by Joey W. Hill
He was looking at her throat. More specifically, she thought he’d latched onto the jump of her pulse, because what was flickering in his eyes seemed to match that vibration.
Even adrenaline wouldn’t have kept a man on his feet with his kind of injuries. They definitely would not have permitted him the strength to pull another full-grown man through the jungle to their hospital. Even the hold he had on her wrist was far steadier than it should have been.
If he was mortal.
As if he sensed the direction of her thoughts, his eyes now lifted to her face. She saw open hunger in his gaze, not pain.
Alistair. It wasn’t an uncommon name, but all the other things…it should have added up. Shock coursed through her.
She knew what he was. What’s more, she knew who he was.
A small, handheld portrait wasn’t always the best likeness of a person, especially when the man in question was in far rougher circumstances than the groomed and suited person in the picture. However, when she took a closer look, she knew she was right.
Her heart thumped into her throat, and a surge of impossible-to-separate emotions flooded her. Charlie hadn’t been hallucinating. The man who’d carried near half a dozen men to safety was no man at all.
He was a vampire.
Chapter Two
There were families with ancient, secret ties to the vampire world, having loyalties and obligations to them for a variety of reasons. If required, the first born of every generation was promised for training as an Inherited Servant, or InhServ, as they called it.
The first time Nina had heard it described, she’d had another word for it. Slavery. A vampire’s property. Bound to him or her for three hundred bloody years.
Sher had come out of the womb minutes before Nina. Her at-home training to be an InhServ had started at the age of six, preparing her for “assignment to an elite member of the vampire world.”
Whereas Nina’s raising had been that of a mostly normal child, like that of her two younger siblings, Jim and Manny, Sher’s treatment had been far different. At least she’d been able to live under the same roof with Nina. Until she turned sixteen. On that day, Sher underwent a formal ceremony at which she received official notice of who her assigned vampire would be, which included a small portrait of him. Sher had kept it on her person like her most precious memento, studying it as if she expected the image to start issuing her commands. His desires, she called them.
On that day, Nina had told herself her sister was happy, which should be all that mattered. But Nina couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Perhaps because she didn’t want to understand, any empathy overshadowed by dread. The same day of that ceremony would be the last night she and Nina would share a room, because the next morning Sher would be transported to the InhServ training facility, where she’d live until she began active service for her assigned vampire. Nina’s chances to see her might be few and far between going forward—if any. And entirely dependent on her vampire “Master.”
It was one of the reasons Nina had lied about her age on her nursing application, so she could start school at the hospital the very next week.
But on that night, she’d sat with her sister in their shared bedroom, listening to her talk. Nursing her hurt and fears for her sister in silence while Sher gushed on excitedly about the life that had been mandated for her since birth.
Brainwashing, Nina thought. But her sister didn’t act brainwashed, not exactly. Sher insisted her devotion to a male she’d never met wasn’t a romanticized delusion, but a deep, true feeling.
“It’s part of the training, Nina,” Sher explained. “But it’s also who I am. They evaluate us every year to be sure of it.”
“How do you train someone not to have any dreams of their own?” Nina retorted.
Sher was lying on her side on their bed, her fall of brown hair across the spread so shiny it was absurdly like silk. Nina sat cross-legged, her arms hugged tight against her until Sher tugged one hand free and squeezed it. “This is my dream, Nina,” she said earnestly. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to understand. It’s bred into our family, after all. They told me. Even you have it. A limitless desire toward service. It’s why you want to be a nurse.”
“Service to those who need help. Not to a spoiled blue blood with a spoon up his arse.”
“I don’t know if he’s a blue blood, not that way. He’s a made vampire, and it’s really unusual for a made vampire to receive the honor of an InhServ.” Sher’s hand tightened on Nina’s. “But think of it, Nina. I’m considered an honor to him. Apparently a very high-ranking vampire turned him, a queen. She’s not on the Council, but has a great deal of influence upon them. Thanks to her, and to his own capabilities, he’s risen in their ranks and is in line to be a Region Master, watching over and protecting other vampires.”
“Anyone is lucky to have you,” Nina said staunchly. “If he doesn’t realize that, I’ll come put my foot up his arse. I don’t care what he is. Just that he’s good to you. Oh, Sher…what am I going to do without you?”
Sher’s face softened, her own eyes glinting with tears. While it was petty, it did gratify Nina to see her sister wasn’t entirely reconciled with leaving her.
Sher wrapped her arms around her, the two of them holding one another like when they’d been children. Nina felt like one; resentful, helpless, angry, sad and tearful. “Silly goose,” Sher whispered.
“I don’t want to lose you. Sometimes it felt like I lost you when you were six.”
“You’re not losing me,” Sher said firmly, stroking her hair. “We’re twins. We’ll always be connected. Always. I’ll bet he’ll give me permission to come see you sometimes. You’ll see.” Her voice broke a little, though. “It will be okay. We have time, Nina. Don’t worry, love.”
Fast-forward, and Sher and she were twenty-one. Sher was still living at the InhServ training facility, but was allowed two trips home a year, one on their shared birthday. With each visit, she demonstrated she was becoming more cosmopolitan and educated than the most well-traveled university graduate Nina knew, male or female. It made it hard to argue that being an InhServ was keeping Sher from experiencing life to the fullest.
But all of her experiences were for the service of another. Not for herself. And some of the sexual things she was learning…they made Nina uncomfortable. Not because she was a prude about naked bodies. She’d graduated and was a nurse now, working at the Sydney hospital where she’d trained. No, it was how she reacted to the appalling and provocative things Sher told her. How much she thought about them.
For a vampire and servant, sex was…different. The things Sher described would come back to Nina in the dark of the night, stirring odd feelings, making her fingers fist in the covers and her body throb as she imagined herself…doing the things Sher said she was learning. It appalled her, but it didn’t stop the imaginings that couldn’t be characterized as anything but fantasies.
She usually covered her reactions to Sher’s tidbits about the sexual side of things with mock gagging and by putting her fingers in her ears. But this time, on their twenty-first birthday visit, when the subject came up, admittedly because she asked about it, Nina couldn’t be as flippant. Maybe because she knew this was probably Sher’s last visit home for the foreseeable future, since twenty-one was when most InhServs started their service.
“So how is having to do for him, however, whenever he wants, not unpaid prostitution?” she asked in a sullen tone.
“It’s not like that at all,” Sher said sharply. Her reproachful gaze told Nina she’d been unkind, creating a flood of regret. But it just went along with the other disagreeable feelings she was having.
“Nina.” Sher’s voice softened, and when Nina wouldn’t let her hold her hand, Sher moved her foot so it linked over Nina’s ankle. They were on the back veranda bench together.
“It’s…service. It’s a way of giving yourself completely to him. It’s something that, when I think about it, I want to…
You’ll laugh at me, and I don’t think I could bear that.”
Sher actually flushed a little, her articulate sister stumbling over the explanation like a flustered, lovesick girl. It pulled Nina out of her own darkness, somewhat, enough to realize being a shrew was not how she wanted to spend their time together.
“No. No, I won’t.” Nina might be privately horrified, but she wouldn’t show it. She told herself that, fiercely.
Sher sighed and looked straight at her. “It makes me want to call him Master. For him to be all that means to me. And I can’t describe what that is. I just know it’s everything that matters.” She took a breath. “Which is why I’ll be remaining in InhServ training for another seven years.”
“What?” Nina straightened so quickly the bench creaked.
She gave herself credit for looking past her own sudden flood of elation to see the somber set to Sher’s face. Sher had looked forward to reaching twenty-one so very much. No matter how Nina might feel about that personally, she knew how much going into her vampire’s service meant to her twin.
“What do you mean? You were so excited to be going to him this year.”
“I was. And I admit, it was a hard blow.” A shadow passed through Sher’s brown eyes, the hint of tears she swallowed back, though Nina realized it was the aftermath of the flood. She’d probably had her hardest cries with her fellow InhServs who, unlike her twin, would understand how disappointing it was to wait longer. Nina hated falling short on that, and made an effort to do better, at least in the here and now. She slid closer to her sister, turning on her hip so she could put an arm over her shoulder, stroke her hair back.
Sher gave her a grateful look and took a breath. “But it’s what he wants, and that’s all that matters. A vampire has the right to extend his or her InhServ’s training so they go through the full training curriculum before they come into their vampire’s service. It means I’ll be given the maximum amount of time to learn the skills with which to serve him. Language, dance, social demands, mechanical aptitude, fighting, weaponry…” She cleared her throat. “And the sex. I mean, Nina, really, it’s a good thing. I will have training that even most InhServs don’t.”
Nina digested that. “Well, that’s good then. Maybe it will go faster than you expect. And once it’s all said and done, you get to live three centuries. So seven more years is like one in normal people years.”
“Normal people years?”
“Exactly.”
A little smile teased Sher’s mouth. “Daftie. He sent me a letter.”
“He did?” Nina elbowed her. “Were you going to share it?”
“No,” Sher said soberly. “Not at first. But I will, if you promise me something, Nina. Don’t say anything negative when you read it. Okay? This letter is very important to me.”
“All right. I won’t. I promise.” She touched her sister’s hand. The sun was moving to mellow afternoon, the bugs making hot weather sawing sounds. They were barefoot, the two of them, their feet stretched out side by side. Their hips touched. Twins down to the soul. It was what they’d always told one another.
That said, Nina wondered what else the InhServ school could have left to teach her sister. Every time Sher came home, not only was she more well-educated and well-traveled, she looked more and more beautiful. She gave Nina and their mother makeup, hair and clothing tips. It was like she’d entered the same world that Hollywood movie stars frequented.
They were twins, but physically they were so different. Sher had always had a fresh glamor, even before InhServ training, while Nina had a practical, serious look, the gift of a mature face that allowed her to pass as a few years older. She kept her hair cut to her shoulders, wispy lengths more likely to fly about like feathers, rather than ripple along her shoulder blades like Sher’s thick curtain of locks.
But Sher wasn’t just a pretty face. She was equally capable of debating politics and economics with Nina’s father, and when Jim, a fair boxer, had goaded her to share her “fighting skills,” she’d left them slack-jawed when she put him in the dirt in less than ten seconds, her knee on his throat. For a moment, the level stillness in her gaze had been something almost chilling, then she’d helped Jim to his feet, dusted him off and laughed, becoming their sister once more.
Sher removed the letter from her skirt pocket. The page was a heavy cream stationary with a black script on it. Not even or elegant, but bold. Decisive. Nina laid her head on her sister’s shoulder and read it while her sister held it and waited silently for her to finish.
Dear Sher,
The Mistress at the InhServ training school has been instructed to provide you the full curriculum available to InhServ initiates. It is my desire to have you exceed all standards of an InhServ for the benefit of my household.
Being an InhServ is a lifelong and challenging commitment. As such, it is also my desire for you to have the maximum amount of time to enjoy your family and experience your human life to the fullest, before you come into my service.
Lord Alistair
Though Nina didn’t share the thought, the words seemed so carefully chosen. It made her wonder if the magnanimous explanation was his real reason for holding off.
“See how considerate he is?” Sher pointed out.
“This bloke can do no wrong,” Nina said dryly. “Sure he doesn’t have a unicorn up his arse?”
“Nina,” Sher said reprovingly, but her eyes twinkled and she squeezed her sister’s hands, telling Nina she hadn’t mucked things up too badly.
If nothing else, she had her sister for another seven years. She liked Lord Alistair a little better just for that. The total bastard.
Then the war had happened.
So now she was in Singapore. Nina rarely wrote to her mother and father. Her weekly letter went to Sher. Sher’s letters came far more infrequently. When they did, they were more guarded than war correspondence, because no uninitiated human could know the vampire world existed.
But she still wrote of Alistair with genuine devotion, despite not having met him face to face, even now. She shared every scrap she learned secondhand about him with Nina, framing those scraps so he seemed the best of men.
Nina had doubted it all. However, seeing him here, in the middle of a human conflict, trying to save his friends’ lives? She had to admit that helped balance the more negative, poisonous thoughts she’d had about him over the years.
Those had been the thoughts of a lonely girl who missed her sister. She was a woman now, a woman who’d seen horrible things she couldn’t control or fix. She could only help the next man in front of her. At the moment, that was him. He needed blood.
As the door to the hospital opened and closed, even at their considerable distance from the tennis courts, she saw his nostrils flare and the hunger in his expression increase. Too much, and he obviously recognized it. “I need to go,” he said, short to the point of rudeness, and pushed out of the tent. Waving John away despite his perplexed look, she followed the male.
“The one you’re going to go get,” she called after him. “Is he as bad off as Mort? Will the dressing station be able to help?”
He stopped, glanced back. Something gripped his features, and when he spoke, his voice was rough. “No. He’s already gone. He’s where no one who cares is likely to find him, and I need to make sure he gets home.”
“Oh.”
As he turned, began to walk away, her blood started to pound in her ears, a sure sign she was about to do something impetuous and unwise. They were on the slope of lawn, out of earshot of the men in the tent.
“I’ve been told… a vampire drinks from a servant because it steadies him. Centers him. Protects others from his blood hungers while bringing him comfort. Calm seas.”
She might have challenged her sister’s choice at every turn, but she remembered verbatim every word Sher had shared about that choice. Maybe because they were twins, or maybe because she’d run her sister’s words through her head so much, trying to make sense o
f them. Or maybe for other reasons. That inexplicable fascination.
A girl’s fascination, she reminded herself. Though when he pivoted, his gaze sharpening on her like scalpel blades, the unanswered questions she’d carried for so long were even more unsettling.
“My family is bound to your kind,” she said. “That’s how I know what you are.”
“I see.” He studied her. “Small world.”
It was such an unexpectedly courteous and mundane comment to make about such a remarkable thing, she couldn’t help a bubble of laughter. His eyes warmed again, his lips doing that appealing reserved twitch. Then that expression disappeared and became something more discomfiting.
“What are you offering, Sister…?”
“Nina.”
He took two steps toward her and stopped. There was still a good few feet between them, but he seemed much closer. What had she intended? She was mad. She took a breath.
“I suspect…you’re thinking of getting nourishment from an enemy. I don’t think you’ll get strength or calm from their blood, will you? And you really need it if you’re going to do what needs to be done for your friend.”
“I’m not taking any of the blood that the other chaps can use, but I thank you for offering.” He bowed to her, an oddly formal gesture, and pivoted again. He began to retrace the way he’d come, which would take him up the opposite slope and the shadows would reclaim him again.
For a lot of years, she’d thought of her family’s obligation as something that rested wholly on Sher’s shoulders. But her parents had sat all of them down as soon as they were old enough to understand, and declared that keeping the secret of the vampire world, realizing they were tied to that world, was something that bound all of them, for the overall welfare of the family. To think otherwise was very…unwise.
The idea of her family being pushed around by some kind of blackmail had infuriated her, as much as the rest. But Nina thought of how Sher looked at Alistair’s portrait. She might not understand it, but she loved her sister.
