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

by V M Black

  I hung up, and my mind went back to the circles that had already worn grooves into my brain.

  What did I want? If only I could answer that question. I’d thought I wanted a way out. I’d been fighting the bond with every bit of strength that I had since I’d woken to discover what Dorian had done to me.

  And now the door was open. I had a way out. And once out, I could never come back.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

  Why not? What did I feel toward him, really? My heart went wild at the brush of his fingers, my body tuned to his every desire. He terrified me, his power over me as well as the cold political calculations that ruled his life. His ideals were almost as frightening, as was the place that they demanded that I fulfill. I had no doubt that what he felt for me, whatever name I gave it, was deep and real.

  And I knew that, right now, if I had to, I would die for him.

  But the only way we could have anything was through our bond. And keeping it meant something more insidious than death. It meant that I had to give up myself—if not tomorrow, then over time, as my old self was slowly altered and worn away by the force of Dorian’s will, whether he meant to or not.

  If breaking the bond meant that everything I felt for him was gone, then it wasn’t real at all. But what if only some of it left? What if I was left with something that was very real, quite apart from whatever chemical changes tied us together?

  What if I would never be the same again?

  I still have time. I don’t have to make the decision right now.

  But if I didn’t make it, I soon wouldn’t be able to.

  I pulled up to the small ranch house at half-past eleven. It was orange brick from the ground to the high horizontal slider windows, with white siding and black shutters above. It looked like a dozen other houses in the neighborhood—small, dated, and unremarkable. Other ranch houses had an adorable cottage vibe or at the least had a big living room picture window to let in the light. My Gramma’s didn’t really have anything about it that someone might find particularly attractive.

  But stepping into the yard still felt like coming home. And for a moment, at least, I could put Dorian out of my mind.

  I reached up to the sun visor and hit the button on the opener to the single car garage. It shuddered open reluctantly, creaking in protest. Adjusting my earbuds, I started up my peppiest playlist and got out of the car. I’d already slathered myself with sunblock, and I wore my sunglasses, a ball cap, and gloves. My cheeks had been pink with a slight sunburn after the trips to the bookstore, the Plant, and the mall yesterday. No need to risk worse.

  Time to work. I smiled despite everything, feeling the strength in my body that the cancer had tried to steal away. I’d never been so happy to do a menial task.

  Stray leaves on the driveway crunched under my feet as I approached the garage. I got the big old wooden leaf rake and a box of garden bags and got started. The work was comforting, mindless and repetitive, and I was quickly able to lose myself in it.

  No one stirred in the houses around me. Old Mrs. Quinlan had moved in with her daughter’s family the year before last, and the rest of the neighbors that I knew were at work at that time of day. Not that I particularly wanted to see them. They always wanted to talk about Gramma, and I was out of things to say. She had died. She was gone. And I missed her. There were no words that could bring her back or pay her for the years she’d given me.

  It didn’t take long to clear the small yard and make a neat line of bags at the curb for pickup. During the growing season, I’d paid a neighbor’s kid thirty bucks every other week to do mowing, so at least the grass looked decent under the leaves. I made a quick circuit of the house to pull weeds and prune shrubs, though that didn’t really fix the fact that the bushes had mostly grown out of their spaces.

  Surveying my work from the curb, I tied up the last lawn bag. It was still a small, unimpressive house with 1960s styling and 1980s siding. But it looked loved now, as it should.

  I put up the lawn equipment and got the lunch I’d packed out of the car, stepping through the garage into the kitchen. I stopped just inside the door.

  It still smelled the same. It was a more than a year after my Gramma had gone, nearly five months after I had packed up or sold the last of her belongings, and it still smelled like her house.

  I blinked away the tears that suddenly sprang to my eyes as I unwrapped the sandwich I had packed. I sat down on the floor with my back to the door and ate it slowly.

  I could almost see her standing in front of the stove with yet another boxed dinner filling the kitchen with the smell of food. It wasn’t that she couldn’t cook. She’d just never had much interest in it, unless it was a dessert.

  “Unless it’s really bad for me, why bother?” she used to say with the mischievous smile that always made her seem younger than she was.

  Of course, part of the reason she hadn’t cooked much was because she was so often tired. It was hard work raising a kid when you should have been retired years before. When I’d grown old enough to realize what she’d given up to keep me, I’d tried to pitch in when I could and not burden her with anything I didn’t have to. She’d never resented me or shown the least regret—about me, at least, though I knew that she missed my mom and my grandfather, who’d died in an accident when I was born.

  With a deep breath, I tossed the empty bag in the kitchen trash and grabbed the broom and dustpan from their places between the refrigerator and the wall. I began to systematically attack the floors, sweeping away the dust that had accumulated since I’d last come by to clean just before school started.

  I was doing fine until I walked into my Gramma’s bedroom and saw the green and gold striped damask wallpaper that she had chosen when the house was built. She’d told me how she’d walked into the room six months pregnant with my mother to discover the paperhanger putting in the wallpaper upside down. She’d let out a shriek of horror, and the man had fallen and broken his arm. After that, all the construction workers had regarded her with a fearful kind of respect. And despite her dismay at the man’s mistake, she’d felt too guilty about the accident to make anyone fix the wallpaper, so it was upside down still.

  That silly story, told so often, hit me with a sudden intensity of longing that I hadn’t felt in months.

  I miss you so much.

  So many nights when I was sick, I’d wanted her to hold me. And now that I was well, I wished I could tell her that it had turned out all right, after all, even more than I had ever wished for her soft lap and quiet voice.

  I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

  The broom and dustpan dropped from my hands. I slid down against the wall, hugged my knees against my chest, and cried.

  Chapter Five

  I cried like a little kid, all snot and tears and wracking sobs. There was no one to hear.

  There was no one to care.

  Gramma had been dying of congestive heart failure, and she’d never told me. My last summer with her, I’d seen how she was slowing down, struggling with everyday tasks. She’d managed to hide her illness so well that I’d felt only concern, not alarm, during my visits every Sunday to drive her to St. Paul’s and then run her errands and help out around the house. She covered her struggles with the excuse that she was just a little “tired” from some activity or other that she had done earlier in the week. Each time, it was a new excuse, and each time, I believed her.

  She’d been so determined to be there for me when I was little, that I would have a normal experience growing up despite how much older she was than my friends’ parents, that she hadn’t even told me when she needed me to be there for her.

  And then one day, when her friend dropped by for her weekly visit, she was dead. My Gramma died alone, with no one to hold her hand. No one to even know for two long days. Mrs. Turow had called me with the news, and only then had I learned that she’d been sick at all.

  I would’ve wanted to be there, damn school and my grades an
d everything else. Gramma was more important than all those things. But she’d given up even my being with her in her last weeks for fear of being a burden on me, afraid she’d be keeping me from the life she thought I would have had if my mother had lived.

  I wished I could tell her now that it was going to turn out okay. Because it had to, didn’t it? I wasn’t sick anymore. I was still the girl that she’d known, still going to have the happy life that she’d wanted for me. I was still going to make her proud....

  And how could Dorian fit into any of that? He didn’t have a place in that life, the life my Gramma had given up so much for. I could have been free of him forever last night, but I couldn’t let go. And now I was afraid that after everything she’d done to give me a good life, I was going to throw it all away because I was weak and stupid and drugged with sex and addicted to a vampire’s presence.

  Gradually, my sobs turned to sniffles. I paused the music app, abruptly silencing Jason Mraz’s voice, and stumbled into the bathroom to discover that the toilet paper roll was empty. Sniffing hard, I got another from under the sink mechanically, changed it out, and pulled off a good length to blow my nose. I flushed it, noticing the slight ring of lime around the toilet as I did so.

  I closed my eyes. I’d take care of that, too. I’d take care of everything.

  I picked up the broom and finished the floors in the bedroom and bath. Then I washed down all the tile counters in the bathrooms and kitchen and wiped out the sinks. All the windowsills got a pass with a wet sponge, and every corner of the house was cleared of spider webs with a towel knotted over the end of the broom.

  Crying or not, there was no one to do it but me.

  Finally, I set to work on the toilets, which had calcified rings at the waterline from neglect and disuse, scrubbing with single-minded determination.

  “You should try vinegar.”

  I jumped so hard at the voice that I launched myself backwards into the bathtub, knocking my spine and elbow into it as the toilet brush went flying.

  Dorian stood leaning in the doorway of the bathroom and looking down at me in a three-piece suit, as handsome as the devil himself. His jet black hair was impeccably arranged, his blue eyes piercing under the dark wings of his brows. I had no idea how I hadn’t noticed his approach, because the force of his presence was almost too much in the tiny room.

  My blood sang in my ears, terror and relief and joy all mixed up until I didn’t know where one feeling stopped and the next began.

  And all I could do was rub my throbbing elbow and stare at the beautiful not-man who had come for me. He was still mine. Or I was still his. It was hard in that moment to believe that it mattered much which it was.

  Finally, I found my voice. “What are you doing here? You scared me to death.”

  But my heart was hammering for reasons other than surprise. Oh, God, I was so glad to see him, so glad even in the midst of my fear. I didn’t know that I could be so glad to see anyone.

  I had almost lost him the night before—had almost given him up, thrown him away. Now, that seemed like madness.

  Please don’t leave me, I thought. Don’t let me leave—

  I slammed a door down on those thoughts.

  “I didn’t realize that I was sneaking.” He stepped inside, reached across me, and retrieved the toilet scrubber, offering it to me handle-first.

  I took it.

  “How do you know about cleaning toilets, anyway?” I asked, covering my reaction behind a curtain of hair as I went back to attacking the toilet ring.

  “I’ve owned a few disused properties in my time,” he said. “If you fill it with vinegar and let it sit for a day or two, it will eat away the lime without hurting the porcelain.”

  “That really works?”

  “Like a charm,” he said.

  Like a charm. Funny, those words, so easy and casual. They weren’t the kind of thing I could imagine him saying even a few days ago.

  But I said, “Do you have any vinegar?” It was always a strange sensation when Dorian revealed knowledge about some everyday matter. Somehow, he seemed above the world, apart from it. I wasn’t sure I liked it when he showed himself to be as real as anything else.

  As anyone else.

  “Not on me at the moment,” he said.

  “Neither do I.” I paused, sitting back on my heels and looking at him. “You never answered my question. What are you doing here?”

  “I told you that I can tell if you are feeling an intense emotion,” he said.

  I remembered my uncontrolled crying jag. Yeah. That would certainly qualify. No one to care, I’d thought. But I’d been wrong. Dorian had cared.

  He would always care.

  “I guess I was pretty upset,” I said.

  “And now?” he prompted.

  “Better now,” I said. I dropped my eyes and resumed scrubbing.

  He touched my shoulder, giving it the smallest squeeze, and I leaned into the contact. It felt better than it should, dangerously reassuring.

  And when he spoke again, Dorian’s voice colored with echoes of an unreadable emotion. “You were so deeply disturbed, Cora. I had to call off the rest of the team when I realized you weren’t in actual physical danger.”

  “The rest of the team?” I echoed. “You mean like when you came to get me when I was being chased?” He’d used the GPS software he’d installed on my phone and car to find me then—as I assumed he had this time, too.

  “Given the intensity of your response, I was close to panic,” he said.

  Those words startled me enough that I looked into his impassive, inscrutable face. He was as impossibly collected as ever, and yet the speed at which he had arrived gave weight to his words, and I didn’t doubt them.

  Dorian Thorne, the ageless, powerful vampire. In a panic, for me.

  “I’m twenty-one, my family’s all dead, and I just recently nearly died, too, only to be saved by a vampire who seems to want my soul in exchange,” I said aloud. “I think I have reason to be disturbed, as you call it.”

  “I’m sorry, Cora. I don’t want to cause you pain.”

  His words were quiet, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of that old, haunted expression pass over his face. And it hurt me.

  I sighed. “I know. I’m just afraid that you’ll decide that you don’t want to cause me pain so much that you make it so I don’t feel it anymore.”

  He plucked the scrubber and cleaner from my hands, setting them on the counter, and pulled me to my feet. His touch set my whole body to humming, and I realized how much I had wanted it, how much I had missed it.

  I couldn’t make myself let go of his hand. The night before, I had almost—I couldn’t even finish the thought.

  Was I crazy then? Am I crazy now?

  “I won’t do that, Cora.” His free hand stroked my cheek tenderly, sending a bittersweet yearning through me, and I almost started crying again.

  “You wouldn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “For now.”

  “Ever,” he insisted.

  “What if I ask you to?” I whispered. “I don’t want to be changed. I don’t. But I don’t want to hurt, either, and I can be weak and stupid, and in a rash moment—”

  He kissed me, gently, stopping my words. My entire body ached at his touch, but I only stood there, frozen, like a rabbit that had seen a fox. “I won’t, Cora, I promise. Even if you ask.”

  He pulled my head against his chest, and I leaned into him, his strength supporting me. “Not even for your damned Adelphoi?”

  His arms tightened fractionally. “I do only what I must.”

  I whispered, “Must is such a funny word. If you do change me, the only thing you risk is your principles. I could lose myself.”

  I could feel his words in his chest as he answered. “Sometimes principles are the most important thing. Sometimes, they are the only thing.”

  “The only thing?” I echoed, looking up at him.

  His smile was disarming. “Between me and madnes
s.”

  I felt a slight chill because I knew, despite the lightness of his words, that he was deadly serious.

  “And you’re not mad,” I said, both a statement and a question.

  “Not yet,” he agreed. “And I never will be, as long as I have you.”

  How long would that be? I wondered. I wanted to demand why he hadn’t told me that the bond could be broken. But Dorian had been hiding it from me on purpose, and whatever reason he had, he might consider it one of those troubling cases of the greater good that I not find out or that I forget that I ever knew.

  I took a shuddering breath. With all my willpower, I disengaged myself from him and stashed the toilet scrubber and cleaner in the vanity, then wiped down the counter a final time. The ring of lime around the toilet was slightly lighter now, but it was still there.

  “Thanks for worrying about me,” I said, grabbing the kitchen trash can from the back of the room. I was surprised to realize how much I meant it. “It’s just a bit weird to have someone sense my feelings psychically and fly to my side. I’m not actually sure how much I like that.” I’d never grieve alone with him, not really, and sometimes, grief didn’t want to be shared. “But I’m glad you care.”

  “Of course I care.” He stepped out of the way so that I could leave the bathroom.

  “Would you, though?” I asked, going to the kitchen. “Without the bond, I mean.”

  “That’s like asking a human if they would love if they weren’t in love,” he objected. “It makes no sense.”

  I put the trash can in its place under the kitchen sink and turned to face him. “This isn’t the first time you’ve said that word. Love. What does it mean to you? What can it mean?”

  He stepped up to me so that I was trapped between his body and the sink, pulling me to him. “What does it mean to anyone, Cora? You tell me. What is this love that you want to talk so much about?”

  I stood there, in my Gramma’s kitchen, my body against this man, this falling angel or rising demon who had claimed me as his own. And I thought of my Gramma, Sally Lowden, who had given so much of herself.

  “Love is caring,” I said. “Self-sacrifice. Kindness. Patience. Connection. Compassion and sympathy.”