Serafina and the Silent Vampire

by Marie Treanor

  “Blair?” She rushed over to him, wondering wildly if some ray of daylight had seeped through the curtain and zapped him. Though, of course, his body would have disintegrated, wouldn’t it? She grabbed his arm. “Blair!”

  And suddenly he wasn’t on the bed but in the doorway, both hands raised in self-defense. His eyes were steely, murderous, just as she’d seen him in the car park, a timely reminder—or was it too late?—of the nature of the being she’d welcomed to her bed. And yet in the time she took to register this, he was already lowering his arms to his sides. The vicious glare faded from his eyes.

  “Serafina.”

  “Were you asleep?” she asked in disbelief.

  His lips quirked. “I had a busy night.”

  Her face, her entire body flushed, and yet beyond her own memory and embarrassment, she recognized that she’d found his vulnerability, that he knew it and didn’t like it. “Normally, I’m aware while I rest.”

  “But you didn’t even hear me come in.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he acknowledged, his voice very carefully even. “It seems I don’t register you as a threat.”

  “Not sure that’s a compliment,” she said ruefully. His eyes lightened, seemed to smile, and her breath caught. She wanted to walk into his arms and hug him. She wanted to fall onto the bed with him and repeat all the things they’d done last night. Instead, she spun the other way, opening the wardrobe door to rummage for the wrapped Christmas gift. It was a small parcel—a ring—so it was difficult to locate. “I’m going to see my witch friend. She lives near Loch Lomond, so I’ll be gone most of the day.”

  Finally retrieving the ring box, she shoved the fallen things back in and closed the door. “Nicholas Smith is into magic—real magic, like Phil said, not conjuring. Jilly found stuff on the Internet.”

  He hadn’t moved, just continued to watch her. She drew in her breath and walked toward him. “I can trust you, can’t I, not to touch my friends?” She brushed his hand lightly. It might have been casual, almost accidental, but Blair would know better.

  His mouth tugged upward on one side. He said nothing. His mind was as silent as his lips.

  “Can’t I?” she repeated with a shade of desperation. “Blair, please!”

  “What do you take me for? A trained animal?”

  Uncomprehending, she frowned.

  He leaned closer. She could smell him, earth and spice and sex on legs. “Don’t make that mistake,” he whispered. “I’m not trained at all.”

  She snatched her hand away from his as if it burned her, but he moved faster, grasping her wrist and yanking her close into his body. Remembering and yearning, she found her gaze riveted on his lips, so close to hers they were almost touching. Her nipples, pressed into his chest, ached for attention. Between her legs pooled the moist warmth of sexual arousal, made all the more intense by the feel of his erection growing against her stomach.

  “I have no interest in drinking your friends.” His words seemed to echo around her mind with contempt. “I am quite capable of finding my own supper.”

  Only pride stopped her struggling in his hold. As if he felt it, he smiled and ran one finger down the artery in her neck. She gasped without meaning to. And he released her, walking past her to flop back down on the bed. This time, he closed his eyes.

  Sera felt like a disciplined child. And she had never taken well to discipline. It didn’t help that he spoke the truth.

  “Sleep well,” she said nastily and marched out of the room without looking back. It was tempting to slam the doors as she left, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.

  ****

  Dropping in on the Bells, she was surprised to be ushered into their sitting room by Ferdy. Under the stark wooden cross on the wall sat Mrs. Bell, a tired, worried smile on her pale lips. Shit, who was she to get angry with people suffering like these two?

  “I thought you were running away with us last night,” Ferdy said as she sat down. “How did you get away?”

  “I had friends there with—er—a getaway vehicle.”

  Mrs. Bell stood abruptly. “Cup of tea, Miss MacBride?”

  “No thanks. I can’t stay long.”

  “We need to know which vampire you killed last night,” Ferdy said in a rush.

  Mrs. Bell sat back down. “Was it Jason?” she blurted.

  “No, it wasn’t Jason,” Sera said quietly, and Mrs. Bell dropped her head into her hands.

  “It would be so much better if it had been Jason,” she wept. “And yet I’m glad; I’m glad.”

  Sera stared at her, frozen by the conflict suddenly tearing her apart. The Bells needed closure, to grieve for the death of their son and begin to move on, to cope with life without him. And yet Jason wasn’t just dead; he was undead. Like Blair.

  She was right—she was sure she was right—to fight the takeover bid of the banking vampires. But was it right to kill them? Would it be right to kill Blair? “I’m not trained at all… I’m quite capable of finding my own supper.”

  Somehow, murmuring soothing inanities, she managed to get out of the house and back into her car to begin the drive across to Loch Lomond. She hoped Melanie had some answers for her, but because right now, she was struggling to know anything at all.

  ****

  Blair was no knight in shining armor.

  He’d never wanted to be. Or had he? He had some vague recollection, hundreds of years old, of a boy desperate to save his mother the killing drudgery of work in the factory by obtaining food and clothes for her, some luxury to make her happy again. If the memory was true, he’d failed utterly, because the poor woman had died of exhaustion within two years of coming to Glasgow. Knights in shining armor didn’t pick pockets or suck blood from strangers. They didn’t cheat bartenders and prostitutes or consider betraying the trust of girls they seduced. In fact, he was pretty sure they didn’t go in for seduction at all.

  But then, they weren’t real. They’d never existed in that sense and never would. He’d found that out even before his mother died, so exactly why he wanted to be Serafina MacBride’s knight in shining armor, he really had no idea.

  It wasn’t as if she trusted him or expected anything of him.

  Did she?

  He shifted restlessly on the bed. Why the hell did she? She knew what he was.

  No, she doesn’t. She didn’t realize vampires existed until three nights ago, and she knows nothing about me except she likes me to fuck her. No damsel in distress. No knights. Just sort it out, and stop being an arse.

  One way or another, it was probably going to come to a fight, in which case, he might well need support. He could summon them all, every vampire in the United Kingdom, including those who’d never crossed his path. It was within his power and, in Ailis’s absence, his right. However, with at least one older vampire still left in the banking camp, he preferred not to risk a general call being picked up. Besides, quality not quantity was what counted here.

  To start with, he reached out with his mind to Scotland’s largest city, to the old, silent building which, only a few hours before, would have been vibrating to the blare of human music. As always when he contacted Davie, he could almost smell the stale alcohol, feel the human pleasure and slightly squalid excitement of the nightclub where he’d chosen to hang out lately. He was, officially, the caretaker. He had a tiny flat at the top of the building and even received a pittance of a paycheck, which was quite an achievement for a vampire. It certainly amused Davie no end. He wasn’t there for the money but for the easy nighttime access to human blood.

  “Blair?” Davie acknowledged in some surprise. He didn’t trouble hiding his location or his occupation. He rarely did. He lay naked in his own bed between the legs of an equally naked young woman. Her improbably red hair was wildly rumpled and her makeup smudged. A narrow trickle of blood ran down her neck, which wasn’t surprising, since Davie was drinking from her semiconscious body. He saw no reason to stop in order to talk to Blair. “What d’you wan
t?”

  “I’m giving you warning. I might need you to come to Edinburgh at short notice.”

  “What for?” Davie asked with a spark of interest, though not enough to detach him from the girl’s vein.

  Blair said, “To fight.”

  Davie stopped sucking. He even sat up while the girl fell back into a deeper sleep. “Now that’s funny, since the last time I saw you, you were beating the crap out of me for—oh aye, fighting.”

  “That was different,” Blair said serenely. “You were drawing human attention to yourself and therefore to the rest of us.”

  “And your fight won’t?”

  “It might,” Blair admitted. “But there may be no other option. This threatens all of us. You have to be ready to drop everything as soon as I give the word.”

  “That right?” Davie sneered.

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  Davie shrugged, mentally and physically. “Better get my energy levels up then,” he said and bent over the sleeping girl once more. She moaned as Davie sank his fangs back into her throat.

  Vaguely, as he left Davie to his breakfast, Blair wondered how long she’d been there, but he wasn’t particularly worried. This was what passed as a relationship in Davie’s world. A girl he preyed upon first in the club, now in thrall to him, supplying him with regular blood and sex. She probably never left his room. When he was done, or she was, he would feed her up a bit and send her home with little memory of anything except a few nights of debauchery.

  It was a simple life for a vampire. Blair had done similar things on several occasions. And for all the girl slept in his bed, Davie was preserving vampire isolation far more efficiently than Blair was right now.

  Sera in his bed for days on end, in thrall to him. He couldn’t deny its appeal, and yet he couldn’t quite imagine it. While one part of him wanted it quite fiercely, another part rebelled because he couldn’t bear the idea of Sera in thrall. She was too rare. He wanted her willing, passionate, desperate, as she’d been last night.

  “You wouldn’t go now, would you?” she’d whispered. “Stay with me.”

  What the hell was he getting into here? Abruptly, he rose from the bed, away from her insidious, intoxicating scent, and paced through to the living room. It was more than time for a dose of sanity.

  “Phil.”

  “Ah, Blair. I thought you’d burned up with the dawn.”

  “No, you didn’t. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing. I’m contemplating my navel. Good night?”

  “Perfect, thank you,” Blair said impatiently. “Did our friends make any further moves last night?”

  “Well, some of them went out hunting. One killed someone, stupid bastard. A couple broke into New Register House in Prince’s Street—”

  “They what?”

  “Bizarre, isn’t it?”

  “Serafina,” Blair said. “They’re looking for some record of Serafina.”

  “It’s a bit of a jump, assumption-wise,” Phil pointed out. “Besides, can’t you do all that sort of thing online these days?”

  “Not all.” He thought for a moment. He’d begun to think that Sera was right, that the new vampires’ mutations weren’t down to too distant descent from the Founder after all. “Magic, Phil,” he said abruptly. “Who among your acquaintances practices magic?”

  “No one,” Phil said in surprise. “That’s one thing the Founder never passed on to us.”

  ****

  Melanie had recently renovated and united two old cottages by the side of a small loch a few miles from Loch Lomond. Being Mel, she’d chosen a place well off the beaten track, on the end of a bumpy, single-track road.

  As Sera pulled off the road and got out of her car, she saw that Melanie had also chosen a place of spectacular beauty, even under gray skies. There were woods and hills on two sides, and on the third, across the smooth, glinting water you got a glimpse of the much larger Loch Lomond and more hills beyond.

  She heard the door of the cottage open and felt the warmth that was Melanie. She smiled without turning.

  “You like my spot?” Melanie asked.

  “It’s beautiful.” She turned at last to face her friend. Mel looked good, as she always did, all dark red hair and luminous green eyes. Bone structure to die for. She looked relaxed and content and pleased to see her. “How in the world did you find it?”

  Mel wiggled her eyebrows. “Magic.”

  “Really?”

  “Nah. It was in the Glasgow Solicitors’ Property paper. Come in before the rain starts again.” Mel took her arm, gave it a little hug as they walked together toward the cottage. She wasn’t a demonstrative person, and Sera always valued her outward signs of affection. “How’s the world of psychic research?”

  “Crazy,” Sera said ruefully.

  Mel cast her a sardonic glance. “Get away.”

  Sera laughed. “Seriously. Way beyond cranks and ghosts and poltergeists and people who want to prove I’m scamming them.”

  “Do they do much of that?”

  “I’ve had a few. I’ve even had a cop accuse me of preying on the grieving and the vulnerable.”

  “I have to assume you’re not.”

  Sera sighed. “I suppose it depends on your definition of grieving, vulnerable, and preying.”

  “Finding it’s not all black and white?”

  What Sera liked about Mel was that she never accused.

  “It’s more complicated than I wanted it to be,” Sera confessed. “But that’s not my real problem.”

  They entered the house, and with obvious pleasure, Melanie showed Sera around. Sera admired the original features and praised her friend’s tasteful and yet very Mel décor. After which, sitting at the dining table by a window overlooking the loch, they ate a rather delicious lunch that Mel claimed to have just thrown together.

  “I’m going to leave Edinburgh and move out to the country,” Sera said, raising her glass in a toast. It was only orange juice, much to Melanie’s disappointment, but Sera was wary of the effect of wine on her after her blood loss. She used having to drive home as an excuse. “To your new house.”

  “So,” Melanie asked after a little, “what is your real problem?”

  It was what she’d come for, and yet now that the moment had arrived, she found herself curiously reluctant to go into it. The threat of the banking vampires, the mystery of Nicholas Smith, all faded into insignificance beside the one huge event of Blair, which she wasn’t yet ready to discuss with anybody. She doubted she ever would be.

  “Vampires,” she said abruptly. “Do you know they actually exist?”

  Prepared for several responses, including horror, ridicule, and pity, Sera was relieved when Melanie merely raised one intrigued eyebrow and murmured, “I have heard the odd whisper, though I’ve never encountered one myself.”

  “What have you heard?” Sera asked curiously, helping herself to another of Melanie’s delicious cheese-and-spinach pies.

  Melanie shrugged and reached for the bottle to top up her wine. “Nothing much. Rather mysterious, elusive beings, few in number, appallingly strong and absolutely deadly when riled. For the most part, they seem to prey secretly on the humans they live among, and rarely kill.”

  Sera swallowed the last of her pie and, under Mel’s amused gaze, reached for yet another. “Did you ever hear whether or not they could talk? How they communicate among themselves or with humans?”

  “I believe they’re telepathic. They don’t talk at all, at least not as we do.”

  Sera nodded slowly, absently heaping two kinds of salad onto her plate. “That’s what I heard,” she agreed. “But recently, a new breed of vampire has appeared in Edinburgh—in alarming numbers, actually—and they can talk, just like we do. How do you suppose that could happen?”

  Mel set down her glass, frowning. “I haven’t the foggiest idea, but I don’t like the sound of alarming numbers. Are they dangerous? And are you sure they’re vampires?”

&nb
sp; “Yes to both. A couple of murders have been in the news. I think they’ve covered up a couple more. But they seem to be creating new creatures like themselves all the time—all from the financial industry. And they’re going back to work. They want to take over the running of all the country’s finances, siphon off wealth for themselves, and eventually reduce the role of humans to little more than slavery.”

  Mel closed her mouth. “Yes, that is a real problem.”

  “The other curious thing is—apparently, vamps don’t normally take to discipline. They’re free spirits, if you like. But these guys aren’t. They answer to a human.”

  “What human?”

  “Bloke called Nicholas Smith. Ever heard of him?”

  Melanie closed her eyes tight, perhaps dredging her memory. “Not sure,” she said uncertainly.

  “He does stage magic—mixture of conjuring and mind reading—under the name of Nick Black.”

  Mel opened her eyes. “Ah. Now I know who you mean. I’ve even met him. He’s a member of WASA.”

  “WASA,” Sera repeated, unable to stop herself from grinning.

  “WASA,” Mel repeated sternly. “Witches’ and Sorcerers’ Association.”

  It wasn’t really funny. Sera sobered and cleared out the salad bowl. “What can he actually do? I know he’s telepathic to some degree, but does he have other gifts? Like you? Can he—er—‘do’ magic?”

  “I believe he’s quite strong.”

  Sera glanced at her. “Stronger than you?”

  “He’s older than me, been practicing for longer.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Sera laid her knife and fork together and sat back.

  “Coffee and walnut cake?” Mel offered.

  “Ooh yes, please.”

  While Mel took the used plates away, Sera tidied the leftovers and watched her surreptitiously. She sensed an unusual tension in her friend, a discomfort that wasn’t usually present between them. And if she had to put her finger on when this discomfort arose, she rather thought it was when she spoke the name Nicholas Smith. He worried Mel.