Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6

by V M Black

  Now was the time when I should send him home, back to the great mausoleum of a house where he belonged, buried in his wealth and antiquities. Buried in his memories.

  I opened my mouth, and what came out instead was, “Want to come in?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Of course.”

  I stood back to let him in, and I knew that he’d be staying the night. I was probably breaking half a dozen terms of my lease, but then again, there weren’t many rules left that Christina and Chelsea hadn’t already shattered.

  I shut the door after him and pulled off my coat, hanging it on one of the self-stick wall hooks we’d put behind the door. I held out my hand for his, and he gave it over. Even his jacket didn’t look right, hanging on my wall.

  I cleared my throat. “If you didn’t notice before, this one’s my bathroom. In case you need to use it.”

  I opened the door into the small, utilitarian room, cluttered with Lisette’s bottles of products.

  “Lisette and I share it, actually,” I said.

  Vampires did use the bathroom, didn’t they? I thought. Immediately, I chided myself. They ate, drank, and had sex. Of course they used the bathroom. How was it that after everything, Dorian still seemed impossible enough to me that I even had that question? It was almost as if I was afraid of him being real.

  Heading toward the living area, I led him past the door of my bedroom, which was the only one standing open.

  “Yours,” he said, reaching past me and flicking on the light.

  “You should know,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest as I turned to face him. “You sent your people to clean it.”

  I hadn’t let him into my bedroom...before. Even now, it was an intimacy I wasn’t fully prepared for.

  Dorian was the last person I should have in here with me now, even if he was one of the few who might be able to help against a djinn.

  If I’m that scared, I should have gotten him to call Clarissa. Maybe she’d find it amusing to hang out on a college campus for the night.

  But I didn’t want her. I wanted Dorian.

  Because I was an idiot.

  Self-consciously, I surveyed my crowded bedroom, taking in the extra dresser, the bed with its double-stacked twin mattresses, and the cinderblocks I had used to raise it so I could cram everything I had boxed up from Gramma’s house underneath it.

  “Princess and the pea?” Dorian asked, nodding to the extra mattress and box springs.

  I hugged myself. “A few of my Gramma’s things and the stuff from my room at home. She died last year, and I don’t really have the money for a storage unit. I’m really not a hoarder, but I don’t have anywhere else to put it right now.”

  And then his face opened, like a curtain being lifted, and I saw sympathy written there.

  “I didn’t know, Cora, or I wouldn’t have teased,” he said softly. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. Your medical records listed no next-of-kin, but I didn’t have any idea what that meant.”

  “I thought you’d have gone to the effort of finding out something like that,” I said around the sudden lump in my throat. It was stupid, but seeing the room with fresh eyes made the old wound ache. It looked...sad.

  “I didn’t look too deeply into the pasts of candidates,” he said.

  Because almost all of them would die. And the less he knew, the less he would have to remember—or to forget.

  I could have died. By sheer odds, even with the screening, I should have died. The paths I had, the future he’d set for me and the one I had wanted for myself, would have been moot then.

  But I survived. And now it seemed like the harder I clung to my past, the faster it slipped away.

  “I’m not a candidate anymore, though,” I said. “I haven’t been for more than a week. You didn’t care enough to find out about my family since then?”

  Dorian’s forehead creased. “I don’t remember mine.”

  I blinked. “You don’t remember what?”

  “My mother. My father. I don’t remember them. I don’t know if I had any brothers or sisters.” He was still looking at me, but I had the sense that he wasn’t seeing me at all. “I know that my parents loved me very much, and sometimes I think I remember a smell, a snatch of song....”

  He broke off and shook his head. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I just remember myself, trying to remember.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t remember mine, but that was because they’d died as I was born. But Gramma had been my family, and I couldn’t imagine forgetting her.

  That was almost worse than the idea that he didn’t care—the idea that he didn’t think that things like parents and grandmothers were worth knowing about. The idea that they were just another fact, another circumstance, that would become irrelevant in time.

  “You look sad for me,” he said. “Don’t be, Cora. I’m content enough now.”

  Now. With me, or with his victory against his political opponents? God, was I being unfair? Did I care if I was?

  He took my chin and kissed me gently, and I closed my eyes, clinging to him, as the sweet warmth trickled through my body.

  “Why did you invite me in, Cora?” he asked softly when he pulled away.

  “Because I’m scared,” I admitted. “I know you say it’s safe, but you didn’t think I was in danger before.”

  “There are no guarantees in the world,” Dorian admitted. “The longer I live, the more I know this is true. But I also know that living in fear is only half living.”

  “And I want you to try to understand my world, too,” I added, realizing that it was true only as I said the words. “I don’t have a great big house or a ton of mystery or some great load of money or fabulous talent or...really, anything. I’m a college student. I live in a dorm apartment. I do college student things. And I’m sure that to you, it seems like a small and unimportant life, but maybe if you see just a little more of it, you can understand why it’s the life I want.”

  “I’m a patient man, Cora. If this is what you want right now, I won’t stand in your way.” He stood in the doorway, my boring, ordinary doorway, and it did nothing to diminish him.

  I shook my head. He said those words, but everything that had happened that night had shown only too clearly that my old life couldn’t survive the new one. My plans had no room for Dorian in them—and Dorian’s world had no room for me. Not really. It had a place for the cognate I was supposed to become.

  I didn’t bother arguing with him. I knew it would get nowhere—resolve nothing, because nothing could be resolved. Not as long as I was bonded to him.

  “There was one other reason,” I said instead.

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “I don’t want to be alone.” There. I’d said it. “Not tonight. I’ve spent too many nights alone and scared, knowing that I was dying. I don’t want to be alone again tonight.”

  He closed the space between us so quickly that I had no time to react before he was gathering me in his arms.

  “Oh, Cora,” he said. “You never have to be alone again.”

  And I didn’t know whether I was more relieved or afraid.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke up the next morning wearing nothing but Dorian’s body wrapped around mine. Pushing my fears back to sleep, I savored the sensation for a long time, his arm draped over my waist, his breath against the back of my neck, my butt snugged against his stomach and the slight sleeping erection there.

  Then my bladder woke up, too, and made its ordinary demands clearly known. I disengaged myself as carefully as I could, trying not to wake him, but he roused immediately.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he said, his eyes still soft with sleep.

  Damn, but he was breathtaking, this man in my bed who claimed too much of me.

  “I think that was my line,” I returned, clambering rather gracelessly over him before sliding to the ground. I grabbed a t-shirt and panties and headed for the bathroom. When I finished and opened the door, I found Dorian wa
iting outside of it, wearing only his boxer briefs.

  “Your turn,” I said, ducking under his arm.

  He came out as I was pouring a bowl of Cheerios, dressed in the white shirt and dress pants from the night before. He dropped his blazer on the counter.

  He looked like he belonged in the apartment now. I wasn’t sure whether that should reassure me or disturb me more, so I chose to be reassured. Either way, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  “Help yourself,” I said, swinging open the door to the cabinet where the bowls and cereal were kept. “I don’t have a fully staffed kitchen to make me a buffet every morning, but I muddle through somehow.”

  “That was for your benefit, since the chef couldn’t predict what you would like,” Dorian said, stepping into the narrow aisle between the cabinets. “If you communicate with the kitchen the night before, they’ll cook to order.”

  “Oh, well, how practical,” I said, shaking my head as he entirely missed my point.

  He chose the raisin bran and filled a bowl. I couldn’t help but smirk as I watched him.

  “What is it?” he asked, too observant, as always.

  “You. I mean, you’re like a thousand years old, and you’re eating raisin bran for breakfast.” I hopped up onto the counter and dug in.

  “And what exactly am I supposed to have for breakfast, being ‘like a thousand years old?’” he asked, putting the milk back in the fridge.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something more exciting than that.”

  “There have been many times in my life when a bowl of cereal would have been far more exciting than what I had,” he said dryly. He leaned against the stove across from me and scooped up a spoonful of raisin bran.

  “I thought you were super-rich,” I retorted.

  He shrugged, looking amused. “I’ve been wealthy much more of my life than I haven’t. It isn’t hard when you live a long time and are very, very persuasive, at least as far as humans are concerned.”

  “Persuasive? Like, ‘Give me all your money’ persuasive?”

  His expression grew clouded. “It is more a matter of holding on to what I’ve earned in the face of adversity. But you can’t eat gold or property, and agnates have no powers to tell the future. It’s easy to become jaded, complacent. When you live in a city that has flourished virtually unmolested for three hundred years, it’s easy to see the last invader—the one destined to pull it to the ground—as just another minor inconvenience in a history of prosperity. The next thing you know, the fields are burnt, the livestock gone, and the countryside filled with a hostile army.”

  “That sounds bad,” I said. I knew he was describing his own past, impossibly distant from anything I’d ever experienced.

  I took another bite of my cereal. It tasted like cardboard.

  I added, “I think we have a bit of a generation gap, here. Like, a ten-generation gap.”

  His expression was unusually gentle. “We’ll have plenty of time for us to build our own history.”

  I tried to imagine a day when I could think like him—when I could look back on three or four centuries and talk about the decade I realized that the decay of the United States was irreversible or that some new superpower was going to launch the world into war. I shook my head. It seemed impossible, but even then, I would be no more than a child to him.

  How could any relationship be built on that, even if I wanted it to be?

  “What do you study here?” Dorian asked abruptly.

  I blinked. “I thought you didn’t care.”

  “You care. Perhaps I should care. Perhaps it’s a thing like grandmothers—something I have forgotten to care about.”

  There was a lot more going on behind those clear blue eyes than I had given him credit for. For all my questions, all I ever thought about was what he wanted from me, what he did to me, what my life meant to him in the context of his history. I’d wondered the night before if he even peed—because I still didn’t credit him with being fully real.

  “Economics,” I said, as awkward as any first date. “I want to go to grad school, then work for a governmental agency or maybe a nonprofit, studying markets. After I got sick, I was thinking maybe healthcare.”

  “I have any number of businesses. I’m sure that some of them make use of economists,” Dorian said.

  Was he really offering what I thought he was? “I don’t need you to find me a job.”

  “A job. A company.” He shrugged. “Whatever you wish.”

  “I’ve worked for everything I have,” I objected. “I’ve earned my scholarship and my grades, and I’m going to earn my degree. I don’t need to be given a job—or a company.”

  “It’s not about need. I want you to have it,” he said mildly.

  My mind rebelled. When someone could come in and drop into my lap so much more than I’d ever hoped to earn, it made my own efforts seem pitiful in comparison.

  Did that mean I was proud of standing on my own two feet? Or was I just too easily ashamed of how little I’d been able to do?

  “Think about it. The offer stands,” Dorian continued. “Don’t want a corporation? How about a charity? Feed the starving children of whatever country you wish.”

  And that offer struck me like a knife in the heart. How did I dare say no to that? All it would cost was my own small life, and how many others could I save? And I’d have happiness...of a sort. Eventually. Dorian would see to that.

  “What if I want to go to grad school?” I didn’t realize I’d spoken those words until I heard them. My own small, selfish dream. Would he give me that?

  Dorian blinked. For once, I’d surprised him. “Yes, you’d said something about that. The University of Maryland has an excellent program—”

  “I didn’t apply to UMD. It’s not one of my choices.”

  Dorian was quiet for a long moment. “The research labs are here, Cora. And at this moment, the world’s politics revolve around Washington, and I’m in the center of them.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I didn’t say no,” he said.

  “You didn’t have to.” He wouldn’t leave D.C. And I couldn’t stand to be away from him for a whole week at a time. After only twenty-four hours, I could hardly think of anything but him.

  “We can work something out,” he said, but I couldn’t imagine what. “In the more immediate future, I want you to consider coming to my New Year’s Eve party.”

  “Will it be like the Lesser Introduction?” I asked. I didn’t bother to hide my distaste.

  “No. I will not subject you to that again. You’ve seen the gamut of our society. I want you to see the best of it now. I want you to see what’s worth fighting for.”

  I looked at him over my bowl of cereal. “What if I say no? Will you force me again?”

  He had that weary look again, the one I couldn’t quite understand. “This is not an obligation that I must keep, nor is it something that must be done to keep you safe. If you refuse, I won’t make you come. But I want you to give me a chance to show you what else a bond can mean.”

  I thought about testing him then, refusing just to find out if he was telling the truth about not making me.

  But he was right—if there was something better than what the night before had shown me, I should see it. I wanted to, and I was sure it was me wanting, not him. I needed some sign of light beyond the trust in him that the bond had forced on me.

  I looked up at him where he stood across from me. In the utilitarian kitchen, his appearance was even more striking. Jarring, even. And he wanted me—more of me than I had ever expected to give to anyone.

  Did I even want to refuse him?

  “I’ll come,” I said.

  He nodded with satisfaction and took the single step to the sink, where he washed his bowl and spoon, dried them, and put them away. I took the last bite of my cereal, and he held out his hand. I gave my own bowl and spoon over and watched as he repeated the process.
/>
  I was struck again with an almost dizzying sense of his immediacy, his tangibility, the water running over his too-perfect hands as they moved the sponge efficiently over the earthenware.

  “I could clean your toilets as well, if that would interest you as much,” he said dryly.

  I jumped a little guiltily. “Can you read my mind?” I wouldn’t put anything past him.

  He raised his hand to brush his damp knuckles against my cheek, and I shivered. I would never get used to that touch.

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t have to. Sometimes your thoughts are written on your face. I can, however, feel echoes of any particularly strong emotion that you have.”

  I thought of how much I had missed him on Christmas morning when I had woken alone. “So when we were apart....” I began.

  “I didn’t have to feel you then to know what you were feeling, Cora. I felt myself.” Again, that sad smile.

  And he would be leaving again soon. Because I would insist on it. I had to insist on it, to keep my own mind, my sanity apart from him. To put some semblance of a barrier between the parts of my life.

  He had stepped between my knees where I perched on the edge of the counter, his eyes almost level with mine. I watched his expression change, growing more intent.

  Did he sense how desperately I wanted him to stay? How desperately I wanted him to touch me, in spite of everything?

  Involuntarily, I leaned forward, tipped my head up, and he bent to catch my mouth. I sank into the kiss, wishing I could disappear into it, just for a moment, and forget everything.

  My abdomen clenched, a twinge of anticipation wakening my body, sensitizing it to his touch. He pulled me to him. I looped my arms around his neck, kissing him back hard, not content this time to merely be stroked by him. My tongue pushed past his teeth, into his mouth, tasting him, wanting him to be a part of me as I wanted to be a part of him. His hands were under my shirt, against my naked flesh.

  My nipples tightened at the stroke of his thumb, heightening the need between my legs. My blood sang with it, my head light and hot at once. I ground my hips against the hardness that bulged at his fly, panting against his mouth. His fingers slid beneath the elastic of my panties. Hooking my legs around him, I kissed his neck as he traced the edge of the elastic down to just beside my entrance, urging him on with my mouth, tasting his skin and wanting more.