Page 22 of The Vampire Always Rises
You can hear me.
“Of course I can.”
No one can hear me. Not like this.His eyes narrowed.Who are you?
“I told you. I’m Tempest Keye.”
Why can you hear my thoughts?
I gasped and stared openmouthed at him for the second time in a few minutes. “Holy shish kebab! Is that what I’m doing?”
How are you doing it?
I don’t know.
You must. There has to be a reason for you to be able to do this.
I gasped again. “You heard me, too? Jeezumcrow! We can mind-read each other! I read about that in C. J. Dante’s books, but I thought it was a bit of literary license on his part. Cheese and crackers! We can mind-talk!”
He froze solid, just like he was a block of extremely sexy vampire.
His nostrils flared slightly. “You find me sexually attractive?”
“Gloriana, you heard that?” I slapped a hand over first my mouth, then, when I realized that didn’t make any sense, my ears, just as if that would hold in my wicked thoughts about his naked self. “Ack! Pretend I didn’t have a smutty thought about you, OK?”
Another one of those indescribable expressions passed over his face. “I cannot help it when you project into my mind. If you don’t want me hearing them, then do not be so brazen with your thoughts.”
I dropped my hands. “Oh, I am so not projecting! I wouldn’t know how to if I wanted to. You’re eavesdropping, that’s what it is. And eavesdroppers never prosper, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Now he just looked confused. “What pipe?”
“There’s not ... it’s a saying ... oh, never mind.” I thinned my lips at him. “The point is that people who deliberately listen to other people’s thoughts about how sexy they are deserve what they get. Wait ... that came out wrong.”
He made an exasperated noise and glanced over his shoulder, then pulled back onto the highway.
I felt oddly deflated for a few minutes before realizing that he hadn’t responded to my comment.
I smacked him lightly on the arm. “Don’t you know what this means?”
“Yes. I will have to practice my mental barriers more.”
“No, I mean what the implication of it is. Don’t you read C. J. Dante’s books? Boy, and you’re a vampire. You’d think you’d know this stuff.”
He slammed on the brakes again, pulling over, much to the annoyance of the car directly behind us. The face he turned to me was filled with suspicion. “Who. Are. You?”
“We’ve been over this like a dozen times,” I said, somewhat exasperated. “OK, three times, but still. I’m Tempest Keye.”
“How do you know I’m a Dark One if you are not Victor’s woman?”
“I can’t say. Wait, actually, I can’t discussallof it, but I can tell you that I was at C. J. Dante’s castle and saw you there.”
“You know Christian?”
“Yes. Kind of. Mostly he asked me to leave, but I did see you there. For a little bit.”
“What else did you see?” His voice was gritty, and I could tell he was trying to intimidate me.
“Nothing. There was a conversation about you, but as I said, I can’t talk about it because I promised I wouldn’t.”
