Night Huntress 06 - Eternal Kiss of Darkness (5 page)

“Are you ready to go inside now?” Mencheres asked, offering her his arm.

Kira’s mouth curled as she took it after a moment of hesitation. “I guess so. Tell me, vampire, what’s your name?”

What was one more thing to erase from her mind? “Mencheres.”

“Sounds Spanish,” she murmured, looking him over as best she could in the dark.

“Egyptian.” Yet another detail he’d have to erase from her later. What was it about Kira that made him so uncharacteristically talkative?

“Ah.” She smiled then, the first one he’d seen that didn’t look forced. “So, Mencheres the Egyptian vampire, are you really old, or are you as young as you look?”

He gave her a sideways look as he began walking back toward the house, feeling the oddest pang as he contemplated their age difference. “I’m older than dirt,” he answered dryly.

“A vampire with a sense of humor. I
really
didn’t know that existed,” she quipped with equal dryness.

Mencheres didn’t answer. First, he was telling her things he had no reason to reveal, now he was joking about his age. How strange. He’d thought his sense of humor had expired a long time ago.

“I suppose putting that room back together will give me something to do for the next few hours,” Kira noted with a sigh.

“That is not necessary, you’ll… stay in another room.”

Mencheres almost tripped as he bit back the words that had so nearly crossed his lips:
You’ll stay in my room.
What possessed him even to think such a thing? He hadn’t found his sense of humor—he’d lost his mind.

Undead senility. There weren’t very many vampires left who were older than he was. Maybe it was an actual condition after all.

K
ira awoke with her heart pounding, her arms lashing out against an attacker who wasn’t there. For several panicked seconds, she couldn’t seem to merge reality with the image of that
thing
tearing open her stomach. Then she fell back against the pillows, panting.
Just a nightmare
,
only a nightmare.

Except it was more than that. Kira willed her breathing to slow as she counted backward from thirty. By the time she’d reached one, her heart had stopped racing, and she was no longer gasping. Another set of backward counting took care of the tremble in her hands. By the third set, Kira could get out of bed without constant images of the ghoul’s face bombarding her mind.
He’s dead
,
he can’t hurt you anymore,
she reminded herself firmly.

Besides, though the circumstances were different, this wasn’t the first time someone had attacked her, yet she’d survived. Those awful memories might show up again in her dreams, but she wasn’t about to give her attacker’s ghosts—either of them—power over her once she was awake.

And soon, her memory of this recent assault would be erased, courtesy of a strangely formal, lethally powerful vampire named Mencheres. Of all the assaults she had to stumble upon on the way to her apartment, who would believe she’d come across one involving creatures who weren’t supposed to exist?
No one, that’s who,
Kira thought darkly. Hell, she’d
seen
it, was living proof with her stomach miraculously healed, and still she had a hard time grasping that all of this was real.

Vampires. Ghouls.
What other creatures existed that weren’t supposed to be real? Kira shuddered. Maybe Mencheres was right. She’d probably live a much happier life if she didn’t remember any of this.

Oddly enough, she
did
expect to get out of this alive. After their exchange last night, Kira believed Mencheres when he said he’d let her go. It could just be part of vampire allure, but all of Kira’s instincts said that Mencheres was trustworthy, and her instincts had never been wrong—even when she’d desperately wanted them to be.

Vampires who didn’t murder innocent people. It was almost as incredible a revelation as vampires’ existence. Ghouls seemed to be a much crueler species, at least from what Kira had seen. What those creatures had done to Mencheres had been horrifying, and they’d certainly shown her no mercy. If Mencheres hadn’t stopped them, then healed her, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes after walking into that warehouse…

Kira froze in midstride to the bathroom as a question that had been buried under an avalanche of shock finally surfaced in her mind.

If Mencheres could stop those ghouls so easily, why hadn’t he done it
before
she arrived?

M
encheres felt Gorgon approach before his image appeared through the haze of water above him. He gave a mental sigh as he rose from his comfortable position at the bottom of the swimming pool. Being underwater was one of the few times he could enjoy relative quiet. The layers of water muted the sounds from the mortals in his house, and being enclosed in it had become a sort of meditation.

“Sire,” Gorgon said, once Mencheres had surfaced. “Your human is requesting to speak with you.”

Mencheres’s gaze flicked behind Gorgon to Kira, whose expression said she didn’t care for the term “your human.” Once again, Mencheres probed at Kira’s mind, and once again, he came up against a thick wall. The barest hint of confusion threaded through her scent, but the bewildering, impressive barriers that prevented him from hearing Kira’s thoughts as easily as he heard her heartbeat were still there.

“Bring her forward,” Mencheres said, balancing his arms against the side of the pool.

“Tinted glass,” were Kira’s first words as Gorgon beckoned her forward. “I thought you said vampires had no aversion to sunlight?”

Mencheres glanced around the enclosed pool area with a slight shrug. “Sunlight does not harm us as legends claim, but prolonged exposure does sap our strength, and we tend to sunburn easily.”

Why am I explaining that to her?
he wondered in the next moment. Every word he uttered to Kira would only be erased from her recall later. It was as senseless as speaking to the wind.

She sat a few feet from the pool’s edge, folding her legs underneath her as if she were at a picnic. “Why not have real walls around your pool? Concrete blocks a lot more sunlight than opaque glass.”

Mencheres gave a small, grim smile. “Because sometimes I enjoy things regardless if they are beneficial to me or not.”

Speaking to Kira was another of those unbeneficial things he seemed to enjoy, because here he was, still answering her questions despite there being no sense in it.

Kira tilted her head, the muted sunlight highlighting the gold in her hair. She had on denim pants and a collared blouse that was a fraction too tight. Mencheres made a mental note to arrange for new clothes for Kira during her stay. She was wearing some of Selene’s now, but Selene’s breasts weren’t as generous as Kira’s.

Mencheres’s gaze lingered on her chest until Kira crossed her arms over it with obvious annoyance. She gave him a pointed look as his gaze traveled upward to meet hers. He glanced away, almost chuckling at this unexpected absurdity from him. How many centuries had it been since he’d been caught ogling a woman’s breasts? A woman’s
clothed
breasts, no less. His co-ruler, Bones, would fracture a rib laughing if he knew.

“Some things must never change,” Kira muttered under her breath.

Mencheres found himself smiling. “It appears they do not.”

Kira brushed a hand through her hair, giving him another feminine, censuring look before her expression became serious.

“Why didn’t you stop those ghouls yesterday before I showed up? You–”

“Quiet,” Mencheres said instantly. Gorgon had walked away out of eyesight, but he could still hear her.

“I’ve thought it over, but it makes no sense,” Kira went on, completely ignoring his order to be quiet. For a stunned second, Mencheres didn’t know how to react. It had to be centuries at least since a human had dared to ignore his commands. “You didn’t even need to touch them to—whoa!”

He’d vaulted out of the pool to physically stop Kira from uttering more damning sentences by putting his finger to her mouth. Water dripped onto her clothes, and her pale green eyes widened as he loomed over her.

“Never speak about that again,” Mencheres said, his voice soft but steely. He couldn’t mesmerize her into silence, but if need be, he would gag Kira so Gorgon didn’t find out about Mencheres’s thwarted plan with the ghouls yesterday.

Her heartbeat had accelerated the moment he leapt from the water, and it stayed elevated when she looked away from his face at the rest of his body. Then she gasped.

Her warm breath vibrated against the finger he still held to her lips. Kira gasped again as her gaze dragged from his shoulders to his feet, then became fixated at the point between his legs. Abruptly, Mencheres’s dark mood over her nearly spilling his secret changed to amusement when Kira didn’t seem to be able to tear her eyes away.

W
hen the vampire burst from the water to crouch over her, Kira’s first thought had been,
Uh-oh.
She hadn’t even seen him move before he was upon her, black eyes blazing with warning, water dripping down onto her. That single finger to her lips felt like a mini hammer, and Kira reminded herself that on the food chain, he was a predator, and she was prey.
He
really
doesn’t like this topic
,
so I’ll shut up now,
had been her very logical decision.

Then she’d looked down—and forgotten what she’d started to ask him about. Beads of water caressed down the hardest, tightest body she’s ever seen. Mencheres’s chest, arms, and stomach were corded with an intricate pattern of muscles that seemed too flawless to be real. His lightly tinted skin only emphasized how black his hair was, dripping in dark rivers past his shoulders. At some point since yesterday, he’d cut the uneven pieces so it was all the same length now. Her gaze swept lower, revealing that his legs were as deliciously sculpted as the rest of him. Nothing interrupted her view of his taut, rippled flesh, either, because Mencheres had been swimming naked. Kira was surprised to see that he was hairless everywhere, even between his thighs…

Kira’s eyes fastened there, widening.
Oh. My.
If the vampire hadn’t still had a finger to her lips, she would have licked them in reflex.

“Some things must never change,” a deep voice noted, as his finger left her lips to raise her chin.

Kira reluctantly tore her gaze away to meet Mencheres’s dark eyes. They were devoid of his former anger, and the corners of his mouth twitched. Her distracted mind finally translated that he’d repeated her earlier chastising remark, and she laughed.

“Guilty,” she admitted, resisting the urge to drop her gaze again. No wonder the vampire didn’t wear swim shorts.

He smiled as he sat back. “One could argue that I had it coming.”

He reached behind him, pulling a white towel off a nearby chair and settling it around his hips with a casual unhurriedness that said the action was more for manners than modesty. Kira gave her head a slight shake. At least now with him covered below the waist, she should be able to keep her train of thought.

Of course, her initial train of thought was what had sent him catapulting out of the pool to silence her. Something about yesterday had Mencheres so spooked, he refused to discuss it with her. Was it simply that he’d been so close to being eaten by ghouls? Did he not want to remember how helpless he’d been? He hadn’t seemed embarrassed about it yesterday when she’d first woken up, but maybe that changed. Delayed traumatic reaction, or something similar. She’d had experience with that before.

Either way, it was clearly a delicate subject, and though all her investigative instincts were burning with curiosity, she wanted her freedom more. It seemed common sense that keeping in Mencheres’s good graces was directly related to his letting her go, so she’d drop the subject of his bewildering failure to free himself before. Getting back to her life was more important than finding out why a frighteningly powerful vampire had almost died at the hands of several ghouls that he’d later killed without even needing to touch them.

“You said that I could call my sister,” Kira reminded him, changing the subject.

He rose with the same quicksilver grace that all his movements seemed to have. “So I did. Come.”

Mencheres held out his hand, and Kira took it, letting him draw her to her feet. She glanced down at her borrowed shirt and pants, feeling them stick to her in places from the pool water Mencheres had dripped onto her.

He held out his towel without the slightest hesitation that it was the only thing covering him. “Please, use this.”

Just like when she’d dangled from that rope outside the house, Kira told herself not to look down. “Ah, no thanks. I think you need it more than I do.”

His mouth quirked again, as if he were fighting back a smile. Kira felt that touch of surrealism once more. She couldn’t
really
be standing by a pool next to a naked vampire who was offering her his towel so she could blot her damp jeans and shirt, could she? So much of what had happened in the past thirty-some hours had a dreamlike quality to it. All she needed to make this scenario more unbelievable would be for leprechauns to come somersaulting out of the nearby garden.

Or for the gorgeously bare vampire to give her a sensual massage while feeding her peeled grapes. Then she’d
know
this was a dream. But because Mencheres was belting the long towel back around his waist instead of throwing it to the ground while he went in search of fruits and scented oils, Kira supposed this was reality. A bizarre, sometimes terrifying, sometimes titillating reality, but reality nonetheless.