“No,” Mitch shook his head and flicked a glance to me, before returning his attention to the dance floor. “I think this might be a good thing for him. Maybe he’ll be able to understand our relationship better as a result. And maybe he’ll be able to accept the fact when he learns what I have become.”
“Maybe,” I agreed half-heartedly. “Or meeting her might just prove to be the worst mistake of his young life.”
We watched them dance for a while; he towered over her and the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. To any outsider they would look like a young couple in the first flush of love.
At first they held each other apart while Vivienne chattered up into his face. She smiled, she flirted, and he responded, warming to her more, rewarding her efforts with a smile so much like Mitch’s that it made my heart twist. As they continued swaying to their own personal music, they drew each other in closer, their bodies touching, not even a hair’s breadth separating them. Chris put his head down closer to hers and she stretched up on her toes, her lips straining to reach his ears.
“I hope she’s not hungry,” I said to myself, feeling somewhat uncomfortable and very much a voyeur.
Mitch groaned a bit. “I suspect watching this is not such a good idea. Excuse me for a minute.” He got up from the table and disappeared into the men’s room. I continued to watch Vivienne and Chris, fascinated at how she managed to hypnotize him, there, in full view of everyone in the club. Was this how I looked in the process of the hunt? Was I as good as she?
“She’s really something, isn’t she?”
Mark’s unexpected arrival made me jump and I knocked over my wineglass, not breaking it, but spilling the dregs on the table. “Yes, she certainly is.” I mopped up the wine with the loose napkins on the table and when I was done he set three more drinks in front of me, removing the empty ones to a tray set on the table behind him.
“Fred says you were the best.” He placed both hands on the heart-shaped table top and leaned into me, an undisguised admiration reflected on his face. “He says you could capture them with just a look, just a movement of your hand.”
“I was the best?” I saw no need to hide my nature from this young man and I was too weary for denials. “Why the past tense?”
Mark looked away, blushing. “Fred says that when vampires,” his voice lowered on the word, “fall in love, they lose their touch. They become soft; their instincts get dull.”
“Ah, I see. I suppose Fred is an expert.”
“He’s usually right.”
The laugh I tried to give came out more of a growl; it was a threatening sound and he backed away. “And Fred probably is right,” I continued. “I don’t know. But I have never gone hungry. Please tell him that for me next time you see him.”
“Oh, God, I—I mean, I meant no offense, Mrs. Greer. Really. I was just sort of talking off the cuff. That happens when I get nervous.”
“No offense taken, Mark. At least not from you. But from Fred?” I shrugged. “Our Fred should remember not to sit in judgment over his elders and his betters. I’ve won with him before and I have no doubt I can do so again.”
Mark gulped. “I’m sorry I said anything at all. Shit, Fred will be really mad at me now.” His hangdog attitude did not calm me down, but merely annoyed me further. Who the hell was Fred to inspire such devotion in a man? But I kept my thoughts to myself and pulled my eyes away from him, fastening them again upon the couple on the dance floor.
“Please, don’t say anything to him about this, Mrs. Griffin.”
“Fred and I are not close. Not by any stretch of the imagination, Mark. Should we never come into contact with each other again, I would not spend even one minute of my endless time seeking him out. So your secrets are safe with me. And you’re free to think whatever you like.” I turned my direction back to Chris and Vivienne on the dance floor. His hands had reached lower on her body and had pulled her in against him. Her mouth was still on the level of his ear and I could see her lips moving. She was not biting him, I realized with a sigh of relief, she was only talking to him. And what kind of harm could that do?
Mark snuck off when he discovered that I was paying him no attention and Mitch returned. “Are they still at it?” he asked, a tone of disgust appearing. “Maybe we should just leave.”
The band, now, had returned to the stage and they started to tune their instruments, laughing and joking with each other, some of it apparently focused on the two on the dance floor. It seemed good natured though and I assumed that they were well acquainted with Vivienne’s presence at the club.
Without warning, Chris abruptly pulled away from her; his sudden separation and withdrawal of support caused her to stagger. They stared at each other, their breath coming in short gasps. Finally, Chris looked over at our table, then back to her. All the blood had rushed out of his face, as if she had indeed been feeding off of him. And in a sense, that was only too accurate.
“That can’t be true . . .” His voice carried even over the discord of the instruments. “My father is not a vampire. And he will never be one.”
Chapter 17
Chris took one last look at our table, catching my eyes and holding them for a time. Then he pushed Vivienne away from him and ran out the door. The three of us watched him leave without making a move to stop him, without saying a word. There was nothing that could be done or said.
Vivienne slowly approached the table, her hands pressing firmly against her mouth. When she lowered them, her lips were almost white. “I’m so sorry, Mitch. I thought he knew.”
Mitch stared off in the direction of the street as if he were able to see through the walls and watch Chris’s retreat. His face was expressionless. “Maybe it’s better this way; I’m not sure I could have found the right words. He’ll go away for a while, sleep off the beer, and things will be okay.”
“Oui.” She stretched up on her toes and kissed Mitch’s cheek with a gentleness that surprised me. “Perhaps you are right. I pray that you are.”
I said nothing. I had seen the expression on Chris’s face. Had read the hatred in his eyes. There would be no forgiveness, no understanding and it would tear Mitch to pieces. I sighed.
“We are doing no good here, Mitch,” I said to him. “Let’s go home. Vivienne, are you coming?”
“No, I think I’ll stay here for a while, if you don’t mind. I’m sure you wish to be alone and I’ve caused enough trouble for one evening. Please know that I did not mean to.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Trouble seems to follow me wherever I go.”
She seemed so sincere in her upset that I almost believed her. I could see from Mitch’s face that he did. Perhaps that was most important right now.
He straightened his shoulders and ran his fingers through his hair. “Don’t worry about it, Vivienne. It was inevitable that Chris find out sooner or later.” He gave a humorless laugh. “It’s not as if I could’ve been able to hide what I am from him indefinitely. I was deliberately avoiding the issue, knowing that there was no way he would take it well. We should have told him immediately, even before we left for England.”
“But,” I reached over, took Mitch’s hand and squeezed it, giving the only comfort I could, “now at least he knows.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “and strangely enough, that’s a big relief. Let’s go.”
We said brief good-byes to Vivienne, waved to Mark as we walked through the club and stood on the street for a few minutes. Mitch looked intently at the crowd of pedestrians for Chris’s familiar figure, but he was nowhere in sight.
“You want to go after him, don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question on my part. It is what I would have wanted to do.
“Yeah, do you mind?”
“Even if I did, my love, what else would I have to do?”
We started walking down the street in the direction of Mitch’s old brownstone apartment building. “Chris was always such a good kid. Never gave us any trouble, not even during his teenage years. Most
kids go crazy at a certain point; turn rebellious and hate their parents, you know the phase. But not Chris. He always followed my advice, was always around to talk to after a particularly bad day at the department. And even if he never said that he was proud of me, I knew that he was.”
“He’s your son, Mitch, and he loves you. He’ll
come around.”
“And what if he doesn’t?”
We stopped under a streetlight and I squinted up into the light reflecting from his face. “You want the truth?” I waited for his nod, then continued. “If he doesn’t come around, you’ll both still survive. You’ll both go on with your own lives. Isn’t that the way it should be?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is.”
We searched until the sun was almost up. Chris was nowhere Mitch thought he might have gone. We made a final check back at the apartment, let ourselves in the front door, and listened. His place was empty.
“We’ll have to go somewhere soon, Mitch. It’s almost dawn.”
“I know. But I’m worried about him, where could he be?”
“It’s a big city, my love, and Chris is a big boy. I’m sure he’ll be okay. Could he have gone to his mother?”
Mitch always teased me that I had no past because I chose not to speak of it. I thought he had told me most of the intimate details of his life, but I realized that there were things he held back on also. His previous marriage was one of them; I didn’t know his ex-wife’s name.
“Barbara’s?” He thought about the idea and rejected it. “No, I don’t think so, the two of them have never really gotten along that well since the divorce. And he absolutely hates her new husband.”
“Sort of like he hates your new wife?”
Walking to the curb and signaling for a cab, he laughed and looked back over his shoulder at me. “Much worse than you.”
“Worse than me? Is that possible? Who is this guy, Jack the Ripper?”
He gave me a quick look. “I’ve never told you the story of my divorce, have I?”
“No, other than the fact that your wife, Barbara, was tired of being a policeman’s wife. So she remarried? Who was the lucky man?”
“My ex-partner.” His voice held no emotion and I couldn’t read his eyes.
But I couldn’t help stifling a quick laugh as I got into the cab and gave the driver the address of the Imperial. Mitch slid over next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “I can understand why you don’t want to talk about it, Mitch. That must have been a pretty humiliating experience for you.”
“Actually,” he spread the word out, trying to maintain a serious expression, but failing, “it was the funniest situation I’ve ever been involved in. You’d be amazed at the machinations these two put into the affair, when all either one of them needed to do was tell me, honestly and up-front, what was going on. I knew for years before Martin got up the nerve to confess.”
“But you still don’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t talk about it, Deirdre, because it’s unimportant to us. Unimportant to almost everything in my life. And I never loved her the way I love you.” He touched his hand to my upper thigh, rubbed down to my knee and up again. “You’re all that matters to me. And I don’t ever want you to forget that.”
The Imperial was deserted when we arrived and the pre-dawn streets surrounding the restaurant were practically empty, giving the area an almost surrealistic quality. We let ourselves into the back entrance with our key and made our way through the corridors to our rooms.
I smelled the roses before we were halfway into the room. I stopped, inhaled deeply, and turned to Mitch, who was turning on the light by the bed. “They’re lovely, Mitch. Thank you so much.”
“Huh?”
I pointed to the bouquet sitting atop the dresser; a dozen blood red roses and one black bud. Walking over to them I buried my nose in the blooms and pulled in their rich scent.
“I didn’t send them.”
I spun around and he was smiling a rather sheepish smile. “I’ve been a little busy and haven’t really had time to think of flowers. They must be from Victor, or maybe the whole Cadre; you know, as a sort of thank-you for a job well done.”
“Well, maybe.” I turned back to the dresser and looked around for a card. “But I didn’t really do anything. If Larry is truly dead, he did that on his own. They should have sent these to the cemetery in that case.”
“Maybe they’re just standard Cadre decorating, then. Pretty though, I wonder why there’s one black rose with the rest.”
“Max used to do that. Do you remember when we first met and my office was filled with flowers?”
“Yeah.” He smiled at the memory. “I wanted to know who died. I’m afraid that’s as close to romantic behavior as I ever get, Deirdre. You’ve tied yourself down to a very practical man.”
“You don’t hear me complaining. I don’t need roses, my love.”
“Well, if this is a Max-type tradition,” he walked over to the dressers and looked at the roses, fingering one of the velvety blooms, “I would expect that these came from Victor. Maybe as an apology for his ‘unpleasantness.’ ”
I smiled at his impersonation. “You do that so very well, my love. But I keep telling you to watch your step; Victor might just resign and they’ll elect you to the job.”
I stepped out of my clothes and kicked them over into the corner of the room. “I really have to call Betsy this afternoon; I can’t go on wearing the same things over and over again. But first, I want a shower and some sleep. Interested?”
His eyes lit up and ran appreciatively over my naked body. “You’re perfection, you know.”
I gave a low chuckle as I went into the bathroom. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Detective, or have you failed to notice? Come here.”
He stood in front of me and I pulled the t-shirt from his body. “Now,” I reached up and took hold of his shoulders, turning him around to face the mirror over the sink. “Look at yourself.”
I stood behind him, one arm stretched around his neck and the other resting on his upper arm. We both stared at our reflection and our eyes met. Our skin glowed, his a slightly darker hue than mine. His gray hair flowed back from his forehead, ending just a bit above his shoulders. He might be mistaken for an old man at first glance until he opened his eyes; electric blue as always, they glowed with an inner heat that hinted of stronger flames within. We were both strong and conditioned predators. “See,” I said with a twisted smile, “perfection.”
Then I slapped him lightly on his backside and ducked away from him, pulling open the shower curtain and turning on the water. “I get first dibs on the hot water.”
Mitch skinned out of his jeans and his underwear. “The hell you do.” He stepped into the shower and lifted me up by the waist, twisting me around and setting me down behind him. We played the game for a while with the hot water splashing over our bodies, warming our skin to a near-human temperature. It had been a difficult night and we had more than our share of problems to solve, but together we were one. In that unity, all else in the world seemed to pale.
After all the soaping and the teasing, the nipping, the gentle and the not-so-gentle love play, we dried each other off and got into bed. Mitch gave a great yawn, exposing slightly sharpened canines that had grown during our play and I laughed at him, softly.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re like a great big dog, sometimes. Especially when you yawn like that.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said, baring his teeth to me in a fake snarl. “I prefer to think of myself as a wolf, hunting the wilds in search of warm, rich blood.”
He growled at me and just for a second his face seemed to twist into another shape; I saw what he could be. I gasped; he was frightening but beautiful. Then he yawned again and the illusion disappeared.
“Damn, I’m beat,” he said, reaching over and giving me a light kiss. “Sleep well, Deirdre.”
He was out almost instantly, sleeping the wa
y I used to, effortlessly and deeply, almost boneless in his utter relaxation. I lay sleeplessly next to him for a while, disturbed by the sounds of daily life outside the room, sounds that urged me to find a window somewhere in this crypt and look upon daylight one final time. I stayed in bed and resisted the whispered seduction, but the seeds of yesterday’s dawn vision had been planted.
This time the picture seemed clearer, sharper; a lone figure in the pre-dawn mist, sitting quietly, unmoving. The sky lightened, the sun rose, and the figure glowed, echoing the colors of dawn, before bursting into flame.
I turned my face to the ceiling of the darkened room as if to feel the cleansing heat of my vision. Ah, to see the sun once more, I thought and sighed. But Mitch stirred next to me, and murmured my name, reminding me that I had reason yet to live. Closing my eyes, I nestled into the cool skin of his shoulder and slept.
Chapter 18
I woke in the late afternoon with a start, shivering in the draft from the open door. Open door? I sat up in bed and elbowed Mitch.
“What?” His eyes opened and he stared around the room hazily until they focused in.
“Mitch, we did close the door this morning, didn’t we?”
“Of course, closed and locked.”
“It’s open now.”
“What the hell?” Mitch jumped from the bed and crossed the room, slamming the door shut and turning the dead bolt. “That’s strange. Really strange.” He started back across the room and yelped as he stepped down on something. He bent down and picked up the stem of a rose. It was missing its bloom completely. “Damn,” he said and then, “stupid thorns.” Hopping over to the bed, he sat back down, laid the stem on top of my covers and inspected the sole of his foot. “I suspect I’ll live.” He pulled a thorn from his skin and tossed it into the corner of the room. “This is why I never send a lady roses, she just finds a way to hurt me with them.” He smiled to soften his words. “What the hell were you doing while I was sleeping, Deirdre, dancing the tango with Max?”
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