Vamped Up

by Kristin Miller

  Glaring into Ruan’s determined eyes, Dante thought through his options. He could remain silent, refusing to give up a lick of information. That option sounded the most appealing of all. Or he could give as little info about his curse as possible—just enough to satisfy Ruan’s questions and get him out of this predicament.

  After that, he’d need to relocate. Put in his notice with Eve and the university. Find a new job. Anything to separate himself from people who knew what a freak he really was.

  Kill him, a voice inside Dante purred. Make him listen. Make him bleed!

  Dante shoved Ruan hard in the chest, his insides squirming. “Get away from me!”

  He took two quick strides before Ruan was in front of him again, gripping him around the shoulders. “Dante, hold up, your eyes, they’re . . . off. Are you feeling all right?”

  Kill.

  Dante shoved Ruan again, harder. “I said get the fuck away from me!” Why wouldn’t Ruan listen? Why wouldn’t he give him the space he needed? Dante’s heart rate skyrocketed. His skin became too tight for his bones. He needed to run. He needed to breathe. The air was too thin. He needed . . . God, he needed . . .

  “Dante?” Ruan asked, bending low to peer into his eyes. He checked one, then the other. “Dante, my man, your eyes are flaming gold or some shit. Are you all right? Do you need some help?”

  Without thinking, Dante cocked an arm back and leveled Ruan right in the jaw. Ruan staggered, then threw a lightning-quick right cross that connected to Dante’s temple. Stars streamed into his vision. Dante ducked low, swung again; a right, then a left. He didn’t know if his fists landed on their target and he didn’t care. The voices quieted to a hum as his energy sapped. He kept swinging until his adrenaline levels flatlined and the evil voices weren’t tempting him anymore.

  Blows rained down on his head from above. A cannon went off in his side. His kidneys burned. Ruan was going to beat him to a bloody pulp. He looked up in time to see Ruan jab him square in the face with all his strength. Like a grenade went off in his skull, pain exploded in Dante’s face and blood poured from his nose.

  He stumbled back onto the grass, his face soaked from a sobering mixture of rain and blood. Ruan stood in a wide stance in front of him, his fists clenched. He didn’t show any evidence of having been in a fight, except for the red starburst on his jaw from Dante’s initial blow.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Ruan thundered over him. “You have a death wish? I was trying to help you!”

  Dante dabbed a finger to his nose and came away with gobs of blood. His body felt like it was on fire, but the voices were gone. He may have lost the fight with Ruan, but for tonight, victory was his. The voices were silenced. He stifled a smile, brought his knees to his chest, and leaned over, staring at the dirt.

  Ruan paced in front of him, readjusted his shirt, then grabbed Dante by the scruff of his shirt, yanking him off the ground. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  Dante breathed hard, lifting his bloody hands to the falling rain. “I can’t tell you how much I needed that.”

  “You ever feel the need to go toe-to-toe again, say the word,” Ruan said, his words steaming in the cold night air. “But tonight I’m not gonna settle for your hands doing all the talking.”

  Dante sighed. “Come on.” He led the way down the footpath, through the cover of heavy-limbed trees. For what he was about to say, he needed to be moving. “I’m . . . uh, not exactly what you’d call normal.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” Ruan blurted out. “You gotta give me more than that.”

  Here we go. “I guess you can say that I, ah . . .” He scratched his shoulder and shifted his gaze to the trees towering over them. “I can kind of disappear and reappear. Under certain circumstances.”

  “You mean . . .” Ruan slowed. “Teleporting?”

  Damn, he hated what that made him—freak and more freak. “If you want to call it that.”

  Ruan caught back up. By the light of the full moon, Ruan’s eyes burned with heated concentration. Seemed like every time someone figured out Dante’s freakishness, he had to disappear again. The feeling of being used was the worst feeling in the world. No matter how someone tried to pretend they didn’t want Dante’s abilities, they were too tempting to resist. Everyone had an agenda. Everyone saw personal advantage to having a teleporter in their back pocket.

  Greed had pushed his loved ones out of his life. He was sure this time wouldn’t be any different.

  “Think of the possibilities,” Ruan said, already fitting the mold. “Are there others like you?” He swiped a hand across his jaw. Seemed Dante’s right caused him more pain than he’d originally thought.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Man, Slade and the Crimson Council would love to get their hands on you. What are its, I mean your limits?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you teleported us back to the Tahoe, but why not somewhere further away? Couldn’t you have sent us to Italy or Germany? Hey, why not Japan?”

  Dante let the sarcasm slide and sighed, glad the voices were banished until the tide rose again. “I don’t get to pick and choose where I’m sent. You should be grateful I got us out of there at all.”

  “You better believe I am. I’m not so much of an ass that I hold back credit where it’s due, it’s just that . . . I’m not usually taken by surprise and you’ve done it twice now. I’m trying to figure you out.”

  Something resembling tension spread through Dante’s hand. He clenched his fist, then relaxed it. Swiped his fingers across his hand where the death shade had kissed him. Was it his imagination or was the smudge spreading? Maybe that was stains of blood, drying into his skin.

  They walked in silence, rain drenching their clothes, soaking their skin—their breath coming out in fogged pants. As they rounded a bend leading to the westernmost edge of the park, they stopped. The ocean stretched before them with long fingers of moonlight illuminating cresting waves.

  “And your blood,” Ruan said, keeping his eyes on the span of ocean in front of them. “How’d you know to do that with the bodies?”

  Dante bent down and rubbed the last remnants of blood across his thighs. “I told you I’m not what you’d call normal.”

  Facing him head on, Ruan said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “My blood is different. It’s tainted somehow.” He paused, thinking about how for the first time, he wished he had the answers to give. “That’s all I know.”

  Ruan nodded, satisfied by the half-answer. “I have to ask one more thing and this time I need a direct answer. Lucky for you, I saved the one that could get you staked for last.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you an elder?”

  Well, that sure as hell wasn’t the question he was expecting. He expected something like, How long have you been able to do it? Can you go back in time? To the future? All of the things loved ones normally asked when they found out about his ability to teleport. “Would it matter?”

  “Under the circumstances, yes,” Ruan growled as the heavens thundered down. “Answer the question.”

  “I’m not an elder. Wish I were. Maybe then I’d know what the hell was wrong with me.” All he ever wanted was answers. Why didn’t he sleep? Why could he walk in sunlight? Why could he teleport? And what would the voices do if he let them take him over completely? He’d lose control until he killed again, he was sure of it. Even as he tried to convince himself that he could put the sins of his past safely behind him, he couldn’t shake that feeling that there was more to the story he was skipping over.

  “Now is about the worst possible time to wish for elder status.” Ruan sized him up, from his soaked leathers to the rain streaming down his face. “So you don’t know how you do it and you can’t control where it sends you. What can you do with a maware like that?”

&n
bsp; “Mawares are powers specific to elders, and I already told you I’m not one.”

  “Okay, then what can you do with your . . . gift?”

  “Nothing.” Dante stood his ground, looking out to where the ocean bent over the horizon. In another few hours, his nightlife would end and his wakelife would begin. God, could his life be any more depressing? “I should never have gotten mixed up in all this.” He should’ve stayed in the shadows where he belonged, cast aside by both societies in which he lived. Mundanes had never accepted him into their world, yet he’d never completely fit in with vamps either. He should never have signed up for Ruan’s training classes, and the instant Dante found out he was working for Eve at the university, he should’ve quit right there and then.

  He couldn’t hide the truth from Ruan any longer. “I gotta tell you one more thing,” Dante said, measuring the tension in Ruan’s shoulders. “I was hired to be an assistant at Crimson Bay University.”

  “Good for you,” Ruan said flatly, lost in thought.

  Dante shook his head. “No, I mean, I was hired to be in Eve’s classroom.”

  “My Eve?” Glaring through thick, wet strands of blonde hair, Ruan squared his shoulders.

  Before he got his ass handed to him again, Dante threw up his hands. “I didn’t put the two of you together until I saw her in the training warehouse the night of the slug fest.”

  Ruan’s jaw ticked. “So what’s your plan?” he asked, each word slow and deliberate.

  “I’m quitting first chance I get. Laying low sounds great about now.”

  “Good answer.” Ruan bent down to pick up a small rock and flipped it over in his hand. He must’ve figured Dante wasn’t a threat as much as a tool, because he said, “Teleporting is a nasty trick to have up your sleeve, you know. But it makes you a valuable weapon to have in our arsenal and a big-ass target for our enemies.” He chucked the rock over the cliff and into the swell of the sea.

  “If you think I’m going to put on a puppet dance for your khissmates so they can point fingers at me and use me as some sparkly tool, you’re wrong.”

  “All I have to do is tell them about you and you won’t have a choice.”

  “Then as long as I don’t teleport anyone else, I guess it’s your word against mine that I can do it at all.”

  Ruan stood silent, his form casting a massive moonlit shadow over the ground. “The way I see it,” he said at last, “is you can either work for us or against us. I could ask Slade if there’s room for you in the haven army. That’s your best option.”

  “No.” Dante turned from the ocean, from Ruan, and started walking back the way they’d come. The last thing he needed was to have more reason to listen to these voices and become the monster they wanted him to be. “Besides, you’re forgetting something. I’m not even a member of your haven. I belong to the haven in Petaluma, remember?”

  Ruan must’ve read Dante’s frustration right because he kept a few paces back. “I don’t care what haven you belong to; we can work that out later. All that matters is there’s a fight going on right now and it involves all of us.” Ruan paused, his eyes focusing far off. Dante wondered if Ruan was thinking back to Twitch coughing up Eve’s name. He was about to ask when Ruan said, “We can use all the help we can get. If you can teleport, who knows what else you’re capable of.”

  That’s exactly what worried Dante most. He didn’t know what the voices would eventually lead him to do. He couldn’t silence them forever.

  “I told you I’m not getting involved.”

  “No, you said you shouldn’t have. That’s different.” Ruan grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “You’re already too involved and you know it. You’ve been working for Eve. That death shade back there said her name, and I know you heard it. You came to me, wanting me to train you, needing my expertise. Well, I’m giving it to you. I’ve never seen anyone do something like what I saw you do back there. And I get the feeling there’s still more to you than you’re letting on.”

  Dante exhaled heavily, slapping his hands to his sides. “I don’t have the answers you want, Ruan. I can’t expect you to understand this, but I don’t want to be used for my abilities. For once in my life I want to be more than useful. Damn it, I want some kind of purpose.”

  Instead of arguing back, Ruan clenched his jaw, and stared right through him.

  When Ruan spoke again, his voice had changed. It was a deep rumble, all traces of anger vanished on the winter wind. “Your Camaro is only a few miles that way.” He pointed through the clearing. “It’s an easy enough run. You’ll be back to your haven before sunrise.”

  “What’s the catch? You’re going to drop this whole thing just like that?”

  Ruan nodded, taking the lead down the path back to the Tahoe. “Just like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, despite my huge ego, you made me realize something.” He pounded heel through the trees, around a cypress trunk, and disappeared into a curtain of rain.

  “And?” Dante shouted, standing firm, too leery to follow.

  “When someone asks you for help, they don’t want to exploit your abilities or use you as a tool. They just have more of a sense of purpose than you do.” His voice faded to a distant mumble. “I’ll be at ReVamp deciphering the scrolls if you need me. And work on your weak right cross before our next training session, would ya?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Mawares are a gift of power from the Ever After. Don’t abuse them.”

  What to Expect When You’re an Elder by Antoinette Lightoller

  THE INSTANT EVE pushed open her apartment door, she knew she wasn’t alone.

  Her feet froze of their own volition. She scanned the blacked-out entryway and living room beyond.

  “Hello?” She forced her hesitant body to take a step into the apartment. “Ruan? Is that you?” Her voice trembled. She hated it.

  On tiptoe, careful not to make that third board squeak, Eve took a few more steps and peered into the empty bathroom on her right. She wished she had a weapon. A gun like Ruan’s. A blade like Dylan’s; though if she did walk around with a blade on her belt, she’d name it something more lethal-sounding than Mathilda.

  She huffed and took another careful step. Hell, right about now she’d settle for a can of pepper spray named Rosie.

  She stepped into the living room and flicked on the wall light. Her breath caught in her chest as a warm glow spread across the walls and set upon a figure on her couch. Sitting on the edge, staring straight forward, cross-legged and proper, was a lady covered head to toe in red. From her velvet hooded cloak to her stiletto heels, the woman was a vision of poise and elegance.

  She didn’t move a single muscle. Did she not hear Eve come in? Was she made of marble or something?

  Eve stepped back. Only a few more steps and she’d be into the hall.

  The woman turned her head slowly, revealing a ghastly pale face. Too pale for even a closet vampire. Full lips. Pointed nose. Lava-red hair that parted around her neck and fell to her lap in thick, sweeping curls.

  As Eve opened her mouth to speak, the lady in red held up a long, delicate hand and motioned like she was zipping a gap in the air closed. Eve’s lungs deflated. Her lips pinched tightly closed. Pinpricks dotted her vision. With the same elegant movement, the woman motioned for Eve to come closer.

  Mind blank, words on the tip of her tongue forgotten, Eve shuffled to her side and took the seat to her left. No matter her desire to leave, Eve became prisoner to this woman’s power. Like a magnet drawn to its likeness, Eve couldn’t leave her side.

  “I’ve waited for you,” she said, her voice commanding, yet motherly. “I thought perhaps we’d have more time to iron things out, but it seems I was wrong.”

  Everything moved in slow motion, like being in this lady’s presence made the world slow to a crawl. She
slowly opened her mouth to speak. The mesmerizing lady in red planted a narrow finger over Eve’s lips, silencing her. Even if Eve wanted to say something, she couldn’t. Her voice failed her. This was the closest thing to magic she’d ever seen. The woman had complete control over her.

  “Now is not the time for questions. Now is the time for answers. I’ll not hurt you.” She pulled her hood down, revealing fiery red curls that overwhelmed her porcelain-white skin.

  Pangs of familiarity hit Eve hard. Could it be—could she be the woman who’d saved her when she was young . . . ? No. What were the chances? And why would she reveal herself now?

  “My name is Lilith. I’m an elder—the oldest of our kind, actually. And you, my dear, are the one we’ve been waiting for.” Her fangs dropped low, two dainty white tips that touched her bottom lip.

  Although Eve couldn’t move, her brain kept pace. She’d heard of elders. Ruan talked about their mysticism and mawares often. From her understanding, they were in hiding. Why would this elder, professing to be the oldest and probably most valuable of her kind, expose herself here? In their apartment? Why was she talking to Eve like she was something to be revered? And where on earth were these whiffs of cinnamon coming from?

  “I’m sure you have many meaningless questions to ask me, as you always seem to do when we meet like this. Most of them will go unanswered today, I assure you, but what you need to know most I won’t deny you. You have my word on that, as my own life depends upon your understanding something in great detail.” She tossed a curtain of red curls over her shoulder, sending sharp whiffs of cinnamon floating into the air.

  Eve closed her eyes and felt her chest flush warm. She felt happy. Loved. This maware, although not frightening or overwhelming, had to be one of the strongest around. Eve didn’t feel threatened or fearful, just unconditionally loved. She’d give this elder anything she asked for on trust—and the tingles warming her chest—alone.