Vampires and Sexy Romance (32 page)

Moonlight streamed into the bedroom from an open window.  Min lay on the floor, her limp, bloodied body framed beautifully in that cool, silver light.  Inside, somewhere far from his mind, his beast called out, howling for Min’s blood. 

Her body looked so warm and tempting, like the most delicious banquet he had ever imagined.  So much of him wanted to take her, to glut himself at her neck, to end his servitude and his new found pain and guilt.  He knew right then that if he just let his beast take over again that he would never feel again.  It would be so easy.  He saw the outline of her breasts as she slept, and the pulse at her throat, but he pulled away.

The beast inside him howled incredulously, baying for the blood.  He tried pushing the beast back, tried to walk away from Min’s bloodied, placid form.  When he looked up he saw something that he’d never thought to see again.  His reflection in Min’s vanity mirror.  He hadn’t seen his reflection in three hundred years, and it was terrifying to see it now.  Especially since it wasn’t really him.  It looked like him, and was dressed like him, but there was blood trickling from the corner of his mouth down his chin.  The image of him licked at it with his tongue and smiled at him, a knowing look on his face. 

“Don’t waist this.”  It said to him.  “If you really don’t want her to die, you should bring her over.  Then she would truly,
always
be ours, ours to hunt with, ours to fuck…and you know from Elaina that she would have to do as you command.  That no matter where she was she would have to come back and answer your call.  She would be ours, forever.

Luca closed his eyes and balled up his fists until the bones creaked.  “No,” he said to both his beast and to the image of himself in the mirror.  He moved back to where Min was and scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to her bedroom, laying her down in her unmade bed.  She was bleeding.  Cuts and some nasty gashes on her hands, her forehead, and the side of her face where she hit the wall looked poised on bruising. 

If that filthy fae were there he would latch onto her throat and suck her dry.  That would, after all, be the only way he would have a fighting chance against one of the sidhe.  Even if it had been one of their weaker lot, he’d have a hell of a time killing it by himself.  But this creature was powerful.  Maybe the most powerful. 

A chilling and sobering thought.  Most powerful or not, all Luca wanted to do was rip her throat out.

Luca pushed thoughts of vengeance out of his head.  He ministered to the cuts and the soon to blossom bruises, easily finding first aid supplies in Min’s bathroom, and a bag of frozen peas in her freezer. 

He sat there by the bed and waited.  An hour went by, and just when he began to think she would not wake again, finally she stirred.

Min woke to find her head a riot of pain.  Nausea caught in her throat and she forced herself to swallow it.  Then a wave of regret and disappointment washed through her.  She’d been in the middle of the ceremony, she had felt that it was working, that somehow the soul of the vampire was calling to her mothers, drawing it from wherever it was back to her body as a vampire can push a mortal to do just about anything, if they want to and don’t hunger to fight with them.  But some love such violence.  To use their vampire whiles takes the fun out of it for some.  

She felt fear well up in her, the sight of her mother sitting up in bed with those frosted blue eyes, and that black flame in her hand.  How much it had hurt as that power had shot out and beat her into the wall.  She’d panicked as all had gone black…and now her head hurt and…

Her eyes shot open as she realized what had happened.  She had passed out.  Passed out alone with the vampire.  Not Luca, but
the vampire
.  She gasped in fear as she looked around the candle lit room—her bedroom.  And there sitting in the chair in the corner, staring into her eyes, was the vampire. 

Oh god, I’m at his mercy
.  Her wards may not depend on her being conscious, but the gris-gris hex she’d used was voodoo, and necromancy, and if she wasn’t awake to control it, it evaporated completely.  She reached out with her senses and found nothing.  She’d been unconscious too long.  The magicks were gone, and she wouldn’t be able to use it upon him until he passed into the house again, and passed under one of the talismans. 

But he didn’t have a triumphant smile on his face.  He looked…relieved.  And why hadn’t he taken her, killed her while she was out?  Why hadn’t he bound and gagged her?  She could still work magicks on him, and if she was lucky she might just be able to destroy him.  Or maybe he wanted to play with her before he tried to kill her…or turn her into a soulless thing like him…but then, of course he did had a soul.  If he sired her, would she have a soul too?

But when he finally spoke it wasn’t about any of the things racing through her head.  “We really should get you to the hospital.  You’ve hit your head pretty hard,”—Min could see herself being flung across the room and into the wall, a vision seen through his eyes.  And then of her lying defenseless on the floor of her mother’s room.  The hunger had been so strong in him—“and you’re still just human.”  She blinked at him, and gulped—her mouth and throat were so dry.  He reached out and handed her a glass of water, as if he’d read her mind.  “And then we need to talk about what you tried to do to me.” 
Okay, there’s that other shoe I’ve been waiting on to drop.  He’s still going to rip my throat out…well, after he gave me a tongue lashing for trying to sacrifice him to wake my mother.
  “I don’t pretend to understand the magicks you were doing, but I’m quite certain it wouldn’t have worked.”

Min scowled at him.  “It would’ve worked.  I mean, why else would fate send me that spell and the one vampire in-all-the-world to use for it?”

He got a cold, detached look on his face, his young, handsome features hardening.  “All vampires have a soul, Min.” 

No they don’t!
 

“Yes, we do.”  Min felt a stab of panic as the vampire answered her mental objection.  “It tortures us when we’re first brought over, but the hunger helps us ignore it until it fades to only a memory.  Once you get past that part you will never suffer from it again.  You know the phrase, ‘Better, for lack of use.’”  He looked so thoughtful sitting there.  “Something about what has happened between us has reawakened mine.”

Min shook her head, but it made her nausea all the harder to ignore.  “But it was working.  I could feel it.  A presence was in the room.  My mother’s soul.”

“So that’s what she is to you.  Your mother?”  He looked to the door and Min got a brief chill.  “Well, believe me, what animated your mother’s body wasn’t her ghost, or her spirit, or anything like that.”

“Alright, smart-guy!  What was it?”

“The sidhe.” 

“The what?” 

“The sidhe…faeries…but not Tinkerbell, the kind that rule over the ethereal mists…” 

Min just stared at him like he was crazy. 

“You’ve had to have heard of them: The Summer and Winter Courts—Seelie and Unseelie.” 

“You’re trying to tell me little fairies did that to my mother, and that they smacked me around up stairs like I was a piñata?”  She laughed at him. 

“You’re a gypsy, a witch.  You can’t tell me you’ve never heard of them?”

“Fairies are just…the stuff of
fairytales
.  That’s all.” 

“No, they are most certainly real…and they aren’t little.  At least the ones you’re dealing with aren’t.  They’re also so strong they can smack a mightily powerful witch like you around,
like a piñata
, and not even be in the same room as you.  They probably weren’t even in this world when they did it.”

Min waved him off, feeling like his words were simply madness.  “How in the world would you know anything about such creatures, even if they did exist?” 

Luca’s face turned from hard cold to almost winsome, a smile touching his lips, and then there was torment.  She could suddenly feel his grief.  And then Min was slammed with another vision: one of his memories. 

An injured fae, a woman, and even injured he would never have been able to take her by himself.  There had been half a dozen vampires, all so hungry for the creature’s blood, the scent of the faerie so powerful and alluring, intoxicating and absolutely irresistible.  They had fallen upon her in concert, like ravening dogs.  One had lost his head to her sword, but the other five sunk their teeth into her and drained her, though it took all their strength to subdue her, her strength finally faded as her blood was sucked away. 

They drank her until she was stone cold and dry to the bone.  Then they tore her body apart to get at what little was left inside her.  It was terrible. 

And all the while one of the vampires had Luca’s hand in hers.  He loved her, hated and feared her, her glittering black eyes and pale skin—so beautiful and crazed. 

Elaina.
The name wafted into Min’s mind, cold and sharp.  And she knew that this horrifying creature had made Luca into a vampire.

She ripped herself from the vision and she spoke the words that fell from Luca’s lips.  “Hard to kill.”  And she knew he enjoyed the thought of having killed the fae as much as he loathed himself for ending the life of something so powerful and beautiful.

She was suddenly frightened, for as he spoke again of the Summer and Winter Courts of the fae, and that he could tell just from the smell, and the feel of power, that whatever fae had been in her mother’s room, that it was one of the Winter Courts, the Unseelee Court. 

But somehow, someway, it all seemed vaguely familiar.  Like, as he spoke of it all, she realized she’d already heard it, knew it once.  Yet as she listened, as she tried to pin down and touch those thoughts, they slipped away.  As if something were obscuring those things from her mind’s eye.  Magic, it had to be.  But who had done it?  Was it the same thing that had stolen her mother’s soul and life, or was it something else entirely? 

Min felt the coldest of sensations trickle like the blood of a corpse down her spine. 
What else do I not remember?  And for how long has this been going on?

After a fuzzy, dizzying moment, min tried to stand on her own.  She couldn’t even pull herself to sit up on the side of the bed. 
How hurt am I?

Min finally agreed to let Luca carry her to the hospital.  Moving with his preternatural speed, they arrived only moments after he departed her home.  He took her in, setting her oh so gently in a waiting room chair that seemed to magically become vacant, and he talked to the woman at the desk.  For a moment the woman flatly told him to fill out the paperwork and they would get to her eventually.  But then Min felt a twinge, something cold and dead, and then she realized that the vampire was pushing, glamouring the clerk.  Abruptly she was smiling at him, and saying that she would have her in a bed in no time.

Min glared at him, ready to hit him—but as her stomach turned over, just sitting there was making her so very, very dizzy—she let it go.  Maybe having him around wasn’t all bad.  She cringed at the thought.        

The nurses and the doctor seemed a little surprised that Min was in the bed she was.  Obviously the desk woman had pulled a bit of clerical sleight of hand, but they shook it off and were quick on the pickup.  Min was wheeled off to radiology, where they took some x-rays and a CT scan.  Once back in the ER, the nurses cleaned and dressed her wounds, and the doctor breezed in, looked at the results for a couple moments, and declared that min didn’t have a concussion.  And that she was very lucky. 

“How did you sustain these injuries?”  He was looking over her chart, the one the clerk had dashed off so quickly.  He was looking for the cause, and was noticeably irritated that it wasn’t there. 

“She had a fender-bender with a fire hydrant.” Luca said, rolling his eyes in an intentionally irritated display.  It made Min want to reach out and smack him. 

The doctor looked down at her, a condescending smirk on his face.  “Well, drive safely little lady.”  And just like that he turned and disappeared through the curtain. 

Min glared at Luca.  “You’re not funny!”

Luca gave an elegant shrug that meant nothing and everything all at once.  He grinned.  “Get dressed and I’ll take you home.”

There were fresh clothes on the foot of the bed.  And they were hers.  He’d dashed back to her place and raided her wardrobe.  Not that she wanted to put those clothes back on.  She took them and tossed them in the trash.  They reeked of dark magic, and of whatever it was that made the fae’s scent so distinctive.  But it bugged her that he could so easily come and go from her come.  She’d have to rescind his invitation when they got back to her place.  She was almost certain that she should.

Yet Luca surprised her, having called a taxi cab, and paying the driver—and not using even one of his preternatural powers—to drive us both back to her house.  He let her decided she needed to hold onto his arm as she climbed the front steps up to the porch, but once they were in the house he scooped her dizzy form up into his arms and without so much as jarring her, took her upstairs to her room.  She noticed that he’d closed the door to her mother’s room once again, as if it all hadn’t happened. 

But it had, and no matter how long she lived Min would forever have the sight of her mother’s body possessed by that evil, dark force, burned into her memory.

She let him undress her, ever so gently, as he redressed her in a Betty Boop night shirt that was her favorite.  How he knew, she could only wonder.  But it was her favorite because it was worn and comfortable—and as far from sexy as bed clothes could get.  Another point, if not a creepy one, for the vampire’s scorecard.

Luca made to lay with her in the bed, but she put her hand against his chest.  His expression turned hurt, but that look vanished almost instantly.  Min smiled.  “You’re clothes reek of that fairy magic.”

His mouth made a perfect O.

“So take them off.”

He shed his shirt and pants in no time at all, looking so very graceful and beautiful as he did so. 
Far more beautiful and graceful than I will ever look doing such a thing.

He slid into bed with her, and to his credit, wasn’t even aroused.  He just seemed to know that she needed the feel, the touch of his flesh against hers…just not sex.  She needed to be held and comforted, and without another word Luca did exactly that.

Maybe being psychically connected to my vampire lover isn’t the worst thing on earth
, Min thought right before she passed into a blessedly dreamless sleep.