Eternal Kiss of Darkness

"Thank you," Kira said before she hung up. Then she met Mencheres's gaze.

"She's in intensive care." Her voice was raw, her scent swirled with fear, agitation, and guilt. "She hemorrhaged and was brought to the hospital by ambulance this morning . . ." None of this should matter to him. Kira's sister was in a hospital; there was nothing more she could do to help her, and an unknown mortal's poor health was truly not his concern.

But Kira cared, and because of that, he did, too. Regardless of all the reasons why she shouldn't matter to him, Mencheres found that he couldn't bear to see Kira in pain.

Yes, he cared far, far too much.

He'd kept Kira here with the original intention of protecting the secrecy of his race, but as the days passed, Kira's greatest threat wasn't to the vampire world - it was to him.

She made him feel things he couldn't allow himself to feel at this point in his life. No matter how hard it was, it was time for him to remove that threat. He had no other choice if he intended to stay the course he'd set.

"Come," Mencheres said, holding out his hand.

Kira's brow furrowed, but she took it. Beautiful dark lady, he thought. I wish I didn't have to do this.

He had Kira locked in an unbreakable grip before she could even gasp.

Chapter 8

Kira's breath whooshed from her lungs when Mencheres set them down in the parking lot. It took a second for her legs to stop trembling enough for her to let go of him, but the hospital gleaming so close ahead gave her the needed strength to start walking toward it.

"Why didn't we drive here?" she asked, her heart still hammering.

"It would have taken three times longer," Mencheres replied. "More, if we were caught in traffic."

Sure wasn't any traffic in the skies, Kira thought, still a bit dazed from her recent flight.

Mencheres had swept her up, hurtling them through the night skies, before she'd even realized what he was doing. The vampire's ability to fly in a dizzying blur of speed was both exhilarating and terrifying. She didn't think she would ever forget the sight of the buildings from her vantage point of being zipped along above them. Superman and Lois Lane, eat your hearts out.

But Kira pushed her residual wonder aside when she entered the brightly lit hospital.

Somewhere on the floors above, Tina was fighting for her life against a disease that left no survivors. The hospital attendant gave her a sympathetic look as she assigned Kira a visitor's pass.

"You're just in time. ICU visiting hours end in thirty minutes."

Kira shot a grateful glance at Mencheres even though the vampire wasn't looking at her. If they'd driven instead of flown, she wouldn't have made it.

"Only family members are allowed in intensive care. Is he family, too?" the attendant asked.

"Yes," Kira replied at once. She wasn't about to repay Mencheres's kindness in bringing her here by making him cool his heels downstairs.

The attendant gave a single, doubtful glance at Mencheres. Kira couldn't blame her.

She and Mencheres looked nothing alike, with her blondish brown hair and light eyes in striking contrast to his darker coloring and Arabian features.

"Driver's license, please," the attendant said to Mencheres.

He leaned forward across the counter, the flash of green in his eyes gone so quickly, Kira wasn't sure if she really saw it.

"Given. Now, hand me the pass," Mencheres directed in a smooth, low voice.

The attendant handed over the visitor's pass with a glazed smile on her face, not even writing a name on it. Mencheres took it and turned to Kira.

"Let us go."

Kira looked back at the attendant, who still smiled in a frozen sort of way, before she followed Mencheres to the elevators. Once they were inside, she finally found her voice.

"That's how easily you can control people's minds under normal circumstances? A one-second glance with a little bitty flash of green?"

Mencheres gave her a sideways look. "Perhaps now you can appreciate the rarity of your resistance to my power."

"Because you gave me your blood," Kira murmured pensively, looking at the floors light up as the elevator passed them. "And possibly my stubbornness," she added with a limp smile.

Mencheres almost seemed to sigh. "There is one more possibility. A very small percentage of humans are naturally immune to vampire mind control. In my lifetime, I've come across only a few dozen humans with that immunity, but there are those who must have a form of genetic mutation that prevents - "

"You never told me that before," Kira interrupted, dread filling her. "You knew this whole time that it might not just be your blood that's prevented you from erasing my memory?" Sick fear boiled up in her. Was this Mencheres's way of telling her he'd never let her go?

The elevator doors slid open, revealing the nurses' station to the intensive care unit.

Mencheres said nothing, which Kira took as a damning admission.

But she couldn't talk more about that now. She only had half an hour to see her sister, and that took precedence even over her fears of Mencheres's new revelation. Kira's gaze flicked around the clear doors of each room until she found the one marked Tina Graceling. Then she flashed her pass at the nurse before approaching her sister's room, not even looking to see if Mencheres followed her.

Tina looked to be asleep, her petite body connected to machines that seemed to dwarf her from their perches around the hospital bed. She was almost as pale as the sheets around her, dark shadows circling her eyes the only spots of color on Tina's face.

She looked so frail, so broken, like a beautiful doll some child had carelessly discarded.

A clear plastic tube was taped in place over Tina's mouth, the steady compression of the nearby ventilator sounding like a wheezing accordion.

Tears filled Kira's eyes, making her sister and all the machines blurry. Tina wasn't asleep; she was unconscious and on a ventilator. One of Tina's greatest fears was being on a vent. Her sister had often said that once her lungs deteriorated to that point, it was all over.

And Tina was probably right.

A sob escaped from Kira before she could stuff it back. She'd known this day would come. Thought she'd even prepared for it, but the sizzling pain that wrapped around her heart when she saw Tina alive only by the assistance of machines made her knees give out. She sat in the nearby chair, unable to tear her gaze away from her unconscious little sister.

"What disease does she have?"

Mencheres's soft, deep voice startled Kira for a second. She'd almost forgotten the vampire was here. He circled around Tina's bed, looking down at her sister with his usual hooded expression.