Sex And The Single Vampire Part 2

It was the word command that did it. Ever since Timothy, I react badly to it. Without even the merest thought about the repercussions of my actions on an obviously insane and badly wounded man, I stomped my boot down on his bare foot and slammed my elbow back into his belly. He grunted in pain and doubled up as I lunged forward and raced up the stairs. I knew it was the sheerest folly to leave a lunatic with a bag full of expensive equipment, but I had no choice. Whoever he was waiting for, whoever had left without having the decency to help, clearly wasn't going to call the police or medical aid. I leaped up the stairs, ignoring the pain in my leg and the st.i.tch that instantly formed in my side as I ran down the hallway to the door. I had remembered seeing a callbox down the block. I'd call for help, then sneak back into the inn and keep an eye on the poor, handsome, utterly deranged man.

It was raining-a cold, nasty, sleety type of rain-as I galloped awkwardly down the road to the call box. It took me three tries to dial 999, but at last I was connected with an emergency dispatcher. Two minutes later, having described where I was and what the problem was with the man, I headed back to the old inn at a slower pace, worried that my escape might have sent the poor man over the deep end.

I crept into the hallway and stood with my back to a moldy wall, keeping an eye on the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt. It seemed like it was an hour before the sound of a police car siren Dopplered against the building, but according to my watch it was only eight and a half minutes. I greeted the two policemen, explained quickly what I had seen, and followed them down the stairs to the now closed door. They switched on powerful flashlights and cautiously opened the door.

The room was empty.

Not only was the room empty, the table was gone, and the pool of blood on the floor had vanished. My bag and piece of chalk and flashlight were still there, but everything else was gone.

"Wait a minute-I... There was... He was right here! How could he... And the blood, it was right there-that table must have weighed a ton! How could he have moved it so quickly?"

"Madam," said the smaller of the two policemen, shining his flashlight right on my face. I heard him gasp as I turned away so I was in profile. "Madam," he said again, his voice a bit shaky. "Are you aware of the fact that it is a crime to call the police out on a nonemergency situation?"

"But..." I looked around the room, keeping my head tipped so they couldn't see directly into my eyes. There was nothing here but an empty room, two cops, and my bag of tricks. "He was here! I swear to you, he was here! Bleeding all over the place, and naked as the day he was born."

The taller policeman took a deep breath. It didn't take any psychic abilities to know I was in for a lecture. I gathered up my things as they took turns telling me what happened to tourists who turned in false alarms. By the time I explained what I was doing there, reiterated that I wasn't given to phoning in prank calls, and heard their second round of lecturing, they hustled me upstairs. I was more than willing to believe that I'd had some sort of weird episode in the inn, something related to its spectral inhabitants, and imagined everything with the handsome, if troubled, man.

Until I reached in my bag to pull out the key to lock the door behind us. Then I saw my notebook.

There were b.l.o.o.d.y fingerprints all over it.

I spent the rest of the night writing up my experience, in between watching the ghost cat sleep, groom itself, and hobble around the room poking into things. It didn't seem to be thrilled to see me, and after trying unsuccessfully to convince it to lie on the bed next to me (so I could take a picture of the two of us together), I ended up more or less ignoring it as it ignored me.

By the time dawn lightened the gray layer of clouds enough to indicate it was morning, I was exhausted and cranky, unsure whether I had witnessed some amazing spectral encounter with a ghost that could manifest a physical presence, or if I was delusional.

I fell asleep wishing the former. At least then I could touch him.

"No messages, Miss Telford," Tina the receptionist said that afternoon as she handed me the room key. I waited to see if she had anything else to add, anything along the lines of a complaint about the three-legged semitransparent feline that was inhabiting my room, but she just smiled and turned to deal with another customer.

"Curiouser and curiouser," I said as I limped over to the elevator, my bag clinking and rattling. I shifted it to the other shoulder and wished I were in a line of work that didn't require so much equipment, equipment that had to be taken everywhere, just in case it was needed. My day trip to a haunted abbey turned out to be one of the times when it was nothing more than a heavy albatross hanging off one shoulder. I punched the number for my floor, and wondered if the Summoning had faded enough to let the cat return to its previous existence. Maybe the maid hadn't seen the cat because it was gone.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, kitty," I said as I unlocked my door. It was sitting on the windowsill, staring out the window. "I thought you'd gone. I'm glad to see you haven't, although..." I tugged on my lip. Between the tests I'd conducted early the evening before, and the ones I'd done during the dark hours of the night, I had about as much data as I could conceivably collect. Pictures, video, infrared and ultrasound readings, ion a.n.a.lysis, you name it, I had it, enough to give the a.n.a.lysts back at the office an o.r.g.a.s.m. Perhaps it was time to Release the cat.

"You want to go home, kitty? I think it's time. I really don't want to have to explain to the housekeeping staff just what I've been up to in here, and although you really are the almost ideal pet-no shedding, no litter box odor, no finicky eating habits-I get the idea you aren't wild about being here either."

I laid out the necessary tools in front of me, and after sprinkling a bit of ginseng over the cat, started reciting the words of Release.

I had to stop midway through to pinch the bridge of my nose. The powdered ginseng was tickling my nose, making it scrunch up and my eyes water with the urge to sneeze. I waited until the urge pa.s.sed, completed the Release chant, made the protection symbols, and unguarded my mind to envision Releasing the spirit to another plane of existence.

The cat twitched an ear at me and started licking its shoulder.

"Uh-oh." I gnawed on my lower lip and considered the cat. Maybe I didn't use enough ginseng? Or maybe my stopping in the middle of speaking the words threw it off. I'd try it again, this time taking care not to breathe in the ginseng.

As the last word of the Release left my lips, the cat moved on to licking its sole back leg.

"p.o.o.p. Something's not right here. I wonder if the ginseng wasn't fresh enough?"

I spent the next hour and a half trying variations on the Release, adding and subtracting amounts of ginseng, even adding a dollop of dead man's ash in case that was the secret ingredient to a successful Release.

Nothing worked.

I was starting to get a bit worried. I knew by the rules of Summoning that if I didn't Release the cat, it would be bound to me for all my days, and while it had managed to escape being seen by the maid, I couldn't count on it achieving that feat every day.

Not to mention how I was supposed to get it home to my apartment in northern California. I hated to think what I was going to have to write on the customs form: One translucent feline, dead fifty-some-odd years. Vaccinations up-to-date.

The alarm on my watch started pinging, signaling something I was supposed to do.

"Oh, that stupid book signing. Drat. It would have to be now, when I'm busy with something important."

I thought of brushing it off, but Corrine had begged and pleaded with me before I left for London to attend this book signing.

"Honestly, Cory and her vampire romances," I scoffed as I started repacking the bag. "So some hotshot author has a book signing. Big deal. I have a job to do! But no, I have to go stand in line and wait for a smug author to sign a copy of a book she could get back home. I have to suck up and make nice just so he'll write something pleasant that she'll forget five minutes after she reads it. I have to spend my evening standing on my bad leg in a line that's sure to go for miles because Mr. I'm So Important Dante can't be bothered to do more than one book signing a year. Well, fine, just fine. Make me give up trying to Release my ghost cat. Boy, she's going to owe me for this!"

I finished tidying the bag, popped on my evening sungla.s.ses, told the cat to behave itself, and headed out to find a taxi to Covent Garden. On the way there I ran over the mental list of who in the area I could consult about why the Release wasn't successful.

"Let's see... there's Carlos at SIP, but he's not a Summoner. There is that witch who Ras mentioned supposedly Summoned the ghost of Karl Marx, but I don't have her address, and besides, I'm not sure I want to hang out with someone who actually wanted to spend time with a dead Marx who wasn't Groucho. Urn..." I tapped my lip, watching as the dark, damp streets of London pa.s.sed by the rain-splattered window. "Oh! That hermit that the woman at the SIP office mentioned. That might be a possibility."

"SIP as in Society for the Investigation of the Paranormal?" the taxi driver asked me.

Rats. I was talking to myself out loud again. It's a habit that I can't seem to break myself of. I smiled at the driver and nodded, hoping he wasn't one of the religious fanatics who seemed to delight in lecturing me as to the sinful nature of my job. "Do you... um... know about them?"

"My wife and me go ghost hunting with them a couple of times a year. Just last August we spent the night in the Tower."

The Tower of London was said to be the most haunted spot in all of England. It was a paranormalist's version of Disneyland.

"Did you? See anything interesting?"

He shrugged. "Couple of orbs, a hand coming from the wall, and we felt one or two cold spots, but nothing we caught on film. You a Summoner?"

Normally I don't admit to my job to laypeople, but the driver seemed to be copacetic with the whole idea of ghosts and ghoulies, so I nodded again.

"Thought you might be. What's with the dark specs?"

I waited until he was stopped at a light and lifted the gla.s.ses to my forehead for a moment.

His eyes widened as he whistled. "That natural?"

I laughed a harsh, bitter little laugh. "It's nothing I want, believe you me."

He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I guess not. Must make for some odd looks, eh?"

And odder responses, responses like people screaming and dropping things, claims that I was doing it just to get attention, and worst of all, accusations that I was a freak.

The rest of the ride was conducted in silence. I looked out at London at night and wondered if my optician wasn't wrong-the last time I'd tried contacts, I'd managed to wear them almost a week before my eyes started ulcering. That had been over a year ago. Maybe now they could handle the contacts...

As I left the taxi, the driver pushed a card into my hand. "In case you ever need a chauffeur to take you outside of London. I do that as well."

I thanked him and joined the throng of people streaming into the new bookstore.

"How many copies do you want?" a harried bookstore employee asked me a few minutes later as I shuffled forward in a line so long it was guaranteed to leave my leg aching.

"One of whichever is the latest book."

"One?" She looked me up and down as if I were an insect that had donned human clothing. "Just one? One?"

"Oh, you want more than one, dearie," the woman in line behind me said as she tugged my arm. "They're ever so good."

"I've never read them. I'm just doing this for a friend."

"Never read them!" The woman gasped as I accepted a hardback book from the store employee. "Never read them! Well, you just have to read them. Here, you, give this lady another copy. You'll love it, you truly will."

"No, thank you," I said as I pushed the second copy back to the employee. "One's fine. I'm sure they're very nice, but I'm not into this sort of book."

The woman's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, this sort of book?" She shook the three copies she held at me. "These are beautiful books, wonderfully written and full of dark, brooding men and the women who save them!"

"And the s.e.x is good, too," a woman behind her added.

The woman behind me nodded emphatically. "Just lovely love scenes, very creative and hot enough to melt your knickers. Here." She shoved a book into my hands. "You take this. Read it. You'll be a believer in no time. The way Dante writes... it's positively unearthly."

I lifted my gla.s.ses just enough so she could get a good look at my eyes. "Trust me, I don't need to read a book to know what unearthly feels like."

She choked and hurriedly dropped her gaze from mine. I pushed my gla.s.ses back down and gently returned the book she'd shoved in my hands, turning around to face forward in the line. I hated calling attention to myself in that manner-my limp was enough to make people stare-but if there's anything I dislike, it's a rabid fan.

Those were my thoughts until the line slowly snaked its way down the rows of bookshelves, close enough for me to see the group of people gathered around a table situated in the middle of the store. Bodies shifted and moved in an intricate dance of color and pattern. I stood, bored, mentally drawing warding spells to protect me from overeager readers, until suddenly every hair on my arms stood up on end. The person directly at the front of the signing table shifted and moved far enough to the side that I could see the man who was sitting behind a stack of books, his head bent over a copy as he signed it.

Long, shoulder-length black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, but a strand had escaped and framed one side of a hard jaw, a jaw that led down to a familiar squared chin. The man looked up at the person he was signing for and smiled. I staggered back as if I'd been punched in the stomach, literally feeling as if all the air had been sucked from the room.

It was the man I'd seen first in my dream, then later in the inn, the crazy man who had cut himself all over his really nummy body and then disappeared... or had that been a fantasy, nothing but the deranged ramblings of an overtired mind? I rubbed my forehead, unsure of whether that whole episode had been imagined, or if he was... My mind came up with a blank as to an explanation, if he really had been at the inn. No one could have cleaned up that room and gotten rid of the table in the ten minutes I was gone. No one human.

C. J. Dante, famed vampire author, the man who came to me in my dreams and begged me to help him. A tormented man, one whose anguish I could feel without even opening my mind up to him. A man who sliced himself up like a loaf of bread, then got testy when I tried to help him.

"Just who-or more to the point, what... is he?" I muttered to myself.

Unfortunately, I had no answer.

Chapter Three.

As I saw it, I had two choices. I could either a.s.sume that the past evening spent in the presence of a mentally disturbed individual who thought nothing of inflicting horrible tortures upon himself was not real, something my mind dredged up for some purpose or other, or I could rip that black sweater from Dante's manly chest and look for healing cuts, calling loudly for the police and the nice guys in the white suits.

In the end I decided to take my cue from the man himself. If he recognized me, I'd know the episode was real. If he didn't, I'd know that I had the most vivid and realistic vision I could ever possibly imagine, one that had left red fingerprints all over my notebook.

As the line slowly crept forward, I kept myself hidden by the chunky woman in front of me, just in case Dante spotted me and started making a scene. One of the store employees was escorting people to him, handing him the books to be signed, then making sure the fan was hustled off so the next one could take her spot. I looked behind me, then back to the front. Every single person in line was female. Hmm. I peeked around the shoulder of the woman in front of me and studied Dante. He was every bit as handsome as I remembered him, more so because he wasn't dripping blood everywhere.

"Some men look really, really good in black," I said without thinking. The woman in front of me turned and nodded her head emphatically. I gave her a cheesy smile in return. I felt something behind me, a sort of rippling in the air, and turned to see a tall, very pregnant woman waddle past the line of people waiting. She was accompanied by a short woman with one of those pretty heart-shaped faces that I had always secretly coveted. Both of them grinned and circled around behind the table to greet Dante. He stopped signing long enough to kiss both their hands, and speak with them for a few minutes before apologizing to the person who was waiting for her book.

So he has groupies, I told myself. So what? You can't expect a man to go around looking like he does without having great huge hordes of women falling all over him. Means nothing to you, unless of course the slice-and-dice scene last night was real; then you have to do something about him before he starts cutting up others.

I gnawed my lip and tried to decide what to do as the line snaked ever so surely forward, but in the end I just kept myself hidden behind the chunky woman until I was next in line. The bookstore woman grabbed my book from me.

"Just signed, or inscribed to someone?"

"Um... inscribed, please. To Corrine. Two Rs, one N."

The woman nodded and turned back to look at Dante as the chunky woman giggled and told him he was no better than he should be. He smiled and the bookstore woman handed him Corrine's book, leaning forward to give him the information. He bent over the book, writing with an elegant hand that reminded me of Victorian copperplate.

"I hope you enjoy the book," he said as he signed his name with a flourish, his voice as beautiful as I remembered it. It slid over my skin like silk, raising the hairs on my arms with the pure, rich tone. He looked up and smiled as he handed me the book, then froze like a pointer spotting a pheasant.

"Christian?" The pregnant woman looked between the two of us standing still as statues.

I stopped breathing. Even through my dark gla.s.ses I could feel the pull of his eyes. It was as if I were being sucked into them, teetering on the edge of an abyss.

"Christian?" The woman touched his arm.

Without being aware of it, I unguarded my mind and felt myself plunge down into the depths of his eyes, down into a blackness that surrounded me, filling me with grief and anguish and hopelessness without end. I was overwhelmed with his pain, filled with it, unable to catch my breath under its suffocating presence.

"Christian, are you okay?"

Desperately I tried to reguard my mind, bringing down as many mental barriers as I could to keep him from filling me with his torment.

"Who are you?" I asked in a whisper that was all I could manage after the experience of looking into his mind.

His eyes darkened.

"More important, who are you?" the shorter woman with the pretty face asked. She looked at me curiously, eyeing me from toes to nose before turning to Dante and whapping him on the shoulder. "I told you this was a good idea! See? We got her after only a half hour! Good. Now I can go home."

The bookstore woman nudged me, and when I didn't do anything but stare at the man in front of me-who, it should be noted, was staring right back at me, his eyes dark with mingled surprise and pain and no little amount of speculation-she took the book from his hand and shoved it at me, giving me a little push to get me going. I stumbled forward, unable to tear my gaze away from Dante's until the pregnant woman put a hand out and touched my shoulder.

"You're probably going to think this is very strange of me, but I wonder if I could talk to you for a few minutes?"

I blinked and dragged my gaze off Dante's tortured eyes to look at the woman standing next to me. She was a few inches taller than me, and had pleasant eyes and an aura of friendliness that I could feel without dropping my guards.

"Um..." I said, still feeling more than a little bit dazed. I mentally shook my head and gathered my wits. Summoners were in control at all times. To be out of control was a dangerous thing; it opened the Summoner up to all sorts of horrible eventualities. I couldn't let a little thing like a meeting with... My eyes drifted back to where Dante was sitting. He was watching me even as the woman before him prattled on about how much she loved his books. I took a deep breath and turned back to the woman, who was also watching me closely. I had at least a thousand questions to ask about Dante; his groupies were likely to be a good place to start. "Sure, I can spare a few minutes."

The woman smiled, warmth glowing around her like a halo. "Good. Rox?"

"Right with you," the smaller woman said, grabbing my arm. "Let's go to the espresso stand. I don't know about anyone else, but I could sure use a latte right about now. It's hard work, hunting Beloveds."

I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye. She must have noticed, because she grinned and tugged me forward until I was frog-marched between the two of them, feeling like nothing so much as a prisoner being escorted to a cell.

The tall one stopped after a few steps and glanced down at my leg. "I'm sorry; I'll walk slower."