Serafina and the Silent Vampire (11 page)

The woman from the Bells’ party, she of the black dress, wore a smart black trouser suit today, and there was panic all over her pretty face.

“You’re killing them all,” she said worriedly. “There won’t be any left.”

It was bizarre. She was undoubtedly dead, like him, and yet the sound definitely came from her mouth, her throat. It made her annoyingly superior. Because she could speak to him, but he couldn’t reply. She wouldn’t understand him. He battered his way into her mind; she didn’t seem to notice. It was as if her pathways to receive were blocked with rubbish. He thought of shoveling his way through for ease of communication. But for the moment, it seemed more important to hang on to any tenuous advantage. And if these vampires could only communicate verbally with each other, surely that
was
in his favor.

Blair let himself shrug, then placed the stake against his captive’s heart. His question was clear, even to the non-telepathic vampiress.

“Why shouldn’t you?” she said quickly. “Because we have a proposition for you.”

Blair curled his lip and exerted a little pressure on the stake. His captive screamed while the other bewildered vampires got to their feet, waiting, it seemed, for orders.

“All right, all right, listen,” the woman said urgently. “We don’t know who you are, but we get that you’re strong and much older than us. We’d like you on our side.”

Blair lifted his eyebrows. It wasn’t so hard after all. Centuries of silent if basic communication with humans made questioning her simple.

“Why? Because we don’t think you want to hide, feeding off human flotsam and leftovers. There are riches out there that could so easily be ours, that would reverse human-vampire positions and put
us
in control.”

Although she was still afraid of him, she spoke with increasing confidence, knowing she’d caught his interest.

“We don’t need to fight,” she said persuasively. “There’s enough for all of us—enough blood and enough wealth,” she added as he stirred. It might not have been telepathy as such, but she understood him quickly enough.

Slowly, Blair smiled and released his captive to wave the lady politely to a sofa. He was listening.

****

Phil, Sera knew, was well aware of his own superiority. He was stronger, faster, and far more deadly than she. So she moved away from the door again, went back to pick up her glass. As she’d known he would, Phil followed her, relaxing as she did, although he didn’t retrieve his own glass. She did her best to radiate submission.

“Vampires,” she said, lifting the glass to her mouth. The whisky sloshed against her lips as she began to pace around the room. “I can feel other vampires in the house.”

Phil inclined his head.

“Not friends of yours,” she hazarded, lowering the glass with no whisky swallowed. “Or of his. So why aren’t you down there helping him?”

“He doesn’t need my help,” Phil said carelessly.

“What did he say to you that I couldn’t hear?” Pausing for an instant at the dark window, she paced restlessly on.

“He wanted me to stay here with you.”

She kicked off her shoes to further allay his suspicions and glanced over her shoulder as she took another step toward the door. “Why?”

Sensation shot through her foot from the cold floorboard, up through her leg and spine to her brain, blasting her with vision.

A man. A young man, little more than a boy, a university student. His fear and horror tore through her before she realized what was happening to him.

She’d been wrong before, so wrong. Blair
had
taken life in this room, right here where she stood, in an orgy of bloodletting and death. Part of her tried desperately to move away, to stop the awfulness of the young man’s suffering, while her cool, thinking self wanted to know more. But it seemed she had no choice, for suddenly she was swamped with far more than the young man’s pain. She felt the sensual pleasure mixed up in it, his confused jumble of emotions that somehow included pity for the being killing him.

Rooted to the spot, Sera saw it all through the eyes of the long-dead youth.

His name was Jamie, but his new, sophisticated London friends called him Jay. Bright and bored in an age of experimentation that belonged to the young—the sixties—he’d been fascinated by these new people, Tony, Chris, and Mark, and their bizarre tales of killing vampires across Europe. They’d used his knowledge of Edinburgh to follow this vampire to his lair, where they’d told him they could kill the vampire while he slept. It was how they’d killed the others. But this one hadn’t been asleep. When they burst into the room, he sat on a worn, red-velvet-covered sofa and regarded them without obvious interest.

“Shit,” Tony said with the first hint of panic he’d revealed to Jamie. “Why aren’t you asleep?” As if it was a weapon, he shone his flashlight full in the vampire’s face.

The vampire had luxurious long and wild chestnut hair, streaked with auburn. A thick lock of it fell forward across his high brow. Under it, the vampire glanced around his visitors but said nothing. The only sounds in Jamie’s ears were the creaking of the odd floorboard, the erratic breathing of his friends, and the drumming of his own heart. The vampire’s silence was curiously, reasonlessly terrifying. The light in his face didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

“Surround him,” Jamie said, his voice too high with the fear he wished so badly not to reveal. But at least he hadn’t gone numb as appeared to have happened to the others. Obediently if hesitantly, they began to fan out, moving slowly to surround the velvet sofa. They all held sharpened wooden sticks, long and wicked looking. For the first time, a gleam of something that might have been amusement flashed in the vampire’s dark, almost black eyes, but he didn’t trouble to watch. This fact bothered Jamie. Was the vampire so powerful that he didn’t even feel threatened?

“Can you really not speak?” Tony asked, and the panic had gone from his voice, as if comforted by the vampire’s lack of obvious aggression. “Plead for your life, vampire.”

The spark of amusement was so faint this time that Jamie barely caught it, for behind it, the vampire’s eyes were dead. Weirdly, it came to Jamie that it was the deadness not of death itself but of utter misery.

“He
wants
us to kill him,” Jamie blurted. “He knew we were there all along. He let me follow him, left the door open deliberately.”

The vampire’s gaze focused on him, a faint almost-smile curling one side of his mouth. The black, dead eyes challenged, taunted, chilled. But Jamie had lost his stomach for killing.

Not so Tony, who used the vampire’s distraction to leap at him from behind and stab the vampire in the middle of his back. Blood oozed from around the stake, spreading over the vampire’s white shirt. He didn’t even scream. Tony leapt back, leaving the stick embedded in the creature’s flesh while Chris and Mark stabbed him from either side.

The vampire didn’t trouble to stand up. There was a glimmer of pain, perhaps, but he looked more resigned than angry.

“No, wait,” Jamie said urgently. “Maybe he’s sorry…”

The vampire threw back his head, dislodging the stake in his right shoulder. Blood gushed over his arm, and splashed onto his hand, shockingly red against the paleness of his skin. He was laughing.

Okay. Not sorry, then.

“Jay, now!” Tony commanded, reaching for the fallen stake. “He’s not fighting back. Finish him!”

A flash of movement from the door caught Jamie’s eye. “More!” he yelled in warning, just as the flash resolved into two more figures, a man and a woman, skidding into the room with fangs fully bared.

Tony, stake in hand, ran at them, and suddenly faced not the newcomers but their original quarry, who’d leapt so fast Jamie hadn’t even seen him. With an impossible contortion, he tore the stake from his back and hurled it on the floor. And before Tony could even have registered the danger, the vampire had seized him and bitten into his neck.

The female vampire smiled and strolled with monstrous casualness toward Mark. He stabbed at her, but she knocked the stake from his hand and reached for him. The third vampire leaned his shoulder against the wall and appeared to pick his teeth, watching Tony slither to the floor, undoubtedly dead. His sightless, terrified eyes stared at nothing.

Screaming, Chris charged at the first vampire who’d killed their friend and leader, and Jamie forced himself to help. It was no longer murder. They were fighting for their remaining lives.

Too late for Mark, who was thrown across the room by the vampiress who’d just drained him.

The first vampire backhanded Chris so that he flew through the air and hit the wall beside the third vampire, who stopped picking his teeth to snatch him up and bite into him. By then, the first vampire, their original quarry, had Jamie in his impossibly powerful grasp.

Jamie stabbed wildly at the vampire’s arm and shoulder. Blood dripped onto the floor, but the vampire’s grip didn’t even loosen. Jamie might have been a midge for all the good he was doing.

In a blur of motion, the vampire’s head swooped, and Jamie screamed as teeth pierced his throat. The useless stake fell from his suddenly numb fingers as he felt the strange pull of his own blood into the vampire’s mouth. It was gross; it was utterly, lethally terrifying, and yet somewhere, the sensation intrigued him. He imagined the blood rushing through his body, desperate to escape him and to feed instead the beautiful creature who was killing him. It wasn’t an unpleasant death after all. It was strangely pleasurable. Sexually pleasurable. His blood, his life was being taken,
he
was being taken, and God help him, he liked it. At least he’d die on a sexual high. Better than drugs, unbelievably better than drugs.

Abruptly, the pull stopped. There was more pain as the teeth detached from his skin, and he slid from the vampire’s viselike grip to the floor. Disappointment warred with desperate relief, because he was still alive after all.

As if it were a fuzzy dream, he watched the vampiress touch the vampire’s arm—
his
vampire’s arm—gazing up at him with serious, liquid eyes. She was the most beautiful woman Jamie had ever seen.

The vampire stared back at her. Their lips didn’t move; there was no sound; but Jamie realized that some kind of silent communication was passing between them. And whatever it was, the auburn vampire didn’t like it.

He spun away from her, and the third vampire was there too, waving his hand negligently from the vampiress to the carnage of Jamie’s friends’ bodies to the curtained window, as if indicating the broader world outside.

Some deep, powerful, emotion passed across the first vampire’s face. There was fury there and frustration, a sorrow so profound that Jamie couldn’t bear it and started to cry. No one paid him any attention. The vampires continued to gaze at each other. The woman touched the first vampire’s cheek, reached up and kissed him. She smiled with something that might have been affection. It was hard to tell. But Jamie thought she’d just asked for something unpalatable.

The first vampire walked away to the middle of the room. For a second, the other two looked at him, still communicating, Jamie was sure. Then they turned and walked out of the room.

The remaining vampire stood perfectly still for several minutes, his back to Jamie. Then, the vampire kicked a chair against the wall. The wood shattered. After the long, eerie silence, the sounds of the vampire’s fury shocked Jamie. A table swiftly followed the chair. The sofa flew back against the wall, landing broken upon Chris’s drained body. Jamie could only watch helplessly as the vampire indulged his orgy of destruction and finally came to notice his last breathing victim.

The vampire’s lips curled, his eyes flashed, no longer remotely dead but gleaming with blood lust as he snatched Jamie back up into his tender, unyielding arms and bit once more into his throat.

Jamie cried out, but he had the feeling his voice was now as silent as the vampire’s. There was pain and rushing pleasure and Jamie reached for both, knowing they were his death…

Sera gasped as the vision vanished. Shaken, she took a moment to remember where she was, to refocus.

Phil still stood in the middle of the room, watching her. He said, “Blair had this idea that I should protect you. If necessary. Is something wrong?”

As the present reformed in a rush, something fizzed inside her. A warning, because despite Phil’s laid-back approach, both he and Blair acknowledged danger from the visitors; determination, because it meant he deserved help. A strange, oddly triumphant warmth closed around her heart, because he was trying to look after her.

And yet she couldn’t ignore what she’d just seen of his past. He’d killed
humans
—admittedly, humans who’d been trying to end his existence, but nevertheless, the knowledge chilled her.
Why? He’s a fucking vampire!

She’d worry about it later. Right now, the vision changed nothing, so she thrust it aside, kept her mind deliberately on Phil in case he could read her leaking thoughts, while she again paced closer to the door. Despite the rapid events of the vision, she couldn’t have been “out” for more than a few seconds.

She thought quickly. She could use her moment of distraction. “I’m not sure… Who are these visitors? What do they want with him?”

Phil shrugged. “I suspect he got in their way once too often, and they want to kill him. A stronger vampire is too much of a threat.”

Sera kept pacing, kept her mind on her own personal fear and revulsion as she said slowly, “I don’t feel well. Maybe I should sit down
…
”

Phil’s distraction—concern seemed too strong a term—gave her the extra instant she needed. She’d already grasped the door handle and tugged before she finished speaking. Phil flew at her so fast he looked some monstrous, terrifying bat, but it was too late; she was out the door and dashing for the stairs. Every hair on her body stood up because she’d no idea if he would grab her and haul her back or just kill her for disobedience. She was depending on his own desire to help Blair and on his recognition that the three of them were on the same side—in this, at least.