Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (54 page)

She went still. “I . . . I don’t really know. But I had to. I

couldn’t stand to think about you dying.”

He brushed his fingers across her cheek. “You said you needed me. How can you need me? I’m a vampire. We’ve spent

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exactly eight days together. One week last year. And today.

How can you need me?”

She licked her lips, leaned in and pressed a kiss on his cheek. “I don’t know, but probably for the same reason that I couldn’t hurt you. Probably for the same reason you told me to leave you there to die.” Looping her arms around his neck, she cuddled against him. “You’re OK, right? You’re not . . .” A sob escaped her lips and she buried her face against his shoulder.

“Shh.” He stroked a hand up her back. “I’ll be fine. Thanks

to you.”

She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. Wasn’t. Wasn’t. And after about two minutes and dashing away her tears and sniffling, she almost believed it. Lifting her head, she self-consciously wiped the damp tear tracks from her face before looking at him.

“So  you what?” He asked.

“I think maybe you should take me with you  –  wherever  you’re going. After all. I’m not exactly safe to let put around  you vampire types.”

A faint smile curled his lips even as he shook his head.

“You don’t want that, Sara.”

“Why not?”

“You come with me. I won’t ever let you go.” He sighed,

laid a hand on her cheek. His flesh was still cool, too cool.

Laying her hand over his, she whispered, “Promise?”

His eyes glowed, for just a second, reflecting golden light

back at her. “Sara,  you’re asking for trouble.”

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“You’re trouble. Sexy. Broody. Not entirely truthful when  we first met.
 
Vampire
.  And I’m asking for you, so yeah, I am  asking for trouble.” She pressed her lips to his, forgetting that  he’d had his lips pressed to her bloodied  wrist. By the time she  remembered, she didn’t even care.

“We don’t really even know each other,” he muttered

against her lips.

“So? We’ve got time, right?”

He laughed softly. “Yeah. We’ve got time.”

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Remember the

B lood

V icki P etters s on

I
 
na moves through the crowd as if leashed and muzzled, careful to make eye contact with no one, to touch no one. Sensuality is her perfume  –  as it won’t be long

now  –  so she can’t fault people around her from undressing her  with their eyes.  She can barely refrain from touching herself.  Although knowing better, yesterday she opened a door she  shouldn’t have, entered a club packed with people desperate to  start their New Year’s celebration early and paid the price in  mounting frustration. Dozens of bodies had ground against her,  hands sliding over her waist, across her belly; seeking, too, the  outer curves of her breasts, her ass. Fingers had pressed and  kneaded, searching for something they’d never possess, begging  with wordless, tensile strength, as if Ina were a living talisman.

The crowd tonight is different. No one dares to touch her at a black-tie event. Not even at a New Year’s Eve gala, when  Dom flows as freely as water. Not even when she’s dressed in

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silk so thin it outlines her nipples. Not even though she’s so

aroused she’s sure some of them can smell it on her.

Still, they watch. She feels their thoughts  –  pretty fireworks going off behind curtained gazes  –  rising into the air to explode with coloured lust and hopes and dreams. And that’s just the

women.

Being at the centre of a desire that borders on worship is hard to describe and, if someone had asked her to, the closest  Ina could come is this: she is more than woman; she is goddess.  There are others like her, but she is uncommon  enough to be idealized, the humours at such perfect balance inside her bodily vessel that she is at once both at peace with eternal life and kissing cousins to lumbering death.

And yet, and yet . . . Ina has found herself unexpectedly living in a world that worships girls. All of a sudden, to open one’s thighs is to declare yourself a woman, and to capture it invideo or print is to make it true. If she’d known how lonely this would cause her to feel, displaced rather than elevated, an eidolon rather than  a deity, she may have chosen to remain an innocent, ignorant girl herself.

She slips from the vaulted arcade of the museum and into the horticultural gardens of the Cuxa Cloister. She holds her champagne glass aloft, like she belongs there, but no one is around to see. It’s cold in Manhattan, and elsewhere bodies are tightly packed in a manic bid to stay warm and connected. Here, however, Ina freefalls into the darkness, with only torches to light her way as her heels clip-clop against 900-year-old  Stine never meant to see the New World.

Russell is waiting where the note said he’d be, leaning against the rampart of the west terrace, with Fort Tryon Park dropping down the hill behind him and, beyond that, the  Hudson. Ina’s first instinct upon sighting him is to flinch. He’s

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pretty in that unearthed way; a strong chin inherited from  someone who may or may not have been strong and a physique  built in front of mirrors, where grunting loudly and breaking a  sweat while some pop tartlet’s video plays in the background  means a good day’s work. He has done his work for the day, and  showered since, but it’s the stench of his motives and thoughts  and past deeds that helps Ina pinpoint him in the dark.

The scent is so strong, so perversely recognizable, that it takes a  moment for her to notice the two women slumped on each side of him. Perfume and beer and desperation assail Ina as they both shift upon seeing her, and she can tell they just came from that twisting, gasping mass of humanity at the core of this city, which will soon pulse as one.

As if, she thinks, the entire world is one giant heartbeat

pumping for her.

Russell laughs when Ina licks her lips. Clearly she has made the mistake of telling him in some previous ‘lifetime’ that in the eleventh hour every human she passes is a dusky red temptation.  Thus the women.

“Ah, lovely Ina. Fucking ravishing . . .” His eyes trail her  body like he knows it. “Though it looks as though you’ve been  stealing kisses from nefarious places.”

Ina doesn’t smile, and his companions look disturbed that he should actually know her. Russell leans against ancient brick, enjoying the reaction. Ina imagines he’s said the same thing to her every year for the past eight. She both wishes she can remember and gives thanks that she can’t.

“Let’s go,” she says shortly. Even had she wanted to  converse with him, she’d have trouble doing so. For the past  three weeks she’s had trouble completing thoughts, much less  sentences. She is now so distracted by the impending hour, so

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obsessed
 
with crossing into the next, that she wants to jump  from her own skin. Hunger and desire, her sharpest weapons,  are now turned against her. She knows it was the same last year  because she’d written it down in a pained, sharp scrawl.

Russell gifts her with an oily smile. “Come Ina. Stay awhile.

Perhaps you’d like something to drink?”

He’s fucking with her. She’d written it down too.
 
He will

fuck with you. He always does
.

Russell frowns when she doesn’t react, which would be enough to cause her to smile, but the shadow that cuts across the torchlight like a falling axe widens it on her face.

“The lady said move.”

The voice is silken death. It belongs to Alexander. And he is

hers.

He is wide, shoulder to thigh, muscled beneath the denim, menacing even as he drops a  light palm to her shoulder. Her memory of him may only reach back a dozen months, but she knows that touch anywhere, and can tell it’s the same for him.  The heart always recognizes its twin, even when the mind is forced to forget. Ina looks up, watches the  light flickering in his black hair  like it’s kindling there. She likes to tease that the threading grey is as golden as the sun. It makes him snarl, which she loves.

Russell jolts upright and the women flanking him actually flee, probably unaware it’s a  prey’s instinct causing them to do so. Russell recovers by sucking on the neck of a dark bottle, scowling at the departing women. They had stifled their screams, but the squeals and relieved giggles fly over the rampart walls once they deem themselves safe. There’s nothing more reassuring than the receding effects of adrenaline.

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Meanwhile, Russell soaks in the alcohol like a sponge. A foul weak human with poisoned blood, he’s a natural disaster, but that’s why they chose him all those years ago, and it’s what makes him perfect for the task. That, and that he can be so easily bought.

Recovered from the jolt Alexander has given him, Russell jerks his head. With drink-induced bravado he leads them back through the gardens and along the covered walkway, past brightly lit rooms filled with music and laughter and medieval treasures a man such as Russell shouldn’t even be allowed to breathe upon. But Russell is ignorant of real treasure and more intent on slipping through the narrow stone arcade before them, then  down the dark stairs and into the ageing park. Ina sidles up to Alexander once their soles hit the winter earth, and when he takes her hand she’s almost warmed.

Still, right now Alexander reminds her of an ancient warrior, his gaze distant and trained on  an unseen threat. He belongs in armour, palming shield and sword while he screams murderous intent to the skies. The only time that distant gaze melts into focus is when it’s turned upon her face, and this is what brings out Ina’s warrior side. That softening gaze makes her feel powerful as well, like she could crush a man with no more than a smile.

Russell  keeps the lead all through the park, alternately swaying and swaggering as he steers them over the dormant heath and ivy clinging to the gently sloped  hillside. A running monologue of curses and bullshit streams from his mouth like sewer water, which neither of them care to, or even can, concentrate on. They remain so silent that every few yards  Russell has to look back to make sure they’re still there.  Perhaps he’s hoping they’re not.

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But despite his bluster and bravado, the path he carves towards the Hudson Parkway, where they first met, is unfailingly direct. It’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to be done with this dark chilling business, and get back to  the light and warmth of those who age. The beer had made him boisterous and the night giddy, and he laughs too loudly in the silence of a park that has been abandoned for places that glitter and wink. It seems everyone in New York is indulging in the fantasy that tomorrow life somehow really will be different.

Ina smirks knowingly. For her, this is actually true, but even as the thought fans the embers of her hunger, she remains cynical. It’s hard to be expectant of a future when you never possess a memory beyond a dozen months. Still, to cynicism or not, there’s no way to stop that ticking clock, or to convince others that their hope for the future  –  now rising like impotent prayers in the empty night  –  is fragile, misplaced, unheard.  Better to hope one simply lives through the night.

Ina grimaces as she swallows back blood-tinged saliva, her attention abruptly drawn to the artery in Russell’s neck. It pulses like cascading neon, beckoning and bright against the pitch-black park. He turns, thinks she’s smiling, and smiles back.

“Yo, Alex,” he calls, somehow knowing Alexander hates  the grating of the single syllable on his foul tongue. “Your girl  wants me.”

He laughs and laughs and Alexander grips Ina’s hand so hard he breaks the bones in her pinky finger. The pain gives her something to think about and takes the edge off her hunger, though it’s only a temporary solution, like putting a numbing ointment atop a fresh wound. But it’s her turn to calm Alexander

now  –  thank God they alternate their little breakdowns; she  thinks it’s one  of the things that makes them so good together  – and she keeps her tone light as they turn the final corner around  an oak being strangled by ivy. The three of them slip under the

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recessed bridge like a series of dark tides. “Don’t you ever