“Centuries ago.”
Her head dropped back against the wall with a thud. “The least you could do is laugh at me and tell me there’s no such thing.”
Cool fingers slid into her hair, caressing her scalp. “I’m sorry, Lizzy-mine. You should never have found out this way. I never wanted you to know at all.”
She pushed away from the wall, from him, her mind awhirl. Centuries ago. He’d been turned centuries ago. All this time, she’d thought he was human. She’d thought he was falling in love with her, as she’d fallen in love with him. A vampire.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Reaching out blindly, she touched his arm, felt his hand close around hers, and she snatched it back, pulling away. “You bit me. When we were dating, you bit me.” She turned back to him slowly, his face faintly illuminated in the twilight from the back window.
He smiled, but in his eyes she saw only regret. “Your blood was sweet. And you loved it, Lizzy girl. You came and came and came when I sucked on your neck like that.”
Speechless, she stared at him. “God.” Her cheeks turned to flame. “Why don’t I remember any of it?”
“I took your memories. Only the ones that would damn me.” His eyes pleaded with her to understand. “I never hurt you. I would never hurt you, my Lizzy.” He reached for her, but she jerked her hands out of his reach and stepped back.
“Don’t. I’m not your Lizzy. I’m not your anything.” The heat in her cheeks deepened, not from embarrassment now but from utter humiliation. She’d thought he loved her, when all she’d been to him was food.
At the sound of footsteps outside, Lukas moved between her and the door.
The pierced one poked his head in through the doorway. “I’m hungry.”
Lukas scowled. “You have your own slave.”
“I’ve been sharing with you. I think it’s time you returned the favor.”
“And I think you should get back to work.” Lukas turned and started walking toward the stairs. “Come, Elizabeth,” he snapped, holding out a hand for her.
She glanced at the hungry eyes of the other vampire and flew to Lukas’s side, sliding her hand into his, gladly. His cool fingers closed around hers, and he led her up the stairs, warning her to watch her step. As one of the stairs splintered and crumbled beneath her foot, he pulled her clear as if she weighed nothing.
Finally, at the top of the stairs, he released her hand. “Wait here.” Then he disappeared, or moved away from her so quickly that he might as well have. She sensed rather than saw him dart in and out of the upstairs rooms. And then he was back at her side, his strong hand once more closing protectively around her own.
“You’re looking for a woman?” Elizabeth asked, as they started back down the treacherous steps.
“Yes. Or evidence that anyone’s been hiding here.”
Pierced-face was waiting for them when they returned to the shop level, his pupils white as snow, his fangs elongated as he watched her hungrily, making chills race over her skin.
“Have you told her the way of things around here, Lukas?” he asked silkily. “Does she know that we don’t just need blood to survive, but various emotions? Have you warned her that Butch is a pain-feeder, that he’s watching her, waiting for the chance to snatch her away from you and hurt her?”
“He’s not going to touch her,” Lukas growled.
But Pierced-face continued as if Lukas hadn’t spoken. “My guess is he’ll rape her and probably sodomize her. But he might go the quick route and just yank out a couple of her fingernails.”
Elizabeth’s blood turned to ice.
Pierced-face threw back his head in delight.
Lukas’s grip on her arm tightened. “Ignore him, Elizabeth. The asshole is a fear-feeder, determined to scare you. Butch won’t touch you.” His voice rose, turning hard as granite. “Neither of them will if they want to live.”
Pierced-face grinned. His words had hit their mark, and they all knew it.
“Come,” Lukas said, tugging her past the prick and out the door.
Elizabeth’s grip on Lukas’s hand tightened. Lukas might be a vampire who’d fed on her without her knowledge, but she still trusted him a thousand times more than she did his companions.
As they walked toward the next building, a small house, Pierced-face remained close behind them, apparently hoping to scare her again. Her mouth tightened in annoyance even as her spine tingled and crawled as if, at any moment, she might feel a knife plunge between her shoulder blades. Or fangs sink into her neck from behind.
She fought the scaremongering, struggling not to succumb. Hardening her jaw, she glanced at Lukas. “Do vampires really feed off emotions?”
He met her gaze, his blue eyes touching something deep inside her even in that brief and hooded look. “Emoras do. We’re just one race of vampires, but we’re the predominant race in Vamp City.”
“Do you have any idea how much this is twisting my mind?”
His hand squeezed hers gently. “I have some idea.”
She peered at him. “What emotion do you need?”
Meeting her gaze, his mouth tightened, then turned rueful. “Pleasure.”
“Your own or others’?”
“Mostly others’.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “I fed well from yours.”
Her breath stuttered, the thought incredibly . . . hot. No wonder he’d lavished such sweet attention on her body. She’d thought him the kindest, most thoughtful lover any woman had ever had. He’d loved to make her come—before he entered her, while he was inside her, over and over and over. Then yet again when they lay close and sated and complete. He’d told her he got as much pleasure from her orgasms as she did.
Apparently, that was, quite literally, true.
Bastard.
She pulled her hand from his, her stomach clenching with yet another spasm of betrayal. He hadn’t brought her to orgasm for her. He hadn’t done it to make her happy. He’d done it for the simple, cold reason that he’d needed to eat.
“You used me,” she said, her tone flat. Hurt.
“You were my slave, Elizabeth,” he said coolly. “Even if you didn’t know it.”
Her jaw clenched shut. Damn him.
As they reached the crumbling front walk of the house, Pierced-face spoke. “Just wait until he gets you back to the stronghold, Elizabeth. Just wait until all those pain-feeders get their fangs . . . and cocks . . . and knives . . . into you.”
Lukas released her and whirled, his sword suddenly free of its sheath. “Go. Now. Before I cut off your idiot head.”
Pierced-face grinned. “She’s not as fearful as many new arrivals, but she’s been a sweet little snack.” A moment later, he was gone.
As Lukas led her up the rotting steps, he said quietly, “I never used you. I never enslaved you. I . . .” He didn’t finish, and she wondered what he’d almost said. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that no one realize that I have feelings for you, Lizzy, or we’re both going to suffer.”
As he led her inside the old house, and they were finally alone, she turned to him. “Do you? Do you really have feelings for me?”
With a sound of misery, he pulled her into his arms, tight against his chest. “You have no idea, woman. You’ve no idea how I’ve suffered not being able to return to you, knowing you thought I’d abandoned you.” He pulled back, cupped her face in his hands. “I have thought of you, missed you, every minute of every hour of every day for two solid, miserable years, Lizzy-mine. Yes, I have feelings for you.”
As he kissed her softly, tenderly, his words slowly soaked into her mind, her heart, her soul, like a warm, summer rain on parched earth. Could she believe him? Did she dare believe him?
Her heart said yes. Her mind insisted on reserving judgment.
Finally, he pulled back and took her hand. “Come. I have a job to do. And it’s critically important.”
As they began to search the fully furnished, if decrepit house, she glanced at him. “This sorceress you’re looking for. Is she real? I mean . . . magic?”
“So they say.”
“Why do you need her?”
“Because she’s the only one who can save us.”
She looked at him sharply. “Save you from what?”
His expression turned grim. “In 1870, a powerful wizard created Vamp City, an exact duplicate of a portion of Washington, D.C. at that time. It was billed as a vampire utopia, a place where the sun never shone and where vampires were free not only to come and go as we wished but to bring in humans for whatever purposes we desired. An arena was built for games to be played only by vampires, where we were free to use all of our skills, all of our strengths, without fear of discovery by the far-too-prevalent humans. And for 140 years, it has been that—utopia. Until two years ago, when the magic started to fail. Those of us within Vamp City at that moment became trapped here.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s why you never came back.”
“Yes.” He pulled her against him, kissing her hair. Then he stopped and turned her to face him, his hands gripping her shoulders, then cupping her cheeks, a plea in his eyes. “I never would have left you willingly. There are millions who can provide me sustenance of the body, my Lizzy. It is you alone who feeds my soul.” The pain in his voice soaked into her heart, nourishing the song there that had already begun, once more, to sing.
“When the sorceress is found, will you be free?”
“We hope so. We hope that she’ll be able to renew the magic and save Vamp City.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
His thumb stroked her cheek. “Those of us trapped are tied to the magic. If the magic dies . . .” He shrugged. But she heard his unsaid words, and they ripped the heart right out of her chest.
If the sorceress failed to renew the magic, Lukas’s immortal life was over.
Chapter Seven
ELIZABETH ACCOMPANIED LUKAS back outside, her hand firmly tucked in his. She was so confused. So confused. For two years, she’d ached, mourned, railed at Lukas for leaving her without a word of explanation. She’d felt humiliated, angry, and sad. At times she’d even wondered if he’d died, and no one had known to contact her.
Now she’d found him gloriously alive. Or, at least, thoroughly undead. And he claimed he’d never stopped caring about her, that he’d been unable to return to her. That he was trapped and in danger of dying, this time for real.
She didn’t know what to think. Worse, she didn’t know what to feel. Her heart sang at his nearness, at his touch, as it always had. And it trembled now with fear that he might once more be ripped from her life, this time for good.
But, my God, he was a vampire. A bloodsucker who’d fed on her the entire time they’d been dating, then wiped her mind clean of the memory each time. And he’d not only fed on her blood but on the pleasure she’d found in his arms. He’d used her in the most despicable of ways. Yet he claimed he cared. That he’d always cared.
What on Earth was she supposed to believe?
“We have to get you out of here,” he said quietly, as they left the house and started toward the next one on the street. “Tell me what you remember. How did you get here?”
She glanced at him, her heart melting a little more at the beauty of his face and the intensity in his eyes. “I was walking to school with Steph. Between one step and the next, right in the middle of P Street, everything changed. Everything went dark. Silent. I heard the sound of horses, then your friends came riding around the corner. And then you,” she added softly.
His mouth turned grim. “You came in on the sunbeam. I figured as much. The sunbeams are the places where the real world is breaking through. As the magic crumbles, the real world breaks through more and more often and in more and more places. Every now and then, a human will slide into Vamp City through one of those breaks between the worlds. How, we don’t know. Most can’t. Most pass unaffected through the breaks and never sense them at all.”
“So why me?”
“I don’t know. But you have to promise me something.” His grip on her hand tightened. “If I get you out of here, you must never return to the area of D.C. overlaid by Vamp City, or you could walk right back in again through another sunbeam.”
“How will I know where that is?”
“I can give you some directions. Your apartment is safe. It’s just outside. Your school, unfortunately, is just inside. You can’t go back to Adams Middle as long as the worlds are bleeding through this way. Not until the magic is renewed.”
“But I . . .” She stopped, swallowing her automatic objection that she had to get back to school. One step at a time. First, she had to get home.
The rumble of a vehicle engine sounded in the distance, cutting through the unnatural stillness of this world, surprising her. The sound was so . . . anachronistic.
“You have cars here?”
“Some.” Lukas stopped at the base of the front steps. At the sound, he’d tensed. “Come on. He changed directions, heading back toward the street. “SUVs are the only ones that can manage what pass for roads in this place. Most of us ride horses.”
As they started down the street the way they’d come, Elizabeth listened to the approaching vehicle. There were so few sounds in this place. “I haven’t seen a single bird,” she mused. “Or heard one. Not even any insects.”
“When the sorcerer created Vamp City, he duplicated the physical aspects of D.C., but nothing living conveyed. No plants, no animals. The only creatures here are the ones we’ve brought in. Horses, humans, and a handful of cats and dogs. All foodstuffs and supplies have to be brought in from the real world.”