Chasing Shadows(29)
She sighed. “I know. You’re right, Saphrona, I know that. It’s just… I almost feel like a mother who is sending her kid off to school for the first time. I know Mark is a grown man, and he’s military trained so I know he can take care of himself. But letting go is so damn hard.”
I gave her a sympathetic smile and reached over to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. I then looked around again for Mark and Lochlan.
“Where the heck are they?” I mused aloud. “Usually men complain about us taking too long in the bathroom.”
“No kidding,” Juliette agreed, also looking left and right for any sign of her brother or mine. “You don’t think they’d have gone out to the car already, do you?”
I shook my head. “No. It may be early evening, but it’s still daylight outside. Lochlan wouldn’t spend any more time than necessary out in the sun, direct or not.”
Just as I was about to go into the men’s room to see if they were still in there, Mark and Lochlan came out. Mark immediately put his arm around me and Lochlan placed his around Juliette’s shoulders, whispering in her ear as she started to pull away, “Please do not make a scene. Let us leave casually with all due haste.”
Alarm shot through me at his words—and at the scent pouring off of both men. They’d encountered the vampire in the men’s room and their desire to make a quick getaway meant the encounter had not gone well.
Juliette nodded stiffly and the four of us walked outside, heading straight for the Escalade. Lochlan used his keychain remote to unlock the doors, and to my surprise, Juliette continued the charade by climbing into the front seat next to him. When Mark and I were in the back seat and we had all four of us shut our doors, Lochlan turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the parking space.
“What the hell happened in there?” Juliette demanded, turning in her seat. “I can smell vampire stink all over both of you—no offense,” she added with a nod in my brother’s direction.
“None taken,” Lochlan muttered.
“The vampire ambushed me at the urinal,” Mark told us. “How f*ckin’ messed up is that—to come at a guy when he’s taking a piss?!”
“Did he say anything at all?” I asked.
“No. He was standing at one of the urinals when we went in, but since I can’t smell him like you guys can, I didn’t know it was him at first. Just walked to one a few feet down to do my thing,” Mark said. “I’d barely gotten my dick in my hand when he flew at me. Didn’t even seem to f*ckin’ care that Lochlan was there.”
I’d never heard Mark curse so much, so I figured it was a sign that he was royally ticked off. I couldn’t blame him of course, and I gave the hand I held what I hoped was a comforting squeeze.
“He didn’t bite you, did he?” Juliette asked, and at her words I found myself inspecting Mark for signs of injury.
“He didnae have time t’ bite ‘im,” Lochlan said, his own voice conveying his annoyance by the thickening of his accent. “The moment the bugger moved, I was on ‘im and snappin’ ‘is neck like a twig.”
Juliette looked at him with wide eyes. “You killed him?”
Lochlan shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. At least not permanently. The sodding git will live—‘is spine is probably re-fusing even as we speak, and because his spinal cord wasn’t severed, he may well recover in just a few hours instead of taking three days to do so. He’ll be in a right foul mood when he does, too.”
“How did you conceal the body in the meantime?” I asked.
“The reason you smell so much vampire stink on us, as Jules so aptly put it, is because we hauled the f*cker into one of the stalls and yanked his pants down so people would think he was taking a shit,” Mark replied tersely.
“Eeww,” his sister remarked with a wrinkling of her nose.
“It’s really too bad you couldn’t have killed him,” I said slowly, surprising Mark. “Obviously I don’t like the thought of killing anyone, or I wouldn’t have been able to give up people as a food source. But allowing him to survive means allowing him the chance to attack you again, because he knows what you smell like.”
For the first time, Mark looked more alarmed than angry. “He’s not going to be able to follow us home, is he?”
I shook my head as Lochlan replied from the front seat. “No, our scent trail will have ended in the parking lot. He won’t be able to follow us unless he’s adept at tracking vehicle exhaust, and the chances of that with the countless petrol vapor trails in that area are nil. However, Saphrona is right about one thing: if you encounter him again, he will not hesitate to attack. Not only does he want your blood to feed on, he’ll be wanting you dead for getting the best of him.”
“Won’t he want you dead, too?”
Lochlan nodded. “Aye, most likely,” he said, “which is why I intend to see that he’s taken care of as soon as possible.”
“Oh, so it’s not because he tried to kill Mark, but because he’s gonna want to kill you too,” Juliette said with a sneer, crossing her arms as her eyes shot daggers at our driver.
My brother glanced sidelong at her as he maneuvered us through traffic. “On the contrary, madam—the threat against me is, although very real, a mere annoyance at best. And while I admit to wanting to remove said annoyance permanently so I am no longer thus annoyed, I’m far more concerned with the fact that a threat against Mark means a threat against my sister. And that I will not tolerate.”
“How is a threat to Mark’s life a threat to Saphrona?”
I cleared my throat and she looked back at me. “Because now that our bond is complete, if Mark dies, so will I.”
Back to Top
Ten
Mark turned to me with an alarmed expression. “Are you for real?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so. As a friend who has bonded once explained to me, our experiencing pure physical and emotional intimacy in the same moment completes the bond,” I told him. “So if something ever happened to you, I would be so heartbroken as to eventually be consumed by my grief.”
“But what if, God forbid, something happened to you? Would I die as well?”
“You would.”
“Of course,” Juliette mused softly. “I’d forgotten that vampire pair-bonding is virtually the same as imprinting among shapeshifters. In that first moment of dual intimacy, you exchanged a small part of your life force with one another, making it impossible for either of you to live without the other.”
Mark looked understandably ashen, and even though we both wore seat belts, he reached over and wrapped his arms around me, holding me for a moment before he said, “You told me you thought I would be human, that vampires almost always bond to humans. Doesn’t that kind of give you guys the short end of the stick, to dangle immortality in your faces only to have it cut off by the relatively short lifespan of a human being?”
“Very observant of you, brother,” Lochlan put in, “but what may surprise you is that when one of us bonds to a human, the metaphysical connection delays the aging process for that human. It doubles their life expectancy. But because it does not grant true immortality, most human bondmates are eventually turned.”
“So if it turns out that I’m not truly immortal, I can expect to live to anywhere between a hundred sixty and two hundred years old?”
Lochlan nodded. “Give or take a decade.”
Mark looked at me for a long moment. “Well then,” he said slowly, “if it becomes apparent that I’m not going to live forever, I want to be turned.”
“Absolutely not!” Juliette exclaimed. “Mark, think about what you’re saying, about what you’ll be giving up: No more sunrises, no more sunshine. You’ll only want to sleep during the day.”
“Lochlan is up right now,” Mark pointed out.
My brother cleared his throat. “The only reason I am wide awake right now is because I consumed the entire blood supply of a 400-pound porcine in order to spare your life and my sister grief,” Lochlan reminded him.
Juliette looked at him, again with widened eyes. “Saphrona said you fed on one of the pigs—you actually killed it?”
Loch nodded. “Aye. Meeting your brother awakened a bloodlust the likes of which I have not felt since I was newly turned,” he told her. “It was by no small effort that I was able to maintain my self-discipline and deny the urge to take his life right in front of Saphrona’s eyes. I may not share blood with her as you do with Mark, my lady, but she is my sister nonetheless, and I have no desire to cause her harm. I do not think I could live with myself if such a thing were to occur.”
The shapeshifter’s expression changed to one that I could not decipher, but before she could formulate a response, my brother continued. “Something else you’ll have to give up, Mark, is food, because the only thing you will be able to digest as a vampire is blood. It is the only thing you’ll want, and I for one dearly miss the taste of steak, pork, potatoes… I miss wine and water and tea, and I’ll never know what soda tastes like. Although you’d still be able to consume them, they’d be tasteless and do absolutely nothing for you, so all the things you enjoy eating and drinking now you may as well give up for good. Whoever Vivian Drake got her information from is right about one thing: this is not a life I would wish on anyone.”