Confront your fears.
You can do this.
The space between the buildings was narrow. Swal lowing a blasphemous oath, Jesse squeezed through, entering a hazy world of moist stone and grimy asphalt.
She was in. A couple of steps in, anyway. The odor of the place hit her like a billy club in the face—awful, more nauseating than the leather in the car. But she had to face this alley. She had to start somewhere in addressing Elizabeth Jorgensen’s kidnapping, and would begin by confronting her own personal fears.
Every fiber of her being demanded that she enter this alley, knowing what had gone in before her. She’d avoided this moment for years, had panicked more times than she could recall. After last night’s show of weakness, however, her ego needed a boost.
Time to move on.
Make a leap.
Jesse took five more steps. As the hazy light from the street dimmed, she became even more certain of the presence of a creature inside. Her pulse rocketed. She heard nothing over the thundering of her own heart.
Maintain control.
But maintaining was difficult when the dank odor confronting her was disgustingly that of mold, mildew, age and grime. Fighting off a gag reflex, she inwardly chanted, It’s only an alley. Alleys aren’t alive, only the things that roam in them.
There was no room for cheating on this test. All six senses were required to catch a beast, and all six were necessary to face down old fears. She had gotten this far. Only a few more steps remained.
“I can do this.”
It was a long, narrow space, four shoulders wide and looking more like a tunnel to hell. As far as Jesse could see, there appeared to be no break or turn. No trash cans lined the asphalt. There were no visible doorways.
“So, where are you hiding?” Jesse murmured, flexing her fingers inside her coat pocket like a gunslinger cracking knuckles before a showdown.
The buzz in her body had intensified with each step, and now centered in her hands and feet. Her right cheek twitched. She felt it, all right, here somewhere in the periphery, its feel wrong in the dank darkness.
Encapsulated in the alley’s dimness, Jesse paused. Her nerves continued to tap out a warning. A test, she told herself. A beginning. Pass this one and go directly to Boardwalk.
“Can I do you something?”
The thing had the audacity to address her, and in a voice teeming with unrepentant hunger and a heavily accented Eastern-European sprawl of syllables.
“Just an alley,” Jesse whispered, her fingers closing around the wooden stake she’d brought with her today, in case just such an occasion as this one presented itself. “Not a gateway to hell.”
“Well?” the creature pressed. “Cat got your tongue?”
Did it assume its lure had worked, that it had gotten some poor unsuspecting soul to follow it inside? The hair on the nape of Jesse’s neck raised. Her nerves were red-hot, despite the chill. This vampire gave off the stench of moldy parchment paper, saturating the close, damp air.
Although fear edged her ability to speak, Jesse forced herself. “What,” she said, “are you doing here, in the daylight? Has your watch stopped?”
Her surroundings oscillated in a crest of frigid air. Movement. The vamp had relocated to her right in that fishy way they had of suddenly appearing where they were least wanted without actually taking a visible step. Maybe, she reasoned, because they were neither dead nor living, the laws of nature no longer applied.
Nasty thought.
Drawing the stake out of her pocket, Jesse jumped toward the opposite wall. Her head felt light, her body moved between cold and hot. But it was too late for retreat. The thing had a bead on her and was no doubt waiting to pounce.
Up.
With a shocking bit of insight, Jesse looked up, managing not to hurl the coffee she’d ingested. The freak was there, above her head, hanging by its hands from a drainpipe. Like a bat.
Run, Jesse’s warning system screamed, though she knew she couldn’t escape this meeting, important on many levels.
“I wasn’t sure about the bat part,” she remarked, drawing on the false sense of calm cops had to adopt in life-and-death situations. Focus was everything. All senses had to remain on alert while adrenaline slammed through her.
Incensed, perhaps unused to its breakfast talking back, the vampire dropped to the ground in front of her. Landing with barely a sound, it straightened its gaunt body.
The thing was short, maybe five-six, tops, and all bones. A walking cadaver. Its white face shone like a circus clown’s, its eyes black holes of nothingness. As discomfiting as those things were, they alerted Jesse to the exact spot where his withered, useless, unbeating heart would reside.
Down and to the right.
The vampire hissed, bared its teeth and moved in another blur of speed. But Jesse’d had enough of being paralyzed. Elizabeth Jorgensen was waiting to be found. Stan waited in the car. The wooden stake in her hand awaited a target, and she just happened to have one. If she didn’t do this now, she might never have the nerve.
She scrambled to the side, anticipating where the vamp would end up, without thinking. Spinning on her heels, she breathed in more stagnant air, perceived a softer hiss in the silence and straightened with an adrenaline rush that made her hair stand on end.
The freak was on her before she blinked.
Terrible sucking sounds came from the vicinity of its mouth. A drip of hot, sticky saliva hit her chin as it whirled. Jesse swore, ducked again and lunged to the side. She rose to her full height, with the stake positioned in her hand, its sharp point facing out.
“Elizabeth Jorgensen,” she said as the vampire grabbed hold of her coat. “You know the name?”
“Death to all foreign bitches,” the vampire snarled.
“Not today,” Jesse hissed back, driving her body forward with the gathered momentum of nerves working well beyond their limitations.
“Elizabeth …” she said again, without finishing the sentence.
A startled gasp came from the beast, then a curse uttered in a foreign language. Both those things were followed by a sudden burst of frigid air.
Silence fell.
Jesse stood, stunned, stake still poised in her hand. Pure unadulterated fright closed her throat as the smell of decay turned into the smell of ashes.
The stake wavered, though she maintained her grip. She stared into the dark, anticipating that the monster might rise again, not quite believing that a vampire could be killed by the force of thought alone. Because the tip of her stake hadn’t touched it.
So what just happened?
“That was quite a show,” a deep voice reproved, jamming her attention in another direction.
The velvety voice did not belong in the darkness of an alley, but in a bedroom. Soft-spoken, low on the register, exceptionally rich, it floated to Jesse as if on a stray breeze, bringing a familiar heat.
She spun, stake poised. A hand caught hers as she bumped into something solid, teetered sideways, then quickly regained her balance.
God, did she have the strength for round two?
“Although,” the smoky voice went on, “this creature was new, and too hungry to control himself.”
Jesse stood, frozen. So, he had been watching.
“How does it feel?” her nocturnal companion asked, stepping closer to her, his wide shoulders outlined by a ray of passing overhead light. “Being so close to a kill?”
“I didn’t kill anything,” she said.
“You hold a weapon.”
“For self-defense.” Jesse couldn’t keep her hands from trembling uncontrollably. The truth was that she hadn’t been prepared for one vampire, let alone two. Especially this one.
“But you would have killed him?” the golden vampire asked, his tone unemotional, smooth.
“If I had to.” And it would have removed one parasite out of how many? Hundreds?
Thing was, she hadn’t touched the gaunt monster.
“You
did this,” she charged, her attention on the creature whose face seemed to glow eerily in the alley’s dimness.
“I didn’t want such a thing on your conscience,” he admitted.
“I was doing fine on my own. I had questions for it.”
“And if it didn’t answer? I wonder if you were you planning on keeping a death count? Painting notches on the side of Stan’s helicopter, perhaps?”
Jesse had to blink. In that one brief second, the vampire disappeared, glowing aura and all. Rounding on a premonition, she found him behind her.
“Now, that’s just creepy,” she said, holding the stake rigidly in both hands. “And the stake is still sharp.”
“I’m afraid I am not so new, or hungry,” he said.
Again, shadows coalesced in the space where he stood, as if filling in a deficit. As if he was an illusion after all. A dream. Some kind of terrible fantasy.
His voice, coming from Jesse’s right, brought with it another shot of adrenaline. Jesse couldn’t possibly have been any more alert. She pivoted and the stake bumped against his chest. He did nothing to restrain her this time and just stood there, quietly watching her with eyes she knew were light blue and deadly dangerous.
Her fingers quivered on the stake. She had a thought to drive it home, sink this big splinter into the place where the vamp’s heart should have been, but wasn’t. Nevertheless, she did not apply pressure. She didn’t so much as poke a hole in his immaculate black overcoat, distracted by the scents of leather and wool—calling cards that didn’t speak loudly of the word undead.
For the second time in just a few hours, she noted how something indecipherable hid behind those scents that she was unable to pin down. Indecipherable and intimately familiar.
Her thighs picked up the quiver. Deep down inside, all the way to her bones and extending to the ultrapersonal, unmentionable spaces in between, her body reacted to this vampire’s scent with longing. Unwelcome. Sexual. Vile.
She groped for an answer to this new puzzle as her stomach churned. He had to be doing this to her—making her perceive him in a different light. Vampires were notorious for this sort of thing. Then again, this one was out in the daylight, too, so it was pretty obvious she hadn’t gotten some facts straight.
Furthermore, it didn’t help that golden boy beside her didn’t in any way resemble the other creature in the alley. He was way too solid and completely fleshed out. His bearing was regal, superior. Power radiated from him, carefully maintained and cultivated. Did vampires have kings and princes, or was he merely older and more experienced than his cousins?
Maybe he had recently fed on some poor unsuspecting soul, in order to look the way he did.
Thinking to take a step in the opposite direction, instinct warned that it was questionable whether she’d be able to get back to the car. Her feet weren’t responding.
“Get away from me,” she ordered.
“I believe you may be in need of further assistance.”
“Not from you.”
“Do you think you can make it out of this alley on your own? You are tilting on your feet.”
The richness of the vampire’s voice made Jesse’s knees weaken further. Such a mesmerizing voice also went against nature, surely?
“I’m fine,” she declared.
“I’m holding you up,” he corrected.
He was holding her up. His shoulder was touching hers. The acknowledgment of his nearness produced a current of electricity that sparked through her body like a loose live wire.
“Are we to fight today? Here? After all?” Jesse planted her feet in a wider stance and drew back. “Now that I have the use of both arms?”
“No fight. I told you I’d help and I meant it. I’m an ally, Jesse, not the enemy.”
“How many times do you have to hear my answer on that subject?”
The vampire followed when she backed up a step.
“Damn you,” she swore as he took a firm grip on her shoulder, the unexpected heat from his fingers streaking through her skin beneath her coat sleeve, waltzing along overextended nerve fibers.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
As the demand left her lips, and in an exact contradiction of her thoughts, she leaned toward the warmth. Toward him. Automatically. Insanely.
Gritting her teeth, unable to comprehend why she might break her own rules, she allowed her focus to travel up. She found his mouth closed, with no evidence of vampire trickery confronting her at the moment, and no sign of fangs. His lips were full and closed tightly in his pale, chiseled face. Was the set of his mouth meant to insinuate concern?
Anomaly, big-time. A beautiful predator.
An urge so foreign hit that Jesse rocked against it. The urge was to touch him, explore, delve into his warmth. Those thoughts were more frightening than the idea of dealing a gaunt vampire a final death blow. No matter how long it had been since she’d felt completely warm or comforted, this was a false sense of those things. Trusting a vampire would be the epitome of the word mistake.
“Like you’d let me walk away from this,” she said.
“Of course I will,” he returned, as a flash of memory hit Jesse, there and gone in another passing bit of overhead light. This memory centered on his voice. She might have heard his voice before last night, in another dark place.
Where?
More memories struck with the force of an un anticipated blow. Recent stuff. This vampire had carried her to the bed, leaving a lingering perception of him as manly and strong. Leaving her with the inconceivable idea that he would be a capable, virile lover. If he were human.
Sacrilege!
Yet surely he’d had his mouth on her body. She could almost feel it there now, whispering along the curve of her neck.
Ignoring the urge to swipe at her throat, Jesse continued to hold up her hands as she retreated another pace. The vampire had to be exerting some sort of mind control, and she was caving,
because the desire she was fighting was not to kill him, but to get closer to him; to tilt back her head and expose her neck. Her scar throbbed in anticipation, as if this would be a good thing. Her heart beat out a frantic refrain.
Stop! God. Stop!
“You won’t be able to help anyone after I’ve put this stake in you,” she shouted, in spite of the fact that the stake was now dangling from her fingers.
The memories were becoming jumbled. His face. His scent. Those things wrapped around her like an invisible blanket of uncertainty. Where had she heard his voice? Why did she want to trust him, when she knew better?
“You’re making me weak,” she charged.
“You’ve had a fright,” he said. “Weakness is normal.”
“Who are you?” Jesse realized she had only moments of strength left before she crumpled in a heap. She wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to kill this vampire; that fact had become obvious. The alley was closing in on her. Without her mission to kill the vampire, the alley became a living, breathing entity, with this creature at the center of her personal storm.
She had to work for each new breath.
Instead of taking further advantage of her weakened state, the vampire maintained the small distance sep arating them. Jesse saw the street beyond him, and couldn’t make herself move toward it. Blackness was settling over her. Too much nerve burn. Anxiety out of control.
Alley … Red … Blood.
She was dead. Just like her parents. Her time had come.
Concentrate. Separate the threads.
Put everything in perspective and in its place.
“Jesse?” the golden vampire called, his voice skimming the perimeter of the blackness closing in. “It’s all right. Today, it is all right.”
What was he talking about? The world was turning inside out, taking her down with it.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” she said weakly in a repeat from the night before. Raising the wooden stake took every bit of strength she possessed. She concentrated on the length of wood
as though it were the focus of her life.
“We’ve been through this, Jesse. The thing you chased in here knew nothing of the Jorgensen girl. He was little more than a pathetic scavenger, unlike the others who have taken the girl. You’re not ready to face those others. Let me help you to the car.”
“You really know who has Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
“Then where is she?”
“When you’re ready to accept my help, I’ll provide the answer. You’ll know where to find me.”
“You’d keep that information from me, possibly at the poor girl’s peril?”
“On the contrary, I’ll tell you everything when you’re ready to do something about it.”
The blur of the golden vampire’s sudden movement merged with the blur of Jesse’s surroundings. He pried her fingers from around the wooden weapon and tucked it back into the pocket of her coat. Then he dared to take hold of her again.
A stab of sensation, like hot coals on vulnerable flesh, accompanied his touch on her elbow, at once painful, scintillating and suggestive. His heat was disarming. Jesse’s muscles contracted. She drew in an unfulfilled breath.
“You undressed me.” She tried desperately to compartmentalize the growing desire to give her trust to this beast, fending off the idea that she’d end it all here, at last, with a creature like the ones that had brought her parents down. Not dropped from the roof of a building, but confronting a vampire on her own two feet.
“Your clothes were wet and your arm useless,” he said by way of an explanation for his behavior.
“This arm?” she shouted, lifting it. “You made me think so, but here it is!”
He did not reply.
“You had no right to touch me in that way. In any way at all,” she said, knowing she had to get to the car before the desire to give in to him became reality. No matter how loudly she shouted, his flame was calling hers, somehow. She was arguing, but wanted to stop. She was icy on the outside, while her insides burned … for him.
“You are stubborn. Not making sense,” the vampire pointed out. “Without my help, you’ll get nowhere, and may wind up dead.”
Golden Vampire Page 8
