Need (13 page)

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Authors: Todd Gregory

BOOK: Need
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I closed my eyes and remembered lying on the bed in the back room of the house on Orleans Street, my ankles and wrists tethered to the bedposts, the candles burning while Sebastian chanted his spell, fearing that he was going to kill me—as he slit my wrist and drank my blood to add the power of a vampire to that of a witch.
“Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Narcisse,” Rachel said with a smile, standing and offering him her hand.
I reluctantly stood up and shook his hand. Again, I felt the same electric shock I had the first time our hands came into contact with each other.
But this time, from the look on his face, I could tell that he'd felt it this time too.
C
HAPTER
7
I
couldn't get Quentin out of my mind as we went down the stairs in his building. I wondered what his skin would feel like. I could remember how silky Sebastian's had felt before things had turned so ugly, before I found out that he wasn't interested in
me
but wanted to drain all of my blood and drink it.
“Can you go more than five minutes without thinking about sex?” Rachel said snidely from behind me. “Not that I mind, usually—gay sex is so much hotter than hetero, or even lesbian sex, for the most part—but you're wearing me out already.”
I opened the door at the foot of the stairs and stepped out into the damp night air. It had gotten cooler while we were inside, and the air felt wet. I looked up, and while the clouds still had that pinkish tint to them, they were definitely darker and moving faster than they had been. It meant rain was coming. “So, are you a lesbian?”
“I'm a vampire,” she replied as we started up Orleans. “When I was a human, I considered myself a lesbian. Since I turned”—she shrugged—“sometimes, when I'm in the mood, I have sex with a man.” She smiled at me. “I think a lot of it had to do with fear, but since I'm a vampire now, I don't fear any man. Any man who tries to overpower me or force me into anything”—she made a snapping sound with her tongue—“crack goes his neck.”
“Charming.” We crossed at Bourbon.
She gave me a sour look. “We're vampires, Cord. Get used to it. We're predators. We survive on the blood of humans, and we can kill them.”
“So it's okay for us to be sociopaths?” I climbed the steps to my front door and unlocked it. “Killing humans every chance we get?”
“I didn't say that. Are you always so literal?” She slammed the door shut behind her and plopped down onto the couch. “Our job is to protect humans, you know. Vampires who go around killing, well, that's what part of our job as Nightwatchers entails.”
I turned the dead bolt just as the entire house lit up with a flash of lightning. “What exactly does that entail?”
Rachel said in a rather snotty voice, “Your primary concern should be Jared, you know—not what the Nightwatchers do or whether you'll get to fuck Quentin Narcisse this evening.”
Stung, I started to answer her when I realized something didn't feel right about the house. I closed my mouth and walked over to the pocket doors, sliding one back, just as thunder roared so loudly the entire house shook. Rain started pounding against the window on the far side of the room as I walked over to the bed and looked down at him.
Jared was still lying there on his back, his eyes closed, his bare chest moving up and down as he breathed shallowly. I sat on the bed and leaned over him, staring intently at his face.
It's not him,
I thought, looking around the room and seeing everything exactly the way I'd left it.
What's different? What's wrong with the house?
I closed my eyes and tried to sense it, put my finger on whatever it was that I was feeling.
“What is it?” Rachel stood in the doorway, her arms folded over her breasts. “What are you feeling?” She smirked. “This doesn't feel like another one of your pornographic daydreams.” She walked over to the bed and gently brushed Jared's bangs off his forehead. She lifted first his right eyelid, then his left. “He's okay, and from the looks of it, his conversion is going well—his body is adapting to the second infusion of blood from Nigel.” She looked over at me and said gently, “I know you worry about him. He's going to be okay.”
I turned around and glared at her. “No, he isn't going to be okay. He's never going to be okay again—”
“Stop.” She reached over and grabbed my wrist. “Listen to me, okay? What's done is done. Are you going to feel guilty about this for the rest of eternity?” She shook her head. “I may have been a vampire for only twenty years, but I know that we can't hold on to things the way we could when we were human. Trust me, I've seen what happens to vampires who obsess. . . .” She dropped my wrist and shuddered. “You don't want to end up like that. Just trust me on that one.” She looked at me, and her eyebrows knit together over her nose. “What are you feeling? I can sense something—”
“I don't know.” I got off the bed. “Something's wrong. I just can't figure out what it is.” I shivered and closed my eyes as there was another roar of thunder.
“Just focus,” she replied, also standing up. On the bed, Jared rolled over onto his stomach and mumbled something. She leaned down and pulled the blanket up to cover his bare butt. “Pretend like the feeling is a string and grab on to it with both your hands—in your mind, I mean.”
“Everything seems okay to you?” I tried doing what she suggested, but it didn't work. Whatever it was, was just outside my mind's eye. I pushed past her and walked down the hallway, opening every door and checking every room. They were all empty, exactly as they were the last time I'd looked at them. But as I searched that side of the house, the feeling that something was wrong kept growing stronger. I walked back into the living room, and into the kitchen and down the other side of the house. I opened the door to the back gallery and walked out. A cat glared at me from the top of the wire table and proceeded to clean himself.
The rain was pouring off the roof into the courtyard like a waterfall. The pavement was under a couple of inches of water already. Lightning flashed again, close enough so that angry red spots filled my vision and the hair on my head stood up. I started to say something, but the clap of thunder was so loud Rachel couldn't hear me. She looked at me quizzically.
“I can't figure it out,” I said, sitting in one of the chairs.
“I know it's frustrating,” she said, sitting across from me at the wire table. “I mean, I can sense what you're feeling—”
Get out of my head!
“—but I don't feel it other than that.” She made a face. “Which doesn't make any sense.
You
can't be more sensitive than I am. If you were, you'd be able to . . .” She ran her hands through her hair. “Maybe . . .”
“Maybe what?” The cat glared at us both and jumped down from the table. He walked over to the edge of the gallery and looked up at the steady stream of water coming down from the roof. He looked back at me, leaped onto the fence, and down into the yard next door.
“Nigel didn't want me to say anything—he didn't see any point in worrying you unnecessarily—but there's always issues when witches are involved.” She frowned. “It's possible that Sebastian changed you somehow. Did you notice anything odd before you came back here?”
I shook my head. “Other than being a vampire?” I asked sarcastically. “Having to sink my teeth into humans and drink their blood in order to survive? Gee, what could possibly seem odd to me? Let me think for a minute.”
To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. When she was able to finally speak again, she grabbed my hands with hers and pressed them to her lips. “Oh, Cord, Cord! I'm beginning to understand what Jean-Paul saw in you. You remind me—” Her voice broke off. She looked stricken and turned away. “You remind me of my friend Philip.” Her voice shook as she said the words.
“Philip?”
“It's a long story. Maybe someday I'll tell you about him.” She looked away from me, watching the streams of water coming from the roof. “After we solve this problem and everything's okay around here, yeah.” She turned back to me. “We might even end up as friends, you know.” One corner of her mouth went up, and she raised an eyebrow. “Most people find me charming.”
I found that unlikely but didn't say it out loud. Maybe she didn't mean it that way, but it was annoying to be referred to as “a problem.”
But while she'd distracted me from thinking about it, whatever I was sensing in the house had faded away into nothingness, as if it had never been there. I took a deep breath and walked back into the house, leaving her sitting there on the gallery. I shut the door behind me and closed my eyes. I focused, like she told me to do earlier. I could feel it, and reached out for it in my mind, grabbing it with a mental hand.
And there it was—a faint greenish glow, a kind of essence of something that was slowly fading away, even as my mind was finally able to see it.
It was gone in another instant.
“Okay, what the hell was that?” I whispered as I walked through the kitchen. I could see that the rain was lessening—the storm was moving on.
Rachel's words came back to me.
If there
was
something wrong with me—if Sebastian had done something to me, altered me in some way—why hadn't Jean-Paul or any of the others ever noticed? Why hadn't Nigel—and Rachel, for that matter—noticed? Especially Nigel. If he'd been around since the beginning of human history, surely he could sense if I wasn't a normal vampire.
As if there was such a thing as a normal vampire.
The whole thing was making my head hurt.
I walked into the bedroom and watched Jared. He had rolled back over onto his back. His chest still rose shallowly as he breathed. He'd shrugged off the comforter again, and he was aroused.
It was a really remarkable cock.
I sat down on the bed and stared at him, willing myself to not become aroused. It was wrong. He was gestating, converting from human to vampire, and taking advantage of him while he was in that state was no better than raping a girl passed out from drink, the way some of the brothers back at Ole Miss used to do.
But it was tempting—oh so tempting.
“Are you constantly horny? You're worse than a thirteen-year-old.”
“Stay out of my head, Rachel.” I closed my eyes and imagined a wall going up around my mind, keeping her out.
“Nicely done,”
she said, her voice fading.
I touched his forehead. His skin was cool, and I could feel his breath on my arm.
I remembered meeting his parents, how kind they'd been to me, and once again felt sorrow and guilt at what I'd done to him rising within me.
What story would be concocted to explain to them what happened to their son? Undoubtedly they were worried—he hadn't come home that night; he'd simply vanished. Had they already contacted the police? Was there an alert out for him? I closed my eyes.
I'd never really known how Jean-Paul had fixed things with the fire so my parents had believed me to be dead. All I knew for sure was there were two bodies in that house when it burned—Sebastian and another who had been identified as me. I'd been an only child. My birth had been difficult, and after a long, horrible labor that had almost killed her, my mother had been left unable to have another child. She liked to remind me of how difficult my birth had been when I disagreed with her or disobeyed. By the time I was a teenager, I could say the words along with her. But because she couldn't have another child, she had clung to me—they both had. I sometimes wondered why they never considered adopting—it certainly would have made sense with their deep religious faith—but as far as I knew, it was never even considered an option. As much as I'd hated them for trying to control every aspect of my life, planning my future and forcing their hateful religion down my throat, I had loved them, which was what had made trying to break free from them so difficult. My high school friends had envied me my parents, who'd never missed a game or a play or anything I did. There was never a question I'd go to college, and they'd bought me a secondhand car when I got my driver's license. So many of the kids I went to school with had parents who could barely afford to clothe them, let alone send them to college or get them a car or give them an allowance.
But it was all a trap too. How could I tell them that their much-loved only son was gay, was an abomination in the eyes of the religion that was so much a part of their lives? Could they turn their backs on the Church of Christ and realize I was actually born this way, gay by the grace of God and not by choice?
I feared they'd cut me out of their lives. My uncle had done so to his oldest son when he'd left his wife for another woman. “The church forbids divorce,” he'd said in a tone that left no doubt that he no longer considered his oldest son his child.
It was either tell them or live a lie for the rest of my life, and I didn't think I had the courage to tell them. But I'd been so desperate to escape that decision that I'd been easy prey for Jean-Paul. It had been easy for him to convince me that being a vampire was the best possible escape for me. They'd think I was dead and I would be free to live my own life for all eternity.
But sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at Jared and what I'd done to him, I began to wonder if I had made the right choice.
The bitter memories were pushed aside and I began to remember the good things about my parents. There had been laughter, love, and above all else, joy. Birthday parties and high school football games when I could pick out the sound of my father's voice shouting from the bleachers over all the other noise, and coming home after the game, staying up for hours discussing and dissecting the game with him at the kitchen table. Both of my parents had wonderful senses of humor and loved nothing more than to laugh. I remembered the summer vacations on the sugary white sand beaches of the Florida panhandle, where my skin turned brown from the sun. There had been trips to Six Flags in Atlanta, and my father had ridden everything with me, enjoying the thrilling rides as much as I had.

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