A Whisper Of Eternity (10 page)

Faint images whispered through her mind. It took her a moment to realize they were fragments of his life. She saw him as a young boy tending sheep on the side of a grassy hill. He was tall, even then, his skin dark, his hair long. He sat on a rock holding a small black lamb in his arms. In the distance, she saw a hut with a thatched roof. The scene changed and he was strolling down a cobblestone street with two other young men. They were laughing as they walked along. The scene changed yet again, and Dominic was seated at a small table in what looked like an inn. A woman sat beside him, a beautiful woman with long red hair and skin that was almost translucent. The woman smiled at him, a come-hither look in her dark eyes, and Dominic followed her out of the inn. The scene changed yet again and she saw the two of them sharing an embrace in a dimly lit room, saw the woman’s lips draw back to reveal a pair of small white fangs....

Startled by what she saw, Tracy drew back, frowning.

Dominic looked down at her, askance.

She shook her head in wonder. “I . . . I saw you . . .”

He lifted one brow. “Saw me? Where?”

“You were a little boy holding a lamb . . . a young man laughing with two other men.” She swallowed hard. “I saw you with a woman. A beautiful woman with red hair . . .”

“Kitana.”

“She bit you.”

“Aye, she did indeed.”

“She was a vampire?”

There was a wrought iron bench under one of the trees. Dominic sat down, and after a moment, Tracy sat beside him.

“I had just turned twenty-five when I met her,” he said. “Until then, I had done little, seen little. I knew nothing of the world beyond our little village, had no ambition other than to tend the sheep with my father. It was not a bad life. I had a few friends, and I had met a woman I planned to marry. And then I met Kitana. She was a wild Gypsy woman, more beautiful than any creature I had ever seen. She tempted me beyond all reason and I was suddenly filled with a restlessness I did not understand. And then one night she asked me to go away with her. She said she could arrange it so that I could be what she was, promised that I could live with her forever, if that was what I desired. I said yes without a moment’s thought. Naïve as I was, I thought she meant I would be as wild and free-spirited as she. I had no idea then what she really was, or what being like her entailed.”

“So, you’re saying she was a vampire?”

He nodded. “Yes. She was very old, and very powerful.”

“Did it hurt? Becoming a vampire?”

“The bite did not hurt. What came later was . . . frightening, more than anything else, though she could have made it easier for me.”

“What came later?”

“What difference does it make, if you do not believe?”

“What happened to her? To Kitana?”

“We spent many years together and then one night I woke up and she was gone. It was while I was looking for her that I found you the first time. I knew the moment I saw you that we were fated to be together.”

“How did you find me in all those other lives you claim I’ve had?”

“I do not know how to explain it, but somehow, sooner or later, I am drawn to where you are.” He smiled faintly. “But this time, it seems, you were drawn to me.”

She didn’t want to think about what that might mean. “Did you ever see Kitana again?”

“From time to time.”

“Why did she leave you?”

“She found another young man. I imagine the world is filled with those she has brought over and abandoned.” He did not tell her that once Kitana had tired of her young man, she had come to him again, wanting to take up where they had left off. They had not parted on the best of terms. He had told her it was over between them. She had vowed that one day she would bring him to his knees.

“You’re saying there are hundreds of vampires running around sucking people dry and no one knows?”

He laughed softly. “It is easy to pass among mortals. They do not want to believe vampires exist and so they dismiss the little things they see that are beyond their comprehension. As for sucking people dry, that is rarely done these days except by overeager fledglings who cannot control their hunger.”

“Did you . . . have you ever . . . done that?”

“Not for many years.”

Tracy gazed out over the gardens. They were beautiful, even in the moonlight. The air was fragrant with the scents of earth and grass, trees and flowers. It was beyond bizarre to be sitting here having such an outlandish conversation. With a vampire.

“Where do you sleep?”

He pressed a kiss to her palm. “That is one question I cannot answer.”

She regarded him curiously. “Why not?”

“There is no need for you to know.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Should I?”

“I don’t see why not. I knew where you . . . where you slept at Nightingale House.”

“Indeed.”

“Are you afraid I might . . . let’s see, what are the ways to destroy a vampire?” She frowned, trying to remember how it was done in the movies. “You can cut out its heart, or chop off its head, or burn it up. Isn’t that right?”

“It?” he asked with a wounded expression. “Do I look like an ‘it’ to you?”

He didn’t kiss like an ‘it’! Oh, no, he was all man in that regard. “Don’t change the subject,” she admonished. “Let’s see, what am I forgetting? Oh, the ever popular stake through the heart.”

“Shall I hide the axe and the matches?”

“No need,” she said, laughing in spite of herself. “I couldn’t dissect a frog in biology class. I think you’re safe from me.”

He laughed with her.

Warmth passed between them, bringing with it a sense of camaraderie from shared laughter.

His gaze rested on her lips again.

Her heart seemed to skip a beat.

Before she succumbed to the look in his eyes and the yearning of her own heart, she said, “What’s it like for you, during the day? What happens when the sun comes up?”

“The sun steals a vampire’s strength. We are overcome with a lethargy that is, in the beginning, impossible to resist. We sleep the sleep of, you will pardon the expression, the dead.”

“And if someone found you while you were asleep, what then?”

“Very young vampires are totally helpless when the sun is up. After many centuries, some vampires are able to stay up after sunrise and rise before sunset.”

“Can you?”

“Yes, though my powers are weak until after dark.”

“And if someone invaded your resting place, would you know? Would you be able to protect yourself?”

He nodded. “Self-preservation is as strong with us as with anyone.”

“Has anyone ever tried to . . . to destroy you while you were at rest?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do to them?”

He did not answer, only gazed at her through fathomless gray eyes.

“You killed them, didn’t you?”

“Should I have let them destroy me?”

“No, of course not.” She smiled faintly. “It was self-defense, after all.” She didn’t ask how many times he had defended himself, didn’t want to know how many men or women he had killed to defend his life or to satisfy his thirst.

Silence settled between them. Tracy was keenly aware of Dominic’s presence beside her. Their conversation, while interesting, had been quite disconcerting. Feeling a sudden need to change the subject, she asked him how she was supposed to pass the time.

“In any way you wish. Paint. Read. Walk in the gardens. If there is anything you want or need, you have only to let me know.”

“And you’ll get it for me? Kind of like my own personal Santa Claus?”

“If you wish to think of it like that, yes.”

Tracy smothered a yawn behind her hand. Though it was still early, she was suddenly sleepy.

Dominic stood and offered her his hand. “Come. You’ve had a long day, and much to think about.”

Much to think about
was putting it mildly, Tracy mused as she lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin later that night. She had locked her door even though she knew it would not keep Dominic out. She was completely at his mercy here, in this house. He could take her blood or her virtue and she would be helpless to stop him. He could keep her here for as long as she lived, and no one would ever know what had happened to her. It surprised her that she wasn’t afraid of him, but then, he had never done her any harm.

Still, she couldn’t stop tossing and turning. She didn’t know whether it was the strange house, the strange bed, or the fact that there was a vampire downstairs, but sleep eluded her.

Finally, she slipped out of bed, drew a comforter around her shoulders, and curled up in the window-seat. She stared out the window, her mind replaying the conversation she’d had with Dominic earlier. It was beyond belief that he had existed for so long, or that she had lived many lives.

So, if he was truly a vampire, and she had little doubt now that he was, what was it like for him never to grow old, to watch the world change and evolve while he always stayed the same? What had it been like to watch her die in his arms time after time? For the first time, she considered how awful it must have been for him. If he loved her as he said he did, it must have been painful to tell her goodbye over and over again, unsettling to wonder if he would be able to find her when she was reborn. What had he done while waiting for her return? How much time passed between one lifetime and the next?

Questions, and each one more eerily weird than the last. Were the answers as bizarre?

A movement outside caught her eye and she leaned forward to get a better look. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at and then, when he moved out of the shadows, she realized that it was Dominic walking in the moonlight. His cloak billowed behind him, stirred by the same breeze that whispered through the trees.

He moved fluidly, lightly, as though his feet barely touched the ground. And when he passed under one of the lamps, she saw that he cast no shadow. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Everything in the yard cast a shadow on the ground, save Dominic.

After everything he had told her, after everything she had seen, it was that fact that convinced her of the truth once and for all.

He came to her the next night as soon as the sun was down. One minute she was alone and the next he was there, standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her dry the dishes.

She pressed a hand to her heart. “You startled me!”

“Forgive me.”

She wiped the last dish and put it away; then, feeling slightly self-conscious for no reason that she could discern, she slipped past him and went into the living room. She sat down on the sofa, her heart skipping a beat when he sat beside her, close enough to touch.

“How did you spend your day?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I painted a little. I wandered around the yard. I finished reading
Wuthering Heights.
She regarded him for a moment. “I wondered where you were . . . sleeping. Is it like sleeping? Do you dream?”

“It is like death,” he replied quietly. “There are no dreams. And yet . . .” And now it was his turn to regard her through narrowed eyes. “Back in Nightingale House, I dreamed of you.”

“I saw you last night. You were walking in the gardens.”

“Indeed?”

She nodded. “You had no shadow.”

“Perhaps, like Peter Pan, I have merely lost it.”

Tracy stared at him, then burst out laughing. Peter Pan! Now that was funny! And yet, they were very much alike. Like Pan, Dominic never aged.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “You really are a vampire.”

He nodded.

“What did you do all those years when I was between lives and you were waiting for me to be . . . to be reborn?”

“I educated myself,” he said, “over and over again. I traveled the world, learning to speak other languages so that I would be able to speak your language, whatever it might be. It was no easy thing, keeping up with the world. Vampires are reluctant to change. We try and cling to the life we knew before the change came upon us. But those who do not change do not endure. So many new inventions with every century. New languages. New countries. New ways of life. I came from a poor village. We raised sheep for a living.” He laughed softly. “In my day, people rarely traveled beyond the place where they were born. Today, you can be across the world in a matter of hours. It is a remarkable time.”

“You’re the one who’s remarkable. Don’t you ever get tired of, well, of living?”

“Only when you are not in the world with me.”

Sincere words, quietly spoken. They went straight to her heart.

“Dominic . . .” She lifted a hand to his cheek. His skin was cool beneath her fingertips.

He went utterly still at her touch. His eyes were focused on her face, his breathing suddenly shallow.

Slowly, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his. Perhaps she could learn to love him as he deserved. One thing was certain—no man she had ever known had affected her the way he did. Never had she responded so quickly to another man’s touch, or another man’s kiss. Had her subconscious remembered him from the past even though she had not? Did her body yearn toward his because they had made love in other lives?

His arm slid around her waist to draw her closer and when she didn’t resist, he deepened the kiss, stealing her breath away until all she could do was cling to him as the world slipped away and there was nothing left but Dominic’s mouth on hers, his body pressing intimately against hers, his hand caressing her back, lightly skimming the outer curve of her breast.

His touch filled her with such pleasure it was almost painful and she moaned softly, a wordless plea for more, or less.

Dominic drew back, his gaze burning into hers, his body trembling with a deep-seated desire that was far more than the yearning for physical fulfillment.

Muttering an oath, he gained his feet. He stood there staring down at her, his eyes blazing. And then he was gone.

Tracy stared at the floor where he had been standing, flabbergasted by his sudden disappearance.

She took a deep breath. My, oh my, but that man knew how to kiss! If he had kissed her like that in any of her previous lives, it was no wonder she hadn’t been able to resist his advances. To tell the truth, she was glad he had vanished when he did because she wasn’t sure she would have been able to tell him no if things had gone any further. One thing was for certain—if any of her boyfriends in this lifetime had kissed her like that, she would have lost her virginity long ago.

Which left her wondering if she had said no to all the others just to surrender her virtue to a vampire. She shook her head in bewilderment, not certain if she felt like laughing or crying. She had refused to let him make her a vampire in all her past lives, and she wasn’t about to let him make her one now, either. She really didn’t know anything about vampires other than what she had seen in movies and the little Dominic had told her. Knowing Hollywood, she doubted if their portrayals of vampires were any more accurate than their portrayals of cowboys and Indians in the Old West.

So, where to find out the truth? Would Dominic answer her questions? If she had access to a telephone, she could hook up her laptop and do some research online, but for now that was out of the question.

Books? She thought of the library with its shelves and shelves of books. Would a vampire have research books on vampires? There was only one way to find out.

 

 

She went to the library first thing in the morning. The door opened on well-oiled hinges. Stepping inside, she opened the curtains wide. Sunlight poured into the room.

She had never before seen so many books, except in a library. A sliding ladder provided access to books on the top shelves.

She started in one corner of the room. There was no rhyme or reason to the arrangement of the books. Paperbacks were tucked in beside expensive volumes bound in leather. His taste in reading was varied, from Shakespeare and Steinbeck to Chaucer and Dickens, as well as novels by more contemporary authors. She found encyclopedias, dictionaries, books of poetry and limericks, and novels in just about every genre imaginable, from westerns to horror.

She was about to give up when she hit the jackpot. Located at the top of the last shelf were three rows of books, all of them having to do with vampires. Some were novels by Elrod, Huff, Yarbro, Hamilton, and Herter; some were research. She glanced over the titles:
The Complete Book of Vampires
,
V is for Vampire: An A to Z Guide to Everything Undead, The Vampire Encyclopedia
,
The Vampire Gallery
, and
Vampires, Restless Creatures of the Night
.

There were also a couple of books on Transylvanian-born Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, who had killed thousands of people by impaling them on wooden poles, surely one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. In spite of his cruelty, he was hailed as a hero in Romania for defeating the Ottoman Turks.

She also found several editions of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. It was said that while trying to find a model for his vampire, Stoker had come across the history of Vlad Dracula, who fit Stoker’s vampire perfectly. Vlad had died under mysterious circumstances; he had been decapitated, and it was rumored that his body had never been found. She recalled hearing somewhere that Stoker’s novel had never been out of print since it was first published in 1897.

Whether vampires were real or not, they certainly garnered their share of literature. Plucking several books from the shelf, she curled up on the sofa and began to read.

In the next few hours she discovered that, according to the books, a true vampire was a dead body. It wasn’t a spirit or a ghost or a demon from hell. Some believed that vampires weren’t human at all, but a separate and distinct species. Unless they met with some sort of fatal accident, like a stake through the heart, they were immortal. They needed the blood of the living to survive. They had superhuman strength and while they were helpless during the day, they were practically unstoppable at night. Of course, since they were already dead, they were naturally hard to kill. They lived in graves. They had the power to control animals and could even turn into bats or wolves or dissolve into mist....

She shivered. She had seen that firsthand.

Around noon, she went into the kitchen and made herself a sandwich. She chewed thoughtfully, enjoying the taste of mayonnaise, tuna, tomato, and whole wheat bread. Did Dominic ever miss chewing? Did he miss the taste of solid food? Did he even remember what it had been like to sit at a table and eat a meal? Did he ever get tired of a warm liquid diet?

The thought soured her appetite and she threw the remaining few bites of her sandwich in the trash. After tidying up the kitchen, she went back to the library.

She supposed it was to be expected that the authors couldn’t agree on vampire characteristics. Some books said that vampires had no reflection. Some said they did.

She tried to remember if she had ever seen Dominic’s reflection in a mirror or window.

One book said vampires could not be active during the day. Another book said they could move about during the day or the night. The books also mentioned contemporary men and women who took on vampire characteristics—sleeping during the day, always wearing black, claiming to drink blood, and, in some cases, actually doing so.

She knew the books she was reading were based on conjecture and old myths and ancient tales; still, the more she read, the more fascinated she became. One book said that in Eastern Europe it was believed that vampires had two hearts or two souls and since one heart or one soul never died, the vampire was immortal. Other beliefs were that if a vampire wasn’t found and killed immediately, it would first kill the members of its family, then kill the people in the town or village where he lived, and finally kill the animals. Another belief was that if a vampire could go undetected for seven years, it could travel to another country and become human again. It could marry and even have children, though the children were all doomed to become vampires when they died.

Closing the last book, she put it on the table, then leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes and tried to remember what she knew to be true about her own personal vampire. She never saw him during the day. He could dissolve into mist. He had transported her across country without her being aware of it. He seemed able to appear and disappear at will. He had put some sort of spell on the doors and windows. He cast no shadow. For some reason, that was the most disturbing thing of all.