I Want You to Want Me (8 page)

She noted a flatness in his tone, but his words held none of the rudeness of before. This tone was different, although she couldn’t begin to know what the difference meant.

“Well, given the way I was feeling, your actions seemed extraordinary and downright courageous to me.” This time,
her
gaze dropped to
his
mouth. His bottom lip was plumper than the upper one and sinfully sexy against the square cut of his jawline. Her hands knotted into fists. Lord, she wanted to touch him—and not just with her fingers. She fought the urge to lick her lips.

His full bottom lip compressed against the top one, capturing her attention, then slowly signaled to her amorous mind that something might be amiss. Her eyes moved upward, seeking his, but he wasn’t looking at her. He stared at a place on the floor between them.

She didn’t want this moment to end with him withdrawing, so she quickly said, “Okay, well, I just wanted to thank you—and let you know that I was really glad you were there.”

He lifted his gaze, then nodded, a look in his eyes that she didn’t quite understand. Dark irises shadowed with sadness. Or maybe longing. Or maybe just something from her own overactive imagination.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

She nodded, then lifted a hand. “Okay, I guess I will talk to you later.”

“Okay.”

As she turned away, she hoped Vittorio would say something to stop her, but with each step she knew he wouldn’t. So when she reached the stairs, she stopped herself. She glanced back at him.

His eyes were still on her, giving her a touch of hope. And courage.

“I know this sounds strange, but would you consider posing for me?”

V
ittorio didn’t quite understand what Erika had asked. Model? He shook his head slightly, revealing that he wasn’t following, because she added, “You know, model for a sculpture.”

One of her sculptures. His person immortalized forever. Except his person was immortalized forever already. A living sculpture.

“I—I don’t think I’d be a good subject.”

She moved closer to him, so her lovely pale skin and dark hair, knotted on the top of her head, glowed in the light from his apartment.

“I think you would be a wonderful subject. You have such a beau—an interesting face.”

She’d been about to call him beautiful. Not a word he’d ever use to describe himself. And a word that scared him, because he liked that she found him beautiful. And he couldn’t like it.

“I don’t think—” He didn’t know quite what to say.

“No,” he finally said, which he realized wasn’t the best response as soon as he said it.

Erika actually backed away as if he’d shouted his answer.

“Oh. Okay,” she said, making a valiant attempt to sound blithe about the whole idea. “That’s fine. I just thought I’d ask.”

He nodded, but she barely saw it as she turned and headed down the staircase into the encroaching darkness.

“Thanks again for last night,” she called back, again trying to sound nonchalant.

“Sure,” he said, trying to capture his own sense of indifference, although he could already hear her opening the door to her apartment, then closing the door behind her.

He stayed in the doorway, somewhat stunned. She wanted to sculpt him.
Why?

Then he grimaced. Why was he even considering the idea? Last night, he’d done what he had to do. What he’d have done for anyone. She’d been terrified, and even as cold as he could be, he couldn’t leave her shaken and panicked. But he’d known when he left that was the end of their interaction. It had to be. A clean break.

He’d wanted to talk himself out of what he’d come to believe about his past. But he couldn’t dismiss it—not yet. He hoped he would be able to, but his hopes weren’t too high.

He glanced at the sky through the windows. It had to be close to 7 p.m. The coroner’s office would be closed now.

He headed down the stairs.

Erika heard the porch door open and close, but she didn’t glance toward her door. She continued to knead the fresh clay in her hands, working all her emotions into the caked earth.

In the silence, she absently smoothed her hands over the existing curves of the lopsided bust, unaware if she was fixing the piece or not.

“I can’t believe I asked him to pose,” she suddenly announced to Boris, unable to continue her pretense that she was thinking of anything else. Boris opened one eye from where he lounged on a cushion at the end of the sofa.

What had she been thinking? She smeared more clay onto the torso of the sculpture. And didn’t she know what Vittorio’s answer was going to be anyway? Had she really expected a yes?

Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling they should somehow be together. Even though Vittorio had hardly reacted with joy to seeing her. He wasn’t as cool as previous meetings, but he was hardly warm either. Why was she doing this to herself?

She slapped on more of the softened clay, then used water to smooth it.

But even without the attraction, she knew she’d want to sculpt him. Something so intrigued her about his face and his eyes. She wanted to capture that. His expression spoke to her in that unidentifiable way that Maksim’s didn’t.

She reached for her sculpting knife, and shaved away some of the excess clay she’d just added, trying to get the shape she wanted. Wet clay splatted onto the drop cloth beneath the pedestal her creation was perched on.

Her hand paused mid-swipe.
But mostly you just want to be with him.

She had to face the truth. She wanted an acceptable excuse to look at him. To study the nuances of his features, the build of his body, the hints of emotions in his eyes.

“But instead, you just weirded him out. As usual. Good work.” She rasped the palette knife harder than necessary, gouging the side of her creation.

“Crap,” she muttered, then tossed the knife down on the table next to her. She reached for more clay, kneading it between her palms. She filled in the hollow.

She had to let go of this crazy idea about him being
the one
, her romantic interest. His behavior last night was simply what he’d have done for anyone. Nothing special. Certainly not a hint of potential interest.

There was a show to get ready for, so she didn’t have time to worry about him anyway. She was thankful he’d been there last night, but all other feelings had to go away. They had to stop. Before she made a pathetic fool of herself. If she hadn’t already.

She smoothed out the clay, filling in the deep nick she’d made. She wished she could erase her own feelings like she did flaws in the sculpture, manipulating her own thoughts until they disappeared, smoothed out with no signs of ever having been.

She reached for another clump of clay. She was going to do just that. No more of this nonsense. She shaped the clay to the chest of her sculpture, attempting to level out the female statue’s breasts. She would focus all her energy into her work—if it killed her. No more Vittorio.

Vittorio moved through the hallways of the coroner’s office. Fluorescent lights streaked the hallway in stark bluish light, and he appeared as nothing more than a shadow against the institutional grayish-white of the walls.

He stopped outside the door marked with a tarnished metal sign, the word
Records
etched into it. He passed through the solid wood door, not rematerializing until he was sure he was alone.

Then he appeared like fog, gathering and condensing until he returned to his solid form. He waited, expecting the dizzying disorientation he normally felt when shifting, but it didn’t come.

Because he’d fed from Erika, he realized, guilt stealing over him. He forced himself to ignore the emotion and strolled down an aisle of metal shelves lined with cardboard boxes labeled in alphabetical order.

He went down one of the middle aisles, pulling several boxes, flipping through the manila folders until he reached one of the names he was looking for.

The first, Jessalynn Taylor, twenty-eight, reason of death, drug overdose. Jessalynn had been a heavy drug user. She’d had two children, lost them both to the state. She’d been a stripper. Not a good person by society’s standards. But she had been good before her husband left her for another woman, skipping out on her, refusing her child support. He disappeared, leaving her destitute with no real skills to survive.

So with three mouths to feed she’d turned to the one thing she could do. Strip. And then the problems snowballed from there. It wasn’t an unusual story here. Nor was her death.

Except now, he wasn’t sure.

He sorted through the pages, looking for anything. Any comments and notations that might look out of the ordinary. He did find indications of some bruising and scratches on her back and arms. But they weren’t extreme and didn’t necessarily indicate a struggle.

He moved on to another box, rifling through, to find Angela Snow’s records. She’d been the first of his friends to die. Gone almost twenty years now.

Her death had been declared an accident. A fall down the stairs in her apartment building. She’d had high levels of alcohol in her system, which had led the coroner to pronounce the death the way he had.

Yet, Vittorio couldn’t shake the image of a struggle at the top of the stairs, then Angela being shoved, her body landing in a crumpled, broken heap at the bottom of the staircase.

He went on, looking at several more files, finding nothing definitive. But then he knew the individual he suspected of murder was savvy enough to cover her tracks. She’d certainly duped him readily enough.

Finally, he went to the section of the alphabetized files he’d been avoiding since stepping into the claustrophobic room with its towering shelves and the endless records of the dead.

As he walked down the aisle, the room seemed to tighten in around him, making it hard to focus. But he forced himself to go directly to the D’s.

Da-Dae
.
Daf-Daj
.
Dak-Dap
.
Daq-Dat
.
Dau-Daw
. He stared at the box he’d been seeking for several seconds before pulling it down. Crouching, he set the container on the floor and flipped off the lid.

With the faint light from the hallway filtering in through the small, square window in the door, he began to thumb through the folders, slower than he had with the others, until he found the one he was looking for—Seraph Davidson.

Date of death, December 25, 1998. God, had she really been dead ten years? He supposed it had been that long. Funny, it seemed like ages ago that he’d played keyboard for The Impalers, but just yesterday that he’d lost Seraph. He’d left New Orleans right after her death. Being here was just too hard.

He opened the folder. Pictures fell to the floor at his feet. He picked them up, making himself look at them. Pale blond hair matted around her grayish, sunken features. Her eyes closed, not showing her pale blue eyes.

He stared at them for a moment longer, then shoved them under the rest of the records. He didn’t want to remember her that way.

He moved on to the autopsy findings. The death was labeled a drug overdose. Heroin. The next form was a police report, stating she was found with drugs scattered around her body and a needle still in her arm.

At the time, he’d had no reason to question the findings. Seraph had a long-standing heroin addiction. She’d tried to get clean many times, but her other problems made that difficult.

He’d believed heroin had done the actual killing, but he’d known, even then, he’d been as much a cause of her death as any drug. He felt the same today, but now he wondered if he was to blame for other reasons.

Seraph, an angel. A name that oddly fit her despite the roughness of her upbringing, her lack of proper education, her propensity for overindulgence. Yes, despite all that, she’d had a sweetness. A gentleness. A lost, broken quality.

She, above all the others he’d tried to help, had touched him. Even though he’d known romantic involvement with her wouldn’t help fix her, he’d allowed it. She’d drawn him in.

So he’d begun to see her, and their romance was probably as close to love as he’d ever felt, in all his centuries. Maybe it wasn’t exactly love, but it was deep affection and a need to protect her. All too quickly, however, it became clear she had problems he couldn’t begin to protect her from—not even with his preternatural abilities. Depression, manias, even bouts of psychosis. Drugs were her mask for much deeper-rooted problems.

When she’d been discovered dead the day after Christmas, he hadn’t been surprised. And he’d been riddled with guilt and despair.

They’d had an argument, because she’d wanted them to marry. He’d told her that wouldn’t, couldn’t, happen. She hadn’t even known the truth about what he was. He never planned to tell her. And he certainly wouldn’t offer immortality to a woman who suffered like she did. An eternity of mental illness, drugs, self-hatred—that would have been beyond cruel.

He’d known for a while he should end things. But he always wondered if he’d handled the situation better than he had, would she be alive today? Breaking things off on Christmas Eve. It had been terrible timing, and he should have guessed she couldn’t handle it.

When he’d discovered she died, the overdose made sense. She’d always turned to drugs when life became too much. But now, he wondered. He read the coroner’s report. He studied the autopsy diagrams.

She did have fresh needle marks, but there was also mention of some bruising on her wrists, and two broken fingernails.

Vittorio stared at the notations scrawled in barely legible black ink next to a drawing of a body. Had she fought someone? Had someone killed her, then covered their tracks by making it look like an overdose?

A strange, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach told him, yes. Seraph hadn’t died by her own hand. But that knowledge didn’t lessen the regret and the never-quite-gone guilt he felt about failing Seraph. His feeble attempt to make it up to her by saving another long-dead woman. By saving them all from their addictions, their awful lives.

But he hadn’t saved any of them, had he?

He left the box in the aisle, and moved to find the last file he needed to see. Julianne’s file.

What was her last name? Simmons? Sinclair? Yes, it was Sinclair. He went to the S’s, and found the correct box. Her file was toward the front. Again, the first things he saw were photos. These were more gruesome than Seraph’s, Julianne’s death more visibly violent. But both were disturbing in their own way. More disturbing because of his suspicions.

The final outcome of the police investigation and the coroner’s report was that she’d committed suicide, jumping from the third story window of her apartment building.

He studied the autopsy report, searching for anything that didn’t coincide with the determined cause of death: severe head trauma and internal damage.

On the diagram of the body, marked heavily with the locations of her injuries, he found two interesting notations in handwriting much neater than on Seraph’s report. One noted bruising around the neck that appeared to have happened before the other damage. And the other was written at the bottom of the report. Material fibers under her fingernails.

Vittorio frowned. Material fibers? He flipped through the other reports. They had done an investigation. And forensics had determined the material fibers matched those of curtains hanging in Julianne’s apartment.

An image flashed in his mind, of Julianne clinging desperately to the curtains as she struggled against being pushed out a window to the street below. Julianne had been a slight girl. Of course, the one he suspected was guilty of her murder was slight too. But then, the murderer had vampirism on her side.

And determination. Vittorio knew full well how much determination she had. He’d experienced it for decade upon decade.