Claim the Night Read online

  “Get what?” she whispered back.

  “I’m a vampire. I want you like hell on fire. And you’re on thinner ice than you can possibly know.” He breathed deeply again, then almost instantaneously reappeared in the chair behind his desk, leaving space between them.

  “Sit,” he said, pointing to one of the armchairs that faced his desk.

  She obeyed, slowly, never taking her eyes from him.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He studied her, frowning. “Maybe you better figure it out before you come back here again. You want me to feed on you? I can do that. I’ll also give you a sexual rush you’ll never forget. But the danger is…” He paused.

  “You might not be able to stop?”

  “No. I can stop. I never let myself get so hungry I can’t stop. The danger is, you might want more of it. You might never be able to forget it, and nothing will ever be quite as good.”

  “Seriously?” Astonishment caused her heart to trip.

  “Seriously.” His smile was grim. “How do you think we survive? Not by causing pain and horror, at least not usually.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t thought of that.

  “Which is not to say I couldn’t. I could scare you out of here in the next ten seconds in a way that would ensure you never set foot here again.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Damned if I know.” He continued to study her, frowning. Her heart pounded heavily, but only slightly faster than normal. She felt as if she stood on the lip of a precipice of some kind but couldn’t back away.

  Finally, he rose and went into the room beyond. She caught a glimpse of his bedroom, just a glimpse before he returned carrying a bag she recognized instantly as blood.

  “I buy this from a blood bank,” he said, holding up the bag. “A fresh delivery every three days. It’s awful.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s full of anticoagulants. It’s like drinking rotgut wine when you know a bottle of the really fine stuff is within reach.”

  That actually struck her as sad. The reaction shocked her, and made her wonder yet again about her own state of mind. Sympathizing with a vampire? But she did. “That’s awful.”

  He shrugged. “You deal with what is.”

  Then, astonishing her with the bluntness of his act, he bared his fangs, plunged them into the bag, and began to drink. After a few gulps he looked at her with red-rimmed lips. “This is reality.”

  She swallowed hard, but refused to stop watching as he drained the bag. When he was done, he tossed it aside and pulled a tissue from the box on his desk and wiped his mouth.

  “Feeling sick yet?” he asked.

  “No.” And she wasn’t. She’d dealt with enough blood and gore that the only thing that could surprise her was that someone could drink that much blood without getting ill. She couldn’t even feel shock.

  “Reality is that I die every morning. I can fight the sun for a little while in here, where it can’t reach me, but not for too long. So I die every morning. And when darkness returns, I resurrect. I have only half a life, sometimes even less than that. There was a time I was an indiscriminate killer because I had to feed, and I couldn’t leave anyone behind to tell what had happened. Then I learned. I learned self-control. I mastered my compulsion. I found ways to handle it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I loathed myself. Do you think I wanted to become this?”

  Surprisingly, she ached for him. She couldn’t imagine living with so much self-hatred. “I’m sorry. How did it happen?”

  He hesitated, his eyes darker than ever. The light in here was dim. Just enough for her to see by.

  “Because of an act of kindness.”

  “What?” It didn’t seem to connect.

  “Before the battle at Waterloo. I saw a woman being harassed one night by some drunken soldiers. I intervened. I thought I was saving her from them.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head. “I had no way to guess that the only thing I saved her from was having to reveal what she really was. She wouldn’t have let them hurt her. In the end, they would probably all have been dead, but I didn’t know that. I guess I really saved them, even though I had the provosts arrest them. But I didn’t know.”

  “How could you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. After the battle…” He closed his eyes. “The dead. There were so many. Thousands upon thousands. And the survivors lay among them, hard to find in the carnage. I was badly wounded. Dying. I vaguely remember lying there all night and through the next day, listening to moans, drifting in and out of consciousness. I didn’t care. I just wanted death to end it all. I could feel the gangrene beginning. It was worse than the pain from the musket ball.”

  Terri had enough medical experience to imagine what it had been like, and the image was still terrible enough to make her hurt with horror for him. Never in her life had she considered what it must be like to be wounded, and lying hopelessly among the dead and screaming. Her experience had taken her to some pretty awful places, but none on that scale.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “she found me. That woman I thought I had saved. And she saved me. She dragged me out of that stinking heap of carnage to her little house, and she turned me.” His gaze grew distant, as he lost himself in memory.

  Terri remained quiet, absorbing the things he was telling her, accepting the truth of them at last. At least she accepted the emotional truth. The scientist in her was far from happy. Finally, she asked, “Are you grateful to her?”

  His dark eyes snapped back to her. “Once in a while. It was a difficult transition. I couldn’t go back to my family and friends. I had to learn a whole new way of life, one that repelled me even as all my newborn instincts demanded I do those things. All in all, it was an ugly time. I was filled with rage beyond description. I should have just died, but when I demanded to know how I could end it all, she just laughed at me and told me I’d get used to it.”

  The impulse to comfort him nearly overwhelmed her, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could say or do. Not one darn thing.

  “Enough of that,” he said abruptly. “I’m here. Still. Sometimes I even revel in the night. Nothing is all bad, not even being a vampire. But it does make me dangerous, Terri. Especially to someone like you. I’m a predator. I’ll always be a predator. I can control it, but I can’t change it. You need to understand that. Believe it. And get the hell out.”

  It was then that Terri understood at last at least part of what was driving her. She bit her lip, then decided to just say it out loud. “You may be a predator, but you saved my life.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I saved your virtue. They might not have killed you.”

  “You saved me from more than that. You saved me from a gang rape, from a beating. I could be in the hospital or the morgue right this instant.”

  He waved his hand as if it was meaningless now.

  “You saved me,” she said again. “Then you took care of Sam so I don’t have to be afraid of him anymore. I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “Yes. I do.” And that was why she kept coming back, at least part of what she was struggling with. “Unfinished business,” she said.

  “No, it’s finished.”

  “It’s not. I owe you. I want to repay you. I always pay my debts.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “I always pay my debts. It’s how I was raised. I’ll pay your fee gladly.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  She closed her eyes and drew a long, shaky breath, terrified of the impulse that was growing in her, but unable to squash it. “You want my blood.”

 
“I’m not hungry.” He sounded angry.

  “You want my blood, anyway. So just take it. I owe you.”

  “Not that.” His voice was as hard and sharp as the edge of a blade.

  “Yes. If not tonight…” She opened her eyes. “Then another time. It’s the least I can do to thank you.”

  His glare was truly frightening, almost wild with anger. “The last woman who thought she needed to repay me turned me into a monster.”

  He was gone before she could blink, his destination revealed only by the closing of his bedroom door.

  She sat there, shaking, feeling weak, scarcely believing what she had just offered. Yet, was it so different from a blood donation? And if that was the only way she could repay him…

  A long time later, on rubbery knees, she managed to stand and walk out. She barely murmured good-night to a puzzled Chloe.

  Out on the street, she found sunlight painting the world golden. She hailed a cab and headed home to get ready for yet another day at work.

  Okay, she told herself. She had offered to pay her debt in the coin he would most value. He hadn’t accepted it. But at least she had offered. Maybe that sense of debt unpaid had been what had been making her feel so uneasy, like something was hanging over her head. Like something was tagging along with her. It certainly seemed to be gone now.

  Now, perhaps, she could forget the whole thing. Perhaps now she could go back to her world of science, and solve problems that could be solved, and pigeonhole things that could be pigeonholed.

  Because she desperately needed to do exactly that.

  Chapter 5

  Something was watching her, following her. The awareness rode Terri constantly again, reminding her awfully of her childhood. Scaring her. Plaguing her. As much as she tried to ignore the feeling, she couldn’t quite banish it. Apparently, she’d been mistaken that it had arisen from her sense of unfinished business with Jude.

  Yes, it seemed to have begun right around the time Jude had saved her. Or just after. After she left his office for the last time. But evidently she’d mistaken its cause, because even though she had offered to repay him somehow, the feeling had returned. Stronger now.

  God, she thought she’d left that sensation behind years ago, the night she stopped panicking and got mad, and hunted up the family Bible that nobody in her house ever looked at, and added the St. Michael prayer from the back of a holy card a friend had given her.

  Her religious training had been minimal, something her family had treated as an identifier, not a practice. But her girlfriend, Tina, had come to her rescue with advice and the holy card.

  And one night she had gotten fed up with the voice, with the watcher, with the whole damn thing. Anger had triumphed over terror, and she’d stood in her bedroom all alone with just a penlight, and she had read the Psalm, then chanted the St. Michael prayer repeatedly, and demanded that ghost get out of her house, out of her life.

  To this day she remembered the shadow that had seemed to rise from one corner of her room, darker than the darkness of the unlighted room, as if in defiance. How her heart had tripped at the sight. How her anger had risen to her support, making her pray even more loudly.

  The thing had vanished and never returned.

  But now here she was again, sixteen years later, with that same creepy, awful feeling of being watched.

  And now she had come to hate the way her shift often made her go home after dark, because she often stayed late to finish important details while they were fresh in her mind.

  It was an odd schedule, designed to introduce her to everyone on the M.E.’s team regardless of their shifts, an opportunity for her to learn from everyone. But because it was a shift designed just for her, she was seriously beginning to think of asking Dr. Crepo to change it. Except how could she explain her request? She certainly couldn’t say she felt as if some thing was following her, watching her.

  She rode the bus home with a headache. Sometimes she wondered if she had made a bad career choice, choosing to work with the dead, rather than the living. With the living she might have saved lives. With the dead she could do nothing but bear witness to what had happened to them. Yes, she knew she was giving voice to those whom death had left voiceless. But sometimes she found it a grim way to live. Maybe it was getting to her.

  Leaning her head against the window, she waited for the blocks to pass, grateful for the coolness of the glass. Hoping that she’d make it into the safety of her apartment before something caught her, much as she had felt as a child. Again and again she told herself that was ridiculous, and tried to focus on reality. The real moments and events in her life.

  As the bus started and stopped, she watched happier faces pass by, or even climb aboard, like the smiling mother with two excited children, both of whom seemed to be eagerly anticipating getting home to play with new toys. Had her life ever been that simple?

  Not since she was five and had first experienced the prickling feeling that something was watching her. The feeling over the past week had grown so strong that now, when she got home in the evening, she stayed home, refusing to follow even her usual pursuits, like going to the gym.

  Like back when she’d lived in the haunted house. Only different somehow. Inside her locked apartment, the feeling went away. It was only when she was out and about that she felt observed. She was growing increasingly unnerved, but without a thing to point to, what could she do?

  Some little voice kept telling her to go to Jude with her concern. That he wouldn’t dismiss her. But how could she know that when she hardly knew him at all?

  A part of her felt sorry for him, because the more she thought about it, the more she realized that his life must be full of loss. If he made any friends, he outlived them. Everyone he cared about would slip away sooner or later.

  Yet he still seemed to care. She could tell he cared about both Chloe and Garner, even though he could be tough on Garner. How could he keep opening himself to that loss over and over again?

  It seemed he was courageous in more ways than one.

  She sighed and closed her eyes for a minute, hoping the pounding in her head would ease, that her neck would stop prickling. She thought again of going to Jude.

  Although he’d made it pretty clear he’d be happy if he never saw her again. Nor could she blame him. She’d been pretty selfish by persisting when he kept telling her to get lost, even when he warned her how much he wanted her and told her flat out he wouldn’t cross that line with her.

  She’d actually tormented him by offering her blood.

  She was an idiot.

  Sighing, she opened her eyes again and then stiffened.

  There was Jude, standing on the sidewalk, ignoring the few people who hurried around him, looking up at a very low-rent apartment building. This could be a bad part of town, one she wouldn’t have come through at all except for the bus.

  At once she grabbed the cord to stop the bus. The driver obliged her half a block later. Almost frantically she hurried down the aisle, practically stumbling in her eagerness to get down the steps.

  What was she doing? Even as she ran toward where she’d seen him, she scolded herself. He’d told her to get lost more than once. She must be nuts.

  But as if something stronger than sense tugged at her, she kept going. And saw him enter the apartment building almost casually.

  She burst into the small lobby in time to see the elevator doors close behind him. Impatiently she watched the display until she saw it stop on the seventh floor. Then she punched the button desperately, calling the cars back.

  What was she doing? The question shrieked at the back of her brain but she ignored it. She didn’t even answer the equally noisy question of what she was going to do if she found him. She knew, just knew that she had to follow him.
r />   He’d probably be so mad at her…

  The next car over arrived just a few seconds later. She stepped in alone and hit the button for the seventh floor. It seemed to take forever.

  Then, finally, she arrived and stepped into a deserted hallway.

  Brilliant, she thought. Absolutely brilliant. Had she really thought she’d find him dallying up here?

  Just as she was about to summon the elevator again, to go home and take care of her pounding head, she heard his voice around a corner in the hallway. She couldn’t make out the words, but there was no mistaking that it was him.

  She hurried around the corner just in time to see the door close behind him as he stepped inside.

  Now what? She could hear nothing, see nothing. She was being nosy, she had no business here, she must be out of her mind…

  She pressed her ear to the door and heard something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Was that a growl?

  Then Jude’s voice. Chanting. Chanting in a cadence she remembered from childhood and movies. Latin?

  A guttural scream, not even human she was sure. Heart pounding, she pulled back from the door and leaned against the wall. What was going on in there? That demon-fighting that Chloe had talked about?

  Leave now.

  That’s what she should do. This could go on for hours, she didn’t have any part in it. Yet she remained rooted as the minutes turned into nearly an hour, for some reason unable to run. Something compelled her to stay, much as she wanted to flee. Something seemed to have called her here, and she couldn’t fight it.

  Her heart wouldn’t slow down, her breath kept coming rapidly, almost in pants, and she hardly noticed the one or two people who passed by and looked at her oddly. All she knew was that a force inside her refused to let her leave.

  Then someone stuck his nose out of a nearby apartment and looked at her. “What’s going on in there? Jeez, it sounds like a dog with rabies.”

  Terri stared at him, seeking words, any kind of explanation. Finally a lie sprang to her lips. “My friend’s a dog trainer. He’s trying to help with a troublesome dog.”