Forever and Ever Amen

Chapter 3: Bar None

Henry was obsessing. He knew it. And he was powerless to stop it.

His drawing pen sketched relentlessly, rendering scene after scene of the tale unfolding in his mind, half fact half fiction, half memory half dream. The curve of an arm, the glint in an eye, a small fist like iron around the hilt of a sword. And over her shoulder...

He stopped. He stared.

What was providence trying to tell him? He pressed his elegant, long-fingered hands together in critical thought. She looked back at him in black and white as unflinching as she ever had in life. The drawn version of the woman carried aloft the mighty sword of a king just as the flesh and blood version had on several occasions—sometimes with disastrous consequences. He could still feel the place in his chest where she had run him through with it once in an insanely misguided attempt at saving his life. It had worked, of course, but the price had been staggering and—to him—unacceptable. But that was her logic. That was his Vicki. That was his Warrior Princess.

Obscured in shadows behind her, the figure of a young man had materialized out of his pen without conscious intent. He had a shock of thick hair falling across a striking face of long, slanting angles. Only one eye was visible, watching the image of the Warrior Princess with more than a hint of possessiveness.

Henry pushed away from his workbench and the unsettling drawing. Walking to the window, he stood for a long while, watching the glittering life of the city at night sprawl before him. A month he had been here, but even though he was physically settled, his soul was still far away. He missed Toronto. He missed the streets there, the atmosphere, the culture, the people. Closing his eyes, Henry relented to himself. Who was he kidding? Vancouver, Toronto, what did it matter? As often as he had moved over the centuries, he found it easy to make a new home for himself wherever he went. No, he didn't miss anything about Toronto except...except her.

He had really thought that by now he would have found enough new distractions to relegate the memory of her to a pleasant back corner of his mind. But no. She is all he thought about even when he was "playing with his food" as she had so curtly called it. In his mind every woman became Vicki, every scent was hers. Every time he fed, he fed from her. He had caught himself doing it early on and even made an effort to choose women who looked and acted nothing like her. Just the previous night he had even drowned himself in the affections of two dark-haired, buxom beauties at once. But he realized now that the only way he was going to exorcise Vicki from his mind, if not his heart, was to give his fantasies full reign and experience every tortured feeling they brought up until he got roundly sick of it all. Suppressing them only meant they would surface elsewhere, and painfully, and more than likely inconveniently. Like in his work, for instance.

To his surprise, the clock read one in the morning. Drawing feverishly, he had lost all track of time. And other things as well; he was hungry. A bite was in order before he could come back and continue to bury himself in his work and misery.

Not quite an hour later, freshly cleaned up and attired in his favorite outfit of black jeans and black blazer, Henry Fitzroy strolled past the line waiting to get into the Bar None nightclub. His slanted blue eyes skipped across the women in the patiently queued crowd, all of them sweet, luscious and in the mood to party. They were short and tall, thin and voluptuous, and he imagined that short skirts or tight jeans together with plunging necklines predominated under the thick winter coats. There was no equal to her, but he soon located a pale approximation. Literally pale. Her hair was too light and her skin almost rivaled his own complexion. But the expression was right—cold. He turned on his considerable charm, smiled, and extended a hand to her.

"Would you care to join me tonight?"

"Join you? Join you where? The end of the line?"

Perfect, he thought. "The front of the line actually. I'm a VIP here, but I hate going in by myself. Would you do me the honor?"

She considered the length of the line, half a block at least, and hugged herself against the damp chill. "Well, I'm holding a place in line for my friends..."

"Say yes," he purred, caressing her cold cheek lightly with the back of one finger. This would have been the moment where Vicki would have decked him—or tried to anyway.

"Oh what the heck. OK. I'm Melanie, by the way."

If you say so.

At the front of the line, Henry needed no more than a moment and a word, and the attendant unclipped the velvet rope for them. He liked the interior of this place. Not the ultra glitzy style that was so in vogue these days—and so frigid in his opinion—the Bar None maintained a Soho feel about it, including the liberal use of brick and wood in its interior design. The club attracted the kind of eclectic upper-crust artsy clientèle he preferred to dine on, so he frequented the place as well.

Henry didn't drink anything from the bar, but any bartender there would have sworn that he was their best customer. What he bought he gave away, usually to those he later chose to also take home for a more intimate dining experience. But that was more than what he was willing to indulge in with this girl tonight. The music thumping in the dark, smoky air was ghastly as far as he was concerned, an assault on his brain as well as his sensitive ears, but it also served to anesthetize the humans. Once they entered here, their perception of reality altered, making it that much easier for him to feed.

Having shed her coat, Melanie revealed more curves than Vicki ever had. Nor would the Warrior Princess have consented to a dress quite that frilly. It looked good on Melanie. It was definitely not Vicki. Slightly riled at this ding to his fantasy life, Henry opted to concentrate on her face. Still aloof, she was nevertheless warming to him. He had yet to meet a female who wouldn't. Except for Vicki, of course.

He told her that she didn't need a drink first, and so she didn't. She seduced him onto the dance floor and he nudged her into his favorite dark corner with practiced skill. Over the frantic beat of the music, no one heard her gasp in his sensual embrace. The blood came and with it the warm, erotic joy he always felt when feeding. He grasped the back of her head with one hand, pulled her hips against his with the other, and let his mind expand and penetrate hers until she trembled with the release of an experience she imagined to be very different from what it truly was. Not much of this was conscious on Henry's part. It was simply what he did when he fed, this sharing of joy and hypnotic deception. In the meantime he lost himself in a fantasy all his own.

Vicki.

He could clearly see her face in his mind's eye the way he always wanted to see it—soft with ecstasy and surrender. He could feel her warmth against his body and in his mouth. He tasted her blood, so uniquely hers, so uniquely marked by his own. He could smell her...

He could smell her.

Henry's breath caught, the girl in his arms suddenly forgotten, his lips still locked against her quaking throat. He could smell her. In the miasma of scents and noise swirling about him, her scent was but a whisper, but it was there. As was her voice.

"Are you sure? I can't see that far."

"I'm sure," replied a stranger's voice.

Henry pressed his tongue against the wound in the girl's neck until the blood stopped coming. "You're having a great time," he told her. "You never met me. Go." Looking at little dazed, she turned and gyrated back out onto the dance floor.

Henry wiped his mouth and turned, making no effort to subdue his aroused vampire nature. Something was very wrong besides the unlikely fact that she was there. He spotted them easily across the room off to one side in another darkened alcove, his Vicki and a male easily a head and a half taller than her, elegant in a long, dark coat and smooth, dark waves of hair swept back from a handsome face with a decidedly blank expression. He was too still, too pale, too intend on watching him. Henry knew the truth moments before he admitted it to himself; Vicki had come in the company of another vampire.

Henry moved forward across the dance floor with supernatural speed, making little more than a blur of a motion in the confusion of light and shadow and whirling bodies. He stopped before them with barely a foot to spare, popping up out of thin air as far as Vicki was concerned. She gasped in surprise.

"Damn it, Henry, I..."

"What have you done?!" he demanded, his voice thick with blood and power.

"Nice to see you again, too, Henry."

"Explain. Now," he snapped. He didn't have to elaborate. She understood.

"My client. Mick St. John. We need your help."

The other vampire nodded politely and extended his hand. "Henry Fitzroy, I take it. Heard a lot about you."

Henry growled but made no move toward him.

"You didn't have to interrupt a good feed on our account," Mick went on, blatantly ignoring the warning. "We would have waited."

"You're not scoring any points here, Mick," Vicki mumbled.

Mick smiled.

Never, never, never since Christina first took him hunting had Henry been surprised by another vampire while feeding. It simply wasn't done—not if the other expected to live at any rate. "Unless you have a death wish, you will leave this instant and never set foot in my territory again! Do I make myself clear?"

Mick quirked a brow at him. "Feel strongly about this, do you?"

"Get. Out."

"I don't think so." By the time Mick had uttered the last word, his voice had fallen into an inhuman timber, his eyes glittered green and bright, and a pair of fangs extended into prominence between his lips.

Henry couldn't help the snarl ripping out of his chest. He had rarely been this angry. The only reason he hadn't ripped out the other vampire's heart by now was because he remained acutely aware of Vicki's presence. He preferred to think that he stayed his hand because he had never before exposed her to the full violence of his being, rather than that she might be distracting him.

But then, there she was, before him, her hands on his chest, her body wedged between him and the other. Madness! She kept repeating his name like a chant, a prayer. "Henry. Henry. Henry. Henry. Listen to me, Henry."

She was so close. Her scent filled his senses, nearly obliterating the unwelcome stranger if he weren't standing right there glaring back at him over her shoulder. Over her shoulder…. He felt disoriented. What was she doing here with this creature? "I need you, Henry. I need you. Do you hear me? I need you."

He looked at her then. Tears welled in her eyes. Her lips trembled. So close...

"Henry, I need you. I love you."

He touched her face softly, brushing at the tears, felt his own rising, fought them down. He leaned forward to whisper into her ear, to feel her hair against his face, horrifyingly aware of the other watching every move and hearing every word. He didn't intend for it to turn into an embrace, but her arms came around him like delicate vines. In spite of himself he pulled her closer. "Please, Vicki. You know what this means to me. Why did you bring him here?"

"I needed him to find you."

"No you didn't. You know me well enough. You could have found me on your own."

He felt her tense then relent. "I needed an excuse, Henry. And Mick really does need your help. It was fate."

Self-same was watching this exchange in respectful silence, no longer displaying any type of aggression. With Vicki in his arms and bolstered by her declaration of love, Henry was feeling somewhat more magnanimous. Wishing he could explore this new development further right now, he instead inhaled a deep drought of her beloved scent...and stopped short. Blood. He pushed her to arm's length and looked at her critically, inhaling again.

"Henry?"

He had almost missed it in his agitation and filled as he was with the taste and smell of the girl's blood. But there it was—Vicki's blood. His gaze dropped to her arm. She impulsively reached for it with her other hand. Henry tilted his head, scenting, reading the situation as clearly as though it were being re-enacted for him. "Henry, it's not what you...," she began.

Mick never saw it coming. The speed with which Henry leveled his fury at him was invisible to the human eye and nearly so to the vampire. Henry felt Mick's nose burst into a spray of blood at his knuckles at the very same moment that he himself felt his groin explode in an unspeakable agony that shot straight up his spine and pierced his brain. In his rage, Henry had completely missed Mick's instantaneous counterattack as well.

They both went down hard, writhing side-by-side on the floor, one clasping his bloody face, the other cupping his genitals. Henry pierced his tongue clear through with his fangs in an effort to keep from roaring loud enough to shatter every glass in the building. Beside him Mick gasped and blubbered. A number of humans stared curiously, alert as only prey animals could be, trying to decide if either fight or flight was indicated.

Vicki stood over them, bewildered. "What...what just happened?"

Mick sat up, adjusted his broken nose and took several noisy, experimental breaths. Wiping at his face with a handful of discarded drink napkins, he looked at Henry who struggled to sit up, blood dripping from his mouth. "Your friend didn't like you saving my life." The grin on Mick's messed up face looked downright maniacal. "And I didn't like him not liking it."

"Oh," said Vicki. "Henry, it was an emergency. Why didn't you let me explain?"

Henry dabbed at his mouth, pushed his hair out of his face, and looked up at her. "You offered, didn't you, Vicki."

She crossed her arms over her chest. "Yes. I did. So?"

"You shouldn't do that."

"Unless it's you, of course."

"Yes."

"Henry, you've got issues, my friend," said Mick as he got to his feet. His face was nearly fully recovered from the incident, fueled, no doubt, by her blood, Henry thought darkly.

"Only one. You."

"Whatever. Can we talk now? Are we done playing your games? Because I'm running out of time here."

Henry stood up in a fast, smooth motion. "Vicki, why did you bring him here?"

When her pleading gaze met his eyes, Henry knew he would have no choice but to believe everything she said and do all that she asked. He was helpless in the knowledge of her love for him. "I promised you would help him, Henry."

He clenched his jaw in displeasure but gave a small nod. True love always had a price. And if this was hers, then so be it.