Dark Rapture (66 page)

He released her wrist and turned to the coffin.

I’m not taking up with them. I don’t even want to see Vince anymore. Nor do I want to please you after all I have learned today, Sebastian DelaCourte.

She backed away as the chains hugging the coffin began to snap and fly off, aided by the force of Sebastian’s rage. She shielded her face, not so much from the flying links but from Sebastian’s anger burning like a blaze in the hazy room.

“Bring the lighter over here,” he snapped and she rushed to obey.

The stone cover scraped across the box and as the light filled the room Scarlet peered over Sebastian’s shoulder into the dusty confines of the sarcophagus.

There was a woman inside. At least it resembled a woman.

“I wonder how long she’s been in there?”

“Maybe she really is dead,” Scarlet offered.

“Then why the chains to hold down a
dead
corpse?” he said, surveying the contents. “No, she is alive. There is still flesh on her bones, though it has wrinkled and dried. Look here.” He lifted a snarl of matted hair. “It would crumble with time if there were not a minute amount of vampire blood pushing slowly through her withered veins. Others have survived centuries to reawaken, I’ve heard tales.”

Sebastian pushed a hand under the dried relic and lifted.

“No! You can’t lift her. She’ll crumble.”

Considering her words, he gently lowered the head back.

Scarlet clamped her hand over her mouth.
What the hell am I doing? Giving him advice on how to get his dried lover out?

“Then I shall revive her right here.” He jumped inside the coffin, carefully placing his feet to either side of the withered legs.

The room fell still. Scarlet listened as he shuffled about inside the narrow confines of the sarcophagus, his boots scraping across stone. She heard a ripping noise, as if leather were being torn. “What are you doing, Seb—”

“Silence!”

Firmly admonished, Scarlet stepped toward the window and listened intently.

“Her mouth is so dry,” he said to no one in particular, more as if he were talking his way through the procedure. “Come here, Scarlet. I need you to pry her lips apart so I can drip my blood into her mouth.”

Oh, well, that was certainly high on her list of things she most wanted to do. Pry a dried vampire’s lips apart so her lover could drip his blood into it and revive her for a grand old reunion. No problem.

“Scarlet!”

Snapping to motion, she groped her way to the coffin. Sebastian grabbed her hand and pulled it down so she could feel the dry parchment that was Catrina’s face. “Well, I guess this is better than walking through corpse hell.”

“I would appreciate your silence,” he said swiftly.

No pleasing this guy tonight.

Feeling her way about the woman’s dried face she located the crusted mounds she assumed were lips. The jaws were stiff but she was able to pry them apart and felt the first drops of blood on her fingers as Sebastian bit into his flesh and lowered his mouth to the parched vampire.

Feeling once more like a voyeur as she assisted in some twisted sexual practice between a man and his dried vampire, Scarlet closed her eyes and rolled her head to the side, thinking there were probably more pressing things for her to do at the moment. Lounging in the garden at home, soaking in a luxuriant bath, or even helping Anthony prune the viciously thorned rose bushes seemed a treat compared to this.

“Step back.” Sebastian nudged her hand and she pulled back.

What followed was nothing less than incredible. Though she couldn’t see, what she
heard
was more than enough to determine what was going on.

After long minutes, a rustling started within the boxy depths of the coffin. A sharp cracking noise, as if bones were snapping straight, knees were bending, and arms began to animate beneath a rubbery shroud of dried skin. Skin Scarlet felt sure became more supple with each reviving drop of blood Sebastian dripped into the vampire’s mouth.

Sebastian’s lingering moan did more than startle Scarlet—it infuriated her. My God, she thought, I’m jealous of some stiff! But the next sound sent chills down her spine. The sound of her lover moaning and the ripping of flesh as the sharpened daggers of his reincarnated vampire lover sank deeply into his neck.

Scarlet stepped forward in the darkness, then stopped. She heard a new sound now. The sound of a female voice as it awakened to a new life.

Chapter Twenty

Sebastian brushed his cheek along the renewed flesh. The dried corpse had reanimated quickly, the cheeks filling out and moistening, her lips becoming slippery with saliva and the hair softening into fine silk across her forehead.

“Sebastian?” He remembered Scarlet stood in the darkness.

“We must take her home with us. She is still too weak.”

“Did she…revive? Is she—”

“She is as you are now.”

Not quite as lovely, he remembered, though it mattered no longer. He now stood in the presence of two women who had betrayed his love. He felt drained and tired. He wished to go home and crawl into the comforts of his coffin and forget them both. But he had started something here tonight he must finish. He had to find out why Catrina had been locked away by her brother and what Rico was up to. That bastard could not remain in the same town as he. Not without a fight.

“What time is it?”

“It’s only been an hour,” Scarlet answered.

“Then we must hurry. We’ll have to go through the house. I don’t want to push her through the window in her fragile condition. Open the door for me and I’ll carry her.”

He listened for a creak of a door, some motion, but heard none. “Scarlet?”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t go through that room again, Sebastian, it’s too gross.”

Immortality had hardened him over the two centuries he had lived, but Scarlet was still so new, so affected by her surroundings.

“There’s no light, Scarlet. Now come on, you won’t see a thing.”

“That’s what I mean, I won’t see! I might step
on
something. Can’t we try to hoist her up to the window.”

“Open the door now,” he demanded. “I will not argue with you when we’ve so little time. Now, do it!”

Her footsteps skittered away and he turned to lift Catrina in his arms. She was heavy, her dead weight being over a hundred pounds, he thought. But he could feel his blood flowing through her veins, reviving, warming and renewing, as it had over two centuries ago when he first created her. His blood child. His insincere, spoiled, nasty brat blood child.

You must be crazy, he thought. Why are you doing this? Is it because you have some vicious desire to be used by women? Can you never leave well enough alone? Both of these women have spurned you once already.

The door creaked open and he walked blindly, recalling the door in the other room had been directly across from him when he had scanned the scene earlier. “Hold onto my shirt so you won’t get lost,” he offered.

Sebastian stepped on something hard. He instantly pictured a thin finger bone, but walked on, shrouding his senses to the carnage.

Once out and up the stairs, he breathed deeply, inhaling smoke tinged air to rid his senses of the putrid vapors. Catrina hung limply in his arms, motionless, though the
shimmer
was becoming stronger. She was gaining strength with each breath she took, but she would need more blood to recover completely.

The hallway was dark. They walked quickly and soon the moonlight shone ahead of them. Scarlet rushed to the foyer. Sebastian looked around. Rico’s taste for the extravagant hadn’t changed. Had he become selfish over the years? Did he lock his own sister away so there would be more for him? He found it hard to comprehend when there was only the deep love he remembered between the two of them.

The second floor was lined with a trail of doors. Most likely bedrooms, Sebastian presumed.
I wonder if there are any sick children locked behind them?

As they crossed the massive front room, Sebastian paused in the moonlight to look over the sleeping vampire in his arms. Catrina’s clothes had rotted to threads and her breasts, full and pink, pushed through strands of an ancient crimson dress fashioned in the style of the 1920’s. He felt an irresistible shock of desire as his eyes fell across her nipples, which were soft and shaded a dark rose.

Her hair hung over his arm, a deep mahogany that reminded him of a velvet-covered book he once owned. Pale as snow, her face, though lightly flushed in the cheeks. He knew she needed more blood to regain full consciousness. He bit into his lip again and pressed them to her mouth.

“Drink, Catrina,” he whispered and looked up from his kiss into Scarlet’s jealous stare. She tapped her watch and turned away.

“It is Sebastian DelaCourte,” he said into Catrina’s mouth. “Please…don’t remember me as an enemy but as a friend who got tangled in one of your webs. You were young, you could think only of yourself. I…I hold no grudge now. I wish to help you.”

It seemed she stirred in his arms and a tiny whisper escaped her pursed lips in a gurgle of his blood. “Lover.”

Sebastian clutched her tightly and dashed into the night where Scarlet waited at Anthony’s car. It was a good thing they’d taken the Lincoln instead of the Porsche. “Give me your coat. Her clothes are falling to pieces.”

Scarlet wrestled it off and tossed it to him, landing it across Catrina’s face.

“Help me,” he insisted. “Don’t be so obstinate. Open the door, I’m going to lay her in the backseat.”

Obeying mechanically, Scarlet stood by the door, bowing deeply as Anthony often jokingly did, and then closed it after Sebastian had deposited his new pet.

“Would you like me to drive, master?” she asked sarcastically.

“Oh, would you?” he replied sharply. “Give me the keys. I’ll drive. The mood you’re in will have us in an accident before we ever get home.”

Scarlet stomped her foot into the loose pebbles on the drive. “
My
mood?”

“Get in.” He paused, sternly looking over the hood of the car. “Or are you going to stay and wait for your lover? Perhaps he’ll bring a nice morsel home for the two of you to share?”

Rage brightened her eyes to a brilliant emerald. A sight that had always filled Sebastian with desire. But a part of him slumped, falling deep into the pit of his stomach.
I shouldn’t tease her so. I will regret this, I’m sure.

“Would you prefer I did stay?”

I don’t think I could survive without your presence
. “No. I’ll need your help when we get home.”

***

“How is she doing?”

Scarlet bent over the back seat and flipped on the ceiling light. The reincarnated vampire shivered.

It was amazing how Sebastian’s blood had so quickly transformed a bone-dry skeleton into a living, breathing woman.
Vampire
, Scarlet corrected her thoughts. Beneath the cover of her jacket, Scarlet examined the pink flesh rounded to smooth curves over Catrina’s hips and thighs. Her fingernails were long and ragged, which generally stopped growing last of all things after a vampire went into hibernation.

“I think she’s scared.”

“I imagine so, if she’s been locked away for any amount of time she may never have been in a car before. Does she look like she’s conscious, like she knows what’s going on?”

Scarlet lifted the woman’s hair from her face to reveal one brilliant azure eye and one a dead gray.
One is mine, the other my sister’s.
A pale hand snatched forward, catching her sharpened nails across the back of Scarlet’s hand.

“Ouch!” She slid back into her seat, sucking the blood from the back of her hand. “She clawed me. What kind of monster did you create?”

“Stop blaming me for everything that hurts you.”

He shifted into park and opened the door. “We need gas. You fill, I’ll run inside and pay.” He slammed the door and walked around to her window. “That is if you can handle something as complex as filling a gas tank without causing yourself harm. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you setting yourself aflame.”

Scarlet thrust her tongue out at him as Sebastian stalked away. As he entered the tiny supermart a trio of teenage girls spied him. Knowing how he hated drooling fans, Scarlet got out of the car, smiling to herself. Serves him right, she thought, and shoved the pump into the gas tank.

She glanced into the backseat, finding Catrina still shivered in a huddle, and eyed the service station again. Sebastian stood in front of the counter patting his pockets while a gaggle of wide-eyed teenage girls eyed him dreamily. He forgot his wallet. He never did carry money with him, finding it wasn’t necessary, for he had no need for it. Anthony was always the one who carried his credit cards.

Pissed she had to go inside and bail him out, Scarlet stalked toward the supermart.

***

“Ah, ladies.” Sebastian slipped away from the pawing young girls who waved pens and scraps of paper before him. “I’m sorry, but my girlfriend is here.” He slid over to Scarlet and stood behind her as she waited for her cash card to be swiped.

“Your
girlfriend
is out in the car,” Scarlet muttered and stomped past the teenage girls. Sebastian followed, passing her by on the way to the car.

Something snapped. Scarlet stopped, clenching her fists at her sides. “You know, Sebastian,” she blurt out, causing him to stop abruptly in his tracks in the middle of the pumping port.

He turned around with a
now what?
look on his face. So damn sexy, even in his anger.

“I think I’d like to settle this right here and now. You’ve been treating me like grave dirt for the entire night and I need to know where I stand with you.”

“Grave dirt—” he approached her calmly, his fingers steepled together before his chest “—I enjoy. I have never betrayed you in the time we have been together, and I will not tolerate it from you!”

“Fine! I never wanted this false relationship in the first place.”

“False?” She could feel his breath on her lips as he spoke. “How can you call the love I have given you false? The undying devotion, the constant care and nurturing. I have given you everything you have ever desired, Scarlet, yet you repay me by sleeping with another man.”

“I did not! Why won’t you believe me? I never desired immortality,” she said, her anger causing her to leave his misconceptions as they were.

“And did I?”

Frozen by his stare, a trance of memories floated before Scarlet’s eyes. The truth was far stranger than any fiction novel could ever record. Sebastian had taken her mortal life from her without her consent. But she had actually been the one to take his mortal life from him first.

After living the vampire life for less than a week she had been kidnapped back through time where she discovered a pre-vampire Sebastian, a young boy of nineteen with hopes of marrying and beginning a new life. And she, in a selfish move with hopes of returning to her own time, had changed him into a vampire to insure she would spend the rest of her life with him.

Had she had made a mistake?

If he could actually believe she would want Vince over him, then so be it. She wanted nothing to do with a man who had so little trust in her. She glanced away from his accusing stare.

“She’s gone!” Scarlet raced to the car where the door hung open, exposing the empty back seat.