by Nancy Gideon
“I spent the afternoon in the circulating library, reading through books of folklore.” Then her confidence faltered with an endearing touch of innocence. “Do any of these things actually work?” And she looked to Louis for the answer of how to mount an effective defense against him.
His smile took a wry twist. “Oh, most assuredly. Silver is like a corrosive. We cannot touch it. The garlic we find extremely offensive, and the wood—I assume you mean to sharpen all of them—has immediate stopping power when one is impaled upon it.” He spread his arms out from his sides and offered gallantly, “Would you care to try out any of them on me? Or do you plan to wait until I am in a more helpless state?”
“You are not amusing, Louis.” She snapped that at him as her gaze worriedly assessed the full-length windows.
“I was not trying to be,” was his quiet reply. When she turned her attention back to him, he continued, “If you mean to destroy me, do it now. As I’ve said, I’m not much for surprises.”
Arabella pursed her lips and chided, “And you would just stand there and allow it?”
“I would assist you, if that was your wish. Is it, Bella?” He lifted the sharpened stake to place its point to his breast. “It’s not hard. We are creatures with incredible strength and power, yet we are amazingly vulnerable to such simple things. You could finish me with one blow.” And he pressed the heel of his hand against the blunt end until a dark dot of crimson formed upon his snowy shirt front. He kept his features expressionless. Arabella looked between his calm facade to that well of blood and with a dismayed cry, knocked the stake away.
“No! No, it’s not what I want.”
She leaned into him, her head bowed, her shoulders trembling, her hands clutching unsteadily at his. Gradually, he freed himself from her grip so that his palms could surround her face, lifting her head so he could kiss her with a slow, sweet fervor. She started to return the pressure, then wrenched away with a moan of confusion.
“Louis, please...” She was quick to reassemble her composure, wiping her cheeks with the flutter of her hands while backing away from him. His kiss was so disturbingly—human. She distracted herself from it by gesturing to her purchases. “So, what should I do with these amulets?”
“You can hang the casements with the herbs—you’ll forgive me if I don’t help. That should keep an intruder out.”
“I should have enough for all these lower windows.”
“Both floors and the attic.”
“Both—”
Because she looked so doubtful, he chose a visual explanation. He put his hands out slightly away from his body, palms up, and lifted them. At the same time, his feet left the floor, clearing the boards by several inches. And there he hovered until she was suitably pale with belief before lowering easily again.
“Both floors,” she echoed faintly.
“Takeo will see to it. You and I have things to discuss between us.”
Arabella glanced at him in alarm and reluctance, but she agreed with a faint, “Yes, we do.”
“Shall we go up—”
“No! Here is fine.”
Again, the small, cynical smile. “As you wish. Are you hungry? Would you like Takeo to fix you something?”
“No.” Then she gazed at him with a narrow suspicion. “And you, my lord? How is your appetite?”
“Under control. You need not fear I will give way to temptation and dine upon you, little one.”
His sarcasm was lost, for she skewered him with a look and drawled, “But you have, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So I would assume you were not in control, then. You must advise me of the difference between being in control and lacking it so I might know what to watch for.”
Humor was good, Louis told himself, even if it did bite like acid. It meant that she was trying to deal with the truth, and she was not going to make a cowardly retreat. And the significance of her statement was not unrewarding. It implied she planned to stay with him long enough to learn the subtleties of his state. Yet it was too soon to be confident. “So, you can have your stake and cross at ready, yes.” He sighed. “Bella, I am not a monster.”
Again, she pinned him with that unwavering stare. “All I know is the name of what you are and some superstitious folly that’s supposed to protect me from you. I do not know what to believe, Louis.”
“Believe that I love you, little one.”
That took her off guard and it made her angry. Because she did believe that, and she was upset by his familiar use of endearments, reminding her of their degree of involvement and intimacy. She had wed and bed a vampire—a monster, no matter what he claimed. She was upset as well with her own lack of resolve. Even as she feared him, she longed for his embrace. She needed an element of detachment with which to study the situation.
“Are you dead?”
He smiled. “Do I look like a dead man?”
She was quick to counter, “Is this how you really look or what you want me to see?”
“For a man who lived during the Medici rule in Florence, I do not look so bad. I have a marker in my homeland with the dates 1491 to 1515 upon it, so I should be dust, yet here I am. Do I not look real to you?”
The actual dates shook her. It made everything seem more impossible, yet more true. Arabella stared at him, trying to see beyond the handsome facade. What was behind there, behind the human illusion? Something monstrous? Something dead? Something she’d let touch and love her? She shuddered involuntarily, and he went very still, as if he felt her revulsion. And there, for just an instant, the image blurred and shimmered, a mirage, a dream she clung to, yet was without substance. But as soon as she began to perceive what was really there, he blocked the truth from her mind. She knew he did. And it infuriated her.
“What are you afraid I’ll see, Louis? Something horrible? Something that will send me screaming from you?”
His eyes darkened and canted downward. “Accept what is before you.”
“But it’s not real.”
His smile was sad. “You are not ready for that kind of reality. This is the form you are familiar with. It is me. It is how I looked when I still lived. Nothing has changed, nothing in three centuries.”
“What else are you? Show me if you are not afraid. What do you hide behind this pretty picture that’s meant to seduce and deceive by its beauty? Are you like a bog that casts the illusion of smooth green grass to conceal the fetid slime below until the unwary falls in and cannot escape its pull?”
“Bella, you don’t want to know.” He grew irritated with her insistence. Or was he simply afraid?
“Yes, I do. Show me, Louis. Show me what I’ve married. Show me what sleeps in a box downstairs and feeds off the blood of the living. Off my blood! Show me!”
“Is this what you want to see?”
And the change was so rapid and absolute, she could scarcely comprehend it. And it was horrible. She’d seen a shadow of it at her father’s office. The being she beheld was not the beautiful and elegant Louis Radman, but a frightening apparition of gaunt, pallid skin, eyes that gleamed red with a feral brilliance, thin, cold lips that curled back from teeth shaped like an animal’s fangs. He gestured to his face. Even his hands were different, pasty looking, with long, transparent nails.
“Is this what you prefer to look upon? Or maybe this?”
And he continued to shift and change, becoming something altogether alien—not human at all—with wolfen features and fur instead of flesh. But the eyes were the same: Those red, unholy eyes. Changing still, a collage of impressions, animal, rodent, awful.
Then pin dots of light enveloped him, flaring to a hurtful brilliance before fading to a thick, mobile fog, a mist that transfixed and surrounded her even as she started to cry out in terror. It felt cool, then burning hot against her ski
n, brushing like a caress, awaking a startling arousal of sensation from her. The power, the chill of death, the overwhelming helplessness that smothered her will.
Then his voice spoke close to her ear, within her mind, a cruel and tormented whisper, “This is what I am. Are you satisfied now?”
And Arabella swooned dead away.
SHE AWOKE WITH a groggy dizziness clinging to her senses. She was lying down, and it took only a moment for her to recognize her surroundings as those of her bedroom, and the figure at the foot of her bed as her husband.
It was Louis again, handsome, slightly melancholy of expression, watching her with a wary anguish. With a gasp, she sat up, clutching the covers as if they would afford a barrier against the horrors she’d seen.
“I’m sorry I frightened you.” How terribly sad and sincere he sounded. Then he smiled, and that was somehow worse. “But you did say we should have no secrets between us.”
“I want to leave. Let me go, Louis.” Her voice snagged upon a pent-up sob.
His somber mood deepened. “I’m sorry, little one, but you are safer here—at least for tonight. If you wish to go tomorrow, I cannot keep you.”
“Safer?” Her tone edged on the hysterical. “How can you say that?”
“I’ve promised not to harm you, Bella.”
Her hand lifted to the bandage at her throat. “And what do you call this if it’s not harm? You—you bit me. You drank my blood!”
“But did I harm you, Bella? Did I hurt you? Did I scare you?” He reacted in his own defense, letting his tone grow silky and his eyes take on that sultry green-gold smolder she found so irresistible. “You seemed to enjoy it at the time. All of it. Remember?”
At that quiet provocation, recall flooded back and she inhaled sharply in the possession of those sensually sizzling memories. His touch, his kiss, the pleasure, the desperate need to give him... everything. She panted slightly, her senses vibrating, alive with—him. Her body responded, tightening, trembling, moistening with a voluptuous dependence, with a yearning needful ache, with a wanting painful to endure. Her eyes closed as she surrendered to the magic, until the way she moaned his name in breathy desperation woke her mind to his manipulation. And she fought it.
“Stop,” she whispered raggedly, then more strongly, “Louis, stop!”
And the feeling ebbed and evaporated and she wanted to wail in protest at the emptiness that followed. The sense of separating from him was emotionally shattering. But Arabella held firm against the desire to weaken.
“Don’t, Louis. Don’t play tricks to cover what it is you do. You fed off my blood like some kind of—”
“Animal? Monster? Perhaps. But isn’t that the way of humanity, feeding off one another?”
“This isn’t a discussion of philosophy.”
“Forgive me. No, it is not. We were discussing a demon, were we not? An unholy and unnatural being quite deserving of all your hate and disgust.”
He withdrew behind a veil of indifference, his expression shielded and his eyes opaque. So wary. So vulnerable, despite all he would pretend. She could wound him with her words. She knew that. Because no matter what else he was, as much as he was capable of it, he did love her.
“So, let me try to understand,” she began with her analytical crispness. “You are dead, but not really dead. You live, but you are not alive. You say you will not harm me, yet you drain me close to death.”
He didn’t choose to reply.
“How often do you need to... drink?”
“At least once a week,” he answered matter-of-factly. “If I don’t, I grow weary and lose my abilities.”
“Is human blood the only kind that can sustain you?”
“I can take from animals, too, but it isn’t... the same. I don’t get the psychic stimulation from their blood, and I grow mentally sluggish after a time.”
“So you hunt the night and prey upon strangers.”
“Not by choice.”
She couldn’t help but draw the gruesome parallel and morbidly speak it aloud. “Is that why you married me? To lay in food for the winter?”
He was plainly shocked by her conclusion and began to pace in agitation. “Is that what you think? Is it? That I keep you here to feed off you? That was not my plan, Bella. It was never my intention to... touch you that way. I wed you thinking—foolish me—that all would be well, that we could live together in mortal harmony, that you need never know what it was I had been—and am again. I wed you out of extreme selfishness, because I could not bear to be alone, I couldn’t stand to think of an existence without you. I married you because I love you—for no other reason. If you cannot believe that, go now. Go home to your father and I will vanish from your life as if I had never existed.”
When she said nothing, he risked a glance at her. She regarded him with a pensive study that was not unsympathetic. She knew he didn’t want her pity. And he didn’t want her observing him as if he was some curious specimen strapped to her father’s table. Restlessly, he moved across the room in his smooth, effortless strides... until he passed the mirror. Then he stopped. And he lifted an unsteady hand to his face.
The strange sound he made brought Arabella from her defensive huddle to see what had his attention so entranced. She approached him cautiously, coming up behind him to peer over his shoulder. In the small cracked mirror, she saw him and she saw herself right through him. There was no solidity to his reflection. It was like a glass transparency.
“I am there, but not there.” His fingertips touched the fragmented surface, following the ghostly image he cast. “What does a man do with half a soul?”
Just as her hands were about to settle consolingly upon the slump of his shoulders, Louis spun away from the mirror and stalked the room. She watched him, hurting for his troubled mood, no longer afraid of him, but still far from comfortable with what she’d learned.
“Louis, what happened?”
He drew up and gazed at her mournfully. “Could you be a bit more specific, my love? Much has happened. What did you wish to discuss?”
“You were human when we wed, and when we first... when we first made love.”
“Yes.”
“But not now.”
“No.”
“Did my father’s work fail you?”
“We never had the chance to test it. There were problems, but we were searching for means to cope with them. We had hopes, and I still didn’t think you were in any danger from me. I’m sorry, Bella. I should have been more careful. I should have understood my enemy better.”
“Your enemy?” A dawning moment. “You went to see him. You went to Gerardo. Why? Because you came between him and that witch Bianca?”
A soft, deprecating laugh. “Oh, little one, that does no justice to the truth of it.”
“Then tell me the truth of it.”
He hesitated. The look of sorrow intensified in his expression, a look so deep and inwardly tormenting, she couldn’t help but respond. She came to him, stopping close, but not touching. He’d gone totally still, waiting for her next move. She didn’t think he was breathing. Did he need to, or was that an illusion of life, too?
Gradually, she reached out to where his arms hung rather limply at his side. She touched the backs of his hands. They felt warm and familiar, those big, gentle hands. Slowly, one finger at a time, he gathered her much smaller ones into the cup of his palms until her hands were secured within his poignant grip.
“It is a long and complicated story.”
“We have until dawn.” And she smiled slightly in encouragement. He smiled back, just a sketch of a curve, and lifted her hands up to lightly kiss them both. Then he held them to his face, pressing her palms to his taut features. She didn’t resist or recoil, but instead did a tender sweep of his chiseled cheekbones. And she swallowed
back a tremendous swell of emotion, wondering how this man could be a demon, this man she loved.
“We should sit down. You are still weak. Get under the covers and I will begin.”
Though reluctant to release him, Arabella was anxious to hear his tale, so she slipped into their bed, then was bemused when he perched upon the very foot of it, a world away from her. She said nothing because he was already far away from her—centuries away.
“I was born in Firenze, the only son of a Florentine grandi. I led an enviable life of plenty, a ricchi, a nobili. I studied all the noted scholars and artisans of the day and discussed philosophies with Machiavelli. It was a city of such unequaled beauty, a time of grace and elegance and culture, rivaled by no other. I was raised to believe there was no greater challenge in life than how to make an elegant spectacle of oneself without appearing to. One had to sing and play, recite verse, speak foreign languages, and dance with a spirit of sprezzatura. Gerardo always said I was too sober for our times. He was the soul of nonchalance. None could strut and swagger as well as he. He was such a joy to me. Were it not for his friendship, I would have most likely ended my days as a pondering recluse, content to argue the liberty and spirit of man with others as withered and inexperienced as I.” He drifted off into a reflective silence, looking back upon those times.
“He told me you were great friends.”
Louis glanced at her. His eyes glistened. “Did he? Yes, we were. He was of a lesser family, a mezzani of the popolo minuto; the common class, not truly suitable for my acquaintance. So greedy for the fine things, Gerardo was; uno appetito di grandezza. Perhaps that’s why he cared for me and endured my fits of introspection that drove him near to madness. Perhaps he coveted the life I was born to. I was not opposed to sharing it with him. Wealth is not something one enjoys alone. He was neither scholarly nor culturally inclined, but he had a zest for living that I quite envied. And he could always make me laugh. I loved him like a brother... right up until the day I killed him.”
Chapter Twenty
IN AN AGE WHERE beauty and blond hair won praise in verse and song, Bianca du Maurier conquered the romantic hearts of all the young courtiers. She appeared one evening on the arm of a merchant’s son and all of Florence was at her feet. She was witty and sensuous and mysterious; no one knew the slightest thing about her. She dressed like a queen and behaved like a clever courtesan. Gerardo Pasquale was in an immediate thrall of passion and it seemed none could resist her... none except a rather wary Luigino Rodmini. Which, of course, made him stand out within a crowd of many.
