The Vampire's Seduction (26 page)

My heart hummed like a lover who’d been stroked one step away from orgasm. The hunger for human blood had been mitigated by the almost druglike after-feeding euphoria. Sucking away an actual life added extra power to the already pleasant sensation of feeding on human blood.

More,
my body whispered.
More please.

With what turned out to be a child’s shirt, we cleaned up and watched the drama unfold from further down the street. The mayor’s car had been blocked in by four cruisers. A few of the neighbors—if you could call this a neighborhood—came out to see if they knew any of the dead or jail-bound. That’s when I saw Officer Consuela Jones. As she was interviewing a witness, she suddenly stopped, pivoting to look directly at me—as if she’d felt my gaze on her back.

I turned to Reedrek. “I think we’d better move on before they want to ask us questions.”

“What about my car?” he said with a smirk.

“It was never yours. Besides that fact, there’s someone there who knows me.”

Reedrek zeroed in on Officer Jones. “Ah yes, Jack’s little girlfriend. A pity we didn’t run across her with fewer—” he glanced at the knot of neighbors close to the police “—witnesses around.”

“As for
your
car—” I nodded in the direction of the SUV. “One of the officers seems very interested in it.” A policeman with a notepad was writing down the license number. It was only a matter of time until they found out who it really belonged to. The mayor would not be very happy.

An ambulance raced from the far end of the street. “Our new friend has his own transportation,” Reedrek said. When he smiled his teeth were still pink with blood.

The power of feeding shot through me again, like electricity. My cock thickened, hard and insistent. The habit of sex after a feeding was coming back to haunt me. There would be no time for sex tonight, and, more important, I had to keep the memories of my games with Eleanor out of my thoughts—or Reedrek was liable to reverse the order and have her for sex, before eating her heart. He was still staring at Officer Jones.

“Come. We have other places to hunt,” I said. Without looking back, I turned and headed toward the next street. We could find more victims before the police even finished their paperwork.

On foot now, we paced down the broken sidewalks, barely touching the ground. Playing the part of tuning fork, I caught snatches of conversation behind windows and walls: a baby crying, a man sighing into a drug-laced stupor, a couple having lackluster sex. That nearly stopped me. But even as I broke many of my time-tested rules, I clung to some. Anger was my affliction and my lure. And it took less than ten minutes to find another sample.

Jack

I’d barely gotten to sleep when I heard the eerie sound of brokenhearted sobs—sort of disembodied and creepy. I opened the coffin and crawled out, over Rehya and her sleepily murmured protests. At first I thought the cries were coming from Shari’s coffin, so I flung open the lid, hoping that the horrors of the last day and a half—geez, how long
had
it been anyway?—had been a mistake or a bad dream and that she was alive after all.

But her body was in the same state as when I’d last seen her, so I closed the coffin again.

“Over here,” said a small voice.

I should have realized what it was. Ghosts love me, I tell you. And the feeling is not mutual. Yes, they creep me out as much as they do anybody else, okay? She stood wringing her translucent hands in front of her, shimmering with that weird light they sometimes have.

It was the ghost of Shari.

I know it sounds silly, but ghosts kind of look like Princess Leia in
Star Wars
when she appears in that hologram and says, “Help us, Obi Wan. You’re our only hope.” I had a feeling that Shari had come back looking for help from me, and Obi Wan I wasn’t.

I put up my hand in a feeble little wave. “How you doing?”

She shimmered a little harder in answer to my question and gave another squeaky little wail.

“I was afraid of that.” I ran one hand through my hair. “Can’t you sort of go toward the light or something?”

Her eyes got bigger and rounder. “There’s no light here. It’s dark and scary. There are frightening noises everywhere. Things are moving in the shadows. Dead things, evil things.” She rubbed her arms. “And it’s cold.”

“Look. I’m really, really sorry. I did everything I could to keep you around here as a vampire, and something went wrong, so you died. I don’t have any idea how to help you now. Can’t you just stay in this dimension with us even though you don’t have a body anymore? Just, well, hang out or something?” I was trying really hard to be helpful, but I’ve never understood the big picture afterlifewise. Who does? I mean, it’s not like anybody hands you a map or anything. It’s also not like anybody ever gets to tell about it—except for when the dead talk to me, that is.

“I’m not really there with you anymore. I’m stuck here. There are scary things and I don’t know what they are.” She began to sob again, real hopeless-like, and looked over one shoulder and then the other. Poor little thing. It was enough to break your heart. “I think some of these . . . these . . . animals or creatures or whatever are after me.”

“What do they look like?”

“I can’t see them. I can only hear them—feel them. Every now and then something slimy will reach out and touch me.”

Damn them, whatever they were. I wished I could protect her. I felt helpless. “So there’s no light at all to go to and there isn’t anyone there to help you find your way to a better place?”

“Nooooooo! Please help me!”

Talk about your king-size, grade-A guilt trip. I decided the next time I got the bright idea to make somebody a vampire, I’d just go and stake myself. Not like it
was
my idea or anything. William should have just left this girl alone—but no, he had to make out with her at that club and get Reedrek to fang her.

That idea made my blood go cold . . . colder. I realized I’d made the same mistake with Connie by letting Reedrek know I cared for her. I just hoped to hell that Connie would wear the charm like she promised me she would.

As I was wracking my brain for how to help Shari, Melaphia came back in with a tray of ointments and herbs. Under one arm she had a really old-looking book.

“What are you doing out of that coffin? I thought you said you were going to get some rest.”

I pointed in Shari’s direction. “Do you see that?”

Melaphia narrowed her eyes. “No. But I can feel something—a spirit. Is it Shari?”

Melaphia’s way with the dead was almost as good as my own. “Yeah. She says she’s in a dark, scary place and that there are things in the shadows making her nervous. There’s nobody there to help her.”

Putting the tray and book down on the straight chair by Shari’s coffin, Melaphia spoke to the little ghost. “If you feel something bad approaching you, move away from it as fast as you can.”

“Oo-kay,” Shari whimpered. “Which way should I go?”

“I heard her!” Melaphia answered the question before I had a chance to ask. A look of profound sadness came over Melaphia’s face. “I’ve only heard about the place where you are,” she said to Shari. “None of us who walk the earth have ever been to that dimension and come back to tell the tale. All I can tell you is to move away from anything that troubles or frightens you.”

“That’s pretty much everything here, but all right. Is there anything
you
can do?”

“Yes. I’m going to try to fix things on this end so the evil entities that are there—and here—can’t . . . take you over.”

Shari issued another otherworldly moan, as if she hadn’t understood the danger she was in until Melaphia spelled it out. She hugged herself harder and shimmered some more.

“I want you to go back inside yourself now,” Melaphia said. “Make yourself as big and strong and brave as you possibly can.”

Shari nodded and slowly began to fade out until there was nothing of her left to see. At least here on earth.

“Thank you,” I breathed to Melaphia. “Again.”

“You’re welcome, Uncle Jack.” She favored me with a tired smile. She hadn’t called me that in years. It comforted me somehow, as she knew it would. “Now, you get back in that coffin. And don’t come out even if the devil himself tries to wake you.”

“Don’t jinx me. The way this night has gone, he might just show up.” I climbed back in next to Rehya.

Would I ever rest again? We vampires sleep pretty soundly. We are dead, after all. But even though we’re the stuff of nightmares, don’t think for a New York minute that we don’t have nightmares of our own.

William

We headed for the river, avoiding the area of well-lit bars and restaurants. Instead we sought out the darker parts, where the underbelly of the city gets scratched in its own favorite way. We walked the turf of small-time drug dealers. We moved through streets occupied by ever-present pimps, sitting like fat tomcats, waiting for their girls to return with the cream. We slipped through night air that was growing cooler, making the damp, cloying breath of the tunnels seem springlike. But winter was almost here. The nearly full hunter’s moon was rising from a bank of clouds to the east. It was still early yet. Plenty of time for hunting.

A disagreement had broken out on a dark street corner a block away. We moved toward it, following several other curious bystanders.

“You owe me money, man. Don’t come around here beggin’ for somethin’. You hear me?”

“You cheated me last night. You gave me some squirrelly shit!”

The dealer smiled, but it didn’t change the hard look in his eyes. “You can’t cheat somebody who don’t give you no money.
Comprende?
” He slid a knife out of his pocket and twitched it open. “Now get away from me.” He glanced toward the small but growing group of witnesses. “Or I’ll cut off your limp dick and feed it to the rats.”

“The doomed,” Reedrek whispered. “They never cease to entertain me. Cutting off body parts . . .” He chuckled as he stepped forward into the light, causing two of the bystanders to turn and stare in our direction.

At the center of the argument, the two participants didn’t seem to realize that death had arrived.

“I told you to get the fuck away from me!” the dealer bellowed at the smaller man.

Rather than backing down, the disgruntled customer showed poor judgment when he pulled what looked like a household butcher knife out of his jacket. Instantly, the dealer grabbed the arm of the junkie and pushed upward. Then he plunged his own knife into the man’s stomach.

“Damn crackheads don’t ever listen!”

With a gasp of surprise, the wounded man crumpled. Reedrek and I stepped into the circle of onlookers.

“We’ll handle this now,” I announced to the witnesses.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” the dealer asked. He looked me up and down, his fingers moving on the knife hilt. “You ain’t no tired-assed cop,” he laughed.

“No, I’m not.”

He raised his weapon. “Then get out of my face and off my corner.” I could smell his fear under the bravado. When I didn’t move, his grip on the knife tightened and, after a moment’s hesitation, he sliced it in an arc across my chest. Blood seeped from the cut, dyeing the edges of my white dress shirt. I could have easily prevented the contact, of course, but that urge to stand on the edge of immortal life and unholy death kept me still. In some ways I was more like my sire than I wanted to admit. I liked it when they fought back.

I ran one of my fingers through the welling blood and brought it to my mouth to suck it clean. “Damn. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined my new shirt.” I heard Reedrek chuckle, but I kept my eyes on my next meal. In a movement too quick for the dealer to follow, I removed the knife from his hand and flung it away so hard that I heard it splash into the river fifty feet away.

“What the fuck—”

My grip on his throat didn’t allow him to finish the sentence. Both Reedrek and I gazed around the group of people who’d gathered for the fight, soothing their minds and sowing forgetfulness until they began to melt away, back to their own dark business.

“Time to go,” I said, and led my attacker by the neck like a recalcitrant dog, down in the direction of the tunnels, allowing him to struggle just enough to hold my interest. Reedrek followed, dragging the mostly dead junkie by one foot.

In the dark tunnels, away from inquisitive eyes, I allowed a scream from my hapless meal before I silenced him. Death at least was quiet and peaceful.

We hunted until well after midnight, until we were drunk with blood. My head was spinning with sheer delirium. I needed sleep, but I needed sex more. All of my body wanted Eleanor—she would understand this thrumming energy running beneath my blood-hot skin. She would soothe my mind and take part of this restless power inside her. Then she would play the game of death and undeath. But these were thoughts that I had to block from my sire.

Reedrek was actually staggering under the frenzy of our blood gorging. We stumbled back through the empty streets and squares, arm in arm, like two of the drunken Irishmen he held in such disdain—Reedrek searching for sleep, and I half-crazed with lust. Somewhere near Colonial we came to the conclusion that we needed to lie down, if only for a while. We set our spinning heads on finding a tomb to use as a resting place.

We’d just decided on an ornate tomb with room for two when I smelled a sweet smoky odor and heard low voices, then a coughing laugh. Reedrek smiled like a tipsy card player who’d been dealt four aces. He wasn’t finished with the night just yet. By the startled looks on the faces before us, we’d appeared among the tombs like wraiths stepping from thin air.

Eight surprised teenagers stared at us in silence.

Then they burst into uncontrolled laughter. The laughter stopped when I reached forward and snatched the cigarette, or joint, as Jack would say, from the hands of one of the boys.

“Don’t you know that smoking this stuff will make you stupid?” I suggested with a fatherly smile.

“Nah,” one of the boys protested. “The worst thing it’ll do is give you the munchies. Go ahead, dude, try a hit.”