Petty revenge. He wanted to give up his beating heart, warmth, sunlight, to rise as one of the undead just so he could get back at someone bigger or stronger or smarter than himself.
She shouldn’t feel so disappointed. She didn’t know the man well enough to have expected anything better of him.
But she had.
Strangely deflated, she turned her back to him and fished in her pocket for her car keys. So absorbed with her disillusionment was she that she didn’t hear him move.
Didn’t realize he stood behind her until she felt the sting of the needle he plunged into her shoulder.
2
DANDELION fuzz floated on silver beams of moonlight as Daniel sat on a grassy hillside an hour north of the city, Déadre handcuffed to his side. In the distance, the lights of Atlanta blazed like so many earthbound stars. Above them, the moon settled toward the horizon.
He dragged his free hand through the stiff spikes in his hair. It would be dawn soon, and she was still out cold. He checked for vital signs for the thousandth time.
She wasn’t breathing. Had no pulse. But then, she wasn’t supposed to, was she?
He wasn’t sure. All the research he’d done on vampires, and he still didn’t know a thing about their basic biology. Apparently no one did, since most of the literature he’d amassed had been based more on speculation and fear than fact, as far as he could tell.
He glanced down at the unconscious woman—at least he hoped she was just unconscious—at his side. A vampire. It was still hard to believe. Not the fact that they existed. Everyone knew vampires were real; they just weren’t talked about in polite company. Kind of like venereal disease.
What he had trouble believing was that she could be one of them and still be so beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face with bowstring lips. Her dark auburn hair was thick and shiny and slid through his hands like silk. Even though she wasn’t a big woman, her body flowed from one enticing curve to another.
She was the kind of woman who had always attracted him before he’d met the long, leggy Sue Ellen. The kind of woman who still turned his head, though it made him feel guilty every time he did. Except this woman was a vampire.
Jesus, he couldn’t have killed her, could he? Only exposure to sunlight, a stake through the heart, decapitation, cremation, or being completely drained of blood by another vampire could do that.
He hoped.
Her pale skin shone like marble. A cool breeze teased her bangs over her eyes and he brushed them back and tried shaking her again.
To his relief, her eyelids finally fluttered. She groaned.
When her eyes opened, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Wha—What was…?”
“Holy water.” He let go of her shoulders when she stiffened. “Only a couple of CCs. It was just supposed to make you weak, not knock you out.”
Wincing and arching her back, she rolled the shoulder he’d stuck with the hypodermic. “It burns.”
“Burns? Is it supposed to burn?”
“Ohhhh.”
“All right. All right. It burns. What can I do?”
She bit down hard on her lower lip. “Mmmmmmm.”
“Okay.” He picked her up, curving his shackled left arm behind her back and lifting her beneath her knees with the other. “There’s water at the bottom of the hill. Regular water,” he added when she looked up at him with alarm.
She was definitely breathing now, shallow little gasps that tore at his conscience. Maybe she only stopped breathing when she slept. How the hell did he know?
At the moment, he didn’t really care. He only cared about taking away the pain carved into her ivory-smooth face.
He set her on the creek bank facing land and peeled back her leather jacket, but he couldn’t get it off over the cuffs, so he pulled it down her arm and then lifted her shirt over her head to join it.
She gasped and tried to cross her arms over her chest, but surprisingly enough, it wasn’t her breasts that had him ogling. It was the jagged scar on her shoulder.
Surely to God he hadn’t done that.
Please, don’t let him have done that.
“How did this happen?” He reached out to touch the reddened mark in the shape of a cross, but she flinched before his fingers even brushed the puffy flesh.
“Please.” Her voice was close to a whimper. “Don’t.”
He gave her one searching look, but found no answers in her dark eyes. Unable to stand her pain any longer, he leaned her back, holding her just above the water with his left arm and spooning the cool liquid over her back and upper arm with his right hand.
“Better?” he asked.
Her hair drifted on the current. Her face gradually relaxed. “Better.”
She started looking around. Cicadas serenaded her from the trees. A toad croaked downstream. “Where are we?”
“Cherokee County.”
She frowned and jiggled her wrist as if just realizing she was shackled to him. “Why?”
Avoiding her gaze, he dribbled another handful of water over the cross branded over her shoulder blade. “Because it’s a long way from anywhere.”
She shifted in his arms. “Did you bring me here to kill me?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I told you,” he said mildly. “I want to be like you.”
“No, you don’t. Believe me, you don’t.” She craned her head toward the east. “It’ll be dawn soon. You know I can’t be out here when the sun comes up, right?”
“I know.”
She scanned the hillside, left and right. “How did we get here? You—You have a car somewhere, don’t you?”
“Somewhere.” And just in case she decided to kill him and drive off in it on her own, he added, “But the keys aren’t with it. They’re hidden.”
“You’re going to hold me here?” She sat up, turned and tried to backpedal away, but didn’t get far. She jerked the end of the short chain between their handcuffs. Her voice rose an octave. “You said you weren’t going to kill me.”
“I’m not. You’re going to kill me.” Tired of chasing her up the hill as she continued to back away from him, he pulled her to him. She wasn’t strong enough to fight. Yet. “You’re going to kill me and bring me back…like you. Then I’ll get the keys, and we’ll drive out of here together. Before the sun comes up.”
Once he had the strength and speed of a vampire, he could fight Garth on equal footing. Kill him and free Sue Ellen’s physical body from his evil influence.
What he’d have to do later to set his own soul free he wouldn’t put words to.
Not yet.
THE moments before dawn were always the darkest, the quietest, the most peaceful for a vampire. These were the moments Déadre held on to when she thought she couldn’t stand being what she was for another night. When she couldn’t stand the hunger. These were the moments she’d always hoped would be her last, should her existence ever come to an end.
She pulled Daniel’s coat tighter over her shoulders. After bathing in the creek and having gone so long without fresh blood to warm her, she had been chilled. He’d turned his jacket inside out and settled it over her shoulders. The gesture of simple kindness had touched her.
And confused her.
“Do you know what happens to a vampire in the sunlight?” she asked without looking at him. Pine and magnolia and jasmine all mingled on the breeze.
“I have a vague idea.”
“The eyes go first. Our night vision makes us so sensitive to light that we’re blinded.”
A muscle in Daniel’s jaw jumped. He jerked a blade of grass out of the ground and rolled it between his fingers.
“Then our skin begins to blister and peel. Our hair catches fire, and our internal organs start to liquefy.”
“We don’t have to be here when the sun comes up. All you have to do is…whatever you do to make me a vampire, and we’ll leave.”
“I don’t like being used.”
He turned toward her. His green eyes looked flat black in the darkness. “How is it using you to ask you to do what comes naturally to your kind?”
“I’m relatively young for one of my kind,” she said. “But I’ve been a vampire long enough to know that I don’t like it much. I won’t curse another to suffer this existence.”