Embrace the Twilight (7 page)

“It said you walked twenty miles through the desert when you escaped.” He glanced down at the foot. “As painful as that is even now, I can't imagine how you managed that.”

Will shrugged again, shook his head. “Yeah, okay, you really read the article. What do you want, an autograph?”

The vampire smiled. “I have to go.” He turned again to the window.

“No, wait. I need to talk to you. I have questions—”

“Questions I cannot answer, my friend. Even for an exceptional mortal like you. I'm sorry.” He turned to face out the window again, then quickly ducked back inside and to the left of the glass. “Hell, I've been seen. There's a crowd below, looking up here and pointing.”

Will glanced toward the door at the sound of running feet. “Someone's coming. Tell me, vampire, are you a man of your word?”

“I am.”

“Then give it. I cover your ass now, you answer my questions later. Agreed?”

The doorknob turned, and the vampire glanced that way, then out the window again. “Questions about what?”

“A vampiress named Sarafina.”

“Why?”

Will swallowed hard. “I need to know if she's real. That's all. Do you agree or not?”

“All right,” the vampire said quickly. “I agree.”

The door was opening as Will glanced around the room and spotted a folding screen. “Over there, behind the screen,” he whispered.

The vampire moved so quickly he was but a blur of darkness. If Will had had any doubts—and he had—they were gone now. Nothing human could move with such a burst of speed. Nothing
he
knew about, anyway. “I never got your name,” Will whispered.

“Jameson Bryant,” the vampire hissed back.

“Willem Stone,” Will replied.

“Good to meet you.” There was a touch of irony in the vampire's tone.

“Same here—I think.”

Three orderlies burst into the room, flicked on the light and paused to stare at Will, as he stood near the open window. He lowered his head, painted a look of anguish on his face.

“Listen, don't jump,” one of them said. “It's no answer. You know that.”

“Jesus, it's that Stone guy,” another muttered. “Mr. Stone, you're a hero—”

“It's Colonel Stone,” he muttered. “Or it was.”

“It still is, man. Colonel Stone, U.S. Army Special Forces, and a fucking national icon. God, if you go out like this, then they win, don't you see that?”

“Yeah, that's right,” said the other guy. “Man, don't tell us you survived all that crap just to give up now.”

“Colonel Stone, sir, I just got out of the Army. I was over there. Let me tell you something, you did us proud. You cash out now, it's gonna crush all those soldiers who see you as a hero.”

Will turned slowly, looking at them, even while swinging one leg over the windowsill. “Just stay where you are, okay? I have to think.”

The men stopped their forward progress. “Come on, come on back in here. You can think in here as good as anywhere else.”

The door opened again, and a woman stepped in. She was mid-fifties, fit, kept her hair colored, but the smokers'-wrinkles in her face gave her age away. “Mr. Stone, I'm Amelia Ashby. I'm a psychiatrist here.”

A psychiatrist was just what he needed, he thought, considering he'd just been conversing with a vampire. Shit. He almost laughed, but that would have blown the suicidal depression skit right out of the water.

“Tell me what you're feeling. Please, I only want to help you.”

He pursed his lips, sighed, wondered if this was going to end up lengthening his stay, when he'd so been looking forward to getting the hell out of here tomorrow. He drew his leg inside, stood on the floor, closed the window, and grabbed his cane. “I'm not going to jump, all right? I was just…out walking the halls.”

“Good. Very good. And you came in here because…?”

“My leg got to aching. I was looking for a place to sit down for a while.”

“I see,” she said slowly, coming closer now.

To stop her from reaching the point where she might catch a glimpse of Jameson-the-blood-thief, Will met her halfway. “Look, I'm ready to go back to my room now, all right?”

“That's fine. Do you mind if I walk with you?” She took his good arm, walked with him back toward the door.

“Sure. Whatever.”

One of the orderlies opened the door. Another slapped him on the shoulder as he passed. “You hang in there, man. We need more like you, Colonel Stone.”

The former soldier sent him a snappy salute.

They all followed Will and the shrink into the hallway, and then the orderlies dispersed, one of them pausing to relock the door before taking off.

Dr. Ashby walked slowly. “You're in a lot of pain, aren't you?”

“The leg? Ah, it's not so bad.”

“Bad enough that it had you considering suicide.”

“What, you think I'd kill myself over a little pain? I can handle pain, Dr. Ashby.”

She nodded, smiled a little self-deprecatingly. “I guess I should have known that, considering. Physical pain certainly wouldn't drive a man like you to such an extreme decision.”

“It wasn't a decision. More like a passing thought.”

“So you didn't really plan to jump from that window tonight?”

“No. I opened it. I even stood there a while, contemplating the notion. But I never would have jumped.”

“Because you realized that you have too much to live for?” she asked.

“Because I realized it's not a high enough window to ensure a quick end. I may have a high tolerance for pain, Dr. Ashby, but I'm not a masochist. If I'd been seriously thinking of jumping, I'd have taken the elevator on up to the top floor—better yet, the roof.”

She blinked at him. “I'm not sure if I should find that reassuring or troubling.”

“Reassuring,” he promised. “I swear.”

S
omehow—he wasn't sure how—Will convinced them to let him leave the hospital on schedule. Though he was now expected to follow up by keeping an appointment Dr. Ashby had set up for him with a New York therapist. Therapy he
didn't
need. Didn't even believe in it. You were either sane or you weren't.

He was. If his little red caboose were capable of chugging around the bend, it would have been long gone by now. He was perfectly sane.

Except, of course, for the visions. But hell, under torture, the mind did what it had to in order to survive. If that meant creating a fantasyland with beautiful Gypsies and dangerous vampires, then fine. Those little flights to La-La Land were not signs of instability. Hell, they were probably the only things that had kept his crackers from crumbling.

Of course, that didn't explain the vampire who'd shown up in the hospital lab last night. Nor the fact that Will had…kind of liked the guy.

Making snap judgments about people was not unusual for him. He'd been trained for years to size a person up in a glance, so that wasn't an issue. The issue was that he'd believed the guy to be a vampire. A real one. At least until he'd gotten up the next morning to examine the theory in the full light of day and realized how ridiculous it was. Maybe it was easier to believe in fantasies when you were creeping around a shadowy lab in the dead of night. Besides, he'd been through the mill, and they'd been keeping him pretty drugged-up to boot. Far more than he liked.

That must have been it. He'd probably imagined the entire thing. Hell, it was a wonder he wasn't suffering far worse side effects after his weeks of torture, mangled foot and near-death in the desert. His brain had been baked, his body dehydrated, his senses deprived. Top all that off with a little morphine and you had a hallucination just waiting to happen.

The nurse pushed his wheelchair up to the double doors, which parted automatically. He took his first breath of fresh air in weeks, even if it was tinged with exhaust fumes. It was spring. God, how he loved the spring.

There was a taxi waiting at the curb. He glanced up at the smiling nurse. “I can take it from here, hon.”

“I don't doubt it.”

He got upright, his weight on the good foot. The nurse pulled the chair out from behind him, then handed him his cane and the plastic bag filled with his belongings. The few that were here, anyway. He didn't own much, or hadn't until he'd come home. Uncle Sam had secured an apartment for him in the city of his choice, which was New York. They'd furnished it and told him there would be a car waiting in the parking garage when he arrived. His worldly possessions, most of which fit easily into a large Army-issue duffel bag, had already been sent on ahead of him.

He muttered his destination to the driver as he got into the back seat, then settled in for the ride to the airport.

It was a short, easy flight. The landing, though, was a bit of a surprise. When he limped off the plane, keeping to one side so the other passengers could rush past him in their hurry to the gate, he had no idea what was awaiting him in LaGuardia's main terminal. In fact, when he first glimpsed the press, the cameras, the people waving their tiny flags and holding up their signs, he wondered what celebrity had been on that airplane with him.

Then a reporter said, “Welcome to New York, Colonel Stone! How does it feel to be back home?”

The microphone hovered in front of his face, and he thought about laughing out loud. This wasn't home. Home was a camouflage-colored tent or sometimes a hole in the ground. It was men in fatigues carrying automatic rifles, and bad food and warm water, and anti-nerve-gas injections. It wasn't this.

But aloud, he only said, “Great. It feels great. I'm glad to be back.”

“Colonel, how is your leg?” another one shouted, shouldering her way to the front of the pack.

“Foot, not leg,” he corrected. “It's as good as can be expected, I suppose.”

“What's your reaction to the news that earlier today a daisy-cutter was dropped on the caves where you were held?”

“I hadn't heard.” He wondered if any of the men who'd held him were stupid enough to have remained in the same place this long and doubted it. “They get anybody?”

“A pile of them. They're still sorting through the remains.”

He swallowed his reaction to that and wondered who'd been killed for the sake of avenging the latest American hero. He stopped answering questions, shouldered his way through the mob, not without effort, but they didn't give up until he got into a cab outside the airport.

It was only as the cab pulled away that he saw her.

She was getting into a long black limousine. She wore dark glasses and real fur, and her hair was wild and loose. Her pale, pale skin, like alabaster, was almost luminous in the dusky light of sundown. Her legs were endless, her nails as red as her lips.

“Stop the car,” he told the driver. “Stop!”

The cabdriver hit the brakes, jerking the wheel to one side. But it was too late. She was in the car, drawing one long leg in after her and closing the door. Then the limo lurched into motion and took her away.

He squinted at the plate number, but the sun reflected off the rear window, and he couldn't see through its glare. Then he just sat there staring after her for the longest time.

“You wanna sit here all day or what?” the driver asked.

Will snapped his attention back to where it belonged. “No. Just…drive.”

Again the cab was in motion. But Will knew, he knew deep down, that he had just seen Sarafina. His beautiful fantasy. And then he wondered if maybe he should take Dr. Ashby's advice to heart and get some therapy.

 

It had been two months—two months that he'd been trying to banish thoughts of his make-believe woman from his mind, but he'd only become more and more desperate to see her again.

Well, today, dammit, he would. If it were possible to find her again, find that place again, then he would. He stopped taking his pain meds, walked excessively and left his cane at home. By the end of the day, Will's foot was screaming in unmitigated agony. He was damp with sweat, his entire body shaking with pain by the time he got back to the Manhattan condo his dear Uncle Sam had bought and paid for.

He went straight to the bedroom. The drapes were drawn, no lights on, and it was well past sundown. Now. Maybe now.

He fell onto the bed, closed his eyes and drew his mind as far away from the pain as he could. He'd been determined to let her go, to just get on with his life. But she haunted him. Her eyes. Her smile. Her hair.

Part of him was afraid that he might get trapped in his own fantasy—become so enmeshed that he spent the rest of his life in a mental ward somewhere, living only in his mind. But the craving for her, the need, only grew stronger. He had to see her again. And so he tried, just as he had tried a thousand times before.

Nothing. Nothing.
Dammit to hell!

Eyes still closed, he reached out for the cane that leaned against the headboard, where he always kept it. His hand closed around the cool shellac-coated oak, and he brought the cane around fast and hard, smashing it into his bad foot.

Pain ripped a scream from his chest. He dropped the cane to the floor as fireworks went off in his brain. Mentally he skittered into the darkest corner of his mind and cowered there, where the pain couldn't reach.

And then he found her. He saw her eyes, gleaming in the darkness, and then he fell into them, into her world, or her past, or whatever the hell this place was.

Sarafina.

She was sitting in a room, lit only by the glow coming from the dying fire in the hearth. It startled Will at first, that he could see the room so clearly in such dim light. The antique furniture looked new, and the oriental rug that covered the hardwood floor showed its vibrant reds and yellows as brightly as it would by full daylight. But then he reminded himself that he was seeing her, and everything around her, as she would. And she, apparently, could see quite clearly in the dark.

She felt stronger, more alive, than she ever had during his previous visits. But there was a hardness about her now that he'd never sensed before. He remembered her anguish on learning of her lover's betrayal, and that of her own sister, and he thought that might account for the change.

She sat in a velvet-covered chair, with a small, round three-legged table beside her. She wore full, flowing skirts of jewel-blue, a turquoise-colored satin blouse that bared her pale shoulders. Jewels dangled from her neck and her ears, and decorated every scarlet-tipped finger as she absently shuffled a deck of cards. Tiny silk slippers covered her feet. Her hair was long and loose, curling wildly around her shoulders.

“Sarafina, I'm here,” he whispered. “Can you feel me?”

Sarafina frowned, a tiny furrow appearing between her full, dark brows. She turned her head to look about the room but saw only the man who had transformed her that night in the cave so long ago. Bartrone.

He sat in a chair much like hers, only larger, and placed closer to the fire. He didn't seem vibrant or alive, as she did. He seemed…tired. Exceedingly tired.

“Did you hear something just now?” she asked him.

He didn't answer but remained as he was, his shoulders slightly slumped, gaze turned inward as if he were deep in thought.

“Bartrone?”

His head came up slowly. “Yes?”

“Did you hear anything just now?” He only stared blankly, and Sarafina finally shook her head in frustration. “No, of course you didn't. You barely hear
me.
What is wrong with you, Bartrone?”

He shrugged. “Do you know how old I am, my Gypsy love? Have I told you, in all the years you've been my companion?”

All the years? God, Will wondered just how many years it had been at this point.

She blinked slowly, searching her mind. “You…no. I don't believe you have. Though I've asked many times.”

He sighed, seemed to think a long while before answering. “You've heard of Babylon?”

Sarafina sat up a little straighter, widening her eyes. “How could I not, with all the books you've made me read, all the lessons you've insisted I complete?”

“Immortality spent in ignorance is wasted.”

“So you've been telling me these past fifty years.”

Fifty years?
That long? But she didn't look so much as a day older!

Bartrone nodded, drew a breath. “I was born there.”

She blinked slowly. “In Babylon?”

“The year of my birth, by the modern calendar, would have been seven hundred and one, before the Common Era.” He lifted his gaze to hers slowly. “I am more than two thousand years old, my precious Sarafina. And I have come to understand that, in truth, there is no such thing as immortality.”

She stopped shuffling the cards, a larger deck than the modern ones Will had seen, and simply held them in her now-still hands. “That's ridiculous, my darling. You yourself are the proof of it.”

“I'm afraid I am the opposite of that.” He lowered his head. “I'm tired, Sarafina. Tired of never seeing the sunlight. Of killing in order to live.”

“Is it your conscience that's troubling you, then?” She got to her feet and went to him, leaning over his chair and running a hand through his long, dark hair. “You kill only those who need killing, my love. How many times have you explained this to me? That we must kill in order to survive, but that we must never harm an innocent? Goodness knows there are criminals enough to sustain us. Abusers of children. Murderers.”

He nodded. “We are natural predators, like the lion or the shark. But unlike them, we have a conscience and, I believe—though many others do not—a soul.” He heaved another heavy sigh. “It is unnatural for a human to live forever, Sarafina.”

“We're not humans. We're vampires. It couldn't be more natural to us.”

“We're humans. We were born humans. This…this condition of ours is no more than an aberration. A curse, perhaps.”

She wanted to lash out at him for those words. Will felt the anger rise up in her. But she banked it, held it in check. And he realized suddenly all the things this man—this monster—had been to her over the years. A teacher, a mentor, a protector and guide, a companion and friend. She loved him—not passionately, but deeply.

“You've never believed these things before, Bartrone. You taught me to embrace my preternatural strength and power. To relish this life and all it offers.”

“I know, child, I know. But with age, comes wisdom. And a new knowledge has settled on my heart these past few months.”

“Wisdom, is it?” she snapped, nearing the edge of her temper. “Or perhaps a simple case of melancholia?”

He drew a long, slow breath. “I'm sorry I brought you into this life, Sarafina.” Lifting his hand, he touched her face. “I need you to forgive me.”