Immortal with a Kiss

by Jacqueline Lepore

  “Sebastian cannot be accepted by society. He clowns to cover his pain, but the man’s heart is nothing but love although he can never have love, not openly. He pretends it does not matter. But he feels; he feels it all, and deeply.

  “We are all broken, father. We are all lost, and frightened. That is why we need each other.”

  He shook his head. “You do not understand. I am not just broken. I am shattered. I am beyond redemption. I want the opium. I want oblivion.”

  “I love you,” I whispered fervently. “I cannot imagine what I would have done these past weeks without you here with me. I need you.”

  He shook his head, refusing the consolation I offered. “The others—”

  “They are not enough. None of us are enough without each other.”

  He finally looked at me. “Emma. You forgive too easily.”

  “Forgive? I cannot afford to forgive. I am merely being selfish. You tell me of your suffering, of your desire for your drug, and I say the one thing I know will trap you here with me. I tell you I love you and that I need you, and I know I have just bound you as surely as with iron chains anchoring you to that chair. You can no more leave me than you could take my life.”

  He blinked, his hard features blank. I could believe that face had taken blows, I could believe those hands had killed. I could believe he had both loved and hated. He was no saint. He was just a man.

  “We will talk again,” I told him. “I will pray for you, father. I will pray this telling will unburden you.”

  He bowed his head, his jaw working with emotion. I left swiftly, knowing that if he were close to tears he would not wish me to see it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Suddington was in the dining room when I descended the stairs. I paused to say hello, acutely aware of Valerian’s stare. Suddington immediately came to his feet.

  “Ah, here is that face which launched a thousand ships. Not to mention those poor topless towers!” He laughed and held out his hands to me. “Mrs. Andrews, I am cruel to tease you so, but you blush so prettily. This is an unexpected pleasure. Will you join me for supper?”

  I would have welcomed his hearty charm any other time, but I was not up to it after my talk with Father Luke. And there was Valerian’s presence, keenly felt, glaring from the other side of the room.

  “I have to decline, I am afraid. I have student reports to prepare. We are finishing up the term this week, you know.”

  “Then I shall look forward to your having some free time during the break,” he replied amiably.

  I might have more than a term break’s free time if I did not redeem myself with Miss Sloane-Smith, I thought.

  Valerian caught up with me in the stable. “I am taking you back,” he announced.

  “Do not be foolish. I travel the road all the time.”

  “You do not have to fight me at every turn, Emma,” he countered wryly.

  “I am merely being sensible. It would not do for me to be seen in the company of a man when my status at the school is fragile. We cannot afford for me to be dismissed.”

  He bowed, yielding. But as he retraced his steps back into the inn, I noticed his jaw grinding in frustration.

  I almost called him back. I was equally as frustrated. If truth be told and I were honest, I thought as I pointed the trap toward the road that led up to Blackbriar, I would see that I was afraid. But that fear was not something I was willing to explore.

  My breath came in puffs of smoke but I barely noticed the cold as my mind turned from the subject of Valerian Fox to Father Luke. I was much affected by his story, and my empathy for his terrible loss put me in a somber mood.

  Then, just when I was about to climb the series of switchbacks and inclines that paved the way from village up the fell to the school, the voice of Ruthven rose like a snake from the gathering darkness and hissed into my ear. I have missed you, Sister.

  I pulled the conveyance to a halt. All around me was still, and I realized how silent and still the woods had been all the while I’d been passing through. “Ruthven? Is that you?”

  Have you yearned for me?

  “I want to know more of you,” I replied. “Are you what they call the Cyprian Queen?” I peered into the woods, where shadows gathered into knots of secret darkness. Where was he?

  I do use that name, for it embodies beauty and romance, and erotic love. I shall show you all the wonders of these things.

  I felt the touch of a finger trip lightly down my spine and jumped, crying out softly. He was before me all of a sudden, seeming to materialize from nowhere. In the darkness, I felt his power emanating across space to me, affecting each nerve. I struggled to make out his features, for I could see no more than a suggestion of golden hair, of a wide, inviting smile in a shadow-hidden face, of a lithe male figure clad in black. He was affecting an appearance, merely. Well did I know the vampire’s true form was hideous; this was merely an illusion.

  Yes, I am indeed a god, my love. He reached toward me. I cringed from him, even as a part of me wanted to take that hand stretched out . . .

  You will marvel at me, at my beauty and my power. You will know me as none other ever has. My long wait will end. We shall roam my kingdoms, and find our pleasures together.

  I forced myself to concentrate. “Is this what you offered my mother? Laura Newly. It was many years ago, but you have been here before, haven’t you?”

  The timbre of a chuckle floated around me. She was never one of mine.

  I was shocked. My mind railed against this—it couldn’t be! “But . . . You made her. It had to be you.”

  Enough with your questions. What does any of it matter? You will care for no one else from your old life when you have me. You are destined for me and only me. I understand at last why I failed with all the others. You are whom I’ve waited for all these ages.

  Something touched the back of my hand. I started, crying out softly and swatting furiously at the spot. I could not stand to have this thing violate me again. “Stop that!” I shouted.

  I will show you what I am. I will show you the Cyprian Queen—and all I can give to you.

  And then it was happening again—that vile touch was on me, everywhere. All my courage, all my independence drained from me. “Please! Please, no!” Panic made me beg. I could not bear it again.

  I tore at my clothes, needing desperately to reach those unseen hands. I could feel them all over me, invading, grasping, pinching, pulling me apart. I heard him whispering, cajoling, wheedling.

  Then I heard a different voice, a new one, speaking my name. And hands, different hands, feeling wonderfully substantial and secure, holding me.

  “Emma! Emma! It’s Valerian.”

  The horrid touch was gone. The beautiful shadow figure was gone. Valerian has chased him off. I surged upward, clutching, climbing, writhing into the safety of Valerian’s arms.

  “He was here!” I cried.

  “Hush. I know. I followed you from the village. I saw you talking to someone.”

  “Did you see him? He wants to . . . He tried to take me, Valerian.” I was sobbing, unable to calm my racing heart, my stomach sick with revulsion and fear.

  “He cannot now,” he said, yanking off his crucifix and placing it over my neck. “I am here.” He dragged me down from the trap, the exertion nothing to his extreme strength, and he bore me away. I did not know where he was taking me, and I did not care. I buried my head in the curve of his shoulder and inhaled his scent, ridding my lungs of the sickening stench of Ruthven’s perfumed presence. I pressed my cheek, my lips, and my temple against his skin, wanting to fill my senses with as much of Valerian as I could get.

  When he laid me down, I was amazed to find I was in his rooms. He had carried me all the way to the inn, I realized. “I will get Serena,” he whispered.

  I pulled at him, preventing him from leaving. “Do not leave me!”

  He grasped my hands, freeing himself, and folded them in his warm, strong palms. “I have prot
ections here. You will be safe while I am gone.”

  “No. I need you,” I gasped. “He tried to do to me what he did before. Eustacia said they liked it, but she was horrified by it as I was. He is the Cyprian Queen, do you not understand? This is what he does to them!”

  “To whom, Emma?”

  “The girls. He uses . . . desire. He makes them want him. He fools them into thinking he is their demon lover, but he is a vampire, Valerian. He makes them think it is all some kind of a wonderful adventure when it is simple lust, and he controls them with it.”

  “We have discussed this,” he told me calmly. “No manner of vampire craves sensual pleasure.”

  “It’s not that. He used the Irish boy. That was why he sent him . . . before. It’s . . . It was power. It is all about power. He talks of being a god. It is a game to him, to move these girls this way and that, manipulate them and twist them. They are mere amusements.”

  He bowed his head and brought my fingers to his lips, squeezing his eyes shut as he kissed them. “Your hands are cold.”

  He was trying to distract me, calm me. I was touched, and I realized that my faith in him, which had been so sorely strained, was restored. I suddenly had the impulse to trust him with the deepest horror. “He speaks of me as the one.”

  “The one?”

  “His mate,” I choked.

  Valerian’s dark gaze glittered. His fingers stroked my skin. The fluttering pulse in my wrist lay under his fingertips, and I had an acute sense of connection to him. It was like a balm, this small caress. “Why is he doing this to me?” I whispered.

  I do not know why I asked him, when I knew the answer. The blood of my mother, the vampire who had made her, bound me to Ruthven. He thought me a sister, and as the gods of Olympus had lain with each other, sanguinity notwithstanding, he believed that blood connection would satisfy something he’d been searching for all of his existence. Something his sadistic games only soothed for a little while but never fully satisfied.

  He expected me to revel in the pleasure he inflicted on me. To him, he was offering a great gift . . . “I am going to retch!” I exclaimed, mortified that I was so weak.

  “I am here.”

  “No, you . . .” Valerian gathered me into his arms and the swell of nausea subsided. I clung to him desperately, taking everything I needed to breathe, to exist, from him.

  “Is it possible for a vampire to be mad?” I whispered.

  “There is much that is possible,” he murmured soothingly, stroking my hair.

  My breathing eventually slowed under his calming touch. My thoughts unlocked, and I realized something. “The sick game, it is all a puppet play for his vanity. There is more than the evil of the vampire in him, Valerian. There is something else, something twisted and . . . wrong. He craves being all-powerful, toying with these girls as gods play idly with the fates of mortals.”

  Valerian sat back, but he still held my hands. My thoughts were falling into place quickly. I could scarcely speak fast enough to keep pace with them. “Yes, a god. That is how he sees himself. And so he seduces the girls. But it is not sex that he craves. He wants for them to admire him, adore him, make him their everything. If you could sense what I did, the sickness in him to be acknowledged as superior, even supreme.”

  Our bodies were pressed intimately against one another. I knew it was improper, but I could not bear to break contact, wanting every inch of myself entwined with his lean strength.

  “He did not make my mother. I thought perhaps . . .” He squeezed my hand. I said, “Yet we are made both from Lliam. And I do not even know who that is.”

  “Enough for now. You have been through an ordeal.” Valerian reached for my face, gently molding his palm to the contour of my cheek. “You will find the answers in time. We will search together.”

  “I cannot go through another attack,” I said. I noticed then how my fingers were biting into his flesh. The ghost of Ruthven’s putrid touch still shivered along my skin. I felt better here with Valerian. More than better. I felt safe.

  “Then I will protect you,” he said tenderly. “You have only to let me, Emma.”

  Could he do so? I believed that he would. He had always given me courage. That was why I had felt his absence so keenly. I had not wanted to accept how vulnerable I was where he was concerned. But I could not fight it any longer. I no longer even wanted to.

  He was a part of me in some way, a stranger in many others. But our connection was real, tangible almost—elemental, essential. And as I lay with him, shivering as my flesh twitched in the aftermath of Ruthven’s invasion, I turned my face to his, my hands pulling him toward me. I sealed my lips against his.

  This was nothing like the kisses we’d shared before. This kiss flared instantly, filled with passionate need that was unapologetically carnal. Everything the abhorrent Ruthven had tried to stir in me now flowered, flowed, flooded. I could do nothing to control it, to stop myself. My fingers dug into the silk of his hair and my mouth opened to invite the sensual kiss of lovers.

  He did not indulge me for long. When my hands went to untie his cravat, he locked his grip over my wrists. “Emma,” he warned, pulling away.

  My fingers wheedled into the knot and deftly undid it.

  “No,” he said more firmly. He kept his body rigid, and I opened the neck cloth, exposing his secret. Bending my head, I kissed him there, overlaying the old puncture wounds with my own kiss.

  Nothing magical happened. They did not disappear. He did not even seem to register what I had done. But I sensed a war within him. Looking into his face, my gaze touched those piercing, sharp cheekbones, then slid down the shadows that stretched like gouges underneath. It was a lean face, a bleak face.

  “This is not right,” he murmured, but I knew he was weakening. I placed my hands flat on the smooth skin of his chest where his shirt gaped. He was pale, warm, unblemished, devoid of the roughness of a man. I thought him exotic, unspeakably beautiful, graceful, masculine. For all his leanness, power shifted under my questing hands, strength of far more consequence than the most heavily muscled of men.

  I reveled in his realness, his pureness. The infliction of Ruthven’s touch had been a mere impostor, thin and feeble now that I had the truth in my grasp.

  “Emma,” he whispered, as if begging me to allow him to stop. He could have extricated himself any time he wished. “Not now, not like this.”

  I was suddenly afraid his better judgment would defeat me. I could not bear that. I kissed him again.

  “I am not strong enough to keep refusing,” he murmured against my cheek. “If you knew . . . I’ve thought of this, of us together. Of making love to you. But not like this. You are not yourself.”

  “I am at last myself, and it is because of you.”

  “This is because of him. Of Ruthven.”

  Coldness gripped me, and such a panic as to make me cruel. “What if it is? Would you condemn me to enduring his filthy touch, to the memory of it alive on my flesh like a thousand devouring spiders?”

  His face froze, sealed in a rigor mortis of horror. I pressed forward, my hands frantic, snaking around his neck. “Valerian, do not leave me alone with this . . . thing inside me.”

  He could not hide his reaction. I was using him, and he knew it. What feeling we shared that might have led us to become lovers was not what made my body burn for him. He was right; I was not myself. But I was in pain, and I needed him nonetheless.

  He moved suddenly toward me, surprising me, for I had expected him to turn me away. His hands gripped my waist firmly, locking us together as he pushed me back onto the bed. He made to undress me, but I could not tolerate his patience. Our clothing was discarded in a flurry, without gentleness. What feeling he tried to bring to it, I would not abide. In the end, our lovemaking was swift, fed by my desperation and lust. The pleasure of it shattered me, breaking apart the grip of the vampire, restoring me, giving me what I sought.

  Afterward, however, as I lay in his arms, I
felt hollow.

  I’d paid a terrible price for my healing. It became suddenly clear to me in the silence, and the cold distance that seemed to seal us apart, that I had bargained away a most precious thing.

  “I am leaving when the week is out,” I told him. “The term is over. I promised Alyssa I would go see her.”

  “She has had her child?”

  “It will come any day.”

  “I will come with you.”

  I wished he had not said that. I selfishly wanted him with me, of course, but I was feeling particularly ashamed of myself right now. I’d cheated us both of something I’d had no right to.

  “I think Sebastian and Father Luke should stay here,” I said.

  “It will be up to them. We are all our own masters.”

  How untrue. None of us had the least bit of freedom, or so it felt to me at that moment.

  “I suppose.” I rose to dress. Valerian said nothing. I thought perhaps he was angry with me, or perhaps he felt sorry for me. I did not know which was worse.

  He took me back to Blackbriar, this time uneventfully. I said good-bye and thanked him, then winced, for it might seem to him that I was thanking him for taking me to his bed. I had not meant that, but it was true I did owe him. What I had taken from him—from both of us—was a debt that might be forever impossible to repay.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Father Luke wanted to go to Rome. He would tell no one what it was he wished to do there. I had great fears on this account, but I could not take the time to question him about it.

  The students left the school for the term break, a surprisingly rapid procedure whereupon they piled into the trap in turns, to be taken down into the vale, and on to holiday spots and reunions with their families from there. I had a train out of Penwith to catch, for I was headed to the Peak District, where Alyssa was. Without discussion, it was somehow decided Valerian would travel with me. Sebastian rather reluctantly accompanied a very grouchy Father Luke on his journey, but I could not tell if he was truly put out or merely making a show of it. I suspected the latter.