“He got away, right?”
“Yes. He ran before I could recover enough to fight back. I’m lucky this was all he did.”
“Does it hurt you to look at it? I mean, don’t crosses hurt?”
He laughed and I could have sworn his hands ran up my thighs.
“A holy symbol burned into unholy flesh doesn’t have the same effect.”
Unholy was not the word I would have chosen to describe his flesh, nor the way I felt when I looked at him.
“So tell me, what sort of trouble are we in?”
His chest rose and fell and I wondered if he needed to breathe or if it was just a habit when he was nervous.
“You remember me saying that the council had ordered any records, such as my journals to be destroyed?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“How does your third book end? Does it end with me saying something about the council?”
“No. It ends with you sort of flying off into the night.” I made a helpless gesture with my hands as I added, “I wanted to leave room for a sequel.”
“That’s good,” he said. “So there is no mention of the council at all in any of the books?”
“None. For some reason I just felt like I shouldn’t talk about them. I actually felt a little stupid for leaving them out of the story, but now I’m glad I listened to that feeling.”
“So am I.”
I pulled back and propped against the other side of the tub so that I could look him in the face as we spoke.
“Were they going to ask me to not release my third book to the public?”
“Nothing as simple as that,” he said.
“Honey, that wouldn’t be simple. It’s already ready to go to print, the contract is signed, it’s a done deal.”
Vincent was quiet for several minutes. I could tell he was working his way up to something big.
“There’s something else you should know about me. I’ve worked as an enforcer for the council for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Centuries. I’ve been their loyal servant. If they were to find out that I disobeyed their order to destroy my journals I’d be put to death.”
I gasped.
“And if they find out that you printed them, so would you.”
“Holy shit.”
I stumbled and fell trying to get out of the tub.
“You came here to kill me, didn’t you?!”
“That was part of my orders.”
He rose quickly and in a flash he was by my side.
“Get away from me!”
“Jewel, listen. I had to agree to their terms. I couldn’t allow someone else to investigate this. It’s my life we’re talking about too! I came here to find out how much you knew. I needed to know if you understood what you had written or if you believed it to be fiction.”
“Well, that question has been answered, hasn’t it?”
He took hold of my arms and shook me gently.
“Listen to me. I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here to find a way to save you. In those books you told how to turn someone, how to hypnotize with your gaze, and other things that people aren’t supposed to know. The council demands retribution.”
He loosened his grip on my arms and I flopped down to sit on the cold hard tile.
“What do they want?” I asked, feeling helpless.
“I’m not sure yet. But I’ve got a plan.”
Over the next hour Vincent shared his plan with me. Since he couldn’t allow the council to know what he’d done he was going to say that I got the story through our connection. He would explain to them that it wasn’t my fault and that I truly believed I had published fiction, not sacred vampire knowledge. He was also going to tell them that he had tried to shield me from his thoughts and it hadn’t worked, that our bond was too strong. He was going to explain about my lineage and beg them for mercy.
“The council isn’t big on mercy, so we’ll just have to wait and see,” he finished.
By this time we were sitting in front of the fireplace in the bedroom and I was wrapped in a blanket.
“When will you speak with them again?”
“I’m supposed to check in by tomorrow night. I’m sure they won’t mind if I’m early.”
I watched as he walked toward the balcony doors which were now firmly shut. His coat had been thrown over the back of a chair beside the doors and he started looking through the pockets.
“I know I put it here somewhere,” he mumbled. “Ah, there it is.”
He pulled out what looked like sleek black compact mirror.
“You’re going to put on makeup?”
“I’m going to contact the council.”
“But that’s a mirror,” I said incredulously.
“It’s a two-way mirror. Now stay over there and keep quiet. I don’t want them to see or hear you.”
He sat on the side of the bed and opened the mirror. He held it in front of him with one hand and with the other the made a sort of flourish, like a magician performing a trick.
“Alucard,” he said.
I could feel the magic in his voice and it gave me chills. Even though I had never been in the presence of magic before, I didn’t need someone to explain to me what it was. If you’ve ever been around magic, you just know.
Another face appeared in the mirror, though from where I sat I couldn’t see it clearly. I placed a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming when the reflection’s eyes started to glow.
“You have something for me?” the man asked.
His voice floated over my skin, but in a completely different way than Vincent’s did. This voice made me feel unclean in some way.
“Things are not so bad as we’d thought here,” Vincent said. “I request an audience with the council to report my findings.”
The man laughed and it scared the shit out of me. “An audience, really? You’ve found something so important that you cannot report it directly to me?”
“Respectfully, no. This is something I wish to present to the whole council.”
“Fine.” The face disappeared for a moment and I could hear him rummaging around. It sounded like he was flipping pages in a book. “We cannot see you before March,” he said.
“But that’s four months away.”
“If you want all of us, you will have to accommodate our schedules,” Alucard said. “Is that all?”
“Yes, that is all. Motherfucker.” Vincent added the last as soon as the transmission had ended.
“Who was that?”
I pulled the blanket tighter around me, still trying to ward off the chill his voice had caused.
“Alucard. He is the head of the vampire council.”
“What is he?” I asked, shivering again.
Vincent returned to sit beside me and pulled me onto his lap. “He’s a frightener, a whole other breed of vampire. Some of them are grotesque, like something out of an old movie, long claw-like hands, bald heads, pale skin.”
I shivered again.
“But Alucard is not like that. He looks almost normal.”
“Why is he called a frightener, besides the fact that he’s scary as hell?”
“He feeds off fear the way I feed off of desire. We must both live primarily from blood, but sexual desire is like a supplement to my diet. And fear is the same to Alucard.”
I snuggled against Vincent’s chest and tried to put the other vampire out of my mind. The thing that bothered me most about Alucard was how familiar he was. I didn’t share this with Vincent, we had enough shit to sort out between us without something else to worry about. But still, it bothered me. I hoped with all my heart that I would never have to come in contact with Alucard again. I didn’t want to be reminded of whatever it was I had obviously forgotten.
While we sat by the fire that night we decided to continue with the movie and book projects as if nothing was wrong. Alucard had sent him here with directions to do whatever it took to find out what he neede
d to know. If that included playing himself in the movies, then so be it. Contract negations were set to begin the following day at dusk.
Chapter Nine
I slept surprisingly well after all that had happened, even if I did wake up shortly after dawn. Vincent’s hair looked like a dark dream spilling over my golden sheets. The comforter was a mixture of gold and cream with swirling intricate patterns. My bed curtains matched, right down to the pattern. I picked them out of a magazine that said they added a touch of “Victorian elegance” to any bedroom. They were beautiful, but with Vincent resting on top of them, the sheets had never looked better.
After going into the bathroom and taking care of the necessities, I paused in front of the vanity. The whole time I washed my hands it felt like someone was watching me. I looked down the length of the granite counter top at least twice, like I expected someone to be standing at the other sink beside me. Having double sinks installed looked great at the time, but now it felt like a ghost was washing his hands beside me. What the fuck? Then I dried my hands and looked at the mirror. It was one long smooth piece of glass that ran the entire length of the vanity. Soft lights that looked like flowers hung out and over the top, casting a peaceful glow over the glass. I leaned forward and pressed my hands against the glass, trying to see through to the other side.
It was after dawn. Alucard couldn’t possibly be watching me, could he? I switched off the light and hurried out of the room just in case. I did not want to be standing around in the dark and thinking about Alucard.
I was so glad to have Vincent with me, to be able to crawl into bed beside him. It was such a thrill that it wasn’t until much later when I noticed he wasn’t breathing. Needless to say, after that I couldn’t really sleep. After all I’d seen last night logic told me he wasn’t dead, not in the sense of the word I would normally use anyway. Still, it was creepy. I wasn’t used to having a vampire in my bed. I had loved him for so long and now that he was here I was afraid to sleep beside him. Good grief. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Even though the sunlight wasn’t streaming into the room yet, I closed the bed curtains just in case. If Vincent caught fire because I was careless I’d never forgive myself. I pulled on my favorite black velvet robe and went downstairs.
I had just walked into the kitchen when I heard Brea’s voice over the intercom. There is a speaker beside the front door, beside the kitchen door, and one in my bedroom in case I couldn’t hear either of those.
“Are you awake in there?”
I walked over and pressed the button to respond. “I’m awake. What’s so urgent?”
She rattled a bag near the speaker. “Bagels, babe. Let me in.”
“Come around to the kitchen.”
Brea was wearing a pair of jeans that looked like they’d been run through a shredder, a hot pink sweater, combat boots and a few weird clips in her short hair. She definitely wasn’t going to work today.
“You call in sick?” I asked.
“Nope. It’s my day off. I do get those every now and then.”
A few minutes later Brea was spreading out an assortment of things across my kitchen counter.
“Those aren’t all bagels.”
“Have you read the news?” she asked excitedly.
I couldn’t take any more news. “No. Do you want Jamaican coffee or Columbian?”
“Jamaican.”
“Me too, it goes best with vanilla creamer and that’s what I’ve got.”
“You’re avoiding the subject,” Brea said. With those words she slapped something on the counter and I turned to look. It was this morning’s paper. “Vincent has been found,” the headline proclaimed.
“Oh, crap.” I picked up the paper and started to read.
“What? This is excellent publicity,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but …” My words trailed off along with my thoughts as I finished the article. They were going on and on about how sources said he looked like he’d stepped right out of the book and into Savannah. They were right about that.
“What’s wrong? I’ve never known you to not be happy about bagels and good publicity all in one day.”
“Well ….”
While Brea looked for the cream cheese I started to tell her what had happened last night. Maybe I told her because she was the most likely to believe me. Or maybe I just needed someone to talk to who wouldn’t be mad at me, or someone who had a heartbeat.
“Are you shitting me? He’s real, he’s really real?”
“All the evidence points in that direction.”
“So, did he bite you?”
“No.”
“He pull anything really freaky like flying or something like that?”
“No.”
“You said his eyes glowed, but that could have been your imagination playing tricks on you.”
“Whose side are you on here?”
“Calm down. I just don’t want to get my hopes up too high without some concrete proof.”
“You’ve been dating that cop too long,” I said.
“He’s not a cop, he’s a lab technician. He does blood splatter analysis. And we’re not dating, we’re fucking.”
“Well, Vincent didn’t brutally murder anyone in my bedroom last night,” I drawled.
“Wait a minute,” she said around a mouthful of bagel. “Did he go home last night?”
“No.”
“He’s still here and you didn’t say something?!”
“Shh.”
“What? If he’s the real deal, we’re not going to wake him up.”
After arguing for several minutes, Brea talked me into letting her in the bedroom to see Vincent. I made sure all the important parts were covered before pulling back the curtains on one side of the bed.
“You’re even keeping him out of the sunlight. I’d say you believe him,” she said.
“I couldn’t afford to take a chance and be wrong.”
“Tell me about it, fried boyfriend is not good.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“What is he then?”
I looked down at his almost angelic face and fought the urge to touch him again.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Brea said suddenly. “Have you got any cotton swabs?”
“Sure, but why?”
“What about sandwich bags?”
I followed her into the bathroom and pulled both items from underneath the sink.
“You’ve got sandwich bags in your bathroom?”
I shrugged. “I use them for travel to store makeup and stuff in.”
“Whatever, just give them here.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“I want to take a saliva sample.”
“A what? Are you crazy?”
“James is always complaining about not having enough work to keep busy around here. We could have the results back in a couple of days.”
“You want to swab Vincent’s mouth and turn it over to a cop?! No way.”
“He’s not a cop and I promise no one will know. I won’t even tell James where the sample came from. I just want to know, don’t you? Don’t you want to know for sure?” She sighed. “Jewel, I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to be real.”
“Why?”
“Because like you, I need to believe there’s something more to this world. I need to know that some of the things we think are fantasy are really real. I can’t explain it any better than that.”
I looked at her a minute before answering. “Fine. But nobody knows about this and I mean nobody. You have no idea the trouble we’re in already.”
I hadn’t told Brea about the vampire council or his conversation with Alucard through the mirror, which I couldn’t explain. I figured the less people knew about them, the better. I did tell her that he showed up at my house, claiming to be Vincent. I told her about the visits through my dreams and that it appeared that was how I got his story. It was as
close to the truth as she could know.
We went back into the bedroom with Brea armed with a cotton swab and myself carrying the plastic baggie.
“This is so stupid,” I whispered as I crawled up onto the bed.
I moved Vincent’s head slightly and began to curl back his lip.
“He sure sleeps like the dead,” Brea said. Then she looked closer. “Holy shit, are those fangs?!”
“Oh, my God.”
There was no denying the abnormal point on his canine teeth and they were definitely not fake. Brea leaned over him with the swab and was just about to touch it to his teeth when she slipped on the sheets and jammed her knee into his side.
“Fuck!”
She rammed the cotton swab up into his mouth and fell over him, knocking me into the headboard.
“If that didn’t wake him up, he’s got to be dead,” she said.
The swab was still in his mouth and Brea retrieved it while I held out the bag.
“A few days, max,” she promised. “And no one will know.”
I pulled back the bed curtains at dusk and Vincent was awake within a matter of minutes. He needed to leave to start contract negotiations and I needed to make an appearance at the rest of the auditions. What I’d missed earlier that day I’d need to review on tape. I could have gone over that morning, but I didn’t feel right about leaving him there. He was helpless during the day that much was clear when he didn’t wake up after our rough treatment of him.
When he sat up he made a strange face and stuck out his tongue.
I laughed. “What’s wrong?”
He held a hand to his right side. “I feel like I’ve been kicked in the ribs. Blah! And why have I got cotton in my mouth?”
I couldn’t stop laughing. The whole thing really was funny, but I knew he wouldn’t approve of what we’d done. Still, at the time I didn’t feel like we’d done anything terribly wrong.
“I can’t help you with that one,” I said.
He got dressed quickly, saying that he needed to at least go change shirts before showing up at the theatre.
“I don’t want it to be too obvious that I spent the night here,” he said with a wink.
“Why, are you ashamed of me?” I teased.
Diary of an Incubus Page 7
