Ward of the Vampire: Complete Serial

by Kallysten

  “Ah, Angelina.” She tisked again. “You’re not asking the right person. This is not my tragically sad story to tell. Why don’t you ask Morgan about Melody?” Her eyes gleamed with mischief as she brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh dear. I let something slip. Shame on me.”

  Melody.

  How silly was I for feeling jealous? I couldn’t be sure who Melody was, or even if she was alive or dead, but here I was, needing to remind myself that I had no reason or even no right to feel betrayed.

  Just the same, when Morgan’s voice rose behind me, I turned to him with a mild glare. He didn’t notice. His full attention was on Irene.

  “Mother. I wasn’t aware you had come. What a pleasant surprise.”

  She held her hand out toward him. He took it and bowed lightly to press a kiss to her knuckles.

  “You did invite me,” she pointed out.

  “I invited you to my birthday party, too, but you didn’t come.”

  She shrugged, then returned her gaze to the painting yet again.

  “Lilah mentioned you were redecorating my home, so I came to check the damage.”

  “Speaking of Lilah—”

  She continued as though he had not spoken.

  “You will have this thing removed, of course.”

  “Mother.” Astonishing how much exasperation Morgan could cram in that small, respectful word. “Would you please tell Lilah to come back and let Angelina out of the house?”

  She moved—

  No, ‘moved’ isn’t the right word. When I hear the word ‘move’, I think of a body going through basic gestures that, put together, can be graceful or powerful or clumsy or so many other things. I did not see Irene perform any such gesture. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like when she took the three steps that separated us, settling behind me with her hand on my neck. It just happened. One second, she was in front of the painting. The next, she was all but growling behind my ear.

  “Don’t resist, Angelina, or you’ll be dead before you hit the floor.”

  The champagne glass slipped from my hand and shattered on said floor. I? Did not move a muscle. I even stopped breathing. Morgan stood like a frozen waterfall, power hiding behind stillness.

  “You want her out of here?” Irene said. “We don’t need Lilah for that. I can deal with her right here, right now, since you won’t do it for yourself. I’ll even take care of the clean up for you. She’ll be out of your life, and you’ll be free to wallow in self-pity for another decade or ten, child. All you have to do is say the word.”

  I blinked repeatedly, my eyes focused on Morgan’s, trying to capture his attention, but his gaze remained over my shoulder—on Irene.

  “Please, Mother,” he murmured.

  “Please what?” Her nails dug a little more into my neck, sharply enough that I was sure she’d broken the skin. “Get rid of her? Is that what you want?”

  “No. I don’t want her dead. Please.”

  “Why not? You just said you want her out of here.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Why not?” she said again. “She’s human. There’s nothing more normal than a human dying. Did you forget? How many gifts like this one did Lilah and I offer you over the years? You didn’t use to have qualms taking those lives. Or have you forgotten that, too?”

  I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. I let it out in a shaky, shuddering whimper. Morgan’s eyes drifted to me, and I lost my breath again. We’d known each other for less than two weeks, and our relationship, if I can even call it a relationship, was odd to say the least. But in his eyes, I could see more fear than would fill an ocean.

  Fear for me. He’d saved my life twice, and he was afraid—no, terrified—that this time it was out of his hands.

  And maybe, just maybe, there was something else behind the fear. Something I’d only ever seen in our shared fantasies. Or maybe I merely wanted it to be there.

  “I have not forgotten anything,” he said, looking back at Irene. “I just don’t see why this particular human should die now.”

  “All right. Give me one reason why she shouldn’t die now.”

  The silence that followed didn’t last long. Seconds, I’m sure, if even that. But with my life hanging in the balance, it seemed to take Morgan ages before he came up with a reason.

  “I enjoy her company,” was what he said.

  Yeah, I know, it was a let-down for me, too. ‘Enjoying my company’ was fine and dandy, but I’d hoped we’d come a bit further than that. Still, at that moment, I was happy to take those disappointing words over getting my throat sliced open by sharp nails. Or a set of fangs. Or any other kind of death, if you want to get down to it.

  Except Irene’s hold on me wasn’t relenting. She had her answer, and yet the threat remained the same.

  “Make up your mind, Morgan,” she said in a chiding tone. “Either you like having her here or you want her gone. It can’t be both.”

  “She’s here under duress,” he said quietly. “I’d enjoy her company a lot more if I knew it was her choice to… to…”

  “To what?” she snapped when he didn’t finish. “To be with you? To fall for you? Like no sane woman would ever find you interesting or, God forbid, desirable if she wasn’t compelled to be around you for five minutes?”

  Her nails dug yet a little deeper into my skin, and now I could feel blood trickling from the cuts. I was sure she was about to kill me right here in front of him, with nothing but her bare hands.

  She proved me wrong. She pushed me away with enough force to fling me into Morgan’s arms. He caught me as gently as he could under the circumstances and shifted our bodies, drawing me away from her. I closed my eyes, pressed my face to his chest, and clung to him so my knees wouldn’t fold under me.

  “Get. Over. It,” Irene said. “If you think I’m going to stand by and watch you torture yourself for another hundred years, you really don’t know me. You like the girl. Just admit it and move on.”

  She honest to goodness growled the words, the sounds so animalistic and their register so low that I didn’t understand them right away. Or maybe it was my heartbeat, pounding so furiously against my eardrums, that made it so hard to catch what she was saying. All I knew was that Morgan’s arms had closed around me and he wouldn’t let her hurt me. Nothing else mattered.

  If he answered her, I didn’t hear it. The next thing I knew, he was murmuring close to my ear, “Come on, let’s get you upstairs and look at those scratches.”

  I’m not used to being a scared, helpless little girl. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can take care of myself. But I’m also not used to having nails as sharp as claws dig into my throat while a raving lunatic discusses killing me like she’d talk about cleaning a stain on a dress—or rather, throwing away the dress to save herself the trouble. I tried to nod at his words, tried to pull away and regain my composure. I couldn’t move, couldn’t say anything other than a raspy, “Is she gone?”

  “She’s gone. You’re safe.” His hand brushed down my hair once or twice before he added, sotto voce, “I promise.”

  Those last words lifted a weight off my chest, and I managed to push away from him. I still didn’t feel steady and was grateful for his arm around me as he guided me back upstairs. He didn’t say a word until we walked into the small dining room. He had me sit down and said, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  He waited until I nodded, then stepped into the kitchen. I watched him go, feeling too numb to even wonder why I was in the dining room or why he was going to the kitchen. This was the third time in just over ten days that I had come close to dying. I really wasn’t getting used to it. I didn’t want to get used to it, either. I just wanted it all to end.

  In moments, Morgan returned with a first-aid kit. He shrugged out of his jacket, set it on the back of a chair, then sat down next to me, and pulled disinfectant and cotton from the box.

  “I’m going to clean those cuts. It’ll sting a bit, I’m sorry.”r />
  He must have taken my blink as assent, because he soaked the cotton in disinfectant and touched it to my neck. I tried to prepare myself so I wouldn’t flinch, but even as careful as he was, I couldn’t help it. It did sting. That wasn’t why my eyes started to fill with tears, though. Actually, I don’t know why my eyes started to fill with tears. The delayed effect of fear? Exhaustion, both physical and mental? The realization that ‘Mother’ had come, the elusive person who could command Miss Delilah to let me go, but she had seemed less than inclined to see me free?

  I hated that I was crying. I hated even more that I was crying in front of Morgan. He lowered the cotton ball and cupped my face in his free hand, and even through my tears, I could still see the pain in his dark eyes, a pain deep enough to make me feel lightheaded.

  He said my name, a whisper so low I almost thought I’d imagined it. I don’t remember if he drew me to him first, or if already my arms were wrapping around his neck. The result was the same: I was soon in his lap, my eyes scrunched tight as I pressed my face to his neck and tried to get a hold on myself. It took a little while.

  *

  “Do you feel better?”

  Did I? I wasn’t crying anymore, so I had to. Morgan’s hand helped, rubbing slow, soothing circles on my back.

  “Better, maybe.” I sat up on his lap, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Embarrassed, definitely.”

  “Embarrassed?” His hand felt cool on my burning cheek. “What reason do you have to be embarrassed?”

  I couldn’t help but press a little harder into his hand as I wondered if he was only humoring me or if he truly didn’t understand. Most of the time, he was so careful not to touch me that even this innocent touch felt amazing.

  “I try not to make it a habit of crying like a frightened little girl,” I said, trying to put some humor in my words and failing in the most miserable fashion. “Especially once the danger has passed.”

  He stroked my cheek for a few moments, his thumb running back and forth under my eye as he considered me.

  “As much as it pains me to say it,” he murmured, “you were in danger tonight. Letting your fear overwhelm you when you were in her hands would have made things more dangerous for you. And not letting that fear out in some fashion now that you’re safe would cripple you in the long run. Never feel embarrassed for your tears, Angelina. They only mark you as human, and I for one envy you for them.”

  It was hard to believe he envied my tears, but his expression was so serious, his words so solemn, that it was harder still not to believe his sincerity.

  Unsure how to reply, I brushed the most gentle of kisses across his lips, then rested my head on his shoulder again. He resumed his slow stroking of my back.

  “I don’t understand,” I said for what felt like the thousandth time since I’d first set foot in the mansion. “Why did she threaten to kill me? What would she gain from it?”

  His stroking paused for a second or two before starting again.

  “She wanted to make a point. She’s not exactly subtle when it comes to that. She lost patience for subtlety long ago.”

  I didn’t bother stifling my snort. That, I had no trouble believing. And even though I thought I knew the answer, I asked, “What point?”

  Again, it took him some time to reply. I didn’t mind. He could take all the time he needed as long as he kept me in his arms. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be, after all.

  “You heard her. She wanted me to admit I… am attracted to you.”

  And he hadn’t admitted it, as I recalled all too acutely. I wanted to ask if he did feel something for me. I wanted to know whom I resembled, having been chosen for my looks—even if I had a small idea of the answer. Wanted to ask if my looks were all he saw in me, or if he liked the person I was, too, at least a little bit. More than anything, I wanted to ask about Melody. I wasn’t naive enough to believe Irene had let the name slip by accident. She’d wanted me to ask. She’d given me a clue or maybe the path to one.

  Did I dare use it?

  Before I could muster the courage to ask anything, Morgan spoke again in the same quiet, diffident voice, maybe having taken my silence as a question in its own right.

  “When you live as long as I have, you grow wary of some words. They only seem to cause more heartache every time you say them.”

  He said ‘words,’ but I had a feeling it was just one word he meant, and I had no trouble figuring out which one. I bet you can easily guess, too. Here’s a hint. It starts with L.

  Again, his answer only raised more questions. Rather than voice any of them and poke at what sounded like a painful subject for him, I changed gears. We’d had enough pain for one evening.

  “You never told me how old you are.”

  It clearly wasn’t the response he’d expected. His body shook against mine, and as I raised my head to look at him, I realized he was laughing silently.

  “You never asked,” he pointed out.

  “Okay. How old are you?”

  “My birthday party? That wasn’t for my fortieth birthday. That was the four hundredth.”

  At first, the words made no sense, and I was sure I had misheard. But as he watched me, waiting for me to react, the enormity of the number struck me, and I could only gape at him.

  Four hundred years.

  Sometimes, I could hardly picture myself living into my seventies. It seemed so far away—a lifetime, literally. The world had changed so much already in the couple decades since I’d been born; what would it become in the next five? What would I become?

  But to live for four hundred years… Morgan had seen empires rise, wither, and die. He’d seen civilization shifts, and more wars than I cared to think about, and so much technological progress that today’s technology would have been like pure, unfathomable magic to the young man he’d once been. I tried to imagine him as he might have been back then, but I simply couldn’t. It was too strange. Too outrageous. And yet, it never occurred to me to challenge his words.

  Morgan smiled ruefully.

  “Hard to believe, huh? But it’s the truth. Or, well, if you want to be technical, it was the four hundredth anniversary of my becoming a vampire. My human birthday isn’t for another few months, and I’ll be four hundred and thirty six. But we don’t celebrate those birthdays.”

  This precision didn’t help me find words again, quite the contrary. I tried to wrap my mind around it all and berated myself for being so surprised. It wasn’t like I hadn’t suspected. Just because he’d put an actual number on it didn’t change anything.

  “Well,” I finally managed to say, and was almost proud when my voice only squeaked a little bit. “I’ve always had boyfriends that were older than me. I guess this just continues the trend.”

  His startled look was more than worth my efforts to get a grip on myself.

  “Boyfriend?” he repeated, like the word was foreign.

  The truth was, I hadn’t thought before saying it. But I didn’t regret it. Maybe he had issues saying certain words, maybe he even thought himself too old to have a girlfriend, but in my world, when you slept with someone more than once or did any of the things we’d done in the past ten days, ‘boyfriend’ definitely applied. And I didn’t care anymore that the ‘sleeping together’ part hadn’t actually happened; I remembered it, it was part of my memories, of our history together, and if he wanted to argue the point, he wouldn’t win the battle.

  “You think I sit on just anyone’s lap?” I asked. “Or kiss random men?”

  “What I think is that someone forced you to be here, and if she hadn’t—”

  “Bullshit,” I cut in. There was no anger to the word, only my refusal to let him hide behind excuses any longer. “And so was what you told Irene about wanting it all to be my choice. Other than being unable to step out of this house, and okay, having to sleep in your bed that time, there isn’t one thing I did that wasn’t my choice. Not one, Morgan. Even when we were in those fantasies, I was stil
l me. A more… liberated me, maybe, but still the same person deep down. Don’t insult me by thinking I don’t know what I really want.”

  His eyes darkened, like a night sky made darker by a passing storm. I held his gaze. Had I upset him? I merely wanted him to understand, to know for sure I was with him right now because I wanted to be, and not for any other reason.

  The kiss came out of nowhere.

  One second, Morgan was looking at me with flat, dark eyes, and I was certain another one of those snark fests was coming up, and I’d end up mad at him again for another silly reason. The next second, his mouth crashed on mine, and his tongue pressed along the seam of my lips until I let him in.

  He held my face in his hands, his fingers mussing up my carefully arranged hair. Such large hands, too, and yet he touched me like I was precious porcelain.

  Or at least, at first he did.

  Those same hands felt more forceful, yet no less tender, when they moved, one to cover my right breast until my nipple tightened to a hard point behind the satin, the other to splay against my back and hold me close.

  And close was exactly where I wanted to be.

  I clutched his shoulders and deepened the kiss. His tongue tasted of the sweet wine we’d served at the gala, but the kiss itself, its intensity and heat, made me more lightheaded than a glass of wine, or even ten. When I let out a moan into his mouth, I could feel his entire body shuddering against mine. He was always so responsive…

  I wanted more of that. I craved more of that. More of his body answering to me, reacting to me, to my touch as well as my pleasure.

  My hands drifted from his shoulders and slid over his chest. I thought of opening his shirt and reaching for smooth, toned skin, but I was already past that. There’d be time for caresses later. My fingers descended between us, until they found the hardened proof of his desire for me. I caressed him over the fabric of his pants, pressing my fingertips along the length of his cock and squeezing lightly when I reached the tip. The gasp I drew from him and his thumb roughly playing over one nipple then the other were hardly enough. I needed more. All of him.