The Vampire King (12 page)

Roman had gone on to tell her about the werewolves, their curse, and the Hunters. And this was where her anxiety clearly ratcheted up a notch. He didn’t have to be able to read her mind to know that much. But it couldn’t be helped. In fact, if anything, fear was the right reaction when dealing with Hunters.

“They’ve gone after werewolves all this time,” Evie said, staring down at the table and its half-empty dishes of cookies and fruit. “Why did they go after you at the coffee shop?”

“A lot is changing suddenly,” Roman reasoned. He’d been wondering the same thing, of course. It was something he would have every intelligent, immortal mind under his sovereignty working on by the end of the night. But for now, Evie was his primary concern.

“Whatever their reasons, Evie,” he said, allowing the gravity of his next words to be carried by the weight of his tone. “They will no doubt associate you with me now. I’m afraid I’ve put you in very great danger.”

Evie was so still and so quiet, Roman could hear his own heart beating. His fingernails dug into his knuckles where they were laced over the table. She was so beautiful in repose, so regal and silent, like a painting or a princess. Her long lashes brushed the tops of her cheeks as she stared at the table, her thoughts having taken her prisoner.

“Roman,” she said, lassoing every ounce of his attention with a single word, “you said that I was… not human.” She looked up at him now, her honey colored eyes wide and earnest, and Roman had to rather brutally force himself not to move over the table, grab hold of her, and kiss her then and there. “What did you mean by that?”

Roman swore internally. He’d known she would eventually want an explanation. He’d felt it coming. But he had no idea what to tell her. He could sense that she was different, that there was something incredibly special about her, but for the life of him, he could not figure out what it was. He couldn’t control her mind or take care of her fear or discomfort unless she actively let him in, he couldn’t read her thoughts, and he couldn’t make her forget. Her spirit literally felt as ancient as his own, but she was a mere thirty years old. Three decades.

He’d lived one hundred times that long. And he’d never met anyone like her. The closest he had ever come to feeling as suddenly and furiously obsessed with a being as he was with Evie was when he’d become enamored with Ophelia in 1798. And comparing the two was like comparing a candle’s flame with a bonfire.

Or the sun.

“The truth is, Evie, I don’t –”

He cut off in mid-sentence as a warning vibration thrummed through him hard, fast, and sudden. At once, he was opening his mind, sending a whiplash-like wave of his power out into the waking world above. His men were communicating with him, reaching out to him. He found Jaxon’s mind, Cade’s mind, and the others and he dove in without hesitation.

A body had been found.

A woman in her early twenties, brown hair, brown eyes… drained of blood and half-burned. It had only been a few hours, and already, alarms were being raised.

“Evie, I’m so sorry,” he said softly as he stood from the table and moved around it. “But I have to go.”

Evie blinked, her eyes went wide, and she was immediately standing as well. “What? What do you mean? Go where?”

He looked down at her and couldn’t help but take her in, from the heavy combat boots she wore on her small feet to the thick pink-peach sweater she wore that so perfectly touched on the slight blush to her cheeks and lips. He’d transported all of her belongings into the cottage, he’d filled the cabinets with food, and the cottage was warm, inviting, and safe.

“I want you to stay here.”

“What?”

“There’s been a murder and I’m afraid….” He trailed off suddenly, realizing at once that his fear that the killer was a vampire was the very last thing on Earth he wanted to share with Evie Farrow. He didn’t want her thinking of his kind as killers. It was true that Offspring had not always been under his command, and had not always been as careful as they were now. But he had worked very hard to maintain a sovereignty that was nothing like the twenty-four-seven blood bath portrayed in some Hollywood vampire fiction. And he didn’t want Evie thinking otherwise.

“What? How do you know this?” she asked.

“Several of my men discovered it.”

“And you’re communicating with them or something?” she asked. She was clearly still trying to figure things out. This was an alien world for her, but she was giving it hell.

“Was it the Hunters who did it?” And then recognition flickered in her beautiful eyes and she straightened, her expression darkening. “It was a vampire, wasn’t it?”

Now Roman swore out loud, but softly. “We’re not certain,” he admitted.

“You never did tell me how you feed,” she said. Her tone had lowered, her voice dropping to almost a whisper. “I mean… do you
have
to feed? Drink blood? And if you do,” she swallowed hard and went on, “do you kill your victims?”

A current of desperation abraded Roman, and his skin felt prickly. This was a discussion he had both known was coming and had tried very hard to avoid. Now he was faced with the worst of it when he had the least amount of time. He had never been more tempted to use magic on an unsuspecting human as he was just then. He might not have been able to control her with his inherent Offspring powers, but a simple magic spell and she would be in dream land.

But he held himself in check. Somehow, he knew that such a path was the wrong one to go down with Evie Farrow.

“I promise that I will answer all of your questions in short order, Evie,” he told her. “But at the moment, I’m desperately needed elsewhere.” He lifted his chin and asked, “Will you please stay here?”

“No.”

Roman stilled. He blinked. He hadn’t been expecting her defiance, though he wasn’t sure why. Given the fact that he no longer had mental control over her, and given what he’d learned of her spirit over the last few days, it would have been logical to expect it.

But this cavern…. It was almost everything he loved about life and was quite literally magical. Wouldn’t
anyone
want to stay here? Especially in comparison to where he had to go just then?

“What?” he asked, feeling completely out of his element.

Evie lowered her head and narrowed her gaze, piercing him with a look so severe, Roman was hit with the instant impression of strength. She was so small – but so tough – and he was witnessing evidence to that effect right now.

“You will not leave me here, D’Angelo,” she said softly, her voice so strict, so no-nonsense, it was as if she were speaking to a misbehaving child. “Over the last few hours, you have kidnapped me, used magic on me, and shown me that everything I thought I knew was real
isn’t
.” She paused, took a deep breath, and continued. “If I’m not actually in a hospital bed imagining this entire ordeal, then the fact is, I’m feeling unsteady right now.” She stopped, looked him up and down as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to say the next bit, and her coloring paled. “And… I don’t want to be a prisoner,” she told him. She shook her head, gestured to the house and cave around them, and added, “No matter how gold-gilded the cage might be.”

Roman gazed down at the woman who had turned his world upside down in the course of a single day and thought about her words. Not being able to read her mind was throwing him off of his game. Why hadn’t he been able to tell that she would see things like that? He wasn’t used to being in the position he found himself in now. He felt, for lack of a better word,
mortal
.

Evie’s refusal to stay alone left him with very few choices. He could knock her out with a spell, in which case she would hate him upon awakening. He could leave her here kicking and screaming, in which case she would again hate him. Or… he could take her with him.

Roman felt a heaviness settle in his gut. Again, he swore internally, the ancient words offering little comfort.

He closed his eyes and sighed. “Take my hand,” he told her as he held it out for her. “I will transport us again.”

Evie looked down at his offered hand for a moment, glanced back up at him, and then straightened, sliding her small hand into his.

The sensation was startling. Her touch was altogether distracting, warm and soft and almost literally electric. He stared down at their joined hands and allowed his fingers to close over hers. It was the most gratifying thing he had done in a very long time. He wanted to squeeze tight, use his grip to pull her into his arms, and never let her go.

With effort, Roman martialed his thoughts. He looked back up at Evie. “Please accept my apologies in advance,” he told her. “The city morgue is quite literally the last place I dreamed of taking you.”

Chapter Eleven

It was like being pushed through a balloon. That was the immediate and strong impression Evie got as Roman “transported” them from the fantastical cavern. It was uncomfortable, but not overly so. The feeling of being stretched and pulled and pushed intensified, however. Just when she thought she might say something, they were coming out of whatever space-time bubble they’d been in, and Evie felt Roman steady her with a strong grip as the world became solid beneath her feet.

At once, she noticed the mass of milling bodies. All around her, doctors, nurses, and a few police officers, some in uniform and some in plain clothes, froze in place. Some of them dropped the files or folders they were carrying. One released a coffee mug so that it shattered on the polished, disinfected floor, and one or two stumbled while coming to a sudden stop.

In the wake of the new stillness and silence, Evie exhaled a shaky breath and looked around. She recognized her surroundings at once. They were in a hospital, most likely below ground. The medical uniforms, lack of windows, and the over-bright halogens above gave her that impression.

There were roughly two dozen people in the crowded hall. There was a pair of elevators off to one side, a door leading to a stairwell, and at the end of the long corridor were a set of swinging metal doors.

Aside from the doctors and other officials, there were two other men in the room – they stood beside Roman, nearly as tall, almost as handsome. Maybe it was another delusion and maybe she really
was
dreaming, but it seemed that Evie instantly recognized that these men were more than human. She experienced another quick pang of resentment; for thirty years, the supernatural world had hidden itself from her no matter how hard she had railed against reality, and then in the course of one night, they’d appeared in force.

But overriding the resentment was the pulsing sense of danger Evie had as she took everything in.

One of the non-human men had blond hair and blue eyes. The other had brown hair and green eyes. Both sets of eyes were piercing and stark, the kind models immediately took to agents and that turned Hollywood stars into legends.

Evie absorbed very quickly, and then she turned back to the doctors, nurses and police officers in the hall. They were all staring at Roman, their eyes wide, their jaws open.

Naturally, Evie looked up as well. Roman’s own intense eyes were now glowing as red as stoplights. Evie inhaled sharply. The unexpected picture was beyond eerie, filling her with sudden and renewed apprehension.

The rest of the world receded as the face of the most handsome man she had ever seen came into sharp focus. Everything she’d “learned” in the last few hours ran like a loop through her head, and Evie had an epiphany.

This is no dream
, she thought.
He’s really a vampire.

“Evie, stay close,” he said softly. Then he spoke some arcane, strange set of words, and Evie felt what could only be described as a ripple in the air. She turned to watch in stunned silence as the people in the hall straightened, almost as one. Their hands dropped to their sides, and they stared straight ahead at nothing.

They were zombies, living and breathing.

What has he done?
she thought. How
did he do it?

It was highly upsetting to see other human beings manipulated in such a manner. This kind of thing happened in movies all the time, and viewers lacked the empathy required to feel anything for the victims on the screen. It was make-believe anyway.

But now that she was faced with it first-hand, she was shaken. It felt so intrusive. It felt as if their privacy were being violated. Their bodies, their minds – all of it, just
violated
.

A cold chill went through Evie at the thought. But Roman took her hand in his again, and this time the sensation she received when he touched her was not only shockingly sensual, but foreboding. A part of her wanted to pull away.

Roman looked down at her, his red eyes burning like Hell’s fires. His eerie gaze narrowed, his expression becoming quite grim. His grip tightened around her fingers as if he’d been reading her thoughts.

But he told me he wasn’t.

She had no further time to contemplate the upsetting notion before he was moving, taking long graceful strides down the hall toward the metal doors at the other end. His words replayed through her mind.

The city morgue is quite literally the last place I dreamed of taking you.

Above the swinging doors were the words “Forensic Science.”
Oh God
, Evie thought.
He really is taking me in there. With the dead bodies. The moms and dads and baby girls and baby boys who have all been taken before their times. Oh no….

Beside her, Roman stopped and looked down at her again. She met his gaze and watched as the red began to leak away from his irises, going from a flickering lava-like color to an indigo and, finally, to black once more. Endless, bottomless black.