Casting that difficulty to one side, she looked around for someone to talk to. One man among those streaming back down the hill detached himself and called in Romanian, “Madam? Can I help you?”
“Thanks, I hope so! I was told there was a castle here.”
The man took off his hard hat and gestured around him. Elizabeth took in the piles of stone and rubble scattered across the site.
“Ah.”
“We leveled all that was left today, but there was nothing much to see anyway. Tomorrow we’ll take away all the debris so we can begin building. Perhaps you’ve already reserved a house?”
“Oh, no. I don’t live here. I’m just visiting.”
The man laughed at that, as though the very idea of anyone looking like her—a pale-skinned northerner with untidy, strawberry blond hair; rather worn, old cropped jeans; a cheap sleeveless top; and a cotton hat dangling down her back from a string around her neck—could possibly be Romanian.
“These are holiday homes,” he explained, “for foreigners who like our country.”
“It’s a very beautiful country,” Elizabeth said with genuine appreciation. It was on the tip of her tongue to add that she couldn’t afford luxury housing for foreigners, when it occurred to her that he might look on her request with more favor if he thought her a potential customer. After all, he appeared to be some kind of foreman or even manager.
She tried a smile and hoped it didn’t look too guilty. “Would you mind if I stayed for a few minutes and looked around? Just to get a feel for the place and admire the views?”
He shrugged. “You’re welcome. There are no gates to lock. Take as long as you like. Just be careful. We still have some old foundations to fill in, and some of them are pretty deep.”
“I’ll be careful,” she assured him. “Thanks.”
She made to pass on, but with obvious concern, he asked, “Are you hurt?”
She blinked, following his frowning gaze to the hem of her top, which now boasted a bright red, shapeless bloodstain. There was another smear across the leg of her jeans where she’d wiped her bleeding palm.
“Oh, no, it was just a rose thorn. I bleed easily, but it’ll stop in a minute.”
Satisfied, the man walked on, and Elizabeth began to pick her way over the rubble. Dmitriu had claimed there was a chapel here, and beneath it, a crypt. But neither was obvious at first glance.
Elizabeth rummaged in her bag until she found her flashlight. She was careful to hold it in her uninjured left hand, and shone the beam into the debris, looking for any carvings in the fallen stone, any lettering that might give her a clue. But if there had ever been anything, it had been obliterated by time and bulldozers.
She shivered as if someone had walked over her grave—instead of the other way around. But she couldn’t quite laugh at herself. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up like hackles, and she spun around to see who was watching her.
No one. She was alone on the derelict site. Even the departing workmen had been more interested in their supper than in her.
What’s the matter with you, Silk? she jeered at herself. Vampires getting to you at last?
Of course not. It was just that the sun seemed to set so quickly here, and this place did have an intriguing atmosphere. She liked atmospheres and had learned by experience that they could be useful guides. She preferred hard evidence, of course, but when that was lacking, sometimes you found something just by going with a hunch, a feeling.
Other times, you found nothing at all—like now.
Giving up, she spun around to head back to the car. Her foot slipped, and she flung out her right hand to save herself from falling. She winced as stones pressed into the thorn hole in her palm, and when she dragged herself upright, the flashlight flickered crazily across the tiny smears of blood on the stones. As another drip appeared, she brushed the dirt off her hand and thrust her palm at her mouth before following the beam of the flashlight to its end—a gap in the ground into which gravel and more rubble were already falling. That must have been where her foot slipped.
Elizabeth crouched down beside it, away from the bulk of the shifting ground, and shone her beam into the widening gap.
It was a room, like a crypt.
Excitement soared, drowning the last of her silly anxieties. She could make out rough carvings on the walls, perhaps angel figures. . . .
Elizabeth reached out with care and gave the rubble an encouraging push before leaping back to admire the effects. A little irresponsible, perhaps, but how else was she supposed to get in? She doubted her little avalanche was capable of damaging anything.
When the ground stilled, she edged forward. All seemed secure on this side of the wide hole. She knelt, trying to gauge the distance to the ground of the crypt. She was sure it was a crypt. It smelled musty and damp. If she were fanciful, she would have said it smelled of death, although any human remains would surely be long past the rotting stage. Maybe there were rats—not a nice thought. But she caught no scurrying creatures in the beam of her flashlight, and she thought she could lower herself down there without difficulty—“dreep,” in the language of her childhood.
First, she rolled a fair-sized boulder to the gap and let it fall in. She might need it later to stand on to get herself out. Then, positioning herself, she gripped the side of the hole and let her feet slide through until she dangled. She let go and jumped the last foot or so to the ground.
It was an easy landing. Triumphant, she dragged the flashlight back out of her bag and shone it around the room. They were angels on the walls, worn with age but still remarkably fine for an out-of-the-way place like this. It made sense, she supposed. If this Saloman was important enough to have inspired so many legends, even after he’d been staked as a vampire, he would have been a rich, even princely, man.
The trouble was, there seemed to be no tomb—no markings on the wall to denote he was buried behind them, no tomb on the floor. There were just angels carved into the wall and broken stone steps that had once led up to the gap she’d almost fallen down, where the chapel used to be. It was exactly as Dmitriu had described.
Except for the lack of a body or any kind of inscription.
Bugger. He must have made it up too, just as Maria had done. He couldn’t have known about this hidden room—it had obviously been sealed for centuries, and there was no evidence whatsoever that a chapel had ever stood above it.
So Saloman’s origins remained elusive. But at least the angels were pretty.
Elizabeth laid down her bag, pulled her camera out of it, and propped the flashlight on the bag to shine upward. Walking around the room, she photographed each angel in turn, changing the direction of the light as necessary. In the final corner, she stubbed her toe on something—rubble, she imagined, although her impatient glance could pick out nothing large enough. Ignoring it, she aimed the camera at the large angel above her head.
A shiver ran all the way up her spine to her neck, jerking the camera in her hand. She steadied it, irritated when a drop of blood from her hand distracted her.
“Whoever bled to death from a rose thorn?” she demanded, wiping her hand on her thigh again. Finally, she raised the camera and took the picture. And when she stepped back, she saw the sarcophagus right in front of her.
She blinked. “How the . . . ?” Perhaps her eyes had just gotten used to the particularly dark corner, but was the light really so poor that she’d missed that? Or was her observation so erratic? She must be bloody tired.
Grabbing up the flashlight, she shone it full on the stone sarcophagus. It was the size of a large man, its lid carved with a human figure in sharp relief, almost as if the corpse lay there looking at her.
As beautifully carved as the angels, it was a wonderful, detailed piece of art in its own right. She shone the flashlight from its booted legs upward over the long, open cloak, which revealed an ornate but empty sword belt. The emptiness might have been explained by the broken sword protruding from his stone ches
t; Gory, yet tastefully done. So this must be the basis of the vampire legends.
She’d need an expert to date the carvings, of course, but late seventeenth century seemed about right. That meant she’d have to look for differences between the legends before and after Dmitriu’s date of 1697. There were a lot of those for so young a man. She’d also need to reanalyze those stories set before his likely birth date, perhaps around 1670.
In fact, she needed to speak to Dmitriu again, and soon. She’d never expected to find anything as beautiful as this. . . .
She took one hasty snap before dropping the camera back into her bag. Fascinated, she gazed down at the likeness of the man she now believed to be the legendary Saloman. The still, stone face appeared surprisingly youthful. With no martial beard or ridiculous mustache like Vlad the Impaler’s, it was just a young, handsome countenance with deep-set, open eyes.
Why weren’t his eyes closed? The irises and pupils of each were well delineated; they might even have been colored under the centuries of dust. Christ, he even had eyelashes, long and thick enough to be envied by most women.
But there was nothing else remotely feminine about this face. Its nose was long, slightly hooked, giving an impression of arrogance and predatory inclinations. On either side were cheekbones to die for, high and hollowed, and beneath, a pair of perfect, sculpted lips, full enough to speak of sensuality, firm enough to denote power and determination, and a strong, pointed chin. Long, thick hair lay in stone waves about his cloaked shoulders, and again Elizabeth could almost imagine that the dust covered black paint.
The sculptor seemed to have imbued a lot of character into that dead stone face, as if he’d known him well and liked him; yet he’d also captured a look of ruthlessness, an uncomfortable hardness that sat oddly with the faint, dust-caked lines of humor around his eyes and mouth. Well, he wasn’t the first or the last bastard to have a sense of humor.
And besides, if he was a likable man and the true hero of some of the legends she’d listened to, why had he been killed in such a way? Where had the stories of atrocity come from? His enemies? He was a mirror of Vlad the Impaler perhaps, except no one before Bram Stoker had made Dracula a vampire. The Saloman vampire stories were far older, and they came from natives.
There was a splash of discoloration beside his mouth. Frowning, she reached out and touched it. Wet—it was a drop of her blood.
“Oops.”
But the carved face was so beautiful that she let her fingers linger, brushing against the cold, dusty, stone lips. Another drop of blood landed there, and she tried to scrub it off with her thumb. All that achieved was another drip and rather grotesquely red lips on the carving, so she yanked her guilty hand back and began to examine the rest of the sarcophagus.
It sat on a solid stone table, but it wasn’t just the lid; it was the whole sarcophagus that was carved into the shape of a man, and she could find no hinges in the smooth stone. Perhaps the body was in the table underneath? Unless there were hinges or some kind of crack on the other side.
Leaning over the sarcophagus, she ran her fingers along its far side, but she felt only the detailed outlines of muscled arm and hip and thigh, so lovingly carved that just stroking them seemed intimate. She stretched farther so that her hair and jaw brushed against the cold stone of his face, and she felt along the table instead. It too appeared to be one solid piece of stone. So where the hell was the body?
Movement stirred her hair, almost like a lover’s breath on her skin. Startled, she jerked up her head, but before she could leap away, or even see what was happening, something sharp pierced her neck and clamped down hard.
Chapter Two
She couldn’t move, couldn’t even cry out. Somewhere she knew she should be terrified, but in reality her brain was far too busy trying to work out what the hell had happened.
There was pain at the side of her neck where it seemed to be stuck to the face of the carved sarcophagus—a strange, cold pain that suddenly heated as whatever had gripped her began to suck.
Now the fear surged, deluging her. She felt the blood rushing through her veins, away from her heart, and she knew she was about to die. Worse than that, the cold thing clamped around her neck grew warm, moved on her skin, and the rushing of her blood became a stream of weird, sensual pleasure. Fire and ice flowed together in her veins as she was held captive. Everything seemed to tighten in her body—her muscles, her nipples, her clenching womanhood—until it came to her in a flash that this treacherous, paralyzing sexual response was killing her.
With a yell, as much for self-encouragement as fear, she tore herself free, falling off the sarcophagus into a heap on the floor and scrabbling backward, away from whatever had attacked her.
She knew, she’d always known, it came from the sarcophagus itself, and yet the sight of the carving rising from the table in a cloud of dust drew a long, low whine from her that she couldn’t control. Her neck throbbed in agony; it felt slippery with her own blood under her questing, trembling fingers. Her heart hammered with the force of a pile driver, as the thing shook itself and emerged through the scattering dust toward her.
Not a beautiful stone carving but a beautiful, terrifying man, heart-churningly three dimensional as he yanked the broken sword from his chest and threw it to the ground. A sound seemed to hiss from between his teeth. It might have been pain, but right now, she didn’t care.
In the spotlight of her fallen, wavering flashlight, he regarded her from burning, coal black eyes. His cloak, now streaked with black, fell around him in stiff, dust-laden folds as he walked forward with slow, deliberate strides. Beneath it, his clothing was torn across the chest, but no blood oozed from the sword wound. His pale lips parted.
“Silly girl.” The deep, almost sepulchral voice vibrated through her entire body. “That’s no way to break off a relationship like ours.”
She scrabbled backward in a futile attempt to escape the horror, but inexorably, he kept coming.
“Is it?” he said, bending to take her numb hand and drag her to her feet. She stumbled and, appalled by the strength in his cold, flexible fingers, which didn’t feel like stone at all, she yanked her hand free. Even then, she suspected he let her.
“Is it what?” she demanded. God knew she didn’t care, but some instinct always made her fight back in the wrong situations. She barely knew what she was saying.
“Is it sensible to break away from me like that?” he said with exaggerated patience. “Look what you’ve done to your throat.”
He stretched out one long, pale hand toward the side of her neck; she flinched, staggering out of his reach. Even in the dim light she could see dust particles glistening on his skin, clinging in the creases of his knuckles.
“What I did?” she screeched in outrage. “I didn’t bite my own throat like a . . . like a . . .” The whole impossible situation was collapsing in on her, burying her in a morass of ghastly confusion and questions.
His eyes gleamed. “Like a vampire?” he mocked, coming after her. There was nowhere to go but backward, until the wall ground into her shoulder blades and buttocks, and still he kept coming. Tall and broad-shouldered as he was, his very size threatened her. Most of his handsome face was in shadow, hiding any expression. She could make out only his eyes, blacker than the surrounding darkness, yet glistening with some deep, wild hunger it hurt to look at.
He lifted his hand once more to the wound in her throat. His fingertip was cold, yet seemed to burn her skin. She gasped, quivering, and when he bent his head toward her again, gazing at her bleeding injury, she began to fight, crashing her fists into his chest, pushing uselessly against his shoulders.
He smelled of earth and cold stone, and gave off no sense of human warmth. So why did her body begin to weaken its resistance? Her fists, her struggles, made no impression on him. He continued to lower his head to her wounded neck. At least she could no longer see those terrible eyes. . . .
At the first touch of his lips, she gave up; she
could do nothing against him, and some dark, perverse part of her remembered the unique, agonizing thrill of his first bite.
But he didn’t bite. He surrounded the wound with his lips and licked it once. She shuddered, helpless in the grip of fear and something she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—name. Then he lifted his head, and she stared at him, speechless, because the pain had gone.
The hunger hadn’t left his eyes, but in the glimmer of her flashlight beam, she thought it was overlaid with mockery. The bastard was laughing at her.
“I’m saving the rest for later,” he explained.
Her eyes widened. He was letting her live after all? At least for another minute. “L-later?” she stammered.
His fingers trailed across her throat, butterfly light, making her gasp. “Later. Your blood is strong and heady. I’m taking time to absorb it.” He bent nearer her, inhaling, almost sniffing the air around her head and throat. The skin of his face looked so smooth, she had an insane urge to reach up and touch it. His sculpted lips moved faintly, as if a smile almost danced across them, never quite forming before it faded.
“Interesting,” he observed, and his voice was different now, quiet, almost whispering, with just a hint of hoarseness. “I have to thank you for waking me. . . . What is your name?”
She swallowed. “Elizabeth. Elizabeth Silk.”
The almost smile tugged at his lips and vanished. His cheek brushed against hers, barely touching; yet her stomach seemed to plunge. “Silk. How apt,” he murmured. “Like your hair . . . and your skin, so soft and warm . . .”
His fingertips caressed her face, then slid down over her chin to her throat, and she gasped, jerking in panic. But the movement only brought her into contact with his body. He was hard and solid, and surely that stiff ridge against her stomach was his erection. . . . Vampires had erections? Unless that part of him was still made of stone?
Blood on Silk Page 2
