A Vampire's Soul (2 page)

T
he realization that the man I was in love with was something other than human churned up enough bile to sting the back of my throat. Everything that had occurred during the past twenty-four hours played back on one long mind-loop with far too much realism for a practical joke. Besides, Gabriel would never be so cruel as to play such a sick, twisted prank, and I don't remember anyone laughing, least of all the woman with moonlight hair whose alabaster skin had been stained with her own blood. Lying on black satin sheets, she'd stared at me with terror in her eyes. It was an image I was going to carry to the grave.

The voice that had taken up residence inside my head began to whisper softly, insistently, and this time I had no difficulty recognizing it. How could I have not known it was Gabriel's voice all along? The cadence was so familiar, the phrasing of words uniquely his own, and he told me everything I wanted to hear, everything I needed to hear. It had always been his voice speaking inside my head. Only now I didn't want to believe what it was saying.

My lover was a vampire.

Only vampires didn't exist . . . did they?

We weren't still living in the Dark Ages, when every waking moment was governed by superstition, for God's sake! This was the modern world. A world filled with the Internet, cars that could parallel park themselves, and cell phones with more apps than a normal, sane person would ever need. A vampire had no business in a world of shiny chrome and glass. They belonged in an era of horse-drawn carriages, foggy streets, and butt-ugly Victorian décor. And yet I had seen the proof with my own eyes. Shuddering, I forced myself to take a deep breath so I could examine this barely believable event with something that could pass for logic.

In the relative normalcy of my home, surrounded by the trappings of my ordinary life, I had no problem telling myself vampires were not real. They were a work of fiction, springing from the mind of a brilliant writer with a gift for the macabre. And I almost had myself convinced too, except . . . well, what was that saying about a grain of truth being embedded inside every nightmare? Every fairy tale? Every legend? Stories about creatures who survive by drinking the blood of the living had been a part of folklore long before Dracula became a household name. Suddenly all those shows on the History Channel about Vlad the Impaler drinking the blood of his victims took on a completely different light.

But if such stories are true, then vampires are our natural enemies; they hunt down humans in order to sustain their own existence. A vampire is the real wolf in sheep's clothing—looking like one of us, moving among us, becoming us, the ultimate predator, with seduction as the only weapon needed for us to hand over our humanity.

Fangs? Yeah, they were real. Gabriel's were long and white, and they looked wickedly sharp. He hadn't tried to hide them once he knew I'd seen them, even going so far as to allow me a second look, as if to confirm it wasn't my vivid imagination. You can't fake something like that. But fangs are just a tool, used to perform the coup de grâce. Caught in a vampire's thrall, most humans would probably give themselves up long before they ever saw fangs.

The tremors racking my body began to lessen as my temperature climbed back up to somewhere near normal. I let go of my knees, feeling the ache in my muscles as I stretched out my legs, and rolled onto my back. If I was going to survive this, then I had to accept, without any doubt whatsoever, that the world was not the same place it had been yesterday. It was not as I had always supposed it to be.

I took a couple of deep breaths, letting the implication of those words flow through me. In my struggle to accept this new reality, I received a pretty hefty smack upside the head by a highly relevant, extremely personal, and totally unalterable fact. It was one thing to have been going to the movies and out to dinner with a vampire, but I'd also been having sex with one. An awful lot of sex.

Whoa—talk about seduction! I don't think my ignorance of Gabriel's true nature was going to score me any brownie points, but then again, who was I going to tell?

Oh. My. God.

If vampires are the undead, did that make me some sort of closet necrophiliac? I don't remember this being covered in
Twilight,
but perhaps I'd given up reading the book by then. My mind began to fill with every erotic moment I had shared with Gabriel. Things I'd done to him. Things he'd done to me. Things we'd done to each other, and—oh shit!—in this bed, too! As if on cue, every detail of our last intimate encounter filled my head.

I had been on the verge of falling asleep when he'd slipped between the sheets and curled himself around me. The warmth of his breath fanned my skin as his hands and lips coaxed me into wakefulness. A delicious shiver ran through me when the tip of his tongue teased the outer edge of my ear before continuing its journey down to the spot where my neck and shoulder met. His mouth latched on, sucking with enough force to make my flesh sting erotically. Wrapping one arm around my waist, he cupped a breast with the other, using his thumb and forefinger to bring my nipple to a sensual fullness that ached for the touch of his mouth.

The feel of his erection, hard and magnificent against my ass, made me moan. A heat of my own exploded between my legs and I became wet. The hand that had been around my waist now slid between my thighs, and needing no encouragement, I opened for him. Gabriel slipped one finger, and then a second, inside my body, making me gasp at the delicious friction he created. I pushed back against the heel of his hand, and he quickly brought me to the brink of my climax, taking me over the edge when his thumb rubbed my clitoris. While I was still riding the swell of an orgasmic wave, he rolled me over and gave my nipple the attention it was craving. His mouth was exquisite. Lapping with his tongue, he drew the swollen bud between his lips and then scraped the sensitive tip erotically with his teeth. In response, I arched my back and grabbed a fistful of his long hair, making sure he didn't stray from his task.

And then he was inside me.

I wrapped my legs around his hips, enjoying the fullness of having his throbbing cock fill me. I stroked my hands across his wide shoulders, down his arms, and across his heavily muscled chest. Returning the favor, I rolled his eager nipple between my own thumb and forefinger. Gabriel closed his eyes and groaned softly, and the tremble in his body told me just how close he was to coming. I clenched my pelvic muscles, drawing him farther inside me. It was the only provocation he needed. He pulled back and then thrust forward, coating himself with my body's liquid silk until he brought us both to climax in an explosive rush that left me spent . . . and wanting more.

A sudden hysterical bubble of laughter burst out of me. No wonder he'd been so blasé about not getting me pregnant. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Fuck him! Except I already had, and that's why I was in this god-awful mess right now. My brain was fried. Any logic I was trying to use to deal with my situation was quickly becoming unraveled. I had no idea what the hell I was thinking. So I did what any girl in my predicament would do. I screamed—loud and long, and just a hair's breadth shy of hysterical. And then I did it again for no other reason than that I could.

Why had this happened to me?

A few months ago my life had been perfect. Okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration. Being a virgin at twenty-five wasn't my idea of perfection, and while I might not have been desperate, I had been starting to get a little concerned. It wasn't as if I hadn't been trying to change my status, and there had been a couple of times when I'd truly thought it was going to happen. But something inevitably went wrong. It always did.

Until Gabriel.

I'd just known, somewhere in my heart—and pelvis—that he was
The One
. Except this time when it all went wrong, it hurt worse than any other time before. His dumping me, on my front porch of all places, when I was on the verge of giving myself to him, had been devastating in a way I'd never thought possible. And it was more than just my pride that was damaged. The pain I felt was very real.

Wallowing in misery punctuated by bouts of self-pity was not an experience I ever wanted to repeat. I don't care how necessary it was in helping me move on from Gabriel's unexplained behavior. And then, when I was certain I'd gotten him out of my system, guess who came calling on Halloween, of all nights? Can you say “trick or treat”?

I'm still not really sure what prompted the sequence of events that followed his arrival on my doorstep that night, but I do know that it was more than just satisfying a basic need. At least it was for me. And there's a part of me that knows, deep down, that I wouldn't have changed that night for anything in the world. But now I know why I always woke up alone.

Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. Looking back with my improved vision, I could easily slap myself for my ostrich imitation. Burying my head in the sand had simply put off the inevitable. Gabriel had tried to tell me about himself; as I recalled, he had actually said that knowing the truth would change how I felt about him. Only I'd dismissed the notion. I couldn't blame myself really, not when I'd assumed the truth involved obstacles I could get my head around—normal
human
obstacles like drugs or prison. Shit like that. Never in a million years would I have believed the truth meant embracing the world of the supernatural.

I'm in love with a vampire, for Christ's sake! How sick is that? My head became a whirling mass of mixed emotions, with fear of the unknown leading the parade and threatening to paralyze me. There are times when being afraid is a good thing, when it can save your life even, but this wasn't one of those times. Those are the times when changing the situation you're in is a real possibility, and that didn't apply to me. There was nothing I could do to change what Gabriel was. That being said, there was only one outcome I could see in my future. An outcome that hinged entirely on one question.

How long was Gabriel going to let me live now that I knew the truth about him?

I
t's an odd feeling knowing you're going to die. Actually we all know we're going to die, we just don't have the date marked on the calendar. Death is inevitable. I'm sure someone very clever said that. Now that I knew the truth about Gabriel, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to die. I might not know the date, but I figured getting next year's calendar would probably be a waste of time. It all came down to vampire self-preservation. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that vampires have been preserving themselves for a very long time. There was a reason their existence wasn't common knowledge. I was living on borrowed time.

I told myself that if it was up to Gabriel, and only Gabriel, then I might be given a chance. His feelings for me were strong enough that he might protect me. But it wasn't just about him. There were other vampires whose existence I was now aware of. Other vampires who also knew about me.

Was there any way I could survive this? Perhaps Gabriel's belief that I was somehow promised to him would be my ace in the hole. What was it he'd said?
You are a Vampire's Promise . . . given by word . . . accepted by deed... bound by ritual to keep safe that which has been surrendered.
I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but it was obviously significant to Gabriel, and it might buy me some time.

Yeah, but for how long? What had been surrendered, and by whom? Whatever it was, I knew I didn't have it. And it wouldn't take Gabriel long to realize the same thing. And what would happen then? Back to square one . . . I was going to die.

None of this made any sense to me, and maybe it wasn't supposed to. Maybe it made sense only to those with extra-long canines. It didn't matter what scenario I conjured up in my head, or how I moved the scenery and players around, it all came back to the same thing. I was going to die.

Would Gabriel do it himself? Drink me dry, as he had with the woman on the bed? Except . . . I don't think he actually did that. Thinking back, even though I told myself I didn't want to, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually seen Gabriel drink her blood. He'd punctured a hole in her neck, but then he'd let her bleed out. Now, why would he do that? Weren't vampires thrown into a frenzy at the sight and smell of blood? If that were true, Gabriel had to be the king of self-control.

I told myself that he hadn't had time to drink her blood because my puking on the carpet had interrupted him, only that wasn't true either. There'd been plenty of time before I started tossing my cookies, but Gabriel hadn't even made an attempt. Maybe there was something in her blood he hadn't liked. What if she'd been infected with AIDS or something? Or was the truth really a lot simpler than that? Was it possible Gabriel had killed the woman just because he could? It might have been a show of power, but for whose benefit? Certainly not mine, and I didn't recall seeing anyone else at the party.

I began to blink rapidly as tears spilled down my cheeks. I had no idea why I was crying or who I was crying for. Was it the woman I'd watched die, or myself because I'd done nothing to help her? It made no difference that my head told me saving her had been beyond my power. She'd been dead before I ever got inside that room, but my heart said I should have at least tried. Now I was filled with self-loathing for my weakness—not so much at being unable to prevent murder, but for allowing myself to be seduced so easily by Gabriel.

And realizing the woman on the bed could easily have been me. But Gabriel had never bitten me. Never even tried to. When it came to using teeth on skin, I was the one who'd been the aggressor. Even now I could recall the taste of his blood as it filled my mouth. A spicy sweetness laced with just enough pepper to tantalize my taste buds as it washed down my throat. Granted, it hadn't been anywhere near a mouthful, but the experience had been off-the-wall amazing. So there it was, I had drunk a vampire's blood.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

What the hell did that say about me? I had no idea, but Gabriel had been right about one thing. Knowing the truth about him did change everything between us. How could it not? Even the most rock-solid relationship in the world was bound to slip into a different perspective when your boyfriend needed to supplement his diet with a couple of pints of O-negative.

Taken at body temperature. Directly from the vein.

And speaking of diets, how was it Gabriel could eat regular food? And drink like he did? Was he an anomaly in the vampire world? Was the only vampire I'd spent any time with unable to exist on blood alone?

My hands began to tremble. Truth be told, I don't think they'd ever stopped in the first place. This was all too much for me to deal with. I needed a drink. Ideally something that was at least eighty proof, only I'd yet to replace the bottle of bourbon Laycee and I had destroyed this past summer. Coffee would be a poor substitute, but I would make do. The stronger the better.

Catching sight of myself in the mirrored closet door, I threw on sweatpants and a T-shirt. Then, gritting my teeth, I dragged a brush through the bird's nest that was passing itself off as my hair. Ten minutes later I had a long braid hanging over one shoulder. Taking a hard look at myself, I was grateful not to be scared shitless this time by the face that looked back at me. I definitely looked better. Not a hundred percent, and nowhere near my old self, but then I doubted I would ever be my
old self
again. The world was not the place I had always believed it to be.

I had just reached the bottom of the staircase, my foot on the last riser, when I froze at the sound of a knock at the front door. I hesitated, my hand still wrapped around the newel post. I wasn't expecting anyone, and surprise visitors hadn't been working out so well for me lately. The only person I could think of who might drop by at this time on a Saturday was Laycee.

Ordinarily I would have welcomed her company, but right then her timing couldn't have been worse. No way was I going to be able to look her in the eye. She would know something was wrong, and figuring it involved my Mr. Right, she wouldn't let go until she'd forced me to spill my guts. What was I supposed to tell her?

I snagged my bottom lip with my teeth. Somehow, I didn't see that going over too well.

The knock came again, a little sharper this time, as if Laycee could sense me hesitating and was mildly pissed at being kept outside in the cold. Lord knows, it was no use pretending I wasn't there. Maybe, if I was lucky, I'd be wrong. Instead of my BFF it would be some idiot wanting to sell me a magazine subscription . . . or siding for the house . . . or religion. If I was very lucky it would be that guy from Publishers Clearing House telling me I'd won a million dollars. Wouldn't that be nice? The chance to forget all my problems while vacationing in some tropical paradise.

The distance to the front door seemed longer than usual, but that was because my brain was suddenly inundated with erotic flashbacks. My mind spewed forth a moving collage of me naked, panting, and coming. More than once. I think the only place Gabriel and I
hadn't
had sex in was my dad's bedroom, and no way in hell was fornication of any kind taking place beneath that ceiling.

Crossly, I told myself that now really wasn't the best time to be thinking about vampire sex, no matter how hot or spectacular it might have been—or how much I was going to miss it. Taking a deep breath, I went toward the front door. With my best smile frozen in place, I flipped the dead bolt, opened the door, and found Aleksei, Gabriel's second-in-command, standing on my ho-ho-ho Christmas doormat.

Awww. . . fuck! Another vampire.

I took a step back and mentally slapped myself. Of course! Laycee was in the mountains with Jake and would be gone all weekend. How wonderful, how perfectly normal. My best friend, whose life was filled with the type of difficulties I'd have given my right arm to have, was enjoying a lust-filled weekend with the biggest complication she had—namely, her still technically married boyfriend, who also happened to be the town sheriff.

Staring down at the black military-style boots on the other side of my threshold, I suddenly realized I'd never needed a dose of Laycee's double-wide, trailer-park common sense more than I did at this precise moment. It would be the perfect antidote to the gothic nightmare that apparently had no intention of ending or restricting itself to my sleeping hours. Unless, of course, I was still actually asleep.

I raised my eyes and stared at the huge figure framed in the open doorway. The army greatcoat and camouflage-style pants didn't surprise me, but the T-shirt made me look twice. Emblazoned over the familiar eagle, globe, and anchor logo were the words
USMC Protecting Your Nuts Since 1755.
On anyone else such a declaration would have made me smile, but on Aleksei I had to wonder if it was a statement of fact.

God, he was big!

I'm sure that somewhere in my subconscious I'd already registered this fact, but the last time I'd been this close to him, my brain had had other things to worry about, witnessing my boyfriend commit murder being top of the list. Looking up at the face that was now staring down at me, I realized I was peeing-my-pants terrified. I thought about screaming, but who would hear me? I had no close neighbors, and if he'd come here to hurt me, I sure as hell wasn't going to be able to fight him off. Even if I managed to reach the kitchen ahead of him, I was all out of garlic.

My entire world, everything that I had never questioned, had just been flushed down a paranormal toilet. Any lingering doubts I might have about vampires being confined to the limits of a writer's imagination were gone. Last night had shown me that, and the confirmation was standing in front of me.

Folding his arms, Aleksei shifted his weight so he now leaned against the doorjamb. He peeled back his lips and, with an almost lazy insouciance, dropped his fangs. I made a noise that might have been a yelp and felt my whole body stiffen. His fangs didn't look as big as Gabriel's had been last night, but they were big enough.

“Is good you know what I am,” he said, as his mouth widened into a grin. “Now, invite me inside, Rowan.”

And I almost did. My mouth opened, and I felt my tongue forming the words when something snatched hold of me, and gave me a good, figurative shake.

“Are you kidding?” I shot back. “Just how stupid do you think I am?” The big guy frowned and then began stroking his chin, almost as if he was giving both parts of my response serious consideration. If he was trying to be funny, it wasn't working, and nothing pisses me off more than having my intelligence insulted. Dream or reality, he'd just told me he couldn't come inside my house—at least not the first time—without being invited to do so. Gabriel had also needed me to invite him in, and withholding my permission was the only weapon I possessed. Hopefully it would be enough.

“I don't think you stupid at all. Asking for invitation is only politeness.” His voice was a deep rumble that I found strangely comforting. “Gabriel would not like me to be rude.”

Screw Gabriel. What about me?

Narrowing my eyes, I looked at him. It wasn't that I thought he was lying, but I definitely got the sense he was holding something back. Sighing, he pushed himself off the doorframe and straightened up to his full height. He was an impressive and very scary sight.

“Do you really think we haven't found way to get across threshold?” My stomach curdled. Maybe Gabriel hadn't wanted to be rude that first time either. “You d-don't have to b-be invited in?” I stammered.

He gave a nonchalant shrug before giving me a sly grin. “Is better, but not necessary.” Tilting his head back, he ran both hands down either side of the open doorway, as if feeling for a weakness in the framework. “It will hurt like bitch, and I'll have headache for week, but can be done. And you will need new door.”

I don't know if it was the way he spoke, his accent and the way he stressed certain words, but it sounded like I was being threatened, the suggestion being that more than my front door was going to need replacing when he was through.

Bullies threaten, and I don't like bullies. Even if they come packaged like a brick outhouse. If Aleksei wanted to scare me into inviting him inside, he had gone about it the wrong way. Any initial fear I'd felt at seeing him on the other side of my door had now vanished. I'd been scared enough these past twenty-four hours. Nothing he said or did was going to top it. All his veiled threat did was piss me off, causing my temper to spike recklessly.

“Then knock yourself out!” I snapped before slamming the door in his face.

Immediately I jumped back to a spot halfway down the hall, waiting for the only barrier that separated us to be ripped off its hinges. If Aleksei made good on his threat, it would prove what an idiot I was.

But nothing happened.

I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath until I was forced to exhale, which the vampire on the other side of my front door heard.

“Rowan, you must invite me in. Is for your safety.”

The frustration in his voice was evident, and I'd be lying if I didn't say it felt good to hear it. Hah! Score one for the puny human. But even so, I was still scared half to death. My heart was beating so hard, I expected it to burst out from between my ribs and flop around on the carpet, kind of like a fish out of water.