by Alexa Silver
She gave him the courtesy of honesty. “I’m grateful for your help, Caden. And I like you. But I’m just not sure I trust you yet.”
“I know,” he said with gentle urgency. “But you can. Not all vampires are like Drake Garoul. The last thing I want is to hurt you. I’m willing to take things as slowly as you need to, but I’d like you to give a relationship with me a chance.”
“Do you promise on your sacred word as, um, a creature of the night or whatever that you will never use mind thrall on me again?”
“Yes.”
“Swear it.”
He solemnly raised one hand, palm facing her, fingers spread between the fourth and middle digits. "Vampire's honor."
She looked at his upraised hand and rolled her eyes. “That's the Vulcan sign for ‘Live long and prosper.’”
“I can’t get anything by you, can I?” He lowered his hand, all teasing gone. “I vow to you. I'll use no more machinations than any other man would while trying to get you into bed.”
“But you're not a man.”
Her comment wiped the indulgent look from his eyes.
“No,” he agreed coldly, “as you love to point out, I am not a man. But I am very much a male. Try not to forget that, Serena. Any male when pushed too far can behave unpredictably.”
She realized she’d stepped over some invisible line. She could almost believe she’d hurt his feeling with her quip. She took a fortifying swallow of the excellent wine. “I’ll try to remember.”
Reedus returned with their meal and began serving them. Both Caden and Serena went silent until he was finished.
“Everything looks wonderful,” Serena smiled warmly up at the butler, sensing his need for her approval. She took a bite of food. “It’s heavenly!” And she wasn’t lying.
Reedus seemed to read her genuine delight with the meal. He inclined his head in acknowledgement, seemingly gratified by her praise. “Thank you, Miss.”
“That will be all, Reedus. You and the rest of the staff, please take the rest of the evening off.”
“Very good, sir.” The vampire butler disappeared as swiftly and silently as he had appeared.
“Thank you for being kind to him. The transition from children of the night to the humankind mainstream hasn’t been easy for some of us. The more vamps in the shadows receive courtesy an affirmation from humans, the easier and more successful will be their assimilation into the daylight world.”
“That goal is very important to you, isn’t it? Easing vampires into society as painlessly as possible.” She watched him lift a fork and dig into his triple garlicky mashed potatoes and down them with ease.
“Yes. Finding ways to co-exist together harmoniously in spite of our very different natures has never been more of a necessity.”
“You’re exploding any number of vampire myths for me today. Garlic and human food?” She gestured curiously to his pungent plate of normal looking eats.
“My dinner is a synthetic blood product formulated to look like human cuisine. The ‘wine’ in my glass is also comprised of a blood concoction. My system could never process what you’re eating. And vice versa.”
She looked closely at their two meals. His food appeared to be identical compared to what was on her plate. Amazing.
“Let me guess. Your meal came compliments of Chase Industries’ culinary lab?”
“Exactly. The same way a high-end vegetarian restaurant can make their menu approximate chicken or beef right down to appearance, texture, smell, and flavor, my labs have created many types of food products that look like human meals but that vampires can digest. Our studies show that humans find vampires’ traditional feeding habits distasteful.”
“Why go to these lengths just so you won’t gross out some humans when you dine with them?”
“To make you feel more comfortable around us,” he answered simply. “So you’ll stick around for dessert and not run screaming from the dinner table.”
“I still don’t understand why that’s so important to you.”
“It’s a highly classified matter. Can you try to be open-minded about what I’m about to tell you?”
“Yes, of course.”
He paused for a long beat before he spoke again. “Over the past century, we’ve discovered some rare, interesting blood mutations inside a small, select group of the human population. These mutations offer our kind a hitherto unprecedented, highly sought after opportunity to… breed with humans.”
He ignored the sound of her fork clattering against her plate as she dropped it in shock.
“Breed with us?”
“You said you’d try to be open-minded,” he reminded her in a disappointed tone.
“I am open-minded. But not so open-minded that my brains fall out.”
His face went stony, but he continued with the explanation she had requested. “We call humans who can create progeny with us ‘Blood Mates’. They are prized among our kind since vampires cannot procreate together, nor with just any human. We are long-lived, some say even immortal. But our numbers have been dwindling for centuries as mankind grew better at hunting us, driven by fear and superstition. The vampire line will die out eventually unless we can find a way to make this new opportunity to create offspring with human mates work to the benefit of both parties involved.”
“What you’re saying is impossible. Vampires aren’t even alive,” she snapped.
“We must have a life force of some kind that animates us, Serena,” he pointed out. “Or we could not walk, talk, eat, and have sex. Frequently,” he added giving her a pointed stare that lingered in the vicinity of her cleavage. “What makes us tick is not the same as what makes you tick. But just because we don’t require a pulse to be animate does not mean we aren’t alive in every true sense of the word.”
“But… what about the offspring of such a union? What kind of… cross-breed would they be?”
He lifted his head proudly. “You’re looking at one right now. You tell me.”
She sat stunned. “You? You’re a…a…?”
“The word you’re searching for is ‘vampire,’” he offered helpfully. “The vampire gene is completely dominant as far as we can tell. I have no hybrid factors, no human biological traits. I am fully vampire. Yet I was born of a vampire father and a human mother.”
“How is that even possible?”
“Once a vampire drinks directly from a compatible Blood Mate and feeds her his blood in return, the Blood Change occurs. They are bonded and she’s altered forever.”
“As what? Vampira? Elvira?” She struggled to keep up with his shocking information.
“No, of course not. Try to put your Gothic novel prejudices aside. A Blood Mate still retains a human physiognomy, but she becomes enhanced to a superhuman degree. Once she experiences the Blood Change, she’ll take on attributes of her vampire mate’s speed, strength, and life longevity in order to prepare her to carry, bear, and raise a very powerful vampire child.”
“Stop it! This is not what I came here to discuss,” she hissed, frightened not of his admission he desired her, and not of his stunning claim that vampires and human could procreate. Rather she was terrified because the sudden, vivid vision of her holding Caden’s dark-haired child in her arms was so appealing it made her knees weak and heart beat faster in joy for some reason she couldn’t begin to understand on a first date.
“Actually, this topic is exactly why you risked blackmailing a vampire today,” he intoned ruthlessly. “I believe it’s why Garoul is holding your cousin and trying to force a wedding. He’s most likely discovered she’s a potential Blood Mate. And springtime is when the hunt for a Blood Mate is at its zenith.”
“What?” She shook her head in denial but, as impossible as it seemed, she sensed he was right about everything.
“Like salmon swimming upstream during spawning season, our nature compels us to find the one with whom we can mate if she is anywhere in our vicinity. The problem is, Blood Mates are almost as r
are as unicorns. There aren’t enough to go around for all who desire one. If I’m right, Garoul is not going to let Zoe go easily, even if my team smuggles her out of his lair tonight. No vampire would. Drinking from a Blood Mate is the most arousing event in a vampire’s existence. Tell me, is her blood type AB negative by any chance?”
Serena shrugged. “How would I know?”
He casually reached out to the silver Vampire Bloom in the bud vase at the center of the table. He swiped a long finger over the thorn that had pricked Serena’s finger earlier and showed her a small dot of her blood on the pad of his digit.
“So far the randomly occurring, mutated enzyme needed for a person to be a potential Blood Mate has only been found in a few people with the AB negative blood type. We still don’t know enough about how it all works, but we do know blood types are inherited and can run in families. There would be little other reason for a vampire to wed a human. And one does not have a mere fling with a Blood Mate.”
He slowly twirled the flower’s stem around in his fingers. The spinning bloom mesmerized her as much as the rasp of his melodic voice. “I’ve never been with a potential Blood Mate, and I haven’t tasted you yet, but I can scent a blood type from a mile away. And you, my dear, are most definitely AB negative. Ergo, it makes sense your cousin likely is, too. Garoul is probably holding on to her so tightly because her blood contains the enzyme we crave most in a consort.”
He held his finger up, closely inspecting the small smear of her blood on it. Experimentally, he parted lips and cleaned the speck of blood from it with a light touch of his tongue as if he couldn’t stop himself.
His body stiffened in the chair. Suddenly, his eyes glowed too brightly with an unnatural, feral light as though profound realization had dawned. His voice dropped to a deeper, thicker, more animalistic tone than she’d ever heard him use before.
“Like yours…”
She watched in horror and shrank back as his incisors elongated into full fang mode. He rose to his feet, towering over her, never taking his eyes off his quarry.
With a guttural growl of desire, he swept the table between them aside with a crash. Serena screamed.
Chapter 4
The battle raged outside all night long. Serena sat frozen and tortured through every bit of it. The grunts and the snarls. The reverberating howls of pain from countless, thunderous blows assailed her ears. Every few seconds heavy bodies smashed into the structure of Caden’s home at high speed, shaking it to its foundation. Yet nothing broke through this protective fortress Caden had had the foresight to build.
She hunkered down on the floor of the large foyer, her knees drawn up to her chest, and listened to the war battling outside. She refused to leave the foyer. As soon as Caden knocked on the front door she would damn well be right there to open it. Meantime, the violent sounds beyond the front door haunted her. She could only guess which grunts, snarls, and howls were Caden’s.
At any moment she feared Garoul and his fang gang would tear off the roof and drop Caden’s torn head into her lap. She had never felt so helpless in her life. If only Caden had given her the Blood Change before facing Garoul’s thugs, he wouldn’t be alone out there now.
As the hours ticked by until dawn, she covered her ears to stop the violent cacophony outside from leaking into her them, to no avail. Just when she thought she’d go insane, gradually the thumping, and shrieks, and cursing grew less until they finally quieted altogether outside. In fact, it was too silent outside.
Serena raised her tear-stained face to the dark window in the alcove of the foyer, her heart hammering against her ribcage. Was it over? Had Caden survived?
A dark form flew past the window. It slammed into the transparent material, shaking the frame. She started and let out a scream. But the window held, obviously made out of some kind of super strong stuff at Chase Industries, Inc.
A hard face drenched in rage appeared in the window. The face was handsome, were it not stamped by cruelty. Narrowed eyes brimming with hatred spotted her crouched in the shadows. She recognized Drake Garoul from the one time she’d met him.
His lips twisted into a rude semblance of a smile. “Well, hello, little cousin. You sure smell nice from here.” He slowly tapped the glass with one, pointed nail. It sounded like talons being dragged across a chalkboard. “Let me in, treasure.”
She cringed away from the window. “Go to hell!”
Garoul shook his head slowly. “He stole from me. Now I’m going to take from him. An eye for an eye. A fang for a fang. A Blood Mate for a Blood Mate. After I shatter him,” he said, full of more venom than a diamond back rattlesnake. “I’ll claim you as mine and take your body whenever I feel like it and drink my fill of you. Both will be often. You’ll take your disloyal cousin’s place. I’ll use you for whatever purpose I choose. I’ll enjoy defiling and debasing you. I’ll take pleasure in knowing your mind will know what I’m doing to you but you won’t be able to resist doing whatever dirty thing I command. If you displease me, treasure I’ll share you with my crew. Trust me, baby, they aren’t as couth as I am.”
As he ended his diatribe, he lifted Caden’s slumped body into view, his shoulder pinched hard in Garoul’s merciless grasp. Caden’s eyes were closed and he wasn’t struggling.
The monster continued, “You care for him. I heard your touching little farewell scene from out here. Open up. Or I’ll kill him. Slowly. And make you watch.”
The vicious vampire pressed the side of Caden’s face hard against the glass so Serena could see the cuts, the blood, and the bruises on his battered his countenance.
“No!” Despair clogged her throat. Without a second thought she ran to the window and pressed her hand against the inch thick glass that separated her from Caden’s bashed face.
Garoul’s dark voice echoed eerily through the pane that separated them. “Little darling, you don’t know how bad this can get. It’s over. I’ve won. Let me in. And I’ll let him live. Just long enough to watch me use his Blood Mate like a whore and then drain her dry before twisting his head off like bottle cap.”
She stopped listening to the horror of his words. She couldn’t take her gaze off Caden’s unconscious profile pushed against the window. Tears dripped down her cheeks.
“Open. The. Door.” With every word, Garoul slammed Caden’s head brutally against the window to recapture her attention. The transparent material finally fractured upon the last impact. A small spider web fissure appeared right in the area covering Caden’s parted lips that Garoul kept pressed against the glass.
Caden’s eyelids flickered weakly, the green of his irises flashing in her direction. Serena had the sudden, certain feeling she should press her hand against the crack near his mouth. The crack was small but maybe, just maybe…
Serena jammed the rigid thorns of the Vampire Bloom into the palm of her hand, slicing her skin apart, creating a bloody mess. She forced the wound against the crack’s thin, sharp edge. A little gush of blood oozed from her fingers, dribbling into the tiny chasms in the glass. Right where Caden’s slack mouth was pressed. She jammed her weeping wound into the small, jagged crack.
Caden’s eyes flashed open just as a purple streak of dawn bled into the night sky’s horizon. He bared his fangs. His tongue licked the red drops that leaked through the tiny fissure.
The sick smile melted off Garoul’s face and dripped down his chin. Then he, too, smelled the sticky liquid leaking through the glass crack and went full fang. Garoul slammed his fist through the fractured glass, trying to grab her throat. It was too late.
Caden licked the bloody smear off his lips, threw back his head and roared, rearing up with sudden power in the other vampire’s surprised grasp. In a blur, their positions were reversed. Caden’s forearm pressed inexorably across his enemy’s windpipe, pinning Garoul against the window.
Caden’s face was stone as he stared down upon his nemesis. The sun rose majestically in the east, chasing away the shadows of the long, violent night. S
erena could see in the early dawn the unconscious bodies of Garoul’s fang-gang lying strewn around the grounds. They began to smoke incessantly, bursting into flames one by one when the sun’s full rays caressed them.
Slowly, the golden light moved toward the window where Caden kept Garoul pinned against the glass. He clearly meant to hold Garoul there until the sun reached them both.
“No, Caden,” she begged, flattening both of her palms against the blood-smeared glass. “You can’t.”
“He threatened you. He deserves to die for that,” Caden said in a dead voice, one she didn’t recognize. He increased the pressure on Garoul’s neck. The light was almost upon them now.
Serena shook her head. “Maybe. But you’ll die, too. I couldn’t bear that.”
His stark gaze swerved from Garoul’s face to hers. “Why?”
“Because. You’re my vampire in shining armor, remember? I want you in my world. Good times. And bad.”
At her softly spoken words, Caden’s eyes shone with a bold new light out of his beaten, bruised face. A tender smile pulled at his bloody mouth.
Garoul’s choked, evil voice leaking through the window wiped it away. “I’ll never stop until I’ve made your Blood Mate my eternal whore. I’ll feed on her daily to keep me the strongest of all.”
Caden’s eyes turned to chips of green ice as he regarded the enemy under his arm. “You know what? No one is going to miss you, Garoul.” He increased the pressure on Garoul’s neck until the glass behind his head began to splinter.
Garoul seemed to rethink his untenable position, for he choked, “No. I demand trial by council. I demand justice.”
“Step away from the window, Serena.” Caden’s voice was calm and strong and she automatically obeyed him just as the full power of the dawn’s sun flooded through the window and washed over both of the vampires in front of it.
