From Beyond the Darkening © 2008 by Kerry Allen
Chapter Four
She broke her vow not to cry. She was quiet about it, but in that still, stale space, her tears smelled like spring rain, overpowering the aroma of earth and mildew and long-dead things decaying in the walls.
Nate knew the smell of her tears. He’d always hated it.
She was crying the first time he saw her, sitting on the sidewalk with her freshly skinned knees pulled up to her chest, sucking air in the weird reverse-sob little kids did that usually preceded an ear-shattering wail. Like any self-respecting seven-year-old boy confronted with a weeping female, he would have run in the opposite direction—if not for the blood.
Three days into a fast imposed by his father, he was experiencing hunger for the first time in his life. It nipped at him like one of his mother’s yappy little dogs. In another day or two, the Big Bad Wolf would be chomping on him. A taste of blood could buy him a few agony-free hours. He might earn another week of punishment for feeding against orders, but there was a slim possibility he would get away with it under the circumstances. If the old man hated anything more than disobedience, it was waste. The blood had already been spilled. No one could begrudge him a lick.
No one except Amanda Tessler, who swatted him on the nose with a stern No! Bad vampire! before swiping her hands over her knees and smearing the remains of those precious red droplets on the front of her Barbie T-shirt.
His own eyes stung with tears over the loss, but her callous gesture saved him from much worse than an extra week of starvation. Qualified educators willing to work nights were hard to come by and highly prized in the vampire community, making snacking on the new professor’s kid an offense worthy of defanging.
That became the first of many times she knocked him off the fast track to disaster. He recognized a good thing when he found one and kept her close after that. Even when he ignored her precautionary influence and got busted, aiming her at the nearest angry adult deflected the worst of the consequences. Not even his father could resist those big, soulful eyes.
He should have known he too would fall victim to them sooner or later.
He cursed the sentimental part of him that wanted to apologize or hold her or threaten to lick her knees, whatever it took to make her stop crying. She forfeited her right to comfort years ago.
She certainly hadn’t recovered from her addiction to deceit, taking advantage of his blindness to conceal her identity. What kind of fool did she take him for to believe he wouldn’t recognize someone who’d been a more loyal companion than his shadow for more than a decade? He knew her voice, her scent, her energy that resonated at a frequency beyond the range of the usual five senses. His awareness of her had never been matched. Put him in her general vicinity, and he became a compass that always pointed due Amanda.
It took all the challenge out of hide-and-seek when they were kids, but that awareness made him confident he would find her when he set out to rescue her from the SPH.
Too confident. The clueless way he’d strolled into their custody, he might as well have been blind from birth.
As it turned out, his informant had misrepresented her predicament. She wasn’t a prisoner. She was one of them, such an alien concept, he expected someone to pop up and confess the whole thing was a practical joke gone horribly awry. He still hadn’t learned she could no longer be trusted.
She remained as able as ever to twist him in knots, though. He was indebted to her for rescuing him—unless it was a mock release, dangling freedom in front of his nose, only to snatch it away and laugh at his torment. The skimpy clothing was a vicious tease—but she’d known he was blind, so the outfit couldn’t be for his benefit. In that case, she had dressed like a tramp for some punk kid to leer at—an idea he didn’t care for any more than the others—but the punk kid’s cooperation had been a necessary part of the rescue effort.
But he wouldn’t have needed rescuing if he hadn’t needlessly rushed to her aid.
He rubbed at his itchy, empty eyes. The scarf binding them smelled of her, familiar, comforting, and no doubt the reason he was much more at ease than he should be about being helpless as a newborn. A couple of times tonight, he’d caught himself having fun, as if they were reliving one of their childhood adventures instead of running for their lives.
A week of torture should have taught him this was no game.
He first became aware of the trap when he regained consciousness in the midst of the first eyeball extraction. Since then, he’d had ample opportunity to contemplate every decision leading to his capture, only to realize there’d been very little decision involved. After years of practicing self-restraint, he’d reverted to impulse at the mention of her name. Amanda was in danger, action was required, so he acted, never pausing to question why he gave a damn that a traitor he’d excised from his life needed aid.
The runt who punched a hungry vampire in the nose at the ripe old age of five had enough guts to stand up to any threat, but she’d never had to stand alone while he was around. He rarely intervened, but he made a point of being on deck to lend his fist in the event the threat wasn’t suitably intimidated by hers. Sometimes she ended up scraped and bruised, but she bounced back.
What the SPH did to humans who sympathized with what they called monsters made their treatment of the monsters seem humane in comparison. She wouldn’t bounce back from being starved and blinded, dismembered, burned.
His fingers curled at the tactile memory of a smooth, supple thigh. They’d find plenty of ways to hurt her before disfiguring her too badly. The thought roused the same old protective instincts. No matter what she’d done to him, if they were caught, he would fight for her.
Someone had known he would care this much. They left him a trail of breadcrumbs so their needles and drills and scalpels wouldn’t lie around gathering dust while he wandered aimlessly in search of her. But who? Amanda had once known him better than he knew himself, but he knew her too, and she didn’t have it in her to plot her revenge for six years and then have someone else torture him.
She’d mull it over six minutes, tops, then go straight for his balls.
Even if he was wrong about her, as he’d been once in the past, it made no sense for her to stage his escape after going to all the trouble to capture him. Someone else had set him up, someone with intimate knowledge of the most effective bait to use. He didn’t make a habit of divulging his life history to random strangers and hadn’t uttered Amanda’s name in years, so it had to be someone who knew his history with her, someone on the inside. That escalated the situation into the realm of the espionage crap his brother was far better equipped to handle.
He almost wished he hadn’t told Leo to fuck off six years ago. It might be nice to dial a familiar number and say, Hey, bro, got myself into something of a pickle. Be a sport and bail me out, huh?
He pressed the heel of his hand to his left eye to suppress the itch that had developed to a full-blown squirm. Healing, he told himself, not maggots. He repeated that mantra over and over until he almost believed it and could think about something else.
Why didn’t she have Leo on speed dial? He had an obligation to her for the rest of her life. Even if she realized he was a nightmare to live with and left him after a week, tradition demanded he provide for her. She’d wanted that tradition badly enough to betray Nate. She wouldn’t give up such a valuable commodity just because she’d changed sides, and Leo wouldn’t violate custom by cutting her off. If he wanted out of the deal, he’d do it the traditional way—he’d kill her.
A weak gasp from the corner confirmed she was very much alive. He wanted to ask her why she hadn’t called on her sugar daddy for help, but that would reveal he knew her identity. Possessing that bit of information might give him the upper hand at some point. He’d rather not relinquish it yet.
She sucked in a long, wavering breath. Something rattled, followed by a couple of meaty smacks—like a flashlight being beaten against a palm.
He rested his head against the wall, a grin stretching his mouth. “Let me guess. The batteries are dying.”
A few seconds later, a feeble whine told him the batteries had moved on to a better place.
Good. Now he’d have company in absolute darkness.
His malicious satisfaction lasted all of three seconds before he remembered they were in cave about as spacious as an airplane lavatory, tons of earth pressing in on all sides and a house bearing down on top of them, with no easy access to freedom. Factor in a weakened vampire and a soon-to-be hysterical woman with access to a shovel, and the scenario became far less amusing.
By nature as much a night owl as any vampire, Amanda had always been at home in darkness. Tight spaces were another matter entirely. She relied on light to reassure her the walls weren’t closing in. Without the light…
She exploded off the mattress in a flurry of motion the room wasn’t designed to accommodate, especially not while occupied by two bodies. His outstretched legs obstructed her flight. She tripped and landed hard on his lap. Her flailing fists pointed in the wrong direction to inflict any damage, but her elbows got in a few shots at his ribs, and she kicked the hell out of his shins before he restrained her.
He wrapped his right arm around her waist, the other across her chest, pinning her arms to her sides. Trapping her legs between his eliminated the threat from her feet, but she continued to thrash, landing a headbutt to his jaw that sparked fireworks inside his skull.
”Stop it!” he snapped. “There’s nowhere to go. You’re being hunted, and you’ll never be able to climb out of here on your own anyway.”
She redoubled her struggles.
Okay, so reminding her of the extent of her imprisonment probably wasn’t the most effective means of calming her. Nothing he could say would accomplish that feat, so he shut up and held tight until she wore herself out trying to escape his grip.
As soon as she relaxed, he released her.
She twisted around and punched him in the side of the head.
She fought like a rabid wolverine. It took a few minutes of grappling to get her back under control, by which time he was breathing as heavily as she was. “You are so lucky… I don’t hit girls,” he panted against her hair.
She continued to challenge that principle for what seemed like hours before going limp in his arms. Her heart fluttered like hummingbird wings against his wrist, rapid and fragile. He loosened his grasp by a fraction.
Her fingers twitched against his thigh, burning up the last bit of fuel on loan from abject terror. “We’re going to die here,” she whispered.
He stroked her hair, damp with fear-sweat. Maybe she didn’t deserve comfort, but he owed some penance for the enjoyment he’d gotten from dropping her in the hole, knowing something like this was bound to happen. Deliberate cruelty didn’t sit well with him. “You’ll be fine.”
A tremor coursed through her body. “I can’t bear it for a whole day, Nate. I can’t.”
He recognized the plea for help. He pressed his face against her neck and let his thirst roll over him. He needed to feed, and depleting her would leave her lethargic. He’d be doing them both a favor if she slept the rest of the day.
He kissed the frantic pulse in her throat instead of sinking his teeth into it. Except for that first encounter, he’d never been able to view her as food.
When he’d dreamt of tasting her, it had never been her blood on his tongue.
Her shallow breathing faltered when his lips moved across her skin. “What are you doing?”
”Distracting you.” His hand skimmed down her body to stroke her bare thigh. Of course his motives were purely altruistic, no basis whatsoever in being cheated out of the one thing he’d desired above all else for a good chunk of his life.
Her muscles quivered under his fingers, stretched taut. She had enough freedom to move away.
She didn’t.
”I’ve recently had to adjust to blindness myself. Having something to look forward to helped.” Her legs rested on top of his. He brought one knee up behind hers, and she let her leg fall to the outside, giving him the control to spread her wide open by adjusting the angle of his thigh. His throat went dry at the temptation, turning his voice raspy. “Sex was on the short list.”
”Really not in the mood.” She blocked his fingers’ climb with her hand. “What else was on the list?”
”Blood and revenge. Since you have no use for one and no opportunity for the other, I redirect your attention to Option A.” He traced the line where her hand met her thigh. Her skin felt cool compared to his. Pressed full against his body, she’d soothe one fever burning through him while fueling the other.
He squeezed her thigh to still the shaking of his fingers. “Give me another couple inches, and I promise this place will be the last thing on your mind.”
”But I don’t like you.”
He laughed against her neck. Her dislike didn’t begin to compare to what he felt for her, that special brand of acid hate reserved for those no longer loved. He liked the feel of her skin, though, and the prospect of discovering where it turned hot and wet. For a little while, just once, he wanted what should have been. He could blame it on the drugs later, or mistaken identity or posttraumatic stress disorder, but right now, he wanted her—the deceitful bitch. “We’ll both pretend we’re with somebody likable.”
She withdrew the hand holding him at bay, all the permission he needed to proceed. She tensed when he traced the edge of her panties with a fingertip. Plain, boring cotton. Because she wore them, he couldn’t think of anything sexier off the top of his head. “What color are these?”
”Who cares?” She shifted in his lap to evade his teasing touch. “You’re not going to know the diff—”
She quit squirming when he cupped her with his hand, fingers pressing against the fabric hard enough to feel her contours, her heat, her wetness, her pulse. He wanted to tear away the obstacle, touch her, taste her, bury himself in her. But he also wanted to see her. “I care. I like to look. Women wear their clothing like armor. Watching it fall is symbolic of surrender.”
She made a soft choking sound. “You’re a convenient distraction, not the victor of the war between the sexes.”
”You have your fantasy, I have mine. Tell me.”
”Use your imagination.”
He gritted his teeth, frustrated by her refusal to cooperate. “Are you incapable of telling the truth?”
”What’s the matter, vampire, can’t get it up unless I paint a picture for you?”
Her ass was riding on evidence to the contrary, and despite his preference for cheerfully consenting women, that evidence became more incontrovertible with every belligerent word from her mouth. “What’s the matter, human, can’t do it with a vampire without pissing him off so you can pretend later you were forced?”
”I was hoping if I pissed you off, you’d quit acting like a virgin on prom night, because if this is the best you can do, you couldn’t distract me from a hangnail.”
He growled deep in his throat when she rolled from his lap. The protest turned approval when her hand fisted in his shirt and dragged him down to the mattress. He fell on her, all her soft places cushioning his landing. His mouth found hers like a homing beacon. Her lips smelled like strawberries, tasted like plastic. He rubbed away the last trace of lip gloss with his thumb so he could taste her.
Her tongue rubbing against a fang sent an ache resounding down to his toes. His head swam, his stomach lurched. Maybe from the drugs she’d given him, more likely his reaction to her, and he couldn’t get enough of what should have been a miserable combination of symptoms.
Her hand slipped into the front of his ill-fitting jeans. Her fingers explored the head of his cock, encircled his shaft, stroked him. Her touch, silken and cool against flesh painfully hot and swollen, added weakness to his growing list of ailments. He rested his head against her chest. “God, Manda, if I’d known you’d be this good, we’d have been in bed for the last six years.”
One sharp intake of breath, then the flashlight slammed into his skull. Stunned, he collapsed on top of her.
She shoved him off and kicked her legs free, adding a couple extra shots after they were disentangled. “You are such an asshole. I must have been out of my mind to think I could forgive you when I saw you in that lab.”
He caught her foot when it struck dangerously close to his groin. “Forgive me? Oh, that is rich. The way I figure it, you owe me a quick roll. It’s about time I enjoyed getting fucked over by you for a change.”
”I didn’t strap you to a table and mutilate you. I rescued you, in case you’ve forgotten.”
”I’ve forgotten nothing. I have a reminder of everything you’ve every done etched into my skin.”
She smashed his fingers with her other heel and scrabbled away when he released her. “I suppose you blame me for that too.”
No, the ridiculous tattoo had been his idea—and the catalyst for the ruin of their friendship. His seventeen-year-old genius in top form, he convinced her they needed lasting symbols of their solidarity. It was the last straw as far as her parents were concerned. Both his family and hers agreed his interest had become “inappropriate.”
Ironically, until they suggested it, he had never thought of Amanda as anything other than what she had always been—his friend and fellow adventurer. It never mattered to him that she was younger and human and a girl. She was game for anything, she wasn’t afraid to play rough and dirty, and she was always, no matter what foolishness he dragged them both into, loyal to him. He’d have killed anyone who even thought about hurting her. He hadn’t noticed even a remote similarity to the girls he chased.
Until they sent her away to that snooty school. As soon as she left, all that teasing about stuffing her training bra took on new significance.
She e-mailed him every day, miserable in the land of cardigans and plaid skirts, so he stole a car, drove to Connecticut, and busted her out. Alone with her, he had been too aware of her, their isolation, her youth and innocence. He’d been relieved when Leo caught up with them a few hours later, before he did something else impulsive and irreversible.
The next snooty school was in Europe. Transporting vampires across the Atlantic required special travel accommodations that rendered a covert rescue mission out of the question, so there she stayed, out of sight, out of reach, but never out of mind.
By the time he turned twenty, his mother’s hounding to settle down with a safe, reliable food source had become a daily occurrence. He told her he liked to hunt too much to give it up. He didn’t tell her he hated the tradition of being dependent on one human for sustenance, being responsible for providing for all that human’s wants until the day she died, a mutually parasitic arrangement. His mother could respect the thrill of the hunt, but never his disgust for tradition.
He welcomed the arrival of an ally when Amanda returned for his family’s New Year’s ball, metamorphosis from cute kid to breathtaking woman complete. She fit into his arms like she’d been made to be there, and she kissed him like she’d waiting for that moment for as long as he had. He believed her when she whispered, I love you. The same words were on his tongue in reply, not rash and heated, but honest and loaded with promise.
Then his mother turned to her flock of biddies with a smug smile. “Problem solved.”
The illusion shattered. They presented her to him like a damn hors d’oeuvre, knowing he’d gobble her up. He didn’t need another blood donor or infatuated clinger. He needed the Amanda that had always stood by his side.
Her disloyalty cut him so deeply, he hadn’t yet fully healed. “You betrayed me.”
”I loved you!” The flashlight bounced off the wall and struck him in the shoulder. “I came back to you, and you treated me like garbage.”
She’d earned it. After his mother’s slip, he shoved her away. Laughed at her. Told her and everyone else in attendance he couldn’t love her any more than she loved a cheeseburger. Said he’d pay about the same price to sink his fangs in her.
She stared at him, face ashen, hands pressed to her stomach as if he’d knifed her in the guts, then spun in a swirl of blood-red silk and ran. When she tripped, no one extended a hand to help her. When she made no move to get up, he shoved the gawkers out of his way to clear a path to her, too accustomed to looking out for her to stop cold turkey.
Then he spotted his mother bearing down on her, glowing with fury that her perfect plan had gone wrong, reminding him the fallen angel who conspired against him up didn’t deserve his aid.
He turned his back on her and came face to face with his brother. “What the hell have you done, Nate?”
The greatest source of his resentment until that night had been Leo’s exemption from maternal nagging. “You don’t have a domestic on tap. Why don’t you use her?”
”Maybe I will.”
The was his last encounter with Amanda, until today. When he couldn’t avoid Leo, he kept their interactions brief and to the point, always disengaging before he blurted out the burning question: How does she taste, you bastard?
He touched his tongue to his fang without reproducing the blissful reaction Amanda had induced. Someone had taught her how to give more than a vein. He’d been one thoughtless comment away from following in something far less savory than his brother’s footsteps. “You turned out to be quite popular with the whole family, didn’t you?”
”Like a rabbit is popular with a pack of wolves. Such a comfort to have Leo protect me from mommy dearest, knowing the only reason he doesn’t snap my neck himself is that he has a use for me.” Her ground-glass laugh, sparkling and sharp-edged, lacerated his eardrums. “As of tonight, I’m all used up, and he’s going to be angry enough to let somebody less efficient kill me.”
He scented more tears. These failed to move him. “Now you’re being melodramatic.”
”Right. Because Leo’s the understanding, forgiving type, sentimental to a fault, so tender-hearted, he ordered me to leave his baby brother to die.”
Not a surprise. Leo took tough love to the extremes. When he gave an order—say, for instance, Stay out of Nevada—he expected it to be followed. If an underling chose not to do so, suffering the consequences of the disobedience taught them a valuable lesson. Or killed them. Either way, it saved Leo a ton of time disciplining the troops and piqued the survivors’ interest in following his direction to the letter. “You knew what he was like when you fell in with him.”
”I didn’t fall. I was pushed. You couldn’t just break my heart, you had to do it in front of the whole town. You were the one who protected me from the rest of them. You might has well have declared open season on me. Every time I showed my face, somebody called me Value Meal and offered me two bucks for a quickie.”
His hands clenched the mattress, ancient fabric shredding under his fingers. Humans living among his kind were protected by law, and civilized vampires treated them with a certain degree of respect. The behavior she reported was more typical of savages who struck out on their own and left a trail of exsanguinated corpses in their wake. “Leo should have put a stop to that.”
”Doing so wouldn’t have been to his advantage. I had two options to spare me from becoming the community keg: Leo’s deal, or letting myself be set up as a domestic in exchange for protection. Since I didn’t aspire to be a victim or a whore, I chose Leo.”
Whore was an interesting word choice, coming from her. “You were willing enough to be my domestic. Why the change of heart?”
The silence thickened until he thought his ears would pop from the pressure.
”Are you suffering from oxygen deprivation, or did that bonk on the head give you brain damage?” Her voice quivered somewhere between confusion and anger. “You’re the one who explained to me the function of a domestic, and you made it perfectly clear you had nothing but contempt for them and anyone who kept them, that you’d starve to death on principle before you took one. Even if the arrangement didn’t repulse me and I thought being a professional artery sounded like a swell career choice, you’d be the last vampire I’d submit an application to.”
Confusion took its turn with him. Maybe he did have a concussion. He had expected that response from her six years ago. If she felt that way about it, why had she offered herself?
His head throbbed where she’d tried to crack it open. She never said, Have a bite and fork over my allowance. That was never her offer. The one thing she put on the table was love, and he rejected it because he’d learned to doubt that emotion, which in his family came not only with strings but also ropes and chains and titanium cables.
His mother’s declaration of victory wouldn’t rely on the knowledge of an unwitting pawn. She would have been just as furious with Amanda for failing to achieve an objective she knew nothing about. She had poisoned him with her obsession until he ascribed her motives to the one person he’d trusted would never share them.
There was nothing pleasant about his churning stomach now. What else had he been wrong about? “Leo’s deal wasn’t being his domestic?”
She laughed. “His tolerance for any living creature is twenty minutes, max. He’s even less likely than you to install a permanent human fixture in his household.”
In a few words, she spotlighted every flaw in his thinking. She understood the natures of those involved, while he based his interpretation of the entire event on one snide remark.
He had condemned her for something she’d never done. Humiliated her. Endangered her. Forced her into service to Leo, who had only one use for humans other than blood and who would kill her for abandoning her post. She had every reason to want him dead, but she’d risked her life for him instead. “Why did you save me?”
”I would have done the same for anyone. I don’t have it in me to turn my back on someone helpless, even if he is a jackass.”
He winced at the sharp pain in his chest. What did you expect, moron, a declaration of neverending love? You’re a charity case, and lucky she’s too soft-hearted to discriminate against the terminally brainless.
That soft heart was easily bruised, but she hadn’t been one to hold a grudge in the past. He would explain, apologize, grovel, and maybe they could… something. Anything but leave things the way they’d been, apart and hating each other. “Amanda, listen—”
”I’m not interested in anything you have to say, and if you put your hands on me again, Nathan Hilliard, I will leave you here and forget to tell anybody where you are. I’d prefer a cave-in and suffocation to your brand of distraction.”
She retreated to the entrance tunnel, consigning herself to an even tighter space to get as far from him as possible.
He picked at the crumbly mattress stuffing and dug deep within for a trace of the self-restraint that had abandoned him. Easy for him to decide all was forgiven, since she’d done nothing requiring his forgiveness. Easy for him to decide they should turn back the clock and pick up where they’d left off, now that he’d rewritten history to reflect the truth, which negated all his heartache.
Amanda, however, was entitled to every bit of ill will she harbored toward him. There would be no overdue revelation to make it all better for her because she had lived the truth, in which someone she loved attacked her and forced her life down a course that had been no kinder to her than he had.
Doing nothing didn’t come naturally to him, but talking at her when she refused to listen would accomplish nothing. Touching her would likely accomplish his slow and painful death now that she had a shovel within her reach.
A wound left to fester for six years wouldn’t heal in a day, especially not with the ham-fisted treatment he’d given it so far. He would have to try a more delicate approach, not push her until it hurt, take the time to fix things properly. He could be patient for once in his life.
The trick would be keeping her around for the recovery when she’d made it abundantly clear she couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
From Beyond the Darkening © 2008 by Kerry Allen
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