Cursed (29 page)

If someone had told him before now that this kind of evil existed, he never would have believed them. Not to the extent that he could now attest to, in any case.

Closing his mind to the taint, he focused on the present. The man’s latest victim was bleeding and would need his help.

He could deal with this evil shit later.

Moving fast, knowing that time was precious, he made his way past Greyvian and the soon-to-be-dead-douchebag and searched the area. He couldn’t see her. But he could smell the blood. Tracking the scent, he found the trail and followed it until he found the woman hiding under a large sheet of cardboard.

Taking a moment to lower his Awareness, he pulled the cardboard back and hissed in part sympathy, part desire, as his eyes took in the blood staining the white of her cotton t-shirt. She whimpered and tried to drag herself away from him, but she was too weak from loss of blood.

Without a second thought, he bit into his wrist and pressed it against the woman’s mouth, ordering her to drink. She shook her head and tried to turn her head away, but he held it firm.

“If you want to live, then drink,” he ordered once again.

As if seeing the truth of it in his eyes, she finally opened her mouth and allowed the blood to pool inside of her mouth. One swallow became two, and then a third. On the fourth, her hands came up and locked around his forearm, pulling it closer to her mouth as his blood began to work its magic.

Greyvian found them a moment later. “That’s enough,” he said, wrapping a hand around Jacob’s bicep and pulling him back. The woman’s hands slipped away and she stared up at them with a mixture of horrified fascination.

“If you don’t want her bleeding out again, you need to lick her wounds,” Greyvian told him, ignoring the woman for the moment.

Jacob’s mouth dropped open. Was he for real?

“Our blood is not all magic,” the male reminded him calmly. “It alone will not heal her wounds—but your saliva will.”

“Oh.” Right. He’d forgotten that.

Looking down at the woman, he wondered how the hell you asked someone if you could lick their wounds—as if you were all a pack of dogs or something.

“You are Vampire?” she asked in a heavy accent, lifting her shirt without being told so that they could see where that bastard of a human had stabbed her.

“Yes,” Greyvian replied, seeming not to mind that the woman knew their little secret.

“I become like you?” she sounded almost hopeful.

“No,” he replied. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Without another word, Greyvian turned and walked away, leaving Jacob to the intimate business of licking her wounds closed.

Kneeling down beside the blonde, he smiled half-heartedly at her and then turned his attention to the sluggishly bleeding three-inch slit marring the perfect skin of her abdomen.

“Ah, hold still, I guess.”

She nodded and braced herself as he bent down to inspect the wound closer. It was fairly deep. Would licking the surface penetrate to the deeper layers to heal the entire thing, or was he just going to be turning it into an internal wound that would bleed her out and kill her just as effectively as if the blood were pouring out into the world? He really wished Greyvian had stuck around to provide some instruction. Healing Sienna had been easy—those had just been two little puncture wounds. This was a three-inch deep gash.

Well, no use just staring at it. Maybe a glob of spit would help?

“This might be a bit weird,” he warned, gathering spit in his mouth.

She watched in fascination as he dribbled spit into her wound, his thoughts on healing the entire time. The woman hissed in pain as the fluid oozed down into the wound, going deeper and deeper until he could see the clear shine of it at the very bottom. When nothing happened, he felt at a loss.

Looking up, he searched for Greyvian, wanting to ask what exactly he was supposed to do.

“He say lick, no?” the woman suggested, surprisingly calm given the strangeness of the situation.

“Ah, yeah. I guess.”

Bending down, he crossed his fingers for luck and then ran his tongue over the surface and around the edges of the wound. He had only a moment to feel awkward about the situation, as the thirst gripped him within moments of tasting her blood like an iron fist around the throat, squeezing and demanding that he take more.

Keeping his thoughts focused on healing was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, and probably not the first truly hard thing he was going to have to do in his life now that he was an immortal vampire. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the wound to heal, for the long slit in her skin to become nothing but a thin scar, the only evidence that she had ever been stabbed by a perpetrator of evil.

Staring at the mark, he shook his head at the miracle that was vampire spit.

“Amazing,” the woman breathed, running a hand over the mark and wincing slightly as she pressed on it. “A little tender still.”

Smiling at the blonde, he opened and closed his mouth a few times as he tried to work out what to say to her and then finally got to his feet and turned, relaxing his hold on his Awareness shield as he did so, leaving her to her fate. He felt like he should say something to her, but what more was there to say, really? She was human. It was now up to her to continue on with her life, to work out whether she wanted to continue to remember this as it had truly happened, or to allow sanity to take over and make her believe it was all a hallucination. He didn’t envy her the memory, but at least she was alive—and she didn’t have the broader picture of what that bastard had done with his life stuck in her head.

Healing her had distracted him for a moment from the vile images, but now they came crawling back like so many repulsive insects, biting at his brain. The blood stuck with him the most. Blood splashed across the floor after dealing a beating to someone deemed to have wronged the man. Blood on his hands after having knifed someone because they had tried to get away from him. Thick and red, it pleased him—the man—it pleased the man…

Shit. Shaking his head, he forced the images and the alien thoughts from his mind, replacing them, instead, with the colour red. No. That was too much like blood. Black. He focused on the colour black—like the end of a bad movie that was never to be watched again.

What the fuck was he supposed to do now? How the hell did someone cope with this kind of fucked up shit flashing through their mind’s eye at any given moment?

Catching up to Greyvian, who was waiting by the entrance of the alley, he now had a newfound respect and empathy for the guy. Now he really got it. The killing, the Poker Face, the ability to switch his emotions off whenever he needed to. It was probably the only way the guy could deal with this unnatural second sight.

“How do you stand it?” Jacob asked, his voice weak with the horror of it all. “The evil? How do you stand to have those images and thoughts inside of your head as if they were your own?”

Greyvian looked at him sharply, eyes searching his face with an intensity that reminded Jacob that his father was utterly lethal.

“You saw it?” It didn’t really sound like a question, but he nodded anyway.

“Damn it,” Greyvian cursed and started walking back down the street the way they had come.

Jacob followed because he didn’t know what else to do right now.

“I’m sorry I ever cursed you with this,” his father said, looking across at him, his emotions showing on his face for once. Remorse and self-loathing was the expression of the day so far.

Oddly enough, he took strength from Greyvian’s reaction and smiled. Not the happy-happy joy-joys, but a lightening of the mood nonetheless.

“Hey, if I have to choose between that and never being alive to begin with… I’ll take what I can get. I mean, it can’t be that bad, right? You’ve lived with it for centuries and you’re still sane.”

Greyvian raised an eyebrow at him. “That all depends on your definition of sane.”

Jacob laughed. “Well, you’re not a raving lunatic and you don’t string fluffy bunnies up just for the fun of it as far as I’ve seen, so I’m going to go with a little fucked up, but relatively normal.”

One corner of the male’s mouth lifted slightly in as much of a smile as you would ever get from him.

“Okay, a lot fucked up, but at least you still know which your memories are and which aren’t. Right?”

The no-comment reaction he received from his father was not encouraging. Thankfully though, Greyvian was just being Greyvian and thinking about his response for a long fucking time before he finally answered.

“It helps to apply a red haze to the images when they come to you. When I first realised what they were, and why they were coming to me, I began to associate the red haze that I see surrounding the human with the flashes of insight. It helps to keep them separate.”

“Thanks,” he said, meaning it. It had to be hard for Greyvian to talk about it after having kept it a secret for so long. “I’ll have to give that a try.”

A red haze. That would probably work better than a solid blood red, and probably better than plain black. A red haze to suit the red aura that denoted evil in the first place.

Jacob was so glad he had someone to talk to about this, someone to guide him. Greyvian must have thought himself insane in the beginning. But he had to wonder—was it
really
possible to keep that kind of evil from leaching into your psyche? With as many of the psychos as Greyvian must have killed over the centuries, didn’t it get hard to distinguish between what was you and what was them? When did that line get crossed? When did you become more about their thoughts than your own?

“And, of course,” Greyvian added, completely deadpan, “killing the evil fuckers helps to deal with it too.”

Hearing the words
evil fuckers
come out of Greyvian’s mouth just seemed wrong. He was far too used to the male being all proper English and everything.

“The best thing to do, however,” Greyvian continued, seemingly oblivious to the impact of his curse, “is not to look for that red haze to begin with. If you can learn to control your feeding you won’t have to rely on that to pick your prey.”

“You never learnt.” He hadn’t meant it to come out so accusatory, but the guy didn’t seem to mind.

“No. I never learnt,” he said, voice back to being neutral, inflectionless. Which, with Greyvian, probably meant that he had switched off because it was too painful. “But that’s not to say that you can’t. In fact, I highly recommend never feeding from evil. It makes the memories ten times harder to deal with.”

“Fuck.” That was definitely something he wanted to avoid at all costs.

At this point, Jacob would try anything and everything to avoid that second sight and the possibility that he would one day be as cut off from emotion as his father—or worse, as evil as the sons of bitches whose memories became his. That meant not picking a victim based on their evil red glow, which in turn meant that anyone would do. Coming to a stop, he looked at the people sporadically walking past, looking for… what? A bad mood? A surly expression?

Stop procrastinating and just pick one
, he chastised himself. Time was wasting. Kobus might find them at any moment, so the sooner they got back, the better.

Without another thought, he reached out and took hold of the arm of the next person that went to walk around him. It was a woman, possibly in her mid-fifties, rather plain in appearance. She stopped dead when his hand wrapped around her upper arm and stared straight ahead. He wondered for a moment why she wasn’t squawking at him to let her go and then remembered that he hadn’t lowered his Awareness shield. Probably for the best, anyway.

Pulling her closer, he got a whiff of perfume and eyed her neck doubtfully. Women sprayed their necks and wrists, didn’t they? He didn’t particularly want to taste the stuff and tried to remember his anatomy lessons to pick another artery. Greyvian must have known why he hesitated, because, after a moment, he stepped forward and lifted the woman’s arm, placing two fingers on the upper inside, tapping once before stepping back once more.

Keeping his eyes on the spot, Jacob stepped forward, lowered his head, sniffed once to make sure she wasn’t coated in deodorant and then applied his teeth and bit.

Trying to keep your head while a rush of pleasure threatened to send you down a stream of happy was really frickin’ difficult. As had happened before, the pleasant tingles spread out from his stomach and he lost focus on everything but the taste and feel. Struggling against the tide of the sensation was a monumental effort, but he thought he was beginning to make some headway when he felt Greyvian’s fingers in that magical little spot that had dropped him to his knees a number of times before. The fact that he felt the fingers before the drop told him that given a few extra seconds, he might have pulled back by himself. Unfortunately, Greyvian didn’t give him those extra seconds before putting the squeeze on, sending him to his knees.

“I almost had it,” he complained, rubbing his shoulder and wincing.

“Really,” Greyvian said, looking at him doubtfully.

“Almost. I wasn’t totally gone this time. I felt your fingers before you dropped me, at least. A little more practice and I might be able to stop myself.” After all, he
had
stopped of his own volition with Sienna, so he knew it could be done.