B006XVUCOY EBOK Page 4

  "So what!" I told him and crossed my arms. "There are a lot of things that I can do too, but that doesn't make me special."

  "I know how your feeling."

  "Jason, please, don't analyze me, don't tell me how I'm feeling and please don't start acting like a father." I asked him and turned towards the bathroom. I felt him following me, as I grabbed the towels out of the closet and turned on the water, he stood in the doorway and watched me. I looked at him quickly, one hand in the pockets of his jeans, the other holding his drink as he leaned against the wall. "I'm not afraid."

  "Fine, so you're not afraid." He said and took a sip of whatever it was that he was drinking. I rubbed my forehead and checked the water, and then I stopped and put a hand on the door to the shower.

  "So," I said and looked at him quickly, "if I'm not afraid," I asked and turned to look at him fully; I leaned on the wall and shook my head, "how come I can't stop shaking?"

  He walked towards me, slowly and put his drink on the bathroom sink. He wrapped his arms around me and held me to him as I cried; something that I hadn't done since my mother was killed, but it felt good to do it.

  He left me after a few minutes and I turned the shower to the bath and then relaxed in the hot water. When I had been in there about five minutes, I felt him come back into the room and I looked up towards the doorway where he had been standing before. He was standing there again, but with his arms crossed and without his drink.

  "So, Jason Finn," I smiled and looked back at the bubbles that pretty much covered all of me, "tell me about yourself."

  "I can't." He said and rubbed his chin. "We're not supposed to be involved with our clients."

  "Okay." I smiled and then looked at him again. "So, tell me what you know about me."

  "You're pig-headed, for starters." He said and slid down the wall to sit on the floor, where he let one leg stretch out and the other he pulled up to his chest. I smile at him and shook my head.

  "Okay, now tell me something about me that I wouldn't know." I asked him.

  "You're very beautiful." He whispered softly. I glanced at him and felt my face flush. "In a pig-headed sort of way, of course."

  "I think they kept you on this assignment for way too long." I replied and looked at him. He looked at me oddly and seemed to be waiting for a reason. I sighed and looked at the wall in front of me. "I've never been beautiful to anyone, just a freak."

  "You're not a freak, Angel." He said and put his head back against the wall. I looked at him sternly.

  "I'm part vampire, which ever part that might be. I could break your arm with just a twist of my wrist."

  "Not my arm." He said so sure of himself.

  I had just about had it with him, with the way he kept his cool, never breaking down. I was out of the tub and he was pinned to the ground looking up at me before he could blink. He stared at me as I looked down at his face, anger growing in my eyes. My fangs began to elongate and I tried to control the heavy breathing that I was doing.

  "I am a freak, Jason." I said to him and reached over and touched his lips with the tips of my pointer finger and my middle finger. "I have hurt every single person I have ever come in contact with, please don't tell me that you'll be any different, because sooner or later you'll get hurt too." I felt his hand on my bare wet back and suddenly realized that I was naked and dripping from the water I had just been in. I tried to get up, tried to move, but he held me there and looked into my eyes. "Let go."

  "You can't hurt me, Angel." He said softly, his lips barely moving. "I'm just like you."

  With that, I got up, grabbed a towel, wrapped it around myself and walked out of the room. He didn't move from that spot, at least not for a few minutes, and then he came to the bedroom door, without a shirt on, holding it in his hand. He knocked twice at my open door, and then stepped over so that I could see all of him from where I sat in the middle of the bed.

  "If you're hungry, they're bringing up Chinese food in about fifteen minutes."

  "Would you please not do that anymore?" I asked him, looking at my fingers and not at him.

  "What now, Angel?" He asked. "What have I done wrong now?"

  "Would you please not do that?" I asked again and looked at him, at his bare chest, how he looked in his black jeans and nothing else. He looked at himself and then crossed his arms.

  "It's just skin, Angel."

  "Yeah, it's your skin and I would rather not be attracted to your skin if it make any difference to you." I sighed and looked away. He was about to leave but then he came back.

  "Why?" He asked me.

  "What do you mean why? Why what?" I asked him.

  "Why don't you want to be attracted to me?" He asked. I looked at him and shook my head.

  "I want to go home, Jason." I stood up and walked towards him, grabbing my pants on the way by. I slipped them on as I stared at his face, and then pulled on the shirt that I had been wearing. "I don't want to spend another minute in this place and I don't want to spend any more time with you."

  "You can't go home, Angel." He whispered and crossed his arms, watching me pull on my shoes. I became angry at this and walked right up to him.

  "Oh, screw you!" I said and walked by him. He followed me down the hallway to the door. "I'm not a prisoner, especially not yours and you can't keep me here against my will." I reached for the door, started to turn the handle and was about to leave when Jason grabbed my arm, spun me around, wrapped his arms around me and kissed me hard on the lips. I pushed at him and when he finally broke away from my lips, his firm hold on my body tightened. "This is why I don't want to be here."

  "I am not going to hurt you, Angel." He said and looked me straight in the eyes. "I'm not the one after you, I'm not the man who you're running from in your dreams."

  "Why! Why won't you just let me go?" I asked him, breaking down in his grip.

  "I swore to your grandfather that I would protect you, and if that means holding on to you like this for the rest of the night, then fine, that's how it will be." He said calmly.

  "How did you promise my grandfather? I thought you didn't know who hired you!" I asked him and wrestled in his arms.

  "I told my contacts to tell him that, I don’t know if it was really him, but I wanted to reassure him, none the less." He replied. "I didn't lie to you if that's what you think."

  "I don't want to be touched anymore." I whispered to him, through the tears. "Please, let me go."

  "I won't hurt you." He reassured me.

  "I know that." I hollered at him, and then put my fist against him trying to push away. "It just hurts too much to be touched like this."

  I told him, begging him to understand that he must let go of me. His grip relaxed and finally he let me go. I walked over to the couch and curled up in the corner of the seat.

  "Tell me what happened." He said softly. "Tell me what made you this way, afraid to be held, to be touched. Why does it hurt?"

  "It was the hunters." I said and closed my eyes. The words seemed to come out slowly, but the images flashed by like blurs. "I was twelve when they killed my aunt. The hunters had caught her and brought her to a priest. She wasn't even like me, none of them really were, but they didn't care. It had turned into a feud to see how many of us that they could kill, before we killed them.

  "They dowsed her with holy water, told her to repent and she would be saved from eternal damnation, but all she could do was scream," I sighed and looked at him then sighed. "They killed her the way they would if she was a vampire, with a wooden stake and a mallet. The priest even blessed the damn thing, like he was doing something holy by killing an innocent woman. There was blood everywhere, and I was hiding up in the balcony, just to the right of the alter. I wanted to save her, so I ran down and stood there, watching her. The blood scent was strong. I almost wanted to dive into it, just start scooping it up and drinking it, but it was my aunt’s blood, she needed it. I was going to pull the stake out, but she jumped at me and I screamed, which brought
back the hunters and the priest.

  "They brought me down to the basement and strung me up by my wrist. Stripped me naked and proceeded to burn me with little sticks of fire." I shook violently and then looked at him, and caught my breath. "Those burns healed the next day, but the priest thought it would be funny to do things to me that seemed to me to be unholy. He would put his little finger in the holy water, then he would put it on me in different places, the bottom of my feet, under my arms. It burned like a bitch, but I never cried. When he saw that he wasn’t getting any reaction from me, he did the same thing with the water and his finger and drew crosses on my stomach.

  "I kept my wits about me until the hunter brought out the stake, then I panicked, and what my panic got me was the ability to manipulate everything around me. I learned that day that nothing could hold me, because I could bend and shape it anyway that I wanted it to go, and I got away, and I ran away, far away." I looked at him and smiled. "The next day I went to see a Wiccan priestess. I trusted her and told her what happened. She helped me heal the ache on the outside, the burning feeling on my sensitive skin and she also got rid of most of the crosses that had been burned onto my skin from the holy water, but there was one thing that she couldn't get rid of, well actually there was two things. One was the wings that had formed on my stomach from where the priest had put holy water, and the other was the pain I felt when anyone touched me, the pain on the inside."

  "Wings?" He asked me softly. I pulled up my shirt and just to the left side of my navel, where two raised markings on my skin that resembled the wings of an angel. "Maybe, the pain you feel is psychological."

  "I don't know, but it feels real to me.” I sighed and then looked at him. "I don't want to be attracted to you, Jason."

  "Why would it be that bad to be attracted to someone?" He questioned. I sighed; maybe men don't really listen. "Angel, you won't hurt me, otherwise you would have done it in the bathroom, and you know that I wouldn't hurt you, maybe we could work on this thing together."

  "I can't." I said softly. He got up and paced the room. "I've never been with anyone." I whispered and watched him stop. He looked at me and walked over, sat down in front of me on the coffee table. He reached out to touch my cheek, hesitated and then placed his cool hand on my skin. I knew what he was going to ask me, so I told him without waiting.

  "No one has ever touched me; I've never been "with" anyone," I said again and looked up into his brown eyes, "ever."

  "I'm not going to take advantage of you, Angel." He smiled at me, feeling the sudden heat that was being passed between us just by his touch. "Come on, dinner will be here in a minute, but there's something that I want you to see first."

  He led me out the door, down a dark corridor and into a room with lots of computers. He sat me down in front of one and punched in a code, the machine beeped and then a map popped up on the screen. The satellite zoomed in on a location and then I realized that it was Cleo's mansion.

  "You're grandfather and the others are safe." He told me, whispering close to my ear as he leaned down from behind me and tapped on the screen. The satellite moved closer and caught movement in the back yard. It got so close that I thought we were right above the house, and I saw Quinn on the phone.

  "I have to go back in the morning." I whispered to him.

  Jason nodded then took my hand and led me back to the room. We ate dinner, and then I went to my room and curled up on the bed, lack of a goodnight's sleep was really wearing on me. I turned over and looked at the door, where Jason stood and then closed my eyes.

  "There are no dreams in this place." He told me in a quiet voice. "No one can harm you here, no one can get into your mind; that is of course, unless you willingly let them."

  "What about you?" I asked him without opening my eyes. "Can you get in?"

  Only if you want me too. The seductive voice in my head whispered to me. I smiled and tried to relax. Sleep took over rather quickly, but my night of dreamless sleep didn't last very long.

  Eyes followed me as I walked around through my own mind, and then rushed at me which was when I woke up. I sat up in bed and looked around the room. I was alone, or at least I thought, until I saw the dark figure sitting in the chair in the corner. I stood up and walked over to this person, leaned down close to his face and recognized Jason, almost immediately. I smiled at him, and then reached out to touch his face. When my fingers touched his cool skin; his body was immediately alert and I was thrown across the room, where I landed on the bed. When my eyes opened, after I had been holding them tightly shut, I looked right up into Jason's face as he towered over me.

  He looked at me as if he had never seen me before, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly opened. He licked his lips, and it was then that I saw his fangs, dull and small, but there nonetheless. He moved my hair out of my face, and when his fingers touched me, I felt the warmth that passed between us before, race across my skin where his fingers had touched.

  "You frightened me." He said and closed his eyes, then opened them and caught me looking again. "What were you doing?"

  "Just looking." I told him. He suddenly clenched the hand that he had touched me with into a fist and backed away from me. I sat up on the bed and he walked back over to the chair. "I had a bad dream."

  "Yes, I know." He replied and looked out the window at the moon. "You can't always see me, but I do watch."

  "Who was that?" I asked him.

  "Some vampire, warning you that others are watching, following, observing your movements." He said, still staring out at the moon.

  "Why me?" I asked him. He looked at me and smiled.

  "Why not?" He said and sat forward in the seat. "You're the last of your line, a very powerful line, that's been around for centuries, no one's going to let you go around unwatched. People know too much about your family's history, about Quinn and Julian and the fact Julian's girlfriend just killed Victor."

  "What does her killing him, have to do with me?"

  "Plenty! They're going to find a way to get back at Quinn and Julian and they're going to use the closest thing to them. Right now, that's you. Ashley took her son and left them for a while, she's out of their range, she's also the Queen and her little boy is the prince of the vampires." He said and I moved to the end of the bed.

  "So, because she decided to save her kid and kill the bad guy, I get to be a target in their little game?" I asked him. He nodded. "Not to mention the fact that Jacob's hunters are on my ass, and have been since I was born." I watched him smile; wanting to say something stupid, then he shook his head. "Isn't it great to be wanted?"

  "Only if it's by the right person." He said and got up. I watched him walk towards me and I backed up on the bed. He walked beside it and then sat by me as I lay there. "Go to sleep, Angel. I promise it will be better this time."

  "Because, you’re protecting me, right." I said sarcastically and watched him nod with a straight face. I shook my head and covered up. "Well, do a better job this time." I told him, he nodded and I closed my eyes, back off to dreamless land I went.

  I walked into the living room area of Jason's suite and looked at him as he stood looking out the window. His back was to me and I just watched him for a minute before he realized that I was there. He turned slowly and looked at me, a glass in his hand, full of some sort of red liquid.

  "So, are you one of those people who drink their breakfast?" I asked him. He looked from me to the glass and then back at me.

  "It's tomato juice." He replied and set the glass down, smiling. "Someone told me that if it was just the right temperature, it was a good substitution for, um, you know."

  "It's called blood, Jason." I said and walked over to the small fridge in the corner of the bar. "So, what's the verdict?"

  "I've never tasted anything more disgusting than tomato juice warmed to 98.6 degrees." He walked over to me as I took a pastry out and set it on the counter. "How did you sleep?"

  "Better than usual, I guess." I replied and looked at
him as I opened the Danish and took apiece off. "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Sure." Jason said and sat on the barstool.

  "Do you remember my dreams?" I watched him nod, slowly and then sit up more in his sleep. "Okay, so what's the deal with the little black knife?"

  "It's just to protect you in your dreams." He replied.

  "It looks like a plastic knife, like you use at picnics." I replied and shook my head. "How much will that protect me?"

  "As much as you believe." Jason replied.

  "And how is it that you can get into my dreams?"

  "When I was born, really born, I seemed to have gotten this power from somewhere, where I could pop in and out of other people's dreams. I didn't have to be asleep to do it, just like you don't have to be asleep to read someone's mind, I could pop into your dreams whether I was sleeping or not." He replied and walked over to stand in front of him. His fingers touched my cheeks and I felt the heat from his skin. I smiled at him and he looked into my eyes. "Get dressed and I'll take you home so that your grandfather doesn't worry anymore."

  "He isn't worried or he would have taken me away with him when this whole thing started." I replied as I walked over to the bedroom. "I'll be out in a few minutes."

  As I changed into the clothes that I had on the day before, I looked into the mirror and smiled, but all I saw was Jason's face and how he smiled at me. This was going to get personal if I've only been with him one night and already I couldn't get him out of my head. I closed my eyes, but all I could feel was his touch, tried to block that out, but all I could hear was his voice and I shook my head and opened my eyes.

  "Get a grip, Browne. You don't need this now." I said and looked deep into my own eyes.

  "Don't need what right now?" He asked me. I turned and looked at him as he handed me my coat.

  "Nothing, just a headache." I replied and grabbed my coat from him. "Come on, let's get going."