Passion For Hire (Passion #5)

by J. a Melville

  “We can’t just walk out of here. There are not a lot of people on the beach, but there’s still too many to not be noticed. Faith is horribly burned son. If people see her, it’s going to raise questions we can’t answer, plus we’re all starting to look sun affected, we have to do this so no one sees us. The blanket your mother put on us is hiding us now, but she’s going to have to extend it so we can avoid detection until we’re all in the car.”

  “Your father is right Adrian. It would be disastrous for anyone to see you with Faith. I will extend the blanket so we are all contained within it. We will be invisible to everyone.” She murmured something before smiling. “Ok, we can go now.”

  The drive home cradling Faith’s horribly sun affected body was the longest journey of his life. He was exhausted from the lack of sleep, but mostly from all that had transpired over the night and now part of the day. All the way as Fabian drove them towards home, all he could think, was ‘don’t let her die.’

  He was relieved that it was daytime and that the others would be in bed. He didn’t need a screaming, ranting Flame attacking him and blaming him right now, not until Faith was well again.

  When his father finally pulled up in the driveway of the house, they all climbed out, still under the invisible blanket his mother had over them and hurried inside.

  In the living room, Adrian lowered Faith carefully to the floor and plucked at the fragments of burned clothing still clinging to her body. He needed to see how extensive the burns were, if they covered her entire body or not.

  “Let me get something to cover her, you know, so she’s not on display.” Lucas said and left the room.

  “Faith told me she needs blood but I don’t know how we’re going to get it into her. She can’t move, swallow, talk, nothing. I’m worried we’re going to run out of time.”

  “We need to get her blood Adrian. We can’t all feed her, it won’t be enough. She is going to need a lot of blood to come back from this but if she can’t swallow, she won’t be able to ingest it.” Sirene pointed out. “I could try a spell to reverse the damage?”

  Adrian frowned. “Reversal spells don’t always go well though mother. You said so yourself. You reversed time for the spell you used on father when he died and he became human again. Won’t that happen to Faith if you do that?”

  “I can’t be sure. We will try to get the blood into her first. A reversal spell will be our last resort.” Her tone was vague as if she was deep in thought. “We need to get a human here for the blood and perhaps run a tube into her stomach. My guess is that as the blood goes in and it rehydrates her, it will heal the horrific burns she’s sustained from the sun.” She raised a questioning face to them all. “So who is going out to hunt for a human or two for us to feed to Faith?”

  “Couldn’t we just use the one we have downstairs?” Lucas asked. Adrian looked at him in surprise. In all the panic to get Faith home, he’d almost forgotten about Nadine.

  “Nadine’s blood in Faith; I’m not sure I like the thought of that. Still, I did drink from her many times before I knew what she was capable of. I assumed we would kill her anyway. She doesn’t deserve to live for what she has done and she can’t ever be released. Her silence is not guaranteed. In fact I’m sure turning us in and exposing us would bring her the ultimate satisfaction.”

  “She is not going anywhere son and I too confess I hadn’t thought of her either. Getting your girl to safety has been my only concern.” Sirene gave his shoulder a squeeze.

  “Fabian, please go and bring our prisoner to us and hurry. Keep her tied up. She may be aware of our intentions since she’s a seer and will probably not be very cooperative.”

  Adrian watched his father leave the room, indicating that Lucas should follow him too. He suspected it had been done to give him some time alone with his mother.

  When they were alone, Sirene dropped to the floor where he sat with Faith. She reached for him, drawing him into her arms and he allowed her to do so, feeling them tighten around his shoulders. For so long he’d kept himself distanced from everyone, his parents and his siblings. He felt unworthy of anyone’s love. If he kept everyone at arm’s length, in his mind they couldn’t show him any kind of affection, they wouldn’t love him.

  Why he suddenly felt different, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was Faith. Her name was so appropriate. She had so much faith in a lot of things, but mostly she had a lot of faith in him. She made him believe that maybe, just maybe he wasn’t as bad as he’d always considered himself to be.

  “You don’t know how happy it makes me Adrian my love to see you finally opening yourself up to others. To see you finally open your heart, to not only the love of a woman who has done everything to show you how important you are to her, but to hear you confess your feelings to her. Faith loves you; she loves everything about you, even all that you consider so wrong. Think about what she has done for you. She came to seek you out, a stranger to her because in her dreams, you were the man she was destined to be with. You are literally the man of her dreams. If she pulls through this, treat her well and give up the life you have lived in secret for the last two years. There is no need for you to continue to sell yourself for money Adrian. There never was. If you had only come to your father and me, we could have helped you. We could have shown you that there was never any need for you to service women for an income. Your father and I messed up. We let our own need for revenge absorb so much of our time, we neglected you. We didn’t spend the time we should have preparing you for life as a vampire. You were a child before the spell I cast on you, a toddler, totally dependent on us. Then suddenly you’re an adult and we forgot that the transition from human child to adult vampire would have required some adjusting to.” She kissed his cheek. “You just seemed so grown up, so masculine, so independent my beautiful son. We forgot that you weren’t those things at all. It was all new to you, everything.”

  Adrian felt tears prick his eyes again at his mother’s words but before he could respond in any way to her, Lucas and his father returned, dragging a very reluctant and mutinous looking Nadine behind them.

  Sirene gave the older woman a sardonic smile. “Not so tough without your poisoned chocolates now, are you bitch? Look at what you have done? Be happy about it, gloat about it if it makes you feel better. You are nothing more than a pathetic aging woman who thought she could latch onto a younger man, who just happens to be vampire. Did you hope that he might turn you one day and give you eternal life? That you would not have to continue with the ravages of aging? Well, you will get your wish, sort of. You are going to be used to save Faith. Your blood will give her back her eternal youth.” She smiled and nodded her head, the gleam of satisfaction in her eyes, and Adrian stared at his mother with newfound respect and a reminder to himself, to never cross her.

  “We still have the problem of getting the blood into Faith.” He tried to point out quietly.

  “If we can feed a line down into her stomach, we should be able to get the blood into her that way. I’m not sure intravenously would work on her when she’s so badly burned.”

  “Where are we going to get the tube from to feed down her throat mother?” He touched Faith’s burned cheek. “We don’t even know if she’s still alive. I will try and get her to respond.” He took her hand in his. “Sweetheart, please find the strength to speak to me. I’ve just found you. I can’t lose you.”

  “Adrian, my Adrian, please hurry, I can’t hold on much longer.” Her voice in his head was weak and little more than a whisper.

  “She’s still alive mother but she’s very weak. She asked us to please hurry. Please hurry, she can’t die now.”

  Sirene clicked her fingers and simply said one word. “Appear.”

  With a brief flash a clear tube, bucket, jug and a knife materialised out of thin air. Adrian stared at them, still always impressed by his mother’s ability.

  “Bring the bitch over closer.” She ordered Lucas, and he dragged Nadine closer. Her eyes were wide,
almost bulging from her head but she was still gagged and bound by the ropes so could do little more than make some gurgling unintelligible sounds in her throat.

  Sirene stood and calmly walked over to her, snatching up the bucket and knife as she passed them. Adrian waited, wondering what her next move would be. It still amazed him how tough she was. She was tiny, the smallest one amongst them, but she was the most dangerous one in a lot of ways.

  “Still think it was a good idea to try and kill the woman that my son loves? Well, now you get to watch the man you love, saving the woman he loves, using your blood to save the woman you hate.” She gave a small, triumphant smile. “Now how does that saying go? Life’s a bitch and then you die?” She raised the knife. “Well…die bitch!”

  She kicked one leg out from under Nadine and when the woman went down on her knees, Sirene dropped to the floor with her. Lucas also followed the two women down and held Nadine securely while she positioned the bucket under the older woman’s hand.

  She couldn’t move much due to the ropes that still held her bound, but that didn’t stop his mother getting one of her hands into the bucket. With one fluid sweep of the knife, she opened Nadine’s arm up almost from elbow to wrist, and immediately Adrian heard the sound of the blood flowing into the bucket.

  It didn’t seem to take that long before she began to sag, her complexion becoming waxy looking and pale, but Sirene slapped her hard across the face and gave some command which caused a strand of the rope around the woman’s arm to tighten, effectively acting like a tourniquet. “Make her watch this Lucas. I don’t care how you do, just be sure she sees this.” Once she was sure he would do as she asked, she turned to Adrian. “Pour some of the blood into the jug and your father can help you get it into Faith.”

  He nodded, and managed to tip half the blood from the bucket into the jug without spilling the vital life source. It couldn’t be wasted as it was needed to save Faith, every single drop of it.

  “Father, help me get the tube into her please.” He asked as he picked it up and moved to Faith’s head. While Fabian gently tilted her head back to open her throat up as wide as possible to them, he slowly and carefully began to feed the length of plastic into her. “How will I know if I’m in her stomach or her lungs though?”

  “Do not worry about that son. Even if you get it into her lungs, they will absorb the blood. Remember she doesn’t need to breathe, so you won’t drown her if the blood ends up there rather than her stomach.” His mother assured him.

  Relieved that he couldn’t fuck this up, Adrian continued feeding the tube into her until it met resistance and he could only assume it was as far into her as it would go.

  “Oops son, I forgot this. You’ll need one of these.” His mother snapped her fingers and a funnel appeared, dropping down by his side.

  He fitted it to the end of the clear plastic tube that was mostly inside Faith now and carefully poured the blood from the jug into the funnel, watching it coat it before turning the tube red as it disappeared into her.

  Vaguely as he carefully poured the vital life force into her, he heard his mother’s angry voice and the sound of skin on skin as she slapped Nadine to make her watch her blood being used to hopefully save Faith.

  When the first jug of the healing blood was in her, he turned to see what his mother was doing. She’d obviously knocked Nadine around quite a bit as the woman wasn’t looking so good. One eye was bruising, and her lip was cut slightly. Lucas still held her but he wasn’t looking too good himself and Adrian suddenly realised that holding the injured woman when he was an empath was probably proving to be torturous for him.

  “Father, will you please swap with Lucas? He is an empath and being so close to Nadine while she is obviously not only afraid, but dying is hard on him. He feels everything she feels.”

  “Of course my son.” Fabian stood. “I’m sorry Lucas; we should have considered what this would be like for you.”

  They swapped positions and Lucas dropped to the floor by Faith, placing one hand on her blackened cheek. Instantly his body stilled and his eyes closed. Adrian watched him, nervously, wondering what had brought on that kind of reaction in his son. When tears began to roll down his cheeks and he bowed his head, silent as they dripped off his chin and landed in Faith’s hair, suddenly Adrian panicked. Had they failed? Was she gone to them?

  Finally Lucas lifted his head and reached out to touch his arm. “She loves you so much father. She loves you freely and with such total devotion, it consumes every inch of her. You are her everything. She’s waited her entire life for you, and from the moment you appeared in her dreams, you were all she could focus on. Finding you, getting to you was all that mattered. You have torn at her heart a few times, and yet she has still stuck with her unwavering belief that you two are meant for one another. She loves you selflessly, unconditionally, eternally. She has only one wish for you father. She wants you to see what she sees, what your parents see, what I see. She wants you to love yourself.”

  At Lucas’s words, Adrian closed his eyes and dropped his head, the tears welling up and like his son, he couldn’t control them. They fell rapidly, dripping onto Faith, each one almost seeming to clean her, to reveal a small patch of her skin that didn’t look burnt. Normally he would have been embarrassed at his lack of control, at his open display of emotion, but this time he didn’t care. He only cared that this woman before him, who had endured his abhorrent behaviour loved him. This woman who had tried to convince him that he was the man she wanted to spend eternity with. The woman who had given up being human for him, believed in him, loved him, made him want to be everything she saw in him.

  Adrian wasn’t sure how long he sat there by Faith, weeping, when he felt something. It was the briefest touch, feather light, but his eyes opened and he lifted his head to see her. His Faith staring at him, tears flooding her eyes, making the brilliant blue of them seem to shimmer.

  It took a few stunned seconds for it to register in his tired brain that she was conscious, aware and looking at him. She looked so much better. Not herself yet. There were still some areas where the skin looked angry and red as if severely sunburned, but the blackened look was gone.

  “Sweetheart; Faith, you’re alive? Oh fuck, you’re ok, you’re ok. Wait you need more blood, I’ll get you more blood.” The words kept flying out of his mouth as a mix of emotions flowed through him. The one emotion that dominated the others though was relief, overwhelming relief. It had worked, Faith had been saved.

  “Adrian. I can’t talk for the tube in my throat.” Her voice filled his head and he started slightly at the clarity of it. She sounded so much better, but then her words registered, and gently he pulled the length of clear plastic out of her. Her voice when she spoke now the tube was out sounded raspy but that was quite common when a large volume of blood was consumed quickly. “More blood, I need more blood.” She told him.

  He bent down and kissed her cheek, noticing the skin felt smoother under his lips. “Of course sweetheart but you’re alive. Fuck I was so scared I was going to lose you.”

  “So did you enjoy that?” At the sound of his mother’s voice, Adrian turned to her. “You wasted your time, you almost killed Faith, and now you are going to die because my son could not love you. You are mad, completely mad to think you could change how Adrian felt about you, by killing Faith. Well, now you have had the opportunity to see your blood saving her. Now you can watch as the last of your life drains from you.” She gave Nadine one final twisted smile before releasing the tourniquet and immediately the blood began to flow again.

  The end didn’t take long. Nadine kept watching them for as long as she could, that final defiant look in her eyes, until eventually they lost all emotion and became blank and lifeless looking. As the last of the blood drained from her body, Adrian watched her eyes roll back in her head. When she started to sag in Fabian’s arms, he held her up, his gaze on Sirene’s. She gave him a barely decipherable nod of her head before raising her han
d and with one violent lunge; she buried the knife blade deep into Nadine’s chest, right over her heart.

  It was probably a move that could be considered over kill at this point. She was as good as dead anyway with next to no blood left in her. Her heart would have stopped, it had probably only been moments off beating for the last time.

  Fabian’s arms dropped away from her and she would have fallen to the floor, but before she could even end up in a crumpled, lifeless heap on the carpet, Sirene yelled. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  With a bright flash Nadine’s body seemed to ignite, flames flaring up but just as quickly, they were gone again. He saw a cloud of what looked like dust rise up, but he realised it was ash and his mother blew it, causing it to swirl around her briefly before with a sudden blinding flash of white light, it was gone.

  “She’s gone my son.” Sirene smiled sweetly at him. Her face filled with contentment, a look of serenity that belied the way she’d so calmly killed Nadine. He smiled back reminding himself never to cross her. She was small but scary and she could take down any one of them any time she felt like it if she wanted to. “Now get the rest of the blood into your woman, there’s a good boy.” She told him, holding out the bucket, and Adrian couldn’t hold back the chuckle that burst from his lips at her words.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Faith

  I drank the last of Nadine’s blood from the glass that Lucas had gone to get for me. Now I was awake, and could drink for myself rather than having it fed to me through the tube, it was easier to sip it from a glass.

  By the time the blood was all gone, I was feeling considerably better. Not quite my old self but close. It was still hard to fathom all that had happened from the moment I’d discovered Adrian’s car keys. Being followed, talking to Nadine on the beach, but not knowing who she was; to the horror of being left to die in that blazing, unrelenting sun. She had wanted me to die, and for a while I feared I would. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t do anything. I was effectively paralysed by whatever had been in those chocolates.