Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2)

by Telep, Trisha

  That, she would not do. They shook together, and later she lay against his shoulder, spent and boneless. There had never been another soul that fitted her so.

  “I shall miss you,” she said softly.

  “I don’t want you to. Stay with me.”

  Ah, if only she could. She did not say this would be their last night together, unless – she hesitated, and then risked all.

  “I cannot live in your world,” she told him. “But you could make a place in mine. I have the power –”

  “No.” He stiffened.

  “Not even for an eternity with me?” she asked lightly.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  He couldn’t realize how deep his rejection cut. “Not everyone could turn down immortality so easily.”

  Zane shuddered. “I don’t want that.”

  Her heart ached. Nor do I. Now she wanted everything she had spurned, so long ago. She wanted the freedom to be with him and share his life. But she would never say the words aloud. Across the centuries she had grown allergic to pathos, particularly her own.

  “Then forget I spoke it.” Prithee, do it now, before Cyrus and Galen learn what I have done. She brushed his temples and fogged his mind.

  His hands sifted through her long hair, his fingers knotting. “I don’t think I can bear this,” he said unsteadily. “Our time is running out, and my heart aches with it. I want you as I’ve wanted nothing else in my life. Why can’t you be a woman I could love?”

  The question broke her heart. Pleasure she could offer, but love was forever denied her. She would always need a new chosen, always, no matter how tightly she bonded to the old. It would destroy him to see her with another, and so—

  She rose, graceful and fluid. Her skin began to cool, lacking his warmth.

  “Do you have further questions?” she asked.

  “I’ll ask next time, if I do.” Zane stood, seeming to realize he had been dismissed.

  There would be no next time. She let him go, knowing Cyrus would take care of the rest. The bond required special measures, but her kinsman would blot it from Zane’s mind. For the first time in a hundred years, Ysabel the Untouched wept.

  Eleven

  Zane woke in a cold sweat. His head throbbed, but he couldn’t put a finger on what was wrong. He tore his apartment up, searching in vain, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d lost.

  He went to work in a fog.

  The building looked different to him somehow with its array of cubicles, worn brown carpeting and too bright lights. There was somewhere else he needed to be, but it wouldn’t coalesce. Bobby, the photographer, stopped him in the hall, tapping his arm twice in agitation. “Are you high? Rogers wants to see you.”

  “Shit, why?” He tried to pull himself together. Having the editor-in-chief on your ass was never a good thing.

  “I dunno, just go see him.”

  So he did.

  He listened with growing incomprehension. Taking the story from his editor, he raised his brows at it. The piece was covered in red marks, but Rogers seemed excited. Zane couldn’t remember writing the thing.

  Which worried him.

  “It’s great,” Rogers was saying. “Very hot. I’m using the headline you gave me.” Skimming, he found it: I was a vampire’s love slave. “It would be better if you had pictures, but we can use stock footage. You said she was blonde, right?”

  “Did I?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Rogers shook his head in annoyance. “Anyway, I need you to get me these edits by the end of the day. Fix it up and send it to production, will you? I’m running it on the front page. Congrats, kid.”

  “Uhm. Thanks.” Zane staggered from the office, peering at his own words as if he’d never seen them before. Had he been drinking? He’d heard of people bingeing into a blackout, but he couldn’t remember much of the entire last week.

  The story, however he’d come to write it, made his fortune.

  At first it was just tabloid TV shows wanting to interview him. Then more serious journalists started talking to him about his experiences with the paranormal. He did a few radio interviews.

  Tonight made his sixth, and he was starting to get comfortable with the process. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d lost his heart somewhere. Dusk till dawn, he never stopped aching, never stopped searching the crowd for a face whose lines wouldn’t fully shape up in his mind’s eye. Would he know her if he saw her? Who was she?

  Breaking his reverie, the young woman who hosted Boston Tonight leaned towards him. “Zane, are you telling me that you slept with a vampire and lived to write about it?”

  By this point, his answers were smooth and polished. The truth didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what he remembered – only what they wanted to hear.

  “She wasn’t a killer,” he said. “And I’m no danger to her.”

  “So what was it like?” the woman asked. “Cold, I bet.” She played a laugh track.

  No, she hadn’t been cold. She’d been quicksilver, love and lightning in his arms. Why the hell couldn’t he remember her face? Zane started to wonder if he’d been doing hardcore drugs, and then he considered doing them, if it meant seeing her again.

  Groupies started popping up at his apartment. Usually they were confused young things with barbwire tatts and dyed black hair. They bore the sad eyes of the eternal victim, and they seemed to think he could shift their sorrow. Without fail, he sent them away.

  But pretty soon he had what publishers called a “platform”. Most people seemed to think it was all a gimmick, which was fine with him. Wasn’t that the point of the whole business? Entertainment?

  Within six months, he quit working at Weird Weekly News. He had a bizarre compulsion to write a novel. Though he’d never wanted to do fiction – always, always it had been journalism for him – he couldn’t get the heroine out of his head.

  She haunted him.

  Month after month, he banged out his magnum opus. The book was ridiculously long, epic in scope and spanning nearly five centuries. It began in 1513 with a girl in Cornwall. When it was done, it stretched to 150,000 words; the thing should’ve been unpublishable. Instead, he found an agent, who sold it at auction. To his surprise, Zane was credited with reinventing the vampire genre. He called the story Ysabel, and hoped that having written about her for more than half a year, she would leave him be.

  Yet she still haunted him. Which was ridiculous because she wasn’t real.

  She wasn’t real.

  He tried to date, but the women never felt or tasted right. They didn’t smell of citrus and peaches, honeydew and water lily. Night after night, he found himself holding the book he’d written, stroking the cover as if the cover model’s skin ought to warm him.

  He suspected he was going mad.

  Twelve

  “Still following him?” Cyrus asked with a touch of disapproval.

  Ysabel knew he was right. It had been nearly two years, a wink of the eye to those such as they. Still, she should not clip articles from the paper about New York Times bestselling author, Zane Monteith. She should not watch programmes where he appeared as a guest. But she could not strike him from her mind.

  Oh, he had served his purpose. He had gone away as she intended, swimming in false lore. She turned the jewelled pincers over in her hands then. They used these to mark the necks of their chosen, so they would not realize the true nature of the feeding: energy, not blood. That which flowed from sexual congress was the strongest, but they could feed off anger, grief, jealousy, terror – any of the fierce, dark emotions. In this way, they had hidden in plain sight for centuries. Not even John Polidori had gotten it right.

  But Zane, Zane had been a particular coup. With one book, he had circulated more misinformation than she could have leaked in two human lifetimes. It was a pity she had made the mistake of falling in love with him; Cyrus had been correct in his judgment.

  Once set, her kind could not undo the mate bond whi
le the chosen yet lived. She had done her best to blot herself from his consciousness, but there was no such mercy for Ysabel. She must simply bear the loss. She’d offered him eternity, only to have him recoil in disgust. No, she had nothing he wanted. He was human, and proudly so.

  Thus, she earned back her name, Ysabel the Untouched, and she fed on sorrow.

  Belatedly she realized Cyrus was waiting for an answer. “Yes. I cannot help it.”

  “I hate to see you repine so,” he said gently. “He is no one.”

  She offered a half-smile. “And so I was, once.”

  “What can I do?” He knelt beside her chair, sombre as he almost never was.

  Ysabel ignored the question. “Do you know, Steven once quoted ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ at me?”

  “Steven,” Cyrus repeated. “The suicide?”

  At that, her burden became a bit heavier. “Yes. But I hear those lines and marvel that no one ever wonders what became of her, whether she ever mourned for the loss of her poet, or if she sent him from her in kindness.”

  He inhaled sharply. “I mislike your look, Ysabel. I do not like it when you speak this way.”

  She lifted her shoulders. “If I must bear it, so must you. Or . . . you can leave me, Cyrus. You are more than old enough to start your own demesne.”

  “I will not,” her kinsman said quietly.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why stay now? My house crumbles, and I cannot find the will to care.” It was true. They were down to three now. Antoine had yielded the melancholy, and she should be looking for someone to replace him.

  She could not. She no longer believed perpetuity was a gift.

  He lowered his lovely face, unable to hold her gaze. “All this time, you never knew. I never spoke it. But anything I have done, anything over these long years, I have done for love of you.”

  Even to the murder of your own brother. I ought to have known. Alongside his twin, Cyrus had been her chosen, once.

  “‘Hell is empty,’” she breathed in self-loathing, “‘And all the devils are here.’”

  He shook his head with doleful tenderness. “‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with’t.’”

  “Mayhap so,” she said, sighing. “Mayhap so. Yet I cannot help but weary of it all.”

  She remembered trying to persuade her sire otherwise. Tonight she heard his voice, whispering down the centuries. This, this is the beginning of the decline. First, you gorge on sorrow, and then the melancholia fills your soul. From this, my love, there is no return. You have cheered me these many years, but I can stay no longer.

  Now, this too she would inflict upon Cyrus. He would bear the burden of her death.

  But he knew her too well. “No. That is the one thing I will not do for you. Is this so dreadful? Would you be mortal again, truly? Would you give up eternity for him?”

  Bowing her head, she acknowledged she had asked too much of him; her silence formed her answer. Ysabel went to don her white gown. To feed, she spent her nights at the hospital, ministering to those who were sick unto dying. There, she ate their misery like candy, and they lived three days in peace before passing on. They whispered in the wards of the White Lady, and some prayed for her to ease their pain.

  Three years after she had sent Zane from her sight, Marceau came to her. She had not known Cyrus had confided in him, but she was not surprised by his knowledge, only his demeanour. She raised her brows expectantly.

  “M’selle,” he said, unwontedly diffident. “For the last year, I have been seeking an answer. I am your man in all things, and thus, I delved into the old books. Today, I come to say – there is a way. But there is risk. You . . . you might die of it.”

  “Marceau,” she told him gently. “I am dying anyway. Will you try?”

  They told her only that Cyrus must drain her energies completely, and then she must be laid out on hallowed ground, anointed in olive oil, holy water and myrrh. At the end of three days, she would be mortal or dead. She was willing to take the risk.

  On the appointed night, she went to the cathedral and was surprised to find Cyrus waiting. Candles flickered all around, glazing the marble. He paused in his pacing when she entered. Gently, he took her hands.

  “Are you certain this is what you want?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation.

  He nodded grimly and drew her to him. Ysabel felt everything she was rushing towards him. Memories, brightness, love. She had to struggle not to fight. Cold now. Weak. Her body went limp.

  As through some distant tunnel, she heard someone burst in, but she could not open her eyes. Galen’s voice, angry. “What have you done?”

  She could not explain. Marceau spoke then. “You must go, monsieur. Only Cyrus can stay with her now. Three days and three nights must he hold her, and when that time is done, he will bear her hunger as his own.”

  Oh, no. No. They did not tell me that. It is too much. But her eyes were weighted with lead, and all had gone dark.

  “We are too few already. It’s bloody fucking stupid,” Galen raged.

  Something crashed nearby.

  “No,” said Marceau. “It is love. And the key to all magic is sacrifice. Go now, Galen, and drink to her memory. She will not remember you if she survives.”

  She felt Marceau knotting a cord around her wrist. Symbolic. It joined her to Cyrus, and offered the umbilical of rebirth.

  Epilogue

  Their eyes met across a crowded coffee shop.

  Zane felt as though he had been looking for her his whole life. She was lithe and fair, smiling as if she knew him. It could be that she recognized his picture from the back of a book jacket, but she didn’t demand an autograph.

  The thundercloud grey of her eyes took his breath away. Before he knew what he meant to do, he found himself beside her. He offered his hand and, when she took it, pleasure went straight up his arm, leaving him reeling. Breathless. He’d felt like this before.

  Sometime. Somewhere.

  “I’m Zane,” he said.

  “Ysabel.”

  And somehow, he knew, beyond remembering. Truth bore him up. It was she, the woman who had haunted him for years, who held his heart fast and would not let him go. She seemed equally transfixed, her fingers twined through his.

  He kissed her, and it was right. He held her to him fiercely. She was heaven on earth, and the fear that she was no more than a figment of his imagination finally receded.

  “I thought I dreamed you,” he whispered.

  “And I, you.” She swallowed, seeming to have trouble finding her voice. “I do not remember everything I should, and yet I know this as truly as my own name. I have but one thing to offer you, and I am afraid you will not want it.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, gently.

  “My heart. Will you have it?”

  “Lady,” he said in an odd, courtly tone, “I will.”

  “Linden?” she breathed.

  He remembered coming to her door on a rainy winter night, and how the rushes in her father’s hall smelled of rosemary. He had recognized her then, too, and tried to keep her with him at any price. That cost him her love; he was glad she had not repeated his mistake. Over the centuries he’d known many names – and known her by many as well – but this time, they came together in the way that was right, destined to live and die together.

  And then, and then, they would find each other again, a circle unbroken.

  Skein of Sunlight

  Devon Monk

  Maddie’s hands shook as she angled the visor mirror and applied her lipstick. Even with the make-up, she felt naked. Why had she let Jan talk her into going out tonight?

  Jan sat in the driver’s seat finishing off a cheeseburger. “You aren’t nervous are you?” she asked around a mouthful.

  “No,” Maddie lied.

  Jan stopped chewing to suck up the last of her diet cola and squinted at the quaint Victorian
house just up the block from them. It was bathed in light from the street lamp, and practically glowed from the lantern beside the door.

  “Might be the most dangerous looking yarn shop I’ve ever seen in all my days on the force,” she said.

  Maddie laughed. “Stop it. This is hard.”

  “No.” Jan wiped her mouth with a wadded up napkin. “Chemo was hard. And you got through that. This is fun, remember? A real night out. A little adventure.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just . . . ” Maddie touched her hair; long enough now, it was styled short and spiky in what Jan called a “vixen cut”.

  “Why you picked a yarn store is beyond me,” Jan muttered. “There’s a bar just a couple streets down. That’s where you’ll find adventure. Good beer, lots of hot young ’uns. We could go Cougar for the night. Lord knows it’s been a long time since you had a man in a meaningful way.”

  Maddie cut her off before she could launch into the sex-fixes-everything speech. “Sounds great. You go check out the young ’uns. I’ll prowl for yarn.”

  “You don’t want me to go with you?” Jan tried, but failed, to sound disappointed.

  “Like you’d last five minutes in a yarn store. Plus, I want to touch, stroke, savour.”

  “So do I,” Jan said.

  “Yeah, but I want to fondle yarn. See you in a couple of hours.” She got out of the car and started up the street before Jan had any other bright ideas.

  It didn’t take long to reach the shop, but Maddie’s heart rattled in her chest. She had a thing about yarn stores. She didn’t know why, but she had always wanted to own one. Every town she visited, she made sure she tracked down the yarn shop. She’d never found the perfect store – the one she’d be willing to offer her life savings for – until she’d set her eyes on this beauty.

  She didn’t know who the owner was, but if she was there, and if the conversation turned that way, Maddie was going to ask if she’d be willing to sell.

  Maddie pulled her shoulders back, opened the door, and stepped in.

  The store was a lot bigger on the inside than it looked from the street, walls covered by wooden shelves that held skeins upon skeins of colour and fibre and texture. There was enough walking space to be comfortable, even with the two cosy love seats on either side of a small table that took up the centre of the room. At the far wall was a counter, a cash register, and no one behind either.