Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2)

by Telep, Trisha

  Finn moved soundlessly through the house, edging along the main corridor as the King’s scent grew stronger and stronger. The unknowns were holed up in the King’s study. Finn knew from experience that there was only one way in or out. He flexed his hands, ready.

  He’d have to take out the empath fairy first.

  Finn paused outside the door.

  “This is your final warning,” a cold voice stated.

  Finn’s heart pounded. Inside, the grey-haired King lay back in his leather chair, a war axe with a blade as long as a man’s forearm threatened his carotid artery. One wrong move and his head would be off.

  Katarina’s fiancé, Vlad, held the axe.

  The truth of it slammed into Finn. Vlad had been behind the attempts on the King’s life – the promise of security forces, a mere trick to facilitate a hasty marriage with Katarina.

  The ruthless vamp’s chin shook and spittle clung to his yellowed fangs. “Sit up. Up! Do it or I execute your only heir.”

  Finn about choked when he saw Katarina’s brother frozen to the spot, pink tears of rage in his eyes. Behind her brother stood an empath fairy. His yellow beard had grown longer and he had a new scar over his left eye, but Finn would have recognized Athol Grim anywhere. Shite. Athol had fought with Longshanks. And he was damned good at killing.

  Adrenaline surged through Finn.

  It was a power grab – plain and simple. Vlad couldn’t assume the throne without direct ties to the Volholme bloodline. He needed to marry Kat and drink from her. If he couldn’t do that, he needed the King dead. But not by his own hand or retribution would be swift. No, Vlad needed the King to kill himself.

  Finn didn’t have much time, but he did have a plan.

  Silently as the night, Finn moved back through the corridor and into the music room. He pressed his back to the bronze-leaf wallpaper and, with every bit of will he had, he forced himself to take on the intoxicating scent and spirit of Katarina. He thought of her joy in finding him, her lust for life, that damned gold belt. He called up everything that was good about her.

  And then he waited.

  “I smell her,” Athol said from the study.

  “Well, go get her!” Vlad demanded.

  Finn fought back a growl as he projected thoughts of Katarina, his Katarina, just inside the music room. He pictured her running her long fingers over the edge of a snow-white baby grand.

  Finn could practically feel Athol salivating.

  He’d kill the traitor. He’d kill them both. Finn only wished he could do it slowly.

  Athol surged into the music room, a gleaming silver hook raised to snare Katarina. Finn stepped behind him and slit his throat.

  He lowered the fairy to the floor and thanked the gods that the real Katarina wasn’t here to see any of this.

  Then Finn morphed into a spitting image of Athol. Well, at least the vamps would see it that way. Finn stuffed Athol’s wooden stake into his belt and hoped he could get close enough to Vlad before the King did something they’d all regret.

  What he needed was a distraction.

  Finn strode back to the King’s study, still trying to figure out the second part of his plan. His instincts had never let him down before. But as he came upon the portly King at the end of a blade, he wasn’t so sure he was going to like what happened next.

  “I can’t find her,” Finn said, imitating Athol’s gruff voice.

  The vampire’s face reddened. “I can’t kill him until I take her blood!” He pressed the blade into Volholme’s skin, licking his fangs as a trickle of blood ran down the King’s neck.

  Almost to himself, Vlad said, “I can’t kill the King—” a twisted smile formed on his lips “—but I can kill the boy.” He turned to Katarina’s brother.

  Finn braced himself, ready to blow his cover, when Vlad stiffened and gasped. A volley of acid rained down, scorching the vamp’s face. Finn ignored the poison and went for the blade, wrenching it away. In a split second, Finn separated Vlad’s astonished head from his neck.

  Blood poured from the vampire’s throat as his body thudded onto the thick green carpeting.

  Finn wiped his face. Water. Holy water.

  He hastened to the King’s side. “Are you all right?”

  Volholme nodded while Finn did a quick once-over to make sure the King was, indeed, free of holy water and in one piece. When he was satisfied he’d done his job, Finn glanced back at their rescuer.

  Katarina stood in the doorway wearing nothing but his leather jacket and the black lace bra and panties that had driven him wild back at the monastery. She held his holy water gun in one hand and rested the other against the door jamb like a Playboy bunny. For a moment, nobody moved.

  “Katarina!” the King boomed, the ruddiness returning to his cheeks. “For Varstnic’s sake, cover yourself,” he said, more affronted by her lack of clothing, it seemed, than with his brush with death.

  “Yaaa!” Katarina’s brother lunged at Finn, fangs out, until Finn froze the unfortunate vamp once again.

  “It’s me,” he said quickly, morphing back into himself.

  “Thank the ancestors,” said the King, who looked quite relieved to see Finn instead of Athol in charge.

  Katarina strode up to Finn.

  “Nice jacket,” he said.

  “I was cold.” She laughed and wrapped her slender arms around Finn’s waist.

  Finn looked down at her, never so glad to see anyone in his life. “How did you make it through the underground passages?” He racked his brain. “You can’t smell me, sense me.”

  “Ah.” She winked. “But I can smell me on you.”

  Finn warmed just thinking of it. It didn’t help that she was beaming up at him. Finn found himself wearing a lopsided smile of his own. “You should wear that outfit more often.”

  She blushed. “I got the idea from a contestant on American Idol. She wanted to shock the judges.”

  Finn raised a brow. He wasn’t one to argue with unusual tactics.

  “What did you mean ‘smell her’?” the King demanded, rubbing at his neck. “And unfreeze my son!”

  Finn did and the Prince staggered forwards and caught himself on the edge of an antique suit of armour.

  “What have you done to my daughter?” the King demanded.

  Katarina straightened. “Nothing that I didn’t want done,” she said quietly. All eyes turned to her. She stood, arms folded, the prim and proper aristocrat in a leather jacket and a thong.

  The King spared a glance at Vlad’s wilted, headless body to the left of the red velvet drapes. His eyes hardened as he assumed the chair behind the desk like an executive.

  Katarina balled her hands into fists. “Stop looking at me like that. None of this would have happened if you didn’t try to force me to marry again.” She wrinkled her nose at the body on the carpet. “All he ever wanted was my blood so he could kill us all. Great matchmaking, Dad.”

  The King remained silent, thoughtful.

  He might have the luxury to ponder the old ways, but Kat did not. She might have run away before, but now she was ready to stand up and fight for a new life. Her life. She squared her shoulders and took one bold step towards her father, then another. “I’m not property that you can barter off. I’m a living, thinking being.” She closed the gap between them. “I’ve lived with this for 800 years. Eight hundred years! Don’t you think it’s time I get to choose what I want to do with my life?” She looked at him earnestly, her emotions naked on her face. “It’s my time now.”

  Her father rested his thick arms on either side of the chair. He suddenly looked very old. “OK.”

  “What?” Kat asked.

  “You’re right.” Her father waved his hand. “You’re right. Your mother’s right.” He bit at his thumb and took stock of her. “You know she ran off to Bulgaria when I told her you were to marry right away. Let’s just hope she’s not on a dating show.”

  Kat looked at him like he’d sprouted an extra set of fangs. �
��Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes.” He nodded. “As long as no more of your future husbands try to kill me. Perhaps your mother is correct when she says you should stay single for a while.” He dug something out of the pocket of his brown velvet waistcoat. “One moment.” It was a BlackBerry. Kat almost fell over as her father started texting. “I’ve been bowing to the pressures of old traditions—” he gave her a knowing look “—but maybe it’s time the King stops bowing.”

  She didn’t even know her father owned a phone. Then again, her late husband had forbidden phones, so it wasn’t as if her Dad could have called her anyway.

  “There,” the king said, hitting send. He eyed Kat. “Your mother will be thrilled. Everybody else will have to learn to deal with it.”

  She drew Finn’s jacket around her and stood before her father. “As long as we’re shaking things up,” she said, ignoring the fluttering in her stomach, “I want to date.”

  The King’s eyes widened and he tipped forwards in his chair as if she’d just said she wanted to streak naked through Kiev Square.

  The Prince barked out a laugh. “Princesses don’t date.”

  “Says the old, archaic law that you just changed,” she said to her father.

  Volholme frowned. “Who would you even date?”

  Kat’s hope surged as Finn stepped forwards.

  Finn turned to Kat. The earnestness in his expression almost made her melt. “Katarina,” he said, as he took her hands in his, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” He chose every word carefully. “I care about you too much.”

  “What?” Kat and her father both asked.

  She couldn’t believe it. Men. No matter how many centuries they lived on this Earth, they were still clueless.

  “I have to protect you,” Finn said, as if that explained it.

  The King ground a beefy hand over his mouth, thinking. “You know, that’s a good idea,” he said. “I can’t think of a better way to protect my only daughter than to stick her with an empath fairy. Besides,” he said, sizing up Finn, “314 years without a vacation day is too long for anybody.”

  “Father!” Katarina rushed to him and clasped his hand to her cheek.

  “But what if there’s another assassination attempt?” Finn asked. “You know as well as I do that we’re going to be hearing from Vlad the Impaler.”

  “You’re not the only empath fairy on the planet,” the King said. “Relax. Seize the day. Carpe diem and all that.”

  Finn couldn’t have looked more shocked if the King had sprouted wings.

  Volholme rolled his eyes. “What? You’ve never seen the Dead Poets Society?” The King shrugged. “Never mind. It’s not about vampires anyway.”

  Finn broke out into a smile as it finally began to sink in.

  Kat swelled with gratitude, hope and pure joy. She couldn’t have hidden it even if she’d wanted to. She ran to him. And that’s all it took for the immortal warrior to surrender.

  With a whoop of joy, Finn lifted Katarina in his arms. She revelled in the feel of him as she slid down his body and back to her gold sandalled feet.

  The King stiffened. “Just don’t let her out of your sight,” he warned.

  Finn wrapped his arms against Kat, his grip warm and steady, his wide mouth set into a permanent grin. “Believe me, I won’t.”

  Flotsam

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  The moon is three nights past full, and I sit here alone at the edge of the low dunes while the tide goes out again. That moon, so high and cold and thoroughly disinterested, one great all-seeing, uncaring eye slowly beginning to close in the lazy, inevitable wink of lunar cycles. There’s a warm late summer breeze rustling through the green tangle of dog roses and poison ivy, cordgrass and sea lavender, back towards the brackish expanse of Green Hill Pond. And Block Island Sound stretches out before me, restless and muttering beneath the moonlight, describing time and the night with the rhythmic language of troughs and cresting waves and breakers. I come here when she calls, which is more often than it used to be. I come here, and maybe there are others she awakens, on other nights, but, if so, I have never seen them for myself. I drive down from Charlestown, always stopping somewhere along the way for a few bottles of beer, a pack of cigarettes, following her voice and carefully minding the gauntlet of traffic signals and stop signs. I never play the radio. On these nights, there’s room in me for no song but the one she sings, and it pulls me east and south towards the sea. By the time I cross the iron, concrete, and asphalt bridge where Green Hill and Ninigret ponds are connected through the narrowest of confluences, the song is the only momentum I need. All else has become distraction, annoyance, if I listen, and I freely admit there have been nights I’ve stopped there on the bridge. I’ve pulled over and stood gazing out across the soughing marshes, contemplating the life I lived before. She has left me my will intact – or so she swears – and I will say that it seems as though, in those rare moments of hesitation, my license to turn back, to simply stop listening, is right there before me. I only need the courage to turn away. I linger near my idling truck, hands shaking, smelling the stink of my own anxious sweat (which smells not so very different from the ponds and the sea), smelling the night, and I can almost comprehend the restraint and abnegation that would be required to turn around and drive home again. I have never yet done so, and I don’t believe I ever shall. It is not my will. So, tonight I sit here at the edge of the dunes, beneath the indifferent moon as the tide slides steadily away down the berm, here and there exposing a few stranded jellyfish and an unlucky, gasping cod. Never yet has she asked me to come any nearer to the water than this. I think that’s part of our peculiar symbiosis: she leads me down to the sea, but I am the magnet that pulls her up from the depths where she sleeps away the days, wrapped safe from the hungry sun, shrouded in veils of silt and darkness. Half a mile out, there’s the wreckage of the Caoimhe Colleen, a trawler that went down during a gale, back in ’75. She sleeps in the wheelhouse, most days, coiled up snug as any eel, tight as an oyster in its shell. I don’t know where the sea hid her before the trawler sank; I’ve never thought to ask. It hardly seems to matter. I do, however, know that once, many years ago, she still slept on the land, keeping to one boneyard or another like any good cliché. I know she spent a decade haunting Stonington Cemetery, and the local teenagers still swap ghost stories that must have begun with her. And I know, too, that, farther back, she once rested among caskets locked safe inside a marble vault at Swan Point in Providence. It was there that she first thought of the water and so traded the mausoleum for the succour of the muddy Seekonk River. The only time I ever asked her why, why the water, why the sea, and even though I understood she does not breathe and has no need of air, she leaned close, laughing, and whispered, “You really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea.” Her laughter makes the night flinch, and sometimes I imagine it is harder than diamonds. She loves Lewis Carroll, and there have been evenings I’ve gone to her when every word from her lips is something remembered from “Jabberwocky” or “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. When she bothers to speak at all, and there certainly are enough nights when we have no need of mere words for this necessary exchange. And now I realize that I have been woolgathering, partway drunk on convenience-store beer and drawing circles within circles in the sand. There was a noise, or, rather, there was the most minute alteration in the familiar sonic tapestry of the beach, the wind, the night, so I look up, and there she is, walking out of the waves towards me. She trails some dim bluish phosphorescence, something borrowed from dinoflagellates and tiny shrimp, only by accident or because she thinks it suits her. Beneath all the valleys and mountains and dry basaltic maria of the waning moon, she glistens. Not for me, but this is of no consequence whatsoever. I have never imagined myself at the center of anything, nor asked the paths of stars to bear some relevance to my own existence. She glistens, and it is sufficient that I am permitted to bear w
itness. For a while – I can never say how long – she stands over me, dripping and murmuring about the gravity of appetite and all the epochs that have come and are yet to come. Or this is only my straining imagination, and, instead, she mutters a bit of “The Lobster Quadrille”, or there is not any shape or sense to her voice. Or there is not even her voice. For the song requires so much from her, and there is no need to keep singing when I am sitting at her feet. She kneels before me in the sand, though I must be clear that she is not kneeling to me. If she has ever deigned to play supplicant to any god or goddess, any demon or angel or pagan numen, it is a secret known to her and her alone. For my part, I like to think she has never prayed and never will. She kneels before me in the sand, naked save the limp strands of knotted wrack and ribbon weed woven into her black hair and hanging down about her shoulders and breasts, the sharp scatter of barnacles like freckles across her cheeks and belly, the anemone she has allowed to take hold in the cleft between her legs. One day, one evening, I know, she will become a garden, and no longer will she need to sing across the nights to insomniacs and mad men, suicides and lonely women. If she does not forsake the sea, it will, in distant centuries, make her well and truly its own. She will be nourished not with the warm blood of creatures that walk beneath blue skies, but by the photosynthesis of kelp and pink leaf, by sponges and colonies of encrusting bryozoans straining the murky sound for zooplankton and detritus. She will wear lady-crab garlands and sand-dollar brooches. These visions she has passed along to me, over the months and years, and I think they are a sort of comfort to her, the possibility of an end to untold ages of predation, an end which she accepts with the resignation of one who has been so long in agony and understands that death is, at least, release. She will not end, as my human consciousness will one day end, for that luxury was stolen from her long ago, but she might yet be permitted in this sea change to fade, diminishing as all unperverted Nature diminishes. She kneels in the sand before me (which is only to say in front of me), her eyes the still hearts of hurricanes, and then she smiles the smile I have driven through the South County night to see. She leans forwards, kissing me, and so I taste salt and estuary sediment and, beyond that muddy, saline veneer, the harsher flavours that I know are truly her own. Maybe she is speaking now, words hardly even breathed they fall so softly on my ears. Maybe she is thanking me for following the song again, or maybe she is merely reciting Lewis Carroll, or maybe she is describing some careless, wanton conclusion to our meetings, a crimson abandon that would leave my body torn apart and strewn among the dunes. But it’s all the same, really, as I am hers to do with as she will, no strings attached, no farthest limits to my devotion; I made that promise the first night and have not yet regretted it. Her tongue, rough as any cat’s, probes eagerly past my lips, and now she is pushing me down into the sand. She is the weight of all my joys and disappointments, the bitter weight of living, bearing down upon me. She rises from the ocean and delivers to me the merciless press of fifty or sixty pounds per square inch, and with a single inhalation she could collapse my fragile lungs. Her sighs and cries would rend the skies for her lover that was drowned. And when the kiss has finally ended (for, like a hall of mirrors, it only seems to go on for ever), I show her my throat, my paltry, insufficient offering. She trills enthusiastic approval, though, so never mind my own insecurities and misgivings in this moment. We cannot ever know the minds of the gods we serve, and we cannot second-guess their approval or disdain. O Mother, even a dullard becomes a poet who meditates upon thee raimented with space, and at best I am a dullard as the terrible, exquisite crucible of her mouth opens so wide and her long eye teeth flash the moonlight like pearls. Creatrix of the three worlds, whose waist is beautiful with a girdle made of numbers of dead men’s arms, and who on the breast of a corpse . . . and I do not flinch or cry out or attempt to pull away as those fangs honed hundreds of years before my inconsequential birth divide skin and fascia and muscle to find the hot stream of my carotid artery. I do not turn away from the pain, but embrace it, as she is embracing me in her long white arms. The pain is one part of my penance, one part of my reward, a sliver of agony to last me until the next time, which I understand, as always, may never come. She clamps her jaws tight about me, and in this instant we may almost be as one, the embanked river spilling itself out into the boundless sea, and yes, yes, I am but a dullard, at best, and this is not poetry at all, Shri Kalika Devi, Morrigan – virgin Ana, mother Babd, great crone Macha, Queen of all the Phantoms – Circe, Nerthus, Al-’Uzzuã, al-Manãt, al-Lãt, Demeter: the devouring, loving, enveloping, consuming mother who draws witches to their sabat bonfires and men to sacred crematoria and priestesses to shrines in secret groves surrounding bottomless, serpent-haunted pools. The circle drawn about a stone to render it a mystery, and my mind reels and is all but lost in this ecstasy that I am well aware is not my ecstasy but hers and hers alone. I am, at most, vicarious. Dullard. Grateful, weeping dullard on a beach with the summer sea pulling back towards the fullest extent of low tide as she feeds. You do not satiate that hunger, but only placate it. She could devour the world and not be filled. Her thirst is as profound and abyssal as the “hole” proceeding a star’s collapse, and I am damned and blessed to circle this event horizon for evermore, until she is done with me. Let me pray here for death, which is the same prayer I would utter for life, being and unbeing, and the blood that escapes her greedy, sucking lips trickles down my throat and chest and spatters like ink across the brown-sugar sand. I close my eyes, that shrinking moon, the single eye of all goddesses, glaring down at me. I will not, even now, forget those few lines memorized from the Sakti Sangama Tantra – . . . there is not, nor has been, nor will be any holy place like unto a woman . . . – but these are only a lunatic’s ramblings, an idiot grasping at straws, and a dullard worshiping at the alabaster feet of the incomprehensible universe. I close my eyes, and the night falls away, and the sea is forgotten, and she is only my dream of purity and taint. She folds me open, and folds me shut and, when I awaken, shivering, in the morning to the giggle and screech of the gulls and the roar of the tide coming up again, I shall say my wicked, heathen prayers, and imagine her sleeping in the ruin of the Caoimhe Colleen, and already I will have begun waiting all over again.