Night's Pleasure (Children of The Night 4)

“That’s right, and I’m not going to, not yet, anyway.”

“It must be something really hush-hush,” Savanah remarked. Her father had worked on big stories before, but he had always shared them with her. This was the first time he had refused to discuss any part of it with her. So far, he hadn’t given her so much as a hint. It was maddening and frustrating. Being a journalist and naturally nosy, it had her curiosity ramped up as high as it would go. “Is it dangerous?”

“No more than any of the others,” he said with a shrug. “Don’t worry.”

“Worry?” she asked with exaggerated nonchalance. “Who, me?”

Gentry snorted softly. “I’m off to bed, honey. See you in the morning.”

“All right. Good night, Dad.”

Closing her eyes, Savanah leaned back in her chair and replayed everything that had happened that evening, from the time she’d stepped into the theater until she’d woken up in Rane’s house with no recollection of how she had gotten there.

He was a world-class magician.

He was gorgeous.

He was a shape-shifter.

She wondered what he was doing now. Was he perhaps thinking of her? Had it been foolish of her to agree to see him again? Her father certainly thought so. Did he know something she didn’t? But that was silly. If her father thought it was really dangerous for her to see Rane again, he would have said so and told her why.

In her mind, Savanah envisioned Rane transforming into the wolf. It had been a scary thing to see. Scary and beautiful, she thought, the way his body had taken on a sort of shimmery glow as his muscles and ligaments shifted, stretching, realigning themselves, until the man was gone and a big black wolf had stood in his place. Did it hurt when he changed? Where did his clothing go? Questions, questions. Would he answer them when she saw him again?

Rising, she went upstairs to get ready for bed.

Later, snuggled under the covers, her eyelids heavy, she stared out the open window, her thoughts turning once again toward Rane. Was he home in bed, thinking about her, or was he in his wolf form, running beneath the light of the moon?

Ignoring a sudden, inexplicable urge to go out into the night and look for him, she flopped over onto her stomach and closed her eyes.

Later, hovering on the brink of sleep, she thought she heard a wolf howl beneath her bedroom window.

Rane prowled the shadowed streets of the city, the lust for blood thrumming through his veins. The hunger was always worse when the moon was full, which he found oddly amusing. He had never known Vampires to be influenced by the cycles of the moon; it was a Supernatural law that applied only to Werewolves.

Hoping to subdue his hunger, Rane turned his thoughts to Savanah Gentry. She reminded him of someone, but again, he couldn’t make the connection. Pushing the troubling notion aside, he let his thoughts linger on Savanah. The next two weeks should be interesting indeed, he mused, thinking it was almost like he was a mortal man and she was his girlfriend. He laughed at the idea. He hadn’t had a girlfriend since he’d had a crush on Wendy Simpson when he was twelve.

Rane’s whole life had changed when he turned thirteen. Until then, he and his identical twin brother had been like any other boys on the brink of puberty. They had gone to school, played a harmless prank now and then, switched places with each other from time to time to see if anyone could tell the difference. But the world as they had known it had changed the night after he and Raphael turned thirteen. For one thing, they didn’t wake up the next morning.

Rane had learned later that his mother had tried to rouse him and his brother, but to no avail. They were sleeping the sleep of the Undead and there had been no waking either of them until the sun went down. He had risen with an unrelenting thirst he didn’t understand. His parents hadn’t known what to do. His father, Vince, had taken Rane and his brother outside and told them what he thought was happening, although there was no way to be sure, since as far as anyone knew, no other Vampire had ever sired children.

Vince Cordova’s explanation had been simple. He had been a Vampire only a year or so when he had married Rane’s mother. It was Vince’s opinion that he had retained enough of his humanity to sire Rane and his brother. After that brief explanation, Vince had taken his sons hunting. He had mesmerized a young woman and taken a small amount of her blood. As soon as Rane caught the scent, he had known it was what he had been hungering for, what he wanted. Needed. He and his brother had both fed from the woman. The little they had taken had satisfied Rafe, but not Rane. He had wanted more. He had wanted it all. He had made his first kill later that night, a secret he had kept to this day, a secret that gnawed at him even now.

He and Rafe had been full-fledged Vampires from that night on. Of course, going to school had been out of the question after that, so his parents had hired a tutor who had been willing to teach them at night. Later, after Rane and his brother reached adulthood, their father had brought their mother across.

“Just one big happy Vampire family,” Rane muttered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

Rane had left home shortly after his mother was turned. He had never gone back.

He had kept up with his family’s whereabouts as best he could since then. He knew that his brother, his parents, and his grandparents had all been involved in the recent war between the Vampires and the Werewolves, a war that might have gone on forever if Mara and the head Werewolf, Clive, hadn’t come to their senses and realized that the war between the Supernatural creatures was a big mistake. A good many Vampires, Werewolves, and hunters had been killed before peace had been achieved.

Rane had been surprised to learn that Rafe had fallen in love, married a mortal woman, and settled down in Oak Hollow, a town Rane had never heard of and couldn’t find on a map. He grunted softly. Falling in love with mortal women seemed to run in his family.

The thought brought Savanah Gentry’s image quickly to mind. He had known many women in the course of his existence, some more intimately than others, but he had never let himself fall in love with any of them. Every time he started to care too deeply, the memory of the first woman he had killed burst through the mists of time, reminding him, in vivid detail, that he was a monster.

Chapter Five

William Gentry sat in the backyard, a blanket spread over his useless legs, a glass of strong whiskey cradled in his hands. There were times, like now, when sleep eluded him. When that happened, he came out here to try to forget.

He drained the glass and then refilled it from the bottle on the table beside him. He drank to forget old hurts, old wounds, and usually it worked, but tonight not even whiskey could drive away the ghosts of the past.