“Philip-”
“I know!” he spat, a little more harshly than he intended but feeling flustered and desperate for some time to think, “I know. I hear the things you’re saying. I’m listening, just like I told you I would. But that doesn’t mean all of my opinions on the matter automatically reverse themselves, does it? That’s not the way I work.”
“I know,” softly, delicately even, “I don’t expect that. It’s just that I haven’t told you everything yet. I didn’t just come here to rehash our oldest argument, as much fun as that sounds. There’s something else. Something we haven’t seen in a long, long time. Something that might be more dangerous than anything else we’ve dealt with before.”
But Philip couldn’t hear her anymore. All he could hear was the sound of his front door flying open, the whining of the gate as it was pulled open with more force than it had been in a very long time. Stricken, he turned back to his wall of windows, the place that allowed him to play god with his beloved city.
He saw what he expected to see, the only thing he could have seen, but it made him roar with disappointment and rage all the same. It was the most dramatic noise Caroline had ever heard him utter and she winced, actually stepping back from him as if she thought that he might hurt her. He didn’t care. He couldn’t care, not now. At the moment, the only thing he could care about was the picture of Megan running away from his house just as quickly as she could.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Little magpie, why do you let the world take you the way that you do?”
“I don’t understand. How do I let the world take me? What should I have it do with me instead?”
“You don’t need me to tell you that. Little magpies always know. You’ve always known, that’s why you run. Isn’t that so?”
“I don’t know!” she cried frantically, whirling from one place to the next and seeing nothing. “I don’t! I don’t know a thing. I run because I run. It’s what I do. It’s what I always do.”
It was dark, so very dark, and Megan was afraid. She was afraid because she didn’t know where she was, and she was afraid because she did. She was afraid because she could not see, not a single thing, and yet she did not want to, had no desire to see at all.
She could hear a sort of a breathiness surrounding her, like the way she imagined it might sound to be inside of a person’s lungs while you listened to said person’s breath, and she knew that whoever was talking to her was very close. It was a stranger. She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, everyone knew that.
She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, and who was it that had told her that for the very first time? She knew that it was usually a parent who gave that warning but she had never had any parents, at least not while she had been old enough to receive a warning like that. She had spent all of her young years living in an orphanage and then after that being moved from foster care home to foster care home until she turned eighteen and could pretend to be an adult.
She remembered wishing every night that she might find her forever home, a set of parents who would really want to belong to her, and she remembered when she had stopped wishing for much of anything at all. She had walked out of her last faux home on the very eve of her eighteenth birthday, convinced that now she was an adult.
That was the age her theoretical mother had been when she had given her up, her mother who had loved being a junkie more than she had loved her infant. As it turned out, something she knew now with absolute clarity, eighteen wasn’t very old at all.
It was just that it took being older to know that for real. So no, she hadn’t had a set of Leave it to Beaver parents to warn her off of strangers, but it was something she knew anyway. Strangers were bad. Strangers were to be avoided.
“Little magpie, why do you fight so hard? Don’t you want it? Don’t you want some place to belong?”
Except that this wasn’t a stranger. She didn’t know who it was, was almost certain it wasn’t a person she had actually met, but it wasn’t a stranger, either. It was somebody she knew from inside of her bones and that was the most frightening thing of all.
No, she didn’t want this and she twisted herself with everything she had, pulled herself away like stepping through an ocean of molasses. The last thing she heard before waking up was a warning, and that warning carried across the chasm spanning across sleep and waking just fine.
“Stay close to the dead man. He’s dangerous but he’ll keep you safe. He’ll keep you safe until you see yourself for what you are, little magpie, and then you won’t ever need saving again.”
Megan arched up off of the bed with a gasp. She couldn’t get enough air. She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs and she was going to suffocate. Her body jerked up again, once, twice, looking just like one of those extras on Grey’s Anatomy being electrocuted back to life. She was still stuck inside of her nightmare, at least enough to be disoriented, and it took her a minute or two to realize where she was.
The dead man. Stay close to the dead man. That was what the voice had told her, and what in the hell could that mean? Christ, why would she want to stay close to a dead man? Except she knew what the voice meant. She knew who the voice meant. She looked around her with wide, frightened eyes, seeing that she was still in the massive bed chambers of one Mr. Philip Smith. Chambers.
He called his bedroom (although it was a very, very big space to go by a name as simple as “bedroom”) his chambers, and wasn’t that an antiquated way to put it? She didn’t know anybody who talked that way because nobody talked that way, at least outside of a movie rendition of one of those fancy romance novels. She had never been a fan of those.
Nothing about them seemed even remotely realistic to her. But that was the kind of language Philip used and before letting him ravage her in his ship sized bed, it hadn’t really made much of an impression on her.
But now, shifting up onto her elbows and feeling her whole body ache with both the satisfaction of sex and her almost complete lack of sleep for only god knew how long, it’s different. That language doesn’t seem stupid and silly and like just another affectation of a man who thought too highly of himself. Now it means a hell of a lot more. The dead man.
The voice that had called her magpie (also strangely familiar even though she was positive she couldn’t remember anyone ever calling her by that or any other nickname) had told her to stay close to the dead man, and Megan didn’t really need that explained to her. She knew what that meant.
The dead man was Philip. Cold, stone-like skin, the phantom of a heartbeat she now believed must have existed only in her imagination. And the teeth. It had been kinky and beyond a turn on when he had grazed her delicate ankle with his unusually sharp teeth and sucked lightly until the blood had run dry. Her whole body hand tingled then. It had seemed like she could feel his teeth all over her body, running along her skin as light as feathers. It had felt like ecstasy because those were not normal teeth and they weren’t attached to a normal man.
Vampire. The word flashed inside of her mind like a neon sign and it should have been ridiculous, but it wasn’t. She was in New Orleans, a city that loved the folklore of vampires so well that it often bled into reality and then faded back out again. That was true for a lot of people, but it hadn’t ever been true for Megan. She hadn’t been interested in that kind of thing, not one way or another. She had been much more of a “keep your head down and try not to bring any more trouble down on yourself” kind of a girl. The only thing that had ever really captured her imagination was the big white house.
This big white house, the one she had finally gotten a look at and wasn’t it even better in reality than she could have hoped? But it turned out that being inside of this house was the same as believing in the boogie man because she was close to the dead man now, wasn’t she? She had been sleeping in his bed. Vampire. He was a vampire and what she needed to do was get the hell out of dodge, like, yesterday.
“Shit. Shit!” she hissed to herself, feeling so
mething a lot like panic bubbling up inside of her chest. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The sound of her own voice was enough to get her moving. She had been in a kind of frozen state after waking, totally consumed with the thoughts she couldn’t stop from coming, but that was definitely no longer the case. She jumped out of bed, feeling like she couldn’t ever move fast enough, groping around in the dark for the little black summer dress he had tossed so unceremoniously aside.
The carpet was plush and impossibly deep, the kind of carpet only rich people could afford. Super, super rich people. She knew the dress was here somewhere, could vaguely recall the image of him yanking it up over her head the second time around (he hadn’t needed any time at all before he was ready for round two) and tossing it aside while she laughed giddily.
But where? Where the hell was it? She was on hands and knees now, feeling around in the dark like a blind person. The carpet was a rich purple and the rest of the room was so dark! This guy had to have the best blackout curtains in the whole wide world for the room to be this dark. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of starlight or a moonbeam breaking through. Why on earth would he want it so dark?
“Oh,” she said to herself in a dull, flat breath, “right. Vampire.”
She reckoned that not everything in the myths about vampires were true, especially since she had first seen him when it was still twilight outside and not at all full dark, but that didn’t mean they loved light or anything like that. She felt a moment of curiosity before her mind started to scream at her again and she resumed her search.
Finally, and thank God for it, her pinky finger caught on something strappy and she pulled her little dress towards her, almost sobbing with relief. She had a habit of becoming claustrophobic when she felt like she might not be able to leave a place.
Even in a home as huge as this one, she could feel that claustrophobic panic threatening. It wasn’t about the size, anyway. She could easily have fit about six of her apartment, hell, probably ten, and still had plenty of room to spare. No, it was about the idea that she couldn’t just pick up and go. That was super important to her, to be able to pick up and go.
“Will he let me?”
She had shimmied into her dress quickly, with the ease of a person practiced at leaving places quickly, and slipped on her sandals in one fluid motion. She had been all set, but that last thought stopped her cold. The thought was in her words, in her voice, but it felt foreign. It felt like the same voice from the dream still wrapped tightly around her, and it made her skin prickle with goosebumps.
She couldn’t tell if that voice was friend or foe, and she didn’t want to stick around to find out. She needed to get out of here. She had to get out of there RIGHT NOW. She pulled the door open with a not inconsiderable effort. Even in her intense unease, she was surprised by the weight of it.
She could still vividly see Philip opening it and ushering her inside before making a playground of her body. He had opened it like it had no weight at all, thrown it back so that it almost hit the wall it was attached to. She remembered it so well because she had thought to herself that he was being a showoff, that he was trying to make the entrance to his chambers even grander (as if it needed to be).
Now, realizing that it took almost everything she had just to open that same door at all, she thought that perhaps he hadn’t been able to help that little show. She couldn’t say just how strong Philip Smith was, but she knew it was far stronger than any human man. Just one more piece of evidence to put down in the pro vampire column of the little list she was making inside of her head.
That pro column was growing longer with each minute ticking by on the massive home’s grandfather clock, while the con column only had one item. Only one, that vampires weren’t actually possible, and that point was rapidly losing its weightiness.
Pretty soon she thought that it might be wiped off the slate entirely and she would be left with nothing but the complete certainty that vampires were real. And if vampires were real, what did that mean about all of the other things that went bump in the night? Did that make all of those legends and myths true? Just where in the hell did it stop?
“No,” she whispered fiercely, “no. Not going there. Can’t go there, not while I’m still inside this house. If I do that, I’ll never get out. I’ll slip right down the rabbit hole and I’ll never be able to get back out again.”
She nodded to herself the same way she would have if she had been talking to another person and not herself, and moved on, not bothering to shut the door after she left Philip’s bed chambers. It wasn’t that she was trying to be rude or anything like that, it wasn’t even that well thought out. It was honestly as simple as she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to close it even if she wanted to, and also she highly doubted things like that mattered to Philip.
She knew that it was crazy, that it had to be crazy, that she needed it to be crazy, but she got the sense that it wasn’t a door that he usually kept closed from day to day in whatever strange amalgamation of tides constituted as his life. She felt that he had closed the door for her, for her sake. He had known (whether consciously or unconsciously) that she would be visiting him soon and he wanted to keep that possibility separate.
He wanted her to want to see his room, and to know that, by the time she made it clear that, yes, that was indeed what she wanted, it was because she wanted him to take her. She had let him take her, a vampire, a man who wasn’t a man at all and could have sucked the life out of her without taxing himself at all.
But it was more than that. She hadn’t just let him, she had wanted him to. She had needed to keep from begging him to, that’s how badly she had wanted it. Even now, when she played their escapades back like a film inside of her mind, she could feel that want bubbling up inside. If he had walked up that fancy stairwell of his at that moment and glided down the hall towards her she would have let him pick her up and take her straight back to bed.
She knew it without an ounce of doubt, and that knowing frightened her most of all. It frightened her even more than understanding what he really was (the dead man, the vampire she was supposed to stick close to if the magpie voice held any truth in it), and shaking all over, she finally began to move.
The idea of leaving a place was almost always an easy thing. The concept of how one would do it, the planning of the thing. Sometimes Megan thought that the only times leaving a place was actually easy were the few times when she worried that it would be hard.
Otherwise, there always seemed to be a snag in the plan, some kind of hiccup of varying size. It could be something as vague as emotional responses and it could be something as straightforward as a car that wouldn’t start, but a hiccup none the less.
The hiccup on this particular occasion was the sheer size of the place she was in. Even from the street on the dozens, maybe even hundreds of times when she had stood outside of this house, she hadn’t ever begun to grasp just how massive this place really was. She had known it was large, of course she had. She had known it was larger than most houses in the country but now she knew that saying a thing like that was like referring to the T-Rex as kind of a big reptile (she wasn’t sure that a T-Rex was even a reptile, but it worked for her as a comparison). This house was a behemoth of a home, a real live mansion with room upon room upon room into eternity.
She had no idea how many rooms there really were, but she knew it was enough to get lost in, which was exactly what she went and did. She made it through the ballroom alright, knowing it was a ballroom without ever having been told and getting a whole new case of the creeps when she fancied that she could see a ball from the past going on around her as she moved. She could smell very, very old lilac and the faintest smell of manure and then it was gone.
“Stop it” hissing at herself yet again, “you didn’t smell anything. You’re being stupid now. SO stupid. There aren’t ghosts, no such thing, and even if there were you can’t smell a thing far from the past.”
She told herself that almost sure that it would make her feel better, but it didn’t. It didn’t at all. Her awareness of what Philip really was operated like a floodgate and a floodgate was never so easy to shut off again as say, your run of the mill faucet. Whether she wanted to or not, she knew that vampires were real and that knowledge seemed to be a gateway. It made it so that she could see other things, other parts of the world that most people couldn’t see. Like ghosts. God, if she could see that now, what else would be out there?
A world that may have sucked in a big way but had nevertheless been largely predictable to her now loomed high over her head, completely full with the potential for and the fear of the unknown. And that was assuming that she ever got out of the house, which was starting to feel less and less likely.
Because while she was starting to realize that ghosts were every bit as real as vampires, she had stopped paying attention to where she was going and what she was doing and when she finally came back to her senses, she had no idea where she was at all. Or, to be more specific, how she had gotten there.
Looking around her she could see that she was in a portrait room. It was a long, narrow room with very high ceilings and walls painted a dark but fading blue. The chair rail and crown molding were white and were the only things that broke up the masses of portraits hung at all manner of different heights and angles. She was fascinated, almost fascinated enough to forget that she was trying to run away. Some of these portraits were so old! So old that she felt like they should have belonged to a museum or something.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 8