I tore my eyes from the canvas, laid my cheek on my knees, and looked at Michael lounging against the closed door. By the gods, he was beautiful. Even after all these years he still took my breath away. His dark blond hair was cut shorter than it had been when we’d met, and the shorter length gave it a bit of curl. The neatly trimmed sideburns accentuated the knife-edge sharpness of his cheekbones. His blue eyes were dark with worry as he pushed away from the door, his hard, lean body moving with supernatural grace. He sat down behind me, gently pulling me between his legs and against his chest as he reclined against the pillows.
“Tell me,” he said simply, his lips briefly caressing my ear.
I leaned my head back against him and relaxed in the protective circle of his arms. The warm summer air clung to him, along with the spicy fragrance of his lime-scented soap and the barest coppery hint of the blood he’d drunk tonight. He smelled like home, he felt like a god, and I nearly laughed out loud that I’d even given Drake a second thought.
“I don’t like that man,” I said.
“Drake? He’s very old and very powerful. He’s the messenger of the High King and not a man who’s accustomed to being insulted. He is trustworthy, Cin.”
“Well, I thought Sebastian was harmless, too, once upon a time,” I pointed out. Sebastian had been a childhood friend of mine and nothing more than an unwanted suitor until he’d become a vampire and tried to kill me.
“I understand why you didn’t invite him in, we all do. You had Fiona and Mrs. Mackenzie and the wee ones to protect. Drake understands this.”
As if I gave a damn one way or another whether or not I’d offended the man. “That wasn’t the only reason I wouldn’t let him in,” I said coldly.
I could feel Michael stiffen behind me. “Did he attempt to seduce you already?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, but he certainly made me uncomfortable.”
“Rotten bastard,” Michael muttered.
I laughed. “I got the impression the two of you aren’t exactly great friends. You might as well tell me all of it because something tells me Drake will anyway.”
Michael was quiet for a moment. He and I talked to each other about everything, and his reticence made me certain this story involved a woman. I had long ago ceased asking him about the women who had come before me. On some level I was grateful to them for making him such an amazing lover, but secretly I was just as content to pretend he’d been a monk before he met me. Hearing anything about his previous lovers always sent me into a jealous pout, which frustrated Michael and accomplished nothing but making me think less of myself for it. Therefore, past loves were a subject we both avoided.
Finally, Michael said simply, “I took a woman from him once.”
“Really?”
“Don’t sound so impressed. He didn’t truly care for her or I probably wouldn’t have succeeded.”
Did you care for her? I was tempted to ask, but I kept silent and let him finish the story.
“I shouldn’t have done it but I was young and foolish. This was after the war,” he said, as if there’d only ever been one and I should know which one he was talking about. I assumed that he meant the Jacobite Rebellion of the last century, when Devlin had found Michael mortally wounded from an ambush by English soldiers and had turned him into a vampire to save him. I nodded silently, encouraging him to continue. “I don’t think Drake was truly angry, but his pride was wounded. He’ll try to even the score with me by having you, if he can.”
I laughed. “Well, since I haven’t seen pigs flying around the estate recently I don’t think you should worry. Besides, now that your business has been concluded we may not see him again for years, if not decades.”
“Well, as to that …” Michael said, running his fingers slowly up and down my arm in a nervous gesture.
I turned in his arms until I could look him in the eye. “Michael?”
He sighed. “We have a job.”
I narrowed my eyes. “When?”
“We leave tomorrow at dusk.”
“Michael, you didn’t agree to that!”
“Cin, it’s an order from the High King himself. It cannot be ignored simply because we’re on holiday.”
“Two weeks, Michael!” I yelled, poking my finger at him. “Two weeks! All year we travel the whole of Europe, hunting down rogue vampires, bringing death and destruction in our wake, and all I ask is two weeks of peace and quiet with my family. You promised! We’ve only been here for five days,” I said, with a firm jab to his chest.
He reached out, grabbed my wrist, and in one smooth movement I found myself flipped onto my back with Michael’s body pinning me to the bed, his hands shackling my wrists above my head.
“Quit poking at me, woman,” he growled. “I’ll talk to Fiona in the morning and schedule a time when we can come back for a full fortnight. I did promise you and I’ll make good on it, but we have to do this.” He buried his face in my hair and kissed my neck. “Ah, darling, you know I wouldn’t take you away if it wasn’t necessary.”
Yes, I did know that. I sighed. “Damn Drake anyway. I should have followed my instincts and cut his head off the minute I opened the door.”
Michael laughed against my neck and pushed himself up, his hands pressing my wrists into the pillows. “So, lass, other than rescheduling your holiday, what can I do to make this up to you?”
I smiled at the devilish way his eyebrow arched as he said it. Sliding my legs around his waist, I pressed myself against him. Well, he was certainly ready to make amends!
“Hmmm … We could start with this.” I closed my eyes and called up my magic. An instant later we were both naked, his hard body flush against me, and our clothes in a pile on the floor beside the bed. Michael chuckled and began to explore my newly exposed skin with his mouth.
“I’m so glad you finally mastered that,” he said between kisses. “I was getting tired of ending up on the floor while our clothes stayed in bed.”
“It is a handy bit of magic,” I agreed, my breath catching in my throat as his mouth closed over the peak of my breast.
“How would you like me to make it up to you?” he murmured as one extended canine grazed my nipple back and forth, back and forth. “Quickly or slowly?”
“Michael,” I whispered.
He knew me well enough to know my moods, my every whim and desire. He released my wrists, grasped my hips and drove into me in one deep stroke. I arched my back and braced my palms against the headboard as a low moan escaped from somewhere deep in my soul.
The sheets were tangled in a heap at the foot of the bed, there was dried blood on both of our necks, and I was so bonelessly content that I could have purred. I rested my head on Michael’s chest and traced my fingers across the square muscles of his stomach.
“I love these little ridges,” I muttered, absently. “Michael, you never told me what the job is. Where are we going?”
His mouth tightened and he laid back and closed his eyes. Finally he said simply, “Marrakesh.”
It was enough. That one word tied my stomach in knots. I dug my nails into his biceps. “You’re not serious.”
He opened one eye and looked down at me. “I wish I weren’t.”
I laid my head back down on his chest, thinking. “Dear Goddess. Marrakesh.”
Chapter 3
There are plenty of things that I love about being a vampire, but the process of getting from one place to another is definitely not one of them. Oh, certainly Devlin’s new coach provided the finest comforts that money could buy. The seats were soft and deep, in my favorite shade of dark red, and the paneling was a soothing off-white with just a hint of pink undertone. There was contraband whiskey, fine champagne, and a small selection of fresh fruits to make the journey more bearable. For all that the coach was spacious and comfortable, however, we were still traveling hour upon hour and night after night in a windowless box. No matter how fastidious Devlin was about maintenance and repair, there
was always a chance that something would break and leave us stranded by the side of the road as the sun came up; therefore the windows were heavily painted over in black to prevent us from burning to a crisp if such a thing should ever happen. There were nights, though, such as this one, when I would have gladly traded the chance of ending up in a ball of flaming agony for a window with a view. I should have ridden up top with Devlin when he offered at the last stop.
We didn’t employ a human driver, and Devlin often preferred to take the reins rather than ride in the coach. I couldn’t blame him. The conveyance was spacious, but Devlin was nearly six and a half feet tall and built like a brick wall. He didn’t like being confined, and Michael had reluctantly agreed to ride up top with him on the last leg of the trip. Justine was sitting next to me, knitting. It always made me chuckle a bit inside to see the former courtesan and vampire slayer doing something so domestic. Her pale silver-blonde hair was pulled back, hanging in large curls down her back and over one shoulder. She cursed under her breath as she pulled out several stitches and started again. I chuckled inwardly. I wasn’t sure that anything actually resulted from all of Justine’s knitting—she was simply one of those people who couldn’t stand to have idle hands, and it kept her occupied during long trips. I ran my fingers over the gothic novel that sat unopened on my lap and finally, almost reluctantly, turned my gaze to the man sitting across from me.
In an effort to overcome my initial dislike of him, Drake seemed to be making a concerted effort to win me over. During the trip he’d turned the full force of his rather darkly appealing charm in my direction, and I found it disconcerting the way he seemed to get better looking the longer I spent in his company.
His dark hair was short and curly, his face pleasantly square. If his nose was a bit too large and his lips a bit too thin to be truly handsome, you didn’t notice it once you looked into his eyes. He watched me now, like a predator watches its prey, and I had no idea what was going on behind those haunting, deep-set moss-green eyes. There were dark things behind the mocking arrogance of his eyes, hurtful, angry things. Things I didn’t ever want to know about.
Justine had whispered when we’d been alone, “You can’t help but wonder what it would be like to have him, can you?” No, I suppose you couldn’t. He would not be a gentle lover, though you could see, somewhere deep down, that he might have been in the past, in another life. No, the Drake that sat across from me now would consume you and drag you down into whatever hell he lived in. I don’t think any woman of passion could help but wonder, from a safe distance, what it would be like to stand in the center of that storm.
“How long will this take?” I asked him.
He cocked his head to one side. “Are you so eager to return to your humans?”
Goddess, yes, I wanted to scream.
Ravenworth was my anchor, my last tie to the human world. It was home and those who lived there were my family—not the family I had been born into, but the family I had created. My blood relatives had turned their backs on me after I’d become a vampire. Aunt Maggie, my mother’s sister, thought I was evil. Even my cousin Thomas, whose life I had once saved, preferred to keep me at a safe distance. But those at Ravenworth treated me as though I was the same girl I had always been.
I wanted to watch Fiona’s children play with Prissy’s new litter of great-grandkittens. I wanted to see how things turned out with Mrs. Mac and Lord Bascombe. Young Tim, who’d been just a stable lad when I’d become a vampire, was now a grown man, married to Chloe Harper and expecting their first child next month. He was John Bascombe’s stablemaster, and I longed to sit in a stall with him all night, waiting for my old mare Missy’s granddaughter to give birth to her first foal. Was I eager to return to my humans? Yes, because back there was life and birth and young things at play, and where I was going there would only be heartache and fighting and death. I gave him a look that said as much and turned my face away.
“It is no easy thing, to depose a monarch,” Drake commented.
“You should know,” Justine muttered.
“Yes, I do,” he said, coldly. “I was King of the Eastern Lands for many centuries but madness took me, just as it seems to have taken the Queen of the Western Lands. The Furies came for me then, just as The Righteous comes for her now.”
The Furies were three sisters who were our counterpart in eastern Europe. I’d never met them, but it was said that they could not be swayed by a pretty face. Michael had told me that Drake had lost the woman he loved, a human woman, to the plague before he could turn her. Drake had gone mad and become a danger not only to himself, but also to those who depended on his leadership. The High King had ordered his removal and had sent the Furies to escort Drake to Castle Tara, deep in the Connemara Mountains of Ireland. He had spent many long years there, and when his grief had lessened he had become the High King’s Sentinel, his messenger among the lesser vampire courts of the world.
“Are we to take her to the High King, then? That’s what the Furies did with you,” I observed.
“I had not killed humans,” he replied. “You know the penalty for that is death. It is what you do.”
“Do you believe she’s guilty?”
He shrugged. “I never believe anything without proof, which is why we’re here. This will not be an easy task. If she is guilty, her king will not let her go without a fight.”
I sighed. If she had been killing humans, then as the High King’s enforcers we were duty-bound to execute her. If she was simply insane, then the High King would take wardship of her, and we would escort her to Castle Tara. I’d heard more than one vampire call it Castle Terror, though in defense of the High King these were not vampires who were in his good graces. Drake seemed to have come out of it all right, but I certainly would not like to be the one to tell the King of the Western Lands that we were removing his queen from the capital. The thought of having to execute her, though, was terrifying. Among our kind you did not get to be king by an accident of birth or fortune. No, among vampires you had to fight to claim a kingdom, and there was a reason that kings were rarely challenged for their thrones. These were not creatures you wished to cross.
“What is she like?” I asked.
Justine laid her knitting in her lap and looked at me, the sadness in her eyes speaking volumes. I had forgotten that this was a woman Justine counted as a friend. “She is beautiful. She is just and fair in her dealings with her subjects. She is loyal to her king and loves him beyond measure. And she’s the most frightening woman I’ve ever met.” Justine gave a Gallic shrug. “She is everything a queen should be.”
I looked back at Drake, thinking that if it were up to me I’d tell the High King he could bloody well get his ass on a boat and come do this himself. Taking in the mutinous look on my face, Drake swiftly changed the subject.
“You have not yet come to Tara to make your obeisance, Miss Craven.”
“I have several years yet. I’m required to make an appearance in the first twenty years after my death. I’ve only been a vampire for thirteen.”
Drake waved a hand dismissively. “It is no matter. The High King has given me leave to tell you that you need not trouble yourself with the trip. I will report my impressions to him and he may judge your character for himself upon the next Council meeting.”
“He doesn’t want to see me?” I asked, a chill creeping up my spine at the implications of that. All vampires were required to pledge their allegiance to the High King and sign their name written in the Book of Souls. Not to do so meant that you lived outside the rule of the Dark Council; that you had no honor and no promise of protection under our laws. It also meant that you were not bound to abide by those laws, and that one day The Righteous, or someone like us, would most likely hunt you down and kill you. To be excused from such an important ceremony made my stomach clench. I’d never heard of the High King doing such a thing before. Why make an exception for me?
As if he knew what I was thinking, Drake cocked his h
ead to one side and said, “You are rather an anomaly among the undead. We haven’t had a witch-turned-vampire before, you know. To be quite honest with you, the High King is wary of your power.”
The shock I felt must have registered on my face, because Drake chuckled and settled more deeply into the velvet cushions.
“Oh, yes, you’re quite famous among vampires the length and breadth of Europe.”
Justine snorted. She, at least, still thought of me as a little sister who needed to be protected and taught how to survive in our world. Even though I’d fought by her side for over a decade, she still seemed to think of me as the twenty-two-year-old sheltered aristocrat’s daughter she’d first met. How innocent I must have seemed to her back then. By the time she was twenty-two, Justine had long been a famous opera singer and the mistress of two kings. There were times when I thought she would always see me as that young girl, no matter how many years passed.
“It’s true,” Drake said. “They say your name in whispers. For five hundred years Kali killed or evaded everyone the High King sent against her, and then here you come, a mere slip of a girl not a week turned, and vanquish her.”
“I had a lot of help,” I assured him.
And I had. I’d had Fiona, Mrs. Mackenzie, The Righteous, Archie, and dear old Mr. Pendergrass, may his soul rest in peace. I couldn’t have done it without them, but when the end came it had been just me and Kali. I had walked away and she had not.
“Nevertheless it was quite impressive, and you can understand how a wise man would keep you at a distance, at least until he’d fully taken your measure.”
“And yet here you are,” I observed.
He leaned across the carriage in a motion so quick that I barely saw it, and grasped my hand. He turned his moss-green eyes to me and smiled. As his lips closed over my knuckles, one sharp canine nicked my flesh and his tongue darted out to taste the blood that welled up. “Ah, but I have a death wish. Everyone knows that.”
Grave Sins Page 2
