Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (10 page)

But it was more than that.  She hadn’t just let him, she had wanted him to.  She had needed to keep from begging him to, that’s how badly she had wanted it.  Even now, when she played their escapades back like a film inside of her mind, she could feel that want bubbling up inside.  If he had walked up that fancy stairwell of his at that moment and glided down the hall towards her she would have let him pick her up and take her straight back to bed.

She knew it without an ounce of doubt, and that knowing frightened her most of all.  It frightened her even more than understanding what he really was (the dead man, the vampire she was supposed to stick close to if the magpie voice held any truth in it), and shaking all over, she finally began to move.

The idea of leaving a place was almost always an easy thing.  The concept of how one would do it, the planning of the thing.  Sometimes Megan thought that the only times leaving a place was
actually
easy were the few times when she worried that it would be hard.

Otherwise, there always seemed to be a snag in the plan, some kind of hiccup of varying size.  It could be something as vague as emotional responses and it could be something as straightforward as a car that wouldn’t start, but a hiccup none the less. 

The hiccup on this particular occasion was the sheer size of the place she was in.  Even from the street on the dozens, maybe even hundreds of times when she had stood outside of this house, she hadn’t ever begun to grasp just how massive this place really was.  She had known it was large, of course she had. She had known it was larger than most houses in the country but now she knew that saying a thing like that was like referring to the T-Rex as kind of a big reptile (she wasn’t sure that a T-Rex was even a reptile, but it worked for her as a comparison).  This house was a behemoth of a home, a real live mansion with room upon room upon room into eternity.

She had no idea how many rooms there really were, but she knew it was enough to get lost in, which was exactly what she went and did.  She made it through the ballroom alright, knowing it was a ballroom without ever having been told and getting a whole new case of the creeps when she fancied that she could see a ball from the past going on around her as she moved.  She could smell very, very old lilac and the faintest smell of manure and then it was gone.

“Stop it” hissing at herself yet again, “you didn’t smell anything.  You’re being stupid now.  SO stupid.  There aren’t ghosts, no such thing, and even if there were you can’t smell a thing far from the past.”

She told herself that almost sure that it would make her feel better, but it didn’t.   It didn’t at all.  Her awareness of what Philip really was operated like a floodgate and a floodgate was never so easy to shut off again as say, your run of the mill faucet.  Whether she wanted to or not, she knew that vampires were real and that knowledge seemed to be a gateway.  It made it so that she could see other things, other parts of the world that most people couldn’t see.  Like ghosts.  God, if she could see that now, what else would be out there?

A world that may have sucked in a big way but had nevertheless been largely predictable to her now loomed high over her head, completely full with the potential for and the fear of the unknown.  And that was assuming that she ever got out of the house, which was starting to feel less and less likely.

Because while she was starting to realize that ghosts were every bit as real as vampires, she had stopped paying attention to where she was going and what she was doing and when she finally came back to her senses, she had no idea where she was at all.  Or, to be more specific, how she had gotten there. 

Looking around her she could see that she was in a portrait room.  It was a long, narrow room with very high ceilings and walls painted a dark but fading blue.  The chair rail and crown molding were white and were the only things that broke up the masses of portraits hung at all manner of different heights and angles.  She was fascinated, almost fascinated enough to forget that she was trying to run away.  Some of these portraits were so
old
!  So old that she felt like they should have belonged to a museum or something. 

She wondered briefly if maybe Philip had stolen them, and then she realized that probably wasn’t it at all.  How old was he?  Just how old was Philip, how many decades had he actually lived through?  These portraits, if she was right about everything, which she thought she almost definitely was, must have belonged to him and his family. 

She walked down the room so narrow it could have been a hallway and not a room at all, gazing at each and every picture.  She might have gotten so lost that she was still there when Philip came looking for her if it hadn’t of been for one portrait in particular that gave her chills.  It was an old one, one of the older ones in the room, and it contained two figures.

The first was unmistakable to her, the final nail in the coffin of her new delicate beliefs.  It was Philip Smith (a last name she realized now was probably completely made up; she imagined it took some work to remain anonymous when you were going to live forever), wearing clothing that looked like it had to belong the early 1900s, maybe even earlier than that.  His clothing was different, his hair styled in what had been fashionable in those days, but it was unmistakably him. 

Same beautiful eyes and chiseled bone structure, same haughty expression and way of holding himself.  There was no way of missing the fact that the man in the very old portrait was the same man she had slept with last night, which was definitely weird (also weird was the fact that she was getting used to that idea so easily).

But it wasn’t the thing that scared her all over again.  No, that new wave of fear was thanks to the person beside him in the portrait, the person she couldn’t really see.  Because the face of the woman with her arm linked through his was scratched out with such ferocity it made her feel sick to her stomach. 

A person didn’t do something like that unless there was some real hatred motivating the scratching.  It was a pictorial representation of a relationship of love gone bad, and even though the woman’s face was all scratched to shit, when Megan looked closely she let out a little gasp and clapped her hand over her mouth.

“It’s me.”

The words came out in a whisper, made her jump even though she knew they were her own.  She wasn’t quite right, not completely.  The vandalized woman wasn’t her precisely but it was a woman who looked very much like her.  The only way they could look so similar was if they were related.

But how? 
How
?  Megan didn’t know her relatives at all, not a one of them.  How in the hell would it be possible for her to wind up in this house and see someone who must be her great-, maybe great-great-grandmother?  Impossible, her mind screamed, fucking impossible.  But another part of her mind asked her the question that couldn’t be avoided.

Was that why Philip had wanted her to come here?  Did he remember the look of the face he had scratched out God knew how many years ago?  If so, did he see that face in hers the way that she did?  Perhaps he did, perhaps that’s why he had wanted her to begin with. 

“Jesus, enough.”

She didn’t know the answer to those swirling questions and she found that, for the moment at least, she didn’t care.  What she cared about was getting out of this house, and then getting out of New Orleans all together.  She didn’t think she would have any problem doing that (oh, but don’t think that, she told herself, don’t think that or else it will, it will be hard and you won’t be able to leave after all), not this time. 

Part of her may have still burned at just the idea of having Philip’s hands glide over her again, but that part was just going to have to deal with the disappointment.  Fuck it, right?  She could find another man and no, he probably wouldn’t be even halfway as skilled as Philip had proven himself to be, but she also highly doubted that the next guy would be a vampire, so she figured it was kind of a trade-off. 

All she needed to do now was get the hell out of this goddamned place.  She felt her panic starting to rise, always rising, and stood still right where she was.  The voice of reason in her head was shouting move, that she had to move, for God’s sake, but she ignored it, staying stock still. 

She really did need to get out of here and she wasn’t going to be able to do that if she was all messed up in the head.  She concentrated on her breath, ignoring the feeling of all of those still portrait eyes on her, ignoring the sweet smell that only came from lots of expensive things grouped in one place.  She did her best to ignore all of those things, those things and her fears, to hone in on the things she knew she did have.  She had her wits, which had always done her service.  She had her uncanny ability to flee, and she doubted very much that it had been diminished by being in this most peculiar of situations. 

She knew how to get gone (that’s what the last thing that passed as a boyfriend had called it, her “getting gone”) and that was knowledge that was part of her blood and Philip hadn’t taken that from her.  Hardly any of it, anyway.

Once her breath had started to calm and her heart felt just a little bit more regular, she opened her eyes again and looked anywhere but at the portrait of Philip and the stranger who looked like her.  Her anonymous ancestor, like some not so funny joke. 
Not looking, not looking, never
wanted to look at it again,
she thought, and then she opened the door and she was on her way. 

This time she found her way straight to the front door.  She wouldn’t say she remembered the way because there wasn’t a lot of memory involved in the twists and turns she took, but somehow she figured her way out of that mansion all the same.  She was back out in that beautiful garden that smelled like honeysuckle and threatened to make her forget why she was so keen on leaving in the first place.

“Vampire,”
she thought darkly, “
vampire and some strange dream bitch telling me to stay close to the dead man.  Nope, no thank you very much.  I think I’m going to have to not so politely decline.”

She actually said those last words out loud and started to laugh, a manic kind of sound that would have made a passerby stop and look twice, maybe consider whether they should offer the crazy looking girl talking to herself a little bit of help.  But there were no passersby, not at this hour. 

Even in New Orleans, there seemed to be an hour at which the frequency with which the foot traffic passed by would reduce down to a trickle and one could go for whole spans of minutes without seeing another person at all.

Megan paused once more, startled by the look of her surroundings.  It was disorienting.  So much had happened in such a little amount of time, much more than was reasonable for a person to be expected to have happen to her.  It had only been a few hours before that she had gone for a walk and been attacked by a threesome of asshole men and now here she was, standing in the garden of the magic house after having had the best sex of her life with the oddball owner. 

The
vampire
owner.  That was enough to get her moving again.  Vampire.  She had the strangest feeling that he was looking at her now, that he was seeing her make her exit and that he would do his very best to get her to stay.  She began to run, not bothering to check whether or not the gate shut on her way out.  She didn’t care, couldn’t care, because she was OUT and that was all that could matter for her for now.

“Home sweet home,”
Megan muttered to herself, laughing just a little as she did so.  She felt like it was a pretty ironic phrase to use, if that was the right word for it.  She hadn’t ever been really good at remembering which words meant which thing but it sounded right in her ears.  It felt right, and when a thing felt right Megan tended to go for it.

She had run almost all the way back to her shitty apartment building, which looked exponentially shittier after her brief stay in the nicest house in the world.  She had run until her legs were shaking, screaming at her to give it a rest already, and she could feel the three drinks still settling in the base of her stomach threatening to make their way up again. 

She was a fit girl, an active girl, and she didn’t think it was overexertion that was causing her body to react so intensely.  She had a feeling it had a lot more to do with the crazy amount of adrenaline pulsing through her body than anything else. 

It was just too much for one girl.  The body could only handle so much.  The body began to break down, to give up under the pressure of it all.  Megan’s body could handle a hell of a lot but things were starting to get too out of control, even for her.