Waiting for Darkness (Blood Martyr) Read online

  I knew that voice.

  I recognized that voice.

  I jerked away the blindfold and immediately regretted doing so. A pair of mismatched eyes stared down at me, red hair glowing in the moonlight as though set afire.

  Jamison.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “For I love you truly, truly dear, but you take this heart and dash it on the ground into a thousand…million pieces, and then you make me pick it up and do this all over again….”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid…!

  I flicked a glance at the puncture wounds on his neck; locked eyes with the malachite and amber jewels gleaming in the darkness.

  “Get the hell away from me.” My hands shook, but it wasn’t from passion. I told myself this was all just a bad dream and I’d wake up from it.

  I didn’t. Shit. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

  I attempted to shove past him and get off the bed, but he held me in place, hands around my upper arms.

  He shook, too, but unlike me, I doubted it was from my discovery.

  You just drank from your best friend….

  You just fucked your best friend….

  How stupid, how much more moronic could I have been?

  All there, the clues that should’ve told me Mister “Roane” was not the man he said he was. The sandalwood scent surrounding him. The way I thought I heard him speak with Jamison’s voice. The reason he blindfolded me. Blindfolded me because there was no way he could keep up the disguise while having an orgasm. Tied me up just to make sure I wouldn’t try to pull the blindfold off.

  And I thought it an erotic game! I couldn’t believe how completely I'd been duped.

  A hundred years ago, I would never have fallen for the trick Jamison spun around me. But then again, back in those days I was someone far, far different than the person I am now. I didn’t want to go back to the person I was…but in times like this I wished otherwise.

  “Let go of me now,” I whispered, not trusting myself to speak any louder. Any louder, and I feared I’d start screaming. And I wasn’t sure when I’d stop.

  “Look, just hear me out, will you?”

  I should've kneed him in the groin. Maybe more than once. “No. I don’t want to listen to your stupid fucking explanations. You fucking tricked me! You tricked me!”

  Twice in one day.

  First, completely hoodwinked by Kieran, and now bamboozled by Jamison. By my best friend!

  Things could not get much worse than this.

  “Tell me something, Jamison. Do I have a goddamn fucking sign on my goddamn fucking forehead that says, Hey, I’m a dumb vampire! Come and have your fun with me while the night is still young? Huh? Do I have a fucking sign like that anywhere on my body, because this is the second time I’ve been used in one day, and let me tell you something, I’m getting fucking sick of it.”

  Face blank, he said, “I lost count at your fifth ‘fuck’ in less than two minutes. You really need to work on your language.”

  “You think this is funny? Do you? Because you know what? I don’t find this situation funny at all.” Gnashing my teeth didn’t do much to douse my ire, but it kept me from totally rearing up. I worked really hard on not doing that.

  Witches like Jamison could blow up a city block, but a vampire like me could wreck an entire city…if I so chose.

  “Tanith. I’m sorry. I….” He closed his eyes, and I was thankful for that. I could think better without having those addictive eyes focused on me. “I got sick,” he continued, “I was sick of waiting around, waiting for you to see I was the better man out of all the other men you took home.”

  I wanted to shake him silly and then some. “You idiot. Didn’t you know that was the reason why I never took anything from you? No sex, no blood, no nothing! Because you are the better man, you idiotic dipshit! Because you mean something more to me. Because I couldn’t stand the thought of ruining this!”

  I wasn’t mad at Jamison.

  I was mad at me.

  And I was so hopping angry I wanted to bust something up.

  “Ruining what?”

  I tried not to sputter, but it’s hard to be in control of your body when the only thing you see is red and the only thing you feel is a heat that grows hotter and hotter as the seconds pass by. I jerked out of his hands and clambered off the bed, shrugging into a robe.

  “This! This! You are my best friend, Jamison. I’ve never trusted anyone more than you. You saved my life, damn it! You know everything about me. You could make me, you could break me. You hold a part of my soul in your fucking stupid, incompetent hands! If you were to go away, where the hell would I be?”

  I wanted to throw a chair into the enormous mirror set along the wall, wanted to ruin the image of the tall woman in a black silk robe.

  I refrained. Breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. That, and I didn’t think I’d be up to getting down on my hands and knees to pick up the mirror shards after I bashed it all to hell.

  I needed something…anything to get this anger out of my system.

  He sat back on the bed, not even bothering to cover himself, and I hated myself for staring a little too long at his chest. I knew Jamison was fit, knew he worked out five times a week, but I never once saw him nude.

  “You done?” he asked.

  Forget the seven years of bad luck. Maybe getting down on my hands and knees wouldn’t be such a bad thing….

  After all, to a vampire, seven years is nothing.

  Snatching a small ornament from the coffee table, I hurled it at the mirror. The sound of it breaking rang through the apartment like a gunshot. Shards collapsed one after another on the floor, leaving behind a distorted image of darkness and the lone person standing in it.

  I felt better. Sort of.

  I expected Jamison to get the hell out of the building, but he still sat there, still sat in the silver light that played over the concaves of his bare body.

  “Most people would do the smart thing and leave. But you’re too fucking stupid to do that.” My anger started to simmer down, but it still lingered, flickering through my body.

  He shook his head, the red of his hair glinting in the moonlight, like garnets spun into silk.

  “I’m not going to leave. I’m not going to leave you,” he said quietly.

  I contemplated whether I could get away with throwing a chair through the window without attracting too much attention.

  “Yeah, you say that now.” No, the chair-throwing would be a bit overboard. People were used to seeing vampires go a little crazy here in Centennial City, but even some things were frowned upon. "Goddamn it, Jamison."

  I wasn’t stupid enough to think we could pretend this hadn’t happened. Perhaps Jamison could, but I couldn’t. I prided myself on the fact I could differentiate between friend and prey. My friends never had to worry about me seeing them as another source of nutrients. I worked hard to dispel the initial fear that all humans had around me.

  But now, within the space of an hour, I broke my cardinal rule, my golden rule.

  Your friends are sacred and should be treated as such.

  What the hell was I going to do?

  I turned my back on him, wishing myself anywhere but here, wishing for any situation but this.

  “Can’t you see, Jamison? We can't just be friends anymore. We’ve crossed that line. You made me walk across it with your stupid stunt.”

  “You’re wrong. We might have crossed the line, but this doesn’t change anything.”

  Jamison. Idiotic to the extreme. Yeah, that just about described him to a T, all right.

  “Of course it changes everything! You think we can go back to where we were? When we were just Tanith and just Jamison? Just the witch and the vampire? As if that in itself wasn’t something strange in the first place! I told myself I was never going to take advantage of those close to me because then they’re not even friends to me anymore. You know what they are? They’re my prey. You were my prey!”
/>   He got off the bed and pulled on the jeans I mistakenly thought belonged to a harmless college student. Harmless, my ass.

  “So? I let you feed off me. It’s not like you put me up against a wall and took me against my will. I wanted this to happen.”

  Maybe I’m overreacting? But the thing is…I’m afraid. Afraid that once I start taking blood from my friends…that I’ll do it again. And again. And again until they have no more to give and continue to offer up their shrunken veins until they willingly open themselves up just to give up one last drop of blood….

  And I couldn’t bear to see Jamison like that—couldn’t bear to even think about him like that. To me, he was a thing of light, a Son of the Day. His laugh, his smile, eased me, made me…happy. He was my pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

  To see him diminished…would diminish me.

  To see him reduced…would ultimately kill me.

  I needed to think, to clear my mind. I leaned against the wall, forehead against the chilly masonry, trying to force some of that coolness into my head. Into my mind.

  “Tanith,” he started, and I shook my head.

  “Just go. Please, Jamison. Go.”

  He sighed. "Fine. We'll do this your way."

  The door unlocked, the sound another nudge on my fraught nerves.

  “Tanith.”

  I did not reply. Did not even open my mouth—because I was afraid. Afraid I’d come undone, that I’d bend, that I’d fall to my knees and beg him to stay.

  “I’m not going to say I’m sorry. Because I’m not sorry. I don’t regret what I’ve done,” he said.

  The door closed, and his footsteps echoed down the hallway.

  No longer hearing his presence, I let myself completely break down.

  What would happen now?

  When the moon rose tomorrow night, would he come back, smiling the way he always did? Could we truly pass this off and still be the same people we were before?

  No. We couldn’t. I couldn’t forget something like this. Couldn’t forgive something like this.

  Regardless of what Jamison had said, I knew things were not going to be the same. They couldn’t possibly be the same.

  We crossed the point of no return, and I could only hope we’d both survive.

  In the end.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “For where Thou wilt go, but I shalt follow; to the Depths of Hel, and to the Gates of Olympus, I shalt go….”

  “Well, I certainly think that’s quite a sticky predicament you’ve gotten yourself into, my love.”

  "Yeah," I muttered. "No kidding."

  Cale winked at me over the steaming mug of latte. “I told you, you should’ve taken his blood when you first met him. Then you wouldn’t have this moral dilemma crowding around in that tiny brain of yours!”

  Normally, you wouldn’t find me talking to Cale about such a personal problem, but he was a vampire—the only vampire I trusted enough to keep his mouth shut. In addition, he didn’t work for me, so that was another good thing. I employed a fair number of vamps, but ex-employees tended to talk about ex-employers, and I wasn’t about to take any unnecessary chances.

  The fact I took Jamison’s blood had to be a secret. If other vamps knew, they’d consider him fair game too, and I was too busy to be fending them off while screaming it was all one big mistake.

  Hah.

  If only things were that easy.

  “You’re supposed to help me, Cale, not belittle me,” I said, unbelievable tiredness overcoming me. “Don’t you think you should at least attempt to work for that highly overpriced drink in front of you? You’re not even going to drink it. Why the hell did you ask me to buy it in the first place?”

  We sat in a small café a few blocks down from Club Dragonne. This quiet Wednesday evening, only a few customers inhabited the place, but all of them shot curious glances at Cale, who looked like he stepped out from the pages of a Regency novel.

  The customary silk top hat perched on the side of his head à la Mad Hatter style. The collar of his lacy shirt seemed to cascade all the way down to his knees. On top of that, a bottle-green frock coat emblazoned with a golden insignia looked ridiculous. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he finished off the ensemble with brown breeches, white knee socks, and a pair of leather shoes with real silver buckles.

  I had to admit, he did look all right, in a way.

  In a really freaky way.

  “Because! I’ve seen those horrible human dramas on the telly! Whenever someone—a woman, mind you—has a problem, she calls her friends, and they talk over coffee. And then, at the end, all the problems get solved!” He grinned at me, and I didn’t have the heart to say anything that would break his illusion of feminine life.

  “So. You think because you have a cup of coffee and I’m a woman, never mind that you’re definitely not a woman, and we’re talking about problems, you think they’re really going to go away?”

  He laughed. “No, but it’ll be damn good fun to try.”

  Cale was a weirdo, this I already knew. But I didn’t know it was this bad.

  It’d been three days—three long days and three excruciatingly harrowing nights where I tried to figure out everything that had gone wrong in my life.

  Jamison was gone. I called him, waited out in front of his apartment until the landlord told me I was scaring everyone away, and did some pretty stalker-ish things that might’ve gotten me arrested if anyone actually had the nerve to call the authorities.

  I didn’t know what to do. Not anymore. I was worried sick about him. It wasn’t like him to suddenly run off like that.

  “I know you’re worried about Jamison, but he’ll turn up.”

  “Really? And in what form are you pertaining to, Cale? Are you talking about him showing up alive, or him showing up as a corpse?”

  He shrugged. “To be quite honest, they’re both the same to me.”

  This was pointless. Spending time with Cale would only depress me more, take away time I could’ve constructively spent in trying to locate my runaway witch’s whereabouts.

  Besides, the thick, cloying atmosphere of the café was starting to grate on my nerves. What little I had left, anyways.

  “I’ve got to go. The club has a lot of work that needs to be done,” I said and pushed my chair away from the table.

  We both knew I was lying. The club practically ran itself, but it made me think better of Cale when he didn’t call my bluff. Instead, he looked at me with something akin to worry. Impossible. Cale didn’t feel anything for anyone but himself.

  “Tanith?”

  “Yeah?”

  He paused for a moment, as if measuring his words. “Don’t…push. Don’t blow matters out of proportion. Just take every night as it comes and deal with the problems one at a time. Don’t try to fight them all at once. Take a deep breath before you face the night and then tell yourself you can cope with anything that comes your way. And when it comes, then you can bare your teeth and tear it to shreds. Just like the girl I know you are.”

  He smiled a sort of smile I never expected to see on Cale’s face. Maybe on Jamison’s face, but never the over-dressed dandy sitting across from me. It was soft, slow, and filled with so much goodwill I had to blink twice just to make sure I wasn’t getting it from an angel in disguise.

  But Cale wasn’t an angel, and from my reckoning, he’d never be one.

  “I didn’t know you could smile like that.”

  Cale laughed. “Yes, well, there’s many things you don’t know about me. Now go. Run along. You haven’t been at the club for a few days. I’m sure everyone will be crying for you.”

  He shooed me off with quick motions of his elegantly thin hands, and I walked out, even more confused than before.

  * * * *

  It was only seven. The club wouldn’t be up and running until at least nine, and I watched a few employees run along the dance floor with mops, racing each other. Their laughter echoed in the cavernous space, and a li
ttle bit of the strain faded from between my shoulder blades.

  It did me good observing them. A lot of my employees were people whom life didn’t give a second chance. I walked into at least four of my employees as they tried to call up the courage to jump off the Macomb Bridge outside of Centennial. I wouldn’t say I was all-mighty nor powerful, but I’m a smooth talker.

  Most of them were junkies trying to quit, but couldn’t do it. Seeing no end to the pain, they tried to end it themselves. After I dissuaded them, I paid the cost for rehab, and when they got out, I gave them the option of working for me.

  Most of them did.

  Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have done that.

  Jamison changed me. And now he was gone.

  When he decided to come out of hiding, we were definitely going to have a heart-to-heart talk. No escaping, no keeping back words that should’ve been said.

  “So, what’s with that goofy look on your face, Boss? You look like a cat that got the cream.”

  Eileen, one of the bartenders for the night, handed me a Perrier from one of the coolers, and I leaned against the counter, feeling a bit foolish.

  “Nothing. Just thinking about things, that’s all,” I said, instantly wiping off the smile I didn’t even know was there. Damn. One night with Jamison, and I was already losing control of my body. That sucked eggs.

  She stared down at her chain bracelet, and it took me a while to realize she wanted to say something, but was either too scared or too guilty. Neither of them boded well.

  “Eileen? Something up?”

  The blonde bit her lip until a tiny drop of blood appeared. I hadn’t fed since Jamison, and the fact the blood didn’t faze me alarmed me quite a lot. Usually, I had to feed at least every other day in order to keep from salivating over every living thing I saw. But I felt…fine. More than fine, actually.

  I didn’t know if this was a bad thing or not.

  “Eileen?”

  “It’s my pack,” she sighed and sat down heavily on a bar stool like her legs couldn’t support her body anymore.