Soaking up the energy around me, I felt it swirl in my grasp and I blasted it out of my palm in the form of a thermal beam; a long, silver ray of hot energy that buried itself into Victor’s abdomen and burned him from the inside out: his favourite thing for me to do to his marks.
He cried and writhed and fell to his knees, and I felt that same pain...Like being torn open and sliced by a boiling hot knife while heat shot through my body, singing my extremities. And then he disappeared in the flame and disintegrated completely. It was my turn to cry out.
(Jared)
I couldn’t believe she’d done it. Not many vampires would kill their Sires. It was the same feeling of killing a parent; even if they were a total ass you respected that they created you and you had a special link with them – in most cases, anyway. Plus, the physical pain of destroying that link and killing your Sire was, from everything I’d heard, unbearable. It could even make vampires ill, it was the only thing that could.
So there Sam was on her knees, gritting her teeth against an agony that I could only imagine.
I was the first to react. It was pure instinct to kneel beside her and pull her to me and envelope her with my arms. I half-expected her to push me away – what with her being as stubborn as she was. But instead she buried her face in my chest while her hands clamped down tightly on my arms. An ear-piercing whine still escaped her mouth despite how much she ground her teeth together. She was shaking so hard she was more or less convulsing. I couldn’t even tell where the pain was coming from.
“What hurts?” I asked Luther and Antonio as they rushed over to her. The dogs where making slight howling sounds. “Will it be her stomach, her head – what?”
Luther gazed down at her with sympathy. “The pain supposedly hits every single part of your body.”
I sighed out of my nose. I wanted to punch something. “How long will it last?”
“She could be like this for minutes or hours,” replied Antonio, running a hand over her hair but she didn’t seem to feel it. I wasn’t even sure if she knew who was holding her.
Sam? Sam?
It BURNS! The pain was obvious in her mental voice.
Where?
EVERYWHERE!
“Brave little thing, isn’t she,” said one of the guards.
“A very extraordinary young lady,” commented Luther.
Just then her body shook hard and blood poured out of her mouth and drenched my t-shirt.
I glanced up at Antonio and Luther. “Is there anything that’ll make it stop?” I already knew the answer would be no.
“You have to think of it as her body grieving,” said Luther. “As vampires, our links with our Sires are based on the exchange of blood that occurred during the creation process. Victor drank her to near death and then fed her his own blood. Her body no longer has a living, breathing blood-link and it is grieving it. Grieving is a process – painful, draining, overbearing. It must run its course. For vampires who have ended the life of their own Sire, the agony will be no less than excruciating. I’m told that the pain is bad enough that it makes you want to die.”
Jared? She sounded weak but there was something else in her mental voice. Hope, maybe? Hold me still.
What?
Just hold me still.
So I did. I tightened my arms around her until she was as still as I could get her. Then I watched, completely baffled, as she moved one of her hands from my arm to her chest. A slight zing went through her body and then she was limp in my arms mere seconds later.
“What’s wrong with her?” Seized by panic, I set her back slightly and examined her body with my eyes. The hand she had against her chest flopped down to her lap, revealing something small lodged there. Holding her securely with one arm, I used my free hand to pluck the little thing out from between her breasts.
“Is that a thorn?” asked Antonio.
I laughed a little. “I would never have thought of that.”
“What is it?”
“When she was coaching the guys she absorbed Chico’s power to exhale poisonous thorns. Thorns that knock you unconscious for a couple of hours.”
“Smart,” said Luther. “By the time she wakes up the effects of severing the link may well have worn off.”
“Perhaps you should teleport her to her apartment,” suggested Antonio. “I think it will be better for her to wake in her own bed. Oh and leave her a note to the effect that she should avoid work for the remainder of the night.”
Standing upright with her in my arms, I nodded.
In a blink we were in the centre of the living area in her apartment. I’d been curious to know what it was like inside; whether she’d tried to put her own mark on it or whether she’d left it to look like a show-home. With books stacked on the shelves, a bowl of glass sweets on the little table and a throw hanging over the sofa, it had a homey feel to it.
I noticed the tiny, pink, decorate cushions on the sofa and suspected that Fletcher may have had something to do with them. Sam just didn’t seem that girly. It was impossible to not also notice, as I walked en-route to her bedroom, that she wasn’t the type that had a specific place for everything. The apartment wasn’t disorderly or cluttered, but it wasn’t obsessively and freakishly tidy; it was lived in. Like mine.
Unfortunately there was no underwear lying around. Whoa, did I really just wonder about that? Shaking off my perverted thoughts, I laid her carefully down onto her bed and covered her with the satin bedspread.
And now I should probably leave. I really should. I really, really should. Especially since she’d be absolutely irate to wake up and see me sitting here next to her. Yes, I was now sitting next to her. I could stay for a while and then just teleport out the second she woke up though, right? She’d never know I was here.
Tentatively – I know, since when was I tentative? – I brushed that gorgeous curtain of dark hair away from her face and ran my knuckles from her temple to her jaw. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never done that to a woman before. Not in my eighteen years as a vampire or in my twenty-four years as a human. But, then, there’d never been anyone like Sam around me in all those years. She intrigued me on every level.
I saw then that I had dried blood on my finger. Her blood. It was all over my shirt too from when she’d had some sort of coughing fit. Well that explained why subconsciously my eyes kept dancing to her throat and why I’d gotten so incredibly thirsty out of nowhere. It was that enchanting scent. Christ, even the potent scent of her blood all over me hadn’t been enough to distract me from how worried I was about her.
But as much as I was yearning to taste that blood on my finger right now and had almost brought it to my mouth, I didn’t want to taste her until she wanted me to. And she would want me to, I’d make sure of that.
At least now I had a good enough reason that would motivate me to leave; I needed to change out of this shirt that was soaked in her blood before I lost it. Tentatively – again the tentativeness! – I kissed her forehead and ran my hand through her hair one last time.
It was when I stood upright that I heard her.
Jared.
Of course I had to question whether I’d only heard it because I’d wanted to. And I’d have to question my sanity if things were so bad that I wanted to hear her voice in my head for no good reason.
Jared.
I smiled down on her. They say that when you’re unconscious you can still hear and stuff, right? Maybe on some level she’d sensed me around her. Or maybe she was dreaming about me. If it was the second, then I’d be interested to know just what was going on in that dream.