When an hour passed and Cade still had not returned, Val felt exhaustion begin to weigh at her. Her body was still adjusting to the Change; like a newborn baby, it needed to sleep. Leaving her clothes drying over the shower rod, she wrapped herself in a sheet and curled up naked on the bed.
A burning sensation jarred her awake. Opening her eyes, she discovered one hand was lying in a shaft of morning sunlight. She frowned at it muzzily. The skin of her fingers felt hot, swollen -- as if she’d been lying out on the beach too long. But…
“Oh, hell!” She jumped back so fast her vampire muscles propelled her halfway across the room to bang against the wall. Catching herself barely in time to keep from falling on her face, Val scurried around the bed toward the window and gingerly flicked the blackout curtains closed. It’s a good thing the bursting into flame things is a myth or I’d be one long cigarette ash by now.
This vampire business was going to take some getting used to.
She padded naked into the bathroom to check her clothes. They were wrinkled and slightly damp, but she knew her body heat would dry them. She dressed, grimacing at the feeling of clammy fabric against her skin.
Her stomach rumbled. Suddenly she was ravenously hungry. An image flicked through her mind -- Cade, sprawled gloriously naked under her, tilting his head back… Her nipples peaked, and her fangs slid to their full length in her mouth.
Frowning, she reached for one of the toothbrushes Cade had bought from a vending machine. Usually when I’m this hungry, I fantasize about Egg McMuffins, not Stud McMuffins. There was something more than a little unnerving about this new Hunger and the way it combined the need for sex and blood.
Squirting toothpaste onto the brush, Val lifted it and peeled her lips back from her teeth -- and stopped short at the sight of the two neat fangs. They were sharp, white, and an inch long. Oh, God, I really am a vampire. What the hell have I done?
Gazing hypnotized at her teeth, she didn’t even hear the knock. She jolted from her trance at the sound of the motel room’s door swinging open as a cheery voice called, “Housekeeping!”
God knew the room needed it; Cade had hung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign days ago during her illness. “Come in!” she called back, then closed her lips to hide her new canines.
A blonde thirty-something in a brown polyester uniform bustled in with a stack of towels in her arms. As Val stepped out of the bathroom, the smell of shampoo and soap wafted from the housekeeper, as intense as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. And something else, dark and musky -- her natural scent.
Val drew in an instinctive breath, never having smelled anything like it. Instantly, the scent of blood flooded her mouth and nose. The woman must have a cut somewhere. It smelled a little blander than Cade’s, a little less fiery somehow. Yet there was something so rich and tempting about the aroma, it made her fangs ache.
She froze in the bathroom doorway, unable to move, paralyzed by the sudden intensity of her need. Heading toward the bathroom, the woman almost ran into her. Startled, the housekeeper looked up and met her gaze. “Is there something…”
And Val could feel her thoughts. Her name was Mary Sanders, and she was working to support her two kids while she went to night school to obtain her accounting degree. She was worried about George Billingham, her live-in boyfriend, who’d fallen off the wagon again. Just yesterday he’d slapped her for not having dinner ready, though she’d worked all day while he’d stayed home watching talk shows and polishing off a fifth of vodka.
“You ought to get rid of that bastard,” Val told her. “He’s going to put you in the hospital again.”
Mary’s eyes lost their focus. “Okay.”
And she’ll do it, Val realized in amazement, watching the compulsion close over the woman’s mind. I influenced her. Just then, without even intending to. No wonder Cade uses his power so much. It’s instinctive.
What a terrifying talent. She stared down into the smaller woman’s blank face, wondering wildly if she’d done the right thing. Yeah, Mary obviously needed to get rid of George, but what if he hurt her when she told him to get out? And what right did Val have to make that decision one way or another?
Maybe I need to go looking for George…
And maybe you should tell her to tip up her chin, the Hunger whispered.
Val’s eyes widened. It would be so easy, the Hunger’s dark, soft voice continued. You don’t need much. It won’t hurt her, and you can make sure she won’t remember.
“What’s going on?” Cade asked from the open motel room door.
She jumped guiltily as he walked in, dressed in his familiar black jeans and black T-shirt. His acute chocolate eyes flicked from her to the maid’s blank face. “Oh, hell,” he muttered. She felt him touch Mary’s thoughts, watched him wince at what he saw there.
“I didn’t mean to!” Val burst out, twisting her hands together.
“I know, but you’ve got to be careful.” He sent a wave of psychic energy to erase the accidental compulsion from Mary’s mind. “Even as young as you are, you’ve got a lot of power. You could do real damage without meaning to.” To the maid he added, “Why don’t you come back later. I’ve already checked out, so you can clean up after we’re gone.”
Mary nodded mechanically and left with the slow, dreamy steps of a sleepwalker.
“But what about George?” Val asked. “He’s going to hurt her sooner or later. Badly.”
Cade’s handsome mouth took on a grim line. “No, he’s not. I’m going to have a word with him this evening about the proper treatment of women.”
“Can I watch? In fact, can I slap him around a little?”
“No, you may not, you bloodthirsty little wench.”
“Literally.” Val grimaced, remembering how close she’d come to biting the housekeeper.
“Goes with the territory,” Cade told her, shrugging. “In the meantime, let’s go. I paid a crew to clean up the house while I squared things with the cops. The cleaners just texted me they’re done, and I want to get home.”
She flexed her sunburned hand. “But it’s daylight.”
“I’ve picked up the Lexus when I returned the neighbor’s car. The windows are polarized, so if we don’t hang out in the parking lot, you won’t even get a tan.” He pulled the door open and gestured her out.
Cautiously, Val stepped outside, wincing as the morning sunlight instantly assaulted her eyes. In a space just down the motel sidewalk, the Lexus’ locks clicked open accompanied by a little horn beep. She hurried toward it, intent on getting out of the murderous glare. Cade strode ahead to pull the passenger door open for her, and she slid inside gratefully as he went around to the driver’s side. “So once we get home, what then?”
“Then,” he said grimly, “we get to work.”
Val sent him a searching look. “The psychic amplification thing?”
“Yeah.” He shot her a sudden, wicked smile. “But that we’ll have to do outside, which means we’ve got to wait for sunset. In the meantime, we really need to paint the upstairs hallway.”
* * *
They did indeed spend most of the day working around the house, spackling bullet holes in the wallboard while installers put down new wall-to-wall carpet over the bloodstained hardwood. Cade had evidently paid generously enough to get them to expedite the job. After her experience with the maid, Val went out of her way to avoid them.
But once night fell and the workers went home, Cade went out to take care of George. When he got back, he told her he’d sent the bastard packing. He wouldn’t be bothering Mary again.
Then it was time for the hard part.
“We have to learn to amplify each other’s energies,” Cade told her, as they stepped out into the back yard. Night had fallen, and fireflies orbited the trees like perambulating stars “Even combined, we don’t have the power to take Ridgemont --”
“What?” She stared at him, outraged. “I thought that was the whole point of this!”
“Will you give me a minute? I meant that if we just pool our power, it won’t be enough. We need to amplify it by volleying it back and forth.”
Val frowned at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Look, have you ever heard a microphone feedback squeal -- that shrill, high-pitched sound you hear sometimes when somebody’s trying to give a speech?”
“I’m a reporter, remember? Anytime I’d cover a public gathering, somebody’s mic would feed back at least once and deafen everybody in the room.”
“Yeah. Well, what happens is the mic is so close to the amplifiers, it picks up its own sound from them, then feeds that sound to the amps, which feed it back to the mic, and on and on. It happens so fast you instantly get a blast of noise.”
Making the connection, she nodded. “And we’ve got to do the same thing.”
“But quicker. Unfortunately, I’ve only practiced this a few times, and that was in 1884, when Ridgemont made me learn how to do it for him. But he was so damn powerful we never had to do it in combat, and I’m not sure how it’s going to work.”
Val eyed him grimly. “That sounds encouraging.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the only game in town. Touch my thoughts.”
“Like this?”
“Right. Now deeper, like we do when we make love. Try to feel what I’m feeling.”
Val stepped in close and looked up into his face. Despite the darkness, her vampire night vision revealed his eyes, the planes and angles of his face, the long, straight blade of his nose and the full curve of his mouth. “You know, you’re kind of cute.”
“Concentrate.” The thought boiled with impatience. “We need to get this. Try to look through my eyes.”
She killed her smile and looked at him harder, fighting to slip into his mind. In the background, she could hear the murmur of his thoughts, the tension, the worry. An image of Ridgemont’s fist shooting toward her face flashed through her mind, followed by a searing blast of pain. Startled, she stepped back.
“Dammit, you almost had it.”
“Was that a memory?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a lot of them. Ridgemont made a hobby of beating the hell out of me.” He sighed. “Look, maybe we’re going about this all wrong.” He put his big hands on her shoulders. “Concentrate on this.”
The next thing she knew, she was plastered against him as he kissed her. The embrace started out hard and businesslike, but then he gentled it until his lips were moving softly over hers, seducing, caressing.
The warm velvet of his lips felt different to her new senses as they brushed and stroked, the familiar sensations grown startling and intense. His tongue slipped into her mouth to swirl in a sweet dance around hers. She felt his Hunger grow.
Cade’s tense body relaxed against her, and she sank into him, savoring the long, hot strength of his body. Just as he felt her, slim and soft against him. His mind caught hers, drawing her closer in an embrace that matched the one their bodies shared.
“See how you feel to me,” he thought. “So good.” An image flashed through his mind of her body, naked and languorous, nipples hard and legs spread. Val flushed in embarrassment at his hungry approval. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Now you’re playing with me,” she told him. “That looks like something out of a centerfold.”
“I noticed.” The male satisfaction in his mental voice made her chuckle. He kissed her again, his mouth moving on hers in delicious lust.
She reached for a memory of him, rock hard and hungry, his black eyes gleaming. “You’re not so bad yourself, Cowboy.”
He seemed as taken aback by the image as she’d been. “I think you’re idealizing me.”
“Uh-uh.” She began kissing her way up his jaw toward his right ear. “You’re the sexiest man I’ve ever met.”
“Then we’re a matched set.” Cade pulled her closer, his arms closing tight around her as his mind drew hers deeper. Nibbling his earlobe, she felt the delicate sensation of teeth on her own ear, though she knew his mouth was nowhere near it. The sensation stopped her dead, and the gentle nibbling ceased.
“It’s a mental echo,” he told her. “Closer. You’ve almost got it.” She nibbled again, concentrating on the ghostly sensation until it intensified.
With a jolt, she found herself suddenly standing in a different position, looking down at a slim shoulder. A weight fell against her. Her arms supported something limp and heavy. She turned her head and saw a woman’s profile, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, apparently out cold with her auburn head resting on Val’s shoulder.
“What the hell?”
“It’s you, Val,” Cade told her. “You did it. You’re in my body.”
Her eyes snapped open. Straightening with a jerk, Val looked up at Cade a little wildly.
“Damn,” he said. “We lost it.”
She pulled away from him, blinking. “What just happened? I don’t…”
“We fused.” He reached out to brace her as she staggered. “Your consciousness was in my body.”
The hair rose on the back of her neck. “What about my body?”
“Do you really think I’d let you do anything that would hurt you?”
“Well, no. But I still don’t get what happened to me.”
“When our minds fused, you passed out. Your autonomic nervous system continues to function, though, operating your heart and lungs and everything else. A doctor examining you would probably think you were in a coma.”
“My mind left my body?” Val didn’t like the sound of that.
He shook his head. “No, but the link is so deep it seems to. As soon as we separate, you regain consciousness.”
She eyed him unhappily. “This is scaring the hell out of me, Cade.”
“Unfortunately, it’s the only way we have a chance in hell of killing Ridgemont.”
“But what if we can’t?” She swallowed, remembering that terrifying dream. “What if we lose?”
“I’ll get killed.” Cade shrugged. “Fortunately, if I die when we’re fused, it won’t kill you -- it’ll just throw you consciousness back into your body.”
She glowered and fisted her hands on her hips. “To a very short life as Ridgemont’s sex toy. Not that I’d care, with you dead.”
“Do you want to back off from this?”
“He wouldn’t let us even if I did.” Val smiled tightly. “Besides, it doesn’t take telepathy to know you’ve never run from a fight in your life.”
He looked down at her, his dark eyes solemn. “I’d run from this one to keep you alive.”
“Yeah, well, the only way to do that is kick Ridgemont’s undead butt.” She sighed. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Try it again.” Cade stepped against her and slid his arms around her waist. “At least this particular method has its charms.” Smiling, he lowered his head and took her mouth with his. She reached for him, with her arms and her mind.
And became one with him.
The next thing Val knew, she was looking down at her own unconscious face. “This is just too creepy.” The words came out in Cade’s deep voice.
“Don’t do that,” he said, swinging her body easily into his arms. She was startled at how light she felt. “Look, don’t try to do anything at first, okay? Just watch…” He stumbled and caught himself. “Or you’ll trip me. My muscles can only obey one set of commands at a time. Besides, you’re not used to running a body this size.”
“I hope the neighbors aren’t watching, or they’ll think you’re talking to yourself,” she told him, switching to mental communication.
“It’s so dark, they can’t see a damn thing back here. And a good thing, too.” He carried her inside and laid her down on the living room couch. As he straightened, he looked down at the slim, pale woman on the couch.
“That does not look like me,” Val said.
“It’s really disconcerting to hear my voice saying somebody else’s sentences.”
“Sorry. Do I really look like that? I’m… small.”
“You’re used to seeing yourself from close up in the mirror, Val. Different perspective. Besides, I’m six inches taller than you are. Compared to me, you are small.”
“Should I get a boob job?”
An image flashed through his mind of her round, bare breast just before his mouth closed around her nipple. “No. You’re perfect.”
“That wasn’t a comment, I was just thinking. You know, sometimes thoughts just flash through your mind that you don’t want to share with the world.”
“I’ll remind you of that the next time some really stacked blonde walks by.”
Wickedly, she pictured a pig with fangs and a vampire cape.
“Yeah, well, you seem to have developed a taste for bacon, darlin’, so you’re just gonna have to live with it. Let’s get to work.”
As he headed back outside, she wondered how close she had to be for the link to work.
“I’m not sure,” Cade replied. “We could experiment and see. I think it depends on how strong we are.”
“We’d better find out. I’d hate for us to get out of range in the middle of the fight.”
“Good point.” He frowned as he stepped out onto the yard. Val was instantly distracted by the rich, floral scent of spring in the air. “Pay attention,” he told her. “We’re going to start with a series of katas.”
She was unfamiliar with the word, but she knew its meaning from his memories: martial arts routines designed to drill skills until they became automatic. “Why does somebody who can bench press a Hummer need to study karate?”
“When you’re planning to fight an eight-hundred-year-old immortal, you study any damn thing you can.” Cade slid into the drill, his body moving fluidly as he threw punches and kicks at imaginary opponents. He’d begun practicing the various martial arts in the 1970s, and he no longer had to think about what he was doing.
For Val it was profoundly disconcerting to see a long, thickly muscled arm or leg piston out instead of the slimmer, shorter one her mind insisted should be there.
And the sheer animal speed and power of his body was amazing. Feeling him move, experiencing the intense concentration and discipline he’d built over the decades -- it all touched off a slow, hot burn of arousal in Val. She wanted to savor that hard, delicious strength sliding into her, taking her…
He stopped in his tracks. “Val, if you don’t cut that out, I’m going to have to go back inside and ride that delicious little body of yours. Whether you’re in it or not.” There was a sensation of heat and heaviness in his groin she suddenly realized was a rock-hard erection.
“Oh,” she said, mortified. “I’m sorry!”
“No, you’re not. And I’m not either. But we really need to get this down before we play.”
Trying to distract herself, Val focused on watching everything around them as he went back to his katas. But that only deepened her disorientation, since Cade’s vampire senses were even more acute than her own. The night was full of rustles and chittering and scuttling sounds she’d never heard before, while the air was redolent with smells she couldn’t identify. Even the trees and grass looked strange, each leaf and stem visible in the darkness.
Yet to Cade, it was all familiar. He knew that furtive rustle was a cat slipping over the lawn behind them. And that sharp, musky smell meant a possum had waddled through three or four hours earlier.
“Three or four hours? You can smell something that went by three or four hours ago?”
“Well, yeah.” There was an undercurrent of Can’t everyone? to the thought. It had been so long since Cade had looked at the world through mortal senses that he no longer remembered what it was like.
Suddenly Val had the dizzying sensation that she was becoming something not human. And it would only become worse as the years went on. Opening her eyes, she looked up at the living room ceiling, back in her own body again.
“Val?”
“Give me a minute.” She sat up on the couch, staring down at her hands as she laced her fingers together. She’d never noticed how delicate and thin they were compared to Cade’s huge paws. After the past half hour in his head, her own body felt like a stranger.
“Val, we have to do this.”
She looked up to see him standing in the doorway and felt the punch of vertigo. For the first time in her life, she knew what it really felt like to be somebody else. “I can never go back to what I was. I feel like I’m losing myself.”
“No, Val. You’re not. You’re stronger than you think. Hell, you’re the strongest person I know. As time goes on, you’ll find yourself settling into being a vampire. It won’t seem so strange then.”
He walked over to sit down beside her and pick up one of her hands, clasping it between his own. Val curled her fingers into his and leaned against his muscled shoulder. She could feel him reining in his impatience, his drive to master this new skill so he could reach the goal he’d been working toward for the past one hundred and thirty-eight years.
Killing Ridgemont was more than an obsession to him, she realized, understanding him in a whole new way now that she’d been him. For Cade, slaying the ancient was a holy calling. His offer to run from the fight with his obsession revealed how much he loved her.
“What if we can’t do it?” she asked softly, the memory of the dream tormenting her. “What if I can’t do it? I don’t want to get you killed.”
Cade opened his mouth, then shut it and sighed. “I started to give you a rah-rah ‘buck up’ speech, but you know I’m not any more certain of pulling this off than you are. I just know we aren’t going to get a damn thing done sitting on this couch. C’mere.”
He didn’t mean physically. She gritted her teeth and launched herself into his mind, then watched while he rearranged her limp form on the couch.
“You’re going to have to start doing it with me,” he told her as he headed outside to begin another kata. “The idea is to amplify each other, so we have to work together.”
Cade stepped into the first move of the kata. She tried to move with him, but halfway into the turn his left leg locked. They hit the ground with a jarring thud.
“Dammit, Val, my…” he began, at the same time she said, “I’m sorry!” His mouth froze open, his throat locked, and a deep, grating sound came from his chest. She quit trying to talk, and Cade exploded, “…muscles can only obey one set of commands at a time!”
“Look, I’ve never done this before! What do you expect?”
His anger collapsed. “Ah, hell. I know this is difficult. We’re just going to have to learn to get synchronized.”
What if they did that fighting Ridgemont?
“We won’t,” he told her, reading her fear. “Once we drill long enough, it will become second nature.”
“How much time is that going to take, Cade?”
“I have no idea.”
“We’d better get started, then.”