by Lee, Rachel
“I don’t notice it at all, except at moments like this.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “Now I notice. Very much.”
“So you drink preserved blood, which you detest, and avoid warmth, which you say you crave. Sorry, Creed, but that sounds terrible.”
“It can be.”
She felt he was downplaying it, suspected that his change, brought about in such a horrible way, cost him more than his family. A century without warmth and love? Without the food you most wanted? “It sounds like a sentence to hell.”
“Ah, damn.” He sighed.
“What?”
“It’s not. There are times when I could feel miserably sorry for myself if I wanted to. But if ever I can’t take it anymore, there’s a way out.”
“What’s that?”
“All I have to do is ask another vampire for mercy.”
Maybe she was getting used to the shocks, because only one little ripple of horror passed through her. As a writer, all the nuances of that word struck her. To ask for mercy was to ask for a reprieve from the intolerable. So these vampires didn’t simply ask to be killed. They asked for something so much more meaningful. “Mercy? Is that what you call it?”
“It’s the word we use when we can’t take it anymore. The request is always granted.”
“So you kill each other? Mercy killing?”
“Rarely, but yes.”
“Good God!” Then, maybe because the entire evening had been too much, a tear rolled down her cheek.
“Don’t do that,” he whispered.
The next thing she knew, her face was cupped in his cool, gentle hands, and he leaned close enough to lick the tear from her cheek. It was such an intimate gesture, and it caused a thrill, a purely sexual thrill, to race through her. Her heart stuttered into a faster pace, and her breaths came more rapidly. She absolutely ached.
He pulled back a little, still cupping her face. His smile grew crooked. “Don’t do that, either.”
“What?”
“How much more can you take tonight, Yvonne?”
“What do you mean?”
His thumb brushed her damp cheek. “I told you I want you. But now I know you want me, too. I can hear your heartbeat. I can smell your pheromones.”
Immediately she felt her cheeks flush. “Can I just dig a hole now?”
He chuckled quietly and brushed her hot cheeks with his thumbs again. “That blush drives me wild. And I know you can’t help it. I was just teasing you.”
In a flash he reappeared in the chair farthest from her. “Right now I think you’re safer if I’m over here.”
She clapped her hands to her cheeks, trying to remember the last time she had felt so embarrassed. She had believed she had lost the ability to blush some time ago, but around Creed she seemed to blush frequently.
Probably because of her attraction to him. And oh, it was some attraction! She wished he hadn’t pulled away. She wished… She wished too much.
“Can you read my mind?” Her voice sounded thick even to her. Desire and apprehension both swamped her.
“No, that’s a myth. But there’s a lot I can tell from your scents, things a human couldn’t consciously detect, or maybe couldn’t detect at all. And from your heartbeat.”
“So I’m an open book?”
He shrugged. “Your immediate emotional reactions are. But nothing else.”
“Oh.” She wondered how unnerving that was going to become. Right now it was merely downright embarrassing.
“Regardless,” he said kindly, “given the number of shocks you’ve had this evening, I wouldn’t trust your impulses. So I’ll just keep a bit of distance and make it easier on both of us.”
The way she felt right now, she wasn’t sure that was a good thing. For God’s sake, she didn’t even care that he was a vampire. What she needed was closeness, comfort, distraction.
Which, she supposed, made him right about not trusting her impulses. With effort, she forced her thoughts away from her immediate longing. “What did Garner mean about vampires being impervious to demons?”
“That’s not one hundred percent true, but it’s not as easy for them to possess us.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Maybe because we’re unnatural.”
“You know, that bothers me.”
“What does?”
“That you call yourself unnatural. You exist. That makes you natural, unless you can prove you emerged from a test tube concoction.”
He laughed quietly. “I like that.”
“Well, it’s true. You exist. You guys have apparently existed for a long time?”
“There are a few still around who remember Babylon and ancient Egypt.”
“Then it must be natural. But only a few that old?”
“We can die, Yvonne. We may be harder to kill, but we can die. The difference between us is that I will die a second time.”
“Was the first time awful?” She immediately wished she hadn’t asked, because his face shadowed and his eyes turned black. He was out of the chair so fast she didn’t see him move, and she realized he was pacing only when he paused to turn.
“Can you slow down? I can’t see you.”
“Oh, sorry.” Creed slowed to something closer to a mortal pace. It was still almost enough to make her dizzy.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
“No, I don’t. But I suppose I will. I doubt you can imagine the rage I felt when I realized what that woman had done to me. That she had turned me into this…this monster, that I couldn’t go home, that my every instinct was to prey on my fellow man. I was sickened, and furious, and I even tried to kill her. Especially when I went to my family and realized I could harm them. Especially then. So I backed away. For a while that was the only restraint I was able to manage.”
“Why?”
He faced her. “Because the instincts of a newborn vampire are overpowering, the hunger is overwhelming, so overwhelming that anything as paltry as clear thinking is almost impossible. You have to feed. It’s a hunger beyond reason, beyond thought. Then, if there’s any humanity left in you, you loathe yourself.”
Her heart ached for him, and the tightness in her chest kept her from speaking for a short while. “I’m so sorry. Do you still hate yourself?”
“I am what I am, and as long as I keep my self-control, I can live with it.”
“Do all vampires feel that way?”
“Hell no. Some revel in their worst instincts, and justify it as being part of their nature. Some of us resist. Just never forget, Yvonne. We’re predators by nature.”
She nodded, thinking it over. The world was full of predators who killed to eat, including the human race. She supposed it mattered how they did it and why. “I don’t like to watch a cat kill. Even lions play with their food sometimes.”
“It’s part of the hunt, part of the pleasure.”
She suppressed a shudder, wondering if it was part of his nature, too. “What I don’t like thinking about is the terror their prey must feel.”
“Many of us don’t terrorize our prey. It’s not necessary to be sadistic.”
“Do you play with them?” Because if he said they did, she didn’t know if she could stand it.
He stilled. In fact he became so still that she wondered if he had turned to stone. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. Finally he said, “We play a different way with our prey.”
Her heart seemed to climb into her throat. She didn’t know if she wanted to hear this, but at the same time she needed to. She had to know what Creed was before her yearning for him got her in any deeper. Tommy had taught her that bit of wisdom. “What’s that?”
“Not what, but how. Shall I complete your education? Shall I truly appall you?”
“How?” She felt almost like backing away, except she was curled on the corner of the couch, and he stood between her and escape.
“We provide sexual pleasure, Yvonne. If we don’t kill our prey, they spen
d the rest of their lives hunting for another such experience, like addicts seeking cocaine. Pleasure, not pain, is the key to our survival.”
“Oh.” She barely breathed the word as the air seemed to flee the room. An instinctive throbbing began between her legs, and her heart began a slow, heavy drumbeat. “How can anything be that good?”
Instantaneously, it seemed, he was there, bent over her. He leaned toward her, just enough. His lips hovered near her neck below her ear, and she could feel the whisper of his cool breath. A shiver of longing pierced her center. “I could make you want me forever. And you have no idea just how much I’d like to do that.”
Now she definitely couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she’d just been dumped into outer space. Every cell in her body awoke and began to throb with need.
“I want to take you to that place with me more than I’ve ever wanted to take any other human. But I won’t. There’s no future in it, Yvonne. So I’ll leave you unscathed to get on with your normal life once we take care of Asmodai.”
Then, before she could register more than a stir in the air, he was back across the room.
She sighed and let her head droop, closing her eyes for a few moments, waiting for the sexual tension to ease. He was right on so many levels, regardless of whether she might become addicted to him—and she found that hard to believe, but then most of this evening was hard to believe. Still, she didn’t know him well, and she wasn’t the sort of woman to take sex lightly. Even when she was supercharged with adrenaline, which was probably most of what was going on.
She was tired. So tired. Too much had happened, and the day was already too long. She needed sleep and wondered if she would be able to, tired or not, because she suspected that the minute she started to doze off, she’d get walloped all over again by the things that had happened.
A demon named Asmodai was interested in her for some unknown reason, and she couldn’t escape the feeling that Tommy was the cause. Damn, how had she been so blind to what he must have been up to? Because it had to be Tommy.
She couldn’t think of a single thing she might have done herself to draw the attention of a demon. Not one. She lived a very ordinary life, spending her days working, her evenings reading, or occasionally visiting a friend, or having one over. As lives went, hers approached the downright boring.
Until now. Something had certainly changed somewhere, somehow. Tommy and his threats were all she could think of. God, she hated to think she’d shared her life with someone who would play with dark powers. But what was she thinking? She hadn’t known Tommy might be involved in such things, but she had no excuse when it came to her desire for Creed. And damn, she wanted him, vampire or not. How did she process that idiocy?
Without warning, strong arms lifted her from the couch. Startled, she reached out and wrapped her arms around Creed’s neck. He made her feel as if she didn’t weigh an ounce. “Creed!”
“You’re tired. You need sleep. Do you want to change?”
Even that seemed like too much effort. The only things she seemed to want right now were to stay in Creed’s arms and sleep. “Not really.” The sweatshirt and jeans she was wearing were old, soft and comfortable.
She looked around his room as he carried her inside, taking in its paucity of furnishings. Apparently he didn’t think a bedroom he enjoyed only when he was dead merited much attention. It was bare bones, the only luxury a chair and a small desk in the corner. And a small refrigerator in another corner. If there had ever been a window, it was gone.
“Are you cold?” he asked. “I can’t tell.”
“A little.”
“Covers or should I turn the heat up?”
“Covers.” She preferred snuggling into blankets.
He totally amazed her by holding her easily with one arm while he pulled the blankets back. Then he set her down gently, tugged off her shoes and pulled covers back up over her.
“I’ll bring your things in here so you can get at them in the morning. Just don’t open the door tomorrow, Yvonne. Please.”
“I promise I won’t.”
He straightened, brushing his fingertips lightly against her cheek. They were so smooth, the touch so welcome, that she could have purred. “I’ll put some food in here for you, too, so you don’t have to starve all day. You saw the refrigerator over there?”
“Yes.” God, impossible as it seemed, her eyelids were growing heavy. Sleep took her between one breath and the next.
Creed watched her sleep for a while. He hadn’t watched a woman sleep since his wife, and he’d forgotten how much he had once loved to do that. He loved the soft sighs, the little murmurs, the occasional restless stirring. The defenselessness perhaps. Sleeping with someone else in the room was a mark of complete trust.
But Yvonne’s scent, even in sleep, was enough to push him to the brink of lust and hunger, so he didn’t watch her slumber as long as he might have. Instead he leashed himself and returned to his desk, determined to work until dawn.
Anything to escape constant awareness of the luscious package in his bed.
Except instead he found himself researching Asmodai. Or Asmodeus. He doubted he had anything on his bookshelf on the subject, but as an academic and professional researcher, he had access to libraries not available to the average web searcher.
What he found in his searches among Jewish scholars caused him to sit back in deep thought. Asmodai spent time in heaven, not hell apparently, but returned to earth to do his mischief. And Solomon had controlled him with a neck chain bearing the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that represented the name of God.
Well, getting such a chain would be easy enough but putting it on a demon was another matter altogether. Asmodai had been tricked before through thirst, which had caused him to drink too much wine, and thus he had fallen into a sleep that allowed the chain to be placed on him. Not a likely solution for a city where every dwelling had a water tap.
Otherwise, apparently you needed an archangel. Yeah, archangels grew on every tree.
He picked up a pencil and rapped the eraser quietly against his desktop as he pondered. The story of Asmodai and women was a rather muddy one. Much disagreement existed on whether he fell in love with them, whether he had been sent by heaven to teach a lesson in chastity by means of Sarah and Tobias, or whether he just plain lusted after some women. That he had congress with women was not in doubt, however.
He glanced toward his bedroom and felt rather sickened at what might happen to Yvonne if they didn’t find a way to bind that thing. And he thought he was bad for her?
At least he wouldn’t give her any two-headed children. Indeed, no children at all. Which in itself was hardly better than giving her a monster to bear. Every woman seemed to want children, and he couldn’t offer that.
He couldn’t offer her much at all. A half life, existence in the shadows, a wrenching move every decade or so. Always living on the outside, never the inside.
Maybe watching Terri and Jude in their happiness had stirred things in him he’d given up on long ago. He certainly didn’t know Yvonne well enough to be worrying about what kind of future he could offer her.
No, the only thing he needed to be concerned about was protecting her from a demon and from himself.
That was more than enough to contend with.
He was deep into research when a tapping at his window alerted him. He had a terrace outside around much of his penthouse and it was a place he enjoyed on quiet nights when nothing pressed him. But hearing a tap when no one should be out there alerted him to the type of visitor he had.
In a flash he crossed the room and recognized the vampire who stood outside: Luc St. Just. He hadn’t seen Luc in over fifty years, not since they had worked together to bring down a newborn vampire who held an entire city in a state of terror because she wouldn’t control her appetites. The vampire who had created the newborn had been punished as well for failing to maintain control of her. Since then, he and Luc had gone their separate
ways, for it was the way of vampires not to congregate for long, in order to avoid drawing attention.
He opened the sliding glass door and stepped out. Luc was fast, though. He sniffed the air. “You have food inside? I thought you didn’t indulge.”
“I don’t. I’m helping a friend.”
“Ahh.” Luc, who cut a dashing figure and liked to flaunt it, backed away and leaned against the terrace wall. He always dressed elegantly, and drew the ladies’ eyes with his pale blond hair and golden eyes. “Must be devilishly difficult for you.”
