A Taste Of A Vampire

He had been yanked backward by the top of his head, his body arched backward unnaturally, and Nicholas stood behind him, just off the side of his shoulder. Nicholas’ eyes were glowing a fiery red color, and long white fangs had appeared where his glistening white smile used to be. He growled like an animal, and in one moment, he lunged downward and closed his razor fangs over Drake’s throat, clamping down hard.

Nicholas jerked his head back up, tearing Drake’s throat from his body as he turned his head and spat out flesh and cartilage over his shoulder. Drake’s eyes were wide as he stared at the ceiling, gurgling blood where his throat had been only seconds before.

Blood sprayed and Nicholas growled furiously as Drake’s body flailed in the throes of death. His leg moved sharply and swept Claire’s legs from beneath her. She screamed and slipped downward, hitting the back of her head hard on the desk before collapsing on the floor. Everything went black.

***

When she opened her eyes, she looked around slowly, trying to focus on the lines between light and shadow. Everything was blurry for a few moments, but as she drew in a breath and tried to steady herself, everything around her finally came into focus, as if she was waking up from a dream.

She was not in Grayson Manor. It only took her a few seconds to realize where she was. She was laying in Nicholas’ bed in his bedroom.

Claire tried to push herself up to a sitting position, but she had to do it slowly. Her head was pounding. Before she even moved an inch, Nicholas appeared at her side and reached his hands out to her to help her gently.

Remembering the last moments she had seen him, she turned and looked up at him in terror, but the monster that she had seen; the demon with the glowing red eyes and the dagger fangs, was gone. Back in his place was the beautiful and elegant man she had fallen in love with.

She drew in her breath sharply. “Nicholas! My god…what happened? Why am I in your bedroom?” She remembered everything then: the blood, the death of Drake Thomas, and Drake’s assault on her.

Claire looked down at her body and saw that she was clean. There was not a single drop of blood on her or on anything that she was wearing. She discovered that the torn blouse she had been wearing, and the accompanying skirt, were gone, and in their place was a silken white dressing gown.

“You called out to me. You needed me. I was there to help you. Just in time, it would seem,” he said quietly as she got settled sitting upward. He handed a glass of water to her.

She took it from him with trembling hands and drank. She stared at him, standing there in his snug black pants, with his white button up shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked as if he had just stepped off the cover of a gentleman’s magazine, rather than having come from a murder scene.

She held the glass with both of her hands. “You killed Drake. I saw you. You ripped his throat out with your… with your teeth, like an animal!” Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

He gazed evenly back at her. “Yes, I did kill him. He was attacking you. He’d had done far worse to you if I hadn’t gotten there when I did. If he’d done any more than he did, I would have tortured him before I killed him, but as it was, you weren’t hurt. I made his death sudden and only somewhat painful.”

Claire left the glass in one hand and covered her mouth with her other hand. She shook her head. “How could you do that? How could you…” she trailed off. She couldn’t say it again. “That was horrible!”

“No one hurts you,” he replied with a steady voice. “That’s all there is to it. I love you, and I want you safe. If you loved him, if you wanted him to touch you that way, then I would not have interfered. You didn’t want him to do anything that he was doing to you, and you called out for me, so I came to help you. I came to take care of it. It’s done. We needn’t even discuss it further than this.”

She stared at him and shook her head slowly. “What about the mess? What about… the blood? What about the body? How am I going to explain that to anyone?”

Nicholas shook his head back at her. “There is no mess. I took care of it while I was there. Perks of being a vampire. I can leave a clean scene. He will be found out in the countryside, and it will be called an animal attack. That will be that. No one heard anything, and no one saw anything. You’re safe. There is no repercussion. You are completely protected.