His eyes flared hotter as he stared into hers. "I cannot do that, Morgan. You"re too weak."
"Not for that. Never for that." She lifted her head from the pillows, using him as leverage, and pressed her lips to his. "Please."
Groaning softly, he returned the kiss, folding his arms beneath her and lifting her upper body to his chest. His tongue traced her lips and, when she parted mem, slipped inside to taste her. His breaths came harder, faster, and he slid his mouth from hers to trace her jawline down to her neck and kiss her there, where he had before.
He let her go, let her fall. "I can"t... "
"You have before. You have. I know it was real. It wasn"t a dream. Dammit, Dante, you"ve been with me, night after night."
"It wasn"t real. It was in your mind, in my mind. It wasn"t real."
"Then make it real!"
His muscles were so tense he was shaking, and his jaw was rigid. Then he glanced toward the window, and she followed his gaze and realized the dawn was at hand. "Tell no one what you"ve seen tonight. I swear to you, Morgan, if you breathe a word, you"ll die. Do you understand? I"ll have no choice in the matter."
"Do you really think I would betray you? My G.o.d, Dante, I would never-"
"You already have."
She blinked and realized he was referring to the film. "It"s not the way you think it is."
"You"ve told my secrets to the world, Morgan. Some of my dearest friends have died because of what you revealed about me and my kind in your films. I"m being hunted because of you, my every step hounded by that man you met earlier tonight."
She felt her eyes widen. "I didn"t know. I never would have told your stories, Dante, if I had known they were real. You have to believe that!"
He got to his feet, went to the window. "I have to leave."
She surged from the bed, weak, nearly exhausted, and clutched at the back of his shirt. "Then come back. Dante, promise you"ll come to me tonight. I"ll tell you everything, I swear."
He glanced back at her. "Or maybe you"ll have the scarred man here waiting when I arrive?"
"I would let him kill me first... "
She dropped to her knees, suddenly too weak to stand. Her head falling forward, she drew a shallow breath. "I would die, Dante, before I would betray you." It was a string of words floating on a breath, a mere exhalation, not even a whisper.
"Words I"ve heard before, Morgan." Dante knelt, clutched her shoulders, lifted her chin to search her face. Then he folded her to his chest, held her there with one hand, and took something from his pocket with the other. She saw it shine as it flicked open. A small pointed blade, like a leather punch. He drew it to his own throat and jabbed it in, grunting in pain as he did.
Morgan gasped, her eyes fixed on his corded neck as he drew the blade away and a scarlet strand of blood unwound from the puncture wound, trailing over his skin. She licked her lips. The scent of it touched her nostrils, and a feral l.u.s.t twisted in her gut. His hand was in her hair, at the back of her head, pulling her closer, but she didn"t need it She knew what she needed.
She buried her face in the crook of his neck, closed her mouth over the wound and sucked the blood from his body. She drew on the opening, her tongue darting to catch any drops that escaped her hungry lips. She lapped at him there until he pulled her away, pressing one hand to the wound in his throat. For one insane moment she fought him, pressing closer, clawing at his hand, trying to steal more of this drug she craved. She could have ripped his throat open with her own teeth in that moment, like a wolf. She could have killed him.
He held her off easily enough. But when she looked into his face, she saw the same bared teeth, the same breathless hunger, the same feral gleam lit his eyes. My G.o.d, he wanted to devour her in exactly the same way. Like an animal. Like a predator.
He flung her toward the bed, lunged out onto the balcony and vanished over the side. Morgan lay where she had landed, half on the bed, half off, panting. Her body was alive, tingling, her heart beating loudly and strongly. She didn"t feel weak anymore. She felt alive, more alive than she had in years.
This, she realized, must be a glimmer of what it felt like to be... to be what Dante was. To be a vampire.
She wanted it. Suddenly she wanted it with everything in her. She wanted to be a vampire. And she wondered if she would be, now? If drinking his blood would make her what he was.
Dante made his way to the house Sarafina had told Mm about with all due haste. He found her there, pacing, waiting for him, but he only muttered a terse greeting before moving past her into the bas.e.m.e.nt. She had tossed some blankets into a pair of crates to make do.
She was on his heels instantly, of course. "Where have you been? What"s kept you, Dante? Jesus, is that your blood I smell?"
"A minor accident."
"There"s no such thing!" She gripped his shoulder to stop him, but he kept moving anyway, climbing into the box she"d prepared for him, pulling the lid over himself. She caught the lid in her hands to prevent him covering himself fully and ranted on. "You know how easily we can bleed out, Dante. What the h.e.l.l happened to make you so careless?"
"I had a run-in with our scar-faced vampire hunter," he told her. Because if she ever knew the truth, she would explode. And nothing, not even her bond to their kind, would protect Morgan from Sarafina"s wrath. She was incredibly possessive. Not only of the slaves she kept, but of him. He was her only family. That meant a great deal to Sarafina.
"The scarred man? He"s in town?"
"Yes. So be careful." Dante gave the cover another tug. "The sooner I sleep, the sooner the rejuvenation process can heal my wound, "fina."
Sighing, obviously still filled with questions, Sarafina secured the lid over him. He found the latches that had been affixed to hook from the inside, and he hooked them. Then he listened while Sarafina made her bedtime preparations and climbed into her own box.
He lay very still, closed his eyes. Waiting. Sleep was a long time in coming, though. Even when it did finally sweep over him, he couldn"t stop the images from playing through his mind. Images of him-and Morgan. Naked, entwined. His body buried to the hilt in hers. His teeth sinking into her flesh. Her blood flowing into his body. G.o.d, he wanted her. He wanted to possess every part of her. Her soul. Her flesh. Her blood.
And he knew it would be worse now. She had drank from him not once, but twice. He had tasted her, and he knew d.a.m.ned well that he would do it again if he wasn"t careful. If he made love to her, he would drink from her. Drain her, maybe. He wouldn"t be able to stop himself. And in her weakened state, he would kill her. He would kill her.
G.o.d, he didn"t want to kill Morgan De Silva. He wanted... he wanted to love her.
Too bad he was incapable of loving anyone at all.
Chapter 16.
*Maxine and Lou were sitting in the hospital waiting room, where they"d been sitting for the past four hours. It was daylight now. Stormy"s parents had been notified and finally taken into a private room to await word. None had come. None whatsoever. It was the crudest form of torture Lou could think of. The CIA ought to use it. Just refuse to tell some parent how their wounded child was doing until they gave up every secret in their possession. h.e.l.l, it would work every time.
"I"ve got to get hold of Jay. Jason Beck," Max said. "He would want to know."
Lou didn"t like seeing his normally s.p.u.n.ky Max this way. She was pale and shaken. Like someone had hit her smack between the eyes with a f.u.c.king two-by-four, and no wonder. He remembered the kid she referred to. He had been the third part of their inseparable trio all through high school and college. "Do you know where to find him?"
She shook her head slowly, stayed quiet for a long time. Then finally she spoke again. "It"s probably just as well," she said. And it took Lou a moment to realize she was still talking about Jason Beck. He wondered vaguely how she"d managed to lose touch with someone she"d been so close to. But time pa.s.sed. s.h.i.t happened.
"Why do you say that?"
"Come on, Lou. You know what this is about as well as I do. They found out that I"d told you what I knew about DPI."
He averted his eyes.
"It"s the only thing that makes sense. They kill Stormy and frame you. It"s a message to me. A lesson for me. It serves to make sure I won"t ever tell anyone else. They destroy two people I lo-care about. Just like that Stiles guy told me he would. The question is, how does he know I told you?"
Lou licked his lips, lifted his gaze to hers slowly. "I made a call last night."
She went very still. Didn"t say anything, just stared at him, begging him with her eyes not to tell her what she had to know he was going to tell her.
"To the friend of mine who works for the CIA. I asked him to find out what he could about DPI. Told him I suspected they"d been running some kind of covert op out of White Plains until the HQ burned five years ago. I didn"t mention you or the man you saw."
"You didn"t have to." She swallowed hard. "I asked you not to talk to anyone, Lou. How could you do this tome?"
"Hey, Max, come on. I had no reason to think it would result in anything like... like this."
"No reason? You had one reason. You had my word. I told you they threatened my friends and my mother, and you went right ahead and-" She stopped there. "Oh, G.o.d. Oh, G.o.d, my mother."
She was on her feet and heading for a pay phone before Lou could stop her. He leaned back in his vinyl seat, pushed a hand through his hair. She was right; she was dead right. If it had been another cop asking him to keep quiet about something like this, he would have taken them at their word and done it. But he"d underestimated Max. Mad Maxie the conspiracy theorist, always seeing trouble where there wasn"t any.
Well, h.e.l.l. Maybe for once she wasn"t so far off base.
There was a dull ping, the elevator doors off to the left slid open, and Lydia came hurrying from them, eyes wide. "What happened? Lou, are you okay? Where"s Max? G.o.d, is it Max?"
"No, no, she"s fine. I"m fine." He was on his feet and met Lydia halfway, hugged her good and hard.
"I woke up this morning and no one was at Max"s. So I called your place and got some cop who told me I could find you both at the hospital. Jesus, Lou, I was scared half out of my mind."
She looked it, he thought, stepping back a little. Her hair was a mess, no makeup. She looked her age for a change, which was kind of refreshing. But totally unlike her.
Then she lost interest in him completely when she saw Max coming back from the pay phone. Lydia walked up to the kid and hugged her as if they"d been friends for a long, long time instead of only a few days. "Honey, you look like h.e.l.l."
"I feel it."
"How"s your mother, Max?" Lou asked.
"Fine. Maybe she"s safe down there. Maybe they don"t know where she is. Or maybe they don"t have the manpower to be down there and up here at the same time. Or maybe there"s only the one man, the one I saw. Maybe it"s just him, working alone." She pushed a hand through her hair. "G.o.d, I don"t even know what we"re dealing with here. I don"t know who to be more afraid of. The vampires or the vampire hunters."
Lydia let her go and stepped back, staring at her.
Lou looked up and down the hall to be sure that remark hadn"t been overheard. "Keep it down, will you? Someone will show up waving a one-way ticket to the mental ward with your name on it if you keep this up."
She glared at him.
"Will someone please tell me what"s happened?"
"It"s my friend Stormy. My partner in the business. She was found at Lou"s place with a bullet in her head. They left her for dead, but she wasn"t quite. They trashed Lou"s place, and they used his gun. Tried to set it up to look like he"d done it."
"My G.o.d." Her gaze shot to Lou"s, but then she turned it inward. "Wait a minute. Stormy? There was a message on your machine from someone named Stormy this morning when I got up. I saw the light, thought it might have been something from you, letting me know where you were, so I played it."
"I never looked at the machine when we got in last night." Max gripped Lydia"s hands. "What did she say?"
Glancing around her, Lydia lowered her voice. "She said she had an odd call from Lou asking her to come to his place. That she wanted to let you know, in case he was in trouble. She said he sounded funny." She gave her head a shake. "I think that was all, but it"s still on the tape in your machine."
"That machine records the time the call came in. Do you remember what it was?"
"Around nine p.m.," Lydia said.
She nodded. "It wasn"t Lou. Lou was with me, seeing a movie, and then sitting outside watching my place. Someone called her. Lured her over there and met her at the door with a twenty-two."
"Thank G.o.d it was a twenty-two," Lou put in. "Anything bigger would have killed her."
"But why? Why would anyone want to do that?" Lydia was baffled.
"It has to do with-" Max broke off as a doctor finally emerged from the room where Stormy was being treated. At the same moment a nurse came from the private waiting room with Storm"s parents behind her. Everyone crowded together in the center of the waiting area.
"She"s alive," the doctor said. "But she"s in a coma."
Storm"s father, a blond man whose normally healthy tan seemed to have turned to gray, lifted his head, met the doctor"s eyes. "Is she brain dead, Doctor? Just tell us the truth."
"No. She has brain wave activity. It"s minimal, but it"s there."
"How long will she be in the coma?" Max asked, stepping forward, clasping Mrs. Jones"s hand. "I mean, a day? A week?"
"We have no way of knowing when or... or even if she"ll come out of the coma," the doctor said. "But as long as she has brain wave activity, there"s hope." They all waited for him to say more. Lou knew what they wanted to hear. Exactly how much hope? Exactly what were her chances, and when would they know anything more for certain? He could see by the doctor"s weary face that he didn"t have any answers to give them.
Sighing, the doctor led them all to chairs, urged them to sit, sat opposite them. "Look, there have been cases where a coma has lasted months, even years. Sometimes they wake up, sometimes they don"t. The longer she stays comatose, the lower her chances of recovering will be. But there have been cases where people woke up after extended comas to make nearly full recoveries. There"s just no way to know."
"And what about when she does wake up?" Mrs. Jones asked. "Will there be brain damage?"
"We can"t even begin to tell until she does wake up, ma"am. Again, though, the sooner she regains consciousness, the better."
"She"ll wake up," Max said. She said it to the doctor, and then she said it again to Storm"s parents. "She will wake up, and she"ll be fine. They say comatose people can hear you talking to them. Is that true, Doctor?"
He nodded. "In some cases. I"ve seen reactions in the EEG readouts when loved ones speak to comatose patients."
"Then that"s what we should do," Max said, in typical Maxine-Take-Charge-Stuart fashion. "I think someone should be in there with her all the time, talking to her. And if no one can be there, we can have tapes of our voices playing, or music. I know all her favorite music. Nothing slow, though. I mean, we want something hardcore and powerful, like G.o.d-smack, banging in there. We won"t let her slip away. We just won"t let her."
"Some of those might be very good ideas," the doctor said. "Keep in mind you"ll have to give her a chance to rest in between."
"If she wants to rest, she can d.a.m.n well wake up." Maxine"s eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears.
Mrs. Jones cupped a hand to Max"s face. "You"re a good girl, Maxine. A good friend." Then the woman looked past her at Lou and lowered her eyes.
"You need to know, Mrs. Jones, that Lou was at my place last night. I wasn"t lying when I told you that. You know how much I love Stormy. I wouldn"t lie to you about this. Someone set him up."
Mrs. Jones nodded.
"We"ve known Officer Malone a long time," her husband said. "It would take a lot more than what we"ve been told so far to make us believe him capable of anything like this."
"I appreciate that," Lou told the man. "And I swear to you, I"m gonna do everything I can to find the SOB who did this to your daughter and put him away for a long, long time."
"Yeah. And so am I." Maxie sent Lou a look when she said that. And he knew what it meant. They were going to do this her way from now on. With his help or without it, Maxie was going to track down that screenwriter and pump her for information about-G.o.d, he could hardly think it without smirking-vampires.
And when he glanced at Lydia, Lou knew she was going to be attached to Max at the hip until they got the answers she wanted. This was not even close to what he had hoped to accomplish by bringing the two women together. Not by a long shot. In fact, his entire goal had been derailed by all this nonsense. He had fully expected Max to rea.s.sure Lydia that there were no such things as vampires and end that part of the entire arrangement. After that, they were supposed to get to know each other as friends and maybe later make a few discoveries on their own. The same discoveries he"d made himself, entirely by accident.
It was all blown to h.e.l.l now. Christ.