by Dani April
“Yes. We are friends.” She was happy at this turn of events.
“Don’t have any more silly worries about getting turned into a vampire!” he admonished her.
“Easier said than done with Peter running around here every night talking about turning me into one.” She let out a long breath. “But I’ll give it a try.”
“You know, I think you might just be falling in love with Peter, too.”
“No!” She wanted to shove away from him at that thought. “Don’t even say that. It isn’t true.”
“Worse things could happen to you.”
“You’re wrong about that.” This brought up all sorts of possibilities in her mind, none of which she wanted to face. “Right now I can’t think of anything worse than being in love with the vampire Peter von North.”
Ian had an erection. She felt it under the covers pressing outside of his boxers and against her leg. She looked up at him with what felt like a wicked smile on her face.
“Ian?” she asked him. “Want to use each other one last time?”
She smiled, letting him bend her back onto the mattress as he rolled on top of her. She wrapped her arms around his muscle-toughened shoulders and hung on for the ride. This time when she reached her orgasm she refrained from biting him, but just barely. Today the prying eyes of Peter were not on them and they were only performing for each other.
It was a nice fuck that sealed their friendship. She hoped it would be forever and felt that it probably would be. If she never found Mister Right, or if life got turned upside down which it had a way of doing sometimes, at least Ian would be there to be her friend.
Chapter Sixteen
That night Peter came to her as he always did after the sun set. For the first time since meeting Peter almost a week before, Rebecca was feeling more like herself and in control of the situation. She knew she could not allow him to take her back to his room beneath the castle. There would be too much temptation for both of them down there, and she couldn’t allow any physical contact between them that might infect her with the vampire blood.
She asked Peter to take her for a walk in the desert. He readily agreed. He took her by the hand and led her on a leisurely walk across the dunes. They made their way a couple miles out to where the first blast crater was formed.
The stillness and quiet of the desert at night was overwhelming. The wind wasn’t even blowing tonight. The moon was full and served as a mini sun in the sky, illuminating every rock and grain of sand. A brief glance across the tumbleweeds and Rebecca got her first glimpse down into one of the craters. It was a hole nearly a hundred feet deep, ugly and ominous.
Strolling across this weird landscape with a vampire at her side gave Rebecca a chill down her spine. Then when Peter took her hand to lead her around a desert mound, she felt his warmth and looked up into his handsome and confident face. There seemed to be so many possibilities with a man like Peter because of his intelligence, his sureness of character, and his unique way of viewing the world. She asked herself what she would have thought about him or started to feel for him if he only hadn’t been a vampire. But he was, and she had to get her mind back on the mission at hand, which was saving her life from this vampire.
He caught her hand up in his and moved them down a different path, changing their course. “We should avoid walking down that avenue. Come on, this way.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“A rattle snake.”
“I guess vampire senses come in pretty handy sometimes.” Rebecca smiled. She watched the shadows clear from his face, and he smiled down at her. This was almost a normal moment between them.
“Why are you doing this, Peter?” she asked him point blank.
“I thought you wanted to go for a walk with me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked up at the moon and let go of her hand. “I know you think I’m a monster.”
“I think that if you weren’t trying to turn me into a vampire, I would actually respect you.”
“But I am going to make you a vampire, Rebecca.” He looked back down at her with a determination that frightened her.
“Then you lied to me when you told me you loved me?”
“I do love you, and that’s why I am going to make you mine forever.”
She stopped and let him walk ahead of her a few feet. She leaned against a large boulder and folded her arms across her chest. This was her moment to get through to him. She was free of the vampire blood for the first time in days and had her right mind back. She was going to have to convince him to see reason now, or leave him and flee back to her life in the city.
“You don’t care what I want,” she told him. “That’s not the sign of love. You don’t even care if I end up hating you. If you really loved me, you would care about something like that.”
He returned to her with a smile on his face and gave a laugh. He was looking down on her like she was a child. The all-knowing air he took on made her furious.
“I expect you will hate me at first.” He reached out and took her chin in his hand. “You are still human for the moment and looking at the world from the eyes of a human woman. I can’t imagine any other reaction from you than the one you are having. But I have watched the world and those in it for a thousand years. Given enough time, I know that all things work themselves out. I can make you fall in love with me just the way I can make you into one of my own kind.”
“And you’re giving me no choice?” Rebecca took a deep swallow. When she looked at him like this, the fear rose up inside of her. Gone was the nice Peter who she thought she could admire. Standing before her now was a vampire filled with nothing more than primal lust for his victim.
“You never had a choice in the matter.” When he smiled at her this time, she saw his incisors had grown in his mouth and were protruding from his gums. “You never had a choice from the first moment I fell in love with you. I am changing your destiny from the old and mundane of your former life. Your destiny is now rewritten. You are destined to become a vampire with me and live through all eternity at my side. I am going to be your maker. Do you know what that means?”
She pushed away from him, fury mixing with fear inside of her as she stumbled backward across the desert floor to escape him. “It means I was right when I told you I hated you the other night. I told you that even after we made love, and I meant it!”
“I promise you will not always harbor these feelings for me.”
“You’re wrong!” She hissed at him. “I’m happy I took you for this little walk in the desert tonight. I did it hoping I would get to know you better. Stupid me! I actually wanted to get to know you better. Well, I guess I have. I see the real Peter von North now, and I hate him more than I ever have!”
When he tried to approach her, she spit at him. Her spittle flew onto the chest of his half-open shirt. This made him pause. He looked down and wiped off his shirt. She could feel the pain behind his words when he spoke next.
“I can’t help being what I am, Rebecca.”
“Probably not,” she admitted. “But I can’t help wanting to stay alive.”
“You realize of course, there is no way out for you.” He was sad now, but seemed more determined than ever to get his way. “There is no escape from this desert. I’ll never let you leave me.”
Rebecca was beginning to become convinced. She had made a horrible mistake. The vampire blood had forced her to stay out here for sex and more sex. The men had told her that Peter was a good man and would never harm her in the end. She had looked into Peter’s eyes after making love with him and found no evil there. She had allowed herself to believe all of these things. Suddenly she realized they had all been wrong.
“Your friends didn’t think you were capable of this.” She was ashamed to hear a note of pleading in her voice as she backed further away from the monster.
“They don’t know me.” He approached her, his fangs growing by the se
cond. “And neither do you. Not yet. But you will get to know me, that I promise you. You and I will have centuries to get to know each other. You will find love for me as I have found for you once you can read my thoughts as clearly as I can read yours. Whether you like it or not, I am giving you a great gift, Rebecca.”
She realized there was no running away from him. He was as fast as a shooting star in the night sky. He could fly with the wind, and he probably had the strength of ten men. He was right. There was no escape for her. She had been a fool to wait so long. She saw her life flash before her eyes.
He took her back into his arms. This time she did not feel warmth or comfort, but stark, cold fear. His long fingers were caressing her neck, combing back her hair.
He bent down to her and placed his lips on her neck and began feeding. Rebecca looked up into the sky and looked at the beauty of the world through the eyes of a human as the vampire drained the blood from her neck. There was a roaring in her ears like a tornado was loose in her brain. Then there was silence and blackness. She went still and closed her eyes.
* * * *
She opened her eyes to bright sunshine. This was the brightest sunshine she had ever seen. It was brilliant and beautiful, but frightening in all the power it held.
She sat up and brought her surroundings into focus looking around. She was in bed back in her room in the tower of the castle. The window next to her bed was open, and there was the explanation for all the sunlight.
Tex was sitting on the bed with her. He had just laid a tray of breakfast over her lap. He was looking across the bed at her with a worried look.
“You gave us all quite a fright, Rebecca,” he said in his slow and friendly drawl.
“How are you feeling, Rebecca?” This was Ramos’s voice, and she turned over to see him sitting on the other side of the bed with Tex.
She couldn’t react to them immediately. Her mind was just too foggy, and she didn’t think she had ready command of her voice. The fever was back on her, that now-familiar fever she got whenever she had been exposed to a healthy dose of vampire blood. Today it was different, however. Today accompanying the fever and the euphoria that made her mind go dull and focus only on her need for sex was a bone-numbing weakness all through her body. The first few times she’d had vampire blood inside her, she had felt happy and like nothing in the world could hold her back. This morning all she felt like doing was falling back onto the bed and sleeping for the rest of the day.
Ian came out of the bathroom holding a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin. “I see the sleeping beauty has awakened.” He reached down and fed two white pills from the aspirin bottle into the palm of her hand. “Take these,” he commanded her. “I’m not for sure they’ll cure what ails you, but they can’t hurt any.”
Looking down to where the two aspirin sat in her palm, she saw a strange chalkiness to the pallor of her skin that she had never seen before. The sight of her own skin made her stomach turn. Apparently she looked worse than she felt.
Ian held the glass of water up to her lips, and she swallowed the aspirin.
“I answered your phone for you, Rebecca,” Tex explained to her. “Hope you don’t mind, but it kept playing that song over and over again. I figured someone wanted to speak with you pretty bad.”
“Who was it?” She spoke for the first time. The words sounded foreign out of her mouth, like someone else was doing the talking for her.
“Bruce somebody…Said he was your boss.”
“Yes. He is my producer.”
“He was awfully worried about you. He wanted to make sure you’d be on that flight out of McCarran tomorrow morning. I promised him you would be.”
“What happened with Peter last night, Rebecca?” Ramos asked her. The concern for her in his voice was evident. “What did he do to you?”
“I…I can’t remember…” At that moment she could hardly remember her own name.
Ian ran fingers along her collarbone and to her neck, stopping at the sore place over her jugular vein. “I’ll tell you what happened to you last night, Beck.” He inspected her wounds in more detail. “Bloody vampire took a bite out of you. Goddamn him! That no good, bloody bastard! He got lots of your blood last night from the looks of these puncture marks. They’re three times the size from yesterday. I think I may have been wrong about Peter. I should have killed him when I had the chance years ago.”
The other two men were silent for a moment, but did not try to argue with the deduction Ian had reached.
“Eat this breakfast,” Tex urged her kindly. “I made it myself. Now I’m not usually much of a cook, but I think a little grub would do you good this morning.”
She picked at her food. She tried eating a forkful of scrambled eggs. As soon as she tasted the food, she made a face, and it was all she could do to force herself to swallow it and then to keep her stomach from throwing it back up. Her appetite had abandoned her.
“Please try and eat a little more,” Ramos told her when she tried to shove the tray aside.
“Sorry,” she told the men. “I’m just not hungry today.”
Her words and her reaction to the food seemed to alarm Ian. He jumped up off the bed and headed for the door. “We’re getting you out of this place now!”
“But I’ve got one more night here on my assignment,” she pleaded with him.
“Fuck that! We’re getting you back to Vegas today!” Tex and Ramos had gotten up with Ian, too. He turned to them to bark orders. “One of you boys stay with her and see that she gets ready and pack up her things for her. The other one come with me. I’ll bring my blazer around to the front. The four of us our taking it into Sin City.”
“I’ll go with you, big guy,” Tex told him. “Ramos, you stay here with Rebecca and help her get ready, but don’t take too long. We’ll meet you out front in twenty minutes.”
Ian and Tex hurried out of the room, closing the door behind them. Rebecca looked over at the beautiful Ramos. His olive skin had never looked more attractive to her than it did in the light of the sun streaming in through her window.
She still wasn’t too sure where the others guys had gone or what the urgency was, but she figured she would have to allow herself to go with the flow. She certainly was in no shape today to make any decisions on her own. Without even knowing what she was doing, she had laid her head back down on the pillows and was in the process of drifting back off to sleep.
Ramos was hovering over her field of vision, and she felt him gently shaking her back from the brink of sleep. He was wearing such nice aftershave. When he got up close to her like this, she could smell it. The scent was intoxicating to her and made her want to take him in even closer.
“Rebecca.” He spoke her name gently. “Come on and wake up for me now. You can sleep during the ride into the city. But right now you have to try and get up.”
She reached out and curled her arms around him, bringing him down to her, finding a new strength in her lust. “Make love to me, Ramos?” she asked him in a faraway voice that did not even sound like it was coming from her own lips.
She pulled him down on top of her on the bed and mashed her lips against him, tasting his lovely flavor.
He struggled back up from her grasp. “No, Rebecca,” he told her, his voice never possessing anything but kindness toward her. “I want to make love with you again, but not like this. It isn’t right.” He took her hand in his and forced her up from under the covers. “You have to come with me now. You have to let me help you.”
She tentatively placed her bare feet onto the carpeting beneath the bed. She was still dressed in the same clothes she had worn the night before. Whatever Peter had done with her last night, it had only to do with him satisfying his urge for her blood and nothing to do with satisfying his lust for her body. At least she could take comfort in knowing she hadn’t been raped, but what Peter had done with her might have been worse.
She leaned against Ramos for support. Now that her lust had gone, she f
elt all her strength go with it and didn’t know if she had enough strength to support herself. She had to be honest with herself, at that moment she felt like she was dying.
“I’m sorry, Ramos,” she told him in a weak voice. “Thank you for being a friend and trying to help me.”
“Do you want to take a shower?” he asked her. “I will wait out here.”
“Do I have time?”
He looked at a clock set over on the bureau. She knew what he was thinking. How much time did they have before the sun went down? When he hesitated, she knew what the answer was.
“That’s okay. Just let me wash my face and try and get some of the cobwebs out. It won’t take me five minutes.”
“Thanks for being strong, Rebecca,” he told her. “I’ll get your things packed.”
“What time does that clock say anyway?” she asked him because her vision was still too blurry to see that far.
“Don’t worry. We have plenty of time.”
But Ramos wasn’t a very convincing liar, and she knew they didn’t have time. She brought up all her reserves of courage and strength and moved into the bathroom with all the speed she could muster.
Rebecca knew she was going to die that night unless she got out of Peter’s castle before the sun went down.
Chapter Seventeen
The sunlight hit her again, this time stronger and brighter and, yes, even painful. The sun was high in a cloudless sky and shining down brightly on the courtyard as Ramos helped her to step outside into its brilliance. It was so bright she couldn’t even see, the streaming rays blinding her.
Upstairs in her bathroom when she had washed her face she got a good look at herself. The face of the woman staring back at her was not her own. It was a stranger’s face and that of a ghost. So pale and white had her face become that the thin blue blood vessels beneath the surface were on full display and the ugly pathways they weaved under her skin.
