Cursed (13 page)

Jacob might be exhausted, but he wasn’t slow. The vampires were definitely not telling him everything there was to know about the world he was about to become a part of.

Glancing sideways at Sienna, he wondered how much they’d told her while he was unconscious. She didn’t seem too concerned about the name Katarina had called the blonde, but her eyes were distantly thoughtful, so maybe she was just as curious.

“So, I heard a rumour a little while ago,” Katarina said after a lull in the conversation. “That my brother, Greyvian, has been spotted in the city.”

Jacob’s eyes widened and he felt a jolt of adrenaline shoot through his tired body, perking him up a bit. Oh, this couldn’t be good.

“Not so far away from here, in fact,” she continued, oblivious to their alarm. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Knox was cool as a cucumber as he answered her. “Greyvian? I thought he was just a story you full-bloods told their children to scare them away from humans.”

“Ha ha,” Katarina said without humour. “You know full well that he’s not a story.”

“Oh, why do you say that?”

“Don’t fuck with me, half-breed,” she said, suddenly serious. “I know you’ve been in contact with him.”

Suddenly, she drew in a deep breath and he could practically feel her eyes boring into the back of his head. Or maybe that was just paranoia talking?

“There’s a pre-trans here, isn’t there?” she said in accusation. “I knew I smelled burnt coffee.”

Nope, not paranoia. Oh, crap.

“Excuse me!” a loud voice called from the counter. “Could you order, please? You’re holding up the line.”

Shit! He and Sienna had been so focused on the conversation behind them that they hadn’t realised it was their turn. Pretending he’d just been day-dreaming, he stepped forward and ordered his usual breakfast muffin and cringed when he heard Katarina gasp. He’d forgotten that his voice was similar to Greyvian’s.

Suddenly his shoulder was wrenched backwards and a pair of pretty brown eyes peered up at him, widening in what looked like horror even as her hand jerked back to her mouth on a gasp.

“Greyvian!” Katarina paled visibly and took a step back, her head shaking in denial.

Jacob had only a moment to wonder what Greyvian could have done to warrant a reaction like that from his own sister when Knox cursed under his breath and stepped closer to Lucas, as if ready to bar a sudden exit. Meeting the blonde’s eyes, he silently asked what the hell he was supposed to do. Knox made a face, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea. Rolling his eyes at the vampire, he looked back at Katarina.

“The name’s Jacob, actually,” he told her, trying for a light tone and missing the mark only by a fraction.

The brunette stared at him with eyes as big as saucers, a great deal of white showing. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad. Finally she blinked a few times and some of the colour came back into her cheeks as she remembered to breathe.

“You’re not Greyvian.” It was more a statement of relief than a question, but he shook his head anyway.

“No. I’m not Greyvian.”

She closed her eyes briefly and breathed out slowly, her shoulders slumping as she recovered from her shock, but then her eyes snapped back open.

“Why do you look like my brother?”

Jacob glanced at Knox and Lucas to see if they would be more help this time and received a half-shrug from the blonde, and a slight nod from his son. Focusing once again on Katarina, he smiled slightly. “Probably because I’m his son.”

She gasped, her eyes swinging wildly around the room as if she were searching for her brother, afraid that he was nearby. Unfortunately, her eyes then darted in Sienna’s direction, her gaze locking onto his best friend, who had forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to be Aware and was watching their exchange with rapt attention. It took Katarina a moment to realise what she was seeing, but eventually she got there and looked shocked once more, her mouth falling open and her eyes widening, in what Jacob was coming to understand was her
holy-fuck
expression.

“That human is Aware!” she squeaked, darting a glance at Knox and Lucas to check if they were seeing the same thing. When she saw that they were unsurprised, her nostrils flared and her eyes darted around again, this time looking for an exit.

Knox swore again and then exchanged a resigned look with Lucas before the two of them fell on Katarina, fangs out in full force. Jacob watched in horrified fascination as the two of them bit into her, one at her neck, the other her wrist, and then proceeded to drink her blood as she struggled for all she was worth.

“No, no! Please!” Katarina cried. “I can’t see him! I can’t.”

Jacob wondered why she was so terrified of seeing her brother, and why, if she was so scared, she had seemed so persistent in asking Knox about him in the first place.

A minute or so must have ticked by before Katarina subsided into weak mewling noises, her struggles reduced to nothing more than slight twitches of her hand. Glancing around, Jacob was amazed once again by the effectiveness of vampire Awareness tampering. Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to them. They just gave the vampires a wide berth, as if they were a piece of furniture or something.

“Sir!” the worker behind the counter called impatiently, his order ready, making him realise that they must have been trying to get his attention for a while now.

Shaking his head, he turned away from the sight and mechanically paid for his food, only now getting a look at Sienna to see how she was reacting to all of this. Her blue eyes were wide, fixed, and unblinking as she watched the scene, her lower lip between her teeth and an expression of excitement on her features. God, she was such a Twi-hard.

“I can tell you now that it hurts, Sienna,” he told her, snapping her out of the trance she seemed to be in. “Quite a bit, actually. Just try to imagine someone biting you hard enough that their teeth penetrate your skin, and that’s pretty much the reality of it—so don’t get any ideas of it feeling good.”

She blushed, her expression guilty as she glanced down at his neck, obviously remembering him telling her of his little run-in with Bartlett yesterday. But, when she looked back at Knox and Lucas feeding on Katarina, she didn’t look convinced. Following her line of sight, he frowned when he saw the expression on the female’s face.

Katarina didn’t seem to be feeling pain at the moment. The abject horror she’d been showing previously at the prospect of seeing her brother had turned into something so sensual he felt like he was watching high-grade porn. As a matter of fact, when he looked at Knox and Lucas, it was clear that they were similarly aroused.

Hmmm, being a vampire and drinking blood was looking up. Was it possible to survive on the blood of another vampire? It certainly looked like Knox and Lucas were getting some sustenance.

Finally, after he had no idea how long, the two males detached their mouths from Katarina’s flesh, their teeth stained red with blood and their eyes gleaming black. Katarina’s eyes were closed and she looked deathly pale.

“Dead?” Sienna asked, her voice a mere whisper.

Knox was the first to recover, his pupils slowly contracting so that the pale green of his eyes shone once more. “No. Drained. She’ll be alright as long as we get some blood back into her soon.”

Sienna frowned. “I thought you said you were a lot like a human and could be killed like one. I’m pretty sure that when you drain a human of their blood, they die.”

The blonde shrugged. “I said similar, not the same. We’ve got about twenty minutes before she wakes up and starts going ballistic for blood.”

Bending down, he put his shoulder to Katarina’s midsection and then hoisted her up over his shoulder like she weighed nothing.

“Come on, let’s get back upstairs.”

“Greyvian won’t be happy,” Lucas noted.

“Boo hoo, who cares,” Knox replied tartly. “It’s his fault for not arguing that we shouldn’t go out. I told you something bad was going to happen.”

As they left the bakery, Jacob glanced around at the crowd of people, once more amazed at their total lack of attention.

Being a vampire was definitely going to have its advantages.

The ride in the elevator was deathly quiet and the silence seemed to suck all of the remaining energy out of him. His feet felt like they were made of lead as he entered the apartment behind the others.

He had only a short moment to notice that Greyvian’s Poker Face slipped a little when Knox laid Katarina’s prone body down on the couch and then it was lights out.

*  *  *

Greyvian hadn’t seen his sister, Katarina, in close to three and a half centuries. The last memory he had of her wasn’t a very good one, so it was understandable that he was disturbed by her sudden presence. Thankfully, Jacob chose that moment to succumb to exhaustion and toppled like a tree to hit the floor with a thud, diverting everyone’s attention away from his involuntary expression.

Ignoring the others as they crowded around Jacob’s prone form, he stood staring at his sister, his gut tightening with a multitude of unpleasant emotions.

She looked much the same as he remembered her, even for all the modern alterations of straightened hair, makeup and severely different clothing to when he’d seen her last. She still had the same dark hair, strong features and athletic build, and still had the power to make him feel the weight of his sins, even unconscious as she was.

He couldn’t help but wonder if this whole weekend was the Universe’s punishment for the lives he’d taken over the centuries. To have so many things set upon him at once was surely a sign. First, there was Sienna who managed to cut through a century of hard-earned numbness with one whiff of her intoxicating scent, then there was a pre-trans son who would surely inherit his curse, and now this?

Karma was a real bitch.

“Give us a hand with him, would you, Lucas?” Knox said from over by the door.

Greyvian watched them lift Jacob by hands and feet and then shuffle him off towards the hallway with a sense of calm that he knew would most likely be short lived. He missed this remoteness, this distance from everything. He’d been feeling it so little the past twenty-four hours that it seemed like a lifetime ago now.

Sienna suddenly appeared at his side, joining him in staring down at his sister’s unconscious form.

“What happened?” he asked calmly, as if he were asking her if the sun was shining outside and not how his sister, whom he had avoided so successfully since his killing spree started so long ago, had come to be in the same room as he.

“She came into the café,” Sienna explained, her voice subdued. “At first she was just having a pleasant little conversation with Knox, but then she mentioned that she’d heard you’d been seen not far from here and wanted to know if they knew anything.”

Damn. Those two from last night had been quicker than he’d thought in spreading the word about their little encounter. He then realised the larger implications of what Sienna had said. His sister had come looking for him. Someone who had made it clear to him that she wanted nothing to do with him… had come looking for him. Why?

“She didn’t seem convinced that their presence here was just coincidence and then she realised there was a pre-trans with them. We tried to act natural, but it was our turn to order and I think she recognised Jacob’s voice as being similar to yours.”

He turned his head slightly to look at her profile as she spoke. Her lips were a darker shade than normal; causing his gaze to focus on her mouth and his thoughts to drift towards that kiss she had branded him with last night. God, what he wouldn’t give to be a normal male. Squishing the thought before it had time to fully form, he focused on her words and not her mouth and husky voice.

“At first, she thought he was you,” Sienna continued, oblivious to the direction of his thoughts, “but Jacob set her straight. She kind of freaked out when he told her he’s your son and then she saw me. I wasn’t exactly unAware, if you know what I mean.”

She looked up at him guiltily, her vibrant blue eyes pleading his forgiveness.

Greyvian could guess the rest. “And then Knox and Lucas drained her to keep her from spreading the word. Having nowhere else to take her, they brought her here.”

Sienna nodded. “I guess... Wait. Are you saying they drained her because of me?”

“Afraid so, honey,” Knox said as he came back into the room with Lucas trailing behind. “Do you have any idea what would happen if the rest of the vampire nation caught wind of your existence? Disaster.”

She blinked a few times and Greyvian could read every one of the emotions that passed across her features as her mind worked over the realisation that her life was in danger. He hadn’t wanted this for her. He knew all too well what it was like to fear for your life and it was not a welcome sensation.

“I’d really love to know how long you’ve been Aware,” Knox said, eyes bright with inquisition. “Have you ever taken any notice of the fact that you were Aware of people others seemed inclined to ignore like a piece of furniture?”

She thought about it for a minute and then shook her head. “Nothing blazingly obvious, no.”