This seemed like the kind of house a person needed to dress up for. The closer to the front of the house she got, the thicker the gardens became until when she looked over her shoulder she almost couldn’t see the sidewalk anymore. The air was perfumed with the scent of honeysuckle and lilac, however, and the gas lanterns hanging along the path and up on both sides of the door held little fires dancing merrily and welcoming her to the estate.
Megan could hardly breathe. It felt like she had walked into another world entirely, or had been transported to a dark fairytale world where absolutely anything could, and probably would, happen. She knew she should probably turn around and go back to her apartment but there was no way she actually would.
The voice of reason inside of her head was growing dimmer with each step she took and by the time she got to the twelve-foot tall double front doors, it was completely silent. It had been drowned out by all of the opulence she saw in front of her. And as if she had sounded an alarm, those doors opened and Philip was standing there with that smirk of his.
His face made it seem like he had always known she was going to come see the house for herself, something that was profoundly annoying to her, but she still wasn’t going to leave. He held out a hand to her and offered her a drink in a beautiful gilded flute.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a French 75. Classic drink, clean flavors. I had a feeling it might be the kind of thing you’d enjoy.”
She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but it was actually her most favorite cocktail. She shook her head in disbelief, took the drink and then a long sip, and stepped inside.
CHAPTER THREE
It had been a long, long time since Philip had experienced anything close to real frustration or disappointment. Those were emotions more commonly felt by flesh and blood people with the blood still pumping through their veins insistently and their hearts going pitter patter in their chests.
Philip had neither of those things, hadn’t in quite some time. There was also the fact of the matter of how little time he had actually spent as a living man. When a person is all of thirty years old, or even approaching the age, he tends to believe that he has reached the full and complete state of what it means to be an adult. He feels that he is responsible, that he sees the world for what it truly is instead of the imaginings he saw as a boy.
How ridiculous, to presume a thing like that. How juvenile, how naive. It was only the young and foolhardy who believed that they were done with their internal growth. Philip knew that now, after a century of living after he had died, but he also believed that there were certain aspects of who and what he was that would have benefited from having had more of his natural born, God given life.
One of the things that people found so appealing about being changed into a vampire (when it came to the legends and stories of them; there weren’t many people who believed that vampires really existed) was the fact that once changed, they would never age another day. It seemed to Philip that people were more afraid of the process of aging than they were of the idea of death itself and they were willing to do anything, to sell their souls, for the promise of eternal youth.
What those same people failed to realize was that it wasn’t only the outward physical appearance that was cut off when the change occurred. The experiences a vampire gained after being turned were all well and good, but there was something different about the experiences he gained while still alive. There was a light to those experiences, a sepia tint that made them somehow more meaningful.
The process of growing emotionally continued after the turning, but never in the way they would have when still alive. Or at least Philip thought that was true. It was something he had been told many times before. Or maybe it was just that Caroline (her and every other person who had delivered her same messages over the course of the century) was right. Maybe he was just a brat.
He hadn’t gotten his way with that girl. He had wanted her, wanted her still, and she had resisted his charms. He couldn’t remember the last time he had experienced that, either. When Philip Smith wanted a woman, he got her. The process of doing so was almost always embarrassingly easy. All he had to do was look at them the right way and they were practically taking off their clothes right there in the street.
He had loved it at first, he had to admit that. What man wouldn’t? To be able to choose whichever woman he wanted and have her for as long as he wanted and then walk away with no attachment at all. He had gorged himself, feeling as if he would never be able to satiate his sexual appetite. Everything about him had felt like it was on fire in those days, back when immortality was still new and had not yet lost its luster. But as with all things, the luster of it all began to fade and Philip had gradually grown bored. He didn’t stop his sexual marathons, but he enjoyed them less and less. He was bored, so terribly bored. He formed no attachment to any of the girls he was with. He wasn’t even sure he was capable of doing so.
He had heard rumors of vampires mating to and forming long lasting, monogamous relationships with people or other vampires, but in his humble opinion it was all a bunch of bullshit. Vampires lost a little bit more of their humanity every year until all they were inside was cold. He felt that. He felt that cold growing inside of him.
The bonds he still felt attached to were the bonds he had formed when he was a newborn vampire, terrified and with little idea of how to navigate the new world that had been opened up to him. His father, his sister, the vampire family that he had been ushered into in that dark, confused time, those were the only bonds he still held dear and sometimes he found himself wishing fervently that he could sever those ties as well.
“Stupid, this is beneath you, Philip.”
He had stormed back to his home, seething along the way, and was currently pacing back and forth in front of his long cherry oak bar. He remembered how impressed he had been with himself when he had acquired his house and then with each subsequent beautiful thing he had installed inside of it. He remembered the silly pride he had felt when this bar had been complete and now the thought of it made him even angrier. To be so pleased with himself over a thing like that! What had been the point? It hadn’t gotten him anything worthwhile.
None of this shit had. All it was was another piece of furniture taking up space. If it weren’t for the fact that it was stocked full of liquor it would have been completely useless. But it did have liquor, and a lot of it, so he poured himself a large tumbler full of scotch and drained it before pouring himself another.
It hadn’t worked on her. The only thing he had really wanted in decades, and his charms hadn’t worked on her. The concept of not getting what he wanted was so foreign to him that he was no longer equipped to handle it. So there was that, but there was more than that, also. There was something about Megan that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Even having been parted from her now, he could feel some part of her calling out to him, calling for him to find her again. She was beautiful, he didn’t think that was up for debate, but it was more than that, too. She was beautiful but broken, cracked from the inside in ways he doubted anybody else had really noticed before.
In the small amount of time they had spoken and the even smaller amount of time in which he had touched her supple skin, he had felt a deep sadness inside of her. There was a history of tragedy there that she wore like a suit of armor. There was something compelling and beyond intoxicating about it.
He wanted more than to have her body. He wanted her to belong to him, both body and soul. He wanted to help her, to protect her. He wanted to save her, as ridiculous as that sounded even to his own ears. He wanted to save her from herself and from whatever dark cloud that had followed her all of the days of her life.
He had never felt that way before, didn’t know what to do with the feeling now that he had it. And how stupid he was being! What made him think that he was in a position to be saving anybody? Here he was, an abomination of nature, a chest without a heartbeat and a syst
em of morality that was questionable at best. Did he really think that he could do anything to save another being when he hadn’t been able to save himself?
“Stop it!” he roared to himself, now pacing around the room as if a man half mad. “Stop it, now! Damned the both of you, and what of it? She has her pains and you have your own. She has her demons, and you? You are a demon, through and through. You’re too old to be this stupid.”
Somehow Philip expected this chastisement to pull him out of his funk, but it did nothing of the sort. It was like there was some voice inside of him that was not his own. That voice was whispering fiercely, telling him that this girl was unlike any others. This girl was not to be given up on so easily. Except that he hadn’t really given up on her, had he? No, not at all. He had made his play to gain her favor and the privilege of her company.
She had shot him down, unceremoniously and without even a pause of consideration. He could go around and round the matter and in the end, it wouldn’t change a thing. She was gone, did not want him, and more power to her. He had been unforgivably arrogant, not just in his brief dealings with her but for decade after decade of his afterlife and his human life before it.
He deserved to be shot down, and what if he had only made up his intuition of the way she may need him in the first place? It seemed likely enough. After all, he was no prophet, no angel. He was just a demon of a man, a husk that once held a life of potential and now held...what? What did that husk hold?
He did not know, wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He had heard the tales of the opening of Pandora’s Box just like so many others. He knew full well that certain things were better left undisturbed.
“Silly, you’re just being silly, Megan! What are you doing? Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Philip stopped in the very center of his large, probably too ornate, sitting room, the sound of Megan Wright’s voice stopping him in the middle of his tantrum. For a moment, he felt completely ridiculous, as if she had somehow opened his massive front doors and was watching his spiral into childish unhappiness. He even went so far as to stop and look for her, but found that there was nobody there but himself.
So what then? Had he made it up? Did he want her to be with him so badly that he was hearing her voice inside of his head? He would have thought it was very possible; it wasn’t like he hadn’t descended into his own kind of madness before and he did not doubt that he would do so again. But if that was the case, why was he hearing her say things like that?
If he were going to make up an internal dialogue, he would have thought he’d make up something that put him in a favorable light. Or at least something that was about him! He didn’t know, it was possible that what he was hearing was about him, but it was difficult to tell. Especially since it wasn’t real, he reminded himself, and that was a major roadblock in terms of him being able to understand her thought process.
“Just go back, won’t you?! Seriously, Megan, just because you’ve always wanted to see the inside of that house doesn’t mean you should actually do this. Because you shouldn’t. You definitely shouldn’t do this. You should turn around and go HOME!”
Just when he almost had himself convinced that he really had made it up, that maybe his lack of feeding combined with the few stiff drinks he had downed in such a short amount of time had brought on some momentary psychosis, there it was again. The voice of that Megan Wright, blaring inside of his head so loudly that he actually winced.
Hearing it this time, he was almost sure that he wasn’t making it up, after all. Because the voice didn’t sound like him. The way it spoke, the way she spoke, wasn’t the same kind of cadence his voice would have assigned her. It was a voice all her own and for some reason it was playing like a radio in his brain.
He hadn’t meant to tune in, but now that he had, he was entirely fascinated. It was probably an unfair advantage, seeing as he highly doubted that she knew he could hear her now, but he found that he didn’t really care all that much. He wanted her, now more than ever, and if hearing her internal struggle might help him to win her in the end, well then so be it.
He had never been accused of being a saint, not even when he was alive. He was a predator if he was anything at all, and at the moment, he felt like he was on the hunt. On the hunt for something other than food, but still on the hunt, and all of his senses had come alive, blaring at him in Technicolor.
She was coming to him. She had gone all the way home, from the sounds of it, and then stalled. He wondered if she had ever even made it inside of her apartment. Had she let herself inside and then trudged right back out again? Had she even made it inside of whatever shitty little building she was holed up in at all (he wasn’t sure how, but for some reason he was totally sure that the place she lived was some anonymous shithole that nobody chose when given a better option)?
Somehow, he thought not. He could see her now within his mind’s eye. He could see her pacing back and forth in front of her graffiti-ridden apartment building, torn in two as to what her next course of action should be. She wanted to go inside and pour herself a big ol’ glass of something.
She wanted to run back to that strange man who was not a man at all, to take him up on his arrogant offer. By the sound of it, she had decided on the latter. Or maybe not decided exactly, but she was coming nonetheless, cursing her compulsion the whole way. She was literally running to him.
He could feel that, too. He couldn’t understand why he was hearing these things, why he was privileged to have this access to her, but he welcomed it. He knew without needing to be told that it was only temporary and so should be cherished, which only made him welcome it all the more.
And all of a sudden, he was calm. That violent storm raging inside of him that came from a feeling of impotence and want was quieted immediately. He became who he had been before taking his surprisingly eventful walk. He walked quietly to his large bar, not feeling like it was ridiculous at all at this point, and began fixing Megan a drink. He couldn’t have said why, but he was pretty sure he knew what her favorite was.
That connection he had with her had been temporary and was already fading fast, but he had developed a kind of a profile on her and that didn’t look like it was going anywhere any time soon. A French 75, that was the drink for her. A French 75 would be just the thing for her and she would be there to drink it very, very soon.
He could practically hear her footsteps falling, pounding against the pavement as if her life depended on it. Pretty soon, she was close enough that he could actually smell her sweet perfume and the equally sweet smell (to him, at least, and he was willing to recognize that his tastes did have a tendency to go to the strange) of her sweat mingling with agitation and just a little dose of fear.
It was an animal smell and it made Philip’s mouth water. It was funny, the way desire worked on a man. It didn’t seem to matter what kind of man he was, either, what sort of background was his to call upon or barriers he had in his past. Desire could become an all-encompassing thing, eating through him with an insatiable hunger that could not be ignored. That he did not want to ignore.
Desire could make everything else in the world pale in comparison of its sweet face, could kiss you sweetly and then slap you in the face hard enough to rock your head backwards on your neck. Desire was a funny thing indeed, and his particular desire was now standing beside his front gate and peering up at his large and admittedly lovely house.
He could see her silhouette through the billowing white curtains of his front room and he realized that he positively burned for her. Even just that silhouette, that hint of the perfect curved lines of her body, was enough to drive a man insane. Philip wasn’t any kind of man, he was far more than that, but even he was not immune. He wondered if she knew just how much of an impression she could make.
It seemed to Philip that most women realized just exactly how they affected the men they interacted with. It was both their gift and their curse, the thing that helped them to get wha
t they wanted and also sometimes restricted their lives into spaces far smaller than the ones they perhaps deserved.
But Megan, Megan seemed to be different, at least to him, from the little bit he had intuited about her. Megan struck him as the kind of girl who didn’t know much about herself at all. She struck him as the kind of girl who just existed, flitting from one place to the next without any real intention.
It was part of why she was here now. It was part of why she was standing outside of his home and gawking up at it, then opening the little picturesque gate (a gate that had to be there for decorative purposes only; there was no way it could keep anyone out besides a child) and moving with uncertainty through his gardens.
He could feel her awe at those gardens and then the sense of pride he felt at said awe. The gardens were something he really did love, although he would rarely admit such a thing. He didn’t like admitting things like that. He had an archaic sense of male pride that kept him from wanting to tell people when he loved something, especially when he loved something as feminine as a garden.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 4
