She wondered briefly if maybe Philip had stolen them, and then she realized that probably wasn’t it at all. How old was he? Just how old was Philip, how many decades had he actually lived through? These portraits, if she was right about everything, which she thought she almost definitely was, must have belonged to him and his family.
She walked down the room so narrow it could have been a hallway and not a room at all, gazing at each and every picture. She might have gotten so lost that she was still there when Philip came looking for her if it hadn’t of been for one portrait in particular that gave her chills. It was an old one, one of the older ones in the room, and it contained two figures.
The first was unmistakable to her, the final nail in the coffin of her new delicate beliefs. It was Philip Smith (a last name she realized now was probably completely made up; she imagined it took some work to remain anonymous when you were going to live forever), wearing clothing that looked like it had to belong the early 1900s, maybe even earlier than that. His clothing was different, his hair styled in what had been fashionable in those days, but it was unmistakably him.
Same beautiful eyes and chiseled bone structure, same haughty expression and way of holding himself. There was no way of missing the fact that the man in the very old portrait was the same man she had slept with last night, which was definitely weird (also weird was the fact that she was getting used to that idea so easily).
But it wasn’t the thing that scared her all over again. No, that new wave of fear was thanks to the person beside him in the portrait, the person she couldn’t really see. Because the face of the woman with her arm linked through his was scratched out with such ferocity it made her feel sick to her stomach.
A person didn’t do something like that unless there was some real hatred motivating the scratching. It was a pictorial representation of a relationship of love gone bad, and even though the woman’s face was all scratched to shit, when Megan looked closely she let out a little gasp and clapped her hand over her mouth.
“It’s me.”
The words came out in a whisper, made her jump even though she knew they were her own. She wasn’t quite right, not completely. The vandalized woman wasn’t her precisely but it was a woman who looked very much like her. The only way they could look so similar was if they were related.
But how? How? Megan didn’t know her relatives at all, not a one of them. How in the hell would it be possible for her to wind up in this house and see someone who must be her great-, maybe great-great-grandmother? Impossible, her mind screamed, fucking impossible. But another part of her mind asked her the question that couldn’t be avoided.
Was that why Philip had wanted her to come here? Did he remember the look of the face he had scratched out God knew how many years ago? If so, did he see that face in hers the way that she did? Perhaps he did, perhaps that’s why he had wanted her to begin with.
“Jesus, enough.”
She didn’t know the answer to those swirling questions and she found that, for the moment at least, she didn’t care. What she cared about was getting out of this house, and then getting out of New Orleans all together. She didn’t think she would have any problem doing that (oh, but don’t think that, she told herself, don’t think that or else it will, it will be hard and you won’t be able to leave after all), not this time.
Part of her may have still burned at just the idea of having Philip’s hands glide over her again, but that part was just going to have to deal with the disappointment. Fuck it, right? She could find another man and no, he probably wouldn’t be even halfway as skilled as Philip had proven himself to be, but she also highly doubted that the next guy would be a vampire, so she figured it was kind of a trade-off.
All she needed to do now was get the hell out of this goddamned place. She felt her panic starting to rise, always rising, and stood still right where she was. The voice of reason in her head was shouting move, that she had to move, for God’s sake, but she ignored it, staying stock still.
She really did need to get out of here and she wasn’t going to be able to do that if she was all messed up in the head. She concentrated on her breath, ignoring the feeling of all of those still portrait eyes on her, ignoring the sweet smell that only came from lots of expensive things grouped in one place. She did her best to ignore all of those things, those things and her fears, to hone in on the things she knew she did have. She had her wits, which had always done her service. She had her uncanny ability to flee, and she doubted very much that it had been diminished by being in this most peculiar of situations.
She knew how to get gone (that’s what the last thing that passed as a boyfriend had called it, her “getting gone”) and that was knowledge that was part of her blood and Philip hadn’t taken that from her. Hardly any of it, anyway.
Once her breath had started to calm and her heart felt just a little bit more regular, she opened her eyes again and looked anywhere but at the portrait of Philip and the stranger who looked like her. Her anonymous ancestor, like some not so funny joke. Not looking, not looking, never wanted to look at it again, she thought, and then she opened the door and she was on her way.
This time she found her way straight to the front door. She wouldn’t say she remembered the way because there wasn’t a lot of memory involved in the twists and turns she took, but somehow she figured her way out of that mansion all the same. She was back out in that beautiful garden that smelled like honeysuckle and threatened to make her forget why she was so keen on leaving in the first place.
“Vampire,” she thought darkly, “vampire and some strange dream bitch telling me to stay close to the dead man. Nope, no thank you very much. I think I’m going to have to not so politely decline.”
She actually said those last words out loud and started to laugh, a manic kind of sound that would have made a passerby stop and look twice, maybe consider whether they should offer the crazy looking girl talking to herself a little bit of help. But there were no passersby, not at this hour.
Even in New Orleans, there seemed to be an hour at which the frequency with which the foot traffic passed by would reduce down to a trickle and one could go for whole spans of minutes without seeing another person at all.
Megan paused once more, startled by the look of her surroundings. It was disorienting. So much had happened in such a little amount of time, much more than was reasonable for a person to be expected to have happen to her. It had only been a few hours before that she had gone for a walk and been attacked by a threesome of asshole men and now here she was, standing in the garden of the magic house after having had the best sex of her life with the oddball owner.
The vampire owner. That was enough to get her moving again. Vampire. She had the strangest feeling that he was looking at her now, that he was seeing her make her exit and that he would do his very best to get her to stay. She began to run, not bothering to check whether or not the gate shut on her way out. She didn’t care, couldn’t care, because she was OUT and that was all that could matter for her for now.
“Home sweet home,” Megan muttered to herself, laughing just a little as she did so. She felt like it was a pretty ironic phrase to use, if that was the right word for it. She hadn’t ever been really good at remembering which words meant which thing but it sounded right in her ears. It felt right, and when a thing felt right Megan tended to go for it.
She had run almost all the way back to her shitty apartment building, which looked exponentially shittier after her brief stay in the nicest house in the world. She had run until her legs were shaking, screaming at her to give it a rest already, and she could feel the three drinks still settling in the base of her stomach threatening to make their way up again.
She was a fit girl, an active girl, and she didn’t think it was overexertion that was causing her body to react so intensely. She had a feeling it had a lot more to do with the crazy amount of adrenaline pulsing through her body than anything else.
It was just too much for one
girl. The body could only handle so much. The body began to break down, to give up under the pressure of it all. Megan’s body could handle a hell of a lot but things were starting to get too out of control, even for her.
“That’s why you’re getting out of here,” she reminded herself reassuringly, comforting herself because there was nobody else there to do the job, “out of this apartment, out of this town. Just have to put together a couple of things and then you’re out. Don’t ever have to come back again, not if you don’t want to.”
She stood a little longer, bouncing nervously from one foot to the other while she looked up at her building with poorly concealed trepidation. Maybe it was just the massive case of the willies she had gotten from her car crash of a realization that the supernatural make-believe hocus pocus bullshit in the world wasn’t actually bullshit at all, that was doing it.
Whatever it was, she had a kind of an ominous feeling about going in there. She hadn’t ever been a huge fan of the place (who would be, when it was one step above the abandoned building homeless people squatted in?), but that feeling had magnified tenfold. It was like some known yet unknown voice (little magpie, why do you let the world take you the way that you do?) was warning her to stay away, to forget about grabbing any of her things and just go.
Just go, that voice insisted, just go and get the hell out of here and go anyplace other than the one you’re at. She might have listened to the (magpie) voice, too, if it weren’t for the money. Megan was a naturally mistrustful girl and years of being shipped from one rank foster home to the next hadn’t done anything to improve her disposition.
Because of this, she had always been against the idea of putting all of her money in a bank. What she opted for instead was the old money under the mattress trick and a good portion of her last several months’ tips were stuffed under that flea bag thing up in her room. She couldn’t just leave it there. She couldn’t do it. She had worked too hard for it.
She could still remember the nasty attitudes, shitty tips and impossibly long hours that had brought her that money and she wasn’t about to let it all go because of a voice she may or may not actually be hearing. So she took a deep breath, several, in fact, in the hopes of steadying her still shaking legs, and cursed her rotten luck.
She looked around her quickly, looking for...what? She still had the feeling that somebody was watching her, but that didn’t make any sense. She had understood it when she had still been standing in Philip’s gardens, she still thought it quite possible that he had been watching her from one of the hundreds of windows in the white southern style mansion. But here?
Just as it had been outside of Philip’s place she could see nobody on the streets near her and the people in her building surely didn’t have any interest in her or what she was doing. It had to be close to three, maybe even four in the morning. If anyone in her building was still awake they were probably busy drinking or doing drugs or having sex, any of the things people did that kept them up that crazy late.
She let out another string of curse words, just for good measure and an added dose of courage and then opened the door and headed for the stairs. Her apartment was three floors up, which would have indicated the use of the elevator, except that the elevator in this building didn’t work and so, you guessed it, ladies and gentlemen, the elevator was not for her.
She didn’t mind, not so much anyway. It was good for her, a way to get some cardio in on top of her cardio. She wrinkled her nose, as put off as always by the smell of stale sweat and urine and other things she’d rather not think about, and did her best not to touch the molding, peeling paper on the walls along the banister.
She counted the stairs, six, seven, eight, as she moved up them, an old habit she had developed when she was little and had been doing ever since. She almost always made it from the bottom to the top. The only ones she hadn’t counted all of were the ones in Philip’s home, the ones leading up to his “chambers.” She had been a little bit too distracted to count all of those.
“Hello? Anyone here?”
She smacked herself in the forehead at the sound of her voice, feeling like a grade A idiot for speaking into her own empty apartment. She didn’t even have a cat to come home to, not a goldfish, nothing for her to say hello to. There was no reason for her to be talking out loud and the fact that she was doing it just proved that she had become more unhinged than she had wanted to admit.
She shook her head, and turned to lock her four separate locks securely into place. Even though she was only going to be home for a couple of minutes, she would not leave them unlocked. Not for a moment. Not in this shithole. Once it was done and after laying her fingertips briefly on each lock in turn, she smiled a satisfied little half smile to herself and turned towards her room.
Not that it was much of a room. This wasn’t an apartment but a loft, and her bed was really just in the middle of the one small room. She liked to tell herself that it made things easier, made it a little bit less depressing. She went about the business of grabbing her clothing from wherever it lay (closet rack, folding chair, mostly the floor) and shoving it into a bag.
It was when she was in the process of taking bills by the fistful from beneath her mattress that she first heard the voice. It was so startling, so out of place, that she got half way to convincing herself that she had made it up before realizing it was real.
“Ms. Wright. We’ve been wondering when you were going to get home.”
“Holy crap!”
She stood quickly, made as if to head for the door, but one of the men in her apartment, the one she believed had not done the talking, stood in front of it to block her path. The other man, the talker, started to laugh. He clapped his hands like her attempt to flee had been her putting on a show.
“Megan, please, you’re smarter than that, aren’t you?”
She just stood and stared, feeling completely dumbfounded. It was like being held underwater so that you could see the action top side but couldn’t quite reach the air. To put it mildly, she was pretty terribly confused. For a moment she thought that they were the men who had taken her behind the dumpster with the intent of doing god only knew what.
It made sense in some crazy kind of a way. After all, what were the chances of her being under attack twice in one day? But it wasn’t him. The rational part of her knew it even if the little girl part that wanted things to work in a story where all of the puzzle pieces fell into place didn’t.
These weren’t the same guys, they didn’t look even remotely like them. That meant this was something else, another awful situation only this time with completely unknown qualities. But what did they want with her?
“Here,” she replied in a voice so steady it surprised her as she extended a fist with a wad full of cash towards the two strange men, “take it. I’m not sure how much there is, a couple of thousand dollars, I think. You can have it. It’s everything I have and you can have it, just go ahead and go afterwards, OK? Can we make that deal?”
He laughed at her. He laughed hard, like he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard and she watched in astonishment. Because there was something odd about these men, other than the fact that they were standing in her apartment with no sign of forced entry when all of the locks had been in their proper places.
They looked...shit, they looked almost like they were out of focus. It wasn’t the right way to explain it but she wasn’t sure how to do a better job. They seemed almost blurry to her, the way it was when you looked too long at the sun and then tried to focus on something right in front of you. She thought that part of it was the quality of their skin. It was so perfect it was almost too perfect, almost looked pixelated.
Maybe it was just a hangover from her already incredibly weird day, but something about them struck her as not quite human. It was stupid, right? It had to be stupid because not everything in the world around her was something supernatural. But as true as that was, it was also true that some things were. If she was tr
usting her gut, which was what had kept her out of trouble for most of her life even in really bad situations, she would have to call it. She didn’t know what they were (besides criminals), but she was pretty damned sure that they weren’t exactly your everyday, run of the mill humans.
“No sweetheart,” the man said with an indulgent smile and a friendly glance at over his shoulder at his partner, “we can’t make that deal. We don’t want your money.”
“Well then, what do you want?”
Stupid question, the kind of question the heroines always asked in B-rated movies, and Megan winced inwardly. She would have hoped that she would be better than that if push ever came to shove. People always told themselves that they would make the smart moves in cases like this but Megan was failing miserably.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 9
