Paradox

by Jeanne C. Stein

  He gives me that look. “You know what this is, Anna. It’s a giraffe! And we got to feed one at the Wild Animal Park. Do you know what they eat?”

  I set him down and Frey steps beside us, encircling my waist with an arm. “Why don’t you tell us?” he says, leaning close to peck my cheek.

  John-John windmills his arms in excitement. “They eat leaves. From the top of tall trees. And they eat hundreds of pounds of leaves a week. Hundreds of pounds!”

  His enthusiasm makes me smile. One of the things I love about having a child around is that sense of wonder I lost long ago…and never thought I’d find again. As a vampire, I can’t have children. Marrying Frey and being step-mother to John-John is an extraordinary gift.

  “Okay, son, time to wash up for dinner,” Frey says.

  John-John grabs his toy and skips off.

  “Could he be any cuter?” I sigh.

  Frey shakes his head in amusement. “He has his moments. We’ve only been home two days, though. The halo will wear off.”

  I put my arms around Frey’s neck and pull his face close. “What about your halo? When will it wear off?”

  Frey glances at his watch. “Right about John-John’s bedtime,” he says with a grin.

  “I can hardly wait.”

  We disentangle and Frey follows me into the kitchen. I can’t eat food, but Frey and John-John do. When they’re home it’s fun to play Suzy Homemaker, a role I’m not accustomed to. Tonight I’ve fixed lasagna with salad and bread. Well, to be honest, I bought the lasagna at a local deli. Garlic and I don’t get along.

  Frey breathes in appreciatively. “Smells good.” He pulls the cork on a bottle of wine and pours us two glasses. Handing me one, he says, “So, what did you do today?”

  I take the glass and sip before answering, “Well, nothing of interest at the office. Except for this…” I hand him the envelope from Chael.

  Frey lifts an eyebrow as he takes the envelope and looks inside. He withdraws the article and the note.

  “Chael.”

  His tone says it all. This vampire has never been one of Frey’s favorites. There is a natural enmity between shifters and vampires, but Frey’s feelings go far beyond what’s natural. Chael was once determined to get rid of me, and made several attempts on my life. He and I have since managed a truce, but Frey’s instinct to protect me makes it hard for him to trust Chael. They are barely civil to each other.

  Now Frey frowns as he reads, first the note, then the article.

  When he finishes, he looks up at me. “Is this real?”

  “I guess.” I pull the lasagna out of the oven and place the pan on a trivet. “I admit I’m curious. I did a computer search on her—she’s a New York Times bestselling author. Writes fiction—paranormal fiction. Vampire fiction. Could it be a coincidence that she was attacked from behind by someone who tried to bite her neck?”

  Frey looks dubious. “It could simply be a publicity stunt,” he says. “The article says she has a new book about to be published.”

  “And she’s working on a non-fiction piece,” I add, setting out plates and utensils. “About the supernatural underground.”

  Frey shakes his head. “Not the first time someone’s claimed to be ready to—” he makes air quotes with his fingers—“‘expose what creatures live amongst us.’ Probably won’t be the last either.”

  “And yet Chael is concerned enough to bring this to my attention.”

  Frey clucks his tongue. “Chael looks for any excuse to intrude in our lives. This is just his latest.” He narrows his eyes and shakes his finger. “He’s sweet on you. And he thinks I’m an unworthy consort to the Chosen One. The next thing we know, he’ll be at our front door.”

  I grin and plant a kiss on his cheek. “Doesn’t matter what he thinks. I say you’re more than worthy. I plan to show you how worthy later tonight.”

  “Yippee,” Frey growls, pulling me close.

  “I hope John-John tired himself out at the Wild Animal Park.”

  “I did my best,” Frey replies. He takes one of my hands and slides it down between us. “God, I missed you.”

  I grin up at him. “I can tell.”

  John-John is in bed and Frey and I are enjoying a glass of wine on the deck from our bedroom. The ocean sparkles and froths under a sliver of the moon. The sky is full of stars. Our lounge chairs are so close I feel the warmth of Frey’s skin where his arm comes in contact with mine. It sparks the sweet ache that’s part lust, part hunger. Frey will let me feed from him tonight while we’re making love. It’s the cement that binds us even closer than marital vows.

  Frey stirs beside me. He’s placed his glass on the deck and stands, offering me his hand. “Ready?” His voice is a rumbling whisper, full of promise.

  I take his hand and let him pull me up. I press myself against him and he leans in for a kiss. His passion sparks my own. Breathless, I lead him into the bedroom. In a heartbeat, we’re out of our clothes. Frey backs me to the bed, his hands and lips busy. I cling to him, surrendering. When he enters me, the world explodes in a whirlwind of sensation. And when I find his neck and begin to feed, we are lifted to new heights.

  Sex and blood.

  For a moment in time, I’m alive again.

  Chapter Two

  Day Two

  Frey and John-John are with me, coming to say hello to David before we head out for a day at the beach. John-John runs into David’s open arms.

  He picks up the boy and swings him around, John-John squealing with delight. When he sets him back down, John-John says, “We’re going to the beach. Come with us.”

  “I’d love to,” David replies. “But I have a job this morning.” He winks at me over John-John’s head. “Some of us have to work.”

  “Tracey here?” Frey asks.

  David shakes his head. “Nope. Seems I’m going solo on this one.”

  Frey takes a step forward. “Need any help?”

  I turn and raise an eyebrow. “You want to go with David on a job?” I glance at John-John. “What about the beach?”

  Frey shrugs. “You go ahead with John-John.” He glances at David. “We shouldn’t be too long, should we?”

  David turns to the desk and picks up a flyer. “Not for the two of us. The skip is a white collar embezzler. Ran out on his bail in New Mexico. He’s been spotted up the coast in Del Mar.”

  The details sound alarmingly familiar. Several years ago, David and I were after a white collar skip who turned out to be a vampire. It’s how I was turned. I put a hand on Frey’s arm. “White collar doesn’t mean harmless,” I remind him.

  He knows the story. He’s also aware that David knows nothing of the consequences of that night, nor does he know Frey is a shape-shifter. It’s not that I don’t think Frey can’t handle himself. It’s that if the job turns bad, I’m afraid he might have to reveal himself.

  Frey seems to be reading my mind. “I promise not to do anything dangerous,” he says. “I’ll leave the heavy lifting to David.”

  David flexes a well-defined bicep. “Yep. Heavy lifting is my specialty.”

  John-John, who very well may have been reading my thoughts, speaks up. “I think Dad can take care of himself.” He sounds reassuring and very grown up.

  “Okay. Guess I’m outnumbered.” I stand on tiptoes and give Frey a quick kiss. “Just be careful. No heroics.”

  He squeezes my hand. “I’ll leave heroics to David, too.”

  David gathers up his keys. “Let’s go, then. We should be back by three.” He motions Frey ahead of him toward the door and when I’m the only one who can see what he’s doing, he opens his jacket to show me that he has his Glock holstered at his waist. He winks and follows Frey out the door.

  If that gun is supposed to put me at ease, it doesn’t.

  John-John finds a box of donuts by the coffee machine. David must have picked them up on his way to the office. He looks at me with hopeful anticipation.

  “One,” I say. “You can have
one.”

  John-John takes the box to the desk. It takes two seconds of thoughtful deliberation before he picks a jelly-filled, glazed concoction. My mouth waters as he dives in. Fetching napkins from the corner coffee station, I take a seat opposite John-John to vicariously enjoy his pleasure.

  I so miss the simple things.

  John-John is scrubbing the jelly off his face and I’m at the coffee station putting the donuts away when the office door opens.

  Anna, John-John’s voice is in my head. A vampire just walked in.

  I whirl around, ready to attack.

  John-John, Chael says, opening his mind to John-John, too. I’ve looked forward to seeing you again. We met at your grandparent’s home in France.

  John-John nods. I remember.

  Now I have no reason to think Chael would harm Frey’s son, but all the same, I place myself between the boy and Chael. “You can speak out loud,” I tell him. “John-John knows what I am.”

  “Obviously,” Chael replies.

  “I know why you’re here,” I tell him. “What I don’t know is why you are so concerned.”

  Chael takes one of the office chairs. “I’ll tell you.”

  I open the desk drawer, find some blank paper and a pencil. “John-John, why don’t you go out on the deck and draw me a picture?”

  John-John takes the paper from my hand. I’ll be right outside if you need me.

  Chael chuckles as we watch John-John take a seat on the deck outside, facing into the office.

  “He’s obviously inherited more than Frey’s shape-shifting abilities,” he says. “He’s also inherited his protective gene.”

  “One of the reasons I love them both.”

  Chael shakes his head. “Yet you don’t need anyone to protect you, do you?”

  My eyes drift to John-John. “We’re a family. Protecting each other is what families do.”

  Chael sighs. He’s of Middle Eastern descent with dark, thick hair and soulful black eyes. He’s about five-foot-eight, wears his bespoke designer suits with easy elegance. I don’t know how old he is, in human years he looks fifty-ish, but I’d guess he was around when the first crusade launched to wrest Jerusalem from the Muslims. He wasn’t always a friend. I can’t be certain he’s one now, but he was there for me when my mother died not too long ago and I’ve come to begrudgingly trust him.

  Now he sighs again. “I wish it didn’t take a crisis for me to seek you out,” he says. “Always, it’s the same.”

  “Crisis?” I sniff. “I hardly call this a crisis.”

  “Then you don’t understand what’s going on.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Please, then, enlighten me.”

  Chael crosses one leg carefully over the other, smoothing the crease in his slacks. “You read the article?”

  I dig it out of my purse.

  “You have it with you?”

  “Frey figured you’d be visiting us sooner or later. I thought I’d be prepared.”

  “Janet Carlysle, the author, is very well known and very popular. Her fans number in the millions. One of her books, The Dead Among Us, has sold twenty-five million copies worldwide. It was made into a TV series that garnered even more fans.”

  I shift impatiently in my chair. “I could have found all this out by Googling her. As you obviously have. Not all of this was in the article.”

  “Up until now, her works of fiction have elicited very little attention from the vampire community. Just another mortal putting her own spin on what she believes the vampire existence to be. But this last book, what she calls a prelude to her nonfiction work, contains some items that hit close to home.”

  “Such as?”

  Chael fastens those intense black eyes on me. “A Chosen One. A powerful vampire who heads the Council of Thirteen. Who determines the destiny of all vampires.” He pauses. “Who also lives in San Diego.”

  “How could anyone outside the vampire community know all that?” I ask.

  He raises his shoulders. “No one should.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdraws a paperback. “I think you should read this. The only thing she doesn’t seem to know about is your private life. In her story, you are living in the mansion of a master vampire you vanquished. You spend your days hunting rogue vampires.”

  All things that sound very familiar. When I first became vampire I was “mentored” by a very old, powerful vampire. He turned out not to be a friend at all, but a manipulative enemy. I killed him in self-defense, and “inherited” his wealth—which included a mansion in La Jolla that sits unoccupied to this day. I also worked for a while for “The Watchers”, the underworld equivalent of a police force that hunts down and eliminates rogues whose reckless behavior threatens to expose vampires to the world.

  “Too many coincidences,” I admit.

  “And now, there’s this non-fiction book she’s proposing.” Chael shakes his head. “I think you should find out who’s feeding her information before she goes too far.”

  “Got any ideas how I’d go about that?” I ask sarcastically.

  “You’re not serious.” He waves a hand around the office. “Isn’t that your business? Isn’t that how you track down bail jumpers in this job you’re so fond of? You have resources the average person doesn’t.”

  “Okay,” I concede. “Where does she live?”

  “Close,” he answers. “Los Angeles. It’s on the back cover of her book. Think of this as another skip to hunt. Finding her close acquaintances, places she frequents. Trail her for a while. She’s bound to lead you to her source eventually.”

  “Eventually is the key word,” I say. “John-John and Frey are with me for the summer. I plan to spend as much time with them as I can. I don’t intend to take on a wild goose chase just because some writer happened to come up with a plot that bears some similarities to my existence.”

  “Similarities?” Chael huffs. “Come on. Well—” He stands up. “I’ve said what I came to. Read the book. I placed a card in it where you can reach me when you’re ready to act. In the meantime…” He waves good-bye to John-John. “I’ll leave you to your beach time.”

  With that, he strolls out the door, as casually as if he’d stopped by for nothing but a friendly visit.

  I stare after him. But Chael’s visits are never so simple. He’s up to something.

  Shit.

  And I’m being dragged into whatever it is along with him.

  John-John is playing at the water’s edge with two other kids it took him about a minute to befriend. They’re building sand castles. Every once in a while I tune into his thoughts. He’s engrossed in the intricacies of castle engineering and how wet to make the sand.

  I return to the book.

  I’m sitting on a beach chair under an umbrella. One of the benefits of being a “modern” vampire is that I have the advantage of the thousand years or so it took vampires to acclimate to sunlight. No relegation to dark coffins during the day.

  Janet Carlysle’s book is open on my lap. It’s not badly written, but Chael was right, there are too many similarities between Elizabeth, Janet’s protagonist, and myself. Even the physical description is too exact to be merely a figment of Janet’s imagination. Elizabeth is described as five-foot-seven (check), with honey blonde, naturally curly hair (check), and blue eyes (check). I know that description fits millions of people, but the details of her life are almost identical to mine. How she became a vampire (attacked outside a bar, check), identified as vampire by the doctor who treated her in the hospital (check), being taken under that doctor’s wing (check). The fact that the doctor became an enemy that had to be eliminated (check).

  I turn the book over and look at the author’s picture. Not a glamour shot. She’s dressed in an open-neck shirt, sitting against the hood of a car, a dog at her side. She looks to be thirty, hair drawn back from an average but friendly-looking face. Her bio says she lives in the hills above Los Angeles with a menagerie of animals. No mention of a family.


  I return to my place in the text. I’m about halfway through when a shadow falls on the book and I look up.

  “You’re back!”

  Frey, dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a tee, sits down on the blanket beside me. “Guy didn’t even put up a fight.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  He leans forward and plants a kiss on my forehead. “A little, maybe.” He strips off his tee shirt and his eyes scan the beach until they find John-John. “He looks like he’s having fun.”

  But there was something in Frey’s tone when he said he’d been a little disappointed. I turn his chin to face me. “Are you all right?”

  He places his hand over mine. “Why do you ask?”

  “Our life has changed a lot since we’ve been married,” I say. “We have John-John. You’re on the reservation most of the year, teaching school. Are you having a hard time adjusting to ‘normal’ life?”

  He laughs. “If you’re asking if I miss the trouble we used to get into—” He pauses. “Well, maybe. We had a lot of adventures together. Most of them I wouldn’t care to repeat. But the rush… Adrenaline is addictive.” He notices the book in my lap. “What are you reading?”

  I turn the cover over so he can read the title. “This is the book Chael is concerned about?”

  I nod.

  Before we can discuss it further, John-John spies his dad and runs to greet him. “Come on, Dad,” he says. “Help us build a castle.”

  Frey lets himself be pulled to his feet. “That ‘normal’ life you think I'm having a hard time adjusting to? There are trade-offs.”

  I watch husband and son walk to the water’s edge. Even as I wish our life was always as uncomplicated as it is today, the book in my lap seems proof that normal and uncomplicated will never be permanent conditions for us.

  Chapter Three

  Day Three

  I wait until John-John is in bed to tell Frey about Chael’s visit.

  We’re in our favorite deck chairs, watching the moon rise over the water and sharing a good bottle of French wine from my family’s estate.