Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1)

by Jeanine Croft

  “That,” said Markus, alighting from the window with an audible leap, “was a gift from His Majesty, Ming Chengzu.” His fingers brushed atop her head, tucking the dark locks back from her face as she retched once more into the Ming bowl. “Were he and his golden carp not dead these four hundred years past, he would have been gratified, I’m sure, to know you have discovered a use for it heretofore unfathomed.” Though his fingers were gentle, his voice withered her flesh.

  She pushed his hand away and stood to face him, squaring her shoulders against the wrathful twist of his smile. “It was either the bowl or your coat, my lord.”

  “Obliged, madam.” He shammed a bow and flashed his teeth. “Now, if you are quite well enough to speak, do oblige me by explaining how I came to find you roaming the moors like some sightless itinerant.”

  “I was trying to get back here.”

  “From where exactly?”

  “An errand.” She folded her arms. “Where were you?”

  “An errand,” he rejoined. “I give fair warning, I do not need to sip from your veins to know when you speak false.” He tapped his fingers on his chest, mimicking the anxious tempo of her lying heart.

  “My heart races so because you frightened it half to death with your abduction.”

  “Abduction was it?” He stalked past her, divesting his coat with a terse shrug. By now he’d already tucked his wings beneath his flesh. He then lowered his considerable frame into his favorite chair, leveling her with keen dispassion. “On the contrary, I delivered you from the cold and from certain death. Or have you forgotten my warning you not to stray outside after dark.” He tapped his steepled fingers together with a dilatoriness that belied the menace in his tone.

  She set her teeth. “My death would have been certain indeed had I perished from fright when you seized me from the road.”

  “Ah, yes, the road—a road peopled with cutpurses and footpads.” He leaned forward. “But they are nothing to the beasties lurking about Winterthurse—you were warned against wandering alone at night. Now where were you tonight?”

  “The Whitby inn.” There now, that wasn’t a lie. She folded her arms.

  “A woman alone in a tavern by the wharf? How curious. A man is like to question the nature of her business there. A man might even wonder if he has not erred by placing his trust in such a woman.”

  “You are no man and you have done naught to win my trust.”

  “Have I not?” He narrowed his gaze. “I have exposed who and what I am to only one mortal in all the centuries I have dwelt amongst your kind. You and you alone. What is that if not a measure of trust?”

  She swallowed, feeling cornered by the raw intensity of his gaze. “That, I grant you, is no small boon, but what of your lies?”

  “When have I lied?” he growled.

  “Omission is—”

  “Omission is necessary! Knowledge can be used for ill and I have more than myself to think about. Never forget, my trust is earned by gradations.”

  “Yes, you have your lover, Victoria, to think about—”

  “Ahh, I see you have entertained little witches to whisper in your ear tonight.”

  “Watchers, yes.” Emma swallowed the hurt that surged up when he failed to deny her charge. “They were quite explicit about who your sister really is to you. Or should I say daughter?”

  The soft laughter that followed was much like a growl. “How ironic that you should hear it from them…”

  “Why did you not explain what I am to you?”

  “And what is it you believe you are to me?”

  She bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “A vessel in which to incubate your vile brood.”

  He leaned back in his chair, thoughtful. “My vile brood, yes, so eloquent of the nature of our association. I wasn’t aware you were my incubation vessel; it was you that came to my room not I to yours.” He gestured for her to go on. “What else did the witches have to say?”

  “They had much to say.” Most of which Emma was still trying to process. She had more questions now than ever before.

  “And you doubtless glutted yourself on their oblique truths.” After what seemed an eternity, Markus rose from his armchair and prowled towards her. “I had hoped your suspicious nature would do you better credit than that.”

  “What need have they for lies? Ana has only ever wanted my safety.”

  “Assured you of that, did she? Good of her. And what intelligence did she volunteer of herself and her dear…brother?”

  “There was no time—”

  “No, of course not. By all means, uphold the word of a witch over a vampyre’s, after all the latter is nothing more than a bloodthirsty killer and the former…well, I daresay there was little enough time to denigrate my race without delving into the nature and deeds of their own kind.” He was silent a moment. “I’ve been meaning to ask, how did you find yourself the lucky recipient of their beneficence?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How was it they found you in the first place? A witch requires skin to skin contact to know a Nephilim.”

  She recalled the day she’d ‘collided’ into Tanith. She’d taken her glove off moments before, hadn’t she?

  “But a vampyre cannot know a Nephilim unless he samples her blood.”

  Emma recoiled at the thought.

  Ostensibly impatient with her silence, Markus shot out of his chair and prowled towards her.

  She drew back. “What are you doing?”

  “You reek of fear,” he said, lip curling in distaste. “You have never feared me before.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “No.” His eyes became suddenly engulfed in black. “The scent of fear is cloying and ripe. Your blood is saturated with it.” He parted his lips and his fangs dropped with hunger. “It calls to me.”

  She lifted her hands to arrest his advance, but he merely caught her wrists and drew her closer. “Careful,” she said, “you show your cloven hoof.”

  The blackness instantly retreated from his eyes. “I never truly contrived to hide it from you, Emmaline.” He placed a mocking kiss on the inside of one wrist where her pulse beat frantically and then promptly released her.

  “What power do you wield over me now that you have tasted my blood?”

  He gave her his back and moved to close the window, drawing the curtains across the glazing once he’d secured the latch. “I hazard a guess your witch already divulged the nature of the link extant between us now.”

  “You should have told me!”

  He turned to regard her coolly. “Ay, perhaps I was wrong to omit that.”

  “Perhaps?!”

  “But consider that it is you who wields the power, not I. Power over me.”

  Oh, if only that were true! But, no, she would not allow him to distract her with clever equivocations. She hastily banished the tears from her eyes with an angry swipe of her sleeve. “If indeed I possessed such power, my sister would be safe from you and your vile daughter.”

  “As to that, I do not deny that Victoria and I were once lovers. I am an ageless creature and I have not endured the centuries a bloody monk, much less a wicked one.” He vented a sigh and drew near, carefully this time. “Yes, I sired her and gave her a choice—she chose to become Vigiles Nocturni—a watcher in the night. And as to your sister, I vowed to keep her safe and I intend to uphold that vow.” He pointed a long finger towards the writing desk and stationery. “You have only to write to the nun and allay your doubts.” His jaw clenched with some fell emotion. “But if you insist that my word holds no water then perhaps you want its veracity etched in blood?”

  “What do you mean?”

  By way of an answer, he plunged his fangs cruelly into his wrist and at once the crimson rills flowed into his cuff and sleeve.

  “Stop!” She drew back.

  “In sanguis veritate.” He held his wrist out to her, drawing the cuff away from the bite. “Drink, Emmaline. No creature surrenders its bloo
d without forfeit. Drink and you will know the truth as I have endured it; you will have the knowledge you seek.”

  Knowledge at what price? Emma dropped her wide eyes to his wrist. She gave a stiff shake of her head. “No!” Ana had warned her against this very thing. “Never!”

  “Then you fear the truth.” The blood welled thick and vinous from his wrist, so dark a crimson it was nigh as black as the midnight roses in his garden.

  Emma tore her gaze from the wound. The vampyre was preternatural in his stillness. It was only the tremble of the firelight shifting his shadow on the wall that animated him. His incisive black eyes transfixed her so completely that it seemed an age before she felt herself capable of stirring her tongue. “What will become of me if”—she licked the dryness from her under lip—“if I drink your blood? No more half truths, tell me what the consequences are.”

  He made no movement, not even to breathe. His words left his mouth as though disembodied and far-flung, seeming to echo in her bones from a bygone era. “Blood always comes at a price.” His eyes bespoke much of his ancient past—decadence, poignancy, bitterness, and infinite world-weariness.

  “What is the price?” The color of blood was so evocative of the Edenic fruit of knowledge and disgrace. The fruit of his veins—the knowledge he offered. And like Eve before her, it was becoming too tempting to refuse. “Will your blood make me a vampyre?”

  “I would need to take from your veins every last bit of warmth before such would betide you. Your heart must beat its last ere my blood and venom can fill it with new life.”

  “You mean death.”

  “Immortality is the very antithesis of death.” Behind the sneer his fangs glinted ominously. “And little though you think of me, I have never forced immortality upon the unwilling. But if I offer you my vein and venom…”

  “I become like you.”

  “Not exactly like me, no, and not like Victoria either. You are something different.”

  Emma gasped. “Like Skinner?!”

  His chest rumbled with impatience, startling her. “Never like that! Skinner is a wight—no better than a corpse. And Victoria was merely mortal before I turned her, you are something more than mortal. At any rate, a wight is one to whom the gift of vampyre blood is denied before the last mortal heartbeat; upon death, vampyre venom alone grants something less than beautiful immortality.” One corner of his mouth lifted and she watched as he ran his tongue over a long, venomous fang.

  “Then…last night…when you bit me…had you drained me completely…”

  “Yes, you’d have been forced to endure a scant few centuries as nothing more than a wight who died of a vampyre bite, long in the tooth and sour in the face. And wights are easily disposed of. One has only to remove the organs or the head and—”

  “Yes, thank you.” Emma shuddered to think how close she had come to that—Markus’s control over his bloodlust was all that had stood between her and Skinner’s fate.

  “The wound is closing,” he said. “This is an offer I do not make lightly, so take it now or never.”

  Held fast in the black depth of that ageless gaze, she felt Ana’s warnings vanish like smoke. With an extraneous gaze, she followed her fingers as they wrapped themselves around his wrist, as though she witnessed a stranger’s hand, but it was her strange hand, her movements. She could feel his sinews tense beneath her fingertips. He was all mystery to her, she thought as she lowered her mouth to hover over the puncture wounds. Her breath was hesitant as it left her lips. There was much to know, but the existential and all-consuming question of his past held primacy in her mind tonight. Who had he been? Why had he fallen? Only the past could shed light on the present.

  She licked her lips, eliciting an answering growl of anticipation from this creature that bled for her. “I want to know who you really are.”

  He moved to stand behind her, drawing her curtain of hair from her neck, his trailing fingers rousing the fine hairs at her nape. “Then drink,” he whispered at her back, clenching his fist so that the wound wept anew.

  With her spine flush against him, Emma lifted his forearm for that final indelible kiss, and closed her mouth over the wellspring of truth.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Fall

  The moonlight fell full upon her alabaster throat. Her breasts heaved. She writhed with pleasure beneath him upon the woven carpet, a succulent mosaic of ivory skin, crimson lips, and black kohl-leaden eyes. The darkness mantled her hair so completely that it was only in the brief glimmers of flame light from the clay lamps, undulating in the breeze, that the God of Death perceived the fire in her hair and the embers in her eyes.

  No! This was forbidden. He knew that if he stayed a moment longer he would be mortally undone.

  Cleopatra slapped his chest with frustration as he pulled away. The weight of his unshed tears failed to quell her rage—she had tears of her own to bear. “Go then!” She sat up and threw a gilt goblet at the wall before turning her back on him.

  He watched as the wine fell in anemic rills down the marble. These were her games and well she knew it; he had prided himself on being omnipotent, but he’d begun to suspect her of wielding the greater power between them. Tonight that shift of power nearly cost him everything. He was no longer her preceptor but her besotted thrall.

  It was time to put distance between them. Perhaps a year apart might teach her restraint, and endow him with temperance. Besides, her position in the palace was once more secure—she had the ear of Caesar himself. If ever there was a time to cease his watching, it was now. He placed a kiss upon her cold shoulder, committing her scent to memory, and then he vanished from her chamber without a word or sound.

  The desert sands shifted while he turned his gaze away; the Nile’s banks swelled and dried with the rhythm of the moons and tides. The seasons sprang and fell in flashes of rain and color. When he could force his gaze away no longer, he returned to her; what he saw embittered him.

  The firelight quaked beneath the watcher’s veiled wrath, the oriental drapes shrank back as he alighted on the terrace. “Thou hast lain with Caesar,” he said without preamble.

  Cleopatra’s eyes snapped open. Surprise, rage, love—a thousand emotions seemed to flash in her eyes as they traced his face and then his outstretched wings against the backdrop of glittering constellations. With a brusque flick of her wrist, she sent the servants hastily from her chamber and bade them shut the doors. She stood from the fragrant waters of her bath and therefrom, with deliberate and sensual grace, moved lightly across the room to stand before him.

  Over his shoulder, the Mediterranean lay like a black mantle beneath the stars. It was into that black nothingness that she focused her attention. “Wilt thou not congratulate me on my conquest of Rome, Lord?”

  Death’s gaze dropped to the crescent birthmark that lay beneath her navel like a cup. It was the only blemish, such as it was, upon her glorious flesh. A mark that had drawn the attention of the eyes of heaven.

  He had watched on sternly for nights and days as she and the Roman imperator had sailed, triumphant, touring the temples along the Nile in the royal barge with a procession of ships. Even now there was life stirring in her sacred womb. A life that he resented for reasons that were not altogether disinterested. “What conquest? Thou art merely the mistress of an aged general; thousands of women warmed his bed ere thou took up that office.”

  “There are not one in a thousand like me,” she quipped.

  “Wouldst thou be the servant of Rome?”

  “It is Egypt that I serve.”

  “Thou art Caesar’s pawn and nothing more.”

  “He is all but the emperor of Rome,” she replied with a regal lift to her chin. “And I carry his son.”

  “And what of his wife?”

  “She is old and has given him no son.” Cleopatra left him standing at the window and sat down to apply her cosmetics. “My sons and daughters shall carry the scepters of Rome and of Egypt for many suns and ma
ny moons hereafter.”

  “No, I fear thy line shall all too soon be eclipsed by Rome.” The words were out his mouth before he could halt them, savoring of bitter portent.

  Her lips drew back in a snarl. “That is not what my priests have divined.”

  “Tell me, my queen, where do I fit into thy schemes?”

  Her hand stilled over her neck where she had applied a liberal portion of cream. “You promised to make of me a queen of kings; you vowed that my children would rule amongst the stars; you said you would give me the sun and moon, but you forsook me.” She stood from her stool and turned to face him, heedless of her naked glory. He knew she was well aware of what that glory cost his forbearance. “Wherefore didst my lord not take me as his own? Am I not Isis—thy mother; thy sister; thy wife? I would have loved thee eternally had thou let me.” She rested her hand over her womb. “I wanted only the sun and the moon.”

  “Ask not what I cannot give thee.” He would not repeat the folly of his brother and sister; he would not—could not—do the very thing he had been charged to prevent. He approached her and took her hands in his. “Caesar does not love thee. He loves and desires only that which thy riches will bring his campaign and himself withal. Canst thou not see that? The Romans shalt not accept a queen, much less a foreign one with a bastard in her belly.”

  For all her charms (and Cleopatra had many), Caesar was still and always a politician and a conqueror at heart. Not even her clever tongue was worth an ingot of gold. The unprecedented attachment the young queen had formed to the old man in the wake of civil war had greatly disturbed her guardian watcher. This was not how he had envisioned her future when he’d soared down from the northern sky.