The Vampire s Secret

by Raven Hart

  Then she was mine, inside and out. Doing my best not to hurt her, I plunged into her, reining in my eagerness. Even as I felt my seed rise I fought the natural ending to our bond. But then the pure animal pleasure overtook me and the shudders of completion rocked my body. In the aftermath I lay sprawled over her and could feel the gentle, soothing touch of her fingers on my neck. Truth be told she taught me a few things—not skills, for she’d been innocent, but more the pure intention to satisfy.

  I smiled, face pressed into the bedclothes. This, then, is what heaven must be like. Thank you, Lord, for Diana—

  Just then I felt hands on my shoulders roughly pulling me away. Diana’s scream of surprise stiffened my spine. I spun, ready to fight, and found Reedrek’s evil face and next to him, a grinning Hugo.

  The dream had shifted from heaven to hell, from beginning to end, as dreams are wont to do. I awoke with a start. In the current world, time had passed, the sun had come and gone. As I glanced around, wildly looking for Diana, I came to myself realizing I’d returned to my own private hell. Back in the dark of the tunnels, alone except for the dead humans scattered around me.

  What does not kill you, makes you stronger.

  I pushed the closest body away and stood to dust off my clothes. A hopeless cause, the same as all others. The clothes were ruined and smelled of death, new death and old. No matter. My fastidious nature seemed laughable at this point. Whom was I trying to impress? Humans?

  Diana—now mated to Hugo?

  I suppose she had loved me until she died, that much was true. But I, the perfect fool, had gone on loving her beyond death.

  Back at the harbor by early evening, I found the area hushed and cold. The cool winter rain of the evening before had passed, but the air smelled wet with the promise of more. Low, scuttling clouds carrying the scent of the marshes hid any trace of the moon. A perfect night for vampires, for death.

  For me.

  Leaning on the fender of my Mercedes, wearing fresh clothes, I had come for all or nothing.

  In the end I’d gone to Tilly’s to clean up, nearly giving her a heart seizure in the process. It was one thing for her to deal with Iban’s suffering, but mine was a new and obviously upsetting thing to her. It might have been the look of utter despair and open warfare on my face. Or it could simply have been the quantity of blood I wore like a butcher’s apron.

  Despite all our years of association I was sure these last few nights must have been mind-boggling to her. But I had no energy left for explanations, not even to Iban, who lay dying cell by rotting cell.

  He’d blinked his one good eye when I entered the room. His strong, aristocratic features were almost unrecognizable thanks to the battle being waged between the virulent rot and Iban’s natural vampiric healing process. Hunks of flesh were alternately falling off and growing back.

  “Get away…Go home,” he’d whispered. He didn’t know about the newcomers and had no idea what changes they had wrought on our plans, and I had no heart to enlighten him. Let him rot in peace.

  But I could not go home. Not yet, perhaps not ever. Eleanor’s distress was palpable now, a constant presence in my mind, and even Melaphia had taken to mentally communicating her worry to me. She pleaded for answers, plans, and offered her help even as she’d gathered clothes from my closet, including the voodoo blue coat she’d blessed with her mortal magic, and had them delivered to Tilly’s. As I slipped the jacket over a crisp, unbloodied new shirt I found her note in the pocket. She was never one to be put off long, not when there was any available means to get my attention.

  Captain, the note read simply, you are not alone.

  Ah Mel, but I am. More alone than ever because now I know what I’ve been denied for five hundred years—not by God or even Reedrek, but by the other half of my own heart. By my wife. My love for her, even perverted by our transformation, had survived. But she had chosen to deny me. And my son…

  As though I’d called his name, the hatch of the Windward rose and Will stepped up from below.

  Immediately, a high-pitched keening filled the air, and Will ducked and swung at an indistinct blur of the coalesced mist that bedeviled him. These low-flying clouds seemed to have spirits in the eddies. It was those spirits howled in the wind, and they circled the Windward like any number of enraged hornets—ready to sting.

  Amusing to watch but, in the scheme of things, rather ineffective against immortal beings. Still, it did convey a distinct lack of welcome.

  Master Jack, one of them whispered as it wafted by me on the breeze. Ah, so this was Jack’s doing. Well, best he be about defending Savannah, since his immortal skin was on the line as well. He might or might not have a sire out for his punishment, but he certainly would fall along with the other New World vampires if the double fronts of plague and invasion succeeded.

  I told myself I didn’t care. He’d shown his true colors with more lies and dishonesty. This time I would not be understanding or offer a reprieve. He wanted to be the master of his own destiny, so be it. I had my own dilemmas to solve.

  “I thought the great rebel leader, William Thorne, would be three meters tall at least,” Will taunted.

  I pushed away from the car and walked toward him. Ah, anger. A chip off the old block, as they say. “I thought you’d be dust.”

  He cocked his head. “What could you possibly know about me?”

  “Oh, I know quite a lot, having been present at your conception and—”

  “That’s a lie—Hugo made me, and I—”

  “Careful.” A voice from below stopped him. Diana’s voice reminding him I was the enemy. Well, at least she had not killed him and made him a blood drinker herself. And neither had Reedrek. I had Hugo to thank for stealing my son’s mortal soul. Another mark I would make him account for.

  Hugo appeared at Will’s side with Diana following. She kept her attention on Will, refusing even to look in my direction. I could hear an indecipherable flurry of thoughts rushing from one to the other.

  “The accommodations on your ship are first class, but I’m heartily tired of such close quarters. You must know that certain…pleasures demand a bit of privacy, eh?” Hugo said. He waited a beat for my reaction, then went on, “What sort of place is this Savannah? Are there houses to let?”

  “You make it sound as though you plan to stay.”

  “Only if we are welcome,” he replied. He put a hand on Will’s shoulder and drew Diana close to his side with his other arm. They looked quite the family, Hugo with his Norse coloring, Diana in her golden beauty, and Will, his red-gold Saxon hair marking his heritage. I could see nothing of me in him beside the expression in his angry green eyes.

  “What is your purpose here?”

  “Family business, you might say. I told you I intend to see Reedrek finished. If you’ve managed to kill him, I would know it.” He lowered his chin as his gaze bore into mine. “When I see for myself, I’ll leave.”

  “Your declaration begins to sound like a threat.”

  Hugo smiled. “Not in the least. We are brothers, after all—” His arm tightened on Diana. “—more alike than different. I have no intention of treading on your goodwill, any more than I already have.”

  My goodwill.

  It isn’t very often that an idea materializes in my head and exits my mouth before I think. But it happened then. “I’ll accommodate your group but you’ll leave the boy with me.” Diana made a small sound of shock or dismay; to be honest her reaction tasted sweet to my parched sensibilities.

  “Who are you calling a boy?” Will sputtered.

  I ignored him and went on, “That way you’ll have no distractions from your pleasure, and I’ll have a living, breathing guarantee of your peaceful intent.”

  “Done,” Hugo replied, his fingers giving Will’s shoulder a warning squeeze. I could pick up nothing of Hugo’s emotion over what I might do to his offspring…his adopted son. “Stay out of trouble,” he ordered before loosening his fingers and giving Will a
slight shove forward.

  “Wait.” Diana’s voice sent a frisson of pleasure through me. I fought the lure as she pressed something into Will’s hand, pushed past him, and made her way toward me. A few seconds later she was within arms’ reach, wary but resolute. And so very beautiful. It took an enormous effort on my part not to touch her. She smelled more of Hugo than of herself. Close quarters, indeed.

  “He doesn’t know,” she whispered, so low I myself could barely hear.

  “Know what?” I managed, trying desperately not to make a fool of myself.

  “That you are his…” She blinked as though even she couldn’t believe we were actually speaking after all this time. “His natural father.”

  There it was. Not only had I been purged from his life, but my memory had not been celebrated. Anger warmed my belly, chasing all joy of this long-dreamed-of encounter into thin, sodden air.

  “I would account that his loss,” I answered.

  “So would I.”

  Insincere laughter boiled up inside me, steeped in anger, not joy. With a smile still on my face, I looked past my lying bitch of a wife and motioned to her son. “Come, and make it quick. I have arrangements to settle.” To Hugo I said, “Stay here. I’ll send someone for you and…yours.”

  Eleven

  Jack

  Talk about your strange bedfellows. Sullivan, the hip Hollywood screenwriter, and Huey, the stinky redneck zombie, were like two peas in a supernatural pod. I’m sure there was a period of adjustment when I dropped the Californian off the night before without so much as an introduction to the walking corpse. But I guess if you’re used to rubbing elbows with the living dead like Sullivan was, you were prepared for almost anything.

  By the time I got to the garage from the plantation house where I’d spent the day, the regular card game was in full swing. Sullivan had tried to advise Huey on the finer points of Texas Hold ’Em, but evidently he gave up when he’d realized the little fellow didn’t have the guile to understand bluffing or the unrotted brain capacity to understand, well, much of anything for that matter.

  Sullivan walked over to me, leaving the irregulars to their game. “Any word about Iban?”

  I shook my head. “Not a thing. Maybe no news is good news.”

  The human forced a smile. “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  Every time I felt like putting the bite on this guy, he did something to redeem himself. Iban and Huey were two of my favorite people, and Sullivan had been kind to Huey and was clearly devoted to Iban. Still, I couldn’t get the image from the other night of him and Connie off my mind. What if he’d exposed her to the California virus?

  “So why’d you break up with her?” he asked, right out of the blue.

  He was direct. I liked that. I think. It was worrisome, though, that right behind Iban’s illness, Connie was the first thing on his mind. “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “Seriously. Vampires have affairs with humans all the time. And you clearly care for each other. I can tell from Connie’s hints. What’s the problem?”

  So Sullivan was just as curious about Connie’s relationship with me as I was about her relationship with him. Maybe he wanted to know if I was really out of the picture or if I could still be an obstacle. “Like I said, it’s complicated. So, what about the two of you? How…close are you?”

  “You know a gentleman never kisses and tells, Jack. Ask Connie that question. See what she says.”

  My sudden fury painted everything in my sight with a red tinge that meant my pupils had dilated and the whites had gone bloodshot. The horrific sight of it was reflected in Sullivan’s expression. When a vampire sees red, he literally sees red. Sullivan knew he was looking into the eyes of a predator, and he was ready to run. As if that would do him any good. My hand was on his throat in less than a hair’s breadth of a second. If Sullivan had been able to see the move at all, it would’ve only been a momentary blur before he felt the steellike vise of my fingers on his windpipe.

  “Listen to me,” I said quietly, so as to not alarm the card players. “If you’ve exposed Connie to whatever it is that Iban brought here from California, I’ll eat you alive and spit out your bones. Is that clear?”

  “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. I swear it,” Sullivan choked.

  Luckily for him, William stepped into the garage at that instant. Will was slouching along three steps behind him. William came straight for me, and, given that my last contact with him had been when he laid me out on the ground, I nerved myself up for another pummeling.

  All movement and chatter at the card table stopped. The boys were terrified of William even when he was in a jolly mood, so it didn’t take them long to observe that he was pissed and to size up the badass sauntering along behind him. They cleared out like the devil and all his spawn were after them. When Huey didn’t react quick enough, Rennie came back, took him by the hand, and led him away. Huey went, still protesting that he had two pair, kings high.

  “Shit, Huey, you never have anything better than two pair,” Rennie hissed. “Come with me before somebody puts you back in your Corsica and locks the door.”

  Sullivan rubbed his throat where I’d released my grip. “William, how is Iban? Is he—” William shook his head quickly and firmly, and Sullivan took the hint. We couldn’t let Will find out about the virus and tell Hugo until we knew what they’d really come for.

  “Sullivan, this is Will. From Hugo’s clan,” I said by way of introduction and explanation.

  “Oh,” Sullivan said, studying the red-haired vampire. “Do you work in the movie business, by chance? You look familiar to me.”

  Will shrugged and showed fang. “No. I can’t feature why you’d know me. I don’t hang out with humans…much.”

  William looked at me with such coldness I almost shivered. He jerked his head toward the kitchen area to indicate he wanted to speak with me alone. Once we were out of earshot of Will’s vampiric hearing, I said, “William, I want to explain. I tried to—”

  “Save it,” he said. “If we survive, there will be time to discuss your betrayal and an eternity for me to deal with you.”

  William opened his mind, and with a rush of horror I saw the vampires he’d lately told me about that were tortured by Reedrek and his kind. Then the scene changed and I saw what William himself had done last night in the tunnels. He’d killed innocents. The shock I felt went as deep as the borrowed blood that animated me. The knowledge of Diana and Will’s existence and my betrayal had changed William in a horrifying and fundamental way. God help me. God—somebody—help us all.

  The visions disappeared as quickly as he’d forced them on me. “Make no mistake: I no longer trust you, but for now you can still be of use. My advice to you is to do what you’re told from now on, or on my word you will never see Melaphia and Renee again.”

  I felt like he’d knocked me to the ground again, only worse. He knew how to go right to my greatest weakness—the humans I love.

  “Here are your instructions,” William continued. “Make arrangements for the transportation of Hugo and Diana and their coffins to the plantation house. Their human hangers-on are to stay on the ship. You may release the spirits guarding them back to their resting places. Now that I have Will as collateral, I’m confident Hugo will keep the others under control and out of trouble. He seems a very possessive sort. After that, take Lucius and hunt, both of you.”

  He held up a hand to stop my protest. “I just spoke with Gerard by phone. He says we must all strengthen ourselves as much as possible against the virus, and that means feeding on humans.”

  “But what if I can’t stop Lucius from killing?” My mind swam with the images of William attacking the beggars in the tunnels, and with the horror of knowing that, as far as innocents were concerned, he no longer cared.

  “That, my human-loving friend, is your problem,” he said, his green eyes alive with cold fury. “I’ll be hunting with my son.”

  A fresh pang of jealousy grip
ped the place where my heart should beat. His son. To mortal eyes, William and I looked to be the same age, since we were about the same human age when we were made into blood drinkers centuries apart. But in every sense that mattered, he was my father. He was more of a father than my mortal sire had been.

  I remembered William teaching me to hunt humans. He’d patiently showed me how to feed on mortals, either draining them quickly and painlessly or sucking their life-giving blood only to the point where I could feel their pulse beat in my ears, then using the force of my will to stop drinking, seal the wound in their throats with my tongue, and wipe their memories of me clean with my mind. Now he was killing unprovoked, the deaths unjustified by mortal evil. How much of that was my fault? And how much would the presence of his real, mortal, and, in my eyes, evil son further corrupt his mind? William might be past caring about his moral compass—the closest thing to a soul we had left—but I wasn’t. I had to at least try to warn him.

  “William, do you really know what Will is capable of?”

  Once again, he put his hand up to silence me. “Don’t you dare. Not you. Not after what you’ve done. Do you think for a moment I would listen to you criticize Will after your deceitfulness? Now, mark well the rest of your instructions.” He glanced back at Will, who’d turned his back on Sullivan and was feigning interest in the engine under the hood of a black Lexus in the farthest bay.

  “Will doesn’t know I’m his mortal father,” William said.

  I couldn’t miss the bitterness in his voice. “Why?”

  My sire silenced me this time with just a glare. “I will choose the time and place of that revelation. Am I clear?”

  I nodded. Just when I thought my spirits couldn’t sink lower, I saw Melaphia and Renee come through the door. The idea of them sharing the same space with Will twisted my gut, especially when Will raised his head and sniffed the air, smelling the presence of humans.

  “William!” Melaphia rushed toward him and flung her arms around his shoulders. “I was so worried when you didn’t come home this morning,” she said. As sensitive as I was to Mel’s feelings, I could tell she was relieved at seeing William safe, but not relieved enough. Something still troubled her deeply, and William knew all about it.