Crossed (47 page)

“Debbie Reynolds was Carrie Fisher’s mom, wasn’t she?”

“What the hell are you talking about, babe?” Rachel asked. She was driving too fast, had been the whole trip, not that I mind fast cars, but I’d noticed.

“She married Eddie Fisher and he dumped her for Elizabeth Taylor when Mike Todd died in that plane crash,” Irene said.

“Oh, yeah.” I remembered. “
The Lucky Liz
. Lucky for Liz she wasn’t on that plane, I guess. Not too lucky for folks on board.”

Irene elbowed me. “Be nice.”

“I am nice.”

She took another look out of the rear window and tried to hide it. A human might not have noticed it, but I did. “Why do you keep looking out the back window?” I looked out into the night. Maybe you could see the Alps in the distance, maybe not. By day it would have looked special, but not at night, not
to me. It was a long drive to Montpellier . . . I hadn’t thought France was so big.

“It’s pretty,” she answered. “Just watch your movies. Don’t you have
Casablanca
on that thing? You love that movie.”

“I just watched it.” I settled back in. “You’d have noticed if you weren’t so busy
looking
out the window for bad guys.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Hey.” I warded off the explanation with upraised palms. “I’m a no-questions-asked kind of guy. I don’t need to know and generally I don’t want to. You know that, but if there’s a problem and you need help, well, we’re married and I probably take that a little more seriously than you.”

A combative response lingered on Irene’s tongue and teetered on her lips before sliding back down her throat in an uncomfortable swallow. “You do, don’t you?”

“Yep.” I looked out the back. Vamp vision made things look clearer than I let on. Beautiful countryside at night, speckled with quaint, crowded, beautiful towns and cities, the modern meeting the historic and, even an hour away, I fancied that I could smell the sea. “On the other hand, if you’re trying to keep secrets from me, then do a better job.”

“Why, what did you hear?”

“Well . . .”

If you want an insight into the way my head works, here it is: I could have told my new bride I’d heard her telling a gorgeous little Vlad that she could have me back in a few days, describe the telltale sound of neck muscles giving way, and stop pretending I’d been so wound up in the movie that I hadn’t noticed the accidents behind us or the sirens . . . or the blast of wind when Irene had opened the door and jumped out of the moving car, the second blast when she’d come back in, the blood under her fingernails and down the back of her capris. . . . I could demand to know what the hell was going on.

Or . . . I could paint my brain with Liquid Paper and enjoy the ride while it lasted, have one or two more three-ways while I didn’t know what they were costing me and I could still enjoy the sex without focusing on the bill.

Guess which one I chose.

“Well, I heard a whole lot of sirens . . . and then you said something about my hard-on. I only heard that much because when you went walkabout, I had to scramble to keep my headphones in.

“But what’s annoying me is all the backward glances.” I touched her chin and drew her into a soft kiss. “You can either tell me what’s up and let me help or keep me in the dark. But if you choose option two, then, like I said, you need to do better, because I can only ignore so much. Okay?”

“What if I’m trying to kill you?” Irene started undoing my belt buckle, nipping my lower lip with her fangs as she kissed me.

“Then you’ll die disappointed and a failure.”

Irene’s gaze flickered to Rachel and back . . . and I smelled cinnamon.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I pushed Irene away less gently than I should have and she slapped against the door. “We’re nowhere near a
pâtisserie
and there isn’t a Cindy’s Cinnamon Rolls in this whole damn country . . . so don’t start doing whatever magic you ladies are doing, and—”

“I was just trying to calm you down,” Rachel said. “You’re right, it was me, and it was magic, but only because I’m not supposed to let you get too angry. You remember? I’m supposed to keep you calm?” She flicked on the emergency lights and slowed down. “Remember?”

Nice save,
I thought.
It might even be true. Partially.

Rachel stopped the car, got out, and opened Irene’s door. “You drive,” she said. “He needs me and you know the way.”

Irene’s look shot daggers at Rachel, “I want what I want” so close to being said that my ears were picking up on the initial inhalation of air. “Fine.”

Rachel and I partied in the back while Irene drove (partition up and radio blaring). Live women are more fun anyway, and Rachel’s affections were desperate, her lovemaking urgent, as if she knew it couldn’t last.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and get it over with?” I whispered in her ear.

“You don’t want to know,” she said, and it was the truth.

“That bad?”

Her tongue traced the lobe of my ear, the heat as intoxicating as her breath, coming in shorter gasps against the side of my face. “Uh-huh.”

Our clothes came off and we moved together. No foreplay this time. She didn’t want it.

“Wherever you’d kiss me,” she hissed as she thrust against me, “I want you to bite.”

“These aren’t toys,” I said needlessly. “It’ll hurt like hell. Mine heal fast, but—”

“I want it to hurt,” she said. “Everything’s fucked up. Unrecoverable. And I want to feel it as much as I can.”

“Just tell me what’s going on and then tell me you’re sorry—”

“I did that once.” She increased her rhythm as she spoke, breath shorter, our flesh meeting and separating in hard angry slaps. “You won’t be so forgiving next time.”

I sank my teeth into her wrist following a kiss, kissed my way up her arm and across her shoulder, leaving wounds in my wake, smeared with blood, mine and hers. Scraping the skin of her cheek with my fangs when I couldn’t bring myself to bite, I left red lines on her body, down her jaw, her throat, the underside of her breast, where I bit hard and she lurched, resisting the natural urge to pull away from the injury, leaning into it as I pressed my fangs deeper into her breast.

“Should I turn you?” I asked her. Her laugh caught me off guard.

“No, baby.” Rachel’s nails dug into my shoulders, her thrusts constant. “I’ve got a way out. I don’t want to take it, but I have one.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

My heart woke. My lungs drew air, and blood ran through my veins. I lost track of the time, one sexual act leading into the next, each climax spurring the next one on until the scent of her sex and her cinnamon magic ran together and I tasted not just the cinnamon or the spice of her blood, but the sweat on her skin and her skin itself.

“I want you to do everything and I want you everywhere,” she told me. “Parting gift. Okay?”

I responded wordlessly, ignoring the fact that I’d climaxed multiple times with no sign of an abatement of my ardor. At some point, we reached Irene’s villa and when the car stopped, I carried Rachel out and onto the hood, the engine-heated metal shy of scalding, but uncomfortably hot. She smiled into the metal as I pulled at her hair, fangs buried in the nape of her neck.

“Hit me,” she said, and I couldn’t.

“No.”

“Scratch me then. I want to feel your claws on my skin.”

I raked her back, not as hard as she wanted, because she wanted blood, her own, wanted it running down her back and dripping off my claws, but I couldn’t do that either.

“Now change.”

“What?”

“It’s the only way you can get deeper,” she said. “I’ll help.”

I smelled cinnamon and the skin on my arm blackened in the night and I grew. The skin on my back broke open and I looked sideways at the tenebrous wings that sprung forth.
What the hell?
Purple light from my eyes tinted her skin an alien tinge, her blood darker in that light, close to black, and Irene cursed. The weird part was, I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t remember changing before, but it felt natural.

“You’re doing the uber vamp?” Irene asked.

“The what?” I asked the question, but Irene didn’t answer.

Rachel hissed. “Eyes on me, Eric.”

We built toward a final climax, her cries filling the night, and when I pulled away from her, I was slick with sweat and the normal secretions of sex, not blood.

“What the hell?” My voice was deep, rumbling.

“Now
that,
” Rachel said with a leer, “is unsafe sex.”

“Can he get you pregnant like that?” Irene asked.

“Blood,” I gasped. My heart sped up instead of slowing down. “I . . .” Knees buckling, I collapsed onto the front of the car, grasping at my chest. “. . . need blood.”

With my throat drying, it became hard to speak. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach clenched. My intestines writhed like snakes.

“Cecile,” Irene bellowed, “bring blood wine!”

We were parked in the driveway of Irene’s villa. Lights sprang on and servants came running. When I saw them, Irene’s face masked theirs the instant I saw each of them.

Gunpowder odors wafted past my nostrils, and my skull ached, flashes of white hot searing it, seemingly from within.

“What did you do?” Irene asked.

“Get some blood in him,” Rachel shouted. Exhausted herself, trembling as she tried to rise. “I used up too much of my power and he’s fighting it.”

“Fighting what?” I murmured.

“Maybe if I tweak his hunger . . .”

I remembered El Segundo. Remembered Irene’s betrayal. And someone was calling my name. Someone important, but very far away.

“What . . . ?” I turned my head, and blood was pouring into my throat, but not just blood—there was a fruitiness to it, an alcohol taste. Blood wine.

A hockey game. I remembered tasting blood wine for the first time at a hockey game with Rachel and Roger . . . Roger who had betrayed me.

I roared, blood wine spattering my lips as the person trying to pour it in could no longer reach. More blood. More wine. It was nearby, I could smell it.

“More.”

“The cellar,” said a woman near me. She was short and plump. I batted her away, stepping on another human in my way, biting another and draining them as I passed, pulling the hapless stranger along as I went, dropping him at a wooden door behind which I smelled blood. Beneath the house I found tunnels full of bottled blood in bottom-up bottles, racked like wine. A young vampire was there turning the bottles, and I drained him too.

Aboveground, Rachel screamed in pain, shrill and high, chased with the guttural wrench of betrayal.

More blood wine, some ready and tasting of alcohol, other bottles unfinished and familiar in their coppery flavor.

I think I downed a dozen bottles before I blacked out completely and the world went away. When it came back, I lay in, or rather next to, a bed. Irene was cold and still beneath the covers and Rachel dozed in an armchair against the wall, a crossbow cradled in her lap. A bushy-eyebrowed servant with a stake stood over me—he’d almost staked me before I noticed him.

Humans are easy kills. So easy, in fact, that you can tear a human heart out with your bare hands and, only as you’re holding the gore-covered pump box, realize you probably should have asked its previous owner a few questions first. Rachel, stirred by the man’s death throes, opened her eyes, taking
one look at me and another at the second human coming at me, and fired her crossbow at the human.
Nice save,
I thought.

I recognized a few of the faces as more crossbow bolts hurtled through the door and toward my chest.

“Hard to find good help these days?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Rachel said. “I must have fallen asleep. Irene’s thralls are . . .”

I shook my head. “Nah. I’m not buying that one.”

“It’s a spell, Eric . . .”

“Maybe if you’d opened with that . . .”

“Back off,” Rachel shouted, and the attack ceased, leaving me with a few arrows sticking out of me, but none in very important places.

Then I sensed Tabitha and I half-remembered her.

“Eric,” she said in my head. “You better listen to me this time. Rachel is using magic on you. I know you might not believe me, but she is.”

“I believe you,” I answered.

“You do?”

“Something is damn sure rotten in the state of Denmark.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Gunpowder, mint, and cinnamon assailed my nostrils.

“Quit,” I told Rachel.

“I’m in a cellar,” I said to Tabitha.

“Great! Just please stay there and don’t trust my sister.”

“Your sister?” I said mentally and aloud.

“Rachel,” Tabitha answered. “We’ve been trying to find you all night, but I couldn’t sense you until now. Not even John Paul could find you.”

“Does this room have some kind of cloaking device?” I asked Rachel.

“Yes,” she nodded. “We should have taken you here first, but Paris was too much fun. Is my sister here?”

“Yep.”

“Fuck.” Rachel stood, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, not even bothering with the crossbow. Since the last time I’d seen her, she’d changed into silk pajama bottoms and a keyhole top. “I wish I knew how your power spiked. It’s like your
memento mori
suddenly became more powerful or something.” Stretching her arms up, I saw her belly piercing and scoffed. It was a diamond stud. “I should have had you for a few more days easy. Do you remember yet?”

“No.” I walked over to her.

“You will.” She cocked her head to the side, offering me her neck. “Last drink?”

“Sure.”

She didn’t give me the bells and whistles. It was just blood, but blood was what I needed and I’m not much of a complainer.

Tabitha, bleary-eyed and dressed in what struck me as very high-class hooker gear, walked in the door. A German woman stood next to her, wielding a Walther PPK like she’d used it before.

“Don’t let her touch you,” Tabitha said to the woman, shaking herself more firmly awake. She felt real, alive—even from across the room I could hear her heartbeat.

“Hiya, slut,” Rachel said affably. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll let this count as the bachelor’s party he didn’t get to have?”