When Darkness Falls - Six Paranormal Novels in One Boxed Set
Page 61
“If the victim is awake when captured, the influence will keep them in a state of calm, controlled by the Cruor until the bite releases its venom and mutates the human’s blood. It can also be used to lure their prey. Without influence, the process is exceedingly more difficult, as some humans are not as easy to track. Same can be said of animals.”
I sat upright and explored my wrist from every angle. Bruising remained, but nothing more. I looked at Adrian, a glimmer of trust rushing through my veins. Fear and disgust, however, would not be so easily kept at bay.
“This is all pretty fucked up. Killing other people to live?” The words were leaving my mouth, and the questions were being answered, but none of it felt real. Could I deny what I’d seen with my own eyes?
“You confuse opinion with truth. Many of us control our impulse for blood. We are more in danger from your kind than you are from ours. What do you think humans would do if they knew of elementals?”
“Apparently bring their friends to your underground clubs.” I shot Ivory a glance, but immediately regretted doing so when I saw the pure remorse weighing on her features.
“I understand you are afraid,” Adrian said, “but we must ensure no one else learns of your exposure to the Cruor. Your life would be in danger.”
I flexed my wrist. The pain was all but gone, along with the swelling. Everything came into sharp focus. “I thought you said there was no real danger in knowing?”
“It is true the more recent laws protect your kind from ours,” Adrian said, “but the laws commanding they not kill humans are meant to protect them, no one else. Anyone who learns their secret may be turned or killed. Especially if they are of interest or threat.”
“What’s the point? Even if they said something, no one would believe them.”
“Under no circumstance are you to say anything. It’s bad enough you’ve drawn attention to yourself—you wouldn’t want anything to happen to your friends or family.” Adrian’s hand cupped the doorknob, gripping it so tightly his fingernails somehow dug into the tarnished metal. “As for a ‘point’? There is none. It is only an excuse.”
I turned to Ivory. “How is my life in danger, but not yours? You’ve known longer than I have.”
“Marcus has shown an interest in you.”
“Maybe I can borrow your aura,” I mumbled. “I don’t understand, Ivory. Why would you hang around people who can control your mind or kill you on impulse?”
“Please,” Ivory said, her voice pleading. “You cannot judge an entire race of elementals on a few bad of their kind. These are the people who have been there for me since . . . since . . . ”
Tears welled in her eyes, and I swallowed. Her lover had been murdered. That was why she’d moved to Colorado. Now she was flirting with danger, unless, like she said, not all Cruor were bad. Adrian had saved me and healed my wounds. Even if he still looked like he wanted to eat me, he was clearly nothing like Marcus and Marcus’ companions.
Of all people, I should’ve known not to get all judgmental, but life had a funny way of showing me what a hypocrite I was on a regular basis.
Either way, I didn’t need acceptance so badly as to befriend the Cruor. Not that they came across very friendly to begin with.
Adrian released a heavy sigh. “Marcus has strong ties with the Maltorim. It’s best if none of you return to Club Flesh.”
Don’t need to tell me twice.
Ivory nodded. “You can’t repeat any of this to anyone—not even Lauren.”
The whole, ‘with great knowledge comes great responsibility’ crap. Except the last thing I wanted was more responsibility.
Charles pressed his hands onto his knees and stood. “Adrian and I ought to get going.”
“Not so fast,” I said, and not entirely because I wanted to stare at his gorgeous face a little longer. “I have a lot of questions to ask you.”
“I would rather you didn’t,” Charles replied.
I raised my eyebrows. “You don’t think I deserve at least that much?”
Without a word of response, he bowed to kiss my hand, his lips smooth and warm against my skin. The mauve of his lips, hinting at tones of cognac, only made his eyes seem all the more deep teal. I couldn’t break my gaze from his face. Those lips were perfect—full, soft . . . kissable. But sexy lips wouldn’t excuse him from leaving me to be attacked. He could have taken me with him when he went for help.
Now here he was, moving about so calmly, so confidently, as though he’d done nothing wrong. That alone rendered my attraction to him irrelevant.
Ivory glared in his direction, and he gave a small dip of his head. “Goodbye for now, Sophia.”
“Bye,” I whispered, too stunned by the severity of his gaze to press him any further. I turned to Adrian. “Thanks for . . . well, thank you.”
Adrian saluted us. “Take care, Miss Sophia. Miss Ivory.”
As Charles passed Ivory on the way out the door, he grabbed her arm. “She deserves to know.”
Ivory pulled free and narrowed her eyes. “I’ll tell her everything,” she said. “Anything to keep her safe.”
{eight}
MORNING ARRIVED within an hour of the men’s departure. The sun glinted through the bedroom window, magnifying heat on my face. I rolled away.
“You look much better,” Ivory said from the bedside. “Would anything else help?”
I circled my wrist before pushing myself to my feet. “A shower?” And about a hundred more questions answered.
Did my aura—or lack thereof—have something to do with my curse? Or was I just a vessel for all things horrid and unexplainable?
“Follow me.” Ivory led me down the hall, the carpet in her old home worn but comforting. “I dropped by your house while you slept and picked up a few things. Hope you don’t mind.”
“That’s why I gave you the spare key.”
Actually, when I’d given her the key, it wasn’t so she could pick up clothes for me if I lost my purse while being attacked by vampire-like creatures in the woods behind a supernatural club.
Ivory retrieved two towels from the hall closet. “These are wicked soft.”
The towels blurred somewhere beyond the sudden vision clouding my gaze. A dead bear. Then . . . darkness. Fur pressed to my nose, my forehead. Well, not mine, but whoever owned the vision.
The vision tilted back, panning across the carcass to the top of someone’s head of dark hair and their hunched shoulders, their face buried against the blood-matted fur. Blood smeared over dark-skinned hands, and a familiar ring with a large scripted ‘A’ I’d seen only hours before hugged a finger on one hand.
Adrian.
The images faded, and Ivory’s towels filled my sight. Egyptian cotton, cinnamon red, according to the tag. I would have called the color rust. I opened my mouth to say something about the vision, but since I didn’t know whether it might be related to my curse, it was probably best to keep quiet.
Ivory opened the bathroom door. “It’s not much,” she said, flipping on the bathroom light. “Shampoo, conditioner, soap—all that stuff is in a shower caddy. Holler if you need anything.”
She shut the door, and I jumped at the volume of the click. I set the towels on top of the bag of clothing she’d left on the toilet seat lid. A pale yellow decorative towel hung over a bar on the wall, lace trim fluttering around the hem, and the flames of lit candles on the vanity flickered in the vanilla-scented draft.
The bathroom light created a sudden pulsing pain in the front of my head. Once in the shower, hot water pelted against my skin, and the body wash surrounded me with the scent of wisteria petals, fresh melon, and cherry blossoms, layered over base notes of coconut and vanilla.
My senses were in overdrive, and the silence in my mind felt unnatural, almost uncomfortable. A pulsing but painless throb. It wasn’t truly peace. The noise had merely been locked away in a soundproof room where it pounded its fists on the walls, trying to burst out again.
Had Adrian’s blo
od silenced the noise? Could his blood also cause me to see flashes of his memories?
How was I supposed to make sense of the last twenty-four hours? That Ivory had kept this from me for so long created a distance between us, yet knowing the same secret also brought us closer together. Who was I to judge? I had secrets, too.
After I rinsed the shampoo from my hair, I stepped out, wrapped myself in a towel, and turned the faucet off. Just then, another image flashed into my mind. This one was faster. A mausoleum in a cemetery. Adrian’s hand lifting to wipe a tear, his gold ring swiping against his eyelashes. The images vanished.
Shaking, I huffed and fumbled for my clothes. My hips ached as I pulled on my khaki skirt, and I looked down to examine the cause. Four tiny bruises stacked above each hip.
Oh.
A soft gasp escaped my lips as realization set in: the tiny, barely-there bruises must have been from the dig of Charles’ fingers as we danced. Had his grip been that strong? How hadn’t I noticed?
Thinking of his hands there again sent a shiver blazing down my spine, and I had to force myself to push away the betraying sensation.
I pulled on the sky-blue cashmere sweater Lauren had given me last Christmas and tugged on my chocolate Eskimo boots. Maybe I could get some answers from Ivory without being too direct.
Back in her room, Ivory was folding down the top of her comforter, which looked like burnt wood against her bone-white sheets. The room smelled of clean linen and the soap I’d used, but strangely, the room carried another scent. One I recognized to be Ivory, though I’d never noticed the scent before. Kind of like watermelon candy and something heavier. Loneliness? Could a person smell lonely?
My head was probably playing tricks on me due to knowledge of her past. She’d never told me the details, but one night in my college dorm room, she shared with me that her lover had been murdered. I saw her in a new light after that. A light I couldn’t share with Lauren, even though it might help her understand why Ivory was a little rough around the edges.
I flopped onto Ivory’s bed and stared at the henna design on the ceiling. “Where’d you find that body wash?”
She leaned against the bed. “The dollar store.” She laughed. “It’s nothing special. The Cruor blood is assaulting your senses. Usually that side-effect fades within a few hours.”
“You’ve drank it before?”
“Once or twice.” She patted the comforter. “Come sit. I’ll brush your hair.”
I sat up and hugged one of her throw pillows to my stomach, and she sat close behind with her legs tucked under her.
I clicked my tongue, quickly replaying Charles’ parting exchange with her. “What were you going to tell me . . . you know, when you told Charles you’d tell me everything?”
She grabbed a hairbrush from the side table drawer. “You’ll need to know a few things,” she said. “About fighting the Cruor.”
“I don’t plan on running into them again.”
“Did you plan on running into them the first time?” She pulled the brush’s soft bristles through my hair and then leaned over one of my shoulders. “Staking, decapitation, and burning. That should cover it. Pretty self-explanatory.”
“Forgive me if I don’t share your enthusiasm. I’m still trying to come to terms with how this is real, yet people don’t know.”
Ivory parted my hair with her fingernail and brushed the ends on one side, flattening my curls. “You remember Mr. Petrenko?”
My heart stuttered at hearing his name spoken aloud. Spoken outside my own thoughts. “Mr.—Mr. Petrenko?”
“Yeah. Read about him in the news when I was in high school. I think the whole country heard. Surely you know all about it. You lived here when it happened. It was the media-mystery of the century! Who’s dead body is found surrounded by so much of their own blood, without a single wound on their body? People still talk about his murder.”
Some people still thought about it, too. Thought about how he’d been standing outside with a cigarette burning down between his fingers, smoke billowing from his mouth as though he were breathing into the cold, while they snuck into his store to fill a large paper bag with food.
I’d known stealing was illegal. I wanted to feed the runaway girl I’d met down by the tracks. Get her help. I couldn’t have stolen from Mother’s cupboard or asked even asked her for the money. I feared Mother might try to ‘help’ that girl in all the wrong ways. Mother might not consider the girl’s situation. The abuse. The girl’s stepfather, and the things he’d done. But none of those things excused my actions.
As I’d been sneaking out the back near the dumpsters, Mr. Petrenko saw me. He hollered and started after me, but then he was bleeding, and thoughts were tumbling in my mind—You have to die, you have to die, you have to die—and I told myself those couldn’t be my thoughts, but then he was dead on the ground and it was only me in that parking lot.
I don’t know what happened. I just know I didn’t kill him.
I couldn’t have.
I swallowed and forced myself to speak. “Murdered in front of his own store. I doubt anyone will forget.”
“People don’t notice the Cruor because they don’t believe in them. They’ve never seen them, or, if they have, they know to keep their mouths shut.” She started to brush the other side of my hair. “You’d be wise to do the same.”
“Are you saying a Cruor killed Mr. Petrenko?”
“As good a guess as any.”
“Why didn’t he have any wounds?” I asked, though I knew that wasn’t true. He’d had them, at least when I’d seen him die. They were just gone by the time the cops arrived.
“Alls I know is, Adrian’s blood healed you. His own wrist healed in mere moments. You saw, right? Well, they can also seal smaller wounds with their saliva. Small wounds . . . like punctures to the main artery in the neck.”
“How can you be sure? It could have been—” Been what? A human? Me? I’d been there, and I hadn’t seen him killed by any Cruor. I hadn’t seen what killed him, or who. I’d just seen him alive one second and dead the next.
“Can’t say for sure.” She smoothed long strands of hair away from my face. The brush scraped through my shirt and snagged on my bra strap. I winced, and Ivory eased up. “But isn’t it strange?”
I guess she hadn’t heard I’d been there when it happened. I’d never talked to her about it. Heck, she didn’t even know about how my mom died. Ivory was a private person, and maybe that was why she never asked many questions.
Across the room, a beaded lamp with fringe the color of paprika dimmed. One of the tassels swayed, as though a breeze had passed through. Pinpricks of cold spotted up my arm and neck, but when I blinked again, the tassel had stilled. I forced myself back to conversation, making an effort to keep my tone light.
I couldn’t talk about Mr. Petrenko anymore, but silence would make my discomfort too obvious. Thankfully I wasn’t lacking in the things-to-say department.
“Does Charles always stalk people?” I asked.
“Charles? Stalk people?” Ivory let out a bark of laughter. She combed her fingers through my hair a few times, springing my curls back to life. “Why would you even ask?”
“I saw him outside my window one night. Then again at the woods.”
“I found you by the woods, too. Do you think I’m stalking you?”
Okay, so I was a paranoid, self-absorbed idiot. But I was also cautious.
“Ivory, do you believe one person’s life can be closely tied to another’s?”
“I do.” She stopped brushing, and I turned to face her. She was frowning. “This about Charles?”
“I’m not sure. But for a stranger, he’s been popping up in my life a lot. And at the strangest times.”
“You like him?”
“After last night . . . ” I shrugged, trying to hide the hurt that confusion and uncertainty were pressing into my chest. “I still don’t know why he left me. I could have gone with him to get help.”
I turned around, and Ivory resumed brushing in silence. We shared a secret now. If the Cruor trusted her with their secrets, then I could trust her with mine. I could tell her about the voices.
“About the whole Cruor-thing.” My hands were shaking, but I held them tight in my lap, doing little more than causing my shoulders to tremble instead.
“I said I’m sorry. You need to understand why I didn’t tell you. And don’t just say you do, because you need to keep it a secret for the same reasons.”
“I do understand. There’s something I’ve been keeping from you, too.”
“There . . . is?” She nearly stumbled over the two words, her voice smaller than usual.
The Cruor’s existence defied explanation, just like my curse. Ivory might be the only one who would understand. The only one who might accept me even knowing about the voices. “Remember the positive energy ritual I told you about? A few weeks back?”
She nodded.
“Well, ever since, I’ve been hearing these voices—”
The hairbrush paused. Ivory’s voice came out clipped and quiet. “What kind of voices?”
I shouldn’t have said anything. Obviously feeding on blood was fine. Seeing auras was acceptable. But no matter what ‘world’ you lived in, hearing voices meant you were crazy.
“Nothing,” I said, closing my eyes against the hurt. “Anyway, they’re gone now. Probably just stress or something.”
“Maybe.” She dropped the brush on the bed. “We should get you home.”
ON THE RIDE HOME, we passed yards of grass covered in frost. A finger unable to move less than three hours ago flicked the car lock back and forth with ease. How powerful was Cruor blood? Could it cure cancer?
“Will you be there for Samhain?” I asked, blurting the first thing that came to mind. Blurting anything, really, that might break the silence between us. Though the Sabbat was still nearly two months away, it was present in my mind as the best chance to speak directly with my ancestor’s spirit. I hadn’t given up on that, even if the voices were on vacation.