In one swift movement he had her trapped beneath him, his arms either side of her. “You persist in calling me what I am not. Perhaps now is the time to prove that I am so much more than a vampyre.”
“That does sound foreboding,” she said, her eyes shifting pointedly to his wings. “Have you not already done so?”
“Not by half,” he replied, moving from the bed with the graceful celerity of a giant wolf. “Have you the fortitude to see me without my aegis?”
“Show me.” Her bottom lip was trapped precariously between her teeth.
He waited only a moment before he finally nodded. “All right.”
Emma drew the coverlet almost to her chin, watching with grim fascination. His body became opaline as it shimmered and grew. An instant later he stood before her a veritable giant. His wings, proportionately, had grown too, but the spurs were longer and sharper. The tips of his ears had also protracted into tapered points that peeked out from beneath unruly black locks like devilish horns.
It was indeed an alarming creature that pinned her with its gaze, eyes filled completely with glittering obsidian. Even without the wings he was clearly not of this world. He was both magnificent and terrible to behold. He no longer possessed the lethal beauty of a vampyre but the fearsome eminence of a god.
And yet he was till Markus. His features, though proportionate to his colossal body, had not been transfigured beyond recognition. They were still that of the Markus she knew…and loved.
“Good Heavens,” she whispered, peculiarly unafraid.
“Decidedly not of heaven, I’m afraid.” His lips quirked over long ivory fangs. Even his voice sounded far deeper, it filled the room like a rumble of distant thunder.
“No,” she agreed, releasing the sheets and climbing from the mattress. She paused as her vision filled with stars, it felt as though her head might float away from her body. When the dizziness subsided, she approached him with caution, searching the black vastness of his preternatural eyes. He was so still, it was unsettling. She was a tall woman, but the top of her head barely reached his chest. Her hand explored the powerful thews of his abdomen, marveling at the feel of him. Like cool rock beneath her palm.
He touched a finger gently to her cheek. “What a strange creature thou art.”
“This from you?” She said, smiling. His beauty had been too angelic before, and she had sometimes found herself intimidated by it. But now? It thrilled her to know that he had admitted her behind the facade he presented to all the world. That she alone had glimpsed what no mortal was permitted to see.
Markus chuckled and lifted her up so that her gaze was level with his. It roused her heart to apprehend that, although he could easily smite her with the barest flick of his wrist, or slip of the claw, he was painstakingly gentle. After a pause, he proceeded to the bed again, his aegis slipping back into place. When he lowered his head to cover her mouth with his, he was once more in his guise of humanity. Even his wings had somehow retreated beneath the sinews of his back, or so it felt as she ran her hands over the naked span of his shoulders.
The subaqueous candlelight guttered out and they were once more veiled by night; but not before she’d seen the creamy linens bespattered in blood. Her blood. There was a feint grey blush on the horizon that filtered weakly through the casement. It was enough only to delineate his shape above her as her head fell back against the pillows.
“Will you…drink again?” she asked.
“Do you wish me to?” He pulled at her underlip with careful fangs.
“No.” She slipped a finger between their lips. “For the second act you are merely as mortal as I.” Or so she could pretend.
“As you wish,” he said, nudging her finger aside with his nose. His thirstful kisses thereafter were no less heady for all they did not pierce.
As dawn broke steadily across the sky, Emma allowed herself to forget for a moment what Markus was; and what she was to him. Forget that she was only one fleeting, inconsequential beat in the eternal rhythm of his undying heart.
Chapter Forty-Four
Forbidden Fruits
How different she looked when her lineaments were softened by sleep. How like a lamb. And how deep that slumber. That she had found such peace in his bed, the bed of the very beast for whom she’d shed her stream of life not once but twice. A remarkable creature was she, his Emma. His obsession perhaps? An unpalatable thought.
Markus turned from the bed and stalked towards the open window where, closing his eyes, he could almost catch the scent of Adriatic spice and the lush incense of papyrus reeds, lotus, and date palms floating along the night currents. And the intoxicating perfume of honey and rose. The scent of her—his original sin.
She was incomparable, his little queen. Perched in the shadows aloft, he watched her with tireless devotion each day and every night. The column of her neck was finest alabaster, made starker by the defiant red curls that eschewed the confines of her golden diadem. Hers was not the face of Hellenistic beauty, for it conformed not to the aesthetic ideals that might have launched a navy to Troy; hers was instead the sui generis eminence of a goddess. He did not wonder at her claiming to be the winged goddess, Isis, incarnate.
The God of Death alighted from the shoulder of Horus whose stony gaze surveyed the obsequious nobles and the gluttonous priests that worshipped at the feet of the two young royals below. The servants, however, were nearly as invisible as he. No mortal eye observed him, for he walked in their world and not they in his. He paid them little heed, it was only the queen who intrigued him.
For millennia he had beheld the earth with dysphoric eyes, watching as one eon slipped invariably into another. He was already an ancient being when the oceans were naught but scoria and the mountains raged with fire. In all that time, he’d never seen such a one as her. Until now, no creature had tempted him to soar down from his empyrean throne to look closer.
Perhaps, he thought with dread, he had been too long among these mortals. Latterly, in her lifetime, his heart—if such he possessed—had been unexpectedly and unthinkably moved to beat a mortal and seductive tempo. An earthly affliction with grave and everlasting consequences. The fate of his sister alone ought to have taught him that much. Yet he rarely left his little queen’s side, tempted again and again to touch her. All he allowed himself, however, was to look at what he must never have.
Her nose was like that of a fine young eagle—which was apt in light of her noble Ptolemaic progenitors—and he recognized in its profile a shrewdness that defied her youth. To the gaze of a plebeian it might not have inspired esteem or renown, but to him it was nowise a diminution of her beauty. On the contrary, he regarded it highly. The eyes too were not that of an earthbound creature. They were sunlit gold and imbued with a falcon-like keenness that was wholly without need of the kohl and malachite that adorned her lids. In the petal-like curvature of her mouth, no one could find fault. It was generous and alluring, her voice rich with feminine authority. In fine, there was nothing of docility nor of conformity in either Cleopatra’s accents or her strange beauty. He never tired of watching and listening to her. He’d forsaken all else and all others to watch her with a nascent and forbidden love that he took pains to hide from the Great Eye of Heaven—Ra as He was known here.
So to the shadows Death cleaved and over her old and wizened body he would someday weep in secret, for what was her life but a ripple on the Nile that would vanish in a mortal instant. And mortals, such as she was, whose passions rivaled even the sun, were never long destined to scatter their light like stars upon the vast and winding waters of that great river. Her star would be snuffed far sooner, he feared, by which time she, like her father’s fresh corpse, would be spread atop cold stone like a salted cod.
What remained of the last pharaoh now lay still atop the embalmers’ slab deep within his tomb, invested in linen tresses, his painted sarcophagus gaping and hollow-bellied. His daughter had only this morning pressed her carmine lips to his waxen brow for the
last time.
Unbeknownst to her, the seraph watched as the little queen sipped her wine in the banquet hall, the funereal feast, for tonight at least, drawing to a close. Only the cheese and honeyed figs and dates had yet to be served. Cleopatra, in turn, studied her young husband—eight years her junior—where he sat between the dour commander and the rodent-faced regent. Her brother. Her consort. Her thorn.
Death could feel how her heart constricted with suspicion as the hateful eunuch whispered long and sibilantly into the boy king’s ear. Her hate, in turn, became the watcher’s, though he’d fought it at first. The more he watched and was fascinated by her, however, the further he strayed from Heaven’s light. He heard each murmurous polemic from the eunuch’s tongue like a sharp lash across the character of his love.
In that uneasy and conjoined reign only ill-feeling flourished thereafter—for months it spilled athwart the starved banks of their beloved Nile, and seemed to cloak their valley not in lush greens but with the bleak shade of famine. Whatever small fondness there had existed between the young royals was finally reduced to dust and ash; and talk of exile.
It was late now and all had retired except the stars, and thieves, and palace guards…and the two conspirators. “She cannot be controlled,” said the sexless regent. “She has grown too bold.”
Death watched as the upper lip of the commander curled in distaste, his eyes narrowing over an official correspondence in which Cleopatra’s royal cypher appeared without that of the co-ruling Ptolemy. “Then we must clip her wings,” said the commander at last.
Death had heard enough. He leapt into the night on broad star-lit wings, soaring over the streets of Alexandria till he spied the noble columns of the royal library. It was within the reading room that he knew he would find his Cleopatra at her solitude. All was enveloped in the hush of the dark hours. He moved with unearthly stillness through the gloom of the hypostyle, the brands wavering with fright as he passed. He cast no shadow upon the sunken reliefs and inscriptions that overlaid the pillars, the hieroglyphs depicting ancient battles and godly triumphs, for he was not one amongst the living.
The bewitching scent of rose, beeswax, and honey nudged playfully at the side of his mouth, drawing him closer to his heart’s desire—an unmistakable ambrosial blend that was hers alone and more alluring than the rarest and most costly kyphi.
Studying by lamplight, he found her stretched across her chaise like a feline in her private rooms, her leathern sandals doffed, her head against a blue silken pillow. The diaphanous white linen of her dress parted across her thigh where she bent her knee in repose. Her hair appeared like ochre in the flame light, a dark rich red that was near as dark as kohl. Her heartbeats had lowered to a soporific rhythm and her lids were growing heavy. In another moment, he was sure, the papyrus scroll would find its way from her soft lap to the polished marble floor.
She was unaware that she was not alone, but the same could not be said of her companion. The cat that had been curled beside her pretty ankle gave a sudden black hiss and bounded from the room in fright, startling its mistress from the polyglot scroll.
“Who is there?” she asked.
Ah! Not in a thousand years would he ever tire of listening to that honeyed voice. He had only to step from the shadows, just one step, to make his form known to her, yet he hesitated. What he was about to do would lower the brow of the All-Seeing Eye, if not worse. He was right to dither in the shadows, for he had no business meddling in the affairs of queens. He might end up like the others, fallen through that one-way abyss. Even now the shock of their expulsion reverberated through the heavens.
“I demand you show yourself.” By now, Cleopatra had unfolded herself from the pillows and was standing like a general, peering into the shadows, her scroll forgotten at her bare feet.
She could feel his presence, he knew it by the racing of her heart, yet her voice remained steady and sure. He wanted her to feel him. To know. Perhaps if she had not spoken he might have held himself back; perhaps if his eyes had not whetted themselves on the curve of her hips and those long, sun kissed thighs, he might have had the strength to leave her to her precious scrolls, leave her to her doom in favor of avoiding his own. Yet she had spoken and he had looked; and coveted. His need was such that he could not withstand the call of her fragrant skin and could not resist the chance to have her eyes, at last, rest upon his.
He tucked his wings beneath his flesh and emerged into the light to answer her summons. He knew that, though his ivory wings were hidden, he could no more pass for a mortal than she could be mistaken for anything but a queen. He was nigh as tall as a pillar and his flesh just as white, and not a little nacreous besides. His bones and sinews, leastways in this realm, somewhat resembled a man’s. A god’s perhaps.
Cleopatra dropped instantly to the floor with a soft gasp and pressed her proud nose and luxuriant curls to the cold marble. “It is thee!” Her heart was slamming against her breast in a ferocious tempo. “Mighty Osiris.”
His lips twitched. She had addressed him neither in Latin, nor in Greek, but in the tongue of her people. He, however, preferred best to hear those dulcet female accents spoken in the Alexandrian dialect of poets and scholars. “Wherefore call me by that name, my queen?”
Her wheat-gold eyes flared wide as he approached her with a silent tread that belied his colossal form. “Are not you he?”
His own eyes were neither blue nor green but something in-between, yet too light to be anything but otherworldly. Though his gaze—his very presence—might have frightened any other, she was manifestly struck with fascination and awe only. It pleased him. “You think me the life-giver?” he said. “The Lord of the under realm?” The god of no phallus, he chuckled to himself.
“Ay, lord.” Her breath hitched with wonderment.
He took her arm and pulled her gently from the floor so that she was standing before him. “Kneel not before me, my queen. Art thou not my consort? My queen? My sister?” He lowered his head so that he could press his lips to her brow and her cheeks. “Is thy name not Isis?” He knew that she imagined herself Isis incarnate. He dropped his mouth a little lower, letting it fall lightly against hers, so lush, red, and fragrant. And in that moment he knew he was lost to her. The black abyss loomed closer.
“As you say, lord.” The warmth of her whispered words fluttered across his lips with the redolence of figs and dates—forbidden fruits. “What seeketh thou here tonight? Just a kiss?”
“Just an earthly hour,” he replied.
“And how may a queen of Egypt serve you in that blessed hour?” The petals of her mouth spread delicately, knowingly.
“For tonight I wish only to council if you will hear me.”
“I will hear you, Lord of Love.”
“Then I will make of you a queen of kings. And your children shall rule among the stars.”
A sound from the bed drew his gaze and the incense of ancient memory fled out the window and was lost upon the Yorkshire wolds in an instant. It was Emma, murmuring in her sleep. He hoped her dreams were less troubled than his own; it was why he never slept. His dreams were more often than not beset with remembrances long denied. Failures. Regrets.
When Emma sighed and rolled over onto her side, still fast asleep, he smiled. But there was nothing of softness or humor in it.
A movement outside, below his window, caught his eyes as he turned back towards the night. William. That surly gait was unmistakable, so was the black cloud that followed perpetually in his wake. Well, William’s black mood suited him just now, and the boy was always up for a good hunt. Emma’s blood had only whetted his appetite.
After one last glance towards the sleeping woman in his bed, Markus vaulted over the window ledge and dropped from his tower window.
Chapter Forty-Five
King of Hearts
It was dark out tonight. Too dark for business; well, too dark for most to earn an honest coin. Only dark creatures braved nights like this. Dark creatures li
ke this one—a girl not yet twenty. Desire had driven her from the safe decay of the hostel. Desire for the palliative of hard spirits she could ill afford lest she hike up her skirts for a few drunks and sailors, and only the worst kind of seamen were out on nights like this. As were monsters like him.
Her fear incensed the air, a warm piquant reprieve from the effluvia of London that clung to his coat. The sickness in her was as pervasive as the lingering stench of her last customer. Her blood was ale-sodden, her liver diseased. But not the heart. Leastwise not physically. It beat hard and fast like a nightingale’s. Oh, London’s nightingales were his favorite pets. No one spared much of a care when these night birds stopped singing.
He knew she could feel his gaze, he was best pleased when they could feel him watching. A bird like her hadn’t reached twenty without learning to trust her night senses. With a malefic smile, he crawled along the brick and stuccoed walls like a spider.
He positioned himself further up the road and made ready, presenting a respectable demeanor in his bespoke coat. He was merely a fine gentleman waiting beneath one of the rare gaslights that populated this derelict little corner of London wherein only the forsaken dwelled and hunted. When at last she came into view, spotting him instantly, she visibly relaxed. She did not yet perceive the wolf beneath the lambskin.
He turned to look away from her, glancing this way and that as though searching for a hack to convey him back to his grand house and sacks of gold. He pulled out his silver repeater and made a show of checking the time.
Already her mouth was watering at the prospect of all the drink his pennies would afford her. Already her fear was forgotten. “You lost, gent?”
He glanced up, affecting surprise at finding he was not alone. “I believe I am.”
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 31
