Danielle Yames had once observed that Morgan liked to pull a person's strings and push their buttons, see how far he could goad. "Snap back, show some grit," she had advised. "He'll back off."
Only Morgan wasn't backing off. He was making her face her fear, waking her emotions and sharpening her senses.
"You're not being fair," she breathed. "I've done my best."
"I never play fair. You know that."
"Damn you," she hissed through gritted teeth. Breaking out of his grasp, she turned to face him. She was angry, indignant.
She jabbed a finger into his chest. "Stop it. The time for playing games is over."
He was as still as stone, and she knew it was because he was waiting to see what she would do next. Then, without a word, he stepped back, far enough to give her room to go around him, offering a small relief to her harried brain. No one was going over the cliffs today.
A small, bitter smile tweaked her lips. He not only lived on the edge, he'd been over and back several times. And this time he was taking her with him.
Julienne gathered her wits and her courage, which at this moment were not much at all.
"When does it happen?" She shivered, drawing the material tighter. "This change?
He forced a cynical smile. "I am not really sure."
She took in a long breath, fear and repugnance tumbling through. "And if I choose not to go through with it?"
His gaze grew sharp and damning. "Your hunger will begin to turn on you." He brushed a wing of dark hair clear of his face.
"And I'll die."
She felt a surge in the pit of her stomach. How could she not know what it was? It was now a countdown, each passing hour bringing her closer to when she must have the life source of another living creature.
Blood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Night. Two-thirty-five a.m.
The sky was overcast, not unusual for the time of year. Clouds, already low to the earth, sank to mingle with a translucent fog from no apparent source. It seemed to flow and change, light and shadow dancing together. An all but invisible pulsation of power brightened then darkened to expel a creature from a more sinister side of existence.
Naylor emerged from the veils. He hovered in the heart of a vast empty space. The vapors around him shimmered like frost, but the odd, filtered light cast no shadows. His lean body assumed a vaguely human shape, creating a black space. He seemed to gather the darkness around him like a cloak, then disburse it, a shield of invisibility. His feet did not touch the ground. He waded, feather-light, floating.
The wind laughed, knowing firsthand the secrets of the night. Its cold fingers reached to caress his dead face. Night birds were silent, predators still, as if afraid of the unholy thing that had come among them. The land lay deserted, the acres uncultivated. Trees and berry brambles mingled with the untamed ivy. For the moment, he ruled the vast chaotic night, a prince of darkness.
Creeping like an experienced thief, Naylor moved forward, penetrating the boundary of a six-foot stone fence. Inside were the hallmarks of civilization: manicured gardens, sidewalks. Riding the air currents, he slithered forward until his dark gaze fell upon a whitewashed manor three stories high. This was the mortal sanctuary of his mistress's twin. He lived among mortals. Played at being human.
Naylor's lips curled. Disgusting. How could the assassin live among these weak animals, good for nothing but sacrifice?
Advancing closer, he caught a brief glimpse of the people within. Their faces were pensive, drawn. They were talking among themselves, low and seriously. His eyes narrowed. A Danarran sat among them. The elf seemed uneasy, glancing again and again toward the window and making protective symbols across his little body.
The Danarran knew.
The humans did not. They thought the moans outside only the wind.
Mortals.
Weak.
Warm.
Red.
Sustenance.
Naylor hovered, a wraith on the night air. His undead breath made no fog on the glass when he pressed cold hands against the window.
Abruptly, he drew back. He felt a presence, a pressure pushing him away. An angry hiss passed his lips. He began to search, finding at last the familiar symbols branded into the sill.
A circle of protection.
"Within thy circle," he whispered the words of the spell, "here there is sacred shelter."
He stifled the urge to break away, to scream aloud and shatter the glass. Gnashing his teeth, he longed to bound inside, ripping, tearing, bathing in the fear, glutting himself on blood pumping from hearts he held in his hands.
Blood is the life.
Calming himself, the black man smiled, revealing sharp incisors. He had expected no less. The assassin must surely know other eyes would be watching, waiting…
Naylor's frigid gaze grew pensive. He must take care--the assassin was a power no longer restricted or bound. But Morgan had committed sacrilege. For this he must surely pay.
He knows we watch. He knows we wait.
The being altered his shape, melted into the wind, a soft haunting sigh accompanying his change. He drifted around a corner, tapping on windowpanes, twisting doorknobs. The manor was locked tight, not a crevice to be found. More symbols were burned into sills and doorframes and chimneys.
He hovered outside, finally alighting on the roof. Though he longed to feed again, he would, instead, do what he had been sent to do.
Watch.
Listen.
Wait.
And then he would glut himself on the blood of the woman he had been promised, a new kind of vampire.
A living vampire.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Julienne sat in the library. One leg folded under her body, she was settled on the window seat, which had an unobstructed view of the back gardens. The sky was overcast, the air a bit nippy but not cold. Trees wore the brown and rusty orange of autumn; the velvety green lawn was beginning to fade into a hay-like shade. Faint flowers withered and died. Even the fountain, with its magnificent Celtic lion, seemed…drab, blah.
Lynar sat beside her, small feet banging as he swung his legs back and forth, engaged in trying to figure out the mysteries of a Rubik's Cube. Twisting and turning, trying to match the colors, he was having little luck solving the puzzle. That was good. Anything to keep those itchy little fingers busy.
The elf was on everyone's shit list but hers. Therefore, she'd been honored with his presence this afternoon. Barely four days had passed, and Lynar had managed to endear himself to no one with his incessant thievery. Already, he'd stolen a paring knife from Gretel's kitchen, a compact and lipstick from Melissa, a set of car keys from Danielle and every cent of change he could lay his hands on. His little pouch was bulging with scavenged treasure. He was into everything and constantly underfoot. His welcome was wearing thin, and no one knew what to do with him or wanted to entertain him twenty-four hours a day. Toys were the only solution. Puzzles seemed to engage his mind.
Completing a side of solid blue, Lynar held it up for her inspection. "See?"
She flashed a brief smile, polite but disinterested.
"Yes. Very good. Now try to get all the sides the same color." She had to admit the Danarran was not lacking in intelligence. He had already mastered rudimentary words of basic English and could make himself understood. Now if only he would stop beating his feet against the wall.
Lynar nodded happily and went back to his puzzle cube. She parroted his nod and turned her gaze back to the view outside. Through tired, sleepless eyes she watched Georges Losch and his sons busy with pruning and tilling. The smell of damp grass mingled with the wild scent of wood cracking in the hearth behind her.
Winter was nipping the heels of autumn. It was the cycle of life, of death and, come the spring, renewal. The weary hours that had worn away since Morgan performed the ritual to merge the mutant with her had only brought the unavoidable nearer. Soon the decision would be upon her.
&
nbsp; A touch of panic coursed through her. The decision.
Would she decide on life? Or would she find the idea of vampirism wholly repugnant and refuse?
Life or death.
What did it matter that her agreement to cross over was given when she was wholly ignorant of what becoming an immortal might entail?
With a small grimace, she recalled how Morgan had pushed her toward the edge of the cliff, testing her, forcing her to confront her fear. She thought she was strong, that she could accept what was soon going to happen to her. The truth was she felt neither strong nor confident. She felt weak and stupid and helpless. She knew so little about the world she was walking into, and even less about the man she'd chosen to follow.
Life goes on, she thought. Whether I'm here or not, life will go on. She wanted to think she could get through the coming hours, that it would be easy to take the final steps, but now she was not so sure.
Restless, she sighed gently and shifted into a more comfortable position. Tuning out the elf's hums and exclamations, she kept her eyes fastened on the view outside. The cloudy days seemed to foreshadow the great change in her life.
Her mind drifted back to that day at Goldridge Center when Daniel DiMarco had told her of her family, had handed her an envelope.
Anlese's letter.
This morning she'd opened that envelope, more than two months after receiving it. She was stunned to find no letter inside. Instead, she'd found a passbook to a savings account. In her name. The balance in the account was staggering: $12.5 million.
She had the book in the back pocket of her jeans. She'd already taken it out and looked at it several times, checking the information. Her name? Yep. Balance: $12,500,000.00. Not a cent more. Not a cent less.
Julienne looked around the library. Nothing here reminded her of the drab, barren apartments of her childhood, so many she could barely distinguish one from another anymore. This house was decorated with the best money could buy, each piece carefully chosen.
At one time, she had been obsessed with escaping her wretched past, desperately wishing for a stable home, a place that would offer safety and security from the outside world. She would never again have to live in a way she didn't want because of lack of money. Freedom. Independence. No more answering to the world or worrying about whether or not the scars on her face would stop her from working.
But she knew Anlese had not sent the money. Morgan had. He'd sent it because he did not want her to come back to Virginia.
And I didn't open it. All I had to do was open the damn letter, and I would have been able to walk out of Goldridge scot-free, with not a tie to this place. I could be sitting on a beach in Cancun sipping piña coladas and working on my tan instead of waiting to take my lover's blood.
She gulped. Her thoughts were so insistent her head began to thud. Taking a breath, she tried to capture control of her feelings. She failed. Grimacing, she felt a twinge deep in her gut. How could she not know what it was? Not nervous tension but hunger. For days she'd been trying to ignore it, turn a deaf ear to the primeval cries of the mutant inside, the disease living under her skin, infecting her body. Its need was soon to be hers.
She didn't want to think about that. Not yet. Instead, she blanked her mind, staring into the blurry reflection in the windowpane. Her face was pale, haggard. Dark smudges of nervous fright lined her eyes, lips pressed into a tight line. Her gaze was remote, her mood bleak; and that made what she was to become even more frightening.
Morgan wasn't in any better humor, either. Driven on by Danielle's nagging, he had recently accompanied her to the bank to sign the paperwork that would transfer the property and assets into her hands. That was an interesting experience--only the second chance she'd ever had to observe Morgan interacting with the outside world.
First, she'd learned that he was far from being wholly dependent on his staff to get around. Cash and credit cards in wallet, car keys in hand, he'd blithely ignored Danielle's warnings that he had been barred from operating a vehicle ever again and towed her out the door to where Tobias waited beside a sleek mid-sized sedan with tinted windows. The fact he didn't have a driver's license did not matter, nor did it stop him from doing what he damn well pleased. He'd handled the sleek machine expertly, though, heeding Danielle's reminder not to speed.
Though the years he'd paid over a hundred thousand dollars in fines for speeding and other minor infractions. He even had a few warrants out for his arrest, which fazed him not one whit. He knew he wouldn't spend a single night in jail, and that Blackthorne's attorneys would sort out the problems with the county. That a lot of people in Belmonde, Virginia, owed him favors added to his leverage.
Morgan had carved a strange niche among them; and for the most part, the locals were wise enough to leave him alone. They didn't know who he was and were not exactly sure where he'd come from, but they did know he'd been among them for a very long time and that he was a daunting force to deal with. Money afforded him the luxury of getting away with the impossible. It was his buffer against the everyday bothers and banalities and he never hesitated to spend it liberally.
He had no love of the public masses, did not want to deal with them and absolutely refused to do so if he didn't have to. He deliberately remained as unavailable as possible in a modern world geared toward information and communication.
But that did not mean he wasn't perfectly aware of what was happening outside Blackthorne's walls. He possessed a keen knowledge of how the world worked. If he did not like the rules of society, he bent them or out-and-out defied them in order to get his way.
He'd learned a very long time ago that outrageous amounts of money served as the perfect buffer. He knew how to make it, and he knew how to spend it. He was also his own best perpetuator of the mystery that was Morgan Saint-Evanston.
She remembered asking him where they were going.
He'd sighed as though the very idea was a burden. "In order for you to manage the estate and its affairs, you need to establish yourself as the legal trustee. The paperwork was already set up before Anlese died."
"Manage? You mean I didn't inherit Blackthorne?"
A pause, then a brief shake of his head. "The estate is part of a living trust, set up to administer to the property's long-term preservation. Ownership transfers to the beneficiaries named in the trust--in this case, you. This way, it avoids probate court, reduces estate taxes and keeps everything private because the terms of a living trust does not need to be made public. Everything is handled quickly and quietly."
"And your name is nowhere to be found?"
"It is there. Nobody knows quite how it fits."
"Then who set up the trust? Doesn't there have to be a grantor of some sort?"
"The trusts are controlled by Blackthorne Enterprises, subject to termination or modification if needed."
"Controlled by you."
"Of course."
"How do you get away with that?"
A sneaky sidelong glance. "There are ways of bending every law known to man."
"I don't know how you do it," she said through a half smile and sigh. "You don't have a passport, a birth certificate, nothing on paper that says you exist. Hell, you don't even have a driver's license. How do you explain that?"
His features sharpened, his expression intense and critical. "Who says I have to?" Peering over the edge of fathomless black sunglasses, all pretenses between them suddenly vanished.
"Look, honey, you are kidding yourself if you think our kindred are entirely invisible in this world. They are not. There is a thriving and very active cultic subculture wound tightly around the fabric of everyday life. There always has been. And there are mortal watchers who know what we are. Those who hassle me are the same ones who hire me for my expertise. We have been here a long time and we have cut our deals."
When she'd attempted to question him further, he'd given an irritable wave of his hand as though her words were an intrusion and he didn't want to be bothered any further
with them.
The rest of the ride had continued in silence. Morgan's past in the mortal world was not something that she had given much thought to before, but his cryptic words suddenly opened up a whole new side of him that she hadn't suspected existed. She realized that what she thought she knew about him wasn't half of the truth.
Thinking back on that day, she nibbled her lip in thought. No, interacting was not quite the correct word to apply to what Morgan did with others. It would be more correct to look at it as the rest of the world reacting to Morgan's presence among them. People simply took one look at him and got the hell out of his way, the crowds parting like the Red Sea to let him through. An undercurrent of--what was it, exactly, fear?--no, awe seemed to envelop them. Most people were strangely on edge when he was around; like a bomb, they held their breath, waiting for him to go off. He wasn't really standoffish. He simply ignored everyone equally.
People seemed to sense that he was not like them, and that he would not stand for the mundane hassles of everyday life. Indeed, both of them were immediately ushered into the private office of the bank's president, Charles McIntyre.
McIntyre, a genial redheaded Scot not far removed from his own heritage as a Highlander, was as full of the welcoming spirit of Gaelic bonhomie as Morgan was not. Indeed, if Saint-Evanston ever held any nostalgia for the Emerald Isle of his birth, he certainly gave no sign or made any reference to it. He had no fondness or use for leprechauns, shamrocks, Blarney stones or Eire's mythical heroes.
In contrast, McIntyre's pleasant and affable disposition allowed him to get along with almost anyone--even Morgan in his dourest of moods.
Much to her relief, Charles McIntyre had treated her warmly, commiserating over Anlese's death and doing his utmost to answer her questions and concerns. Morgan, on the other hand, had only lounged in a chair and smoked incessantly, answering or commenting only when necessary. She had to wonder what McIntrye had done to become beholden to him, as it was crystal clear the bank manager answered to him in more ways than one.
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