The Vampires' Last Lover (Dying of the Dark Vampires Book 1) (11 page)

areful… that’s it, Garvan.”

I suddenly awoke. My room was immersed in darkness. The lights and television were off. I could hear Peter’s soft snores to my left, and I was moving toward the window… more like
floating
on my back toward the
open
window.

“What in the hell?” I whispered hoarsely, trying to get my bearings. To my right, I could see light from the hallway beneath the door, and the shadow from one of my floor mates passing by my room. I couldn’t hear Tyreen or Johnny, snores or otherwise, which told me that neither one had returned yet.

I had to be dreaming.

“It appears she is waking up. Cover her mouth and let’s be on our way!”

The same voice from a moment earlier, and the Spanish accent was familiar.
Very
familiar.

“Armando?”

“Si,” the owner of the voice whispered in response to me. “I must insist you keep quiet, dearest Txema!”

It was the same cheerful tone and irreverent delivery from the other night. Definitely him.

“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed and finding it hard to keep my voice low. Preparing to float through a fourth floor window on a chilly night will do that to you.

“I’m grabbing your coat,” said Armando, “and your slippers, too.”

Huh?

“Where in the hell are you taking me?” I shouted at him, or at least I shouted at the spot where his voice emanated from. I couldn’t see his face—just the outlines of his long fingernails guiding me along, as if I lay upon an invisible raft drifting through the air.

“Some place safe.” Another voice, this time Garvan’s, sounded from my other side, calm and assuring.

I couldn’t see him either, although I was certain he was there due to the now-familiar cinnamon scent.

“A place not far from here,” he continued.

“A place where everyone else is waiting anxiously to meet you!” added Armando.

Incredible panic overwhelmed me, and I tried to look back at Peter, still snoring in my bunk bed. Some protector he turned out to be that night.

“Ah, chérie, do not be alarmed,” Garvan said to me. I felt no less terrified. I tried to move my arms and legs and couldn’t do it. I could barely feel anything from my neck on down to my toes.

“In just a minute we will reach our destination,” Garvan continued.

I remember how this announcement confused me. I tried to picture what campus locale was nearby. Even considering the ultra-quick movements I’d seen from both vampires previously, if they planned to carry me out the window at our present drift, we might make it to the Alumni Center if we were lucky.

However, once we cleared the window and hovered some forty feet above the ground below, they both took firm hold of my arms and shoulders. Everything suddenly sped up. Sped
way
up. It was as if we had been shot from a cannon into the sky. We flew so fast that the lights below became a streaming blur.

It wasn’t long before the lights disappeared and the air around us grew even colder. Then, as quickly as Garvan predicted, we reached our destination.

We slowed down dramatically as we approached a cave deep within the Smoky Mountains. I guessed that we were five to ten miles east of Knoxville by the tall cedars and eastern pines that stood near the cave’s entrance. A roaring fire glowed from within the cave. We floated gently above the ground, and Armando released me and knelt on the ground in front of me, placing my fuzzy warm slippers on my feet. Garvan gently guided me the rest of the way to the ground.

My legs felt weak, and it took me a minute to catch my breath after such a frightening and exhilarating experience. I was surprised to find myself dressed in my parka, which covered much of my nightgown. I marveled at how the two had put it on me while we flew through the air, and without me being aware of this fact.

Unlike the other night, both men—make that vampires—were dressed entirely in black, and each wore a leather trench coat that hung below the knees. Their boot heels crunched against loose gravel just outside the cave’s mouth.

“You are now ready to meet the princess and the rest of her entourage!” Armando proudly announced. “Right this way, if you please!”

He motioned for me to walk through the entrance, while Garvan joined him behind me. I could feel them withdraw as I stepped through a narrow passage that opened to a fairly large room. An immense fire burned within a large stone ring near the room’s center, and in front of it stood a tall female flanked by a slightly shorter male on her right, and a petite female on her left.

“So we finally meet, Txema,” said the taller female. “Come closer. Let me have a better look at you, my cousin.”

“Cousin?”

I was confused. How could this pallid woman be any relation to me? I looked at her closely. She stood almost as tall as me with the same build. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair flowed the same way mine did—even with the same slight widow’s peak atop my forehead. Her eyes were greener than mine, like sultry emerald coals. They were similar to Tyreen’s eyes, only brighter and unearthly in their glow.

Her lips were full and pouting—the same as mine, and according to Peter, they were amongst my best assets. She smiled, and the tips of her fangs peered out through those lips. Her subtle nod and amused smile let me know that she had just read my thoughts.

“Yes, it’s sort of like looking in a mirror, eh?” She chuckled warmly, and in the next instant moved from the fire to a mere two feet in front of me. I wished they wouldn’t do that. It was extremely unsettling. A slight lilac scent arrived with her and I felt a familiar comfort settle over me like some cherished memory from a childhood spring day. That clinical part of my brain wondered if their scents were somehow altering my mood or if their mental powers extended so coercion as well as telepath.

“You are as radiant as advertised, and you remind me of Bernadette Soubirous,” she said. She paused a moment before continuing, “The girl who put the city of Lourdes on the international map long ago.” I am sure she didn’t need to read my mind to realize that I needed clarification.

She stepped back with one hand on her hip, studying me, while apparently comparing me to this Bernadette person. Then, in a flash, I remembered hearing my grandmother speak of that name when I was younger. The way this woman stood there reminded me of both my grandmother and Aunt Sylvia, Papa’s sister. That’s how they often stood, when ready to make a point about an issue.

“You have heard of Bernadette, correct?”

Her French accent was more pronounced than Garvan’s, but there was also some other influence in the delivery of her words. Perhaps, an older Basque touch?

“She’s the one who saw visions and had a shrine built in her honor. Thousands of people come to visit the town every year,” I nodded shyly as I answered her. I could tell that I suffered a huge disadvantage in terms of what she knew about me and my family. It was
her
family too, apparently, which I struggled to wrap my mind around.

“Actually, it is three
million
people each year that journey to Lourdes—many on pilgrimage,” she said, her eyes twinkling with the same mirth I’ve often felt when someone gets the facts wrong about a subject. “A basilica was built long ago in 1876, and an underground church was finished in 1958. The town served as a medieval stronghold for our ancestors, too.”

“Oh,” I said, quietly. The warmth from the fire had reached me, and my parka had become a furnace on my shoulders and arms.

“Allow me,” she said, moving to remove my coat so quickly that I scarcely felt my arms pulled through it. “Now, that’s better, eh?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“My earthly name was Berezi Ybarra, the great, great, great auntie to Bernadette—who is one of
your
most famous ancestors, as you’ve surely been told,” she continued, handing my coat to the other female, who stepped forward after a slight nod. “But our bloodline goes very far back… further than you can even begin to imagine.”

“Which, again, is why we’re all here!”

Armando’s booming voice echoed off the cave walls, drifting up through a small shaft nestled between an outcropping of stalactites above us. He danced around the fire, wearing a maniacal look on his face while playing an imaginary violin. The others all snickered.

“Yes, it is the reason we’ve come,” this female, once known as Berezi, continued. “The bloodline that began thousands of years ago is now in danger of extinction. Armando and Garvan have advised me that you now know the reasons for our urgency to protect you. Less than ten years ago there were nearly one hundred females who carried the gift that our breed of vampires needs to survive, and which allows us to govern the less-fortunate of our kind. But, roughly six months ago, the gift carriers began to die. In September, the survivors numbered just fourteen. And that number dwindled further, down to just three as of two weeks ago.”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked away, as if somehow reliving what had happened to these carriers. No doubt they bore the same birthmark as mine.

“Yes, they did,” she said, answering my unspoken thought as she turned to face me again.

She opened her dark trench coat and pulled her sweater away from her neck. The pastiness of her skin accentuated the tiny teardrops that marked her carotid artery, near the base of her throat.

“It is the mark that we all bear—all of us who carry the gift,” she said. “But you are now the only
living
human being in the entire world that has it.”

For the first time during our conversation, her eyes betrayed the depth of her worry. This was some serious shit! An enormous burden began to settle upon my shoulders, and its weight nearly took my breath away.

“Armando called you a princess when we arrived here,” I said, looking for some distraction… something to lessen the impact of what she just told me. “My papa told me recently that the little tears on our necks were once the symbol of Basque royalty. Is that true, and is it the reason Armando said that?”

“It’s more than that, I assure—”

“Armando, let me handle this,” she scolded him, though lightly. He nodded his consent to her interruption, and she addressed me again. “Your papa is correct. Many members of the Basque royalty have been born with the same birthmark, as well as their ancestors from other cultures. Our lineage dates back thousands of years, when the carriers of this gift easily infiltrated the ruling classes of the world’s most highly developed civilizations.”

The petite female suddenly joined us and brought with her a slight aroma of roses. She eyed me as though I were a very rare novelty. Or, perhaps, as a delectable treat to taste. Her voice had the same strong French accent as my ancestor.

“She is known to us all as
‘Chanson de l’Eternelle’
, since she is the vampire who carries forth our Song forever.”

The newcomer’s violet eyes flashed with desire as she spoke. Her face was a small oval framed by a rich halo of crimson hair that hung in loose curls upon her shoulders. She had thin lips and a delicate nose and cheekbones. Although she was dressed in a black leather trench coat and stiletto heels, her dainty features and porcelain skin made her appear more like the pin-up model for some men’s magazine than a fearsome creature of the night. It was only the predatory gaze in her eyes and the sharp fangs that revealed her true nature.

“So, how should I address you, then?” I asked the princess, though really I wasn’t sure how to address either one at this point.

“Chanson will be fine,” she said. “And, this is Raquel Meurtrier.”

She gestured playfully to the flaming redhead, who curtseyed with dramatic flair.

“Ah-hem!” A booming male voice resounded behind the females, as the lone remaining stranger lifted his chin in wounded pride at being ignored for so long. Even so, I detected an impish glint in his amber vampire eyes.

“And this… this is Franz Blutliebhaber,” Chanson said, motioning for him to join them.

Franz stepped over to us, completing my immersion in a mixed bath of sensual aromas. He bore more of a sage-like musk scent that seemed to go well with his strong German features. He was blonde with high cheekbones and dimples framing a toothy smile; only the fangs and iridescent eyes would alert otherwise unsuspecting humans that a dangerous predator walked in their midst.