Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (12 page)

“How?  Caroline, I don’t understand.”

“Megan Wright.  She’s not an ordinary girl, OK?  Not even close.  Clearly you knew that, sensed it.  I’m not surprised you found her.  Even in a city as crazy as New Orleans I’m still not surprised.”

“OK, she’s special, I get that.  But why?”

“She’s a witch.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?  Did you just say she’s a witch?  That’s not possible.”

“Really?  We’re
vampires
, Philip.  Are you really going to tell me you don’t think there are witches out there?  Christ, you live in a house with ghosts.  Don’t tell me you can believe in that, in shifters and vampires and all of the rest of this shit, but somehow witches are crossing the line?  Please, you can’t tell me you think that makes sense.”

“OK, fine.  She’s a witch.  But what does that mean?  Are we talking a ‘pull out your magic wands’ kind of a situation?  Hop on your broomstick hocus pocus style?”

“No, we aren’t.  It’s much more serious than that and you should really think twice before you make light of it.  It has a hell of a lot more to do with you than you think.”

That sobered him right up, sapped him of whatever small amount of levity he had garnered.  He didn’t yet understand what Megan supposedly being a witch could really have to do with him, but he knew that Caroline wasn’t playing around.  She wasn’t much of a jokester on the best of days and there seemed to be very little about this that was humorous to her in any way. 

“OK, Caroline.  Tell me.  Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Megan Wright is a witch, just as I said.  She’s a witch from a very long line of witches, probably the oldest, according to everything we know about them.”

“We?  Who's we?  And how do you know anything about them at all?”

“Please, Philip.  Don’t you remember the order’s library?  I know it’s been a while and you probably didn’t stop to really look at any of the things in there, but you should have seen that we had pretty much anything we needed.  Those weren’t a bunch of first edition fiction novels, you know?  Those books were there for a reason.  Those were resources.”

“About these witches?”

“About all kinds of things, but yes, some of it was about them.”

“They’re dangerous, aren’t they?”

He asked it as a question but he didn’t really need to ask at all.  She wouldn’t be talking to him about it, wouldn’t have been in New Orleans instead of her sprawling rooftop Paris flat.  Paris was where everything she loved lived, everything aside from him.  She was very unlike Philip in that respect. 

Whereas he had never really lost that itch to travel from city to city looking for God only knew what, Caroline had long ago settled on Paris as her base.  It made sense, after all.  It had been her home before she was turned.  It had been all of their homes a long, long time ago.

She had come from a very different kind of a life than the one Philip had been stolen from.  Philip had grown up a petit prince, living in the lap of luxury and taking it all for granted.  Caroline had grown up with nothing. 

At first she had what passed as a family, she had that much.  But her father was more of a drunkard than a father, spending most of his time and all of their money in the tavern.  Her mother had done everything she could to keep him at home and maybe even working from time to time, but instead of shaping up he had shipped out.

Allegedly, he had hopped a ship for the Americas and that was why he never came home again.  It had to remain an “allegedly” sort of a situation because they never heard from him again.  Caroline’s mother had done her best to keep her children fed and reasonably healthy but then she had gotten sick and the thing about being sick and poor (Philip would have loved to say that things changed, but in more than a century he didn’t think it had all that much) was that nobody much cared. 

She had died because nobody cared and Caroline had started prostituting at the ripe old age of eighteen because nobody cared.  She would have died, too, just as her mother had, if it hadn’t been for Antoine.  He had found her and turned her, made her one of the first of his children and brought her into the order.  She had continued to take care of her little brothers until they were old enough to take care of themselves and then she had watched from a distance as they aged and eventually died. 

She had traveled from time to time, she had gone through her own wanderlust phase and had to skip town from time to time when living forever got too tricky, but Paris was her real home in a way that Philip felt his could never be. 

That was to say, if she was here, there was a reason.  There was a good reason.  And she looked troubled, which was maybe the biggest sign.  Caroline and all of her intimidating beauty rarely got ruffled, so to see her gnawing worriedly on her lip now showed him that things might be getting a lot worse before they got better.

“They are dangerous, yes, they most certainly are.  At least some of them.  She isn’t, at least not yet, but she could wind up that way if we aren’t careful.”’’

“What does that mean,” Philip growled, feeling genuinely threatened for the first time in maybe, well, forever, “how would she wind up that way?”

“She doesn’t know what she is yet.  She has no idea, but a subset of her family are here in the States looking for her and they definitely aren’t going to show her the lighter side of things.”

“Here?  They’re here?!  Shit, Caroline, how could you wait this long to tell me that part?  If they’re looking for her she could be in danger.  You should have started with that.”

Finally, something he could understand.  Finally something he could hold onto!  He didn’t really know her at all, but that girl, that Megan Wright, had worked herself beneath his skin.  He hadn’t wanted her to go in the first place and would have done his best to convince her to stay had he gotten half the chance. 

Knowing that she might be both dangerous and also in danger did nothing to curb his appetite for her. Quite the contrary, he felt a burning for her.  Without her there he felt like a man dying of thirst who had been handed a glass of water only to have it taken away again. 

He realized now that all he had wanted to do, even while he had thought that he was perfectly engaged in conversation with Caroline, was go after her and now he had his perfect excuse to do it.  He stood up so quickly that he knocked over two of the three glasses of liquid on his desk, caring neither for the fact that it was a very expensive scotch and a very expensive desk to boot.

It was time for him to do something.  It was time for him to remember who and what he was.

“Philip, stop!”

He ignored her entirely.  He had no intention of stopping.  Nothing was going to convince him to formulate a plan before acting, which he was pretty sure was exactly what Caroline was going to tell him to do.

He wasn’t a fan of waiting,  and that was doubly true when it might mean something he cared about was at risk.  And was that true?  Did he care about her?  Having known her for only a matter of hours could he say that he cared about her?  Some people might think it was a bunch of bullshit, but he believed that he could. 

And that was why he ignored a sister who had traveled so far and was looking more and more distraught with each move he made.  Because he cared about Megan and he couldn’t stand the idea of her getting hurt.  Somewhere deep down, his sudden action might have had something to do with the fact that he wasn’t ready to hear about Megan’s connection to Celia yet, too, but he wasn’t ready to think about that yet.  Not yet.  Not while he still had someone to save.

“Philip!  Stop, come on!  You don’t even know where you’re going!”

And that was true too, he didn’t know where she was going but he was a really fantastic tracker.  He had honed those skills out of a combination of necessity and just plain boredom and he had been graced (or cursed) with plenty of time in which to do it.

There was nothing Caroline could do to stop him now.  She was strong, very strong in fact, but she wasn’t as strong as he was and they both knew it.  She couldn’t physically block his progress and there were no words in her arsenal to talk him down.  The best she could hope to do was accompany him and in order to do that she was going to have to keep up.

He was up and out of his study like a shot, completely unconcerned with the beautiful things around him that he may or may not be breaking (he had run into an incredibly expensive vase that there would be no way to replace and no chance of fixing).  He stalked through the house, ready to tear to shreds anything that got in his way.

He could smell her.  He could smell the traces of her in his house and followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs out the front door and the little iron gate she would later tell him she loved.  He could still hear Caroline calling out to him desperately but it sounded like it was coming from some place very far away. 

He wasn’t
really
hearing her, not with the part of his brain that mattered.  He was following her scent and he had to believe that it would take him to her before she met any harm.

“Megan!”

He roared her name up at her building like some invading tyrant come to claim his prize.  He had no idea what he was doing really. Philip had seen that there was a very specific conception of vampires in pop culture.  They were seen as strong and stoic, vengeful, lustful. 

They were seen as many things but not ever as incapable of being able to control their emotions.  Not from what he had seen, which was admittedly not a lot.  None of that seemed to matter now.  All he had to do was go inside and instead, here he was screaming up at the building like some lovesick, scorned lover.  Pitiful.  It was pitiful and yet he went on doing it until someone opened a window and told him to shut the hell up already.  That was enough to snap the spell he had cast on himself and he moved inside, much more cautiously this time. 

Whatever else happened, he needed to be mindful of the fact that making a scene was not in his best interest.  If Megan really was what Caroline said she was, a scene wouldn’t be good for her, either.  And what if this whole thing was an overreaction?  It wasn’t as if Philip hadn’t done that before.  At one point in his life, Philip had garnered a real reputation for being a hothead. 

And Caroline.  She wasn’t a hothead but she did have a tendency to get completely wrapped up in her books and when she made even the hint of a discovery she ran with it.  She ran with it like it was the absolute truth and how did Philip know that wasn’t what was happening now?

“Megan?”

He whispered now, following her scent up a shitty stairwell that smelled like dead animals and feces.  God, she
lived
here?  In this hovel of an apartment?  He couldn’t stand the idea of it.  A woman as beautiful as she was, as impressive, deserved to live somewhere that reflected those qualities and if given half the chance, he would see to it that she did.

He had this half-cocked vision of her moving into his mansion and making it feel like a real home for the first time but if she didn’t want to do that he would figure something else out.  He would do whatever he could to get her into a better situation than this one as soon as he had her sitting in front of him.  Which should be pretty soon. 

He had followed her scent to a doorway in which that scent became much stronger, telling him that it had to be her place.  He tried the knob and found that it was locked.  That should have made him feel better, told him that she was tucked away safely and hopefully sound asleep, but it seemed to be having the opposite effect. 

She should be in there on the other side of that door but until he could see her he wasn’t going to be able to rest easy.  He needed to see her, just to get a look at her.  “
Just a look
,” he told himself, over and over again it played in his mind like some creepy stalker mantra.  “
Oh, how the mighty
have fallen,”
was another thought that occurred to him as well.

For a minute, only a second really, but long enough for him to be ashamed of it when he thought about it in the future, he resented the fact that she had come into his life at all.  Things would have been much easier had he never intervened.  It sounded cold-hearted but since he didn’t have a heart that wasn’t such a problem.  He wouldn’t have been here, that was for sure.  He wouldn’t have had to worry about her or anyone else.  He thought it and then he felt disgusted by himself and raised one fist to softly tap on her door.