The Vampire Who Loved Me

by Theresa Meyers

  Damn. She was misinterpreting his signals because she wanted him to be just as attracted to her as she was to him. What had Kris said about vampires having a natural ability to change everything about them into your best fantasy?

  “I think it might be better if I just stay over here,” she said smoothly, ignoring the skipping beats of her heart as he shot her a lazy whatever-you-want-babe kind of smile. Getting involved with a vampire—especially this vampire—would be a very bad idea.

  She was his job, not his potential girlfriend, if vampires even had such things as girlfriends. And in less than two weeks, she hoped, she’d return to her world and he could go back to his. It wasn’t a combination for a long-term relationship where either one of them could matter to the other.

  He shook his head as if she’d sucked all the fun out of the moment and sighed a harsh breath. The empty bottle vanished into thin air as he sat the recliner in an upward position. “To phase an object, you focus your energy and thought on what you want. You picture its form, its weight, the color, the texture, the scent—anything that makes it real to you and you call it into being in your presence.”

  Beck’s mind started to work on the process, the rules. Every system, biological or otherwise, had rules. If you could figure out the rules, then you could find the missing opportunities—the gaps, and bend the rules to suit your needs. It was the basis of genetic engineering. “But it has to already exist somewhere else to get it to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you told me how it works, but not the actual process behind it. Are you shifting molecules, using wormholes, extrapolating energy signatures, creating a particle by particle anomaly in quantum space like a wireless facsimile machine that pops out actual objects rather than just duplicated images?”

  He simply stared at her as if she’d spoken pure gibberish.

  “You don’t have a clue what I’m saying do you?”

  His green gaze grew sharper, more penetrating so that she suddenly had the odd impression that he was poking around the recesses of her mind. “You have a hard time simply accepting anything, don’t you?”

  Beck squirmed. Knowing the why and how made accepting things easier. Especially the things a person didn’t want to accept. Things like cruelty, abandonment, death, disease, fear, anxiety and loss. If one could just understand the how and the why, they all became easier to bear somehow.

  His brow furrowed slightly as he brushed his hand through his hair. “The truth is I’ve never asked the kinds of questions you do. It was enough to survive and thrive and learn how to navigate the new life that was given to me. If you want more exacting answers, you’ll have to ask the clan’s medical and scientific personnel.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You have labs?”

  The sparkle of intelligence and excitement in her hazel eyes widened the band of green around her dark pupils and made his fangs throb. Her request was unusual, but then everything about her was. That was part of what made her so utterly tempting and made him forget to be wary. He had to stop thinking of her that way. Achilles doubled his determination to look at her as just another fledgling.

  “Oh, there’s labs aplenty and gadgets enough to keep you interested, I’m certain. I’ll see what I can do to get you an introduction to some of our top medical and scientific people and you can ask all those burning questions I can hear spinning around in that head of yours.”

  “That would be great. Really great. Thank you,” she said in a quiet voice as she turned on her heel.

  Her face might be soft and pliant, but her eyes were focused and a million miles away. Achilles knew her well enough by now to know that her brain was fizzling and popping with possibilities.

  He could see by the rapid blinking of her eyes and the steady quick pulse in her throat that she was terrified of what was happening to her. The only way she could combat it was to remain analytical and scientific as her body changed. His admiration for this woman shot up. She was amazingly strong. But she’d need to be, Achilles reminded himself grimly.

  He reached into her mind once more and heard the frenzied one-sided conversation she held with herself. If they have an electron microscope, I could continue my research. There would be access to more ichor. Hey, what if I could get Margo to come here? We might be able to truly finish the vaccine. Then Kristin and I and so many others could be free. I wouldn’t have to be a vampire. Mom wouldn’t have to—

  Her thoughts snapped him back from his musings to reality. Dmitri was right. She had no intention of giving up her plans to create the vaccine, despite being cast aside by the investors. As long as she was bent on creating a weapon of mass destruction to his kind, she was still the enemy, a vulnerable enemy, but one not to be trusted.

  Chapter 5

  Across the girly living room, with its floral furniture and cutesy knickknacks, Rebecca hardly looked like a threat. But behind that heart-shaped face and sweet lips lay a mind far more brilliant than Machiavelli.

  Why the hell was creating the vaccine so damned important to her? It was a quest. A Holy Grail. Why did it matter so much? That’s what he needed to find out.

  Achilles said nothing more and let her leave the room. Her head swarmed with thoughts he no longer felt like hearing. Let her plot and plan all she wanted. The transition had already begun, and no amount of scientific hoodoo was going to stop it. He could already smell the faint change in her blood, the spicy scent of it growing more complex with vampire pheromones.

  As much discomfort and confusion as she caused him, he dared not leave her. There was no telling how long her transition would take. She would need to feed soon and he had serious doubts she’d be willing to look for a donor. He had to stay to feed her. He’d come into being a vampire willingly. Rebecca hadn’t. Big difference.

  Of course, his own choices had repercussions. He’d fallen for his mentor before the transition had even started. He hadn’t been aware of the consequences, and even if he had, he’d been too raw, too full of male need to care.

  Ione could have been a goddess in her own right. When he’d seen her at the temple of the bull-god Vrishabha over two and a half millennia ago, he’d been stunned by her ethereal beauty. For days he could neither sleep nor eat. She’d captivated him. So he’d approached her.

  “Why have you come to this temple? Do you wish to be a warrior among warriors, Spartan?” The silvery quality of her voice sounded like chimes in the wind.

  He looked at her fiercely, putting all the emotion he had been strictly trained throughout his life not to voice into his eyes. “I do.” Almost as much as I want you.

  She’d looked deeply in his eyes, her delicate fingers stroking his face in a way that burned through him. She’d taken him to her chambers, the night burned into his memory like none other. And for the first time, he believed in love. Not just the power of a woman’s body to ease his own, but in a need far deeper than hunger or thirst. In her arms he’d found completion, and something a warrior never expected he’d want—peace.

  So when she took him by the hand in the nights that followed, he went willingly, spending each night with her and leaving her bed at dawn. Until the last night. The night when she had changed him.

  Her eyes glowed like a blue flame, a smile curving her lips. “I would like to give you a gift. You will be stronger than a hundred of your finest men. Able to go without food or water and fight with the speed of the wind. Your enemies will fall down before you. Would you accept this gift from me, and Vrishabha?”

  Achilles would have vaulted the waters that separated Greece from Crete had she asked it. “I would.”

  As a priestess for the bull-god Vrishabha, Ione seemed larger than life to him, her dark hair flowing over the flawless alabaster skin of her bared shoulders. She’d turned back to the horned altar, her hair a dark river cascading down to her waist. The light from the golden braziers illuminated the fine linen of her robes, rendering them translucent. His breath had caught at the wonder of her body, and the ful
l sexual rush she stirred in him that was more important than the call of battle, more intense than the thrill of a victory over his enemies. Things he had been taught to cherish above all else.

  She turned, her profile glowing in the firelight, her blue eyes so intense they seemed violet. In her hands she held a golden chalice engraved with images of the ancient gods, and studded with egg-sized dark bloodred rubies. At her wrist a cut marred her perfect skin, a thin black liquid oozing from it. “Do you willingly sacrifice yourself to the service of Vrishabha?”

  His heart swelled, beating hard against his sternum. Ready. Willing. Excited. “I do.”

  “Then kneel, Spartan.”

  Achilles sank to his knees on the cold marble floor. Gazing up into her exquisite face, his heart overflowed with so much love he couldn’t contain it. He wanted to feel this way for eternity. Beyond eternity. He’d never in his life felt this much emotion, this much love. The sheer rightness of their love filled him to the brim.

  Eyes glowing, Ione extended the goblet. “Drink from Vrishabha’s chalice, my Achilles.”

  He took it from her pale slender hands. The metal felt cool between his palms, emitting a faint vibration that traveled up his forearms. The dark surface of the liquid reflected his own face, alive and alert and eager for what his ladylove promised.

  Achilles lifted it to his mouth, drinking greedily of the dark liquid, a wine laced with something he couldn’t identify. Ignoring the slightly dark sweet aftertaste, his gaze never left her beautiful face.

  Within mere minutes the hunger had taken over, eating at him like a slow drip of acid spreading through his bloodstream until every cell of his body cried out for sustenance.

  And Ione had brought it to him. A maiden in training for the temple of Vrishabha—the original donors who eagerly participated in a rite that brought them pleasure and gave vampires strength.

  Achilles seriously doubted that Rebecca would be so willing to feed. In fact he’d bet his beloved Bugatti Veyron that she’d balk at feeding from a live donor of any kind no matter how the hunger ate at her.

  She was a scientist. Therefore reason was her drug of choice. In that spirit, he’d prepared several quarts of bagged blood for her to drink.

  In any battle the trick was to understand your enemy. While he didn’t totally regard Rebecca as his enemy, neither could he trust her. Her rational reasoning nature reminded him of those damned Athenians. People who believed that intellect, inquest and discussion could cure all problems. If there was a second thing he’d learned in centuries on this earth it was that sometimes life was just messy.

  A shriek erupted from the vicinity of Rebecca’s kitchen. Achilles phased beside a hysterical Rebecca instantly. He placed his hands on her small shoulders. Mistake.

  She whipped around as if his touch burned and punched at his chest. “What the hell is that?”

  “What?”

  “That, that stuff in my fridge!” She pointed an accusing finger at the interior of her refrigerator.

  “Dinner.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no. No and hell, no.” She gave a full body shiver. “That’s blood.”

  Achilles closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose praying to Vrishabha for patience in guiding this young one.

  “You’re going to have to feed, Rebecca. I thought this might be easier for you than finding a live donor.”

  She skewered him with a hard glare, the brown pulsing in her eyes as if she had an internal bullshit meter. “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach rumbled in protest loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

  Achilles quirked a brow and folded his arms over his chest. “You’re not going to die on my watch, fledgling. You will eat.”

  Rebecca gave a nervous glance at the plastic packets all filled with sluggish red liquid. Her skin grew cold and clammy all over and the base of her throat seemed to swell. She shook her head and glanced at the large man beside her who was clearly unaffected by the sight of so much blood.

  “You don’t understand. Blood makes me—” She bolted from the room and made it to the bathroom down the hall just in time. She bent at the waist and gripped the porcelain, dry heaves undulated along her whole body. God, how embarrassing was this?

  Achilles blocked the doorway, watching her. “Go away,” she managed to mutter. “Can’t you give a girl some space?”

  “So blood upsets you?”

  Rebecca threw him a nasty glare. “I told you I’m not cut out to be a vampire.” Pain, very real pain followed by a searing heat speared up through her stomach into her esophagus causing her to gasp and fall to her knees.

  Without a word Achilles gently scooped her up into his arms and carried her to her bed. She was shaking. Logically this made no sense. But she supposed becoming a vampire wasn’t anything she’d actually studied before. She knew the virus was continuing to colonize her body. What she didn’t understand was how on earth drinking blood could possibly make this any better. It wouldn’t stop the virus. It wouldn’t protect her system from further invasion.

  “This stinks,” she groaned as she doubled up around the pain. “Don’t you people have vampire Midol or something for this?”

  Achilles actually blushed. “Vampires don’t … that is we have no need … I’ll be right back.” He spun on his heel and came back with a glass in hand filled with what looked an awful lot like a Bloody Mary complete with a stalk of celery.

  “I tried to cut it for you into something more palatable. Despite how you feel, I can tell you this is the only remedy. The pain will only get worse until you feed.”

  Beck eyed the glass in his hand as if he were handing her nasty cough syrup rather than a drink. “All I want to know is does that have vodka in it?” If she had to drink bl—no, she couldn’t even think about it before the nausea came back with a vengeance—perhaps she could be drunk enough she wouldn’t care what was in the mix.

  He gave her a broad fangless smile. “What do you think?”

  She took the proffered glass with a shaking hand and took a sample whiff. Tomato, lime, celery, a weird metallic scent she didn’t want to think about too much. She tried to hand the glass back to him. “I don’t think I can do this.” God, she didn’t want to do this. Never had wanted to do this. It somehow violated the laws of nature.

  “It might help if you pinch your nose while drink ing.”

  Beck sighed, then pinched her nose and lifted the glass to her lips. The taste was tangy, and unexpectedly a bit sweet. Don’t think about it. Just keep drinking. She banged down the empty glass on her beside table as if it’d been a shot rather than a full eight ounces of who knew what. “There. Finished it.”

  The edge of his sculpted mouth tilted up at the corner with amusement. “And how do you feel?”

  She took inventory of her body. The shaking had stopped. Maybe it had just been low blood sugar, she thought, but that didn’t explain the odd tingling sensation that was spreading through her system. She pushed herself off the bed and stood.

  Suddenly her vision seemed to shift, as if someone had shoved an electron microscope in front of her. She could see the individual threads in Achilles’s sweater, even pick out the pattern of how the thread was spiraled together like an unending double helix of DNA. She shifted her gaze upward and was struck by the fringe of dark lashes, each one spiked and thick and somehow got lost in a sea of green. Beck blinked and everything went back to looking normal.

  Her joints had become loose and pliable and she felt the floor suddenly shift beneath her feet before being caught in Achilles’s strong arms and pressed tightly up against his firm muscular chest and six-pack abs.

  “You still have a pulse,” he said, shock flickering in his eyes for a moment. His throat moved as he swallowed.

  “I take it that’s not normal after a first feeding?”

  “It should have stopped by now.”

  “Maybe my cells are just as stubborn as I am.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. But the weakness is no
rmal. Wait until your body absorbs a bit more. The first time the rush in the system can be a bit overpowering.”

  “This is worse than a college bender.” Beck wasn’t absolutely sure that the sensations flooding her system, particularly the throbbing between her thighs, could be attributed to whatever blood rush he was talking about.

  In fact, given the shivers racing along her veins as he set her back on her unsteady feet, she was pretty certain they had to do more with the sex god holding her. She stared at him and inhaled sharply when his eyes met hers, and matched the stare.

  Rosemary and mint mingled in the air around him, strong and earthy, clean and seductive, totally, utterly masculine.

  Beck noticed the small twin points of polished white peeping out from beneath his sculpted upper lip and gasped. “Um, your fangs are showing.”

  Achilles smiled, revealing his matched set in all their pearly glory. “Perhaps you’d better check your own.”

  She tentatively ran the tip of her tongue along the rounded edge of her upper lip and ran into two unfamiliar points.

  She stared up at him, her eyes wide. “Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. I have fangs!”

  “First blood usually brings them out.”

  Her fingers streaked up to touch them, and Achilles caught her hand in his, a snap of electricity arcing between them that zapped straight from his hand to his heart. “Careful. They’re sharp.”

  She glanced down at their joined hands. “Is it normal for my senses to be this heightened?”

  “Being vampire isn’t just about diet. You’re a completely different kind of being.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And what about what’s happening between us. Is that just a vampire thing, too?”

  For a moment Achilles was struck dumb. How could he possibly explain how in one kiss he’d already marked her as his own? How could he explain that his own experience was the reason why he’d never touch her either, no matter how much he desired her?