Books by Maggie Shayne (175 page)

She slept heavily, late into the afternoon. But when Morgan finally did wake, she woke all at once. Her eyes opened wide, and she sat up with a gasp, as if something had shocked her out of a deep sleep.

Nothing had. She sat there blinking, pressing her hand to her forehead in anticipation of the rush of dizziness that always came when she sat up too suddenly, or stood up too suddenly, or ran up the stairs, or a thousand other things.

It didn't come, though. And as she sat there, she slowly became aware of the way she
felt
. She felt… better. Almost good. Frowning, she flung her covers back and got to her feet, testing her balance, waiting for the weakness. It occurred to her that she didn't remember getting into bed last night. In fact, the last thing she remembered was the bath, and…and then the dream.

Closing her eyes slowly, she let her breath rush from her lips. Dante. He had come to her again in her dreams. Squeezing her eyes a little tighter against the rush of sweet pain the memory brought, she tried to recall the details to her mind. But nothing came clearly. Just the memory of his voice, speaking in its deep velvety hush, soothing her. His hand, cool on her face. His nearness. His
realness
.

Oh, and his taste!

God, had she really dreamt
that
?

She was losing it, she knew that. Completely enmeshed in the life of a man who didn't exist. Living his stories by day, dreaming of him by night. My God, she was an acclaimed screenwriter. And yet she didn't care. She cared about nothing except him, a man who did not—who
could
not—exist!

Something compelled her to check the French doors that led out onto her balcony before she did anything else. They were locked. From the inside. Of course they were. What had she expected? Sighing, she turned and walked into the bathroom.

She stopped in the doorway, staring in at a tub still full of water. "That's so odd." More than odd, a voice in her mind warned. It was completely unlike her to leave water in the tub. She was meticulous about this house, had been ever since she had first come to know its one-time owner. To her, this place was Dante's headstone. His memorial. His marker. She honored it.

Another sign of her looming nervous breakdown, she supposed. And what on earth had possessed her to sleep all day long? Hell, she shouldn't complain. As good as she felt, she would be able to make up for lost time long into the night.

Heading back into her bedroom, she decided to get out of the house for a little while. Outside, in the brisk spring air, maybe go for a walk down the beach and into the Norman Rockwell town a mile away. It would do her good. Besides, she couldn't remember the last time she had felt capable of walking on the beach.

She showered quickly, threw on a pair of jeans and a cozy sweater, dressed her feet in a pair of white ankle socks and lightweight tennis shoes. She only towel dried her hair, then left it loose. And she grabbed a handbag she rarely used, and a jacket, just in case.

Then she trotted down the wide staircase with a sense of anticipation she couldn't explain and didn't want to. At the bottom, she caught herself, slowed her pace, mentally reminding herself that she would be breathless and panting if she didn't She wasn't, though. Her heart wasn't even pounding hard.

Maybe she was getting better. Maybe the sea air or those herbal supplements she'd been taking were finally kicking in. Maybe…

She walked briskly through the house, out the back door and down across the sloping green lawn toward the cliffs. For a moment she simply stood there, staring out at the horizon. The sun was setting on the other side of the world. If she were on the West Coast, she could watch it go down over the ocean. A huge blazing ball of fire, quenching itself slowly in the cool embrace of the sea. She hadn't watched the sun set over the Pacific in years. But she could watch it rise over the Atlantic. And tonight she could watch the darkness gradually stealing over the water, changing its color, as the sun set far, far behind her.

She thought about the words that could capture such a sight and describe it. The way the water kept changing, racing, it seemed to stay a shade darker than the sky. The sky went from robin's egg to lilac, navy to midnight blue. The sea from turquoise to purple to ebony.

The wind picked up as the sun sank lower. Salty and ever cooler, it pushed Morgan teasingly, daring her to push back. She stood there for a long time as the first few stars winked to life in the darkening sky. Sighing in appreciation, she inhaled the night air. It tasted good. She wasn't ready to go in just yet. Turning, she headed down the path along the edge of the cliffs to where it rolled downward to the shore at a gentler angle. When she reached the level of the shore, she followed the stony, sandy shoreline southward toward town.

Easton was small. Picturesque, but not enough so that it had become a tourist trap—not yet, at least. The sidewalks tended to roll up early. Morgan veered away from the beach onto the town's main road, just north of the downtown area. She took the sidewalk and walked along, looking in the shop windows, most of which were already closed.

A crowd drew her attention, and she glanced ahead, saw the line forming outside the movie theater, its small, lighted marquee above their heads. The theater was small, two screens, a couple of hundred seats. No surround-sound or giant screen. It was closed until showtime, and the doors opened a half hour before each show and not a minute sooner.

Glancing up at the scrolling marquee, Morgan couldn't help but smile. Her latest film was showing, and underneath the title the colored lights spelled out a message that scrolled past repeatedly. "Easton's own Morgan De Silva has earned a Best Screenplay nomination! See the film tonight!"

She blinked happily. Gee, it seemed she was something of a celebrity around town. Odd that no one had been out to the house to bother her. Of course, she kept a very low profile, rarely ventured out, had an unlisted phone number and a whole lot of electronic security. Maybe people just respected each other's privacy out here?

There had to be more to it than that. Part of her knew what, but most of her refused to acknowledge what that part of her knew. It was silly to believe that people avoided going anywhere near her house because it still emanated the predatory energy of the man who had once inhabited it.

She still carried her jacket. Now she put it on, tugging up its lightweight hood and tucking her long hair inside it. She dug into her purse for the case that held her designer sunglasses and slipped them on, as well. Then she moved ahead and took her spot at the end of the line.

She felt a shiver go up her spine, as if a cold breath had just whispered across her nape, and she turned fast. But no one stood behind her. There was someone standing on the sidewalk, though, several yards away, in the direction from which she had come. A man. He stood in the shadows, all the way at the end of the block, on the corner. And the moment she looked his way, he slipped around the corner and out of sight.

His stance… his silhouette, nothing but a dark shape in the night. And yet she thought… No. She was letting her imagination run away with her again.

"Miss?"

She turned, realized it was her turn to step up to the ticket window. "Sorry. One please, for
Twilight Hunger
." She slid a ten across the counter, waited for the change, which was a crisp clean five with her
ticket
on top. She'd been out so few times since coming here mat the low
ticket
prices
still
surprised her. She tucked the five in her jeans pocket and held on to the ticket as she moved inside.

She got a seat in the back and sat quietly while the previews began to roll.

Morgan had thought she was the last one in, but the doors opened a few minutes into the previews, and someone else entered. Again that chill danced over her spine, and Morgan turned to look his way.

He was already making his way to the opposite side of the theater, but, like her, he took a seat in the back row. He wore a long coat with its collar turned up around his face, and he, too, had dark glasses.

It was foolish to think of Dante when she saw the stranger. It was just some other lonely soul who preferred to keep his identity to himself. Dante didn't exist. The Dante of those journals, the one who haunted her mind, had
never
existed. Only a slightly deranged man with a wild imagination and an excellent way with words. The Dante whose life was about to unfold on the screen at the far end of the room was a fictional character. A figment of his creator's imagination, enhanced, perhaps, by Morgan's own. But he wasn't real. And she had to get that through her head. He was not real.

Just because she'd been having vivid, visceral dreams about him…

And just because she had hallucinated those marks on her neck that
night
…

They were there
! her mind insisted.
I checked in the bedroom mirror, and they were there
.

But gone without a trace in the morning, she reminded herself. And as vivid as her dreams had been lately, how could she be so sure that seeing those marks hadn't been just another part of one of them? "Dante isn't real," she whispered to herself. "And he most certainly isn't sitting in this dark theater, watching me watch this film."

Why, then, did she feel herself sinking more deeply into her seat as his story began to play out for the audience—and as the words across the screen told them all that she, Morgan De Silva, had created it?

Lou got a call before Max could show him what she had on the CD, and then he managed to avoid her for a couple of days—hell, she wasn't even sure why, unless he was doing some research on his own.

Finally she caught him by waiting for him at his apartment after his shift. And then she sat him down and made him look at his computer while she manned the mouse and showed him the vampire files of the organization known as DPI.

When they finished, Lou looked as if Max had popped him between the eyes with a two-by-four. He sat there blinking at the computer screen long after she had closed the file and removed the CD from the drive.

"Do you think if you stare at Bill Gates' brainchild long enough you'll find your way back to that logical world where everything makes sense?"

He glanced at her vaguely.

"Believe me, it doesn't work. I spent a couple of hours staring at the Windows logo myself after I saw what was on that CD. It didn't help a bit."

"It's nuts. It's a prank."

"The man I saw outside the fire that night was no prank, Lou. He was real. And he dropped the CD and the ID badge. That place, that so-called research center—it was for research, all right On vampires."

He shook his head.

"I never told you what happened the next morning. The morning after the fire."

"Something happened the next morning?"

"I had an envelope delivered to my front door."

His brows rose now as he studied her. "What was in it?"

"Photos. My friends, Jason Beck, asleep in his bed, and Stormy in her own shower. And there was one of my mother, in the parking garage at work. It had been taken that morning."

"Any note?"

She shook her head. "No, he called instead."

"He
called
you?"

Maxine nodded. Lou was getting riled now. She had known he would. He was the most laid-back guy on the planet until someone he cared about was threatened or harmed. Then he got damned dangerous. And he did care about her, even if he was too dense to realize it.

"The same guy you saw that night?"

"I think so, yeah. I mean, it had to be him."

"What did he say to you, Maxie? Did he know you took those things?"

She shook her head slowly. "Nope. But he knew I'd seen him there. He made it clear that he could get to my friends and my mother at will, told me to forget I'd ever been there, that if I so much as mentioned seeing him or being in that place the night of the fire, he would find out and make me regret it."

"He said he'd hurt your mother."

She nodded. "And I believed him. I still do. And I kept the tape of that call, Lou. You can hear it for yourself." She was nothing if not prepared. She took the tape out of the envelope, popped it into Lou's machine and let it play.

Lou muttered a string of cuss words under his breath. When the tape finished, he said, "I need a beer."

"I could use one myself." She left him sitting where he was—on the edge of his camelback couch, elbows braced on his knees—walked into the kitchen and opened his fridge. As she had expected, it was well stocked. All the beer, coldcuts and cheese a man could eat. A few bottles of ketchup, mustard, salsa, hot sauce and horseradish.
Horseradish
? She took out two long necks, twisted off the caps and carried them back into the living room of the three-room apartment. She handed him a bottle, then flopped onto the couch beside him and took a long drink from her own.

Lou was looking at her oddly as she swallowed.

"What?"

He shrugged. "Never saw you drink before."

"I've been legal for years, Lou."

"Sure. I just never think of you that way."

"I hadn't noticed," she said, loading on as much sarcasm as the words could carry.

He was quiet for a long moment, sipping his beer, studying her sipping hers. Made her feel damned self-conscious. Finally he set the bottle on the coffee table, no doubt adding a fresh new water ring to the collection that had accumulated there. "You must have been scared half to death, Max."

She shrugged, took another gulp. "It shook me up some, yeah."

"You should have told me about this."

"And what could you have done, Lou? File a report? This guy worked for some offshoot of the CIA, Lou. The C-fucking-IA."

He sighed. "Even if that's true—"

"It's true. And if I'd told you about it, he would have known. If you had filed a report, he would have known, and maybe you'd have been getting threats, too—or worse."

He sat back a little. "You were protecting me." He said it deadpan.

"Not just you. Myself, my mother, Stormy and Jason."

"And me."

She shrugged, looked away, because it was true. "Maybe I just don't trust cops."

"I
know
you don't trust cops. But you trust me."

She smiled just a little. "Yeah, and you trust me, too, don't you?"

He pursed his lips. "You're sharp. You don't lie, and you're damn tough to lie to. What's not to trust?"

"You trust me," she insisted. "So trust me on this. There's not a passably sane person in the entire civilized world who believes vampires exist. But if they don't, then why does the government have volumes of research on them? Why does it know them by name and have life histories on so many of them? This is real, Lou. They exist."

He shook his head. "I can't wrap my brain around that one, Maxie."

"You will. Hell, it's taken me the better part of five years. Unfortunately, you don't have that kind of time."

He glanced at her, and she knew he was wishing she wouldn't finish the thought, but she had to.

"Lydia Jordan's friend was killed by one of them, Lou. There's no getting around that."

He shook his head slowly. "She was more than a friend. And you can't tell Lydia about any of this, regardless."

"Why not? What's the point in keeping this secret?"

"I don't know what the point is, but there has to be one, or the government wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to do it!"

She widened her eyes and bobbed her head at him.

"Hell, Max… just let me think, okay?"

"Fine." She polished off her beer, leaned back on the couch and absently reached for the newspaper strewn on the coffee table, picking it up, leafing through the sections. She picked out the magazine section, which she always read first. She flipped it open, paused and shook her head. "Speak of the devil."

"What?"

Sending Lou a lopsided smile, she held up the page so he could see the article's title. "Vampire Thriller Garners Coveted Nomination."

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. "Figures."

She licked her lips as she began to skim the article about the film and the reclusive screenwriter, until she got to the short synopsis of the story, and there she paused. "Uh… Lou?"

"I'm still thinkin'."

"Yeah, well, think about this. Wasn't one of the names on that CD-ROM 'Dante'?"

He glanced at her sharply. "I think so. Why?"

She licked her lips. "Maybe we'd better take another look at the file on that one. And, uh—then we ought to think about going out. Maybe even catching a movie."

In the theater, the story, a prequel to the earlier two films, unfolded on the silver screen. A young man, a Gypsy, lay on the ground. The makeshift bandage was torn and bloody. But there was no longer any pain, and his strength was returning. More than returning, it surged in him, singing in his veins like a thousand violins. He tore the bandage off, balled it up and threw it to the ground beside the rest of what had been his shirt. He stared at his Aunt Sarafina. Her black eyes gleamed in the night, though there was no light for them to reflect. And he saw more now than he had seen before, as if he were seeing her through new eyes now. How he'd ever missed something so obvious before, he couldn't imagine.

Sarafina was not human. Her skin was too smooth. No pores, no flaws. Her lips were too dark, and her eyes had that glow, that luster, as did her hair. There was something else. Involuntarily, instinctively, he tipped his head back and, without sniffing, he smelled the scent on her. Something pungent and exotic, like a mingling of sex and blood. Her scent.

"Your scent, too," she said softly, her voice a rich combination of tones in harmony, not one flat pitch as he had always believed voices to be. It was as if he had never truly heard before.

Then his wonder faded as he realized she had been reading his thoughts. His eyes widening, he turned from her, started off through the woods.

"And where do you think you're going, Dante?"

"Home. Back to the village. Where I belong."

"You can't go back there now." She didn't follow him. She stood where she was, and since she wasn't shouting, he didn't understand why he could hear her so clearly, just as clearly no matter how far he walked from her. "You're outcast now, just like me."

"You lie!" he shouted, and he ran faster and faster.

As he approached the village, the young man was surprised that he heard no music. It was their last night in this camp. In the morning they would move again. All the items they could pack had been packed. Tonight there should be a huge fire, with music and dancing, and stories of past adventures told with excited anticipation of what new ones might lie just ahead.

Instead, there was silence. He heard the fire crackling, smelled it long before he should have. But of voices, there were almost none. Mere whispers now and again, and the gentle brush of fabric as his people moved around the camp.

He emerged from the trees and paused to stare at his family. The Grandmother knelt near a large boulder, grinding herbs with her mortar and pestle. His cousins didn't run or play but instead sat around watching her, their eyes damp, shoulders slumped. The men were grouped together at the far end of camp in a huddle of angry faces, muttering quietly in a way that made Dante wonder who had angered them. They looked as if they were plotting violence. The women were clustered around the tent belonging to Dante and his mother. And beyond them all, he could hear his mother's soft, broken crying coming from within the tent.

He was drawn forward, into the light of the flames. "Mother?" he called. "Everyone, what has happened?"

Heads snapped up fast, eyes widening and turning in his direction. He heard his mother say his name on a ragged breath, and then she was pushing her way through the women as she emerged from the tent.

The Grandmother stepped into her path, putting herself directly between them. "Stay away!" she commanded Dante, and she held her hands up, forefinger and pinky extended, hissing as she poked the sign at him repeatedly. "Stay back, I say!"

Dante blinked at her in shock. "Grandmother… what's wrong with you? It's me, it's Dante. What… ?"

His mother pushed the older woman aside then and came closer. "Is it really you, my son? Dimitri said you were killed. Shot dead when you tried to steal a goat."

"If you lied to us about such a thing… " The deep-voiced threat came from Dimitri's father.

"I didn't lie! I saw it, I tell you. He was shot, both barrels of the old man's shotgun."

"You weren't even there!" Dante said, instinctively denying the tram. Knowing somehow that if he admitted what had really happened, his family would believe him to be some kind of demon. A vampire, just as Sarafina claimed he was. But it wasn't true. It
wasn't
!

"I followed you, Dante." Dimitri's eyes were narrow on him now, untrusting, perhaps even afraid. "I knew you were out for adventure. I planned to join in when the old man came out. I saw him fire. I saw you fall."

"And then you ran, didn't you?" Dante asked, grasping the idea like a drowning man clutching a limb. "Admit it. You heard the gun, and you ran and left me there to die."

"I ran." Dimitri lowered his black head in shame.

"You see?" Dante forced a nervous smile as he glanced at his mother and the Grandmother, and then at the men who were gathering around. The women had gathered their children and were standing as far from him as possible. So many huge brown eyes on him. "He didn't stay long enough to see that the man's shots never hit me. Only frightened me, so I fell down. I was not even hit, much less killed."

Several of them glanced toward Dimitri for confirmation. His head came up slowly, and he stared at Dante. "I saw the blood. You are as a brother to me, Dante, and I love you, but I saw the blood."

Dante shivered, knowing how frightened Dimitri must have been to witness such a thing. He looked for support from the other men but found only suspicion in their eyes. And several of them were not even there, he realized.

"Turn around, Dante," the Grandmother told him. "Let me see your back."

"You'll find nothing there."

"Turn!"

One did not disobey the Grandmother. Dante turned, praying he had managed to wipe all the blood away, wishing he could see his own back. Everyone looked. He craned his neck to look over his shoulder at them, saw his mother inspecting him closely. "There is no wound," she said. "And I see no blood, only there's so much dirt it is hard to be sure."

"Why can you not take my word?" Dante asked. "Dimitri was mistaken. Mother, you wept for me when you thought I was dead. Can you not rejoice for me now that you see me alive?"

She stared at him, hope lighting her eyes. Trembling, she lifted a hand toward his face, and he closed his eyes as he awaited her warm touch.

The forest beside him came alive as men emerged from it, the men he'd noticed missing from the crowd before. When they saw him, they gaped as if seeing a ghost, and Dante shot a look at his mother.

"We sent them out to bring your body home to us, Dante," she explained.

"Tell us," the Grandmother commanded. "What did you find at the farmer's shack?"

The oldest of the group, Alexi, lifted his hand from his side. A ball of material was in it, and as he unfurled the mass, Dante realized what it was. He could do nothing to stop Alexi from holding it up for all to see. Dante's shirt, a hole rent in its back, strips torn away, the entire thing soaked in drying blood.

"The farmer was dead," Alexi said softly. "Two holes, right here." He used his fingers to poke himself in the throat, and young Dante remembered seeing his aunt, Sarafina, drain the old man by biting him there.