Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (8 page)

“It’s a disgusting habit, Caroline,” Philip replied with his nose still wrinkled, “especially for a lady.”

“A lady?  A
lady
?  I might well have been a lady a long, long time ago, but I haven’t been for a while.  And it’s not like it’s going to kill me, is it?  So there’s really no reason to have a problem with it.”

Philip could have come up with any number of reasons, just because she said that they weren’t there, but he resisted the urge.  He was sure that she had come here for a reason, and it hadn’t been to talk about her smoking.  If he was in the mood for a fight, he was sure he was going to get it.  Quite sure, painfully sure.  Just the idea of it made him tired.

“OK, Caroline, OK, fine.  You’re not a lady and there’s nothing wrong with it.  Now why don’t you tell me why you’ve come?”

“Can’t a girl come and visit her baby brother?”

“She can,” he said carefully, not even close to being fooled by her cheery demeanor, “if that’s why she’s really here.”

“OK fine, whatever.  Have it your way.  Why do you think I’m here if it’s not for the pleasure of your company?”

“The phone call.  You came because of the phone call.”

His voice sounded flat, dead, to his own ears and he knew it must sound the same way to Caroline.  That stupid fucking phone call, the one he had tried to dismiss and hadn’t been able to shake off at all. 

That was one of the lessons he had learned after years bleeding into each other, one after the next, until time immemorial.  You could try to get away from a thing, try to outrun it, but a memory was always somewhere in the background, just out of reach.  A person, a vampire, lived his life but the past went right on living just out of reach.  Just out of reach but terribly accessible nonetheless.  If that were true with the bad memories, the really bad parts of the past, how could he expect it not to apply to things as stupid as an unpleasant phone call?

“Yes, Philip, that’s right.  I came because of the phone call.  The one in which you hung up on me.  You remember that?”

“I sure as shit do.  I’d do it again, too.  I’d do it right now if you were on the phone instead of standing here in my office.”

“I know you would.  Which is why I’m here.  See?  You figured it out all on your own.  You didn’t need to ask me any kind of question at all.”

The look on her face was nauseatingly smug and although Philip had never hit a woman before, neither one living or one turned, he was very tempted to do so now.  Not a hard hit, just enough to get rid of her all-knowing smile.

“I guess I didn’t.  Not about that, anyway.”

Caroline cocked her head to the side, daring him to keep going.  That was how a lot of things went when the two of them got together.  Even when they were on the phone or emailing, for God’s sake, this was the way things went between the two of them.  He loved her, he supposed, but loving someone and liking them weren’t always the same thing, were they?

No, no they most definitely were not.  So yes, Philip loved his sister but it was much easier to like her when she was thousands of miles away.  But now she was sitting right across from him and looking at him with wide, playfully innocent eyes that let him know that she was ready to go a couple of rounds.  She was prepared for it, if that’s what it came to.  Being prepared was something Caroline was very good at.

“OK, well then, how about this.  Here’s another question for you.  Why can’t you just let this shit go?  You want me to lay off of your smoking, why can’t you lay off of me?  Why is it that you get to make your own decisions while I’m supposed to just do as you say?”

“Are you for real?  Please, tell me that’s a joke.”

“Why should I be?  I don’t see anything funny about it.”

Despite his best intentions, he was letting her get underneath his skin, letting her climb in and slip along the small open spaces between the skin and the tough muscles.  They were the only places where he had been vulnerable in many years, and Caroline was one of the only people who knew how to gain access to them.  When she began to speak, it was in slow, measured words, clearly meant to highlight the fact that she considered him to be removed from reality at this point.

Not that she really did, but she liked to mess with him that way.  She liked to mess with him in any way she could.  It was part of how she asserted her dominance.  She was a predator just like he was and although they had their own particular ways of showing it, there was no question about it being true. 

“Well, Philip, it’s funny because the two things aren’t even remotely the same.”

“Aren’t they?  Aren’t they basically both about life decisions?”

Caroline snorted in disgust again and rose, putting her cigarette out in his half full glass of scotch and then beginning to pace around the room.  While she did so, looking casually at the vast library he had amassed for himself, he poured himself another glass and one for Caroline while he was at it.

They might as well drink if they were going to really get into the thing.  He watched her fingering his possessions, watched her consider them all and then replace them with no real interest, and then return to her original seat to light another clove.  He slid one of those glasses of scotch across the wide reclaimed wood desk (supposedly built out of a barn as old as he was, but who the hell knew if
that
was true) and she took it without even alluding to a thank you.

She took a deep sip and glanced towards the decanter of the stuff to make sure that there was enough for another drink or two if she decided she wanted one.  She was fidgety, very fidgety, and Philip thought to himself again that she looked a lot like a cat.  Her movements were fluid and while she had her moments when all she wanted to do was curl up luxuriously and do nothing at all, most of the time she could not stay still. 

She would flit from one place to another whether she had been invited to or not and when she was done with a person or a place she would just be gone.  You could not make her do a thing she did not want to do.  Hadn’t been able to even in the first few years after her turning and her increasing age hadn’t done anything to make her more pliable.

So when she opened her mouth to answer him, Philip was surprised by the fact that she sounded as tired as he felt.  Almost all of the cuntish pride that she might as well have had a patent for was gone and her eyes looked almost...sad. 

She looked like she really needed him to understand what she was trying to say to him.  If she hadn’t changed so drastically he would never have come close to listening to what she needed to say.  He would have just sent her on her way and gone about his business, maybe climbing back into bed with that delicious morsel dozing up there in his master suite. 

But she sounded so unlike the version of Caroline he had fought with so many times before and that alone was enough to give him pause.

It broke down his walls just enough for him to listen without being his usual asshole self.  Had it not been for their collective fatigue and the fact that this was not a topic he had any wish to discuss, he would have been pleased by this. 

It was a development.  Even after a century the two of them were able to change to fit each other.  Who knew a thing like that was possible?

“Yes, Philip, I suppose they are.  I suppose they’re both about life decisions at their most basic level.  But they still aren’t the same.  They
aren’t
.  Don’t you see that?  Can’t you try?”

“I’ll try and listen.  That’s all I can promise you for now, Caroline.  It’s going to have to be enough.”

She nodded, put out a butt in that first sullied glass.  Lit another clove, sucked in a deep breath of it and then watched it snake through the air with a look of mild surprise that would almost have convinced a person that she wasn’t the source of that smoke to begin with.  She looked so sad in that moment that part of Philip, a tiny part buried so deep down inside of him that he hadn’t realized it was still there, ached for her.

Looking at her that way, she seemed to him no more than a little girl.  He saw that and resolved that he would, he really would, try to see things from her perspective.  If it meant enough for her to allow herself to look vulnerable, even for a moment, it was deserving of his effort, at the very least.  She looked away from the smoke then, inhaled deeply again and looked him dead in the eye.

“It will be enough.  For now.”

“Well then, you better start talking.  You’ve come an awfully long way to have this conversation.”

“It’s part of who we are, Philip!  This order that seems so easy for you to cast aside and walk away from is part of who we are.”

“And what does that mean?  Part of which part of who we are?  We’re built up of so many pieces that I can’t keep track.”

This was the same song and dance they had gone through over and over and over again until both of them wanted to scream and swear each other off for good and yet here it was again, ready to begin anew.  He felt himself prickle and reminded himself, tried to remind himself, of the promise he had just made.

He could see her struggling with the same thing and she was up again, pacing around the room and looking at all of the same things she had just gone over five minutes ago.  He waited to see if she would sit back down this time and when she didn’t, he realized just how badly he had agitated her.

“You’re right.  We’re fractured and sometimes it’s hard.  Get over it.  You hear me, Brother?  Get over it.  You’ve spent enough of this life acting like a child, moping around, wasting time.  It’s old, do you hear me?  It’s been old for a long time.”

Philip opened his mouth, allowed it to hang that way for a beat or two so that he looked a hell of a lot like a suffocating fish out of water, and then shut it again promptly.  He wanted to tell her that if she didn’t like the way he operated she could get the hell out of his house and not come back again.

That’s what he wanted to do, and it probably would have felt beyond good.  But he stayed quiet.  Why?  Why did he stay quiet when any other day he would have ripped into her with glee?  Because some little part of him knew that she was right.  Shit, what she was talking about might even be part of why he felt the kind of fractured he was always complaining about.

There was Irish in his blood, or at least there had been before he went, and it had a funny way of showing up in a stubborn streak a mile long.  It gave him his fight and had kept him going in times when stopping would have been a hell of a lot easier, but it also made it easy for him to hang onto things that would be better let go.

And what would be the harm
, he thought
.  What would be the harm in me just
listening?
I’ve put it off for the last hundred years and it hasn’t necessarily made things any easier.  Maybe it just made more sense to humor her and give her a listen.  Maybe it was just good common sense.

“No?  Nothing?  Does this mean I’ve finally got your attention?”

Philip said nothing, didn’t trust his voice to speak, actually, but he nodded gravely.  Caroline looked, frankly, astonished.  Philip had to smile when he saw that.  He realized as he looked at his beautiful sister that he had no idea what her family of origin had been before she had been changed and primed to be his sister once he changed as well. 

What he did know was that she had a stubborn streak just as thick as his own.  They were a lot alike in many ways, and that made him feel both better and worse all at the same time.  They were a lot alike but she had used her powers for good while he had used his for...for what? 

For greed, for amusement, for sulking.  He guessed he’d used it for different things at different times, but he couldn’t say he had ever used them for good.  Not unless he was counting coming to Megan Wright’s rescue.  That might count, maybe, although it would feel more like it did if he hadn’t already slept with her.

But now Caroline was returning to her (sometimes) seat without looking at anything but him.  He thought she might be trying to figure out if he was working some kind of a new angle with her and he supposed that made perfect sense.