But there was more to this new boss of hers than spectacular good looks. There was something about him that had nothing to do with his physical appearance. When he entered the room she felt the very atmosphere change.
Or, fueled by the storm’s aftershock, was it an overactive imagination that made her feel as if the temperature in the room was falling and the hairs on her arms were lifting as if exposed to static electricity?
She closed her eyes and tried to count herself calm. One, two, three.
When she opened her eyes, the man was standing less than a foot away from her. She couldn’t hold back another startled gasp. Why hadn’t she heard or sensed his movement toward her?
He took a step forward, seemed to reconsider, and stepped back. “I hope I didn’t frighten you.”
Frighten her? What could she say to that? Yes, you did. Can’t you see the goose bumps on my arms?
She might have said just that had she not looked into his eyes. Eyes that were like no others she had ever seen or even heard or read about.
One of her new boss’s eyes was a clear azure blue. The other a bright silvery gray.
She tried to look away from those two disparate eyes, but couldn’t. Their pull was too strong, drawing her into their depths, absorbing her will, dissolving her thoughts.
Before she could fathom what was happening, she felt as if she were being dragged through a tunnel, as if she were tumbling through time and space. Of leaving this room. This world. Her mind felt disconnected from her body, yet at the same time each remained in touch with the other—and both were connected to those two dissimilar eyes.
And all through the strange, otherworldly journey those eyes held her with the force of steel.
Suddenly, she was jolted backward. She felt herself falling, tumbling back into time and space. She threw out her hands for balance and opened her eyes to the shock of feeling her body plastered against Julian’s. His arm was around her waist, and her fingers were gripping his arms. She watched his extraordinary eyes fire sparks of orange and red, paling to yellow before eclipsing back into blue and gray irises.
But that was ridiculous. Eyes couldn’t change colors like that. It had to be her imagination.
“I . . . What happened?” She felt dazed. Her legs were wobbly. And there was a peculiar sexual-like warmth low in her belly where their bodies touched. At that realization, she tensed.
Julian stepped back, his eyes still on her. “You looked about to fall so I caught you. I think you had a dizzy spell. Have you eaten today?”
She frowned, confused. A dizzy spell? She never got dizzy. Not even if she hadn’t eaten all day, which, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t. She had spent most of the morning cleaning the apartment after she’d found a small grocery store a few blocks away, the only one open in the Quarter, she’d been told. She’d bought a light bulb and the disinfectant she needed. She’d also picked up some canned soup and crackers. None of which she’d eaten yet.
She blinked, gave her head a brisk shake, and brought her mind back to the man’s question. “I did skip lunch, but . . .”
It was just a dizzy spell.
No it wasn’t.
She repeated the head shake, this time with a little more force. What was going on? First, she loses her balance like Alice falling down a hole. Then she blanks out temporarily and recovers to find her body plastered against her new boss’s. And now she would swear they’d just communicated telepathically!
Impossible. People couldn’t really communicate telepathically. But that didn’t erase the sensation that they had, and she shivered uneasily. It had to be lack of food, she lectured herself as she forced her mind to focus on what Julian was saying.
“You’re probably suffering from lack of food, stress over the storm, some anxiety about the job, and me.” He didn’t resist when she loosened her hold on him and stepped back. “I’m afraid I thoughtlessly intruded on your privacy.”
She frowned at his pat explanation. She knew it wasn’t any of those things. It was . . .
She didn’t know what it was. She couldn’t put what had happened to her into words, couldn’t even put it into thought. What she had experienced. How she had been transported—
You never left this room.
Yes, I did.
No. You only imagined it.
She was doing it again! Feeling as if they were communicating telepathically and that was ridiculous. She was simply indulging in some stress related dialog with herself, nothing more. She had to get a grip on herself and stop letting her imagination run wild.
Yet, despite the admonition, she felt compelled to lift her head and look into those unusual eyes once again. A burst of energy rushed through her system, saturating her senses, satiating her like a skilled and sensitive lover. In the next breath, a feeling of serenity like she had never known before, settled over her.
Still captive to Julian’s eyes, she admitted it was possible she had imagined everything these past few minutes. She was hungry, she was stressed, and she was, at the very least, nonplussed by her surroundings and this new boss of hers.
Totally relaxed now, she felt invigorated. She actually looked forward to going downstairs to work.
As if reading her mind, Julian started for the door.
“It’s time for me to leave. You need a few minutes to yourself before beginning your first day of work.”
He left so quickly she barely had time to blink. How did he move so stealthily? How had he managed to make it seem as if time had been distorted, causing her to question her own good judgment? And now that he was gone, she knew he’d been the cause of it all.
Forget it, she counseled herself. So the man’s a little weird. So what? She was in a town known for its weird characters. As long as he treated her well she could overlook the rest of . . . Well, she wasn’t sure what to call whatever it was he did, but she could overlook it. Besides, she had better things to do than worry about her new boss’s strange idiosyncrasies. And at the top of the list was searching for Dottie—after completing her first day on the job.
She devoured a can of soup and a half-dozen crackers, and sneaked one last look in the hand mirror. Satisfied she looked her best, she made her way down the scuffed wooden stairs and into the bar.
“SHE’S THE ONE,” Julian whispered to Michael when Simone took her place behind the bar and his friend joined him at the front of the room.
Michael nodded. “You’re probably right, but remember, you’ve thought this about other women in the past.”
“This one is different from all the others. I felt her presence the moment she arrived.”
“Well, if you’re right and it’s meant to be, she will come to you.”
If it’s meant to be. Julian turned Michael’s words over in his mind as his friend left to join Simone at the bar.
It is meant to be, he assured himself. She is the one. At the surety of his thoughts, his jaws began to ache as his vampiric teeth tried to elongate and a wild energy surged through him.
He knew what lay ahead of him would be no easy task. He had to be patient. It would take time for her to want him, to come to him of her own accord.
But he was running out of time. He was impatient now for the woman who would help him fulfill his destiny. Whenever he thought he’d found her, he’d been wrong. He couldn’t be wrong again. She had to be the one. If she wasn’t . . .
His thoughts were interrupted as a couple he hadn’t seen at the bar before opened the door and stepped inside. He gave them a casual glance and a welcoming nod.
The brief distraction had jerked him away from his fretting. Now, as he resumed his post at the door, he allowed himself to once again feast his eyes on the woman behind the bar. She was the one, and he couldn’t take his gaze off her. She was the hope for him and his brothers. The one w
ho could save them—or send them into a hell that he couldn’t even allow himself to consider.
FROM BEHIND THE bar, Simone felt Julian’s gaze upon her. Shrugging away the chill that touched her from across the room, she turned to Mike. “Does the boss always stand guard at the door?”
Mike finished drying the wine glass in his hand and returned it to the overhead rack. “Not always. Sometimes he takes the bar and I take the door.”
“Like bouncers?”
“Precisely.”
“Have you had much trouble in here?”
Mike looked at her intently and picked up another glass. “Enough,” he answered, as he held the glass up to the light for inspection.
The cryptic answer was really all she needed. She had a pretty good idea what kind of trouble he was referring to. There was still a lot of looting going on in the city. And with so few businesses open, those that were made very good targets for thieves.
Not for the first time that night she took stock of the crowded room. If their customers weren’t thieves or troublemakers, they were certainly a scary looking bunch.
Most of them were male she noted, and both male and female looked woefully pale. That was understandable. For the past six weeks, those who still had a roof over their heads remained indoors most of the time. Dust from the debris left behind in the hurricane’s wake still littered most of the city streets, making it hard to breathe.
Two customers at the end of the bar caught her attention when they signaled for Mike. He left to take their order, and she kept an eye on him, inwardly pleased when, as she’d guessed, he served the two men each a Double B.
“The Double B is a special drink a lot of the customers prefer,” Mike had told her earlier. “I make it myself and only Julian and I can serve it. House rule,” he’d added quickly.
“No problem,” she’d shot back just as quickly to assure him that as far as she was concerned, the subject was closed. Closed maybe, but not locked away. Her curiosity was aroused. She hated mysteries.
Mike’s special drink looked pretty much like a regular Bloody Mary to her, so she couldn’t help wondering what was so special about it. When her curiosity got the better of her and Mike’s back was turned, she’d taken a quick whiff of the remaining concoction in an empty glass she was washing.
It was definitely not a typical Bloody Mary, she’d decided. The smell of alcohol was faint and the other ingredients were a little . . . off was the only word she could come up with to describe them.
Feeling a pang of guilt for disobeying one of the bar’s policies before she’d even finished her first shift, she hurriedly washed the glass and turned her attention to pouring draft beers for two customers at her end of the bar.
Anyway, she concluded, sliding the beer mugs along the counter to the patrons, she definitely had more important things to think about than a manager’s specialty drink.
And at the top of her worry list was how she’d get to Dottie’s apartment tomorrow to search for clues to her stepsister’s disappearance.
SIMONE KICKED OUT from under the sheet and bounced to the floor.
Since the city was still under curfew, the bar had closed at midnight. She should have been asleep long before now. Yet it was three in the morning and she was prowling the apartment like a cage-bound cat.
Her restlessness didn’t come from the unfamiliar surroundings or the busy hours spent at a new job. No, the accelerated breathing, the thump-thump of her heart against her breastbone, and the beads of moisture along her upper lip were not her body’s normal reactions to a change in her daily routine.
All the exaggerated symptoms she was experiencing had to do with the feeling that some kind of invisible presence was in the room with her.
Gooseflesh sprang up on her arms and she glanced furtively around her. For the second time since her arrival, she had the urge to flee, and this time it was stronger than before. Worse, this feeling of a presence in the room could not be fixed with a brighter light bulb or a few dollar store decorations. There was something wrong here. Something very, very wrong.
Releasing a pent up breath, she plopped down on the edge of the bed, propped her elbows on her knees and covered her face with her hands.
What had she gotten herself into? Stumbling onto Mike’s had seemed like the answer to her prayers, a perfect way out of the predicament she’d found herself in after the storm. She had been so desperate for money, for a place to stay, that she’d lost all good sense. Simone LeClerc, attorney-at-law and one time Olympic swimmer, had dived into the shallow end of the pool and landed on her head.
The throbbing that began at her temples only seemed to reinforce the image she’d drawn for herself. Perhaps she should gather her few belongings and make her escape now.
Escape? Had she really come to feel that these tiny rooms were a prison? Yes, because in some way she felt as if she were a prisoner.
She jumped up from the bed again and resumed her pacing. She was acting like an irrational child. There was nothing keeping her here. If she wanted to leave, she could. The choice was hers, one she could exercise at daybreak if she wanted. Oh, sure she could. And where exactly would she go?
If the apartment building where Dottie was staying hadn’t been damaged by the hurricane, the landlady might have let her stay there. But on top of a ripped up roof which allowed a couple inches of rain water into the apartment, and no electricity as of yet, that wasn’t a possibility. Oh, well, she’d find a solution in the morning if she still felt she had to leave.
Comforted somewhat by that assertion, she crawled back under the covers and buried her face in the pillow. At least she was sleeping on clean sheets, compliments of the bar’s washer and dryer located off the downstairs storeroom. She breathed in the scent of soap and softener and let her mind drift.
Always be thankful for life’s small gifts. Her mother’s favorite saying echoed in Simone’s mind as a sudden, unexpected calm swept over her and carried her into sleep. The last image in her mind was of two off-colored eyes drawing her deeper into forgetfulness.
Chapter Three
THE NEXT NIGHT, Julian settled himself on the only empty chair in the small upstairs room that served as an office. Opposite him, Michael sat behind a desk covered with papers.
“I’m close,” Michael said in answer to Julian’s unasked question.
Julian leaned forward. “How close?”
“Close.”
Julian suppressed a sigh of disappointment. Decades ago Michael had discovered a synthetic substitute for blood, which he named HerediPlas. The discovery led him to experiment with ways to chemically alter Julian’s DNA from that of vampire to mortal. But, in spite of his progress, it seemed to Julian that Michael was no closer to success today than he was when he began so long ago. And that was what made Simone LeClerc’s arrival so very important.
Taking in a deep breath, Julian stood and looked across the room in the direction of Simone’s apartment. “She wasn’t easy to put to sleep last night.”
Michael pushed away from the desk, walked to his friend’s side and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Did you really expect she would be?”
Ignoring the question, Julian posed one of his own. “How long before we’re back in full operation?”
“Another week. Two at most.”
“How much HerediPlas do we have left?”
“Two weeks’ worth at least. Everyone’s working as fast as possible to get us back where we were before the storm hit, but we’re still dangerously low. We’re damned fortunate the plasma lab didn’t flood and that our power here was restored as quickly as it was or we’d have lost it all. Those generators were just about ready to blow.”
Julian nodded absently. They’d had this same conversation daily for weeks, but at least today, with Simone LeClerc’s arrival, h
e felt a step closer to fulfilling the Legacy’s promise. The reminder catapulted his thoughts to his archenemy and he began to pace as restlessly as Simone had paced the night before.
“What’s the latest on Zurik?”
“The last I heard, he was getting his needs met on the outskirts of town.”
Julian directed a vicious kick at the chair he had just vacated. Rage threatened to explode inside him every time he heard about Zurik’s blatant disregard for the suffering of helpless mortals.
On the outskirts of town, people were struggling to put their lives back together after the worst devastation in the nation’s history. And those unfortunate souls didn’t need Zurik making their lives even more unbearable. Nor could New Orleans, now at its most vulnerable, afford to fall victim to another of Zurik’s evil plans.
“We have to stop him before he gets another stronghold on the city.” Julian’s chest rose and fell with a burst of quick breaths that momentarily took him aback. When he was extraordinarily emotional his breathing closely resembled that of a mortal. At those times it still amazed him that he could breathe at all. He brought his gaze back to his friend. “And we both know I’m the only one who can stop him.”
Michael clasped Julian’s shoulder and squeezed it lightly. “You’re not strong enough yet. Your injury is not fully healed.”
“I’m stronger today than I was yesterday.”
“And tomorrow, you’ll be stronger still.”
Julian swore inwardly at the reminder of his wound. During a post hurricane rescue mission, Zurik had attacked him. That the wound was taking too long to heal cut Julian deeper than the wound itself. In his haste to keep the evil vampires from making the disaster worse than it already was, he had forgotten to wear the ear studs that protected him from all but the most mortal of wounds. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Julian brusquely shrugged Michael’s hand from his shoulder and started pacing again. “You, of all people, know my time is running out. All Hallow’s Eve is only two weeks away.” He massaged both temples with his fingertips then ran his fingers roughly through his hair.
The Vampire Julian Page 2
