Jean Pamfiloff - Vampires Need Not...Apply

Straddling her, Kinich pinned her wrists to the floor. His turquoise eyes shifted to hungry black, and fangs protruded from his mouth. “You smell delicious. Like sweet sunshine.”

Such a beautiful face , she thought, mesmerized by Kinich’s eyes. Once upon a time his skin had glowed golden almost, a vision of elegant masculinity with full lips and sharp cheekbones. But now, now he was refined with an exotic, dangerous male beauty too exquisite for words.

Ex-deity turned mortal, turned vampire. Hypnotic. He is… hypnotic.

He lowered his head toward her neck, and her will suddenly snapped back into place. “No! Kinich, no!” She squirmed under his grasp. Without her hands free, she couldn’t defend herself. “I’m pregnant.”

He stilled and peered into her eyes.

Pain. So much pain. That was all she saw.

“A baby?” he asked.

She nodded cautiously.

Then something cold and deadly flickered in his eyes. His head plunged for her neck, and she braced for the pain of having her neck ripped out.

“Penelope!” Zac sacked Kinich, knocking him to the floor. “Go!” he commanded.

Penelope rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled from the room as it was overrun with several more of Kinich’s brethren: the perpetually drunk Acan; the Goddess of the Hunt they called Camaxtli; and the Mistress of Bees they called—oh, who the hell could remember her weird Mayan name?

“Penelope! Penelope!” she heard Kinich scream. “I want to drink her! I must drink her!”

Penelope curled into a ball on the floor in the hallway, unable to stop herself from crying. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Helena appeared at her side. “Oh, Pen. I’m so sorry. I promise he’ll be okay after a few days. He just needs to eat.” She helped Penelope sit up. “Let’s move you somewhere safe.”

Penelope wiped away the streaks of tears from her cheeks and took her friend’s hand to stand.

The grunts and screams continued in the other room.

“I can’t believe he attacked me, even after I told him.” Tears continued to trickle from Penelope’s eyes. Why hadn’t he stopped? Didn’t he love her?

“In his defense, you really do smell yummy. Kind of like Tang.”

“Not funny,” Penelope responded.

“Sorry.” Helena braced Penelope with an arm around her waist and guided her to a bedroom in the other wing of the house.

Helena deposited Penelope on the large bed and turned toward the bathroom. “I’ll get you a warm washcloth.”

Ironically, Penelope’s mind dove straight for a safe haven—that meant away from Kinich and toward her job, which generally provided many meaty distractions, such as impending doom and/or anything having to do with Cimil, the ex–Goddess of the Underworld.

“Wait.” Penelope looked up at Helena, who’d become her steady rock of reason these last few weeks. “What happens next?”

Helena paused for a moment. “Like I told you, Kinich needs time to adjust.”

Penelope shook her head. “No. I mean, you heard Emma’s grandmother; without Niccolo and Guy, we can’t defeat the Maaskab. We have to free our men.”

“Well—”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Pen interrupted. “We can’t release Chaam, but—”

“Actually,” Helena broke in. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

“What?”

“We’ve been looking for another way to free them, and I think we found it.”

“Found what?” Penelope asked.

“A tablet.”

New Year’s Day. New York City

“Save me. Please save me.”

“Dammit. Where are you?” Thirty-four-year-old Antonio Acero frantically searched the dark, empty, cavernous room, helplessly listening to the woman’s cries.

“Time is running out. You must work faster,” she wailed.

“I am doing everything I can,” he called out, his voice bouncing off the bare, smooth walls. “But I can’t get to you. If you just tell me…” Two catlike eyes punched through the darkness, sucking the words from his mind. He wanted to see more of her, to touch her. He felt like he might become the one who needed saving if he did not.

“Save me. Please save me,” the woman repeated. “Time is running out. I have the answers you need, but you must work faster. Destiny—”

Antonio catapulted from his deep slumber, dripping in cold sweat. “ Puta madre , ” he whispered and flipped on his stainless steel reading lamp. It had been the same damned nightmare every night for the last month. Ever since he’d found that fucking tablet in Mexico. Or had it found him?

Doesn’t matter. It’s what you were looking for, the answer to your prayers.

“Everything all right, baby?” A silky arm slipped out from beneath the steel-gray satin sheets and rubbed his bare thigh.

“Uh… yeah. Sure.” He looked down at the mop of brown hair. Her face was as obscure as her name.

Mierda. What was he doing? It didn’t matter how many women he brought home, he couldn’t wash her—the woman in his dreams—from his mind.

He slid from bed and plucked his discarded tee and boxer briefs from the floor. On his way to the kitchen, he slipped them on and tried not to punch something.

Dammit. The dreams were only getting worse, more vivid, more frantic with every passing night.

He yanked open the fridge, pushed past the Odwallas and beer, and grabbed the soy milk. He knew this madness didn’t make sense, but what the hell did that matter? The dreams kept coming. Scotch—the good stuff—sex, hypnosis didn’t matter. Every night she came. Every night he woke. Every day he worked and didn’t stop until his mind reached exhaustion. And even then, he couldn’t stop thinking about the tablet.

Or her…

Shit. What was happening to him?

He went to his lab, a room at the back of his sparsely decorated apartment, and flipped on the phosphorescent lights, stopping briefly to remove the black stone tablet from a rat-filled cage. He carefully unwrapped it from the plastic sleeve and shook his head. The damned thing was like a goddamned Mayan Rubik’s Cube.

“You think you can win, don’t you?” No fucking chance, pinche jodida tablet. He laid it down and stroked its rough surface. “You and I, we finish this tonight.”

Yes. He was close to unlocking its secrets. And when he did… then what? Would she be there? The woman with the haunting eyes? The woman he knew in his soul he was destined to meet?

Goddammit, he fucking hoped so.

He placed a welder’s mask on his face and leaned over the tablet, a pair of long tweezers in hand. He reached up and adjusted the overhead light, focusing the powerful beam on the corner of the object. This had to be it, his last test to prove out his theory.

“Steady hand, coño . Steady hand.” He carefully scraped off a tiny particle and placed it on a glass slide. He removed the mask and wiped his brow.

“Coming back to bed, baby?” a silken voice purred from behind. A soft pair of arms reached around his waist and a set of full breasts pushed against his back.

Is she still here? Doesn’t she have her own bed to sleep in? He placed the slide under his microscope. “Yeah. Be right there.”

Yes. Just as he suspected. The black jade had again transformed. He’d left it encased for ten hours with his two most aggressive rats. The day before that, he’d exposed it to his goldenzelle orchid. The day before that, frogs. Each life-form, plant or animal, rearranged the configuration of the microscopic crystals and the hieroglyphs.

“It’s like the damned thing is alive,” he muttered to himself. And now he knew for certain his hypothesis held water. Subjecting the tablet to the right combination of elements would unlock its power and, hopefully, open the portal. A portal that could access any dimension at any point in time.