Her knowledge of him made her dangerous, of course. But she’d been sidelined by the immediacy of the connection between them. The meeting of their eyes had also caused a secondary effect. She would return. He knew this in a jolt of precognition. She would come back for him, whatever reason she chose as an explanation. She couldn’t possibly understand why. She’d be groping for the source of the connection between them.
What were the odds she might know everything?
Then again, Lance mused, what were the odds she’d be here at all, after all this time? That he’d see her?
Such an event was highly unusual. Intriguing.
Still … her eyes were the same, unchanged. He’d have recognized them anywhere. Those brown, amber-flecked eyes that suggested introspection and hidden depths had met his once before, pleadingly, trusting him to make a bond. A bond she had used today to name him, if not place him.
“Indeed. What are the odds?” Lance whispered.
Golden feelers of early-morning sun danced along his shirt like sharp, slender knives needling, but now the sensation seemed more a herald of things to come than discomfort.
A little girl had been in that helicopter. Here. Now. Only she wasn’t so little anymore. Hair the color of shadows. Eyes like a dove.
No, he corrected. Not the eyes of a dove anymore. Wiser eyes. Hardened eyes. The eyes of a woman grown from a girl who had seen the viciousness of the world firsthand. A girl who had barely survived her own personal hint of what hell on earth might be like.
He knew this, knew her, and what lay behind the quickness of their connection.
“Jesse.” Saying the name aloud made him take a useless breath. “Do you know that my blood runs in your veins? That it remains there today, and after all this time? That the little girl from a Los Angeles alley, now grown to womanhood, has been called from the sky because of the blood I once gave her, in order to save her life?”
Pressing the hair back from his face, Lance looked mountainward. The helicopter was heading for the castle. Jesse would know where to find him, all right. She would come calling. He’d seen that in her.
Then again, perhaps those brown eyes of hers were like a dove’s eyes. Perhaps the little girl he’d once helped hadn’t been tainted too much by the hand she’d been dealt. There was a chance she wasn’t too far gone. Just as there was a chance he wouldn’t wait for her to arrive.
In all the world, in all its limitless time, he’d never run across one of them before. Had he not removed himself from the world, hid himself here, far from the madness, from the despair of a civilization plagued by others identified with his kind?
He’d once tried to save as many humans as he could. He’d spent centuries doling out justice. But he’d grown tired, weary. The world had become so large.
Giving the gift of life back to little Jesse had been his last good deed.
The girl in the sky.
The woman with the blazing brown eyes.
“What have you done with your second chance? Why are you here now? What has brought you all this way?”
She had been so very small in his arms when he’d held her. She had thought him to be an angel. Maybe her perception of him as an angel was why he had chosen to help her in the first place, and why he’d made her his last.
Lifting a hand in a gesture of parting, or maybe mere acknowledgment of an imminent problem dropped into his lap, Lance gazed at the yellow cast of sunlight on his palm, noted the steam rising from his pale skin, then took off at a sprint—not for the cover of the nearby trees, but in the direction the helicopter had taken.
Chapter 2
“No shit? Vampire?” Stan said, eyes wide. “I’ve heard about those things before, but I’ve never seen one. And,” he added, “you’re kidding, right, boss?”
Jesse pressed herself rigidly against her seat, wishing she had been kidding. Wishing for anything other than for that man to have been what she thought he was.
That glorious piece of flesh down there was a vampire. Not a man. In no way a man. His molded flesh was dead flesh; nothing more than a walking pile of dust that evil had rearranged into the semblance of a human being.
Fighting evil is what she did for a living.
“How can you tell?” Stan asked, turning his New York Yankees baseball cap around backward. “Except for the getup, I mean?”
“I can’t explain it,” Jesse admitted, wondering about that very same thing, reluctant to try to define the vibration going through her body.
How many times had she felt this vibration before, when she had brushed up against such creatures by accident on a busy city street, and then had been left to wonder what had brought her to a stop, shaking? How many times had this happened prior to gaining a clearer picture, before she became more adept at recognizing the feeling?
But this brush had been different. Startling. Sensual. Not just that, but overtly sexual.
Oh, yes. She knew this golden man was a vampire, much in the same way some people recognized an oncoming storm system by experiencing pain in their arthritic knees. In a similar way to animals sensing earthquakes. Vampires were like that for her. Seismic. The ultimate nightmare. Creatures no longer alive, but not completely dead.
“Really, boss?” Stan said in an obvious attempt to lighten the atmosphere. “I guess I actually would be the better choice, then. You know, between me and him?”
Stan was offering a toothy smile when Jesse looked over. His green eyes were positively merry. Of course, he had to believe she was kidding. He wouldn’t know any better.
“An infinitely better choice,” Jesse agreed, faking a smile, feeling like hell. She’d just wanted to jump out of the chopper for a few seconds back there, headfirst. She found that momentary loss of control disconcerting. She needed control, had to get it back. Control is what kept her together, had kept her together since … way back.
In order to regain her equilibrium and make sure that no one could rob her of her most precious trait again, she’d have to come back here, to this remote place, without Stan. She’d have to plan what to do when she caught up with him. It. She wasn’t a vampire hunter, but had made it her business to learn a thing or two. To ease the nightmares. To try to cope.
“All that charm of yours is why your girlfriend made me promise to keep my distance,” she added. She needed to talk, needed to put the compulsion to hunt the bloodsucker aside for now, even while knowing she wouldn’t sleep until she dealt with it.
“Carol? Naw, she wouldn’t make you promise that,” Stan said. “She knows—”
Stan’s sentence dropped away unfinished, and too late. Stan had no doubt realized he’d made a mistake by merely thinking about alluding to Jesse’s past, and to the fact that she had never, as far as anyone in the unit knew, ever gone on a date.
No one brought up this loner thing. Not to her face, anyway. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard the things said behind her back.
For the most part, she was glad to have the comments remain out of earshot and out of focus. Her mantra was to let the guys in the unit wonder why the little woman was so tough on crime, and even tougher on men. Uncertainty meant they would keep their distance.
“However,” Jesse said into her headset with a manufactured lightness, “a compliment won’t break my promise to Carol, I suppose. So I’ll say that I don’t know about the boots in your closet, but I do like your cap.”
Stan smiled wider, appearing comfortable with their usual pass-the-time game of unrequited, never-in-a-million-years kind of flirting.
“E.T.A.?” Jesse asked.
“An hour at most.”
An hour. Too much time to think. Bad stuff was sitting beneath the surface of her skin, with a bitter tang best left to nightmares, monsters and dark alleys.
Too many nightmares.
Stan was peering at her.
“What?” Jesse managed to say.
“That thing down there put some kind of whammy on you, boss?”
“May
be.”
And wasn’t that truth revealing? She had, in fact, felt the damn vampire’s stare all the way to her bones. She’d known better than to look into his eyes, but had done so anyway, unable to help herself. Admittedly, she was the idiot here.
A leftover shiver, not quite dispelled by the distance, shook her. The vow she’d once taken as a teen came rushing back, repeating over and over in her mind.
Find them. One at a time, if need be.
Show them what the word dead should mean.
But she’d grown up. Finding them wasn’t her job. Finding missing persons was. Missing humans. The instinct to take the missing persons gig to the next level, secretly, still burned her insides, though. One denizen of the “next level” was down there on the ground, somewhere near that old castle.
Jesse looked across the trees, thinking that Stan had been right in the description of the ruins, though he had it associated with the wrong monster. It wasn’t Frankenstein’s castle down there. It was Dracula’s.
“I hear over in Germany guys wear cute little shorts. With suspenders,” Stan said. “I could fly us in that direction.”
“You just want a beer,” Jesse retorted.
“Carol doesn’t like me to drink beer.” Stan offered up a shrug as if to say: Sometimes a man has got to do what a man has got to do. Then he added, “I’d kill for a beer.”
Jesse laughed and rested her head against the seat, thankful that Stan and the others didn’t know about the monsters, and that their dreams could remain safe. Also thankful that her own dreams would remain a secret shared with only one other person on this wide and lonely planet, and that person would never talk, gagged by patient-doctor rules of confidentiality.
She’d had enough of being labeled certifiable. Ten years was enough. Ten lost years.
“There it is,” Stan announced in a hushed, conspiratorial whisper.
Jesse follow the direction of his hand gesture.
“The castle. Ain’t she a beaut?”
Jesse could not reply. The sight of the great pile of stone sitting atop the hill, nearly as white as the dusting of snow clinging to its turrets, produced a second stab of anxiety in her.
These were gothic environs for the living dead. As far from Hollywood as possible but the vamp wore breeches and a billowy shirt, like in the movies. Stereotypical stuff—the clothes, the hair, the chiseled features, the body and the secluded castle.
Shouldn’t there be something wrong with monsters looking like Greek gods? What kind of omnipotent deity allowed for discrepancies like that?
Were vampire looks the source of their allure? Like perverts holding out candy for children? Because that’s exactly what vampires did. Prey.
This one …
This one had been …
Jesse again hid her shaking hands from Stan, and kept her expression neutral. Inside she was screaming. Her heart continued to race. She had to look to make sure Stan couldn’t hear the turmoil of her thoughts.
Go back! Go back there now!
This creature is special.
This blood drinker is powerful.
Her mind was reeling, pressurizing. Past, present and future were rolling together, becoming muddled. She had to retain control, knew the routine.
Concentrate. Separate the threads.
Put everything in perspective and in its place.
She was the force to be reckoned with here. She was the director of an elite missing persons unit sanctioned by both FBI and CIA, and was good at her job. More often than not, she found the people she was hired to find, most of them alive. She brought people back, offered closure and collected huge sums from families and governments alike—and all the monies were channeled back into her business to keep it solvent. All of it—the helicopters, the assignments, the training, the job—were to help keep families together at all costs.
Could she now add to that objective killing vampires?
No. Must stay sane. Vampires will tip me over the edge.
Yet how could she stay sane when she’d found one of them? With a pair of blue eyes haunting her, taunting her? His blue eyes.
He had been interested in her.
Correction. It had been interested.
Pile of dust. Dead Adonis.
She had brought this about herself. She had given the order to take the chopper down. He, it, had not known her name. That wasn’t possible. Just as so many things about bloodsuckers weren’t.
What kind of two-legged creature lusted for human blood? What sort of two-legged creatures savagely killed those they fed upon?
Jesse gnawed at her lip to keep the screams at bay. Images were rushing at her. Bloody pictures bathed in red. She blew out the air she’d been holding, told herself to calm down and acknowledge the pictures and move on. She went over things again, clinging to a fringe of hope.
Yes, she had been there when her parents were killed. She had witnessed the freaks of nature tearing their throats out and then lapping up their life’s blood. The monsters had turned on her, had nearly killed her as well. She’d be dead now if a couple of L.A. cops hadn’t turned the corner and found her.
The pictures in her memory overlapped, changing, morphing as though someone shuffled a deck of colorful playing cards.
Blue eyes. Pale skin. Golden hair.
Deceitful beauty. Hurtful. Dangerous.
A tunnel of darkness …
Blood.
Her parents had been tangled up in a bloody heap. Her mom had been barely thirty, just two years older than herself today. Her brave father’s efforts against the monsters had done nothing. The alley had been too dark, too isolated, the event impossibly quick.
And herself? Young Jesse Jean, just ten years old, had been panic-stricken. At ten years old, she had lost everything, except her life. She’d been shut away for ten more years, unable to process the brutality of such an attack. Closed off. Committed. Until she’d gotten better, a recovery due in part to her secret objective, the only reason for which she could possibly have been spared. Kill them all.
There. Compartmentalized.
Okay. Jesse found that she could breathe again. Her rapid heart rate was slowing. She opened her mouth, unhinged her jaw. “I’d like to see that castle sometime,” she said as casually as if she were a tourist looking at sites.
“Yeah, I thought you might,” Stan said. “But that’s another day, boss. And trust me, there’s a better one at Disney World.”
Chapter 3
The city was like all cities to Lance, cold, dirty, overtly noisy and smelling of ripe human flesh. He had not missed these things, and regretted being immersed in them now.
People swarmed, though the sun had long since set and the night was chilly. So many people. So little space. It was a miracle that disease and illness didn’t take more of them, these walking creatures in such proximity to each other. He dreaded stepping into the flow of moving bodies on the sidewalk, dreaded even a single touch.
Watching from the corner of the Grand Hotel Beaumont, a building nearly as old as recall, Lance waited, arms crossed, posture adapted to mimic those of the men loitering near the traffic light beside him. Buses, automobiles, some of the cars so large as to be buses, flashed past in unending lines of lights and colors as he stared. The sight was disappointing.
Horses had once ruled the streets of this place. Elegant animals, graceful, alive, much more to his taste. Elegance was a concept lost in the twenty-first century. He didn’t want to adapt to changing times that ruled out beauty, quiet and the artist’s touch altogether, in favor of the odor of gasoline and oil, concrete and asphalt. For these reasons and others like them, he wasn’t sorry he seldom ventured far from home.
Leaning back against the building, Lance closed his eyes and sent his mind outward, then became suddenly alert. He felt a ripple in the air, an atmospheric gasp, as though the world itself had held a breath.
He turned.
She was there, emerging from the hotel lobby, sur rounded by a s
mall group of men and women, all of them silent, purposeful and directed.
Jesse. She stood out from the crowd, and would have risen like cream to the surface anywhere, in any surroundings, in any circumstances.
He had eyes for no other.
She wore dark blue, the color of modern business dealings, striped vertically with thin white lines, and a white shirt beneath, its collar showing, the top button open. She wore pants, and a dark blue overcoat that reached her ankles. Her shoes matched the clothes, low heels, though not so sensible in the snow. A briefcase of black leather with a combination lock hung from one of her hands. No purse. No jewelry, outside of a watch. He could hear her watch ticking.
For an instant, Lance couldn’t move, wanting to take in more details, knowing time was scarce. He recrossed his arms and stared at her beautiful face as she intercepted a question from a woman by her side.
“Yes,” she said.
Only one word, followed by a slow blink of her eyes. Large, round, wide-set eyes. Except for a trace of black makeup, these were the same eyes that had found him and recognized him from the air. Not registering surprise or fear now, but steely and fixed. Little softness in them. Jesse’s brown eyes were as businesslike as her suit.
His survey continued in a lavish sweep. High, prominent cheekbones gave Jesse’s face a lean look, with a hungry edge. Her nose, narrow, and quite possibly handed down to her by aristocratic ancestry, guided him to her mouth.
Ah.
Here was the anomaly in the features of her face. Something noteworthy. It was as if all the femininity of her other features had slipped and been manifested into full, moist, luscious lips. Ripe lips, perfectly shaped, uncolored and in no need of embellishment. She left them slightly open as she listened to the woman beside her, as though by utilizing a seventh sense, she might taste the variances in her surroundings in the way most people tasted food.
Lance’s arms fell to his sides, a very small movement, but enough to cause her shoulders to twitch. This pleased him.
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