Embrace the Twilight (9 page)

Tears gathered in her eyes with the last sentence, but she turned away, so her parents wouldn't see them. Better they keep on thinking she was angry and spoiled than to know the truth.

Too late. “Amber,” her mother whispered, coming closer. Then she hugged Amber close, stroking her hair. “Oh, baby, I'm sorry. I know it hasn't been easy on you.”

“It's not that….”

“Of course it is. You're the daughter of two vampires. You're the only one of your kind, as far as anyone seems to know. And we don't even know the full extent of your—your—”

“Mutations,” Amber filled in. “Let's face it, Mom, I'm a freak. I can hear people's thoughts, if they don't know enough to guard them. I can move things with my mind. I'm ten times stronger than a normal person. And God only knows what other latent freakishness is lurking, just waiting to make itself known. I'm not human, but I'm not a vampire, either. Unlike you, I age, but I don't know if that means I'm mortal. No one does.”

“You're different, Amber. You're special. And those things you call mutations are gifts.”

“Gifts? Mom, in all my life I've only had one true friend. Alicia. And she's had to live just as sheltered an existence as I have, because of her mother's loyalty to us. It's not fair to her, either.”

Angelica glanced toward Jameson. “It's true. Susan's been with us ever since you girls were infants. Moving when we moved, never revealing our secrets. We couldn't have raised you without her help, Amber.”

“Have you ever heard me complain?” a woman's voice asked.

They looked toward the door, where Susan Jennings had just walked in. Unlike Jameson or Angelica, Susan
had
aged with the years. She had laugh lines around her eyes, and a broadness to her hips that Amber found comforting. She was the sort of mother all the other students her age had at home.

“Amber,” Susan went on, “your parents pay me an extremely generous wage to help care for you. They provide Alicia and me with a home and an income, and they're even going to put her through college.” She glanced at Jameson, her eyes beaming. “But even if none of that were true, they'd still have my loyalty. And maybe it's time you knew why.”

“Maybe it's time you knew a lot of things,” Jameson said softly. “Sit down, Amber.”

“Dad, do we have to do all this? It's a simple request. It doesn't require a family meeting.”

“Sit. Down.”

Sighing, Amber sat. She took the very center of the velvet-covered fainting couch, and her mother sat on one curving arm beside her. Susan took a rocker to the left, and Amber's father paced.

Jameson finally came to a stop, turned and looked his daughter in the eye. “When you were born, you were taken from us.”

Amber blinked, glancing from him to her mother, and back again. “Taken?”

“By the Division of Paranormal Investigations. You've heard us speak of the DPI, haven't you?”

She nodded slowly as a cold little lead ball formed in her stomach. “They were some sort of shady government agency that harassed vampires.”

“They did a little more than harass us. They hunted us. Captured us. Kept us locked in cells and used us as guinea pigs in their endless experiments to learn more about our kind and how to annihilate us.”

“Jamey, you're frightening her,” Angelica said.

Amber put her hand over her mother's. “No. I want to hear this.”

“But I don't think—”

Jamey interrupted his wife's objections. “Your mother was kept in one of those cells throughout her entire pregnancy, and that is where you were born.”

Amber pressed her fingers to her lips unconsciously.

“The DPI couldn't resist the chance to get their filthy hands on the only child ever known to have been born to a vampire. You were to be their prize lab rat, Amber. And by the time I learned all that and went to get you out, they had already taken you away and left your mother sealed in a concrete box to die.”

Amber's heart lurched, and her stomach clenched tight as she turned, wide-eyed, to her mother. “They did that to you?”

She lowered her gaze from her daughter's. “You shouldn't be telling her this, Jameson.”

Amber sniffed, searching her mother's face. “You're still kind of claustrophobic. Is that why?”

“Yes,” she admitted after a slight hesitation, finally meeting Amber's eyes and holding them.

“But Dad got you out. Right? And somehow you found me.”

“He got me out. And we went looking for you.”

“Your mother could sense you,” Jameson said. “The bond between the two of you has been stunning, even from the very start.”

Angelica nodded softly. “It still is. I always know when you're near, or when you're in trouble. Unless you're asleep, and only very deeply asleep at that.”

“So you came after me.”

“And it was lucky for me they did,” Susan said, taking up the tale now, as she rocked. “Because on the way, they came upon the scene of a car accident. My car had overturned and caught fire. I'd been thrown clear, but my baby was still inside.”

“Alicia?” Amber asked, her eyes widening even farther.

“Yes. Your father went to the car, even though it was blazing, and somehow he got her out. He was burned pretty badly in the process, and knowing what I know now, it makes it even more amazing that he did what he did. But he did it all the same.”

Amber lowered her head, shaking it slowly. She knew, as Susan did, that a vampire's flesh was one of the most flammable substances imaginable. He could easily have been destroyed.

“Later, I had the opportunity to care for you, to keep you hidden and safe, until your parents came for you. And we've all been together ever since,” she said, smiling toward Angelica and Jameson.

“I…I didn't know. I didn't know any of this.” Looking up at her father, Amber smiled. “You're incredible, Dad. And you, too, Mom. To have survived so much and come through it so well. But—” She broke off, bit her lower lip.

“But?” Jameson asked.

“But I still don't see what this has to do with my trip to New York.”

Jameson closed his eyes, while Angelica rolled hers. Susan only shook her head.

“Well, come on. I mean, the DPI's long gone. I may not have heard the rest, but everyone knows the story of the day the vampires stormed DPI headquarters and burned it to the ground. It's legend. So you tell me how the threat of an agency that no longer exists has any bearing whatsoever on my having two weeks in New York.”

“Baby, just because the DPI is gone, that doesn't mean there are no threats out there,” Angelica said softly.

“Mom, there would be threats out there no matter what I was. Normal teenagers have to live with those same threats every day, but they don't become housebound because of it. And I'm not like them. I mean, I'm way stronger than any normal girl. It's not like I'd be mugged or something.” She sighed. “Come on, you guys, it's just two weeks.”

Again her parents exchanged a glance. Aloud, her father said, “One week.”

Amber tried not to grin from ear to ear. “Really?”

“Jamey, I don't know—” Angelica began.

“There are conditions,” Jameson went on. “We book the hotel, and we have a full itinerary. You phone us every single night. In fact, you'll be carrying a cell phone with you at all times, turned on, so that we can call you. There will be no bars, no nightclubs, no drinking.”

“Of course not,” Amber agreed, nodding hard.

He held up a hand. “I'm not finished yet. This is only going to happen if this plan meets with Susan's approval. Alicia's going along, after all.”

Susan frowned. “I suppose, if you think it's safe…”

“Oh, it will be,” Amber said quickly. “We'll be so good you wouldn't believe it, and so
totally
safe. We'll call constantly. I swear. Oh, God, I gotta go tell Alicia!”

Amber ran from the room. Alicia had preferred hiding out in her bedroom while Amber had this particular discussion with her parents. She was nowhere near as assertive as Amber was. In fact, Alicia was shy and timid. She hated confrontation of any kind.

Oh, but they were going to New York City. Two eighteen-year-olds on the loose in the Big Apple. Without a single parent supervising them. What a
blast
this was going to be!

 

Angelica glared at him, springing to her feet the moment Amber left the room, and Jamey knew he was in trouble, but he held up his hands. “I know, I know, but I have a plan. I wouldn't have given in if I didn't.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “This had better be good, vampire.
Very
good.”

“It is. I think.” He went to the magazine rack in the corner, hunkered down to begin flipping through issues. “All we need to do is set someone up to watch her from a distance.”

“Amber would know if there were another vampire around,” Angelica reminded him.

“That's why we can't get a vampire for the job. Listen, I know this man, this really talented mortal, who happens to be living in New York City right now.”

“So?”

“So we simply employ him as her bodyguard. We pay him enough to watch over her 24/7, and he contacts us the instant anything seems the least bit off-kilter.”

“Hmmph.”
Angel tossed her hair. “Just who is this man who impressed you so much that you'd trust him with our daughter's life?”

“Ah, here he is now.” Jameson pulled out the magazine and showed it to her. It was an issue of
TIME,
and the cover held the granite hard face of a man, with an American flag waving as a backdrop. The headline read: They Couldn't Make Him Talk. And in smaller letters, “The amazing story of Colonel Willem Stone, captured, tortured, unbroken, he escaped his captors and lived to tell the tale.”

“What makes you think this man will agree to take on the job?” Angelica asked.

“He helped me out of a tight spot once before,” Jameson said. “When we were visiting Eric and Tam in Virginia, and I, uh, went to Bethesda for some takeout. He was there. He knew what I was in a glance, and he covered for me when I was nearly caught.”

She frowned. “And what did he expect in return?”

Jamey shrugged. “He said he had some questions. I promised I'd touch base with him at a later date to answer them. But, uh, well, I never did. Now, though…”

“Now you need his help again. So you'll tell him what he wants to know.”

“As long as it's nothing with the potential to be used against us, yes. He's a good man, Angelica. You need only a glance at him to know that.”

“I suppose…Rhiannon's place is nearby. I'll make sure Amber has a key, and the address. Will Roland and Rhiannon be back from their trip by then?”

Jameson shrugged.

“Do you think this…Stone will agree to do this for us?”

“He will,” Jameson promised. “I really think he will.”

“I
won't,” Will told the pale, familiar man who sat across from him at the small, round dining table in his rather spartan apartment. Jameson Bryant was Will's first guest, so this was the first time he'd even attempted to see his place through someone else's eyes. It wasn't a bad apartment. Hell, it was a nice apartment. It just didn't look very lived-in.

Will had pretty much settled in over the past two months, though he didn't think it would ever feel like home to him. He wasn't exactly sure what “home” was supposed to feel like, though, so he couldn't be sure.

“You won't?” Jameson Bryant repeated.

“Look, I'm a retired soldier, not a baby-sitter. And besides…” He let his voice trail off, looking at the man again.

“Besides,” Jameson said, “you're still not convinced I am what I say I am.”

“I'm not even convinced you're sitting here having this conversation with me.”

“You've spoken to me before. Covered for me that night at the hospital.”

Will averted his eyes. “I was under the influence of some heavy-duty pain meds at the time.”

“So you think you hallucinated our entire encounter? If that's the case, Willem, then how do you explain my being here now?”

Will forced himself to face the man—or whatever he was. He had piercing eyes that seemed to bore right into his skull. Into his mind. “It wouldn't be the first time my mind had…played tricks on me.”

Bryant continued staring at him, probing with his eyes.

“So are you trying to hypnotize me, or just burn me to cinders with that glare?”

The other man blinked and looked away. “Actually, I was trying to read your thoughts. But you're adept at blocking them. I seem to recall noticing that about you at our last encounter.”

Will shrugged. “It's not deliberate.”

“That makes it even more interesting. Tell me about these other times your mind has…played tricks.”

“No. It's none of your business.”

Bryant nodded. “Fair enough. Tell me how you knew I was a vampire that night when we met.”

“I didn't know any such thing. I don't know it now.”

The man blew air through clenched teeth. Then he seemed to pause, to think, and then he spoke again. “You asked about a woman that night. Sarafina. Who was she to you?”

“Just another figment of my imagination.”

“No. No, she's not. I knew it might take some work, Willem, to convince you to help me. Especially since I failed to keep my side of the bargain last time. So I took the liberty of checking into the name—discreetly, of course. She's a vampire, as am I. And she's right here, in New York.”

A shudder worked through Will's body. He tried hard to keep it hidden. But his mind raced back to the day he had arrived in New York. The woman he'd seen just outside the airport—getting into the limo and speeding away. He'd caught only a glimpse—her hair, the shape of her cheekbones. The way she moved. It had been more than the way she looked that had hit him that day. He'd felt her, sensed her, felt her tugging at him the way magnetic north tugs at a compass needle. He'd convinced himself it hadn't been—couldn't have been—Sarafina. My God, what if it had?

“Willem?” the vampire prompted.

Will cleared his throat, focused on the here and now. “That's impossible,” he said. “She's not real.”

“She's as real as I am.”

Will started to argue that
he
wasn't real, either, then stopped himself. The man was sitting here at his table at two in the morning, solid flesh and bone. He wasn't like other men. Most people might not notice it in passing, but Will was trained to notice things, especially abnormal things. The man's eyes took on a slight glow when he became angry or agitated. His skin was pale, but not in the same way an unhealthy, anemic human being's would be. It was pearly. Almost lustrous.

“From what I've been able to learn about Sarafina, she comes from Gypsy stock. A small band that roamed Italy. She was transformed by a vampire who went by the name of Bartrone, sometime close to two centuries ago, and…” He stopped speaking, smiled slowly, and Will saw the tips of his incisors, slightly longer than the other teeth, and sharp. “You knew these things about her?”

“I…imagined them. But they aren't real.”

Bryant started to get up, but before Will saw him straighten all the way, he was standing right beside him, clutching his upper arm. He drew Will to his feet bodily, without seeming to exert much effort at all. Will felt a single jerk on his arm, and the floor beneath him was gone. When he felt it beneath his feet again, they were standing in the apartment's bathroom, in front of the oval mirror mounted to the wall.

“How the hell…?”

“I told you, I'm a vampire. I'm far stronger, and light-years faster, than a mortal. Now look, and see the truth.” He nodded toward the mirror.

Will looked. There was only his own reflection looking back at him. And even as he watched, his comb rose from the counter beside the basin, floated this way and that way all on its own. Will shot his gaze to the vampire—for that was surely what he was—and saw him holding the comb, moving it back and forth in front of the mirror. He looked at the glass again, and again saw only the floating comb.

“All right.” Will had to look away from the mirror. It was too disorienting to keep watching that damned floating comb trick. “All right. You are what you say you are.”

“At last.”

“But I still don't know why you want me for this job. It ought to be pretty clear to you that I'm not up to it. Hell, with all your superpowers, why don't you just do it yourself?”

Sighing, the vampire walked slowly out of the room. Will followed, limping badly without his cane to help him. He sank into his chair, and the vampire took his own. “I can't do it myself. Amber would know if I were there, just as she would know if I assigned another vampire to watch over her. I don't want to break her trust in me forever, but I am not incorrect in feeling she will be at risk without protection. So it has to be a mortal.”

“I suppose that makes sense. But there must be a hundred men more qualified. Men who do this sort of thing for a living.”

“That's true. But we do not go around announcing our existence to mortals if it can be helped. You already know we exist. You knew it that night in the hospital.”

“There must be others who know about you.”

Jameson Bryant lifted his brows. “Oh, there are. That's part of the problem. They're mostly dedicated to hunting us down like animals. Slaughtering us, if possible.”

Will brought his head up slowly.

“And besides those things, Willem Stone, I trust you.”

“You barely know me.”

“I know what you did for me that night in the hospital. And I know the kind of man you are. I'm very good at sensing these things—just as you are.”

Will lowered his head, thinking it over. He didn't have a job right now. He had all the time in the world.

“I'll pay you whatever you want,” the vampire said.

“I have more money now than I'll ever want or need.”

“Then what? What can I do to convince you to do this for me?”

Swallowing hard, Will met and held the creature's eyes. “Show me Sarafina.”

 

They walked along the rain-damp sidewalk, past concrete and brick facades, and windows protected by bars, past well-cleaned stoops, the pattern broken only by the occasional alley, until the vampire stopped in front of a red metal door. Cars hissed past, their lights waxing and waning in time. Horns blew now and then. Not with the constant, unending taxicab language of midtown Manhattan. In midtown the horns spoke in loud voices, arguing and cussing each other out in a code only they and their drivers could understand. The yellow cabs spoke to one another with a little more civility in the Village.

“This is where she is?” Will asked. He was impatient, his good leg tired of bearing most of his weight, while his injured one ached mildly as his meds wore off.

“I don't do this thing lightly, Stone,” Bryant told him. “Revealing the identity of another vampire to a mortal is—well, it's not done.”

“Because of those who hunt you,” Will said, nodding in full agreement with the wisdom of it. “But you know I'm not one of those.”

“I know you're not one of those. And I know you're no threat to this woman.”

He should have been insulted. “Because of my injury,” he said, again filling in the blanks on his own.

“No. Because of her power.”

Will dragged his gaze from the red door and the sign above it that read The Red Lion, with its stylized scarlet lion silhouettes on either side of the words, and focused on Bryant. He didn't show any sign that he was joking.

“I knew you'd ask about her in exchange for your help before I ever showed up at your door tonight, my friend. As I told you, I did some digging before I arrived. What I've learned about Sarafina—it's less than pleasant.”

Will lifted his brows. “Then she's not the right woman. The Sarafina I knew—or imagined—was young and trusting. Too trusting, I'm afraid.”

“How much different are you today from the child you were at, say, eight years old?”

Will knew what he was getting at and didn't bother answering. The answer was obvious. He was a completely different person now.

“She's lived five times as long as you have, Willem.”

He nodded once. “So what are you telling me? That she's not a
tame, friendly
vampire like you?”

“Are you patronizing me now?”

He looked away. “I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.”

“No, I didn't.” He drew a deep breath, sighed. “From what I understand, Sarafina is…dangerous. Most of us today live on animal blood, or what we can steal from blood banks. Some drink from living beings, but only in small amounts, leaving them unharmed.”

“They don't remember and run screaming to the tabloids the next day?” Will asked.

“They remember what we let them remember.”

Will digested that without asking any of the questions that were swirling in his mind, though Bryant paused to give him time to ask them. He didn't care about their methods. He wanted to know about Sarafina.

“Sarafina is different. Rumor has it she…well…her victims sometimes disappear.”

He blinked. This couldn't be the same gentle woman he'd encountered in his mind. Then again, he had seen what she'd been through. Had losing Bartrone twisted her mind?

“She is not overly fond of humans, I think,” Bryant said.

“Then why would we find her here, at a bar full of them?”

The vampire shook his head slowly. “I don't know. But I was told she comes here often, sits at a booth in the back and writes in a book of some kind. She never hunts here, so it's the safest place for you to approach her.”

“Why does she never…hunt here?”

“It would stir up too many questions, attract the vampire hunters in droves, and that would mean she would no longer be able to come here every night. It would ruin it for her. The place without a single sign of a vampire is the place where you'll find them in droves, Willem. A place where there has been a kill, or a blood bank break-in, or any other sign of our presence, is the last place you will find us.”

Again Will nodded. “You'd make good soldiers.”

“In a way, that's exactly what we are.” Jameson paused for just a moment, then reached for the door. “Are you ready?”

He nodded. Inside, he was preparing himself for disappointment. This woman was not going to be his Gypsy enchantress. She wasn't. There was no way that the Sarafina of his dreams could have become a killer.

“I'm not going in with you. She'll sense the presence of another vampire immediately and might perceive you as more of a threat. She tends to shun the company of others like her, or so I'm told.”

“So she's not overly fond of humans
or
vampires,” Will said, thinking aloud. “Maybe she just likes being alone.”

He looked through the door Bryant held open. People milled around carrying drinks, while others sat at small square tables on impossibly high stools. Still others lined the bar. The place was smoke-filled, the music a little too loud for his taste. A little too hip-hop for his taste, as well. He preferred classic rock, probably a sign of his age.

“I'll meet you tomorrow night at your apartment to finalize our bargain, Willem,” Jameson Bryant said.

“All right.” The vampire didn't seem to harbor any doubt whatsoever that this was going to be the woman Will sought.

“Be careful.”

Will nodded, barely hearing him as he stepped into the bar. The door closed behind him. He limped to the first vacant stool he spotted, sat down to rest his leg and ordered a shot of Black Velvet.