Phoenix Dead (New Adult Dark Romance) (The Vampire Years)

by Vremont, Ann

  ***

  I could hear Danny's teeth grinding as the video played. It was just the two of us in his office. He was sitting behind his desk. The door was locked and the shade on the window that looked out onto the larger bay of desks was down.

  He was holding the remote to the VCR and I could hear the plastic casing creak from his tight grip. I watched, chewing at my bottom lip until I could taste blood. I didn't ask him to stop, just sat straight backed in my chair absorbing the pain I was causing him while I kept my gaze focused on the screen.

  When the tape reached its end, Danny tapped the remote against his desk. "Should I rewind, any part you missed or want to see again?"

  I shook my head stiffly. His question was rhetorical, meant to hurt and it did. But I couldn't allow myself to cry - how would I explain the blood tears? I wanted to, though. It was all I could do to hold them back. And maybe my tears would have eased his anger and hurt, both of which were clearly at a boiling point.

  "Really? Because I'm kind of partial to when you tilt your face up to the camera - right before you dress and leave and then your friend trashes the place."

  My own anger surfaced, but it wasn't directed at Danny. Oscar had made sure before leaving the church that someone would look at the security camera footage.

  "Do you have anything to say, Lee?"

  If I looked at him, I would cry. If I opened my mouth to say anything, I would cry. I sat still, thin lipped and unblinking.

  Danny stood and took the tape from the machine. Slowly, he pulled the videotape out from its holder and looped it around his hand.

  "Father Craig..." His shoulders tensed and he dumped the empty cassette into his trash can. He ran the loose tape between his thumbnail and the side of his index finger. "Father Craig brought me the tape after recognizing you from services."

  The wait while the whole of the tape played through his hands again was agonizing, but I couldn't break his silence. When the last of the tape had been squeezed through his grip, he balled it up and shoved it in a gym bag.

  "He doesn't want anyone to know..." He stopped again, clearly thinking about what I'd done inside the church and that Father Craig, his priest, had seen at least some part of my actions. "He doesn't want this affecting the school or church's reputation, so, no charges against you or your...friend."

  His patience broke completely and he slammed his hands down on the arms of the chair I was sitting in. He jerked the chair, with me in it, closer to him as he bent down. Sticking his face in front of mine, he stared hard at me.

  "Aren't you going to say anything?"

  I love you. I'm sorry. Why the fuck did you have to sleep in your office last night?

  I said none of those things, just stared back.

  He broke away and wrapped his hands around his head for a few seconds. His hand shot out, stopping open palmed a few feet from my chest. "Give me your cell phone."

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out the cell he had given me and handed it to him. He thumbed through the call list and texts. I knew he'd find nothing but the messages we had sent to one another while he was on duty. Outside of school, he was the only one I talked to and I hadn't given anyone the number.

  "You deleted messages?"

  I shook my head and then voiced a quiet "no" because he hadn't seen the gesture.

  "I'll check the bill, Lee."

  "I didn't."

  "Then how did you know where to meet him? Did he pass a message to you at church?"

  I let him believe my silence was an answer. I didn't want to have this conversation here, where I couldn't touch him. Not that I was sure I would ever get a chance to touch him again. If I still had a human heart, it would have been breaking right then while I sat in silence waiting to see if he could at least try to forgive me.

  Danny tossed my phone into the gym bag. "Stand up."

  He did it with the same tone and hand gesture he would make to some perp but I offered no argument, no failed compliance. He stared at my face for a few seconds - this time to make sure I could leave the station without breaking down in front of everybody - and then he shoved a few files and some of his personal belongings into the bag.

  "I requested a leave of absence." He zipped the bag shut and shouldered it before pulling the shade up on his window.

  "How long?"

  "Three weeks." He opened the door and walked out ahead of me, not looking back as I followed him to his personal vehicle.

  I only knew he wasn't abandoning me there in the parking lot of the Maryvale police station because he unlocked the passenger side door before tossing the bag inside the trunk.

  "Three weeks?" I repeated when we were both sitting inside the car.

  He nodded, his hand falling on the center console to shift the car into reverse. I made a slight motion with my hand, wanting to touch him, but his gaze stopped me cold. I folded my hand against my stomach and stared at the front window as he pulled onto the road.

  Three weeks was all I had left of school. He knew that.

  "So, three weeks and school's done and, then what? You're done with me?"

  He didn't answer. It was his turn to play the quiet game.

  Chapter Two

  Danny had picked me up from school that afternoon, pulling me out of fifth period. By the time we finished our private screening of the security tape, the school day was done and I'd missed sixth and seventh period. Unlike the last term, I could afford the absences.

  From the station, he drove straight home, pulled the gym bag from the trunk and walked directly into his office. He didn't close the door, so I sat on the edge of a living room chair that faced the room and waited. He booted his desktop, took the files from the bag and then side kicked it a few feet away.

  He fed something through a scanner and then his cell phone rang.

  I could tell by his unwilling glance in my direction that the call had something to do with me. I heard Danny say, "Just give me the number."

  He wrote it down and shut the phone off without saying anything else. He shook his head, a slow side-to-side motion a couple of times. I didn't know if he was angry about the call or just incredulous. I was still pretty certain it involved me, but I kept my mouth shut and waited. It was a skill I'd picked up living with my mother and bastard step-father and in houses where we were no more than visitors, like I suddenly found myself to be in Danny's home.

  A few minutes later Danny stuck whatever he had fed into the scanner back into the file from his office. He scooped up the paper with the number on it and came into the front room, dumping both his phone and the number on the end table next to me before walking into the kitchen.

  There was a name written next to the number. Chris Kennedy.

  I punched Chris's number into the cell phone and waited for him to pick up. He answered with a short, cautious "Hey."

  "Hey," I answered back.

  "Lee! Where the heck were you? Are you okay?"

  Hearing the concern in Chris's voice was a relief and I smiled. "I'm okay. It was, uh..." I lowered my voice, not wanting Danny to hear for some reason. Maybe because I was offering Chris only a half-truth and Danny would know. "It was police business."

  "They still haven't caught those fu...uh."

  I laughed. Chris probably thought that because I received good grades I didn't swear, or at least not that much. My perfect school demeanor was a smooth facade that I'd had years to perfect, so I couldn't blame him. "No, they haven't."

  "Your, uh, guardian - he going to let you go to the Leavers' Ball?"

  "The Leavers' Ball?" I ignored the crack about Danny being my guardian. Even if I'd never said anything directly, I was pretty sure Chris knew Danny was more than that.

  "Our unofficial prom, graduation night. The non-prom committee came around seventh period collecting for tickets. I, uh, got you one since you weren't there."

  "Oh." I stumbled around for something to say. There was total silence in the kitchen, making me think Danny had either gone out
into the back yard or was listening intently to my half of the conversation. "I don't know if I'm going," I answered at last. "But I'll pay you for the ticket."

  "Don't worry about it right now. Maybe you'll go and you'll need someone to go with."

  Chris stumbled, too, and I felt another smile twitch at the corner of my mouth. Even with the horrors I'd experienced the last few months, it was still a sweet experience to know that one of the school's star football players had a thing for me. I was, after all, only eighteen years old and a girl who had far too few sweet experiences in her past.

  "Yeah, maybe," I answered.

  "Cool." He switched topics. "This your phone?"

  "No, borrowed."

  "Okay, then I better let you give it back. But you're in class tomorrow, right?"

  "Sure." I'd probably have an escort there and back, but I was certain Danny didn't intend any more absences. That might lead to summer school and he'd feel guilty about kicking me to the curb.

  We said good-bye and I hit the end call icon. Standing, I slipped the number into my pocket and walked into the kitchen. Danny hadn't gone outside. He was standing by the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest.

  "One of the students in seventh hour. He was worried that I didn't show up and wanted to tell me about some non-prom prom - Leavers' Ball." I handed him the phone. I wanted to sound nonchalant, like maybe he hadn't just watched - twice - a video of my being finger-fucked by Oscar while I drank his blood.

  Danny pocketed the cell. The set of his face told me he had no plan to talk to me any time soon.

  I folded my arms across my chest, unintentionally mirroring his position. "Is this what the next three week's are going to be like?"

  When he stayed silent, I almost stamped my foot. The situation was impossible. I couldn't tell him the blood had been a physical necessity. He wouldn't believe me and the mere act of telling him could trigger Oscar's wrath. I held no illusions that Oscar wouldn't find out.

  "You're not going to say anything, really?" I hugged myself tight and glanced away before the sight of him made me cry.

  "I don't know, Lee. Is there any truth left in you at all? You continue to keep information from a police investigation, you misled the sketch artist, you know who kidnapped you the second time and clearly you knew how to...communicate with him. So, why, Lee, when you can't give me one true statement, should I talk to you?"

  Still looking away, the words slipped out. "I needed the blood."

  Danny grabbed my shoulders. I could feel his fingertips digging into my flesh but there was no pain. I still couldn't look at him, even when he gave me a small shake. His fingers laced through my hair and he cupped the back of my head.

  "Lee?"

  We were both shaking now. His body was against mine - the small gap of air that had separated us was completely gone. Danny's lips touched my hair, near my left temple. I knotted the loose fabric of his shirt in my fists.

  It was weird how, seconds ago, his fingers had been digging into my shoulders and it didn't hurt, but now the pain of want inflicted me. I could feel it in my nipples, the whole of my breasts. My clit ached. I clenched my hands tighter.

  "You needed the blood and you knew he would give it to you?"

  "Yes." I rested my forehead against his shoulder. I didn't want to talk about Oscar. I wanted him to forget Oscar. I had three weeks to make him forget the tape, to get under his skin like a tick and...

  Wrong analogy. A little sob broke from me. His hand moved through my hair as if he were trying to soothe me.

  "You knew he would because he's one of them?"

  Wariness replaced some of the need that was overriding my brain. I had the thought that I wasn't talking to Danny, my angry lover, but Danny the cop. I started to shake my head but then answered, "Not quite. He's more dangerous."

  "How do you mean?" Danny wasn't shaking anymore, wasn't patting my hair or cradling the back of my head.

  I leaned away and looked up at him. His face was composed. It wasn't the unscratchable adamantine of a few minutes before, but a certain hardness remained.

  I shrugged. "Kind of how Army was just a street level pusher, you know? He wasn't any higher up the chain in this..." I shrugged again. "...this cult. He was bottom of the totem pole in that, too."

  No longer touching me, Danny nodded in the direction of the front room. "Come into my office."

  I caught his hand, the same way I had done in church yesterday morning before he left to take Communion. "Danny -"

  He blinked, shutting me out emotionally, and left the kitchen. Dragging my feet, hoping he'd at least look back at me, I followed him slowly into his office. From the folder, he pulled out a picture. It was a screen capture from the church video. This was after I'd left the church. The picture showed only Oscar's face. He was smiling for the camera, his knowledge of its position clear in his smirk and the lift of one eyebrow. From the video, I knew that he had then proceeded to write in blood on the cloak room wall Christ is in my pants!

  Juvenile to say the least.

  "Why are you showing me this?"

  Danny tapped his computer screen and I looked at it for the first time since entering the room. It was another picture of Oscar, something captured from a high-powered long-distance camera lens. Next to it was a full name and a list of suspected crimes.

  I read the name and a mental hmmph knocked around my head. Oscar Vincent de la Royo translated to Oscar the Red.

  I tried to dig through the memories Oscar's blood had given me but they were a jumbled mess. It would take time for me sort through and decide, never fully knowing, which memories were his and which were those of his victims and lovers. But I did know the last name was self-selected, something he chuckled at when he heard someone say it right before he sank his teeth into their neck.

  "Oscar, yeah. That's what he calls himself."

  Danny pointed at the list of crimes. "Read it, Lee."

  Suspected hitman for a Mexican drug cartel, he was credited with a string of gruesome murders, all of them in the last seven years. Before that, it was as if he had never existed.

  "I don't know about any of that." I tried to touch Danny's shoulder but he evaded me with a slight swivel and slide of his chair.

  "I'm not mad at you, Lee. Not anymore. You're still a kid, and..." He stopped and rubbed at his face. He started again. "...a kid..."

  Kid. The word was like a handgun waiting to go off in my face. I shook my head, whispered his name and took a step toward him that he quietly rebuffed with another swivel and slide.

  I glanced around his office, which he usually didn't let me into. There was a sniper training certificate on the wall.

  "You went to sniper school, like Elliot."

  He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, just like Elliot."

  "He says it's all about breathing, heart rate, keeping control..."

  His eyes fluttered shut for a second and then he looked back at the computer screen.

  "Danny, you don't need to keep that control with me."

  He hit the power button and everything on the computer screen went black. "So, you going to this Leavers' Ball?"

  I gave him a stunned, blank stare.

  "I mean, this kid..."

  There was that word again. Biting the inside of my lip, I supplied the name. "You mean Chris."

  "Yeah, Chris. He asked you, right?"

  I nodded. "Danny--"

  He interrupted me before I could tell him that I didn't want to go anywhere with Chris, as sweet and cute as Chris was.

  "You should go with him. I mean, how many seniors get a non-prom prom?"

  "I'm tired." I couldn't get anything else out of my mouth. I felt like I had been transported back to the weekend, like I was back at ground zero with Danny pushing me towards a prom and a date with someone else. The only difference was that I'd done something irrevocable, on tape, in the church he'd been going to from childhood. I held my hand out in a feeble invitation. "Please."

  A
million miles away from joining me, he nodded. "You should go rest, in your room."

  I don't think he meant the words to hurt, but it was clear what he was saying. It was no longer our room - and he was sending me to it like some kid I could never be again. Numb, I left him in his office and spent the rest of the evening and all of the night in bed staring up at the ceiling and fighting the need to cry.

  ***

  Danny drove me to school and told me where he'd be parked when classes let out. It was the same area Sandy would stand waiting for me, but I didn't remind him.

  Chris met me near the front door and offered Danny an awkward wave. Once we were inside the building and out of Danny's sight line, he rested his hand on my shoulder. "He going to be there after class?"

  "Yeah." I wanted to keep my answers as short as possible so Chris would know not to try to dig deeper.

  "Just today?"

  "Probably until graduation." I glanced at Chris from the side to see him frowning.

  "Are you in a lot of danger again?"

  Only from myself, I thought. "I'm fine between classes, Chris. Don't worry."

  He cracked a smile and then cringed dramatically. "But...but, Lee...I'm not!"

  "Goof ball!" I gave his shoulder a light punch before I turned to spin the combination dial on my locker. He came to a stop at the locker next to mine, his back resting against its door as he watched me.

  "Seriously, Lee. I'm afraid, I need you to hold me."

  His voice was light comedy but when I looked up into his face, his gaze troubled me. The muscles around his eyes were a little too tight and there was a hint of dark circles beneath the lower lids. But then he smiled and the shadows were gone like they'd never been there.

  I punched him again, a little harder. "Get to class, Kennedy, before we both get in trouble."

  He complied, if slowly, walking backwards and still smiling at me until he turned a corner and disappeared down the hall.

  I didn't see him again until lunch. My fourth period class is closer to the cafeteria. I was already sitting at a far table with water and ice in a paper cup and nothing else. He had a burrito and slice of pizza on his tray.