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Authors: Jenna Black

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Secrets in the Shadows (34 page)

BOOK: Secrets in the Shadows
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“Yeah. I heard you talking to me, in my head.” And she remembered the magic words that had made the decision for her. “Do you remember what you said?”

His hand stroked her back, and underneath her ear she heard the steady thump of his heart. “I think I said something about you being too tough to die.”

There was a rumble of humor in his voice, and she smiled, realizing he knew perfectly well what she meant. “Before that.”

“Hmm. I think I said something really incisive, like ‘come back.’”

She slapped his chest, though she was too weak to put much force behind the blow. “After that, you jerk.”

He laughed. “Oh! That!”

She raised her head to glower at him, but the warmth and sparkle of his eyes changed the glower into a smile again in no time.

He brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “I believe I said I love you.” He swallowed hard. “And yes, I meant it.”

She tried to raise up high enough to kiss him, but her strength was failing rapidly. He considerately lowered his head and brushed his lips over hers. She wanted more, but that would have to come later. Her body was insisting she needed to sleep again. And Jules’s chest made quite the nice pillow, even if it was a little hard.

She let her eyes slide closed and sighed in contentment.

“Hannah?” His voice sounded strangely tentative.

Sleep was calling to her, an inexorable force she was too weak to fight.

“Yeah, I love you too,” she managed to murmur before her last ounce of energy drained.

She could hardly wait until she got her strength back so she could show him how much.

Epilogue

Gabriel smiled down at the girl who lay sleeping in his bed. Blonde roots were sprouting under her jet black hair, and he’d removed all traces of eyebrow pencil and mascara as soon as he’d brought her back to his home. He suspected she’d be quite lovely in her natural state. The piercings on her eyebrow and nose were the next to go. He’d hesitated over the ugly, amateurish pentagram tattoo on her right shoulder. In the end, he’d decided to slice it off while she was unconscious, removing her most identifying feature. Her vampire body healed the wound with no scar.

The girl moaned in her sleep, and Gabriel brushed his knuckles gently across her cheek. Her eyes fluttered open.

When he’d made her, he’d created a link with her mind stronger than most master-fledgling bonds, another of the advantages of having been born vampire. Another advantage of his special birth neither his mother nor his father knew he had. He’d been under the thrall of first one, then the other for too long. It was time to stretch his wings and see what he could do.

Someone tapped tentatively on the door. Gabriel smiled at the scent of fear in the air. “Go away, Mother,” he said. “I’m busy.”

He listened as Camille obediently retreated, then turned his attention back to his first fledgling, meeting her clouded eyes.

He saw the nightmare images flashing across the poor girl’s mind—hitchiking on a quiet country road, being picked up by a man who instantly made her skin crawl. She was too smart to get into the car with him, and she’d been armed with a dainty little gun to protect herself from the predators of this world. But no weapon could protect her against glamour.

Then the images got worse—running through a darkened house, terror nearly stopping her heart. Falling through a hole in the floor. Men jumping through the hole after her, baring vicious-looking fangs. The screams of her fellow prisoner as he was raped, tortured, then killed. Hours spent alone in the dark with the corpse. Then the door opened and the vampires came again.

Fangs sinking into her throat, her breasts, her thighs while the man who’d picked her up took her virginity by force. Then the others mounting her one by one as she lay helpless in a pool of her own blood.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, and Gabriel brushed them away.

“Shh,” he whispered, “it’s over now. You’re safe.”

But even the considerable power of his glamour couldn’t ease her remembered pain. She sobbed, her mind begging for help, desperate, nearly shattered. And she didn’t even know what he’d done to her yet, didn’t know she was no longer human. She would be no good to him in her current state of mind. He took her hand in his, giving her an anchor in the here and now.

“I can make the pain go away,” he told her, leaning over her and capturing her eyes again. “I can push that memory to a corner of your mind where it won’t seem real at all, and it will be almost as if it never happened.”

She clung to his hand, her whole body shaking, tears still leaking from the corners of her eyes despite the surge of hope his words inspired. “What’s the catch?” she asked between hiccups.

He couldn’t help smiling to find the hint of her once-keen edge even in the fragments of her shattered mind. “The catch is that you’ll have to do something you may find morally distasteful in return.” There was no “may” about it. He’d examined her mind thoroughly enough to know just how distasteful she would find her mission. He also knew it would be worth it to her if it meant protecting her from the memory of the brutal attack.

She sniffled and clung harder. Her grip would have broken a mortal’s hand. She didn’t know her strength yet.

“Do it!” she begged. “Make me forget.” She closed her eyes hard, as if trying to shut out the images that still flashed through her brain. “Please make me forget.”

“As you wish, my dear,” he said, and with a quick jerk of the psychic leash that held her, he sent her back into a deep sleep.

The End

 

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