Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (4 page)

“Let me walk with you.  We can grab a drink somewhere.”

“No, really, that’s OK.  I’m fine.”

“I believe you.  Do you think I’m suggesting a drink because I don’t think you’re OK?”

“Um, I don’t know.  I guess so.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might just want to spend more time with you?  We could go anywhere you like.  Or, better yet, come back to my home.  It’s safe and I have a fully stocked bar.  I believe that I could make you anything you like.”

OK, was this guy for real? 
He wanted to take her home with him?
 
Before that suggestion she had thought there was something different about him, something menacing and not quite natural.  Now she thought he might just be an asshole.  What kind of guy tried to pick up a chick who had just been attacked?  Maybe he was one of those kinds of guys who got off on women who were feeling particularly vulnerable, or maybe not.

Maybe he was in the middle of living out his superhero fantasy and he wanted her to fulfill it to its completion for him.  Something like that most definitely seemed like a possibility.  Whatever it was, and she really didn’t care, one thing she could see for sure was that he was definitely too good looking for his own good.

It was beyond presumptuous for him to ask her to come to his house when he knew nothing about her, which made her think that he was arrogant enough to believe that she was going to say yes.  That rubbed her the wrong way and she yanked her arm backwards, her fear of him momentarily forgotten.

“Are you for real right now?”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, I’m sorry.  I must be mistaken.  For a minute I thought that you were trying to get me to come home with you.  Was I mistaken?”

At least he had the decency to look surprised and a little bit taken aback.  She had a suspicion that he wasn’t used to people talking back to him like that.  Actually, it seemed pretty likely that he had never been turned down after propositioning a girl.  He was honestly that good looking and even as annoyed as she was, she could see that it was hard to turn down a guy who looked like a more mysterious version of Brad Pitt.

It was probably one of the reasons she was so annoyed by the whole thing.  Even in her current state, part of her wanted to say yes.  She could still feel his strange hands on her back and smell his musk lingering on her clothes.  It was distracting.  It made her feel slightly drunk and off kilter and that was the most annoying part of all.

She didn’t want to be the kind of girl who got her head turned so easily by a good looking man.  She was twenty-seven years old.  She wasn’t a baby or some giggly high school girl.  She hadn’t even been that girl when she had been in high school.  She had literally never before had such a physical reaction to her attraction for a man and her immediate reaction to it was to rebel.  There was not a chance on God’s green earth that she was just going to melt because this pretty boy had made a move on her.  She was going to go home.  That was what she was going to do.

“So you’re offended.  That I want to spend time with you.  Interesting.”

“Interesting?”  Ugh, the response was dripping with condescension which made her feel even angrier. 
Just who the hell did this guy think he was?

“Yes, interesting.  Most people are flattered when another person expresses interest in or appreciation for them.  You seem to operate differently.”

“I guess I do.  Can you let me go now?”

He held on for another minute and despite the pervasive cold of his skin, Megan felt nothing but heat.  There was a renewed sense of that electricity she had felt upon their first physical contact and she was afraid that if he didn’t let go soon, she would cave.

She would throw out all of that indignation she had just expressed to herself and she would do exactly what he was asking her to.  But he dropped his hand and then she was free.  Free of the physical constraints he represented and clear of the fogging effect he had on her brain.  She took a quick step forward and then she was halfway to the sidewalk.

She was on her way and she wasn’t going to look back.  She was NOT going to look back but then he cleared his throat, so quietly that she wasn’t sure it had actually happened at all, and then turning back was exactly what she did.  She was several feet away from him now but looking into his eyes still resulted in such a strong pull that she almost went right back to the place where she had just stood. 

“What?!  What do you want?”

“Nothing.  I want nothing from you.  I only wanted to tell you that I live in that cream house off Carriage Lane. In case you change your mind and decide you want that drink after all.  I’ll be up, there’s no need to worry about that.  I’m a bit of a night owl.”

She gave an exasperated snort of disbelief and turned away from him, walking in the opposite direction as quickly as her legs could carry her.  This time she really didn’t look back but she didn’t need to to know that he was still standing there and watching her go.

She thought that he would probably do that until she was completely out of sight.  Was he expecting her to turn back again?  He probably realized that if she did she would really be a goner.  It felt pretty obvious to her, which was why she made such a furious point of not doing it even though now there was another reason for her to want to go. 

Normally, if somebody told you that they lived on “that cream house” on Carriage Lane you would have no idea what he was talking about.  For Megan, in this instance, that was not the case.  She knew exactly which house he meant.  It was one of the most beautiful and intriguing houses in the city and she was pretty sure that half of New Orleans residents and the tourists as well were dying to get inside and take a look at it.

Now she had her own personal invitation to do just that and there was a little voice inside screaming at her to just do it already!  It was a voice she wasn’t listening to, but it was pretty freaking hard to keep her self-control.  Megan had lived in a whole lot of different places in her almost thirty years and seen many different kinds of homes.  None of them had ever captured her imagination more than that huge romantic white house behind the wrought iron gates set far back from the road with the tangled garden encompassing it.

It was a house that radiated mystery and a sense of somehow sorrowful romanticism and she felt herself drawn to it.  She would find reasons to walk by it to get to the places she needed to be, even if it meant taking the very long way.  She liked to be near it and to imagine who was inside and what those occupants’ story was. 

Now she knew who at least one of those people was and he was giving her the invitation she needed to go exploring the home of her dreams.  Saying no to that one was rough, like a child waking up on Christmas morning, looking at his heap of presents under the tree, and then saying “no thanks, I think I’ll pass.” 
Who the hell wanted to do a thing like that?! 
She did it, but she was pissed about it the whole way home and by the time she was outside of her rundown, drug den-looking apartment building she had almost completely talked herself out of going up to her own place.

There were so many reasons for her indecision that she couldn’t even begin to straighten them out inside of her own head.  Part of it was that she was still badly shaken up by her run in with those shitty men.  The idea of going upstairs and holing up inside of an apartment she was pretty sure a five year old could have broken into didn’t exactly sound appealing. 

She could have called a friend and asked to stay with her, but she didn’t really have any friends.  Not in the city, not good enough friends to ask for something like that. There were a couple of girls she worked with at the diner who she was friendly with but not the kind of friendly where they shared anything about their lives. 

Megan really didn’t do that with anybody.  She’d had enough tragedy in her life to make her skittish of people she didn’t know and the majority of the people she had grown up caring about were long gone.  But she didn’t want to think about that.  That was a story for another time.

So there was still that fear and overblown anxiety that came from a traumatically stressful situation, and there was the mystery house calling out for her to come and explore.  And back behind those two very good reasons, there was Philip.  Philip, possibly the most arrogant man she had ever met (although who knew, maybe she was misjudging him, or at least that’s what she told herself), who was also without a doubt the most gorgeous man she had ever seen.

The more she thought about it, the surer she was that he might actually be the most handsome man anybody had ever seen.  And she couldn’t get him out of her head.  It felt like it was actually getting worse, not better.  All she could see in her mind’s eye were his eyes and the little smirk he wore on his face.  She wanted to see him again.  She wanted to wipe that smirk off of his face, to break that cool and calm exterior he wore like a suit of armor. 

The thing she would never admit, not to herself and sure as shit not to anybody else, was that she wanted to feel his hands resting on the small of her back again, too.  She was crazy attracted to him, so immediately attracted to him that she did not trust the feeling at all, but whether she trusted it or not, it was still there and it was driving her crazy.  She paced back and forth in front of her building for five minutes, fifteen minutes, and thirty minutes. 

She paced back and forth until she couldn’t stand it anymore and then she took off, speed walking away from her home and towards Philip’s. 
Just to see the house
, she told herself
, just to finally get a look inside and maybe try and take him down a peg or two while she was at it. 
If he would still let her in.  Part of her had a feeling that now that she was out of his sight she would be completely out of his mind as well.  He could have met four girls right after she turned his invitation down and taken each and every one of them home. 

She didn’t think anybody but her would even think of telling him no.  By the time she was standing in front of the huge, beautiful home she was convinced that he wouldn’t even be there, but the massive iron gate was standing open for her, beckoning her to come inside.  She walked timidly up the from walkway, suddenly feeling totally out of place and wishing she looked a little bit less messy.

This seemed like the kind of house a person needed to dress up for.  The closer to the front of the house she got, the thicker the gardens became until when she looked over her shoulder she almost couldn’t see the sidewalk anymore.  The air was perfumed with the scent of honeysuckle and lilac, however, and the gas lanterns hanging along the path and up on both sides of the door held little fires dancing merrily and welcoming her to the estate. 

Megan could hardly breathe.  It felt like she had walked into another world entirely, or had been transported to a dark fairytale world where absolutely anything could, and probably would, happen.  She knew she should probably turn around and go back to her apartment but there was no way she actually would. 

The voice of reason inside of her head was growing dimmer with each step she took and by the time she got to the twelve-foot tall double front doors, it was completely silent.  It had been drowned out by all of the opulence she saw in front of her.  And as if she had sounded an alarm, those doors opened and Philip was standing there with that smirk of his.

His face made it seem like he had always known she was going to come see the house for herself, something that was profoundly annoying to her, but she still wasn’t going to leave.  He held out a hand to her and offered her a drink in a beautiful gilded flute.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a French 75.  Classic drink, clean flavors.  I had a feeling it might be the kind of thing you’d enjoy.”

She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but it was actually her most favorite cocktail.  She shook her head in disbelief, took the drink and then a long sip, and stepped inside.          

CHAPTER THREE

          It had been a long, long time since Philip had experienced anything close to real frustration or disappointment.  Those were emotions more commonly felt by flesh and blood people with the blood still pumping through their veins insistently and their hearts going pitter patter in their chests.

Philip had neither of those things, hadn’t in quite some time.  There was also the fact of the matter of how little time he had actually spent as a living man.  When a person is all of thirty years old, or even approaching the age, he tends to believe that he has reached the full and complete state of what it means to be an adult.  He feels that he is responsible, that he sees the world for what it truly is instead of the imaginings he saw as a boy.

How ridiculous, to presume a thing like that.  How juvenile, how naive.  It was only the young and foolhardy who believed that they were done with their internal growth.  Philip knew that now, after a century of living after he had died, but he also believed that there were certain aspects of who and what he was that would have benefited from having had more of his natural born, God given life. 

One of the things that people found so appealing about being changed into a vampire (when it came to the legends and stories of them; there weren’t many people who believed that vampires really existed) was the fact that once changed, they would never age another day.  It seemed to Philip that people were more afraid of the process of aging than they were of the idea of death itself and they were willing to do anything, to sell their souls, for the promise of eternal youth.

What those same people failed to realize was that it wasn’t only the outward physical appearance that was cut off when the change occurred.  The experiences a vampire gained after being turned were all well and good, but there was something different about the experiences he gained while still alive.  There was a light to those experiences, a sepia tint that made them somehow more meaningful.

The process of growing emotionally continued after the turning, but never in the way they would have when still alive.  Or at least Philip thought that was true.  It was something he had been told many times before.  Or maybe it was just that Caroline (her and every other person who had delivered her same messages over the course of the century) was right.  Maybe he was just a brat. 

He hadn’t gotten his way with that girl.  He had wanted her, wanted her still, and she had resisted his charms.  He couldn’t remember the last time he had experienced that, either.  When Philip Smith wanted a woman, he got her.  The process of doing so was almost always embarrassingly easy.  All he had to do was look at them the right way and they were practically taking off their clothes right there in the street.

He had loved it at first, he had to admit that.  What man wouldn’t?  To be able to choose whichever woman he wanted and have her for as long as he wanted and then walk away with no attachment at all.  He had gorged himself, feeling as if he would never be able to satiate his sexual appetite.  Everything about him had felt like it was on fire in those days, back when immortality was still new and had not yet lost its luster.  But as with all things, the luster of it all began to fade and Philip had gradually grown bored.  He didn’t stop his sexual marathons, but he enjoyed them less and less.  He was bored, so terribly bored.  He formed no attachment to any of the girls he was with.  He wasn’t even sure he was capable of doing so. 

He had heard rumors of vampires mating to and forming long lasting, monogamous relationships with people or other vampires, but in his humble opinion it was all a bunch of bullshit.  Vampires lost a little bit more of their humanity every year until all they were inside was cold.  He felt that.  He
felt
that cold growing inside of him.

The bonds he still felt attached to were the bonds he had formed when he was a newborn vampire, terrified and with little idea of how to navigate the new world that had been opened up to him.  His father, his sister, the vampire family that he had been ushered into in that dark, confused time, those were the only bonds he still held dear and sometimes he found himself wishing fervently that he could sever those ties as well.

“Stupid, this is beneath you, Philip.”

He had stormed back to his home, seething along the way, and was currently pacing back and forth in front of his long cherry oak bar.  He remembered how impressed he had been with himself when he had acquired his house and then with each subsequent beautiful thing he had installed inside of it.  He remembered the silly pride he had felt when this bar had been complete and now the thought of it made him even angrier.  To be so pleased with himself over a thing like that!  What had been the point?  It hadn’t gotten him anything worthwhile.

None of this shit had.  All it was was another piece of furniture taking up space.  If it weren’t for the fact that it was stocked full of liquor it would have been completely useless.  But it did have liquor, and a lot of it, so he poured himself a large tumbler full of scotch and drained it before pouring himself another.

It hadn’t worked on her.  The only thing he had really wanted in decades, and his charms hadn’t worked on her.  The concept of not getting what he wanted was so foreign to him that he was no longer equipped to handle it.  So there was that, but there was more than that, also.  There was something about Megan that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Even having been parted from her now, he could feel some part of her calling out to him, calling for him to find her again.  She was beautiful, he didn’t think that was up for debate, but it was more than that, too.  She was beautiful but broken, cracked from the inside in ways he doubted anybody else had really noticed before.

In the small amount of time they had spoken and the even smaller amount of time in which he had touched her supple skin, he had felt a deep sadness inside of her.  There was a history of tragedy there that she wore like a suit of armor.  There was something compelling and beyond intoxicating about it.

He wanted more than to have her body.  He wanted her to
belong
to him, both body and soul.  He wanted to help her, to protect her.  He wanted to save her, as ridiculous as that sounded even to his own ears.  He wanted to save her from herself and from whatever dark cloud that had followed her all of the days of her life. 

He had never felt that way before, didn’t know what to do with the feeling now that he had it.  And how stupid he was being!  What made him think that he was in a position to be saving anybody?  Here he was, an abomination of nature, a chest without a heartbeat and a system of morality that was questionable at best.  Did he really think that he could do anything to save another being when he hadn’t been able to save himself? 

“Stop it!”
he roared to himself, now pacing around the room as if a man half mad. “
Stop it, now
! 
Damned the both of you, and what of it?  She has her pains and you have your own.  She has her demons, and you?  You are a demon, through and through.  You’re too old to be this stupid.”

Somehow Philip expected this chastisement to pull him out of his funk, but it did nothing of the sort.  It was like there was some voice inside of him that was not his own.  That voice was whispering fiercely, telling him that this girl was unlike any others.  This girl was not to be given up on so easily.  Except that he hadn’t really given up on her, had he?  No, not at all.  He had made his play to gain her favor and the privilege of her company.

She had shot him down, unceremoniously and without even a pause of consideration.  He could go around and round the matter and in the end, it wouldn’t change a thing.  She was gone, did not want him, and more power to her.  He had been unforgivably arrogant, not just in his brief dealings with her but for decade after decade of his afterlife and his human life before it.

He deserved to be shot down, and what if he had only made up his intuition of the way she may need him in the first place?  It seemed likely enough.  After all, he was no prophet, no angel.  He was just a demon of a man, a husk that once held a life of potential and now held...what?  What did that husk hold? 

He did not know, wasn’t sure he wanted to know.  He had heard the tales of the opening of Pandora’s Box just like so many others.  He knew full well that certain things were better left undisturbed. 

“Silly, you’re just being silly, Megan!  What are you
doing
?  Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Philip stopped in the very center of his large, probably too ornate, sitting room, the sound of Megan Wright’s voice stopping him in the middle of his tantrum.  For a moment, he felt completely ridiculous, as if she had somehow opened his massive front doors and was watching his spiral into childish unhappiness.  He even went so far as to stop and look for her, but found that there was nobody there but himself. 

So what then?  Had he made it up?  Did he want her to be with him so badly that he was hearing her voice inside of his head?  He would have thought it was very possible; it wasn’t like he hadn’t descended into his own kind of madness before and he did not doubt that he would do so again.  But if that was the case, why was he hearing her say things like that? 

If he were going to make up an internal dialogue, he would have thought he’d make up something that put him in a favorable light.  Or at least something that was about him! He didn’t know, it was possible that what he was hearing
was
about him, but it was difficult to tell.  Especially since it wasn’t real, he reminded himself, and that was a major roadblock in terms of him being able to understand her thought process. 

“
Just go back, won’t you?!  Seriously, Megan, just because you’ve always wanted to see the inside of that house doesn’t mean you should actually do this.  Because you shouldn’t.  You definitely shouldn’t do this.  You should turn around and go HOME!”

Just when he almost had himself convinced that he really had made it up, that maybe his lack of feeding combined with the few stiff drinks he had downed in such a short amount of time had brought on some momentary psychosis, there it was again.  The voice of that Megan Wright, blaring inside of his head so loudly that he actually winced.

Hearing it this time, he was almost sure that he wasn’t making it up, after all.  Because the voice didn’t sound like him.  The way it spoke, the way
she
spoke, wasn’t the same kind of cadence his voice would have assigned her.  It was a voice all her own and for some reason it was playing like a radio in his brain. 

He hadn’t meant to tune in, but now that he had, he was entirely fascinated.  It was probably an unfair advantage, seeing as he highly doubted that she knew he could hear her now, but he found that he didn’t really care all that much.  He wanted her, now more than ever, and if hearing her internal struggle might help him to win her in the end, well then so be it.

He had never been accused of being a saint, not even when he was alive.  He was a predator if he was anything at all, and at the moment, he felt like he was on the hunt.  On the hunt for something other than food, but still on the hunt, and all of his senses had come alive, blaring at him in Technicolor.

She was coming to him.  She had gone all the way home, from the sounds of it, and then stalled.  He wondered if she had ever even made it inside of her apartment.  Had she let herself inside and then trudged right back out again?  Had she even made it inside of whatever shitty little building she was holed up in at all (he wasn’t sure how, but for some reason he was totally sure that the place she lived was some anonymous shithole that nobody chose when given a better option)? 

Somehow, he thought not.  He could see her now within his mind’s eye.  He could see her pacing back and forth in front of her graffiti-ridden apartment building, torn in two as to what her next course of action should be.  She wanted to go inside and pour herself a big ol’ glass of something.

She wanted to run back to that strange man who was not a man at all, to take him up on his arrogant offer.  By the sound of it, she had decided on the latter.   Or maybe not decided exactly, but she was coming nonetheless, cursing her compulsion the whole way.  She was literally running to him. 

He could feel that, too.  He couldn’t understand why he was hearing these things, why he was privileged to have this access to her, but he welcomed it.  He knew without needing to be told that it was only temporary and so should be cherished, which only made him welcome it all the more. 

And all of a sudden, he was calm.  That violent storm raging inside of him that came from a feeling of impotence and want was quieted immediately.  He became who he had been before taking his surprisingly eventful walk.  He walked quietly to his large bar, not feeling like it was ridiculous at all at this point, and began fixing Megan a drink.  He couldn’t have said why, but he was pretty sure he knew what her favorite was.