Serafina and the Silent Vampire (27 page)

He had to use the stake more like a screwdriver, so it was slow going. Between his teeth and the stake, he estimated this would take him an hour or so—if he lasted that long—time Sera didn’t have. Arthur and his allies were over there now, and even if Melanie managed to finish the spell and release them from Smith’s control, it wouldn’t save them from vampire blood lust.

“Working from the top,” Sebastian’s voice said in his head. “You are still alive down there?”

“Too slow,” Blair said curtly. “Someone has to get to that flat, protect the humans inside, and make sure the spell is completed.”

“We’re all pretty engaged here,” Sebastian said dryly. Then, “What the…? Wow, your girl—”

Without warning, the weight flew off him. Or at least enough of it did. With one massive heave of his body, he rose through the rest, shaking vampires off him like a dog shaking off water. It hurt his broken arm, so he placed it in a healing position before staking the nearest vampire with his left hand.

But something had changed. The vampires looked dazed. They stood still, as if wondering why they were fighting. Vampires enjoyed a good fight, as a rule, but these ones seemed to recognize, finally, that their opponents were stronger. They still had the advantage of numbers, of course, but that didn’t guarantee individual survival, and it seemed they were no longer thinking as one.

Blair began to smile.

The vampires had realized they were hungry for human, not vampire, blood. And there was only one human in the park. Blair’s senses sought and found Nicholas Smith. Not in the park after all, but entering Jilly’s flat.

****

Sera stared at the ceiling. She wondered where she was, where all the noise was coming from. There was shouting close by, and from outside, she could hear the wail of police sirens.

In fact, there was a policeman’s ginger head right in front of her face. PC McGowan.

Sera sat bolt upright, clutching her head. “Fuck! Blair! Mel!” She looked around her wildly.

“They’re fine, but we have intruders,” McGowan said with a weird kind of formality. “You need to sit still for a minute while I go and help.”

And the policeman ran out of the room. Sera pulled herself up by hanging on to the table edge. She felt very wobbly, almost dizzy. Mel lay slumped across the table, but a quick, anxious feel of her pulse told Sera the witch was merely sleeping off her labors. As she deserved to, because the spell had worked. She’d known, even before she leapt on the table to try to save Blair, that it had worked.

From the window now, she saw vampires streaming away out of the park. A few seemed still to be having a punch-up with Blair’s friends, who turned a few to dust and shooed the rest away. She saw Jason Bell, his shirt torn and flapping in the breeze, just standing there looking around him. But she couldn’t see Blair.

Something ached deep inside her. She thought it would go on a long time. But she couldn’t pay attention to it now. There was still a fight going on in the house. She drew in a shaky but determined breath and strode across the room as fast as her trembling legs would carry her.

Across the hall, in the bedroom, encircled by Jack, Tam, Jilly, Elspeth, and PC McGowan, stood the vampire Arthur, holding Ella in front of him like a shield. The vampiress hissed at the circle, yet behind her aggression, she seemed almost bewildered. Blood oozed from a wound in Arthur’s shoulder and from several all over Ella’s body, but they moved too fast for the humans to pin down. Sera had the feeling this had been going on a long time. It was a bit of a stalemate. But she supposed she could help finish it.

As she took a step nearer, urgent knocking sounded at the front door.

“Sera!” whispered a voice she knew only too well. “Sera, they’ve turned on me! Let me in! Save me!”

Nicholas Smith, begging to be saved from his own vampires.

I did that.

“Sera, please!”

She walked toward the front door. “I should let them kill you,” she said, reaching for the handle. “Since you didn’t trouble to teach them not to murder.”

She twisted the handle, and the door flew open under his boot. Nicholas Smith, his face murderous, strode in and reached for her throat.

It was so totally, stupidly unexpected that he’d seized her before she could move. She staggered back, away from him, but she couldn’t escape his squeezing hands. She twisted in his hold, kicking, punching, scratching. She drew blood, but she couldn’t make him release her. His face was purple with exertion, his eyes hard and cruel and absolutely furious.

I did that.

“Yes, you fucking did,” he screamed in her mind. “I’d have given you everything, and that’s exactly what you took from me
.
”

Choking, she tried to bang on the bedroom door for help, but everyone was too busy closing in on Arthur and Ella, who surely couldn’t escape this time. Jilly lunged at Arthur’s back, but he whirled just in time, and Jilly’s stake plunged straight into Ella’s heart. The vampiress exploded into dust.

As Jilly leapt back out of Arthur’s reach, the others stepped forward, close enough to touch him now, and he couldn’t grab all of them at once. But as he flexed his knees, Sera knew he could still jump over their heads, and it would all begin again.

By which time, her father would have killed her.

“He’s going to jump!” Jack shouted, just as another figure leapt through the broken window.

Perhaps she was losing consciousness, because it looked like Blair, all leather biking trousers and sexy muscle. He shoved PC McGowan out of the way, seized Arthur in the very act of jumping, and staked him without pause.

He strode through the dust of the disintegrated vampire, his handsome face without humanity or compassion of any kind as he zoomed in on Sera and Smith.

Smith laughed. “You can’t touch me. You still can’t touch me.”

Wake up, Mel,
she pleaded silently, uselessly.
Undo this one too…

Cruelty too pure even to be hatred seemed to spit from Blair’s eyes. He didn’t speak. He just lowered his head, keeping his gaze riveted on Smith’s, and surged forward like a charging bull.

It looked like a slow-motion film, all the more bizarre because of the contrast to his normal inhuman speed of movement. Sera felt Smith’s fingers loosen in surprise. Then they tightened again as he dragged her back. But they’d hit the wall, and Blair kept following. His fist came up, huge and powerful, but shaking with effort as it ploughed slowly onward and kept coming.

Suddenly, Smith’s fingers relaxed, and Sera gasped in the air her lungs so desperately needed, but she didn’t feel the pain, only astonishment as Blair’s fist connected with her father’s face.

It lacked the force of a real punch, but it was still enough to drive Smith’s head back against the wall. Blair seized Sera in one arm, dragging her out of the way. His other hand closed around Smith’s throat and squeezed.

Smith’s mind screamed the same words repeatedly: “How did you do that? How did you do that?”

Blair said, “Because I want to.”

And at that, Sera was able to think again, to grab at Blair’s murderous hand. “No! Don’t kill him!”

“He was killing you,” Blair said without pity.

“Blair, he’s
my father
! Please!”

Slowly, without relaxing his grip, Blair turned his gaze on her. Everyone had clustered out of the bedroom, staring. But no one spoke up for Smith.

The terrifying cruelty in Blair’s eyes seemed to soften as he gazed at her. Now they looked merely angry. Without glancing at Smith, he said, “You’re lucky my arm was broken,” and dropped him.

Smith fell to the floor.

McGowan said, “The police are here.”

And Sera realized that more feet were pounding up the stairs to Jilly’s flat. She tried to speak, but no sound came out, perhaps because she’d been half strangled. Or perhaps because she’d been swept up into Blair’s arms and was flying across the bedroom and out of the window.

Via several rooftops and a passing van, Blair finally landed in the park, some distance from where the vampire battle had taken place, and let Sera slide down his body to the ground. He bent his head and gently, tenderly, kissed her bruised throat. Still dazed, she imagined the physical pain receding, and oddly that helped the emotional trauma too. Her father had tried to kill her, but she was alive because Blair had saved her and taken away her pain.

Not far away, some police officers were going over the ground, looking out for witnesses or injured fighters.

Blair’s mind had been unreadable as he’d escaped with her, a jumble of emotions and regrets he’d deliberately half hidden from her. But as he straightened and she laid her head on his chest, she felt his mind clear and resolve into words. “You saved me. You threw them off me with nothing but the power of your mind.”

“How did I do that?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps because you’d gathered so much during the spell, you needed an outlet. Perhaps just for the same reason I could get to Smith.”

She smiled, lifting her head. “Because we wanted to?”

“Yes. Come with me, Sera. Let me love you and drink from you.”

Some remnant of the magical energy must still have lingered in her body, for everything tingled at his words. Exhaustion slid away, leaving only excitement, especially when she moved in his arms and felt his erection pressing into her tummy. Her breath caught, and then his mouth swooped and took hers.

Interrupting the haze of bliss, her skin prickled.

“Vampire!” she gasped into his mind, since his lips wouldn’t let her speak. He released her mouth and let her half turn.

Jason Bell stopped under a nearby tree. He was confronting a single human who wielded a wooden stake. Sera could see the shape of it perfectly clearly in the moonlight. And she could see that the human was Ferdy.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “I can’t let this happen—”

“It’s too late. They have to reach their own conclusions.”

They were talking, although she couldn’t hear the words. Then Jason spread his arms wide, an act of surrender. Ferdy stared at him, then dropped the stake. Jason’s arms fell to his sides, and Ferdy stepped forward to embrace him.

Sera found she was smiling. “Really? As simple as that?”

“Not simple,” Blair said. “He’ll have to watch his parents sicken and die. But they’ll get some part of their son back.”

“Will you help him? To be good?”

“I’m not good,” Blair said, clearly affronted. His arm tightened at her waist, and she found herself running so fast her feet didn’t touch the ground. “Except at sex,” he added. “Over the centuries, I’ve become quite good at that.”

He said other things too as he ran, things guaranteed to set her blood on fire, even if it hadn’t already been desperate for him. The things that hurt—from her father’s assault, to her guilt at leaving her friends to deal with the aftermath—faded into a mere background to her need.

Impossibly quickly, they reached his house. As they raced up the steps, the front door flew open for them and slammed again behind them. Before Sera could even draw breath, she was flattened against it, with Blair’s weight pressing into her and his mouth devouring hers. Desire thrummed through her, urgent and irresistible. He stopped kissing her only long enough to pull her top up over her head. Her bra was unclipped and thrown on the floor after it, and her jeans quickly followed.

She’d been working on his fastenings and shoved at the leather to get his trousers out of the way, but it seemed neither of them could wait. She stood on tiptoe, desperate to have him inside her, and without taking the time to get rid of all his clothes, he lifted her, and she pushed down, and suddenly he was inside her, shocking her, filling her, and nothing, nothing in the world had ever felt this good.

Once inside, he paused to kiss her mouth. She opened for him, welcoming his tongue and teeth, kissing him back with abandon while she moved on him, tugging at his shirt. She pulled it up and over his head, and while his arms were engaged, he pinned her to the door with his body, thrusting upward so that she cried out with the pleasure. The smooth, cool skin of his back and shoulders undulated to the caress of her hands.

Somehow, he managed to shove at his trousers and step out of them, for, his arms around her once more, he turned away from the door, began to walk with her along the passage. She wrapped her legs around his waist. His every movement was bliss inside her. She listened to her own panting breath and moans of pleasure as she pushed herself slowly up and down on him. His mouth found her breast, raising the pleasure another notch.

A candle sputtered into life as if of its own volition, but Sera was too far gone to care. She fell backward onto the bed with Blair hard on top of her, pushed as far inside as he could get, and she cried out again with the fresh shock of sensation.

For the space of a heartbeat, he gazed at her. Then his lips parted to show his fangs, and she moaned in need, pushing up against his exciting weight. Blair bent to her throat and bit. She gasped in pain, clinging to him in silent plea as her blood rushed into his mouth. He moved inside her, thrusting to the rhythm of his sucks.

Sera writhed with him, drowning in sensuality. As his mind opened up, his pleasure overwhelmed her, driving her onward. He drank her blood and fucked her, and she screamed with joy. Holding him, caressing him, she bucked with him until she fell over the edge of bliss. He tore his mouth free of her wound, licked it with trembling tongue, and fell with her.

“Now tell me I’m history,” he said in her mind.

“I’ll tell you anything you like if you just promise to do that again—”

“Promise? I’m doing it already.”

“Oh God…”

****

She woke to the sound of her phone ringing. Without opening her eyes, she felt for it and unexpectedly found it on the pillow beside her head. Memory rushed back: last night’s battle and last night’s love.

“Hello,” she croaked into the phone as her body flushed. She opened her eyes, looking in vain for Blair. His bedroom was amazing, though. She lay in a four-poster bed with open red-velvet curtains. Beyond them, she could see Georgian furniture, wood paneling, and slightly dusty paintings.

“Sera? It’s Jilly. Blair texted to say you were okay.”

Blair could text? “Good,” she said faintly. “Everything okay there?”

“Yes. We told the police we’d just been watching the fight, and then someone crashed through my bedroom window.”

“On the second floor? They didn’t think that was strange?”

“Probably. But they could see the broken window. They charged Smith with assault, though I told McGowan you probably wouldn’t go through with it.”

No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t want anything more to do with the bastard. Her throat, the throat her father had squeezed so mercilessly, constricted. But at the thought of him, a whisper of emotion brushed her mind, an acknowledgement of defeat, a sense of shame that almost amounted to apology. Nicholas Smith, trying to communicate with her.

She slammed her mind shut. For what he’d done, there could be no apologies. But she realized something else, finally and irrevocably. She didn’t need her father and never would. She was stronger than he; she had the love of loyal friends whom she cared for deeply, and he couldn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t let him.

But the silence had stretched too long. “Sera?” Jilly prompted.

“Um, how is McGowan? He must have seen too much.”

“Let’s say he’s a bit more—open than he used to be.”

“Melanie okay?”

“She’s fab. Everyone is. Even I will be when I get my bedroom window fixed. I don’t suppose you’re coming in today, so I wanted to tell you that—”

“Not coming in? Of course, I am.” Sera peered at the watch still bizarrely on her wrist. It was 9:30 a.m. She and Blair had made love for hours, and then, obviously, she’d slept for several more. “Tell me what?” she demanded suspiciously.

“Ferdy’s just been in. Gave us a nice, fat check.”

“Bloody hell! Really? Why?”

“He said you solved the vampire problem and stopped him from killing his son. Who’s already dead. Jason’s resigned from C & H, by the way. They caught his financial shenanigans, but they won’t cause a scandal by charging him. What’ll happen to the other vampires? The ones who survived?”

“Blair says they’ll disperse now, go their own ways. Ailis and Sebastian will take some away and try to teach them how to behave in their new state. Some will die, and some will learn how to survive. Some might even keep their jobs, but if you’ve ever fancied working in the banking industry, now might be a good time to apply.”

Jilly snorted. It might have been a laugh. “I’ll tell Jack.”

Sera’s answering grin faded. “On the other hand, Blair believes none of the new vampires will exist forever. The Founder’s blood is too diluted in them.”

“Either way, there are more of them than there used to be,” Jilly said with an audible shiver.

“They’re not all bad,” Sera said.

There was a pause, then, “No, they’re not all bad.”

Sera grinned. It felt like another victory. “I’ll be in soon,” she promised, breaking the connection and rolling out of Blair’s luxurious bed.

She found her clothes on a velvet-upholstered chair and hastily pulled them on. She’d make time for a shower at home. She left the bedroom and let her senses find Blair. He sat in the sitting room, wearing fresh jeans and a black T-shirt, reading a newspaper. A mug of coffee stood at his elbow.

The mundane setting for so exotic a creature made her smile. But when he lowered the paper, her smile faded into a mixture of ache and excitement. Even after a night of excessive sex, he could still make her pulses race with one look.

He pushed the mug toward her, and she came and took it. He made good, fresh coffee too.

Lowering the cup from her mouth, she said, “I’m late for work.”

“I know.” He watched her take another gulp, then, “Are you coming back?”

“Do you want me to?” she asked lightly.

He held her gaze. “Yes. Tonight and every night. Live with me here.”

Her heart beat and beat. “But I need the flat at Serafina’s,” she blurted.

His lips quirked. It wasn’t quite a smile. “And the real reason?”

She opened her mouth, smart words already bubbling to the surface.

“Truth,” he said harshly.

Sera closed her mouth, swallowing the sudden lump in her throat. They’d saved each other’s lives last night, had done things they shouldn’t have been able to do because of sheer feeling. She couldn’t ignore that; she couldn’t run from it. Something peculiarly wonderful happened to her with Blair, and whether or not she fled in the end, they really did owe each other truth.

Without meaning to, she sank into a crouch by his chair. “You move too fast, Blair,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you a week ago.”
And you’re a vampire.
The unspoken words hung between them, a justification and an accusation. “I don’t know you now. Jesus, you’re three hundred years old. I feel as if I’ll
never
know you. I thought I had you pegged: a hedonist with odd, charming flashes of conscience, and then I saw stuff, and Phil told me stuff, that made me realize—”

She broke off as his fingers tangled in her hair. The ache grew stronger. He said, “We both hide. Don’t you think the seeking might be fun too?”

“Wanting to die isn’t fun!” she burst out.

He held her head steady as he gazed into her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” he said deliberately. The words echoed around her mind, seemed to seep into her body, spreading warmth and pride and something powerful she began to recognize as happiness. She, Sera MacBride, had made a difference—and
such
a difference!—to this amazing being. Unable to speak, she turned her face into his hand and kissed his palm. She’d never heard his telepathic voice so soft and intense. “It’s a dark place I’m never going back to… Sera, do you love me?”

Did she? Scary, exciting, beautiful thought. She’d never imagined she could feel like this for anyone. It hadn’t even crept up on her. It had hit her like a thunderbolt, shaken the foundations of her life and passions, and God help her, she
liked
it.

She wasn’t blind to the gift of Blair’s honesty. The ache inside her that was at least half gladness grew stronger. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’ve nothing to compare this with.”

“But I’m not history.”

She smiled into his fingers, then covered them with her own and rubbed his hand against her cheek. “Oh no,” she murmured. “You’re not history.”

His lips curved into a smile. Her breath caught all over again, so before she threw herself into his lap, she released him and jumped to her feet, setting the neglected cup back down on the table. She needed to move, to run all the way to Serafina’s just to release the emotion that seemed ready to burst inside her. It was either that or end up back in bed with Blair. She had the feeling whole weeks of her life could disappear like that if she let them.

“I have to go,” she said breathlessly, and under his knowing, predatory gaze, she walked quickly toward the door, where, struck with an idea, she stopped and spun back toward him.

“Blair, would you consider a job at Serafina’s? A sort of special consultant?”

His eyebrow twitched, betraying surprise. Then, contemptuously: “I don’t do jobs. I’m a vampire.”

Of course. It shouldn’t have hurt. Like all men, he just wanted relationships on his own terms. She nodded as if it didn’t matter—which it probably didn’t—and left the room. The gloomy hall allowed in very little daylight, only a fine line under the front door.

“Sera?”

Already grasping the door handle, she glanced back. He stood, leaning his shoulder in the sitting room doorway, watching her. His face was unreadable.

“Yes?”

“I’ll consider it,” he said and walked back inside.

Not like all men at all. Not like any being she’d ever encountered among the living or the dead. And suddenly, that too was part of the fun. She found she was grinning like an idiot as she threw open the door to greet the day. She leapt down the steps in one stomach-churning bound and landed among a group of startled kids on bikes. Sera laughed and waved to them and ran all the way to Serafina’s.