Killian couldn’t leave. He tried, three times he tried to turn and walk back through the forest to the stretch of highway to resume his endless wandering, but each time, he’d failed. So he gave in, and he went back.
There was a reason. It probably had something to do with being a vampire. He was painfully aware of how much knowledge he lacked about his own nature. None of his former gang had been old. None of them had known the secrets of their kind. They’d lived by trial and error, learning fast that the day sleep was inevitable and irresistible and that you’d better damn well find shelter before it took you, because sunlight burned. They’d learned through experience that any injuries they might sustain would heal during the day sleep as long as they didn’t kill you before it came. They learned that bleeding out was a constant risk if you were cut, and that vampiric bodies were extremely flammable. He knew his senses, all of them, were a thousand times as honed as they had been before, when he’d still been a human. Pleasure was intensified. So was pain. Pain could become debilitating in his kind, and the older the vampire, the more exaggerated all of those things became. He was stronger and faster, too. And he could hear things, if he focused. The thoughts of humans near him, but they often came all at once, a cacophony that was impossible to bear. He could even take control of some creatures’ minds, as he’d done with the deer. It was harder with people, and he’d had very little call to try it, but it could be done. And yet there he was, pacing the forest floor in the dead of night, watching that sleepy little cabin as if his life depended on it, longing for another glance of the beautiful redhead through the barred window of her bedroom. Its light had long since gone out.
And then, before his eyes, the cabin’s front door opened, and she was there.
Her hair was long and wavy, with side swept bangs over huge blue-green eyes. She wore blue plaid pajama pants and a pink top that didn’t meet them, so her middle was exposed. Soft flesh. He wanted to touch it. He wanted to taste it.
She stood on the stoop for a moment, rubbing her arms and looking around. And then she stepped into the grass, her bare feet sinking deep. He opened his mind and heard her thoughts, and they were so much louder and clearer than all the other sensations he usually blocked out, that it was easy for him to focus on her and her alone.
I know I saw someone. I wonder if he’s still out here. I wonder why I can’t stay inside like any sane person would. God, I’m in grave danger, if my alarmist, conspiracy theorist grandmother is to be believed. So why am I traipsing around in the middle of the night looking for someone who only exists in my dreams, as if he could be real and–Careful. Trip wire.
She stopped walking, got down on her hands and knees in the grass and peered closely. He was lured from his place within the trees as surely as if she was a magnet and he was steel. He moved slowly, silently, and then he stopped near her, spotting the trip wire easily in the grass with his preternatural vision.
“It’s an inch in front of your pinky finger.”
She gasped and sprang upright, then stood there staring up at him. She was short, barely five two, he guessed. The skin of her face was flushed, and he could feel the warmth of her.
He’s real ohmygod he’s real.
He smiled a little, hearing her thoughts just as clearly as if she’d spoken them out loud. And then she got a little scared.
Can this really be happening? What is this?
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her wide eyes lowered. “Pssht. You couldn’t if you tried.”
“Tough, are you?”
“The toughest.”
He knew it was a lie. The words she said were things she wished could be true but knew were not. She’d always wanted to be tough. To be strong. But she believed herself weak and fragile instead. He got all of that as he stood there, connecting to her even more strongly than he had before, feeling everything she felt—including her attraction to him.
She looked at him intently, her eyes moving over his face like a caress. Inwardly, she thought, He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Can you say that about a guy? There’s just no other word. If I tell him I’ve been making love to him in my dreams, over and over, will he think I’m a lunatic and go back to wherever he came from?
Aloud, she said, “Who are you, and what are you doing lurking around outside my grandmother’s cabin?”
“My name is Killian,” he said. He hadn’t looked into a mirror in years and was self-conscious under her scrutiny. He knew his hair was curly and brown and longer than the norm. His eyes had been dark, dark blue, once. He didn’t know if they’d changed. He’d seen other vampires’ eyes glow red when the bloodlust was upon them. He feared his would do the same if he stayed near her much longer.
“I’m Charlie,” she said. I want to touch his hair. It looks so soft.
He nodded. “I was passing by on the highway, and I heard voices.”
“Passing by on your way to where?”
He shrugged. “Nowhere in particular. I kind of wander.”
“Free spirit, huh?” she asked and smiled for the first time.
It took his breath away when she smiled. “You could call it that.”
“So why are you lurking in the woods, watching me, Killian?” Have you been dreaming about me too? God, please say you have.
But he couldn’t, not without giving himself away. Could he? “I don’t really know that, either. Once I saw you I couldn’t seem to leave.”
I feel the same way. It’s like we’re connected, like he’s someone I’ve known forever, someone important to me. Vital. Past life, maybe? Maybe that’s why I’ve been dreaming of him.
“Wow. That’s like the best line I’ve ever heard. You’re good.”
“I am,” he said. “Good.” He was trying to reassure her but wasn’t sure it was working.
She nodded. “I can tell. I’m just glad you’re here. I know that probably sounds...” She shrugged, let her voice trail off, then turned to look back at the cabin. “Listen, my grandmother has this place wired for sound. She’s both paranoid and armed. Not a safe combination for guys who like to lurk in shadows. If she finds you out here, she’ll probably shoot first and ask questions later.”
“I picked up on that earlier,” he said.
She nodded. “The trip wire. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I think she’s a little bit crazy.”
He had gathered that she thought so. And more. She was thinking that she didn’t want him to go away, and she was wondering what it would be like to kiss him.
He didn’t dare do that, though the notion set him on fire. He hadn’t fed tonight. His skin was cold to the touch. Any physical contact could give him away. And yet physical contact was what he longed for. She’d at least dreamed of it. His dreams, vampire dreams, had been a mosaic. Bits and pieces. Flashes of jigsaw puzzle parts, but they’d left him just as hungry for her.
“Why are you really here, Killian?” she asked him.
“I don’t know.” He swayed a little closer to her as if pulled by her force. “But I’m not leaving.”
“Why not?”
Because of me, because of me, because of me, I know it is, he heard her think.
“Because of you,” he said. He stared into her eyes and felt her reaction to that. Surprise, a little ripple of alarm that he’d said aloud exactly what she’d been thinking. But she was also glad. “Your grandmother thinks you’re in danger?”
“Yes.” She sighed, nodded, paced past him to the tree he’d been hiding behind, and then sat down, putting her back against it.
He sat down beside her, knowing she wanted him to, and his shoulder, his hip, his thigh touched hers. Everything in him sang with need and hunger and lust.
“You heard about the vampire uprising?” she asked.
Every cell in his body reacted with so much shock that he was sure it must show. He forced himself not to react, tried to school his face to reveal nothing
, and keeping his eyes away from hers, he said, “I’ve been on the road. No TV, no newspaper. I thought...I thought all the vampires were dead.”
“Yeah, so did we all. But seven people got their blood sucked out of them last week and a gang of vampires was hunted down and killed for it.”
The joy, the elation he’d felt so briefly, came crashing down and shattered into a million glittering shards. There had been other vampires...and now there were not. They’d been killed.
“They’re saying that was the last of them, but even the government admits that if they were wrong once–”
“They might be wrong again,” he said softly. “There could be others.” His heart seemed to expand with hope. There had been surviving vampires. There had to be more. Had to be. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t the last of his kind after all.
He looked at her, overwhelmed with joy and relief and hope. Not only had he found her tonight, but he’d learned that he was not alone. And she’d brought him that news. She was... a beacon in the darkness of his endless night.
And then he saw her frowning at his apparent joy and quickly looked away as he realized it was the vampires she was afraid of. “I don’t understand,” he said, to change the subject. “Why does your grandmother feel that you’re in danger if the government says all the vampires are dead?”
“Because she’s a fucking lunatic?” She averted her eyes. He tried to hear her thoughts, but she’d closed her mind as if drawing a window shade over it.
And yet it made no sense for her to be afraid. Vampires protected her kind. They didn’t hunt them. This was all backwards. But maybe she didn’t know that.
He sensed her grandmother stirring awake inside the cabin, and it interrupted his thoughts. He didn’t want to cause Charlie trouble. And he didn’t want the shotgun wielding crazy woman to find out about his presence.
“Charlie, I think your grandmother’s waking up. You’d better get back inside.”
She frowned, looking back at the cabin. “How do you know that? Did you hear something or–”
By the time she looked his way again, he was closer, and before he could talk himself out of it again, he grabbed her, pulled her close, and kissed her.
Charlie was stiff in his arms for about a full second. And then she just melted against him, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him back. It deepened and lengthened until she was pressing her body tight to his, and he was grinding his hips against her as passion and bloodlust rose as one to consume him. He tasted her with his tongue, and she pressed even tighter to him, opening to him, wanting more, so much more, and telling him so with her body as well as with her mind.
And then she pulled away, blinking and gasping for air.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He kept his eyes averted, sure they were glowing with hunger for her. Her scent twined around him, and the sound of the blood rushing through her veins thrummed in his head.
“I’m not sorry,” she whispered. “I’m not sorry at all.”
He blinked, stunned.
“Find someplace to get warm, Killian. You’re freezing.” And then she headed for the house.
Killian moved back into the forest then crouched in the shelter of the pines, invisible to her but still watching and still aroused to the point of near madness. He watched the sway of her hips as she jogged back toward the house. She turned to look back just before she opened the front door of the cabin. His eyes were riveted to the shape of her breasts underneath the thin fabric of her pink top, as she whispered loudly, “Tomorrow night, same time, okay?” Then she slipped quietly through the front door.
In the shelter of a giant sugar pine whose drooping boughs made a dome thirty feet in diameter, Killian lay down on his back on a mattress of aromatic needles. Every breath tasted and smelled of the tree. But on his lips, he still tasted her. Charlie.
He was not the last of his kind after all. If there had been one gang of vampires, even rogue bastards who’d murdered innocents, then there would be others. There had to be others. And he had to find them.
Just as soon as he could tear himself away from the girl in the cabin in the woods.
He was going to meet her again tomorrow night, he told himself. He was going to feed just before, so his flesh would be warm with living blood and his hunger sated, so he wouldn’t be tempted by the sound of her blood thrumming in her veins. He would touch her to his heart’s content. And to hers. He would make her erotic dreams about him come true. There was no way around it. He had to have her.
The thought of it tormented him as he lay there. And then he decided that he couldn’t wait for tomorrow night. He would visit her now, tonight, the minute she slept. He would visit her in her dreams, but this time, he would be fully aware of it, too.
Chapter Four