Sabrina Strong Series

1. Night Visitations-2

First, she"d shot Jack Rasmussen in the chest, badly wounding him before she shot me a few minutes later. Jack had been air-lifted to another hospital, where he died. He would never have walked, I was told, if he had survived. Now, Mrs. Woodbine was up on murder charges along with her son, Mark. I"d been able to stall the thoughts about all this by watching the movie and hoped to numb my brain a little with the wine coolers. Why did he have to come and ruin it all?

“I"m staying the night to make sure you"ll be alright,” Tremayne said. “Then you"re going back to the Towers to stay in the penthouse.”

“No!” I grabbed one crutch and made a feeble attempt to look mutinous. This was difficult, especially since I couldn"t stand, face him, and put both fists to my hips. But I frowned deeply.

No“Yes, you are!” he countered. “You can"t expect your sister-in-law to keep bringing food over here for you, while she has her own family to take care of, her own house to clean,” he added and looked around the place.

Yeah, it was a shambles, but hey, I didn"t have a house cleaner, a maid, or a gofer. Unless you counted Rick, who would have done it all for me with a snap of the fingers, but I wasn"t about to take advantage of a good friend and leprechaun.

“That"s what family does!” I blurted.

“Look. You have a maid, a cook, and a butler sitting around doing nothing at your penthouse.”

“I didn"t care for those people. Besides, they"re crooks!” They had stolen or were attempting to steal an expensive collection that belonged to Malcolm. They"d almost succeeded too. “Besides, it"s not my penthouse,” I argued.

“It is until I say it isn"t!” he shouted back, and I swear to God the rafters above shook. I jumped at the sound, gazed up at him.

His gaze went above his head like he had X-ray vision, and asked, “How many bedrooms are there upstairs?”

“Five, plus a bathroom. A small bathroom. Only two bedrooms are furnished, and one is for vampires.”

“You sleep down here, don"t you?” He remembered where my bedroom was, surely. He"d been here just last month for the first time to steal me away from Vasyl and keep me ahead of the demons who wanted to kill me. Oh, and to bed me. He"d paid dearly for that terrible mistake (tee-hee- hee).

He moved away from his position and out of my vision. Snooping, he looked into the bathroom which opened out into the dining room, then he returned.

“I sleep in that room.” I pointed with my thumb behind me to the room that was closed off by the envelope door. To anyone else, it looked like an oak panel. It opened by sliding into the wall (I assumed that was where the name “envelope” came from). It was unique to this old house. Plus, the French doors that opened off the living room into the den (once upon a time, back in its heyday, it was called a parlor). A beautiful set of oak stairs opened from that room near the front door, which faced the road. The other set of stairs opened off the dining room—not as nice. Someone had once said that farmhands had slept up in the attic, and would have used these stairs, not the main ones, back when it was an actual working farmhouse. The house was built in 1904, or there abouts, and had been a dairy farm up until the seventies. My mother and father had bought the house in 1985. The bathroom that I used had once been a bedroom. There was an indoor toilet in the basement—one of the first in the county. (Believe me it was yucky and, of course, no longer in use. But, hey, they"d had pit toilets back then, so they were modern by standards in the early 1900s.)

“That might work,” Tremayne said, nodding.

“What might work?”

“You"re going to bed. C"mon.” Tremayne moved toward me.

“What? Are you my nurse now?” I asked the once-upon-a-time Viking.

He stood over me and gave me a glare that looked half-warning and half-amused. “My bedside manner is not something you"ll want to experience.”

“No. I think you"re right about that.” Aw, hell. As a matter of fact, I didn"t exactly want to be this close to him again. And on that one issue, I had experienced it. But here I was, an invalid. With only crutches to get around on. No way I could run from him.

He bent down and lifted me easily from the chair and carried me to the door of my bedroom. He paused in mid-stride to my bedroom. We looked at one another. I had my arms around his thick neck. This wasn"t going to be one of those romantic moments from a paranormal romance book where the vampire swept the human woman off her feet and took her into the bedroom, and they experienced the best s*x they had both ever had. Nope. Wasn’t going to happen.

I arched my eyebrow. “What?” I asked when he said nothing and didn"t move forward.

“Where"s that f*****g dagger of yours?” We had been intimate a few times in our past. The last time I"d really like to forget (but couldn"t seem to.)

The last time he had tricked me into a bedroom, the Dagger of Delphi had nearly killed him because it had been wielded by Dante. I"d kept that a secret from him to this day. He thought the Dagger of Delphi, which had a pure silver blade, had magically come alive and jammed itself into his heart while he was making love to me (his version, not mine). He"d nearly died. If I hadn"t given him a few pints of my plasma, he would have.

“It"s on top of a building in downtown Moonlight.” So I thought.

“You sure?”

“Positive. I saw Hobart throw it up there after it stabbed Mrs. Woodbine. I haven"t seen it since.”

That I hadn"t thought to go and get it told you something about my mental and physical condition. I was the sibyl, after all. The Dagger of Delphi was my weapon of choice to kill demons, vampires, and the like. As it turned out, Mrs. Woodbine was neither a demon nor a vampire. But there was a very good explanation for her terrible behavior, which included torturing women who she found guilty of doing the “Devil"s work”, and burning down people"s houses, for the same reason.

Turned out, she"d had a rather nasty entity from another dimension, or world, cohabiting inside her, telling her to do these things. It took a diamond touched to her to drive it out, and then a pencil driven into its chest to send it back to wherever it had come from—or maybe it had died (we weren"t completely sure which) because of the carbon in the lead. We"d learned that the thing was extremely allergic to carbon. I knew that was weird, but there you had it. The diamond and pencil had worked on it, and that was all I knew. And Mrs. Woodbine was currently behind bars.

Tremayne paused for another ten seconds and then, with vampire magic (because the old ones always had some frightening magic to unlock and open doors and windows), he unlocked my bedroom door without so much as touching it, and the oak panel slid open all on its own, wide enough to give him access to my bedroom … a very scary thought My throat went dry when I tried to swallow.

Two of his giant steps brought him into my bedroom, and two more brought him beside my bed. He set me down in the semi-darkness on the mattress. To tell the truth, this was not my idea of a good thing—the king of vampires in my bedroom and me all helpless. My stomach flipped a few times.

My light flicked on, illuminating the room in all its magenta glory. Well, shoot, he"d used his vampire magic to turn on the light, too. Was he in control of everything? I had no idea he could turn lights on and off, too.

He pointed down at me. “You wearing that to bed?”

I looked down at my gray sweats. “Yeah. Why? Not sexy enough?”

He let go a withering hiss and turned away. “You need to brush your teeth?”

“You gonna do that for me as well? I need to pee too,” I said, and smiled when he glared at me.

He walked out of the room, in a graceful way that vampires all had. You"d think a big one like him would make the floor creak and he"d lumber around like John Wayne. Not at all. “Just a minute.” He came back with my crutches. “Here. Do what you need to do. I"ll be in here if you need me.” He stepped outside my room, rolled the door back, leaving six inches of it open.

I grappled with my crutches, got up, and hobbled to my bathroom. I liked that the bathroom had two doors. One that I could gain access to via my bedroom, and the other that led to the dining room. It was why I had turned this room into my bedroom after my father had died. He"d had his office in this ten-by-fifteen room. I wanted to be downstairs, where I was close to everything since I lived alone. Of course, since having become a sibyl, I"d had all sorts of visitors and people who had stayed with me. Most of them men. Not all wanted to make love to me, but most did, including Tremayne. But that was in the past. I really hoped it was, anyway.

Using my left leg, I leaned on the counter and did a few things in the bathroom without too much trouble. I could bend my right knee some, as the break was further up, but I was supposed to stay off it as much as possible. Going to the bathroom was awkward as hell. I knew it would mend quicker than a normal human, since I"d been bitten by a werewolf, and wounds tended to heal quicker for whatever the reason. Plus, I"d had some vampire blood in the past, which enhanced things as well. Lucky me.

I was not going to get into a nightgown with Mr. Magnate of the Eastern, and or Western Half of the United States only ten feet from me. The TV came back on. I wondered what a vampire would watch on TV all night. Late night talk shows? Creepy movies? I didn"t have cable, so he couldn"t watch anything nasty, thank God. He turned down the volume. Vampires had excellent hearing too.

When I was finished, I hobbled back to my bed. A thin wedge of light from the TV cut across the floor from underneath the door. He"d turned out the light next to the chair. Vampire"s eyes were very sensitive.

I stopped and noted that my bed covers had been turned down. My lips twisted, and I blinked hard with disbelief. This was a magnate, a thousand-plus-year-old vampire who had probably killed thousands of people for their blood without the slightest concern about them, who had turned my bed down. For some reason, my mind drummed up how he had been near death from silver poisoning from the aforementioned dagger incident.