Books by Maggie Shayne (178 page)

"That's a good plan," the cop said. "We'll have a patrol car drive past a few times tonight, okay? If anything looks off, he'll stop."

"Off?" She gave her head a shake. "You mean, like body parts strewn on the lawn, the doors and windows smashed in, that sort of thing?"

He pursed his lips. "It's not gonna come to that, ma'am. You sure you're all right? I could drive you into town, put you in a room somewhere if—"

"No. No, I'm fine. That was my twisted sense of humor there." He still didn't crack a smile. "Thank you, Officer Gray." She walked him to the door and locked it behind him, resetting her security systems.

Then she went upstairs, took a quick shower, put on a cool nightgown and curled up in bed with another of Dante's journals.

But she couldn't lose herself tonight, not even in the spellbinding words of her phantom lover. The words of that other man, the scarred man, kept coming back to her again and again.
Vampires are real… Dante is real, and he's going to be mad as hell when he finds out
…

She sighed, pushing the covers back, forgetting for a moment the precious book that lay there in her lap. It hit the floor with a thud, and dust rose from it. It had landed on its back, open wide, and when she lovingly bent to pick it up again, some of the words from the time-yellowed pages caught her eye.

Trapdoor…

Beneath the house…

Coffin…

Shivering, she picked the book up. It was the eighth volume, and this was a section she hadn't read before. As she scanned the yellowed pages, a cold chill worked through her body. At last, something that could be verified. Proven. If she had the nerve.

Closing the book, sliding it carefully beneath the pillows, she turned and walked back downstairs, pausing at the double doors of her sanctuary, the room that had been Dante's study. His favorite place, and hers, as well. Swallowing hard, she stepped inside and moved toward the fireplace. She peeled away the oriental rug, rolling it back, baring the hardwood floor underneath.

It was unmarred. Unbroken. No hinges, no outline of a trapdoor where one had been described in the book. But the floor might have been covered over many times since those pages had been written. She recalled the sensation that had rinsed through her, the feeling that Dante was close to her, touching her, inside her mind—how many times in the past few weeks? Often when she was right here in this room.

Reaching for the iron poker, she walked across the floor again, from one wall to the other, tapping the floor with the poker as she did. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,
thud
.

She stopped, frozen in place, wondering if she had heard a difference or only imagined one. Again she tapped, and again the sound changed near the place where the trap door was supposed to have been. As if it were hollow underneath.

Licking her lips, Morgan knelt down. She jammed the tip of the fire poker between the floorboards, then tipped it back to pry them up. The boards resisted the effort, of course. She jabbed the thing harder, deeper, pried again, leaning into the effort with all her weight. And again and again. Until finally a single floorboard came free, breaking jaggedly in the middle.

Breathless, sweating, Morgan stood there, leaning on the poker, staring down. Underneath the floorboard was an older, rotting board, and a single tap of the poker stabbed a hole straight through it into the dark void underneath the house. Still unable to catch her breath, Morgan raced to her desk for a flashlight and returned to the hole she had made. Flicking it on, she shone its beam down through the opening. An old curving staircase was directly below her. Leading from the very floor on which she knelt down into the bowels of the earth.

Straightening away, her heart pounding with so much force she thought it would explode at any moment, she stared at the floor. "My God, could it be true? Could he be… real? Dante?" she whispered.

Then she snatched up the poker again and pried up another floorboard; and then another. She bashed in the rotted trap door—and yes, that was what the boards underneath had been. It was clear now—she could see the rusted hinges—and finally she made an opening big enough to fit through.

Swallowing hard, nodding firmly, she clutched the poker in one hand, gripped her flashlight in the other, and lowered herself through the hole and down to the stairway.

Morgan was not in her bedroom when Dante peered in from the balcony. He had changed his mind about striding up to the front door and confronting her. After the scare she'd had tonight with the scarred man, it would be too much.

She wasn't working with him. Wasn't feeding him information—at least not consciously. He was furious with her, yes, eager to confront her and rage at her for what she had done. Equally eager, though, to visit her in her dreams as he had done before. To make love to her with his mind, even though it was sheer hell on his body. It was release, of a sort. He was hungry for her, craving her, even as he wanted to throttle her until she was silenced forever.

But she wasn't in the bed awaiting his phantom touch or his vampiric rage. And she wasn't in her bathroom showering or bathing so that he could watch the water beading on her alabaster skin or possibly drown her in it. In fact, his senses told him she was far from this area of the house—and agitated in the extreme.

He thought of her earlier encounter with the scarred man, and worry gnawed at his gut. Idiot that he was, he felt every cell in his body aching to go to her, protect her, save her. He didn't sense the man's presence. But he knew that Stiles, as he called himself, was trouble. It was he who had been hunting Dante and his kind for months now. It had to be the film that had led him to Morgan. Stiles would use her to get to him if he had to.

Something was wrong, terribly wrong, with Morgan. Dante felt a twisting pain in his gut that wasn't his own, a hitch in his breathing, a chill of fear—no, terror.

No time now for caution. He responded to irresistible instinct, lunging through her room, into the hallway, following the magnetic pull of her being on his. He raced down the stairs. The study doors were open this time, and when he surged through them, ready to defend her from whatever was the matter, he was brought up short by the sight of broken boards lying on the floor beside the bunched-up rug and the gaping black opening beyond.

"Oh, sweet Jesus, no… "

Dante didn't know what the hell to do. He stood there frozen in time for an instant. And then he heard her scream.

Morgan walked warily down the curving wooden staircase hidden beneath her floorboards, placing her feet slowly, cautiously, shifting her weight gradually. The stairs groaned in protest as if they could give way at any moment. But they didn't, and she managed to make her way to the bottom. She found herself in a dank, dark room. A basement—one that didn't exist, according to every record on the place. God knew she had gone over blueprints and plans and age-old titles during the remodeling as she tried her damnedest to restore the house to its original appearance. She had learned the colors of the decor in several of the rooms. There had been a sketch of the chandelier, and an aging photo of the gardens in back.

But nowhere had there been mention of a cellar. In fact, the lack of one was mentioned more than once in those documents. Almost apologetically, as if it were an inexcusable oversight on the part of the builder. The builder—Daniel Taylor.

Daniel Taylor is one of many aliases the vampire Dante has used…

Oh, hell.

Taking a breath of stale air that had never seen sunlight, Morgan flicked her flashlight on, moved its beam around. Wooden beams crossed the low ceiling above her head. The walls were built of flat stones, piled on top of each other. She didn't know how the hell they stayed upright. An arching opening stood at the far end of the smallish room, and she went toward it, shining her light. No spiderwebs. She found it odd that there were no spiderwebs sticking to her face as she tiptoed, barely breathing, over the dirt floor.

She moved closer and finally stepped through the archway into the smaller, even darker room, this one made of concrete. The beam of her light arced around it to the left, falling on a small table, a kerosene lantern, a book of matches. She could smell the fuel. The lantern's globe was clean.

Blinking, she made her way to the lantern, and then, anchoring her flashlight under one arm to keep its beam where she wanted it, she found the lever that lifted the lantern's globe, struck a match and touched it to the wick. As she lowered the globe into place again and adjusted the flame, soft yellow light filled the room. It was such an incredible relief to have a more helpful source of light that she sighed as she turned to see what the place looked like now that she could see.

On the far side of the room, on a platform that kept it raised off the floor, was a box made of time-dulled wood so dark it seemed black, with tarnished silver handles on the sides.

She stood there staring at it, her mind refusing to process the information her eyes were sending for the drawn-out space between two heartbeats.

And then her mind whispered the truth to her. A coffin. And a scream ran in terror from her lungs, bouncing off the walls and diving back into her own ears to hide.

She bit her lip to silence herself and fought to catch her breath as her heart galloped. The coffin's lid was closed. It looked old. How long had this thing been here? God, what was inside? Her mind wanted to know. It told her body to move closer, touch the wood, open the lid and see…

Him. Dante.

The rest of her wanted to ran. Every cell, every muscle, tingled and twitched with the urge to turn and flee from this place. But her body refused to do either. Her legs were trembling so hard she could barely stand on them. Stress tended to do her in as quickly as physical overexertion, and today she had experienced both in levels beyond what she'd been capable of withstanding for over a year now.

It's not real. This is another of those vivid dreams. That's all.

But no. In her dreams she was always strong, vital, bursting with energy. And she never felt fear. In the dreams he loved her.

God, could that scarred man have been right? Could those journals be real? Could her Dante be lying right here in this casket? Perfectly preserved. Immortal?
Undead
?

"Maybe not," she muttered. "Maybe he just had himself secretly buried here. Maybe that's all this is. The hundred-year-old rotted corpse of a wealthy, eccentric lunatic is probably all that's in that box. Just bones by now. That's all." And when she saw it, when she saw the proof that Dante had been an ordinary man with a vivid imagination and a gift for writing, maybe that would be enough to break the spell he had cast on her. Maybe she could free herself of the sticky web her own obsession had spun to entrap her.

Catching her breath, she forced her feet to move closer. One step, then another. She wasn't even sure she could bring herself to open the lid when she got to it. Then again, it might be sealed. It
should
be sealed, shouldn't it? They didn't just toss bodies into boxes and leave them unlocked.

Then again, they didn't usually hide them underneath houses, either.

She was at the coffin now. She told her hands to rise, and they did, though she was almost surprised to see them obey. She lowered her hands gently to the coffin. It was cold to the touch, and a layer of grime lay between the smooth wood and her palms. Drawing a breath, she told herself to open the lid.

"Don't." The single word came in a deep, rich, hauntingly familiar voice from behind her.

Morgan froze at the command and closed her eyes. He had entered silently. She hadn't heard a sound, not a footstep. Nothing.

"Let it be, Morgan. There's nothing in there that you need to see."

Eyes still closed, she whispered, "Dante?"

"I… " The voice hesitated, and Morgan opened her eyes and knew that his next words would be lies. She knew it as surely as if she were the one about to speak them, making them up as she went along. She felt him groping, searching his mind for a convincing lie. "Yes, I am Dante, but not the one you think I am. He was my great-great-grandfather."

"And he is buried here." She said his next line for him.

"It was his last wish."

She nodded. "And why are you here?"

"To see you." He paused, breathed, and she felt him searching and spinning. "That film of yours is so like the old man's delusions that when I learned you were living in the house he had built, I knew you had learned of his fantasies somehow and used them to create the script."

She didn't turn to face him. She couldn't Not yet. "You're saying they're not real?"

He forced a laugh, just a breath, really. It was the most false thing she had ever heard. "Of course they're not real."

"And you came inside my house without knocking?"

"I… was about to knock when I heard you scream."

"From outside."

"Of course."

"And yet you set off no alarms when you came in?"

He didn't speak. Morgan swallowed hard, and in one swift act of will, pushed upward on the lid. The coffin lay empty, white satin lining beginning to yellow with age. The lid stayed up when she let it go and turned slowly to look on the face of her fantasy lover for the first time.

He stood there dressed in black trousers and a black silk shirt buttoned all the way to the collar, no jacket, no tie. He was dark. Everything about him… dark. Empty. Hollow. His face just as sculpted as she had imagined it, the hollows of his cheeks, the endlessly deep wells of his ebony eyes.

He took her breath away. Because she loved him. Because she was bound to him in ways she didn't even understand. Because he was so exactly as she had known he would be. Familiar. Beloved. He was hers.

"You're real," she whispered.

He stared back at her in silence. She felt him then, stealing into her mind. Felt him planting the certainty that this was just another of her dreams, willing her to believe it. She opened her eyes wide, shook her head hard. "Stop it. You're not a dream. I won't believe you are."

"How can you be so sure?"

"It's no use, Dante. Even if you could do whatever it is you do to my mind, the broken floorboards, this room… they'll all still be here when I wake. Even you couldn't make it all go away in the time left before sunrise."

He studied her, his eyes probing and narrow. "You're either very brave or very foolish, Morgan. Don't you know how angry you've made me? I should kill you for what you've done."

"Then do it."

She saw the shock ripple through him. She didn't let it stop her. Her hands went to the high collar of her nightgown, and she ripped it open, popping buttons all the way to her waist. She tipped her head back, closed her eyes. "Do it, Dante."

Her pulse beat in reaction to the touch of his eyes on her throat. She felt him shiver, felt her own heat rise. She wanted something she couldn't name, as little sense as it made. She knew she was dying anyway, and soon, judging by her symptoms of late. If she had to die, why not in the way he had described so erotically in his journals? The way she had experienced so vividly, if only slightly? Why couldn't she die in utter ecstasy as her essence flowed into him?

And suddenly he was there, his arms tight around her, pulling her body hard against his as he bent over her. His mouth closed on her throat, and she whispered, "Yes… " He bit down without breaking through and suckled her skin. She arched her hips against him, felt the arousal pressing back. Morgan had never felt such fire burn in her body as she did then. Her hands tangled in his hair as she twisted and writhed in his powerful arms, pressing her body closer, arching her throat to his hungry mouth. She felt his lips, warm and wet on her skin. His tongue, stroking and tasting. The delicious pinch of his teeth biting down, just a little.

And then suddenly he wrenched himself away from her so violently that she stumbled and fell to the packed earth floor. Breathless, she remained there, knees bent awkwardly, arms braced on the floor behind her as she stared at him. At his eyes, gleaming now with an odd luminescence that didn't seem to come from the glow of the kerosene lamp. At his face, drawn tight in some kind of unnamed anguish.

"You have no idea what the hell you're playing with, Morgan," he said, his voice coarse and unsteady.

"I know," she said. Her words came less forcefully than she would have liked. Her chest moved rapidly as she fought for breath in between. "I know you… better than anyone ever has, Dante… Or ever will."

He went very still, his eyes narrowing on her. "How?"

She closed her eyes, let her head fall backward. Then her arms bent, and she was lying flat on the floor. God, she was so weak suddenly. It was all too much.

He swore softly and bent to gather her up into his arms. He carried her out of the place, up the rickety stairs, and managed to get up through the jagged hole in the floor. "Are you hurt?" He asked the question almost reluctantly as he took her through the house, obviously knowing his way around.

"No."

"But you are ill," he said unnecessarily.

She nodded, resting her head against his chest. "You're changing the subject."

"Ami?"

They were in the hall now, where he turned and carried her unerringly to her bedroom. To the bed. Then he lowered her onto it, but when he would have straightened away, she locked her arms around his neck and held on. "You want to know how I know about you?"

Leaning over her, one knee on the bed, his face only inches from hers, he nodded. "I have to know."

"Then make love to me, Dante, and I'll tell you."

His eyes flared hotter as he stared into hers. "I cannot do that, Morgan. You're too weak."

"Not for that. Never for that." She lifted her head from the pillows, using him as leverage, and pressed her lips to his. "Please."

Groaning softly, he returned the kiss, folding his arms beneath her and lifting her upper body to his chest. His tongue traced her lips and, when she parted mem, slipped inside to taste her. His breaths came harder, faster, and he slid his mouth from hers to trace her jawline down to her neck and kiss her there, where he had before.

He let her go, let her fall. "I can't… "

"You have before. You have. I know it was real. It wasn't a dream. Dammit, Dante, you've been with me, night after night."

"It wasn't real. It was in your mind, in my mind. It wasn't real."

"Then make it real!"

His muscles were so tense he was shaking, and his jaw was rigid. Then he glanced toward the window, and she followed his gaze and realized the dawn was at hand. "Tell no one what you've seen tonight. I swear to you, Morgan, if you breathe a word, you'll die. Do you understand? I'll have no choice in the matter."

"Do you really think I would betray you? My God, Dante, I would never—"

"You already have."

She blinked and realized he was referring to the film. "It's not the way you think it is."

"You've told my secrets to the world, Morgan. Some of my dearest friends have died because of what you revealed about me and my kind in your films. I'm being hunted because of you, my every step hounded by that man you met earlier tonight."

She felt her eyes widen. "I didn't know. I never would have told your stories, Dante, if I had known they were real. You have to believe that!"

He got to his feet, went to the window. "I have to leave."

She surged from the bed, weak, nearly exhausted, and clutched at the back of his shirt. "Then come back. Dante, promise you'll come to me tonight. I'll tell you everything, I swear."

He glanced back at her. "Or maybe you'll have the scarred man here waiting when I arrive?"

"I would let him kill me first… "

She dropped to her knees, suddenly too weak to stand. Her head falling forward, she drew a shallow breath. "I would die, Dante, before I would betray you." It was a string of words floating on a breath, a mere exhalation, not even a whisper.

"Words I've heard before, Morgan." Dante knelt, clutched her shoulders, lifted her chin to search her face. Then he folded her to his chest, held her there with one hand, and took something from his pocket with the other. She saw it shine as it flicked open. A small pointed blade, like a leather punch. He drew it to his own throat and jabbed it in, grunting in pain as he did.

Morgan gasped, her eyes fixed on his corded neck as he drew the blade away and a scarlet strand of blood unwound from the puncture wound, trailing over his skin. She licked her lips. The scent of it touched her nostrils, and a feral lust twisted in her gut. His hand was in her hair, at the back of her head, pulling her closer, but she didn't need it She knew what she needed.