When Hirsch woke days later, his platoon was dead, and he himself was a vampire -- and Ridgemont’s slave.
And a slave he’d remained for the next seventy-seven years. He -- a son of the Master Race! It was galling.
If he could only get his hands on that little Kith bitch, Hirsch thought through a fog of pain. He’d Change her and use the power she’d bring him to rip out McKinnon’s guts. Then he’d go after Ridgemont.
And he’d be free at last -- with the girl as his slave.
* * *
“This Kith thing,” Val began. “Kith and kin to vampires? What the hell does that mean?” She frowned as an ugly thought occurred. “I’m not going to start growing fangs, am I?”
Cade gave her a dark smile. “Not without help.”
“That kind of help I don’t need.”
“No.” He focused his attention on the traffic again. “But you’re basically right. You do have the potential to become a vampire.”
The thought sent a shiver of revulsion through her. To drink blood, to view other people as prey…
Val shook the reaction off. This was not the time for blind emotion. She needed to understand what was going on if she wanted to find a way out of this mess. Pretend this is just another interview. “I gather most people can’t Change, then.”
“Nope.”
“So -- what? The whole ‘three bites and you’re a vamp’ thing is a myth?”
“Basically. Nobody’s sure, of course, but I suspect vampirism is actually an infection. A virus, maybe. It definitely does things to the body -- makes you faster, stronger, harder to kill. Some kind of cellular changes must be taking place.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Viruses don’t act like that, McKinnon. They hijack your cells to make more of themselves, not turn you into Superman with fangs.”
“Maybe not, but you sure as hellfire get sick when you Change. Kith are the only ones who have even have a chance at surviving the process -- it kills everybody else. And given that the Change begins with a blood exchange, it does sound like a contagion.”
“Or some kind of symbioses.”
“Could be.” His expression turned dark, inward. “But no matter what kind of advantages it gives you, it makes you pay. You pay in everything that matters.”
Chapter Six
Slowly, cursing every step, Hirsch hobbled into the mansion, one arm draped over Mason’s shoulder.
“In the formal dining room, Gerhard.” Ridgemont’s mental voice rumbled with psychic power Hirsch could feel all the way to the base of his skull. “I’m at supper.”
Hirsch ground his teeth against the pain as the chauffeur helped him through the mansion’s endless halls to his waiting sire.
They found Ridgemont lounging amid the gleam of dark wood and polished silver, a stiletto in his hand and a bowl of lemon slices at his elbow. On the table before him rested an enormous silver platter. A nude woman knelt in its center on a carpet of roses. Her long, auburn hair was the exact same shade as Valerie’s.
A length of rope bound the girl, looping around her back and knees so she was bent double, arms bound at her side. The thorns on the rose stems dug into her bleeding shins and the tops of her feet. Three thin cuts marked the out-thrust bowls of her ass; Ridgemont was just getting started with his meal.
The smell of blood hit the back of Hirsch’s throat, and his mouth began to water as the Hunger punched through the pain of his wound.
“Sit down, Gerhard, and report,” Ridgemont said, drawing the point of his knife delicately across one of the girl’s pale buttocks. She jerked with a strangled cry. The Old One leaned forward and ran his tongue over the slice. Her fear poured over Hirsch like a waterfall, and he drew it in greedily, feeling himself strengthen.
Ridgemont rarely killed his victims; he didn’t like leaving corpses to draw unwelcome official attention. But even without actually taking her life, he knew how to terrorize a woman so thoroughly he could feast on her pain and panic.
As the girl whimpered and struggled fruitlessly in her bonds, Mason lowered Hirsch into a chair. When Gerhard leaned back, he noticed the chauffeur’s gaze flicked to Ridgemont’s victim, then quickly away. Mason’s intense guilt at being unable to help her was as delicious as the girl’s fear. Gerhard almost purred as he drew in the psychic energy from both victims and channeled it into his starving cells, repairing the damage McKinnon had done.
Licking the point of his knife, Ridgemont lifted a brow. “Hirsch?”
Prodded, Gerhard hastily began his report. He would have preferred to downplay the ease with which the American had beaten him, but he didn’t dare. Ridgemont took a dim view of efforts to mislead him, and his sire’s displeasure was something best avoided.
As Hirsch described his fight with McKinnon, Ridgemont licked lazily at the girl’s wounds, then buried his face against her sex. She jerked in her bonds. Hirsch felt him give her a psychic push into arousal.
Ridgemont favored a complex blend of emotions when he fed, and he enjoyed creating a mix of pain, desire, and fear in his victims like a chef preparing an exotic dish.
It all seemed unnecessarily complicated to Hirsch. He’d always found beating his women worked well enough. Their reactions provided a psychic charge that, along with blood, more than met his needs. Besides, he enjoyed the sheer sensual pleasure of laying on the whip.
Gerhard had always been a simple man.
When he finished his story, Ridgemont straightened away from the girl and lifted a golden brow. “Letting Valerie distract you was stupid, as I’m sure that gut wound amply demonstrates. You can’t allow your attention to wander in any fight, particularly against McKinnon. He has too many advantages over you as it is.”
“But he has none over you,” Hirsch said, pain making him reckless. “Why didn’t you go with me to claim her? By now, he’ll have --”
“Done nothing.” The Old One lazily traced a fingertip in the girl’s blood. “The gunslinger is too gallant to take her by force, and seducing her will take time. You still have a chance.”
“I?” Hirsch stared at his sire. “Aren’t you going to…?”
“He’d know I was coming.”
“But you could take her away from him so easily.”
“I could, but I have no intention of doing so.” Ridgemont smiled that slow, chilling grin of his. “I’ll make you a deal, Hirsch. If you recover the girl, you can have her.”
Gerhard’s eyes widened. Did the Old One mean it?
Excitement stirred beneath the pain -- along with a wave of dark hunger at the thought of owning Valerie Chase.
* * *
Val twisted at the handcuffs as her mind raced. McKinnon had been quiet for the past half hour or so, which had given her entirely too much time to stew in her rising anxiety. When they finally reached their destination, what would he do to her? I’ve got to get away from him while I still can.
The vampire kept glancing at her, frowning in a combination of guilt and frustration. “Would you calm down? I told you I’m not going to hurt you, and I meant it. Which is a guarantee you’re not going to get from Ridgemont.”
“Ridgemont doesn’t have me handcuffed to a car door,” she snarled, giving the cuffs another vicious jerk and ignoring the way the metal bit into her wrists.
“Stop that! You’re hurting yourself.”
“Then unlock the cuffs!”
“I don’t care to have you attack me when I’m driving down the highway. I might survive a crash, but you…”
“Still better than being an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Transylvania Kid.”
She thought for moment he was going to laugh. Then the humor fled his face. “Whatever you think I’m going to do to you, Ridgemont will do worse. He comes from a time when people believed you had power because God gave it to you, and no one else had the right to question it. Especially women.”
She eyed him. “Just how old is he? For that matter, how old are you?”
“I was born in 184
6.”
Val’s jaw dropped as she stared at him, doing the math. “That makes you…”
“One hundred and seventy-five.”
“Oh,” she said faintly. “You look about thirty.”
“I was thirty-seven when Ridgemont Changed me. Stopped aging then.” He grimaced. “At least where it shows.”
“Were you really a Texas Ranger?” Her eyes narrowed as she remembered all the other things he’d told her. “Or did you lie about that, too?”
He submerged her in an icy stare. “You sure you really want to piss me off this bad -- considering you’re chained to the door?”
Val’s common sense told her to back down, but she curled a lip and stiffened her spine. She was damned if she’d grovel to anybody, vampire or not. “What are you going to do? Bite me?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
She contemplated the wisdom of shutting up, but her reporter’s curiosity overcame her. “So how many candles are on Ridgemont’s cake?”
“Eight hundred and fifty-two.”
The idea was mind-boggling. “Jesus --”
“-- Had nothing to do with it. Though Ridgemont did go on the Third Crusade under Richard the Lionheart.” McKinnon’s voice dropped to a mutter. “A fact he never fails to mention.”
Wonder drowned her impulse to bitchery. “Damn. Eyewitness to centuries… There are historians who’d give their eye teeth to talk to him.”
He snorted. “They’d end up giving more than that, especially if they were female.” McKinnon’s sensuous mouth tightened. “His age is the whole problem where we’re concerned. Vampires get stronger the longer they live, so Ridgemont is likely one of the most powerful on the entire planet.”
Despite her distrust of McKinnon, she felt a chill. “So he’s got you outgunned.”
“Yes, though even as a fledgling, he was formidable. He’d only been a vampire for fifty years when he killed his sire, which is practically unheard of. It takes most of us a century to free ourselves from a sire’s control. Possibly two, depending on the sire’s power.”
“How’d he go from the Crusades to being a vampire? I assume he wasn’t a vamp at the time.”
“No, that happened a few years after he got home. Ridgemont was the youngest son of minor nobility, so he had no lands. He made his living fighting for whichever lord would pay him. But his passion was tournaments -- jousts and what we’d call melees today, with teams of knights brawling. Must have been good at it, too, because he supported himself by taking other knights for ransom.”
Val blinked. “Sounds like the post-season was a bitch.”
“They were pretty hard-core in the Middle Ages. Anyway, one day he went to a tournament held by Simon of Ridgemont…”
“Which is where Ridgemont got his name, I gather. And this Simon was a vampire?”
“Yes. Simon realized Ridgemont was a Kith with impressive combat skills, so he decided to Turn him. Which was a serious miscalculation. Simon was only a century old, so enslaving Ridgemont was rather like trying to walk a tiger on a leash.”
“Sooner or later, you end up Meow Mix?”
Cade grinned. “Basically. Fifty years later, Ridgemont killed him and claimed his castle.”
“Opportunistic little jerk, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, becoming a vampire lord made Ridgemont even more sociopathic. Rumors started circulating about his tastes, and people began to suspect he was a demon.” McKinnon smiled grimly. “They weren’t wrong. The king was so alarmed, he sent an army to seize the castle and kill him. Ridgemont was forced to grab whatever gems and gold he could lay hands on and take to his heels. He spent the next centuries growing more and more powerful and doing whatever he damned well pleased to anyone with the misfortune to catch his attention.” He shot her a glance. “Especially women.”
“So how did you cross paths with him?”
Cade shrugged. “I was a Texas Ranger at the time, hunting some jackass who thought he was Billy the Kid. I’d delivered the bastard to the lockup in Austin and booked a hotel room. I was on the way up the stairs to my room when a woman screamed in pain. When I heard a man laugh, I kicked in the door. Ridgemont had a naked woman tied up and was cutting her breasts with a silver knife.”
She recoiled. “What? Why?”
“His idea of sex games. I tried to arrest him, but what I should have done is blow his head off.”
“Does shooting a vampire actually work?”
“It can if you put enough bullets in his brain. Ridgemont tried to order me to get out, and when I didn’t, he realized I was Kith. I didn’t even see him coming. He knocked me cold, and I woke up tied to a chair just before he sank his fangs in my neck.”
She stared at his profile as he directed a thousand-yard stare at the highway. “I’m… so sorry.”
“You never want him to get his hands on you, Valerie. “
“I figured that out when I watched what he did to my parents.”
“As bad as that was, having him in your head is worse.” A muscle flexed in Cade’s square jaw. “I fought him with everything I had, but he just rolled over me like a stinking black wave. Told me he was what he was because God had willed it, and that gave him the right to do whatever he wanted with anyone who was weaker. When I told him that was bullshit, he pointed out I’d fought a war because I thought the same.”
Val frowned, puzzling, until it hit her. “Are you talking about the Civil War?”
He glanced at her and flinched at whatever was on her face before training his gaze on the road again. “Yes. I fought for the Confederacy.” He said it without emotion, but the muscles in his shoulders tightened, as if bracing against a blow.
Just when I thought he wasn’t a bastard… She’d studied the antebellum South for an African American studies course in college, and the things she’d learned had horrified her. “That’s pretty fucking ironic -- a guy who fought for slavery ending up on the other end of the whip.”
“You could say that.” His hands white-knuckled the steering wheel.
It is not a great idea to piss off the vampire… Oh, fuck it. “Did you actually enslave people?” The muscle working in his jaw was answer enough. “How could you do that? You make such a big deal out of protecting the helpless…”
“Did it ever occur to you that’s why I ‘protect the helpless?’ Because I realized I’ve got a fucking lot to make up for?”
Val had no idea why she felt so disillusioned and furious -- hell, he’d kidnapped her, not to mention almost killed her when she was twelve. “I’m sure that’s a big comfort to the hundreds of people you enslaved.”
“We didn’t own hundreds of people. It was a small farm. Mostly we raised corn, green beans, a few cows. My mother’s family were planters, and she brought a couple of slaves with her when she married my father. Later Ruth and George had three sons, Amos, Malachi, and Zachariah.”
“News flash, Fang. Five people or five hundred, it doesn’t Goddamn matter.”
She’d opened her mouth to continue the rant when he said, “You’re right. And I knew as much by the time I was fourteen.”
Val blinked and closed her mouth.
“I realize this sounds like I’m saying I have a Black friend, but my brother Richard and I grew up with those men, worked and played with them. On a farm that size, everybody worked. I honestly believed the boys were my friends, but Ridgemont made me realize you don’t befriend someone who can kill you at any time. Even when your master’s in a good mood, he can always turn on you.”
“Did you beat them?” She had to know.
Surprisingly, McKinnon didn’t take offense. “Me? No. I was a kid.”
“But somebody did? Because who works sunup to sundown for a plate of fatback and beans.”
“We fed them a little better than that. My father wasn’t particularly cruel by the standards of the time. He was as quick to take a strap to me and Dick as to the slaves. So I didn’t have to confront what we were really doing to them u
ntil a tornado hit one year. Lost most of the crops and a couple of cows. Winter was coming on, and Pa decided he had no choice except to sell Ruth’s oldest son.”
“That must have been hellish for his parents.”
“Yeah. Amos was twenty, smart as hell, and always quick with a joke. He was also worth the equivalent of a car in today’s money, which would feed all of us through the winter. Not that I gave a damn. I was fourteen at the time, and I was closer to Amos than my own brother, who could be a prickly son of a bitch.”
“I’ll bet Amos’s family wasn’t happy about it either.”
McKinnon snorted. “His mother reacted pretty much the way anyone would. She got on down on her knees to my father, crying and begging him not to sell her boy. She must have made Pa feel guilty, because he lost his temper.”
“What the hell did he expect? He was selling her child. Chances were she’d never even see him again.”
“None of which stopped Pa from dragging her out to the barn, grabbing a leather strap, and beating the living hell out of her while we all watched.” He drove in silence for a moment. “I will never forget the way her menfolk looked -- the pain and shame at their inability to defend her. But they also knew my father could legally put a bullet in any one of them if they opened their mouths.”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“I did. Pa had gone to great lengths to teach Dick and me not to hit women. He also taught us you didn’t stand by and watch someone do wrong. So I grabbed his wrist in mid-swing and started yelling at him. He jerked away and laid my face open with the crop.”
“You do realize Daddy was an abusive asshole?”
“By the standards of this century, yes. By the standards of the nineteenth…”
“What happened then?”
“Dick dragged me out of the barn before I could get in any more trouble. While Ma treated the cut, I asked her how she’d feel if one of us was sold. She told me it wasn’t the same because Black mothers don’t love their children as much as White ones do. Said Ruth would get over it in a week or so.”
Forever Kisses Volume 1 Page 8