium library didn't appeal to me at all. I sighed. Okay, that was a lie. The idea of spending the evenings with Lorcan among books collected over centuries held mondo appeal.
For the Broken Heart library, I had tracked down every vampire book I could find. I had shelves and shelves of nonfiction titles that had grown dusty from disuse. I also had shelves and shelves of paranormal fiction by Charlaine Harris, Maryjanice Davidson, L. A. Banks, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rosemary Laurey, J. C. Wilder, and many others. Those got checked out a lot. I couldn't keep Undead and Unwed on the shelves. It was a freaking hilarious book, too, written from the first-person perspective of a vampire queen named Betsy. I had ordered two more hardcovers because the request list was twenty names long.<
br />
I would miss being the librarian. I would miss owning my house and being in charge of the little library. As much as I wanted to hold on to it all, though, I knew the futility of trying to escape change, of trying to forestall what was meant to be. Argh! It felt like giving up, and I hated to give up.
Library hours were from ten p.m. to three a.m., which gave me time to visit Charlie or Alison and afterward to putter around the manse doing librarian-type stuff. Charlie and Alison were two of four donors who'd moved into Jessica's old house on Sanderson Street. The century-old Victorian held too many bad memories for Jess and her family, so after she bound with Patrick, they moved into the old Silverstone mansion on the outskirts of town. They had been fixing it up room by room.
The two-story colonial home was once owned by an oil baron named Jeremiah Silverstone. The house squatted on fifty acres of fenced land. The Silverstones were one of the five families, along with the McCrees and the LeRoys, who had founded Broken Heart in the Sooner days. Jeremiah was an only child who never married and never had kids. About fifty years ago, he disappeared. One day, lawyers showed up and announced that Jeremiah had donated the house to the town. Then they promptly emptied it of all valuable objects. The town had been too poor to do anything with the property, though both a bed-and-breakfast and a museum had been suggested. Despite valiant efforts by more than one eager Realtor, no one had ever bought it.
So Patrick traded in his bachelorhood and his custom RV for a big ol' house, a wife, and three kids. The only thing missing was a family dog. No matter how much her kids begged, Jessica had never caved in to their wheedling for a house pet. She would mutter, "Not after the Hamster Incident, damn it," and the subject would be dropped. However, Jessica's no-pet decree hadn't stopped Patrick from acquiring a white and gray pony subsequently named Glitter, which he gave to his stepdaughter Jenny, a nine-year-old with a tiara fetish.
I went out the front door and stood on the porch, pretending I could breathe in the sweet night air. I knew far, far too much about the town because I had no life and so I had time to collect information as an unofficial historian. Granted, my efforts had taken a strange turn, since I was now documenting the paranormal events, too.
Help me, please!
My hands clutched the porch railing so hard it cracked. Someone was projecting their thoughts into my mind. I looked down at the split wood and grimaced. Jessica had told me that she and Patrick could poke around in each other's heads. Usually, only bound vampires could communicate telepathically, though the ability wasn't always limited to mates.
How had someone tuned in to me? Was it a vampire in trouble? Or an animal? An animal who could articulate words in English? Ridiculous. Says the vampire. I was a mythical creature, but I couldn't fathom a talking animal. As Tamara would intone, "You are a doofus giganticus."
I had no idea if the pleas were real or just me losing my mind. If someone had managed to psychically reach me, I had no idea where to find them. I licked my lips. I was really thirsty. At the mere thought of blood, my fangs popped out. I ran my tongue over the sharp incisors.
I leapt over the porch railing and landed lightly in the front yard. I looked around, but nothing seemed out of place. The animals were gathering: squirrels and birds, deer and raccoons, snakes and mice.
No! Get away!
The fear vibrating in the words, in the thoughts, was very real.
Where are you? I ventured mentally, feeling like an idiot.
I'm in the woods north of the cemetery. Please help me.
"Sorry, guys, I gotta go." The creatures paused and stared at me. Feeling guilty about the temporary abandonment, I held out my hands in supplication. "I'll be right back."
That seemed to satisfy them. I hurried into the street, then ran at warp vampire speed. The cemetery was nearly ten miles away, but I got there in no time flat. I stopped at the edge of the woods, hesitating. The unspoken rule was that this area was off-limits. Three months ago, the Wraiths, vampires who thought world domination was a fine idea, had caused some problems for us. The Consortium responded to the threats by blowing up the cavern the Wraiths had been hiding in and, along with it, most of the Wraiths.
I'm at the edge of the woods, I sent out. How do I find you?
Don't! Get away! Nooooo!
Pain swiped at me as terror filled my mind like a heavy black cloud. Like one of those stupid girls in a slasher flick, I plunged into the dank darkness. Within seconds, my acute hearing picked up familiar growls and the mewling cry of a hurt animal. I followed the noises until I found a tiny clearing.
Hanging from the limb of a large oak tree was a small wire cage. Inside it was a sleek golden cat—Lucifer. She cowered and hissed, her eyes wide with panic as she scrambled around trying to find purchase. I'd be fritzing too if a seven-foot-tall beast was playing "smash the piñata" with me.
I recognized the lycan as the alpha that had chased me the previous night. But who had captured the cat and put her in the cage? The creature jumped and swatted the cage again, causing it to whip back and forth.
Help me! Help me!
I stared at the cat. I was way out of my element. I darted away and ducked behind a tree. No cell phone, damn it. I'd rushed out to this location without telling anyone, not even Tamara.
Lorcan. He was the one who could really help me.
The lycan's frustrated roar made the cat cry louder.
Help me! Help me! Help me!
Hold on, sweetie, I projected.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
I wondered if I could use the mind-meld thing with Lorcan. He'd been an animal of sorts once, right? Without any real hope of succeeding, I sent out the thought: Lorcan? I wish you were here.
"Didn't I tell you to stay out of the woods?"
"Aaaaaaaaaah!" I scrambled away. Crap, crap, oh crap! Not two inches from the spot I had occupied was Lorcan. He squatted next to the tree, looking at me with raised eyebrows. Gold sparkles faded from his body.
"Are you insane? You just appeared out of thin air! Holy God!" I gestured at him like a mad scientist berating his lab monster. "You scared me to death!"
"I didn't incur your death that way at all."
I gaped at him, then snapped, "You might not want to choose a career as a comedian." Obviously, he hadn't been joking, but heavens above, he didn't have to wallow in the morbid every hour of the day. Argh! I was furious that he—he—just popped next to me without warning. But I was also relieved that he had arrived to save the day. I climbed to my feet. "How the Sam Hill did you know where I was?"
If I'd hoped to receive confirmation that my mental calls had reached him, I was sorely disappointed.
"Why did you come here?" he asked, pointedly ignoring my question. His voice was as emotionless as his gaze.
Well, he wasn't the only one who didn't have to answer questions. Besides, what was I supposed to say? Hey, I heard a cat's telepathic plea for help, but I'm not crazy or anything. Instead, I pointed toward the clearing. "Save the little fur-ball from becoming a lycan snack."
In the blink of an eye, Lorcan rose, zipped to me, and grabbed my arm. He looked down at me, his silver gaze gleaming with anger. "We will discuss your disobedience later."
"Disobedience!" I wasn't sure if what I felt was disbelief or anger. "What century do you think we're living in? You can't tell me what to do."
"Yes, I can. Stay here," he ordered. "Or you will be a lycan snack."
Chapter 8
I frowned at Lorcan. Was that statement meant. to be protective or was it meant to be a threat? I didn't have a chance to ask for clarification, because he rose into the air and flew toward the clearing. The growls and screeches still echoed in the forest, which meant the beast hadn't gotten the cage down yet.
"Well," I huffed as I crept toward the ongoing melee, "somebody got out of the wrong side of the coffin today."
I ducked behind a clump of bushes and peeked over the tangle of leaves. The lycan's parfum de sewer attacked my nose in suc
h a heinous way that I pinched my nostrils shut.
Lorcan alighted on the limb and drew up the chain holding the cat's cage. The lycan howled, leaping and swiping to no avail. The second that Lorcan opened the cage door, Lucifer lit out of it like her tail was on fire. She skittered up the tree to a high branch, then leapt to another tree. She repeated this pattern until she was long gone. If that wasn't just like a cat! Not even a "Well, so long and thanks for all the fish" as she left her rescuers in mortal jeopardy.
Lorcan yanked the chain off, then dropped the cage onto the lycan's big, furry head. The creature shrieked in pain as the cage bounced off and rolled onto the ground. It stomped on the cage, clutching its skull and yowling.
Feeling sorry for it, I dared a peek into its mind.
Once, he had been a vampire. I grabbed that much from his lumbering memories, but no name, no Family connection. And I got those same flashes—the pain, the blood, the chains—as I had with him and the other two last night. Who had locked him up? Tortured him? And let him go in Broken Heart?
Not sure what to do, I glanced up at Lorcan. If I hadn't had super vamp hearing, I wouldn't have heard the words he whispered: "Níl neart air. I must release you to Tír na Marbh."
He sailed out of the tree and dropped to the ground. To my utter shock, a sword made of sparkling gold light appeared in his hands. Lorcan's eyes were filled with compassion and sorrow as he raised the blade.
"Lorcan!" I leapt from my spot and landed in front of the lycanthrope. I crossed my arms to block his blow and he cursed a Gaelic blue streak as his wrist smacked into mine. The blade tumbled from his grip. The minute it left his hand, it sparkled into nothingness.
"What the bloody hell are you doing? I nearly took your pretty head off!"
"Wait just a—" I blinked at him. "You think I'm pretty?"
Broken Heart Town 2 - Don't Talk Back to Your Vampire Page 5