by Raven Hart
Connie thrust out her chin in that way she had of letting me know that she was going to follow her own course no matter what anybody said. “Not exactly. I didn’t have enough evidence to go on at first. But now that you tell me there’s a meth operation, if I can go there tonight and see the beakers and other equipment, the lye, the cold medicine, the whole bit, I’ve got the probable cause to come back and bust them on drug charges. After Samson goes down then maybe the women will talk more freely.”
“But the Thrashers can’t go to jail,” I insisted. “Remember?”
Connie grimaced. “Oh, crap.”
I looked at her carefully. “You’re mostly interested in the domestic violence part of this, aren’t you? Do you do this often?”
“Do what?” Connie wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“You know what I’m talking about. Do you go off on your own investigating wife beatings before making it an official police case?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “You have to do what you have to do.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, putting a little swing in my dance step.
“What?”
“By-the-book Officer Consuela Jones, who sees everything in black and white, is a rogue cop. Who’da thunk it?”
Connie gave me a petulant look. “I guess you don’t know everything, do you?”
“I guess I don’t at that. But then, you never cease to surprise me.” I also never ceased to be impressed with the woman I held next to me. Her determination and courage were inspiring. Throw in the brainpower and education and she was just one awesome female.
The music was coming to an end and the other couples were making their way off the dance floor and to their tables, leaving Connie and me on our own. Reluctantly, I took my hands away from her body and immediately felt like a cold-blooded creature again. Whenever she was in my arms, it was so damn easy to pretend I was a real, live boy, as Pinocchio used to say in one of the bedtime stories I read to Renee.
I was about to ask her what she proposed we do now when I saw Nate Thrasher raise a bar stool and break it over Seth’s head. That took care of the what-do-we-do-now? question.
By the time I reached the melée, Seth, who had remained seated until then, had stood up. All six feet, four inches of him. The three Thrasher men went slack-jawed. I took advantage of that half second they remained motionless to lay out the youngest one with a punch square to the jaw. That brought Samson and Nate back to their senses, and the fight was on. Werewolves like to fight in wolf form, so I just hoped these guys could stop themselves from changing in front of all these humans. Talk about all hell breaking loose. And Seth didn’t want Connie to see him like that. I looked into his eyes. He desperately didn’t want Connie to see him like that. That twisted my gut a little bit, I don’t mind telling you. If there had been any doubt in my mind that he had feelings for her, those doubts were gone. I put my romantic problems out of my mind since I had more pressing matters to deal with.
Nate swung; I managed to duck but not far enough, and the punch landed on my shoulder much harder than it should have. “Shit!” I yelled, and shook my arm to bring the feeling back into it.
Seth sidestepped a punch from Samson, which brought him to within a foot of me. “Jack, watch out! They’re on meth!”
Double shit. When guys were tweaking on meth, they came on super-strong. Not only did the drug make them temporarily more powerful and aggressive, but it made them feel like they were ten feet tall and bulletproof. Luckily, I’m a vampire. I am all that, by God. I hauled off and hit Nate Thrasher in the gut so hard it knocked the breath out of him and made his face as red as a cherry tomato.
I took advantage of the extra seconds Nate’s bad fortune gave me to pay attention to the humans in the bar. Some of the men were gravitating toward us. A couple of them had picked up empty beer bottles off tables and were holding them by the neck. Their reaction was only natural. Although I can’t imagine that the Thrashers were popular hereabouts, they were probably regulars and Seth and I were seen as the interlopers. I had to do something quick.
I’d only practiced enthrallment, or glamour, or whatever you wanted to call it, a couple of times. But it had worked, and William told me I was some kind of prodigy at it. I’d never used it on a whole bunch of people at once, but I knew I’d better give it a try and it better be a success or me and Seth, and maybe Connie, would be in a world of hurt.
Nate had his breath back and was barreling toward me. As I braced myself, I concentrated on a message to the humans. There’s nothing to see here. Nothing to do. Go on back to your tables and focus on your beer and your women. And then, just for the hell of it, I thought really hard: Dance!
I dodged Nate Thrasher’s punch and landed one of my own on his cheekbone, which reeled him backward again, this time toward the door. It gave me a second to look around. The Thrashers were unaffected. Samson and Seth still struggled hand-to-hand. Connie stood to one side, watching the melée with her shooting hand under her jacket so she could draw her weapon if she decided it was necessary. The werewolf woman who had been with the youngest Thrasher was kneeling over him as he lay moaning.
It was no surprise that the werewolves didn’t go under the spell. They were not human, after all. And Connie wasn’t human either. I had seen her be enthralled by Reedrek, but he’d had hundreds of years more than I had to practice. It figured it’d take more umph than I had as a novice to put her under my spell.
Sally and all the other humans were dancing like there was no tomorrow. Somebody had put another quarter in the jukebox. Elton John belted out, “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting.”
I paused a second too long gaping at the crazy scene and Nate Thrasher connected with a punch right to my jaw. I shook it off and came at him, knocking him down and half out the door. As we wrestled for the upper hand we rolled down the wooden front steps of the place and landed with a thud on the cold ground. By the time we scrambled to our feet, Samson had come flying out the door and landed next to us.
Seth jumped out of the doorway and landed on his feet next to me with the grace of the powerful animal he was. The youngest Thrasher had come around and staggered down the steps to help his brother haul their father to his feet. The female stood behind them. Connie came out to the top step, watching.
Now on his feet, Samson eyed Connie warily and then turned his attention to me. “Good job in there, Jack. How come our lady friend here didn’t get bewitched like the rest of those humans, huh?”
I stole a glance at Connie and shrugged. “I reckon she don’t feel like dancing, is all.” Man, that sounded lame. Connie wisely said nothing.
Seth looked at Connie and back at me. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. I could guess why he was nervous. It wasn’t that he and I couldn’t take on three male werewolves and one female on our own. It was that whenever there was some real serious werewolf fighting to be done, they always shifted into their wolf form. That’s what Seth anticipated right now.
I had no idea how long the spell on the humans would hold, so I decided I may as well press matters and see what happened when I rolled the dice. “So I take it y’all dudes got acquainted with old Seth here,” I said. “So, boys, what’s it gonna be?”
Seth spoke quickly, I guessed so he could put his own spin on matters since Connie was present. “These gentlemen and I have an appointment in a couple of days. That’s when we’ll settle…matters.”
“When the moon is full,” Samson put in. “We’ll have it out.”
Seth glanced at Connie again. “Until then, boys.”
Samson looked at Connie as slyly as only a wolf can. “You coming with us, precious?”
After seeing that she was different from the other humans, Samson was clearly suspicious of Connie. He knew she wasn’t a shape-shifter or vampire, but he knew she was something out of the ordinary. If he was curious enough and had the opportunity there was no telling what he might do to her to find out what. In any case, it was impossib
le for her to go with him now; I only hoped that she realized that. Earlier she’d said she would go over to Samson’s to try to see the meth operation, but surely she’d give up that idea.
Connie shook her head. “No. I’m not going.” She came down the steps to stand with Seth and me.
Samson didn’t flinch, only looked from one to the other of us. I could see the wheels turning in his head. “I should have known you couldn’t run Savannah all by yourself without William Thorne,” Samson said to me. “You had to call in reinforcements. Had to get yourself a real man, a werewolf, to help you run the show. And some kind of witch woman whose skirts you can hide behind.”
I felt like smacking him, but I wouldn’t let him goad me into prolonging this fight with the humans around. It wasn’t worth it. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just know that Jack McShane and his buddies are in the house.”
Just for good measure, and because they’d pissed me off, I decided to see if I could manage another little show to impress them, something besides my glamorizing of the humans. I let out my fangs and concentrated on lifting off the ground. I spread my arms and raised one leg like in the kung fu movies, and sure enough, I rose a couple of feet and floated toward the werewolves.
Samson and his boys gasped. Seth said, “Dude, you can fly! That’s better than the vampires in Salem’s Lot.”
“Awesome!” Connie breathed.
Determined not to show fear, Samson recovered quickly, belched out a forced laugh, and casually turned to go just like he was menaced by flying vampires every day. The others followed, all except for Nate, who turned to go back in the bar, presumably after Sally. I caught him by the arm. “Not a chance. We’ll take her home.” He shook me off with a nasty look but backed away from the steps and followed his father and the others.
When I settled to the ground and looked back at Connie and Seth, they were now staring at each other. Samson had called Seth a werewolf and Connie a witch within the space of a heartbeat. I didn’t even want to know what kind of thoughts were passing back and forth in those looks, but I had a feeling I was going to learn.
I walked between them and put an arm around each of their shoulders. “C’mon, kids, it’s almost sunup and Uncle Jack needs his beauty sleep. Tomorrow night we’ve all got some ’splaining to do.”
Six
William
I’d made it back to Olivia’s with Donovan just before dawn. Postponing their sleep, Olivia’s vampires had taken turns letting Donovan feed from them before he was put into his coffin to sleep. By my estimation, he would need at least two days’ rest to heal that sucking chest wound. The stake had actually touched his heart, and as eager as I was to hear what he had discovered, my questions would have to wait. So when the next sunset came, Donovan remained in his coffin.
Olivia and I rose before the others. I had deposited my seven-hundred-dollar shoes in Olivia’s trash bin and taken still another shower to try to remove the funk that I could still smell from my time in the sewers.
Afterward, she and I sat at the antique table in the basement lair next to the coffins. It was the first opportunity we’d had to talk alone.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I told Olivia. “What kind of powers does he have?”
“I don’t know of any extraordinary powers that he himself possesses,” Olivia said. “But when we bathed him we did find a lorica tattooed over his heart.”
A lorica is a kind of magic poem. A charm in the form of an incantation, if you will. “What did it say?” I asked.
Olivia recited from memory:
“O goddess Brigid, protect this warrior
Make him invincible
Make him victorious
Make him immortal among immortals.”
“You’re versed in the ways of the Druid,” I said. “Do you think the lorica is what saved him?”
“I believe so, yes. The stake went directly through the verse. It touched his heart but didn’t penetrate it. What else but the lorica could have accounted for such a miracle?”
I smiled. Olivia was a student of Celtic tradition and an avowed pagan. Algernon had told me that his second-in-command took her religion seriously. But who was I to argue? I, who depended on voodoo-infused blood for my very survival. “What do you know about this Donovan?”
“I know that he’s quite ancient. He was a Celtic warrior and fought the Saxons for most of his human life.”
“That explains why he took the name ‘Donovan.’” In the Celtic language, Donovan means “dark warrior” and Baird means “poet.” Interesting.
“He’s a lovely man. Makes us our tea every morning. I think he knew Alger back in the day. That’s how he found his way to us. They had kept up a correspondence with each other for hundreds of years. He arrived here only days after I’d returned from Savannah. When he learned Alger had just been murdered, he was devastated.”
“You said he was ancient. Do you know when he was made?”
“I believe he was made on the battlefield, just as you made Jack,” she said.
It was common for male vampires to receive the dark gift on the field of battle and spend the day of their turning buried in the earth alongside their sires.
Vampires have stalked the shadowy corners of the killing fields since the beginning of time, drawn like sharks by the smell of blood. When night falls and the survivors have retreated with what wounded they can manage to carry with them, the blood drinkers come out to feed. The blood of the dead is an abomination, so they listen for the heartbeats of the ones still clinging to life and feed at their leisure until those hearts are still.
I must admit to being an old war dog myself. The sounds of armed conflict—the cannon’s roar and the rifle’s report—are a siren song. The fear is like nectar, the anger ambrosia. The sheer hatred of one human being for another stirs me.
Olivia looked toward Donovan’s coffin as if she could see though the mahogany. “Alger said Donovan was mortally wounded defending one of the last Celtic strongholds on the northwest tip of Wales. Anglesey, I believe. I always suspected that Alger was a wee bit in love with him, but Donovan is a lover of women.”
“Do you know that firsthand?” I smiled again. It had been my observation that Olivia herself was a lover of both men and women. Many blood drinkers don’t discriminate when it comes to sex.
“I’ll never tell.” Olivia winked but then turned serious. “Anyway, I think it’s good that we have some additional power to draw on. If he wrote a lorica that saved his life, Donovan could even be a shaman. Now we only have to wait until he wakes to tell us who staked him and what he saw when he followed Hugo and Diana.”
“I’m afraid waiting is not an option.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going back to the house to talk to Eleanor. See how she fares and if she’s found out anything about Renee.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, you stay here.” I stood up and put on my coat.
“I don’t feel good about your going out alone tonight.” Olivia stood with me and followed me to the door.
“Your colony needs you. I wouldn’t want them to have to deal with the loss of two leaders in so short a time.”
Olivia shuddered. Made in the roaring twenties, she was a relative infant by the standards of blood drinkers. And like my Jack, she had led a mostly sheltered existence until recently. The carefree flapper became a carefree immortal. Reedrek had put a stop to everyone’s fun, and the youngsters had to grow up fast. Except for the glaring mistake she’d made in not telling me Diana lived, Olivia seemed to be rising to the challenge.
As I walked out the door into the dark mist, I felt myself wondering if any of us so-called immortals would live to be another year older.
I stationed myself in the little park across from the house Hugo and the others were using, far enough away so that my presence could not be sensed by another vampire—that is, unless the other vampire was my offspring.
; Invisible in the dense copse of trees, I could feel Eleanor reach out to me with her mind, probing my psyche. I chose not to block her. Startled, I drew in a breath as she touched me.
It was as if she was gripping my cock and working it roughly. I was instantly aroused, my entire lower body tightening. My shaft stiffened as if she were kneeling in front of me, performing at her personal and professional best. I had to quickly open my trousers to free myself. I looked down, unable to believe that the lips, tongue, and teeth I felt so exquisitely were not physically before me.
As swiftly as she’d invaded my body, Eleanor barged into my mind, serving up image after image of our past lovemaking like a pornographic film. The Best of William and Eleanor. The time we fucked like animals in the midnight surf on Tybee. Me chained to her four-poster bed while she teased and tortured me in ways most men only dream about. She, riding me like a demon in the formal plantation garden as I met her stroke for stroke while the scorching fingers of the sun’s first rays broke the horizon. Her begging for mercy as I pinned her to the deck of the Alabaster in the moonlight, probing every inch of her, first with my tongue and then with my cock.
And most intense of all, the night I told her I was a real vampire, not just another rich man with kinky tastes. She’d fucked me as no one had in five hundred years, showing me every move in her professional arsenal, bringing me to the most shattering orgasm I’d ever known. That same night she began her campaign to persuade me to give her everlasting life.
“It can be like this every night until the end of time,” she’d promised. As soon as she played her old promise in my mind, a new promise resonated there. It can still be that way, my darling. Take me home to Savannah and we can start all over again.
As the film ran in my mind, the feel of her velvet softness gripping me deep inside her was as real as if she was clinging to me here beneath the shadowy evergreens. I let her lead me over the edge and came with a bucking fury.
