The poor guy had totally lost it, Cordelia decided.
"Don't be afraid." Karl's voice fell to a soothing murmur again. "He wouldn't have any reason to come back for you. Then what happened?"
"He ripped open the side of my neck with one swipe of his nails." Howard touched the bandage. "I hit my head when I fell, but it didn't knock me out. I heard him go down to the basement. A minute later, he came upstairs with Miranda. I overheard them talking on their way out. The vampire talked like she should know who he was, but she didn't. He said he was her uncle, Joe something or other."
Karl's eyes narrowed. "Josef Kovac?"
"Yeah, that's what he said."
"We don't have an uncle," Cordelia interrupted. Not on their father's side, anyway. She had no way of knowing about their mother's relatives. And how did Karl recognize the name?
"Your sister acted like she didn't think so, either. But she trusted him enough to go with him."
"Yes," Karl said, "I imagine he would be good at inspiring trust."
"I patched myself up and decided to sit here with the gun, in case he came back to finish the job on me. I forgot all about Ms. Torrance coming over with the book."
"Forgetting is exactly what you're going to do. You'll forget all this nonsense about vampires. They don't exist. No one can transform you into an immortal creature of the night."
The other man's eyes drooped shut.
"Look at me." Waves of pressure radiated from Karl. Cordelia felt them even though they weren't aimed at her.
Howard opened his eyes and resumed muttering under his breath.
With a brisk shake, Karl said, "Stop that. Listen carefully. There are no vampires. Your quest for the journal was a mistake from beginning to end. You will abandon it."
"Yeah." The syllable sounded heavy with despair.
"That book holds no hope for your condition. Do you understand?"
"I hear you." He slurred the words. When his lids closed this time, Karl didn't order him to open them.
"You'll never harass me or the Torrances again."
Howard's head drooped forward. When Karl let go of him, he slumped sideways into an inert heap on the couch.
The atmosphere stopped humming with the force of Karl's will. The pressure slackened so abruptly that Cordelia felt as if her ears popped. He shifted his attention from the unconscious man to her. "Let's go."
Her knees wobbled when she pulled herself upright. He snatched up the gun with one hand and clasped her arm with the other. "What about him?" She glanced over her shoulder at Howard. "He's in bad shape."
"He'll recover, and he won't bother you anymore." Karl hurried her out the door and down the street to his car, putting on his sunglasses on the way. "Do you still want him arrested?"
"What's the point? He doesn't have Randy, and he's obviously insane, not responsible for his actions."
"Then forget about him," Karl said as they got into the car.
"Are you okay?" she asked while belting herself into the passenger seat. For the first time, she noticed a dark blotch on his left sleeve. "Oh, my God, the bullet hit you."
"Grazed, that's all. It's stopped bleeding. I'll be fine." The set of his jaw showed the futility of nagging him on that subject.
If he wanted to act all stoic and macho, fine. Let him suffer in silence. "How can you be so sure Howard will drop his obsession?" she asked after he pulled away from the curb.
Karl cast a glance at her. "Don't pretend you didn't feel it when I tried to influence your mind last night. I did the same to him, and he doesn't have your advantages."
"Whatever he has or doesn't have, his elevator definitely doesn't reach the top floor. This book can't possibly be what he thought it was, the diary of a vampire's victim." She flipped it open and leafed through it, scanning the faded, sepia ink.
Karl plucked it out of her hand. "Of course not. Vampires are a superstition of Transylvanian peasants." He repeated Howard's phrase with a sardonic smile.
"Or movie monsters. But there must have been something weird going on with the woman who wrote that diary, or else why would that legend have come down through Howard's family? And why do you have the book anyway?" The obvious answer popped into her head. "The man in the legend was your ancestor, right?" That fact inspired another question, which she didn't ask aloud. Why did Karl treasure this volume so much that he hid it in a secret drawer instead of shelving it with his other antique tomes? She doubted he'd answer if she bothered to ask. Besides, she had more important worries. "What about Randy? That man, our so-called uncle, rescued her over four hours ago. Why didn't he take her straight home, unless he had some ulterior motive?" Anxiety coiled like a snake in her stomach. Suppose a smooth-talking predator had abducted Miranda under the pretense of rescue? Yet wasn't that scenario too far-fetched to consider?
"I have some ideas on that subject. But we'll discuss it later." To her surprise, Karl turned into the parking lot of a deserted playground and stopped the car under an oak tree as far as possible from the road.
"Why are we stopping?" He dropped the diary in the backseat and placed a hand on her shoulder. "What are you doing?"
"You were right, the gunshot did hit me. I'm taking what I need."
"Need?"
"You." He took off the dark glasses. His eyes snared hers. "I'm going to do what I've been wanting for years."
Chapter 4
* * *
Turning in his seat, he leaned toward her and curled his fingers around her shoulders on both sides of her neck. He lightly kissed her forehead, then her cheek, finally her parted lips. She sat frozen, her breath suspended. Though his hands felt cool, his lips burned. They wandered along her jawline to her throat. Her pulse racing, she closed her eyes and tilted her head, silently begging him not to stop. He insinuated his thumbs inside the collar of her shirt and traced circles on her bare skin.
Was she dreaming? This moment mirrored her fantasies too perfectly to be true. His tongue swirled over the tender flesh at the side of her neck. A hot sting shocked her, but only for a second. Instantly a wave of warmth radiated from that spot. Her whole body flushed. She felt suction, followed by the rapid flutter of his tongue. He was suckling and licking her throat. Her skin tingled, while her nipples and the flesh between her legs tightened and ached.
She was floating in a rosy mist. She clutched his shoulders and pressed her lips together to stifle a moan. After she'd drifted, clinging to him, for a timeless interval, the licking stopped. His hands stilled their caresses and shifted from her shoulders to her upper arms.
When she opened her eyes, he let go of her and sat back. She blinked, and the world snapped into focus.
"Thank you." His tongue flicked around his lips. "I'll heal much faster now." She saw no fangs, but he'd bitten her. He'd actually bitten her throat.
The last of the fog that had enveloped her melted away. Her pulse pounded in her head. “Howard isn't crazy at all! You really are a vampire--or something like that."
"Yes, something like that." He sighed. "Now I'll have to make you forget it, of course."
"As if!" He'd already tried and failed to control her mind once.
A spark of crimson glinted in his eyes. His power surged over her like a tidal wave trying to drown her. She struggled to stay afloat. She swam up to the surface of awareness panting as if she had literally fallen into water over her head.
"I won't forget." She swallowed the panic swelling in her throat. "You can't make me."
"It seems I can't. Damn it, I was sure I could override your will after I drank from you."
This man she'd known all her life wasn't human. Grabbing tight onto the assurance that she had some inexplicable immunity to his mind control, she reached for the door latch. "No, you can't, and you can't keep me here." She'd hitchhike or walk all the way across the river and into town rather than stay in his clutches.
"What gives you that idea?" He pushed down the lock override button and seized her by the arm.
&nbs
p; Her brittle calm shattered. She flailed out with her free hand to claw at his face. He caught that arm, too, and pinned her to the seat. She writhed and bucked against his hold. He seemed to restrain her with no effort, motionless as a figure of stone while she struggled.
She started to scream. He covered her open mouth with his. Before she could draw a fresh breath or think of biting him to fend him off, his tongue darted at hers. She tasted his bittersweet flavor. Again heat flooded her. Her muscles went slack, and she melted under his assault.
His fierce onslaught gentled. He nibbled the corners of her mouth and grazed her lips. Her tongue eagerly welcomed the strokes of his. Her heartbeat accelerated again, not from panic this time.
When he raised his head to stare at her, she imagined a glint of red in his silver-gray eyes. "Now will you please be quiet?" His gaze softened. "I would never hurt you, Cordelia. My feeding didn't cause you pain, did it?"
She reluctantly shook her head.
"Just the opposite, in fact, isn't that true?" His voice held a hint of smugness. "Remember, I could sense your reaction. You can't claim you didn't enjoy it."
A blush suffused her skin. "Well, you don't have to gloat about it." Now that the initial shock had faded, she reflected that this was Karl, her father's friend. He'd had over twenty years to ravage her and had never shown anything but kindness and courtesy. How did that fact jibe with his admission that he was some kind of monster? "You tried to erase my memory. I call that trying to hurt me, even if it's not physical harm."
"I did that for your own good." He stroked her hair. She fought the urge to lean into the caress and beg for more. "You'd be better off not knowing a nonhuman species lives secretly in your midst."
"It's a little late to put that cat back in the bag, isn't it?"
"Obviously." He sighed. "Since I can't make you forget what you know, will you be reasonable about it? I haven't touched you in all these years," he said, echoing her own thoughts. "You can't imagine how difficult it's been to restrain myself. I drank from you this time only because I'd been wounded." He pushed up his left sleeve, stained with drying blood. A faint scratch showed on his upper arm.
She touched it. "That can't be a bullet wound."
"We heal quickly from superficial injuries, given the nourishment to fuel the healing."
A shiver convulsed her. If she wanted to convince herself he was a nut case with delusions of vampirism, the barely visible injury wrecked that defense.
"If I could relieve you of this knowledge," he said more gently than she would have expected, "I would. I've spent well over a century taking care of your family without their knowing what I am. I didn't mean for that to change."
"Why can't you wipe my mind? Not that I'm complaining. I don't like being lied to. You should have told me the truth a long time ago."
His lips quirked in a half smile. "You would have believed me?"
She scowled at him and tightened her seat belt. "You could've tried."
"Why invite complications?" He put on his sunglasses, started the car, and turned onto the road in the direction of the river. "I couldn't control you because the ability to resist is in your blood, the bloodline you inherited from your mother. I never suspected it ran so vigorously in you."
"My mother? What about her?"
"I'll tell you everything when we get back to your house. And we'll discuss how to find Miranda."
He clearly didn't intend to volunteer any more information at the moment, a decision she didn't object to. She needed quiet to process what she'd learned.
Just before driving across the South River bridge, Karl pulled into the parking lot of a seafood restaurant. At this hour in the morning, it hadn't opened for lunch yet. Only a few cars dotted the pavement, maybe belonging to restaurant staff. "Will you wait here without trying any idiotic stunt such as running away?"
"I'm not going anywhere." Even if she had a good reason to fear him, what would be the point of trying to escape? He knew where she lived.
Karl reached over the seat back for the gun and opened his door. The moment he stepped out of the car, he vanished. She choked down a yelp of astonishment. Though she knew she shouldn't be surprised that he had the same power she did, only stronger, the sight of his disappearing into thin air made her head reel. After a minute or two, he reappeared next to the car and took his seat behind the wheel.
"What did you just do?" To her annoyance, the question came out as a faint whimper.
"I wiped the gun clean and threw it in the river."
With this fresh evidence of his power, Cordelia decided she should be glad the neighborhood monster was on her side. New Age devotee Miranda would probably get a thrill out of learning their old family friend was a vampire. As for Cordelia, she didn't even like to read horror stories or watch monster movies. Her idea of leisure activity consisted of mystery novels and crossword puzzles. Rational stuff. Now she was stuck in the middle of a horror film with no way to change the channel.
Back at her house in downtown Annapolis, Karl pulled into the driveway behind her car under the shade of an overhanging tree. Together they walked up the uneven brick sidewalk to the front porch. During her father's life, Karl had strolled up to their door countless times. The revelation of his true nature made this time immeasurably different.
Pausing with the key in hand, she said, "If Dad hadn't invited you, does that mean you couldn't have come inside without my permission?"
He laughed. "Pure superstition, I'm afraid. But would you want to lock me out? You're not afraid of me now, are you?"
"Not right this minute." She blushed again, remembering how accurately he'd described her reaction to his lips on her throat. "You can read my emotions, but I can't read you. It's not fair."
"I maintain a psychic shield most of the time. I can teach you to do the same. You're easy to read simply because you're untrained." He let her take the lead as they entered the house. He lounged on the living room couch, while she claimed a chair out of his reach. To her annoyance, Topaz padded into the room and leaped onto Karl's lap instead of hers.
"How come you can walk around in daylight? If you're a vampire, shouldn't it kill you?"
He let out an exasperated sigh. "Damn horror films. I suppose we should be thankful for the pop culture misconceptions. They keep people from recognizing us for what we are. That 'burn up in sunlight' nonsense was invented by the movies. The sun makes me uncomfortable. Too much of it makes me ill. It doesn't incinerate me."
"But the garlic thing is real?" she asked, remembering how Howard said he'd disabled Karl by spraying him.
"Yes, unfortunately. That's not lethal, either, only nauseating."
Curious as she was about his inhuman nature, she had a more urgent need for information about the current crisis. "What about that book? Why is it so important to you?"
"Howard's family tradition had most of the facts right." He stroked the cat, who kneaded his trousers with extended claws. "That memoir was written by my housekeeper, Lydia. I bought a townhouse in London after I moved to England to escape the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars on the continent. She was already working there, so I kept her on after I purchased the property."
"Whoa! You're over two hundred years old?"
"Much older. I was born around 1300 in what's now the eastern part of Germany."
"So you died almost seven centuries ago?"
With a groan, he bowed his head on his hands. "I've never died. I'm neither dead nor undead. We're another species, as much a part of the natural world as you, not animated corpses."
"Still, seven centuries. That's a long time to hang onto a foreign accent."
"I could lose the accent anytime I wish, as I did during the thirties and forties, when sounding Teutonic was a liability." He spoke that sentence in bland, middle-American English, without the usual ghost of a V in the W-words. "We have a boundless capacity for adaptation." He switched to an exaggerated movie-German accent she'd never heard from him before. "I vant to suc
k your blood, fraulein." In his normal voice, he said, "A touch of the exotic appeals to most women."
"Of which you've had more than your share, I'll bet." An unexpected spark of jealousy flashed through her brain. Ridiculous, as if she wanted him to drink from her again. "Was Lydia one?"
He gazed into the distance as if staring backward through time. "She was a young widow with a five-year-old son. Your father was descended from them."
She rummaged through her confused memories of what Karl had told her within the past half hour. "You said you'd promised to watch over our family--Lydia's family. Why?"
"One night about a year after I took up residence there, I was attacked by a band of would-be robbers, too many for me to handle alone and escape unscathed. I killed two and drove the others away, but I was wounded. When I reached home, Lydia was still awake. She dressed my wounds, and I fed on her."
"The same way you did on me, for the same reason."
He nodded. "She responded with passion and not the slightest shadow of fear. She begged me not to obliterate her memory of our embrace, and in a moment of weakness, I agreed. We lived together as lovers until she died of pneumonia at the age of fifty-eight."
"So that was how long? Thirty years or more?" She had trouble visualizing Karl mated with an ordinary woman who'd grown old and died a natural death. "But for you, that's just a drop in the bucket, right?'
"Each night, each year, each decade lasts as long for me as it does for you." His bleak tone discouraged her from pursuing that line of questioning.
"Did her son, my ancestor, know the truth about you?"
“No, although of course he noticed I was rather--eccentric."
"What about Howard's story? That book he tried to steal really is Lydia's journal, isn't it?"
"Yes, his tale was essentially accurate. One of his forebears, a middle-aged merchant, fell in love with Lydia and conceived the notion that I was holding her in durance vile. She refused to leave me for him, but he never lost interest in her. After her death, he stole the book, where she'd recorded her impressions of our time together. I should have destroyed it as soon as she died."
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