To Julian, the meal seemed to go on forever. He'd had every intention of treating Lorelei to a leisurely dinner, a walk in the dark, a few stolen touches and perhaps a kiss. But a smell had drifted to him across the restaurant. Steely, coppery. Blood on the breath of a vampire.
Nicholas' words echoed in Julian's head. There's a Call out for you, man. Julian knew why. The Senior knew of Julian's change. He wondered if the Senior also knew what Julian was becoming. The Call could be for Julian's audience, or for his blood. Not to be consumed--it was anathema for a vampire to feed on one of his own kind--but certainly to be shed.
He could see no evidence to support either possibility, though. Only a smell, a sense, a flickering of shadow in the corners of his vision. Nothing he could hold, nothing he could be certain was more than his imagination.
They finished dinner, he holding up his end of the conversation with the easy web of fabrications he'd perfected over the years about his nonexistent job at an imaginary TV station. He barely had to pay attention to what he was saying, which gave him the opportunity to concentrate on Lorelei.
She was beautiful. Brilliant, wonderfully alive, achingly mortal. Forbidden. He shouldn't have come, Julian could see that now. But he couldn't not. This kind of compulsion struck him rarely--three, perhaps four times in his eight hundred years. At that moment, watching the light shift on her black hair, the movement of emotion in her sapphire eyes, he chose not to recall that it had always ended in pain.
By the end of the meal, the coppery smell had faded, barely leaving a memory behind. And when Lorelei, much to his surprise, asked him if he wanted to walk back to her place for a nightcap, he agreed before taking time to evaluate the foolishness of it.
"I live above the boutique," she said. "I own the building, in fact."
"Ah. An entrepreneur."
"That's me." She flicked him a coy blue look. "The bank helped me get started, but it's all mine now. All debts paid in full, and we've been in the black for the last two years."
"Impressive."
"I think so."
She watched him as he pulled out a cigarette. He lit it and dragged deep, feeling his fangs retract again. They'd been insistent tonight, stabbing the back of his lip at the most inopportune moments. The raw fish had dulled the need a bit, but not as much as red meat would have--certainly not as much as blood would have.
"You smoke an awful lot," Lorelei commented.
"I'm sorry," Julian said. "Does it bother you?"
She shrugged. "If you mean the smoke, no, not really." She gave him an odd look. "Somehow it doesn't smell as bad on you."
He smiled, charmed. He thought of another girl, a Pictish warrior woman who'd worn her red hair in braids and painted her breasts and her face blue with woad after the manner of her people. They could have been the same soul. Maybe they were.
Her apartment above the boutique brought back similar memories. A reproduction of a Celtic stone cross hung above her couch, and similar trinkets adorned a knickknack shelf in a corner. She took small glasses from a cabinet and filled them with wine. Julian didn't notice what kind. It didn't matter--he couldn't drink it.
"It's a very nice apartment," he said.
"Thank you. It serves its purpose."
She drank from her glass. He tipped his up so the wine touched his lips, but he didn't drink. A deep warmth moved through him anyway, the way wine had felt in his blood when he'd been mortal. But the smell brought the feeling to him now. The wine smell, her smell and the soft sound of her pulse vibrating in the air. In his pocket, he fingered another cigarette, feeling the length of it, turning it between his fingers. He didn't take it out. Desire rose in his throat, and his fangs pricked at the inside of his lip. He wanted her.
She sat on the couch and turned on the TV. "There. Is this your station? What time do you have to be at work?"
"No, and later."
He sat next to her and set the wineglass on the table by the couch. The warmth of her body reached his skin, and another deep convulsion of need shuddered through him. He held very still. He should smoke. But he wanted to feel. This desire was the deepest emotion left to him, and he'd kept it at bay for so long. He wanted to let it take him over just for a time. Long enough to experience it, but not to act upon it.
She turned to look at him. He blinked as her eyes measured his. She sensed his desire--somehow he knew that. More, she shared it--he saw it in the darkening of her blue-blue eyes. Her body shifted toward him, her breath brushed his lips even as his fangs slid into place behind them.
Feel it, he thought as his body became a flame of hunger. Feel it, because it's the only thing you can feel, because it's the closest you'll ever get to love--
The smell again, brittle and invasive, as if a knife had cut through the air made soft by the scent of her skin. The smell of bloodied breath. Then a sharp, violent pain at the base of his skull, and then nothing.
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