by Jade White
The thought of him bursting into ash in the car was horrifying and she knew there was no way she was going to be able to protect Blake from it. There was no way she was going to stop him from breathing in all of that ash.
Maybe that wasn’t the most important thing to be thinking about right now.
“What do you need?” she asked him, looking around. Maybe there was something they could block out the windows with. She didn’t know how piercing the sunlight was going to be to him or how it was going to affect him. Was it any kind of sunlight or was it direct sunlight? So long as they kept the sunlight behind them, maybe they would be just fine.
But they were traveling south.
It was going to come in right through the side of the window, hitting Victor first. He winced already, snapping and hissing at the sight of the sun that was just starting to crest on the horizon, a sliver of blinding white that felt like it was never going to come. It felt like they had been trapped here and there was no escape from the suffocating and strangling darkness of the night, but now it was infinitely worse. This was going to kill the one man she had a hope of being saved by. She didn’t know what he’d done, but he’d definitely killed a lot of those things last night. He was still thick with the gray film of ash that covered him.
She looked at him and noticed that his skin was starting to smoke and steam, his pale complexion turning a red that was going to get worse and worse as the sunlight got more prevalent. She quickly took off her jacket and wrapped it around his head, hiding him from the sunlight and giving him a hood.
“Turn off at the nearest exit,” she said to him, knowing that there had to be some kind of a hotel or motel that they would be able to hide out at for a few hours. She wondered if those motorcyclists, clad in black, would be able to follow them or operate during the daylight. She didn’t think so. It would be too risky. She had seen the cyclists looking behind them at the sunlight when they got onto the interstate. That was the look of fear and terror.
Victor didn’t argue. They got off the interstate at the nearest exit and luckily, there was a sign indicating that there would be a hotel for them. She wasn’t surprised. Practically every exit on the interstate had a hotel or someplace for travelers to rest their weary eyes. Victor’s hands were red and smoking by the time they pulled into the shade of another building and she got out to go pay for the rooms and get their key cards.
She looked at Victor who was hunkered down and waiting for her to return, terrified of getting out. When she got the keys and returned to the car, he was in the passenger’s seat, hiding underneath a mountain of clothing. There was no way he was getting out of that seat.
“Pull around back,” he advised and she did just that.
He walked down the hallway of the hotel, smoking and smoldering a little; his hands looked like they were coated in dry ice and his face was smoking as well. It was a strange sight and they cultivated a few looks from the housekeeping staff who stared at them, looking confused and troubled. They weren’t used to seeing something like this. She didn’t blame them. Truthfully, it was still very hard for Shawna to get used to it.
She set Blake down in the corner, awake and hungry. As she fed him, Victor went into the bathroom and preceded to do whatever vampires did when they were smoldering and burning. She could hear him cursing and mumbling through the door. By the time he was finished with his little task, Blake was fast asleep and she was rocking him gently in the chair.
She was almost afraid to ask what he had been doing in there, but there was a look on his face that suggested he would be more than willing to tell her. She felt a cold shiver run down her spine. She was in the same room as a vampire.
That was going to take some getting used to.
“Why are they after us?” she asked him, whispering so that she wouldn’t wake up Blake, but she was fairly certain that if a semi crashed through the wall right now, he wouldn’t even flinch. He was the hardest sleeper she’d ever met. He was so strong at sleeping that it genuinely worried her. Sometimes, she thought he had slipped into a coma.
“Lots of reasons,” Victor said blankly. “It takes a very old vampire to have a child and it’s a rather rare occurrence. The moment a child is born, those who can sense it are eager to extinguish it.”
“Why is that?” she asked him.
“Rivalry, mostly,” he said with a shrug. “Immortal beings tend to get bitter and angry toward each other and they refuse to play nicely. They’re always looking to one up each other. For a vampire to have a child, though, is a rare moment and the child is mostly hunted down and sought to be killed because it has the best of both worlds.
“You see, Blake will be born with the immortality and the skills of a vampire, but he’ll have none of the negative drawbacks. There’s a whole community of immortal sons and daughters of vampires, living in seclusion, a practical paradise for them. It’s the kind of life that thousands would be hungry for and those who don’t have the luxury of it are envious of it.”
“So my son is going to live forever?” she asked him, skeptical of things that sounded too good to be true.
“There’s a catch of course,” he said with a smile, clearly reading her mind and playing with her. She didn’t like feeling like she was being played with and she almost felt like she should be shouting at him. “You must have had a vision at some point during the pregnancy. You did, didn’t you?”
“The night of it,” she said, nodding. She knew there was no hiding from him and it wasn’t worth it to try and be coy or play games. This was the point where directness was crucial. “I dreamed of people in the shadows and a church.”
“That’s because there’s something that you’re going to have to do,” he said to her with an assured voice. “They’re going to be able to track him, to pick up his scent anywhere he goes for the rest of his life. Right now, while he’s a child, we have to take him to the oldest church and having him touched with holy water. The moment that water touches him, they won’t be able to track him or harm him again. He’ll be beyond their reach.”
She didn’t understand that and it felt like it was a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo, but she supposed she wasn’t really in any kind of a position to contradict or call him out on it. After all, she was sitting here, talking to a vampire.
There was no way any of this was going to make any sense to her. She was just going to have to have faith that he knew what he was talking about and that this was going to work.
Looking over at Blake while he was fast asleep, she wondered if they were going to be able to make it. Where was the oldest church in America? Victor claimed to be around for such a long time that he had to obviously know where that was. He had to know that there was some special location for all of this.
She wondered if he was going to get her there without incident. Were they done following them or were they still in trouble? All of these questions were driving her insane as he walked back into the bathroom and looked at his reflection.
Suddenly, she realized he didn’t have a reflection. He was watching the smoke drift up into the air off his skin and he was trying to smother it with the tip of his finger. She could only imagine how difficult that was. She smiled at the thought of it. It was ridiculous to watch. There was something charming about the fact that he was going to try and find a way to fix this.
She liked watching him in the bathroom, having him here with her. She remembered why she had fallen for him in the first place and how she had become attached to him. He was a charming man with the kind of personality that made people gravitate toward him.
Why he had decided to draw the attention of a young woman who was living a normal life without anything spectacular happening to her was beyond Shawna’s understanding. But it felt good to have him here. He had strangely been the most devastating force in her life and the hero she hadn’t been expecting to come riding in to save her.
Of course, it was easy to forgive him when she had Blake here to think about as w
ell. Without Blake in her life, she didn’t know what she would be doing. She would be devastated and alone. She watched him and smiled at him.
“What are you looking at?” he asked her with a suspicious tone in his voice, like he was going to believe a word that came out of her mouth.
She smiled and shook her head. He could read her mind and she wasn’t going to waste the words. He chuckled and shook his head. There was something wonderfully playful about him.
“How long until sunset?” she asked him, changing the topic so that he wasn’t going to get too bold.
“I have no idea,” he said with a shrug. “But if those freaks show up again, I’ll be waiting for them.”
“How exactly do you think that you’re going to be able to hold off all of them alone?”
“The older the vampire, the harder he is to kill,” he said with a shrug. “All of these little things are nothing more than fresh vampires, hoping to get some credit and renown for killing an immortal. They’re less than a few decades old. They’re no match for someone like me.”
“How many of them are there?” She was wondering how long they were going to have to fight through hordes of vampires to get to the end of this.
“A hundred, maybe,” he shrugged, coming out of the bathroom and dropping down into a chair near Blake and watched him, smiling with glee and delight at the sight of his son. There was something inside of him that was building up with true happiness at the sight of their son. She liked to see him so happy toward Blake.
There was something scared inside of her, worried that he wasn’t going to be interested in their child. She wanted him to like their child at the very least, but that was beyond her. It’s not like she could command it.
Wait, he said that there were a hundred!
“Excuse me?” she asked him. “You don’t think that you’re going to get a little overwhelmed by a hundred vampires?”
“A little more,” he shrugged. “To kill a truly old vampire, you have to stick something straight into his heart, but as the years progress and decades turn into centuries, our bones start getting harder and harder, making it more difficult to kill us.
“These young fools are all flash and style, with absolutely no substance. They waste their time watching kung fu movies when they should be reading up on vampire lore. But, I’m not going to complain about it now.”
She supposed this was going to have to be what would keep her satisfied with the curiosity that was surrounding vampires and what their lives were like.
It wasn’t like she was going to understand any of this or get to the bottom of it any time soon. She was a human and he was something immortal and mythical. He was something that shouldn’t exist. She wasn’t going to start shooting holes in what reality should and shouldn’t be right now.
“Why me?” she asked him after a moment, watching him as he stared at their child with supreme fascination on his features.
He was a handsome man and it was hard for her to get over just how handsome he was. She wondered if that had something to do with being a vampire or if it had everything to do with the fact that he had been handsome from the very beginning. She didn’t know which would be the truth, but she knew that she was curious about why he’d chosen her.
“Excuse me?” he asked, looking up from their child and staring at her for a moment.
“Why did I get pregnant with Blake?”
She was practical about this. She knew that there had to be rules or laws about it. It either had to do with some kind of benchmark that he’d passed in the world of vampires or he had just become something truly spectacular in the world of vampires.
Maybe it was the fact that he had slept with enough women that he finally hit the point where he popped out a child. She didn’t know, but there had to be some reason why he was responsible for getting her pregnant right then in his life. He looked at her with his dark eyes, pondering the question and thinking about what he was going to say to her. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.
“You’re not going to believe it if I tell you,” he said bluntly, looking at her with all the seriousness in the world.
“Try me,” she said with a shrug. “I just found out that the father of my child is a vampire and that there’s a horde of vampires chasing us around to kill my immortal child. I think I’m open to the idea of having something strange shoved down my throat.”
“Fine,” he said, clearing his throat. “The books I’ve read all say the same thing. It says that when you find someone that you truly love, like a truly infinite love, the kind of love that sculpts heroic deeds and changes the way you see the world, that’s when a vampire will give up his child.
“It’s said that the love is so powerful and so pure, there is nothing that can stop the two from having something so incredible that they give birth to an immortal child. They say that this person, the one they find that offers them true love, is their soul mate and the person they’re destined to be with.” He waited for a moment while that fact sunk in to her.
She stared at him, not sure if he was having her on or if she was supposed to believe that. She truly wanted to believe it and she thought she might actually do so for once in her life. She thought there was a good chance that she truly did, but it scared her.
She had spent the last nine months hating Victor and vowing to kill him if she ever saw him. But now that she knew he was being hunted by an army of vampires and trying his hardest to keep them away from her, it was a little difficult to truly hate him. She wanted to be forgiving, but at the same time, that hate was deeply engrained in her.
She was going to need something drastic that actually knocked her out of the rut her life had become. She was going to need to find out if she truly loved him or not.
“I suppose,” she said, clearing her throat, “I should thank you for saving our lives.”
“It’s not like I had much of a choice,” he said with a smile on his lips, sensing what she was thinking.
She hated that he had the ability to see exactly what she was thinking. He grinned at her and she knew he was savoring what he was seeing in her mind.
“You really hate me,” he said with a chuckle. “I hope you realize that I was doing it to save your life. I didn’t know how close they were to getting on top of me, but I can tell you right now they were extremely close. They would kill everyone in your building if it meant getting to me.”
“Why?” she asked him bluntly. She didn’t understand why they were all after him. She wanted to know what made him such a dangerous vampire or such a hated vampire to say the least. What was it that made them all want to kill him and string him up for the world to see and witness. She wasn’t sure she was going to like the answer, but she figured she deserved a little bit of an answer.
“Nope,” he said with a grin on his lips. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Why not?” she asked him, suddenly very frustrated with the man she was staying with.
“Because it’s a long story and you’re not in the mood,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not going to pour out my life story to a woman who has absolutely no interest in hearing it other than to weigh my innocence or my guilt. My life is not going to be what makes you decide whether you’re going to forgive me or not. My actions are going to have to do that for you.”
“I hate you,” she said bluntly. “There’s nothing to think about.”
“Besides the fact that I saved your life and the life of my son,” he said bluntly back at her. “Besides the fact that I risked everything to come back and see you and save you. Besides the fact that I nearly burned myself to death in an attempt to get you to safety? Besides the fact that I’m intending to make sure that every last cent of my considerable wealth goes to making sure that you and my son are taken care of? Is that the kind of stuff that you’re not going to think about?
“Because right now, all I can think about is the fact that any other vampire would have taken their child and left you to die. I c
are about you and have since the moment we spent that night together and I intended to make sure that you were safe.
“So, before you start throwing around how much you hate me and how you’re the queen of the world, maybe you should at least show a little gratitude and get off my back about the fact that I didn’t have a chance to leave you a love letter when I was drawing away an army of blood thirsty demons from killing you and our unborn child.”
She looked at him, her blood pounding through her veins and her heart slamming against her chest. She could feel the rage rippling up through her and she didn’t even remember when she’d gotten to her feet in anger, but there she stood, glaring at him with all the rage she could muster.
She knew she wanted to unleash every last inch of it on him. She wanted to tell him everything she had inside of her mind, but she knew he could hear it already so there was no need to waste the words.
