Love Bites (23 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

SuzieQ calmed down a lot faster than I expected. I wanted to get her to the car and turn on the heater, but I had to make sure there were no signs left of that glob of screwed-up DNA. All I needed was an early-morning hiker to find an alligator tail growing out of a wolf’s leg. I mean, come on . . . I was still learning the terms for some of the things I’d seen—boxenwolves and loup-garoux and weres—but this creature wasn’t even one identifiable thing! “What the hell is a rougarou, SuzieQ? And how do you know about them?” I’d moved down to the water’s edge and was searching for body parts. “And how did you know to tie his snout like that?”

“Well, he’s part alligator, ain’t he? My daddy used to work summers in Brazos Bend State Park and he was always talkin’ about gators. How you could keep their mouths closed with your two hands ’cause they have real weak muscles for openin’ their mouths. He used to wrap duct tape around their snouts when he was trappin’ ’em. I just figured the sheet could do the same thing.”

I couldn’t see anything in the water. Whatever was left must be twenty feet down. All of a sudden it struck me: Here I was with another murder solved, another perp dead, and no fucking way to explain it to the Captain. What was I going to do, tell him the guy who killed Graciella de la Garza was lying in pieces at the bottom of another duck pond—and oh, by the way, they were pieces of a man-wolf-alligator? Fuck me a duck. “But that DeWayne thing was some kind of aberration, SuzieQ—some fucking supernatural monster. That’s like seeing Sasquatch or something. Bigfoot. What do you mean, you didn’t think it was real? How do you even know about it to begin with?” I couldn’t tell her this was one in a long list of
Island of Dr. Moreau
escapees that I’d suddenly discovered existed—just in the last month since I’d met Ovsanna.

“I’m a Catholic girl from the South, Peter. Everybody knows ’bout rougaroux, especially Ovsanna’s friend Maral. She’s from the bayou, right? Hell, the rougaroux come from the bayou. I just never believed they really existed. I thought it was a tale the old people made up to scare us kids, just for the hell of it. Like a bogeyman. A rougarou’s a man who breaks the rules about eatin’ during Lent, and that makes him change into an alligator and a werewolf and a vampyre all rolled into one. He roams around at night, tormentin’ folks he runs into. Only this guy wasn’t roamin’ around at random. He was after you. He came to your house snoopin’ around, and when he couldn’t find you, he grabbed me to use as bait. That sure wasn’t random. He told me Maral McKenzie sent him lookin’ for you.” She stood up and squeezed some of the water out of her pajamas. They were pale blue flannel, a western motif with rattlesnakes and armadillos and wooden rail fences printed on them. She was so tall, they ended two inches above her anklebone.

“There’s a lot going on, SuzieQ, and I can’t tell you most of it. Maral McKenzie brought him here from Louisiana, supposedly because she wanted to get him away from dealing drugs to her brother. That’s all I know for sure.” I didn’t tell her he was probably the perp in the Sportsmen’s Lodge murder. The less she knew about him, the better.

“Well, I can tell you somethin’, sugar. I think Ms. McKenzie wants you dead. I told you, didn’t I? Weeks ago, when you were thinkin’ she was the Cinema Slayer? I told you to be careful of her. She’s got the hots for Ovsanna Moore and you’re movin’ in on her territory. And she’s from the South, Peter. You know southern women will do just about anythin’ to keep their man. Or in this case—woman.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Once again, I could smell Peter’s blood. The rougarou had sliced his back with its tail spikes, and what hadn’t washed away in the pond was drying under his torn T-shirt. I could use my saliva to heal the cuts, but I’d have to wait until he told me what happened. Instead, I stayed hidden long enough to make certain he and SuzieQ were all right.

I heard SuzieQ talking about Maral, and finally I understood what was happening. SuzieQ was right. Everything she told Peter about DeWayne and Maral made sense. Maral hadn’t been using magick to make DeWayne go away. She wanted Peter out of my life. That’s what the spells were for. The animal hairs on his walkway; the pinholes in that candle stub in Thomas’s wastebasket. That’s why she was burying that pepper-covered candle in the cemetery. And when those hadn’t worked, somehow she’d found out what DeWayne was and she’d arranged for him to attack Peter. Maral had arranged for Peter’s death.

Rage flooded through me. I felt the change coming on, anger taking control of my body. If I didn’t calm down, I was going to have to drive with my fucking claws out and my fangs in place, seeing everything in shades of gray and having to concentrate on which traffic light was lit. Instantly, I shifted to my car, way ahead of Peter and SuzieQ. I sat hidden in the dark, breathing slowly and deeply to keep myself from changing. It took all my concentration to drive back to the house.

Maral was asleep when I got there, her red hair fanned out on her pillow like an Avedon photo of Suzy Parker from the fifties. I’d pounded up the stairs, intent on pulling her out of bed and throwing her against a wall.

She looked so innocent sleeping there in her pale pink nightshirt. I watched her soft breath, her arms flung open atop the sheets, her wrists exposed. Those pale, slender veins throbbing under the flawless skin; not a sign of the hundreds of times I’d pierced her in the decade since we’d met. I loved running my tongue up and down the inside of her arms, brushing my lips on her skin ever so lightly before penetration. I’d been feeding on Maral for nearly nine years. She’d been my confidante, my assistant, my lover, and my life’s blood. It had never been an equal partnership, but it had always fulfilled each of our needs. It worked for us. Until now.

I thought about what she’d tried to do, and my anger intensified.

“Maral,” I said, my voice so cold that I didn’t recognize it, “wake up.”

She opened her eyes. When she saw the look on my face, she pulled away to the far side of the bed, holding the blanket to her neck as if it could protect her.

“You tried to kill him, didn’t you,” I said. My words came out strangled.

“Who? What are you talking about?” Her face, already pale from morning sleep, drained of all color. The red began leaching from her hair, and I knew I was changing. The whites of my eyes filled with minuscule threadlike veins; soon they would be glowing red.

“You fucking bitch!” I growled, and this time I did throw her against the wall. My talons dug into the muscled flesh of her upper arms and I heaved her from the bed, pinning her to the full-length mirror across the room. I looked past her for a moment and saw my snarling face reflected back at me, lips pulled open, fangs descending. Talk about a money shot—it was a shame I couldn’t use that on-screen. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Maral. You’ve been using hoodoo to get Peter out of my life. And when that didn’t work, you used DeWayne Carter. DeWayne Carter killed that girl at the Sportsmen’s Lodge and you knew it and you sicced him on Peter!”

“I didn’t know he was a rougarou when I brought him here, Ovsanna. I swear it. I just wanted to get him away from Jamie. I didn’t figure out what he was until I saw that picture of him that Peter said was the killer. And then I thought about what you saw when you touched her body—about how she’d been killed like a gator would—and I figured it out.”

“And what . . . once you realized what he was, you decided to put him to work? Are you fucking nuts? Maral—he tried to kill Peter King!”

“I know that! I convinced him to do it! He was ranting about that girl being a dealer and trying to charge him street prices, even though they had the same supplier, and how he got so pissed off he ‘let the ol’ rougarou out and they took care of business.’ He said sometimes it pays to have a curse on you, and I said, Well, now he had the cops on him, and if Peter King showed up to arrest him, he could kiss his movie career good-bye. And that’s all I had to do. I just gave him Peter’s address and went home and put on my black bustier and crotchless panties to wait for you.”

“Why?!” I could barely speak, I was so enraged.

“Because I tried everything else. I used his business card and the ring you gave me, and I made a Breakup Spell and a Come to Me Spell. I left the animal hairs with the pins and nails at his doorstep. I prayed to the Little Cajun Saint, because that’s the only saint I know besides the football players. I poured breakup oil on a candle and pricked it with a rusty nail and threw the pieces far away from each other. I even poured hyssop tea on myself. Nothing I read about worked! He’s taking you away from me. I can’t let him do that. I won’t. You’re my whole life. Please, Ovsanna, you have to understand!”

I lost it. What little control I had once I’d changed was gone. Maral was squirming in my grasp, blood flowing from the rendering my talons had made in her flesh. The sanguinolent perfume was overwhelming. Coupled with my rage, it drove me to pure instinct, and I watched in the mirror, like I was watching one of my own horror films, as I drove my fangs deep into Maral’s throat.

The blood flowed out faster than I could swallow. I must have pierced her jugular, but I didn’t care. She writhed and bucked and begged me to release her, but I reveled in her juices—rubbing that rich red viscous liquid all over my face and eyes and throat. Sucking as hard as I could. Drinking as fast as I could. Swallowing as much as I could.

Minutes passed and her body quieted.

“Ovsanna,” she whispered.

I pulled my mouth away and looked in her eyes. Those beautiful gray-green eyes. She was dying. Blood pumped from her throat, even without my lips there to draw it out.

“I’m sorry, Ovsanna. I love you. I didn’t want to lose you.”

My rage had abated along with my Thirst. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t want to kill her. I couldn’t forgive her and I couldn’t trust her, but I didn’t want to kill her. In the mirror behind her, I barely recognized myself. Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline was there. Ovsanna Moore wasn’t. I stared at myself for a long minute, thinking back to the Turkish massacres in my homeland at the beginning of the last century. I had slaughtered indiscriminately until then, the first 350 years of my life, whenever I needed to feed; but seeing the brutality leveled against those Armenian villagers had overwhelmed me. Hundreds of thousands of them raped, tortured, and butchered or forced into the desert to die of starvation. Children. Babies. I couldn’t face being a part of that. It left me searching for a way to control my nature. And eventually I learned.

But the vampyre I was seeing in the mirror had forgotten what I had learned.

I stared at my reflection, willing myself back in control.

“Maral, listen to me. Can you hear me?” Nothing I could do would stop the bleeding. This wasn’t a simple puncture wound that I had made; I couldn’t close it and heal it with my saliva. There was only one thing I could do. If it had been anyone else I cared for, I wouldn’t hesitate, but no one else I cared for was as unstable as Maral had become. Would I be able to control her if I saved her? Look what happened to Rudy when I turned him. How much more unbalanced would she be?

“Maral, can you hear what I’m saying?”

She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was thready. She looked so innocent. So helpless.

“I’m not going to let you die. I can turn you. Do you understand?” I wouldn’t do it without her agreement.

She opened her eyes and stared at me.

“Do you understand, Maral? Will you let me turn you? You will become one of my kind. It’s the only way I can give you your life.”

She nodded and moved her lips. I bent closer to them, her blood dripping from my mouth to her cheeks.

“Turn me,” she whispered.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

I held Maral in my arms as best I could while she underwent the transformation from her genus to mine. As angry as I was at her betrayal, I still wished there were some way I could lessen the violent agony brought on by the change.

I couldn’t. The pain was excruciating, I knew. I’d held Rudy and Ty and several others when they turned, watching them writhe and buck as they sucked on my nipples, with their insides ripping apart and rearranging themselves. It starts like the burn you get when you’ve been working out—that feeling of hardness, of muscles expanding. Only it isn’t just the muscles, it’s everything inside pushing out. Like that moment before orgasm when you know you’re going over the edge, you’re going to explode, and there’s no pulling back. But with the turning, there’s no release, there’s no explosion. Just a consistent swelling, until the fullness becomes pain. An aching at first, throbbing, then sharper, a rolling pain that moves like waves through the body. And burns. Ty described it as a white-hot flame searing him from the inside out. Rudy said he felt as though someone were tearing his organs from their membranes, moving them around, scrambling them. Enkindling him from within. The only thing that lessened the pain was the sucking.

It was hours before Maral’s body stopped seizing and she lay limp in my arms. I slid out from under her and went to her closet for a robe. The French doors were open. A sharp December breeze tossed the curtains around, but Maral’s skin was unblemished by the cold. Just like mine. I covered her and moved across the room to sit. She opened her eyes.

“You’re alive,” I said.

“What happened? What did you do to me? The pain . . . is it over?”

“Yes, Maral. The pain is gone.”

“Am I . . . am I like you now?” She’d begun to shake.

“You are. You are vampyre now. You were dying—it was the only way I could save you. And you agreed, do you remember?”

She wrapped her arms around herself to lessen the tremors. She nodded. “You asked if you could turn me, didn’t you? I was moving toward a great brightness, but I didn’t want to leave you, and I said yes. I remember that. How long ago was that? What time is it, is it Friday afternoon?”

We both looked at the clock. It was one twenty. I expected Peter to show up at my door any minute with an arrest warrant for Maral.

She rose from the floor, pulling on her robe, and went to her closet. She had her back to me. “You have a meeting with Solgar this evening. I need to take care of things. I need to take a shower and get dressed to go to the office.” The shaking hadn’t stopped completely. She reached for a hanger and knocked several to the floor.

“No, Maral. You’re not taking care of things any longer. I don’t want you back at the office. Now turn around.”

She wouldn’t. She bent down to pick up the clothes that had fallen and then stayed there, kneeling on the floor with her shoulders hunched, clutching her robe around her. I could tell she expected to cry, wanted to, probably, but she couldn’t. She never would again. My kind don’t.

“I don’t want to talk about this, Ovsanna. I just want things to be the same. I don’t . . . I don’t want to know anything else. I’ll just . . . be whatever you say I am and do whatever you tell me to do, but please, please don’t send me away. Please. I asked you to turn me so I could stay with you. You can’t send me away now. I do everything for you. And if I’m like you now, I can do even more.”

I’d had enough. I pulled her out of the closet and over to the bed. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You betrayed me, Maral. I almost killed you because of it. I can’t keep you with me any longer. I can’t even let you stay in Los Angeles. You are one of mine and there is much I’m supposed to help you with, to adapt to your new existence, but I will not.”

“What do you mean? What do I need to know? What will happen to me?”

I pushed her down on the floor and held her face close to the dried blood on the carpet. “Smell that,” I said. “What do you feel? What do you want to do?”

She twisted her hair out of my hands. Her mouth was on the rug. She began licking the blood. Tentatively, at first, but then the more she licked, the more she wanted. She used her nails to scratch off flakes of it and shove them in her mouth. In seconds she was scrabbling across the dried puddle, tearing at the bloodied wool. I grabbed her by the hair to pull her up, sat her back down on the bed.

“There. You see? You’re a vampyre now. Everything you knew about yourself is no longer valid. Your body doesn’t work the way it did. Your hunger, your sex, your strength, your needs—all different. There are a thousand things you need to learn: how to control your appetites, how to use your abilities, how to live among humans without being discovered. And later, how to temper your emotions. Later still, how to deal with watching the people you care about age and die while you have to move on to someplace where you won’t be recognized so you can’t be questioned. Living in anonymity, or living as someone else—or something else—entirely.”

She grabbed on to me. “I can do that, Ovsanna, I can do that, but I need you to teach me. I need you. You can’t send me away.”

“You’ll go to New York, Maral. I want you as far away from here as possible. For your own sake as well. Peter knows you tried to have him killed. I don’t know what he intends to do about it, but he’s a cop, remember? I’ve already called Theda and Charles. They’ll take you in and guide you. Maybe you can work for them in one of their businesses.” Theda and Charles own a chain of boutiques specializing in Goth clothing and makeup. It would be a perfect place for Maral to begin to learn about herself.

“But I love you, Ovsanna.”

“That will change now, too. As a human, you loved me. You’ve loved me because I completed something in you; I provided whatever it was that you wanted in yourself and couldn’t find. Fearlessness, maybe, or self-esteem. Stability. Emotional strength. Worthiness. The caretaking you needed. You’re vampyre now. Vampyres don’t need caretaking. We don’t need anything—except blood. We don’t need others to give us a sense of worth; we don’t need attention to make us feel valuable. We don’t need ‘things’ to show others what we’ve achieved. We don’t need like humans do, and so we don’t love like humans do. You’ll see.”

“But you’ve kept me with you all these years. You must love me.”

“It’s a word, Maral. And whatever it means to you, it’s not something I’m capable of. I can use it to mean I have enjoyed being with you, I have trusted you enough to expose myself to you. I would rather have had you in my life—close to me—than be alone. My life was easier with you in it, and I took pleasure in caring for you. If you want to call that love, then fine, you can use the word. But I’m telling you, and you will come to know this on your own, vampyres are ultimately solitary creatures. What humans classify as love doesn’t translate to our existence.”

“But Ovsanna—”

“You need to bathe and dress and pack. Now. You’re leaving for New York.”

Maral wouldn’t need to feed for several weeks, but I didn’t want her around people until she’d had time with Theda and Charles to adjust to her new self. She was going to have to come to terms with a lot, not the least of which was living without me. It’s one of the reasons I so rarely turn anyone. Helping a newly made vampyre find his way in the world is a greater responsibility than raising a baby. At least with a baby no one’s comparing the way things are with the way they were. Newly mades are not tabula rasa; they’ve got a whole list of expectations based on their past life. Like making plans for dinner. Well, she’d learn soon enough not to do that anymore.

I called Sveta and had her order a car to take Maral to LAX and then charter a Citation to get her to New York. Vampyres hate flying commercial jets—all those horrific human odors in a confined space with recirculated air. It’s torture. No need to expose her to that so early in her creation. I would continue to pay her living expenses until she no longer needed my help. “You’ll be fine, Maral. Theda is Azeman, and Charles is one of mine. I turned him years ago. He’ll know what you’re going through, and they’ll both be able to help you.”

“Will I see you again?” she asked. Already her emotions seemed subdued.

“Of course you will. You’re Dakhanavar now. We have a lot of years ahead of us.”

She handed the limo driver her suitcases, took one long, last look at me, and left—just minutes before Peter arrived.