His fingertips found the burnt patch of skin under her left ear and she jerked away. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I don’t know you.”
“No, you don’t.” He stood back and sat on the edge of the tub, his eyes locked on hers.
She felt her breath leave through her open mouth in a rush. “Did you do this to me?”
“I’ve never touched a woman to harm her.” He took her hand, deposited the soap on it, and closed her fingers around the bar. “You can finish by yourself now.” With a single movement, he stood and went outside the bathroom, but instead of closing the door behind him, he turned his back to the frame and leaned against it. “What’s your name?”
“Diana Valente. What’s yours?” From the tub, she could study him and wash herself in relative privacy. Despite his casual tone, he was tense judging from the way his body barely touched the doorjamb, his back straight, his shoulders straighter. He was looking at a window facing the hallway. Outside, red tiled roofs, terraces, and terracotta vases filled with the latest blooms of the season framed another sunny day in Rome.
“Marcus Sulpicius Aurelianus at your service.”
She saw his shoulders raising and lowering as if he were softly laughing. “Quite the name.” She passed the soap between her legs and then over her breasts. Her skin tingled.
“Can’t change it.” His words were tinted with a dark undertone.
She pressed her hand over her belly, a sudden queasiness making her stomach contracts. “I have to ask—”
He stilled.
“What happened to Virgil?”
“He’s dead.” He turned, his massive frame filling the entrance to the bathroom, making the view from the window disappear.
“Did you kill him?” Her fingers dug into the soap, her nails embedded deeply into the bar. She waited for him to answer, the rising nausea difficult to ignore.
“No, I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I tried to save him. I needed him alive.” He walked inside the bathroom, not more than a step, but the place seemed too crowded already.
His eyes were roaming over her, from the top of her head to her toes. She noticed the chipped black nail polish on her toenails and lowered her feet under the water. Yesterday or the day before, she had asked for the black French manicure. The nail job had looked elegant when matched with the strapped sandals. Now, it only looked cheap. Marcus stepped closer, removed a white cotton robe from a hanger inside a shallow closet, and handed it to her.
She reached out and took it from him and made to stand, but as soon as she raised her head higher than the tub, she faltered and fell.
“Easy.” He scoped her up and brought her back to the bedroom. There, he stopped at the foot of the bed. “I’ll change the sheets.”
With great care, he lowered her on the couch where he had slept and went to a tall fitted cupboard where he chose among several sets of white linens. To Diana, the sheets looked all the same, but she noticed how he discarded two of them before he picked the one he was proceeding to cover the bed with. Finally, he collected the pile of bloodied linens he had thrown on the floor and dumped them inside a wicker basket by the cupboard.
He came back to her and offered her a hand for support.
She thanked him and let him help her to reach the bed. “What did you want from him?”
He gave her a puzzled look.
“Virgil. What did you want from him?” Suddenly cold and shivering, Diana burrowed under the linens.
“Information. Are you okay?” He moved toward her, but didn’t come close enough to touch her.
“I feel strange.” She couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering, and even in a sitting position, her head swam as if under water and transported by a strong current. A wave of dizziness hit her anew. She saw black one more time.
Marcus walked back to the end of the bed, leaned over a chest, opened it, removed a sage green comforter, and tucked her under its fluffy warmth.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me.” She was scared. If she hadn’t known she had never started the round of chemo prescribed by her oncologist, she would have thought these sensations were the result from the side effects from the chemicals.
He sat on the edge of the bed, but kept his body angled away from her and played with the hem of the comforter. “You don’t know?”
She shook her head as another shiver left her trembling.
“Unbelievable.”
Although Marcus had whispered, she had heard him loud and clear as if he had shouted in her ear, yet she knew he had kept his voice low. Another wave of nausea left her breathless. Then pain shot through her whole body.
He pinched the arch of his nose with two fingers, opened his mouth, then closed it, sighed, then opened it again. “You need to feed.”
She hadn’t thought she could feel hungry given her present circumstances, but as he mentioned feeding, she realized she was ravenous. Images of her favorite dishes scrolled in her mind and she violently heaved and almost threw up on the comforter. “No, no food.”
“Of course no food.” He took his head on his hands, passed them over his short brown hair, then back to his jaws and chin. Finally, he looked at her. “But you must feed anyway or you’ll die.”
The mere idea of eating sent her to another bout of heaving she barely managed to keep under control, while her stomach growled its emptiness.
****
“Little thing?” Marcus didn’t want to touch her more than strictly necessary, but she kept losing consciousness. “Wake up.” When she didn’t give any sign of coming to, even after he had gently slapped her face, he swore under his breath. She was paler than a moment earlier, her eyes had rolled to white, her mouth was open, and he could hear a faint rattle escaping her lips. He took her in his arm and shook her. “Wake. Up.” He wanted to cry in frustration, but only managed to laugh hysterically and raise his head heavenward. “You can’t ask this of me. Gods almighty, you can’t punish me this far.”
Diana convulsed against his chest, emitted one last choked sound, then went limp.
“I can’t believe this is happening to me.” He reached for the nightstand’s drawer where he kept his knife, weighed the elegant blade in his right hand, and nodded at the ceiling. “You owe me peace.” One moment of hesitation, the sharp edge of the knife hovering over his left wrist, one last curse sent to the gods who cruelly played with him, then Marcus cut his skin open. He shouted, not for the pain, he was accustomed to physical abuse, but for the unfairness of it all. The Council is going to be so pissed when they find out.
He brought his bleeding hand to Diana’s mouth. “Feed, little thing.” He had thought, hoped, nature would take its course and she would have latched to his wrist without need of coaxing her to act. But she remained pale and lifeless like a broken doll. Bleeding all over the sage comforter, he moved her, careful that the blanket firmly covered her body, and sat her on his lap with her back to his chest, then brought his open wrist to her mouth and bathed her lips with his blood.
The moment her tongue gently lapped at his wound, Marcus felt an arrow shooting through his back. But when her lips attached to his wrist and she started sucking his blood, his head arched backward and he screamed. Her fangs came down and he panicked. “Stop!” He threw her away from him and jumped off the bed.
Diana’s green eyes opened and she stood frozen, blood covering her lower lip and falling in a rivulet down her chin, her throat, and pooling between her small, now-exposed breasts. The comforter lay bunched around her waist. Her right hand came up to wipe her mouth and followed the trail of blood down her chest, only to smear the darkening red all over. Marcus watched as she brought her bloodied hand before her eyes, fingers splayed, then she looked at him pressing his right hand over his left wrist.
“What…?” Her eyes filled with tears that soon spilled into a river that mixed with the blood.
“I told you, you must feed.” He wasn’t sure how to deal with the situation at hand. “How much do you
remember of last night?”
She frowned. “Virgil asked me to meet him at the Forum. He said he couldn’t let me die—” She looked at her hand and then at Marcus’s wrist once more. She shook her head violently. “It can’t be true.”
“What happened?”
“He kissed me. I felt pain. I woke here.” She kept her hand over her mouth for a long moment, hovering under her nose. She licked her bottom lip, moaned, brought her index to her mouth and sucked from it, then stopped, a horrified look on her face as she removed the finger and cleaned it on her hand. “I don’t understand.”
“You were turned yesterday.” The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Marcus, who would have laughed if he hadn’t felt like he were stuck in a badly written comedy. He was babysitting a vampling. The gods truly hated him.
“Turned?” Her eyes became bigger and, if possible, even more terrified.
“You know what I’m talking about.” In need of fresh air, he looked outside the window, but didn’t leave the bed. His cut wrist was throbbing and he didn’t want to accept the idea he must be the one teaching her what she was supposed to do.
“No, I don’t.” She reached out for him, her hand over his right one.
He looked down at their hands together, and the recent memory of her attempted feeding came back, leaving him in need of breath. A fresh gush of wind entered the room through the open window and he breathed a big gulp of it, trying to slow his heartbeats.
“What happened to me?” She applied some pressure to his hand.
“You are a newborn vampire. A vampling.” He raised his eyes to hers.
She shook her head, but without the conviction she had showed earlier. “No.”
“Yes.”
“How could something like that even happen?”
He let out a long, suffered breath. “Your sire drained you of your blood completely. Then he replenished it with part of his. Your body is now slowly regenerating his blood, transforming it into your own vital essence as you feed.” He kept the pressure on his wounded wrist constant, but the blood was seeping through his right hand, and he couldn’t afford to keep bleeding much longer. “I need you to finish your feeding and heal the cut.”
She was startled by his words into another bout of head shaking. “I can’t—”
“You can and you will. With this amount of blood loss, I don’t think I would reach the ER in time.” To better depict the seriousness of his statement, he swayed. He had done it on purpose, but realized the act wasn’t far from the truth. Numbness claimed the lower part of his body, and he struggled to remain upright. He wasn’t in any danger of dying, but he would have ended in a coma until his body had enough time to regenerate the blood he had lost. “Help me out, little thing.” He raised both his linked hands to her mouth, freed the wounded one and brought it closer to her lips. “Your saliva will heal the cut.”
She looked at him as if he had lost the use of reasoning.
“Humor me before I faint.”
“You do look paler.”
He pressed his now freely bleeding wrist to her mouth, feeling the hardness of her teeth under the soft skin. She closed her lips over the wound and sighed. Then the sucking begin and she moaned and he gasped at the same time.
She immediately stopped feeding. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just that I don’t know what to do and it feels so—”
He closed his eyes and tried to relax his stance, his chest heaving up and down, his heart menacing to escape his ribcage. “Please, keep going.”
She leaned and kissed his wrist, just a brush, but he felt it straight to his core. An unbearable silence followed. Neither of them did or said anything for a long moment, then Diana latched her mouth to his wounded skin, and she lapped at him. While feeding, she adjusted her body along his. Without thinking, he enveloped her in his embrace and rested his head on the inset between her neck and shoulder, his free arm coming around her waist to press her closely to him. Her scent clogged his senses, and for a moment, the whole world disappeared.
“It is healing.”
Her voice woke him from the lulled state he had slipped in.
“What would happen if you drank my blood?” She was looking at him as if he had every answer in the book.
That notion made him feel unsure on how to proceed, but at the same time, he felt responsible for her. “I’d become temporarily stronger—”
“But it wouldn’t turn you into… something like me.”
“No, it wouldn’t. A vampling can’t turn a human into a vampire. And a vampire can only turn a human if the human’s blood is completely drained and replenished by his or her blood.” He recited the basic tenets all supernatural knew once again for her, then whispered, “And I’m not human anyway.”
She didn’t seem to have heard his confession. “The cut is really closing.” She had his hand firmly in her grasp, moving it this way and that before her eyes.
Marcus raised his head and watched as the cut on his wrist healed. “Told you.” He realized was holding her rather intimately against him and removed his hand from her waist. She tensed, but didn’t attempt to move away from him. He inwardly groaned, raised her with both hands—careful not to bruise her—turned her, and deposited her before him on the bed. Then he scooted back where he could think, but her scent still lingered in the air too close to him, and he decided to leave the bed altogether and walk to the open window.
“I have several questions for you.” He inhaled a gulp of air and his head cleared.
She hadn’t moved from where he had left her, but her eyes had followed him. “It’s daytime.”
He automatically looked outside, then back at her. “Yes—”
“The sun is shining and I’m still alive.” Her right hand shot toward her mouth, her fingers wiping out a drop of blood she immediately licked clean.
Once again, Marcus felt the irony in having to be the one to tutor her in the way of her race. “You’re a vampling. Not a full-formed vampire.”
She touched the sharp point of one of her two fangs. “And what’s the difference?”
“Put it back, will you?” The sight unnerved him, but he had enough sense to know she wasn’t trying to piss him off. “You can retract your feeding teeth at will.”
Diana pushed at the fang with one finger, but it didn’t move. “How?”
He sighed. “Same way you command your legs to walk.”
“Oh…” Her eyebrow shot up, then an audible pop followed and her face lit up in a smile.
Marcus was taken aback by the sight. An unfamiliar feeling of belonging filled his chest and he shook it away. He sat on the couch under the window, his head slightly tilted toward the outside. “Do you know where Claudius lives?”
She had just let her fangs down, testing her skills. “Who?” The word came out distorted by her lips maneuvering around the two teeth in the way. She popped them up. “Who’s Claudius?”
“Your sire’s head’s nest.” Marcus turned to face her, stretching his legs in front of him, bracing for what was shaping as a long and probably fruitless conversation.
“I don’t understand. My who’s what?”
“Virgil, the vampire who turned you into a vampling is your sire. Your sire was part of a nest of vampires. Claudius is Virgil’s nest’s head. I’m interested in knowing where he lives.”
Diana shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that and I’ve never met him.”
Marcus heard a soft crack and realized he was pressing his hands too hard over the couch’s armrest. “Of course you don’t.” He flattened his hands by his side, then crossed his legs at his ankles. “What was the nature of your relation with Virgil?”
She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes unblinkingly boring into his. “He was a former client.”
Marcus caught the shimmer of a tear in her eye, but it was soon gone.
“Aren’t you going to ask what kind of client he was to me?”
He shoo
k his head. A dark mood swept over him, threatening to cloud his reasoning, and he considered it more appropriate to keep his words to himself.
Her eyes narrowed and she shrugged. “I see.” She gathered in her hands the untidy mess of linens pooling around her naked body.
Before she covered herself, his eyes lingered on the faint line of the scar running from the side of her left breast down to her navel. He had seen it while washing her, and its sight—and the history of violence it betrayed—caused his flight out of the bathroom. His dark mood took a more distinct shape in the form of a subtle ache originating inside his chest.
Diana took a pillow from behind her and hugged it like a shield. “He took care of me.”
“Well, he didn’t do a great job of it, did he?” Marcus saw she was shivering, left the couch, and went to the chest looking for another quilt. “Here.” He handed her the clean comforter, took the one stained with his blood, made a ball of it, and threw it in the dirty laundry hamper, thinking he would have to clean everything before the housecleaner he had just hired saw the bloodied load.
Bundled in the light-blue blanket, she almost disappeared in the folds, only her shaved head coming out of the cocoon. He resisted the urge of cradling her against him, pushing himself to remember which race she belonged to. The thought that she was a vampire sobered him enough to make him seek the safety of the couch.
“You said I’m a vampling. That’s why I can bear sunlight?”
He nodded. “For now. The full change doesn’t happen overnight. The metamorphosis takes time.”
“How long do I have until I’m not human anymore?” She sunk lower into the blanket.
“You are already undead. And from what little I know, every vampire is different. It could take you a week or a month or a year to complete the change.” For a fleeting moment, Alexander’s warning about not mixing with nest business came back to Marcus, and he regretted his stubbornness in defying common sense and bringing Diana to his house. “Your Virgil should’ve at least given you the heads up.”
The Lost Centurion Page 3
