Eternal: More Love Stories With Bite (3 page)

She protected what she loved.

Since then, there had been men, but not love. Well— Ivan, perhaps—but no, she wasn't going to think about Ivan Derevko tonight. Charlie Jackson was the first guy to come along and make her feel as warm and sweet and overcome as Amos had. And the life Charlie led! He was a sergeant in the army. He'd even been studying at Howard University before the war broke out, and intended to become a professor of mathematics.

She'd grown up seeing black men in chains as slaves. To imagine him as a professor—

Could he do that, after I changed him?

But she pushed aside that momentary concern. Colleges didn't check to make sure students were alive, she figured. Even Evernight Academy didn't have a test to make sure its students were all dead. Charlie might look rather young for a while, but the addition of a pair of glasses could buy you several years; maybe he could be a professor for a decade or so before they had to move along to avoid attracting undue attention. That would be long enough, wouldn't it?

Patrice walked to her closet and pulled out the hatbox where she kept her most precious souvenirs. Within was a lace scarf she'd worn the last time she saw Amos, a fan that had belonged to her mother, a few bills of Confederate money, a bracelet from her first trip to Paris, some newspapers with headlines about the Crimean War, a Faberge egg that held much more than sentimental value, a stole from a Moscow furrier, some Armistice Day poppies, and the older version of the Evernight Academy uniform.

She'd been considering returning to Evernight this fall— but now she had more interesting plans. Instead of teaching herself about the ever-changing world, she'd be teaching Charlie how to be a vampire.

Reverently she folded her pillowcase—the one with Charlie's bloodstains—and settled it in the hatbox before replacing the lid and pushing it back into the closet.

* * * *

Charlie's next leave was on Sunday night, only two days before he was due to ship out to Europe. When he saw her, he (lung his arms around her like he never wanted to let go.

"I can't stand the thought of leaving you," he whispered into her ear.

"Then don't think about it."
Because you won't be.

Although they met at the canteen, neither of them was in any mood for dancing—Charlie because he was practically afire with worry for himself and for her, Patrice because she was impatient to get on with it. The canteen itself wasn't the same; half the girls had tearstained faces, and the boys were either shadowed with terror or wild with the cheap, feral glee some humans felt at the prospect of killing. With her experience of war, Patrice knew that the terrified were the smart ones. The band played upbeat songs, like "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," but the cheery tunes almost seemed to mock the darker mood in the room.

Within half an hour they'd walked out into the night. Patrice had assumed that Charlie would want to return to her room, though she figured she'd have to be the one to suggest it. But he led her along by the hand, walking with purpose to his steps, though they didn't seem to be headed anywhere in particular.

"You have to know what these past weeks have meant to me." His dark eyes could make her melt. "That I love you like I've never loved any other girl."

"And I love you." She couldn't add
like I've never loved any other hoy.
To do that would be to betray Amos and the only love she'd ever known as a mortal woman. Being a vampire meant constantly negotiating between past, present, and future. Someday Charlie would understand this, too.

"A lot of the fellows—they're not bad men, but they just want a romance to comfort them before they go to war. What you and I have is more than that."

"I know, Charlie. It is for me, too." The moonlight outlined him in the night—his broad, muscular shoulders, his army hat, his masculine profile. With her night vision, Patrice could see that he hadn't knotted his tie as tightly as usual, that his collar was unbuttoned at the top. No doubt he didn't remember how he'd scratched his neck and why the skin there was slightly raw—those who were bitten almost never recalled the moment itself. But Patrice did. Remembering the warm velvet of his skin against her tongue and the rush of his blood filled her with longing.

He said, "I've never been one to run around with women. That's not how a Christian man should behave. I knew from the moment I met you that you were the kind of girl I'd been looking for all along. Sweet-natured. Beautiful. And sensible, too, not some flighty little thing."

"You're so sweet," Patrice said, but almost by rote, distracted as she was. She glanced around them: they were on the outskirts of a park, where the thick leaves of trees would shadow the streetlights and provide a bit of privacy. The time had come to kill and claim him.

Charlie was leading them toward the park already. He wanted them alone, too, though no doubt for different reasons. Patrice hid her little smile behind one hand.

"I don't have anything I can give you," he said. "Like—I mean, I don't have a ring."

No need to hide her smile anymore. "Oh, Charlie."

"But when I get home—and I promise I'm coming home for you, Patrice—when I get back from the war, I want us to be married. I know my family back in Baltimore will love you as much as I do."

In-laws. Perish the thought. "I want us to be together forever, too."

"And when this war is over, we can build a life together. The life I've always dreamed of." Charlie's grin shone; the fear of war had left him for a moment, as he looked toward a better future. "I don't know what Howard's policy is toward married students—never had to know, but I'll find out. And if we have to wait while we're engaged, that's all right, too, isn't it? I'll take double the courses. Get done even faster. Once I'm in graduate school, we can get married. Maybe buy a little house. Start our family."

"Our family," she repeated. The thought was all but alien to her, the shadow of a dream that had died for her almost before it began.

He hugged her close. His breath was warm against her ear. "I can't stop thinking about a bunch of little girls as pretty as their mama. Or a baby boy on your knee."

Patrice slowly put her arms around him in return.

"I'm going to love you all my life, Patrice. When we're old and gray, I know I'll feel the same way about you I do right now."

Old and gray.

He loved life as much as he loved her. Too much for her to rob him of it, no matter what. Letting him live the way he wanted meant letting him go—at least, for now. She had forgotten that love sometimes demanded sacrifice. Tears welled in her eyes.

Charlie felt her start to weep and cuddled her closer. "Honey, don't be scared. I know it's hard, but we'll be together again."

"When you're home from the war." And then she broke down in tears, surrendering him to the battle, and the dangers of mortal life.

* * * *

Four Months Later

Evernight Academy admitted vampires of both sexes, but during wars, it practically turned into a girls' school. Battlefields were tempting, for vampires; even many women took part as nurses or other front-line support, if they could manage it. So many wounded, so many inevitable deaths— human blood ripe for the taking, and in most cases the killing was a mercy, guilt-free.

"That is one theory for the appeal of war to our kind," said Mrs. Bethany when Patrice mentioned it to her one day as a school assembly was about to begin. "My personal opinion is that men love war, and they are fools enough to run off to it whenever they can, even if they have had enough experience to know better."

"Not all men love war," said Patrice. Though she was only a few decades younger than Mrs. Bethany, she kept her voice respectful, her disagreement theoretical. Mrs. Bethany ruled over Evernight Academy as headmistress, and among vampires, hierarchy mattered. More than that—Mrs. Bethany had undeniable power. "I think most of them honestly believe it's their duty."

Mrs. Bethany raised an eyebrow. "Human men, perhaps, though I doubt even that. As for vampires—what loyalties can we owe to nations that will rise and fall a dozen times during our existences? Even those I would expect to know better fall prey to the lure of it." She held up a thin letter with the distinctive symbols of the navy on the envelope. "Another deferral for another semester. Yet Balthazar More is two centuries my senior, always entirely sensible in my experience, at least until now. He is of Puritan stock, one of the original settlers of the Massachusetts colony. Why should he feel a duty to fight the Japanese?"

They bombed us,
Patrice wanted to say, but she knew better than to argue with Mrs. Bethany in one of her cynical moods. Besides, the rest of the students had gathered, and it was time to begin the assembly.

Mrs. Bethany's long skirt rustled as she ascended the podium in the great hall. "Girls, as you know, Evernight Academy must appear to the outside world to be a school like any other. Therefore it is appropriate for us to engage in war work, and this year we will again be leading a rubber drive in Riverton and other nearby communities. You will go from house to house and ask the residents for any old tires or other rubber items that can be spared. The school Studebaker will be made available to you for hauling the rubber to our collection point, and when we have gathered enough, we will donate it to the armed forces to be melted down for their use. I must remind all of you to be polite, to use your knowledge of the modem era to interact appropriately with the public, and to conduct yourselves as representatives of this school. Although I would once have thought it unnecessary to add this, last year's drive proved me wrong, so I will reiterate: it is
completely unacceptable
to kill humans in order to take their rubber goods. This is not in the spirit of the drive. Let's have none of it this time."

The assembly broke out into excited chatter—after a few months of relative isolation up in the Massachusetts hills, most of them were eager to get back out in the world and try their newfound knowledge about the way life was lived now. Patrice felt less of a charge than the others; with Charlie away at war, she hardly cared about being out and about. Better to stay here, to bury herself in schoolwork and try to forget the nagging question of what she was going to do when Charlie came home.

Then Mrs. Bethany's aide shouted out, "Mail call!"—and Patrice's name came first.

Smiling, she grabbed for the envelope, expecting another of Charlie's long letters from "Somewhere in Europe," as the soldiers always wrote to protect troop locations from becoming publicly known. He was a good correspondent, writing often, sharing funny stories about his fellow soldiers, his prayers for her well-being, his faith that this was a just and noble fight, and sometimes, when he had to, his reactions to the bloodshed he'd seen. When he did that, he always apologized for shocking her; she always wrote back that nothing he endured could shock her, because it was a part of him. She didn't add that she'd shed more blood than he could imagine.

But the letter wasn't from Charlie. It was from Charlie's mother.

* * * *

"He's a prisoner of war." Patrice paced back and forth in Mrs. Bethany's carriage-house office. "Apparently he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Now he's at the Stalag VII-A camp in Bavaria, Germany."

Mrs. Bethany watched impassively. Probably she thought Patrice ridiculous, but Patrice didn't care.

"At first I was just glad he hadn't been killed," she continued, "but Mrs. Jackson says he's sick. You know as well as I do what war is. How captives are treated. And the Nazis think black men are lower than animals. Even the common people in Germany don't have the necessities of life anymore, so what are the chances Charlie will get the medicine he needs?"

"And what do you propose to do about this?" Mrs. Bethany steepled her hands over her desk.

Patrice hadn't really thought about it until that moment, but she knew instantly. The promise she'd made to herself months before returned more strongly, blotting out everything that had
held
her back before: no Nazi was going to kill Charlie
Jackson.