Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (9 page)

“Philip,” her tone so much softer than it had been only two seconds earlier, “do you remember when Papa turned you?  Can you still remember when he gave you your new life?”

Could he remember?  Of course he could.  He didn’t believe that any vampire could ever forget his birthing, even if it was the thing he most wanted to do.  It differed very much from human birth in that way, although not so much so in others.  Just as with human birth, vampires came into their life with blood and pain and often times screams of anguish that rang in the ears like the beat of a drum. 

It came with the confusion of human birth, too, the feeling of just not knowing what to do or what was expected or if this whole thing had actually been a huge fucking mistake.  More often than not, though, a vampire birth was not due to choice or desire, not a miracle to be pulled out as a reminder that good things really did happen on the days when one was feeling blue.  Philip’s certainly hadn’t been.  Philip knew that he would be dead by now if it wasn’t for his having been changed into what he was, but it was not what he would have been chosen.  Not back then. 

If he hadn’t loved Celia so damned much, and maybe hadn’t been such a child, he wouldn’t have been changed at all.  If it hadn’t been for Celia, the thought of whom still made his heartache that hurt reserved for the loves long lost.  Like the memory of heartbreak.

“Philip?”

“I remember.”  It was all he could say.  It was all he wanted to say.

“I remember, too.  He was rare, Papa, when he changed you and me.  There weren’t vampires like him.  There still aren’t nearly so many as there ought to be.  And there were no rules.  That’s what’s the most important thing to remember. 

“There weren’t any rules to protect us or the humans around us.  It was only going to get more dangerous.  If Papa hadn’t done the research he did, he wouldn’t have realized what we were meant to do; our purpose.  He wouldn’t have discovered the order.”

The order.  The goddamned order.  That’s what Caroline and Philip fought over the most.  They had done so since almost the beginning, for Philip hadn’t been a vampire for all that long before he decided that the order wasn’t something he was interested in being a part of.  He didn’t believe that there was anything sacred about being what he had become.  He wouldn’t have been that thing if there was anything good to believe in and since there was nothing worth saving in the world he didn’t see much of a point in trying to protect the members of said world.

He could remember shouting that opinion haughtily (he now thought) at his surrogate papa and his disgusted brothers and sisters (none blood, all born into the same makeshift family in the same makeshift way).  He could remember how justified he had felt in leaving.  He didn’t need a purpose.  He had really believed that he didn’t need much of anything beside himself and had gone on believing it until, well, until today, and he was only just starting to wonder if maybe he had been too quick to jump to that particular conclusion.

“The order.  Again.  I know, believe me, I know how important it is to you.  To both of you.  I just-”

“You don’t buy it.”

“I don’t know,” he said, running his hand distractedly through his hair, “I honest to God don’t know at this point.  You want me to believe that some ancient literature Antoine found is for real, that a certain lineage of vampire is pre-ordained to watch over humans. 

“You want me to believe that we’re supposed to maintain the balance between the vampires and the humans.  I guess it’s just hard for me to believe things without proof, you know?  And I know, I’ve seen the book, but we don’t really know where that came from.  Doesn’t feel much like proof to me.”

“But Philip!  Haven’t you ever believed in a thing you couldn’t see?  What about love?  You were in love once.  Could you see the proof of it?  Jesus, Philip, what about
us
?  According to most of the planet, we aren’t even supposed to exist!  We’re just supposed to be a scary story people break out at Halloween.”

She was right and he knew it.  It was something that had occurred to him before and something that had been troubling him with some frequency in the last few years.  The thing was, he didn’t want to be part of a special order.  He wanted to be selfish, to keep going along the way he had been.  It hadn’t treated him so badly, not really.  And now he thought that he had something that might take the boredom away.  That girl sleeping in his bed was the most infuriating, interesting thing he had encountered in a long while. 

He thought he might actually want to see her again, maybe even see if he could skirt her skittish side and develop an honest to god relationship with her.  True, he didn’t know what that would look like with her being human and him being a vampire, but he was starting to waver some on his staunch cynicism, thought there might really be a way for him to make it work.

If he chose now to finally agree to become an active member of the order, what would happen to his shot at things with Megan?  Although it hurt his pride some to admit it to himself, his chance with her was already slim to none without him doing anything to mess it up.  If he added anything as complicated as the order, he might as well just throw in the towel before he ever really gave it a shot at all.

“Philip-”

“I know!” he spat, a little more harshly than he intended but feeling flustered and desperate for some time to think, “I know.  I hear the things you’re saying.  I’m listening, just like I told you I would.  But that doesn’t mean all of my opinions on the matter automatically reverse themselves, does it?  That’s not the way I work.”

“I know,” softly, delicately even, “I don’t expect that.  It’s just that I haven’t told you everything yet.  I didn’t just come here to rehash our oldest argument, as much fun as that sounds.  There’s something else.  Something we haven’t seen in a long, long time.  Something that might be more dangerous than anything else we’ve dealt with before.”

But Philip couldn’t hear her anymore.  All he could hear was the sound of his front door flying open, the whining of the gate as it was pulled open with more force than it had been in a very long time.  Stricken, he turned back to his wall of windows, the place that allowed him to play god with his beloved city.

He saw what he expected to see, the only thing he could have seen, but it made him roar with disappointment and rage all the same.  It was the most dramatic noise Caroline had ever heard him utter and she winced, actually stepping back from him as if she thought that he might hurt her.  He didn’t care.  He couldn’t care, not now.  At the moment, the only thing he could care about was the picture of Megan running away from his house just as quickly as she could. 

CHAPTER FIVE

“Little magpie, why do you let the world take you the way that you do?”

“I don’t understand.  How do I let the world take me?  What should I have it do with me instead?”

“You don’t need me to tell you that.  Little magpies always know.  You’ve always known, that’s why you run.  Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t know!” she cried frantically, whirling from one place to the next and seeing nothing. “I don’t!  I don’t know a thing.  I run because I run.  It’s what I do.  It’s what I always do.”

It was dark, so very dark, and Megan was afraid.  She was afraid because she didn’t know where she was, and she was afraid because she did.  She was afraid because she could not see, not a single thing, and yet she did not want to, had no desire to see at all.

She could hear a sort of a breathiness surrounding her, like the way she imagined it might sound to be inside of a person’s lungs while you listened to said person’s breath, and she knew that whoever was talking to her was very close.  It was a stranger.  She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, everyone knew that.

She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, and who was it that had told her that for the very first time?  She knew that it was usually a parent who gave that warning but she had never had any parents, at least not while she had been old enough to receive a warning like that.  She had spent all of her young years living in an orphanage and then after that being moved from foster care home to foster care home until she turned eighteen and could pretend to be an adult. 

She remembered wishing every night that she might find her forever home, a set of parents who would really want to belong to her, and she remembered when she had stopped wishing for much of anything at all.  She had walked out of her last faux home on the very eve of her eighteenth birthday, convinced that now she was an adult.

That was the age her theoretical mother had been when she had given her up, her mother who had loved being a junkie more than she had loved her infant.  As it turned out, something she knew now with absolute clarity, eighteen wasn’t very old at all.

It was just that it took being older to know that for real.  So no, she hadn’t had a set of Leave it to Beaver parents to warn her off of strangers, but it was something she knew anyway.  Strangers were bad.  Strangers were to be avoided.

“Little magpie, why do you fight so hard?  Don’t you want it?  Don’t you want some place to belong?”

Except that this wasn’t a stranger.  She didn’t know who it was, was almost certain it wasn’t a person she had actually met, but it wasn’t a stranger, either.  It was somebody she knew from inside of her bones and that was the most frightening thing of all. 

No, she didn’t want this and she twisted herself with everything she had, pulled herself away like stepping through an ocean of molasses.  The last thing she heard before waking up was a warning, and that warning carried across the chasm spanning across sleep and waking just fine.

“Stay close to the dead man.  He’s dangerous but he’ll keep you safe.  He’ll keep you safe until you see yourself for what you are, little magpie, and then you won’t ever need saving again.”

Megan arched up off of the bed with a gasp.  She couldn’t get enough air.  She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs and she was going to suffocate.  Her body jerked up again, once, twice, looking just like one of those extras on Grey’s Anatomy being electrocuted back to life.  She was still stuck inside of her nightmare, at least enough to be disoriented, and it took her a minute or two to realize where she was.

The dead man.  Stay close to the dead man.  That was what the voice had told her, and what in the hell could that mean?  Christ, why would she want to stay close to a dead man?  Except she knew what the voice meant.  She knew
who
the voice meant.  She looked around her with wide, frightened eyes, seeing that she was still in the massive bed chambers of one Mr. Philip Smith.  Chambers. 

He called his bedroom (although it was a very, very big space to go by a name as simple as “bedroom”) his chambers, and wasn’t that an antiquated way to put it?  She didn’t know anybody who talked that way because nobody talked that way, at least outside of a movie rendition of one of those fancy romance novels.  She had never been a fan of those. 

Nothing about them seemed even remotely realistic to her.  But that was the kind of language Philip used and before letting him ravage her in his ship sized bed, it hadn’t really made much of an impression on her.

But now, shifting up onto her elbows and feeling her whole body ache with both the satisfaction of sex and her almost complete lack of sleep for only god knew how long, it’s different.  That language doesn’t seem stupid and silly and like just another affectation of a man who thought too highly of himself.  Now it means a hell of a lot more.  The dead man. 

The voice that had called her magpie (also strangely familiar even though she was positive she couldn’t remember anyone ever calling her by that or any other nickname) had told her to stay close to the dead man, and Megan didn’t really need that explained to her.  She knew what that meant.

The dead man was Philip.  Cold, stone-like skin, the phantom of a heartbeat she now believed must have existed only in her imagination.  And the teeth.  It had been kinky and beyond a turn on when he had grazed her delicate ankle with his unusually sharp teeth and sucked lightly until the blood had run dry.  Her whole body hand tingled then.  It had seemed like she could feel his teeth all over her body, running along her skin as light as feathers.  It had felt like ecstasy because those were not normal teeth and they weren’t attached to a normal man.

Vampire.  The word flashed inside of her mind like a neon sign and it should have been ridiculous, but it wasn’t.  She was in New Orleans, a city that loved the folklore of vampires so well that it often bled into reality and then faded back out again.  That was true for a lot of people, but it hadn’t ever been true for Megan.  She hadn’t been interested in that kind of thing, not one way or another.  She had been much more of a “keep your head down and try not to bring any more trouble down on yourself” kind of a girl.  The only thing that had ever really captured her imagination was the big white house. 

This
big white house, the one she had finally gotten a look at and wasn’t it even better in reality than she could have hoped?  But it turned out that being inside of this house was the same as believing in the boogie man because she was close to the dead man now, wasn’t she?  She had been sleeping in his bed.  Vampire.  He was a vampire and what she needed to do was get the hell out of dodge, like, yesterday. 

“Shit. 
Shit
!” she hissed to herself, feeling something a lot like panic bubbling up inside of her chest. “What the hell are you
doing
here?”

The sound of her own voice was enough to get her moving.  She had been in a kind of frozen state after waking, totally consumed with the thoughts she couldn’t stop from coming, but that was definitely no longer the case.  She jumped out of bed, feeling like she couldn’t ever move fast enough, groping around in the dark for the little black summer dress he had tossed so unceremoniously aside. 

The carpet was plush and impossibly deep, the kind of carpet only rich people could afford.  Super, super rich people.  She knew the dress was here somewhere, could vaguely recall the image of him yanking it up over her head the second time around (he hadn’t needed any time at all before he was ready for round two) and tossing it aside while she laughed giddily. 

But where?  Where the hell was it?  She was on hands and knees now, feeling around in the dark like a blind person.  The carpet was a rich purple and the rest of the room was so
dark
!  This guy had to have the best blackout curtains in the whole wide world for the room to be this dark.  There wasn’t even the faintest hint of starlight or a moonbeam breaking through.  Why on earth would he want it so dark?

“Oh,” she said to herself in a dull, flat breath, “right.  Vampire.”

She reckoned that not everything in the myths about vampires were true, especially since she had first seen him when it was still twilight outside and not at all full dark, but that didn’t mean they loved light or anything like that.  She felt a moment of curiosity before her mind started to scream at her again and she resumed her search.

Finally, and thank God for it, her pinky finger caught on something strappy and she pulled her little dress towards her, almost sobbing with relief.  She had a habit of becoming claustrophobic when she felt like she might not be able to leave a place. 

Even in a home as huge as this one, she could feel that claustrophobic panic threatening.  It wasn’t about the size, anyway.  She could easily have fit about six of her apartment, hell, probably ten, and still had plenty of room to spare.  No, it was about the idea that she couldn’t just pick up and go.  That was super important to her, to be able to pick up and go.

“Will he let me?”

She had shimmied into her dress quickly, with the ease of a person practiced at leaving places quickly, and slipped on her sandals in one fluid motion.  She had been all set, but that last thought stopped her cold.  The thought was in her words, in her voice, but it felt foreign.  It felt like the same voice from the dream still wrapped tightly around her, and it made her skin prickle with goosebumps. 

She couldn’t tell if that voice was friend or foe, and she didn’t want to stick around to find out.  She needed to get out of here.  She had to get out of there RIGHT NOW.  She pulled the door open with a not inconsiderable effort.  Even in her intense unease, she was surprised by the weight of it. 

She could still vividly see Philip opening it and ushering her inside before making a playground of her body.  He had opened it like it had no weight at all, thrown it back so that it almost hit the wall it was attached to.  She remembered it so well because she had thought to herself that he was being a showoff, that he was trying to make the entrance to his chambers even grander (as if it needed to be). 

Now, realizing that it took almost everything she had just to open that same door at all, she thought that perhaps he hadn’t been able to help that little show.  She couldn’t say just how strong Philip Smith was, but she knew it was far stronger than any human man.  Just one more piece of evidence to put down in the pro vampire column of the little list she was making inside of her head. 

That pro column was growing longer with each minute ticking by on the massive home’s grandfather clock, while the con column only had one item.  Only one, that vampires weren’t actually possible, and that point was rapidly losing its weightiness. 

Pretty soon she thought that it might be wiped off the slate entirely and she would be left with nothing but the complete certainty that vampires were real.  And if vampires were real, what did that mean about all of the other things that went bump in the night?  Did that make all of those legends and myths true?  Just where in the hell did it stop?

“No,” she whispered fiercely, “no.  Not going there.  Can’t go there, not while I’m still inside this house.  If I do that, I’ll never get out.  I’ll slip right down the rabbit hole and I’ll never be able to get back out again.”

She nodded to herself the same way she would have if she had been talking to another person and not herself, and moved on, not bothering to shut the door after she left Philip’s bed chambers.  It wasn’t that she was trying to be rude or anything like that, it wasn’t even that well thought out.  It was honestly as simple as she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to close it even if she wanted to, and also she highly doubted things like that mattered to Philip. 

She knew that it was crazy, that it had to be crazy, that she needed it to be crazy, but she got the sense that it wasn’t a door that he usually kept closed from day to day in whatever strange amalgamation of tides constituted as his life.  She felt that he had closed the door for her, for
her
sake.  He had known (whether consciously or unconsciously) that she would be visiting him soon and he wanted to keep that possibility separate.

He wanted her to want to see his room, and to know that, by the time she made it clear that, yes, that was indeed what she wanted, it was because she wanted him to take her.  She had let him take her, a vampire, a man who wasn’t a man at all and could have sucked the life out of her without taxing himself at all.