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Ruins of a Past Day: Bloodlust 1
All rights reserved. Copyright © January 2008 Melodee Aaron
Cover Art Copyright © January 2008 Tuesday Dube
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
ISBN: 978-1-934475-36-2
Publisher:
Amira Press, LLC
Baltimore, MD
www.amirapress.com
Foreword
This story is a continuation of the saga of Valerie, Roland, and Elektra as originally appearing in Casting Call for Love. This tale, however, focuses more on Elektra than the others. You don't need to read Casting Call for Love before you read this book. Details from that novel may make this story even more enjoyable for some readers, however.
This is not a historical novel. I've sacrificed some historical facts for both flow and clarity of the story. Careful readers will see words used in 1301 even though they didn't come into common usage until the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Give me a break!
As with all fiction that involves an element of paranormal, fantasy, futurism, or any of a number of other facets, just suspend your disbelief and plunge into the world of past, present, vampires, and passion.
Keep Loving!
Melodee Aaron
January 2008
Guatay, California
Scotland, Present Day
Looking through eyes not totally her own, Elektra sighed as she took in the scene. More than seven hundred years had passed since she last saw this place. Now, her essence shared the body of this pretty woman, and she again looked over the ramparts of McGill Keep. Elektra didn't think the other even knew of her presence. Since attaching her mind to the body of this woman, Elektra had led a double life. The woman had to maintain her function, or others would find Elektra lurking inside. That wasn't totally correct, and she knew it. The treatments made it seem that way, and the illusion was good enough. So, here she was, back at McGill Keep, overlooking the setting of one of Markinson's books. The entire production crew and some of the cast had made the trip from Los Angeles to Scotland to get the feel of the place.
Elektra could sum that up in three words—love, passion, and death.
The castle lay in ruins now. Walls and ramparts, ancient when last she was here, now spilled in crumbling heaps on the hillside. Grass and vines intertwined like serpents through the rubble, although the stony ground gave only a moderate foothold for the foliage.
The roll of distant thunder, more felt in the viscera than heard with the ears, pulled her attention to the billowing storm clouds meandering across the low hills. Their blackness fit her mood just fine. The memories of four thousand years of life as a predator tried to overwhelm her, but she managed to push them down. The last time she was here, her battle against that fate, and history, had been in full swing.
* * * *
Scotland, 1301
People in the village knew little about McGill. He had appeared one day with a load of riches and had taken over the old castle. For the first time in living memory, the village had a lord.
Duncan leaned on his hoe and wiped the sweat running from his sandy-red hair and down his brow with the back of his bulging arm. He watched the keep as if it would tell him something of its occupant, but the cold stone said nothing to him from its perfect position on the hill. Just high enough to command the valley below, but low enough to take shelter from the frequent storms that swept over the highlands.
Villagers saw McGill only rarely, only when he personally dealt with a tenant who was late on their taxes. Usually, his minions handled such matters. This was a good thing. Several villagers who had had direct contact with McGill seemed to vanish. The old women whispered about how McGill would kill them, drink their blood, and use the skins of farmers to make a new saddle for his towering, snorting black stallion.
He chuckled to himself over the foolishness of old women as he turned back to the field he needed to finish before sundown.
"Ho! Duncan! Duncan Campbell!"
Duncan sighed to himself. So much for getting done in the field early today, he thought. He turned toward the voice calling his name.
"Ho, Gilroy.” Gilroy McBarens was regarded by most villagers to be someplace on the social ladder between the town drunk and the village idiot. Duncan knew Gilroy resided much closer to the former.
"Hae ye heard, Duncan?"
"Heard what?"
"Why, the news!” Gilroy looked around as if someone were watching him. “McGill is taking a bride."
"Means naught to me."
Gilroy rolled his eyes. “It should, ye dunderhead. Often, when the lord takes a woman, it bodes well for the clans."
"Why would it? Will the man be too busy fucking to pay heed to his keep?"
"Well, no, but with a wee lassie in his bed, he'll be a sight more civil."
"You're a dreamer, Gilroy.” Duncan clapped his scrawny friend on a bony shoulder with a well-muscled hand. “A simpleminded drunken dreamer."
"Aye, maybe I am.” He smiled, great dark gaps showing between his dirty teeth. “Will ye be coming to the pub later? Some o’ The Bruce's men will be there."
"The English will skin the lot of ye one day.” He glanced up at the sun. “Aye, I'll be there. If ye leave me to finish my work."
* * * *
Scotland, Present Day
Valerie jumped when Roland touched her arm. A small frown flitted over his face. “What's wrong, baby?"
Perhaps it was the cold wind leading the coming storm that made her shiver a little. She managed a smile. “Nothing at all. I was just thinking how beautiful this place must have been seven hundred years ago."
"Yeah, I can only imagine.” Roland slipped his arm around her waist. Even after more than a year of marriage, his heat against her body made her heart race. He nodded toward where Stanley Markinson stood leaning casually against a section of crumbling wall some fifty yards away. “I think he can see it back then."
Was Markinson watching the approaching storm, them, or just her? She pulled her gaze from the novelist's eyes. “Yes, maybe he can."
Roland hesitated a moment. “Are you having those crazy thoughts again?"
"I guess that's one word for them.” For nearly a year now, she'd had the feeling that she wasn't alone. Not that someone was watching her or was with her, but in the sense that someone was in her. Sometimes, she had thoughts that seemed to come from another person, another brain.
The events had frightened her enough at first that she did some research, but not too much. As was always the case, a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. She had convinced herself she had either schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder.
One nice thing about being Mrs. Roland Westwood was that she could not only afford the best psychiatrists money could buy, but she could also get in to see them in a day. And they made house calls for her.
After a huge battery of psychological tests and about sixty hours of talking, the headshrinkers had decided that she suffered from stress and nothing more. They assur
ed her that at twenty-eight years old, showing symptoms of schizophrenia would be very rare. They produced articles to show her that real multiple personality disorder was even rarer.
So, she took the anxiolytic medicines and bided her time. It got better. She still sometimes had the idea that someone was watching her every move, and she also believed that sometimes she did things she couldn't remember. But it was better. She didn't have the feelings every waking moment now. She could focus on her life and the great man she'd literally stumbled on more than a year ago. Valerie turned in Roland's arms to face him. “Not really. At least no more than normally.” She stretched up to kiss him.
He pulled away from her lips. “Just tell me if starts again, OK?"
"I will.” She put on her best pout. “Now, shut up and kiss me."
As Roland pressed his lips to hers, he turned slightly. Valerie opened her eyes and looked across the battlement.
Stanley Markinson stood watching them.
* * * *
Scotland, 1301
Melissa watched the rolling green hills slide past the coach window as she rode to whatever fate had brought her to now. Sometimes a small farm broke through the landscape, a few patches of green crops jutting through the rocks and grass where some family tried to scrabble a living from the dirt. All her father would tell her of the man whom she was to marry was his name: Angus McGill. That and he lived in some Godforsaken corner of Scotland. At least he had his own castle and keep.
Her father, that's what he liked to call himself, said McGill would be a good man for her to marry. He had connections with Robert Bruce's men, but McGill sold his services to the highest bidder like a farmer hawking cabbages in the marketplace. He didn't care about politics, only money.
And women.
Melissa had little choice in the matter. Short of revealing herself or just vanishing, she had to go through with the farce of a wedding. She'd been in this role for only a couple of years, and she had no desire to start over again so soon.
As the adopted daughter of a powerful English earl, she had position and privilege, something she'd missed for the last few thousand years. At least she had it until her father decided to marry her off to some scruffy Scot for political gain.
A fine future for Melissa Crommann, she thought, laughing to herself just a little.
The idea of living a lie didn't bother her, not anymore. There had been a time some thousands of years ago that it did. All that bothered her now was people calling her Melissa instead of her real name.
Then again, these simpletons would burn her alive if they knew the truth. Not that it would kill her. It would just hurt.
At least it would hurt until the change took her.
* * * *
Duncan sat sipping his ale as he watched the rest of the pub patrons and thought about the things he had heard this night. William Wallace himself had been there earlier, and the big man had spoken of freedom and crushing the English. In fact, he spoke of these things with a fanaticism that Duncan found a little frightening.
The speech carried a tone of finality, like Wallace somehow knew the future, and it frightened him. Or maybe it was just one possible future. The future Wallace seemed to know, and the one Duncan thought he could see hints of, involved English soldiers, bloodshed, and servitude for Scotland.
But Wallace was a master of oratory. Despite his appearance of being just a farmer, he had held the pub patrons in the palm of his hand. Despite the look of fear Duncan thought he had seen in Wallace's eyes, the man talked a good game.
He had whipped the small crowd into a furor. Over and over, the men in pub had screamed out the word freedom in response to Wallace's cries for sovereignty from the Crown. Almost to a man, everyone in the pub had been ready to take on the English single-handed with nothing more than a pocket of rocks.
Almost.
Duncan knew better. He'd seen fanatics before. His father had been one. The English had left him strung up in the tree in front of the family home for him and his mother to watch as the crows picked at his rotting flesh and the sun bleached his bones.
There was more than one type of fanatic, too. He looked over to where Gilroy lay passed out from drinking, his hand up the skirt of the bar wench who had serviced seven men that night, and those were only the ones Duncan had seen her flat-backed on the tables for. She was a fanatic for the coin it brought her. Just as Gilroy was a fanatic about his drink. They were just as fanatical as Wallace and Bruce.
Duncan took a long swallow to empty his mug and stood from his small table at the rear of the pub. As he made his way to the door, he tossed a few coins into the lap of the sleeping wench. One bounced off her exposed breast. He nodded goodnight to the barman and stepped out into the warm night air.
The full moon shown wetly on the moor at the far end of the valley, and mist hung in the air like a shroud. The scene fit his dark, reflective mood just fine.
He, too, was a fanatic, and Duncan knew it full well. His personal fanaticism was his search for a woman. The village had precious few available women to start with, and none who he thought worthy were interested in marrying a poor hard-dirt farmer.
Duncan really couldn't blame them, though. What did he have to offer a woman other than decades of poverty raising children? Still, his fanatical streak made him look, and hope, despite the odds.
At least his fanaticism wouldn't get him killed.
* * * *
Melissa tossed restlessly in her tent as the dreams came to her mind. Her contacts within her kind living in a faraway land called it the Dream Time. She called them nightmares.
In the dreams, she could see many vague things, but none sharp enough to make much sense. She saw mortals going about their daily affairs. She saw her kind also going about their business, but it was a very different nature than the human activity. She could see two men, one mortal, locked in some conflict or another.
And Melissa saw blood, buckets of blood, splashed across the ground and a stone wall.
To have dreams of precognition wasn't unusual for her kind, but she lacked the training needed to master the dreams. Melissa couldn't focus the swarming images into a coherent story. She'd spent too much of the last three thousand years running from who, and what, she was.
She bolted upright when she woke. Sweat poured from her face and her breath raced. When she raised her hand to wipe the wetness from her brow, she could see the glistening perspiration on her arm in the soft flickering of the candlelight. As she tried to calm herself, she was thankful that she would arrive at her destination on the morrow around midday.
She'd gone four days without feeding, and she was nearing her limits. She'd eaten the mortal's food, but it hadn't provided the nourishment she needed. Feeding now would be a huge risk with the three score of soldiers and two knights accompanying her to her new husband.
Once in her new home, to steal away and find a farm animal to feed on would be a simple matter. While not the ideal food, that would get her through until she could learn the ways of her new fiefdom and how best to get what she really needed.
To distract her mind from the hunger in her body, she thought about starting yet another new life with yet another new man. She'd lost count of how many husbands she'd had over the last thirty centuries. She thought the number someplace around seventy. The enchantments she could place on mortal men concealed that she aged slower, if at all, than they. One of the many tools in her predator's collection also gave her the ability, to some degree, to make herself appear older to mortals.
And now she was on her way to yet another man and yet another marriage.
It didn't matter, though. In a few years, maybe fifty or so, he too would be a moldering corpse, and she would move on to yet another life to hide from the mortals.
* * * *
Scotland, Present Day
Roland's attention kept drifting away from the conversation. He watched Valerie as she wandered about on the property of the old castle. Something worried him
, but he couldn't put his finger on it yet.
"RW? Are you OK?"
Roland turned to Jim Alba, his senior director. “Yeah, sorry.” He nodded toward Valerie. “I'm just a little worried about her."
"What's up?"
"Just the same things, really. I think she's hiding that the voices, or whatever it is, are back."
Jim nodded as he took a drag from his cigar. At least since Roland made him the senior director at Midnight Interludes, Jim had started buying good cigars. “Maybe she is, maybe not.” He tried to blow a few smoke rings, but the breeze whipped them into oblivion almost before the smoke left his mouth. “She'll tell you if something is wrong.” He chuckled a bit. “That whole thing between you two about always being open and honest. Sweet, romantic, and just a little bit dumb."
Roland couldn't help laughing. “Maybe, but that's what we do."
Stanley Markinson walked up to where they stood near the edge of one of the crumbling ramparts. Roland thought Markinson a strange bird. Part of it came from the fact that he was a man writing romance novels, a profession traditionally dominated by women. Part of it came from the fact that the man seemed just a bit odd.
Markinson wasn't a big man, the top of his head only reaching Roland's chin. His hair was a sort of mousey brown, and he was balding in a few areas. Roland thought the novelist's most striking features were his dark steel grey eyes, but Roland never heard a woman call Markinson attractive, not even those strange eyes. When Markinson looked at him, Roland believed the man could see even his deepest, darkest secrets as clearly as if they were written out.
Since he met Markinson during the negotiations to buy the movie rights for his Bloodlust series of erotic romance novels, Roland had tried to pin down what was actually strange about the man. The best he could come up with was that Stanley Markinson was old, much older than the fifty-five or so years he looked.
Maybe, Roland thought, he has an old soul. That's what Valerie always said, but it was clear she didn't like Markinson.
Roland wondered about that, too. Valerie liked everyone. Sometimes she liked people too much and missed the fact that they weren't all that good of people. But she just didn't like Markinson.
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