Luscious Craving (18 page)

At a nod from Ash, she complied. Her neck was bare. There was no cross-shaped
tattoo,
no “x” marks the spot. The spot where Ash had tried, and failed, to drain the blood from my body to make me what he was: a vampire.

I lifted my own, revealed the tattoo, the scars.

“Close,” I said, my voice cheerful.
“But no cigar.
She’s just a cheap imitation and you know it, Ash. But hey, at least she’s a vampire.”

“That’s enough, Candace,” Ash said, his voice like a whip.

“Like hell it is,” I snarled. As long as I kept talking, stayed on the offensive, there was a chance I could drown out the sound of my breaking heart.

“How did you do it?” I asked now. “Did she just happen along? Or did you
create
her? Make her over in my image like the bride of Frankenstein?”

With a cry of rage, the female lunged forward, nails first, like the beast she was. But Ash was too quick. He drew her back against him, pinning her arms down with his own.

“Stop it, Dune,” he said. “Leave her alone.”

She struggled for a moment before subsiding. “Why? You don’t need her, Ash. She was too stupid to know when she had a good thing going.”

“I
know
I have a good thing going,” I retorted. “I’m still alive!”

Abruptly, she changed tactics, turning sideways and wrapping her arms around Ash’s torso. She slid one bent knee up to brush against his crotch.

“Then you don’t know what you’re missing. All this could have been yours. Now it’s mine.”

I laughed then, and saw the fury leap into her eyes.

“Don’t kid
yourself
,” I said. “Ash doesn’t belong to anyone but himself.”

“This is pointless,” Ash broke in. “Dune, go wait for me over by the gondolas.”

Her expression fell at once. “Ash, no, please! Don’t send me away.”

Bad choice
, I thought. He really hates to hear anyone whine. When he didn’t countermand his instruction, she took a reluctant step away.

“I am going to end you, you bitch,” my look-alike, Dune, said in a low and vicious voice. “Some moment when you think you’re safe and warm. I am going to take you so far out of this world no one will even remember you were in it.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “But I’ll look forward to seeing you try.”

“Do as I tell you, right now, Dune,” Ash snapped, and at the naked power in his voice, I felt a finger of pure ice shoot straight down my spine. With a last look of frustrated rage, Dune moved off.

Ash and I faced each other.

“I’m sorry you had to see all this, Candace,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you are. I think I’ve done precisely what you wanted, Ash. Learned what you wanted me to learn. What I don’t understand is why.
What do you want
?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted,” he said simply.
“You with me, in my world, for all time.
Dune is simply an attempt to satisfy one part of that need, nothing more.”

“She’s only a body, Ash,” I said. “She’s not me. She doesn’t have my soul or my mind. Those things belong to me. They always have. They always will.”

Then I turned and walked away from him for the second time that night.

Going back across the bridge, I walked through the empty square. My steps echoed oddly in the silence. After about ten paces, I was horrified to realize I was blinking back tears.
I would
not
cry over Ash
, I thought. Or over the vampire created in my image
who
was utterly pathetic in her eagerness to deny it. I would not even weep for myself. The whole situation was painful and
twisted,
a maze with no hope of getting out.

Bad analogy, Candace
. Somehow I had missed the arch that led to the bar where Michael was waiting. By now he was probably wondering if I had skipped town. Before me was a bank of escalators I had never seen before. I wasn’t sure where they would take me, but I sure as hell wasn’t returning to the canal. I got on, going in the only direction there was: down.

I reached the bottom of the escalator and looked around me. I had wandered into a huge meeting space, the kind of area they give to convention groups. I found a broad hallway and walked in what I thought was the direction of the casino. Rows of closed doors seemed slightly surreal, as they repeated toward the distant end of the hall. The place was eerie. I could have been the only person on the planet, roaming in a maze of halls and doors that opened into some
Twilight Zone
episode. Knowing there were hundreds of people nearby in the casino made it feel even more deserted.

But it wasn’t deserted.

I was cold.

Was it Dune, following me, already making good on her promise? I quickened my pace. The cold deepened, grinding into my bones.
Not Dune, then
, I thought. She was simply not this strong. That meant someone new, or…I took two few steps into the intersection between two corridors and I saw them.

The Bat Pack.
Coming straight toward me.

What in the hell was going on? Except for that night at Taste, I had always been able to depend on my senses. Now they were completely out of sync. The Bat Pack
were
jerks, and they definitely outnumbered me, but even together they weren’t strong enough to send out this sort of cold. Then I remembered. When I had overheard them at Taste, the Bat Packers had talked about
gaining
power.
But how.
Was that even possible?

To hell with staying and fighting.
Instead, I propelled myself through the intersection of the corridors,
then
kept on running, their footsteps pounding behind me. I followed a zigzagging path through the corridors, hoping to throw them off. I knew there was no chance that anyone would hear my screams over the noise of the casino. I was praying the hallway didn’t dead-end on me. All that mattered was that I keep running.

Without warning, the floor beneath my feet changed to marble. I was running up the ramp by the theater. People stared at me. People! I slowed to a walk and dared to glance over my shoulder. Even as I watched, the Bat Pack faded into the shadows. I thought I heard one say “Not this chick.” It might have been Rat Pack–
ese
, but it was the truth, right enough. Not this chick.
And not here.
Too many of the living around me.
And there was Michael! Standing by the curved wall of the bar and looking in the opposite direction.

“Michael!” I called, waving like an out-of-towner on her first visit to
Sin
City
.

He turned and grinned. “Didn’t you go the other way? I was beginning to think you got lost.” He put an arm around my waist, drawing me close.

“I did.” I laid my hand over the center of his chest. His heart skipped at my touch, but it beat. He couldn’t have guessed how much that meant to me now.
“Took the scenic route when I missed a turn.
I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. These places are made to lure you in and never let you find your way out.”

I forced a smile, wishing I wasn’t getting so good at it. “Do you want to go back and finish our drinks?”

“Are you sure you’re okay? You look pale.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just…” I didn’t want to lie. He was honest with me. That was one of the things I liked best about being with him.

His hand at my waist, Michael turned me toward the casino. “It’s all right. No need to explain. I thought guys were the only ones who didn’t ask for directions.”

I laughed because he expected me to.
And because he had saved me from having to lie.
That was a privilege it seemed I would reserve for myself.

Michael suggested we go back to his room, and I wasn’t about to argue. I wanted to feel his warm skin on mine, to lose myself in his arms. But when Michael opened the door to his suite, we both got a shock. A chorus of voices shouted out, “Surprise!”

The living room and dining room were filled with a mix of twenty- and thirty-
somethings
, most of them holding beer cans. Michael made a sheepish grimace.

“I guess maybe I should have mentioned it’s my birthday, huh?”

“I guess maybe you should have,” I said.

“Well it wasn’t, not until about ten minutes ago.”

“And you thought we’d forget?” A guy with bright-red hair and glasses that had gone out of style twenty years ago handed Michael a beer, then leered at me. “If we’d known about you, we would have ordered a cake for you to jump out of.”

Michael gave him an elbow in the stomach. “Ignore him. Josh is used to being around computers. He rates low on people skills. Candace, this idiot is Josh Doyle. Josh, this is Candace Steele. Jumping out of cakes is not her style.”

“So you’re the guy who dared Michael to enter the tournament,” I said, deciding the best way to get around the fact that Michael’s sponsor had thought I was a hooker was to ignore it. This was Vegas, after all. “You must be proud of how well he’s doing.”

“It’s
gonna
cost me a hundred bucks more if he wins.”

Michael grinned. “Now you can see why I’m determined to win. It’s not the five million. It’s Josh’s hundred bucks. C’mon. I’ll get you a beer, Candace.”

Michael introduced me to a few of the others then led me into the sleek galley kitchen where he took beers from the fridge.

“I didn’t know you knew so many people in Vegas,” I said.

“None of them are from Vegas,” he explained with a sigh. “These are my friends, mostly from
Chicago
, who came to watch me play.
Now they’re making themselves at home, as you can see.”

He drew me close.

“I really am sorry about all this,” he said. “I had no idea they were going to show up tonight. I’ll figure out some way to make it up to you,” he whispered as he slid his leg between my thighs, sending spikes of pleasure through my body.

I smiled at him. “Don’t apologize. It’s good that your friends turned out to support you in the tournament.”

He gave a sigh. “Too bad they don’t have your sense of timing. I thought they wouldn’t be here until tomorrow. But they did come a long way. I should probably go socialize. Do you mind?”

“No, of course not.
I should be getting home anyhow.” Now that the adrenaline of the strange evening was wearing off, I was beginning to realize how exhausted I was. “Go be with your friends. We can connect tomorrow.”

I gave Michael a good-bye kiss, lingering just one moment to run my thumb into the adorable cleft in his chin. I saw myself out,
then
grabbed a cab for home.

My house is unique. When I renovated it with my own two hands and the skills my father taught me, I literally built in a safety net, a vampire-free zone. Some houses have storm shelters deep in their centers. Others have panic rooms. I have my office, which contains everything I know about vampires and how to fight them.

If there’s a book printed about vampires, I have it: from medieval texts to
Dracula
to modern science and pseudoscience. Weapons, traditional ones, like stakes and holy water, and some far more exotic. Then there’s my desk, complete with state-of-the-art laptop. A small fridge with emergency supplies in case I’m ever under siege.
A corkboard on the wall.