Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (11 page)

“
That’s why you’re getting out of here,”
she reminded herself reassuringly, comforting herself because there was nobody else there to do the job, “
out of this apartment, out of this town.  Just have to put together a couple of things and then you’re out.  Don’t ever have to come back again, not if you don’t want to.”

She stood a little longer, bouncing nervously from one foot to the other while she looked up at her building with poorly concealed trepidation.  Maybe it was just the massive case of the willies she had gotten from her car crash of a realization that the supernatural make-believe hocus pocus bullshit in the world wasn’t actually bullshit at all, that was doing it. 

Whatever it was, she had a kind of an ominous feeling about going in there.  She hadn’t ever been a huge fan of the place (who would be, when it was one step above the abandoned building homeless people squatted in?), but that feeling had magnified tenfold.  It was like some known yet unknown voice (little magpie, why do you let the world take you the way that you do?) was warning her to stay away, to forget about grabbing any of her things and just go.

Just go, that voice insisted, just go and get the hell out of here and go anyplace other than the one you’re at.  She might have listened to the (magpie) voice, too, if it weren’t for the money.  Megan was a naturally mistrustful girl and years of being shipped from one rank foster home to the next hadn’t done anything to improve her disposition. 

Because of this, she had always been against the idea of putting all of her money in a bank.  What she opted for instead was the old money under the mattress trick and a good portion of her last several months’ tips were stuffed under that flea bag thing up in her room.  She couldn’t just leave it there.  She couldn’t do it.  She had worked too hard for it. 

She could still remember the nasty attitudes, shitty tips and impossibly long hours that had brought her that money and she wasn’t about to let it all go because of a voice she may or may not actually be hearing.  So she took a deep breath, several, in fact, in the hopes of steadying her still shaking legs, and cursed her rotten luck.

She looked around her quickly, looking for...what?  She still had the feeling that somebody was watching her, but that didn’t make any sense.  She had understood it when she had still been standing in Philip’s gardens, she still thought it quite possible that he had been watching her from one of the hundreds of windows in the white southern style mansion.  But here? 

Just as it had been outside of Philip’s place she could see nobody on the streets near her and the people in her building surely didn’t have any interest in her or what she was doing.  It had to be close to three, maybe even four in the morning.  If anyone in her building was still awake they were probably busy drinking or doing drugs or having sex, any of the things people did that kept them up that crazy late.

She let out another string of curse words, just for good measure and an added dose of courage and then opened the door and headed for the stairs.  Her apartment was three floors up, which would have indicated the use of the elevator, except that the elevator in this building didn’t work and so, you guessed it, ladies and gentlemen, the elevator was not for her.

She didn’t mind, not so much anyway.  It was good for her, a way to get some cardio in on top of her cardio.  She wrinkled her nose, as put off as always by the smell of stale sweat and urine and other things she’d rather not think about, and did her best not to touch the molding, peeling paper on the walls along the banister. 

She counted the stairs, six, seven, eight, as she moved up them, an old habit she had developed when she was little and had been doing ever since.  She almost always made it from the bottom to the top.  The only ones she hadn’t counted all of were the ones in Philip’s home, the ones leading up to his “chambers.”  She had been a little bit too distracted to count all of those. 

“Hello?  Anyone here?”

She smacked herself in the forehead at the sound of her voice, feeling like a grade A idiot for speaking into her own empty apartment.  She didn’t even have a cat to come home to, not a goldfish, nothing for her to say hello to.  There was no reason for her to be talking out loud and the fact that she was doing it just proved that she had become more unhinged than she had wanted to admit.

She shook her head, and turned to lock her four separate locks securely into place.  Even though she was only going to be home for a couple of minutes, she would not leave them unlocked.  Not for a moment.  Not in this shithole.  Once it was done and after laying her fingertips briefly on each lock in turn, she smiled a satisfied little half smile to herself and turned towards her room. 

Not that it was much of a room.  This wasn’t an apartment but a loft, and her bed was really just in the middle of the one small room.  She liked to tell herself that it made things easier, made it a little bit less depressing.  She went about the business of grabbing her clothing from wherever it lay (closet rack, folding chair, mostly the floor) and shoving it into a bag. 

It was when she was in the process of taking bills by the fistful from beneath her mattress that she first heard the voice.  It was so startling, so out of place, that she got half way to convincing herself that she had made it up before realizing it was real.

“Ms. Wright.  We’ve been wondering when you were going to get home.”

“Holy crap!”

She stood quickly, made as if to head for the door, but one of the men in her apartment, the one she believed had not done the talking, stood in front of it to block her path.  The other man, the talker, started to laugh.  He clapped his hands like her attempt to flee had been her putting on a show.

“Megan, please, you’re smarter than that, aren’t you?”

She just stood and stared, feeling completely dumbfounded.  It was like being held underwater so that you could see the action top side but couldn’t quite reach the air.  To put it mildly, she was pretty terribly confused.  For a moment she thought that they were the men who had taken her behind the dumpster with the intent of doing god only knew what.

It made sense in some crazy kind of a way.  After all, what were the chances of her being under attack twice in one day?  But it wasn’t him.  The rational part of her knew it even if the little girl part that wanted things to work in a story where all of the puzzle pieces fell into place didn’t. 

These weren’t the same guys, they didn’t look even remotely like them.  That meant this was something else, another awful situation only this time with completely unknown qualities.  But what did they
want
with her? 

“Here,” she replied in a voice so steady it surprised her as she extended a fist with a wad full of cash towards the two strange men, “take it.  I’m not sure how much there is, a couple of thousand dollars, I think.  You can have it.  It’s everything I have and you can have it, just go ahead and go afterwards, OK?  Can we make that deal?”

He laughed at her.  He laughed hard, like he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard and she watched in astonishment.  Because there was something odd about these men, other than the fact that they were standing in her apartment with no sign of forced entry when all of the locks had been in their proper places. 

They looked...shit, they looked almost like they were out of focus.  It wasn’t the right way to explain it but she wasn’t sure how to do a better job.  They seemed almost blurry to her, the way it was when you looked too long at the sun and then tried to focus on something right in front of you.  She thought that part of it was the quality of their skin.  It was so perfect it was almost too perfect, almost looked pixelated. 

Maybe it was just a hangover from her already incredibly weird day, but something about them struck her as not quite human.  It was stupid, right?  It had to be stupid because not everything in the world around her was something supernatural.  But as true as that was, it was also true that some things were.  If she was trusting her gut, which was what had kept her out of trouble for most of her life even in really bad situations, she would have to call it.  She didn’t know what they were (besides criminals), but she was pretty damned sure that they weren’t exactly your everyday, run of the mill humans.

“No sweetheart,” the man said with an indulgent smile and a friendly glance at over his shoulder at his partner, “we can’t make that deal.  We don’t want your money.”

“Well then, what do you want?”

Stupid question, the kind of question the heroines always asked in B-rated movies, and Megan winced inwardly.  She would have hoped that she would be better than that if push ever came to shove.  People always told themselves that they would make the smart moves in cases like this but Megan was failing miserably. 

“Why, you, baby doll.  We want you and we’ve come a long way to get what we want.  And before you get all worked up, don’t worry.  We aren’t planning on hurting you.  Nothing as crude as all of that.  We’ve been looking for you for a long, long time and hurting you isn’t on our agenda.”

“Is that so?”

She wanted to stall, to do anything to keep herself from being moved to some alternate location.  She remembered hearing somewhere that the most important thing when it came to possible abductions was not letting them take you to a second place.  If you did that, you were screwed. 

But her mouth was filling up with saliva and she was also having to expend a whole lot of energy to keep herself from puking all over her floor and she knew even while she was talking that she wasn’t going to be able to get away.  She wasn’t going to be able to do it on her own and this time, there wasn’t going to be a Philip Smith to act as knight in shining armor.

“It is so, you’ll have to take my word for it.  And you’re also going to have to come with us.  You’re going to have to go to sleep.  We’ll wake you up when you're where you need to be.”  

She didn’t have time to speak.  She opened her mouth but she couldn’t get out a word.  The man who did the talking looked at his partner again, who in turn opened the palm of his hand and blew.  Megan saw a haze of purple sand moving through the air towards her at impossible speed and then everything went dark.

CHAPTER SIX

“Philip!  Philip, please, can you hear me?  I’d like it if you’d answer me.  Please, just answer me.  You’re-well, to be perfectly honest, you’re frightening me.  Just a little, but still.  Philip?”

“Jesus, Caroline, I hear you!  Just shut up a minute, will you?”

This line came out in a roar just as loud if not louder than the one he had uttered at his first glimpse of Megan making her exit and Caroline jumped again.  On one level Philip was all animal at this point, completely consumed by the Id (if you went in for all of that Freud crap and, having met the man, Philip wasn’t sure he was) and couldn’t hear or care about the fact that he was upsetting her. 

On a different level, the level that was always composed and maybe even just a little bit human still, he sensed that fear and knew that he needed to rein it in.  He had only lost his temper completely one time in the whole of his lengthy existence, and that had almost been catastrophic for more individuals than himself.

That time it had also involved a girl (for a vampire who liked to think of himself as devoid of emotion, it really was starting to seem like a certain kind of woman was his kryptonite) and now that he thought about it, that girl and Megan --no.  Not possible.  He really was starting to lose his shit and when it was lost completely, along with his grip on reality, bad things would happen.

“Megan” he whispered in a strangled voice.  He turned to Caroline then, feeling all rage and helplessness and wanting her to do something.  Wanting her to
fix
it.  Wasn’t that what big sisters were supposed to do?  Fix things that went wrong, make the scary things go away?

He knew she couldn’t do that, not with the two of them being some of the scary things, but she had to do something because this was starting to feel like her all over again and he was much stronger than he had been way back then.  The damage he might do could be more...permanent.

“I know.  Believe me, I saw it, too.  That’s what I needed you to hear, Philip.  It’s part of why I came here.”

“I didn’t see it before, Caroline.  I just knew that I was drawn to her, that I could feel her brokenness.  I didn’t see it then … but now.  She looks like her, doesn’t she?  Doesn’t she?  Am I crazy?”

“No, Brother, you’re not.  You’re not wrong at all.  She looks like Celia.”

His heart clenched at the mention of her name.  It was one he had spoken inside of his head many, many times over the years but never out loud.  None of his adopted family spoke her name either.  All of them knew without having to have a conversation about it that the topic of Celia was off limits. 

She had been the reason he had to be turned in the first place.  She had led him to the people who had stuck a knife in his gut and had crowed in triumph when the blood rushed out.  She had watched him lying in the street, had dipped her delicate little finger in his blood and stepped back to let her strange companions do with him what they would.  He had passed out before he ever found out just what it was they wanted with him and he had considered it to be a mercy.

The next thing he remembered was waking up to Antoine (otherwise known as Papa) explaining to him that, from here on out, he was going to be living in a whole new world.  That was when he had been forced into this life he was leading now and it had taken decades to get used to it.

In some ways, he was still getting used to it and that hadn’t left a lot of room for him to engage in self-discovery or understanding his past.  God, he really
was
a brat, wasn’t he?  Enough of a brat that he hadn’t seen that the girl he wanted more than anything looked like the sister of the one who had done him in.

“But how?  Goddamnit, Caroline, what the hell is going on here?”

Now it was his turn to pace around the room and Caroline’s turn to watch.  She watched silently.  She knew her brother well and that meant knowing when to keep quiet.  She knew that so well, in fact, that she kept her mouth shut when he tore behind his desk and took one of her cigarettes.  All she did was offer up a light and wait.  She was very good at waiting and Philip knew it.

It wasn’t like the two of them were running out of time.  He paced circles around the room until he felt like he could have a conversation without turning into a monster and then he sat back behind his desk.  He put the cigarette out in the already wasted glass of scotch and steepled his hands again, closing his eyes for (what, courage?) a moment and then looked at her, feeling very much like a little boy.

“Caroline?”

“Are you ready to listen now, Philip?”

He nodded.  He didn’t like the weak, pleading sound of his voice when he had said her name and he didn’t trust himself to speak without sounding that way again and so he said nothing.  If she had any doubt of his desperation to be in the know, however, she would only have needed to look at his eyes. 

Those wide, confused and, yes, a little bit (more than a little bit?) frightened eyes would have told the whole story quite nicely.  But she didn’t have any doubt, just like she didn’t have any desire to make him feel stupid for not having been willing to listen to her about anything before.  “
We all have our way of getting to a place and our own time frame in which to do it,”
she thought. 

Philip could see that she knew that and that there would be no “I told you sos” flung in his direction and he was grateful.  A heaping helping of humble pie would have been more than he could bear on top of everything else.  He was a man who was used to getting his way, for good or for ill, and the fact that everything had so suddenly gone fantastically the opposite of that had him shook up.

And of course, Celia.  The thought, even the mention, of that girl from long, long ago made him feel like he was attempting to walk on water without the appropriate skill set.  Caroline looked at him with eyes he could see really, actually cared, and then she started her tale.  Even for Philip, who should have known full well that there were all kinds of real things that most would rather classify as make believe, it was a tough pill to swallow.  Not that he didn’t want to believe her or anything like that, but it was a lot to wrap his head around.

“That girl, Philip.”

“Who?”

She gave him a patient, somewhat indulgent look one gave a child who hadn’t yet caught on to the most obvious part of a lesson and waited for the look of recognition that would tell her they were on the same page.  When his face stayed confused, she smiled gently.  She was prepared to walk him through the whole thing, if that was what was required. 

She loved him, he realized.  Not just because she was part of his adopted family and it was her job to love him, but because she
really
loved him.  He was touched, didn’t know what to say.  Oh God, how unaccustomed he was to feeling these bleeding human emotions.  He had shoved them down so deep, so deep that he didn’t realize they were still there as anything but an afterthought.

But shit, had he been wrong.  He had drastically overestimated himself (or underestimated, depending on how you looked at it and what your priorities were) and now he was realizing by how wide of a margin.  It was humbling, the most humbling thing he had lived through in any of the manifestations of his life.

“The girl, Philip.  The girl you were with when I first got here.  The girl you were playing around with up in your bedroom.”

“You heard that, did you?  Well, I’d say I was sorry, but we both know I’m not.  It’s not like I knew you were coming or anything like that.”

It was a flicker of his usual cockiness and Caroline rolled her eyes, waiting for it to pass so they could get back to having the conversation they needed to be having.  He shut his mouth immediately. 

Again there was that feeling of being a little boy in trouble with his mother.  His
own
mother had never even given him that feeling!  She had hardly interacted with him at all, and left it mostly to nannies who were too afraid of making him angry.  They had allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased so as to avoid losing their jobs. 

Caroline managed to give him that “I’m in trouble feeling” perfectly well on her own, though, no doubt about that one.  She was a fucking pro and he reminded himself for the millionth time that it would probably be best if he just kept his mouth shut. 

“You finished?”

“Yes, sorry.  Old habits die hard and all that shit.”

“Sure, I bet they do.  And you’re right, you didn’t know I was coming, although I’m surprised you didn’t guess that I would.  You know I can be pretty persuasive when I want something done.  I’ve been trying to get you to come around on this for decades.  You had to know that one of these days I’d get tired of waiting and switch to a different tactic.”

“I guess I should have realized that.  My mistake.”

“It is indeed, sir, but let’s not dwell on that.”

Now it was Philip’s turn to roll his eyes and for a second, it felt like things were back in balance.  They were in their groove, the good one instead of the bad, which they were at least as practiced at.  It was a feeling that was fleeting but it was enough to relieve Philip of some of his jitters.  He felt a hell of a lot more confident that he was going to be able to do whatever might be required of him in the near future and he felt more able to hear the things Caroline had come to say.

It had taken a long, long time, but he really thought he was ready.

“So the girl.  She must have struck you as special, right?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because, Philip, she was here.  I know how you are about letting people inside of this place.  Everyone knows.  Christ, you’re notorious in this area.  Or at least your house is.”

“Really?” 

This one wasn’t a joke.  Even though what she was saying was not only true but also a large part of why Megan had come back to him to begin with, he honestly hadn’t known about the reputation he had gained.  He had been that removed from his life and from the humans he was living amongst.

“Yes, Brother, really.  Leave it to you to gain the reputation for having the neighborhood haunted house on top of already being a vampire.”

“What can I say?  I’m an overachiever.”

“Right,” she said dryly, “always the overachiever.  That’s exactly what you’ve been.  But the girl, Philip.  You let her in.  Why?”

“I don’t know.  I mean I do, but it’s difficult.  It’s difficult to put into words.”

“Try though, will you?  I need you to try.  It’s very important.”

He took a deep breath, trying to draw up all of the things that had made him feel something for her before they had ever met.  What was it he had been doing?  Was it the walk?  Had it really been only on that evening walk that this had begun? 

It seemed impossible.  Even for a man whose concept of time was entirely different from most, it felt like that was impossible.  He had been walking and saw a group of assholes trying to hurt somebody and instead of staying out of it as he usually would have, he had stepped in. 

“She seemed broken,” he whispered, not even sure that he was speaking out loud, “she seemed broken and that was the thing she knew about herself but she also felt strong.  She felt incredibly strong and that was the thing I’m not sure she really understood.  OK?  Does that explain it?  Because it’s going to have to do.  I don’t have any other way to tell you.”

“Is her name Megan?  Megan Wright?”

He had the strangest disembodied feeling when she said that.  Had she heard the name from him somehow?  Had he spoken it while she was there?  Had she been there to hear him speak it without knowing?  No, he didn’t think so.  In fact he knew that hadn’t been the case.  She had told him her full name when they had still been in the alleyway and that had been the only time she had spoken it.

Nevertheless, Caroline knew.  She knew, and that meant that there was something important Caroline knew about Megan and he did not.  How that might be true, he had no idea.