Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the Moon\Immortal Obsession (42 page)

The dried blood was the same color as the blood that had pooled on St. John's scratches. Not the faded hue of dried blood, but much darker, older.

Her stomach tightened. A flash of white heat seared across her neck. This meant something, surely?

It certainly didn't have to be proof that Christopher St. John had lied about not being mortal. Or that the old man in green in the Germand's lobby had been unearthly.

So, how could she prove these things once and for all?

“Proof,” she whispered, earning her a second raised eyebrow from the detective beside her. “I have one stop to make,” she said when the elevator stopped at her floor.

“No time for that,” Crane said.

“I just have to let my crew know I'm okay. It'll take a second.”

Crane didn't actually nod, though he didn't look happy about this.

Passing her door, continuing down the corridor, Madison stopped, lifted a hand and knocked. In spite of the ungodly hour, the door opened and Teddy stood there, looking not worried, but excited.

“There was something on the tape you wanted to show me,” she said. “You sent a text about finding something strange in the footage you shot yesterday?”

If Teddy replied, she didn't hear it. Her heart rate was escalating. St. John had entered the building. Her body knew it and was already heating up.

She had to see that footage. She had to see it so that she could put Stewart's obsessions behind her, and get on with her own.

She knew exactly what she'd be looking for on that tape: a man in the doorway of a pub. A man who would show up on that tape because he was mortal, not some idiotic version of her brother's wicked imagination. That was the vampire deal, right? No captured image for the undead?

D.I. Crane grunted his displeasure over allowing her to stretch the leeway he'd allowed her. As his hand closed on her elbow with a subtle pressure, Teddy switched on the monitor.

The picture came on the screen. Madison zeroed in, ready to laugh, feeling relieved.

She watched other newscasters scrambling to get to the scuffle going on in the distance, and paid attention as the camera turned in Teddy's capable hands.

“What the—?”

She stared in disbelief at the doorway as the camera swept past it. She wanted to shout for Teddy to rewind.

Empty.

Christopher St. John was not in that doorway.

But St. John had been there. She had seen him. Possibly Teddy had taken too long to focus the lens.

“Did you see that?” Teddy asked excitedly.

Her cameraman rewound the tape, and pointed at the screen.

Dazed, trying to rally, Madison saw the face in the crowd that Teddy was alluding to. So did the detective beside her.

“That's Janis Blake,” Teddy said, rewinding again. He looked to Madison for confirmation. “Isn't that one of the missing girls?”

“Damn well looks like her,” Crane replied, loosening his grip on Madison.

The two men in the room would assume she was as stunned as they were to see a familiar face in the crowd—the face of the youngest of the missing Yale Four. They might even have been right if this had happened two days ago.

Unfortunately, she was stuck in the loop of video footage preceding that flash of the missing girl's face, seeing the pub's doorway over and over in her mind, and picturing Christopher St. John standing in it.

The room went unnaturally quiet. Madison observed the scene around her as if it, too, was being played back on a machine in slow motion.

The detective studied the screen, with one hand on his phone. Teddy beamed, realizing he had made an important discovery. The room, for her, had gone hazy. Her ears filled with static. In that scratchy noise swam a memory, a message meant only for her, and for times like this.

“You will crave this touch as much as I will.”

And there was something else, another voice overlapping St. John's.

“Mad one,”
the voice tonight, on the street, had whispered. She remembered that only now.

“Stop fighting, mad one,”
that voice had directed.

Fending off a rising panic, Madison swallowed a cry. Only one person in the world used that nickname for her.
Mad one.

She flashed back to the hand on her mouth and the fact that the abductor hadn't really harmed her. Blacking out had nothing to do with him hurting her; she just hadn't been able to hang on.

She'd been so scared.

But she hadn't been tied up in that awful place where she'd been left. Escape had been easy. The abductor hadn't meant to hurt her. He meant for her to find that body.

Her abductor hadn't been just anyone, reason now told her. It had, in fact, been her brother. Her twin. Stewart. No one else on the planet knew his nickname for her.

The wall felt hard and unyielding against her injured shoulder. She was shaking, had been shaking nonstop for what seemed like hours, from distress and fatigue and so damn many loose ends. Now, there was light.

No!

Hell...

She had provided the police with a blood sample from her attacker, and it might have been Stewart's DNA they would discover. She might have bitten her brother's hand.

Locking her jaw to keep the shouts trapped inside, Madison reached for the doorknob. She had to see St. John. She had to confront him. No matter what he was, if he had connections, she'd ask him to use them to get her brother back.

The detective's voice stopped her from leaving. Slowly, and with her heart revved by a new kind of panic, she turned to face him.

Chapter 16

A
foul wind, impossible to ignore, reached St. John as he stood beneath Madison's window. The Nosferatu hadn't yet breached the city proper.

They had been sent to find the royal blood in his veins and in the veins of the other Knights offered immortality, exactly as his Makers had long ago predicted.

Evil, it seemed, never gave up or gave in. The thirst for greed never waned.

Peeling himself from the wall, St. John rolled his aching shoulder blades. What was happening in London, and about to get worse, went so far beyond the concept of right and wrong, as well as the most basic, normal perceptions most people had of the world, as to be unrecognizable fragments of those ideas.

Ruthless monsters were coming, due to the fact that a traitor had infiltrated the Hundred, desiring to upgrade his personal stockpile of power.

With his etched skin searing, St. John searched the street, setting mental boundaries for the battle to come.

In his mind, the haunting refrain of a question issued through moist, parted lips plagued him.

“Are you a vampire?”

After all this time, St. John wondered if he might be losing his mind.

* * *

“Can you skip that shower?” D.I. Crane asked Madison as she went to leave Teddy's room. He turned to her cameraman and said, “I'll need that tape.”

Madison's hand was frozen on the door. He hadn't mentioned anything about St. John. When he looked at her again, she said, “I need my purse and my credentials. I'll skip the shower but I need a quick cleanup. I've got blood on my hands and knees.”

Crane nodded as he opened the door. “We've got to get back to the station with this information.”

“Back?” Teddy sounded confused.

“I'll have to go with the detective,” Madison said. She didn't sound like herself, and wondered if anyone noticed.

“At this time of night?” Teddy said.

Madison shrugged, hoping she looked nonchalant, feeling like hell. Now wasn't the time to go into what had occurred. Explanations would take time she didn't have.

The news world would be rocked by what was on this tape. This network exclusive would advance the careers of everyone on their crew, but at this moment, she couldn't have cared less about her job. St. John was near. Her brother was near. Answers as to what the heck was going on were required from both.

“There's something I was supposed to tell you,” Teddy said, as if just remembering. “A man stopped by.”

Madison looked to the detective to make sure he didn't sense her sudden stiffness, and found him making another call.

“What man?” she asked.

“Don't know,” Teddy said. “I wasn't paying attention. I only remember that I'm supposed to tell you that he came by. I must have been groggy, or too excited about the tape. Sorry. I think he knocked at my door.”

Madison controlled her reply. “It must not have been important.”

“Want me to go along, wherever it is you're going?”

“I'll have her back before breakfast,” Crane said.

Teddy made a point of looking at his watch. “That's about an hour from now.”

“Is it?” The detective seemed surprised. Probably his night had also been long.

“We have another briefing in the morning,” Teddy reminded her. “You look like hell.” He turned to the detective. “We're going to air the tape. It'll be a gut-busting exclusive for us, and Madison has to be there to present it.”

“I'll be there,” Madison promised.

Teddy handed her the key to her room. “You must have dropped this by my door.”

The preoccupied detective was checking and rechecking his messages, adept at texting while walking as they headed for her room.

“Five minutes?” Madison said to him, when they reached it.

“Four,” the detective countered, leaning a shoulder against the wall, and continuing to fiddle with his phone.

Madison closed the door behind her, drew in a long breath and said to Christopher St. John, “I know you're here, and I know what you are.”

Chapter 17

“D
o you know?” St. John countered from the shadows of her hotel room.

Madison feared that her heart might jump right out of her chest, it was beating so fast.

“Show me, or prove me wrong,” she said.

“It would hurt me to see the disappointment on your face, either way.”

“More than everything else has hurt me?”

“What do you think you know?” he asked.

“A question for a question is a clever parry, St. John, but won't work. What I want is a confession.”

Madison stared at the figure in front of her, and blocked out the soft rap at the door.

“Miss Chase,” Crane called from the hallway. “Only four minutes.”

“You found Stewart,” St. John said.

“He was out there. I was right.”

The silence following her remark eventually filled with his whisper. “He didn't harm you, then?”

“Why would you think he'd harm me?”

St. John didn't answer the question. He said, with relief in his tone, “For that one thing alone I owe him.”

He stepped forward. “Are you afraid of me, Madison?”

“Scared out of my mind. And I now think you know more about my brother than you're letting on. I believe you might have purposefully kept me from going after him at the club, and also on the street tonight.”

St. John's voice was like sifted gravel. “It would have been in your best interest.”

“Did you know that Stewart was there?”

“Yes.”

Feeling faint, Madison stood her ground. “Why would you keep me from him for any reason? Something is wrong with Stewart. I get that. But he is my brother.”

“Your brother came here after creatures he was sure hid in the shadows.”

“You think I don't know that? I've thought of nothing else since I arrived in this city. So, are you admitting that he was right to do so?”

“He was right,” St. John conceded. “You would have found this out soon enough on your own, but the knowledge places you in more danger.”

Madison shook her head. “Stop it. You're freaking me out, and I'm freaked enough already.”

“You said you know about Stewart.” St. John's voice was tender, which made things infinitely worse. “Do you also understand what he has become?”

“I know that he's possibly gone off the deep end, and that he is hiding.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn't that enough?”

The protest she'd been about to use stuck in her throat. A chill rippled across the back of her neck. Gathering her courage, Madison raised her hand, and placed her fingertips against St. John's mouth, sure she had heard what he'd said, and that he hadn't moved his lips.

“Isn't that enough?” she repeated.

“Not by far.”

Beneath her fingers, she felt the shape of something she envisioned in her nightmares, but had never expected. She swayed as if she'd been struck, and reached for the light switch.

The room flooded with light that was blinding in intensity after the darkness she had endured. What that light showed her was alarming.

The chiseled face across from her wore a pained expression. The eyes looking into hers were part blue, and also midnight-dark. Too dark to be human.

God help her, Christopher St. John was a vampire.

“Show me.” Her tone was sharp with despair. “I need to see.”

He smiled sadly, and there they were. Between the lips that had kissed her gently, and savagely, and torturously, were two long, white, lethal-looking points. Fangs.

“You lied,” she charged weakly.

“No,” he said. “You asked the wrong question.”

This time when he leaned forward, she twitched with anger and fear and frustration. She had nowhere to go to get away from him, and from the pain of this.

“Tell me they're fake,” she said, knowing this was a last-ditch effort to make sense of what she was confronting.

“I wish I could,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”

The door handle beside them jiggled with an interruption of metal and wood. D.I. Crane's voice rose in pitch. “Miss Chase? Madison?”

Her fingers untangled from the jacket she had inadvertently clung to as that jacket was dragged from her grasp. Cold invaded the room as St. John backed away from her.

Christopher St. John had teased, tempted, shown his true nature and left her. In the blink of an eye, he had gone, leaving her room the same way he'd gotten in. That damn window. She hadn't seen a thing after the fangs. Her eyes had been closed.

“Stewart...” she sobbed. “I've found one of them. Damn you, brother, I've...found one.”

She had gotten close to the embodiment of danger, had been physically intimate with a creature of the night. A real one. No trick of the light. No fantasy. Not her imagination.

Stewart had been right, all along.

Madison stared after St. John. He had fangs. Possibly he wasn't alive at all...and yet the throb deep inside her, the one connecting her to him, was more insistent than ever.

Impossibly, she wanted those fangs on her. She wanted him inside her. How did a person reason with insanity?

They weren't
people.
This wasn't just any frenetic love affair between strangers. In some rule book, somewhere, a liaison like this one had to be forbidden.

St. John was a vampire.

And he was magnificent.

If there were vampires all over London who could mesmerize with a look and a kiss...heaven help everyone.

“Heaven help me.”

She remembered again the wooden stake hidden in her brother's jacket, and how it had shocked her. She remembered believing that she saw, in her mind, Stewart limp to the London Eye, possibly wounded, to hide that stake.

Her brother had come here to chase vampires, and there seemed to be plenty of them around.

St. John was a vampire. And her brother was alive.

“Miss Chase? Time to go.”

She'd nearly forgotten Crane in the hallway, and wasn't sure about opening the door, or what the detective would see when he looked at her. She wasn't sure if she could stand up straight, or if her face held telltale signs of her inner struggle.

Was it possible to look relatively normal when the earth had tilted off its axis?

There were vampires in London, and she had seen them firsthand. She had, in fact, gone a lot further than that.

She swallowed back the urge to shout St. John's name. She had to internalize the fear, and she could do so. She would handle this. She'd have to. It wasn't over.

It was far from over.

There were vampires in London, and one of them had her name on his lips.

Had her brother been showing her a body, she now wanted to know, or trying to get her away from Christopher St. John?

She had stopped shaking. That, too, seemed odd.

The truth didn't actually set one free, as the saying went. Truth could be terrible, unbelievable, earth-shattering.

“Forgive me, brother,” she whispered, with a last glance to the window.

A final thought came to her as she watched the curtain blow, perhaps out of a need for just one minute of normality in a world that had gone insane and was pulling her down with it.

Teddy had been wrong about there being an hour until breakfast. A gray English morning was set to dawn.

* * *

“So, now you know.”

St. John looked up at Madison's window. “You know about me.”

Daylight was minutes away. He had to start walking, and couldn't make his legs work.

No one knew why vampires and other monsters needed the night to animate them. He had never heard one plausible explanation for the phenomenon, other than that death had always been equated with darkness. Though he was old enough and strong enough to tolerate some light, it was inconvenient as hell.

He turned with a concerted effort that strained his ligaments, and raised his face. In the small wedge of time when darkness slipped into submission and the horizon grew colorful, he usually felt the most alive, and almost normal. Almost mortal.

While humans began to stir in their beds and the monsters went to ground until the return of night, he walked and breathed and thought things over as if he were still an integral part of the human landscape.

Today was different. Because Madison knew, and he'd left her with that.

At least she would be safe for a few more hours.

Often, he had yearned for simpler times. Lately he'd been thinking about going back to where it all started—to Castle Brocéliande, in Brittany—in search of a respite from the world. The castle where he had traded his old life for immortality might still be there. He had never gone back to see. He had been unwilling to face the place of his death, and the site of his rebirth into what he had become.

“I have sipped from the Holy Grail,” he wanted to tell Madison. “The blood that chalice contained was a mixture of my Maker's and another's blood that once stained the famous cup.”

He didn't tell her this in a way she would hear. She couldn't know that the golden chalice had been passed through time by careful hands until it eventually wound up in the possession of the three special creatures at Castle Brocéliande. And that the beings there had chosen St. John and his brethren for a special task that saw them killed and resurrected—bringing them back from death with their souls turned inside out and their bodies strengthened for a new purpose.

He wanted to tell Madison that he had experienced life as a mortal, with its pain and hopes and death, and that he remembered parts of his former life, his last breath and what had come after.

He needed to explain to her that he would never forget his first sight of the five men who had preceded him as Blood Knights, and how much they meant to him.

“Seven new beings of molded muscle, sinew, cold flesh and purpose became the servants of both the Grail and the holy blood in our veins,” he whispered to the dawn mist, and to Madison over their unique connection. “We rode forth from Castle Brocéliande's gates on black steeds that matched our emblazoned shields. Seven men, who were no longer men, but something more, bound to each other and hungering in ways no one else could imagine. Immortals.”

Lance Van Baaren. Mason LanVal. Alexander Kent. He was often left hurting for the companionship of the creatures most like himself who also had traded their mortal souls for immortality.

“Who else but they knew what I need, and what I feel? The regrets, the desires.”

His building lay ahead with the promise of refuge. In a perfect world, he would have brought Madison here and loved her within an inch of her life, saving that last inch for the decision she'd have to make in order to join him. He had actually considered going that far. Not offering just his heart, but immortality, and a love that would last forever.

“And danger rains down from all directions.”

With Nosferatu coming, and Simon Monteforte uncovered as the traitor, all he wanted to think about was
her
. Madison. The radiant woman with the shrewd blue eyes that fate had tossed in his path as if offering a bone to a ravenous beast.

He had to settle things with her before the Nosferatu arrived. A dark hand had disturbed the fabric of London, and threatened to distort it further, but she had to understand that Stewart's ravings about vampires had been correct, though his warning had fallen on the wrong ears.

St. John would not barter with Monteforte, a heinous example of a modern-day terrorist. Monteforte might assume to know how his mind worked, but that assumption would be a mistake. Nosferatu could not kill a Blood Knight. There was only one way to end his existence forever, one unique key to a final death for each of the Seven, and neither sword nor fangs came close to being his.

He dared not involve the rest of the Hundred in this situation. He couldn't afford to show his true self to them, or anyone else. Although his goal here in London had been achieved, and the traitor among them exposed, the situation remained fragile.

In the meantime, the detective outside Madison's door should be able to protect her. For a while, anyway.

Luckily, the sun was about to rise. Simon Monteforte would be going to ground, locked away somewhere until that sun went down.

Madison, can you hear me?

Her face appeared all around him as he walked.

“My strength is not endless,” he said. “Still, I will honor my promise to help you.”

Come to me tonight,
he sent to her, using their bond.

By nightfall you must find me, Madison. Hurry. Do not delay.

He knew the second she received this final message, and that its arrival stunned her. As he lifted his face to the pink brilliance of the rising sun, thinking of Madison's warm, lush body and worrying that she might never come, now that she knew about the fangs...the sun, like so many other things in his age-old existence, finally began to betray him.