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  “What’s going on?” He was disoriented, his voice groggy from sleep. “What’s wrong with me?” He looked from me to her and back again. “Cord? You’re alive . . .” He shook his head. “I thought you were dead. . . .”

  Rachel sat down on the side of the bed and started stroking his head. “It’s all right, Jared. You’re just feeling a little under the weather is all,” she said, the timbre of her voice dropping a bit. She was mesmerizing him—another vampire skill I didn’t yet have. I’d seen Jean-Paul and the others use it from time to time, and they always assured me that I’d learn it in time. “Hush, now, you just lie down and go back to sleep, okay? You just need to rest.”

  He murmured a bit, his eyes drooping, and he slid back down, curling up into a ball on his side. In just a matter of moments, his chest was rising and falling again in the steady breath pattern of sleep.

  Rachel stood up and glared at me. She stalked back into the front room. I started to close the pocket doors, but she stopped me. “There’s no point,” she replied. “If he wants to hear us, the doors won’t stop him, nor will the lock hold him if he wants out.” She looked grim. “He’s converting, but it’s much worse than I feared, than I sensed.” She shivered and grabbed a pack of Pall Malls out of her purse. She lit one and took a long drag. She blew the smoke out and started pacing. “There’s a reason why his wounds won’t close,” she said, still pacing. “You never should have fed from him.”

  “I know that,” I replied, irritated. “It was a mistake—”

  “It’s even bigger than you think,” she cut me off, flicking ash on the hardwood floor without a care. Jean-Paul would have a stroke if he saw it. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She ran her other hand through her hair. “I don’t know how to break a curse, or if it’s even possible. This is out of my league.”

  “Curse?” I stood up. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She stopped pacing and ground the cigarette out under her shoe. She turned and faced the front door. “He’s almost here, thank heaven.” She plopped down into a wingback chair and sprawled across it, swinging her feet over one of the arms. She smiled at me. “This is a lot to take in, I know.” Her tone was kind, which was rather a surprise. “I know I’ve been a bit of a bitch to you, and I’m sorry. I’m worried, is all, but Nigel’s almost here and—”

  “Nigel?”

  “My master.”

  “Master?”

  “You really don’t know anything, do you?” She sighed. “My creator. He turned me into a vampire. Jean-Paul is your master.”

  “I don’t know that I like the sound of that.”

  “That’s because you were created by a lazy, indolent idiot who doesn’t take his responsibility to his creations seriously,” she snapped. “Making a new vampire is a responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Jean-Paul . . . he only makes vampires out of men he wants to fuck, at the risk of sounding crude.”

  Even though I knew what she said to be true, I still felt the urge to defend him. I fought it down and said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Cord, but it’s true,” she said softly. “And you know it’s true.”

  I nodded, feeling the sadness and desolation roll over me again like a wave. “I know,” I whispered. “It’s why I left.”

  In a blink, she was sitting beside me on the couch, holding my hand in her cold ones. “I know.” She kissed the side of my head. “I know it hurts.” She swallowed, and stroked the top of my head. “I know how hard it is to cope with such a thing.”

  Everything I’d been holding inside since I left Palm Springs came rushing out of me in one fell swoop.

  I’d been so stupid to think Jean-Paul cared about me. All I had been to him was a piece of ass, a pretty boy one of his coven had seen on the streets of New Orleans and taken to meet the master on the dance floor. He’d seen me, and I’d been a plaything for him, nothing more—someone to introduce to the pleasures of man-on-man sex. Was it my virginity that had struck his fancy or my deeply religious upbringing? All he wanted was a young man—it didn’t matter which one—and when he tired of me, when I stopped amusing him, he’d started looking for other young boys. I’d first realized it at the party in Miami, and the pattern had continued after that as we traveled far and wide, to the Black and Blue Ball in Toronto, to Cherries in Washington, DC, and finally Easter in Palm Springs—when I’d finally rebelled. I’d told myself for months that he’d turned me, that all he wanted from the others was to fuck them and drink from them, but he’d made me one of them so that I could be with him forever.

  Forever didn’t last long in Jean-Paul’s mind.

  “He never told you why he turned you?” she asked me in a whisper. She had her arms around me, my head down on her shoulder as my tears flowed and my body shook with my heartbroken sobs.

  “I thought it was to save me because Sebastian had drained me.” I wiped at my eyes, smearing blood on my hands. I licked them clean. “But Sebastian wanted my blood because I was already turning. I don’t remember what happened that first night with Jean-Paul and the others. I don’t. But I must have drank from him, right? Why else would Sebastian have wanted me?”

  “There’s no memory of that night in you.” She kept stroking my hair. “The only person who can answer those questions is Jean-Paul, and the Council of Thirteen will want answers from him, I assure you. But first we have to solve the problem of Jared.” She sighed. “The easiest thing to do would be to kill him, you know, and dispose of his body. His family and friends can have closure that way— knowing that he’s died, rather than spending the rest of their lives wondering.”

  “No,” I replied. “It’s not right. It’s not his fault.”

  There was a knock on the door, and she stood to answer it.

  I rose as she answered the door. I watched as she reached up to hug the man standing there, but all I could see was a thick head of white hair as he put his arms around her and returned the hug. He was wearing a seersucker suit, and as I stood, not sure what to do next, his head lifted and I saw his face.

  He looked old, older than anyone I’d ever seen before—yet his face was free of lines, his blue eyes bright and alert. The white hair was perfectly combed, parted in the center and falling down to his broad shoulders. The age was more of a sense I got from looking at him than any physical representation. He simply gave off an air of great age, of experience, of having seen the world in all of its ugliness for more centuries than he cared to count. But with that same air, a feeling of great power, strength, and compassion radiated from him—a feeling that calmed me, convincing me that everything would, indeed, work out for the best.

  Or at least the way it was supposed to.

  He murmured something to Rachel that I couldn’t hear, and she nodded as they separated and he entered my house. Underneath the seersucker jacket he wore a salmon-colored silk shirt and a blue-and-white-striped tie knotted firmly at his throat. He was tall—certainly taller than me, most likely well over six feet.

  He looked at me with a gentle smile and spread his arms wide. “And you must be Cord.”

  I nodded and took a hesitant step forward. He beckoned to me with one of his hands, a slight gesture that was almost imperceptible, and I crossed the room and put my arms around him, placing my head down on his chest as his arms went around me.

  “We will take care of this, my child,” Nigel whispered to me. “There’s nothing for you to fear anymore.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I sat up in my bed with a start, my heart pounding in my chest.

  I opened my eyes. The light outside the window was fading, which meant the sun was starting to go down. I could hear pigeons cooing.

  The dream began fading out of my mind, yet I still felt nervous and unsettled. It had seemed so vivid and real; it had been like living the whole thing all over again.

  And it was just as awful this time as it had been when it all actually happened.

  In my dream, I’d been back in the house across the s
treet, tied to the bed while Sebastian toyed with my body, laughing as he tormented me and performed his strange rituals. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. My cock was still hard from the dream. It had always disturbed me that my dreams about him were so erotic, so arousing—he had wanted to kill me and had almost succeeded.

  But I hadn’t had the dream in quite some time, either.

  Maybe it meant something that it had come back.

  I stretched and yawned, my head still foggy from sleep as I tried to shake off the dream. When I’d been human, it had always been hard for me to wake up—and that hadn’t changed. Back in our room at Beta Kappa, Jared used to always laugh about how I “could sleep through nuclear war.” My mother had always used to say I slept like the dead. While I never felt tired or sleepy, once I lay down in my bed and closed my eyes, sleep came quickly and deeply. And the dreams . . . when I’d been human, I rarely remembered my dreams. Now my dreams were almost as vivid as reality, and when I woke up, it was sometimes hard to differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t, what had just been a dream. My mouth was gummy, the way it always was when I’d fed before sleeping. The light outside continued to fade, and I shifted in the bed, and my leg brushed against another leg.

  There was someone else in the bed with me.

  I turned and looked at him in the fading light.

  It was Jared, all right—so that hadn’t been part of my dream. That nightmare was all too real. Last night had really happened, which meant Rachel was somewhere in the house, and everything the old man (Nigel) had told me last night had also been all too real. My dreaming subconscious had not made any of that up.

  I swallowed and resisted the urge to scream in frustration.

  Jared moaned and shifted in his sleep at my side, turning over so he was facedown on his pillow.

  I had placed a blanket over him the night before, but he had wormed his way out from under it at some point after I had climbed into the bed with him. The first rays of the morning light had been working their way through the window as I undressed—sharing this bed with Jared had been Rachel’s idea.

  Someone has to be there in case he needs someone, she’d said, and the old man had agreed with her. And since you’re responsible for his state . . . She’d let her voice trail off. She hadn’t needed to say anything more, really. I understood.

  I was responsible for him now and forever; they’d made that abundantly clear to me. It was an obligation I might never be free of—unless of course he was put to death.

  The wool blanket I’d covered him with was lying in a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed. His naked body glistened and glimmered a bit in the fading light.

  I slipped out of the bed and pulled my robe on to cover my own nakedness. I looked at Jared’s naked, recumbent body—the sexy curve of his ass just below the dimples in his lower back, the broad expanse of his upper back, the mussed hair on his head. He looked beautiful, the way he always had.

  I remembered the first time I’d ever seen him—at Preference Dinner the semester we pledged. It was the last night of Rush Week, and all the newly recruited pledges were in our best suits and ties, every hair in place, shaved and scrubbed and clean. The brothers of Beta Kappa took us to a really nice restaurant—the Prime Steakhouse on Jefferson Avenue in Oxford. There were some alumni there, too—the state’s attorney general, a bank president from Memphis, and a state senator from the Biloxi area showed up to impress the new pledges with the greatness of Beta Kappa and its rich tradition at the University of Mississippi. The brothers seated us alphabetically at our own table in the banquet room, so naturally I wound up sitting next to this incredibly beautiful boy from New Orleans.

  I wanted him from the moment we introduced ourselves and shook hands. I’d seen him during the rush parties, but there were so many good-looking boys going through Rush at the Beta Kappa house that my mind—and hormones—were on overload. I’d never been in a room with so many gorgeous guys before. The brothers were also, for the most part, really attractive. I knew from the first minute I walked into the plantation-style house with the big Doric columns and the wide veranda that this was the fraternity I wanted to join. I’d decided to go through Rush in the first place because I thought joining a fraternity might actually help “straighten” me out. (Although why I thought that would work when playing football, basketball, and baseball at good old Hubbertville High School hadn’t done the trick was still a mystery to me.) My decision to go Greek was also helped along by the fact my parents were dead set against it. My father told me all kinds of horrible stories about what fraternities were like when he was at Alabama, which only made me even more determined to get a bid from one of the houses at Ole Miss. It also amazed me that it never occurred to either him or my mother that if they’d encouraged me to join Beta Kappa, I would most likely have avoided the place like the plague. But they did offer me a bid, and I had walked on air all the way back to my dorm.

  And when I walked into the banquet room of the restaurant for the preference dinner and saw all the good-looking boys cleaned and pressed and spiffed up, I wondered if pledging was such a good idea. Would I be able to keep the secret of my sexuality surrounded by so much mouth-watering temptation? How on earth would I be able to use the communal showers without an erection giving me away?

  Yet despite my instant crush on Jared, I soon realized I had nothing to worry about on that score. The way he flirted with our waitress, a pretty young thing with black hair and white skin and dimples and an accent thick enough to cut with a knife, it was pretty obvious he wasn’t gay. And no matter how much I might wish he was, that wasn’t going to change him.

  But it was impossible not to be fascinated by him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I couldn’t remember ever meeting someone I so desperately wanted to like me. It wasn’t that he was the best-looking guy in the room—he wasn’t. He didn’t have the best body of all the brothers and pledges. There were two pledges in our class who should have chucked college and run off to New York to be underwear models.

  But there was just something about him that drew your eye, made you feel good and comfortable and relaxed. His grin was so infectious that no matter how down in the dumps you were, you couldn’t help but smile back at him. His blue eyes twinkled—I’d read that description in books before, but never really knew what it meant until I met Jared. He seemed larger than life somehow, like he took up more space than most people did. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. He wound up being our pledge class president, the brothers voted him the outstanding pledge award, and every semester he was elected to whatever office he ran for. Every girl he met was his for the taking—but part of what made Jared so special was he treated girls with respect. He didn’t do the one-night-stand thing—he preferred to have a steady girlfriend, and he never participated in any of the usual frat boy boasting about his sexual expertise.

  And he was from New Orleans, a city I’d always wanted to visit—a place that seemed exotic and foreign to me.

  We talked and laughed and joked all through the dinner. He showed me a picture of his girlfriend, Josie, who was pledging Kappa Kappa Gamma, and promised to take me to Mardi Gras sometime.

  And by the time the meal was over and we headed back to the house with our pledge brothers to tap a keg and get drunk for the first time with the brotherhood, we’d decided to move out of the dorms and share a room in the house.

  Jared turned out to be the friend I’d always wanted, had always dreamed of, when I was growing up. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t tell him—even the gay thing. He was cool with it. His mother’s brother was gay and lived in the French Quarter. I knew my secret was safe with him from the homophobic brothers of Beta Kappa. He even encouraged me to drive over to a gay bar in Memphis and went with me the first time, getting us fake IDs and finding the place on the Internet. He encouraged me to talk to a guy who was checking me out, gave me a couple of ones to tip the hot guy dancing on the bar in his underwear, and
stayed sober so I could get more courage from alcohol. It was his idea that I go with him to Mardi Gras so I could go visit the gay bars in the Quarter, and he disguised the visit by inviting two other brothers to come with us to New Orleans. Once we were there and out watching parades, he helped me escape from the crowds watching the parades on Canal Street so I could go, as he put it, “get my gay on.”

  How was he to know I would encounter a pack of gay vampires that first night on my own?

  And now it had all come full circle, hadn’t it?

  I’d repaid his friendship, his kindness, everything he’d done for me by infecting him and forcing him to give up everything that was important to him.

  I walked around to his side of the bed and knelt down next to him. He looked so innocent and beautiful in his sleep, with his eyes closed.

  I remembered as I looked down at his face how kind his parents had always been to me, his older sister and brother. On that trip down for Mardi Gras, they’d welcomed me into their beautiful home. Even before that, when they came to Oxford to visit, they’d always treated me like a member of the family. They’d always included me in dinner invitations or on day trips—anything they did I was more than welcome to join them.

  Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Holcomb, for making me feel like I was part of your family. By the way, I’ve poisoned your son and destroyed his life. You’ll never see him again.

  I sighed and tucked the blanket around him again. He murmured and rolled over onto his back. His eyes fluttered briefly and subsided again.

  I walked down the hallway and brushed my teeth, splashing hot water onto my face and rubbing goo out of the corners of my eyes.

  I could smell fresh coffee and headed into the kitchen.

  Rachel was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. Without looking up, she said, “I hope you don’t mind I made coffee.”

  “I’m glad you made yourself at home,” I replied a little sarcastically. “Did you sleep well?”

  She didn’t look up from the paper. “I haven’t slept. Someone had to keep watch. How was your rest?”