Blood of Life: Cora's Choice 1-3 Bundle

by V M Black

  Because of me. Because he drank my blood.

  Holy shit.

  How could I have ever thought he was human? He looked like a man, but there was a difference to him, not just in the paleness of his skin and the intensity of his eyes. He seemed to extend beyond the limits of his own flesh in the way that ordinary mortals could not, as if his will formed a dark force around his body. I could feel it drawing me to him.

  Now that I could truly see him for what he was, I understood how he gave such an impression of size. His physical height was perhaps only a trifle over six feet, but the part of him that was more than human extended beyond the confines of flesh and bone, making him seem larger than he had any right to be.

  Despite the attraction he exuded, a very immediate and primitive part of my brain wanted nothing but to run away, screaming. My legs twitched of their own accord—and reminded me that I was tied to the bed in quite a literal way.

  “I’m glad to see that you’re awake,” Mr. Thorne said. He crossed to my bedside.

  I shrank away, but as he came closer, the strange magnetism that surrounded him overtook me, overwhelming the panicked directions from my hindbrain to flee. I closed my hands around my blankets to keep from reaching out for him. Even now.

  This is crazy, a distant part of me screamed. He bit you. Get out!

  I couldn’t move a muscle.

  Mr. Thorne didn’t comment on my reaction, but I knew nothing escaped his sharp notice. “The medical team has been taking your lymphocytes every twelve hours,” he said instead, standing so close I could touch him. “Your counts have already gone down by half, and they should be back to normal in another week.”

  My brain went blank, wanting the words it thought he’d said too badly to allow them to register all at once. If my lymphocytes were going down, it could mean only one thing.

  My cancer was going away.

  “I really am...cured,” I said hoarsely. The hope he had offered me might be real, then, not just some cruel trick to lure me into his power.

  I swallowed. Cured. The word hardly had a meaning. It had been a desperate dream for so many weeks. Since there had been something inside that was going to kill me, I felt like I should know somehow that it was gone. I did feel...different, but the reality was one intangibility replaced by another. My fight against leukemia had been a battle against an invisible opponent, and the evidence of my victory was equally abstract.

  “Survival is not compatible with cancer,” Mr. Thorne said coolly. It was hard for me to think straight with him so close. He had a contained, coiled energy about him, each movement that he took carefully studied, as if there was a danger in what he might do if his attention slipped.

  “Survival. Survival of what? What did you do to me?” I demanded. I needed words to describe what had passed between us, the ecstasy and the pain and the overriding rush that had swallowed everything.

  His smile was full of meaning. “I think you know, Cora.”

  My name on his lips was like a caress and a blow all at once. It was the first time he’d addressed me so informally, and I knew it was because of what he had done—and that I had survived.

  But I still didn’t even know his name.

  A memory stirred in the back of my mind. Except that perhaps I did....

  “Dorian.” I breathed the name. It suited him.

  He simply raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement, hooking an ankle around the nearest chair and pulling it under him as he sat in one easy motion.

  I shivered and tried to decide if that was an improvement. He was no longer towering over me, but his face was much closer to mine, which only scrambled my scattered wits even more.

  The memory of his mouth on mine came over me. Oh, God. One part of me wanted to kiss him again—the other wanted only to escape. But I wasn’t going anywhere as long as I was trapped in the bed.

  “Get me out of this.” I raised my hand with the IV taped to it to indicate the tubes that I was strapped to. “Now.” I heard the hysterical note in my own voice and clamped down on it.

  “Of course.” He captured my hand in his, and I couldn’t stop it from trembling at his touch even as he removed the tape from the back of my hand. My body burned with awareness of him no less than it had the night before, no less than in my dream, when he had led me to my destruction.

  Even knowing what he was.

  “You can’t just go around biting people with no warning,” I heard myself say. It sounded stupid. I didn’t care.

  He pressed slightly where the needle pierced my skin and slid it out in a straight, smooth motion.

  “You knew the risk and the reward,” he said. “Did the details matter with so much at stake?”

  Even with my hand still held in his, I sputtered in outrage. “Details? You didn’t tell me you were a vampire! That was kind of an important detail you omitted. Something a girl might like to know. ‘Oh, by the way, this procedure I’ve been talking about? It involves me sinking my teeth into your neck.’”

  His chuckle sent ripples down into my core. “Who believes in vampires anymore? We’ve been turned into a popular trope, a pet monster, a joke.” He looked at me, his pale eyes going straight into my mind, as if he could read the thoughts written there.

  Dorian Thorne carried darkness around him, a shroud even in the light. He was all too real, nothing at all like a joke.

  He raised my hand to his mouth. I stared, mesmerized and powerless, as he brought the mark that the needle had left to his lips, his mouth damp across my flesh. My nerves danced with fire where he touched me, and a tiny groan escaped me, my breath catching and my heartbeat coming fast.

  He turned the back of the hand to face me. The skin was flawless except for a tiny pale mark and a surrounding bruise that faded even as I watched.

  Impossible.

  “You really did heal me,” I breathed, pulling my hand back. “How?”

  “I don’t know. No one does. After thirty years of research, we are scarcely closer to an answer than we were at the start,” Dorian Thorne said. “But we do know this: The saliva of a vampire is fatal when introduced into the bloodstream of most humans, but those it does not kill, it heals. And changes. Forever.”

  Chapter Two

  Changes. My heart hammered in my chest. I didn’t want to be changed. I wanted my life back, the one the leukemia had threatened to steal from me.

  “I’m not a vampire now, am I?” I demanded.

  “Vampires are born, not made,” Dorian Thorne said. “You are something else. No longer fully human, but not a vampire, either.”

  I didn’t like that answer, and I wanted to pursue it, but another question, more troubling though less personal, was pressing upon me. “Why bite people at all, then, if it means they’ll usually die?”

  “Because I die, if I do not. And it is not an easy death or a swift one,” he said.

  His eyes tightened briefly. He opened a drawer and pulled out a large syringe, like the kind used for giving oral medications. At my expression, he said, “For the catheter. You want it out, don’t you?”

  I nodded curtly. “So you’re not actually...you know, undead,” I said, feeling foolish.

  He reached down beside the bed and came up with a loop of tubing. He put the syringe to a port on the tube and pulled out the plunger, sucking a clear liquid into it. My eyes jerked to the ceiling because at the same moment, I felt a pressure inside my bladder release.

  “No, not undead.” He sounded weary. “I am as alive and sensible, in the old meaning of the word, as any human. And you can remove the catheter now,” he added. “Unless you require assistance.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Not at all.”

  I reached under the blanket and slid the catheter free with a tug. I tore through the wrap that secured the tube to my leg and pushed it all off the side of the bed, adjusting my gown back down again.

  I was free. Or as free as I could be while trapped in a room with a vampire.

  “So why don�
��t you just drink animal blood? A really rare steak?” I challenged. “Do people just taste better?”

  He snorted. “Animal blood does no more for us than it does for you.”

  “Blood donations?”

  “Cora, we have tried. Over years, centuries, millennia, we have tried. If I could drink blood removed from its host or take the life of a mouse or cow instead of a human, I would. Many of us would.” A frown crossed his face, creasing his forehead for a moment before it relaxed again, leaving no mark. “But it is the interaction between a living, human host and the vampiric enzymes that produces a change in the cells themselves that we need to live.”

  “So you eat people.”

  The disgust of it should have been greater. I was horrified, but it was a muted, intellectual reaction. I knew he very well could have killed me—killed me to save himself, perhaps, and I would have gone eagerly enough to my grave, but I would still be just as dead. And I knew with certainty that he’d killed before, people just like me, people who had given themselves to him, heart and soul, only to be devoured in the end.

  “Not like food,” he said. “More like a vitamin, without which we develop something like scurvy or rickets. I don’t sit down to dine on living victims every night. Not every week or even every month.”

  I shuddered. “That’s really no different from...from buying organs from stolen living donors on the black market.”

  His eyes, pale and icy, seemed to open to another world, drawing me in. “There is a difference, Cora. When a human kills a human, it is murder, and there is no consent asked or given. When a human kills a creature that is not human, or vice versa....”

  And he wasn’t human. He was a too-perfect facsimile of one, too beautiful to bear. I knew how a deep-sea fish felt, enticed into the gaping mouth of an abysmal monster with the glowing lure on the end of its tongue.

  “We aren’t animals,” I breathed.

  “You aren’t. But what if we are?” he asked, leaning closer. “Animals made to need you. It is what I am, not what I choose.”

  Dorian brushed my cheek with a fingertip. I rocked slightly at the touch, my mind ablaze with his madness even as I intellectually rejected everything that he had said. His head angled down towards mine, his mouth so close that I could feel his breath.

  He stopped, his lips a hairbreadth from mine. “And I never take anything that is not offered to me,” he whispered.

  Then he pulled back, leaving me dazed and panting, the truth of his words piercing me to the core. I pushed up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and sliding to the floor, trying to cover my agitation as I twitched my nightgown straight.

  “You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s not right. Who could refuse you?” Even if it meant death....

  “Cora, I am telling you how things are, not how I would like things to be,” he said, not moving from his chair. “I want to put an end to all this death.”

  A monster with a conscience, then.

  Oh, well, that makes it so much better, Cora, I told myself acidly. The lion that weeps for the lamb.

  “So the screening,” I said.

  “It was very real.” His eyes bored into me with the intensity of his words, the need for me to believe him. “I have poured millions of dollars into my research, attempting to lower the casualties, to identify those who will live. You are the first success.”

  “How could you possibly know that I would be the one in one hundred, then?” I demanded. “How could you quote me statistics if you really had no clue?”

  “It was an estimate,” he said, “based on the conversion rate of the general population and the number that we could exclude from consideration. We knew for certain that all those we exclude have no chance of survival. Simple mathematics dictates the likelihood among those that remain.”

  “You accepted me on a guess,” I said. I should have been more outraged. I was angry, still. But overriding that was the fact that I was not only alive but cured. He had offered me a chance and been brutally honest about my odds. He had just hidden...everything else.

  And that everything was a whopper.

  I pressed on. “And what were the other requirements, other than that I had to be terminally ill and pass the blood test?”

  “That you be female,” he said flatly. “And an adult young enough to withstand the conversion.”

  Chapter Three

  An adult female. Oh, God. My unnatural reaction to his every touch, the throbbing need that drove me to comply to every demand.... It wasn’t just me, then, at least not entirely.

  “So it’s...like that...for you, too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes. The hunger that comes upon us is very comprehensive.”

  “Is it like that every time?” I pressed. “With everyone?”

  His eyes were shadowed. “There seems to be a correlation between the likelihood of successful metabolic conversion and the level of arousal.”

  Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn. I fought the heat rising in my cheeks and retreated to the other side of the bed, away from him and his clinical dissections.

  “So I survived,” I said, turning back around to face him and folding my arms over my breasts. “What now? Do you send me packing off home again, cured but not-quite-human?” The thought of never seeing him again sent a sudden jolt of panic, unexpected and frightening, coursing through me.

  “Do you think, after all the trouble I took to find you, that I would just...send you away?” he asked, standing from the chair.

  He looked even taller and darker halfway across the room, taking up far more space than his frame gave any justification for. The light in his eyes was sharper now, and in it I could see need—need and something more, a kind of desperate hunger that I feared to name, something that was more than physical that he kept caged deep inside.

  I found it difficult to breathe, afraid of that caged thing. No one knew where I was. I could just vanish forever into this great house. Only my doctor and Lisette could have any idea where I’d gone, and how easy would it be for a man like Mr. Thorne to make a single, parentless girl disappear?

  “Am I your prisoner, then?” I managed.

  “Of course not,” he said, approaching me. “Do you really want to go, Cora? Put on your clothes, take your jacket and disappear from this place, never to see it again? Never to see me again?”

  “Yes,” I lied reflexively. The thought of leaving was like a sickness in my stomach. I stood, transfixed, as he approached, unable to put even another foot of space between us. “What do you want from me? More blood?”

  He stopped, his body only inches from mine.

  “Your cure—and my nourishment—is only the beginning to the changes that the conversion has wrought,” he said. “And only the beginning of what is between us.”

  “What do you mean?” I whispered, swaying slightly as I fought the warring urges within me.

  I wouldn’t let my life be changed, whatever he said. I wouldn’t give up the very thing I’d wanted so desperately to save.

  He reached down and enclosed my unresisting hand in his own, raising it so our clasped hands were in front of my eyes. I could see a mark, like a tear-drop of blood, on his inner wrist. I stared at it uncomprehendingly, and he twisted our hands so that I was looking at my own inner wrist, and there was its mate. It looked like a port wine birthmark, not a tattoo, except it hadn’t been there before.

  “What have you done to me?” I demanded.

  “I have changed you,” he said. “That is the bondmark, Cora. It appears when a human survives feeding and is transformed. It shows that you belong to me now. In every way. Forever.”

  I shook my head, unable to summon the words to deny him.

  Dorian released my wrist and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, a motion I might have called tender if it had come from someone else. Something else.

  “It’s a great gift, Cora. More than a cure. Not only can you never again develop cancer, but you will never suff
er any other human illness. And, like me, you will never grow old.”

  I gaped at him. “I’m...immortal?”

  For some reason, the question called up a deep grief that flickered over his face before disappearing again.

  “No,” he said. “You can die of starvation and thirst, exposure or heat or cold. And if an injury is sudden enough and catastrophic enough, it will kill you. Agelessness—isn’t that gift enough?”

  I felt dizzy. How long might I survive in that case? A hundred years? Three hundred? My Gramma had died at eighty-two. Would there be a time that I would look around and find that everyone I had known in my first fifty years of life was dead?

  Everyone except for him, of course—the creature who was now claiming me as his own.

  “And you? Can you die?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I, too, am not immortal, but my ability to heal is considerably greater than yours, and my ability to tolerate extremes and deprivations similarly stronger.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Older than empires,” he said, “but memory fades.”

  The perfection of his skin no longer looked young to me. It looked ageless and hard, like the beauty of a diamond.

  “I don’t want to forget my past,” I protested. “I don’t want to lose who I am—who I was.” I didn’t want the coldness that I felt in him.

  Again, that brief sadness. “Despite everything that I will do to protect you, it is unlikely that you will live so long.”

  I could feel his influence rolling over me, sweeping me up in it like a twig in a flood, but I pulled back, away from him.

  “No. I don’t care what some mark on my arm says. I’m not...yours. I didn’t agree to it. I don’t want it. All I want is my life back. School, a career, marriage, a nice house in the suburbs, kids.” I rattled off my list, so often rehearsed. “Normal things. Sane things.”

  That was the whole point of saving my life. I had a plan, a plan to have all the things Gramma had sacrificed so much for. I wasn’t going to give that up. There had to be a way to get out of this, whatever it was, and back to my old life. My real life.