One With the Night (4 page)

“Jane Blundell,” she said, “if you will permit so unorthodox an introduction. And this is my father, Dr. James Blundell.”

“Well, I know why he’s workin’ on a cure,” the stranger muttered. His accent was like the ones she’d heard in Edinburgh, not nearly so broad as the Highlanders in the village. His lips were very mobile and expressive. Words seemed to ripple out over white, even teeth. Definitely not like the villagers, and really quite … fascinating. His nose was straight. Under a two- or three-day growth of beard she thought his chin was cleft. There were streaks of gray, obviously premature, at his temples. His dark eyelashes were lush, almost like a girl’s. And now that she was so close, she realized just how big he was, over six feet and powerfully built. The thrill between her legs was unwelcome. Lord, but she was untrustworthy these days! This creature might well kill her and here she was lusting after him. She could thank her infection for that.

He looked uncertainly at her hand before he extended his own. When he saw that it was smeared with blood he jerked it back. “Pleased,” was all he said. Indeed he turned away, grabbed his cloak and threw it over the headless body. He swayed on his feet as he turned back to her.

Her father wandered through the debris to her side. He carried the slate on which he chalked his formulas. It was cracked.

“Is th’ place wrecked past savin’?” The vampire’s eyes burned with hope and fear.

Her father sighed, and pushed a broken beaker from the table with one finger. It crashed to the floor. “No. Replacing this glassware will stretch my store, though. And the delay for repair will set me back at a crucial time.” He frowned.

“Ha’ ye found it, then?” the stranger insisted.

Her father glanced up to him. “What? Oh, the cure. No. It has proved rather elusive. The trick, you see, is killing the parasite without killing the host as she becomes human again.”

The stranger’s look of hope dimmed. He set his jaw. “Well, then…” He moved to the table. His boots squelched with blood. He fingered a beaker with a green liquid still sloshing in it to cover the fact that he was bracing himself against the workbench just to stand upright.

Her father glanced at him with an avaricious gleam for knowledge in his eye. “So, can you heal even these wounds?” Her father knew he was vampire, of course. It was the red eyes and the cinnamon. Could her father feel the vibrations, as Jane did?

The stranger nodded. “Aye, I’ll heal.” He sounded disgusted with himself.

“Aren’t you in pain?” her father pressed.

“Some,” he acknowledged. He looked around as though bewildered. And then his eyes rolled and his legs collapsed under him.

Jane lunged forward and grabbed at his body before he could fall into the broken glass. “Perhaps more than some,” she noted dryly. She shrugged the unconscious man’s arm up over her shoulder. What should she do with him? Could they take in a creature who had red eyes?

“Well, get him into the house, my dear. He’s too big for me.” Her father was right. They must help him. He had saved their lives tonight, at great personal cost.

“All right, Papa.” He accepted her strength and the acuity of her senses so much better than she did. Of course she had never told him of the increase in her sexual response. One didn’t tell one’s father about things like that, even if he was a scientist.

“We shall witness the healing process,” her father said, rubbing his hands in anticipation. Perhaps her father’s impulse had not been entirely humanitarian.

Jane wasn’t so sure there would be any healing to witness, no matter what the stranger said. She knew she could heal cuts and abrasions almost instantaneously. But could anyone survive with so little blood as this man must have left, and with so much damage to internal organs? His shirt gaped where their attacker had slashed at him over and over again. Could the parasite in his bloodstream heal such damage? She put one arm around his waist and clasped the hand that draped over her shoulder. Warm blood soaked her dress.
I’ll never get the stains out,
she thought, as she dragged him out the laboratory door and up toward the house.

It was a good thing her father couldn’t know about that sexual response, for the feel of the stranger’s hard body pressed so closely against hers, the cinnamon scent, the droop of his head on her breast, were making her throb.
How can you?
she scolded herself.
The man is more than half-dead!
But apparently that didn’t matter, for the wetness between her legs increased.

Her burden was awkward, but by no means too heavy for her. She probably could have picked him up like a baby had he not been so large her arms wouldn’t encompass him.

Her father held the door to the kitchen open for her and lit a lamp. The room glowed golden. It was big, and would be awash with light during the day, except that Jane kept the windows carefully covered against the sun. The peat fire in the great hearth was banked around an iron caldron. A large dark wooden cabinet sat in one corner with dishes neatly stacked behind the leaded glass of the top portion. The fresh loaves of bread she’d baked today were laid out on the big central table designed for working or eating. Pots and pans hung from a metal rack suspended from the high ceiling and dried herbs dangled from hooks in the rafters. Their exotic scents hung under the yeasty smell of bread. Under the windows sat a large basin for washing up. Shelves under another window held her books. It was her favorite room at Muir Farm.

“Put him on the table,” her father ordered.

Jane turned him and dragged him up on to the huge trestle table.

“Just you undress him while I get my medical bag. I wonder if I should consider sutures at all in such a case?” he muttered as he hurried away. “Will the process begin at once?”

He doesn’t want to miss a minute of the show.
Jane sighed. She was going to have to strip this man naked. The very thought excited her body.
Stop it!
She started with his neckcloth. It was tied simply but it was clean; at least it had been clean before the blood. He was deathly pale. As she worked, a cut on his forehead slowly closed. Papa would be sorry to have missed it.

She should take a tip from her father’s attitude. This was science. They were impartial observers. She ought to be able to observe a naked man calmly. She had done so many times, as her father dissected cadavers and she had handed him instruments while she absorbed as much anatomy as she could. She tossed the cravat to the floor and grabbed the neck of his shirt. It ripped easily with her strength. She tore the sleeves then pulled the whole thing out from under him. Nasty sword wounds. Shoulders, sides, chest, arms, belly. Several were deep enough to show bone or intestine. Sweet Lord, but she had never seen a man cut up so! Under the gore he was certainly well made. His shoulders were broad, his chest well defined with muscle. Dark hair curled over his breastbone and then cradled his pectoral muscles in twin crescents. His nipples, pink and soft just now, made him look more vulnerable than did the wounds …

Never mind that! Boots. She couldn’t get his breeches off unless she removed his boots. She grasped first one and then the other. They were finely made but worn, not dandyish with white tops but serviceable, though they were soaked with blood. She tossed them aside and pulled off his stockings. His head rolled to one side. His neck was strong. His throat still beat with a pulse, though where it got the blood for that she wasn’t sure. There were small white, round scars just under his jaw. But this was no time to examine them. A vee of dark hair on his belly seemed to point downward, across the gaping wound there. The throbbing in her loins was becoming ridiculously insistent. Where had he come from? They might never know, if he were to die. Could he die? The vampire in the laboratory had died. And his passing had caused her a tremor of revulsion that seemed to come from the parasite in her veins. She worked the buttons on the stranger’s breeches, just below the gaping wound in his belly. Her fingers touched the flesh below his navel and that light dusting of hair. The jolt she felt—could that be actual passing of energy between them? Never mind! She ripped the fabric, sending buttons flying. Breeches were pulled out from under him, tossed aside. His smalls were the work of a moment.

She sucked in a breath and stepped back.
Oh, my.

Her father scurried in, his bag in one hand and the writing box in the other. “It was in my room of all places.” He stopped. “Interesting. I shouldn’t think he’d have enough blood for that.”

Her father was reacting to the impressive erection the stranger was exhibiting. Heat spread to Jane’s face from somewhere at her core. Luckily, her father was too preoccupied to notice. He lit another lamp as she went to get some hot water from the caldron sitting in the coals of the peat fire. The room brightened from a romantic glow to stark surgical light. Jane shook her head to clear it. Her only experience with a man had not prepared her for this stranger.

Her father peered closely at the stranger’s body. “The wounds have stopped bleeding already,” he muttered. “I’ll wash him, Jane, as I examine him. Can you just take a note or two? I mustn’t be distracted from my observations.”

Thank the Lord God he hadn’t asked her to wash the man. She didn’t think she’d survive it. Somehow, Jane moved to the little box in which her father kept his writing equipment and took out his notebook, the stoppered inkstand, and a quill. She glanced at the watch she wore round her neck and noted the time. It was nearly ten.

“Just put down ‘firm erection.’ We’ll see how long it lasts,” her father murmured, adjusting his spectacles. He scrutinized the stranger’s body. “Fourteen wounds. Bone clearly visible in most. Entrails revealed”—he peered closer—“and damaged in at least three wounds. Jane, can you lift him?” She put down her quill and lifted the stranger by one shoulder and hip. There was definitely some exchange of electrical current between them. Should she note it down? Her father peered at his subject’s back and buttocks. “Make that twenty-nine wounds.”

Over the next hour, they catalogued the healing. Her father tried sutures in the deep belly wound, but they popped out as the wound sealed itself and resolved into a pink line of shiny new flesh. Jane did not touch the vampire again. After about twenty minutes, his erection subsided. Jane noted the time, suppressing all other thoughts ruthlessly.

Her father was very excited, though not, she trusted, in the way Jane had been. “Well, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he announced, after nearly two hours, hands on his hips.

Of course you haven’t,
Jane thought, equally struck.
Is this what I am?
If the parasite allowed one to heal injuries like this … A thrill of fear wound through her. Of course, the vampire in the laboratory had been killed tonight by decapitation. But this one was whole again. His flesh was pink. The remaining lines of new skin were disappearing fast. What did it mean?

Now that the blood had been washed away and the wounds were healing, she saw that he had many white scars, both round circles and jagged lines, over his body: circles at the inner crook of his elbows and at the joint of groin to thigh, as well as on both sides of his throat, jagged lines over both shoulders, both biceps, his pectorals, thighs. Why would he have scars if he could heal wounds to a point where his flesh was virgin? And what kind of scars were these? They were symmetrical on his body, as though they had been inflicted purposely.

The stranger’s head rolled. A small moan escaped him. He was waking.

Jane had no desire to face those eyes, red or not, while the man was naked. She hurried upstairs for a blanket. By the time she returned her father was helping his patient to sit. She stopped just inside the door. He was still most definitely naked. The play of muscle under his broad back was spellbinding. How had she never noticed how strangely triangular men were, with their broad shoulders and narrow waists? His back was crisscrossed with fine white lines. More scars. It looked as though he had been whipped. A lot. What had happened to this man? He was still a little shaky. He ran his fingers through his hair. They came back sticky with blood.

“I dinnae want ta be a charge on ye,” he murmured, staring at the blood on his hands as though he couldn’t be certain the struggle in which he’d so recently engaged was real.

“Nonsense, man,” her father harrumphed. “You are no burden. It is a pleasure to observe your unusual physical qualities, isn’t it, Jane?”

The stranger turned his head over one shoulder, shocked to see her. Jane felt herself blush and saw with some interest that the stranger did the same. Her body responded with more than a blush, but at least there was no evidence of that. “Here,” she said, holding out her blanket awkwardly. He snatched it from her and drew it across his lap, his expression clearly alarmed.

Her father patted his thigh. “Don’t worry. Jane assists me often. She’s seen male patients before, though perhaps not in quite so interesting a state as you were in.”

That didn’t reassure him. “Ye dinnae mean…” His voice was panicked.

“Actually,” her father remarked as he scribbled a final notation, “erections are not uncommon in the recently deceased, but I’ve never encountered one in a badly wounded man.”

The stranger looked as though he wanted to sink into the floor. Jane thought she might join him. He swallowed. Then he shot her a self-deprecating glance over his shoulder. “Sorry.”

“No apologies necessary. My … my father forgot to thank you for saving our lives. We are in your debt. Uh … can I get you food or do you want to retire directly for some rest?”

He got up off the table, careful to pull the blanket about his waist. There was a noticeable bulge at his groin. Then he jerked his head up. “Faust!”

Jane and her father both looked blank.

“My horse,” he explained. “I left him in th’ copse.” He glanced to the blanket. His eyes strayed to the pile of bloodied clothes on the floor. “I ha’ some extra gear tied ta th’ saddle.”

“I’ll go for him,” Jane said. “I see well in the dark.” She colored. Of course he knew that.