Kindling Flames—Gathering Tinder Read online

  She also knew he had a passion for his coffees, and she had seen him put away an entire box of clementines in one sitting. Sure, he did look a little green afterwards and complained about heartburn the next day, but he still ate them.

  Vicky sighed as she tried to wrap her head around this. A strange thought hit her, and she laughed despite the fact she was still confused and terrified.

  “What’s funny?” Darien asked as he patted Vicky on the back.

  She pushed back from him and looked up into his face. His eyes were still a brilliant green, but they no longer held the fire that burned in them when he had first burst into the room. She was also glad to note there were no signs of sharp teeth poking from his mouth. “I think my sanity just cracked a bit,” she admitted, sitting up. Vicky folded her hands and looked into the concern-filled eyes of her boss. “Are you really a vampire?”

  Darien’s face grew serious, and he nodded.

  She let out a snort of laughter and collapsed to the bed in a fit of mirth.

  Of all the reactions he had expected, laughter was not one of them. He didn’t know if he should be happy that she wasn’t screaming or upset that she was laughing at his status as a vampire.

  Vicky looked up from where she was twisted on the bed, wiping a tear from her eye. She didn’t want to tell him she found it funny that she really did have a blood-sucking boss, so she revealed the other amusing fact that shouldn’t offend him. “Do you remember my friends from the club?”

  “How could I forget them?” Darien smiled.

  Vicky sat up as she told him about her strange friends. “While we were waiting for you to arrive, they kept pushing me for information. Since I wouldn’t tell them anything, they kept coming up with some rather outrageous descriptions. One of the ideas Beth suggested was that you were a vampire out for my blood.” Her right hand went up to cover the area were Michael had bitten her, and her left hand rubbed her arm near the elbow.

  Darien chuckled and folded his leg up so he could lean forward to pull the hand clutching her neck away. He rubbed his thumb across her knuckles reassuringly.

  “A vampire, yes. Out for your blood, no.” Darien sighed deeply and dropped his head so he was looking at the blanket between them. “I am truly sorry about this, Victoria. I never had any intention of exposing you to this world.”

  Vicky could hear the regret in his words, and she squeezed his fingers.

  He looked up into the face of his assistant.

  “It’s okay. Sometimes shit happens that you can’t control.” She smiled at Darien to let him know that she would be all right. “I’ve learned that there are two things you can do—deal with it and get on with life, or roll over and die. I’m not about to roll over and die. I’m not sure that I want to be anyone’s snack again, but I’ll get over it.”

  Vicky’s view on life amused Darien, but her words reminded him that there was something important he needed to take care of. “Speaking of snacks…” He released her hand and pulled the plate of cookies and glass of orange juice over to her. “I’m not sure how much blood you lost, but this should help.”

  She grinned at the offering. “This reminds me of when I used to go sell plasma.” Vicky picked up a cookie and nibbled at it. “Only creepier.”

  Darien laughed, enjoying her odd sense of humor. “If you’re okay now—” he paused so Vicky could nod at him, “—there’s something I need to go take care of.”

  Darien withdrew from the bed and left her to enjoy her cookies and juice. When he opened the bedroom door, he found Brian leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.

  “Good evening, Master Darien,” Brian greeted him.

  Darien stopped and stared at the guard.

  “Clara sent us to see to your needs, should you call.”

  Darien smiled and shook his head. He should have known that Clara would post a watch. “Thank you, Brian, but I have to get something to eat.”

  Brian nodded and offered his wrist to the vampire.

  “Have you already fed Clara tonight?” Darien asked.

  Brian dropped his arm and nodded again.

  “Thank you for the offer, but I’ll go find someone that hasn’t donated yet.”

  Darien started to head away when a thought hit him. He stuck his head back into the bedroom and called to Vicky. “Brian’s stopped by to check on us. Would you like company while I’m gone?”

  Vicky froze as she tried to remember who Brian was. The name brought to mind the polite, muscular man with wavy, brown hair.

  Darien noticed the pause as she considered his offer. “I promise that he won’t hurt you, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay. He can come in,” she answered. If it was the same Brian she was thinking about, Vicky was sure it would be all right. After all, he had been so concerned for her well-being in the onsen. Maybe he could answer some of the questions running around in her head.

  Darien opened the door to let Brian in. “Please make sure she’s okay,” he said, patting Brian on the shoulder as he passed.

  Brian nodded as he slipped into the room, closing the door behind him.

  Darien turned his attention to the hunger that had been growing inside of him and headed down the hall to find someone willing to give up a pint.

  ***

  “How are you doing, darling?” Brian asked from where he stood near the door.

  Vicky looked up from her cookies at the man here to keep her company and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders again. She felt more comfortable protected inside the woven material.

  “Better, I guess.” Vicky admitted and took a sip of the juice, working up the nerve to ask him what she wanted to know. “Are you a vampire, too?” she asked shyly over her cookie. Brian smiled and stepped closer to the end of the bed. “No, I’m—” he started.

  “—Food?” Vicky finished for him.

  Brian chuckled and sat himself lightly on the end of the bed. “Sometimes.” He smiled to keep the young woman from being frightened by his words. “Most of the time, though, I run the house for Clara,” Brian explained. “We all have jobs here. It takes a lot of people to keep a house of this size going.”

  Vicky listened as she chewed her cookie. “Are the others…?” She couldn’t think of a polite way to ask their status.

  Brian grinned and shifted to sit more securely on the bed. “We’re all servants here,” he explained. “Natalie is the main housekeeper. She makes sure things get done and we all get fed. I don’t know if you met her, but Tiffany is her daughter.”

  “She was the teenager who brought me back,” Vicky sat up a little more as she grew more comfortable with Brian’s presence.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.” Brian turned and pulled his legs up on the bed, so he was facing Vicky fully. He crossed them and went on with his explanation of the functions of the house. “Tiffany sometimes helps out in the kitchen or in the garden, but she’s been a handful recently. And apparently, she forgot to pass on Master Darien’s message, which complicated things. Natalie grounded her for it.” Brian made a pained face.

  Vicky snickered and took a sip from her glass. She looked down at the large wine glass filled with orange juice and held it up for Brian to see. “Who puts orange juice in a wine glass?” Vicky laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “That would be Terrence,” Brian replied, smiling. “He is a great guy, but he has an odd sense of style.”

  “So, what does everyone else do?” Vicky was starting to enjoy hearing about the weird people she had just met.

  “Well, Roger is the house mechanic. He fixes whatever gets broken and keeps the onsen clean and working. Josie and Jenny keep the rest of this place clean, and Liz takes care of the gardens. Hank, well, he’s the butler and public face of us all. He runs the errands and takes care of any business dealings in the real world.”

  Vicky took another sip of her juice as she processed what he’d said. She was surprised that they were all just
ordinary people. “What about Terrence and…” she snapped her fingers as she tried to remember the other girl’s name. “Um… that gothic chick.”

  Brian grinned at Vicky’s description. “You mean Marsha?”

  She nodded, slipping another cookie into her mouth.

  “They came from town with their masters, so they don’t actually live here.”

  Vicky gave him a long ‘ahhh’ as he explained.

  “We look out for Marsha when we can, and Terrence… well, he makes our lives interesting.”

  “How so?” She cocked her head, giving Brian a puzzled look.

  “Well, every time William brings him over, he tries to redecorate the house in his own, how should I say… unique style.” Brian waved his hand in front of him, trying to gather the proper words for Terrence. “He’s a little… um…”

  “Gay?” Vicky offered.

  “Flaming.” Brian laughed.

  Vicky took another sip of her orange juice. Now that she was comfortable with the muscular man sitting on the bed, she worked her courage up to ask some of the scarier questions puzzling her mind. “Can you tell me more about vampires?” She spoke softly, unsure if she wanted to know the answers.

  Brian tensed up a little as he thought of the best way to explain them to her. “Well, they’re just normal people,” he started.

  Vicky scoffed into her juice.

  “Okay, so they can’t go out during the day, and they live off blood, and they have weird powers, and they can live for a really long time.”

  She giggled as the man dug himself in deeper with ever trait he listed.

  He finally gave up trying to reassure Vicky. “Okay, so they’re not like normal people. But they aren’t the cold, heartless monsters that you see in the movies. I’m sure there are some out there like that, but Clara runs a tight ship here. She and the Council have a very solid set of rules, and they deal with anyone who breaks them very severely.”

  Vicky took a sip of juice to ease the sudden dryness in her mouth. She didn’t know if Brian’s words scared or reassured her. She pulled the blanket tighter around her and opened her mouth to ask questions about the person she really wanted to know about, but she was interrupted by a loud knock on the door.

  Brian and Vicky both looked up to see the door crack open and two heads pop in.

  “Can we come in?” Jenny asked.

  Vicky nodded and Jenny and Josie hopped up on the other side of the bed. Shifting back to give them space, Vicky set her plate on the bedside table.

  “How are you doing, sweetie?” Jenny asked as she looked over the younger woman wrapped up in her blanket.

  “Better,” Vicky said. After talking with Brian, she was feeling a little better about the whole ordeal.

  “We were talking about vampires,” Brian informed the new arrivals about their conversations.

  “We’re so sorry.” Josie leaned forward and touched the edge of Vicky’s blanket. “If we had known, we would never have left you alone like that.”

  Vicky reached out of her blankets and took up the blonde’s hand. “It’s okay,” she said, squeezing Josie’s hand reassuringly. “It’s not your fault.”

  Josie smiled weakly and pulled away, sitting back up.

  “Where is everyone else?” Vicky asked and looked towards the door. If these three had come down, would the rest of the group follow?

  “The Council has gone to bed. It is almost dawn,” Jenny informed her.

  Vicky looked towards the window to see the night starting to fade.

  “As for the rest: Terrence is with William, Marsha is with Michael, and Roger is sacked out on the couch in the lounge…”

  “As usual.” Brian rolled his eyes.

  “…and Liz is seeing to Master Darien.”

  Vicky unconsciously raised her hand to cover her neck when she heard the name Darien had yelled. “Michael was the one that bit me.” She shuddered a little as fear gripped her heart, and a tear formed in the corner of her eye.

  “It’s all right, darling.” Brian shifted up the bed so he could touch the blanket wrapped around Vicky. She dropped her hand down and took up the offered comfort. “You’re safe now.”

  Vicky tried to smile and nod her head, but it didn’t really work.

  “I can promise that Michael won’t touch you again,” Jenny added. She snorted out a harsh laugh. “He is well and truly terrified right now.”

  Vicky’s eyes widened as she turned towards Jenny.

  “As he should be,” Brian added with a satisfied note.

  “We’re all a little terrified right now,” Josie swallowed and looked over at the door. The scene from earlier played in her mind. “I’ve never seen Master Darien that mad before.”

  “And that power!” Jenny shivered. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

  Vicky released Brian’s hand and pulled her blanket tighter as she listened to the three people talk about the man who had just saved her.

  “That wasn’t normal?” Vicky asked. Brian, Josie, and Jenny all looked at her with shocked faces. She gave them a ‘how should I know’ shrug.

  “Not for any vampire I know,” Brian explained. “Master Darien is kind of a mystery to us all.”

  “We were always told that Master Darien refused a Council seat a while back, but I always thought it was because he had paid the Council to leave him alone,” added Jenny.

  Josie shrugged. “He doesn’t come around here very often. That’s why we were asking you about him.”

  “I only ever see him at work,” Vicky offered. “And he’s never given me any reason to think he was a vampire.”

  Vicky’s three visitors looked at each other in confusion.

  “Never?” Josie asked.

  “Well, there was that one time with that woman, but I figured he was just trying to intimidate her.” Vicky shrugged again. “But, that would explain his bad habit of only having coffee for lunch.”

  “Wait, lunch? As in, at-noon-type lunch?” Jenny asked. “You work during the day?”

  “Isn’t that when most businesses are open?” Vicky asked with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  The look of pure shock on Jenny’s face made Vicky want to explain. “I report to work at seven AM, and we work till we’re done. Sometimes, rather late in to the evening.”

  Brian tried to wrap his mind around this. “Where do you work?”

  “Top floor of the main building downtown. There’s a magnificent view of Main Street from Mr. Ritter’s office windows.” Vicky sat up a little. She was proud of her job.

  “He has windows in his office?” Josie asked, like this was an outrageous idea.

  “Yes.” Vicky didn’t understand why this would be a foreign concept to the group. “But we don’t spend much time there.” The group let out a sigh of relief that Vicky still didn’t understand. “Mr. Ritter is always running around, making sure the various ends of his business are running smoothly. Why, just the other day we were out for the groundbreaking ceremony for the new shipping hub.”

  Jenny gasped. “I read about that in the paper! It was in the afternoon!”

  “Yes, it was at three,” Vicky confirmed.

  “But how did he get out into a field at three in the afternoon under the sun?” Jenny asked.

  “Um… he wasn’t happy about it, but we walked,” Vicky explained. The gaping faces told Vicky that this was out of the ordinary for vampires “That’s… not normal,” she stated in a very flat voice.

  “No, that is not normal,” Jenny confirmed, as soon as she collected herself. “The masters aren’t subject to the rise and fall of the sun like the fledglings are, but they can’t get out and move in the daylight.”

  “Clara can get out a little on very cloudy days, but she burns under strong sunlight,” Brian added. “And she’s the oldest here at around five hundred fifty.”

  Vicky whistled in amazement.

  “How old would Master Darien have to be to handle full sun?” Josie asked. />
  “Nine hundred years,” Darien answered from where he stood, leaning against the door that Josie and Jenny had forgotten to close.

  Brian fell off the bed trying to turn around and see the man who no one realized had joined them.

  “Although, I started to be able to really get out at around seven hundred,” Darien added as he walked into the room.

  Brian scrambled from the floor where he had fallen and circled the bed to stand behind Jenny and Josie, gawking at the vampire coming into the room.

  Darien let out a sigh. The only person who wasn’t bothered by his presence was the one person not use to vampires.

  Vicky watched as Darien tucked one of his hands in his pocket and crossed the room to stand next to her. She felt odd seeing her well-dressed boss rumpled after the long night. His expensive dress shirt was wrinkled in the front from where she had clung to it, and he had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. His silk tie was missing, and he had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt so he was more comfortable, but it was the smear of blood on the front of Darien’s shirt that made her turn her gaze away, embarrassed. It was too dry to have happened recently, so it must have gotten on him while he was holding her.

  Darien picked up a cookie that had fallen from the plate. He took it with him to go lean against the wall and stared at the people in the room. “Is there anything else you want to know about me?” Darien asked as he raised the sugary snack to his lips and took a bite.

  Josie, Jenny, and Brian stared in an awed silence as they watched the vampire consume the wayward treat. A million questions swirled through their minds, but they were all very personal and inappropriate to ask.

  “Are you really nine hundred years old?” Vicky asked, looking back up at him.

  Darien shrugged. “Give or take a little. They didn’t keep very good records where I was born.” He popped the other half of the cookie into his mouth and dusted off his hands.