Dark Pleasures

by Aja James

  “You don’t have good memories there,” she stated rather than asked.

  He swallowed and gave her hand another squeeze, as if to brace himself.

  “No. I do not.”

  “We can stay at a YMCA if you’d rather not go,” Grace said, “I’m sure one will have a bed or some place on the floor available.”

  He loved her, he really did. And in moments like these, Devlin knew precisely why.

  “It’s fine,” he said again, as if repeating the words would make it so. “I have you. You’ll come to my rescue if I’m besieged by bad dreams or unhappy thoughts.”

  “I will try,” she stated solemnly.

  He gave her a small smile, which he almost felt, and brought her hand to his lips for a kiss.

  “We’re here,” he said as the cab slowed to a stop in front of an enormous gated mansion at Hyde Park Corner on Piccadilly.

  Grace got out without waiting for Devlin to come around and open her door, as she was mostly a New Yorker and never expected others to open her doors, and craned her neck way back to look up at the gigantic edifice which could easily be called a palace.

  “This is a ‘house’?” she breathed, awe-struck, “You lived here?”

  Devlin paid the cab driver and unlocked the gate, ushering Grace inside the expansive courtyard.

  “I resided here when I was human for a number of months each year when Parliament was in session, from October to June. The rest of the time I stayed at my family’s country estate.”

  “Estate,” Grace echoed. “Was your family an important one?”

  “You could say that,” he answered, “if you consider members of the English nobility important.”

  They entered through the stately front door. The building must have been hundreds of years old, older perhaps, than Devlin, but it was outfitted with modern security safeguards, and as Grace took in the interior, modern conveniences and décor as well.

  “We’re going to stay here, just the two of us?”

  “Yes.”

  His reply was clipped, and she could already notice the brooding tension within him, as if the house itself threatened him.

  “We’re not intruding?” she wanted to make sure, because it felt like they were in a museum and everything was priceless, despite the renovation updates she could see.

  “I own it,” Devlin said. “It’s used as a heritage museum, open to visitors most weeks of the year, but I called my estate manager before we got on the flight to close it to the public for the time being so that we’d have a place to stay.”

  He didn’t pause to look around, instead leading her directly up a flight of very long, very grand curving stairs.

  “It probably worked out for the best actually. We have a lot more privacy to conduct our mission from here.”

  There were paintings everywhere, some landscapes but mostly portraits.

  “Are these paintings of your family?” Grace asked, slowing her gait to look at some more closely.

  There were several paintings, larger-than-life-sized, of a beautiful, blonde woman whose eyes seemed to follow Grace as she moved along.

  “Yes.” His tone was curt.

  “Where are the paintings of you?” Grace was eager to see what Devlin looked like in his human life. Perhaps there were a few of him as a boy. She’d passed by a couple already that depicted a dark-haired boy and young man who looked nothing like Devlin.

  “There are none.”

  “Are they kept at the country estate or…I suppose you have more than one estate?”

  “There are no paintings of me anywhere,” he said flatly. “My parents never commissioned any. Perhaps even they knew that I would never inherit.”

  “But…” Grace didn’t understand.

  Even if Devlin’s human life was cut short, he must have been the age he looked now when he was turned. So somewhere in his twenties. His parents would have had plenty of opportunities to commission any number of paintings of him growing up.

  And he must have been a gorgeous little boy, a breathtakingly handsome young man, she thought. What parents wouldn’t want to capture his beauty and charm for posterity?

  He didn’t explain more, guiding her into a room at the very back of the house on the uppermost level. It was like an attic, but it was renovated into a studio office with a large, modern platform bed, and she could see the bathroom through a slightly opened door in the corner. There was also a small kitchenette with a portable stove and refrigerator-freezer.

  “Who stays here usually?” she asked, looking around.

  “My estate manager,” he answered. “He comes to London, from Bristol where he lives, to oversee things personally during the busiest tourist season in the summer. I had this outfitted for his convenience. He’s delaying his trip here by a week or so while we’re in town. That should be enough time for us to get what we need from Zenn.”

  “The fridge is fully stocked,” Grace noted as she opened the door to check, impressed.

  “I only hire the best.”

  She closed the fridge and turned to face him fully.

  “There’s so much I don’t know about you,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “You’re obviously very rich. You were born into English nobility. You had a family. And you hate being in this house.”

  “All true,” he confirmed, but didn’t elaborate. He wondered whether she’d ask the questions that were on the tip of her tongue, whether she’d scratch the itch of her curiosity.

  She regarded him unblinkingly for a long time, as if she were trying to puzzle him out just by looking at him. But then he saw the tiniest shrug, just a nudge of one shoulder really, to indicate that she wasn’t going to pursue his past.

  At least not today.

  “Shower first or set up our tech?” she asked, refocusing their attention on the mission.

  “I’ll set up. You go freshen up,” he decided, relieved more than he could say to have something other than his disaster of a history to concentrate on.

  Two hours later, they agreed on the plan of attack.

  Tomorrow, they would visit Zenn’s HQ for reconnaissance to take note of the security protocols and assess the number and quality of guards. Grace had already retrieved the building blueprints from secured archives, though not secure enough to prevent her infiltration.

  “I feel like I’m in a movie, not real life,” Grace confessed when they finally called it a day and settled in bed after a light repast. “Mission Impossible or Jason Bourne or James Bond. Ones of those action thrillers. In times like these I’m glad I’m not quite normal. A normal person might have a heart attack.”

  Devlin was amused for the first time since they’d arrived in London.

  “I’m glad you’re not normal,” he said, pulling her closer. “You’re my kind of unique.”

  She propped her head up on her hand and looked down into his face.

  “I want to find out the truth about my parents, but what are you planning to find about…what was that entity’s name again?”

  “Medusa,” he supplied darkly. “Anu Medusa. Although she’s only referred to as A. Medusa in almost all of the documentation that connects her. She, or a conglomerate she controls, owns Zenn, one of many such companies in her portfolio. She also has majority stake in several biotech and genetic engineering research facilities.”

  “Everything we’ve been dealing with as a race, we Dark Ones and our allies, points back to her. She’s at the nexus of much chaos and destruction, most of which humans aren’t yet aware. But I don’t think her intention is to stay in the shadows for long. We need to stop her before she launches full-scale open war.”

  “Why is she doing this?” It seemed a logical question to ask.

  Devlin shook his head. “I’ve researched my race’s histories meticulously. The last time there loomed such a threat was the Great War between my Kind and the Pure Ones, a race similar to mine but also different in many ways. There are many of the same patterns today as there wa
s millennia ago. But whereas the Great War started because the Pure Ones rose up to fight for their freedom from Dark Ones’ rule, what Medusa is stirring is sinister. Evil.”

  Devlin took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I’ve seen it first hand, this evil. The world has known quite a few dictators in the last few centuries. It’s a voracious, unqualified greed for power. It’s about domination and fear. We have to stop her.”

  Grace briefly reflected with awe on the strange, surreal universe she’d landed herself in by associating with Devlin. Even if they parted ways in the future, she’d never look at the world the same way again.

  Mythical monsters, legendary heroes, vampires and shadow demons apparently did exist. It was a lot to take in for a human woman who liked to manage her life just so.

  “I knew I had to help you,” she said simply. “I could tell you’re one of the good guys.”

  He quirked his lips. “Depends on whose perspective you take.”

  “From any perspective,” she emphasized firmly.

  He looked into her eyes with a small smile. “I don’t think the humans whose blood and souls we sometimes take as fuel for our bodies would agree with that assessment.”

  “But you’ve taken my blood,” she argued. “I don’t feel any ill effects.”

  “Because I stopped when I needed to. Not all vampires would.”

  “That’s why you’re good, Devlin,” she reasoned. “Whether you are a human or a vampire, or whatever else you might become in the future, you’re always one of the good guys. Because you’re you.”

  But was being good the same as being lovable? Devlin wondered. Where his family and his fiancée had been concerned, it hadn’t paid to be good.

  Or perhaps something was simply wrong with him, and that was why he was surrounded with, and attracted to, people who didn’t—couldn’t—love him.

  “What are you thinking about?” She stared deeply into his eyes and seemed troubled by what she saw.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured, pulling her down to him for a heady kiss, trying to take his mind off of hurtful thoughts.

  She responded readily, her body immediately aflame for him.

  Ravenously, they made love. Then again slowly, losing themselves in a simmering pleasure that warmed them from the inside out.

  At last they slept, limbs entwined, bodies joined. There were no hauntings from the past for Devlin this time. Only dreams of Grace.

  But Grace…

  Through her blood still unfurling inside his body, communicating with the blood inside her own, she saw everything.

  All of his memories, pain and self-doubt. Including his ill-fated visit to the new Duchess of Devonshire in this very house.

  June 1814. Devonshire House, London, England.

  Devlin waited until her latest lover unhurriedly left, after performing his services in the Duchess’s bed. Her chair, the Aubusson carpet, and back again in the bed.

  This one was different from the one a few days ago. There had been four different men in the two weeks that Devlin had staked out the house, watching, assessing, deciding.

  But William never visited the Duchess’s chambers.

  It had been a month since his return from the Continent, since the end of the Peninsula War. He’d continued to collect intelligence for the English after his…rebirth, never revealing his identity. His efforts had helped the Allied forces rout Napoleon in a decisive victory at the battle of Toulouse and the capture of Paris.

  He’d discovered new powers as a vampire in the process, including an eidetic memory, only more precise.

  He’d always had a good memory and was able to store an inordinate amount of knowledge in his insatiable mind. But now he recalled with perfect detail everything he saw—faces, words, pictures, places. Even symbols and languages he didn’t understand.

  He supposed this was what the Greek had meant when he said that Devlin would take on some version of his Gift.

  He’d debated coming back to England. There was nothing for him here. The old Duke, his father, had died in a hunting accident a year after his own “death.” William was now the Duke, Lavinia his Duchess. Devlin wanted nothing to do with either of them. Not revenge, not justice. Nothing.

  And yet here he was, lurking behind Lavinia’s sitting room door, with an unobstructed view to her bedroom and everything—everyone—in it.

  She was now sitting at her vanity, brushing out the tangles in her long, golden curls. Her lady’s maid always made herself scarce when she knew her mistress was entertaining, so Lavinia tended to her own toilette this night.

  She was more beautiful than ever. Even after giving birth, not once but twice.

  An heir and a spare were already ensconced in the nursery, keeping the nurse and housemaids busy.

  Ironically, the heir looked nothing like his father, instead taking solely after his mother, all golden curls and big green eyes. The spare didn’t look like William either, though if one didn’t look too closely and the boy was camouflaged by shadows, one could perhaps make a tenuous connection. In full sunlight, the boy’s brown hair had fiery undertones and his fine, delicate features had no trace of William in them.

  He looked rather a lot like lover number three.

  William didn’t seem to care. He and Lavinia treated each other with cool regard. They kept up all the social graces and dined together always for breakfast. During which half hour words were seldom exchanged.

  William then went off to his Clubs and Parliament, the races and his mistress’s apartment not three blocks from the house, and Lavinia went off to shopping, paying social calls, rides with ardent beaus in the latest chariots. The most recent trend tended toward cabriolets, a special import from France, now that the war was over.

  In the evenings, they might attend some of the same amusements, but usually arrived separately and hardly even greeted one another at the same party. For the most part, they lived entirely separate lives and seemed content to keep it that way.

  At least, there seemed to be no seething resentment or overt disdain. They each seemed satisfied with their part of the partnership.

  They each got what they wanted: William, the title, all its wealth and privileges, and the most beautiful and coveted woman in England as his wife; Lavinia, the title, wealth and privileges, an undemanding husband and continuing reign as Queen of the Season and Belle of the Ball.

  Her parties at Devonshire House were famous for their elaborateness and flair, not only in England but on the Continent as well.

  Without fully realizing what he did, Devlin quietly approached Lavinia, edging across the darkened room where the candlelight from her vanity and bedside table did not touch.

  He was not three feet behind her to the right, his dark clothes blending in with the dark colors of the velvet draperies half drawn over the beveled glass French doors of her balcony.

  “Lavinia.”

  Her name was but a whisper, but she stopped her brushing and lowered her hand. Her eyes slid to a corner of her vanity mirror and unerringly met his gaze in the near darkness of her chamber.

  “Are you a ghost attempting to haunt me?”

  Her voice was calm and low. She did not seem surprised to see a man in her bedroom who was supposed to be dead.

  Whom she’d urged others to murder.

  “I have no interest in haunting you,” Devlin answered, taking one step closer to the flickering candlelight, revealing more of himself to her unblinking perusal.

  “Since I am no ghost.”

  She took him in leisurely from top to bottom, an appreciative glint entering her eyes as she did so.

  “No, I can see that you’re not,” she murmured silkily. “What is it you want then, pray tell?”

  “Why did you do it?” Devlin got straight to the heart of his misery. “Why did you and William do it?”

  With a flick of his hand he threw the two incriminating letters on the carpet at her feet.

  Slowly, she
reached for them, and just as leisurely, she took them to the low-burning fire in the grate opposite her bed and tossed them inside, without reading the contents. The letters quickly disappeared in the flames as if they’d never existed.

  “You made me wait,” she answered finally, turning to face him. “I am not a patient woman. It took me the better part of a year to land you and then you went off to that stupid war and made me waste the best time of my youth waiting for a soldier who might never return.”

  Her volume increased as she spoke, the frisson of anger in her tone building quickly into rage.

  “Do you know how many proposals I turned down while I waited that first year? And all anyone wanted to talk about was my heroic, dashing soldier of a fiancé. Who risked all to fight for his country, his love.” Her emphasis on the last word could only be termed as derisive.

  “You were the heir to a Dukedom! You were supposed to behave like one! But no, I understood from your letters all your misguided notions of saving your country and duty and blah blah blah.”

  She turned away, and her voice quieted again.

  “And I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake. You were as strange and awkward as people said you were. You didn’t behave as a normal man should. But I was taken in by your beauty, so perfect and bright. I wanted it.”

  She could have been speaking of the latest Parisian fashions, Devlin realized, her tone was just as covetous and detached, as if she were talking of possessing a thing instead of a flesh-and-blood man.

  “But I could have never controlled you,” she continued, still facing away from him. “You had all these righteous ideals. You probably expected faithfulness in marriage when it’s simply an alliance, a business arrangement. You were already doubting me, I could tell. Doubting what we had together. You would have found a way to cry off our engagement when you came back from the front. If you came back.”

  She turned so suddenly and fired without warning that even Devlin’s honed reflexes couldn’t avoid the bullet that embedded itself in the muscle and sinew of his upper chest, near his left shoulder.

  The impact and shock of being shot made him stagger a step backwards, but he remained standing, otherwise unmoved.