Masters of the Night

1.

One
sweep of the second hand on a clock.
That was all Henri
De
LaCroix
needed. In that one tiny, luxurious moment
he swept through the halls of the deserted park museum like a silent wind. His
eyes pierced the mystic’s, and she lost herself. Her violet orbs fell fully
into his bottomless blue wells, filling with crystalline power. He easily
whipped sticky, mesmerizing threads around her thoughts.

Her lips parted, but no words fell from them. She was captured, caught
in his beautiful web like a helpless butterfly while his sapphire orbs broke
her, melting her will and her heart onto the threads of the web.

But not enough, he realized. A mystic’s defenses were not easily
defeated.

The mystic shook herself as though from unwanted sleep. “I’m sorry. Did
you say something?”

“Do you prefer Renoir or his friend, Monet?” he
asked,
his voice coffee-rich and thickly Parisian.

He stood next to her gazing up at the wall of paintings, and risked a
sidelong glance. She was impetuously beautiful, this mortal mystic, beautiful
in her dazzling green sequined dinner dress and diamond earrings, with blue
eyes so startlingly deep they appeared violet. The silken tresses that framed
them shone like burnt gold in the soft museum light, and her face glowed with
the innocence of a Disney princess.

Deceptive innocence.
Liora
Anjanette
Carter was
endowed with rivers of power.

Mystics were that rare breed of mortals with the uncanny ability to
sense the unseen, see the unknown.
To “know” things.
They walked within the twilight world, the chasm between space and time.

And through their second sight, they could see and read auras, those
wondrous radials of color that encircled the beings
who
moved across the earth.

Their blood was sweet, powerful.

Poison.

Poison to the
vampyre
who lost control.
Bleeding out a mystic would cause horrors in the brain—insanity.

Neverthless
, hunger gnawed at
the shriveled chambers of the French
vampyre’s
heart,
and his veins craved to pulse and throb with mystical essence. He was certain
he could survive her.

He placed his eyes on the magnificent painting hanging before them, the
Renoir portrayal of a man holding a woman close as they danced.

“
The Dance at
Bougival
.
On loan from the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” Henri offered informatively, inviting
conversation. “The background is airy, reminiscent of his Impressionist days,
but the dancers are a return to solidity for Renoir.” He turned to her. “A man
asked Renoir to paint him dancing with his fiancée. Do you know much about
him?”

“The dancer or the artist?”
She laughed
lightly, as though pleased by the unsolicited attention from the suave,
well-toned Frenchman. He had inky black, shoulder-length hair, disarmingly blue
eyes and a brilliant white smile.

A voice suddenly boomed through the room, startling her.
“Hey Angie babe!
Got us dinner! We can go over to the park
next door. Lots of table space since most everybody is vacating. Speaking of,
we’d better get our butts
outa
here before museum
lock-down.”

As she spotted the grease-spattered, fast food bags in the young man’s
hands, the Disney princess smile waned and her shoulders drooped a little
beneath the sequined spaghetti straps.

“Well, enjoy Renoir,” she sighed to Henri in parting. Then she turned
back briefly, coyly, her smile returning a little. “And
The Dance
is a favorite of
mine.”

“Good evening, mademoiselle,” he returned with a smile and a nod.

Her gaze flickered with uncertainty as he looked at her one last time,
but only briefly. And she left.

Secretly moving through the trees, Henri followed them to a picnic
table secluded in the cool dusk under an ancient cottonwood. Climbing easily to
a high branch cloistered in a corridor of leaves, he let his long black trench
coat drape the limb. He watched her through the shadowy skeins.

Her violet eyes were sad.

“You could have at least told me dinner out meant outside, Bobby,” she
said toward the face buried in the fast food bag.

A pity, Henri thought as he grimaced at the bag seeping spots of brown.
She was worth far more.

While the mortal with barbell muscles and a dopey smile finished his
fries and hers, she boosted herself up to the top of the picnic table, and
crossed her shapely legs beneath her tight little sequined dress.

Henri drank in the sequin draped thighs, the depth of sweetness male
dreams were made of.

She stared at the romantic park pond with its sprinkling of water
lilies and emerging starlight, and sighed again. One sandaled foot swung back
and forth in sad little sweeps while the other nudged at a crack in the cement
bench.

Dusk deepened. A nearby walkway lamp came on and the leaves on the tree
lost their summer green under its pasty haze. The whole place, in fact, seemed
to take on the dead of winter. The pond became flecked with gray as though
ashes of the dead had been scattered across the ripples, and even the glass
green sequins of the dinner dress now shimmered gray-green as though a layer of
grave dust covered the bodice.

While evening slipped away, Bobby continued chomping and asked the
mystic if she wanted her limeade. Pushing a plastic cup toward him, she turned
her violet orbs from “dinner out” toward a northern sky becoming shimmery with
stars.

“The Dipper’s beautiful tonight,” she murmured.

The Big Dipper was tipped, pouring milky stars into the universe. Henri
gazed at the Dipper’s points of light for some moments,
then
moved his gaze to the southern sky.

Above the wavy horizon of park trees, the constellation Scorpio curled
into the heavens. Three bright, diagonal stars for the head, a sweep of stars
arcing downward from the center star into the body, a curve back up again at
the tail—and into the stinger.

Henri wanted the young man to leave so he could slip down beside her.
And sting
her
. He would enjoy
the stars with her first, of course, telling her how Scorpio was his favorite
constellation. And that Sagittarius, the archer, was not. Then tell her why.

“
Liora
Anjanette
.
Such a beautiful name,” he murmured. His words in the dark were no more than the
brush of the night breeze against the sky.

Yet she looked up as if she had heard the whisper high in the branches
of the gnarled, old tree.

And she shivered! Though the night was not cold!

“Ah, Eleanor,” he whispered, excited, stroking the night bird that
lighted on his shoulder. “She is aware something is amiss in the portals of the
night. And now she searches the very night itself for the dark disturbance. And
of course, the disturbance is—me.”

His deep, dead eyes tingling, he continued to watch her, captivated.
The mystic was now looking directly into the canopy of foliage that held him
secretly in its embrace.

Her violet eyes reflected starlight in every shimmery facet. His cold
blue sapphires reflected a scarlet soul, tincture from the world of the damned.
Could she see the red glints emanating through the leaves, he wondered, the
fire in the depths of his pupils if one looked too close?
Or
too long?

But no.
She did not see
him. This one’s talent was
raw,
needing honing … She
was reluctant to trust her instincts.

She shrugged away her tremors of warning and placed her attention on
her lover again—or at least Henri supposed the young man with the food bag
smile was her lover—and she wasted a soft gaze that was totally lost on Bobby
Billboard Boy.

She’s languishing in sequins and pearls and you’re oblivious to her,
Henri thought with
disgust.

Henri drank in every curve of the femme fatale body the foolish fellow
couldn’t see, and enjoyed the perfume wafting upward through the leaves.

But how the night carries irony in its black talons!
he
thought.
The night is waltzing on her sweet perfume, the wind
whispering into her hair, and they both seduce her past the innocence of a
heavenly dipper, to a scorpion.
To me.

Look toward me, Angie.

In heavy French he pronounced his name for her in a slow, sensual
thought threaded through the branches. “
Ähnrē
, De La
Cwah
.”

She smoothed back a rope of golden strands that had fallen forward, and
as her fingertips brushed the nape of her neck, Henri’s eyes could now look nowhere
else. His fangs dropped, and he beckoned her toward him again. He was
determined she would be his.
Forever.

Look toward me,
Liora
Anjanette
.

She looked up toward the highest leaves, toward him.

Fierce delight coursed through him. Her disappointing date with her
escort had left her vulnerable. He had been able to deliver the subtle
suggestion into her mind as easily as if she were a rag doll.

She began nervously toying with a gold chain at her neck. The strength
of his thirst, his hunger, the excitement in the challenge to see if he could
survive blood that was poison to the undead, the swell of false breath in
anticipating her life in his veins and her afterlife with him, had penetrated
her senses.

Henri became mesmerized by the links of gold sheen caressing her
jugular.

The chain twined downward, disappearing into a plunging neckline.

What was the necklace hiding? Did the tiny rope of gold hide some
charm?

An amulet, perhaps.
Or
maybe a heart-shaped locket.
A locket with a tiny treasured picture of
herself and her paramour—

Surely this wad of human spit was not a lover she cherished enough to
hold next to her heart!

Angie and her mismatch.com began arguing. Apparently, the beauty
dressed to the hilt in a sparkle of green and high-heeled sandals cradling
little pink toes, hadn’t realized dinner “out” meant a weed-encrusted, poorly
lit county park on a pigeon-poop picnic table without even the benefit of a bit
of moon to offer solace and salvage a night gone sour.

Irritably, she pushed back the soft golden tress of hair that the
breeze kept tussling into her eyes. Then the vivid, violet gaze began to burn
with anger and disappointment.

The starlight in them was gone.

Cinderella didn’t even get a pumpkin,
Henri thought.

The feces-laden discourse continued. She had tickets to a hockey game
on Saturday. He wanted to work on his motorcycle.

She said he had promised. He said he had only mentioned it.

Would the argument turn violent? Henri thought hopefully. What was an
angry mystic like who became out of control with her own feelings? Would her
escort stomp off in a huff? Would she stomp off in a huff? He felt the rush of
excitement become almost uncontrollable. Could he possibly hope for so much?
That she would end up alone in the park fast becoming deserted as dark settled
in? Would it be that easy? Could it be too far-fetched to think that Fortune
would smile on him tonight? That the desire of his dead heart, to take the
mystic as his own and into the Realm, would come to pass?

Surely the dumbbell would not leave her in a desolate park alone.

Utterly alone.

She would be Henri’s, his for the taking.

Unless, of course, that gold chain held a cross.