B004SOYUR8 EBOK Page 7

  “So you think it’s real?”

  Alec shrugged. “I don’t know, but from Omar’s reaction when I confronted him about it, I think that he believes that it is real.”

  Nicole stared out of the passenger side window. Her thoughts went to the dream she had the night before. She wanted to tell Alec about it, but thought that it would be better to wait until she’d talked with her mother and found out exactly who the dark man was from her childhood. That’s what she’d called him when she was a kid. He’d seemed so dark.

  “When will I hear from you again?” she asked, turning back to Alec.

  “Soon.” He was evasive.

  Turning away, he opened the car door and got out. He started to walk around the car to open her door, but she didn’t wait.

  Nicole led the way up the stairs to her apartment; Alec was close behind. She wanted to ask him to stay, but she was getting the impression that he was preoccupied tonight. Whatever was on his mind, he wasn’t sharing it with her.

  “Thank you for all that you are doing,” she told him when they reached the door to her apartment.

  Alec reached out and lifted her chin so that she was looking into his eyes.

  “I know that you want me to come in, but that could lead to things that we might regret.”

  Nicole said nothing. He was right. She wanted him to come in, and she wanted so much more.

  Alec kissed her gently. “I hope you know that it’s not because I don’t want to.”

  Nicole started to shake. Her desire for him was so overwhelming that she could not control it. She was becoming the same as the rest of his groupies.

  “I’m fine with that,” she lied.

  Alec backed away. “I’ll see you soon,” he told her, before disappearing down the stairs.

  When he was gone, Nicole let herself in, shutting and locking the door behind her.

  Why had she lied? The fact was that she was anything but fine. Every time he turned her away, it felt as if he were sticking an ice pick into her heart.

  * * * *

  Alec flew high above the city, his eyes roving the ground for his prey. He was weak. He hadn’t fed well the past few days, not since meeting Miss Nicole Ashe. His world had been in disarray since he’d set eyes on her. No matter how he tried, he could not get the girl out of his mind.

  Omar wanted her badly. So much so that he was willing to talk about the ancient truths of the vampire. But why couldn’t Omar just go get her? That’s what really had Alec curious.

  He’d told Omar that he would think about what he had offered. Alec was buying time.

  Below, a tall figure stumbled into an alley. Leaning against the brick wall, the man slid to the ground. He was obviously in a drunken stupor and would be easy prey. Alec hated to feed on those that were too fond of spirits, but this one would take little effort.

  He came down, his feet hitting the pavement so softly that he made no sound. Kneeling in front of the man, he tapped the guy’s face softly. The old man looked up at him, his eyes sad and miserable.

  “Are you happy with your life?” Alec asked him.

  The man shook his head.

  “I can end all of your suffering for you,” Alec told him. The light of the immortal entered Alec’s eyes and he bared his fangs.

  The man’s eyes widened in terror - he made an attempt to evade Alec’s bite, but he was so drunk that he fell to his side, hitting his head on the pavement.

  Alec stopped. The hunger gnawed at him relentlessly, but so did the terror in the man’s eyes. The drunk had known suffering and sorrow - death would likely be a welcome relief, but Alec couldn’t do it. He kept seeing the warmth in Nicole’s eyes. Did she realize what kind of monster he was?

  Alec backed away. A look of relief and gratitude entered the man’s eyes.

  “I guess I will find me a goat or something,” Alec mumbled to himself.

  Deep laughter emanated from the darkness behind him.

  Alec swung around to face the menacing presence.

  “A vampire with a conscience … now that’s something unusual.” The figure that stepped out of the shadows wore all black. The man’s gray eyes glistened beneath the streetlight. He appeared to be middle aged, but his dark hair was speckled with just a touch of gray.

  The scent of the wolf hit Alec full force. Snarling, he drew his lips back to reveal his fangs.

  The man’s silver gray eyes instantly started to change, taking on a golden-yellow light. For just a moment, Alec saw the stranger’s features twist and merge with the wolf, but then it was gone.

  “I knew if I followed you around long enough, your true nature would rear its ugly head,” he told Alec. “So many of you are scavengers these days.”

  Alec growled, and would have attacked, but the man held up his hand. “Do not take such offense. Instead, look for the truth in what I’ve said.”

  “What is it that you want,” Alec asked, his voice harsh and unyielding.

  “I want nothing more than to protect my family,” he told Alec.

  “What does that have to do with me? Who are you?”

  “I am Lex. I think that maybe we can help each other,” he said.

  “You are the one who went to Ethan,” Alec voiced his suspicion.

  “Yes, your friend the Light Seeker. I saw him one night and knew that he could be useful. He is a vampire masquerading as a human. He has not yet accepted his fate.”

  “What is it that you want,” Alec was still distrustful.

  “Omar is a danger to my family, and he is a danger to your kind. He must be stopped … but I cannot do it alone,” Lex explained.

  “What do you know of the place of light?” Alec asked him.

  “Omar can tell you whatever you want to know about this.”

  “Does it exist?” Alec asked him.

  “Oh yes, it exists … I assure you.”

  “Then take me to it,” Alec told him.

  “That is not something that I can do. I too have been banished from this place.”

  “You can tell me how to get to it.”

  “I could, but it would not do you any good. Omar has the key of entrance to the place called Outerlands.”

  “Why would he keep it from us?” Alec asked.

  “That is something that you must ask him. I know no more than the legends myself. But what I do know is that Omar will kill my granddaughter if given a chance.”

  “Who is that?” Alec asked, wondering if he was talking about Nicole.

  “Who it is does not matter, but I intend to make sure that he never gets to her.”

  “Is it Nicole?” Alec wanted to know. The thought suddenly occurred to him that maybe this was why Omar wanted Nicole.

  Lex shook his head. “It is not Miss Ashe, though she is also in grave danger.”

  “So what do you want me to do … kill one of my own kind?” Alec sneered.

  “Bring his dark secrets into the open, for this is why he is a danger to my granddaughter … and to your young lady. He wants to keep the truth hidden. As long as they live, he risks the truth being revealed.”

  There was a gurgling sound coming from the man that Alec had forgotten was there. He looked over and the drunk was on his back, passed out and choking on his own vomit. Alec reached over and turned the man over so that he would not aspirate and drown. He would hate to spare the man’s life, just to have him die in such a disgusting manner.

  When Alec turned back, Lex was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Nicole pulled into the driveway of the small white house located in the Gentilly Terrace District. This was where she grew up, and often the place she would come back to when she needed to feel the comforts of home. Today what she needed were some answers.

  She found Vicky Trenton in the backyard, trimming the rose bushes. Her mother had always had an affinity for flowers, and she took pride in her garden. Nearly every morning you could find Vicky outside caring for her garden. After Nicole’s stepfather was killed, Vi
cky had never remarried. Instead, she had filled that void with caring for her children.

  And then Jay was gone, and the only child she’d had left was Nicole. Though this should have brought mother and daughter closer together, Vicky seemed to distance herself from Nicole after that. This only added to the guilt that she felt for her little brother’s death. Nicole was sure that her mother blamed her for what happened to Jay, and maybe it was her fault?

  Nicole knelt down next to where her mother was pruning the bottom of the rose bush. There was little resemblance between Vicky Trenton and her daughter. Where Nicole was dark, with brown eyes and hair, Vicky was fair. She still wore her blond hair in the puffy style of the 80s, and she used colored contacts to change her brown eyes to green.

  Her mother looked up and smiled, but her eyes seemed vacant, as if she were miles away. “Well hello Nicole. What brings you here?”

  “Can we go in and get a glass of iced tea?” Nicole asked.

  Vicky shrugged and set the pruning sheers on the ground next to the rosebush. “Sure, I need a break from the sun anyway.”

  Her mother always kept a large picture of iced tea in the fridge so that she could offer visitors a drink when she had company over. She reached into the cupboard and pulled out two tall glasses, filling them both with the brown liquid. From a small bowl, Vicky pulled out some lemon slices and squeezed the juice into the tea.

  Nicole was not sure how to broach the subject of the dark man. Finally she just decided to come right out and ask her mother about him.

  “Mom … do you remember that one time when you took me to the park at night … when I was about five. There was a man there that talked to me after I skinned my knees.”

  Vicky went pale. She was shaking so badly that the tea splashed over the top of the glass. Nicole reached up and took the glass from her and set it on the kitchen table.

  “Are you okay mom?” she asked, alarmed by the distress she saw in her mother’s eyes.

  “Why? Has he come back?” Vicky asked with a whisper.

  “No, but he promised to come back. Why didn’t he, and who was he?” Now she knew that there was something significant about the man, and she intended to find out what it was.

  Vicky sank into the kitchen chair opposite her daughter. She looked down and appeared to be absorbed in the tiny purple flower design on the plastic tablecloth. When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t know why he never came back,” she told her daughter. “I never saw or heard from him again after that night.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was your father,” Vicky confessed.

  “That was Donavan Ashe?”

  Vicky nodded. “Your father and I were never married, but I gave you his name. I did love your stepfather, but not like I loved Donavan.”

  “Then why did you marry Jake?”

  “I had not heard from your father for years, and decided that you needed a normal family life, so I married.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  Vicky again turned away from her daughter. She opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again.

  “He was a vampire … wasn’t he?” Nicole swallowed hard, not sure that she could accept the possibility.

  Vicky looked up sharply. “How do you know about those creatures?”

  Nicole thought it best that her mother not know the whole story of what was happening in her life at the moment. Vicky had already gone through the heartbreak of losing a husband and child. What would losing another child do to her?

  “I’ve met someone and I have suspected that he might be a vampire?”

  Vicky shook her head. “Don’t do it Nicole. They hold a power over women that is unimaginable, but they are cold down to the core. There is also the fact that you will age into an old woman, while he remains young forever.”

  “Why do you say that they are so cold?” Nicole was troubled by her mother’s words.

  “He never came back,” Vicky said, tears forming in her eyes.

  “Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe something happened to him,” Nicole suggested.

  Vicky waved her hand, dismissing the possibility. “What could happen to him … he is a vampire?”

  Nicole thought of Omar and she knew that there was a chance that something had happened to her father. Then there was Bellea. The old woman had told her that she needed to find the man.

  “Mom, you need to tell me everything that you know about Donavan Ashe.”

  With a sigh, Vicky sat back in her chair. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about him. I fell madly in love with someone I really didn’t even know.”

  Nicole could relate. Wasn’t she on the verge of doing exactly the same thing? After all … what did she really know about Alec?

  “Well don’t you think it’s time you enlighten me?” Nicole told her mother.

  “It was strange how I met him,” Vicky began. “I was walking home after my shift at the diner where I worked. You know … Pete Snows, down by the riverfront?”

  Nicole nodded.

  “This man came up behind me and stuck a gun in my back. I couldn’t see him well because it was dark, but he demanded that I hand over my purse. I would have given it to him with no problem. I didn’t have two cents to rub together anyway.” Vicky shrugged her shoulders.

  “Then Donavan was there. He just showed up out of nowhere, and boy did he scare that mugger. That man took off like the devil was after him,” Vicky smiled at the memory.

  “Donavan walked me home, and then he started doing that every night.” Again, there was sadness in her mother’s eyes.

  Nicole said nothing, but waited for her mother to continue. She didn’t want to risk Vicky changing the subject.

  “Then you came along,” Vicky smiled. “He did love you, but he changed then. He became more distant. Then one day he went away and I didn’t see him again until that night in the park. He’d sent a message that I should bring you there, so that he could see you.”

  “What did you know about him? Who was he before he changed?” Nicole wanted to know.

  Vicky shook her head. “He never talked about his life before he was a …” she couldn’t seem to bring herself to say the word vampire.

  “A vampire,” Nicole finished for her.

  Vicky nodded her head. “He did claim to have brothers that were the same as he.”

  “Go on,” Nicole urged.

  “He told me that the original vampires were really a species, but that their bite was poisonous to humans, especially those that shared the same genetic makeup as the original vampires. I think that’s what he said.”

  Vicky put her hands up in the air. “That’s really all I know.”

  “Where do you think I can find him?”

  “If I had known that, I would have tried to find him myself.” Vicky mother smiled.

  Nicole’s eyes strayed to a calendar that hung on the wall next to the fridge. Jay’s little face stared back at her from the top of the calendar. It had been a Mother’s Day gift to Vicky that year. He had made it for her in Kindergarten, and had been so proud of it. The calendar was still open to the month that Jay died.

  Like every time that she thought of Jay, Nicole’s heart shattered into a million fragments. Tears stung her eyes. It had been three years now, and still the wounds would not heal.

  “Mom … do you hate me because of Jay?”

  Vicky’s face twisted with grief and tears streamed down her eyes. “No … it was just meant to be.”

  Nicole was not convinced. “I’m so sorry mom. If I could do that day all over again …”

  Vicky cut her off. “There’s no sense of dwelling on what cannot be.”

  Nicole leaned over and hugged her mom. “I should be going now.”

  “Don’t go looking for him. You belong in the light … not the darkness,” she told Nicole.

  * * * *

  The Lafayette cemetery was not just a place of beauty and tr
anquility. It was a place to reflect on grief and loss. This is where Nicole would go whenever her pain became too much to endure. She sat on the small bench near the tomb. It was beautiful, with depictions of angels and heaven, inlaid into the surface of the tomb. On the plaque were the names of several members of her family that had come and gone before her. The last name on the plaque was Jason Trenton. This was the one name on the plaque that shouldn’t be there. He had gone to heaven much too soon.

  She could not stop the flow of tears and was glad for the privacy of the empty cemetery. Nicole was so lost in her sorrow that she did not notice the fading light, or how the black clouds obscured the sun, darkening the sky even more. As the light faded and dusk settled on New Orleans, Nicole sat on the bench, crippled with the darkness that gripped her soul.

  Emerging from her haze of self-pity, she was suddenly alert. From the corner of her eye she’d caught a flash of movement nearby. Nicole did not move, giving no indication that she’d seen them. She moved her eyes, but not her head. They stood behind a tomb, maybe a hundred feet away. They were vampires - she could sense the predator in them. Her head ached as they tried to crawl into her thoughts.

  She wondered what they were waiting for. Why hadn’t they descended on her? She was alone and completely defenseless against these creatures of the night. Why did they wait?

  Without giving any hint that she knew they were there, she stood up from the bench and started walking toward the cemetery exit. Just outside the exit, her car was parked at the curb. It was dark - almost too dark to see.

  She heard them behind her and picked up her pace, still not daring to look at them. With her heart pounding, she started to run, though she doubted she would get very far.

  “That’s right … run Nicole!” The laughing female voice called out.

  Nicole stopped and turned to face them. There were two of them, a young man with blond hair that hung in his eyes, and a woman. The woman was dressed all in black, her red hair in a punk style that was not so common anymore.

  “What do you want?” Nicole asked them, her voice even and strong. She would not betray her fear. They seemed to feed off of fear, as much as blood.