then I only tell you half of it.”
“I’m not planning to play with fire again,” she said firmly.
At that he actually smiled. “Plans. Yes. They so often work.”
“Stop it.”
His smile remained, and she was quite certain he’d smelled the scents of her desire for him off and on all evening. If she were to be honest about it, the only time her body wasn’t demanding more of him was when she could keep her mind distracted enough, and even then there was an edgy sort of yearning between her legs. Desire seemed to have a mind of its own. Since meeting him, there seemed to be a part of her that was always ready, always aware, always wanting.
Frankly, that sucked, but nothing seemed to stop it.
“There’s an addiction that vampires experience,” he said, his smile fading. “I’ve managed to avoid it for millennia, and I’d like to continue to avoid it.”
“Like crack addiction, what you said I might feel?”
“Worse. The only cure is death, or sometimes vengeance.”
She caught her breath. “Whose death and whose vengeance?”
“Ours. We call it claiming. An innocuous word for something so dangerous. If a vampire claims someone or something, it’s beyond obsession. For example, were I to claim you, you’d never be able to leave me. You might run to the farthest end of the planet, and I would follow and find you. I wouldn’t be able to prevent myself except by ending my own existence. And were I to claim you and you died, I would have only two choices—to avenge you or die to break the claiming.”
“Wow,” she whispered.
“Judging by what happened to my friend Luc after his claimed mate died, I’m not so sure that vengeance is a cure either. Most of us attempt to avoid claiming, although it’s beginning to seem to me that it’s not something that happens by choice. Jude claimed Terri, and that’s the third case I’ve seen since coming here.”
“But...she’s not a vampire. So what happens when she dies?”
“Exactly what I told you. Thus Jude will have a decision to make eventually. Terri wants him to change her so she can fully share his life. But he’s reluctant because he knows how painful the change is and knows there’s no way back once it’s done. But at some point or other, he’s going to have to decide whether to keep her by changing her or face her eventual death, and his own as a result.”
Caro tried to imagine it. “I’ve heard of heartbreak, but this is beyond anything I’ve ever heard of. Well, not true. Some humans become that obsessed.”
“But obsessed in a different way usually. How many cases have you seen in your career where a human would rather kill the object of his obsession than leave it?”
“Too many,” she admitted.
“Our kind...we kill ourselves rather than those we’ve claimed.”
Her eyes felt strangely hot as she looked at him. “That’s scary.”
“It is,” he agreed. “So we avoid it if there’s any way we can. You’d better get some sleep. Dawn will come all too soon.”
She turned toward her bedroom, not because she wanted to obey him, but because she felt a need to think over what he’d said. But just before she entered, she looked over her shoulder to ask, “Isn’t there anything good about claiming?”
“I wouldn’t know from personal experience. But Jude seems happy with it.”
She carried that to bed with her, trying to imagine what he’d said and telling herself that being stalked by an obsessed vampire was not something any woman could really want. She’d seen enough obsessed people and it had never struck her as a healthy state of affairs.
But it wasn’t claiming she was thinking about when she finally slipped away into sleep. It was the thing stalking her and the sense it was coming closer somehow, and growing more dangerous.
In her dreams, it dogged her heels as she tried to run—she was never able to see how close it was or what it intended.
All she knew was that somehow Damien was there with her, encouraging her, promising to place himself between it and her.
She didn’t want to wake. A half hour before dawn, Damien tried to get her up and out of bed, but she’d finally reached a point of exhaustion where nothing short of a fire in the house would get her moving quicker than a snail’s pace.
She heard him moving around her room as sleep tried to cloud her brain again, then felt him lift her in his arms as easily as if she were a child.
And for some reason, she didn’t mind that he carried her down the stairs, put her in the car, buckled her seat belt and drove off with her.
Vaguely she knew she was too groggy, that she never had this much trouble waking up, but she didn’t care. She was asleep again as they pulled away from the curb, and she stirred only when they jolted to a stop in front of Jude’s office.
One thing she did notice: the sky was lightening with the first rosy tinge of dawn. “Light,” she said, unable to form a more coherent sentence.
“It’s all right,” he murmured. Then strong arms lifted her again, and she retained only the merest memory of being carried inside to the office and laid on the sofa.
As sleep started to claim her again, she heard Damien say, “Something’s wrong. I can’t wake her.”
Then she slipped over the abyss into the nightmares and darkness again.
Damien and Jude gathered in his office where, with the door closed, no light could enter. There they could postpone the sleep of death, but only for a little while.
Neither of them felt they could simply let their own deaths take over when Caro couldn’t wake up, yet Damien knew the prickling on the back of his neck was painful and would soon become utterly distracting. In fact, soon he wouldn’t be able to avoid the sleep of death at all.
“Maybe she’ll be safer here,” Jude said. “I’ve got a lot of wards on this office.”
“I’m worried about when neither of us is awake. Who is going to watch over her and ensure this sleep doesn’t turn into something else?”
Jude’s frown deepened. “How can we be sure what’s going on here? How can we know how to counter it? I’d suggest you keep her in my office with you throughout the day, but...”
“But,” Damien agreed. “But I’ll be virtually useless unless she tries to wake me. If she opens the damn door to get out I’ll be cooked, and she could die right beside me without me ever knowing. No solution.”
The burning on the back of his neck was beginning to feel like hot coals. Soon he wouldn’t be able to avoid dying any longer.
“We need to get her attention,” Jude said. “Wake her enough to get it through to her.”
“All right, I’ll try.”
Jude stopped him before he turned. “I don’t think you can go out there now.”
The flames that seemed to be licking at the base of Damien’s skull would seem to agree. “Then what the hell are we going to do?”
“Chloe.” Jude picked up the phone and punched in a number. “I need you over here now. Something’s going on with Caro, and we’re not sure what. Regardless, neither of us is going to be awake for more than a few minutes. You’re going to have to keep an eye on her. We can’t.”
Silence, followed by “We can’t seem to wake her up completely. If anything changes, you’re going to have to bust into my office and get me and Damien. And you’re going to have to find and put up those blackout curtains for the outer office because it’s too late for us to do that.”
When he disconnected, he looked only mildly irritated. “Like I have time to answer a million questions right now. Okay, I’m going to bed with Terri. She’s waiting for me. And you sleep here in my office. It’s totally blacked out, as you know. Once Chloe gets the blackout curtains up, the outer office will be safe, too. Then if anything happens...”
“Something is already happening,” Damien said tautly. But they both knew that. Never in all his centuries
