Prophecy: Child of Light (13 page)

She stared at the girl’s neck, watching the pulse that was visible in her jugular.

It wouldn’t be the same. Whatever Valentine could offer her wouldn’t be the same as drinking from the girl. Her claws extended against her will as her hunting instincts began to take control, whispering words of temptation to her as she struggled against it.

He didn’t have to know.

She needed to feed her Hunger. Bottled blood wasn’t going to sate it.

“I like your style,” the girl drawled and tried to stand without the assistance of the washbasins. “Pale and innocent. Guys dig that.”

Prophecy cocked a brow. Pale and innocent. Pale maybe, but she wasn’t innocent. None of her kind could be considered that.

She lost control the moment the girl turned to face the mirror, her eyes widening when she saw only herself reflected in the glass. Not waiting for the girl to turn to face her, and not giving her a chance to scream, Prophecy snapped her neck. She was too weak and desperate for blood to deal with the struggle the girl would have put up.

It would be easier this way.

When the girl began to fall, she grabbed her around the waist and held her tightly. She sank her teeth deep into her victim’s neck, her eyes fixing on the mirror and watching the twin puncture marks appear on the dead girl’s skin. The sight of it drove her on, making the blood taste even sweeter as it intoxicated her. A rivulet of red ran down over her victim’s collarbone and she held the girl tighter, digging her claws in. She drank deeper, desperate for the pleasure that came from the fresh blood. It was delicious. She felt as though she’d been starving since her first kill. Now that she’d found the remedy for her craving, she didn’t want to relinquish it until there was nothing left for her to drink. She bit down harder. Her head began to swim and she felt her hunger abating.

She blinked when she looked into the mirror again and everything seemed to sway and spin.

When the door opened, she hazily sensed something familiar and dropped the girl. She tried to wipe the blood off her lips but missed and instead watched her hand as it moved slowly in front of her. It looked fuzzy and the more she tried to get it to focus the worse her head felt.

She barely registered the tight grip on her arm before she was spun on the spot and her knees collapsed beneath her.

Valentine growled and caught her other arm, forcing her to stand. She beamed up at him, her eyelids heavy and her lips and chin covered in blood.

He tightened his grip on her upper arms until she pulled a face of discomfort and then he tugged her close to him.

“There are places to get blood. There are sources in every city where it is untraceable. But you have to do this! You are worse than a child!” His eyes narrowed, reflecting the anger in his voice. She flinched away, making a small whining noise while trying to prise his fingers off her. He towered over her, increasing his grip until he saw the pain reflected in her eyes. “Even children know the rules!”

He should have let go of her then, he knew that he should have, but he suddenly found that he didn’t want to. He’d gotten dangerously close to her and now he could smell the blood on her. A feeling of desire began to grow in the pit of his stomach, running through every inch of him and taking command even as he tried to shut it down.

She broke free of his grasp but was back in it again before she’d even had the chance to move a foot.

“I’m not a child!” She retaliated and his fingers closed tightly around her arms again as he stared into her eyes. They moved over her, hunger burning in him as he ran them down her body and back up again.

“You really aren’t.”

She stilled in his grasp, her eyes becoming wide at first as she caught his meaning and then drooping again as the moment of recognition passed and the pleasure of the feed fogged her brain.

Her flesh felt so warm under his fingers. The borrowed heat from the blood and the alcohol made her even more alluring than she had been in the cemetery. He pushed her away, wanting to shut out the desire he felt for her. A deeper sensation coiled in the pit of his stomach, spreading into his chest and drawing him to her as she stood before him with a drunken smile on her face. She was too tempting right now and he was too weak to resist if she made a move.

He looked down into her eyes and stepped towards her again. He licked his lips at the same time as she cleaned hers of blood. He wished it were his tongue doing that, not hers.

He shook his head in an attempt to clear it of such ideas and then found his eyes drawn back to her. She closed her eyes and smiled. He could see she still took intense pleasure in the kill. It wasn’t the alcohol that was making her this way. The taste of fresh blood straight from the body had a profound effect on her, one that she didn’t bother to hide.

His breathing became heavy while he looked at her and she opened her eyes to reveal their emerald depths to him. She had changed, her vampire guise making her even harder to resist. His chest heaved and he stared at her, unable to draw his eyes away no matter how much he tried. He wanted to reach out a lone finger and swipe the blood off her lower lip. He wanted to let her lick it clean. He wanted to taste the blood in a kiss that he knew was forbidden.

He barely kept control as his eyes switched and his fangs tried to descend.

Finding the strength, he turned away from her and grabbed her wrist, yanking her along behind him while he strode towards the door.

He was foolish to have waited so long before moving. The hunter may have realised where they were and it would be difficult to see him in amongst the crowd in the club. He shouldn’t have let her get to him. He should have kept his mind off blood and on the business of getting safely to the hotel without being followed.

He shouldn’t have wanted to kiss her.

Leaving the bathroom, he scanned the club, hoping that the hunter had given up his chase this time.

“Useless child!” he shouted over the din of the music and tightened his grip on her wrist when she tried to twist herself free.

The room went silent as someone screamed and he didn’t need to look in order to know that they had found the body.

It was time he and Prophecy got out of there.

He mentally chastised himself and dragged Prophecy through the club behind him, heading for the fire exit sign he could see on the other side of the stage. He didn’t relinquish his grip on her as he pushed the door open and took a deep breath of air to clear his senses of all the blood and the scent of humans.

“I feel funny,” Prophecy mumbled.

He walked her out of the alley and into the street, and then looked at her. She was still swaying. It took a lot of alcohol to get a vampire drunk. The girl she’d fed from must have been close to falling unconscious. Her first kill had been drinking, he’d tasted a trace of the alcohol in her blood, but it hadn’t been to this extent and it hadn’t got Prophecy drunk too.

He gave her a look that said he wasn’t impressed.

“I think someone drugged me,” she said.

He began walking with her again.

“You are not drugged. The girl was drunk and now you are drunk. It will wear off soon.” He stopped to get his bearings and then walked down the road to his right.

They weren’t far from the hotel. It was something he was thankful for when Prophecy fell in a heap on the floor and giggled.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a drunken vampire.

He hauled her to her feet and cast her an angry look. She bit her lip, an innocent look on her face as she held her hand out to him. He rolled his eyes and took hold of it, tired of telling her off and wishing they were already at the hotel. He wanted some time to think. He’d let her sleep off the effects of her feed and do a little pacing so his head would clear.

It felt as though there was so much going on in it that he couldn’t cope with anything else that came along. It was a dangerous way to feel. One wrong decision and they’d both be dead.

He picked up the pace when he saw the bright sign of the hotel beckoning him up a side street and scanned their surroundings to check it was safe before heading towards it. Prophecy stumbled along behind him, muttering things to herself that he didn’t care to hear. She mentioned his name a few times, but he told himself it was best not to listen. She wouldn’t be making any sense right now and the last thing he needed was to spend the whole night trying to decipher what she’d been talking about.

Stopping outside the hotel, he looked her over and roughly wiped her chin on his jacket sleeve in case there was any trace of blood on her. He didn’t need the concierge seeing the blood and presuming he’d been hitting her.

He pushed the door open and held it for her. She walked unsteadily through it and stopped in the lobby. Her head fell backwards and she stared at everything with wide eyes and an open mouth.

Shaking his head, he went to the reception desk and checked them in, all the while keeping his senses locked on her where she was turning gradually on the spot.

Taking his door card with a smile, he grabbed her hand and pulled her over to the lifts. He kept the smile on his face as people passed him, and tugged on Prophecy’s hand, trying to speed her up as his cheeks began to ache. He never could smile for long. Cornelius had always said it was because his position demanded for him to be serious all the time. He just thought it was because there wasn’t much to smile about in the world.

He pushed Prophecy into the lift when the doors opened. The smile dropped off his face. He ran his fingers through his hair and leaned his head backwards while he heaved a sigh. Why did everything about the girl seem so difficult? They couldn’t even achieve the simple task of arriving in Paris without drawing the attention of both a hunter and the police. It wasn’t bad enough that they had guardians and Law Keepers hunting them, she had to get humans involved too. He looked at her. She was leaning against the wall opposite him humming to herself while she traced patterns on the mirror.

He shook his head again and sighed.

He’d arrived in this city no less than a hundred times in his life, not once had he been tracked by a hunter the second he’d arrived, and not once had he drawn the attention of the police.

The lift door opened and he went to grab hold of her wrist again but she pushed him away and walked in what she clearly thought was a straight line out into the hall.

He turned her around when she started heading in the wrong direction and suppressed his desire to growl when she jerked her shoulder backwards, making him let her go. She wove down the corridor, bumping into the wall occasionally and mumbling things under her breath whenever she did.

At least she was amusing to watch sometimes.

He whistled at her when she walked straight past the door to the room and she turned very slowly to face him, as though she was sure she would fall if she moved any faster.

He pushed the door open.

She held her hand out, ghosting it along the wall while she walked back towards him and then taking hold of the doorframe as she went into the room.

He almost walked into her when she stopped dead and looked around the room. Easing the door closed behind him, he slipped past her and let her take it all in. He went straight to the mini bar and opened himself a whisky. Sitting down on one of the couches, he watched her as she continued to stand in the same spot, her eyes moving over everything in the expansive room.

“Big,” she said and he looked around.

It was big.

Not as large as the apartment he owned in Paris, but he couldn’t risk taking her there. Whenever he’d travelled, he’d always stayed at the best hotels. There was no point in being immortal if you couldn’t enjoy the finer things in life.

The décor was typical upmarket hotel. The walls were painted a warm cream colour and the furniture was pompous and expensive. The living area between the two bedrooms was brightly lit. Flowers and fruit adorned the table that was situated near the window and the whole room smelt of them. His gaze moved back to Prophecy when she muttered something.

She moved painstakingly slowly towards the middle of the room. She blinked rapidly, her eyes rolling as she pressed her hand to her head and pouted. Standing, he downed the little bottle of whisky and tossed it into the bin. He caught her around the arm, pushed one of the sets of white double doors open and held his other hand out, intimating the bed.

“Sleep. You will feel better tomorrow,” he said.

She looked up at him, right into his eyes, and smiled.

She placed her free hand against his chest. “Thank you.”

He relinquished his grip on her arm and then turned away when she began to strip in front of him. His jaw muscles tensed and he stared at the ceiling, ignoring the voice at the back of his mind that told him to look. It had been hard enough in Prague when she’d got changed in front of him, now it was bordering on impossible.

He heard a soft thud and a sigh.

Risking a look, he found her flat out on her front on the bed wearing nothing but her underwear and a black vest top. The rest of her clothes were in a crumpled heap on the floor. He looked around the room, searching for a blanket to cover her with. She didn’t need it to keep her warm since her body would never naturally get above room temperature. It was more for him than for her. He would never be able to concentrate if he knew she was lying on the bed like this.

He found what he was looking for in the wardrobe. Unfolding it, he draped it over her body and raised a brow when she moaned, shifted onto her side and curled up into a tight ball.

He should have got her some nightclothes when he’d gone to get them clothes to change into but he’d been in a hurry. As it was, all he’d managed to bring with them was a small black bag filled mostly with underwear and clothes for her. Mathias had given him a black jacket to wear that wasn’t too dissimilar to his old one. It was less conspicuous, but made him feel like a Japanese schoolboy.

He gave her one last look and then walked back into the living area. He would leave her door open. That way if she woke during the day she wouldn’t panic because she’d easily be able to find him. He didn’t know how much of tonight she would remember, but he was sure it wouldn’t be enough for her not to be frightened when she woke to find herself in unfamiliar surroundings.