by Ann Vremont
“Sara, I know there are so many things we need to talk about…” Mathias began but halted when he saw her jaw clench even tighter. “Sara,” he started again in a more conciliatory tone.
“No, Mathias,” she said. She released the locket and pushed him away with her palms against his chest.
He caught one of her hands, held it to his lips. “Sara,” he pleaded. “Just stay so that we can discuss this. You’ll understand why—“
“I understand that I have a choice now.” Sara pulled her clothes from the pile on the floor. She kept her back to him as she shoved her arms and legs through the openings. “And I’m making my own choice.”
“No, your temper is making it for you,” Mathias corrected her. His voice held a hard edge born of concern for her safety and he wrapped his arms across her shoulders. “The League won’t let you live on the fringes, Sara.”
She paused, considered what he was saying and how much—nearly everything—she didn’t know about what had happened to her, what she had become. She looked back at him, her chin resting lightly on her shoulder, as the rest of her body remained rigid within his embrace. “Go on. What is the League?”
“The League of the Nine Houses, Sara,” Mathias answered. “A vampire council, if you will.”
“Why should they care about me?”
“New vampires are rare, Sara, approved only by the League and subject to its governance, or else they are hunted down and killed,” Mathias explained, his voice breaking at the end.
“Am I…” Sara clamped down on the words and the spike of fear the question sent plunging into her chest.
“Approved? Yes, but not in the manner I would have had it accomplished,” he sighed and doubled his hold on her. His lips brushed her shoulder and Sara felt herself relax.
She cursed her body’s reaction to him. When she spoke again, she made her words as hard and cold as the spike of fear still wedged in her chest. “What is this game with Colm all about? The tablet, Patrick…”
“Let me show you,” Mathias pleaded.
He tried to force Sara to him, to offer the truth through his blood but she refused. Still, he nuzzled her neck, looked for the least bit of softening in her posture.
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“I don’t know where to begin,” he said and slung his legs around her when she threatened to stand. “No, you must stay and listen, then you can go if you want.”
“Then start at the beginning,” Sara said. She knew that she would go mad if he didn’t start explaining things immediately. It was too much being this close to him—the press of his lips against her skin, his arms confining her, the tight embrace teasing her sore, erect nipples.
“From the beginning?” Mathias chuckled. Sara growled at him and he relaxed his grip on her, made apologetic shushing noises against her ear. “Why don’t I start with the day I fell in love with you,” he offered. “With a little back story as necessary?”
“Just-get-on-with-it,” she snapped.
“The League learned that your father was starting a dig near Pecaya,” he said. “We knew the tablet fragment was in the vicinity—I had carried it with me from the Middle East almost two thousand years before,” he explained as she started to interrupt, a certain evasiveness clouding his voice. “I was spying on the dig to make sure that the tablet wasn’t discovered, or that it was recovered at whatever cost necessary.”
The hairs along her arm rose at the suggested means of recovery and Mathias rubbed her arms with his palms until she brushed his hands away. She wasn’t, she told herself, going to just give in to her need, to capitulate because her body wanted him so badly it threatened to openly revolt against her mind. “Just continue,” she said.
“But I saw you.” He stroked the back of her right shoulder, traced her birthmark and then kissed it. “I saw this.”
“So?” Sara asked.
His legs still encircled her and he began to release her but hesitated, worried that she would leave.
“Show me!” she yelled, more than ready to escape the temptation that the constant contact with him presented. She wriggled in his arms until she was facing him and then repeated her demand.
Mathias grinned, a hungry smile, and leaned into her. His hand cupped her face, drew her mouth to his. “You said to tell you.” He whispered the challenge across her lips.
“Stop playing games, damn it. I need to know!”
He released her and slowly turned to expose his left shoulder to her. A birthmark, a mirror of her own, was stamped on his back like a crimson stain. “Like two halves, Sara. I’ve waited millennia for you.”
She touched the birthmark and felt a twinge that ran from her shoulder to deep inside her womb. “That doesn’t mean…” she started but he spun around and gently laid a fingertip on her lips.
“Is that what you really think, Sara?”
Telling him what she thought would rob her of her choice and so she walked to the window and watched the sun slowly rise while she asked him her next question. “What else do I need to know?”
“The tablet fragment your father discovered is a part of our history…lost in a landslide,” Mathias continued. “The half you saw downstairs was recovered from a dig site near Jerusalem.”
“Do you know what it says?” Sara turned from the window; saw him stretched on the bed, his body still uncovered. She closed her eyes, heard him slide across the bed, knew that she would be able to touch him if she extended her arm. “Do you?”
“The Hebrew pictographs, yes, the rest, no,” he answered.
The wounded longing in his voice drew her closer to the bed. His hand touched hers and he pulled her to him.
“Sara, I wanted this to be your choice, when you were old enough to choose.”
“I will choose,” she reminded him.
“Me? Life…Death?” he demanded. “Sara, there are factions in the council that fear you…what you…what your mark means…” Mathias ran an agitated hand through his hair, clasped her to him. “Athos has become a complete wildcard and you have needs now. What do you really think your choices are?”
A vision of her mother, at home, in her final hours of life, three days of morphine hoarded for one fatal overdose that would finally bring relief flashed through Sara’s mind.
“No!” Mathias roared the word. “That’s no choice at all.”
She broke from his protective embrace, carefully folded his hands against his chest. “I’m going back to my dorm. I’ll meet you here, tomorrow, at noon.” He started to speak and she stopped him, as he had stopped her a few minutes before, by laying a fingertip against his lips. “The choice is mine, Mathias, and I will make it. Don’t let me see you before then,” she finished with a cold finality.
Chapter Ten
Sara returned to her dorm room to find half a dozen sticky notes from the dorm monitor tacked on what should have been her closed and locked bedroom door.
Patrick called, 9:20
Patrick called again – 10:08
Again! 10:32
10:58
11:20
Midnight!
A single note, tucked under her unplugged phone, was signed by her three dorm mates and politely demanded that she either unplug her phone before spending the night out, change her phone number to one 'that crazy little bastard doesn’t know', or tell that 'crazy little bastard' where she was at.
Sara shut her bedroom door and stripped her dirty clothes from her body. In the shower, she scoured Mathias’s scent from her skin and hair. With the steam cleared from the mirror, she surveyed her body, looked for some sign that she was different. There were little things. Her pores were smaller, the tissue beneath her skin more solid. Her skin was cooler and she could see that coolness, just as, passing other students on campus, she had seen their heat signatures. She wondered whether anyone not looking at her with vampiric eyes would notice the subtleties.
Remembering the tremendous strength Colm had displayed in the basement, she picke
d up a comb and snapped it in half. Not satisfied with the test, she took the back brush from the shower and snapped it, too.
Sara slipped her bath robe on and sat down in front of her computer after she plugged her phone back in. While she pulled up her web browser, she listened to the increasingly angry messages Patrick had left the night before. She was doing a search on vampire powers when Colm’s voice played on the answering machine.
“Hey, babe.” Smug, self-satisfied. “Sorry I couldn’t stay last night. Hotter fish to fry.” A muffled snicker. “I’ll make it up to you next time.”
The hairs on the back of Sara’s neck lifted and a growl filled her stomach, chest and throat. She was suddenly hungry, overwhelmingly so, and wanted nothing better than to tear a section or two from Colm’s smarmy ass. The growl turned to a gut-wrenching cramp as real hunger hit her.
Sara deleted the message and tried to focus on the web search. “Dammit,” she yelled. “Damn role playing sites drowning out any useful—” She slapped the mouse away as the phone rang.
“What?” Sara looked at the phone in her hand, marveled at the speed with which her hand had moved to pick it up.
It was Patrick. Static from his cell phone made his voice crackle as he yelled recriminations at her. “I’m coming over, Sara.”
“No, Patrick,” she said, but her stomach growled in protest. “I don’t want you coming over now.” An image of him, bare-chested, his pants lowered around his hips, rose unbidden. “You can’t,” she warned, her words slurring as her gums swelled.
“Then tell me where you were!” he demanded. His voice shrilled at the edge, exposing how close he was to coming unhinged.
“Patrick, we can talk about this later today.” Her stomach registered its dissent—insisted she talk to Patrick at once. She started to wonder how foolhardy she had been in leaving Mathias. She had never experienced such a mind-possessing hunger as that which fishhooked its way through her entire body.
“Now, Sara!” he screamed through the phone. “Before you fuck everything up. Now!”
“Patrick—” The line was dead. Determined not to be there when he showed up, Sara grabbed some jeans and a T-shirt. She searched under her bed for a bag and tossed her wallet, keys and cell phone inside.
She slammed the door to her bedroom, unlocked and opened the door onto the hallway.
Patrick stood in the doorway. His feet were spread, touching the bottom sides of the threshold. His arms, long like the rest of him, were casually stretched up, his hands touching the top of the doorframe. His face was a haggard mess of lines, dark circles rimming the eyes from a night without sleep. “I told you now, didn’t I?”
He was enraged. Sara, her enhanced senses reeling, could smell the extra testosterone and adrenaline seeping from his pores, see the rapid pulsing of blood in his torso and face, hear his harsh breathing, his heavy heartbeat. Her stomach contracted. It was the first time, she mused, that she had ever found Patrick attractive. She smiled at him hesitantly, took a step toward her bedroom door, beckoned him with an inward sweep of her hand. “Fine, in my room, then.”
He refused to enter her bedroom until she was seated on her bed. She patted the mattress and he stepped inside and then closed the door.
“Why don’t you lock it?” she suggested.
His body displayed confusion at her sudden willingness to talk with him and at the docility that infected her voice. His heartbeat slowed, blood flowed more readily to his arms and legs. After he locked the door, he stood in the center of the room. His eyes searched her body for clues on her night out. “Where were you?” he asked.
Unable to keep her expression demure, Sara cast her gaze down at the mattress, patted it again. When she saw that he was not ready to relent, she grabbed a pillow and wrapped her arms around it as she buried her face into its downy depths. Power. She heaved an exaggerated sigh into the pillow. He had to exercise it over her, craved it more than anything. She had never realized the depth of his desire for her.
Sara summoned to her mind a picture of her mother. Sick or healthy, any image of the woman brought either tears of joy or sorrow. Eyes wet, Sara looked at Patrick. She kept the lower part of her face hidden behind the pillow, her blood lust elongating her teeth. A stranger might not notice the small increase in length, but Patrick’s attention had always been split in their conversations between looking at her mouth and visually caressing her breasts and hips.
Voice muffled, she pleaded with him to join her. “I just can’t talk to you when you’re standing there, so far away.” A knot of hunger twisted through her and brought fresh tears of pain and frustration. “I’m afraid you’ll leave.”
His face brightened cautiously and he sat down on the edge of the mattress. “For the last time, Sara, where were you?”
“Trying to protect you.” She could smell the salt on his skin and she reached out. The tip of her fingers brushed the back of his neck and he turned to her, pulled the pillow away from her.
Patrick’s gaze skipped her face, sweeping, instead, over her body to take in the hardened nipples, the quick rise and fall of her breasts. He moaned and she buried her face against his chest, filled all but one of her senses with him.
A little taste. Just to see if he’s as good as he smells.
Sara wrapped her trembling arms around his neck as a sob broke from her throat. Patrick instinctively embraced her, clasped her hard against his body. Her mouth was pressed against his chest and her lips ached at the erratic beat of his heart beneath the thin barrier of his cotton shirt. His taut nipple teased the edge of her mouth and she locked onto it. His body instantly grew rigid in surprise.
“You…you’re not yourself, Sara.” His hands wound their way through her hair, tightened their grip without pulling or pushing her. His entire body hovered uncertainly on the edge of his lust.
She released his nipple and tilted her face until she was staring at his mouth, her own lips pulled tight to conceal her sharp hunger. She could hear the blood pounding in his veins. His cock throbbed with the same steady pulse as blood fed his erection.
“Patrick.” She groaned his name, her voice and body tinged with bloodlust. Her lips parted at last in the only invitation Patrick needed. His mouth closed on hers, his tongue probing so deeply she felt her air being choked off. Sara strained to break free, to nibble at his lips, run her tongue along his jaw line. She leaned back until they fell onto the bed, his hard body pushing her down into the mattress, the bulge of his cock pressing through his jeans against her flat stomach.
She reached down to unbuckle Patrick’s belt. His cell phone was still hooked to the side and it rang, an urgent twitter of three rings that repeated itself as she unhooked the phone and let it fall to the floor.
“I’ve got to answer that,” Patrick said.
His cock strained against Sara as he stretched for the phone. She arched her hips, smiled when the phone fell from his hand. She had his pants undone now, could see beads of pre-cum falling from the tip of his cock. She wrapped her hand around him, smeared the drops in circles around the tip while he struggled to pick up the phone again and find the on button.
“Oh, God, Sara,” he breathed into her ear. “You’re so fucking hot, just let me answer this, I’ve got to.”
She brought her fingertips to her lips, sucked the fluid from them, her stomach screaming for blood. Patrick finally turned the cell phone on and panted a hello into the mouthpiece, keeping his gaze locked on Sara’s mouth and fingertips.
The voice on the other end of the phone snapped Sara to her senses. It was Colm, yelling excitedly into Patrick’s ear. She closed her eyes, tried to appear serene, seductive, while she strained to hear what Colm was saying.
“I’m telling you, Patrick,” Colm yelled. “He’s trying to fuck us and your girl!”
* * * *
Patrick glanced suspiciously at Sara, saw her closed eyes, full pouting mouth. His cock contracted in a threatened orgasm. Colm had to be wrong, Sara was his; in a
few seconds, she would be his completely. He could smell her pussy, wet, ready for him. He wondered how he could have doubted her, doubted his ability to win her. “You’re mistaken,” he hissed into the phone.
“I’m telling you, Hurukan is going to steal both parts of the tablet and he’s using Sara,” Colm insisted. “You’ve got to meet me at the student union, right away.”
“I can’t leave.” Patrick bit the words into the phone, oblivious to how quiet Sara had become beneath him. “I can’t.”
“You can and you will,” Colm assured him. “I will be there as soon as I can, but I have to pick something up first.”
Patrick started to repeat his protest, but the line went dead. He looked at Sara, saw that she was biting at the inside of her lips and brushed his own against her mouth. “I don’t want to leave you.”
Sara looked at him, saw the lust and fear, and something bordering on insanity, in his eyes. Bile rose in her throat as she contemplated what she had been seconds away from. She relaxed her mouth, let him kiss her one last time, knew it would be the last time. “I understand.”
“I’ll hurry back,” he promised as his hands hurried to zip and button his jeans over the bulge of his unrelenting erection.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said. It was a lie. She had to stay away from the dorm room, from its temptation of soft flesh and warm blood. She had to learn how to feed. But first, she had to stop Colm. There was no doubt in her mind that he was heading back to the house on Abincourt to steal the other half of the tablet.
Chapter Eleven
Colm’s little white Vette was parked in the semi-circle drive. The side patio doors, their leaded glass throwing off a rainbow of colors, were open and Sara entered the house through them, followed a short hallway into the kitchen and descended the stairs to the basement. Colm was standing in front of the crates, his hands resting lightly on top of the tablet. A black leather doctor’s bag was open on the floor by his feet.
