Out of the Light, Into the Shadows

by Lori Foster

  That troubled Nick, too, he had to admit. Hadn’t Jordan mentioned that very thing the night before? She wanted to get to know Peter, share Nick’s life with him, in its entirety. But the reality was, she couldn’t share most of his life.

  He was a vampire and she couldn’t know that.

  How the hell had he ever thought he could have a normal relationship with Jordan? There was no explaining Peter long term, no explaining his own lack of aging, their inability to move around during the day.

  He had chosen to ignore all of that. Now he cared a great deal about Jordan, and they were both going to get hurt.

  “I’m not going to make you play happy little family, don’t worry.” He couldn’t stomach the deception or the stress of worrying what Peter might say. Nor did he want to draw Jordan further into a relationship that couldn’t last.

  “I think maybe it’s time for me to leave,” Peter said. “Go off on my own. You can tell your cock-sucking cop that your kid ran away and she can comfort you.”

  Nick grabbed a bag of blood out of the fridge and glared at Peter. “You need to stop insulting Jordan. I’m not going to tolerate that. I’m serious.”

  Peter just stuck his tongue out at him.

  “And as for leaving, we’ve discussed this before. What kind of life is there for a person everyone thinks is a thirteen-year-old boy? You can’t get a job, so you won’t have any money. Even if you had money, no one is going to rent you an apartment without parents. And you’d probably get in trouble for not being in school. I’m sorry, I know it sucks, but your options are limited.”

  “I need a girlfriend,” Peter said morosely. “A woman in her thirties who will want to have sex with me or adopt me, or both. I can’t stay here with you any more.”

  Nick drank his blood quickly, then licked the remnants off his lips. “You can do whatever you want. You’re a grown man. I’ve just been trying to help you.” Though he did not want to think about the kind of woman who would get her rocks off screwing around with a boy she thought was still preadolescent.

  “You really mean that? So like if I said I wanted to go out tonight without Kelsey, you wouldn’t freak out?” Peter rocked back and forth on the stool at the breakfast bar and looked slyly at Nick.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I can’t stop you.” Maybe Nick needed to recognize that. He couldn’t control Peter. His life was his, to screw up however he wanted. Nick was weary and ready to wash his hands of all of it.

  “Cool.” Peter hopped off the stool. “Cancel the sitter, I’m going out.”

  NICK was dressed and ready for work an hour early, sitting around watching TV, worrying about Peter running around the Strip by himself, worrying about Jordan and how he had involved her in his abnormal life, and worried about Kelsey, who had neither answered her phone nor shown up for work at ten like she was supposed to. He had also texted Jordan twice and she hadn’t answered him, which was odd. He was used to their daily communications, and he was feeling melancholy and missing her.

  When the doorbell rang he assumed it was Kelsey, until he realized it was a mortal as he moved to answer it. He could smell blood. Jordan’s blood.

  A smile tugged at his mouth. This was a pleasant surprise.

  “Hi,” he said, when he opened the door. He leaned forward and gave her a soft kiss. “I’m glad to see you.”

  Jordan kissed him back, but her lips were stiff. When Nick looked closely at her, he saw her expression was troubled, the circles under her eyes pronounced. Her arms were wrapped over her chest.

  “Are Peter and Kelsey here?” she asked as she moved into the room. “We need to talk.”

  Nick stopped short. That was not a good tone in her voice. “No, they’re not here,” he said cautiously. “What did you want to talk about?”

  Jordan dumped her purse on the coffee table and flopped on the sofa. “God, I have no idea how to broach this subject. But do you really know what Peter is doing when you’re not around? I mean, do you ever check to see what’s on his computer or DVD player? Does he have a cell phone?”

  Of course he didn’t check those things. Peter was an adult vampire, such as that was. “Why do you ask?” he said, avoiding the question.

  “Because I caught him watching porn when I left this morning.”

  Nick almost sighed in relief. Here he’d been thinking Jordan was going to break up with him, and it was just more oddities from his alleged son.

  “Oh, I see. Well, boys will do those things.”

  She frowned. “Don’t you care? I mean, this was explicit. And he seems to have picked up some questionable language from watching them.”

  “It’s natural for a boy to be curious. But I’ll speak to him about it.” He’d speak to Peter about not bringing out the porn in Jordan’s presence. As far as him viewing it, he had no say over that, even though he had personally never gotten the appeal of pornography.

  Jordan stared at him for a long minute. Nick tried to sit down next to her, but she wouldn’t scoot over, so he perched on the coffee table and took her hand. “Hey, is something else wrong?”

  “This is none of my business and I’m not a parent, but I think you need to recognize that autistic or not, Peter is at a pivotal age, Nick. I don’t think porn and Kelsey are the best influences for a young boy.”

  “I appreciate your concern, but I have it under control.”

  She gave a sound of exasperation. “No, you don’t. Peter asked me if I come over here every night to get fucked. Any thirteen-year-old who is saying that is not under control.”

  He shouldn’t be surprised, but it still made him angry that Peter was speaking like that to Jordan. Before Nick could answer, though, Jordan continued.

  “And Kelsey is going to be taken in for questioning for the latest murder. She was spotted in the area where the victim was found.” Jordan rubbed her hands over her face. “They think you and Kelsey are a serial-killing team.”

  “What?” Appalled, Nick sat up straight. “You know that’s not possible! I would never kill anyone.”

  “I know it’s not possible because I was with you the night of the last murder. I was in your bed.” Jordan held her hair over her ears, tucking hard before dropping her hands. “But do I really know what you are capable of? I don’t know.”

  “You know me. Granted, we haven’t been together that long, but what we have is real, honest. You know that, Jordan. I am in love with you.” Idiotic or not, he most definitely was.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what I know. Something’s not right. Your boss was murdered, too.”

  Nick couldn’t believe she was serious, that she was really implying that she thought he had something to do with Chechikov’s death. “He was a man who made a lot of enemies in the business world. It’s not surprising he was murdered. I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Yeah, but most businessmen aren’t drained of their blood. Like these women are.” Jordan shot him a look. “Are you really even Russian?”

  “Of course I am! Why would I lie about that? Especially to a cop who can do a background check on me very easily.”

  “I don’t know. But why is your English so flawless?”

  Nick hesitated. How much of the truth should he tell her? “Peter’s mother spent a lot of time with her English grandmother. English was her preferred language.” That was the truth, even if Nick had never had any contact with the tsarina.

  “Why don’t you ever eat?”

  That question came out of left field. The hours they saw each other were so unusual that Nick hadn’t thought Jordan had noticed he never ate anything. “Umm, I eat. Obviously.” He patted his stomach and lifted his brawny bicep. “Jordan, what’s really going on?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” she whispered. “Who are you? Why does your son watch porn? Why are you connected to these murders in any way? Why do I like it when you …” She swallowed hard. “Bite me.”

  Nick stroked her hand and tried to stay calm. T
hey were reasonable questions. “It’s just possessive, that’s all, a small form of domination. If you don’t like it, I’ll stop.”

  “But I do like it. A lot. That’s what I don’t understand. It can make me orgasm … Why? I’ve never experienced that before.”

  The look on her face was alarming. She was staring at him like he was someone she had never seen before, like she was actually afraid of him.

  “Nick, do you really care about Peter?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Suddenly she stood up, shaking her head. “I’m leaving. I can’t see you anymore.”

  Then he knew that he was going to have to tell her the truth. The whole truth. Nick grabbed her arm. “Wait. Jordan, please, let me explain.” He wasn’t one to use vampire glamour all that often, but he did now, using a subtle mind influence to guide her back to the sofa. She slumped down and just stared at him, eyes huge, breathing heavy and frightened.

  “Just listen to me, okay? I will tell you everything, from the beginning.”

  Nick had never bothered to turn the lamps on in the room, and the only illumination was the glow of the Vegas strip from his living room window. It cast a pale gleam across Jordan’s face, and he sat down across from her on the coffee table again. Digging his nails into the denim of his jeans, he took a deep breath.

  “Peter is not my son. Peter and Katie were supposed to be assassinated with their whole family in Ekaterinburg, and I was one of the guards standing post at the door. I was to make sure they didn’t try to escape. That was not something I had signed on for. Being a guard, protecting those in power from other grown men, yes, I could do that. Killing insurgents I was capable of. But standing there and watching children being gunned down? I hadn’t intended that … I couldn’t stomach it.” Nick swallowed hard. “I can still smell that room. It was damp and acrid and two of the girls were crying. The others were stoic, dressed in their expensive and impractical clothes. Their mother cursed the gunmen, and their father, the tsar, he looked as though it could not actually be happening. That’s how I felt … this is not happening.

  “Then the bullets started flying, spraying the family left to right and back again and there were screams and cries and the loud ricochet of the bullets, the scent of sweat, fear, fresh blood. What the guards hadn’t realized was that the little girls were wearing all their jewelry sewn into their clothes, which repelled bullets, sending them back … And when you have bullets bouncing around in a windowless room that is fifteen feet square, they hit everything, including those pulling the trigger. I stepped into the room, in horror, to try to stop something, anything, and I saw that Peter and Katie were still alive, crying and cowering in a corner, wounded and covered in blood.”

  Nick rubbed his jaw, amazed that the image, the horror, was still as fresh today as it had been a hundred years earlier. But then, he had never told anyone the story, and he kept it tightly locked in a corner of his mind most of the time. “To see a young girl, blood sprayed across her lovely gown, bits of brain and flesh from her family stuck to her face, her brother wrapped in her arms, it was the most appalling sight I had ever been witness to, and I acted on instinct. I stepped in front of them and took a bullet. And as I went down, landing on her, I told her to play dead. To both play dead.

  “They took us out with the other bodies and tossed us on a cart and took us into the woods. They were building a fire to burn the bodies, just two guards, and I overpowered them and had the children run into the woods. I caught up with them, and we escaped and moved west to start over, with new names, new lives.” Nick shrugged. “But there are emotional scars that have not faded as the physical ones have.”

  Jordan leaned forward, touching his knee. “I … I’m sorry. That’s horrible. When did this happen? I know there was a lot of fighting in Chechnya a few years back.”

  Now for the even harder part. “It happened in nineteen eighteen.”

  Her face went blank. “Excuse me?”

  “Nineteen eighteen. During the Russian Revolution.”

  “That was almost a hundred years ago!”

  He nodded. “You have heard of the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas, and his wife, Alexandra? And her son, who suffered from hemophilia? That is Peter, and his parents. Katie is his sister Maria … like I said, we’ve taken new names, new identities.”

  Jordan stood up so quickly, she bumped Nick with her knees. She dropped her purse, but grabbed it off the floor and strode across the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you make up stories. I felt sorry for you for a few minutes and it was just bullshit!”

  “It’s not bullshit.” Nick caught up to her and tried to take her hand. “It’s all the truth. I can tell you anything about that night, anything about the family that you want to know.”

  Jordan yanked at her hand but couldn’t get it free from his grip. “Let. Me. Go. There is no fucking way you can be over a hundred years old.”

  He held on, knowing she could never escape, not with his strength, and he needed her to hear everything. “I can be if I am a vampire.”

  She stopped struggling. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’re a whack job! I can’t believe I thought for one minute I could be falling in love with you.”

  It was a logical conclusion, that he was insane, but it still wounded his feelings. Nick said carefully, “No. I’m a vampire.”

  Jordan was shaking her head, her efforts to free herself renewed.

  But Nick continued quickly. “That’s how we survived the bullets. I knew I would survive because I was already a vampire. I landed on the children and bled into their open wounds, turning them. I was trying to do the right thing, save their lives, but I didn’t think about the fact that Peter would be forever in a small boy’s body, that he would mentally grow to a man yet still be the size of a thirteen-year-old. It’s made him difficult to deal with, mentally unstable … He craves blood more than normal vampires.”

  Jordan was grappling in her purse with her free hand, and Nick wasn’t surprised when she pulled a gun out. “Let me go.”

  But he was still stupidly hurt. “Jordan … I’m telling the truth. I don’t eat. I sleep during the day. I drink blood. But I am still the same man you knew and were falling in love with. Just with …” He bared his teeth, displaying his fangs for her to see. “A few differences from the average mortal man.”

  That was a mistake. She went pale in the dark room, swaying a little on her feet.

  He wanted to hold her up, but she struggled against him, so he gave up and let her go, the gun still pointing at him. “You can shoot me to prove it. I won’t die.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you. I’m just going to leave.” Jordan gave him one last look of disbelief and horror, then stumbled out the door of his suite.

  Nick punched the wall, creating a two-foot hole in the drywall.

  That probably could have gone better.

  EIGHT

  KELSEY Columbia stared at the picture in front of her and then at the detective who had shown it to her, the same man who had come to Nick’s room a few weeks before. Kelsey recognized this woman smiling up at her from the photo, and Kelsey had just figured out what the little vampire was doing.

  Ringo always said she was slow on the uptake, and she guessed she was because she’d been clueless as to what was really happening, which made her just the worst babysitter ever.

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” she told the detective, uncomfortable with him standing in her suite, wishing Ringo were home. Cops made her nervous, especially ones who thought she had anything to do with murder. Ringo wasn’t afraid of cops. Her husband wasn’t afraid of much of anything, except maybe his drug supply drying up.

  “Two different people said they saw you in the parking lot in front of the Dumpster a mere thirty minutes before this woman was killed there.”

  “So? I went outside to smoke. I was playing blackjack all ni
ght at the Ava. They can tell you. They know me there, I’m there almost every night.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t see her? You didn’t see anything suspicious at all?” He gave her a hard stare.

  Kelsey crossed her fingers behind her back. “No. I didn’t see anything at all.”

  “Are you protecting someone?”

  Ack. Was he a mind reader? Kelsey didn’t think mortals could do that. She widened her eyes and blinked. “No. Of course not.”

  The detective sighed. “Alright, but if you remember anything, anything at all, give me a call. And keep in mind, we may be back with more questions. This is a dangerous killer on the loose and we want to catch him, understand?”

  Kelsey nodded solemnly. “That’s all I want, too.”

  She walked the detective to the door, waited until she heard the elevator start down with him, and then grabbed her purse and headed out herself.

  Time to have a chat with the little vampire.

  “I can’t believe you went to question Kelsey Columbia without me,” Jordan said to Shawn in a shaky voice, feeling doubly betrayed.

  She had come racing downstairs after talking to Nick, terrified she was going to cry, desperate to get to her car, when she had spotted her partner.

  The guilty look on his face said it all. “You’re off the case, Jordan. I’m sorry. You’re too close on this one. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t.” Shit. The tears were there, blurring her vision and making her furious. Jordan blinked hard, needing to control them, wanting to hold the floodgates on her emotions closed, despite the pressure building up behind them.

  The man she had thought she was falling in love with was either insane or playing some ridiculous game with her.

  God, it was just horrible, crazy, ridiculous, weird. He wanted her to believe he was a vampire and that his thirteen-year-old son was actually over a hundred years old.

  And the biting …

  Jordan actually gagged at the thought of what that meant, and she clapped her hand over her mouth and squeezed her throat shut to stave off vomiting. Here she had been letting him do that, nip at her, and she had been aroused by it, thoroughly enjoying it, and it was part of some sick fantasy on his part that he was a goddamn vampire. It was sickening.