The Vampire's Seduction (43 page)

Everything went silent then, or perhaps I was struck deaf. Breathing hard, I could smell burnt flesh and scorched clothes. I watched in growing horror as my friends dropped away from Reedrek like dead bugs, their mouths burnt, their bodies limp. Anyplace his blood had touched them was blackened.

Reedrek pushed to his hands and knees, then to his feet. He was weakened but not, by any means, dead again. And that meant we were doomed—as, I finally realized, we’d been from the beginning.

The only members of our group left standing were those who hadn’t attacked Reedrek: myself, Jack, Melaphia, and Renee, who was hiding, her fingers clutching the colorful material of her mother’s skirt.

“Run!” I shouted. “Leave this place.” I shoved Melaphia out of the way. Then, with a shriek born of soul-blackening hate, I launched myself at Reedrek. My fury reached him before my hands did. With a surprised look, he stared down at the red mist pelting his shirtfront like horizontal rain before my hands clamped on his throat. As I pulled him into the air, the chandeliers in the room began to sway and twirl. Safely away from those below, I bit down hard, tearing open Reedrek’s neck but unable to stop him from sinking his fangs into my shoulder. Growling, we crashed into the barrier of the twelve-foot ceiling, rabid wolves in deadly earnest—sending the closest crystal chandelier plummeting amid the partygoers. Lath and plaster fell in a choking cloud around us as I did my worst to my sire.

His blood tasted like acid, burning me with the pure essence of long-fermented evil. No matter how much I drank, I would not kill him. I could, however, hurt him—slow him down. The red haze of my fury surrounded us and with the last of my strength I gave a gurgling howl and ripped again at his throat.

For a very brief moment, I tasted his fear. Looking for any advantage I shifted my grip to gouge at his eyes. A satisfying
pop
sent a gush of liquid over my right hand.

Reedrek’s talons sank into my jacket, ripping wool and linen. He managed to bare my chest as he flung me away from his face. Loath to take any more chances, with one striking motion my sire slashed the skin over my heart with fingernails that were still hot from his surge of power, meaning to rip out my heart. I could feel his fingernails sink deep, slinging my blood over the still bodies on the floor. But I was on his now blinded side and managed to twist away. I fell to a place next to my friends and covered the wound with my hand, but blood still gushed between my fingers.

Melaphia, keeping Renee behind her, moved to my side. She yanked the blue scarf from around her neck and pushed it under my fingers to stanch the flow.

“Now, Jack. Give me the vial,” Reedrek demanded.

The voodoo blood—Lalee’s blood—would make Reedrek strong again, stronger than he’d even imagined. I watched my offspring calculate different outcomes.

“Don’t you do it,” Melaphia said to Jack. “That blood belongs to me, to my family. You have no right to give it away!”

“Quiet, woman!” Reedrek ordered. “You have no power here.” As casually as one might swat a mosquito, Reedrek backhanded Melaphia. Then, to prove his point, he turned toward Renee. She made a small surprised sound as she rose into the air. Melaphia grasped for her hand but couldn’t hold on. Renee didn’t stop struggling until she hung suspended in the air in front of Reedrek.

He drew one edge of his cape forward to blot his bleeding, empty eye socket. “Your family, you say?” Reedrek asked, keeping his good eye on Renee with an unholy look of calculation.

“Here, take it.” Jack withdrew the vial from his pocket.

Jack’s mind telegraphed his alarm as he looked at tiny, helpless Renee. But he still lusted after the dark gifts Reedrek offered. I could taste the greed in his throat, and I could feel his remaining humanity, that which I treasured most in him, being shaken to its core.

My vision from the shells returned to haunt what would probably be the last moments of my overlong life. The vision of Jack, wearing my blue jacket, betraying me. Betraying us all. If Jack had had an alternate plan, he’d already failed.

“This is the real deal,” Jack said. “You can kill them later.”

So Jack thought to both claim his reward and have Reedrek spare his humans. Little did he know his grandsire had never kept a bargain. But then, I hadn’t bothered to educate Jack in the ways of the truly evil, just as I’d neglected to tell him so much else. And my human family of the present would suffer the same fate as my Diana.

“Uncle Jack . . .” Renee’s small plea seemed to please Reedrek.

“No, I think I will have the ‘real deal,’ as you say, and you can kill them now. It’s time to put an end to this rebellion of blood. You were made to rule over mortals, to make them your minions. It’s time for you to prove yourself worthy of the name
vampire.
Take the little one first. How is it the song goes?
You always hurt the one you love.
” He reached for Renee’s hand as though to help her, but instead, he casually ran his thumbnail along her wrist, opening the vein. Blood gushed, dripping down her fingers before falling through the air to splash on the floor. “Then I’ll finish your sire.”

Jack’s fangs extended. His large black irises made his eyes look cold and doll-like as they fixed on Renee as if he’d never seen her before. Suddenly, my line of communication to his mind broke like a frayed violin string, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, what he’d decided.

Then he blinked, and I knew. There had always been a chance he might betray me, but I would die with the conviction that he would never betray Renee and Melaphia.

I still trusted him.

With everything to lose, I used the dregs of my strength to reestablish the psychic connection with my offspring. I might help save him—or I might push him to become an evildoer worse than Reedrek.

Damn the consequences. I opened my mind to Jack.

Jack

The first explosion of William’s thoughts rolled over me so fast I could only gasp like a swimmer pounded to the sand by a tidal wave. The force of it sent me back in time.

“Come on, Jack, you must bite deeper, harder.” William’s voice echoed through the flood of memories. Me, with my dead soldier’s belly scrapin’ my backbone. Him teaching me how to bite, how not to waste time or perfectly good blood by being weak-kneed about the killing. He gripped the dying soldier’s hair and pulled his head back.”These poor souls are already suffering. You can release them.”

Hell, I’d killed for the army, why not kill for myself? I bit down like a tiger, wanting to please my new savior and needing to cure my infernal hunger. I could see in his thoughts that he understood I’d been starving most of my years on earth. He’d promised me more.

“That’s better,” he said, unknowingly giving me more praise than my bastard of a father had uttered in his whole mean-spirited life.

Next I saw through William’s gaze as he stood perched on the steeple of St. John’s Cathedral. I felt his need to protect and guard this city from the monsters waiting in the darkness for their chance to take over new territory. And, more than this, I felt his need to protect me. Not just from the other vampires but from the knowledge that they even existed. How many battles had he fought to defend Savannah without even asking for my help? Without my even knowing? For a blessedly short time I saw fiery eyes filled with hate and bloody jaws snapping. I reeled backward from the power of William’s concern for me and had to blink to focus on his living face.

Everything I’d ever wanted to know about when and why was staring back at me. There was too much to grasp all at once as it rushed into my mind. What came shining through the jumble of information the clearest was not a fact—but an emotion.

William’s total trust.

Reedrek’s voice fought for my attention. “He could have released you anytime he wanted. But he was determined to hold you for the entire two hundred years.”

I lied to protect you,
William whispered in my mind.

“What are you talking about?” A terrible realization teetered on the edge of my understanding. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to sink in, but it did anyway. My sire had tricked me. All this time, he’d had me fooled into servitude when I could have been living out my dreams.

Unholy laughter came from a distance. Reedrek. “Oh, isn’t this just too precious to bear.” He made a mewling sound like a baby. “I only wanted to protect you,” he mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “He plays the benevolent lord, but he’s no better than me. All he had to do is declare your oath discharged. Then you could have traveled the world as a vested member of our little vampire club. Ask him the real reason why he didn’t let you go to find your own destiny.”

Visions of hot race cars and even hotter Vegas showgirls bombarded me. All my heart desired. I did my best to ignore him and concentrate on William.

Reedrek’s mocking laughter hurt my ears. I battled both him and William for control of my mind. The part of my brain that was still Jack was trying to summon another memory—one of my own, not one that William had forced on me—to make sense of what was happening. A very old memory, one from my moonshine-runnin’ days that had tried to surface the day I was diggin’ into the oil pit. Back in the good old, bad old days, when I was happily unaware of anyone like my grandsire. William had come to me like a haint in the night, had warned me. What had he said?

William himself filled in the blanks.
I want you to know, Jack, that whatever happens in the future—that I’m sorry . . . that I truly . . . care about you.

Don’t trust Reedrek. Good-bye, Jack.

It finally made sense. William had visited me as a vision with a sentiment I had hungered to hear from my own father, but never had. I could feel the truth of the words, not like the poisonous lies Reedrek had told me. William had cared for me, and that was why he’d deceived me to keep me with him—to protect me. But there was one more thing I had to know.

“Why me, William?” I asked. “Of all the poor, dying bastards on all those bloody battlefields, why did you pick me to walk beside you?”

Reedrek stopped his braying laughter to hear the answer, making the silence in the great room seem like a living thing, a spectator as breathless for the truth as I was.

William appeared to be fighting for enough breath to answer. “Do you know what a gut-shot soldier always does, Jack?” he asked. “His last act on this earth is to use his ebbing strength to open his uniform and inspect his wound. That’s why they are found on the battlefield with their clothing askew, as if trying to scratch an itch. But that’s not what you were doing.”

“I don’t remember what I was doing,” I heard myself say.

William smiled a weary smile. “You were propped on one elbow, using the last of your life to tend an old man dying beside you. As your blood drained away, you were trying to lift his upper body and head so he wouldn’t drown in the mud hole where he’d fallen facedown.” William took a labored breath and continued, “That is how you would have died—in service to your fellow man. That is how I found you . . . why I wanted you. I thought the humanity in you could redeem any that might remain in myself. You and Lalee’s spirit are all that has kept me on the side of the light for the past one hundred and forty years.”

Holy crap. All this time I’d thought of myself as just a flunky. Now suddenly I was the savior. As I tried to absorb this, Reedrek shouted, “Of all the treacle-laced drivel I’ve ever heard—that is the frozen limit! It’s time to shut you up for good.” He dragged William from Melaphia’s care and bit down with fangs already bloody from the fight.

William seemed to barely notice. His gaze held me prisoner. “Here’s blood in your eye,” he said.

Drink it, Jack,
he said in my mind.

I pulled the vial from my pocket, popped the seal, and raised it in a toast to my sire and my grandsire. “Bottoms up.” I’d swallowed half of it before Reedrek could react. He came up for air with an ungodly screech. “You will not!”

He flew at me as I stuck my thumb in the top and put my hand back in my pocket.

“Here, take it, then!” I flung the vial at his chest—not the voodoo blood, but the vial of holy water Connie had given me. His greedy fingers closed over it, breaking the glass, spraying him and William.

Father Murphy’s law: It’s hard to aim holy water. And this holy water seemed to be high-octane. Reedrek screeched and began to twirl in a hell of an imitation of one of those Tasmanian devils in Saturday morning cartoons. Only this devil was shrieking and smoking. William writhed on the polished oak floor at Reedrek’s feet. I started forward to help him, but I didn’t get more than a step. What happened next spooked me good. First the smell of cinnamon and vanilla bean spiced with rum.

Lalee.

As Lalee’s pure blood mixed with my own, my arteries caught fire. If this was what happened to dopers when they stuck needles in their perfectly good veins, I finally understood what “getting high” meant. A soft chant followed the sizzle to calm my fear as what was left of my spirit grew taller. Like my body wasn’t big enough to hold it. Higher, higher. Soon I was looking down at the top of Reedrek’s spinning head. Shit. I’d faced all kinds of threats from some pretty nasty characters, but I’d never had to handle one on the inside before. One that could take me over, body and blighted soul, and literally make me ten feet tall.

But Lalee wouldn’t hurt me. She whispered under my skin like the spirits of departed family members living in the walls of their great-great-great-grandchildren’s houses. No, she wouldn’t hurt me. But she would protect her own, even if it meant scaring me into the next dimension.

After traveling through every cell of my body, her low, eerie keening gained power and came blasting out of my mouth. The sound had a strange effect on the scene below. Renee’s feet floated down to the ground and she ran to Melaphia. They both fell to their knees, looking up at me, their mouths moving like they were praying in church. William stopped writhing. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or merely unconscious.

One thought clanged through my mind.
I have to stop him.