Night Huntress 06 - Eternal Kiss of Darkness (10 page)

And yet it was more than lust. When he’d been unable yet again to penetrate her mind, the relief that filled him was undeniable. He couldn’t help but wonder if reluctance on his part played a role in his inability to erase Kira’s memory. Yes, there was another possible reason for his inability to alter her thoughts, but the truth was that he didn’t want her to leave. It was a pleasure seeing Kira’s face each day. Her voice was something he found himself straining to hear whether she spoke to him or not, and her close proximity occupied his thoughts far more than he would ever let her know.

It was ironic; he held her captive, yet she’d captivated him.

Mencheres rose from the pool, abandoning this futile pursuit of tranquility. One thing would make him feel better, and it had nothing to do with basking underwater. He would have Gorgon pull all of Kira’s information, discreetly and thoroughly. Mencheres had already decided to claim her as his so she would be left in Bones’s care once he was gone. Now all he needed to do was ensure that Bones knew whom to look after once that day came.

The fact that this was one of the few items he was prioritizing didn’t escape his notice, but he didn’t care. He could pretend that Kira hadn’t become important to him, or he could accept it and find a way to proceed regardless. Denial had never assisted him in the past.

“Gorgon!” Mencheres called out. He didn’t even wait for the other vampire to come out onto the deck before he spoke again. “I have a task for you.”

M
encheres could hear Kira pacing in her room. She’d been doing that for the past two hours. Doubtless, she was again chafing at her circumstances, for which he could not blame her. Her time with him had gone on longer than either of them had anticipated. Still, in her sixth day since drinking his blood, he did not catch even the slightest glimpses of Kira’s thoughts, which he should have been able to do by now.

He could no longer pretend that his blood was just taking an unusually long time to wear off in her system. It was time for him to make a decision. And he dreaded it.

“Screw it,” Mencheres heard Kira mutter before she shut her door and came down the stairs. He stayed seated in the living area, keeping his expression composed, as if he hadn’t been tuned in to her every nuance for the past few hours.

“I need to call my sister,” Kira said as soon as she saw him.

He raised a brow at the urgency in her voice. “Is something wrong?”

“I hope not,” Kira muttered. “Library phone okay again?”

“Yes,” Mencheres replied, watching Kira as she almost ran toward there. What had her so agitated? When she’d hung up on her sister last night, Kira had been fine. Worried, but otherwise calm. Now she acted as though she’d just walked on her sister’s grave.

Mencheres heard the mechanical beeps that signaled Kira dialing, then her tense breathing as she waited. After a dozen rings, Kira let out a curse, then hung up and dialed again.

He came into the library just as Kira muttered another curse and hung up again. Her face was pale.

“She’s not answering. Something’s wrong.”

Mencheres didn’t reach out to her, but to his bafflement, his first inclination had been to stroke her in a comforting way.

“You’ve been unable to reach your sister other times before, yet nothing was amiss,” he noted.

“This is different. Ever since later this morning, I just… felt that something was off.” Kira shot him a pensive look. “You’ll think it’s crazy, but sometimes I just
know
things. Call it instinct, gut reaction, whatever, but I’ve had it all my life.”

On the contrary, he was one of the few people in the world who could relate to knowing things based on an unusual inner gift. Or at least, he used to relate.

“Concentrate on this feeling. Focus,” Mencheres stated.

She looked surprised at his instruction, but then her brow furrowed, and she began to pace in a slow stride. Silence and concentration had sharpened Mencheres’s gift when he was younger and unused to it. Then over time, he’d honed his ability to call visions forth at will. He’d even been able to use his power to locate people over countless miles, especially if he’d tasted that person’s blood.

Until his visions abruptly ended and all he saw was darkness. Symbolism was often a part of his visions, and Duat, the underworld where his soul would travel to await judgment by the god Anubis, was a place of uniform darkness. Death was coming for him, but Mencheres would choose his own end. One that best served his people.

“If I’m right, and something bad happened, Tina would be in a hospital. I need to make another call,” Kira said. She went to the phone and started dialing, not waiting to see if Mencheres objected. He said nothing, watching as her fingers twisted together in agitation.

“Mercy Hospital and Medical Center,” he heard the operator’s voice intone.

“I’m checking to see if my sister has been admitted,” Kira said, taking in a deep breath. “Her name is Tina Graceling. She might also be in the emergency room.”

“One moment.” Hold music filled the line for several seconds, then the operator’s voice again. “Yes, Tina Graceling is a patient here. Please hold while I connect you to the nurses’ station.”

Mencheres didn’t speak as Kira was transferred and another voice explained to her that her sister was in critical but stable condition. From what he deduced, it wasn’t due to an accident but a recurring medical ailment.

“Thank you,” Kira said before she hung up. Then she met Mencheres’s gaze.

“She’s in intensive care.” Her voice was raw, her scent swirled with fear, agitation, and guilt. “She hemorrhaged and was brought to the hospital by ambulance this morning…”

None of this should matter to him. Kira’s sister was in a hospital; there was nothing more she could do to help her, and an unknown mortal’s poor health was truly not his concern.

But Kira cared, and because of that, he did, too. Regardless of all the reasons why she shouldn’t matter to him, Mencheres found that he couldn’t bear to see Kira in pain.

Yes, he cared far, far too much.

He’d kept Kira here with the original intention of protecting the secrecy of his race, but as the days passed, Kira’s greatest threat wasn’t to the vampire world—it was to him. She made him feel things he couldn’t allow himself to feel at this point in his life. No matter how hard it was, it was time for him to remove that threat. He had no other choice if he intended to stay the course he’d set.

“Come,” Mencheres said, holding out his hand.

Kira’s brow furrowed, but she took it.
Beautiful dark lady,
he thought.
I wish I didn’t have to do this
.

He had Kira locked in an unbreakable grip before she could even gasp.

K
ira’s breath whooshed from her lungs when Mencheres set them down in the parking lot. It took a second for her legs to stop trembling enough for her to let go of him, but the hospital gleaming so close ahead gave her the needed strength to start walking toward it.

“Why didn’t we drive here?” she asked, her heart still hammering.

“It would have taken three times longer,” Mencheres replied. “More, if we were caught in traffic.”

Sure wasn’t any traffic in the skies
, Kira thought, still a bit dazed from her recent flight. Mencheres had swept her up, hurtling them through the night skies, before she’d even realized what he was doing. The vampire’s ability to fly in a dizzying blur of speed was both exhilarating and terrifying. She didn’t think she would
ever
forget the sight of the buildings from her vantage point of being zipped along above them.
Superman and Lois Lane, eat your hearts out
.

But Kira pushed her residual wonder aside when she entered the brightly lit hospital. Somewhere on the floors above, Tina was fighting for her life against a disease that left no survivors. The hospital attendant gave her a sympathetic look as she assigned Kira a visitor’s pass.

“You’re just in time. ICU visiting hours end in thirty minutes.”

Kira shot a grateful glance at Mencheres even though the vampire wasn’t looking at her. If they’d driven instead of flown, she wouldn’t have made it.

“Only family members are allowed in intensive care. Is he family, too?” the attendant asked.

“Yes,” Kira replied at once. She wasn’t about to repay Mencheres’s kindness in bringing her here by making him cool his heels downstairs.

The attendant gave a single, doubtful glance at Mencheres. Kira couldn’t blame her. She and Mencheres looked nothing alike, with her blondish brown hair and light eyes in striking contrast to his darker coloring and Arabian features.

“Driver’s license, please,” the attendant said to Mencheres.

He leaned forward across the counter, the flash of green in his eyes gone so quickly, Kira wasn’t sure if she really saw it.

“Given. Now, hand me the pass,” Mencheres directed in a smooth, low voice.

The attendant handed over the visitor’s pass with a glazed smile on her face, not even writing a name on it. Mencheres took it and turned to Kira.

“Let us go.”

Kira looked back at the attendant, who still smiled in a frozen sort of way, before she followed Mencheres to the elevators. Once they were inside, she finally found her voice.

“That’s
how easily you can control people’s minds under normal circumstances? A one-second glance with a little bitty flash of green?”

Mencheres gave her a sideways look. “Perhaps now you can appreciate the rarity of your resistance to my power.”

“Because you gave me your blood,” Kira murmured pensively, looking at the floors light up as the elevator passed them. “And possibly my stubbornness,” she added with a limp smile.

Mencheres almost seemed to sigh. “There is one more possibility. A very small percentage of humans are naturally immune to vampire mind control. In my lifetime, I’ve come across only a few dozen humans with that immunity, but there are those who must have a form of genetic mutation that prevents—”

“You
never
told me that before,” Kira interrupted, dread filling her. “You knew this whole time that it might not just be your blood that’s prevented you from erasing my memory?”

Sick fear boiled up in her. Was this Mencheres’s way of telling her he’d never let her go?

The elevator doors slid open, revealing the nurses’ station to the intensive care unit. Mencheres said nothing, which Kira took as a damning admission.

But she couldn’t talk more about that now. She only had half an hour to see her sister, and that took precedence even over her fears of Mencheres’s new revelation. Kira’s gaze flicked around the clear doors of each room until she found the one marked Tina Graceling. Then she flashed her pass at the nurse before approaching her sister’s room, not even looking to see if Mencheres followed her.

Tina looked to be asleep, her petite body connected to machines that seemed to dwarf her from their perches around the hospital bed. She was almost as pale as the sheets around her, dark shadows circling her eyes the only spots of color on Tina’s face. She looked so frail, so broken, like a beautiful doll some child had carelessly discarded. A clear plastic tube was taped in place over Tina’s mouth, the steady compression of the nearby ventilator sounding like a wheezing accordion.

Tears filled Kira’s eyes, making her sister and all the machines blurry. Tina wasn’t asleep; she was unconscious and on a ventilator. One of Tina’s greatest fears was being on a vent. Her sister had often said that once her lungs deteriorated to that point, it was all over.

And Tina was probably right.

A sob escaped from Kira before she could stuff it back. She’d known this day would come. Thought she’d even prepared for it, but the sizzling pain that wrapped around her heart when she saw Tina alive only by the assistance of machines made her knees give out. She sat in the nearby chair, unable to tear her gaze away from her unconscious little sister.

“What disease does she have?”

Mencheres’s soft, deep voice startled Kira for a second. She’d almost forgotten the vampire was here. He circled around Tina’s bed, looking down at her sister with his usual hooded expression.

“Cystic fibrosis,” Kira rasped. “She was born with it.”

The irony of that stabbed a fresh spurt of pain in Kira. According to what Mencheres just revealed, Kira might also have been born with a genetic mutation, but though hers might steal her freedom, it wouldn’t grow deadlier until it killed her, like Tina’s.

“She is dying,” Mencheres said, still with that same indecipherable expression.

“Don’t
say
that.”

Kira gave the vampire a look filled with all her impotent rage over her sister’s condition as she stood up. She knew it was true. All her instincts warned that this time, Tina wouldn’t recover. She’d felt that dread growing in her all day even though she’d tried to discount it.

His black eyes were hard. “As she is now, that is fact, but what are you prepared to do to change that fact?”

Did he mean… ?
Kira looked at Tina, at Mencheres, then at the EKG machine monitoring her sister’s weak pulse. A pulse that Mencheres no longer had.

“Nothing quite that drastic,” Mencheres said, with the barest hint of a nod at the heart monitor. “My blood healed your injuries. It cannot cure your sister’s disease permanently, but it could heal the complications that cause her to be in this condition.”