Masters of the Night (3 page)

3.

Pushing aside low
hanging tree branches and snarls of brush, Angie tried to follow the man
pursuing his bird, but she was running haphazardly, and soon found herself in
the older, denser part of the park.

Gnarled mangles of ivy that had been allowed to run rampant snapped at
her ankles, threatening to coil and trip her as she tried to follow pieces of
broken cement that had once been a walkway.

The night became wicked.

But neither the black feathers and fluff, nor the strange Frenchman,
was anywhere in sight.

Her steps slowed. She could hear a rustling, behind a bit of scraggy
hedge.

The bird?

Something glinted through the wands of leaves, metal …

She leaned in to peer closer.

A pair of powerful arms reached out from the leaves.

She gasped, caught in a grasp she could not break.

Cold steel pressed against her throat, warning her to silence.
Whispering, “Good girl, Angie, don’t scream. My little friend here is antsy,”
her assailant held the knife close, oh, so close, to her jugular.

Then the arms hauled her backward, toward a small stone building
devoured by ivy vines.

A groundskeeper’s shed?

The iron door was an easy push for the weighty arms. Angie was plunged
into utter darkness, silent shadows of stone.

In a frenzy of disbelief, she tried to steady her breath, while terror
kept threatening to choke it from her. “Bobby! What are you doing?” she cried.

His sweaty hands shoved her roughly to a cement floor. “Shut up!”

A speck of park light filtered in through a tiny, cut-out window,
illuminating his eyes. Angie shrank in horror of the vile gleam.

Her eyes darted frantically around the room.

This dark little square was not a gardening shed at all!
Frescas
and stone pillars were not what one would find in a
tool shed.

A low, cement slab like a coffee table rose from the concrete flooring.

Angie’s heart pumped hard with fear as she realized the slab was to support
a coffin. She was in a mausoleum … in the cemetery that adjoined the park.

What was he going to do to her?

Grabbing her painfully by her hair, he began hauling her backward
across the room to the slab.

She dug her feet into the cement, twisting her body, trying to impede
him. Her fingers clawed at his hands, tried to pull her hair from his grip.

He tripped on an unseen piece of debris on the stone flooring, a broken
branch.

With a mighty shove, she rolled and jumped to her feet, grabbing the
branch.

Hands like steel slammed her back, flat against the coarse, rock wall.

Rough stone scratched at her bare flesh, scraped and tore. She saw her
cross falling. The precious symbol her grandmother had given her when she was a
child, a memento from her mother, was falling to the ground, its chain broken.
No! It’s mine!
Her hand reached
out toward the golden sunburst splayed behind the tiny, notched beams becoming
buried in the dirt.

The iron door began to close with a great groan, scraping on its creaky
hinges.

“No!” she cried, whirling. Clutching the branch, she leaped toward the
door, grasping the ring, pulling at the ring, trying to stop the iron door that
was locking and sealing her in.

With him.

She fled to the furthest wall, and struggled to control her rapid,
terrified breathing.

He was crossing the room …

She shrank from him, clinging to the branch that seemed so useless in
the face of the slim steel menace slicing the air, coming for her.

She ducked under his arm and headed for the window. The fight wouldn’t
be long, she knew. But it was all she had.

Grasping the window ledge, she stood on tiptoe, screaming for help
through the tiny opening, trying to see someone, anyone.

Her screams sailed out onto empty air.

The park was closed. Budget cuts. The county workers were gone.

Collapsing despairingly against a stone pillar, she turned to him.

For what seemed an eternity, he just stood there with a grotesque smile
behind the slab, watching her.
Just watching her.
Why
didn’t he move? Why didn’t he get it over with?

He was taking his time, letting the terror linger.

He was cruel.

“You bastard!” she flashed at him, with tears stinging her cheeks.

He moved toward her. The knife lunged.

She ducked, fled to the opposite wall. But in an instant, the knife
slashed and blood spurted, poured down her arm as she threw up her hand to
protect her face. Then the blade pierced the air and descended again.

She blocked the blade’s point with the branch. The knife went flying,
clattered across the stone flooring, slid into a crack in the grout, and was
swallowed up by the earth.

But her attacker still had his hands, monstrous, murderous hands. He
came at her, threw her against the wall, and a new flow of red poured against
the jagged mortar. Crying in pain, she tried to beat him back. But his fists
found her over and over again and the walls found her body over and over again.
Screaming for him to stop, screaming for someone, anyone to help her, she stumbled
around the room helplessly.

No one came. The assault became relentless, merciless, and did not stop
until she had collapsed to the floor, exhausted, broken, and bleeding,
defeated. Still clutching the branch she had futilely flailed at him, she looked
up through half-shut eyes.

An evil grin, the shape of sardonic pleasure, demonized the billboard
perfect face.

“You dirty, damn, dirty, sorry excuse for a human being,” she moaned
through a broken breath.

A black blur sailed across her field of vision.

The night bird.

With screeches and screams that seemed to rise from some wild,
forgotten place, the bird hurled itself toward her attacker like a piece of
black night torn from the heavens.

He tried to beat it off, flailing his hands futilely against the fury
of feathers, beak and talons.

He fell, blood gushing from gaping orbital holes that only seconds
before had been eye sockets. He groped, but found only dust and cold, concrete
floor.

And a pair of eyes.

4.

Through half-closed
eyes behind a drape of soft, black eyelashes, Angie looked up in awe at the
beautiful
vampyre
emerging from the shadows. His
black hair flowed around him in inky, silken swathes that fell to his
shoulders, and his powerful form was liquid as he moved. The folds of the
loosely buttoned, black silk shirt rippled softly, as though a tender wind blew
against him. He seemed more a dream than reality, more of the night than of
man.

His long, black trench coat swirled out away from him as though from a
wind.

He seemed to be floating through airy veils of lustrous, pale blue
light that emanated from his eyes—enveloping her, they pulled her into their
depths and away from her pain.

He lifted her gently as he would lift a fallen sparrow, and placed her
carefully on the coffin slab.

“My cross,” she begged weakly. “Do you see my cross?”

“I am sorry,
chéri
. I do not see your little
charm. I will look for it—later.”

Gingerly, he touched her arms and her sides, and her body, assessing
the damage.

“Are you here to take me to the hospital?” she asked, barely aware.

“No,
chéri
.”

“I—don’t understand.”

The French
vampyre
gathered her into his
arms, cradling her, unable to fight the sorrow wrenching his heart. “I thought
you had gone. Why did you not leave,
Anjanette
?”

He smoothed her golden hair gently away from her neck.

As his gaze fell into hers, Angie tried to appear unafraid of his
violently blue eyes. Her grandmother had told her tales of
vampyres
.

But her grandmother was as crazy as a loon. She’d been locked up for
years!

Sticky pale blue strands from the power of his eyes were suddenly all
over her, spinning a web. The room dissolved.

“I can save you, Angie …”

She understood. “I’m dying.”

Beyond them, Angie could hear her attacker moaning where he had fallen.
A strange gurgling sound was replacing the labored exhalations of breath and
moans.

Then nothing.

The bird lighted on a beam above her, its beak bright with ribbons of
red.

“You were in the tree, weren’t you?” she said, touching the
vampyre’s
shirt with her fingertip. “I felt you.”

“I was there.”

“Damn you. Was I chosen at random, just tonight’s dinner and dessert
because I was there?” She paused to draw in a breath, but inhalation was like a
rake across her lungs. “Or was I on the menu to become a
vampyre
princess?”

His lips curled into a small smile.
“A princess?
Your power would surpass my own,
Liora
Anjanette
. You would be a queen.”

Her heart sank. He knew who she was, what she was.

At twelve, her grandmother had explained her heritage, the legacy of
mysticism. But with her cataract eyes widening like saucers, she had raised a
gnarly finger in warning to beware the night and keep her windows closed.

Everybody said the demented old woman was off her rocker and had no
right to scare a child sleepless with her loony bin ranting, so Angie blew it
off.
Sort of.

“You must be crazy, wanting a mystic.”

He only shrugged. “No. I’m bored. I have watched men act like fools for
eight hundred years. Nothing changes but the tide and the times. For one night
of the kind of power and ecstasy you offer,
Anjanette
,
you were worth the risk.”

“You were out of your mind to think you …” She stopped in mid-sentence
as a sick thought hit her. “Or you’re a master.”

“I am a master, Angie.”

“You belong in hell with Bobby,” she sobbed through her pain.

“You are not happy, Angie. You have a gift no one of your kind even
understands. Come with me.
Where you can be appreciated.”

“No.”

“Use your talent with us. The way it was meant to be used. I can teach
you.”

She tried to shake away the webby film in her brain. But he was oh, so
carefully spinning across her thoughts as she lay dying in his arms. The room
felt hot.
Yet so—cold.
Perspiration beaded up in her
palms. Then dried up like dust.

His voice was as rich as cream, mocha as it played across her skin.
“You don’t have to die, Angie.”

“Do you think I would even choose?” she spat woefully.

He sighed and mumbled something about her obsessive spirit. “It would
seem you have already chosen.”

He kept her in his gaze, a gaze that was now clearly revealing his
thirst, and a hunger so deep it drove a new horror into her heart.
A hunger for more than her blood.

He wanted his queen.

Her thoughts began to ramble like lost rivers.
Have to—get— out
of here.
She pushed at his chest, tried to free
herself
from his embrace. He eased her back onto the slab.
She tried to rise. Sand replaced the stone slab, and she felt as though she was
sinking.

Is this what it felt like to die?

The wall.
Find the wall.
If I can just reach the wall, and the door.

She put out her hand, as though to reach for the wall.

There was no wall.

She fought the swells of confusion, the wall that wasn’t there.
Everywhere, everything was dissolving around her. Then, for a moment, the black
gravelly stone was clear. She could see the room, the dirt, the debris, the
murderous bird on the rafter … and her cross. She reached out, tried to reach
for it.

The
vampyre
was softly calling her name. The
room, icy with mist, floated, and he was a visage through pale veils as he
leaned over her without form or shape … so handsome and desiring in the soft
wind.

He lifted her into his arms again, so close she could have felt his
breath—if he had any. Then he touched the nape of her neck.

The brush of wind blew through his raven hair. “Come to me,
Liora
Anjanette
.”

She fought the hypnotic voice.

He was haunting, horrible.

Magnificent.
Beautiful.

“I have never fought a demon of darkness …”

“Right.
Sorry. You have
only one foot in hell.”

He took a lock of her hair in his hand and curled it softly into his
palm, inhaling its fragrance. “I have felt you in the portals of the night for
a long, long time, Angie. Have you not felt me as well?”

The mocha voice was so soft. “I don’t know what you mean.” The air felt
hot.

“Of course, you
do,
chéri
.
On those nights when you suddenly would stop and turn and
search the darkness.
As though someone was there.”
He paused. “But of course, it was only me.”

“No,” she protested weakly.

“You sensed me, Angie. Do not deny it.”

He described the nights he had followed her, and even walked beside her
in crowded streets. He had walked the halls of her apartment building, paced in
front of her locked door, and rustled the hawthorn to catch a glimpse of her
violet eyes when she would turn, searching for the intruder who was not there.

Indignation rose up in Angie in a fury. With a sudden, mighty push, she
rose up toward him with the broken branch. She would stake the monster!

He loosened her fingers from the limb and tossed it away.

“I’m going to try to save you, Angie,” he said. “You will live. And I
will live through you.” He paused. “A pity you did not train your talent. You
would have been a warrior, an opponent worthy of battle. You would have killed
him, and probably me as well. As it is …”

His dark, black silhouette enveloped her.

Her life was over.

She cried out, tried to push him away.

“Your wings are broken,” he whispered. “Do not fight me.”

“I won’t let you mesmerize me,” she sobbed.

He shrugged and sighed—and stroked her hair. “You are going to fight
me?”

“With the last
breath
in my body.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

The essence of his intent permeated the very air like thick oil, taking
her breath.

The imminence of death.

“Surrender.
Your pain will fly
as the dove in morning.”

“Another deception,” Angie choked bitterly. “If I surrender, surrender
means you would be able to call me back as I died, and I would have to
yield—give up my mind, my body, my soul to you.” She paused for breath, her
inhalations weak, shallow. “Mental slavery to you as I relinquish my mind and
will, and become a slave to hell as well is not my idea of a fun afterlife.”

She looked into the sapphire eyes filled with fire and hunger—and
something else, something she could not identify.
Lust?
Surely it was not love she saw in the fiery, blue depths?

“Take a walk in the sun, De
LaCroix
.”

Try as she might to struggle, Angie finally could no longer strain
against the hands holding her pressed to the cold stone. But she was determined
he would not get near her soul.

Build the wall, brick by brick, she told herself as she began stacking
bricks, one by one, in her thoughts. Brick by brick and block him out.

“Stop, Angie.”

Brick by brick …

“I just have one question. Did you love him?”

The
vampyre’s
ploy worked. She was caught off
guard. The wall fell.

“Who?”
She tried to force
a fuzzy brain to think. Keep him talking. As long as he’s talking, he’s not
sucking you dry.

“The boy.
Surely you did not
love him.”

He sounded too hopeful.
Like he wanted to make a
vampyre
lover tonight.

“He’s a piece of junkyard chrome,” she coughed, struggling to breathe.
“So are you.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Why did I do what?”

“Go out with him?”

“All the junkyard of life has is scrap and crap.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding. “You were lonely.”

He massaged the nape of her neck.
To coax wounded
vessels to flow.

“Just remember,” she warned him, her voice, raspy, weak. “One drop too
much and it becomes poison in your veins. Not only will you suffer forever, you
will become mad.
Forever.”

The mystic’s comment did not faze Henri. The
vampyre
pressed his fingertips against her pulse.

The throbs were weak, erratic.

She was badly bruised and broken, her veins torn.

She looked up at him with her beautiful violet eyes glistening. Then
the lids closed softly, and the lashes became wet with tears.

Compassion coursed through him again, smashing into his heart like a
meteor. He felt her despair as he had felt no
other’s
.
She was closing her eyes against the pain, against him, against her dream of
love lying dead on the floor, and against her sorry life.

He pricked her carefully to lessen the pain since he’d been unable to
mesmerize her.