Animal Instinct

by Kate Davidson

  After stumbling a few times and smearing her clothes with ash, finally she crouched beside him. The powerful need she had to find him dissipated now that she’d accomplished her goal. He was still as death and might have appeared a corpse to anyone else. “How do I do this?” she whispered, touching her fingertips to his mouth where she could see no hint of fangs. “How do I feed you?”

  Something happened then. Either her touch or her scent or perhaps the sound of her voice stirred him and Liam’s eyes snapped open. They were completely black. She almost withdrew her hand but in a blink he had his fingers locked on her arm. Jackie had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. She had wanted to help him. Now she had to sit still and do it. His fangs extended then plunged harshly into her arm. She did whimper then. The familiar pleasure that had so often followed one of Liam’s bites was missing. Pain radiated in her arm from where he’d bitten and the crushing grip of his hand. It burned and stung and, God, she wanted it to stop.

  But it didn’t. His eyes stayed black and intensely focused on her arm as he continued to feed. The burns across his body began to heal as she watched. Her vision blurred. She felt dizzy and weak. The consistent pressure on her arm finally pulled her down. Her face pressed against a charred bit of what might have once been roof and she winced at the smell. “Liam, stop,” she tried to say but it came out garbled. A real, sincere fear of him struck her for the first time and she knew that he could be the death of her.

  Then she ceased to think at all as the world went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “WHY ISN’T SHE AWAKE yet?”

  “You have to let her heal at her own pace, Liam. She’s going to be fine.”

  “Don’t use your reassuring doctor tone with me, Jack. I’m not in the mood to be coddled. Just tell me what’s wrong with her. There has to be something wrong or she’d be awake!” The voices didn’t make sense to Jackie at first. The one she’d heard first was strained with the effort not to shout and distinctly Irish. The other was the barest hint of a whisper. She didn’t know who these people were or what they were talking about, although they seemed vaguely familiar. Then as the cobwebs of unconsciousness fell away she remembered. She was the one who hadn’t woken up yet, Liam was the one who’d almost killed her, and Jack was the one who’d most likely brought her back.

  “If I can hear how strong her heartbeat is from this distance then I know you can. There’s nothing wrong. She’s just been through something traumatic and her body needs time to recuperate,” Jack explained, the patient doctor tone replaced by irritation.

  “She’s waking up.” A hand gently touched her cheek and she didn’t have to open her eyes to know who was touching her. “Jacquelyn.”

  “Hi,” she mumbled. She was tempted to simply turn over and fall asleep. But there was a weakness in her limbs that worried her. Also Liam was touching her as though she were glass on the verge of shattering. She needed to know what was going on. Her eyes cracked open.

  “This is my home,” Jack informed her, which was kind of him since she hadn’t had a clue about her location. Jackie slowly took in the large bed with the impeccably white sheets she was lying on before studying the dark wooden walls decorated with a few paintings that were mainly creative splashes of orange and red paint. There was also a very large stainless steel refrigerator set against the wall and beside that what looked to her like medical equipment. She averted her eyes, looking down at her body instead. Her shoes had been taken off as well as her shirt. Thankfully her bra was still on so she wasn’t flashing the room.

  “Seems more like a vampire version of a hospital room,” she commented, glancing up at the two men who were hovering over her. Jack was looking at her calmly and she supposed that was a good sign. He was the doctor, after all, and he would probably act a little more distressed if she was about to kick the bucket. Now if only he’d stop hovering.

  Liam looked like crap and since he was standing over her head she was close enough tell. His hair was sticking up as though he’d been running his hands through it for hours. There was so much tension in his face it made him seem a good ten years older. Strangely, his clothes didn’t fit him the way they usually did, either. They looked as though they’d been made for someone else. Jackie glanced at Jack and compared his body to Liam’s. “You’re borrowing his clothes?” she asked. Some of the tortured darkness left his eyes when she looked at him.

  “My wardrobe was incinerated.” He stroked her hair and she noticed some of the rigid tension had eased out of his body.

  “Along with your skin, muscles and internal organs,” Jack added, turning his observant eyes onto Liam. “You should have been dust.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jackie was feeling less fatigued now and she was remembering all that had happened before she woke up in Jack’s house. She pushed herself into a sitting position, ignoring the tired cry of her body. “You called for me. You were supposed to be dead but I heard you calling me.” Liam very subtly winced but with everyone’s attention suddenly on him it was impossible to miss.

  “You didn’t mention that,” Jack said.

  “It wasn’t your business,” Liam retorted.

  “You could have killed her!”

  The older vampire’s eyes flashed black as he turned from her to snarl at Jack. A hint of fangs peeked between his soft lips and Jackie vividly recalled what it had been like when they had been draining the life from her.

  “I was not thinking! I had just recovered from being burned to almost nothing but bone. The only thing in my mind was - ”

  “Hunger,” Jackie supplied. Liam’s eyes were human again when he looked at her. She could see regret there coupled with a deep fear. The regret made sense to her but the fear was puzzling. “Before I heard you calling for me, it felt like I was buried alive and once I was free all that existed was this insane hunger. That was you, wasn’t it?” Liam looked stunned now and Jack’s anger had turned to confusion.

  “Liam, did you feed her?”

  “No,” he murmured. “I don’t know how she did that.”

  “Did what?” Jackie demanded. She shouldn’t have had the energy to get pissed off but she wasn’t about to let that stop her. No one was explaining anything to her. They were just hovering by her bedside and staring like idiots. “What happened? How did Liam survive? What the hell does ‘did you feed her’ mean? I’ve got more questions than answers here so someone better start talking.”

  “I wanted to know if he had given you his blood,” Jack told her. “I can’t go any further into it than that. There are laws that govern our kind and one of the big ones is to never discuss the blood of the dead with the living.”

  “Laws,” she repeated. Jackie recalled Sofie’s questions about Liam and his place in vampire society. A society that existed beneath her world. A society she had never looked into because, frankly, she had far too many living concerns for her to spend her time considering vampire secrets. “Liam, I think we need to talk.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. He did not need to ask for Jack to leave. His friend knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t want an audience. He appreciated that more than he could say. There were very few people who understood him to that extent. The only other one he could think of was lying on the bed before him. Despite the fact that Jacquelyn knew him so well, she was staring at him as though he were some great mystery she might not want to solve. That stare cut into his heart.

  “You could have killed me.”

  Liam nodded. She merely continued to stare as though that wasn’t particularly important. He wished she would scream at him for his foolishness. If he had been in his right mind he never would have called her to him when he was dying from thirst. The veins in his body had been dry and crackling like fallen leaves. It had taken a massive amount of power to regenerate his body after all the damage he’d taken. His hunger had been undeniable. He would have bitten anyone but he had called
her.

  “When you called me, I couldn’t think anymore. I just started moving and I didn’t stop until I found you.”

  “If it had been anyone else they would not have been so compelled,” he admitted, deciding it was time for him to explain the connection between them whether she liked it or not. He should have done it after she had nearly been murdered. If he had been thinking with his head instead of his heart he would have. “To survive comfortably a vampire need only have two or three donors to themselves so they are well fed and the humans have enough time to heal. It is not necessary for me to have as many donors as I do. I can afford to keep as many girls as I like for my private use. Vampires without my resources always rotate donors so as not to feed from one more than any other.”

  “So vampires need variety?” she asked, looking confused. He managed a weak smile at her statement before the situation caught up with him again.

  “Well, yes, we do but that has more to do with living forever than blood. If we drink more blood from one donor more than any other, we begin to grow attached to them.” Her eyes widened and he knew she was beginning to understand. “We have a natural connection to anyone we take nourishment from but repeated, recent exposure creates a far more powerful bond.”

  “But then why would you get close to me if you knew you’d become attached?”

  “I was already attached to you,” he said. “It happened fast and quite out of my control. If I weren’t still in control of my faculties, I would assume I’d formed a Fascination for you. Sorry, that’s a vampire term. We use it to describe our obsessions, the things that engulf us. The bond we developed seemed a much smaller thing in comparison to that. Once vampires would form attachments to humans deliberately. The theory was that a vampire with a healthy emotional life could better resist Fascinations. However, after a few centuries of losing the people we had grown so close to, it was decided that it was a far better idea to feed from a variety of donors and simply learn to avoid the things that drew our interests too greatly. Their deaths hurt us, you see. We could feel the loss of them in every atom of our beings and it was too much to be expected to endure repeatedly throughout our existence.”

  “And you couldn’t turn all of them because then they would need donors of their own, feel the same pain and the cycle would keep going until there weren’t any humans left,” Jackie concluded. It made sense to her. Still, she couldn’t say the vampire notion of Fascination wasn’t terrifying. She decided to table that. “So this bond makes the donor aware of their vampire?”

  “No,” Liam said. “Only the vampire is affected and he can extend only a little influence over his donor but what you did… You shouldn’t have been able to do that. That indicates a sort of connection we haven’t made.”

  “The secret blood thing Jack mentioned. The thing you can’t tell me because there’s a law against it. But there’s just the two of us in the room and it’s not like I’d go blabbing to Sofie - ”

  “Jacquelyn,” Liam interrupted, shaking his head. “No. We have laws for a reason. I can’t break them, not even for you.” He sat beside her on the bed as though to soften his cold words with physical proof of his affection. Jackie didn’t know what to make of him then. She’d never taken him for a law-abiding citizen. She even felt as though she had to respect his choice not to tell her and she very rarely let her curiosity die that easily. Damn, it really had been a long day. She cleared her throat.

  “That still doesn’t explain how I was able to feel you.”

  “No, it does not. Tell me how it felt when you thought I was dead?” Jackie cleared her throat again, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. She really didn’t want to admit that she hadn’t managed to grieve. It would more than likely hurt him and she hadn’t meant for that to happen.

  “I think I was in shock because I couldn’t feel much of anything. I was just - ”

  “Numb,” he finished for her, nodding as if it made sense. “You couldn’t feel me but you knew, somehow, that I wasn’t dead.” She stared at him blankly. How could he know that? “When the fire consumed my house it nearly took me with it. If I had been younger, I would not have been able to withstand that kind of damage or move fast enough to protect my body. I went underground and stayed there to heal. Since I was barely alive at that point, I was not capable of maintaining a connection to you.”

  “What would it have felt like if you were dead?” she asked. The fact that she had felt nothing had made her feel intensely guilty. Jackie wanted to know what she should have been feeling.

  “If this bond we created was acting normally, merely the normal symptoms of human grief. However, you seem to be breaking the rules of vampire life just by existing.” Jackie couldn’t help but smile at that. Turnabout was fair play. He broke her rules and she broke his. “If I had to guess, I would say you would feel the loss of me like I would feel the loss of you. It would be a pain beyond anything you were ever meant to experience.” That wiped away the smile.

  “We’re bound closer than we should be and you don’t know how that happened. Is there anything else I should be aware of?” she asked.

  “You recently had a blood transfusion,” he offered. Jackie quickly glanced down at her arm and there she found a carefully applied Band-Aid. “Once I came back to sanity I realized how much blood I had taken from you and I brought you to Jack. It is not the first time a donor has been drained past their limit. Generally it’s the young vampires who make such stupid mistakes.”

  “And he just happened to have my blood type on hand?”

  “Yes. He is nothing if not prepared.”

  Jackie’s mouth thinned. That had been a stupid comment on her part. Of course a vampire doctor would have a variety of blood types on hand. “How long was I out?”

  “Five hours,” he said in a tone that made her think it had been more like five days for him and that every second had dragged on for a small eternity. “Jack called Sofie and let her know you were safe.”

  She nodded. It was a good thing he’d said that because she had been ready to jump out of bed and run for a phone, which might have been a bit much for her body just then. After being nearly murdered she couldn’t imagine how frantic Sofie must have been when Jackie had vanished. “All right, I understand all of that. I know what happened to me and I know what happened to you. Now I want you to tell me who you are.” He stared at her blankly and she let out an irritated sigh at his lack of reaction. “You were dead, Liam, and all I could think about were all the things I didn’t know about you. Where were you born? When’s your birthday? What were your parents like? These are things I should know.”

  “Ah, I see. You told me your life story and now you expect a trade.” Her eyes narrowed at his cold voice. The man could make his voice sound like he was miles away from her when he was sitting right beside her. It was not the right time for him to distance himself, especially after he’d nearly killed her.

  “I’m not blackmailing you. I’m asking my vampire lover for some details about his life. Seeing as you nearly killed me I hardly think that’s an unreasonable request,” she added. He looked away from her.

  “So it is blackmail. Your forgiveness in exchange for my life story,” he stated flatly. Jackie had to stop herself before she slapped him. She felt incredibly insulted by his attitude. As if asking about his past was some sort of invasion of privacy after all they’d been through! She deserved so much better than this cold disdain and he knew it. So why was he acting this way? What didn’t he want to admit?

  Finally the way he avoided her eye and had angled himself away from her had the light dawning in her head. “You don’t remember.” He let out a quiet hiss and she knew she was right. “Oh God, Liam, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She touched his shoulder then tried not to feel rejected when he flinched away.

  “Once a vampire is turned they can never go back to where they were born. I was determined to forget where I came from so I would stop thinking abo
ut it. I’ve been alive for about five hundred eighty-eight years. I stopped celebrating my birthday centuries ago,” he told her quietly. Jackie closed her mouth before she could interrupt him with questions. He was trying to explain this to her. She needed to listen. “My parents have been dead for longer than that. I’d forgotten what they’d looked like after the first hundred years. All I have left of them are their names and sometimes I struggle to remember even those. My father was Colum O’Gilin. My mother was Moyna.” The life seemed to go out of him when he said their names, the curl of his native accent sorrowful, as though something precious had been plucked out of his soul.

  “Liam,” she murmured. This time when she touched him he didn’t move away.

  “That wasn’t my name when I was human. I’ve had several names during my lifetime. Liam is the one I’ve owned for the past eight years. Before I came to L.A. I was Martin. I could give you my list of names but it would get dull rather quickly.” He raised his hand and threaded his fingers with hers where they were touching his arm. When he looked at her she could see the fear in his eyes. “If I cannot come up with a reasonable explanation for my miraculous survival that passes muster with the rest of the board in Los Angeles I won’t be permitted to stay.”

  “What?” She knew she looked like an idiot now that her mouth had fallen open. She didn’t care.

  “I am the oldest vampire in Los Angeles. As such I manage vampire affairs but I’m not above the laws. It would be wrong to simultaneously enforce and defy them. If they decide it’s too risky for me to be brought back into the public light I’ll be expected to relocate. I’ll have a new name and a new career in a new place.” Her hand fell away from his arm as Jackie continued to stare. She couldn’t believe this was happening. She had nearly lost him and now she might lose him anyway because of some stupid vampire rule.