Six, p.20
Six, page 20
Lorcan reached his hand toward her. “Yes, it is a vampire thing. If your great-grandfather gets any rash ideas, he will have to get through me. Also, I can protect you with the full force of vampiric law should your other friends come after you.”
“You mean the other werewolves,” she said, eyeing his hand. Slowly she slid her palm against his. “Why are you so warm?”
Lorcan looked away. From the new angle, Paige could see pink-tinged sweat dripping from his hairline. “Lorcan?” she asked again as she felt a tremor in his normally steady grasp.
He stumbled, but Paige caught him easily. He pushed weakly back to his feet. “I need to lie down. If you would please, Miss Paige?” he said, pointing to a hallway across the living cavern.
She eased him all the way back to a door with a lock. He handed her a key with sweaty, shaking fingers. Paige gasped as she saw reinforced steel bars in the windows and heavy-duty chains running through the metal bars of his bolted-to-the-floor bed. Parts of the wall had been ripped away to reveal cinder-block reinforcement behind the Sheetrock.
“You should probably leave,” he said as he eased onto the bed. He grabbed his head and groaned as his fangs poked out of his mouth.
Paige grabbed her stomach. “Lorcan, something is—”
The vampire slammed the door shut behind them both and tapped a big, red panic button on the keypad next to the wall. He grabbed his head again, and this time a spray of blood came out of his nose.
“Lorcan!” Paige barked. All of her claws popped out at once, including the ones jammed in her shoes. As she kicked them off, her little toes decided to break and start inching back toward her ankle. While she was staring in horror at her feet, something slashed through the back of her shirt and sent shreds of fabric to the floor. She whirled around to see Lorcan staring in awestruck horror at the deep red talons stretching from the tips of his fingers.
“You—you’re—” Paige stammered as she backed away.
Lorcan’s irises now filled his inhumanly bright green eyes. He let out a guttural snarl as he methodically followed her.
“I infected you,” Paige finally stammered out as her back hit the wall.
Lorcan slammed his fists on either side of her. He leaned in and snarled, “No, I’ve always been like this,” before grabbing her shoulders and jerking her head to the side.
Before he could sink his teeth into her neck, Paige’s eyes lightened to solid amber, and she snarled right back as she drove her knee between his legs. The once ferocious hunter let out a yelp as he staggered. Paige didn’t stop her attack. Her claws raked against his shoulder and tore his shirt. He retaliated by snagging the front of her blouse and horse-collar tackling her, throwing her on the floor with surprising ease. She slashed again, this time cutting through shirt and skin. He didn’t yowl this time; he smiled.
Paige used her small size to her advantage and slithered right under the bed. Lorcan reached for her a few times, but she managed to wedge herself quite stubbornly between the laminate floors and the steel bed frame.
“I’m hungry, Paige,” Lorcan growled. “I’m hungry and I’m patient.”
“What are you? Half-vampire, half-werewolf?” Paige asked as she slipped farther toward the head of the bed and farther from the patrolling monster.
“I am the berserker the Pendragons had to tame,” Lorcan growled. “I was the monster who would not bow to a foreign king.”
The claws raked under the bed, this time shredding her pants leg and her garter. Her tail snapped free and gave Lorcan the perfect handhold to drag her kicking and screaming from her hidey-hole. She leaped at him, hitting him with enough force to send him crashing to the ground. This time she pinned his arms and bared her teeth.
The blow to the head seemed to snap some lucidity back into the vampire. He looked deep into Paige’s eyes and softened his growl. “We don’t really want to hurt each other, do we?” he asked.
Paige remained firmly on top of him. She pressed her hips against his as she forced his arms down. A rather different sort of sound escaped his lips. “Now that is really not fair,” he moaned.
“What are you doing to me?” Paige snarled as an intoxicating smell oozed from his pores.
“Nothing, for now,” Lorcan growled.
She rolled off him and backed away slowly. Lorcan tore off the shredded remains of his shirt and stared at Paige hungrily. Paige stared at the healed-over scars on his chest—some recent, others clearly weathered with age. He cracked his neck and retracted his claws. Paige kept hers at the ready.
“You’re just like me,” she snarled.
“I’m more like you than you realize. I didn’t ask for my condition. I was chosen when the invaders came from the south—”
“The red banner,” Paige said. “I dreamed—”
“You remember my beginning. Six of us were chosen; only I survived. I made the invaders pay with so much blood it would have sustained a vampire until the end of days. It took an army to capture me.”
“The old Lord Pendragon had to make an example. He had to prove, prove, that he could turn the savages into his subjects,” Lorcan continued. “He couldn’t just give us death. He had to rule us.”
Paige watched as Lorcan’s face softened. He collapsed, defeated, onto the bed and grabbed his face with shaking hands. “No one has seen the truth in two thousand years, and you stripped it from me in seconds.”
“The dreams—”
“Even Mina never saw the Battle of the Barrows,” Lorcan said softly. “She is one of three living creatures who know who I am, what I am. I never thought that anyone else could strip my defenses so completely—”
“Lorcan—”
“That’s not my name!” he barked. “It never was.”
Paige approached him slowly, cautiously. He looked through his fingers with humanlike eyes now, and his body was hunched and trembling. She stayed just out of the range of his potential claws.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice returning to a human register as well.
“But you will,” Lorcan said. “I don’t know how or why exactly, but you will. Somehow you appear thousands of years later with the very same strain of the virus that infected my clan. I should have been killed, drinking that much berserker blood, but instead you empower me, you entice me—” He trailed off and wrung his hands. “My father always warned me that fate was your most faithful dog. It always comes back to find you. It always comes back—”
“What are you saying?”
The vampire gnawed at his lips until blood dribbled down his chin. Paige didn’t have time to react as he leaped at her and pinned her against the wall. Somehow every shadow in the room had wrapped around him, obscuring his features and turning his eyes into inky, hollow sockets.
“My father, he knew. He knew that this would happen.” Lorcan laughed. “He laughed at me as I drove the spear right through his blackened heart.”
Blood dripped on Paige’s cheek. The metallic smell filled her nose. Lorcan leaned in closer.
“You killed your father,” Paige choked out. Lorcan’s breath burned her cheek.
“I most certainly did. If I didn’t kill him, the council would have killed all of us. He was going to do it, you know. He was going to tell the whole world the truth. He thought with a human for a wife and a berserker for a son that he could conquer anything, that all the kingdom would understand the true nature of our kind. Can you imagine a world where everyone knew that vampires were real, Paige?”
“You’re insane,” she whispered. The first trickle of blood touched her lips.
“Quite insane,” he said as he leaned in even closer. His lips stopped millimeters away from hers. “My father was willing to risk everything for a human girl, and his kingdom was torn apart over rumors of jealousy and adultery. I thought that I was better than him. I really did.”
Paige kept her eyes locked on the hollows where Lorcan’s once were. Her heart thundered in her chest.
“I brought you here tonight to end this once and for all,” Lorcan hissed. “But I invited you in; I offered you my protection. I was going to kill you, Paige Carmichael, for the good of this world.”
Paige glared right at him. The shadows flickered over his eyes. “No, you weren’t,” she growled.
The shadows pulled away, and intensely bright green eyes stared at her once more. “You’re right,” he said before kissing her passionately. He slid his arm once more along her collar, but this time, he ripped her shirt off. As warm skin touched hers, Paige began to kiss him back just as feverishly.
Lorcan threw her on the bed and tore away the remains of her pants. Not one to be outdone, Paige used her claws to tear away his jeans and gave him a pointed look as she saw black silk lining the denim.
“Cotton gives vampires hives,” he said as he pounced on top of her. His impressive fangs slid down her chest and cut clean through the front of her bra. Lorcan ran his tongue back up her sternum and along her neck, pausing over the pulsing carotid artery while his hand slid up her thigh. “You know that I’m going to do very bad things to you, Miss Paige,” he whispered.
She tore away the last vestiges of both of their clothes before snarling. “And I don’t care,” she growled back.
He tilted her head to the side to let his fangs slip past her pulsing artery and into the slower, sweeter recesses of her jugular veins. At the same time, Paige howled and pounced, forcing their bodies together. Lorcan groaned as her blood siphoned into his mouth and his blood rushed between his legs. The two of them remained connected, thrashing and thrusting until Paige managed to flip him over and take control. This time she sank her teeth into his battle-scarred flesh and lapped up the blood oozing from his shoulder even as he roared and shuddered inside her. She yowled once more before rolling off him—a bloody, smelly, sticky mess. He rolled over and stared at her, dumbstruck at the amount of blood dripping from her mouth, and lapped it up hungrily. She quickly followed suit, licking away the blood from his lips until the puncture wounds sealed on their own.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against his chest, breathing in the scent of her hair as he nuzzled the top of her head. Paige curled against his chest and let her tail flop over both their legs. As she rested her ear against him, she couldn’t hear a heartbeat, only a faint, pulsing sound like a dishwasher.
“You didn’t kill me,” Paige said softly.
“I was half expecting you to kill me,” he whispered. “You may very well regret this choice, a rún.”
“I’m sick of regretting things,” she mumbled as she wrapped her arms around his waist. “Life’s too short for most of us.”
Lorcan held her close and whispered, “Mordred.”
“It’s not morbid—”
“No, my name; it’s Mordred, Mordred Pendragon.”
15
“When you say King Arthur, you don’t really mean the King Arthur?” Paige asked incredulously as she ate another spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Lorcan poured another shot of blood over his ice cream before joining Paige on the sofa. She watched the red swirl into the green as he stabbed at the concoction with his spoon. He scooped up a bite and offered it her way. She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Suit yourself; it’s bloody delicious,” the vampire sighed. “And yes, I mean the King Arthur.”
“And you’re—?”
“Mordred, but I wouldn’t get used to calling me that. Mordred died at the battle of Camlann when his father ran him through with Excalibur.”
“Yet you are here, so I’m guessing the Arthurian legends aren’t entirely accurate.”
Lorcan rolled his eyes. “I’ve never ceased to be amazed at human imagination. Between King Arthur and Dracula, I also never cease to be annoyed. I, under no circumstances, thought that the legend would be so pervasive, and now you’re looking at me with the same starstruck eyes that everyone gives me when they find out who my father was.”
Paige began to dutifully and quietly eat her ice cream. She tucked her knees into the T-shirt she stole from the vampire and peeked over her bowl. After a few seconds of puppy-dog stare and an adorable twitch of the tail, Lorcan let out a deep sigh.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Was there really a Merlin?”
Lorcan nodded. “I called him grandfather, though.”
“You mean?”
“Merlin was the sire of Arthur, along with a particularly cranky vampire named Uther. The whole Igraine thing was made up for humans. He didn’t have magic, though—just science.”
“And your parents?”
“Arthur and his sister, Morgana. The intention was to create a perfectly pure Pendragon strain of vampire, one capable of even converting a berserker into a vampire. I know that look, Miss Paige—”
“Just Paige, please. I think you can call me Paige now.”
“Ask the question,” Mordred sighed.
“Guinevere? Lancelot?”
“Guinevere was the sister of Sir Kai, one of Arthur’s bondsmen knights. She was without compare for a woman of her time, free-spirited, beautiful, and utterly uncontrollable. Naturally, she was the very woman my father sought to control. It worked out exactly as well as I expected.”
“Did you hate her?”
Lorcan took that moment to mix up his ice cream. He stared off into space for a frighteningly long time. “I hate what she was forced into being,” he said softly. “I hated what I had to do to save myself at her expense, but, no, I didn’t hate her.”
“But she wasn’t a vampire?”
Lorcan shook his head.
“And a vampire can marry a human?”
“A vampire can marry whatever he wants so long as his partner can drink his blood. We had one crazy Azarola married to a dog for a decade. Don’t give me that face, Paige. It was a beautiful relationship until that car hit that Great Dane—”
She punched him in the leg. “Stop messing with me,’ she ordered.
“The lady’s wish is my command,” Lorcan said in an exaggerated British accent. “I wasn’t lying though. He did accidentally marry a dog. Vampire marriage is like all things in our society—deceptively simple on the surface but ridiculously complex in process.”
“And vampire divorce?”
“Same story,” he sighed. “In theory you can just declare your intention to be apart before witnesses and trade your blood back, but if you think a marriage dissolving after a few years is bad, try a few decades or centuries of baggage.”
“You didn’t really get a divorce like you told my mom,” she said.
“I thought you said life was too short for regrets.”
“People say stupid things when they are upset and caught up in the moment,” Paige muttered. She rushed her ice cream bowl to the sink and washed both it and her spoon with ferocity. She set the pottery down with such force that it split in two on the granite.
“I’m no better than Cal,” she said as she tried to keep her hands from shaking. She looked at her solo reflection even as she heard Lorcan behind her. He wrapped his arms around her. She watched her shirt flatten against her belly with phantom force.
“You had already left him—” Lorcan whispered in her ear. She tried not to react to his touch, but the color was already creeping across her cheeks.
“But you have a wife,” she said as she jerked away. “I guess adultery is just a family thing for you—”
“That is not fair,” he growled.
“Life isn’t fair,” she snapped back. “I don’t care how hot you are; I am not going to be just some vampire’s mistress—”
“Fine,” he said, walking away. She heard a door slam a minute later. She started pacing the house, trying her best to stay calm.
“I sure know how to pick them,” she moaned as she flopped on the couch. She heard a door slam again.
She kept her face buried in the cushion even as she felt a finger crawling up her spine. She swatted halfheartedly with her tail. A heartbeat later, she felt his lips on her neck. She swatted him with her hand this time, but he was relentless. Finally, she turned around and snarled.
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that you don’t feel our connection,” he said as he tilted her face toward his. She tried to look away, but he pulled her back. “I have lived for over two millennia and only found a handful of women worthy of my bed.”
“That is a line only a vampire could use.”
“Lucky for me, I’m a vampire. Now, do you really think that sleeping alone will make either of us feel any better?”
“You’re not playing fair,” she said as he slid a hand up her thigh.
“Life isn’t fair, I thought.”
She let him kiss her and lead her back to bed.
She woke up dripping with sweat and tangled in a knot. She yelped as her tail was trapped under Lorcan. He snapped his eyes open and did his best to calm her down.
“I’ve never had such vivid nightmares,” she said as she grabbed her chest. “So much . . . so much blood.”
“Shh,” he said as he held her close. “That’s my fault; I’m sorry.”
She stared at him in panic. “I saw you with a sword in your chest, right before the aliens came to take Arthur to Avalon,” she babbled.
“Vampires can have that effect when they are intimate, a rún,” he whispered. “I tried to be careful, but it’s been a while.”
She shook and whimpered in his arms, eventually settling down to the whooshing sound in his chest. She ran her fingers along his ribs. “You should have a scar there,” she said softly.
“My old body did,” he said. “Merlin helped me into the body of a dying mercenary. I had the horrifying experience of waking up next to my own corpse. This shell you see was my second form. I took my infection with me, but I can only transform my hands and face now. I must admit, I was jealous of the flexibility of your form.”
“You’re the red goo,” she said sleepily.
“You’ve seen the real me,” he said as he kissed her forehead. “I am indeed a pile of red goo pretending to be a man.”
