Vacation with a Vampire & Other Immortals (3 page)

So close he felt her breath.

He whispered, “What are you doing, Anna?”

“What my heart tells me, like you said,” she whispered back. And then she kissed him.

The power of it was beyond imagining. He was as engulfed in the kiss—in the woman—as a lifeboat would be by a hurricane. He felt her heart, soft, and loving and pure. He smelled her scents, and heard her heartbeat inside his own chest. He tasted her kiss, and it was beyond anything he’d ever dreamed off. He wrapped his arms around her and held her to him, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.

And then, finally, he gave heed to the sense of self-preservation he’d built upon a foundation of pain and betrayal. He’d thought Cassandra’s heart was pure, too. And he’d been wrong.

Sleep,
he commanded.
Sleep, and remember me as but a pleasant dream. Sleep, Anna. And when you wake, follow your heart’s desire, no matter what. I’ll find you again before you die. And you will be offered a choice. I promise you that. But for now, sleep. Sleep, Anna. Sleep.

Anna slept. He held her against him as her legs went weak, and he scooped her up into his arms and then sped through the night, carrying her at speeds far too fast for mortal eyes to observe him. He probed her mind to find where she lived, and he took her there. An attractive, one-story house with flower boxes in the windows. Yellow. It would sell easily.

He unlocked the doors with the power of his mind and laid her gently on her bed, and then he turned and forced himself to go away. It was, for some reason, far more difficult than it should have been.

An hour later he sank his teeth into the throat of a drunken pedophile in a stinking alley outside the bar the man had been visiting.

But as the rush of the blood hit him, carrying with it the pleasant burn of rum, his mind went back to the woman he’d kissed beneath the lighthouse. He saw her eyes, her face, her hair. He heard her voice, rough with tears. He tasted her mouth, felt her hands on him. He closed his eyes and for just a moment gave in to the fantasy that it was her blood he was drinking now. Her blood, rushing into his throat, warming his flesh, sizzling in his soul, filling him with power, with strength, with vigor and, God help him, with desire—for her.

A surge of ecstasy rose in him even as he released his victim. The man’s body fell to the alley floor, and Diego tipped his head back and, in spite of himself, released a growling roar to the night. In that moment, pure primal power and unleashed lust washed through him, and he had no control.

As he brought his head level again, he heard voices, human ones.

“What the hell? Was that a freaking lion?”

“I never heard anything like that in my—”

“A bear?
Here?
”

“C’mon.”

Crouching low, Diego pushed off with his powerful legs and shot upward, rocketlike, landing easily on the roof above even as the curious mortals arrived at the mouth of the alley and saw the dead man lying there.

He didn’t stick around to see what happened next.

Two months later…

A
nna stood in what felt like the vastness of eternity. There was no clear boundary between the sea around her and the night sky above. The only visible difference was that the sky was dotted with glittering stars and the water was too choppy to reflect them back. On calm seas, she’d experienced nights when she honestly couldn’t tell where the mirror of the sea ended and the sky began. Breathtaking. And peaceful.

She no longer feared dying. She imagined that the night sky above was a black canvas, and that behind it there was a light—that beautiful heavenly light talked about by near-death survivors. She imagined the stars as tears in the fabric, giving her tiny glimpses of that warm, loving glow. One more month, give or take, if Mary’s predictions were true. And then she would be able to find out for herself.

Below, and all around, her there was water. Blue-black, with whitecaps appearing and vanishing again as if at random. But there was an order to it, she thought. One she couldn’t see but felt on some level. There was order to everything. It all happened for a reason.

Beneath her feet, her boat, the
Spanish Angel,
rocked and bobbed at the whim of those waves. She’d furled her sails, dropped anchor for the night. There was a vague and brief rocky shoreline in sight, but only barely, off the starboard side. It was small enough that she suspected it was an island, but she had no desire to visit it. People, tourists, were not what she had come out here to experience.

She stood on the port side, near the bow, staring out at the endless expanse of sea and sky, and letting her focus go soft until the two blended into one. One living, breathing, heaving, moving entity. The great Whole. And she was a part of it. Alive or dead, a part of it she would remain.

Anna was at peace now. That night on the pier, in the hulking shadow of the lighthouse, she’d met an angel. Her own guardian angel, she thought. And the fact that he had the face of her dream lover, who’d hovered just beyond the edge of her dreams since she’d been a teenager, made him even more real.

Yes, she had probably imagined him. Maybe. Her subconscious had conjured just the image she had needed. He had broken through her grief and her worry and her pain, and given her permission to be selfish. To be happy, even, during the waning months of her life.

He’d seemed so real. She’d even given him a name, in her imagination. Diego. It had come to her during that imaginary kiss. She knew his voice, his touch, his kiss. God, his kiss. And that sense of him looking so deeply inside her that he knew her deepest thoughts, fears, longings.

She’d spent a great many hours pondering her angel while she’d been living blissfully at sea. There had been something otherworldly about him, and a faint trace of an accent—Spanish, in his case—the way there always seemed to be when people claimed to be channeling the words of a spirit guide. Or of an angel. He’d had that accent in her dreams, too, she recalled.

Hazy, those dreams. Vague. No real story to them, just images of him, of his eyes blazing into hers, his hand reaching out to touch her cheek. And a feeling of absolute love welling up inside her heart.

She’d thought, in her youth, that those had been glimpses of her soul mate. Her future partner, husband, lover. But now she knew better. She’d been glimpsing her own personal guardian angel. He had come to her that night and told her what she needed to hear. And when she passed from this life into the next, he would be there, waiting. She was actually looking forward to seeing him again.

She’d sold her home and her possessions, and she’d closed out all her bank accounts and cashed in her retirement. She’d quit her job. And then she had bought one thing for herself. Something she had always wanted.

She’d given part of the remaining money to her sister’s kids, and she’d invited them to lunch at a fast-food joint where she used to take them when they were little, so she could deliver the money personally and have a chance to say goodbye. She told them that she was leaving the country and didn’t know when she would return. They’d accused her of abandonment until they’d seen the numbers on the cashier’s checks she handed them. Then their whining had gone silent and the questions had begun.

But by then she’d already been on her way out the door.

The rest of the money had gone for supplies, that she stowed on the gift she had bought for herself. This sailboat. She’d named her boat the
Spanish Angel,
after the otherworldly being who’d come to her on that night when all had seemed lost.

And now she was doing what she had always dreamed of doing. She was sailing down the East Coast, embracing the ocean she had loved since birth. She was riding the waves, and soaking up the sun, and relishing the wind. She was communing with dolphins, and whales, and sharks, and seals, with seagulls and osprey and birds and fish she had yet to identify. She was meditating, and pondering the meaning of life and the universe and spirituality. She was living. For the first time in her life, now that she was dying, she was truly
living.

She’d saved enough money to keep herself in food and fresh water and other essentials for the three months Mary told her she might have left, with a little extra left over in case she lived longer. Honestly, though, she didn’t think that was going to happen. She was sleeping more and more. And soon, she thought, it might not be safe to remain at sea, with no one at the helm in case she never woke up.

Then again, what did she have to lose, really?

As she stood there with the wind in her hair, she smiled and felt content right to her soul. She was happy, she realized. She didn’t have a worry in the world. She had no bills to pay, no jobs to rush to, no phones to answer, no computer to crash, no email to answer, no people depending on her and expecting things of her. All she had to do was sail, and live, and breathe. Eat and sleep. Read and sing. Pray and meditate. Ride the waves, and dream of crossing to the other side, into her guardian angel’s open arms. She wondered if it was sinful to feel the way she felt for him. Because her love for him, while pure and powerful, didn’t feel at all platonic. But she supposed if there was anything wrong with that, he wouldn’t have kissed her the way he had.

If she died tonight, she thought, she would die happy. And she would be even happier when she emerged on the other side. She could feel the antigen tugging her to sleep yet again. She’d managed to stay awake for six straight hours today. That was pretty good, for her.

She went below, to the little cabin, and fell asleep in a state of bliss.

She’d been sleeping pretty hard, as she tended to do these days, when she realized the wind was howling and water was rolling over her face. It was too dark to see, and she was completely disoriented; nothing in the room was where it belonged, and she couldn’t tell which way was up or which was down. And yet, she felt no panic. The water was warm. And if she drowned, so be it. Suddenly there was a crash, and her beautiful boat seemed to explode in a thousand directions, flying away from her like the expanding universe itself and leaving her in the open water, which was roiling, throwing her up and sucking her back down again. Lightning flashed over and over, and she gasped for air, blinking through saltwater to see brief strobing images. Jutting rocks. Broken boards. Foaming froth. Pouring rain. Heaving waters.

The instinctive urge to survive overwhelmed her even as her practical mind told her to just relax into the embrace of the sea. She was dying, anyway. What did it matter? But at that moment, in that instant, all she wanted was to keep her head above water, to keep sucking air into her lungs, and to struggle ever nearer to the rocks that had demolished her boat.

In desperation, she cried out, spewing water with her words. “Help me! Help me, someone!”

Diego was safely inside his cottage, the window shades up and shutters thrown wide, so that he could watch the rain, enjoy the electric light show that nature was putting on tonight. He loved storms. The pure, raw power of them. Right now, the wind was blowing the palms so that their fronds were nearly upright, and the vibration of the airwaves whisking around their variegated trunks made a hum that was not unlike the primal tone of a didgeridoo. The wind, that hum, the thunder, the crashing waves—together they created a symphony, and he listened in pure raw pleasure.

And then, a heartbeat later, his entire body quivered in awareness. Danger. Fear. Panic. What the hell was—

Help me! Help me, someone!

He felt the summons more than heard it, but then realized he’d heard it, as well, just barely. Not only that, but he knew its source, knew it immediately, as her energy rushed into his awareness, filling him. The woman he’d seen two months before, near the lighthouse, the one who’d been weeping. The woman he’d kissed.

One of the Chosen, and one with whom he’d felt an instant and powerful bond.

That made her very dangerous to him.

And yet, he was unable to deny the gut-level drive to help her. He had no choice. Nor would he have done otherwise even if he could have. He pulled on a slicker, a black one, caped. He pulled a cap down over his ears. It would only be soaked through in a few minutes, but he wore it, anyway, then dashed out of his haven and into the heart of the storm.

He could move faster than any living thing. Fast enough so that he would not be detectable to human eyes, nor, he suspected, to most of the wildlife here—though he wasn’t entirely sure about that. Still, he pushed himself to preternatural speeds through the storm, until he stood on the windward shore, and there he paused, listening—not just with his ears but with all his senses—and staring intently out at the violent sea.

“Where are you?” he asked aloud, but he sent the words out to her, too, using the power of his mind, knowing that might be the only way she, a mere mortal, would be able to hear him.

Rocks. Water. Can’t…see….

He felt a wave smash into her face, felt it as if it were happening to him. It silenced her mind and pushed her downward, and he felt her consciousness fading.

No time for the boat. He shed the slicker and hat, and ran into the water, sensing her near the treacherous rocks that rose from the sea a few hundred yards from shore. He dove, arrowing through the waves toward her. Angling deeper, to escape the surface effect of the storm—which would have slowed him, though only slightly—he sped onward, his senses attuned to the essence of her. Flawlessly they guided him, and in only seconds he was wrapping his arms around her body and shooting upward.

They broke the surface, and he held her so her back was against his chest, one hand pulling her forehead back and up. “Breathe!” he commanded, with his mind and will as well as his voice.

She gulped in air and gasped, gurgled and choked. Water spewed from her lips.

“Again,” he told her. “Breathe.”

And again she inhaled. Her eyes were closed tight, her body still. No fight left in her. He turned them toward shore, struggling now. He couldn’t just speed through the waves without forcing more water into her lungs. And it was difficult to make headway while keeping her head from submerging once more.

Lifting his own head, he called out, no longer speaking like a man. His voice was a high-pitched chitter instead. And within moments a dorsal fin appeared, pale amid the black water.

“Thank you, my friend,” Diego said softly, gripping the slick fin with one hand, holding on to his charge with the other. The dolphin swam rapidly toward shore, chirping happily, the ever-cheerful demeanor unaffected by the storm.

Diego couldn’t say the same for his own—although his darkening mood wasn’t due to the storm itself, but to what it had carried to his beach. His haven.

A woman. One of the Chosen. And not just any one, but
this one.
This woman he’d met during what he’d taken as a chance encounter two months ago. He’d gone into seclusion forty-five years ago because of a woman just like her. He’d taken refuge far from the reach of human or vampire. And yet, she had come.

Hell, was history doomed to repeat itself—even here?

“Far enough, Layla,” he said, releasing the dolphin and giving the animal a pat on the side even as it turned and swam away. His feet sank into the sandy sea-bottom, and he shifted the woman around to face him, carrying her as he strode up out of the waves, onto the beach and then along the winding and well-worn path through the forest to his cottage. His sanctuary. A place where only one other being had ever set foot, at least within his five-century-plus lifespan.

Allowing someone else to visit the island had proven disastrous. He had sworn that no one ever would breech his sanctuary again. And yet, here she was. And there was not one thing he could do about it.