Jeaniene Frost - Eternal Kiss of Darkness

Kira’s voice had risen in her agitation, and her pulse accelerated again. Mencheres said nothing, knowing she was trying to reconcile the facts out loud more than anything else. It was always frightening for humans when they realized their belief in the superiority of their race was false. When they realized how vulnerable they truly were to the other species that shared the dark with them.

“Besides,” she said at last, expelling the word on a ragged sigh. “No matter how many people I’d tell, who would believe me? I’d never believed any of the clients who used to talk about weird, impossible things, and I heard more than a few of those stories as a private investigator . . .”

Kira’s eyes widened even as she stopped talking in midsentence. Mencheres couldn’t hear the thoughts form in her mind, but from her expression, she was realizing some of the stories she’d summarily dismissed might have been true. Then she looked around the darkened yard as if seeing it with new eyes, her breath hitching.

Mencheres watched with pity, knowing it was the moment Kira truly accepted that all of this was real. The small part of her that still hoped there was another explanation had finally given up. He’d observed this same mental surrender in humans before, too many times to count, and though Kira might believe she could return to a normal life with this information, Mencheres knew she couldn’t.

“You do not want this knowledge,” he said, his voice quiet but firm. “It will destroy your life. You will see every shadow in a different way, and every strange sound will make you wonder—is that a person, or a monster? Humans who are not part of a vampire’s or ghoul’s line do not do well with this information. Time has proven that repeatedly.”

What he didn’t tell Kira was that time also proved that such humans usually ended up dead. Eventually, those mortals tried to make someone believe them about the supernatural world, and an unclaimed human spreading tales about the undead was a threat to both species. Both vampires and ghouls did claim a certain number of humans as property, but those humans were specially chosen, then removed from their own world. They lived with their undead protectors in full knowledge that if they spilled the secret about either species to mainstream society, they would be eliminated.

Such knowledge wouldn’t reassure Kira, however, so Mencheres kept it to himself. He really didn’t want her climbing out of any more windows in the future.

“You’ll let me go unharmed?” she asked at last, seeming to come to a decision.

“As soon as I remove these memories from your mind,” Mencheres promised.

She gave him a measuring look. “I’ll need to call my boss, make some excuse about missing work. I can’t afford to get fired.”

“I’ll see to it that your employment situation is taken care of.” But Mencheres wasn’t about to let her call her employer even under his watchful eye. Kira worked for a private investigator; the line could be traced, or she could use code words indicating danger that Mencheres might not recognize. He would like to hope that Kira wouldn’t do such a thing in light of her new capitulation, but he was too jaded to trust in hope.

“I need to call my sister.” Her voice hardened in a way that it hadn’t when Kira spoke of her job. “She’s not well. I can’t let her worry my disappearing without telling her something.”

Mencheres inclined his head. “I will make arrangements for you to speak with her tomorrow.”

Kira took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “All right. How long should it take until you can erase my memories?”

He mentally calculated how much blood he’d given Kira. It had been several swallows at least, and his blood was very potent. “A few days at minimum, a week at most.”

She winced but didn’t reply. Again, Mencheres was impressed with her fortitude. Kira had attempted to run away and had repeatedly argued with him to let her go, but she hadn’t resorted to begging or hysterics. What sort of person was she, to make her so unusually strong in the face of such trying circumstances?

If he still had his visions, he could look into the future and see exactly what kind of person Kira was. Nothing revealed character more than seeing the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of decisions. But Mencheres couldn’t see the future anymore. He drove back his immediate flash of anger at that. Railing at the gods over what they gave—and then took back—was useless.

“All right,” Kira said again, bringing his attention back to her. “I can’t believe I’ll be spending up to a week with vampires, but . . . all right.”

Mencheres hid a smile, his mood lightening as he saw the wry way Kira shook her head. She wasn’t the only person surprised at this recent turn of events. A part of him also couldn’t believe he’d just committed himself to being housebound with the same human who had ruined his plans this morning.

“Are you ready to go inside now?” Mencheres asked, offering her his arm.

Kira’s mouth curled as she took it after a moment of hesitation. “I guess so. Tell me, vampire, what’s your name?”

What was one more thing to erase from her mind? “Mencheres.”

“Sounds Spanish,” she murmured, looking him over as best she could in the dark.

“Egyptian.” Yet another detail he’d have to erase from her later. What was it about Kira that made him so uncharacteristically talkative?

“Ah.” She smiled then, the first one he’d seen that didn’t look forced. “So, Mencheres the Egyptian vampire, are you really old, or are you as young as you look?”

He gave her a sideways look as he began walking back toward the house, feeling the oddest pang as he contemplated their age difference. “I’m older than dirt,” he answered dryly.

“A vampire with a sense of humor. I really didn’t know that existed,” she quipped with equal dryness.

Mencheres didn’t answer. First, he was telling her things he had no reason to reveal, now he was joking about his age. How strange. He’d thought his sense of humor had expired a long time ago.

“I suppose putting that room back together will give me something to do for the next few hours,” Kira noted with a sigh.

“That is not necessary, you’ll . . . stay in another room.”

Mencheres almost tripped as he bit back the words that had so nearly crossed his lips: You’ll stay in my room. What possessed him even to think such a thing? He hadn’t found his sense of humor—he’d lost his mind.

Undead senility. There weren’t very many vampires left who were older than he was. Maybe it was an actual condition after all.

Kira awoke with her heart pounding, her arms lashing out against an attacker who wasn’t there. For several panicked seconds, she couldn’t seem to merge reality with the image of that thing tearing open her stomach. Then she fell back against the pillows, panting. Just a nightmare, only a nightmare.

Except it was more than that. Kira willed her breathing to slow as she counted backward from thirty. By the time she’d reached one, her heart had stopped racing, and she was no longer gasping. Another set of backward counting took care of the tremble in her hands. By the third set, Kira could get out of bed without constant images of the ghoul’s face bombarding her mind. He’s dead, he can’t hurt you anymore, she reminded herself firmly.

Besides, though the circumstances were different, this wasn’t the first time someone had attacked her, yet she’d survived. Those awful memories might show up again in her dreams, but she wasn’t about to give her attacker’s ghosts—either of them—power over her once she was awake.