“I forgive you,” she whispered at last.
I wrapped my left arm under her waist and yanked her into me. “But the question is,” I grazed my fangs along her neck, “do I forgive you?”
I stole her breath from her with another kiss.
Sunaria gave an insistent glare and I turned to see Rachel in the doorway.
“Well, hello there.” I smiled.
“How long have you been standing there?” Sunaria said, annoyed.
“Please hurry.” Rachel looked miserable. “Marcus is drunk.”
I sat up. “He can’t be drunk.”
“Unless his victim was,” Sunaria said.
Rachel bit her bottom lip. “He’s drunk three bottles of wine.”
Sunaria and I swapped a wary glance.
“Has he eaten food?” I asked.
Rachel nodded.
“That’s just great.” I sighed. “Bloody great.”
* * * *
Rachel and I found Marcus lying in his own vomit.
They’d created a den of sorts in the lower rooms of a rundown East London shack. Paint peeled off the walls and broken windows gave a horrid sense of vulnerability. No thought had gone into choosing their temporary refuge. At least, I hoped they considered it temporary.
“Nice place,” I said.
Despite my consideration that I’d take care of them, I’d let them down. Finding Marcus lying in this filth showed evidence of my abandonment.
“How do you bear it?” Marcus slurred.
“It gets easier.” I said flatly. “Rachel, bring me a cloth.”
She scurried off.
“I thought you were staying at the Old Towne Inn?” I held a tight smile.
“Rachel took a fancy to the innkeeper.”
“She didn’t—”
“Drank him dry.” His eyes fluttered shut.
I shook him. “Did you finish the job I gave you?”
“Are you sure you want to go through with it?” Marcus asked.
“Yes. Though I didn’t account for you getting shit-faced.”
“I’m dying.”
“You’re pissed. You have a headache.”
He retched and I dodged his vomit.
“My head’s spinning,” he mumbled. “We can’t eat food. Does that not strike you as strange?”
“We’ve been over this.”
Rachel returned and placed the bucket by my side. I dipped the old rag into the water and washed Marcus’ face.
“She doesn’t seem to mind drinking blood.” He pointed to Rachel. “She almost looks like she’s enjoying herself.”
I found Rachel’s guilty expression endearing. “You need mentoring.”
“If you die tonight, we’re done for,” he sobbed.
“What’s happening tonight?” Rachel asked.
“I’m a vampire!” Marcus cried.
“You’re a sorry excuse for a vampire,” I said.
He clutched my shirt sleeve. “Am I insane?”
“Help me get him undressed.” I turned to Rachel. “He’ll sleep off the booze. He’ll be fine.”
Marcus pulled me closer. “I’ve let you down.”
I glanced out of the window and wondered how long it would be before he sobered up. “We have to be at St. Paul’s in under an hour,” I said.
Marcus fell asleep.
“Shall I throw the rest of the chicken away?” Rachel said.
I stared at her, hoping she was joking. She wasn’t. “Get your things. You’re both staying with me.”
Marcus stirred and grabbed my shirt collar. “It seems so wrong.”
“It’s the only way.” I watched Rachel wander out.
She hesitated and stared at me, smiling, and then went all coy and disappeared from sight.
“Think you can pull this off?” Marcus asked.
“We can pull it off.”
“What about the others?”
“The Creda will free us from the Stone Masters.”
“But does she have to die like that?” Marcus asked.
I sat back and stared out of the window. Witching hour fast approached. “If I’m to be free from the Creda,” I said, “it’s the only way.”
* * * *
A storm raged over London’s skyline.
Thunder rolled, followed by flashes of lightning, and flooding rain, weaving through the city’s lanes only to find its way back into the Thames.
I entered St. Paul’s alone, just missing the worst of the downpour. A schism in the silence, whispers up near the nave. Hugging close to the walls, using the shadows for cover, I approached. Incense hung thick, bestowing a faint fragrance of rare spices.
Count Delacroix murmured to a man who was hunched over in the front pew. Trying to get a better view, I drew closer. I bit down hard on my hand to suppress a gasp.
It was Roman and he was talking. The very head that I’d stuck in the coffin the previous night, down in the catacombs, was now frighteningly animated and attached to someone else’s torso. His head was easily out of proportion to the slender body and his features moved sluggishly. Along his neck ran shoddy sutures all the way around, and his flesh bubbled up in between the thick stitches. A macabre rush job, stitched with a callous hand. It was Roman’s head, but Benjamin’s body.
Despite all that Benjamin had done, I felt awful. I’d trapped him in the casket, making it easy for the count to catch him and perform his sick work. Delacroix nodded in response to the morbid head’s utterances. Roman, or what was left of him, was struggling to be understood.
No Creda yet, but the Stone Masters were here. They hid somewhere far back in the west cloister and they were also watching the spectacle. I tried to count how many of them were here, got to twenty men and then movement pulled my attention back onto Delacroix.
Grasping the handle of an axe, he raised it high above his head, and then swung the blade wide, slicing through Roman’s neck sending his head flying off his shoulders. The body shuddered, slumped, and then slid to the floor and stilled.
I stepped out from the shadows. “Even your brother isn’t immune to your madness.”
Delacroix’s hands shook with anger.
“You can’t blame that on me.” I tried to keep my eyes off the decapitated head.
Delacroix gazed down at Roman. I wondered if he’d been mad as a mortal. I dashed away from the nave and down into the lower chambers. He followed me, closing in, and soon passed me, almost colliding with the far wall.
“Dead end!” He spun round and headed back the way we’d come, passing me again.
I rammed the silver stake into his back, straight through his heart and he stumbled and fell.
I knelt beside him.
He lay conscious, but incapacitated.
I buried my fangs into his neck and closed my eyes. A wave of images flashed before me, dragging me with them and carrying me down. Macabre visions of Delacroix’s life unfolded with each mouthful, revealing a million fragments of moments, experienced over centuries. A continuous revolving nightmare sucked me in. Slipping away, the present was no longer perceptible as my mind struggled to grab hold of something solid, something real. Drowning in him, I lost my way and had to pull back.
He picked up on my reluctance and his mouth slid into a smile. Pressing my lips against where I’d bitten him and bruising them, I gulped the scarlet flow again, impossible to subdue the turmoil. As if peering into the blackest mirror, my authentic nature was realized. I barged past his resistance. Tortured faces, each human life I’d taken and he’d taken appeared, only to be replaced by another, the madness of murder entangled. I was unable to ignore the visage. It was impossible to turn away. I faced my own atrocities as they intermingled with his.
The count didn’t have my son.
I tried to pull away, but something held me at his neck, an invisible force. It wasn’t Delacroix, it was something supernatural that kept me drinking, and it came from within. No turning back. Secrets passed over, information unraveled,
and all sinuous links disintegrated.
Crawling on my hands and knees, with his blood mixed with my saliva dripping from my gaping mouth, I scrambled away, eager to put distance between me and him.
Remnants of my essence were listlessly evanescing, and I was powerless to stop it.
* * * *
“Breathe, Daumia . . . breathe.” Marcus’ voice was distant. “Breathe . . .”
Lost somewhere within my deepest recesses, I had an out of body experience and a glorious feeling of empowerment, one with the sublime. Breath, so simple and yet so unnecessary.
“My name’s Orpheus.” A tingling all over that settled in my groin, the rush caused me to shudder, an experience unlike anything I’d ever known. My body pulsated and I quivered in response to the sensations, enshrined within these invisible pleasures.
Marcus’ breath felt warm on my ear. “I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered.
“Glad you could make it.” I rose up.
Marcus looked confused. “You kind of look . . .”
“What?”
“Different.”
Everything felt different. My movement seemed effortless, spectral even, and I took my time to adjust.
I heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairwell, heading fast our way.
I yanked at the stone door of the passageway and it scraped opened. I turned to Marcus. “Go.”
“Not without you.”
I shoved him through it.
Stone grated against stone as I secured it shut. I sensed Elijah before I saw him. With my back against the clandestine wall, I waited. Elijah flew around the corner. Underneath his arm, he carried Roman’s head.
“I was hoping I’d never have to see that again,” I said.
Elijah glanced at the count.
I gestured to Roman’s head. “Was he always that glum?”
“Whatever you tried here tonight didn’t work,” Elijah shot back. “Where’s Sunaria?”
“I have no idea.”
“We saw her enter.”
“You have Roman, or what’s left of him.”
He glanced at the head. “You told me he was alive.”
“He was, kind of, a few minutes ago.”
“What is this?”
“Ask him.” I pointed to Delacroix.
“Seems you impressed Lord Archer,” Elijah said. “But you don’t impress me.”
I shrugged.
“Out of all our descendants your lover murdered,” Elijah lowered his chin and locked his stare on mine, “you were the last.”
The truth had been glaring at me all this time and yet I’d not seen it. Elijah’s familiarity, a faint likeness distorted by time. The feeling that I knew him even though we’d never met.
“She planned to start with your brother, Ricardo,” he said, “but his friends took care of him. You were next. That night in the mausoleum, she couldn’t go through with killing a boy. She waited for you to age.”
I showed no reaction.
“Why do you think she left you in that house with Roelle?” He looked smug.
My gut twisted. “Give me one minute with her.”
“Then you’ll hand her over?”
“She’ll be in the tower.”
“We’ll be outside.”
* * * *
The aroma of iron flooded the nave, the scent of blood. There, scattered along the aisle and amongst the pews were men, some dead, others dying. The Creda had taken on the Stone Masters and won. I searched each man’s face. Glass and broken artifacts crunched beneath my feet. I found Lord Archer on the floor taking small breaths, leaning up against the font. I knelt beside him.
Archer’s complexion was morbidly pale. “We weren’t prepared.” He gasped.
“They’re ancients.” I offered him my wrist.
He turned away.
I ran my fingers up his blood-soaked sleeve. “Your right arm’s broken.”
He glanced at the deformity. “If I had any strength in that arm, I’d strangle you with it.”
“You want me to speed your death? That’s why you’re provoking me?”
“I want to die with honor, not discussing the finer points of life with the very creature I’ve dedicated,” he cringed with the pain, “my life to tracking down.”
I applied pressure to his wound. “Something’s different with me.”
“You look the same.” He pushed himself up and looked around. “My men?”
I bit into my wrist and held it over the gash on his arm, splashing my blood into the laceration. Archer flinched and his wound leaked serous fluid, as our blood intermingled, bubbling up and then reabsorbing. The cut healed.
I lifted my wrist to his lips. He pushed it away.
“How’s that pain?” I asked softly.
“Bastard, your filthy blood’s in me.”
“That arm either heals or you lose it. Or worse.”
“At least it would be an honorable death.”
“Death is death.”
“What do you want, Orpheus?”
“You must live.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons.”
Archer’s breathing was calmer. “Go on.”
“Firstly, because I find myself rather fond of you.”
“Ridiculous. And the second?”
“Deep down, you desire to truly understand what we are.”
“Get out of London.” Archer closed his mind.
“One minute and I’ll have what I need,” I whispered.
Archer’s fingers affectionately traced my cheek. “You don’t have that much time.” His eyes flickered to the right.
Several Stone Lords headed straight for us.
* * * *
The lid to the coffin where I’d placed Roman’s head was back in place. Candlelight threw shadows over the dark walls of the burial chamber. In here, there was nothing but stillness, a complete contrast to the mayhem above.
Sunaria loomed in the shadows. “Are they all dead?”
I looked her up and down. “Not exactly.”
“Elijah? Archer?” She studied my expression.
“This time, you behaved yourself and stayed put.”
She looked serene, beautiful even. I tried to shake off the effect she always had on me, considering whether to fuck her, or worse.
I stared at my hands. “You didn’t try to stop me?” Blood surged through them like never before. “You knew this would happen if I drank from him.”
Sunaria rested back on the middle casket. “You went through with it?”
“But you knew that when I entered, I saw it in your eyes.” A timeless essence rippled. A supernatural wellspring threatened to spill over into this moment and force my carnal hand. I quivered.
“Anyone who consumed him entirely and survived . . .” her gaze seemed to take in my new form with nervous excitement. “You are Status Regal, the most feared among us.” She slid off the coffin. “You’re magnificent.”
Stronger now, my muscles were taut, my physique sinewy.
Sunaria read my mind. “Elijah lied to you.”
“Did he?”
“I would never have gone through with it.” Her lips quivered.
“You were in my home town to kill Ricardo. To kill me?”
“Please listen—”
“Elijah was pretty persuasive in his argument.” I stepped toward her. “I read his thoughts.”
“That night in the mausoleum was meant to be my last. When I came across Ricardo, your brother, he was so brave and so sweet that I couldn’t go through with it.”
“So you admit that’s why you were there?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think you’d believe me.” More tears. “When I first saw you, saw Aaron holding that cudgel over you, I had to stop him.”
“Why didn’t you warn Ricardo?”
“Daylight robbed me of the chance.”
“Why should I believe
you?”
“Because I love you.”
I raised a hand, gesturing for her to keep her distance.
She looked lost. “Let me explain.”
I nodded my permission.
“You’re not the last descendant of the Creda to be turned. Jacob is. This proves my innocence.”
I stared at her.
“I couldn’t let you die in Felipe’s courtyard,” she said. “Not after the night we spent together, after I rescued you in the carriage.”
“You know I still can’t remember it.”
“I gave you a small taste of me and then you reacted . . .” She sighed. “You took me.” Her eyelids flickered. “It was a dark promise of what it would be like if we became lovers.”
“Great, the best sex of my life and I don’t remember it.”
“Their ancestry endures through Jacob.”
“Are they searching for him?”
“I don’t know. I made sure they weren’t following you. I never once saw them.”
“You’d better be right.”
“You wanted to hear the truth, but I was terrified you’d leave.”
“Tell me how this all started,” I asked her.
“Mara, my three-year-old daughter, was taken from me by my master. He told me he sold her.”
“Why did you wait so long to kill him?”
“He warned me that if anything happened to him—”
“That’s what he had over you?”
“Yes.”
“But you killed him anyway.” I added coldly.
“Eventually, yes.”
“And the Creda?”
“They seduced me with the promise of helping me find my daughter.”
“They lied?”
“I would never have harmed you.” She tilted her head and stared off. “Some part of me hopes Mara’s still alive. Some part of me hates myself for even thinking it.”
“That she’s one of us?”
She nodded. “After you went to live with Roelle, I returned to Rome to continue my search for her.”
“When will the whole truth come out?”
“You won’t give me up to them?” she whispered.
My rage ignited and I bared my fangs, stomped my foot, and roared at her.
She cowered away from me.
My gaze wondered over her curves, her breasts rising and falling with each nervous breath.
A Vampire's Rise Page 25
