“That doesn’t take away from the fact,” Talisen argued, “that Neshi saved us all from Dylan, and if not for him, you wouldn’t be here.”
The queen’s gaze lit upon her, red-hot for a moment, and in the next, icy with old hatred. “His merciful gesture was but salt in an old wound. I have never minced words with him. He knows I will waste no opportunity to rid our world of him. If Badru can do this, I will deny him nothing, and neither will any of those in my demesne. I will spare no one who fails to yield to my decision on this.”
Ellory rose slowly, drawing Talisen from her chair with a gentle tug on her hand. He fixed a hot gaze on Freya, and even though his tone was respectful, Talisen felt territorial rage eating through his composure like acid. “I won’t stand by and watch my best friend be destroyed by that Cupid-faced leech. We’ll find Meical without your help.”
“Stop coddling her, you stupid nit.” Neshi strode out of a dark corner of Meical’s cabin. “You’ve been feeding her psychological dribble for a week. You have her eating out of your hand. Why do you hesitate to take it further than that?”
Meical turned his back on his creator and stared out his open front door at the night beyond his cabin. “It’s my business how I spend my time with her. Our sessions make her feel like she’s not wasting her gifts. It pleases her. Where’s the harm?”
“How long do you think you can keep up this charade in her dreams? You lose half the strength you gain trying to maintain the illusion. Make it real to her, Grabian. She must come to accept you in her waking hours.”
He eyed the moon and breathed in the fragrances of the night. They called to his deepest impulses. He could hardly wait for Caroline to fall asleep. She shared herself with him more generously each night, and in return, he made her dreamscape more lavish than the night before.
But Neshi was right. As long as he spent his energy fueling Caroline’s dreams, he would never obtain his full power. But her trust was too precious to risk, even for the sake of the truth.
Tonight he’d take her dancing at a ball. Dancing—yes, that was something no one else could give back to her. He’d populate the ballroom with every fictional character she loved and see that they swarmed around her, eager to bask in her company and answer her questions about their make-believe lives. Caroline would be happy in the midst of her imaginings tonight.
He cast a glance over his shoulder at Neshi. “As long as I have time to take it easy on her, I’m not going to rush her.”
The vampire sat down and propped his booted feet on the table. “But do you have time? You know as well as I do, you aren’t stable yet. Far from it. You’re still in transition.”
No sense in trying to lie. Last night he’d left Caroline completely spent, but he…he had scarcely begun to feed. He’d hardly been able to get through their therapy session today without kissing her.
He closed his eyes and flung his senses in her direction. He saw her in his mind. She looked so soft and sweet in the baby blue flannel shirt she was wearing tonight. Just that shirt and nothing else beneath…
“Can you tell me how you’re managing,” the vampire prodded, “or must I see for myself?”
Meical said in the most casual voice he could manage with the ache in his groin, “The vampiric symptoms come and go. Mostly I’m a little sensitive to the sunlight, a bit sleepy at midday, and…I can’t seem to…”
“Spit it out, Grabian.”
He turned and eyed Neshi, then the floor, then the ceiling, then Neshi again. “I can’t get enough of her.”
Neshi smiled slowly. “And this is a problem?”
Meical rolled his eyes. “There are limits to what she can handle—or did you take that into account when you turned me into a stag in rut?”
“So, expand your menu.”
Meical turned away again and leaned in the doorway. “No.”
“When you were a vampire, weren’t there nights when your hunger necessitated feeding on more than one human?”
“She’s different from other prey.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Neshi’s deep preternatural laughter echoed around the cabin. “By Ra, boy, you’ve fallen in love with her.”
Meical scowled. “What do you know of love, you blood-sucking carcass?”
“After three millennia, more than you can comprehend. Tell me about your sensitivity to the sun.”
“I’m more comfortable in the shade. The sun hurts my eyes.”
“Does your flesh burn?”
“Do I look like I’m going up in flames?”
“Stop dodging my questions. Does the sun cause you pain?”
Meical hesitated. “A little.”
“Well, if a ‘little’ becomes a lot, you must tell me. What about human food? Any problems there?”
Meical sat down at the table and shrugged. “It doesn’t agree with me as well as it did at first. Today I…”
“Couldn’t keep it down. Is that it?”
Meical nodded. He hadn’t been able to tolerate anything in his stomach, and yet he’d been hungrier than ever. For Caroline.
Neshi rapped his knuckles on the table, his face inscrutable as he regarded Meical. Abruptly he rose and came around to Meical’s side of the table. Before Meical could protest, the vampire wrapped him in a compulsion so deep he scarcely remembered to breathe.
He heard Neshi’s voice as though it came from the depths of the sea. “You’re craving blood. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Meical opened his mouth to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. His heart began to pound hard, and the ache in his loins throbbed until he groaned. His body, his very soul, told him that Caroline was now asleep. “It’s time for me to go to her.”
“Answer my question. Is it getting harder for you to resist drinking from her?”
Meical sighed. “I wanted to drink from her last night.”
The vampire snapped his fingers in Meical’s face, and his awareness returned to him fully. “Listen to me, Grabian, and listen carefully. If you drink blood before you get through your transition, you’ll revert to vampirism and be dead in twenty-four hours.”
Meical stared up at Neshi, half in denial, half in disbelief. “Are you saying this process you’ve put me through is that fragile?”
“Only during this time of transition.” Neshi’s gaze shifted away from his. “Among my past subjects, those who reverted to drinking blood before they got through their transition went mad. They were raving animals. I couldn’t have that. So I altered my formula and incantations to be sure no subject survived to cause trouble if they reverted to vampirism. If you can get through this difficult time, you’ll become a full incubus and blood will no longer tempt you.”
Meical ran his tongue over the roof of his parched mouth. Even now the thirst burned in his veins just as it had when he was a vampire. He had known moments, while loving Caroline, when he was half-mad with his hunger for her pleasure and his thirst for her blood. How could he resist it? How could he survive it?
How could she?
“Neshi,” he murmured, “if something goes wrong, you can rectify it, can’t you? That is, if I make a mistake…”
Neshi’s black-brown eyes glinted with impatience. “There may come a moment when I can’t help you. You’re not the only one for whom time is running out. I suggest you do your best to survive, Meical.”
Never had Neshi used his given name. Meical studied his creator’s face, made an attempt to penetrate the shield with which Neshi hid his emotions, but it was futile.
A pull on his very soul drew his focus away from all but Caroline. It was a sweet pain he’d grown accustomed to when she fell asleep every night. She had just entered the REM state. She was ripe for dreaming.
His hunger spurred him, and he shot to his feet and pushed past Neshi. “Got to go.”
The door slammed in his face before he reached it. He spun around to face Neshi, ready to tear the vampire apart.
The Alchemist lifted a warning finger
. “You’ve come far. You have only a little way to go before you’re fully changed. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Use all the willpower you can. Don’t drink from her. Do whatever you must to keep from doing so. The only balm for your blood thirst is her loving. It will soothe you through this time, if you will bring it into the light of day so that you can nourish yourself more completely. That is your one hope of survival.”
The ire drained out of Meical, leaving only resignation to the weary vigil over his hunger. “I’m not sure of my control.”
Neshi’s expression softened with the first sign of sympathy Meical had ever seen in him. “Incubi are not creatures of restraint. Their appetites are inexhaustible. And yet you are by nature a giver now, not a taker. You’re no longer a source of harm to her but pleasure. Remember that.”
Olek stepped into his dark house and flipped on the hall light. Twelve years worth of Caroline’s school pictures smiled back at him from the wall. Those were the days when all he’d had to do to make her feel safe was hold her in his lap. And what he couldn’t fix, her mother could.
Even after losing Midge, he and Caroline had done all right together. Her problems had seemed so small and easy then…
“A very bright and beautiful girl, your daughter.”
Olek’s breath deserted him as a man in a ski mask came out of the dark of the living room. He spun on his heels and fumbled with the doorknob. He tried to elbow the intruder, but the guy slammed him against the door and held him there.
Olek managed to catch his breath enough to spit out, “I’m not telling you where she is. You may as well kill me now.”
He felt his opponent’s gloved hand rip his sleeve. The man’s breath smelled like mint. “That won’t be necessary, and that’s fortunate for both of us, because I dislike unnecessary violence. It always causes me problems in the long run.”
The odor of alcohol reached Olek’s nostrils, followed by the icy swab of a drenched cotton ball along the inside of his trapped arm. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me. I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“I’m not even going to ask. You see, I already have a pretty good idea where Caroline is. But I want to make it as painless as possible for her. She’ll put up a lot less resistance if she knows I have you, Mr. Olek.”
There was the sting of the needle, and then the whole world went fuzzy. Caroline.
Burke bent close and whispered, “I give you my word, Mr. Olek. I’ll make it a clean kill.”
“I can’t believe it.”
Caroline laughed and shook her head as she surveyed the occupants of the ballroom. She and Meical had just entered, having been announced like royalty. They’d arrived by carriage, drawn by four perfectly matched black horses.
This was only a dream, all of it, but the reality and detail of it kept superimposing themselves on her senses. She seemed to be here, really and truly, in an imagined eighteenth-century gala of her own device, under the same roof with Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines, their families, friends and foes. It was as though her unconscious mind had dumped them sprawling out of the pages of each book she hoarded on her bookshelves.
Meical, dressed in his ballroom best, leaned close and murmured, “See anyone you know?”
She turned and grinned up at him. “It’s amazing. I recognize everyone here because they all look exactly how I imagined them. Look, there’s Mrs. Bennet herself.”
“One needn’t look to know she’s here,” Meical groused. “You surely heard her the moment we set foot in the room.”
“Do you think she’ll cause a scene and embarrass Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy?”
He shrugged, smiling. “I think that’s up to you. I’m just your escort for the evening—one who’s about to be replaced by the look of that rambunctious bunch headed our way. Is that your Mr. Darcy? You could’ve imagined him a little shorter and less good-looking, for my sake.”
Before Caroline could respond, the tall, dark and handsome hero of Pride and Prejudice bowed and requested the pleasure of a dance with her. Meical bowed and gave her a nudge from behind and away she went to partner the divine Mr. Darcy in a country dance that was just beginning. Never mind that she didn’t know the first thing about this dance they were about to do. As the orchestra began, the steps just seemed to come to her.
Incredible what the unconscious mind could supply when needed. And in a lucid dream like this, one had only to want something and it happened. She was in complete control here.
She danced with Mr. Knightley next, and then there followed a boggling procession of gentlemen, some of whom she only vaguely recalled from her reading.
It didn’t seem to matter that she couldn’t place them, for they were only too pleased to tell her exactly who they were and what novel they came from, and would even quote her the scene in which they made their debut in the story to which they belonged.
Between dances there was an opportunity to chat with all her favorite heroines. She even took a stroll in the fragrant, twilit garden with Elizabeth Bennet and all of her sisters. She took some punch with the Dashwoods and eavesdropped here and there to find bits and pieces of dialogue in progress, as though she were in the midst of a living recitation.
And all the while, whenever she needed something, Meical was at her elbow, quiet and unassuming, constantly attentive, and oh so perfect for the atmosphere. In fact, he was the epitome of what her imagination had conspired to reproduce in this dream. No one, not even Mr. Darcy, seemed as handsome, as elegant or as appealing to her as Meical did.
He spoke little and only to her. He asked but one thing of her, and that was to allow him the last dance of the evening. But when the time came for him to claim his dance, the dream changed.
Gone were the people, including the orchestra. Yet the music played more sweetly than it had all night. The chatter turned to silence, the happy chaos to peace. It was as though someone had deigned that she and Meical should be the only two people on earth. And no country dances or reels or anything of the sort would do. For the two of them, it had to be a waltz.
He swept her into the dance as though they were one person.
“You’re good at this,” she said, looking up into his twinkling gray eyes. “You’re really good.”
He laughed softly. “I doubt I’d be able to hold my own for long if this were real.”
If this were real…
The words made her wistful. “I could live here, you know.”
Meical laughed. “No, thank you. It’s too exhausting.”
“No, really. I’m always wishing I could have been born two hundred years ago.”
He shifted his gaze away from hers as they danced into a little pocket of darkness at the far end of the deserted ballroom. “You wouldn’t like the squalor. Or the cruelty. Or the ignorance. And certainly not the violence. There is a difference, you know, between fact and fiction.”
She studied his face, even though focusing so hard made her yawn. Under the light of the moonbeams that seeped through the curtains at this end of the huge room, his face looked pale. He looked weary, in fact. He was so serious all of a sudden.
The music abruptly became muffled, and Meical swayed on his feet a little.
Caroline caught his arm. “Whoa. Are you all right?”
“Too much wine,” he murmured with a shaky chuckle. “You really should dream up a less irresistible vintage. I swear, your Mr. Knightley and Colonel Brandon made fixtures of themselves at the punch bowl. Sots, both of them.”
Caroline laughed. “Let’s sit down. Come on.”
Taking his hand, she led him to one of the couches that lined the walls. Meical sank onto the couch.
Caroline looked around them at the darkened, empty ballroom. Her contentment bled away in the eerie shadows. “Okay, all the people can come back now. I promised Mr. Collins I’d listen to him go on and on about Rosings.”
When the ballroom failed to fill with people again, she held her breath and looked more closely around her. The wallp
aper had begun to lose details of pattern and color. Not only was the orchestra gone, but the very chairs in which the musicians had sat were nowhere to be seen.
The ceiling was fuzzy gray, the floor yawned and the windows seemed ever more like the swaying curtains that hung in them, filmy and in constant sickly motion.
Caroline swallowed, feeling almost bereft. “Wow. Maybe I’m waking up.”
“Or perhaps you wanted to be all alone with me.”
She smiled at him, until she felt the heat of his glinting eyes. Yes, he looked almost feverish. “You look awful. Maybe we’ve overstayed our welcome here in dreamland.”
“I’m sure you have it in you to give us a decent ride home.” He stood up and pulled her to her feet. “Come on. I think it’s this way.”
And as the words left his mouth, while Caroline was watching the floor and walls disappear around them, she suddenly found herself with him in their carriage again, speeding away across the moors, which seemed to be losing their color and shape with every imaginary mile they traveled.
She looked out the window at the miles of nighttime beyond them. There was a spicy, musky scent on the wind. She grinned. “Hey, it smells like you out here.”
“Imagine that.”
The carriage sped onto a stone bridge that stretched across an endless sea. The sky above seemed endless, too. There were two full moons to shine down on them, as if one wasn’t enough. The bridge didn’t end. It went on and on like a gray velvet ribbon until it disappeared into nothingness.
Caroline looked up to catch a glance at their driver, but there wasn’t one. The driver’s seat was deserted. The horses were there one moment, and in the next, the carriage was hurtling along on its own. Next the stars disappeared, and then the sea vanished. Only the bridge remained, stretching into nothing.
Caroline drew back into the stable confines of the carriage feeling dizzy and hot. “I feel…really weird…”
Meical smiled, wolfishly. “That’s because you’re sitting too far away from me.”
Incubus Page 14
