Found, a Vampire Romance (5 page)

Perhaps from being in the dark for so long, she could see better than it seemed like she should, but still, light would be nice. It might help her shake the feeling of unease that had settled over her.

“We…” The second boy, whose name she hadn’t been told, started to answer, but Dave cut him off.

“Don’t want to use it if we don’t have to.”

Surprised, she raised her brows. “Why?”

“Predators,” the second offered.

The wolves
. Nancy rubbed her elbow where Dave had grabbed her. “But wouldn’t the light scare them off?”

She felt the two look at each other. After a moment, Dave answered. “They might think we had food.”

“Oh.” What they said made no sense. Not if what they were worried about was wolves, or even the mountain lion she had feared was attacking Dorian. And the old Nancy, the confident Nancy, would have argued with them. But she wasn’t that Nancy, and while the boys might only know about the wolves, she knew about Dorian and his brother. Or she thought she did. She frowned, confused even more as to whether what she thought she had seen was real.

She moved her hand to her neck. “Is there... Do I have a mark here?” she asked. Her voice sounded uncertain even to her own ears, but the boys didn’t seem to notice.

Dave leaned in close. “I don’t see anything. Brandon?”

The other boy, Brandon, tilted her head to the side with two fingers and repeated Dave’s inspection. She flinched, and he pulled back his hand with a jerk.

“Looks fine to me,” he mumbled.

Embarrassed, she lifted her hand to touch his arm, to apologize, but her fingers stopped short of touching him. She folded them back against her palm and lowered her arm.

“I’m sorry. I’m just jumpy,” she said.

“Understandable.” Dave stared at the other male. Brandon’s lip rose.

Nancy blinked.

“You’re tired. Let’s go.”

With no more conversation, they continued walking.

Soon Nancy would be back at her sorority house, back with Rachel. She would realize then that what she’d seen and felt with Dorian wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be a vampire, and she couldn’t love someone she had only just met.

All of it had to be a delusion. It had to be.

Chapter 6

Dorian stared at his brother, his outward demeanor calm but his mind whirring. Nancy wasn’t far ahead. He could catch her, but first he needed to shake his brother.

But how?

The stake was twenty feet away. Dorian knew exactly where he had tossed it. Did Cameron? Would he realize Dorian’s plan?

Only one way to find out.

Dorian lowered his head and began to pace. He mumbled to himself as he did, talked about their father and what Dorian had done for him. He gave Cameron information he knew his brother wouldn’t be able to resist.

It worked. As Dorian moved closer to the stake, Cameron moved too, but slowly and without speaking. He was listening, believing that Dorian was slipping again and, for the first time, hearing the truths that Dorian had kept hidden from him.

Dorian was over trying to please his father and his cronies. He was over hiding their messed-up deeds. Cameron needed to know the truth too. He deserved to know it, and this was the easiest, least painful way for Dorian to share it.

But Dorian wasn’t talking, his monster was— or at least that is what he hoped Cameron saw.

When the stake was at his feet, Dorian knelt and picked it up. His head bowed, he pointed the tip at his chest.

Then he looked up. “Help me. I can’t live like this. Not any longer.” He knew he looked pathetic, hair disheveled and his face strained. And he knew his brother would be unable to resist his plea.

Cameron moved closer, his eyes wary but also filled with regret. He was going to do what he thought he had to do, put down his brother as he would put down any creature in pain and at risk of damaging others.

Except this was one noble deed Dorian was going to stop his brother from completing.

As Cameron approached, Dorian held out the stake flat on his palm, handle out. Cameron reached for it, and Dorian moved. He closed his fingers around the blade, ignoring the pain as the metal sliced into his hand, and, shifting his body to the side, he kicked his brother in the back of the knees.

As Cameron fell, Dorian did to him what his brother had planned to do to Dorian. He slammed the stake into Cameron’s chest. Then he pushed his brother down and the stake forward until Cameron was flat on the ground and the stake was shoved through his body and into the earth beneath him.

Releasing his hold on the weapon, Dorian jumped back. Cameron, realizing what was happening, reached for him, but, for once, Dorian had the upper hand. As his brother’s fingertips brushed his arm, Dorian spun and raced after Nancy.

o0o

It felt as if they had been walking for hours. Nancy had stopped looking at her companions a while back, and they seemed to have almost forgotten her existence. The pair chatted with each other as if she didn’t exist or perhaps as if she was too dim-witted to comprehend what they were saying.

And perhaps she was, because nothing they had said made any sense to her.

The one boy, Brandon, seemed annoyed with Dave, blamed him for Nancy’s wreck and the loss of her friends. But that was crazy— an animal had jumped in front of her car, something with teeth and fur.

“A wolf,” she murmured.

“What?” Dave’s gaze shot to her, his tone annoyed.

“You didn’t cause me to wreck, a wolf did,” she replied. Thinking this revelation would appease him, she smiled.

Brandon grunted, and Dave fell into silence again.

The tension between the two made Nancy uncomfortable. An ache formed in her chest. Dorian had made her feel safe. 

Until she saw the fangs, she reminded herself.

The ache grew larger. She rubbed her arms and tried to forget Dorian, tried to focus on where she was now. “Are you sure we’re going the right direction? It feels like we’ve been walking a long time, and it’s getting darker.”

“That happens here.” Brandon this time, his tone dry rather than surly, but still disturbing. She understood they had to be cold and tired, but the two boys had come to rescue her. Their lack of concern now seemed odd.

Besides, the canyon wasn’t just getting darker in the way the night grew darker. It
felt
darker too, as if the blanket of gloom was growing thicker, denser. Something she felt as much as saw.

Her concern that they were moving in the wrong direction grew. She glanced around as if one bush would look any different than another, or as if a big “home is this way” sign might appear.

“We aren’t going to the road,” Dave muttered.

To her right, Brandon stiffened, but, relieved one of the two was speaking to her in civil terms, she turned to Dave. “Why not?”

Brandon, however, answered. “The searchers are gathered somewhere else.” He touched the back of her arm, telling her to walk faster.

Her first instinct was to resist, at least until the pair explained more, but then she saw light and heard voices.

People
.

“Hurry. They aren’t going to be happy as it is.” Dave again, giving her another nudge, this time in the center of her back.

Eager to be away from him, she did as he said. She quickened her pace, stumbling only once down the steep incline that led to the open area where it appeared a crowd of ten or so waited.

The rescue party
. Now she was safe. 

Now she would be okay. Her mind would clear, and she would realize that the fangs she had seen in Dorian’s mouth were no more real than the feelings he’d stirred inside her.

She walked faster.

o0o

Dorian jogged down the path after Nancy, following instinct more than sensory clues. The stake he’d shoved through Cameron’s chest, well clear of his brother’s heart, wouldn’t hold for long. Cameron would be back on his feet and giving chase in no time.

Dorian didn’t have time to play tracker. He had to trust his gut. Luckily, there was an obvious trail leading from where Nancy had left him and Cameron. The odds she had stuck to it were good.

He followed the path without hesitation for a hundred or so twisting yards, then something, some sense, told him to stop.

He glanced over his shoulder, listening for a sign that Cameron was closing in, but heard nothing. Still, knowing he had little time to waste, he walked in a quick circle, off the path and between the few trees that grew beside it. Next to one, he froze. His hand brushed the rough bark of the tree’s trunk.

Nancy had been here. He could feel her fear. He squatted and placed his hand on the ground. The earth was muddy, thick, and almost frozen with the dropping temperature. He touched tiny jagged bumps, the tread of a shoe. He concentrated harder, and he could make out prints, three sets. One, much smaller than the others, he knew had to be Nancy’s. The others were larger, males’ most likely.

Human rescuers? His brother had taken Rachel to the road. It made sense that at some point humans would come to look for the other girls. But would humans make it this deep into the canyon?

Dorian didn’t think so.

An edge of unease slid through him. He tapped his fingers against the heel of his palm.

From behind came the sound of a twig breaking. Cameron, getting close and not even bothering to hide that he was following.

Quickly, Dorian followed the males’ footprints, backwards, to see from where they had come.

What he discovered stopped him cold.

One pair of the booted footprints stopped about ten feet away, or they didn’t stop, they changed. In a small area no bigger than two feet wide it appeared one of the humans had stopped to put on or take off his shoes.

And since Dorian was following the trail backwards, he knew which. One of the males who had found Nancy had, only a short time prior to that, been walking barefoot through the cold, dark canyon.

Who did that?

Not any human he knew. 

He continued to follow the trail. This time what he found made him curse.

He knelt to study the tracks better and was hit from the side, Cameron slamming into him like a linebacker intent on taking down half of the opposing team.

Enraged by what he feared was happening to Nancy, Dorian fought back. He rammed his palm into his brother’s throat and tossed him to the side.

With another curse, he sprang to his feet and faced Cameron.

“Enough. Back off.” Dorian’s voice rose as he spoke, and surprisingly, Cameron, now on his feet also, took a step backward. It was sufficient. Ignoring his brother and the bloody stake gripped in his fist, Dorian knelt to study the tracks.

His first glance had been accurate— paw and footprints. Wolf and human. His gut seized. With a curse he stood. “Werewolves,” he muttered.

Cameron shook his head. “You fooled me once.”

Before his brother could continue, Dorian pointed at the cold hardened mud. “Look for yourself. Human and wolf tracks, merging.”

“Don’t equal werewolf. I haven’t heard there are wolves here, but it’s possible. And human?” Cameron lifted his shoulder.

“Barefoot. Human tracks. Barefoot. And they don’t move beside or over the wolf tracks, they lead into them,
turn
into them.”

Cameron’s brows rose, but he didn’t move forward.

Knowing at this point his only hope to get to Nancy’s side was to convince his brother to help, Dorian raised his hands, as if someone held a gun on him, and stepped back.

After inspecting the tracks for only a moment, although it felt like eons to Dorian, Cameron faced him.

“Werewolves,” he said. With no word of apology for his original intentions when coming to the canyon, he slipped the stake into the back of his pants. “So, brother, what do we do now?”

They were the first civil words Cameron had spoken to Dorian in months. A tiny knot in the pit of Dorian’s stomach loosened. And for a moment, he didn’t feel alone. His brother was going to help him. Together they would save Nancy.

Whatever arguments happened after that, Dorian would deal with them.

“I think I know where they are going.” Trusting Cameron would follow, Dorian began to follow the three sets of human footprints.

They pointed, as he had guessed they would, not to the road but to the deepest, ugliest part of the canyon. It was the one part of the canyon he hadn’t investigated. Even in his stressed-out state, he hadn’t wanted to wander that deep into this cursed place’s secrets.

Cameron came up behind him. Dorian stopped. If they were going to go on together, Dorian needed his brother to trust him.

“Someone or thing carried off the bodies,” he said.

He didn’t have to explain which bodies. After Dorian’s earlier ramblings, Cameron now knew why Dorian had come to this canyon in the first place, to dispose of the humans his father, in some fit of self-indulgence, had drained.

“I thought it was me. I think that idea pushed me faster into losing control.”
Of his monster
.

Cameron listened, his face impassive.

“Believing that was a mistake. It kept me from really investigating what had happened to the bodies. If I’d done that, I might have discovered the werewolves myself.”
Before they had a chance to take Nancy.

“You think werewolves took the bodies. For what?”

“Wolves eat carrion.” He held his brother’s gaze, let his suspicions sink in.

Vampires drank blood, but blood of the living. Dorian’s lips thinned. The idea of consuming a human’s dead flesh was repulsive.

The two fell silent.

After a moment, Dorian spoke again. “I have to find Nancy. I’d like your help, but at the least, don’t get in my way.” Without waiting for his brother’s response, he started walking, moving as fast as he could without making noise that might alert the werewolves that he was following.

Within seconds, Cameron strode by his side. “This doesn’t mean I approve of what you’ve done, and it doesn’t mean you don’t have a lot to answer for, but I made a promise to bring Nancy back, and I’m going to keep it.”