Endless Night

Endless Night by R.M. Gilmore

© 2013 R.M. Gilmore All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Editor: Becky Johnson (
Hot Tree Editing
)

Thank you –

All those stellar bitches who never lost hope in a fat little bitch with a bad attitude.
We
thank you.

Dylan Hart Odyssey of the Occult series

The Scene

Endless Night

Sacrifice

Prologue

Never did I think I would ever willingly get on a plane and travel across the country in order to spend three nights surrounded by vampires. How things changed. Or better yet, how persuasive was Tatum Price. After gruesomely staking and beheading two would-be vampires, my outlook on life changed dramatically. Recently, I developed a crunchy exterior. I had been told this wasn’t a good change.

Mike and I
were on speaking terms at the moment. Mike had his hands full with Reggie and her missing head, leaving little time to harass me. I had decided to bow out from chasing leads and killing vampires. From what I heard, another headless and staked body turned up in Vegas about a month ago. Mike was scared there was another serial killer on the loose. I tried not to care. I had other things to do.

I decided
, out of respect for the lives lost, I would not write the book I had set out to write a few months earlier. Instead, I had chosen to compose a fiction novel based on the individuals I met through my journey. Sanguinarians. Lifestyle vampires as I had learned they preferred to be called. Tatum and I were going to attend the Endless Night Masque in New Orleans for research. Really, her new full time beau gave me a free VIP ticket so I said what the hell. Tatum and I had made up. Well, in all actuality I gave in and stopped being mad. She and Malcolm had become an exclusive item. She seemed happy. I, on the other hand, wish she’d realized he was an idiot and forgot the entire thing. But until then, I might as well reap the benefits of my best friend dating the Primus of California. Whatever the fuck that meant. Of course, the Primus would be attending with us and likely bringing his puppy, Cyrus. I hadn’t spent much time with Cyrus since I accidentally shot him when trying to kill a boy who thought he was a vampire. Cyrus healed from his gunshot wound fairly quickly. I sent balloons to the hospital.

The Endless Night Masque de Sang
was a three day event featuring loads of fun for vampires everywhere. Tatum insisted for a month I go with her to keep her company. I was planning on using it as a chance to explore further into the scene I was so irreverently thrust into. I was a tad apprehensive at first, but who could blame me after my last go-around with vampires. As long as no one ended up dead and drained of blood, I would be fine. Oh, shit, who was I kidding? The likelihood of a corpse popping up at a function revolving around vampires was high. I was taking my chances.
And who knows, it might make for a killer book.              

Chapter One

It always feels awkward being in Mike’s house. Standing in his living room, looking at pictures of us hanging on every wall, posted on every surface. It was weird to think he walked around in this house every day with my face staring at him from every angle. I always wondered why he never took them down. I’d hung most of them there when we moved in and I left them right where they hung the day I walked out. Apparently, so had he.

“You never know,” Mike said from the bathroom.

I looked in the direction of his voice to see a sliver of light around the doorjamb; he hadn’t bothered closing the door. I had to admit, it felt very natural talking to him through a crack in the bathroom door. Like nothing had ever changed. I leaned against the edge of the couch just down the hall from the bathroom and listened to the water running in the shower.

“Never know what?” I asked loud enough so he could hear me over the running water.

Small wafts of steam puffed out from the opening in the door, and with it, the smell of his soap. I hadn’t had the pleasure of that smell in a long time. I closed my eyes and breathed in deep.

“The truth,” he said just after he turned the water off.

I could hear him moving around the small room. Clanking his toothbrush in the cup, opening and closing the medicine cabinet, all the little mundane tasks we took for granted every day. Those little sounds of daily life pulled me back into a time I thought I’d almost forgotten. A time I was in love. A time I was safe and happy. A time I could never get back.

“And you do? Does anyone ever really know what’s real?” I asked, looking at a picture of the two of us that hung on the wall only inches from my head. We looked so happy. Big smiling faces and bright eyes.

“Not usually, no. But you could, if you wanted to.” His voice came much clearer than it had before. I looked away from our shining faces to see Mike emerge from the bathroom, shower wet and towel clad.

He never met my eyes when he turned from the bathroom and walked away from me. The expanse of his thick shoulders lay totally exposed and the deep indent that trailed from between his shoulder blades to the small of his back shifted and moved with every step. I hadn’t forgotten what his body looked like, I just hadn’t thought about it in a while. An unconscious smirk and tweak of my brow reminded me of every moment I’d laid eyes on the better half of that man. Mike walked the short space between the bathroom and his bedroom door wearing only a small stark white towel around his waist. He seemed to not care a lick that I was in perfect eyeshot of his half-naked body. There was a part of me that was quite pleased with the situation. Then there was a part of me, the logical part, which said there was no way in hell this was ever going to happen. I happily ignored that part and enjoyed the view.

A few steps before he reached the privacy of his room, he pulled the towel from around his waist and brought it up to dry his wet hair. In that tiny second, I caught a lovely glimpse of the backside I’d been missing for damn near two years.
Two dimples sat just above his nicely round cheeks and just below the curve of his back. My throat made a small noise before I caught it and moved on. The sight of something so long missed can wreak havoc on your psyche and that was the last damn thing I needed.

“What is it that you want?”
I asked. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this conversation. And seeing all that he had to offer, well, not all, but a lot, made me forget why I was standing in his living room in the first place.

“The same thing you do.” He came out of his room and walked down the hall toward me. He’d put on pants but not much else. His hair was still wet and messy from the shower.

He stopped a few feet from me, but I could still smell his soap. I tried hard not to look at the expanse of his chest and shoulders. He wasn’t a chiseled master piece, not even close. But he had the look of someone who could scoop you up in his arms and carry you to safety. Not that he’d ever tried to pick my fat ass up, but you got the idea. I tried to look him straight in the face as I had always been able to do, but all I could think about were those two little divots just above his ass. My eyes jerked away and moved down his body more and caught an eyeful of the line of hair that led from the top of his jeans to his belly button.

Holy moly.

My breath caught in my throat, but I managed to squeak out, “What is it you think I want?” I decided looking at his face was probably the best idea.

He smiled and stepped closer. I liked his smile. It
made his eyes crinkle on the sides. Standing this close to Mike felt as natural as putting my shoes on, but I knew it wasn’t right. I knew there was no way this was a good thing. He was acting like nothing had changed. Like we were still…us.

“What’s wrong, babe?” he said looking down at me from his six-foot-three stature.

I just shook my head. I had no idea what to say. He’d never put me in this position before. Not in a long time had he been so…naked. I’d thought for a long time it was completely over. That I was done with it. With us. I’d come to terms with it and moved on. My tenacity was the only reason we were able to stay as some kind of friends.

He carried a look on his face that I hadn’t seen in so long. He looked like he was seeing straight into me. Like he was planning every moment with me from here on out. Like he’d never leave me. He’d die for me.

The muscles in his chest flexed and his hand came up and wrapped around the base of my neck. My heart literally stopped beating. I watched his face intently, looking for some kind of motive. Waiting for the truth to rear its ugly head.

“When you run, I’m here,” he said confidently, as if it wasn’t a seriously weird thing to say. “Believe in nothing you can’t reach out and touch.”

Out of sheer compulsion, I reached out and touched his chest. He was warm and solid.

“I love you, Dylan Hart.”
His mouth said those words without hesitation, without an ounce of regret. He crooked his head and leaned down toward me then. The smell of his soap so strong I thought I’d climbed inside of him. Drops of water fell from his wet hair onto my face and trickled down my cheek like tears. Maybe they were. I didn’t care. I waited, ready, for him to kiss me. Wanting to remember so terribly what those kisses felt like and waiting for him to remind me.

I could feel the heat from his breath touch my mouth. My breathing was heavy and my heart was pounding from my chest. I lifted myself up onto my tiptoes eagerly forcing my lips to meet his.

BAM, BAM, BAM!!

My body lurched and jerked, forcing me to tumble from the couch to the floor. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I yelled loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

I lay there for a moment on my plush carpet trying to get a grip on what had just transpired. As I lay there, reality flooded into my head and I knew where I was. I was at home, lying on my living room floor, desperately wishing the last fifteen minutes of my life had been reality.

A small twinge of impure thoughts hit my stomach at the image of Mike and I knew it was wrong. My psyche had taken me on a journey into the past and it was fun while it lasted. But that shit was long gone and it
was never coming back. Not if I had anything to do with it anyway.

Yeah,
right, okay.

My bags had been packed and I’d been waiting, or sleeping, on the couch for three hours when that fucker knocked on the door and took me away from potentially the first piece of ass I’d gotten in a year. Subconscious or not, it was still more than I’d had in a while. If left unchecked, sexual frustration apparently
ran rampant on your dreams too.

I hopped up from the floor, wiped the residual drool from my cheek, and stomped toward the door.

"Fuck Tatum, take you long enough?" I said in a huff as I opened the front door.

"I’m sorry. I just couldn’t decide on what to wear." I stood in shock in the open doorway. My eyes locked on to the beautiful white smile that was plastered on the man before me. “Looks like you’ve had some trouble finding a hair brush this morning,” he said, smoothing the side of my hair down and back into my ponytail while I stood there in shock.

"Cyrus. What are you doing here?" I said, flabbergasted. His perfect form nearly filled the doorway. It had been almost four months since I’d laid eyes on him. I would swear he had gotten prettier in that time. It didn’t help I’d been knee deep in butt dimples just a few minutes before opening the door to this beautiful, yet entirely unwanted, surprise.

"Our lovely Tatum has taken too long to ready herself, so I have been asked to escort you to the airport." I looked at him questioningly. "Is that a problem for you?" he asked seriously, voice seeming almost hurt. His smile faded and a look of sadness moved across his perfect golden brown face.

"Do I have a choice?" I asked rhetorically before I turned and moved into the living room to retrieve my canvas messenger bag and rolling suitcase.

“You could drive yourself,” he spoke through an obvious snicker from his place in the doorway.

I let out a scoff that nearly shot a bit of snot from my nose. Luckily, my back was turned so wiping it away proved to be fairly stealthy. Cyrus stayed in the doorway, watching my every move.

I was annoyed that Tatum hadn’t come to get me. She was the only reason I was getting on this torpedo of death headed to the Big Easy to rub elbows with a horde of bloodsucking fiends. She promised we’d be together and have a blast. She’d told me how bored she’d be if she was dragged along with Malcolm to his vampire meetings and begged me to come with her to keep her company. Granted, the idea of snooping and getting an inside look at the world of vampires, no matter how fictitious they truly
were, called to my inner curiosity. Oh, shit who was I kidding? Four months of working on my fiction novel and I had nothing that wasn’t already done to death. I needed something raw and a trip to New Orleans to hobnob with the underground vampire elite was just what the voodoo doctor ordered.

Tatum and I had planned to meet Malcolm and Cyrus at the airport an hour ago. Now I had to make the trip to LAX riding bitch in Cyrus’ white SUV. I was not happy about the new arrangement. It wasn’t that I hated him, because I
didn’t. In fact, I actually really liked him. But that’s the problem. It was too hard to focus when I was near Cyrus. Not to mention, half the time he was either driving me insane or causing me to question his motives. I’d just as soon leave him to be pretty somewhere other than in my living room.

Either he
needed to be less attractive or I needed to get over my self-conscious bullshit. Maybe I could maul his pretty face a bit. Bring him down a peg.

"I’ll be just a minute," I called from the bedroom. It was a shock to the system seeing Cyrus only minutes after having a close encounter with Mike. Cyrus
was very pretty, but...he wasn’t Mike.

Cyrus waited patiently as I fixed my bed head and put my shoes on. I grabbed my house keys from their normal spot on my nightstand and trailed my hand over the cold metal of my new best friend that sat next to them. The one and only thing that allowed me to get a good night’s sleep in months. After offing two vampy boys in a basement full of blood, I’d become a bit hardened to society. My gun let my off kilter brain pretend it was safe long enough to catch some z’s. Unfortunately, you
couldn’t bring a gun through an airport. Probably a good thing for Cyrus though. I snatched my phone from the charger in the wall, rolled up the cord, and grabbed a thick book just in case. Even if I didn’t get time to read it, at least I could whack someone pretty good with the hefty hardback. Maybe it’d be Cyrus. I smiled to myself at the thought.

It always drove me nuts when I
got twitterpated over a stupid boy. Let alone two at once. Although, in the long run, Cyrus was the less complicated of the two. Surprisingly.

"I’m ready," I said as I walked through the living room, bags in hand.

I tried my damndest not to meet his stark green eyes. The lustful hold he had on me had faded since the shooting incident. I guessed putting a bullet through someone you were fighting to despise helped the cause. Don’t get me wrong, I still wanted to strip him down and screw him six ways ‘til Sunday. But the unadulterated need to do as he wished had all but disappeared. Not looking into his perfect face was just a precaution. Especially considering my Mike dream had left me all kinds of lusty. Now that I was almost a hundred percent sure Cyrus wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, I could do as I pleased with him. I just preferred not to get any more involved than necessary with people who drank blood.

Without a word, Cyrus pulled all my bags from my hands in one fell swoop and headed out the door with them. Not having to drag a suitcase and an overstuffed messenger bag down the stairs of doom was a blessing, but allowing him to take my stuff left me feeling like I owed him.

I stayed behind and made sure I’d shut everything off. We’d be gone three days which was absolutely long enough for my apartment to burn to ashes. Once satisfied I hadn’t forgotten anything, I began the process of locking my damn door. As I fucked with the lock, I was reminded of the time Cyrus unlocked it with ease. I almost wished he had done this task and left me to heft the bags.

After a few aggravating moments, I finally had the door locked tight and made my way down the steps. The tree limb was not only still hanging low over my staircase, but had doubled in size. Fledgling branches protruded from the thick limb nearly putting an eye out. I ducked instinctively, but caught my hair on a few leaves. This now happened at least three times a week, so I’d recently become a pro at releasing myself from the clutches of nature.