Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the MoonImmortal Obsession

by Michele Hauf

  This monster’s master had trained it well.

  He would soon find out how well.

  But first, a detour.

  London’s Central Hospital rose before him. As was usual on a weekend night, the place bustled. St. John went in. He headed for the E.R., tracing Madison’s scent on the ceiling, the walls and the floor.

  The detective had been wise to bring her here, where her sweet scent could be partially masked for most of the creatures looking for it. No doubt Monteforte would be salivating for the taste of another budding Slayer, now that he’d seen her.

  Foregoing the elevator, he opted for the stairs. His skin continued its pattern of twitches and undulations under his black sweater as he strode to a room where Madison’s scent was the strongest.

  She wasn’t there. The bed was still warm.

  “Madison, you little fool,” he whispered.

  He went through the adjoining door, and into the next room, which was also empty. Then he started back down the hallway, driven by a vicious need to find her.

  He came face-to-face with the one man he didn’t particularly want to see at the moment. “You’ve lost her,” he said cuttingly to the detective who had stopped to return his stare.

  Crane anxiously looked past St. John. “Hell. She’s gone? That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “You were to watch her,” St. John said.

  “Do you give the orders in this hospital now, too?”

  “Isn’t it common sense, Detective, to keep her out of trouble while searching for her brother? At least, I’d have thought so.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” Crane said.

  Arguing wouldn’t get him anywhere. St. John passed the detective in a hurry, nearly brushing shoulders with him in the narrow hospital hallway. Two steps beyond the cop, he paused with the hair at the nape of his neck bristling. Turning his head, he gave the detective a last glance, and grimaced.

  “What?” Detective Crane snapped, anger creasing his features.

  St. John kept walking.

  Back on the street, he dialed up more of his senses. Picking up the faint trace of the fragrance of orange blossoms nearby, he started in that direction.

  * * *

  Madison continued at a sluggish pace up the street, slowed by drugged limbs and feeling as if she were dreaming.

  The night seemed darker than usual and saturated with smells. The old bricks of the building facades she passed gave off odors of weak, trapped sunlight eating away at rampant, aged mildew. The sidewalk stank of the thousands of feet that had used it that day.

  Without her cell phone and wallet, hailing a cab was useless. Though her hotel wasn’t far, she had no intention of returning there. The guys would be celebrating their video coup. Their work would pick up again in the morning. Joining them probably would be expected, but was also the first place D.I. Crane would look for her after discovering she’d escaped.

  She needed a breath of fresh, untainted air, and wasn’t finding it. Unsure of where to go, what to do, or how to deal with the truth about the existence of vampires, she found London doubly ominous now.

  Before seeing St. John’s fangs, she had vowed to pressure the monsters in the media. That idea had fallen away, with no viable way to resurrect it. By shining light on monsters, she’d be placing her entire crew in danger, and maybe a good section of London’s human population.

  “Where are you, St. John?”

  Did vampires prefer the lower floors of buildings? Basement apartments? Coffins? London was huge. The odds of finding him without outside help were slim, and she’d left the detective and his resources behind.

  What she could do was test her own version of speaking to him via their strange internal connection. It was only fair for communication to work both ways.

  Nothing to lose.

  Waiting for a break in the line of people on the street, she looked up and spoke loudly. “Okay, St. John. You’re all I have. Bring it on. I’m here, and I’m listening.”

  “Good,” he said clearly, in a voice that definitely hadn’t come from inside her head.

  * * *

  Madison had appeared before him like a desert mirage, spreading flickers of familiar fire throughout his body that he now knew were meant to be warnings, but what the hell.

  She leaned against a building with her eyes raised skyward. Her face and lips were bloodless. Dampness gathered on her forehead. The cloying odor of drugs hung in the air.

  His heart lurched when she met his gaze.

  “It worked,” she said, just as she had on the dance floor the first night he’d seen her in person. “Imagine that,” she added.

  The desire to hold her beat at him as fiercely as if they were normal people finding something special in each other in a normal world, when nothing could have been further from the truth.

  St. John held himself back.

  “They gave me a sedative.” Her words slurred. “I’m probably helpless if your intention is to harm me.”

  “Harming you never entered the picture,” he said. “I’d have thought you had figured that out by now.”

  “Your nature is to...” She left that remark unfinished, took a rattling breath and started over. “Can you get me off this street? My legs aren’t working properly. People are staring, and will recognize me. I haven’t the money for a cab.”

  “Will you trust me now?” he asked her.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Her eyes held to his as if she’d seek the truth there and know it when she saw it. If she had any intuitive knowledge of how this meeting affected him, she gave no indication.

  “I give you my word that your safety is foremost in my mind,” he said. “You know that I’m not the only one looking for you.”

  “The detective is a good enough guy.” She lowered her gaze. “It’s just that he can’t fill in the blanks. Only you can do that, and you’ll have to if you help me now.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Made it this far, didn’t I?”

  “You’re less than a block from the hospital,” he said. “I can see it from here.”

  Her eyes rose to his again, briefly and unfocused. “Am I to believe what you say because you never lie?”

  “Quibbling over semantics seems silly when there’s so much at stake,” he countered. “In any case, you asked for my help, when being near to me at the moment is an added danger.”

  “Is that some kind of disclaimer?”

  St. John smiled. “I suppose it is.”

  “That old man in that hotel lobby has it out for you,” she said, surprising him again with her insight and her candor. “Am I right?”

  “I believe so.”

  “He is a vampire?”

  He nodded. “A very old one.”

  Madison blinked slowly. “I knew it without knowing how I knew it. So, where will you take me?”

  “To my home.”

  “No. Not there. It’s too intimate. Too private and personal. I was going to find it. But now that I see you, I...”

  “You’ll be safe there,” he said. “Only there.”

  “Safe from who?”

  He knew what she meant, and that she was thinking of a kiss and a hardwood floor and the potential hazard of his fangs.

  “Protector,” she muttered weakly, though St. John perceived her strength and wits recovering with an astounding swiftness that only someone with her kind of secrets had the power to pull off.

  The bit of darkness he had discovered when he had first observed her now lay like a fine film over her skin, changing her skin’s tone. Some of that darkness curled upward, foglike, over her spinal column.

  In addition, his scrutiny turned up something else.

  In the ce
nter of Madison, a new skill set was building, even as she drunkenly staggered. Her body was uploading a program that was her birthright to possess.

  That tiny illumination inside her would soon get brighter. Already she’d find strengths to tap into if she figured out how to access them. She’d made it here through the meds.

  When he roused from thought, he found her attentive.

  “I have to know,” she said, “what that look was about. What our strange relationship means, if it isn’t supposed to be.”

  “There’s so little time left, Madison.” He offered her his hand, assuming she’d back away, as she had done the first time he had wanted to touch her.

  Then again, he had to acknowledge how far they had come since that original meeting, where she’d been nothing more than Stewart Chase’s sister, a potential media pain in the backside, and he hadn’t shown her his teeth.

  Clearly, and in spite of everything since that first meeting, Madison’s hunger remained, relayed to him by the soft gleam in her eyes.

  Yet also inside those big blues of hers lay another clue about her oncoming evolution. Sparks of liquid silver swam there, as if a ghost were sharing her vision. The ghost of what she was to become, not long from now, if he kept her with him much longer.

  She knew about the dark river coming their way. She was maturing before his eyes, with no way for him to turn back time, or start over. By remaining close to her, he would have no way to stop her transformation, and transformation might be her only way to cope with what lay ahead.

  He just didn’t care about any of that. He no longer wanted to take one single breath, real or otherwise, that didn’t contain the scent of orange blossoms.

  Madison was special. She was, in essence, a fighting machine with a nose for the supernatural, and the enemy of all those who had begun their new lives by drinking the blood of another. She was halfway to her heritage already, and sparring with the learning curve.

  “So very little time,” he repeated as she voluntarily placed her fingers on his upturned palm. “I will explain as much as I can before then.”

  She had touched him because she wanted to, had chosen to, and the pleasure this gave him was extreme. Hers was the first touch he had allowed, in any manner, in a few hundred years.

  His heart beat faster, keeping time with hers. Without thinking of an action that possibly harked back to the days when chivalry ruled the land as the foremost rule of behavior, he brought her knuckles to his lips.

  “Too easy,” she said breathlessly. “Need answers.”

  “You won’t like what you hear,” he warned. “You might not remember what came before those answers. I’ll regret that, Madison. I’ll regret it deeply, I swear.”

  No longer hindered by having to keep some of his identity hidden from the woman beside him, St. John swept Madison into his arms. Not because she needed to be carried, or even would allow it, but because it might truly be the last closeness offered them, and he wanted to take full advantage of the minutes left.

  Turning on his heels, gripping her tightly, he and the Slayer he had bonded with, for good or ill, became one more shadow in an already troublesome night.

  Chapter 22

  Wind whipped through Madison’s hair. Buildings moved past as if they were made of rubber. Streetlights left thin streams of luminous thread suspended in the air.

  The surroundings passed by at a fantastical pace as she and St. John rushed through it, seemingly shredding all known theories of time and space.

  St. John hadn’t lied about being exceptionally fast. He was also stronger than anything she had imagined. She hoped that her trust in him was warranted, but a debilitating fear of vampires hadn’t entered the picture. Her stomach hadn’t turned over.

  Cohesive thought patterns were returning. She no longer felt heavy with fatigue. The reason she allowed St. John to carry her was that he was so much faster than she. And because he still had a fight ahead.

  Her plan had always been to be self-sufficient, and most people perceived her to be. Madison Chase, they thought, was strong, independent and forthright. Her very private fear was that by giving in to St. John, or anyone who got close enough to mine the gaps in her plan, she’d lose some crucial part of herself. That was a feeble thought, she admitted now, when a vampire had hold of her and she had delved her fingers into his thick blond hair for no other reason than she liked the feel of him.

  This special being carrying her had helped her that first night to escape the rogue vampire gang who’d had her in their sights. He had checked to make sure she was all right, she now felt sure, using her hotel window when she was at her most vulnerable, unconscious, asleep, without disturbing her.

  St. John had provided the information about the Yale girls being at the other hotel and had taken her there, intending to help her find them. Because of that, the girls had been found, Crane had said. The girls were safe.

  Jesus, they were safe.

  St. John and his tip about the Germand hotel had proved that he had a tender side. He had proved this over and over, as a matter of fact.

  He had come to her after her ordeal in the abandoned apartment, keyed up and worried about what she had been through. His features had registered pain and guilt and sorrow over having left her open to that awful event.

  They had kissed, screwed their brains out and shown evidence of their feelings for each other in one way or another each time they met. A quickly formed kinship had taken the place of fear and wonder. In spite of what St. John was, and what he’d told her she was, they always found each other.

  Finally, most importantly, St. John had allowed her to see him, sharing a confidence that could turn out to be harmful to him in the long run. He didn’t have to let her know his secret, or view his fangs. He had trusted her.

  In all their time together, and through all those things, he had not harmed her in any way, or shown an inkling of an intent to harm her.

  The truth was...she had feelings for him. Deep feelings. For a vampire.

  Vampires, he had told her, had been people once upon a time. Some of them could and did adhere to the path of virtue. Not all of them were evil bloodsuckers.

  Bigger, stronger, twice the presence of anyone else. That had been her first impression of the man on the club balcony. This remained as obvious to her now as it had then. It was indeed a special kind of being that held her.

  “God help me,” she whispered. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  When she again looked up, they were exiting an antiquated elevator, the kind historical warehouses used, made of an open-weave iron mesh with visible cables.

  Time regained its foothold after having brakes applied to its wheels, dumping them into a lofty open space filled, not with dungeonlike darkness, but brilliant wood floors and long spans of floor-to-ceiling glass.

  Bewildered, Madison stared at St. John’s refuge as her head cleared away the last remnants of the sedative.

  “No one has seen this place,” he said, setting her on her feet. “Except you.”

  Madison faced him. He still had a stabilizing hand on her elbow. “What are you, really?” she asked.

  “First. Can you repeat what you just said?”

  “I said I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  She watched him close his eyes.

  “So, now that I have admitted that, what are you really?” she pressed.

  “Immortal,” he said.

  “Another term for vampire.”

  He shook his head, corrected her gently, his voice little more than a sigh. “Not a vampire, Madison. The source from which vampires spring.”

  “You...make them? Make vampires?”

  Another shake of his head tossed his golden hair away from his cheekbones. She would have touched his face, had they been r
eal lovers having a reunion. As real lovers, human lovers, she would have remained in his arms.

  “I do not make them. I fight against those who do, as you soon will,” he said.

  “You’ve got that wrong. It’s my brother who carries a stake.”

  Without pausing, she spoke again. “You are older than the vampires on the street, and in the club, right?”

  His affirmation was a nod.

  “You are different,” she pressed.

  “Yes.”

  “There is a distinction, then, between the term you used, immortal, and vampires? A real difference?”

  “A vast one.”

  “I have to know if there are others like you. Not vampires. Immortals.”

  “Only a few.”

  “In London?”

  “There are immortals in London. Old vampires we call Ancients.”

  “Not like you, though. Not exactly like you.”

  “No. Not like me.”

  “Stewart wrote that the club, Space, along with half of London, is owned by vampires.” She gestured to the stunning room around her. “This is yours?”

  “Not material gain by way of tyranny or theft,” he said. “Only a long succession of careful acquisitions.”

  She nodded, feeling the pressure of time’s passage, and St. John’s need to confront what lay beyond those windows.

  “The creature in Germand’s lobby is a vampire, you said. An old one.”

  “Vampires are what most Ancients originally were before they learned to control their appetites.”

  Madison waited out a beat of silence before continuing. “If they don’t feed on mortals, how do they sustain themselves?”

  “As a vampire ages, it loses the necessity for sustenance.”

  “Does that mean they live on air? Regular food?”

  “They must take in blood now and then, when necessary, but only if it’s offered freely. That’s the way it’s supposed to go, anyway.”

  “Except when they feel like biting somebody for fun, like in the good old days?”

  St. John remained patient, his voice quiet. “The Ancients in this city are supposed to forego their beginnings and their pasts. They’ve evolved.”