Chasing Shadows(10)
Juliette took another bite of the sandwich, swallowed it after two chews, and then cracked open the second can of pop, which she chugged two good swallows of before she answered. “Obviously you have a lot of questions—I have a few of my own for you, but maybe I should start at the beginning.”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. “Yeah, you just do that.”
Juliette took another bite of the sandwich and another swig of Dew. “Patricia Singleton, Mark’s mother, was attacked by a vampire during her eighth month of pregnancy—the vampire part you obviously already know. The vamp was a rogue newborn, one some other vamp had drained and left for dead, or thought he’d killed. Or maybe he’d been unbalanced before he’d been turned. Mom just said that by the time the shifters found him after the attack, he was completely unglued.”
“Why were the shifters going after him? Why not leave it to the vampire community to take care of him like you usually do?”
Mark’s sister scoffed, then polished off the sandwich I had made her and the second can of Mt. Dew. She sat forward with her hands together on the table. “For a half-breed, you seem to know so very little about your own kind. Vampires wouldn’t have acted unless he became a real menace to society.”
“I haven’t lived as a vampire since I was fifty and I hardly associate with anyone from that world,” I retorted.
“Really now?” Juliette asked, raising an eyebrow. “Then how come I can smell another vampire’s scent in this house?”
“I said ‘hardly,’ Juliette, not ‘never.’ I have a younger sister and an older brother. Both created, not born. Evangeline paid me a visit today, not that her doing so is any concern of yours.”
Juliette’s eyes blazed for a moment as she stood, leaning across my table at me. “It is every concern of mine now that my brother is living here. I am Mark’s guardian, and I will not allow you to put him at risk.”
I stood as well, slowly, and stepped closer. My proximity forced Juliette to stand upright, and so I moved even closer, until we were nose to nose. I could feel my canines descending, my sudden anger kicking up my adrenaline.
“Let’s get one thing clear right away, dog,” I seethed, my voice dangerously low so that she knew I meant business. “You will watch your tone when you speak to me in my own house—or didn’t your mommy ever tell you it was a bad idea to piss off a vampire?”
“Now you look here—”
“I told you before that Mark is very important to me. As such, I am not about to knowingly put his life at risk, and I am a dhampyr, so I daresay I can take care of him myself. I would even go so far as to say that your services as guardian, whatever the hell that means, are no longer required.”
Juliette surprised me then by laughing. She turned and dropped back into the chair she had vacated, throwing one arm over the back with an air of nonchalance. “I am astounded by your arrogance, half-breed. But please, tell me why my brother is so important to you, when you’ve obviously just met him today.”
“That’s where you’d be wrong, at least in part. Mark just met me today, but I met him over two hundred years ago.”
She scoffed again. “That’s impossible; he’s only thirty years old. The only way that could be is if…”
Juliette’s eyes widened when she looked up at me. “You mean vampires imprint too?! How can that be—you’re all dead!”
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Four
It was my turn to laugh sardonically as I retracted my fangs and returned to my seat.
“For someone who claims to know so much about vampires, you sure don’t know a lot,” I said. “Don’t you read Vivian Drake novels? Vampire magazine, maybe?”
Juliette scoffed. “Please,” she lamented. “You’re not going to tell me that all that crap is true, are you?”
I grinned slightly. “Most of what she’s written about vampire biology is true. We don’t know the origin of vampires—that’s too steeped in myth—but we do know that no human ever became a vampire after dying. Dead blood is like poison to vampires because it lacks the life-sustaining properties of the living. And take me for instance: I’m half vampire, half human. How could I and others like me possibly exist if vampires are dead? Everyone knows that a dead man can’t conceive a child with a living woman—because he’s dead, for crying out loud.”
She sat up straighter. “So vampires really are like the X-Men? They’re mutants?”
I shrugged. “That’s the closest analogy, yeah. Same could be said for shifters, if you think about it. We’re all of us mutated forms of the human animal.”
“How does Vivian Drake know all that stuff?” Juliette wondered. “I would think that vampires would want to keep that stuff secret.”
“They do,” I replied as I rose and fetched myself something to drink. As I poured myself a glass of iced tea I went on. “The belief is that she’s getting her information from a vampire.”
“Or she is one.”
I turned around slowly with the glass of tea in my hand. “There is that possibility, yes,” I conceded. Shaking myself mentally, I set my glass on the table and then returned the pitcher to the fridge before I rejoined my guest.
“Anyway,” I said, “to answer your earlier question, yes. We call it pair bonding, though—possibly another indicator that vampires are alive, because they almost always bond with humans.”
“And why would they bond to a human if they were dead,” Juliette broke in. “Yeah, I get it now. Still weird to think of it, so you’ll excuse me if I’m having a hard time accepting it.”
She shook her head and leaned forward on the table again, her hands clasped together in front of her. “Patricia was found by my father. She was already near death, and when she was brought into the ER, my mother was on duty and she immediately smelled vampire. She also knew that if they were going to save her baby, they had to get him out quickly, or he’d be miscarried as she died.”
“Did his mother go through the change?” I asked cautiously.
“No,” Juliette answered solemnly. “The vampire that broke into their house nearly ripped her throat clean off, and she’d lost too much blood for that stuff—draculin, I think you call it—to save her, though it was the only thing that kept her alive as long as it did. The draculin was trying to do its job, but there just wasn’t enough blood left in her system. Mother knew as soon as Mark was born that most of it had gone toward altering his DNA.”
I nodded as I sipped my tea—it sounded very much like the stories I’d heard when I was younger. “It is called draculin, you are correct. You said that the shifters went after the vampire that killed her. Why?”
Juliette smiled lightly. “Mother’s not the Alpha Female in our pack, but she carries some authority. Or maybe she’s just very charismatic—when she described the brutality of the vampire’s attack to the rest of her pack, they took it upon themselves to hunt him down so he didn’t have the chance to do that to anyone else.”
Mark hadn’t told me that his father had found his mother—how horrible it must have been for him to see his wife like that. I knew that such a sight had been known to crack even the strongest of men, and I felt so sorry for him, and for Mark.
“Why did your mother volunteer to help take care of Mark after he was born?” I asked after a moment.
She looked at me. “Partly it was because Daddy was broken by the loss of his first wife, and he was so consumed with grief he simply couldn’t think, or do anything. He could barely take care of himself for a while, let alone a newborn infant. He hired her as a private nurse to take care of Mark, but she ended up having to take care of him, too.”
“And the other part?”
Juliette cocked her head to the side. “You said you ‘met’ Mark over two hundred years ago—I assume through dreams, right?” she asked me.
“Yes, that’s how it works, apparently. Why?” I wondered.
“Didn’t you have one of those Coming of Age ceremonies where you drink the blood of your sire to gain his memories?”
My eyes narrowed. So she really had been reading my Vivian Drake novels, I noted. Otherwise she would not have known that particular truth, because I’d never written about it in the articles I wrote for Vampire.
“My ceremony was, shall we say, interrupted,” I said slowly.
“Why? What happened?”
“I found out what a bastard my father really was,” I confessed. “He never loved my mother like he said he did, wasn’t devastated by her death as he had claimed. He knew what the pregnancy was doing to her, how my strength was basically tearing her apart from the inside out, and he could have saved her by turning her after I was born. But he didn’t do that. He picked me up and walked away without a single look back, while she died screaming his name.”