The Bite Before Christmas Read online

  It took another long minute, but he finally, slowly turned around. He met her gaze, but looked none too happy about it.

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” he asked, eyes narrowed. “You really believe you’re a vampire.”

  She nearly laughed at that. Yes, a hundred or so years of living the life had a way of convincing a person.

  Her lack of response must have been answer enough for him, because he blew out a breath and let his chin fall to his chest.

  “Fine, I’ll stay. For a while. But when the sun comes up and I don’t burst into flames, I’m going to want to know what I’m really doing here.”

  It probably wasn’t the worst night Sean had ever spent, but it was up there.

  On the one hand, he was bored out of his skull. Vivian refused to drop her ridiculous assertion that she was a vampire, he was a vampire, everyone, apparently, was a vampire. It made him think of that stupid Dr Pepper jingle from the seventies, and then he couldn’t get the song out of his head.

  And since all she wanted to talk about was how he’d become a supposed vampire, and all the things he needed to know about being a bloodsucking goon. And he wouldn’t let her talk about all of her ridiculous undead delusions…. Well, it made for a very tense, very quiet evening.

  On the other hand, a part of him was enjoying Vivian’s company. He’d spent the last two years ogling her from afar. Trying not to be obvious as he watched her slip in and out of his office, stealing glances at her while they worked.

  He wouldn’t say he’d had a crush on her, exactly, but he was a red-blooded male and she was a very attractive woman. He suspected he’d lusted after her on and off the same as any other man with a flaming-hot secretary would.

  Then there’d been the night he’d told her he was dying, when her upset and his efforts to comfort her had transformed into something more.

  The “something more” could have been just one of those things. A brief physical encounter that had helped them both blow off steam, but meant nothing and would never be repeated.

  Unfortunately, it had gone the other way for him. He hadn’t been able to get it out of his head since the moment he’d climaxed inside of her.

  It was as though being with her had flipped a switch in his brain and opened a door he’d never considered before. A Pandora’s box of thoughts and feelings he had yet to come to terms with or put into any sort of order.

  He liked order. He liked things neat and tidy. It was why he had gotten into journalism to begin with, and later joined DNN. Not every story he reported had a pat, happy ending, but his job did. His job had a certain cadence to it; a mix of excitement and adventure, but within a very organized structure.

  Which was probably why he was having such a hard time wrapping his mind around the vampire garbage. It wasn’t like he didn’t believe they existed. Everyone knew that they did, and everyone also knew that they weren’t quite the soulless, bloodsucking killers early movies and novels made them out to be.

  That was all well and good, but didn’t exactly give Sean the warm fuzzies. He couldn’t explain it, but the idea that vampires could blend in and walk amongst regular folks without anyone being the wiser…it just didn’t sit well with him.

  Now here Vivian was, telling him that she, his trusted assistant, was one of them. And that somewhere along the line, he’d been turned into one of them, too, by her apparently vamped-out friend.

  It was too much to comprehend, too much he didn’t want to comprehend. He was pretty much hoping it was all a bad dream and that any minute, he would wake up. Still sick, maybe. Still moderately horny from spending so many unconscious hours wondering how he could convince Vivian to untie her bathrobe and come sit on his lap, but also still one hundred percent human, thankyouverymuch.

  The problem was, this didn’t feel much like a dream. It was weird enough, definitely, but he’d never had a dream that seemed so endless and boring. Usually, they flew by and he found himself waking up before the end, wanting to go back to sleep for just a few more minutes to find out what else might happen.

  But this one—if it was, indeed, the dream he was hoping for—was dragging on endlessly. So far, they’d sat in silence for the first two hours, then watched the entire Matrix trilogy (and he only really liked the first movie), and played half a dozen hands of gin rummy. He was b-o-r-e-d and starting to think about jabbing a needle or something into his thigh to wake himself the hell up.

  Was it possible to be a vampire and still be bored stiff? (No pun intended.) Weren’t the undead supposed to have superpowers or something to keep them occupied, even when there was nothing interesting on television?

  Deciding to test Vivian’s insane claim—because, what the heck, she didn’t need to know and it couldn’t hurt anything here in la-la land—he concentrated as hard as he could on turning into a bat. Bat, bat, bat, he chanted silently, picturing one of the brown, flat-nosed, wide-winged little creatures.

  Yeah, nothing. Dream Viv had a few screws loose, that was for sure.

  And Dream Sean was experiencing hunger pangs. He called gin and laid out his cards, suddenly realizing that he was starving. But no matter how many food items he imagined biting into—including all of his favorites—not a single one appealed to him. Not pizza. Not lobster bisque. Not even Mister Cho’s famous fried rice or sweet and sour pork, which had gotten him through more late nights and bad situations than he could count with his socks off.

  Nothing. Instead, he found his mouth watering over the thought of drinking more of that thick red stuff Vivian had poured down his throat when he’d first “woken up.”

  And how gross was that, if it really had been blood? Or blood substitute, as she’d claimed.

  It didn’t help, either, that she’d been sipping the stuff throughout their time together, hunkered down in front of the sofa. He could smell it, even from across the full length of the low coffee table.

  Sweet and metallic, it tickled his nose, making his stomach rumble and his gums ache. Especially right around the fake fangs she’d somehow adhered to his real teeth.

  Another oddity in a night brimming with them. She must have bumped and rubbed his gums a lot while sticking the artificial incisors in.

  See, that was a perfectly logical explanation. There were perfectly logical explanations for everything that had happened, and even Vivian’s belief that she—and he—was a vampire.

  On that one, the answer was clear: She was a closet nut case.

  His stomach clenched again, his hunger and the scent of whatever the junk was that she was drinking making him feel edgy and weak. Desperate.

  And to make matters worse, she’d just taken a drink of the goopy ruby liquid he was this close to killing for. A drop remained on her lower lip, taunting him until the tip of her sexy pink tongue darted out to lick it off.

  Shit. His dick was a steel pipe in his pants. His blood felt like each individual cell had grown spikes that ripped and tore as they flowed through his veins. And his breathing was choppy, shallow.

  He was on the verge of something not good, and if he didn’t get out of here now, five minutes ago, he was seriously worried about what he might do. Violence wasn’t like him, but that didn’t keep the sensation from thrumming through his brain, pounding in his chest, making his palms sweat.

  “All right, that’s it,” he bit out, his patience finally snapping clean through. Pushing up from the floor, he stood with his hands on his hips and glared down at Vivian.

  “You’ve had your fun,” he told her. “Played your little game. You’ve kept me here all night, for whatever warped reasons you think you had. But I’m done. The sun’s coming up, and I need to get me some bacon and eggs.”

  He pictured a big, hearty breakfast on a plate in front of him, and felt his stomach lurch. Okay, that wasn’t good. He liked bacon and eggs. And toast and home fries…the whole nine yards of Farmer Brown/Trucker John crack-of-dawn fare. But the thought of chowing down on them had never made him want to vom
it before.

  Maybe it was the tumor. He’d had bouts of lost appetite before, and aversions to certain food items, so maybe this was just an extension of that. One more sign that he didn’t have a lot of time left.

  Unaware of the direction his thoughts had taken, Vivian climbed to her feet in a rush. Her robe gaped open, revealing long stretches of pale, shapely legs, and Sean’s gut jolted again. Not with nausea this time, but with good old-fashioned lust.

  He didn’t miss the flash behind his eyes or the sudden throb of his so-called fangs, either.

  Christ, this evening was getting stranger by the minute.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t,” she said, voice thready with concern. Her fingers fumbled nervously with the sash at her waist.

  “Boy, you’re really not going to let this go, are you?” He shook his head, annoyed, frustrated, fed up. “Fine, tell you what. Let’s just get this over with. You think you’re a vampire. Hell, you think I’m a vampire. You want me to drink blood and hide under the bed until nightfall, but that’s not going to happen. I’m going to prove to you once and for all that this is just some crazy fantasy you’ve cooked up in your mind to convince yourself that I’m not dying.”

  Wow, that actually made a lot of sense. He hadn’t thought of it before, but telling herself he was a vampire was the perfect solution to his announcement that he was dying. If he was a vampire, he could theoretically live forever. And making herself one, too, meant they could live together forever.

  He never would have suspected that Vivian suffered from mental illness. Nothing in her personnel records had ever hinted at such a thing, but maybe sharing his secret with her the other night—and then giving in to temptation and making love with her—had tipped her over the edge and caused some kind of psychotic break.

  There was only one way to prove to her—to them both—that this wasn’t a fairy tale, and she couldn’t save him by fictitiously turning him into a supernatural creature of the night. With any luck, it would also startle him awake, if this really was a dream, so he figured it was a win-win situation.

  Stalking past her—she smelled like cinnamon; how had he never noticed before that she smelled deliciously like cinnamon? he crossed the living room and grabbed hold of the heavy mauve draperies.

  “Sean, no!” Vivian shouted. He could hear her bare feet thumping against the carpeted floor as she raced toward him.

  She was only a few yards away, but in the split second it took her to reach him, he gave a yank and parted the curtains to the lovely gold-and-pink hues of the coming dawn.

  With a gasp, Vivian threw herself to the side, hiding in the shadows behind the unopened section of window.

  See, Sean thought triumphantly, nothing. She’s completely delusional. And then, I’ll have to make sure she gets the best treatment available before I check out.

  Over the scent of cinnamon Vivian was still throwing off—burnt cinnamon now, rank with her fear—he smelled smoke. And not just any smoke, it smelled like…

  “Sean,” came her horrified whisper. “Your hands.”

  He glanced down, and for a moment couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. The faintest rays of sunlight shone over his entire form, and every bit of exposed skin was beginning to bubble, to burn…to send up tiny whorls of smoke.

  The smell, he realized as his eyes slowly sent signals to his groggy brain, was his own burning flesh.

  TYPE B-POSITIVE

  “What the hell?” He jerked back, lifting his hands to examine them more closely…only to have his palms sting as they now came in contact with the early morning sunlight and began to scorch.

  “Shit,” he swore, taking another jerky step back, and then another.

  A sound of panic, of urgency, came from Vivian’s direction as she lurched forward, dragging the curtains closed without ever stepping into so much as a millimeter of daylight herself, and pushed him forcefully backward to the sofa.

  “Sit,” she ordered before bustling off down the hall.

  Like he had a choice. When his calves hit the edge of the couch, he sank down on the thick cushions, but his knees were so weak, he’d have dropped to the floor if the sofa hadn’t been there to catch him.

  Holy Jesus. The sun had actually burned him—and not in the fun, just-got-back-from-a-Jamaican-vaca sort of way.

  And it hurt. Shock had kept him from feeling anything for the first couple of minutes, but now the blisters covering his skin stung like a thousand tiny pinpricks.

  Not just his hands, either, but his face and neck, as well. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks, but couldn’t tell if both were burned or not. It was just a sensation of blisters upon blisters.

  So maybe this wasn’t a dream, after all. As much as he didn’t want to admit that this might be real, he wasn’t sure he had a choice. One couldn’t feel pain inside a dream, could they?

  While he was staring at his hands and trying to come to terms with what was going on, Vivian returned to sit beside him, dumping a handful of items on the coffee table.

  “I told you,” she said with barely suppressed accusation. “I tried to warn you.”

  As angry as she sounded, she was completely gentle when she uncapped a tube of ointment and started spreading the greasy stuff in a thin layer across his face. His nose, his cheeks, his forehead, even his lips. Then she took his arms by the wrists and covered his hands, both front and back.

  If he hadn’t been in a fog of confusion and smarting from second-degree burns, he knew her attentions would have turned him on big-time. As it was, the soft, even strokes of her fingertips had heat pooling in his groin and made him imagine those same fingers caressing him in passion rather than nursing.

  “You’ll heal completely in a couple of hours,” she told him, “but this will help with the pain.”

  Setting aside the ointment, she opened another bottle of the stuff she’d fed him earlier, stuck a straw straight in, and held it to his lips. He met her gaze for a moment, even though everything in him was screaming for him to drink.

  “I know what you think, but I also know how much you want this. Just drink it. I’ll pinch your nose for you, if you want me to, but trust me that you’ll feel better afterward, and it will help you to heal a lot faster.”

  He weighed his options for all of half a second before realizing that since this apparently wasn’t a dream—damn it to hell—everything she’d told him must be true. From here on out, he vowed, he was listening to her and trusting her with his newly immortal life.

  Leaning forward, he wrapped his lips around the straw and sucked. Slowly at first, then faster when the taste of the…It’s blood, Spicer. Face it and deal with it.…sent fireworks of satisfaction bursting through his entire system.

  Screw bacon and eggs, and even Mister Cho’s many Asian delights. He wanted this. He wanted more, and he wanted it forever.

  Vivian watched the tendons of Sean’s throat convulse as he drank. Putting him in front of an open window at dawn wouldn’t have been her first choice for convincing him he was really a vampire, but it certainly seemed to have done the trick. If he kept drinking her synth like this, she’d have to make a blood run sooner rather than later.

  “So you believe me now, right?” she asked, just to be safe.

  For a minute, he didn’t answer. Then his straw made a sucking sound as he emptied the bottle and he released it with a sigh.

  “I think I have to,” he responded carefully. “I’m not sure I like it, though.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She dropped her gaze, studying the familiar rose pattern on the front of her robe and toying with the ends of its sash. “I was so upset about what you’d told me at the office, and when my friend came by and saw me, she thought changing you would be the perfect solution.”

  She brought her head back up, meeting his eyes and hoping he could read the honesty, the apology in her own. “I said no. I told her you wouldn’t appreciate the gesture, even if it saved you from your illness. I did not ask her to do
any of this,” she insisted, needing him to believe her. “I swear I didn’t.”

  It took him a moment, but he nodded. “So what does this mean?” he asked. “If I’m a vampire, that means I’m immortal, right? The tumor…it’s gone? I’m not going to die?”

  “You’re not going to die,” she reassured him, emotion clogging her throat and dampening her eyes. “Not unless you go out in sunlight again. Or get yourself into a situation that puts you between a stake and a hard place.”

  He inclined his head again, as though absorbing every bit of information she was giving him. “And what about the blood thing? Is that all I can drink from now on? No regular food?”

  “No, you can eat anything you want. It won’t nourish you the way blood will, so blood is a must, but you’ll be able to enjoy food again, too. Right now, you won’t tolerate regular food very well because you’re still transitioning. Your body needs blood and only blood. Once you get your fill, though, you’ll be fine and get on a bit more of a schedule with the stuff.”

  Licking her lips, she added, “And before you ask, no, you won’t have to bite or kill anyone to feed. There are lots of ways now to get real blood, and plenty of synthetics on the market.”

  He was silent for so long, she wondered if he was even listening. Then he raised his head, his green eyes snapping as they bored into hers.

  “I guess I have a lot to learn,” he said quietly. “And a lot to get used to. But you were right about one thing—I wouldn’t have chosen this, not even to escape a fatal disease.”

  The accusation—and that’s exactly what it was, an accusation, placing the blame for his current, unwanted condition squarely at her feet—went straight to her heart, squeezing like a vise. Tears stung her eyes and she blinked to hold them at bay.

  She deserved his condemnation, she knew that. And not for the first time, she cursed Angelina for her stubbornness, and for taking matters into her own hands when Vivian had clearly asked her not to.