Chapter 14

Why are you here?

Eliot didn’t know how to answer that.

To be fair, he didn’t usually find himself on the other end of such a question.

Whenever he broke into someone’s house, he typically never got caught.

Or, on a more morbid note, back in the days when breaking into mortal’s homes had been the normal way he fed, he made sure to never get caught.

Ever.

Because he usually left the occupants dead.

But Miriam wasn’t dead…and he had no intention of killing her.  So, he was left to answer that infernal question—for the first time in nearly a hundred years.

“Your door was unlocked.”

She swallowed, and her hands hefted the bat a little higher.

“I know.”

They were at an impasse.  An unspoken dare; who would go first?  Who would break the suffocating silence?

Eliot wasn’t inclined to do so, but the look she was giving him, eyes all wide in an effort to hide her fear, irritated him enough to try.

“I thought that you were…” He fished around for the right word and only found two.  “In trouble.”

She gulped.  Her pale throat jerked with the motion, unintentionally displaying a ripe, throbbing vein right at the curve of her shoulder.

Eliot stared.  She had such a nice throat actually—perfectly slender and white like ivory.  Even the thin, blue veins feeding her heart were clearly visible, snaking underneath.  He couldn’t help the way his eyes narrowed, taking it all in…and she noticed.

Ever so slightly, she moved the bat higher so that her neck was hidden behind the wood.

As if he couldn’t still hear the slight thrum of her pulse playing like a taunting lullaby.

“W-why would you think that?” she asked.

Her fragile brave routine was slipping; a moment more of this tension and Eliot knew that she would break.

A dark part of him almost wanted to see it.

Would she cry?

Break down in shivers?

Or maybe scream?

“I…I could call the police, you know?”

The tremor in her voice made him glance up—he was still gazing at her throat—and into those big, brown eyes.

He mulled over her words, but he already knew the answer.

“But, you won’t.”

He knew it because of several reasons, actually.

One was that he could literally break her neck before she could even reach the tiny cellphone sitting out in plain sight on her desk.

Though, he wouldn’t go that route, he decided.

Another—the more obvious reason—was that with that clumsy grip on the bat, he could easily knock her off balance should she be brave enough to try and use it.

Hell, a part of him almost wanted her to try…

Funnily enough, he got his wish.

She shifted, aiming to dart for the desk—but he blocked her easily, in a motion so quick she barely even saw it.

He caught a slender wrist in one hand and yanked it down so that the silly bat slipped from her grip to land on the floor.

Thunk!

She flinched as he yanked her close.  Without meaning to, he caught a whiff of her scent, so raw it stopped him dead.

From far away, her scent was…intriguing.  Up close, it was damn right intoxicating.

Mind numbing.

His thoughts went blank like a slate wiped clean—all of it.

Everything but tiny whispers at the back of his mind that noticed things, like how her hair was the exact shade of burnished gold; the color of ripe, amber wheat in the fields, ready for harvesting.

There was a time when he knew first-hand what that looked like.  He could still remember it.

And her scent was like that of wild roses, so fresh you could still smell them for hours after.

Her eyes, however,caught his attention most of all.  They were the hue of wet, rich earth after a long awaited rain; mud, but that odd shade you didn’t realize was beautiful until you saw it in a different light…

They were idiotic things he had no business thinking.

But, try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of them.

She was trembling beneath the sleeve of a pale lavender sweat, he realized.  Her eyes kept darting from his face to her cellphone and back. Her free hand twitched, fingers clenching into fists, but she didn’t try to hit him.  Not even scratch him.

Which was just plain stupid on her part.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her, fighting the part of him that railed against that.

She smelled so good…and one little bite technically wouldn’t be enough to hurt her.

Hell, she might even like it—

Stop!  He scolded himself with a firm shake of his head, and tried his hardest to focus.

“I’m not,” he insisted on a rough growl, though he might have been speaking to himself more than to her.  “I just thought that…”

He had to physically stop himself from mentioning Sage.

Why give the girl nightmares?

While the other vampires may have come snooping around, obviously he hadn’t touched her.  Because if he had drained her dry—oh, he would know it.

Sage liked to play his game by his rules, and his rules only—rough.  Kind of the way the mortals depicted vampire attacks in horror films; with all the running and the screaming and the growling.

It had taken literally decades for Sage to learn some tiny molecule of control just to keep himself from killing his feeds in the chaos.

Like a trained puppy.

Eliot could still reluctantly remember the days he used to hunt his prey himself, and he had never enjoyed their shrieks and whimpers the way Sage seemed to.

However, their terror was another thing.

Fear had such an odd, bitter taste…

He had liked it for some reason.  Liked the way the heart frantically raced as it tried to combat blood loss—only to speed up the process.

But, as he glanced over Miriam, whose head barely reached his shoulder, he was relieved to see that her skin was intact.

Not a single blemish marred that beautiful neck, Sage’s preferred place to bite.

No…the vampire may have come close—his scent was too strong to be mere coincidence—but he hadn’t touched her.

Or, at least not fed, Eliot corrected mentally, because on second glance she was far too pale, holed up in her room, hefting a baseball bat in fingers shaking so badly they could barely hold it.

Even her pulse was racing manically like the swish of a rushing river.

She hadn’t been bitten, but something had spooked her.

“You were just, what?”  She pressed in a voice that only trembled slightly.

To her credit, she didn’t even seem too terrified by the fact that he held her fragile wrist in a grip that could easily break it if he wanted.  Even through the thick wool of her sweater he could feel ever slender bones, as fragile as China glass.

“You weren’t walking this morning,” he grumbled with a shrug.  “I just assumed that…”

You’d been in a bloody scuffle with a vampire.

Still the look she gave him—a wide, disbelieving look—made him examine what he’d said with a frown.  It had been so long since he’d conversed with mortal humans, he’d almost forgotten the etiquette of it.

What had he said that could possibly make her look even more uneasy than she had before?

He hadn’t even mentioned vampires or the potential of her being drained of blood.  So, why the hell…

“You…you were watching me?”

Oh.  That.

His jaw tightened.  He didn’t answer.

But she seemed to guess what he wouldn’t say with another frantic gulp!

“Yesterday…with my seizure.  You were following me then?”

She sounded scared, there was no doubt about that.  But, Eliot couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t sound scared enough.

She had just discovered that a stranger had been watching her in the shadows from afar, and she seemed more incredulous of the fact than terrified.

Almost as if she couldn’t possibly understand why someone would want to take time out of their day to follow…her.

She frowned, her pink tongue rushing out to nervously wet her bottom lip.  “D-did you want to hurt me?”

“No!”  The suggestion annoyed him for some reason.

He saw her eyes dart nervously to his grip on her wrist and with a sigh of irritation, he let her go.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he repeated.

She looked skeptical of that.  Slowly, she took a step back, rubbing at her wrist through the sweater’s sleeve.

“Then…why?”

Why.  Wasn’t that the same exact question he’d been asking himself since the day he arrived in this horrible part of the universe?

Why?

Maybe because she just smelled good—was that an acceptable enough reason?

Maybe because he had a masochistic streak and liked torturing himself by being so near and testing the boundaries of his own control?

Maybe it was just the wispy, far-away look in those dark brown eyes that called to him, even now?

There could have been a million reasons—but he doubted that most of them would go over well with a mortal girl who’d just had a stranger barge into the middle of her room.

“I was…bored,” he settled on, finally.

“Bored?”  Surprisingly, she seemed to accept the answer.

That’s it, he could imagine her reasoning.  Sheer boredom is the only reason someone would want to watch me.

God, she was so naive.

Which just confused him even more, because Sage had a taste for naïve, innocents.

They weren’t his favorite, of course, but the other vampire had never been able to resist the chance to shatter a mortal’s safe sense of security to show them firsthand what nightmares could be.

She smelled so damn good, on top of it.  Eliot couldn’t fathom why the hell Sage had come to this house and not so much as touched her.

Especially when even he was having such a hard time keeping control around her.

Unconsciously, his fingers began to twitch in tune to her heartbeat.

Thump, thump, thump.

“Is that what you and your friends do when you have nothing better to do?” She asked softly.  “Follow people?  Break into their house in the middle of the night?”

“What are you…?”   He meant to say, ‘talking about?,’ but at the same moment, it all clicked.

“Sage,” he blurted, confused even more at the realization that she had seen him but the vampire hadn’t fed.

Her jaw tightened.  “Sage.  Is that his name?”

“Who’s name?”  Eliot growled, though he already knew the answer.

“His,” she said with a hint of anger coloring her voice.  “The boy who broke into my kitchen last night.”