Turning away from the mirror that showed no image of her, she left the bathroom. She knew she looked pale, strained, but before anyone could offer empty platitudes, she sat down in the chair Brian had positioned near the equipment for her.
“Just do what you need to do,” she said.
The scientist nodded, began to attach sensors to her skin. Fortunately they were wireless, the equipment sensitive enough to pick up the necessary readings as long as she was within a few feet of it. Though his touch was relaxed and impersonal, it still made her tense. She didn"t care for people touching her without permission. Even less these days, since it often felt like there were things crawling under her skin that jumped at outside contact.
Once again, though, Gideon and Daegan were different. They seemed to make that reaction lessen, instead of increase. Picking up on her needs, Gideon ran a hand down her arm, on the opposite side from Brian. “I"d have brought you one of mine,” he said, nodding to the shirt.
“But—”
“But you only have the shirt you"re wearing.” She tried to keep her tone light. “I guess one of these days we should go out and get you more than one change of clothes.” He grunted. “Not ready to be a kept man yet, thanks. I"ll just grab one of Daegan"s overpriced shirts if I anticipate ruining my T-shirt.”
“I didn"t realize he"d left that much behind,” she said nastily. Debra glanced at her, but said nothing.
“He"s coming back, Anwyn,” Gideon said. “He doesn"t know how to stay away from you.” Neither do I.
He said that in her head, a quick voice caress, but she wasn"t ready to be soothed. “You don"t like vampires. You don"t even want him to come back.”
“I like you. And you do want him to come back. That"s what matters.”
“If you don"t stop being so agreeable, I will punch you in the face. It"s entirely unlike you.” He gave her his faint smile, a hint of the breathtaking appeal it gave his rugged features.
“All right. I hope he trips and falls on the pointy end of all those stakes he"s carrying. Gets a nasty, oozing infection that smells bad so you won"t want him within twenty feet of you.
How"s that?”
“Better.” When his fingers found hers, she tightened her grip in response. Inhaling the scent of Daegan"s shirt, she felt the fabric against her skin and imagined it was his skin. This wasn"t the first time Daegan had taken a trip away from her. As the Council"s private assassin, he traveled quite a bit. She"d been fine with that, because her own life kept her pretty busy.
Sometimes, though, she"d sleep in his bed the first day or two, absorbing his scent to tide her over while he was gone. Before, she"d never have revealed that kind of weakness for another, but of course the information was there for Gideon. He"d probably suggest they sleep in Daegan"s bed tonight, because he picked up a lot of things in her mind, even though they"d made a privacy pact of sorts.
She and Gideon had a tacit agreement, that she would limit her forays into his mind, trying to keep it high level when she couldn"t stay out completely, using the ability for conversation and trying not to probe his thoughts uninvited. It took practice and skill, somewhat like not using her vision when her eyes were open, but she was getting better at it. She couldn"t do it during their more passionate encounters, but he"d seemed fine with that.
In turn, he"d agreed that when he was in her mind to monitor the indicators of her violent transition seizures, he"d practice mental “peripheral vision” to ignore other thoughts that might float by. Most vampires had the ability to restrict their servants" access to their minds, but most
vampires didn"t take full servants as fledglings, or deal with the unusual transition issues she had. She had to trust Gideon more than she"d ever trusted anyone.
Without probing his mind, she knew enough about Gideon to know he was out of sorts about Daegan"s absence as well. He"d rationalize it, tell himself it was because Daegan was useful to help with Anwyn"s transition. She didn"t argue with him over it. With so many things uncertain right now, there was no sense goading Gideon, making him face possibilities that had only started to develop between the three of them before Daegan had left.
For the next week, Brian hooked her up to all sorts of monitoring equipment, but in the end she admitted she was glad she"d mostly held on to her patience. She"d had seven seizures during the first three days. Like those little balls sent up in the tornadoes to collect data, the monitors had given Brian a tremendous amount of data about predicting the episodes. He"d created the first cocktail and begun to inject it in her daily. Already it seemed to lessen the severity and frequency of the seizures, though he noted it likely wouldn"t stand up against extreme stress factors.
He also couldn"t predict if the injection was something she would need forever, or if, in time, the seizures would go away on their own. The shadow creatures in her head were something that the injections didn"t change. Like the schizophrenia that had infected Barnabus"s mind and spawned their presence in hers, only human drugs could address that, and her vampire blood would neutralize them. So that one she had to handle, but she could, with Gideon.
When he was in her mind, the shadow creatures tended to cower back into the shadows, not whisper so insidiously, as if they liked her best when she felt all alone. She"d lived most of her life adamantly independent, and probably the worst part of her transition was dealing with her dependence on others, her unpredictable loss of control. It was Gideon who had quickly recognized it could destroy what was left of her mind if some remedy wasn"t found, and it was Daegan who had figured out the remedy. A third-marked servant, one who could balance and steady her, help her sort between what was real and those voices, while in theory she had command over him, a sense of control that dangerously wasn"t a complete illusion.
A fledgling never took a third-marked servant, because they didn"t have the control to keep the proper shields in between their two minds. Not only was it an etiquette issue, because no vampire was supposed to be that vulnerable and open to her human servant, but it also was hard for a servant to function if there were two running sets of thoughts going through his head at once. On a more serious note, if a vampire let her bloodlust run away with her, she might dive too deeply into the servant"s soul, damage him psychologically.
Any one of those reasons would have kept her from marking Gideon, but mortally wounding him during one of her attacks took the decision away. Daegan made it for her, forced her to mark the vampire hunter. Gideon had made his peace with Daegan doing that. As for her, she didn"t know if she was angry at the act, or if her anger was a cumulative net. She"d been blaming him for all of it, but was that just because she needed someone to blame?
Not only was she a vampire; she was starting out with three major handicaps in her scary new world. Number one: unstable, uncertain if the completion of her transition in another couple of months would bring the improvement it normally would, allowing her to take steps back into the nighttime world. Number two: a fledgling vampire with a full servant. Number three: a vampire who, more often than not, allowed her servant full access to her mind to monitor those seizures, and lend her mental and physical stability.
She did practice that curtain Daegan had taught her, to help screen her thoughts from Gideon so he didn"t always have that running ticker tape of her subliminal thoughts in his mind. She also practiced increasing the thickness of the wall, because she knew there was no sense in not honing every skill she might need.
Sometimes, though, when Gideon slept in her bed, or with her in Daegan"s, his arms curled strong and sure around her hips, his head on her breast, lips so close to her nipple it ached for him in that nonstop carnality that seemed to plague and delight the vampire mind, she"d drift in his mind and see things there she wished she could forget.
As a human Mistress of a BDSM club, she"d already been a type of vampire. Feeding on the surrender of the males who came to her, the few who"d needed something extra special to let go of the reins and let her have them. She"d understood so many things about them without vampire senses, but now that she had those senses, it was almost irresistible to use that extra ability to forage that much deeper into a man"s mind. Particularly this man.
His mind was as much a battleground as hers. Whereas her field of combat was between sanity and surrender to those voices, his was a siege force, clustered around an almost impenetrable fortress. His will to be what he"d always been was that fortress. The idea that he was becoming the antithesis of everything that had given his life purpose for the past ten years or so was an increasing horde outside the gate, growing louder and more insistent every day. It disturbed his dreams, even under her stroking hands. During their waking hours, his attention was all upon her, but she knew in the end, the battle in his dreams would determine the difference between temporal devotion to a cause and true loyalty, from his heart.
She"d been surprised, at the beginning, by how little her ability to be in Gideon"s mind seemed to bother him. He encouraged her to do it if it would help her. But as she learned to navigate the pathways of his brain ever more deeply, she was chagrined to find out why. He felt he had few secrets she and Daegan didn"t already know. He"d lost his girlfriend to a vampire in high school, and he had a brother who was now a vampire, as well as servant to one of the most powerful vampires known.
What he didn"t realize, and what pained her, was finding how many of his thoughts and reactions were practically secrets to himself, things he"d buried far below his subconscious.
At different times, she"d pore over that buried treasure. Like when she hung in restraints, trying to get a grip on herself, or in the lethargic aftermath, when she lay on the couch, her head in Gideon"s lap as he stroked it, lulling her into the deep sleep that the seizures often caused.
Like many men, he wasn"t self-analytical. He knew what he knew about himself, and he assumed that was it. The inexplicable things he did didn"t require any explanation, because that would require an examination of feelings. Amused, she thought it was fortunate men weren"t required to do self-exams on their minds as women did for their breasts, because all manner of tumors would grow unchecked when they simply refused to turn their attention to them.