Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the MoonImmortal Obsession

by Michele Hauf

  “We have another briefing in the morning,” Teddy reminded her. “You look like hell.” He turned to the detective. “We’re going to air the tape. It’ll be a gut-busting exclusive for us, and Madison has to be there to present it.”

  “I’ll be there,” Madison promised.

  Teddy handed her the key to her room. “You must have dropped this by my door.”

  The preoccupied detective was checking and rechecking his messages, adept at texting while walking as they headed for her room.

  “Five minutes?” Madison said to him, when they reached it.

  “Four,” the detective countered, leaning a shoulder against the wall, and continuing to fiddle with his phone.

  Madison closed the door behind her, drew in a long breath and said to Christopher St. John, “I know you’re here, and I know what you are.”

  Chapter 17

  “Do you know?” St. John countered from the shadows of her hotel room.

  Madison feared that her heart might jump right out of her chest, it was beating so fast.

  “Show me, or prove me wrong,” she said.

  “It would hurt me to see the disappointment on your face, either way.”

  “More than everything else has hurt me?”

  “What do you think you know?” he asked.

  “A question for a question is a clever parry, St. John, but won’t work. What I want is a confession.”

  Madison stared at the figure in front of her, and blocked out the soft rap at the door.

  “Miss Chase,” Crane called from the hallway. “Only four minutes.”

  “You found Stewart,” St. John said.

  “He was out there. I was right.”

  The silence following her remark eventually filled with his whisper. “He didn’t harm you, then?”

  “Why would you think he’d harm me?”

  St. John didn’t answer the question. He said, with relief in his tone, “For that one thing alone I owe him.”

  He stepped forward. “Are you afraid of me, Madison?”

  “Scared out of my mind. And I now think you know more about my brother than you’re letting on. I believe you might have purposefully kept me from going after him at the club, and also on the street tonight.”

  St. John’s voice was like sifted gravel. “It would have been in your best interest.”

  “Did you know that Stewart was there?”

  “Yes.”

  Feeling faint, Madison stood her ground. “Why would you keep me from him for any reason? Something is wrong with Stewart. I get that. But he is my brother.”

  “Your brother came here after creatures he was sure hid in the shadows.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I’ve thought of nothing else since I arrived in this city. So, are you admitting that he was right to do so?”

  “He was right,” St. John conceded. “You would have found this out soon enough on your own, but the knowledge places you in more danger.”

  Madison shook her head. “Stop it. You’re freaking me out, and I’m freaked enough already.”

  “You said you know about Stewart.” St. John’s voice was tender, which made things infinitely worse. “Do you also understand what he has become?”

  “I know that he’s possibly gone off the deep end, and that he is hiding.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  The protest she’d been about to use stuck in her throat. A chill rippled across the back of her neck. Gathering her courage, Madison raised her hand, and placed her fingertips against St. John’s mouth, sure she had heard what he’d said, and that he hadn’t moved his lips.

  “Isn’t that enough?” she repeated.

  “Not by far.”

  Beneath her fingers, she felt the shape of something she envisioned in her nightmares, but had never expected. She swayed as if she’d been struck, and reached for the light switch.

  The room flooded with light that was blinding in intensity after the darkness she had endured. What that light showed her was alarming.

  The chiseled face across from her wore a pained expression. The eyes looking into hers were part blue, and also midnight-dark. Too dark to be human.

  God help her, Christopher St. John was a vampire.

  “Show me.” Her tone was sharp with despair. “I need to see.”

  He smiled sadly, and there they were. Between the lips that had kissed her gently, and savagely, and torturously, were two long, white, lethal-looking points. Fangs.

  “You lied,” she charged weakly.

  “No,” he said. “You asked the wrong question.”

  This time when he leaned forward, she twitched with anger and fear and frustration. She had nowhere to go to get away from him, and from the pain of this.

  “Tell me they’re fake,” she said, knowing this was a last-ditch effort to make sense of what she was confronting.

  “I wish I could,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”

  The door handle beside them jiggled with an interruption of metal and wood. D.I. Crane’s voice rose in pitch. “Miss Chase? Madison?”

  Her fingers untangled from the jacket she had inadvertently clung to as that jacket was dragged from her grasp. Cold invaded the room as St. John backed away from her.

  Christopher St. John had teased, tempted, shown his true nature and left her. In the blink of an eye, he had gone, leaving her room the same way he’d gotten in. That damn window. She hadn’t seen a thing after the fangs. Her eyes had been closed.

  “Stewart...” she sobbed. “I’ve found one of them. Damn you, brother, I’ve...found one.”

  She had gotten close to the embodiment of danger, had been physically intimate with a creature of the night. A real one. No trick of the light. No fantasy. Not her imagination.

  Stewart had been right, all along.

  Madison stared after St. John. He had fangs. Possibly he wasn’t alive at all...and yet the throb deep inside her, the one connecting her to him, was more insistent than ever.

  Impossibly, she wanted those fangs on her. She wanted him inside her. How did a person reason with insanity?

  They weren’t people. This wasn’t just any frenetic love affair between strangers. In some rule book, somewhere, a liaison like this one had to be forbidden.

  St. John was a vampire.

  And he was magnificent.

  If there were vampires all over London who could mesmerize with a look and a kiss...heaven help everyone.

  “Heaven help me.”

  She remembered again the wooden stake hidden in her brother’s jacket, and how it had shocked her. She remembered believing that she saw, in her mind, Stewart limp to the London Eye, possibly wounded, to hide that stake.

  Her brother had come here to chase vampires, and there seemed to be plenty of them around.

  St. John was a vampire. And her brother was alive.

  “Miss Chase? Time to go.”

  She’d nearly forgotten Crane in the hallway, and wasn’t sure about opening the door, or what the detective would see when he looked at her. She wasn’t sure if she could stand up straight, or if her face held telltale signs of her inner struggle.

  Was it possible to look relatively normal when the earth had tilted off its axis?

  There were vampires in London, and she had seen them firsthand. She had, in fact, gone a lot further than that.

  She swallowed back the urge to shout St. John’s name. She had to internalize the fear, and she could do so. She would handle this. She’d have to. It wasn’t over.

  It was far from over.

  There were vampires in London, and one of them had her name on his lips.

  Had her brother been showing her a bod
y, she now wanted to know, or trying to get her away from Christopher St. John?

  She had stopped shaking. That, too, seemed odd.

  The truth didn’t actually set one free, as the saying went. Truth could be terrible, unbelievable, earth-shattering.

  “Forgive me, brother,” she whispered, with a last glance to the window.

  A final thought came to her as she watched the curtain blow, perhaps out of a need for just one minute of normality in a world that had gone insane and was pulling her down with it.

  Teddy had been wrong about there being an hour until breakfast. A gray English morning was set to dawn.

  * * *

  “So, now you know.”

  St. John looked up at Madison’s window. “You know about me.”

  Daylight was minutes away. He had to start walking, and couldn’t make his legs work.

  No one knew why vampires and other monsters needed the night to animate them. He had never heard one plausible explanation for the phenomenon, other than that death had always been equated with darkness. Though he was old enough and strong enough to tolerate some light, it was inconvenient as hell.

  He turned with a concerted effort that strained his ligaments, and raised his face. In the small wedge of time when darkness slipped into submission and the horizon grew colorful, he usually felt the most alive, and almost normal. Almost mortal.

  While humans began to stir in their beds and the monsters went to ground until the return of night, he walked and breathed and thought things over as if he were still an integral part of the human landscape.

  Today was different. Because Madison knew, and he’d left her with that.

  At least she would be safe for a few more hours.

  Often, he had yearned for simpler times. Lately he’d been thinking about going back to where it all started—to Castle Brocéliande, in Brittany—in search of a respite from the world. The castle where he had traded his old life for immortality might still be there. He had never gone back to see. He had been unwilling to face the place of his death, and the site of his rebirth into what he had become.

  “I have sipped from the Holy Grail,” he wanted to tell Madison. “The blood that chalice contained was a mixture of my Maker’s and another’s blood that once stained the famous cup.”

  He didn’t tell her this in a way she would hear. She couldn’t know that the golden chalice had been passed through time by careful hands until it eventually wound up in the possession of the three special creatures at Castle Brocéliande. And that the beings there had chosen St. John and his brethren for a special task that saw them killed and resurrected—bringing them back from death with their souls turned inside out and their bodies strengthened for a new purpose.

  He wanted to tell Madison that he had experienced life as a mortal, with its pain and hopes and death, and that he remembered parts of his former life, his last breath and what had come after.

  He needed to explain to her that he would never forget his first sight of the five men who had preceded him as Blood Knights, and how much they meant to him.

  “Seven new beings of molded muscle, sinew, cold flesh and purpose became the servants of both the Grail and the holy blood in our veins,” he whispered to the dawn mist, and to Madison over their unique connection. “We rode forth from Castle Brocéliande’s gates on black steeds that matched our emblazoned shields. Seven men, who were no longer men, but something more, bound to each other and hungering in ways no one else could imagine. Immortals.”

  Lance Van Baaren. Mason LanVal. Alexander Kent. He was often left hurting for the companionship of the creatures most like himself who also had traded their mortal souls for immortality.

  “Who else but they knew what I need, and what I feel? The regrets, the desires.”

  His building lay ahead with the promise of refuge. In a perfect world, he would have brought Madison here and loved her within an inch of her life, saving that last inch for the decision she’d have to make in order to join him. He had actually considered going that far. Not offering just his heart, but immortality, and a love that would last forever.

  “And danger rains down from all directions.”

  With Nosferatu coming, and Simon Monteforte uncovered as the traitor, all he wanted to think about was her. Madison. The radiant woman with the shrewd blue eyes that fate had tossed in his path as if offering a bone to a ravenous beast.

  He had to settle things with her before the Nosferatu arrived. A dark hand had disturbed the fabric of London, and threatened to distort it further, but she had to understand that Stewart’s ravings about vampires had been correct, though his warning had fallen on the wrong ears.

  St. John would not barter with Monteforte, a heinous example of a modern-day terrorist. Monteforte might assume to know how his mind worked, but that assumption would be a mistake. Nosferatu could not kill a Blood Knight. There was only one way to end his existence forever, one unique key to a final death for each of the Seven, and neither sword nor fangs came close to being his.

  He dared not involve the rest of the Hundred in this situation. He couldn’t afford to show his true self to them, or anyone else. Although his goal here in London had been achieved, and the traitor among them exposed, the situation remained fragile.

  In the meantime, the detective outside Madison’s door should be able to protect her. For a while, anyway.

  Luckily, the sun was about to rise. Simon Monteforte would be going to ground, locked away somewhere until that sun went down.

  Madison, can you hear me?

  Her face appeared all around him as he walked.

  “My strength is not endless,” he said. “Still, I will honor my promise to help you.”

  Come to me tonight, he sent to her, using their bond.

  By nightfall you must find me, Madison. Hurry. Do not delay.

  He knew the second she received this final message, and that its arrival stunned her. As he lifted his face to the pink brilliance of the rising sun, thinking of Madison’s warm, lush body and worrying that she might never come, now that she knew about the fangs...the sun, like so many other things in his age-old existence, finally began to betray him.

  Chapter 18

  For the tenth time in as many minutes, Madison pressed a hand to her neck, searching for possible puncture marks that might explain her ability to hear Christopher St. John as clearly as if he sat next to her.

  Looking out the window of D.I. Crane’s car that hadn’t yet left the curb, she said, “Have you gone to the Germand?”

  “Officers are there now,” the detective said.

  “Have you found out anything about that apartment where my abductor took me?”

  “You mean in the four minutes you were in your room?”

  Madison filed away the detective’s cynicism. She had no idea how long she’d actually been in that room with St. John, or where he had gone after he’d jumped out her window. She strained to see the faces passing on the street at this early hour, searching for St. John and Stewart among them.

  “I’m afraid so,” Crane said, cutting his eyes to her.

  Madison faced him directly. “What did they find, Detective? I can take it. Trust me.”

  He took a minute to think that over, appearing not too sure. As the sun began to rise between the buildings, he said, “It was a girl, as yet unidentified.”

  “Not one of those—”

  “No. Presumably not one of the missing American girls. Another young one, though. We can’t get an ID until more tests are done. I’m telling you this because you were there last night, and I’m asking for this information to go no further. This is off the record. Is that clear?”

  Madison nodded. “What happened to her?”

  “It seems,” Crane said, “that there was a wooden stake sticking out of h
er chest.”

  Madison sat very still, trying not to scream. Then she said, “Not through her heart, then. The stake would have to pierce her heart if she were one of them. She wasn’t. That’s why she could be found, and why she wasn’t reduced to a pile of ash.”

  Horrified that she’d said those things aloud, she stiffened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize...” D.I. Crane nodded warily.

  “So,” the detective finally said. “You did know what that weapon in your brother’s pocket was, and what it potentially could be used for.”

  “My brother didn’t do that,” she said. “In case that’s what you’re thinking, Stewart would never hurt anyone.”

  Would he harm a vampire, though? she wondered.

  The detective seemed to be waiting for her to come up with a better excuse for why such an odd weapon had been in Stewart’s possession, now that a similar weapon had been found at a crime scene.

  “I can’t explain that to you,” she said before he could even ask his question. What she didn’t add was the idea that Stewart, after all his research, would know better than to miss the heart if the victim had been a vampire, and if killing a vampire had been his objective.

  A wooden stake through the heart was supposed to explode a vampire, turning them to ash, to dust. There would be little left to identify, like the ashes the cops said they had found near her lost shoe.

  That’s how the story went. Stake through the heart, and gone, baby, gone. Yet the girl in that apartment hadn’t gone. And Stewart had taken his sister there why? To find that girl, and make Madison wonder what the heck was going on.

  News flash. I know they exist.

  God, yes, she knew they did.

  And she knew that her brother was no homicidal maniac, so he couldn’t have been the stake wielder. Someone else had killed that girl.

  “I can’t go to your department,” she said. “My head is splitting. I need to lie down. Please, Detective, give me just a little more time.” She glanced at the detective’s wristwatch. “I have a job to do in thirty minutes.”

  She needed to figure out how she could clear her brother’s name. A clear head was necessary for that.