by Michele Hauf
“Please, do not think this is retaliation against the hurt you have caused me. I reacted,” her words warbled. “He would have torn off her arm. Or worse! His wolf was so big, standing on its hind legs. He was a monster!”
“In retaliation?”
“You do not love me. You just left me!”
Must they do this now? “I was busy today, with Constantine,” he said lowly. “We will discuss this when the time is appropriate.”
“Yes. Yes. Please, I cannot look at him. Take him away. Get him away from my home.”
He pressed her hard against the door frame, keeping her from escape. “You do not get to control this situation. He was my friend.”
Tears stained her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.” Rhys touched her cheek, his fingers shaking. So difficult not to slap her, to deliver her punishment. Wolf slayer. “Give me time with him. Yes? Send the maid out with sheets, blankets, something.”
“Portia is—” She nodded, and he released her. “I’ll be out with them right away.”
HOURS PASSED AND RHYS did not come inside. Viviane paced the vast music room floor, now empty of furniture, including the harpsichord. She wondered all sorts of scenarios. Had he wrapped the young man’s body in the blanket and taken it away to be burned or buried?
Or was he still out there, mourning a lost friend?
She had murdered his friend!
There had been times Viviane had walked right past a battling domestic couple or once witnessed a horse biting an old man. She tendered no concern for mortals and their pain. Yet the victim had been so young. Blond ringlets springing at each ear. Pretty in her blue gown. She may have been a fine lady’s maid. Like Portia.
Rarely did a wolf enter the city and attack a human, even in the winter when food was scarce.
Rhys suspected the boy had syphilis, which she did know could drive a man to insanity. In proof, the hospital Bicêtre overflowed with the sick and insane. How awful to have watched the wolf change to human form and then to see the injury cleaving open his abdomen. A cut she had delivered with macabre zest.
A vicious reaction she could have stopped, for that first stab had killed the beast, cut into the heart and ceased its struggles. But Viviane had continued to pull the knife through fur and cartilage to the soft, giving belly.
Some darkness in her had arisen. The same had emerged when she’d first journeyed to Paris. She’d wanted to cut out the untouchable wickedness within her. To release it. To punish it for her descent into an abyss she feared never escaping. And to strike out for Portia’s death.
If she had accepted Constantine’s offer that first evening after Henri’s death none of this would have happened.
But self-preservation was firmly embedded within her psyche.
As she paced the floor, the hungry pining in her gut told her nothing could be as she wished. She needed a patron. A consistent supply of blood so she would not wither from the weak mortal blood, which made her believe she were living.
Why were the females so weak? Male vampires who had been created required a few draughts from their creator to survive, and then they went on to patron their own kin.
She clasped her throat, feeling a genuine need for sustaining blood, which she had not got to answer before encountering the attacking wolf. But was it normal hunger, or a more life-preserving desire? She did not know.
“I am not weak. I refuse to be!”
Drawing aside the window sash, Viviane gasped at sight of Rhys, standing knee-deep in a large hole in the center of the courtyard. A body wrapped in a wool blanket lay at the edge of the hole.
Viviane leaned out the window. “You cannot bury him there!”
Dirt landed the mound at the head of the grave. Sweat and mud smeared Rhys’s face.
“Bring him to Les Innocents!”
“He is my friend. He deserves more respect than tossing him into an abysmal mass graveyard.”
True, the cemetery was overflowing with centuries of bodies tossed unceremoniously upon one another, most during mass death such as plague. She’d had Portia taken there. Cruel of her.
“Then take him to the country. It is his real home.”
“I cannot get him out of the city without inspection and too many questions.” Rhys jammed the shovel into the dirt. “Here he lies.”
“No! I do not want him buried here.” Her conditioned disgust was difficult not to acknowledge. “He is a wolf.”
“What is wrong with a wolf?” Wrist resting on the shovel handle, he tilted a condemning glare on her. “You suddenly hate us all, wolf slayer?”
Viviane gaped. “Do not name me that awful title.”
“But it is yours to own. You killed the wolf outside of Paris in the spring?”
“It was self-defense.”
Rhys smirked, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Please, don’t be ridiculous. I know the boy meant the world to you, Rhys, I do.”
He climbed from the grave and stalked to the window. His jackboots were muddy, his bare chest smeared with sweat and dirt. “I wish you were not like the other vampires,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“You claim to care for me because you think I am safe. A vampire, yet not.” He looked at the ground. “Emeline accepted me when everyone else would not.”
“I accept you!”
“Yet why do you only see my wolf? Why does not my vampire threaten you?”
“Because you are a wolf in mind and heart. I accept that, Rhys.”
“And it is my wolf you should fear.”
“No, I—” She shook her head, but could not find words to protest.
“Wolf slayer,” he recited acidly.
Viviane’s heart cracked open. She should have told him before this. She’d wanted to. Now she understood how he had been unable to present his complete truth to her. “The wolf killed the driver,” she whispered. “It was rabid.”
“It—he—was not rabid,” Rhys pronounced fiercely. “And his name was Pierre Rebeaux. He was upset over the recent death of his wife and stillborn child.”
She did not like knowing the name or the wolf’s circumstances. It made him real. A thinking, feeling being.
Two werewolves she had killed now. What monster had she become?
Truly, she had won the right to wear the wolf’s talon. Perhaps if she wore it still, Rhys would stay away from her. She would infect his life with her darkness.
“And you think I will take your heinous act as retaliation? You know me so little, Viviane. I love you. I would not harm you.”
“So many secrets revealed lately,” she said, her mind aspin with so many different perspectives. “I know you love me, but…”
“Constantine wants you to believe I would use you. Well, it did not start out that way. The first time I saw you in the ballroom, I fell in love. Your eyes, so deep and blue, they spoke for you before you could open your mouth. I had to have you. I spoke with you not long after, and became more determined to have you. Later, Orlando mentioned he’d heard Lord de Salignac was in love—with you.”
“You learned that after you saw me?”
“Yes, after we’d spoken in the hall. The relationship between my brother and I has been a constant battle over who is better, who can win the most, who has all the gold, so to speak.”
He propped an elbow on the shovel.
“We have, through the decades, beaten one another down, taken from the other, tricked and stolen if it would see the other in misery. A wicked sort of game I’m sure you believe vulgar. It is, but it is all I know, to go to heads against Constantine over the years.”
“What has this to do with me?”
“The moment I learned he was in love, I decided I would take that love away from him. It would be my next turn at revenge, for the last time I saw Constantine he had stood over my murdered lover.”
Viviane turned away and clasped her hand to her breast.
“It mattered n
ot to me who the woman was, what she looked like, or that she was a vampire,” Rhys continued. “I simply wanted to hurt Salignac. And what better way than by aiming directly for a man’s heart?”
Viviane pressed a palm to the windowsill.
“And yet I had already fallen in love with you. What to do? Revenge or love? I knew revenge would be much sweeter for your beauty rivals all. What a tremendous prize for Constantine to lose.”
“Say no more,” she insisted.
“It began as revenge, but I think my heart abandoned vengeance even before my mind understood the futility of such a ruse.”
“I don’t want to listen to this. I’ve heard quite enough.”
Rhys slammed the windowsill with a dirty fist. “You promised to listen until I was finished.”
“I promised nothing. I never promise a thing to any man! And you are finished. We are finished.”
“There is a we, Viviane.” He grabbed her wrist and would not relent. “You cannot deny it, nor can I. I had thought I could simply seduce the girl and she would not look twice at Salignac. Yet revenge lost its sweetness. Viviane, please, I have fallen in love with you. I am in love with you. Please hear my truths. I have never wished to harm you. That is why I am confessing. I want you to know what brought you to me, and now I know you better, understand I cannot continue to deceive.”
Claiming the frockcoat from the ground, he drew out the small wood carving from the pocket. Grasping Viviane’s hand, he placed it on her palm and folded her fingers over it.
“No jewel would do you justice. But this—this is your heart, Viviane. Wild, steady, ever beating. I love you.”
She opened her fingers. A tiny wooden hummingbird wobbled in her grasp.
A woman should be devastated when the man she has realized she wants more than life itself has confessed to betraying her.
While Viviane’s heart thumped with the words Rhys had unleashed upon her, she remained surprisingly rational.
She stroked the smooth bird’s body. Always, she must beat her wings quickly, to stay one step ahead. He knew her heart well. Better, perhaps, than she did.
“Leave me to finish,” he said softly, his attention on the open grave. “Close the window.”
“We must talk.”
“Not tonight. I must away…from here,” he said. “I need to breathe. And I must go to the Marsauceux pack to tell them about Orlando.”
Bowing her head and nodding, Viviane stepped back and shut the window.
She had lost him.
CLAUDE MOURREIGH STOMPED the loamy earth beneath a willow tree. “You are positive it was the vampires?”
Antoine nodded. “She stabbed Orlando before all. They cheered her! The bloody mortals were cheering a vicious longtooth for slaying one of our own. And then Hawkes arrived.”
“What did he do to her?”
“He scooped up Orlando and the vampiress followed him as they ran off to her home. He buried Orlando in her courtyard!”
Claude stopped his erratic pacing. “That is most offensive. You can bring me to her home?”
Antoine nodded.
“If the vampires think to take justice upon themselves for the murder of their own, then we, too, will show them we will act swiftly should any deem to murder our own. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
RHYS TAMPED THE DIRT over the makeshift grave. His arms ached from digging. His heart had been shredded and buried alongside Orlando’s torn body.
The summer night had turned cold and threatened rain. He shivered and stumbled backward to sit on the stone bench hugged by frothy night jasmine.
“Forgive me, Claude,” he muttered. “Pray the entire pack can forgive me.”
Yet he did not expect forgiveness. It was not owed him.
He had been Orlando’s guardian. Instead of allowing him to gallivant about the city seeking pleasures in all the wrong places, Rhys should have accompanied him to the inns. Rhys could have pointed out those women he’d felt were safe.
Rhys had failed the one person he’d ever felt was his family.
The loss strangled his breath. He heaved, seeking air and fighting sobs.
Tilting his head, he let out a long and mourning howl. He cared not that he sat in the center of Paris and the neighborhood would surely think a real wolf was again stalking the streets. A few dogs joined his miserable tone with yips and howls.
Rhys pulled his palms down his face. His vampire prodded at him; it wanted blood in the form of revenge. He swallowed to keep back another howl.
An odd thought occurred. If Orlando had been sleeping with Annabelle, and she had also slept with William Montfalcon—could Montfalcon have developed the same affliction and gone mad, thus killing the vampires?
No, Rhys knew differently. He’d been bought by Constantine. But what if Montfalcon had required some nudging to do the heinous deed? Would Constantine go so far to ensure his wicked plan succeeded? How could he know the whore would cause the werewolf to rage? There were yet questions he wanted to press upon his brother, but would it matter?
William was dead. The vampires were dead. And Orlando was dead—at the hands of the wolf slayer.
Anger twitched his muscles. Rhys felt the uncomfortable shift in his bones. The werewolf wanted revenge for what had been done to his companion. It mattered not the vampire had been sated a few days earlier with the blood of an unsuspecting mortal. Together, werewolf and vampire would be avenged.
“No.” Rhys winced and clutched the bench, straining against the powerful darkness, struggling for release, for vengeance. “Can’t…”
With the stroke of a blade the vampiress had destroyed his family.
Rhys’s arm jutted out and his skin crawled as the flesh prickled. Fur grew beneath his sodden breeches. He kicked off his boots, anticipating and cursing the imminent shift.
This could not happen here. In the city. So close to her. The woman he loved despite her mindless cruelties.
She had been protecting an innocent.
Orlando had been innocent.
A throaty howl curdled in Rhys’s throat. His ankle bones popped and the marrow liquefied. He tore at his muddy breeches. Fingernails grew into adamant talons. His chest expanded and fur pelted his skin.
As his werewolf mind struggled to hold to one last vestige of sanity, the vampire within scented the betrayer’s blood.
VIVIANE CLUTCHED HER NIGHT robe close to her body and scurried through the dark hallway toward the music room. She could not sleep knowing Rhys was outside. Even if he had left, knowing a dead werewolf was buried in the courtyard disturbed.
The estate felt wrong as she moved through its cool confines on a ghostly stride. No longer did it welcome her as Henri had by sweeping her into his arms and offering her his redeeming blood. The walls and quiet air pressed against her skin and made her wish to be away, far, far away.
With Rhys.
Could he forgive her the horrible crime she had committed tonight?
“I would not expect it—”
She pushed open the music room door—at the same time the window across the room shattered. A massive shape leaped inside and scrambled over the glass pieces on the floor.
The werewolf stood on its hind legs and stretched out its arms, talons cutting the air. A rangy howl clutched at Viviane’s heart. Never had she seen a shifted werewolf. Her legs wobbled.
Rhys had not forgiven her.
The beast sighted her and snarled, revealing long, sharp fangs.
She screamed. Scrambling away, her low-heeled shoes slipped on the marble floor. Stumbling, she slapped the wall and managed to stay upright.
Behind her, the werewolf careened out of the music room. Claws and padded paws slapped the floor. Heavy, grunting breaths punctuated its loping advance upon her.
The tepidarium door was open. It was not an escape, Viviane realized at the worst moment. As the wolf’s talon tore through her robe, she scrambled across the tiles and tripped, hitting the floor with a b
one-jarring shock.
The wolf leaped over her, landing at the pool’s edge. It growled and snarled.
Viviane backed away, her voluminous silk robe impeding and slipping from her shoulder. Rhys had said his vampire mind ruled while in werewolf form. The vampire should not be so angry over Orlando’s death as the werewolf, but she could not reason that right now.
She did know one truth. The vampire wanted blood. And it would not take a sip, but rather influence the werewolf to take her head from her body to get at the blood.
Talons clutched her ankle. Blood scented the wine-drenched air. Viviane’s body dragged across the tile floor. She dug in her fingernails, clutching the slick tiles, but they bent. Kicking backward, she managed a heel to the werewolf’s maw.
She had kicked her lover!
Did some part of Rhys know who she was? Please, let him see her. To believe her as he’d once said. He must believe she would never mean him harm.
Turning, she darted away and reached the wall where she fit herself into the corner.
The wolf growled and slapped a paw onto the water’s surface. Cold white droplets spattered her face.
“Rhys, it’s me!”
Another howl felt as if the blades of her fan were fixing into her spine, one by one, burrowing deep.
Viviane eyed the doorway. The wolf crept toward her, blocking a straight retreat to freedom. Its gold eyes raged. Talons cut through tile. If she ran left she’d be caught in the corner. To the right, the vanity with fresh linens. She could shove it at him, and hope for a moment’s distraction—
The wolf lunged.
Her foot slipped in a puddle and she toppled, landing in the pool of cold water. Her head went under. Flailing her arms and kicking at the pool’s bottom, she struggled to surface. Her feet slipped and she swallowed the horrible mix of water, stale milk and wine.
Something sharp cut into her gut. Blood bubbled on the surface. A taloned paw dipped in and scooped her around the waist. Viviane’s body went flying and she landed against the wall, her jaw clacking and arms flinging out as if boneless. Sinking to the floor, she sputtered out the offensive water.
