The Vampire's Seduction (20 page)

“Yes,” Melaphia answered. “It’s in place with the others.” She followed me down the hall.

“Has Olivia returned?” I asked.

“No, Captain. Neither has Jack.”

I hoped I knew where Jack was. All I could afford to do was hope, since I literally had a life balanced in my embrace.

“Draw a warm bath and help me get her out of these clothes.”

As I lowered Shari into the bath, her eyelids fluttered. As the warmth returned to her body she sighed and slipped away again. Keeping her face out of the water, I carefully rinsed the blood from her skin and hair, paying special attention to the ragged puncture marks in her neck. She’d been used ill, and not only by Reedrek. My fingers traced the long scratch—made by my own hand—that marred her breast.

“I’m sorry about Jack,” Melaphia said from behind me. “He—”

I held up a hand to stop her. “I know. I left you as a safeguard, not as a jailer. Next time I’ll seal him in his racing coffin and be done with it.”

“As you say,” she said. “But I’ve already worked up an
abide
chant that would make a man on fire sit still.”

The comment wasn’t lost on me. One might easily offend a backyard dabbler in the occult, but it didn’t do to make voodoo royalty mad.

I moved on to the problem at hand. “Shari?” I whispered close to her ear. She moaned and tried to turn her head in my direction but I held her still. “Shari, open your eyes.” Her eyelids fluttered but the tiny drops of water in her lashes seemed to weigh them down. I shook her slightly and put more force in my words. “Look at me.”

Ever obedient, she gazed up at me, blinking once to clear her vision. Her pretty amber eyes were pale, the color faded. Instead of normal white, her left cornea floated in brilliant red blood, courtesy of a broken vein. From the struggle with Reedrek, no doubt. My hunger stirred.

“Please save me. He said you would save me.”

Anger, my ever-present partner, reared up in me. Reedrek had set me up well and fully—teaching the girl to plead for her life in my name. “Do you wish to give up the light forever and live like me, in the dark?” I asked.

“I want to stay with you.” She arched her back upward, pushing her breasts out of the water—to tempt me, I suppose.

“Do you know what I am?”

She relaxed back into the water. Confusion crossed her face. “What do you mean?”

I bent closer so there would be no doubt; then I bared my fangs.

“No!” she struggled weakly. “Don’t let him hurt me!”

So she remembered Reedrek’s evil after all. I composed myself and made the offer. “If you become one of us, I’ll do my best to protect you.” Even as I said the words I knew she would be better protected by remaining human and taking her chances with death. The process of making her a vampire might kill her anyway, since the odds were against female making. I forced her to look into my eyes. “Do you want me to let you go, to leave you in peace?” I hoped she would say yes.

“I want to be with you,” she said, her voice fading. Her eyes closed. She was slipping away again.

Damn.

“I’ll need a blanket now,” I said to Melaphia. “Then a preparation table and candles for the ceremony. As soon as Jack returns we’ll begin.”

To thwart Reedrek, I’d decided to let Jack make Shari. Were I to make her, then Reedrek, as my sire, would benefit—and that irked me to my angry black heart. If the girl survived, Jack would receive the lion’s share of the power. My share would be of a lesser degree. There would be little left over for Reedrek.

Melaphia returned with a blanket and I lifted Shari once more—wrapping her against the cool air.

“Come with me,” I said to Reyha and Deylaud. I took Shari to the closest bedroom, waited for Rehya to pull back the bed covers, then placed my unconscious swan on the sheets. “Get in and keep her warm,” I ordered, holding up the covers so Reyha and Deylaud could lie close to her.

Then we waited.

And waited.

An hour later Melaphia moved into the parlor. “The sun is rising,” she said as she began systematically closing the heavy second set of curtains that hung from each window.

I had already felt the itch of it on my skin, the weight of the sun pressing down. Melaphia approached and stood in front of me, her hands folded. She didn’t speak the question on both our minds.
Where the hell was Jack?
Had Reedrek been waiting for him? Had Jack just dawdled the time away instead of doing what I’d asked of him? Having used up my meager portion of perseverance, I walked into the bedroom where I’d left Shari.

Rehya and Deylaud remained curled next to her, but now they were in dog form. Without moving, Rehya’s gaze followed my progress as I tested Shari’s pulse. Weak but still there.

I pulled back the covers and carefully scooped her into my arms. Then I carried her down into the vault, past the flickering altar candles, past the table where she would be killed only to eventually be called back to life. Melaphia arrived and opened the black-and-chrome coffin meant for Olivia. She fluffed the pillow and I placed Shari on the cushions.

I patted the cushion next to Shari. Reyha leaped into the coffin and curled up next to our fading swan. “Deylaud, with me.” If Jack couldn’t return on his own, then I would go and find him. Reyha whined once as we left the room.

Have I mentioned that Savannah is my city? I know it better than my own veins. I’ve tasted and tested every dark corner, every secret. Many people don’t realize that the older part of the city is basically a second incarnation built on top of the original streets and alleys. You see, the river that brought prosperity to the city turned traitor at times, flooding the streets, taking lives and ruining commerce. Spoiled goods meant lost money. So the enterprising merchants built a wall—a bluff, they called it—from the stone brought in on ships as ballast. A wall so high that come flood or hurricane, the river would never again threaten the heart of Savannah. When they reached a proper height, they hauled in river sand and filled in behind it, raising the level of the city by twenty feet in some places. Then they simply built a new city. Even now you can look into a few of the storm drains and see abandoned machinery or cobblestone streets from bygone days. Pirates took advantage of the secret spaces left behind, digging new burrows to hide contraband to be loaded later in private.

I’ve walked the streets—now more like tunnels—of the city below. I maintain a door to underground Savannah in my cellar. It’s the only way for a night dweller to safely move around the city during daylight.

Yet darkness is not the only thing to be found in the city below. Through the years since piracy failed there have been others who’ve found uses for shadows and secrecy. Let me just say that the homeless who huddle inside the known openings to fresh air are the least of the dangers. There are tunnels so close to Colonial Cemetery that occasionally one might have to step over a moldering thigh bone or face an empty skull grinning from the crumbling wall. Or one might meet the restless ones who won’t accept their fate and refuse to stay in their graves. There are sounds human ears aren’t meant to hear. Faces like my own hidden by darkness that humans are better off avoiding.

The true length and breadth of the tunnels was another secret I’d kept from Jack. The havoc he caused on the surface with his thundering automobile was enough to warrant my silence. I had enough to worry about without setting Jack on the underworld during daylight hours. But it couldn’t be helped now.

I unlocked the heavy iron door, opened it, and, with Deylaud at my heel, I stepped into the cool dark. A fine shower of shifted dirt sprinkled downward as Deylaud raised his head and drew in a breath of tomblike air. “Let’s go find Jack,” I said.

Jack

Now this was a fine howdy-do.

I’d found my way to the cellar of Connie’s building and managed to squeeze myself into a corner to keep out of the shafts of sunlight coming in through two ground-level windows. I shoved all the castoff flotsam and jetsam of the tenants’ lives into a pile and still didn’t have enough room to stretch out for a nap. Screw it. I’d have a hangover from sleeping outside my coffin anyway.

With nightfall so many hours away, I figured I’d just have to while away the time reliving that kiss. Hmm. What a woman. She was soft and firm in all the right places. And warm—living, breathing, mortal human warm. I could still feel the thrum of blood pumping through her veins. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the plaster wall, recalling every curve of her all over again, tasting her salty-sweet mouth.

I was settling into a more or less comfortable slouch when I heard a snuffling noise on the other side of the plaster wall. Rats. Shit.

I remembered a time right after World War I when I got locked for two days in a storeroom inside a hospital full of Spanish flu victims. I was looking for their newfangled blood depot, stumbled into the wrong room, and had to hide when someone came in. They locked the door on me and I was alone with my thoughts—and about half a dozen wharf rats as big as ’possums and just as mean. I had to eat those suckers before they ate me. And let me tell you, it wasn’t what I’d call four-star cuisine.

The snuffling turned into loud scratching. Geez, those rats must be as big as wiener dogs.

Quicker than you could say “Houdini,” a long-fingered fist came through the wall and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. Before I knew it, I was being pulled through an opening in the plaster like a rabbit yanked out of a hat. Was this what it was like being born? Holy crap, no wonder everybody on the planet suppressed the memory.

The next instant I was nose-to-nose with William, dangling from his beyond-human grip. I put my feet on the ground and he released me.

“For cripes sake, haven’t you ever heard of ‘Ready or not, here I come’?” I sputtered. “You could’ve at least given me a three count. I would’ve heard you on the other side of that wall, ya know.”

“Why didn’t you come back like I told you to?”

I dusted plaster off the shoulders and chest of his blue velvet coat and mostly told the truth.”By the time I got a chance to talk to Connie, it was daylight already. I decided to hole up here until dark.” Deylaud sniffed earnestly at the knees of my jeans. I scratched his head, and he lolled out his tongue. At least someone was glad to see me.

“Did you get the charm back?”

“I told her to keep it and wear it for protection.”

“Jack!” William glared at me, showing his fangs, then looked upward as if he could see into Connie’s apartment to where the charm was. For a moment I thought he might levitate and get it himself. He was not a happy vamper. “I should have known you would give up your protection for her sake.” He looked at me and his expression softened into resignation. “I suppose threats won’t influence you to go back upstairs and get it now.”

“Yeah.” I braced myself for another choke-and-dangle routine like the one when I’d defied him in the cemetery earlier. Instead he just sighed. I could tell he was mightily stressed, and then I remembered Olivia and Shari. And my old buddy Reedrek.

“Have you heard from Olivia?”

“No.”

“How’s Shari? Is she going to make it?”

“That’s why I came for you. I need your help with her. Come.”

He started off down some sort of tunnel, Deylaud at his heels, and I noticed my surroundings for the first time. “Hey, what is this place?”

“This is part of a labyrinth of tunnels beneath Savannah.”

I stopped in my tracks and looked around me. I was standing on a cobblestone street with the stone front of a colonial-era building on one side of me. An antique piece of machinery, a hand cart of some kind, had been abandoned on the other side of the passageway. Just the right size to transport a body or two. William sidestepped a shaft of light coming through a street grate above our heads. I could hear the sounds of morning traffic from the streets overhead. I felt myself go all whomper-jawed.

“What?” I asked feebly.

I jogged to catch up with William and Deylaud. “This is the perfect way for us to get around the city in the daytime!” I said.

“Yes,” William said.

It took a second for the full impact of his tone to register. Of course, he had known that all along. Had known it for hundreds of years probably. I stopped walking and watched the back of William’s pompous head. I charged at him just as he sidestepped another shaft of light, missed him, and ran right under the grate. A stab of pain knifed through my scalp.

William turned to glance at me briefly, but he didn’t slow down. “Your hair’s on fire, Jack.”

“I know that, goddammit!” I slapped myself on the crown of my head with both hands as I jogged to catch up with him. I’d never been one to use much hair product, but what little gel I had was obviously flammable. I decided to adopt a more natural look from now on.

“Why the hell haven’t you told me about these tunnels all these years? I mean I knew there were a couple of pirate tunnels along the river. We used to stash a little shine in them. But this—” I flung out my arms. “—this is something you should’ve let me in on.”

“What would you have done with that knowledge? Gone on daytime shopping trips? Lunch with your cronies, perhaps?”

“Hey! Real men don’t shop,” I said, indignant.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“And vampires don’t do lunch.”

“That’s right. We’re vampires, and we need our sleep for rejuvenation. I’ve only had to use these tunnels for emergencies, perhaps just a handful of times over the centuries. You needed to use them today, and now you know about them.” William dismissed the discussion with a wave of his hand.

I was torn between wanting to throttle him and being fascinated with my surroundings and the freedom of movement they represented. If nothing else I had to remember the way back to Connie’s cellar. The possibilities were absolutely exhileratin’. We came to an intersection; William kept on in the same direction, but I paused to peer off into the darkness of the side tunnel, wondering where it led.

“You can explore some other time, Jack. We have to see to Shari.”

It had been a very long time since we’d found Shari nearly drained. She was evidently still alive. “Shouldn’t she have a transfusion or something? Why didn’t you take her to the hospital?”