Page 19 of Incandescence

Maya

A scream of denial built in my throat, but the sound froze before it could escape. Alexander was now a vampire. The red shadowing of his eyes betrayed his inner monster as surely as the bloodsucker who’d made him that way.

“Charley, what is it?” Alexander asked, sounding alarmed, yet somehow defeated too, as if he knew the awful truth.

“It’s...your eyes,” I whispered.

He stepped forward, but stilled as I retreated from him. He shook his head. “I’m not like him. I’m nothing like him.”

I glanced at the vampire who’d ruined so many lives.

Who’d killed even more. But only the good died young.

Already the hole in his head was closing over, his chest wound no longer bleeding.

Even his pasty look of death was nowhere near as pronounced.

Only when the vampire looked at me, a lazy smile of triumph curling his lips and his eyes deader than a snake’s, did I realize Alexander was right.

He wasn’t anything like this bloodsucker. Alexander still had a soul. A heart.

I drew my gaze away from the centuries-old monster to lock my stare on Alexander. “I believe you.”

The residual red in his stare disappeared, replaced by whatever powerful emotion he was feeling right then. My mouth dried and hope fluttered deep. If I didn’t know better, I’d say love shone from his eyes.

From his soul.

If only my belly wasn’t churning and quivering with need at the scent of vampire blood. It’d taken monumental effort to block my hunger, to deny the scents that pulled at me. It was only my focus on Alexander that kept me grounded.

Jasper limped toward me, pushing his big, black head under my hand with a whine of doggy need. I stroked his soft fur, my stare not once leaving Alexander as I said, “And now we need to finish this.”

Understanding flashed across his face even as the bloodsucker broke out with a belly laugh that chilled me to the bone.

“Do either one of you really think you can defeat me?” He smirked.

“If it wasn’t for the fact your blood is far superior to any I’ve ingested before, I’d have hunted you both down and enjoyed killing yo as effortlessly as an ant stamped underfoot. ”

Alexander straightened, facing the vampire with unflinching vitality.

“Power isn’t from how many people you can kill with your bare hands, or how strong you are physically.

True power comes from here.” He tapped his heart.

“Real strength is the love shared by two people. Love that you’ll never know, no matter how much you might wish for it. ”

“I don’t want or need love,” the vampire snarled. “It makes a person weak, not strong.”

Alexander stepped forward. “And yet love is one of the reasons you brought me those other women, isn’t it?” Certainty filled his face. “You watched me fuck them, hoping I’d fall in love with at least one of them, even as you wished it was you who had the power to feel something...anything.”

My pulse skipped a beat. If what Alexander was saying was true, the vampire would have been elated at the instant connection I’d experienced with Alexander. The bastard had undoubtedly fed on their emotions as much as their blood.

Alexander took another step. “When you first brought Charley into your revolting nest and saw our chemistry, you craved it too, didn’t you? Except you’ll never have that. You’re not even human. You’ll never experience anything but emptiness, despair and hunger.”

My mouth dropped open. The vampire almost looked...beaten. Like every word wounded him deeply, infecting his power.

Alexander shook his head. “Good God, little wonder you only gave us drops of blood. You didn’t just want to keep us weak, you wanted us to also experience the same emptiness as you every single damn day of your cursed eternity.”

The vampire didn’t bother denying it. “Enough talk. If you think I need you, you’re wrong. It’s past time I killed you both...I’ll search the whole planet if I have to for new donors.”

He opened his mouth, his fangs lengthening, his eyes growing crimson.

The monster Alexander had known in all his forty-six years in the nest had probably never revealed this side of himself, his true side that he hid with such horrible ease.

His whole face changed, from the almost cherubic placid man everyone saw, to a hard malevolence that made him look like someone else.

A someone who could almost have been handsome if not for the evil shining through, his corrupted soul that was beyond repair. A man—vampire—on the verge of a mental implosion.

A vampire so intent on finishing off his prey once and for all, he didn’t appear to hear the silent tread behind him.

His eyes sharpened a microsecond before Newry cut the sword through the air.

An expression of relief crossed the vampire’s face, before his head dropped and rolled along the floor, his body crumpling lifelessly alongside.

“The first time you visited my house you took my Nancy. Now it’s my turn to take from you.” Doctor Newry didn’t drop his long silver blade, which dripped with vampire blood. Instead he gripped it as if it was his lifeline, one that might appease his daughter’s death.

I stared at the vampire, whose body didn’t even twitch in final death throes, and whose blood was turning a sludge-black. It was odd, the sense of nothingness filling me. But then all my remorse and despair had been saved for those women who’d died at the bloodsucker’s hands.

Women like Sophie.

I turned to the doctor, nothingness falling aside for gratitude. Newry had made a life, a future between me and Alexander possible. I stepped toward the older man simultaneously with ferocious, stabbing pain lancing through my belly.

I fell to my knees with a strangled hiss.

Alexander shouted my name and I looked at him with wide, terrified eyes, before I surrendered to the darkness that took away all my pain.

I woke gagging on the blood streaming down my throat. I swallowed convulsively and pulled my head away, sucking in a startled breath. My agony was gone. My eyes flew open and I turned back, meeting Alexander’s stare.

My head was draped on his lap, and as he withdrew his wrist I saw the telltale crimson line, which told me exactly whose blood I’d been drinking. My eyes widened even as I glanced at Newry, who stood looking down at us on the floor. My horrified gaze returned to Alexander. “What have you done?”

He didn’t look even slightly repentant. “I saved your life.”

I shook my head. “I can’t drink human blood...can I?”

The doctor sighed. “Who said he’s human?” At my gasp, he added, “No human lives to his age without gray hair, wrinkles and health ailments.”

I blinked at Alexander, and he said, “I’m not a vampire, but I’m not a mortal anymore either.”

“So...what are you?” I bit into my bottom lip. “What am I?”

Alexander stroked my hair. “That’s what we’re hoping to find out.” As I struggled to sit, he put a hand between my shoulder blades and assisted me up, adding, “But not right now. Tonight we sleep, and tomorrow, in full daylight, we enter the nest and find out what we can.”

“The vampire’s library?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. With luck we’ll find our answers there.”

He pushed to his feet before offering his hand to me. I accepted, noting his ease of strength, and my own surge of energy. I frowned. “How is it that your blood took away my pain?”

He looked at Newry. “To be honest, we had no idea if my blood would be an acceptable substitute. Turns out it was...not that I was left with any choice.”

I shivered with realization. I’d been close to death. Alexander really had saved my life.

He brushed the back of his hand down my face. “We stick together, okay?”

I stared at the black blood stains on the floor. The vampire who had ruined so many lives was nowhere in sight. “You buried him?” I asked.

Alexander shook his head. “Not even minutes after you blacked out, his whole body dissolved. His vile blood is all that is left behind.”

I shuddered, hardly able to believe such a powerful being was dead. “He’s really gone.”

“Yes.” I turned to the doctor. “Thank you for coming back here and saving us.”

He smiled. “No thanks necessary. It was my honor to rid the world of the monster who claimed the life of my daughter.”

Alexander turned to him. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I really am.”

The doctor nodded. “Yeah, not half as sorry as me.” Newry swung away to head into the kitchen. “I think I’m in need of a strong drink.”

I brushed my lips over Alexander’s as he watched Newry walk away. I took Alexander’s hand to lead him to the guest room. After so much pain and suffering, we needed to celebrate being alive.

Alexander slipped under the covers then reached for me, taking me into his arms and nuzzling my throat, my hair, my breasts as he murmured sweet nothings that warmed my heart even as his touch warmed my body.

“The doctor—”

“Won’t hear a thing,” he said against my ear.

We took our time taking off each other’s clothes, and I moved across the mattress so that my legs draped over his hips as he lay on his side facing me.

The satin head of his cock was already wet with pre-cum, and I shivered with need at the hot, pulsating length of him as he aligned himself to my center.

We couldn’t kiss in this position, but in that moment, I didn’t care. He slipped inside me in one careful thrust, then moved slowly back and forth in a rhythm that felt all kinds of right.

I lay spread open for him, my breasts jiggling and my womb warming with pleasure. I didn’t know much about sex, only what this intensely passionate man had taught me. But I didn’t need to be experienced in the sexual arts to know that this rightness every time we joined wasn’t typical for couples.

I closed my eyes, pleasure singing through my body in a growing chorus that I knew would reach the heights sooner rather than later.

Alexander growled as though holding himself back, even as he increased his rhythm, the pace only fast enough that our flesh gently slapped and wouldn’t be heard by anyone but ourselves.

Not that I cared anymore. He could have lifted me in his arms and slammed me against the wall before fucking me like a primal alpha and I wouldn’t have stopped him.

Nothing was more important in that moment than reaching the orgasm steadily building inside me, a pressure so intense I knew it’d be next to impossible to hold back my—

I clapped a hand over my mouth and screamed into my palm as pleasure imploded inside me. Starbursts of wonder rippled through my body and made me arch against him.

The moment I let go, Alexander followed suit, his breath hissing at his climax, which pulsed deep inside me, his eyes bright with ecstasy and more than a little bit of awe.