Her Secret

by Tara Fox Hall

  “Yes,” Devlin said. “I trust him and Danial, and that’s about it.”

  “What did you mean when you said that Danial enjoyed wielding power?” I asked next.

  “He’s gotten more ruthless since coming to power, and becoming a father a second time. Power is hard to resist exercising, in and of itself. That is a good change I approve of. Those under him need reminders that there are lines that are not to be crossed.”

  That sounded bad but true. “Why did you come back when you told me you wouldn’t?”

  “First of all, I never told you I wouldn’t come back.”

  “You said you loved me and that you weren’t coming back in my lifetime.”

  “And I meant it, until you said you loved my eyes.” Devlin kissed me chastely, moving my head with his so our eyes met. “I knew if you could love part of me, you could come to love me in time. So I told you I’d return.”

  “Was I in the same truck you were? You said no such thing.”

  “You said you knew poetry,” Devlin said. “You don’t know ‘Love is like a Red, Red Rose’?”

  I gave him a blank look. “No.”

  “The end goes thus, Sar: Fare thee well, my only love; Fare thee well awhile. For I will come again, my love, though it be ten thousand miles.”

  I’d been so worried about Theo finding out about Devlin I’d not paid enough attention. “I know the poem. I didn’t know that is what you were saying.”

  “I perhaps should have said it more blatantly,” Devlin said, nibbling my ear. “But in any case, I made good on my word.”

  “Why did you come back, really? Because Theo isn’t here? For the Gathering?”

  “Many reasons. To find out why you didn’t come to me. To find out if you cared for me. To be with you again, like we were today.” He paused. “But most of all to save you, Sar.”

  “Save me from what?” I said, alarmed.

  “You were dying,” Devlin replied.

  Chapter Eleven

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said, incredulous.

  “Danial told me only two days ago that you weren’t getting warmer, you were getting colder. I would have come sooner if I’d known, but he said nothing to me until then—”

  “Known what?” I cried.

  “That you hadn’t been turning at all; your body had changed and if you didn’t get more of the vampire virus into your system, you were going to die.”

  I huddled against him. “That can’t be true.”

  Devlin picked me up, and carried me back into the cellar, speaking softly. “That is why I had to come in the day. I had to get to you in time. Waiting for nightfall might have been too late for you.” He helped me under the covers and then got in beside me.

  “You’ve been tired lately,” he said sadly, wrapping me in his arms. “Sleeping more, your body cooling down, slowing down, getting ready to shut down. By now if you hadn’t been on the drug, you’d have sought out another vampire, if not Danial. Your body was giving you warning signs, but you weren’t hearing them.”

  Fear was coursing through me. I practically tried to crawl inside his chest, wanting to be as close to him as possible.

  “Shh,” Devlin said, hugging me tightly. “You’ll be fine now. Being with me has started your body repairing itself. You should notice a difference by tomorrow.”

  “Dr. Camlyn said that needing the extra sleep was normal, that I just needed more time to get back to normal.”

  “Another few days and you would have gone to sleep and not woken up,” Devlin said ominously. “You need regular doses of the vampire virus now to live.”

  I shivered against him. “Why didn’t you call and warn me?”

  “I should have come to you back in the fall, that first night Danial called asking for advice,” Devlin said bitterly. “He said you had both lost control, that you had wanted one another. I thought that he had taken more of your blood and given you some of his, and he was ashamed to say so. The symptoms seemed right to me. Women who are turning act as you did. Then he said after you had been together that it hadn’t worked, that you had still been wild, and it was in his voice that he’d had your blood again. When he said you were going to take a drug to stop the wanting, I thought that was probably the only choice. I knew if I came back and tried to be with you then that I might cause you to turn. I didn’t want that. So I stayed away.”

  Anger replaced fear. “Why didn’t you call and tell Danial I needed more of the virus?”

  “As I’m trying to tell you, I was worried I might be wrong.” He took a breath. “I’m sorry I lied to you, and told you that you were turning months ago. It was the best way to get your permission then. As I told you then, I would not have had another chance to be with you.” He kissed me lovingly. “Just as I’m not going to miss this one.”

  “Everything you’ve said makes sense,” I said slowly. “But there is a good deal you’re leaving out.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as camping doesn’t usually prepare you to operate a wood stove; it shows you how to make an open fire.”

  “Starting a fire is the same wherever you do it,” Devlin replied, annoyed. “The point I was making is that I don’t spend all my time behind a desk or inside comfortable walls. I know the outdoors, and how to handle the normal tools of life, woodstoves included.”

  “So you’re a regular country man in addition to being a dashing singer and lover,” I said sarcastically. “I’d never have guessed you were so multi-faceted.”

  “That is because you’re short-sighted,” Devlin said loftily.

  “Actually, my view is almost always the long term,” I retorted. “Which brings me to my next question: have you regained the ability to make vampires?”

  “I’m not what I was when we first met,” Devlin said slowly. “I know you don’t want to be vampire, so I’m not sure what you’re really asking, Sar.”

  “Could you turn me accidentally?”

  “No,” he assured me. “I’ll be able to taste when you get close in your blood. I’ll stop sharing myself with you if I sense you turning. It could not happen accidentally, ever.”

  “Why not?”

  “I believe you are resistant to the virus. I’m not sure you can be turned, without a massive infusion of my blood. You’ve already had enough from me today to turn a normal human woman of your size twice over, yet you taste as sweet as ever.” He put his lips to my wrist and kissed it lightly.

  “What are you not saying?”

  Devlin leaned up on one arm, and I rolled onto my back, looking up at him. “You can still be drained if I take too much, Sar. That will still kill you.”

  “How do you know all this?” I said in consternation. “You aren’t just guessing.”

  Sadness drowned his eyes again. “Annabelle was like you.”

  Anna was the woman who’d been Devlin’s that Danial had seduced away from him, beginning their long feud. “You loved her a long time ago.”

  “Yes,” he said, old pain in each word. “I loved her very much.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Anna and I were together for years. She got to a point, and never progressed further than that. No matter how much I was with her, loved her, her body refused to turn. It was then that we thought we might try having a child.”

  Anna had died in miscarriage. I’d deduced that was because Devlin had not waited for the potion to work completely. “What happened?”

  “I knew of the potion. She was afraid, but she wanted to try it. It took us a year of trying before it worked. The day she told me that she was pregnant was the happiest day of my life.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly.

  “She tasted of spring, Sar,” he said, haunted. “It’s been two hundred years she has been gone from me, and I can still remember it clearly.”

  Worried at his sudden encompassing melancholy, I tried to bring him back to the present. “How did you discover she was resistant? Did she behave
like I did?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “After we’d been together a year, her body changed. We didn’t know it until I had to be away for a month on business. When I got back, she was as you were earlier today. She slept a lot, her body was cold, and she had difficulty moving. She thought it was depression, from missing me. Yet she went wild when I returned, provoking me to bite her. After I spent that night with her, she began to feel better. In a few days, she was fine again. But I never left her alone again for more than a week after that.”

  He shook his head as if shaking off the fetters of the past, and took another deep breath, letting it out slowly. He tilted my chin up to look at him. “You’ll have to monitor your blood virus levels from now on, and make sure they never drop under a certain threshold. I can help with that, if you permit me to. There is also a benefit, Sar, a substantial one.” He kissed me softly, then drew back. “You won’t age as fast, if at all. You won’t ever have to die, unless you want to. Yet you won’t be vampire, you will still be able to walk in the sun.”

  I stared at him, aghast.

  “You don’t seem as pleased by that as I thought you might be,” Devlin said, searching my eyes with his own. “Danial said that was the reason you wouldn’t give him your Oath: you would not stay young and he would. Now there is no reason for you not to be with him, as you both want to be. In fact, you must be his blood lover again, if you are not with me.”

  Hearing his words, my life changed again utterly. I could be with Danial. We could have a life together now. But the flip side was that Theo and I were finished for good.

  “You’re distressed,” Devlin said curiously. “You can’t seriously still be thinking of Theo?”

  Theo had wanted me to go back to Danial, had pushed us together at Elle’s recital. He’d probably be happy this tied me up as a loose end. But Elle...she would age and so would my parents...I might live to see them die...maybe Theoron, too...Panic and fear coursed through me.

  “Sar,” Devlin murmured. “Breathe.”

  I took a deep breath and put his supposition out of my mind. I had the here and now. I’d worry about the future when I had to, when we knew for sure he was right.

  “And again,” he encouraged. “You have many questions, I’m sure. I can give you answers to—”

  “Blood lover?” I said disdainfully.

  “There’s no need to be offended,” Devlin said wickedly. “It merely means a lover who agrees to donate blood to a vampire, nothing more.”

  I rolled my eyes. “All the same, I’d prefer you never refer to me that way, ever.”

  “If you wish.”

  “I do have one more question for you, Dev.”

  “Ask it,” he said softly, kissing my neck, his fangs pricking gently.

  I took another deep breath. “What were you planning for me that night you came for me?”

  He drew back, startled. “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’re right, I don’t. I need to know. Tell me the truth. Whatever it is, my imagination will do worse. But if I know the truth, I can let it go. And so can you.”

  Devlin moved away from me, and looked at the wall. “Don’t ask me this.”

  “Tell me, Dev,” I said firmly. “Or it will always be something unspoken between us. You and I have that history. We always will. If you’d gotten your way then, really gotten it, I’d have gone home with you. What was waiting for me, besides Lash?”

  He sighed. “You know what I’m capable of. Why do you have to ask me this, now?”

  “Because you haven’t changed, just your feelings for me have. You want me to trust you, tell me this and don’t lie.”

  He stared at me, incredulous. “I don’t see how admitting my evil to you helps me gain your trust.”

  “I need to know I can trust you to tell me the truth. And if there was anything you’d want to lie about, it would be this.”

  He gave a faint smile. “You’re right. But you won’t forgive me if I tell you.”

  I gave him merciless eyes. “Tell me or get on your bike and leave.”

  He took a deep breath. “I didn’t know what I would do if Danial relinquished you. I was so sure he wouldn’t that I didn’t plan anything for that reason alone. But there were a lot of things that I thought about doing to you.” He closed his eyes.

  “Such as?”

  “I thought about draining you with Danial, as we almost did before Terian and Theo rode to the rescue. Your blood reminded me of Annabelle’s blood, even then. I was angry that you were Danial’s and not mine. I was breathtaking and the most powerful and you still wanted him and not me—”

  “Did Annabelle care about your power?”

  “I knew her before I was a Ruler. I was more Danial’s level, when you first met him. I hadn’t any power then, save the power of an ordinary vampire, as compared with a human—”

  “Devlin, you are talking around the question. Yes or no?”

  “No, she didn’t care if I was powerful, so long as I could protect her.”

  “Why would I be any different?”

  He looked away from me, and shrugged.

  “Go on.”

  “Danial refused to share you with me. You didn’t want me to have any part of you either.” He abruptly cut off, and started again. “Angelica was not the only woman we drained over the centuries,” he said, emotionless. “It’s a common punishment for Oathbreaking and vampire murdering, and often, it falls to the Ruler of a territory to mete out—”

  I’d guessed that after Danial had threatened to do it to Monica. “I know all this. Go to—”

  “No,” he said sinisterly. “You want to know it all, I’ll tell it my way. I was fully prepared to drink you down with him that night, to make sure that he could not have what I had been denied. It wasn’t everything I wanted from you, but at least then I’d have gotten part of what I desired. I’d have finished you off that night, if Terian hadn’t interfered.” He gazed at me and swallowed. “I’m so glad he did, I’d have made the biggest mistake of my life—”

  “Say you’d gotten Danial to relinquish me,” I replied coolly. “What then?”

  “I wanted to bring you to my home and have you every way I could think of. To take you by force if not by seduction, to drink in your fear along with your blood for as long as it lasted, as long as I could draw it out. After I’d possessed you in all ways, I was going to keep you for a while. I loved your hair even then, and wanted it to grow out to the length it had been when I first saw you. By the time it had, I would be ready to sire a child on you, Sar. And I was going to, whether you wanted one or not. No matter how long it took, or what I had to do—”

  “I Oathed you. Why have a child with me?”

  “I knew you’d gotten pregnant amazingly fast. Your blood was so similar to Anna’s. Together, that was enough to make me want to try. You don’t look like she did, but that didn’t matter. I was determined to mold you into the woman she was. To recreate her, so to speak.” His eyes found mine and held. “I’d have destroyed you in the process.”

  I drew in a long shuddering breath. “Do you still want to do any of that to me?”

  “No!” he said vehemently. “I dislike even admitting to thinking it in the past. But you wanted to know, so I was honest.”

  “I can’t be her, ever,” I said quietly. “I can only be myself.”

  “I know that,” Devlin said, hurt. “I don’t want her back. I want you, Sar.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Until you, the memory of her stood in the path of any living woman. Since we were together, all my fantasies have been of you,” he said, reaching out hesitantly to clasp my hand. “Of us happy together, loving each other. I’m sure.”

  The moment he touched me, my resistance crumbled. I moved closer to him, and hugged him. He looked down at me, surprise still on his face. “If I were standing, I’d get down on my knees and beg your forgiveness,” he said seriously, drawing back from me. “Can you ever forg
ive me?”

  I pulled his head down to me and kissed him slowly. “I will if you make love to me again.”

  Devlin kissed me eagerly, then rolled his body on top of mine, pushing me gently down into the sheets. He spread my legs, moving into position. My desire came roaring back and I writhed under him, again baring my throat. He slowly bore down again with his hips, pushing his erection deeper as I strained upwards to receive him. The feeling of being utterly filled washed over me. At once, Devlin began sliding fast, each stroke determined.

  “Bite me,” I breathed.

  The moment he sank his fangs into me I came for him, arching up into him. Though he didn’t drink from me, my climax was as powerful as if he had, each thrust bringing cry after cry from my parted lips.

  When I stopped shuddering, Devlin withdrew his fangs, giving my neck gentle kisses. Abruptly, he quickened his movements. With a sudden jerk, he climaxed, his satisfied moans stirring as he clutched me.

  “I love hearing you come,” I said languidly, as he moved to my side.

  “I’m glad to please you,” he said tenderly. “I love you.” He settled back, moving me so my head rested on his chest, and began to stroke my hair.

  “I care for you, too,” I replied affectionately, reaching up to stroke his face. It was rough under my hands.

  It had been years since I’d felt a man’s stubble. Oddly, Theo had never had any that was noticeable, and Danial never grew any, as he hadn’t had any when he’d been turned.

  Devlin smiled under my hand. “I should shave,” he said, irritated. “This gets so old.”

  “You don’t have to. I don’t mind. But I do have to get up,” I said, turning to him. “Theo and Danial will be calling after dusk, and I have a lot to do before then.”

  “It’s already dark,” he said, throwing off the blankets. “I’ll come with you.”

  Naked, we went upstairs. It was close to five, the house dark. After turning on the lights, and getting the fire going strong, I put on some jeans and a sweater.

  Devlin checked his clothes. “They’re still a little wet.”