by Nancy Gideon
“I like your stubbornness too much to humble you.”
“Then stubborn I shall be. And your lover I shall be. And I shall share with you all that I am, all that you need me to be.”
Louis took an unsteady breath. What she was offering humbled him and, at the same time, made his bloodlust rumble. Imagining how it could be sent a tremor of anticipation growling through him. Arabella: His love, his wife, his slave. Tending his needs for companionship, for shared affection, for sensual gratification, tending to the hunger. Kissing her, caressing her, loving her, drinking from her, all part of one exquisite ritual of desire. The taste of her passion on his lips, gliding hot and renewing down his throat. Her love sustaining him. He couldn’t envision anything so perfect as that.
Unless he was careless. Unless the intensity of the moment carried him away and her to an uneasy grave.
“I need to go see your father. He means to start the treatments again. Perhaps this time, the success will take.”
Arabella said nothing. She was shamed by her need to tell him that if mortality meant losing the beauty they’d just experienced, she preferred him as he was. But that was such a selfish desire, she didn’t speak it.
“I should go now.”
But the moment he made to rise, Arabella clung to him, her words filled with urgent inflection. “Louis, stay with me. Don’t go. Stay this night with me, just you and me, together. I—I need you so.”
“Bella, my love—”
“Louis, please? I want this night with you to be without fear. Hold me. I want to fall asleep with your arms around me, knowing you’ll be safe when I awake. Please. Go see my father tomorrow. Let the devils wait out there. You’re mine tonight. Let nothing interfere.”
Silence, then a quiet, “All right.”
“I love you, Louis.”
“Go to sleep. I’ll watch over you.”
And he held her and guarded her. And later, he woke her and loved her sweetly, with all the tender passion in his heart. And when she drifted off to sleep a second time, so did he, carelessly entwined upon the big bed in mortal sleep where dawn could find him.
“BELLA, THE CIRCLE! You must break the circle!”
Arabella woke with a sense of confused urgency. “Louis? What is it?”
“It’s dawn. Break the circle. The daylight must not find me!”
But even as she sat up, she saw that it was too late. There was a part to the drapes, and through it streamed a broad ribbon of morning, flowing like an invisible barrier across the width of the bedroom, a barrier Louis could not pass even if he could escape the consecrated circle she’d drawn around their bed the night before.
“Close your eyes. Don’t look at it.” And, as he obeyed, she pulled the covers up over him even as she grabbed for his silk robe. Belting it about her, Arabella took a cloth from the washstand and vigorously scrubbed away the sacred line that trapped him as dawn brightened the room about them. Then she ran to draw the heavy drapes tightly together, sealing in a semi-gloom. She could hear the rasp of his breathing as she returned to the bed. “Louis, are you all right?”
“Hand me my clothes.” His voice was unnaturally hoarse as she did as he commanded. He stayed under the sheet, wrestling into the tunic and trousers. “Bella, stay back from me. I don’t want you hurt if—”
“If what?”
“If I should go up in flame.”
“Up in—” Distress and denial held her fast, then she disregarded caution as he slid out from under the covers.
“Bella, no!”
She took up his hands and tucked them within the folds of the robe. She was remembering the way his fingertips had smoldered. “We must keep the light off exposed skin.”
He was trying to pull back. “Bella, you’re risking—”
“Hush! We discussed this last night, Louis. I will not lose you, and I’m not afraid to do whatever must be done to see you safe. Remember, you said you liked my stubbornness. And,” she concluded with an iron-laced quiet, “if you go, I go. But I would prefer to get us both safely below. Come, my lord, hide your pretty face, lest it be scorched.”
For a moment, almost a moment too long, he stared up at her, his eyes huge and luminous. Then he ducked his head and allowed her to draw his face up against the concealing warmth of her bosom. Not an unpleasant hiding place, by any means. They moved slowly together across the room, not pausing even when he gave a sudden gasp as bare feet they’d forgotten stepped through the beam of sunlight.
In the darkness of the hall, he straightened. She could see the effort of composure lining his face. He looked gaunt and worn beneath a sheen of perspiration and was frowning at the sight of yellow light pooling in the lower foyer from the uncovered transom and sidelights on the door.
“Louis, what shall we—”
But before she could finish with her concern, he vaulted lightly over the stair rail and jumped with an almost weightlessness, floating to the shadowed hall below. She stared after him, shaken by his demonstration of mastery of space and suspension. He looked up, his eyes glowing golden in the dimness.
“Bella, come down.”
Judiciously, she took the steps.
In the dark inner corridors of the house, Louis was able to move freely, just as he would during the night. He spent some minutes observing his translucent reflection in a small mirror in the dining room until Arabella slipped her arms about him from behind and pillowed her head against the tense line of his shoulders.
“As long as a part of me remains there in the glass, a part of me remains here with you in this world.” He gathered up her hands in his and clutched them tight.
Part of you will always remain with me, Louis.
The feel of her love weaving about his conscious mind with the internal whisper of those words pleased him. And suddenly he wasn’t sorry he’d initiated her with his kiss. The closeness, the kinship, was satisfyingly intimate. He relaxed and let her home in on his emotions, let her attach her fledgling sensitivity to the tenderness within him. And he heard and felt her sigh of contentment. Could she be happy with him? He wondered and he hoped and he wished it could be so. Because he had never felt as satisfied with his life as he did now.
Mistress Arabella, might I fix you some breakfast?
She looked to Takeo with a smile upon her face. Such a soft, gentle voice he had, like the voice one would give an angel. “Thank you, Takeo. I believe I would. My lord, will you sit with me awhile, or do you need to go below?”
“I’ll sit with you. I am not uncomfortable.”
“Louis—”
“Well, it is a tolerable discomfort. I will endure it to spend time with you.”
As he walked with her to the head of the table, she noticed his uneven gait and glanced down. She gasped. “Louis, your feet!”
“It’s nothing. They will heal.”
Nothing, he said. She couldn’t believe that. “Sit down and let me look at them.”
He smiled patiently as she pushed him into a chair and knelt to draw one foot upon her lap.
“Oh, Louis.”
The top of his foot was a mass of blistered flesh and the bottom cooked nearly raw. But he was studying her face with an odd bemusement, as if he felt nothing beyond a curious gratitude for her care.
“Takeo, bring me some cool water and some clean linen.”
“Bella, it will be fine. The burns will be gone by the time I rise up again.”
“But they must hurt you, and if poisoning sets in—”
“My love, you forget, I am immortal. Such things are only a temporary annoyance.”
Despite that claim, his heel gave a hearty jump atop her knee when she applied a cool wrap to it. He sat stoically and let her tend him.
“All this from the brush of the sun. Louis, you must be carefu
l. Do not flirt with the danger of it. It would quite destroy me to see you reduced to the consistency of fireplace ash.”
“Delicately put, little one, and it would not please me, either. Stop fussing, cara. There is nothing more you can do for me. It is unnatural flesh. It doesn’t respond in the way of mortal tissue.”
She was massaging the taut calf of his leg with worried strokes. “Is there nothing I can do to ease the hurt?”
“The powders.” He was thinking of the way in which Howland cured the silver burn in his palm and he spoke aloud without realizing.
“What powders? Those my father mixed for you?”
“They counteract the toxic effect of sun and silver on me. They alone are what keep me here with you in the light of day. Elsewise,” and he smiled somewhat grimly, “I would be fireplace ash. But I have no more, and he was going to prepare some. I will have him look at the burns tonight.”
“I’ll get some from him while you rest.”
“Bella,” he began, in a cautioning tone.
“I need to speak with him, Louis. To explain certain things.”
“I do not wish you to go out alone. Danger walks in many forms.”
“Then let’s go. Let’s leave this place and the danger behind. While you sleep, I will pack up all we own and we can be gone before they know where to look. Maybe to America. You said you would like to see it. With Takeo and me to watch over you, the trip would not be perilous to you. And we—”
“Could be safe? Not forever, Bella. As I said, it is a small community through which word travels fast. They would find us again. Gerardo will not stop until he has destroyed me.”
“Then destroy him first!”
His answer to her appeal was candid. “I don’t know if I have enough strength.”
“Then run with me.”
“I have run for three hundred years, Bella. Now I have reason to stay. If I leave, I will never have a chance to walk as a man again.”
“I don’t care.”
“Bella—”
“I don’t, Louis. I don’t care if you lie with me in our bed at night, or sleep alone in a box by day. I will not lose you. Who’s to say another transfusion will work any better than the last? That it would not prove fatal this time? I would rather have you as you are than not have you at all. I’m sorry if that is selfish. I have waited too long to know a love such as yours. I value it above all things. All things, Louis. Please come with me. Live out my life with me.”
“Bella, I will not grow old. You are asking me to watch you die while I stay forever young.”
She hadn’t thought of that. And thinking of it brought up the obvious alternative. “Or I could stay unchanged with you.”
He drew a pained breath. “Bella, you would share damnation with me? Please, my love, think on that very carefully before you consider a road to darkness.”
Because she could see it upset him, she let it drop for the moment, glad Takeo had arrived with her meal. As she ate, she watched Louis begin to weave in his chair as his senses eased into their natural daytime dormancy. He was blinking slowly, clearly struggling to stay alert.
“Louis, lie down. Refresh yourself while I go to my father. I’ll ask him to make up an abundance of the powder, enough to last you a journey and beyond, if we’re forced to take one. Then we’ll talk and decide what is best to do.”
“Takeo, go with her.”
Master, my place is with you!
“Your place is where you are best served. None can get to me when I’m at rest, yet once Arabella leaves the protection of this house, she is at the mercy of many things. Go with her. See she is safe.”
AND AS HE SETTLED back into the familiar folds of his belowground bed, feeling the soft press of his wife’s kiss even as his eyes closed, he remembered what he needed to tell her. That Bianca and Gerardo could still work their evil during the day through the hands of their servants. That she must beware. But his eyes were heavy and his heartbeat was slowing and speech was beyond him.
And he slept with the warning unspoken.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I WAS WORRIED.” Stuart Howland followed up that claim with a crushing embrace. “Are you all right, Bella?”
“Yes, of course.” But her reassurance didn’t keep him from examining either side of her throat. Her voice chided gently. “Father, that isn’t necessary.”
“You wouldn’t say so if you knew—”
“I do know.”
Howland stepped back, his features blanked with surprise. “He told you.”
“Everything.”
“And you’re leaving him?” That hope quavered.
“No.” Aware of Bessie Kampford’s curious hovering and Takeo’s silent shadow, Arabella took her father’s elbow. “Can we discuss this in your study?”
“Can I bring you anything, Miss—Madame?”
Arabella smiled at Bessie’s eagerness. “I’ve already breakfasted, but some hot tea would be nice. Thank you, Mrs. Kampford.” Then she was tugging on the doctor’s arm.
Once the solid doors closed with Louis’s servant standing guard outside them, Stuart turned to her in a severe mood. “You know what he is and you choose to stay with him.”
“You knew what he was when you allowed me to marry him.” When he flinched at that curtly spoken truth, she softened her tone. “He is my husband. My place is with him.”
“Bella, he is—”
“The man I love!”
“The man he was died three hundred years ago.”
“You brought him back to life,” was her calm argument. “You brought him back to me. I will not let him go again.”
He regarded her in disbelief. “How can you say that, knowing what you do?”
She stared back at him without a flicker of regret.
“Bella, Wesley’s dead.”
She blinked at that.
“I see he did not tell you everything. Radman killed him.”
Louis killed him.
Arabella reeled in a moment of realization. Listening to a tragic story centuries old had a romantic appeal, but hearing the grim fact of the death of someone she knew at the hands of the man she loved.... She was tortured by a brief vision of Wesley Pembrook struggling in Louis’s grip. She could imagine his terror at the sight of the fangs, at the feel of the bite, as the blood was being drained from his body. And Louis, the man who’d kissed her and loved her, emptying another human being of life so his could continue. Drinking blood. Swallowing another man’s soul. Her fingertips pressed to her lips as a queasy sickness swelled within her on the tide of a cold despair. She shuddered helplessly. Louis Radman was not human. He was not a being through whom natural life flowed. He was a killer, a killer of innocent people.
But Wesley hadn’t been innocent.
She clung to that with a saving desperation, able to face her father with crisp fact. “Wesley was trying to destroy him.”
“To save you.”
“From Louis? Louis loves me. He would never consciously hurt me.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen how you looked when he brought you here, pale as a ghost and nearly dead.”
“But he brought me here, didn’t he? Father, it wasn’t his fault.”
“Bella, I’m not talking fault. I’m talking fact. Perhaps he killed Wesley to save himself. Perhaps it was some regrettable accident that had you close to death. But those things don’t excuse what he is. What he is is a vampire. And what he does is kill. Relentlessly. Week after week, year after year, decade after decade. He is not a man. He has no soul or conscience.”
“Yes, he does!”
“Bella, he murders and he drinks the blood of his victims. And you are going to live with him, knowing that? Letting him come home to you after he’s bee
n out on the street, hunting and killing his prey? You’re going to accept that he’s coming to you with another’s blood on his hands and in his veins?”
Her jaw firmed and her eyes narrowed. “I don’t care.”
And her father took a step back, aghast. “How hard he’s made you already. Or is that Radman talking through you? I don’t like to believe my daughter could throw off her concern for human life.”
Arabella had to turn away as her eyes welled up with anguished tears. Because she did care. She could try to pretend she didn’t, but it was a lie. She could accept what Louis was, but she didn’t know, deep down, if she could handle what it was he did. She didn’t know if she could let him come into her arms warmed by the stolen life of another, without thinking of whom he’d taken into his fatal embrace: a young man with his future before him, a woman with children at home, a father providing for his family? And she knew right then she could never join Louis in his nocturnal existence. She could never develop the indifference or the desperation to do what must be done for her to survive.
She looked back at her father, her stricken expression saying it all. Wordlessly, he hugged her up to him and let her sob against his shoulder. “I love him, Father. I love him so. Please help him. Please find some way to cure him!”
And his tone was all tender assurance. “I will do my best, child. I will do my best.”
She was under control again by the time Bessie brought in the tray with its fragrant hot tea, and she sipped from her delicate cup while it trembled in her hand. Takeo had slipped into the room and stood well back behind her chair and as incongruous as possible. She looked back at him and smiled, gesturing to the pot of tea. He shook his head, his black eyes fixed on her father.
“Who is the boy?”
“He’s Louis’s.” She said only that, not knowing what else to add to explain Takeo.
Stuart rose up and went to circle the Asian youth. Takeo stood placidly, but Arabella felt his inner tension and defensiveness, especially when Howland took up his wrist. He jerked his arm back violently.
