Ichor : Blood & Secrets

Chapter 36

Casie was clearly fascinated. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Because I’m stupid, Klaus thought. Because to vampires it’s as instinctive as breathing is to you. He lied unblushingly. “It takes a certain level of competence to accomplish.”

“And I can do it now?”

“I think so.” Klaus put slight uncertainty in his voice.

Naturally, this made Casie even more determined. “Show me!” she said.

“You mean right now?” He glanced around. “Someone might drive by—” “We’re off the road. Oh, please, Klaus? Please?” Casie looked at Klaus with the huge blue eyes that altogether too many males had found irresistible. She touched his arm, trying once more to make some kind of contact, but when he automatically drew away, she continued, “I really do want to learn. You can teach me. Just show me once, and I’ll practice.”

Klaus glanced down at his arm, felt his good sense and his will wavering.

How does she do that?

“All right.” He sighed. There were at least three or four billion people on this dust mote of a planet that would give anything to be with this warm and eager, yearning Casie Malrux. The problem was that he happened to be one of them—and that she clearly didn’t give a damn for him.

Of course not. She had dear Lucien. Well, he would see if his princess was still the same when—if—she managed to free Lucien and get out of their destination alive.

Meanwhile, Klaus concentrated on keeping his voice, face, and aura all dispassionate. He’d had some practice at that. Only five centuries’ worth, but it added up.

“First I have to find the place,” he told her, hearing the lack of warmth in his voice, the tone that was not merely dispassionate but actually cold. Casie’s expression didn’t flicker. She could be dispassionate, too. Even her deep blue eyes seemed to have taken on a frosty glint. “All right.

Where is it?”

“Near where the heart is, but more to the left. He touched Casie’s sternum, and then moved his fingers to the left.

Casie fought back both tension and a shiver—he could see it. Klaus was probing for the place where the flesh became soft over bone, the place most humans assumed their heart was because it was where they could feel their heart beating. It should be right around…here.…

“Now, I’ll run your Power through one or two circulations, and when you can do it by yourself—that’s when you’ll be ready to really conceal your aura.”

“But how will I know?”

“You’ll know, believe me.”

He didn’t want her to ask questions, so he simply held up one hand in front of her—not touching her flesh or even her clothing—and brought her life-force in synchronization with his. There. Now, to set the process off. He knew what it would feel like to Casie: an electric shock, starting at the point where he had first touched her and quickly spreading warmth through her body.

Then, a rapid montage of sensations as he went through a practice rotation or two with her. Up toward him, to her eyes and ears, where she would suddenly find she could see and hear much better, then down her spine and out to her fingertips, while her heartbeat quickened and she felt something like electricity in her palms. Back up her arm and down the side of her body, at which point a tremor would set in. Finally, the energy would sweep down

her magnificent leg all the way to her feet, where she would feel it in her soles, curling her toes, before coming back around to where it had started near her heart.

Klaus heard Casie gasp faintly when the shock first hit her, and then felt her heartbeat race and her eyelashes flicker as the world suddenly became much lighter to her; her pupils dilating as if she were in love, her body going rigid at the tiny sound of some rodent in the grass—a sound she would never have heard without Power directed to her ears. And so, all around her body, once, and then again, so she could get a feel for the process.

Then he let her go.

Casie was panting and exhausted; and he’d been the one expending energy.

“I’ll never—be able—to do that alone,” she gasped.

“Yes, you will, in time and with practice. And when you can do it, you’ll be able to control all your Power.”

“If you…say so.” Casie’s eyes were shut now, her lashes dark crescents on her cheeks. It was clear that she’d been pushed to her limit. Klaus felt the temptation to draw her to him, but suppressed it. Casie had made it clear that she didn’t want him embracing her.

I wonder just how many boys she didn’t push away, Klaus thought abruptly, bitterly. That surprised him a little, the bitterness. Why should he care

how many boys had handled Casie? When he made her his Princess of Darkness, they would both go hunting for human prey—sometimes together, sometimes alone. He wouldn’t be jealous of her then. Why should he care how many romantic encounters she’d had now?

But he found that he was bitter, bitter and angry enough that he answered without warmth, “I do say you will. Just practice doing it alone.” In the car, Klaus managed to stay annoyed with Casie. This was difficult, as she was a perfect traveling companion. She didn’t chatter, didn’t try to hum

or—thank fortune—sing along with the radio, didn’t chew gum or smoke, didn’t backseat drive, didn’t need too many rest stops, and never asked

“Are we there yet?”

As a matter of fact, it was difficult for anyone, male or female, to stay annoyed at Casie Malrux for any length of time. You couldn’t say she was too exuberant, like Octiva, or too serene, like Meredith. Casie was just sweet enough to offset her bright, active, ever-scheming mind. She was just compassionate enough to make up for her self-confessed egotism, and just skewed enough to ensure that no one would ever call her normal. She was intensely loyal to her friends and just forgiving enough that she herself considered almost no one an enemy—kitsune and Old Ones of the vampire kind

excepted. She was honest and frank and loving, and of course she had a dark streak in her that her friends simply called wild, but that Klaus recognized for what it really was. It compensated for the naïve, soft, ingenuous side of her nature. Klaus was very sure that he didn’t need any of those qualities in her, especially right now.

Oh, yes…and Casie Malrux was just gorgeous enough to make any of her negative characteristics completely irrelevant.

But Klaus was determined to be annoyed and he was strong-willed enough that he could usually choose his mood and stick to it, appropriate or not. He ignored all of Casie’s attempts at conversation, and eventually she gave up trying to make them. He kept his mind pinned to the dozens of boys

and men whom the exquisite girl beside him must have bedded. He knew that Casie, Caroline, and Meredith had been the “senior” members of the quartet when they had all been friends, while little Octiva had been the youngest and had been considered a bit too naïve to be fully initiated. So why was he with Casie now? he found himself asking sourly, wondering for just the slightest second if Shinichi was manipulating him as well as taking his memories.

Did Lucien ever worry about her past—especially with an old boyfriend— Mutt—still hanging around, willing to give his very life for her? Lucien must

not, or he’d have put a stop—no, how could Lucien put a stop to anything

Casie wanted to do? Klaus had seen the clash of their wills, even when Casie had been a child mentally just after returning from the afterlife. When it came to Lucien and Casie’s relationship, Casie was definitely in control. As humans said: She wore the trousers in the family.

Well, soon enough she could see how she liked wearing harem trousers, Klaus thought, laughing silently, although his mood was darker than ever. The sky over the car darkened further in response, and wind ripped summer leaves from branches before their time. Cat’s paws of rain dotted the windshield, and then came the flash of lightning and the echoing sound of thunder.

Casie jumped slightly, involuntarily, every time the thunder let loose. Klaus watched this with grim satisfaction. He knew she knew that he could control the weather. Neither of them said a single word about it.

She won’t beg, he thought, feeling that quick savage pride in her again and then feeling annoyance with himself for being so soft.

They passed a motel, and Casie followed the blurry electric signs with her eyes, looking over her shoulder until it was lost in darkness. Klaus didn’t want to stop driving. Didn’t dare stop, really. They were headed into a really nasty storm now, and occasionally the Prius hydroplaned, but

Klaus

managed to keep it under control—barely. He enjoyed driving in these conditions.

It was only when a sign proclaimed that the next place of shelter was over a hundred miles away that Klaus, without consulting Casie, swung into

a flooding driveway and stopped the car. The clouds had let loose by then; the rain was coming down in bucketfuls; and the room Klaus got was a

small outbuilding, separated from the main motel.

The solitude suited Klaus just fine.

As they hastened from the car to the secluded motel room, Casie had to put pressure on her legs to keep them steady under her. As soon as the door to the room slammed shut, with the storm more or less outside and her own stiff and aching body inside, she headed for the bathroom without even turning on a light. Her clothes and hair and feet were all damp.

The fluorescent lights of the bathroom seemed too bright after the darkness of the night and the storm. Or maybe it was the beginning of her learning to circulate her Power.

That had certainly been a surprise. Klaus hadn’t even been touching her, but the shock she had felt still reverberated inside her. And as for the feeling of having her Power manipulated from outside her body, well, there just weren’t words. It had been a breathtaking experience, all right. Even now just thinking about it made her knees tremble.

But it was more clear than ever that Klaus wanted nothing to do with her. Casie confronted her own image in the mirror and winced. Yes, she looked like a drowned rat that had been dragged backward a mile through the gutter. Her hair was damp, turning its silky waves into tiny wisps of curls all around her head and face; she was as white as an invalid, and her blue eyes were staring out of the pinched and exhausted face of a child. For just a moment she remembered being in even worse shape a few days—yes, it was only days—ago, and having Klaus treat her with the utmost gentleness, as if her bedraggled appearance had meant nothing to him. But those memories had been taken from Klaus by Shinichi, and it was

too much to hope that that might have been his real state of mind. It had been…whim…like all his other whims.

Furious at Klaus—and at herself for the prickling behind her eyes she felt—Casie turned away from the mirror.

The past was the past. She had no idea why Klaus had suddenly decided to start jerking away from her touch, or to look at her with the hard cold eyes of a predator. Something had caused him to hate her, to barely be able to sit in the car with her. And whatever it was, Casie had to learn to ignore it, because if Klaus left, she would have no chance of finding Lucien. Lucien. At last her trembling heart could find rest in thinking of Lucien. He wouldn’t care what she looked like: his sole concern would be for her well-being. Casie shut her eyes as she turned on the hot water in the tub and stripped off her clammy clothes, basking in her imagination of Lucien’s love and approval.

The motel had provided a small plastic bottle of bubblebath, but Casie left it alone. She’d brought her own translucent-gold bag of vanilla bath crystals in her duffel bag, and this was the first chance she’d had to use it. Carefully, she shook about a third of the beribboned bag’s crystals into the rapidly filling tub and was rewarded with a steamy blast of vanilla, which she drew into her lungs gratefully.

A few minutes later, Casie was shoulder deep in hot water covered with a vanilla-scented foam. Her eyes were shut and the warmth was soaking into her body. The softly disintegrating salts were easing away all pain. These weren’t ordinary bath salts. They had no medicinal smell, but they’d been given to her by Lucien’s landlady, Mrs. Flowers, who was a genteel elderly white witch. Mrs. Flowers’s herbal recipes were her specialty, and right now Casie would swear that she could feel all the tension of the last few days being actively sucked out of her body and gently soothed away. Oh, this was just what she had needed. Casie had never appreciated a bath like this before.

Now, there’s just one thing, she told herself firmly, as she inhaled breath after delicious breath of vanilla steam. You asked Mrs. Flowers for bath salts that would relax you, but you cannot fall asleep here. You’ll drown, and you already know what that feels like. Been there, done that, didn’t even have to buy the shroud.

But even now Casie’s thoughts were dimmer and more fragmented, as the hot water continued to relax her muscles, and the vanilla scent swirled around her head. She was losing continuity, her mind drifting off into daydreams…. She was giving herself to the heat and the luxury of not having to do anything at all….

She was asleep.

In her dream, she was moving briskly. It was only half-light, but she could tell somehow that she was skimming downward through deep gray mist. What worried her was that she seemed to be surrounded by arguing voices, and they were arguing about her.

“A second chance? I’ve spoken to her about it.”

“She won’t remember anything.”

“It doesn’t matter whether she remembers. Everything will remain inside her, if unawakened.”

“It will germinate inside her…until the time is right.”

Casie had no idea what any of it meant.

And then this mist was thinning, and clouds were making way for her, and she was drifting down, more and more slowly, until she was deposited gently on a ground covered with pine needles.

The voices were gone. She was lying on a forest floor, but she wasn’t naked. She was wearing her prettiest nightgown, the one with real Valenciennes lace. She was listening to the tiny night sounds all around her when suddenly her aura reacted in a way that it never had before. It told her someone was coming. Someone who brought a sense of safety in

warm earthen hues, in soft rose colors and deep, blue violets that enfolded her even before the person arrived. These were…someone’s…feelings about herself. And behind the love and soothing concern she experienced, there were deep forest greens, shafts of warm gold, and a mysterious tinge of translucency, like a waterfall that sparkled as it fell and foamed like diamonds around her.

Casie, a voice whispered. Casie.

This was so familiar….

Casie. Casie.

She knew this…. Casie, my angel.

It meant love.

Even as Casie was sitting up and turning in her dream, she was holding out her arms. This person belonged with her. He was her magic, her solace, her best-beloved. It didn’t matter how he’d gotten there, or what had happened before. He was her soul’s eternal mate.

And then…

Strong arms holding her tenderly…

A warm body close to hers…

Sweet kisses…

Many, many times…

This familiar feeling as she melted into his embrace…

He was so gentle, but almost fierce in his love for her. He had vowed not to kill, but he would kill to save her. She was his most precious thing in all the world…. Any sacrifice would be worth it if she were safe and free. His life meant nothing without her, so he would gladly give it, laughing and kissing his hand to her with his last breath.

Casie breathed in the wonderful autumn-leaves scent of his sweater and was comforted. Like a baby, she allowed herself to be soothed by simple familiar odors, by the feeling of her cheek against his shoulder and the wonder of the two of them breathing together in synchronicity.

When she tried to put a name to this miracle, it was at the front of her mind.

Lucien…

Casie didn’t even need to look up at his face to know that Lucien’s leafgreen eyes would be dancing like the waters of a small pond ruffled by wind and sparkling with a thousand different points of light. She buried her head in his neck, afraid somehow to let go of him, although she couldn’t remember why.

I don’t know how I got here , she told him nonverbally. In fact, she didn’t remember anything before this, before awakening to his call, only jumbled images.

It doesn’t matter. I’m with you.

Fear seized her. This isn’t…just a dream, is it?

No dream is just a dream. And I’m with you always.

But how did we get here?

Shhh. You’re tired. I’ll hold you up. On my life, I swear it. Just rest. Let me hold you just once.

Just once? But…

But now Casie felt worried and dazed, and she had to let her head fall backward, had to see Lucien’s face.

She tilted her chin back and found herself meeting laughing eyes of an infinite darkness in a chiseled, pale, and proudly handsome face.

She almost cried out in horror.

Hush. Hush, angel.

Klaus!

The dark eyes that met hers were full of love and joy. Who else?

How dare you—how did you get here? Casie was more and more confused. I don’t belong anywhere, Klaus pointed out, suddenly sounding sad. You know I’ll always be with you.

I do not; I do not—give Lucien back to me!

But it was too late. Casie was aware of the sound of water trickling and of tepid liquid sloshing around her. She woke up just in time to keep her head from going underwater in the bathtub.

A dream…

She felt much more flexible and easy in her body, but she couldn’t help feeling saddened by the dream. It hadn’t been an out of body experience, either—it had been a simple, crazy, mixed-up, dream of her own.

I don’t belong anywhere. I’ll always be with you.

Now what was gibberish like that supposed to mean?

But something inside Casie trembled, even as she remembered it. She hastily changed—not into a Valenciennes lace nightgown, but into a gray and black sweat suit. When she emerged, she was feeling overtired and prickly and ready to start a fight if Klaus gave any sign of having picked up on her sleeping thoughts.

But Klaus didn’t. Casie saw a bed, managed to focus on it, stumbled toward it and collapsed, flopping down on pillows that sank unsatisfactorily beneath her head. Casie liked her pillows firm.

For a few moments she lay, savoring her after-bath sensations, as her skin gradually cooled—and her head cooled as well. As far as she could tell, Klaus was standing in exactly the same position as he had taken up when they’d entered the room.

And he was still as silent as he had been since the morning.

Finally, to get it over with, she spoke to him. And being Casie, she went straight to the heart of the problem.

“What’s wrong, Klaus?”

“Nothing.” Klaus stared out the window, pretending to be engrossed in something beyond the glass.

“What nothing?”

Klaus shook his head. But somehow, his turned back eloquently conveyed his opinion of this motel room.

Casie examined the room with the too-bright vision of someone who has forced their body beyond its limits. She contemplated beige walls, beige carpet, a beige armchair, a beige desk, and of course, a beige bedspread. Even Klaus couldn’t reject a room on the grounds that it doesn’t match his basic black, she thought, and then: oh, I’m tired. And bewildered. And scared.

And…incredibly stupid. There’s only one bed in here. I’m lying on it. “Klaus…” With an effort, she sat up. “What do you want? There’s a chair. I can sleep on the chair.”

He half turned, and she saw in the movement that he wasn’t annoyed or playing games. He was furious. It was all there in the faster-thanthehuman- eye-could-follow assassin’s spin and the complete muscular control that stilled it almost before it had begun.

Klaus with his sudden movements and his frightening stillness. He was looking out the window again, body poised as always for…something.

Right now it looked poised to jump through glass to get outside. “Vampires don’t need sleep,” he said in a voice icier and more controlled than she’d heard since Matt had left them.

That gave her the energy to get off the bed. “You know I know that’s a lie.” “Take the bed, Casie. Go to sleep.” But his voice was the same. She would have expected a flat, weary command. Klaus sounded more tense, more controlled than ever.

More shaken than ever.

Her eyelids sank. “Is this about Matt?”

“No.”

“Is it about Shinichi?” “No!” Aha.

“It is, isn’t it? You’re afraid that Shinichi will get past all your defenses and possess you again. Aren’t you?”

“Go to bed, Casie,” Klaus said tonelessly.

He was still shutting her out as completely as if she weren’t there. Casie got mad.

“What does it take to show you that I trust you? I’m traveling all alone with you, without any idea where we’re really going. I’m trusting you with Lucien’s life.” Casie was behind Klaus now, on the beige carpet which smelled like…nothing, like boiled water. Not even like dust.

Her words were the dust. There was something about them that sounded hollow, wrong. They were the truth—but they weren’t getting through to

Klaus….

Casie sighed. Touching Klaus unexpectedly was always a tricky business, with all the risks of setting off murderous instinct by accident, even when he wasn’t possessed. She reached out, now, very carefully, to put her fingertips on the elbow of his leather jacket. She spoke as precisely and unemotionally as she could.

“You also know that I have other senses now than the usual five. How many times do I have to say it, Klaus? I know it wasn’t you torturing me and

Matt last week.” Despite herself, Casie heard a certain pleading in her own voice. “I know that you’ve protected me on this trip when I was in danger, even killing for me. That means—a lot to me. You may say you don’t believe in the human sentiment of forgiveness, but I don’t think you’ve forgotten it. And when

you know that there is nothing to forgive in the first place—”

“This has absolutely nothing to do with last week!”

The change in his voice—the force in it—hit Casie like a whiplash. It hurt…and it frightened her. Klaus was serious. He was also under some dreadful strain, not completely unlike that of fighting off Shinichi’s possession, but different.

“Klaus…”

“Leave me alone!”

Now, where have I heard something like that before? Befuddled, her heart pounding, Casie groped through memories.

Oh, yes. Lucien. Lucien when they had first been in his room together, when he was afraid to love her. When he was sure he would cause her to be damned if he showed he cared.

Could Klaus be that much like the brother he always mocked?

“At least turn around and talk with me face-to-face.”

“Casie.” It was a whisper, but it sounded as if Klaus couldn’t summon up his usual silky menace. “Go to bed. Go to hell. Go anywhere, but stay away from me.”

“You’re so good at that, aren’t you?” Casie’s own voice was cold now.

Recklessly, angrily, she moved in even closer. “At pushing people away. But I

know that you haven’t fed this evening. There’s nothing else you want from me, and you can’t do the starving-martyr bit half as well as Lucien—” Casie had spoken knowing that her words were guaranteed to incite a response of some kind, but Klaus’s usual response to this sort of thing was to lounge against something and pretend not to have heard.

What happened instead was completely outside the range of her experience. Klaus whirled, caught her precisely, held her locked in an unbreakable grip. Then, with a swoop of his head like a falcon on a mouse, he kissed her. He was more than strong enough to hold her still without hurting her. The kiss was hard and long and for quite a while Casie resisted out of sheer instinct. Klaus’s body was cool against hers, which was still warm and damp from the bath. The way he was holding her—if she put enough pressure on those particular points, it would hurt her possibly seriously.

And then

—she knew—he would release her. But did she really know what she knew? Was she prepared to break a bone to test it?

He was stroking her hair, which was so unfair, curling the ends and crushing them in his fingers…just hours after he’d taught her to feel things to the

tips of her hair. He knew her weak spots. Not just every woman’s weak spots. He knew hers; he knew how to make her want to cry out in pleasure and how to soothe her.

There was nothing to do but test her theory and maybe break a bone. She would not submit when she had not invited him. She would not! But then she remembered her curiosity about the little boy and the great stone boulder, and she deliberately opened her mind to Klaus’s. He fell into the trap of his own making.

As soon as their minds connected there were something like fireworks. Explosions. Rockets. Stars going nova. Casie set her mind to ignoring her body and began looking for the boulder.

It was deep, deep inside the most locked-off part of his brain. Deep in the eternal darkness that slept there. But Casie seemed to have brought a searchlight with her. Wherever she turned, dark festoons of cobwebs fell and heavy-looking stone arches crumbled and fell to the ground.

“Don’t worry,” Casie found herself saying. “The light won’t do that to you! You don’t have to live down here. I’ll show you the beauty of the light.” What am I saying? Casie wondered even as the words left her lips. How can I promise him—and maybe he likes living here in the dark! But in the next second she had come much closer to the little boy, close enough to see his pale, wondering face.

“You came again,” he said, as if it were a miracle. “You said you would come, and you did!”

That brought down all Casie’s barriers at once. She knelt, and pulling the chains to their utmost length, took him on her lap. “Are you glad that I came back?” she asked gently. She was already stroking his hair smooth. “Oh, yes!” It was a cry, and it frightened Casie almost as much as it pleased her. “You’re the nicest person I’ve ever—the most beautiful thing I ever—”

“Hush,” Casie told him, “hush. There’s got to be some way to warm you up.”

“It’s the iron,” the child said humbly. “Iron keeps me weak and cold. But it has to be iron; otherwise he wouldn’t be able to control me.”

“I see,” Casie said grimly. She was beginning to get a grasp on what kind of relationship Klaus had with this little boy. For a moment, on a hunch, she took two lengths of iron in her hands and tried to tear them apart. Casie had super-light here; why not superpowers? But all that happened was that she twisted and turned the length for nothing, and finally cut the web of her finger against an iron burr.

“Oh!” The boy’s huge dark eyes fixed on the dark bead of blood. He stared as if he were fascinated and afraid