He went silent.
“Rayner…,” I said, hesitant. “But why…”
“That was the beginning of my hell.” He spoke softly. “I will never forget when the life went out of you, that first time. When you were gone and I remained. I would spend my life fighting the greatest enemy a man can ever face—the dark, yawning chasm between life and death. I refused to let it swallow you…not you, my beloved…”
“You left out the most important point of the story,” Silvus said. He looked at me. “You must be wondering, why didn’t he turn you into a vampire?”
“Yes,” I said.
“There is a spell upon you,” Silvus said. “One might say it’s a blessing, but to us, it’s been a curse. It may have been cast by your mother or members of the Amsterdam covens—or perhaps even by the warlock who held the grudge against your family. We don’t know for sure who it was or whether their motive was to protect you against living the life of a vampire, or to get back at Rayner. He didn’t know a damned thing about wizards and all their politics and maneuvers until he met me. He came to me directly after your death in the plague. I say ‘came to me’—ha! Attacked me is the more accurate description. I told him what he wanted was against my Ethereal code of conduct, and he turned me into a vampire so I was an Ethereal warlock no more.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Vampires tend to be terrible people,” Silvus said. “I have tried not to succumb, but it’s quite hopeless. Lust can be an overwhelming emotion for ordinary mortals, but for vampires it is far worse. The hunger for blood and…” He trailed off, leaving the rest unspoken but obvious.
“Do I get to talk yet?” Jie asked.
“No,” Silvus said. “You know very well that you haven’t entered the story yet.”
“It gets a lot more interesting with us,” Jie said.
“That is true. It took me a cursedly long time to find you, pet,” Silvus said. “It was just Rayner and I fighting like two unfamiliar cats for many years. I could cast spells to seek you out but that didn’t give me the wherewithal to reach you. You seemed to be somewhere out to sea, as far away as the stars, from where we stood in London. I presume you might have been somewhere in the Pacific. There was nothing I could do. I had no idea how to even begin to reach you.”
“The modern world is quite a wonder,” Rayner mused. “Back then, I was faced with the prospect that you might be born out of my reach, again and again. And then, one day, you were gone, presumed dead. The waiting and searching began again and God blessed me. We found you in France.”
“Of course, we waited patiently for you to grow up,” Silvus said. “We let our homes in London to younger vampires and obtained a country house in Provence near to you. You were the fifth child of eleven, in a farming family, with no money. We tried our best to arrange good fortune for you and your family, but there wasn’t much we could do without arousing suspicion. At the age of sixteen, times being what they were, mind you—sixteen was considered a woman—we were wed.”
Rayner was looking at me but his eyes held a memory. “It had been nearly a century, now, but you were finally mine once more. I gave your parents a bag of gold to have you. I would have given them the clothes off my back. I would have given them everything, just to have you.”
“So…I am always…the same?” I asked, unsure what to think of that. “Did you give me any choice?”
“In 1750, there was no such thing as choice,” Silvus said. “You are a modern woman now, but at the time many marriages were economic. You wouldn’t have dreamed of saying no. But I daresay you were very lucky, because we wanted to make you happy and protect you. It would never be your fate to bear eleven children or work the fields, bake your own bread or brew your own beer. The two of us took care of everything for you.”
Am I a modern woman now?
I was aware of what the life of a modern woman could be. I saw it in the authority of the witches like Councilwoman Garcia who stopped by, or in the books I read, but I never imagined that life for myself.
Father Joshua said my fate was to be his bride, and now I found it was a very different fate than that. Father Joshua, I now knew, took as many women as he wished for himself by naming them priestesses, while he intended for me to have his children. Now, I was the one who was meant to have four lovers and no children.
I never wanted any lover at all.
I am just a slave to these vampires, I thought, but that didn’t seem right either.
They stirred something inside me at the same time as they terrified me, and in the end I was simply confused.
“Marguerite,” Rayner said. “Your name was Marguerite, but I just called you Tulip, my flower of Holland. I didn’t want to forget that girl. You had no memory of before, and you had French mannerisms and tastes, but you were still remarkably similar. To put it simply: I wasn’t disappointed.”
“When the food shortages and the Revolution troubled France, we decided to stay on the safe side and took you back to my London house,” Silvus said. “You lived to quite a goodly age.”
“Seventy-one,” Rayner said, with a certain precision that made me think he never forgot anything when it came to my life.
I laughed nervously. “I can’t believe that the two of you really wanted to be with a seventy year old woman. What did people say?”
“I don’t care,” Rayner said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be two hundred years old.”
“It’s true,” Silvus said. “At first, you imagine yourself aging. Every man thinks old age will come for him. We are wired as such, I think. As much as every human resists their mortality, at the same time, the world begins to pass you by, faster and faster. Everyone you knew is old. The youths are incorrigible and completely confusing. You figure you must be old too, but somehow you aren’t. You are eternally regarded by others as a young man.”
“Then, that feeling also goes away,” Rayner said. “And you don’t think about the centuries or the fashions anymore.”
“Did that answer your question?” Silvus smiled. “I’m not so sure. But to make a point, we don’t think about you aging. I know it’s hard for a human to grasp.”
“Okay, Marguerite is dead, and now it’s my turn,” Jie said. “Silvus might not have been happy about being turned into a vampire, but it was the best damn thing that ever happened to me, after you.” He smiled at me, and I could tell that the younger two vampires had a more light-hearted rapport and didn’t seem troubled by much of anything.
I wondered what sort of moments I had shared with Jie. Just the way he smiled at me, I knew he must remember other times between us when he made me smile back.
“I met these guys when I was docked in Guangzhou,” Jie said. “They were looking for an interpreter. Man, did they stick out. Everyone had their own nickname for them, and thought they were trouble.”
“But you’ll do anything for a buck,” Thomas said.
“That’s right.” Jie grinned. “I was a sailor—“
“Pirate,” Silvus said. “You were a pirate.”
Jie shrugged. “Pirates are still sailors. They sail.”
“We had been on quite a journey,” Silvus said. “At that point, it was certainly possible for an Englishman and a Dutchman to get to China, but not on a whim, and not usually as deep as we needed to go.”
“They said they were missionaries!” Jie was laughing now. “We didn’t even know what good Christians were supposed to look like and we still knew they weren’t it.”
“Well, it was the only explanation that made any sense,” Rayner said. “We certainly couldn’t say we were there to kidnap a woman.” He frowned. “But we got to you eventually.”
“He doesn’t like this part of the story,” Jie said.
“Too bad. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s my favorite part besides the parts I’m actually in,” Thomas said. “Wish I coulda seen it.”
“Hush,” Rayner said. “The fact is, Tulip isn’t a fiend, and she has merc
y for people who don’t deserve it. I would do it again. I will do it again—but I promised to ask permission.”
“This is when you…you killed my family?” I remembered Silvus saying something about it.
“Your in-laws,” Rayner said. “Not your family. They didn’t treat you like family. You were a slave to them. I know I’m supposed to reflect upon the culture before I act, but we have cruel families in western Europe as well. I know what they look like.”
“I don’t remember it, of course,” I said. “So I don’t know what I can say.”
“The fact is, he snapped when he saw your feet were bound,” Silvus said. “Even though by then we knew this was the custom.”
“I’ve heard of it, I think,” I said. “But they didn’t teach us very much about other countries in my school. Is it very bad?”
“It was madness. Your feet had been broken and deformed.”
Jie raised his eyebrows. “In hindsight it’s crazy, but a lot of things are crazy in hindsight.”
“You liked her feet,” Rayner said.
“Well, of course I did, back then,” Jie said defensively. “How am I supposed to help being a product of my time either? Where I grew up, a girl that beautiful with Golden Lotuses would have been promised to the son of the richest man in town. Never thought I’d have a girl like that. I’m not going to apologize for being a product of my time when Thomas never has to apologize for tying him—or her—up.”
My entire body shivered with horror and at the same time I felt liquid heat rush out of me between my legs. Thom grinned at me.
“See? Same as ever,” he said. “Our blushing bride doth protest, but you’re a dirty girl, ain’tcha?”
“Thomas,” Silvus said warningly. “Can you ever just be delicate for a day or two?”
“Why should I? I’m impatient. The sooner she remembers how much she likes it, the sooner I get to indulge my art.”
“Please!” I stood up, about to flee back to my room. “I’m sure I don’t want this! I just want to see my family.”
Rayner reached for me, his hand pressed against the bodice of this unfamiliar dress, before he trailed his fingers to the skirt and bunched a little of the fabric in his hand. He caressed it like it was a part of me. “Tulip, I will protect the people you love,” he said. “And harm the ones who hurt you. It has always been that way. Marguerite’s family loved you even though you worked so hard, so I gave them gold. I made sure that even during the lean years, none of your sisters and brothers ever starved. But Li Mei’s little shit of a husband, and his sister and mother? They sure didn’t deserve you.”
I twisted my hands. “That wasn’t me, anyway. It wasn’t me. I don’t remember anything you’re talking about. It sounds terrible.”
“Nah, Rayner’s right,” Jie said. “The world wasn’t any worse off without those people. Rich pricks. And you were so beautiful. Straight from heaven. I’d never seen a more beautiful girl in all my life. Even these two white boys agreed.”
“You were,” Silvus said. “Very beautiful. It was quite difficult at first when you didn’t speak a lick of English or French or Dutch. Trying to explain about reincarnation and vampires and Lisbeth under those circumstances…well, I don’t think you really knew why we took you until a year later.”
“Took me? You took…Li Mei…to England?” I didn’t really think of this Chinese girl as being me at all. “And she didn’t even know why? You always just take whatever you want?”
Rayner looked at me and his eyes said, Sit down.
He seemed a little impatient with me. Of course I take whatever I want, if it’s you. Don’t you understand by now?
You’re mine.
I sank into my chair, my skirts poufing around my hips a little.
“Here’s the truth, as I saw it,” Jie said. “You were scared, but you were also desperately relieved. No one loved you in that house. I remember holding you in my arms. You were so small and scared, but you were already used to your husband coming to bed and doing what husbands do. Selfish asses of husbands, anyway. All I did was hold you and tell you about my travels and all the things I’d seen, and how I’d never been to London either. It was new to both of us. I could feel you relax in my arms, and you fell asleep there.” Jie gave me a fond smile that made his eyes merry.
“We ended up buying another country house, however. You couldn’t fit in very well in London. I failed Li Mei,” Rayner said. “I admit that. I felt there was nothing I could do because you were still homesick for China and I just…didn’t know how to make you happy. The races and nationalities didn’t mingle easily as they do now. It was only thirteen years before you died far too young.”
“The food killed you,” Jie said. “It was just awful. I tried to make you Chinese food but just try making Chinese food out of an 1840s English kitchen. I think it was a merciful passing.”
“My life sounds…very…difficult,” I said.
“But then you were born as our Bertie,” Silvus said, pouring himself more tea, with pleasant reminiscence in his tone. “Such a shock at first, but with Thom and Bertie—well, up until then, we weren’t truly a family.”
“It was the shock that made us a family.” Rayner rubbed his chin. “I had to truly shed the man I was. Rayner van der Berg would not have loved a man, but at that time I realized that love could transcend not just age or culture, but also gender.”
“I taught them to share,” Thom said. “Of course, where I learned it from, I couldn’t tell you. I was brought up a good Christian boy, same as anyone back then, but I was always getting into trouble and I didn’t feel much like repenting for it. So I guess I was always meant to be a Sinistral.” He grinned. “Yes, I think I was born to be a vampire. So just imagine, I’m heading out west and I run into this lot on the way to the Dakota territory.”
“Oh, we were hopeless,” Silvus said.
“You were a real pretty boy, that Bertie,” Thomas said. “I always thought I liked ladies but now I have to tell you, you have a lot to live up to.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Nah, I’m kidding. I shouldn’t say that when you look so scared. I joked around with Bertie like that. You were my treasure, Bertie…”
“So you all…fell in love with a different me.”
“That’s right,” Silvus said.
“I picked these three up along the way to help me find you,” Rayner said. “I turned down some that didn’t feel right. I wanted to bring you men that would please you, Tulip. But with Bertie, we truly learned to share your affections. That love…was so forbidden.” Now Rayner flushed himself, and I had this weird feeling that all of them had been particularly aroused by Bertie because of the forbidden nature of it at the time. Rayner and Silvus were already so old, and it unleashed something new in them that made them feel young again.
“Bertie lived longer than your other lives,” Rayner said. “We had sixty exquisite years with you, in a world that was changing so fast. Very good years. And then—it was over. And as we said…well, not only were we unable to get to you past life, but the gaps between your lives have been getting longer.”
“No wizard knows what reincarnation really is or how it works,” Silvus said. “We can piece together theories based on study, but every time you pass on, we don’t know if you will ever return. If we knew you were dead, we might finally end our own lives. But we can’t know. It took you twenty years to return this time.”
“And so, we keep waiting,” Jie said. “Hopefully Silvus doesn’t get tired of living.”
“I won’t,” Silvus said softly.
But I could tell the two older vampires were tired.
Tired of hunting me down, convincing me that I was the woman they loved, and watching me die.
I couldn’t blame them. I couldn’t believe this was me they were talking about. Me they wanted. But if I looked at it from a distance, it was a romantic story.
“Every life we have shared, at some point, you beg me to turn you,” Rayner said. “So that we
never have to say goodbye. And every time I try, the attempt fails, because there is a protection on you. Some ancient curse that keeps you mortal.”
“I don’t want to be turned,” I said. “I don’t want to be a vampire.”
“Well, you would say that now,” Rayner said. “A year from now, you will have changed your mind.”
I shuddered. I didn’t want to offend them, but not only was it a dark path to walk, but it also seemed lonely and miserable. I already missed my family terribly, and the only thing keeping me from trying to return was Father Joshua, and knowing nothing at home would ever be the same again.
“I want you to tell me about this Father Joshua,” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
Rayner knelt on one knee in front of me, looking at me as gently as he was probably capable of. “Tulip, you said he killed your mother.”
“Dad thought so.”
“All I want is your permission to kill this man,” Rayner said. “Then we can leave this place.”
“He’s a prophet,” I whispered. “The Ethereal spirits speak to him.”
“Bullshit,” Thom said.
“Then, how did he know how to create the purifying spell?” I took a deep breath. “He can hurt you. The village is surrounded by wards. You can’t just walk in, and if you do, he can kill or damage you badly with purified bullets, as I told you last night. We can’t kill him. I would rather just…just go.” I swallowed.
Truthfully, I felt defeated. I didn’t want to leave home forever to be a vampire’s thrall. This was a fate as terrible as any, wasn’t it? Occasionally I felt a glimmer of strange excitement but that was surely just some wicked side of me talking, and listening to one’s wicked side only led to pain. I would be taken far away from my family forever, and Father Joshua would still have my wand and the ability to punish Dad, Carrie and Joan.
Take Me Slowly (Forever in Their Thrall Book 1) Page 11