by Michele Hauf
“Inherited. From my mother’s side. She didn’t die that way, though. My parents were killed in a car crash. What about you? Your condition?”
His chuckle rumbled in his chest. It permeated my body and tickled my insides. Sliding my toes along his pants leg, I nestled tight against his chest.
“I didn’t ask for vampirism,” he said. “In fact, it was forced on me.”
“Tell me about it?”
“I …”
“If it’s a bad memory you don’t have to.” “I will tell you because you are the first woman in a long time I feel connected to. Safe.” “Seriously? With a stake not far away?” “Yes, even with that damned stake in eye’s view.”
“I was married at the turn of last century,” I began.
Veronica sat on my lap, the two of us facing the gray sky, which had begun to lighten with the threat of daylight. I didn’t worry about escaping. I didn’t want to leave Veronica now knowing how short the days could actually be between us.
“I loved my wife, Maria. But I had to leave her during the day to work the coal mines. We lived in the Yosemite Valley at the end of the nineteenth century. Little mining town I’d grown up in. One evening I returned to find the door off its hinges. I rushed inside and found Maria sitting on the floor, her dress tattered, blood on her hands and face and a dagger stuck in her heart.”
I felt Veronica tense on my lap. Her heartbeats raced mine.
“Maria whispered ‘I love you,’ and then she died. Thieves had claimed the gold locket from around her neck. She had been raped, and left to die. I realized later, she had sat there for hours with the dagger in her heart, hanging on, waiting for my return. And when finally she saw me, she was able to stop her struggle to survive.
“I went on a rampage. I knew exactly who had done it—the Crow gang. Three brothers who drank, stole and tormented all the women in the town. I killed all three of them, and another man who merely got in my way.”
“I was sentenced to hang three days following. For avenging my wife’s death. I didn’t care. Be damned to them all. I could not live without Maria. I went to my death willingly.”
Veronica clutched my tight fists and kissed them tenderly. Her warm teardrops stained my flesh and I remembered Maria’s warm blood seeping into my skin.
I swallowed the desire to shout until my lungs ached, and hugged Veronica desperately.
“I was hanged at midnight. But the rope did not snap my neck, and I struggled, fighting the noose, wishing I would simply die. The crowd left when they thought I was surely dead for I’d stopped kicking. But yet I sensed the world.
“When the moon was high in the sky the vampire arrived and cut me down. He bit into my neck, smirked and pronounced me strong and vital. It wasn’t my time to die yet. He dumped me in his wagon and sought the darkness of an abandoned mining cave. After my strength returned, I fought him. He was stronger. Life without Maria was unimaginable. I tried to kill myself by slitting my wrists. But I was already vampire. And so there you have it.”
“You eventually decided to live.”
“Yes, I accepted what life had given me. It took me a long time to get over Maria’s death. Some days I’m still not over it. Hence my visit to Paris. I thought I could chase away the memory. I have moved on, but the memories stick into my bones as if they were metal spikes.”
“Thank you for telling me that, Alexandre. I’m so sorry about your wife.”
I kissed the crown of Veronica’s head. “So am I. No one will replace her.”
“I imagine not. The scar on your neck.” “From the hangman’s noose.”
She sighed, but then jerked in my embrace. “Oh my God, the sun is on the horizon.”
“I can slip along the shadows of the buildings to get home. Will I see you on the dance floor tonight?”
“I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
MY ATTEMPT to become a heartless assassin had failed. Thankfully. I was no killer. That I’d gone through the motions, and gained confidence and learned how to act and react in a dangerous situation had shattered my desire for witless revenge against something I could never stop.
No one wants to die. But I wasn’t angry about it anymore. Death isn’t spiteful. It doesn’t pick and choose. It is random. So random as to steal an innocent woman from her loving husband and then force him to witness her pain.
Oh, Alexandre. How he must have suffered to know he would live forever yet could never give that life to Maria. I am glad he chose life, and hadn’t become reckless and attempted to make someone stake him.
I didn’t need immortality. Nor did I want to replace Maria. I wouldn’t be around long enough to matter to him. But I did want all the time with Alexandre I could manage.
I dressed in my sexiest dress tonight. It was sheer red with discreet lining, yet when the light hit it just so, it made me look as if I was nude beneath.
As usual the dress plunged in the back. I loved the feel of Alexandre’s hand against my flesh as we danced. He never tried to force me into a move. He was the consummate leader in that he suggested the direction he’d like to go, but if I desired a different path, then he followed.
Exactly how he was off the dance floor.
How could a vampire be so caring? They couldn’t all be monsters. Why had I never questioned my training once? My teacher had been most convincing they were all evil.
I sniffed away a tear thinking of Alexandre walking in to find his wife who had tendered her last breaths until he returned home to finally die. And now he had to live with that pain an eternity. Forever. It wasn’t as though a person could erase memory.
Truly, immortality was not all it was cracked up to be.
I wanted to make his eternity more bearable. If he would allow it.
Locking the door and skipping down the steps, I made the dance club quickly and pushed through the crowd.
My lover stood at the edge of the dance floor, his hand held out for me to clasp.
We danced the first tanda, and the second without pause. Eight tangos. Eight heart-racing moments of passion-laced contact. Eight more sweet memories to carry with me the rest of my days.
I was determined to dance until sunrise with Veronica.
After pausing to sip some water (she doesn’t like alcohol and I find it goes to my head too quickly) we resumed the dimly lit dance floor. We refused the open embrace. Why the distance when we could press close and talk to one another without speaking a word?
When a man leads the tango his intentions come from his chest and torso. Veronica read my intent as if she were the interpreter of my unique language. We walked counterclockwise around the circumference of the floor, avoiding the poseurs who occupied the middle.
When I signaled my intention, she paused minutely, and I knew she preferred a switch to lead. I allowed it because following her is daring and yet submissive, but also, it made me feel so strong I surrendered willingly.
After a dozen or so dances, I had fallen into the bliss our connection forged. The music provided but a setting to our private embrace. No one else mattered.
I nudged aside a wisp of dark hair from her cheek, and whispered at Veronica’s ear, “I love you.”
Her body reacted. Her breasts hugging at my chest, I felt her hard nipples through my shirt. She slid her leg along mine, drawing it up and caressing my shin with her toe. Sexual conversation via a dance move.
We held there for a few beats, unmindful of the dancers moving around us. We committed a faux pas by pausing too long and forcing others to bypass us. Neither of us cared.
“I love you, too,” she said at my mouth.
I tasted her words and kissed her quickly. We twisted and stepped backward. No time to pause for a longer kiss. That short contact was more perfect than any other. For it sealed a pact between the two of us—slayer and vampire.
“Let’s go home and make love,” I said to her. “I thought we already were.”
“We are. But I prefer the dance mov
e that sees you naked and pressed against me.”
“Will you bite me, Alexandre?”
I broke the embrace and studied her eyes. No wonder, no teasing. She was serious.
“Just a bite,” I said. “Nothing more.” Meaning, we would not make her a vampire. She wasn’t ready for it. I was, perhaps.
No. I would not go there. Could not dream.
“Right. Just that.” She wanted something different. Something she could never completely understand. A dark tease at immortality. A sacrifice of soul. “I want you to have a part of me. So you’ll never forget me.”
I looked aside. I didn’t want her to see the tear welling at the corner of my eye.
I had been transformed to vampire against my will. I would never do that to someone. Yet hadn’t Veronica the right to ask for the life she should be granted? Who was I to determine the right and wrong of it?
My world was horrible, dangerous, the battle we vampires had with the werewolves keep me vigilant. And yet my world was also remarkable, forgiving and promised an endless future.
I could not decide what was more deplorable—Veronica’s sentence or mine.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WE SURFACED from the dance club to chaos. A fire engine was parked before the adjacent building, and flames whipped out of the building’s windows.
Alexandre pushed me left, away from the havoc, yet he veered right. I let him go. He spoke to one of the firemen, nodding and pointing to the building. He wanted to make sure everyone was all right, that no one had been trapped inside.
How many bloodsucking vampires would have the same concern for mere humans?
Flushed with admiration for him, I leaned against something solid and smiled to myself. And then the solid thing locked its arms about me.
I got half a scream out before he clamped a hand over my mouth and dragged me down the street. Arms flailing, I groped for hold on anything, a chair placed before a restaurant, the railing of a gate before that same restaurant. I kicked backward, but he was too strong.
And he was a vampire—because he reeked of blood.
When we arrived at a T where the road turned left and right down an alley, he stopped and took his hand from my mouth. I screamed Alexandre’s name, but realized too late, that was what my captor had wanted.
Alexandre turned, scanning where he had left me. He tracked down the street. When his sight pinpointed me, the vampire whisked me to the right, and handed me over to another burly man who waited. He bent and hefted me over his shoulder, and took off running.
They would lead my lover into a trap.
Whether or not it was I who wielded the stake, I would be the death of Alexandre.
The fire had been a cruel distraction. I knew it as my heart pounded viciously against my rib cage.
This would be my punishment for killing one of my own.
I stroked my fingers over the scar running along my neck. Not if I had anything to say about it.
Vampirism grants me supernatural speed. I turned the corner into the alleyway but seconds after I’d heard Veronica scream. Unfortunately vampirism made her captors quick, too. Two blocks ahead, they disappeared to the left.
Passing an iron gate that decorated the front of a tourist shop, I grabbed the iron post and bent it, twisting to break it off. A makeshift stake. I would kill them all if they harmed one centimeter of her flesh.
It was happening again. Another senseless crime against my heart.
It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to feel anything for a woman beyond friendship or to use her as a sex partner. I cared for Veronica. I could even admit I loved her. Dancing together had quickened our intimacy, and I had probably known that first dance she was the one woman I had been searching for since Maria’s murder.
“Not again,” I growled. “They won’t take the woman I love away from me.”
I smashed the iron bar across the corner of a brick building as I rounded it swiftly. My fangs lowered. I would tear out hearts if I had to.
There, beyond an open iron gate, a garden was tucked between two buildings. It was common in the city to find these secret alcoves. The heady scent of some flower I couldn’t name overwhelmed the cherry and vanilla scent I had followed. Veronica’s scream routed through my senses and opened my pores to her innate fragrance. It was flooded with fear, an acrid odor I could literally taste.
Slipping by the low-hanging vines dusted heavy flower blooms across my shoulder. I walked into the depths of the garden. There at the far wall laced with more wild vines, held by two vampires, stood Veronica. She didn’t struggle; she looked ready to pass out.
Before them stood Bruce Westing, a lackey for the Anakim tribe, who had tried to convince me to join them upon arrival in Paris. I already belonged to tribe Nava back in the States. Vampires could switch alliances at will, but I was not interested in a tribe of vampires who believed they had descended from bloodsucking giants.
I held the iron stake near my hip, my knuckles tight.
“You killed one of our own?” Bruce tossed out in mocking disbelief. “Alexandre, have we not walked a wide path around one another as agreed? You do your thing, we do ours?”
“They were going to kill her,” I said. It was the wrong thing to say.
“She was going to slay them!”
“Oh, come on. Her?” I wanted to meet Veronica’s eyes, to convey I was going to get her out of this somehow, but it was wiser to focus on Bruce. “She’s a bitty thing. The moment your men were on her she lost all confidence. She couldn’t slay a mouse.”
I did catch Veronica’s defiant hmmph. I loved her for her spunk.
I loved her for her daring.
I loved her for the silent language we spoke when we danced.
“Let her go,” I said. “You’ll gain no favor by taking out an innocent.”
“Whether she possesses any ability to slay or just likes to blow smoke,” Bruce said, “she is a slayer. If you hadn’t been fucking her, you’d have taken her out by now, too.”
“Enough!” Lowering my head, but keeping my eyes on Bruce, I growled deeply, showing my fangs. “Release her.”
“You’ll have to stake me to get to her,” he offered, spreading his arms to display his chest as a target. His fangs were exposed in challenge as well. “But I promise my men can break her pretty little neck before I pluck that pitiful stake you’re holding from my chest.”
“It will kill you.” I spun the iron stake between my fingers.
The argument was futile. I could stake the man, but indeed, Veronica would die while I was occupied with murder.
A new tactic was required.
I met Veronica’s eyes. She shook her head subtly. Silly girl, she thought to influence my decision? She may have little time left on this earth, but I intended to ensure she enjoy every single one of those moments. “Me for her,” I said. “Release her and you can have me.”
Bruce scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, I don’t think so. I like spilling pretty girls’ blood. And I really love it when they scream.”
“She is dying,” I argued. “It is some mortal cancer. She has but a few months left. You’re not going to steal anything from her that hasn’t already been taken away.”
Bruce turned to Veronica. “Is that true?”
Veronica winced. If she dared to lie …
Bruce stalked up to her and slapped his hand to her cheek. I tensed.
“Tell me the truth,” he said, using, I knew, subtle persuasion to influence her mind.
“I am,” Veronica answered.
With a nod of his head, Bruce had his men release Veronica. “Take him.”
“Wait!” I shouted.
“Now what?” Bruce asked dryly.
“Allow me to kiss her goodbye.” I tossed the iron stake through the air and Bruce caught it smartly. “And then I am yours.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE IDIOT VAMPS agreed to Alexandre’s request. Now he would whisk me away from a sure massac
re. Except, I knew the whisking away wasn’t going to happen as Alexandre approached and his sad eyes told me everything I didn’t want to see.
He was serious about surrendering himself to save me. Me. A woman who had but a year to live!
“Don’t do this,” I whispered as he neared me. My body shook palpably. My throat was dry. I couldn’t calm myself. “After they kill you,” I said quietly as he pressed his chest to mine as if to dance, “they’ll come after me.”
“You will run as soon as we’ve parted. I’ll occupy them long enough to give you a head start. Kiss me, Veronica.”
His mouth pressed to mine. Tears rolled down my cheeks and wetted our lips. It was horrible. Bittersweet. Agonizing. I couldn’t let him go—would not. Not ever.
“Allow me the kiss that will grant you freedom?” he whispered.
I knew what he asked. And I didn’t have to consider the options I’d vacillated previously. “Yes,” I simply said.
“Bite me.”
With his back to the waiting vampires, Alexandre bent into my neck. The intrusion of his fangs hurt but I did not cry out. He penetrated my flesh and the growl of satisfaction that accompanied shimmied throughout my being. He sucked hard, drawing out my blood. I felt no pleasure, could not.
This was our goodbye kiss.
Working too quickly for what I had hoped could have been a leisurely indulgence in one another’s flesh, I took enough blood from Veronica to remember her taste, but not enough to satisfy the craving that had burned in me for days. I couldn’t risk Bruce and his men suspecting.
Drawing out my teeth before she would experience the blissful orgasm that accompanied the vampire’s kiss, I regretted not being able to grant her that pleasure.
“Run now, and think of me often.” I shoved her away and turned to face Bruce. “Promise me she will be safe.”
Bruce shrugged. Then he straightened and his gaze fixed to my face, intensely interested in something on it.
I thrust out my tongue to taste my flesh. Damn. A dribble of blood sat at the corner of my mouth. The plan had changed. “Run, Veronica!”
