Tainted Love

by Nancy Morse

  Tainted Love

  SoulSearchersBook II

  By Nancy Morse

  Copyright © 2014 Nancy Morse

  Cover design by Delle Jacobs

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  ***

  About this book

  Fledgling vampire Prudence Hightower feels her humanity slowly slipping away. The only thing that can save her is love. Not the tainted love offered by Nicolae, the vampire lover who forced his dark gift upon her, but the love of a mortal man—the pirate Stede Bonham. But Stede’s happy-go-lucky nature hides a secret that threatens to destroy Pru’s faith in love as surely as her mortality was destroyed by Nicolae.

  Without her, Nicolae endures life. With her, he can embrace it—if only she would forgive him for turning her into the undead. He aches for redemption and deliverance, but will not find it without her love.

  As the French tricolor is lowered in New Orleans and tempers flare between old world Creoles and brash Americans, the key to reclaiming Pru’s lost soul lies with an ancient witch inhabiting the body of a powerful voodoo queen. Can Pru trick the witch into chanting the spell that will restore her soul? Will a voodoo love potion win Stede’s love? From the mud-filled streets of New Orleans, to the steamy bayous throbbing with voodoo ceremonies, to the pirate stronghold of Barataria, Pru follows a tempestuous path into the heart of darkness and the love-hate relationship with the vampire who will never let her go.

  Tainted Love

  SoulSearchersBook II

  Chapter 1

  New Orleans, 1803

  “Death is only the beginning.”

  That’s what Nicolae said to her the last time she saw him. It was nine years ago in Paris. She and Papa had just emerged from the Salle des Cent Suisses where Breval had performed his Sonata in C Major for violoncello. The city was fragrant with cherry and apple blossoms, the cobbled streets lined with daffodils, and the trees along the Seine wore every shade of green. Unusual warmth lingered in the April air, and there had been no sign of the rain that came so frequently at that time of year.

  “Did you enjoy the concert, Papa?” she had asked.

  “Oh yes. Very much,” her papa had replied.

  Sensing an evasion, she questioned, “But?”

  He hesitated. “I do so miss the way our young friend played the violoncello. Oh, to hear it again. That would be heaven. Sheer heaven.”

  “That’s an interesting choice of words,” she had commented sourly. “Considering it is on his account that you and I shall never see Heaven.”

  “Now Pruddy,” her father had said in a conciliatory tone, “Nicolae only did what had to be done.”

  “I’ll thank you not to mention his name to me,” she had tersely replied. “Or have you forgotten what we are?”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “When was the last time you sat in the sunshine?” she asked pointedly.

  “When was the last time you enjoyed the beauty of the night?” he had countered. “Look around you, Pruddy. It’s a beautiful night. The moon is high and the stars are shining brightly.” He had drawn a deep breath into his lungs. “The air is warm and clear. And have you ever smelled anything so lovely? Why, all of Paris is blooming.”

  But Pru had ceased listening. Her gaze was riveted on a tall, lean figure across the square. Something inside of her froze, but it was not until he turned and saw those astonishingly green eyes from afar that the recognition slid like ice down her spine.

  How he found her she didn’t know. After leaving him for dead with a poker in his heart sixty-four years earlier in London, she had fled to Paris, hoping to put the whole sordid experience behind her, and had settled herself and her dear papa in a lovely little chateau just outside the city where their nocturnal pursuits would not arouse suspicion. How foolish she’d been to think she could destroy him. Oh, how she hated him.

  She had grasped her papa’s arm to turn him away, but the figure moved across the cobbled square like a swift dark wind and was suddenly standing beside them.

  “Nicolae,” James Hightower exclaimed. “What a coincidence. We were just talking about you.”

  Those green eyes lit up with typical conceit and a mellow voice spoke from out of the past. “My dear music master, what a pleasant surprise this is.”

  She had watched the exchange in tight-lipped silence. Coincidence? Surprise, pleasant or otherwise? Not likely. Of course papa would be delighted to see him. Unlike her papa, who had taken with a measure of alacrity to the exiled existence Nicolae had forced upon them, she found nothing cheerful in the dark and lonely existence to which they were consigned. In all these years she still had not gotten used to it. As if the darkness and the unsavory feeding habits weren’t enough, she was always so dreadfully pale that people were forever asking her if she was ill. And there he was, looking impossibly handsome and smiling that luminous smile of his as if nothing had happened to make her hate him.

  “You are looking well,” James had remarked.

  “Thank you. I was somewhat indisposed for a while.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “No, no. Just an unfortunate accident with a poker.”

  Nicolae had nodded courteously and turned to her then. “You look surprised to see me, Prudence.”

  He had always called her that. Not Pru or Pruddy. Prudence. So formal and polite, when there was nothing courteous or considerate about him. He was evil personified, a clever and cunning manipulator despite the devastatingly good looks.

  She studied that pale face. Did it seem a little crueler, or was it a trick of the street lamp? Through gritted teeth she told him, “I have no wish to see you after what you did to me.”

  His green eyes coursed over her. He smiled, a mere uplifting of one corner of his beautiful mouth, and said, “Death is only the beginning.”

  Wasn’t it just like him to be so haughty and cruel? “Come Papa.” She’d taken her papa by the arm and steered him away from Nicolae’s disdainful arrogance, sifting into the crowd, trying desperately to ignore the heat rising within at the memory of the nights she had shared with that monster, when she had actually imagined him capable of possessing a soul, what seemed now like a lifetime ago.

  She didn’t see him again after that. Perhaps he sensed what was in the air and fled Paris. Because soon after that fateful meeting people were having their heads lopped off at an alarming rate. Even the French king’s head wound up in a lunette. She’d been among the crowd in the square the day Robespierre himself, that master of terror, an intelligent but smug and self-righteous man, had ridden in the cart for his date with the guillotine to cries of “Down with the tyrant!” Master of nothing was more to the point when his head lay inside a bloody basket while his legs still wiggled behind him. The whole thing was quite distasteful.

  “You cannot kill what cannot be killed,” Papa had said in an attempt to assure her of their safety. But decapitation was a different matter for their kind—she’d never be
en able to bring herself to tell poor papa about that—and she wasn’t waiting around for it. So, as France sank further into debt and a reign of terror enveloped the republic, she and Papa packed their bags and fled Paris to the new world, settling first in Boston and then New York, and finally here in New Orleans, a city of splendor and secrets too deep to reveal.

  “Death is only the beginning.”

  Nicolae’s words haunted her even now, nine years later, when that Paris night was far behind her.

  The heat of the day lingered, but there was a breeze off the river on this August evening in New Orleans. Pru wrapped herself against the chill that had become so much a part of her as her footsteps took her through the seedy Vieux Carrè with its houses that looked more Spanish than French, and past the nine-pointed cross, a symbol of the voodoo religion, atop the Catholic church. Twining jasmine choked the brick walls all around her as she made her way across Rue Bourbon with no particular destination in mind.

  It was like that, wandering aimlessly night after night in pursuit of sustenance. She damned him for doing this to her. She could feel it growing stronger, the thirst that led her on these nocturnal hunts. At the beginning, all those years ago, she had tried to ignore it, foolishly thinking she could subvert it. But as the transformation took hold, the thirst grew stronger, until it was an overpowering force she had neither the will nor the wish to control.

  On this night her footsteps led her to the cemetery. The elaborate stone crypts and mausoleums lining the rows made the place look like a city of the dead. How clever of these people whose city was built on a swamp to put their dead above ground, lest buried caskets float away.

  It was an appropriate place for her to be. The narrow paths and tombs offered concealment for muggers, and she might find one that wasn’t drenched in liquor or didn’t stink too badly. But it wasn’t only for sustenance that she often found herself here. The quiet finality of the place brought a strange sense of peace and calmed her restlessness.

  Here she was, seventy-three years after she’d crashed through a window and been left for dead, when Nicolae had made her the unwilling recipient of his dark gift, and she was still struggling with her evolution from mortal to immortal. Her life had become more chaotic as her humanity slowly slipped away. The worst part of it was that she wasn’t more unsettled at losing that part of herself. It was funny really, how things that were once unthinkable became entirely possible when there was no choice in the matter. Nicolae had once tried to explain that to her, but she’d been mortal then and hadn’t understood. Now, to her unending regret, she did.

  She moved through the rows of tombs, some surrounded by rusted ironwork, running a pale hand over the stone carvings, reading the inscriptions, some in Spanish, some in French. Her acute eyesight fixed on the broken face of a stone angel on wrought iron and the carved head of a lion with a metal ring through its nose adorning one of the tombs. As she carefully picked her way through the twisted paths and over the brick and plaster strewn everywhere, skirting the crumbled corners of tombs jutting out like fingers to snag her pelisse, she stopped in her tracks. Only one such as she could have detected the nearly inaudible sound of a heartbeat and smelled the warm blood close at hand. With stealth-like cunning she crept silently forward and peered with cat’s eyes into the darkness.

  A man stood in the shadows at the foot of one of the tombs. For many long moments he did nothing. Then, leaning forward, he scraped a big X into the stone. He kicked his right foot backwards three times. Then he kicked the grave three times with his right foot. He knocked three times, turned to the right three times, bowed, and put his right hand over the X. His lips moved, and although his words were too soft to be heard by mortal ears, Pru’s astute sense of hearing made out the man’s secret wish. When he was finished, he left something at the foot of the tomb and was gone.

  Pru approached the tomb. At its foot were three pennies left as an offering to whomever…or whatever…was inside. She decided to follow the man who disappeared down the street and had no trouble picking up his scent on the wind.

  He didn’t know he was being followed as he made his way through the streets of the city, beyond the ramparts and out into the surrounding countryside. She followed him along the river road, past the levees on both sides of the riverbank, her feet treading noiselessly over the damp ground, past an old plantation house, through the hardwood forest and deep into Bayou Saint John.

  The sound of drums reverberated through the damp air and the orange glow that flickered through the trees grew brighter as she approached.

  In the glow of a campfire a group of slaves congregated around a tree in the center of a clearing chanting to the syncopated rhythm of the drums. A man cloaked in a black robe drew symbols in the dust with cornmeal and poured rum on the ground.

  A woman entered the circle and began to dance. She was beautiful, tall and statuesque, with curly dark hair and brown skin glowing red in the firelight. Faster and harder she moved with the rising pulse of the beat, while off to the side two men drew their knives and slit the throats of a black pig and a small goat and chopped off the head of a rooster. The blood from the pig and goat was sprinkled over the worshipers. The rooster’s blood was drained into cups of green liquid and passed around for everyone to drink. The animals’ bodies were thrown into a pool of bubbling mud. Many of the people jumped into the pond as well and came up drenched in the brown, oozing slime to join in the dancing.

  The woman who danced at their center looked to be struck by a severe blow at the back of the head even though nothing touched her. She collapsed on the ground as if in great pain, writhing, contorting her body and shaking uncontrollably while screaming for vengeance against all those who suppressed them. One of the dancers moved too close and brushed her with his foot, whereupon the others began screaming and fell upon the offender.

  The man shrank back in terror as the others surrounded him and grabbed his arms from behind. They dragged him to the nearest tree and bound him to it. His cries carried deep into the cypress forest. The drums stopped. The beautiful woman who danced lifted herself from the ground and turned her head in his direction. The firelight glanced off her face, and even Pru who watched surreptitiously from her hidden place and who had seen much of life that was other-worldly, cringed at what she saw. The woman’s eyes rolled back in her head until only the whites shone through the darkness. Moving like a blind woman in a trance-like step, she approached the man bound to the tree.

  Tears spilled from his eyes, leaving crooked little trails down his mud-caked cheeks. “No! Sabine! Sabine! No!”

  The tortured scream dissolved into deep-throated gurgles cut hideously short when the woman he called Sabine reached forward, her hand contorted, fingers spread like grotesque talons, and grasped him by the neck.

  Pru’s breath caught in her throat. Was it possible she had stumbled across another of her kind about to drain a victim? Except for Nicolae and Papa, she’d never met another immortal and drew forward with morbid curiosity. But what she saw next sent a wave of revulsion through her.

  In one swift motion the woman called Sabine pierced the skin of the man’s breast, and driving her fingers in with superhuman strength, she ripped out his heart.

  She turned to the others who stood in paralyzed silence and held up the bloody, still-beating heart in her palm for them to see. With a snarl of contempt, she bit into it, spit the piece to the ground and tossed the dead man’s heart into the mud pond where it landed atop the carcass of the slaughtered pig.

  Pru turned away in disgust. She’d heard about the voodoo ceremonies brought to these shores by slaves working the sugar plantations of French settlers in Saint-Domingue, but she’d never witnessed the terrifying ritual. She was reminded of the time Nicolae had taken her on one of his hunts and the sickness that welled up from her stomach at the sight of him feeding from another man’s throat. It was when all her illusions of him had been shattered and she saw him for the thing he really was. Vampire. The wo
rd itself filled her with revulsion. She’d never even heard the word until she’d gone to see an alchemist about the possibility of reclaiming Nicolae’s lost soul. The sinister little man told her something about reclaiming the soul through a witch’s chant, but she never imagined that she would need a witch’s chant one day for herself.

  She was about to leave that place on the bayou when she spied the man she had followed there break away from the crowd and melt back into the forest. In the confusion of dancing and drum beats and sacrifice and murder she’d forgotten all about him and the wish she had overheard him whisper at the cemetery. She felt the hunger begin to bubble hotly inside. It was time to hunt him down and make his wish come true.

  She followed him back to the city and through the angled streets. At the Place d’Armes she was glad to be a creature of the night and spared the spectacle of the public executions of disobedient slaves that were carried out in broad daylight. Was it her imagination, or could she hear the cries and moans of the dead as she hurried along?

  The man she was following stopped before the Ursuline Convent on Rue de Chartres. Pru glanced at the building. Except for the slightly arched windows and rustic cornerstones, it was plain and ordinary, with nothing about it to warrant more than a passing glance. Yet the man stood transfixed, staring up at the timbered walls as if they held some secret significance, before moving on.

  She passed by one of the few houses whose whitewashed brick was still intact, having escaped the fire that destroyed so many others nearly a decade before. She wrinkled her nose when her keen sense of smell picked up the lingering scent of ash and soot and shuddered at the memory of the distillery fire in London that had almost destroyed her and Nicolae all those years ago.