“That makes sense,” Shelly said, and we headed back out to the car.
“So where do we go next?” Brad asked.
“The next address is about ten miles from here,” I replied, giving Shelly the coordinates.
We wove our way through the city traffic, me watching every single vehicle that passed by us, looking down every alley I could, hoping I would be lucky enough to spy Vance out there somewhere. He never appeared.
When we finally reached our next destination, we all crawled out of the car, Shelly locking it behind us once again.
I didn’t have to prompt Shelly to open the door for us this time; she was excited to do it.
Once we were inside, we spent the next hour doing more of the same that we had done at the last place, finding all this searching was indeed growing very old, very fast.
“Receipts, receipts, receipts. That’s all I’m finding,” Shelly said in exasperation, tossing another handful of invoices onto the ever-growing pile.
We soon called this place finished, too, after failing to uncover anything of significance, and headed to a nearby drive-through to grab some lunch and take a much needed break from shoveling though dusty papers.
“I just thought of something interesting,” I said, while we waited for our order.
“What’s that?” Brad asked, staring out at the busy street next to us.
“All those receipts and shipping orders. They were all for orders received. There was nothing for an outgoing shipment,” I explained.
“Now that I think about it, you’re right,” Brad agreed, nodding his head thoughtfully.
“And all those crates were just left there, too,” Shelly added. “Whatever was shipped in them was taken, but the crates were left behind.”
The restaurant server opened the window just then to hand us our food. Shelly paid and pulled to the side of the parking lot so she could hand us our items out of the bag.
“Where to now, Captain?” she asked with a small smile and a wink, right before she took a big bite of her hamburger.
“Hang a right and drive straight for about five miles,” I replied and took a sip of my soda.
We drove the few miles before turning into another warehouse district that was even worse than the other two had been.
Damien must have really been slumming it here, I thought. We pulled up to a very large, old building. We quickly finished up the last couple bites of our food and climbed out of the car once again.
Brad stepped forward to open the door to this building, however, stating it was “his turn” now. Following our previously established ritual, I stepped ahead of them and entered the building first.
The emotions hit me all at once, and suddenly everything was spinning out of control. I took off running down a narrow hallway and into a large shipping area, looking frantically around the enormous room the second I entered it.
There he was, standing across the huge space in front of me, rifling through an old filing cabinet. His back was to me, but I knew his leather and jean clad physique anywhere.
My breath caught, and I could feel my pulse racing in my neck at my reaction to seeing him.
He straightened suddenly, stopping what he was doing. Slowly, he turned to face me with a puzzled look on his face.
Our eyes connected instantly across the room.
“Portia?” he breathed out softly, looking at me in confusion, as if he couldn’t believe what his eyes were showing him.
“Hello, Vance,” I replied, trying to sound calm and collected, but I couldn’t keep the tiny tremor out that crept into my voice.
I couldn’t judge his reaction to tell whether or not he was happy to see me standing there in front of him.
He hesitated for a moment, before he started moving toward me, quickly then, and my heart began pounding hard in my chest.
Chapter 3
I matched his pace then, crossing the room toward him, meeting him in the middle, with all sorts of thoughts tumbling in my mind, relief and anger being the foremost ones.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, stopping just short of me, as if he was afraid to touch me, and I saw the uncertainty flash over his face.
“I came to do this,” I said, my emotions threatening to boil over the surface in that very moment.
I swung back and punched him in the jaw as hard as I could.
He fell back a step, his eyes widened in surprise, and his hand reached up to rub his jaw while he worked his mouth out for a second.
“What was that for?” He looked completely confused, as if I had suddenly sprouted two heads or something.
“That was for leaving me and going off on your own, you stupid knucklehead!” I yelled at him, my eyes flashing in anger.
“Portia, I was trying to protect …,” he started to explain, but I didn’t let him finish.
“Don’t you DARE try to feed me that ‘protect you’ line of bull again!” I shouted at him. “I have had it with you, Vance! I think I’ve proven, on several occasions, I’m not the one who’s been needing protection!”
He watched me, his eyes growing wide in amazement over my little emotional display.
“Wow! You’re really angry!” he said, and it took me a second to realize that he had said it into my mind.
“Get out of my head!” I continued, shouting back to him out loud. “You’ve lost the right to be there! You cut me off without any warning whenever you feel like it, only to step right back in whenever you want!”
I turned away from him and started walking in a huff toward Brad and Shelly, who were both looking very uncomfortable at the moment.
Vance grabbed me before I could take two steps away from him and swung me back around to face him. He pulled me into his embrace with one arm while grabbing my hair in his other hand, tilting my head back as he lowered his face and started kissing me.
“I love you,” he said, his words penetrating my mind, as his lips ravaged mine, obviously not caring one bit that I had just told him to get out of my head.
I tried staying stiff in his arms, but I was having trouble resisting him, I had missed him so badly.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Really,” he spoke into my head, and I felt his tongue trace lightly over my closed lips. “I just wanted to keep you from any danger.”
I stood still only for a moment before I was unable to fight him any longer. I felt my arms go up to wrap around his neck then and I really kissed him back.
We held each other tightly, our reunion becoming heated very quickly. I kissed him like I hadn’t seen him in years instead of just days. I ran my hands through his hair, over his face and down his neck, forgetting completely about Shelly and Brad standing in the doorway behind us.
His mouth moved away from mine then, and he began kissing across my cheek. I found that I instinctively leaned my head over to the side to give him better access, and his lips traveled down my neck. His tongue snaked out to lick seductively over the spot where he had bitten into me before.
I flinched involuntarily.
Suddenly he released me, pushing me away from him and taking several steps backward.
We just stood there staring at each other, our breathing ragged from our encounter, and I could feel the sparks flying between us.
“I need you to leave now, Portia,” he said, his teeth clenched as he spoke. “You aren’t safe here.”
“Why? I’m not afraid of your ….”
“Because of this,” he said, cutting me off and stepping closer to me, but making sure not to touch me.
I felt a streak of terror pass through me as I watched his eyes flash a dim shade of red, not wanting to believe what I was seeing.
“No. I’m not leaving,” I said flatly, standing my ground against him.
“Don’t you get it?” he replied in frustration, his voice getting louder. “I still taste you! I still want you! I could kill you right now!”
He reached out to grab me to him again but was sudden
ly stopped by some sort of magical force field which had popped up between us.
“That is what I’m here for,” Brad said, and I noticed his hand was between us, creating the barrier which had stopped Vance.
“What the heck?” Vance said, stepping back from Brad, looking at him incredulously.
“Let’s you and me take a little walk,” Brad said, nodding his head in the opposite direction.
Vance looked in amazement between Brad and me, as if searching for an explanation, before he turned to walk with him away from me.
“Are you okay?” Shelly asked softly from behind me, placing a hand lightly on my shoulder.
I sighed deeply.
“I’ll be fine,” I said softly and glanced back at her before returning my gaze to the two young men across the room.
“All I can say is … Wow! The two of you are intense! I seriously thought I could break the two of you up?”
“Apparently,” I said with a small smile.
“Well, I’m an idiot!” She laughed.
“You weren’t exactly yourself at the time,” I reminded her.
“That’s true.” She moved past me slightly. “What do you think they’re talking about?”
“Beats me,” I said turning away from the scene in a huff. “He still isn’t letting me listen.”
I left the room and wandered back out into the hallway we’d come through when we had first entered the building.
Leaning up against the wall, I was suddenly very tired, so I slid down the surface until I was sitting on the floor and held my head in my hands.
I knew the exact moment when Vance came to stand next to me, because all of a sudden his mind was completely open and unfettered toward me.
“If there is any chance of us making this little reunion work, then I’m going to have to be completely honest with you,” his voice spoke into my head.
Sighing, I looked up into his eyes, not replying. Brad and Shelly tried to sneak past us to go outside.
He crouched down to be at my level, resting his arms against his knees, and his gaze bore into mine. At that moment, everything he had been holding back began to slam into me like bricks hitting a wall.
His memories raced through my mind, starting at the moment the explosion had happened at the high school. I could feel his terror and pain as he rushed to try to get to me through the panic-stricken halls.
Then his mom was suddenly standing in front of him. He only had a second to register the shock before he had felt a sharp stick from behind. The needle stabbed into his neck knocked him out instantly.
He had awakened later to find himself magically restrained in the room I had discovered him in, at the bar. Krista had taunted him for hours with stories of her life since she had left him. He had kept his mind closed to protect me, even though he didn’t know where I was or how badly I was injured.
His mother had begun to feed on him regularly, as well as taking a lot of blood from him to store up for his father. She hadn’t been quick about it either, enjoying the torture of him, though she made it clear she intended to change him first and then take him to be reunited with his dad.
She had to push him to drink her blood in the beginning, literally pouring it down his mouth and forcing him to swallow. After a while, he began craving the blood as the change in him started, even though it made him sick.
He lost consciousness frequently during the process and was often overcome with horrible spasms and vomiting. Krista would clean him up when he was finished and start the process all over again, all while he suffered in silence, never speaking a word.
I felt his horror as he realized that I had found him and he knew I wasn’t safe. Then his emotions changed to terror when he realized that he wanted nothing more than to kill me as he had been instructed to do.
He had no intention of letting me live until he heard me say I loved him before he bit me. Those words had been the only thing to break through the confusion in his mind. I realized he had felt something that must have been close to ecstasy for him, as he tasted me for the first time, the fresh blood, laden with all that uncontaminated power. It took everything he had to hang onto the one moment of sanity that allowed him to destroy his mother, even though his heart ached by doing so.
It was the thirst which had awakened him for the first time, after I had brought him back with me, thirst that was all-consuming to him above anything he had ever experienced. I saw that he only thirsted for my pure blood, not the demon blood that had belonged to his mother.
His anger and hatred overwhelmed me as I continued to refuse him the one thing he most wanted. He knew he had to have a drink or it would mean death, and I felt his crestfallen spirit finally accept defeat when he knew he was going to die.
And then I had fed him. He had wanted to consume every drop at any cost. I had reached him once again by telling him I loved him.
Then his feelings turned, and desire began to course through his body. He lost all sense of his moral compass. He would let me live, but he was determined to have me physically, one craving being traded for another of equal power.
I felt the pain coursing through his veins at this time, and I started speaking the words of our binding spell to him, as if fire were racing though his very body, melting everything inside. The pain had been so bad he had wanted to scream out, but he had been frozen by the power, unable to move. The change had happened as the white light that consumed us both began to stop his demon transformation.
He held me for only a moment after I had passed out, laying me gently on the floor and scooting back against the wall. He sobbed in anguish, racked with guilt over what he had done.
He watched without moving; my dad and my grandma rushed back in to pull me out of the cell and then sealed him back in again.
They left with my body, and he had waited in agony for word on how I was doing. When they finally returned to speak with him, he had to work hard to convince them he had truly changed.
They were reluctant to let him out of the chamber. After a day, they finally believed him and set him free. He had come directly to my room and crawled onto the bed, lying down next to me. He had entered into my unconscious state.
He had held me in my dream, in my field of flowers, and was explaining to me how everything worked. While he held me, he felt the first stirrings, the cravings threatening to raise their evil heads once again. He knew then that I had stopped the conversion, but the desire was still there. He had to leave, to see if he could put an end to this once and for all. He refused to risk being so close to me, afraid he would harm me once again, knowing he would never be able to live with himself if he did.
He had gone back to his home to find all his things had been taken, so he went to my house and got some of his stuff from there. That was when he had seen the camera I had given him. He took it with him and developed the pictures at a one-hour photo place, while he wrote me the letter he had left for me.
Even while he was away from me, preparing to leave, he still felt the cravings at regular intervals. He knew he was going through withdrawal. He had to get away from me. He had to protect me, that thought being first and foremost in his mind.
It had been difficult for him to part from me, in fact excruciatingly painful. He had tried to concentrate on the job in front of him, though he had to stop several times during his searches, overcome with the need for blood, and wait for the attacks to pass. He knew he had been right to leave when he realized it was specifically my blood he craved, though he wished desperately it wasn’t so.
In spite of all that, I experienced the first surge of joy he felt when he realized I was standing behind him today, followed by the second surge of fear that he would lose control.
He had been truly surprised when I had hit him, but he wasn’t angry. He felt like he deserved it. If it were up to him, he would have let me beat him to a pulp.
When he had grabbed me and kissed me, it had been with good intentions, but the force of his emotions had quic
kly changed everything. Without realizing it he had begun to crave another drink of blood, the sound of it racing through my veins calling out to him in the heat of passion.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked me softly, his blue eyes streaked with shots of red in them staring deep into my soul. “I want all of you. I crave all of you. My body is demanding to have all of you, and my emotions are always right behind them. I’m always teetering on the brink of disaster. One second, I just want to sink my teeth into you; the next, I want to throw you down and have my way with you. It hurts to be away from you, but I think it might hurt more to be with you. If I slipped, just once, and did something bad to you, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I’ve gone too far already. That is why we’re in this mess.”
He stood up and paced away from me over to the opposite wall, which he slammed hard with his fist, causing me to jump as cracks appeared in the thick block, and I wondered if he had broken every bone in his hand.
“What do I do, Portia?” he asked quietly, without turning, hanging his head in frustration. “I’m completely out of control.”
I stood and walked over next to him, reaching out to place my hand on his shoulder.
He flinched away from me as soon as I touched him, leaving my hand in mid air, before I slowly pulled it back and lowered it to my side.
I turned to walk across the hall from him, leaning against the wall and folding my arms over my stomach, trying to keep all the quivering emotions in there and out of my voice.
“So what do you want me to do, Vance?” I stared at his back. “If you really want me to be completely out of your life, then just say so. I’ll leave and never come back. I don’t want to do that, but I love you. I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
I felt like my heart was being shredded by my own words, and I held my breath waiting for him to answer, hoping against hope that he would tell me everything was fine and we would be okay.
There was a very long pause before he spoke. I could feel him trying to shutter his emotions from me as he struggled over them.
Of Witches and Warlocks: The Demon Kiss Page 3
