by Stella Blaze
“I’m not—”
“Yes you are, my beautiful boy. Somehow she has revived what I and three hundred years of the hunger had long killed!” Her voice cut like glass through his flesh. He knew he wasn’t in fact bleeding, but it hurt all the same. She hugged herself, looking momentarily confused, but then looked up at him, her frightened little girl eyes morphing back into the glittering nightmare they usually were. “But all is not lost.”
She stood there, silently gazing into Luca’s eyes, until he finally asked, “What do you want, Elaina?”
Virtuous concern bloomed in her expression, her eyes melting like the darkest chocolate. “To show you that you have choices, options; there are many options to your quandary.”
“You want to help me?” It was a trick. Some game she was playing, some fantasy that had wrapped itself around her mind like some fanatical silk.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” she said simply. Amazingly her words tasted like truth.
He laughed, and it wasn’t a good sound. It was bitter and edging on this side of madness. He was ridiculing himself with that laugh, for even for a moment believing a word that passed her lips.
“You doubt me?” She turned from him and walked across the roof, swaying to that always playing song in her head. “I took you from your mortal life because death was already upon you.”
“What?”
She chuckled indulgently, as you would while admonishing a recalcitrant, though beloved, child. “You didn’t know? You would have been dead and rotting in the cemetery of that church I’d found you in within the week.”
“You can’t predict the future, that’s not one of your gifts.”
“But we can all smell the sweet smell of death in a human’s blood, wafting like the scent of carrion from their flesh.”
“You smelled death on me?”
“You had just exposed yourself to the plague, you silly fool. Caring for the poor and sick always has its price.”
“I would’ve died,” Luca whispered. “You’re sure?”
“You were already in the grips of the fever. Do you not remember?”
Luca shook his head, “My mortal life has faded from my grasp over the centuries.”
“As it has for us all: perfect recollection of everything from our change on, but our mortal memories slowly slip from our grasps. Sad, but comforting.” She smiled most wickedly at him. “I’d hate to remember what I was before I was given this gift. I would probably want to light myself on fire and perish right now.”
Luca couldn’t imagine what she’d been like as a human. Had she actually ever had a soul?
As if she could hear his thought, her smile turned almost sweet. “You’d be surprised.” She batted the subject away with the swipe of her hand. “As you’d be surprised to hear that I care about you more than any being I’ve ever met. You are the only food I ever turned, the only thing in the entirety of the mortal world I cared not to destroy. You should be flattered.”
Luca was silent. The fear of Elaina ever present, and now that she was right in front of him, he realized that he’d felt this fear all the years he’d been with her. It had not once abated, or faded. And he hadn’t really realized it until now, when that constant fear came back and refused to be quelled. But then he thought of what she had said, and he asked, “Then why me?”
“Haven’t I already said this?” she groused, clapping her hands together with impatience. “Because you were the one thing, the only thing—”
“No. What was it about me—what did you see in me that made me…essential?”
Elaina looked taken aback, surprise and then uncertainty flickering across her face. But then realization flowed into her eyes, a thorough certainty. The smile that passed over her lips, her features, and then into her eyes was almost human in its radiance.
“Because you were so good.”
“What?”
“There in your little church, cleaning the pews, lighting the candles, helping those who came to your door more than you would ever help yourself. I saw you were a man of total conviction.”
Luca had never thought of himself as a good man—not that he could remember. And since his change he saw himself as nothing but the worst kind of evil. A murderer, a rapist, a torturer of mankind…and he’d been so good at it—he’d enjoyed it, until recently.
“I knew that if I made you a vampire, that once I forced you to start killing, showed you the beauty and pleasure in the darkest, most titillating of tortures, that you would transfer that ferocious commitment to being a vampire.”
Luca’s head was spinning. “I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense. You made me a monster because I was so…”
“Good.” She sang that one word with such delight. “Oh yes. I knew that you would surpass all my hopes. You would kill and wreak havoc wherever you trod, with perfect impunity.”
Impunity. That was how he had felt until recently. Until he’d been with Min. As if nothing could touch him. No matter how vial or sadistic the kill, no matter what hurt or torture he thought up, all he would ever feel during or after would be ecstasy.
And here Elaina was, telling him that had been her plan for him from the beginning.
She was suddenly beside him, her face so close to his, her lips so close to his ear that he could almost feel their silky flesh against him. “I made you to be the perfect evildoer,” she chuckled. “Without an ounce of compunction…someone in this wide world worse than me.”
Luca turned and glared at her. “I am not—”
“Of course you are.” She sighed, “At least you were.” She inhaled deeply through her nose, scenting the air around him, her hands playing lightly over his back and shoulders.
“And then I felt it. The instant it began to happen. I had no idea what could cause such a thing. After all, it is unheard of. But as you stand before me, I cannot deny it. Your soul has been awakened, reignited anew. I can see it in your eyes. Hell, I could smell it as soon as I got within sight of you. It’s not just lit, your soul is burning brightly.”
“I don’t know what has happened.”
“You don’t?” She wagged her finger at him, pursing her lips reproachfully. “But I think you do, my beautiful boy. I think you know very well what caused it…or at least whom.”
The fear rose up inside him, and Luca fought to keep his face, his body language, from showing it.
“The witch, the gypsy—I could smell that too. Filthy gypsy magick, so much worse than a Wiccan or even a white witch of the church. No, you had to get involved with a gypsy whore—”
“That is enough!” Luca roared.
Elaina smiled and stepped closer, the glee rancid in her features. She’d finally pressed the right buttons and gotten what she’d wanted: a reaction.
“Don’t call her that.”
“So gallant,” she clucked her tongue at him. “I wonder…if you could, would you turn and rend me right now? End me; destroy your creator, your savior? Kill me and dispose of my body, this body you have had in every possible way, dispose of it—of me—so that I would never darken you or your…lover’s door again?” She moved so close, her hand on Luca’s chest. “Could you do it, my sweet Luca, could you end me?”
Luca looked into Elaina’s eyes. The crazed fire was absent, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, waiting just behind her gaze to turn on him. The truth had blazed so easily into his heart: yes, he would end her in a heartbeat to keep Min out of her clutches. Min could handle herself, of course, but could she survive the attack of something as deranged and insane as Elaina?
Luca let his eyes drop, and he tried to fill them with sincerity as he spoke the lie. “No.” He looked up into her eyes. “I could not.”
She smiled, and absently scented the air again, her smile deepening with each passing second. “You’ve gotten so very good, my sweet. I can’t even smell the lie on you.” He took a breath to argue, to try and convince her, but she raised her hand to him and said, in t
hat master tone that made his will fall to hers with immediate results. “Quiet.”
She paced around him, hands on hips. “But I don’t need to smell it on you. I’ve seen you with her. I’ve been watching you for almost a week now.”
A week. The thought of her spying on him, taking in all that he had done, all that he had done with Min, it turned his stomach.
“What I’ve seen is your selfless devotion to that witch.” She caught his gaze and the crazed fire was back. “I’m sorry, to your Min.”
Dear god, she knew her name.
“I’ve watched you fuck her. I’ve seen you turning away from those victims that would so easily nourish you, to go pandering at a human blood bank. What, have you been watching some silly teen movie, or some ridiculous television show? You are a vampire. You cannot just subsist on…leftovers. I know such technologies weren’t available for me to have taught you about them, but I’d have thought you’d have figured it out. I mean, just look at you. You’re so weak, and gaunt. I have not seen a vampire that made it through his first years this immediate before. It’s sickening.
“She has domesticated you, and she hasn’t even had to try. All she had to do was bat her pretty eyes and spread her legs, and you fell to your knees. Hell, she was holding you to her through magick, using necromancy to control you, to make you her bloody sex toy, and you just lapped it up like a big, dumb dog.” Her voice ricocheted into the night, again slicing metaphysically into Luca’s flesh. She looked up into his eyes, weary disgust in her gaze. “She was going to sacrifice you to a Sidhe.”
He turned, stunned that Elaina knew so very much. She couldn’t have been in the room, but she still knew.
“And still you grovel for her affections…even after the spell was broken. I had hoped that with it gone you would have regained some sense about you. But instead you played nursemaid to her. It was disgusting.”
The playfulness, the insane fire, all died away from her gaze, replaced with cool, clear nothingness. He knew the look. She was about to pull the trap, to do whatever horrific, terrible thing she had planned all along. And he knew from how she’d spoke just now about her, that she was going to do it to Min.
But the words that she spoke in a flat, detached voice shocked him. “I could order you to kill her.”
No. His mind reeled and he tried with all his strength, all his anger, to rip himself free of Elaina’s hold on him. He needed to break free. He needed to kill her and kill her now. But there was no way, no possible way.
“One word from me and you’ll bloody up that pretty little house—that soft, warm bed—with her. They’ll be finding pieces of her for weeks. And you’ll have every stinking moment of it to remember. I’ll be so very specific…hell, I might even take a seat and watch, giving you little adjustments like a movie director.
Luca looked to Elaina, beseeching her with his eyes, for he could not even open his lips to speak.
Elaina perched on the chimney of the house they were atop and daintily crossed her legs, her skirt slit high enough she showed a lot of slender, curving leg.
“But I won’t do any of that.”
He blinked at her.
She waved her hand in a permissive gesture. “Go ahead, you can speak now.”
“What…” he choked as her control over his tongue vanished. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is I have no intention of killing your lady love.” She nonchalantly adjusted the sleeves of her dress. “I’m not going to make you do anything at all. In truth, I think I’m going to steal off into the night and lick my wounds. Your choosing her over me has cut me to the quick.” She said these things with a languid sarcasm, rolling her slender wrist with her words.
“I’ve hurt you?” he said with disbelief. Anger, hatred, cold and hot running sadism—he’d seen all these in her aspect—but never had he dreamed she could be hurt.
“Well, that is what I’m telling you. You’ve broken my heart.”
Luca felt a glacial surge run down his spine. Sarcasm or no, whether she was acting or no, there was truth to her words. He’d hurt her. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t move, he dared not even think too loudly. He had hurt her, and he couldn’t imagine that he could have really touched her in any such way. She thought of him as a possession, a consort when she wished it, and then as disposable when she didn’t. Anger, vengeance, rage, those were things she felt, and lashed out with wild abandon. But he had actually hurt her?
What would she do to avenge a wound as deep as that? The prospects were unthinkable.
But even more than he feared her, he felt sorrow. Not sorry for her, but guilty that he’d hurt her. It was insane, but he couldn’t shake it.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said.
“For what?”
“For hurting you.”
She laughed, playing it off with a wave of her hand. “I’ll live.”
It was the inflection of that one word that made him gulp.
“What have you done?”
“I’ve done nothing,” she said, looking with still, radiant eyes into his. “I’ve been hunted, without stop, by a pack of werewolves. They are a part of the great Hunt—a very old-fashioned concept in my opinion. And just before I came to your little city I slaughtered the leader of the pack’s sister. He is gunning for me in a hellbent push for vengeance.”
She smiled devilishly.
“I led them straight to your lover’s house. Their leader watched as you fucked her. He will kill her with you, you know.”
“They know each other. He would not kill her.”
Elaina thoughtfully stuck out her lower lip, tapping her chin with one crimson painted fingernail. “Maybe not,” she said winsomely. “But he’s so going to try and kill you. They all will, some two dozen werewolves, all lethally trained, and all with a pawn to leverage against you.”
“And what is that?”
“He may not wish to kill her just for being with you, but he has his sister’s death on his mind. He will see you as part of me, and he will readily use her to get to you.”
“As I said, Min can handle herself.”
“But she will be looking to protect you from him. She won’t think to protect herself.”
“He won’t hurt her. He can’t know I have anything to do with you.”
Elaina hopped down from atop the chimney and sidled over to him, leaning in and kissing him. Her cold lips so soft, the fresh taste of blood intoxicating on her lips. He tried to turn away, but she deepened the kiss, and the taste of the blood was too much to resist. He feasted at her mouth, pushing his tongue into her, trying to get at every last trace of the innocent’s blood. When she finally ended the kiss, breaking it off, she smiled and glanced to the right, pointedly leading him to look where her eyes were leading him. Günter and a squad of his men stood on a neighboring rooftop. And like Elaina had planned, he took the bait, his pack falling in around him, and then surging out to jump from rooftop to rooftop.
“New plan, my beautiful sweet boy,” Elaina purred, and then in the tone of a master order she said, “Go to sleep for one hour, lover.”
Luca tried to say something, but she spoke over him, too loudly for even him to hear his words, “Run, my love! I’ll hold them off!” And with that she pushed him off the roof. He pitched over the side and the world turned to black as he fell to the ground below.
Chapter 18
Min woke in her own bed, gasping for breath. She’d been dreaming, and it hadn’t been good. It had been horrifying. And somehow she already knew that it wasn’t just a dream. It had a completely different feeling to it, a taste that made her know, without a doubt, that it had been really happening. Luca had left her bed, followed his maker out to a rooftop where they spoke. He'd been so scared. And then she’d kissed him. And he’d responded to her kiss. She had seen it; she had freaking felt it. His hunger for both her and for the blood that tainted her lips. But then came Günter and his pack, and then Elaina had pushed him from the rooftop. Min w
oke as he’d blacked out. She knew the building they’d been arguing on. She knew where the alley was where he had fallen.
As she sat there, gasping for breath, she looked beside her and his side of the bed was empty. It hadn’t been a dream. He’d really been with Elaina, and now he was…she couldn’t think of it anymore. She pushed the thoughts that he could already be dead out of her mind. He's a freaking vampire. Unless he fell on a wooden stake, or a silver blade, or into a vat of holy water, or into the freaking sun, then he’d live from a fall.
But Elaina’s last words came to her. “Sleep for one hour.” That meant that he would fall to the alley below, but not stir, not run away, he’d be completely defenseless.
Min pulled on some clothes, shoes and her coat, and set out to the alley. Halfway there it occurred to her. Out in the middle of the night with a homicidal, insane vampire thirsting for my blood, and a pack of werewolves to boot, and I don’t have any weapons…just my girlish charm and some magick. Could she hold it together enough to cast powerful enough hexes and charms to outwit all those foes?
She raised her hands in front of her and her hands gave a tremor before she could hold them steady. Shit, definitely not together enough. She walked on, but slower, her mind racing, frantically trying to grab some brilliant idea out of thin air. And just when she thought none would come she walked right up to the magic shop. Sometimes, she thought as she pulled the key to the shop’s front door from her pocket, I am incredibly dense.
~*~
