by Renee Peters
He had never tried to determine why she affected him so. It had been easier to escape the storm — to follow their Arch Lord away from the sorrow her nearness had radiated like a grim shroud. Away from the castle and into the shallow rituals and empty games of the mortals in their society parlors.
He’d made it a point to keep his distance on his visits home — easy enough for her hiding.
The Conde knew now, with a reawakening heart, the uneasy weight of guilt — and debt.
As he turned into the alleyway, he still could not hear the French queen — a fact that honed his awareness to a razor’s edge. He could smell a hint of vanilla and orange blossoms on the air; a woman’s perfume over the scent of grime slick cobblestone.
Then he smelled blood.
It was not unexpected on the hunt, save for the quantity he could scent on the air. He felt an ache in the muscles of his jaw as his fangs distended before a flex of his mouth hid them away again. There was something wrong with the blood. It tasted cold on the air.
Cold and dead.
Almost without a thought, the High Lord’s steps quickened, carrying him with all the grace of a large cat down the length of the alley. The sound of shuffling and the hissed, coarse whispers of a man’s voice reached his ears before he saw her.
The youth who had been pursuing Joanna had a hold of her arm and was kneeling over her with a knife in hand.
He saw it the same instant he noted the weakness in the queen's legs that had betrayed her.
Something was not right.
Though their Immortal kind could not fly, the Elder may as well have sprouted wings for as quickly as he was upon the assailant.
The man stunk of decay, and there was a ring of blood dribbling down his mouth.
Blood.
Droplets fell upon Dorian when the man sputtered in surprise as the Castilian’s hand closed around his neck. It took more control than he realized he had not to snap the bones in his hold.
Dorian threw him.
It had taken more control than he realized he had, not to snap the bones that had been in his hold.
The man’s body crashed against the brick wall of the building that bordered the alley with a wet thud, and another bloom of blood perfumed the air like a fungus releasing its spores.
With a wrench, his attention was on Joanna.
The fledgling's legs were folded awkwardly beneath her where she had dropped against the wall of the alley. The same scent of decay that had clung to her assailant overpowered her perfume.
Choking, the queen leaned over to wretch. Her lips were stained with blood, and Dorian recognized it for what was responsible for the taste of death in the air.
Corpse blood.
Reaction to corpse blood was one of the few weaknesses of their race. Large enough doses could induce a crippling paralysis that rendered them as vulnerable as mortal infants. The hunters knew that only too well. That Joanna’s music had been silenced, that she had been unable to defend herself or flee, could only mean one thing.
Her intended prey had been a predator — one that had known her for what she was and of the means to overpower her.
The Elder closed the distance to the blonde queen and lowered into a crouch at her side.
“How much did you take, little one?” he murmured, reaching into his waistcoat pocket to dig out his handkerchief.
His gaze searched over her body, and he knew a flare of the beast’s rage in his blood on a scratch of dark discord. Joanna’s pelisse had been torn open at the buttons. It had slipped off her shoulder where she had been grabbed, revealing the plain, brown dress she wore beneath.
The woman’s fingers left her mouth to take his offered kerchief, briefly uncovering the paleness of her face before they pushed back the fallen curls that had come loose from her braid.
“No more than what was on my tongue. He… had it in his mouth. Il m'embrassa.”
He had kissed her.
Forced the blood into her mouth. It was not the way of the hunters. That close they would have used a different means to dispense their idea of justice.
The darkness rippled deeper through Dorian’s song like the churn of a storm.
There were those among mortals who knew of their kind; not thralls who were addicted to the pleasure their bites could bring, or hunters who sought to destroy the Immortals. They were the mortals who craved the promise of power in Immortal blood — unaware or uncaring that they would become less than human over time and exposure to their chosen vice.
Men who would make prey of their predators at the cost of their lives.
Ghouls, the Immortals called them, and Dorian glanced to where the man had fallen. They rarely lived long for their inevitable deterioration.
With trembling hands, the queen wiped the handkerchief across her mouth, smearing away the blood. Her eyes lifted, unfocused and watery to find the place the man’s body had landed. “I stopped.”
“Good girl,” he whispered.
She had not taken in the death offered in her assailant's kiss.
It would mean only a passing state of weakness, but one they could ill afford with a bleeding body in the alleyway. He reached out to lift the shoulder of her gown into place, and the roughness of his knuckles skimmed the softness of her skin where it lay bared at her throat as he secured it there.
Beneath his touch, Joanna stiffened with an intake of breath, and he felt more than saw, the rush of heat that betrayed her flush.
His music staggered — a lurching dip in his strings that recovered so quickly that he might have questioned if it had happened at all were it not for the sudden tension that had crept into his frame.
She was a fledgling, an infant.
It did not mean she was not a woman.
Dorian almost laughed at the whisper of his consciousness. Was he then so deprived of female companionship that he could be moved to lust by an accidental touch to the skin of a child?
“We cannot stay,” he said. “It will mean carrying you. Can you stand?”
The disturbance in his music would bring their sire soon enough. Dorian could not risk being seen on the streets with a half-dressed woman in his arms while he walked among mortals as the Conde.
“Je suis désolée, Dorian.” Her whisper was quiet, and she glanced away from him to her hands. “I… can try, oui. If you would help me to my feet. S'il vous plaît. You may not have to hold me so. I know….” She went silent for a beat and lifted an arm for him to assist her. “You are the Conde, and my dress is torn.”
So, she knew the picture she presented.
“It is I who am sorry,” he said quietly and managed a hint of a smile for her. “I should have come sooner.”
“It is not for you to apologize for, mon Seigneur.”
He eased his shoulder beneath the limb she raised, and the warmth of her body in the cooler night radiated to embrace him. It carried a bloom of vanilla and orange blossoms and something else — a honeyed sweetness that was uniquely her scent.
A knot formed and grew gradually tighter in his gut: a tangle of masculine awareness and self-recrimination. He had known she was in danger, somewhere in his soul, and he had not heeded the warning. His lips pinched tighter.
“Were you able to hunt tonight?” he asked.
For a moment, the queen did not answer him. Her gaze was set on her feet as he helped her into a stand, and her golden curls spilled over her shoulder with her lean, briefly blocking her face from view.
“Oui,” she said finally.
He was unsure if she was being truthful, but the chit had let her weight fold against him in fit that was, for an instant, too distracting. He could hear the faint rise of flute song in her blood, muted to near silence despite her proximity, and without thought his own violins lifted to brush around the edges of her melody in the ghost of a harmony.
He sucked in a soft hiss of breath and almost let his arm fall from its wrap around her. Only the awareness that she might collapse without his sup
port held him in place. Then her voice was a distraction of its own once more.
“I cannot hear the music… and I… do not know that I can walk alone, but… I hear you a little… I should be well soon enough. Save for shame.”
“You have borne enough of shame for several lifetimes, madam,” he answered, and the silence of the shadows that had long separated them fell again.
There would be no easy penance for the price she had paid in being claimed to their darkness.
There was tension in his frame as he held her amid the growing stench of death, and his relief was palpable when the music and form of his sire appeared at the end of the alleyway.
Lian closed the distance, and it was with quiet words that the Lords spoke of what had occurred. The Arch Lord was the one to slip his arms beneath Joanna then, and Dorian was all too willing to release her to their sire’s hold.
Curled against Lian’s chest, Joanna did not speak again, but as the Conde passed them to collect the carriage, he caught the glitter of her eyes watching him.
A hitch in his body and movement briefly betrayed that his beast had taken notice and wanted to answer the queen, and it was with more resolute determinedness that the High Lord had to turn his focus back on the path and the task at hand.
Chapter 5
It was another early morning, six days from the catastrophe that had been Joanna’s last hunt. She had been keeping track of the time as it passed, entirely aware that her next hunt was due to be supervised. Supervised as they had once been in the days when she was first turned.
Little one.
The queen grimaced and felt her cheeks redden. With a breath and a self-depreciating huff of laughter, Joanna forced herself to continue her walk along the great hallway.
Still little. Still a child and incapable of tending to herself.
Joanna might have been able to let the embarrassment fade, were it not for the increasing proximity of a violin song that rippled through her blood. She could count the days since their absent High Lord had last been at the castle — thirteen — and he had been in Lian’s company, then.
It was far too soon for a reappearance in Anowen’s walls when he had taken care to appear only once a month since he’d left.
Fortunately, he was in the habit of scarcity on his visits, and had rarely crossed her path in the years she had lived in Anowen. Clearing her throat and petting a hand down the length of the braid that rested over her shoulder, Joanna continued walking.
It did not take her long to realize she was likely to meet Dorian this time, whether she wanted to or not. Her path to the basement led through the same foyer that held the entrance to the carriage court.
Already, the Elder’s music was singing in her blood, and Joanna hesitated. She was not sure if she would be pleased or not to miss him, and torn, the queen continued forward at a slower pace.
She had nearly crossed beneath the archway that led into the foyer when the slap of feet coming down the main stairwell halted her progress again.
“Dori!”
The word could barely keep up with the body that shouted it, and a flash of white blew across Joanna’s path to intercept its target.
The Frenchwoman pulled the crate she held closer and eased a look into the room.
Despite being well over three-hundred years into her curse, her sister Eden had all the appearance of a young girl — no older than fifteen or sixteen years, and Joanna often found it difficult to remember she was anything but.
She had a twiggy, birdlike figure, and a penchant for running about in nothing but a thin shift that had taken some getting used to. But it was Eden’s coloration, more than anything else, that set her apart from the rest of the coven.
The mortals had come up with a name for her condition. Albiness. With milk white skin and soft, corn-silk hair, and eyes that sometimes seemed pink or lavender in the light, the girl seemed almost ethereal in her paleness and in the perfection of their curse. It was not Eden however, who held Joanna’s attention.
Dorian was dressed for the cooler weather in a suit perfectly tailored to reveal the elegant power of straight shoulders — shoulders that Eden had flung her thin arms around to cling. Resting at an angle over one of the joints, was the barrel of a highly polished musket. Its butt sat perched in the curve of his palm, while his free hand reached out to pluck what appeared to be a wild bird feather from Eden’s cropped curls.
“Not even a minute. I should have known you would find me out, Pet,” the Elder teased, and his drawl was rich with amusement. “But you’ll need more than a shift on if you’re to take Bess through her paces.”
“You’re going to let me?”
“Perhaps. If you tell me why you are dripping in feathers,” he answered dryly
“It’s the fashion for ladies’ hats, I’ll have you know. It’s too bad I couldn’t find one of those big ones — the bright green n’ blue ones. Had to settle for pigeons.”
“I won’t ask, Kitten.”
“That would be safest,” the queen chirped. “You’ll wait while I change? Don’t shoot it without me, aye? You’ll have me runnin’ out half naked.”
“We would not want that. I’ll wait.”
The Lord was speaking to the limpet on his body, but Joanna knew he was aware of her presence. He had said nothing nor even cast a look in her direction, but she could almost feel his music breathe across her own.
Traitor that her flutes were, the notes quivered.
Both songs seemed to startle then and retreat.
Joanna knew the flush of heat in her face and her own racing heartbeat would betray her if she entered the space. Clutching the crate she carried to her chest, the queen pivoted on her heel to depart his proximity.
She could take the servant’s stairs. The servants might whisper for the fact — about her and her clothing and wonder again why she chose the life of a pariah among Immortals. But it would only be more fuel for a fire they already tended.
It was a small price to pay for the peace that came with distance from the music, and she found she could breathe again as she navigated the cooler corridors of the basement.
Beneath Anowen were two sprawling basement levels. On the lower ground floor, there were enough rooms to house the army of servants it took to tend the castle and its residents. Below that was a service access to the underground tunnels that led west from the castle.
That level was an empty cave system now, where the only fresh footprints were her own and those of the servants who kept the fires lit in the gas boilers. Even they never ventured as far as the former storage room she had turned into her refuge.
Decades had come and gone, and Joanna had furnished the space with a writing desk, a single bed, a chair, a bookcase, and two small tables with vases of flowers. She had taken no small measure of comfort in stitching her quilts and repairing her furniture. As the years passed, she had found her refuge meant far more to her than the gilded room she had been given.
She left her crate on one table to restock her writing supplies, but once she had finished, she found herself unable to settle into the mood for writing at all.
Not with the letters piled accusingly on her table and certainly not with the distraction of the violins some distance above her.
Curling her fingers into her ribbon, the French queen reached blindly for one of the books on the shelves. She dropped onto her bed and plunged into the book to drown out the world around her.
Chapter 6
It was of no surprise to the French queen that she had managed very little reading in the hours that passed. The violins upstairs had proven to be far more of a disturbance than even her letters for the memory it wrought. The memory of the High Lord’s body supporting her, how warm and solid he had been, and the scent that had clung to him. An elder’s scent of aged parchment, like the book she held — parchment and rain in the forest.
She sighed, nudging the tip of her nose into the book’s pages and breathed in. It had not been so diffi
cult to tune out the High Lord’s song when the music had been quieter. Now it felt as if it were resting against her own, and she felt a shiver slip down her neck. Tension followed.
His music, resting against her own, and close.
The woman edged up on her elbows. The book dropped from her face to land on her stomach, and Joanna stared at the door to her refuge.
A very foolish, very childish part of her snapped the book closed with the full intention of readying a projectile to throw.
Thankfully, by the time the knock came, she had tamed the impulse, and set the weapon aside.
Joanna breathed in a breath to steady her song and spared a moment to straighten her gown, entirely too aware of the stitches that kept the decade old garment from falling apart.
The French queen pulled open the door with a tight smile and a curtsy.
“Bonjour Dorian.” She kept her smile in place as she stepped aside. “It is not so nice in my hole as it is upstairs. You might have spared yourself and your suit a trip through the dust.”
Not that he seemed the least bit concerned for the dust — or covered in it. In fact, he seemed far more interested in watching her, despite her efforts clear his path.
The High Lord’s lips twitched into the ghost of a smile, and her flutes skipped an answer.
“Had you dug yourself any deeper, Joanna, I might have needed a shovel to find you.”
There was a hint of a tease in Dorian’s voice despite an apparent solemnity. He offered her a bow before crossing the threshold. “Your kindness in opening the door is appreciated. I will admit I found myself uncertain of my welcome.”
Her fingers lifted to curl into Marjolaine’s ribbon, and she eased the door closed behind him out of habit.
His gaze settled upon the barrier, and an unreadable expression flickered across his expression before it traveled an idle path to her tumbled bedding.
Joanna gripped the fabric of her gown at her stomach, and felt as much as heard the richness of his song when it danced around the flutter of her heartbeat.
