A Taste of Love and Evil (12 page)

“Help me, please!” the girl shrieked. “I didn’t sign up for this. They sold me to this club!”

Sold? He’d heard about this, but he’d never found one in time. So far, he’d only rescued the occasional screamer who’d signed up for a scene and then changed her mind.

Sold, sold, sold…
An ecstatic hiss snaked through the crowd.

Jack moved up behind two of the regulars. In his sleaziest murmur, he asked, “That true? They really bought her, or is it just a gimmick?”

“What I heard,” one dude said.

“For a fucking fortune,” the other guy said, awe in his voice.

So…maybe, maybe not.

“Blood,” somebody growled behind him. Another dude took up the chant, and a woman’s shrill voice joined in. Calls for blood bounced off the walls, punctuated by the girl’s sobs and screams. “Somebody save me! Oh, God, have pity on me.”

“No pity,” responded the growler, and the crowd took up the cry, and it might just be a performance, but…

“Fuck,” Jack said, and went into action. Camoing as best he could while moving, he scrambled into the darkened private room amongst the leaders of the crowd, ducking the bludgeons, shoving toward the stage. Here he had room to maneuver. The crowd leaders would be allowed to stay; some might even be accepted into the elite, depending on how they handled themselves. Everyone else was slammed out into the hall to be driven like animals back to the dance floor.

Two burly men dressed only in loincloths hoisted the squalling girl onto the stage and tied her arms to a bar above her head. A single spotlight haloed her, shimmered over her glistening tits and ass, casting the surrounding stage into even deeper shadow. Another man, hooded executioner-style, strolled into the light, sharpening a long knife with slow, sinister strokes. No telling what was planned here. If they’d paid for her, they would do whatever they damn well pleased.

Judging by the mood in the room, they would do what they pleased regardless.

Jack slipped behind the stage, scoped the room’s rear exit and the narrow hallway beyond, then semicamoed through the darkness onto the stage. The guys in the loincloths were spreading the girl’s legs. It was now or never.

He memorized the setup, raised the gun, and fired. The spotlight shattered. With his weaker hand, Jack stowed the gun in his pocket; with the stronger hand he swiped the knife as his foot connected behind the executioner’s knees. Two swift strokes while the audience hollered and the big guys blundered in the dark, and the girl was free. Jack grabbed her as she fell, half carrying, half dragging her through the backdrop.

“Stand up,” he hissed, slugging someone who had shown up backstage, instinctively ducking a return blow. “On your feet, girl. Move.” He thrust her through the door, slammed it
shut, and hauled her along the corridor, smashing the wall sconces as he passed.

Now for the kid.

Jack’s arm throbbed furiously.
Yeah, yeah, I really could use some help. No, not Rose. Someone who has guts and thinks on her feet.

And that would be…Rose.

But Rose wasn’t there, only the naked, gasping, sobbing chick. Ahead of him a door opened and Stevie came out. Jack plowed straight into him, feet and fists flying, and mowed him down to the floor. One sharp blow with the butt of the gun and Stevie was out for the third time that day.

“Shut up,” he told the squealing girl. “Do you want them to find you?”

He pushed her into the room from which Stevie had come, dragging the scumbag behind him. The kid from the Dump-ster was tied to a chair there, a few bruises on his face but battered mostly by fear. Ten seconds later the kid was free. Jack covered the girl’s mouth as the behemoth of a security guard lumbered past, joining the fiasco in the private room, and a minute later they were in the yard, then in the alley and home free.

“Thanks,” the kid gulped, unable to keep his eyes off the naked, shivering girl. She couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.

Jack took off Gil’s coat, removed the gun from the pocket, and wrapped it around the girl. “Where do you live?”

She pulled herself together enough to gasp, “The dorms.”

Jack herded her toward the main drag, with the boy tagging along.

“Did they really buy you?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know!” Pause. “I don’t remember.” She broke into a fresh spate of tears, but he didn’t dare touch her, not after what she’d been through. Rose sure would come in handy.

The girl wiped her eyes on Gil’s coat sleeve. “That’s what
they told me, but I don’t remember
anything
that happened. I just went there to have some fun.”

Rose would give these idiots another chance.

Jack hailed a taxi. As it pulled to the curb, the girl said, “Thank you. Thank you so much!”

“Show your appreciation by staying away from that dive.” Including the boy in his stare, Jack said, “If I catch either of you there, I won’t rescue you again.” He then put the girl into the taxi, paid the fare in advance, and shooed the boy on his way. Then he walked alone, lying to himself and justifying it like mad to the cool, indifferent night.

Rose woke, sweating and throbbing, to the sound of her own drawn-out moan. She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow, squeezing her legs together to make the most of it, waiting for the aftershocks to subside. It wouldn’t keep her going long, but she needed anything she could get.

Then her brain kicked in. She shouldn’t be this horny. She’d gone without for a month—she couldn’t stomach another mobster boyfriend—but she’d had a good taste of Jack’s blood yesterday. Usually, either sex or blood—although both together worked better—calmed her enough to keep the sex dreams away.

Jack’s aroma wafted up through the pillowcase and tickled her nostrils. Rose tossed the pillow across the room and sniffed the sheets. Sure enough, even though the sheets were clean, the mattress cover beneath smelled of Jack as well.

So, this was his bed. And this was his apartment. No big
surprise, what with all the literature in the bookshelf. The few clothes in the closet were costly, the kind of designer clothing that would draw attention to the man who wore them, while Jack’s expertise seemed to be in avoiding notice. Still, Rose herself had plenty of attention-grabbing outfits to make the mobster boyfriends happy. Maybe these were Jack’s impress-the-woman clothes—definitely not what he was likely to wear for her. Tomorrow she’d find someplace else, rather than be tortured by the pheromones of a man she lusted for but couldn’t have.

Rose swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She took off her T-shirt, replaced it with a tank top, and yawned her way to the living room, where Juma had fallen asleep over a book. The girl’s backpack lay in open invitation beside the bed.

No way, Jack.
Rose turned off the light beside Juma and continued to the kitchen. A cockroach skittered partway beneath the toaster, waving its antennae, but she let it be.

Pickings in the fridge were slim. Beer. Eggs. Grapefruit juice. Apples in the crisper. She peeled a satsuma orange from the bowl on the table and ate it slowly, wandering through the living room to the windows. She pushed open the blinds and looked down into the street. This wasn’t a quiet town. Music still wafted from at least two sources, and a couple strolled out of a bar on the corner. Cars passed, and on the next block a neon sign advertised tattoos.

Loneliness crept toward Rose from inside the apartment, whose owner didn’t want to be anywhere near her, from the dark streets of a town she didn’t know. It was nothing she wasn’t used to, nothing she couldn’t handle. Juma would be gone in a day or two, but for now she was glad to have someone to take care of, to offset the anxiety over Titania, Violet Dupree, and the Elizabethan gown, and to compensate, however briefly, for the disappointment—the strange and foolish dismay—over Jack.

Back in the bedroom, she rolled her T-shirt for a pillow and curled up at the bottom of Jack’s bed. Here the aroma of pheromones was far fainter, and with luck she’d get through the rest of the night. She concentrated on Juma’s steady breathing in the other room, visualizing herself in that same peaceful sleep. She focused on a long, deep breath…

A breath which came from another direction entirely.

Rose shot up in bed.
Who the hell?

Calm down,
she scoffed.
There must be an apartment next door.
She listened again, picturing the externals of the building, trying to recall what little she’d seen. Yes, there might be a room on the other side of this wall.

The breathing broke, followed by a weary sigh and the faint squeak of a mattress as someone turned over.

Behind the closet,
Rose decided. She held herself silent and still. The breathing slowed and deepened, more soothing than Juma’s by far. Rose lay down and closed her eyes again. A thin wall, but so what? The breathing broke again and the sleeper shifted. The sharp scent of blood assailed her. Rich, delicious, familiar male blood.

“Damn!” said a voice from behind the closet, way too loud and clear for a too-thin wall.

Rose leaped up. “Jack? Where are you?”

No answer, but the sound of movement. Rose switched on the bedside light and scanned the closet. The shelves were at one end, Jack’s clothing and the Elizabethan dress in its garment bag and the mantle at the other. At the back of the closet hung a tacky old vinyl shoe holder with two pairs of high-quality men’s shoes and a rip down the middle. She peeled the ripped vinyl to one side…to reveal a neat round hole in the wood.

“A
peephole?”
The aroma of fresh blood overwhelmed her. Jack’s wound must be bleeding again, which pissed her off even more.

“Rose,” came Jack’s voice, roughened by sleep, “calm down.”

“I will not calm down.” She slapped the vinyl back into place and banged the wall hard with her fist. It hurt, but she banged it again anyway. “What kind of pervert are you?” The thought that he might have seen her writhing in her sleep, turned on by his damned bed, made her more furious than ever. “Can’t stand vamps, but still want to watch?” She banged the wall again.

Ouch!

“Rose, let me explain.”

“Go away!” Rose throbbed. Her fangs bucked angrily inside her gums. She clamped her mouth hard to keep them in place and moved the garment bag, making good and sure it covered the rip in the vinyl. She hung the mantle beside the garment bag and kicked the wall once more. Somewhere, floors and walls away, a dog yapped twice.

“Stop making such a ruckus,” Jack said.

“I’ll make as much ruckus as I please.” She gave up on fighting her fangs and let them slot down. “If you wanted me to put on a nasty little show for you, why didn’t you just ask? At least I’d have the pleasure of saying ‘No fucking way.’”

“I don’t want you to put on a show.”

Jack sounded disgusted. Again. And Rose simply couldn’t take it. Hurt and rage twisted inside her. “For a moment back there in the van, I thought you were actually going to treat me like a human being. You even defended me for a few seconds. Took all the niceness right out of you, did it, saying a few positive words about a vamp?” She kicked the wall. “I bet there are chameleons who aren’t good guys, but do you hear me dissing you because of them?” She kicked the wall again. And slammed her fist into it, over and over.

The distant dog launched into a crescendo of hysterical barking, the shelves at the end of the closet swung open, and Jack strode through, tousled, gorgeous, and pissed off. A
secret door? The tornado of rage inside Rose spiraled and twisted and grew. Another dog joined in the frenzy.

“Stop it right now,” Jack said, dabbing the edge of his T-shirt against a trickle of blood on his arm. “Listen to me.”

Fat chance. Her nostrils quivered at the ripe scent of his blood—blood she craved, blood she couldn’t have. “That’s why you pushed your clothes to that end of the closet? So I wouldn’t notice the door you were going to sneak through?”

“Of course not, and if you’d just get a hold of yourself for a second—”

Rose lashed out with a fist and a barrage of allure. Jack blocked the fist with a hand, whipped around and pulled her hard against him from behind. “Let me go,” panted Rose, “or I’ll kill you.”

“You’ll kill me if I do let you go,” Jack said into her ear. “Not only that, you’ve got Gil’s damned dogs barking, and—oh, shit.” His arm tightened across her belly, and the other snaked around to touch her breast.

A hot, honeyed thrill of desire shot through Rose. Oh, God, it felt good: his hands, his voice, his breath in her ear, now his erection pressing against her. Of its own accord, allure reached out to rope him before he could change his mind, to tie him, bind him to her, a helpless love slave…

No.

Rose melted into his embrace anyway, protesting,
I don’t want him, because he doesn’t want me.

It doesn’t matter,
said the allure, and Jack seemed to agree. He palmed her breast and nuzzled her neck, toyed with her nipple and touched his tongue to her bare skin.

The telephone rang.

Thank God,
thought Rose.

“Thank God,” Jack said, and let her go, and Rose wanted to slug him.

He grabbed the phone on the bedside table. “Gil, I’m fine.
It’s nothing. Don’t call the cops.” He sat on the bed, raking his hands through his hair—thick, dark hair, which Rose wouldn’t at all mind running her own hands through. After she slugged him, of course. That healthy hair would be perfect for dragging him back to her cave. Not that she wanted him in her cave, or anywhere else. Right.

“Just a little mishap.” Jack dropped his forehead onto one hand, and blood drizzled to his elbow. “The underworld is not attacking me.” He pressed his fingers to his temple. More blood trickled down. “No, you don’t need to come over. See you tomorrow.” He hung up the phone.

“Ah, I see.” Rose flung allure heedlessly around the room. “You won’t even introduce me to your friends now. Are you afraid I’ll jump the poor man? I wasn’t planning on it, but since you’d doubtless like to be proven right—”

Jack groaned. “Damn it, would you stop with the allure? You don’t want me any more than I want you, so it’s nothing but a goddamned nuisance. Didn’t your mother teach you how to control it?”

Rose stormed off to the bathroom and turned on the cold water full blast. Two seconds later, she remembered Juma’s backpack. Jack was already in the living room, the sneaky bastard. Was he planning to go through it, looking for information?

“Come in here with me,” she snarled, softly so as not to wake Juma, although if the preceding commotion hadn’t disturbed her, Rose doubted anything would. She seized Jack by the belt and hauled him toward the bathroom.

“Bad idea,” Jack began. “Neither of us wants this.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to take my clothes off,” Rose said. She shut the bathroom door behind them and got into the shower, fully dressed.

Jack closed the toilet lid and sat down. “Why am I in here, then?”

“What happened to the cold water?” Rose messed with
the taps. The cold tap was totally on, no hot at all. Why wasn’t the water cold?

Jack stuck his hand in the shower. “We’re in south Louisiana. That’s as cold as it gets.”

“This place sucks,” Rose said. Okay, so maybe she was exaggerating, but she was so horny that even freezing water wouldn’t do the trick. “No, Jack, my mother didn’t teach me about controlling my allure because she couldn’t. She’s not a vamp.”

Tense silence.
Serves him right.

“Oh,” Jack said.

“I got the vampire gene from my father. Most of what I know about being a vampire I learned through trial and error.”

“Oh,” Jack said again. Another silence. “This is all fascinating, but I still don’t see why you dragged me in here, so—”

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Rose popped the shower door open to grab him as he stood. “I’m not leaving you out there to go through Juma’s bag.”

He made an exasperated noise and removed her hand from his arm. “Stop jumping to conclusions.” He sat down again.

“Like you never jump to conclusions,” Rose sputtered, back under the shower. “That’s all you’ve done about me all day. The last one was only ten seconds ago.”

“I apologized earlier, and I apologize again, but—”

Rose broke in. “You can apologize all the way to China for all I care. It’s too late to make up for the crap you’ve fed me.” She let out an enraged little scream. “How the hell do you take cold showers in this godforsaken place?”

“You don’t need a cold shower. You need to grow up.”

“Listen, mister.” Rose opened the shower door, stuck her head out, and dripped water all over the floor. Her furious eyes caught his and held them. “Just because I
loathe
you—more
every minute—it doesn’t mean I don’t want to fuck you.” She got back under the water.

After a long, horrible pause, Rose couldn’t take it anymore. She glanced through the shower door. Jack still sat on the toilet lid, head in his hands. A drop of blood gathered on his arm, swelled, and fell to the floor. And another, and yet another.

Tears rose along with her gorge. She faced away from him, toward the fabulous Italian tiles. “That doesn’t matter, because it’s just sex. But why would you rather bleed to death than let me heal that wound?”

Once again, he said nothing.

She turned off the water, squeezed out her hair, and opened the shower door. Jack was gone.

He moved quietly and fast through the closet, across the secret bedroom, and up the stairs to the flat, open roof. He had to get away; he’d almost ripped off her clothes and jumped her, jammed her, rammed her, hard against the shower wall. Just sex, she’d said. Maybe that’s all it was for her. Did Rose have no idea what her allure did to a guy?

Titania had known exactly what she was doing. She’d steamrolled him in two minutes flat, and he’d been so blinded by lust that he hadn’t seen through her for days.

He would never lose control like that again.

The two nearby clubs were closing their doors. The bar across the street had rolled out its last customers and locked up for what little remained of the night. Jack took stock of the jumble of roofs, flat and steep, on both sides of his building, across the street above the exotic pet shop and the tattoo parlor, and stretching on one side into the club district proper, where Violet Dupree lived in a garish purple Victorian house behind Blood and Velvet. A half block away on the other side, the dormers above the Impractical Cat gazed with closed, secret faces across the rooftops at Jack’s jumble
of buildings. He still wasn’t sure why he’d bought this derelict property over a year earlier.

He sat down against the parapet. Rose would find him if she wanted to, but there was no reason to suppose she did, unless she felt like cussing him out even more.

Too late. Her words hammered at him in the quiet darkness. He curled up, head in his hands, and sank into camouflage against the cool bricks. Too late.

Damn it all, didn’t he deserve another chance? What were the odds of his meeting the one good vampire? Was he supposed to get over his lifelong prejudice in just one day?

You never give anyone else a second chance.

He huddled against the bricks, desire and chagrin and common sense thrashing it out inside him. In childhood, camouflage had been his refuge from the unwelcome: from chores and from homework, from his mother when she was distressed and he could do nothing to help, even from bullies, until he learned how to fight. Then it became a game, to disappear from the schoolyard and reappear as if he had never been gone. And because he was very, very careful, and because in any case what he did was impossible, no one ever caught on.