She searched for a phrase.
Stephen watched, as if trying to comprehend.
Words spilled out before they even took shape in her mind. “When I’m with you, I understand. I don’t need to ask any more questions. I think that, maybe, everything will end up turning out all right in the end.” She paused. “But after each bite, real life happens again and all the questions won’t stop coming.”
“Questions. About what?”
Kim slid to the ground, her back finding the wood from a decimated chair frame to support her. Numb, she felt so numb.
“Lori,” she said, closing her eyes, seeing her laughing sister on the backs of her lids. Watching Lori’s strawberry-blond hair catch a Tennessee breeze in the old days.
When she opened her eyes, dampness blurred her vision. It turned Stephen and the darkness into one black-and-green shape, like a kaleidoscope’s shards.
It was only when tears fell that he became clear again.
He’d ventured closer, his expression as collected as usual except for a slightly furrowed forehead.
“My big sister,” Kim said, wiping her cheek against her shoulder. She didn’t want him to see her crying. The time for crying should’ve ended a long time ago. “After her death, I lost faith in anything and everything. I lost hope, and sometimes I think you’ll be the one who can…”
Give it back to her by detailing what it was like to pass from this life to another?
“Sister.” Stephen said it as if testing the word.
Then, before Kim could react, he closed the distance between them, reaching out, placing his fingers on her temple so gently that it had all the weight of a butterfly.
It was as if he were asking to see what she was really thinking, to witness everything she found so impossible to express in words.
“Yes,” she whispered, body going limp and warm as she felt a pleasant heaviness in her mind, as if something welcome had joined her there after she’d given it permission.
She pictured Lori again, laughing, lifting her face to the sun.
Seconds later, Stephen removed his fingers, the cold/warm imprint of them lingering and throbbing on her flesh even as the weight in her mind disappeared. She felt a keen loss—was it because he was gone?—and realized that he had joined with one of her memories in his own vampire way.
“I’m sorry, Kimberly,” he said.
“For reading my thoughts? I was fine with that.”
“No.” He moved away, came to a plastic-covered sofa, then busied himself with taking off the tarp. It was as if someone had stopped in the middle of moving out the furniture, leaving only a stray piece here and there. “I’m sorry she’s gone and…”
A slant of weak moonlight rotated through the hole in the wall to reveal Stephen staring into the distance, the glow robbed from his gaze.
“And?” Kim asked, wanting so badly to reconnect with whatever it was he had brought to her just now.
“And I understand. I could see what you might be searching for.” He lowered himself to the sofa, looking defeated. “Yet I cannot give peace to you—not anything more than the specter of it, anyway.”
Her posture slumped. His bite: The one thing that had infused her with hope, the one thing that maybe could’ve explained everything, and it wasn’t real.
Yet…Dammit, she still wanted him to come to her again.
It was all she had.
Sadness expanded until it became her voice. “I miss her so much. To this day, I worry about her and I can’t stop.”
“I know.” He just kept looking at nothing. “Is she happy now that she’s left this world? Or do they even exist in any form?”
Kim tilted her head. When had she turned to they?
The vampire seemed to catch on without her even having to ask. “I have seen loved ones leave, as well. When I was human, I lost my brother….”
He stopped, as if becoming just as confused as she was about all the questions.
“Your brother,” she added, “you can’t stop thinking about him, either?”
When their gazes met, she saw the same devastation she knew and it made things worse, not better. She’d always wanted to find someone who understood, but she didn’t want them to feel as empty as she did.
Tears pushed at the backs of her eyes. Stephen really didn’t know the answers. And, if a creature who lived so close to death didn’t, who did?
She broke into a sob and angrily tried to hold back. Yet the force of so much built-up sorrow overtook her, reducing her to silent tears that she tried to hide with all her might.
“Kimberly…” he whispered, his voice a balm, the very thing she needed, even though she knew it wasn’t real. It was only a vampire trick, the seduction he’d used on others to get the blood he needed to survive.
But she found herself talking through the tears, relieving the burden she’d been carrying for more than a year now because there was no other way to cope.
“We said we’d always be together.” Kim twined her fingers together, staring at them through a blur. “Sisters. But she left me. And my parents…They’re like ghosts. I feel like they’re not even there anymore, either.”
“Everyone needs family, to have someone else,” Stephen said. “Everyone.”
He’d said it with such wistfulness that Kim held her breath and watched him, her own sadness suspended.
A bite. It was the only thing that had made her feel vital in so long. It would make her feel so much better now, even if it was just a fantasy.
As if sensing her need, Stephen stiffened.
“I saw many things in your mind,” he said, as if trying to steer clear of what she was gearing up to get from him. “Not only did you lose your sister, but her child, as well. Although Lori was only a month and a half along, you had already started buying toys for your niece or nephew.”
Kim shied backward, spine against the chair wood. It wasn’t so much that he’d read this from her—it was that the naked truth burned.
“I saw that you used to want children, too,” Stephen added.
She tried to play it off, as if what he said was in the past and therefore sterile. “I used to. Believe it or not, I used to think I was a normal woman who just wanted a husband and family. But after our first…encounter…I rethought all of that. I became someone else entirely—a person who didn’t need those kinds of ties because she knew they could disappear in an awful second.”
Stephen narrowed his eyes in perception. “But sometimes you miss what you used to want, like children. Sometimes you wonder if you can ever go back to feeling that way, and then you remember the anguish of losing.”
Stunned by his precision, she sat there, anesthetized. Then a yearning crept over her, as if let out of its cage. It begged to allow in what she’d denied herself after Lori and her child had died.
Sending him a pleading glance, she said, “I’m so scared to want the same things. I’m scared of seeing them disappear before I even have them, so I changed my needs and told myself I’d never have to deal with the devastation.”
Now I want what’s much easier to get, she thought. Sex had tided her over for so long that she’d convinced herself it was all there was.
But Stephen had reminded her otherwise, even as he fulfilled her simpler needs.
When he took her hand in his, his skin was cool, otherworldly. It made her want to cry again, because merely touching him wasn’t going to solve anything.
She knew that without a doubt now.
AS KIMBERLY LOWERED her head and hid her face from Stephen, he didn’t force the issue. He could not stand to watch her cry, and he was thankful her sorrow was not in full view.
He could not afford to empathize with it.
Still, her naked emotion touched him. He had no idea his bite could mean so much to one of them. It had always been just a means to a meal, a necessity. Yet, it was only now, in the net of her tears, that he realized he had the potential to have wreaked this sort of personal damage on ev
ery woman he had seduced into giving blood. In his detached state of being, he had refused to even consider that.
While Kimberly fought her tears, Stephen’s chest felt pried open, his heart exposed and prodded to sharp sensation. He didn’t know how to comfort her, though his instincts screeched at him to try.
He had brought a measure of this upon her, and he was compelled to alleviate it. After all, he had spent years robbing and his crimes had crept into his consciousness over the decades, making him less and less comfortable with his lifestyle, though he didn’t know how else to carry through the years.
But how? How could he bring her comfort short of the bite she coveted?
Earlier, Kimberly’s eyes had gleamed with something like hope when he had mentioned his younger brother, and he knew just how much her sister’s death hurt her—when she had given him permission to enter her mind, that was all he had seen. Thoughts of this Lori drove her, darkened her.
Shouldn’t he attempt to soothe her by commiserating about his own losses?
He dredged up Nathan’s face, but it was muddled by the passage of time. So many faces, decade by decade, century by century. Even those he had loved had faded like portraits veiled by dust and left untended.
Holding her hand, he hesitated one more moment, reluctance getting the better of him. In the corner, a rat stuck its head out of a tunneled hole. Stephen silently commanded it to leave, just as he had done with the rest of the creatures when he had brought Kimberly here to rest.
To rest, he thought. To heal.
“His name was Nathan,” Stephen finally said.
Kimberly froze, as if attempting to decode what language he was speaking. Then she sniffed back her sadness, her grip tightening around his hand. She was so warm, so fragrant and tempting, her tears bringing out a purity not unlike petals washed by rain.
His blood quickened, but he stilled his urges.
“Nathan?” she asked.
“As a human,” he said, “I was born in the early eighteenth century on a manor well outside of London, the first son of servants. My parents expired…” The word seemed wrong, absent of the emotion he had felt as a young man, so he made another attempt. “My parents died in an overturned coach as they traveled to pay respects to an elderly aunt I had never met.”
Pausing, he saw that she had pushed a stray lock of red hair from her face, revealing tear-stained pale skin that he yearned to caress. Yet, it wasn’t out of passion—not entirely. He wished to lay a palm to her cheek because it might quell the unnerving, unnameable emotion these memories were stirring—memories unexplored since his choice to turn away from humanity all those years ago.
“Were you young when it happened?” she asked. “I can’t imagine being orphaned even now, when I’m supposed to be this adult who can handle it.”
“I was…” Stephen was surprised to realize he didn’t recall how old he had been. He merely had a distant feeling of it being much too early to lose the people whom he had looked up to and loved.
“It’s okay.” Kimberly clasped his hand tighter.
She seemed to know that he was finding it difficult to piece together his crumbled past. He slid his fingers farther over her hand, encompassing her in his grip and thinking it was nice.
He added, “The master of the manor accepted responsibility for Nathan and me, yet I was a proud one. I wouldn’t have any part of his kindness. Besides, I dreamed of London and what the streets held for a young man with ambitions. I believed I could earn my way with perhaps an apprenticeship and then my own shop. A smithy, since I was versed in the trade on the estate.”
“You didn’t want to be a charity case,” she said.
Her tears had subsided. His instincts sent up a red flag: Stop! Your job is done! Leave!
Yet he continued, anyway, and he suspected that it was because this felt nice, too. This easy unburdening.
“Nathan had refused to accompany me to London, but I’d assured him I would return when I had become a success. I’d been determined to keep what family I’d had together, without the pity of anyone else to maintain us. So I’d made my way to the city, apprenticing at a smithy, then eventually opening my own shop. But I was always catching up financially, never stable enough to be able to take in Nathan.”
“You had to leave him behind?”
“At that point, I was not going to allow that to happen. No, I…” A combination of shame and excitement bolted through him. “I found another way to earn my coin.”
Kimberly gave him a sidelong gaze and, suddenly, the days—the nights—were back upon him. A lovely lady peeking out from the shade of a coach as he pointed a pistol at her father or husband and told him to stand and deliver.
Stephen couldn’t hold back a bitter grin. “I took to robbing the roads.”
A beat passed as Kimberly absorbed that. She was, no doubt, remembering when he had told her to stand and deliver the other night. He hadn’t left all of his past behind—just the parts that were too impossible to maintain.
“You were a…highwayman?” she asked, smiling in disbelief.
Even as a tweak of remorse got to him, his blood gave a jolt. He was once a “thrill seeker” and, even now, it appealed, mainly because his tale had dashed away Kimberly’s sadness.
“I started later than most gentleman robbers, yet lived longer than many due to unexpected circumstances.” In other words, Fegan.
Kimberly was still watching him closely. “From a mild-mannered smith to a dashing highwayman.”
Again, she was romanticizing when she shouldn’t be. Before he could correct her, however, she continued, “I know what it’s like to find a new angle of personality. Believe me.”
He thought of her reclining against the windshield of the Chevy, skin bared, breasts heavy and red-tipped.
His gums tingled as his fangs threatened.
“A highwayman,” she said.
He shouldn’t be so happy that she found him this irresistible.
Kimberly gripped his hand harder. Her skin had grown moist, her pale blue eyes wide. “Did your brother join you then?”
“No. When I’d approached him about leaving the manor, my pockets weighed with gold, he’d refused. By then he’d been a young buck in love and enjoying country life as it was, although he would have had to serve a master until the end. I’d been angry at the rejection, and I’d returned to robbing with a vengeance, as if that would prove to Nathan that he had chosen wrong.”
“I’m sure you got a nasty reputation.”
The Gray Phantom. That was what they had called him, the masked robber who roamed the roads like mist and had never gotten caught by the authorities. Yet he didn’t reveal this to her. Stoking her fire wouldn’t be wise at all.
For her nor him.
“But what about the vampire part?” Kimberly’s flushed skin spoke of her growing stimulation.
Perhaps the story should end here. Yet he found himself so enamored of her excitement that he couldn’t refrain; he would put an end to this soon. He could control the situation.
“Though I’d escaped the law, time and again, I was becoming careless.” That was an understatement. He had stopped caring altogether, feeling too alone and wondering why he continued to gather riches when Nathan would never require them. “A man—actually a vampire—named Fegan had a gang who moved into my territory. Soon, I discovered they weren’t so much interested in my loot as they were in recruiting me into their ranks. And I’d been very willing.”
Cursed to a life of hiding and isolation, he had missed Nathan, missed his parents. It’d made him all too vulnerable to the glamour of vampire togetherness, promises of jolly relationships that would last and last. “He turned me, then gave me a family again. We hid in a forest cave by day, then emerged by night to steal money, valuables and blood from our prey.”
“Still, you never got caught.”
If there were any justice in this world, he should have gotten caught at some point. Why hadn’t he?
> “No, luv. There were close calls, but we never did.”
Her pulse was thudding against her skin, echoing into his own flesh and wiping out all other thought. He welcomed that, needed that, because with the awakening of his emotions came the remorse, as well.
He had robbed, gotten off scot-free…
He embraced how his body was overriding his mind. His pulse matched her own, linking them in a primal rhythm.
“What came next?” she asked, breathless. “Tell me, Stephen.”
He didn’t even think twice now, not if he wanted to chase away this newly emerged guilt.
It felt too good to surrender.
“After highway robbery became less lucrative,” he said, “the gang moved on, always lingering on the shady side of deals, no matter where we settled in the world.”
“Where’d you go? Europe, Asia…”
“Mostly the continent, yet we couldn’t resist America, the land of opportunity. We avoided the War between the States, then profited from Reconstruction.”
That had been Fegan’s idea, and Stephen had gladly traveled overseas with the gang. Back then, before Cassandra, he had thrived on pleasing his new father, found contentment in helping to keep his vampire family comfortable.
Odd how his relationship with Fegan actually echoed the one he had with his mortal parent, and even with the Lord of the manor. Stephen had been somewhat of a “black sheep” in those cases—too stubborn to be anything like the perfect son. The same had come true with Fegan, validating a pattern that followed Stephen no matter who he was or what he had become.
“What happened next?” Kimberly asked.
Suddenly, a light seemed to dim over her, obscuring her features, but he knew it was only in his mind. Cassandra Danforth, the belle of Savannah. The woman Stephen had loved by moonlight only to be rejected in the end.
One night had changed everything—the time he had lost control and his fangs had sprouted during the heat of the moment. After witnessing her horror, he had become resentful of what he was, too self-aware of what he lacked in humanity. He had become so aware, in fact, that he had forced himself to purge any remnants, any ties to it. He had become all monster, dedicated to survival even as he abhorred it.
The Ultimate Bite Page 11
