“A spirit?”
“Yes. She helped the Indian create the containment border around the farm. William was a rogue. He probably still is. When the Indian called out for help against him, she was the one who came. She has an issue with vampires. She wants to get rid of us all.”
That wasn’t what I expected to hear. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. She came to me a few years after I left the farm and told me that unless I provided some protection for my daughter, horrible things were going to happen.”
I stopped and looked at her. “Daughter? You mean daughters.”
Carefully, she avoided my gaze. “No. Daughter.”
“What are you saying?” I grabbed her by the arm.
“Let me go,” she complained.
“No. Not until you tell me.” I shook her, sick of the lies and tired of the manipulations. I felt cartilage and bone begin to crack under the pressure of my fingers, but I didn’t want to stop. Her expression sang of fear. I almost hoped she wouldn’t tell me so I would be forced to kill her.
“Katie is my daughter!” she shouted hoarsely, “Not Sarah.”
CHAPTER 16 – Michael
“You have violated our laws.”
I turned from the sight of the snow falling outside the window and looked at Vincent critically. He had dispatched agents to meet me and bring me to his high-rise apartment in downtown Chicago. It was a sterile place, far too white and modern for my tastes, but the view was attractive.
“What did you do with my guards?” I asked.
“They are being detained under orders of the Council.”
The fireplace operated from a switch on the wall and didn’t seem to burn real wood. I had never seen such a thing before. I flipped the switch a few times, watching the flames go up and then disappear completely. Modern technology puzzled me.
“Your actions at the scene of the accident were recorded on a cell phone.”
The Spaniard. I remembered seeing him hold the phone out towards me, but hadn’t made the connection. The urgency of Vincent’s words resonated somewhere inside me, but I could not seem to care very much. I was disconnected. It wasn’t like me.
Vincent’s black eyes raked over me furiously. “What has changed you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How did you get away from Isaiah? Our agents said that several guards were killed.”
The fireplace wasn’t very interesting to me anymore. I approached him instead, wondering how much force it would take to remove his head from his shoulders. When that thought crossed my mind, I felt a stirring of something inside me that resisted the idea of harming him. I couldn’t grasp it fully, but it made me hesitate.
“Michael, you are not yourself. Were you poisoned by Isaiah?”
Isaiah. He was a hateful old creature. But I remembered that his blood had been in my mouth. Amanda had given it to me. I recalled the power it held and how strong I was after I drank it.
Strength without reason. Power without humility.
“His blood,” I whispered.
The price of my survival was suddenly very clear to me. Amanda knew exactly what she was doing when she gave me that vial of blood. I still didn’t know how she had come into possession of it, but her intentions were unmistakable.
The essence of Isaiah’s black soul had been rolling through his veins for centuries, and it should have occurred to me that the mystical elements that allowed me to break my chains might also drag me back toward the bloodthirsty, vicious vampire I used to be. Amanda had attempted to take away whatever morality was still left in me. I was becoming the thing I hated.
A bitter taste filled my mouth. I sat down in one of Vincent’s pristine Italian leather chairs and stared numbly at my hands. What had I done since Amanda helped me escape? The memory of the night at the cabin with Sarah stroked my brain, bringing alive the primal lust I’d been carrying around with me. What else did I do?
It took me a few minutes to process the ramifications of what I’d set into motion. Once it hit me, a rush of genuine panic swept through me. I tugged my cell phone out of the pocket of my dark coat and dialed Victoria’s cell number. After three rings, her voicemail program took the call. I ended the call without leaving a message.
Vincent was still and quiet, waiting for me to make the next move. His guards were out in the hall, awaiting his instructions. I felt sure they couldn’t overpower me, but the awareness that others could suffer for any violent act on my part kept me in my chair for the moment. I did not know how long these little sequences of common sense might last, but I knew I had to draw it out long enough to explain what I’d done and make sure that the woman I loved would be safe.
Sarah was somewhere in the city. Her presence in my world had eliminated the last few shreds of complete self-absorption that so many of my kind continued to carry with them throughout their unnatural lives. Then those dead pieces of me had begun rebuilding themselves with the help of Isaiah’s blood. If I were to kill them again, I would need her help.
“Where’s Sarah?” I snapped.
“She’s safe,” he said. “The hearing is tomorrow night. Once she testifies in front of the Council, she’ll be free to go home.”
I shook my head. “She can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“Because I revived two vampires with Isaiah’s blood running through me.” I got up and went to Vincent, determined to make him see that there was far more going on than he might have thought. He didn’t flinch at my approach, but remained stony and thoroughly reserved.
I looked at his perfectly manicured fingernails and expensive suit and hated him for his aloofness. I hated him for the calm way he seemed to approach each problem. I wondered what he might look like if he were truly rattled.
“Elizabeth Grant and David Truman were two of the vampires in the caves at the farm. Twenty-four hours ago, they woke up. I gave them both some of my blood. Right now, they could very well be giving their blood to the other vampires who were asleep on the property.”
He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them. “But they are contained.” There was no fear in his voice—only caution.
I nodded. “They may be. Or Sarah’s sister may be releasing them right now. The last time I saw her, she was a prisoner of my seer, my ex-lover and the first vampire to ever set foot on the property.”
Vincent’s cool exterior revealed a little crack. His lips became incredibly pale against the ivory of his ancient face and his mouth opened slightly in disbelief and shock.
“William has returned,” I said. “You may want to put Isaiah away for all he’s done. You may want to have me destroyed as well. But let me make something very plain to you. The Council has a much more dangerous problem right now. William is ten times the monster that Isaiah is. You know that from personal experience.”
“It can’t be true…” he protested weakly.
“It is true. He’s back from whatever hole he’s been hiding in for fifty years. So unless you want a full-blown war on your hands, I suggest you get a team out there that can lock things down.”
“Is he still working for the Europeans?”
I shook my head. “Vincent, you have an international network of spies at your disposal. You should already know the answer to that question.”
He turned away and pulled out a cell phone. I went back to the window and looked outside.
The snow was falling faster, creating a white wall of swirling flakes on the other side of the window, thirty stories above the street. I pressed my fingertips to the glass and thought about Sarah. The possibility of seeing her only one more time sent splinters of agony through my chest. She was my beacon. It was Sarah who guided me past moments when I might have reverted to the monster I had once been. It was Sarah who had revealed to me the true gift that humans could still give to those of us doomed to walk the earth for the rest of eternity. It was the simple gift of trust. And that gift from her
meant everything to me. Everything.
“Where is Sarah?” I asked him again.
“Teddy’s townhouse,” he said quietly, holding one hand over the receiver of his cell phone. When he turned away, he was already embroiled in another serious conversation with one of his lieutenants.
I touched the window again, studied the frame of the window and then stepped back.
Turning shortly, I nodded my head at Vincent and then, with every ounce of black energy contained inside me, I slammed through the glass window. The force of it was deafening, but there was no pain. I was airborne for just a moment or two before I began falling at an incredible rate of speed.
The wind rushing past me almost seemed to be whispering her name.
CHAPTER 17 – Sarah
It was a dream. It was a horrible, stupid dream. But I woke up crying.
Michael had been falling. He had been falling from a very tall building, plummeting towards what could only be certain death. The folds of his dark wool coat fluttered behind him in the wind, and they looked like broken wings beating uselessly.
Tears were still rolling down my cheeks. The smooth sheet that had been covering me was bunched up in my fists. My hands were shaking as if I were some frightened child. And maybe I was. I didn’t have very many bad dreams, so experiencing one in which Michael was in real trouble was a shock to me.
“Are you okay?”
The room was dark, but I recognized Alex’s voice instantly. He was close. Probably sitting on the bed, I thought. Then I heard the springs of the bed creak and felt a lift. He had gotten up. A few moments later, there was a clicking sound and the light of a small lamp filled the dark space of the bedroom.
Alex looked different. There were dark shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there before. His face and hands weren’t just pale. They were almost translucent. It was obvious that something was seriously wrong with him.
“Alex, what’s happening to you?”
He reached into an inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out of a pair of sunglasses. He slid them onto his face and then came back to sit down beside me. His posture was all wrong. He seemed to be slouching, which was unusual for him.
“I don’t know. I started getting headaches not too long ago.”
“In South America?”
He shook his head. “No. When I first came back to the states.”
Reaching out to him, I grasped one of his hands. “Is there a lot of pain?”
“Yes. Light and noise seem to make things worse.”
I rose from the bed and went to the lamp to turn it off. He got up and opened the heavy drapes, letting the muted city lights wash over the room. There was no hint of sunlight. I could only assume that it was very early in the morning. He stayed by the window, but averted his face from it. I wanted to comfort him somehow, but wasn’t sure what I could do. He seemed so lost.
“Selena’s here,” he said in a hollow-sounding tone.
That was a surprise. I hadn’t seen or talked to my mother in a long time. I had assumed that she knew about Katie’s transformation, but she hadn’t yet made any attempt to contact me. I wasn’t sure what I would say to her anyway.
“What does she want?” I asked.
He went to the chair by the bed and sat down with a sigh. He took off the sunglasses. When he looked over at me, his eyes were bloodshot and his face looked drawn with worry. “She wanted me to get a message to Vincent. There’s going to be an uninvited guest at the hearing.”
“Who?”
He paused for a second and then lowered his head. “The Breath-Giver.”
My mother had told me only a little about the supernatural being who had changed Alex from a vampire back into a human, but I’d heard from others that all of it was just a story. Of course, they couldn’t explain the physical changes in Alex that had happened either. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, to be honest. I knew that Michael had considered the possibility of asking for her help. With everything that had happened since we first met, there hadn’t been a chance for us to talk about it at length. So I had pushed it to the back of my mind.
“Have you seen her?” I asked. I crawled back onto the bed and pulled the covers over me.
“No. And Selena said she would never appear in her natural form in front of a group of people. She will show up at the meeting as a human.”
“A human would probably raise just as much attention. Why is she going?”
“Apparently, she feels she has a stake in this.” He chuckled without humor.
“You should probably take everything my mother says with a grain of salt. How did you get in here, anyway? Teddy locked me in.”
“She knows you,” he said, smiling a little. “She was afraid if you knew that Isaiah was somewhere close, you would do whatever you could to find him and kick his sorry ass.”
“She’d be right about that.”
“It was also for your protection. There are some problems that have come up. Serious problems.”
I sat up. “What?”
“Michael made some mistakes after the car accident.”
The memory of sitting in that room and talking to Teddy about Michael came back to me. I had felt that something had gone wrong. I had known. She refused to tell me. She had been protecting me from the bad news.
“Tell me, Alex,” I said.
He looked at me seriously for a few quiet seconds. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” But I was also sure that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to make much of a difference in how I felt about Michael. We belonged to each other. Alex couldn’t change that. Jackson couldn’t change that. No one would convince me that he was evil.
Alex gazed at me with a sad expression and began talking in a low voice.
“Amanda was the one who helped Michael escape. She did it because she knew that if he was offered a chance to drink blood, he would take it. Especially after they had drained most of the blood out of him. But she didn’t give him the blood of a human. She brought him Isaiah’s blood.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
“Isaiah’s blood has changed him, Sarah.”
“No.”
He nodded forcefully. “Yes. When we were in the car, something triggered his thirst. He wanted me to pull over because he had to get away from you.”
“But before that, when he first came back…” I wanted to explain how tender and amazingly gentle Michael had been with me at the cabin. But it was too personal. I couldn’t use it to argue in favor of him.
“It could be progressive. He may have been fine when he got back to the farm, but he’s not fine now. After the accident, he attacked three teenagers who witnessed the crash. It was caught on one of the guys’ cell phones. The Council is trying to keep the video away from the media.”
“The media? Nobody would believe it, Alex.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. But do you think the Council wants to take that chance?”
The idea of Michael physically attacking three humans seemed far-fetched to me. I knew his past was full of those kinds of incidents, but the vampire I knew would never go after innocents. It just wasn’t who he was anymore.
“How badly were they hurt?”
“The one who recorded it survived. The other two…” He abruptly stopped speaking, turned towards the window and then quickly stood up. I looked towards the window and saw a shadow slice through the meager light coming in. I heard a scrape and a rattle outside.
Alex was alert. He motioned for me to move against the wall by the bed, but I ignored him.
“It could be Isaiah. Get back,” he whispered.
But I wasn’t about to listen to orders. I knew exactly who was outside the window. Before Alex could stop me, I unlocked the metal latch. His hands stopped me from doing more. He wrapped both arms around me and pulled me away from the window.
“Let me go!” I yelled.
Then I heard something from outside that made my heart sing.
“Sarah?” It was Michael’s low voice, soft and promising.
“It’s him!” I cried. But Alex wouldn’t let go. He grabbed me by the shoulders.
I pulled to the side, trying to dislodge myself. But it was pointless. He was too strong. When I looked past Alex at the window, the face I adored was there. He was there. Michael was outside, waiting to be let in.
“You don’t understand, Sarah! He killed the other two,” Alex said.
Shaking my head, I continued to struggle. “No. He wouldn’t do that. Somebody lied to you.”
“He killed them and then turned them. He’s not the same, Sarah!”
Suddenly, he let me go. His eyes went cold and his body went still. Then he gestured half-heartedly towards the window. “Ask him, then.”
Freed by his grip, I rushed to the window. Frantically, I tried to pull it up but it wouldn’t move. I heard a door opening behind me and then Teddy’s cool voice.
“He can’t come in, Sarah. He hasn’t been invited and you don’t have the power to do it. Not here.”
I put my fingers on the glass. “I’ll go to him, then.”
Michael’s strong jaw was tense and his eyes flashed from me to the two who were behind me. He dropped his head and rested it against the glass. His dark hair was wet and tangled. I longed to run my fingers through it.
“Michael…” I said gently. “Tell them you didn’t kill anybody.” I knew he could hear me. It was likely he had heard my entire conversation with Alex. I wanted him to defend himself, even if it were through a pane of cold glass. I needed him to tell them the truth.
But he didn’t raise his head.
CHAPTER 18 – Alex
She crumbled. I didn’t want to see it. More than anything, I wanted to kill Michael Graviano. He was a murderer, a vampire, a traitor. And I could have destroyed him, if I hadn’t been in such a crappy state. I stumbled down the dark stairs that led to the front door of the townhouse and went out into the cold.
The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) Page 8
