Free Blood In The Stars by Jennifer Shea Page A

phone out of his pocket and ordered Italian food for delivery. It was too dangerous to leave Daria alone. She needed someone to watch her twenty-four hours a day. That was an excuse, as he wanted to spend as much time as possible with her. If he could chain her by his side, he would.
    Jason returned to the sofa and grabbed a magazine off the coffee table. He flipped through it occasionally so it appeared as though he read. But mostly he sat there and stared at her.
    He watched the way she sometimes pulled her hair in frustration, studied how she tilted her head as she reviewed her documents, and smiled every time she scrunched her brows together while she pondered. He could sit here without food or water and never grow tired of watching her.
    He had sat this close to her in the past but she had never realized it. To Daria, he was always another stranger grabbing coffee at the café, another guest eating dinner at a restaurant, a random pedestrian on his way to work. He blended into the crowd around her. So he could protect her.
    Several times, he even brushed her shoulder as they waded through the throngs. She never once gave him a second glance, never once caught his eye. In those moments, it had taken all his willpower not to grab her by the arms and force her to look at him. To really see him.
    It was his bruised ego talking, he knew. Despite those periods of weakness, he continued on, protecting and admiring her from afar.
    All these years of watching her from the shadows made him feel closer to her than if he had revealed himself. He knew exactly how she took her coffee, what snacks she preferred, the little mannerisms that were all her own. They were his memories to keep, instances he shared with her when she didn’t know anyone watched. And these years had been the happiest of his life.
    Five hundred years he had wandered the known realms, traversing different worlds, a ghost of a man, a shell of a person. And the mistakes of his past haunted him. He had borne the burden of his errors until twenty-seven years ago when he arrived at the hospital and gazed down at a beautiful baby girl. Her gurgling laughter had swept away his doubts and given him new hope.
    That helpless child in the crib needed him, and in ways she didn’t even know.
    His cell phone rang and pulled him away from his memories. The food had arrived.
    “I’ll go get the food.” He expected her to be too engrossed in her work to hear him. Yet she jumped up from her seat and grabbed her keys to give to him.
    “I’m making good progress,” she grinned. “Just ten more pages and I can send it out. Then we can enjoy dinner.”
    Jason retrieved the food and returned a few minutes later. Tomato sauce and fresh bread wafted through the brown paper bag. Not his ideal dinner date, but good enough for now.
    As he turned the knob to Daria’s door and stepped inside, he noticed a glint of gold in the back of the kitchen. With narrowed eyes he scanned the perimeter. Daria stood next to the sink, reaching for something in the cabinet.
    She turned, holding a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. He blanched, then strode to her side.
    “I thought some wine would go well with the meal—”
    He stayed her hand with tense fingers. One squint at the wine bottle told him all he needed to know. He clenched his teeth in fury. A crack burst through the silence and suddenly, red wine began to leak from it.
    “It’s broken,” Jason pointed out tersely.
    Her eyes flew to the bottle and she gasped, leaning over the sink as it broke in two. The burgundy liquid bubbled and frothed, sending an acrid fume into the air. She dropped the bottle in shock.
    Daria jerked back and Jason caught her around the waist to make sure she stood far enough away from the noxious liquid.
    With disbelief written all over her face, she stammered, “What was that?”
    Jason forced himself to calm down. “Probably just some bad wine,” he said casually. “Why don’t you wash up and I’ll take