Cursed (20 page)

The male huffed a laugh as they headed back to the apartment and then cast a sideways glance his way. “You really see every act of evil that someone commits?”

Good humour vanishing, he nodded his head. “Yes.”

Jacob shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Sucks to be you.”

He couldn’t disagree.

The walk back to the apartment was silent for the most part, but as they rounded the corner of the building, Jacob asked the question Greyvian had known would come eventually. “What was my mother like?”

Like a scene from a movie, he pictured the first time he had seen Jacob’s mother. “A little shorter than I, dark hair, green eyes, a shy smile. She had a husky voice and a pleasant nature. I met her in the bar where she worked.”

Entering the apartment building, he became lost in memory as they headed for the elevator. It didn’t happen very often but sometimes after feeding, the sexual desire that he felt wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he willed it to. On those occasions, it was necessary to find a female in order to purge himself of the unwelcome feeling or the need to feed returned days, not weeks, later. On that specific occasion, he had found himself inside a bar not quite knowing how he’d gotten there, his eyes already searching for an appropriate candidate. When he’d spotted Mary Fletcher behind the bar, her smile had caught his attention. There had just been something about it that had had him heading in her direction. The rest, as they say, is history.

As they reached the elevator, Jacob pressed the button and stood staring at him until Greyvian finally realised the male was waiting for more. The problem was: he didn’t know what else to say that wouldn’t sound sleazy.

Jacob said it first. “So… wham-bam, thank you, ma’am?”

“Something like that.”

His son nodded as if that were the exact answer he had been expecting. They stood in silence as the elevator door opened with a ding and he had the sudden urge to take the stairs while Jacob got into the carriage.

Suppressing the desire, he followed the male and turned around as the door closed, trapping them both in the four by four square container.

“You could almost say that she died for a single night of pleasure,” Jacob said in a conversational tone of voice. “She died shortly after giving birth to me, you know. Complications—or something like that.”

“I’m sorry you never had the chance to know her.”

Jacob looked over at him, eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I didn’t really expect a response to that. You’re a regular chatterbox compared to when I first met you. Were you just having a bad day?”

Greyvian felt his own surge of surprise as he realised Jacob was right. He’d probably talked more in the past hour than he had all year. It must be another side effect of ingesting Sienna’s blood. Jacob seemed to be waiting for an answer, so he shrugged and deflected with, “A bad couple of centuries, really.”

His son laughed and shook his head in amusement. They spent the next few moments in silence as the elevator completed its journey to the tenth floor. When it came to a stop and the doors slid open, Jacob stepped out first and then looked back at him, expression thoughtful. “If it was a one-nighter, why is my surname Greyson instead of Fletcher? Or Kobussen, like yours? Why would she give me that particular surname?”

Why indeed. He’d wondered the same thing ever since Knox had introduced his son with that particular surname. Mary had been human. There was no way she could have known the naming conventions of vampire society, the naming of children depending on who fathered them: Kobussen or Kobukter in his family, depending on gender.

“I don’t have a definitive answer for that,” he told Jacob, “but she couldn’t have called you Kobussen because I never gave her a surname. As to why she didn’t give you her surname… I guess we’ll never know.”

12

Katarina looked up as the apartment door opened, half expecting Greyvian and Jacob to be covered in blood as they walked into the room. Jacob entered first, looking exactly as he had before he’d left, if only with slightly rosier cheeks. There was no mad gleam in his eye, no boasting of feeling great—he looked as normal as ever. Well, as normal as she could assume he looked. Not knowing him very well, she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure of his ‘normal’.

She was surprisingly disappointed, yet relieved at the same time.

“Kill anyone?” she asked Jacob, unable to bite her tongue.

The male lifted his eyebrow and smiled at her in amusement, the expression reminding her so much of the Greyvian she used to know that she was momentarily nonplussed.

“Thankfully, no,” Jacob replied, walking towards them as Greyvian came in behind him, also lacking blood-drenched clothing.

She wanted to ask her brother if
he
had killed anyone, but was pretty sure she didn’t really want to know the answer.

“So does this mean that you’ve just got no self-control?” she asked him instead.

Greyvian said nothing but met her eyes as he walked towards them and then sat down on the sofa beside Jacob. The younger version of her brother gave her a good excuse to look away from that unnerving stare when he spoke for Greyvian.

“Actually, he had to do the Vulcan Nerve Pinch on me to get me to stop.”

“Really?” Knox asked, his eyes on Greyvian, fascinated. “You knocked him out with it?”

“Not quite, but it did the job,” her brother replied, lifting one shoulder in a what-can-I-say kind of shrug. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have said that he looked a little pleased with himself to boot.

She supposed it
was
a handy trick to have up one’s sleeve. But the knowledge that Jacob was just as susceptible to the blood lust Greyvian supposedly went through gave her mixed feelings. On one hand, it was a comfort, because it meant her brother really
couldn’t
control it, but on the other, it meant that there was another one of him on the loose amongst the human population. However, maybe if the two of them were on the loose together, they could keep each other from killing—as Greyvian had supposedly done for Jacob tonight.

But, it also begged the question—why hadn’t Greyvian ever taken anyone with him before?

“Where’s Sienna?” Jacob asked, looking around the room for the female.

“Sleeping. She was understandably tired after her donation.”

Greyvian’s face was neutral as, one by one, they all looked at him. She had to give it to her brother—he had really great control over his thoughts and emotions—at least, she hoped it was great control and not just that he felt nothing.

“So, what happened? What was it like?” Knox asked the two males, ever curious.

Jacob shrugged. “We went down a dark alley, I made a human Aware and then I drank from him. Greyvian stopped me from killing him and that’s that.”

There seemed to be more that the male was leaving out, some sense of ‘and then’, but neither Jacob nor Greyvian seemed inclined to explain in any more detail. They simply shared a look between them and then sat in silence.

“Can you explain the feeling to me?” Knox asked the younger male. “Grey has never been inclined to satisfy my curiosity on the subject. Just how far gone are you?”

Jacob’s eyes immediately turned black, his gaze distant. When he spoke, there was a rasp to his words that indicated his fangs were out. “Instinct took over the moment the man spoke. Before I knew it, my fangs were in his neck and it was… euphoria. Time lost all meaning. Everything around me disappeared. All I knew was the taste of that man’s blood, the feel of it travelling down my throat and throughout my body, filling me with energy. With life.”

Katarina’s eyes drifted to her brother as Jacob spoke. Was that how it was for Greyvian? Did the thought of stopping never even enter her brother’s mind? Again—if that were the case—why did he not take somebody with him whenever he went in search of blood?

“The thought of stopping never even entered my mind,” the male finished as if he had heard her thoughts, blinking a few times and shaking his head as if to rid himself of the blood lust. It seemed to work, as his eyes slowly returned to their former light grey, the pupils retracting to a normal size.

She couldn’t keep quiet. She couldn’t let the question they were probably all thinking go unasked. “If you were able to keep Jacob from killing, why do you not go with another so that they can do the same for you?”

Her brother looked into her eyes and was silent for a long time. She stared him down and wished, not for the first time, that she was able to read his emotions like she used to be able to. But there was nothing there to read now; or if there was, it was hidden behind an impenetrable wall of diffidence. When he finally spoke, his voice was neutral as ever, “If it had been that way from the beginning, perhaps that would have been possible. But not now.”

Feeling like she’d been stabbed in the heart, she knew this was all her fault. If she’d just helped him through his first taste, this could have all gone so differently. He might never have become the killer he was today.

“Why not now?” she asked, feeling lightheaded, her voice a mere whisper.

“I have my reasons,” he replied evasively.

She cast an appealing look Jacob’s way but the male threw up his hands and shook his head. “Don’t look at me. This is between the two of you.”

Feeling ill, she lapsed into silence. She couldn’t understand why her brother wouldn’t explain himself. Could he not see how much his silence wounded her? Perhaps that was his intention? Perhaps he was paying her back for the life he now lived? Perhaps she deserved it.

It was her fault he was a killer.

Greyvian ignored the tormented look his sister was directing his way. He wasn’t entirely certain why he didn’t want to tell her and the half-breeds that he could see the evil inside of humans, but perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was already seen as a freak. He didn’t exactly want to add more fuel to the fire and give all of the full-bloods more reason to want to hunt him down and kill him. Not that it would really make that much difference. He drank human blood,
needed
it for survival, which was more than excuse enough for some.

Not that those present would go announcing his affliction to the world—they possibly wouldn’t even care—but he didn’t feel like explaining himself to them right now, if ever. He’d talked enough in the past 48 hours to last him the next decade and sincerely hoped that he could soon return to the solitude of his home and forget all that had happened here. Sienna, her scent, the taste of her blood, the feel of her mouth pressed to his, her soft body beneath him—those memories he could almost deal with. But her defence of him, her faith that he wasn’t beyond redemption, however naïve it might be—that was something that would haunt him to the end of time.

“What the hell do I do now?” Jacob asked suddenly, distracting him from his inner musings. “I mean, making that human Aware was an effort, so I can’t go back to my life as it was, can I? So what the hell do I do? How do I earn a living? How do I DO anything?” His son’s frustrations were clearly evident in his tone, if not by the forlorn look on his face.

“How have you made a living so far?” Lucas asked, causing Greyvian to realise that he really knew very little about his son’s life. Which was forgivable, really, seeing as the male had been unconscious ninety percent of the time they had been there.

“I teach martial arts.”

Greyvian couldn’t help but think that would come in handy.

“How many students?” Knox asked.

“Twenty or so. Three times a week and twice on Saturdays.”

The blonde’s lips tightened and he shook his head with regret. “Well, that’s out. You
can
sustain Awareness—with practice—but for no more than a handful of people at a time. If you’re really serious about continuing, you could scale it down to a few private lessons, but it would be damn hard work and very draining.

“I’m sure feeding every day could be just like eating food and drinking beverages—although you might be hard-pressed to get someone to go with you every time if you’re really serious about the no-killing rule. We half-breeds do have a life of our own, you know.” The smart ass smiled a teasing smile and looked back and forth between Jacob and Greyvian. “Unless Greyvian wants to hold your hand on a regular basis? You could make it a father/son bonding experience.”

Jacob’s pale eyes met Greyvian’s and he somehow knew that Jacob was wondering if it would be possible for Greyvian to feed without killing—to feed on an innocent—instead of the evil he’d grown used to. He himself had no idea if that were possible with Jacob by his side to ensure he left the human alive, but he knew that he didn’t even want to try. He’d killed enough innocents already.

As if his son could see the answer in his eyes, Jacob simply turned his attention back to Knox and brought the conversation back on topic. “So what’s my alternative lifestyle? What do you do?”

Knox laughed easily and reclined back on the sofa, spreading his arms along the top and resting an ankle on his opposite leg, the picture of arrogance. “I’ve been around for over a century. Along the way, I’ve invested wisely. Now I don’t
have
to DO anything.”

Jacob rolled his eyes and then looked over at Greyvian with a pained expression. “Is he always like this?”

“I think you will find that most half-breeds can tell you the same thing,” he replied with a brief look of reproach in Knox’s direction. “They’ve either made their wealth over the centuries, or they’re living off the wealth that their families invested for them. They rarely maintain any kind of profession they might have started when they were human.”

Jacob looked at him with an expression of confusion. “Half-breeds? They? Like you’re something different?”

Knox burst out laughing, followed by Lucas, with a snicker or two from Katarina.

“Sorry,” Greyvian said with a grimace, ignoring the cackling. “I keep forgetting you’ve been unconscious through all the information sessions we’ve had with Sienna.”

Jacob made a face and rolled his eyes. “Great. My best friend knows more about being a vampire than I do—and she doesn’t even really need to know this shit.”

Knox laughed harder, merely shaking his head when Jacob sent a glower his way.

Deciding to go with the notion that Jacob knew nothing about vampires, Greyvian outlined the basic difference between a half-breed and a full-blood for his son. When he was finished, Jacob looked at each of them in turn, his thoughts churning visibly as he connected the dots.

Finally, Jacob sat back and looked at Knox. “So, those guys jumping us the other day—if I recall correctly—one of them said something about defiling lineage.” He looked at Greyvian, expression sombre. “I take it not everyone is on board with the whole half-breed thing?”

He hadn’t wanted Jacob to have to worry about that just yet, but he was going to find out sooner or later, and thanks to Bartlett, it appeared it would have to be sooner. “Unfortunately most full-bloods share in Bartlett’s beliefs.”

Ever the intelligent male, Jacob’s eyes darkened. “Is it the fact that we’re not full-blooded vampire’s that’s the problem, or that we’re half human?”

“Humans do not rate highly on a full-blood’s list of favoured species, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Knox confirmed.

“Not all of us are like that,” Katarina interjected, casting a mock glare in Knox’s direction. “Some of us happen to like humankind just as much as our own kind—if not more.”

Jacob made a face, judging correctly that those numbers were a minority. “Great. So I’m a half-breed vampire who also drinks human blood. Awesome. Tell me again why you saved me from being killed by my transition?”

“Would you rather be dead?”

The male seemed to think it over for a long minute and then finally sighed. “I guess not. So, you still haven’t answered my question—what the hell do I do now?”

“Now?” Greyvian asked, having already thought about it. “Now you come stay with me and learn how to defend yourself against a vampire attack. Afterwards? You’ll figure it out.”

All eyes turned toward him, every expression one of surprise or downright shock. He supposed he should have expected it since he had never given any inclination towards anything other than solitude. If he could have, he would have continued that way, but the fact of the matter was, Jacob had just reminded him that his son would be a target from now on and would need proper training—and who better to teach him than the most hunted vampire in history?

“Stay with you?” Jacob asked, the first to recover. “Why would I need to stay with you for that?”

Greyvian thought it interesting that his son—a martial arts instructor—hadn’t immediately declared that he didn’t need training, but then, Jacob had already shown himself to be an intelligent male, so he shouldn’t have been too surprised. “It’s either that or somewhere else until you can find alternate living arrangements. I figured it would just be more convenient that you live with me while we train.”