Page 2 of Twilight Longings

Reveling in his power, drinking her fear as he intended to drink her life’s blood, he lowered his head to her neck.

“Stop it!”

Saintcrow’s head snapped up. Holding fast to the woman, he snarled, “Jake! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Keeping you from making a bad mistake. Kadie would be horrified if she could see you now.”

All the rage drained out of Saintcrow at the mention of her name. Trapping the woman’s gaze with his, he wiped the memory of what had happened from her mind and sent her away. “What are you doing here?” he asked again. “I thought you went back to Arizona.”

“I never made it. I could have sensed your rage if I’d been in Africa. It practically knocked me off my feet.”

“Yeah, well.” Saintcrow shrugged. “Thanks.”

“You gonna be all right now?”

Saintcrow nodded. “You’re worse than a mother hen. Come on, let’s go get a drink.”

They materialized in The Crimson Rose. A few years ago, Saintcrow had arranged for Kincaid to meet Rosa here. She had wanted to become a vampire and Saintcrow’s idea had been for her to meet Kincaid and for Kincaid to scare the idea out of her mind. It hadn’t worked. They had fallen in love and married instead.

“There’s got to be a way to end this,” Kincaid muttered, swirling the wine they had ordered in his glass.

“I wish I knew what we were dealing with,” Saintcrow said. “I’ve lived a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this. Hell, no one has. I’ve contacted a few of the other ancient ones. They don’t have any answers, either.”

“Well, it came from somewhere,” Kincaid said. “Just because no one’s ever heard of it doesn’t mean it’s never been seen before.”

Saintcrow frowned. The one person he hadn’t tried to contact was the vampire who had made him. To his knowledge, she was one of the oldest of their kind. He hadn’t seen his sire since she turned him centuries ago. In all that time, she had never tried to contact him, nor he, her. He didn’t have any idea if it was possible to get in touch with her, didn’t even know her name. For all he knew, she could have been destroyed centuries ago.

Damn her soul to hell. He had hated her for turning him, hated everyone, himself most of all. Back then, he had been the monster of myth and legend and he had reveled in it. A creature filled with rage, he had left a long trail of death and carnage in his wake.

Clearing the past from his mind, Saintcrow said, “We’re not solving anything sitting here. Go home and make love to your wife.”

Staring into the distance, he wished fervently that he could go home and make love to Kadie just one more time.

Back in Morgan Creek, Saintcrow went down to his lair. His Kadie lay as he had left her, eyes closed, skin as pale as death. He undressed, then slid into bed beside her. Lying there, holding her close, he remembered all the nights they had shared, the way she had always smiled when she saw him, the way she had melted in his arms. How long could she go on like this? Vampires often went to ground to rest when they tired of living, but in a dim part of their mind, they were still aware of the world around them, able to react at any sign of danger.

Murmuring Kadie’s name, he closed his eyes, eager to surrender to the dark sleep, to forget, for a while, that he might never again see his Kadie’s smile, hear her voice, make love to her until the sun chased the moon from the sky.

But the dark sleep eluded him. Instead, his thoughts went round and round. The curse or plague had to have originated somewhere. But where? Had it been cooked up in a lab? He knew there were scientists all over the world doing experiments on vampires, dissecting them, measuring their hearts and brains, trying to find out what there was about their blood that had the power to turn others, that allowed them to live such long lives, to change shape and dissolve into mist. Vampire blood had been proven to cure disease and slow the aging process.

Sitting up, he stared into the darkness of his lair. Hunters were another possibility, but he dismissed the thought. If hunters were behind this, they wouldn’t have wasted it on young vampires but unleashed it on the old ones, like himself, who were far more dangerous and harder to find and destroy. He thought it unlikely that even the black witch, Izabela, powerful as she was, would have been able to conjure a spell of this magnitude.

But what about a very powerful necromancer?

Rising, Saintcrow pulled on a pair of jeans, a shirt, and boots, and then called Kincaid.

“What the hell do you want?” Jake growled. “Do you know what time it is?”

“We need to go to Colombia.”

“What? Why?”

“Luca had power over the dead.”

“Yeah? So?”

“It would explain why the curse only affects those in Wyoming.”

“You think he was trying to avenge himself onus?” Kincaid asked, a frown in his voice.

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