Secrets in the Shadows by Jenna Black
“You’re still recovering.” Jules’s voice was faint and distant. She had the vague impression he said something more, but her mind sank into the darkness and she didn’t hear.
SHE WOKE AGAIN SOME unknown amount of time later. Her body felt a little stronger, and she managed a tentative stretch. Every muscle and joint ached and protested, but she struggled her way into a sitting position.
Jules was standing by the fire, looking at her with obvious concern.
Sitting on the edge of her bed was a man she’d never seen before, but whom she instantly recognized. She licked her dry, chapped lips.
“Gabriel has your eyes,” she told Eli, who smiled faintly.
“I know. How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been run over by a truck. And I think it backed over me afterward to finish the job.”
Still standing by the fire, Jules laughed. “That’s my Hannah,” he said with obvious affection.
My Hannah. She truly was his Hannah now, wasn’t she? He was her maker. Her master. Bile rose in her throat, and she forced it back down.
“It will take you a few weeks to become accustomed to the changes that have occurred in your body,” Eli said. “I’m afraid you’ll suffer quite a bit of discomfort for a while, but it will pass.”
She nodded, then looked over at Jules. Why didn’t he come any closer? Why was he hanging back by the fire? And why was he sweating and chewing his lip?
She frowned at Eli. “So, what’s going on here, exactly?”
“Jules broke a cardinal rule by making you,” Eli said. He lost his kindly-old-man look and became coldly stern. “If it weren’t for the extenuating circumstances, his life would be forfeit.”
Something fierce stirred in Hannah’s center, and she made a snarling sound she’d never heard from her own mouth before. “You’re in no position to be throwing stones, buddy! Remember, I’ve met your fledgling up-close and way-too-personal” Her gums tingled strangely and her heart-rate accelerated as she struggled to sit up straighter, maybe even get out of bed and put herself between Jules and his hypocritical, holier-than-thou mentor. Though what she thought she could do against him was anyone’s guess.
Eli smiled at her bravado and patted her shoulder. “As I said, I understand there were extenuating circumstances. Jules is in no danger. Calm yourself and withdraw your fangs.”
Fangs? She tentatively touched her tongue to her canines and discovered that they’d grown and sharpened. Ah, that’s what the tingling feeling in her gums was. She frowned. How exactly did one withdraw them?
“They’ll withdraw on their own when you calm down,” Eli answered, as though she’d asked the question out loud. “You’ll gain voluntary control of them eventually.”
She forced a slow, deep breath, calling on her martial arts training to find a core of calm. Not that she’d ever been much good at that part. Still, her heart-rate was slowing, and her gums tingled again.
“As I was saying,” Eli continued, “it’s highly … irregular … for a Guardian to create a fledgling. Jules had a choice between making you or letting you die. My question to you is, are you comfortable with the choice he made?”
“Huh?” Boy, she was just full of intelligent questions today. A regular Einstein.
“If you had to choose between life as a vampire and death, which would you choose for yourself?”
Jules made a little choking noise, and she glanced over at him. He stood motionless by the fire, his eyes pleading with her, and she realized he was in the grip of Eli’s glamour.
“Let him go!” she snapped at Eli.
“Answer my question first, then I’ll release him. This is your life we’re talking about, not his.”
She opened her mouth for a retort, but when she met those implacable, ancient eyes, she swallowed her words. She had the distinct impression that if she said she’d choose death, she’d be dead before the words finished leaving her mouth.
A lot of things made sense now. She remembered Jules’s question—Do you hate me?—and even now she saw the guilt in his face. Ignoring Eli, she met Jules’s eyes and spoke only to him. She remembered that horrible falling feeling, and she remembered Jules extending his psychic hand to catch her.
She chose her words carefully. “Unlike most people, I knew what you were offering. I’m the one who decided to accept. You didn’t force anything on me, I’m not mad at you, and I certainly don’t hate you.”
His shoulders sagged in relief and he came to the bed in two long strides. Eli stood so Jules could take his place. With a nod and an enigmatic smile, the Founder slipped out of the room.
Jules grabbed her hand and squeezed it, then seemed to decide that wasn’t enough. He pulled back the covers and slipped into the bed beside her; pulling her into his arms. She went readily, laying her head against his chest and wrapping her arms around him.
“You know,” she said, “there’s nothing like a near-death experience to show you what’s really important in life.”
His arms tightened around her, and he pressed a kiss on the top of her head. “You know I would never take advantage of my power as your maker.”
She thought about it a moment, feeling his muscles stiffen when she didn’t immediately reply. She smiled and rubbed his chest. “Yes, you would.”
“I would not!” he cried, and he couldn’t have sounded more indignant.
She raised her head and looked up into his eyes. “If I were about to do something insanely dangerous, like walk all alone into a house filled with nine Killers, you’d freeze me in my tracks without a second thought. Hell, I’d do the same to you if I had that kind of power.”
He frowned at her, no doubt trying to puzzle out whether he should be offended. She snuggled against him once more.
“Besides,” she said, smiling against his chest, “you used glamour against me, and you even tied me up, and I managed not to hate you for it.” And to get the better of you anyway, she thought but didn’t say. Before, she’d thought letting a man have any amount of power over her was a sign of weakness. Now she understood that she’d given him power the moment she’d fallen in love with him. What’s more, he’d given her the same power over him.
“Did you mean what you said?” she asked, thinking back to the moment when she’d been on the brink of death.
“What I said when?”
“When I was dying and you were trying to bring me back.”
“You remember words?” He sounded startled.
“Yeah. I heard you talking to me, in my head.” And she remembered the magic words that had made the decision for her. “Do you remember what you said?”
His hand stroked her back, and underneath her ear she heard the steady thump of his heart. “I think I said something about you being too tough to die.”
There was a rumble of humor in his voice, and she smiled, realizing he knew perfectly well what she meant. “Before that.”
“Hmm. I think I said something really incisive, like ‘come back.’”
She slapped his chest, though she was too weak to put much force behind the blow. “After that, you jerk.”
He laughed. “Oh! That!”
She raised her head to glower at him, but the warmth and sparkle of his eyes changed the glower into a smile again in no time.
He brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “I believe I said I love you.” He swallowed hard. “And yes, I meant it.”
She tried to raise up high enough to kiss him, but her strength was failing rapidly. He considerately lowered his head and brushed his lips over hers. She wanted more, but that would have to come later. Her body was insisting she needed to sleep again. And Jules’s chest made quite the nice pillow, even if it was a little hard.
She let her eyes slide closed and sighed in contentment.
“Hannah?” His voice sounded strangely tentative.
Sleep was calling to her, an inexorable force she was too weak to fight.
“Yeah, I love you too,” she mana
She could hardly wait until she got her strength back so she could show him how much.
Epilogue
GABRIEL SMILED DOWN AT the girl who lay sleeping in his bed. Blonde roots were sprouting under her jet black hair, and he’d removed all traces of eyebrow pencil and mascara as soon as he’d brought her back to his home. He suspected she’d be quite lovely in her natural state. The piercings on her eyebrow and nose were the next to go. He’d hesitated over the ugly, amateurish pentagram tattoo on her right shoulder. In the end, he’d decided to slice it off while she was unconscious, removing her most identifying feature. Her vampire body healed the wound with no scar.
The girl moaned in her sleep, and Gabriel brushed his knuckles gently across her cheek. Her eyes fluttered open.
When he’d made her, he’d created a link with her mind stronger than most master-fledgling bonds, another of the advantages of having been born vampire. Another advantage of his special birth neither his mother nor his father knew he had. He’d been under the thrall of first one, then the other, for too long. It was time to stretch his wings and see what he could do.
Someone tapped tentatively on the door. Gabriel smiled at the scent of fear in the air. “Go away, Mother,” he said. “I’m busy.”
He listened as Camille obediently retreated, then turned his attention back to his first fledgling, meeting her clouded eyes.
He saw the nightmare images flashing across the poor girl’s mind—hitchiking on a quiet country road, being picked up by a man who instantly made her skin crawl. She was too smart to get into the car with him, and she’d been armed with a dainty little gun to protect herself from the predators of this world. But no weapon could protect her against glamour.
Then the images got worse—running through a darkened house, terror nearly stopping her heart. Falling through a hole in the floor. Men jumping through the hole after her, baring vicious-looking fangs. The screams of her fellow prisoner as he was raped, tortured, then killed. Hours spent alone in the dark with the corpse. Then the door opened and the vampires came again.
Fangs sinking into her throat, her breasts, her thighs while the man who’d picked her up took her virginity by force. Then the others mounting her one by one as she lay helpless in a pool of her own blood.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and Gabriel brushed them away.
“Shh,” he whispered, “it’s over now. You’re safe.”
But even the considerable power of his glamour couldn’t ease her remembered pain. She sobbed, her mind begging for help, desperate, nearly shattered. And she didn’t even know what he’d done to her yet, didn’t know she was no longer human. She would be no good to him in her current state of mind. He took her hand in his, giving her an anchor in the here and now.
“I can make the pain go away,” he told her, leaning over her and capturing her eyes again. “I can push that memory to a corner of your mind where it won’t seem real at all, and it will be almost as if it never happened.”
She clung to his hand, her whole body shaking, tears still leaking from the corners of her eyes despite the surge of hope his words inspired. “What’s the catch?” she asked between hiccups.
He couldn’t help smiling to find the hint of her once-keen edge even in the fragments of her shattered mind. “The catch is that you’ll have to do something you may find morally distasteful in return.”
She sniffled and clung harder. Her grip would have broken a mortal’s hand. She didn’t know her strength yet.
“Do it!” she begged. “Make me forget.” She closed her eyes hard, as if trying to shut out the images that still flashed through her brain. “Please make me forget.”
“As you wish, my dear,” he said, and with a quick jerk of the psychic leash that held her, he sent her back into a deep sleep.
TOR PARANORMAL ROMANCE BOOKS BY JENNA BLACK
Watchers in the Night
Secrets in the Shadows
Shadows on the Soul1
PRAISE FOR WATCHERS IN THE NIGHT
“Jenna Black has crafted a fine story with Watchers in the Night. She supplies deft handling of plot, characters, and genre, and I enjoyed the novel tremendously. I see many more fascinating novels coming from this author in the future!”
—Heather Graham, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author
“You’ll want to bare your throat to Jenna Black’s enthralling heroes. This cleverly plotted romantic tale will leave you hungry for more!”
—Sabrina Jeffries, New York Times bestselling author of One Night With a Prince
“Mystery, magic, and vampires! In Watchers in the Night, Jenna Black has created a fresh and fascinating vampire universe. What more could any lover of the paranormal ask for?”
—Lori Handeland
“Jenna Black’s Watchers in the Night is sexy, suspenseful, and what a great read! Vampire Gray James hits the top of my Hot-O-Mmeter from the moment he comes back from the dead to save his girlfriend, Carolyn Mathers—who just happens to be a kick-ass P.I. able to take care of herself. Just the right mix of mystery, vampires, romance, great characters, and underworld shenanigans to keep me happy. I can’t wait to see what happens next in the world of the Guardians!”
—Tess Mallory
Featuring the GUARDIANS OF THE NIGHT
by Jenna Black
Shadows on the Soul
(0-7653-5717-8)
Coming in September 2007 from
Tor Paranormal Romance
GABRIEL GLIDED INTO THE Four Seasons hotel bar in a cloud of glamour. He smiled to imagine what the patrons would think if they caught a glimpse of his studded motorcycle boots and black leather. But tonight, as every night, he’d declined to dress for dinner.
He passed by a table where an amorous couple huddled close together, the besotted male oblivious to Gabriel’s passing. The woman’s eyebrows drew together and she shivered, sensing the passage of a dangerous predator even if she couldn’t see him. He lingered, his nostrils flaring as he scented the air, but neither of them tempted him.
He’d held off feeding for the three days he’d been in Philadelphia, wanting to make a statement with his very first kill in his dear father’s territory. The woman shivered again, and Gabriel realized she felt the chill of his rage. He reeled himself back in. For his revenge against the man who’d sired him and then tried to kill him, he would need to leash his rage and act with calculated precision. Which was why his first victim had to be perfect.
He could never defeat Eli in a fight. His father had been an old and powerful vampire when Gabriel was born, and Gabriel would reach his five hundredth birthday this Christmas. But after careful thought, he’d realized he had the perfect weapon with which to torture the old man for as long as it pleased him.
Table after table he passed, considering then discarding one mortal after another. Until he approached a woman who sat alone at a table for two. His nostrils stung as he picked up a familiar scent, acrid and yet cloyingly sweet all at once. He paused to focus his full attention on her.
He guessed her age at around thirty, and her appearance screamed Corporate America. An expensive pinstriped pantsuit clung to her curves—no doubt tailored, because off-the-rack clothes never looked so perfect. Hair of varying shades of blonde framed her face in a rather severe pageboy, and her eyes held a look of intense concentration as she tapped away at her Blackberry. A vodka martini sat neglected on the table before her.
Gabriel smiled. Now here was perfection. Female, pretty, with all the trappings of wealth and respectability. No doubt she was a pillar of her community. And yet, there was that scent, fighting its way through her expensive perfume … .
He dropped his glamour enough to allow the woman to see him, then pulled up a chair uninvited.
She was so intent on her work that for a full sixty seconds, she didn’t notice him. He might have felt insulted if he were inclined to vanity. In his long-ago youth, his appearance
When she finally noticed him, the woman started, her hazel eyes growing wide as she put the Blackberry down. She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell him he wasn’t welcome at her table, but he reached out to her with his glamour and she froze in place with that startled look still on her face.
Gabriel smiled at her, but it wasn’t a warm smile. Even through the glamour, she sensed the menace in that smile, for a hint of fear blended with her other scents. He rested an elbow on the table and leaned toward her.
“What is your name, pretty one?” he asked.
She blinked and swallowed hard. “M-margaret. Margaret McCall.” The scent of fear sharpened as his glamour dragged the answer from her lips against her will.
He let his eyes drift from her face to her throat, where her pulse visibly drummed. His fangs descended, and he made no attempt to hide them. Margaret’s face went pale, the pulse in her throat now leaping wildly. He could hear the beat of her racing heart as primal instincts warned her she was staring death in the face.
“You’ve been a very naughty girl, haven’t you Margaret?” he asked, tonguing one of the fangs.
“I-I don’t know what you mean,” she stammered.
He sensed her trying to look away, trying to break the hold of his glamour, but it was a futile effort. He breathed deep the scent of her, the fear and the perfume and the … other. The scent he liked to think of as corruption.