by Michele Hauf
“Play,” he whispered softly from the darkness by the curtains. “Play louder than the demons rapping against my skull.”
Swallowing back a gasp, Lark wiped away a raindrop that had fallen from her hair to her cheek. She could not cure his madness, but perhaps, stroke it softly to submission?
With a decisive nod, she lifted the instrument and unhooked the bow from its soft, clasping hooks. Experimentally, she tested each string, not surprised to find that each one sounded in tune, crisp, vibrant. The instrument had a voice that wanted free.
As did its owner.
With a glance over her shoulder—Domingos’s legs, clothed in tattered leather, were visible, yet shadows concealed his upper body—she began a simple piece. The one she had played most often when she had been alone and wanted to soften the space around her, an allegro in A minor. It was a sad yet buoyant piece, and she played it slowly, walking across the room toward the curtains where a slim stitch of lightning intermittently flashed. The piece was designed for two violins, and she had once been able to play the majority of both parts at the same time, but having not practiced in a long time, she stuck to the melody.
“L’Estro Armonico,” Domingos stated from his dark corner.
“Yes.” She paused, seeking the voice. In the darkness, she’d lost track of his position.
“Continue,” the ghostly voice said.
“If you’ll join me? It’s for two. The cello would be a lovely—”
He suddenly scrambled to his feet and strode out of the dark and toward the doorway.
Lark rushed after him, beating him there and blocking his exit. The hunter wasn’t about to let the vampire sneak away this time.
He still held the bow, and she rapped it gently with her bow. “Play with me. You know the piece.”
“Lark, you press me.”
“Yes.”
Jaw tense, he looked down his nose at her. Fangs were revealed as he opened his mouth. Ready to lunge? A scare tactic? Nothing about him scared her anymore. Except the idea of him forever trapped within the madness.
“I’m not moving,” she said, and held the violin beside her as a defiant shield should he think to lunge at her.
He straightened and looked aside, avoiding her eyes.
“Domingos,” she whispered. “The music wants you. It lured you here today. You’re stronger than you think you are. Will you let those crazy cats in your head win?”
She caught his smirk, and figured that was a good sign if he could find the humor in her question.
The man pointed the tip of the bow onto the floor and stood there, hand at his hip as if contemplating the deep question. And she saw the minute change in his body, the relaxing of his neck muscles, a subtle shift of his shoulders.
With a sigh, he wandered over to the cello. Standing over it, he waited so long she wondered if he’d retreated into the madness again, but he was too still.
Please, she thought, give me this part of you. And win it back for yourself.
“Something quieter,” he finally said. “A funeral march. Adagio molto.”
He hadn’t named a piece, but rather the slow tempo with which it should be played. Not knowing what he would play, Lark could not accompany him. But it didn’t matter.
He was going to play.
Domingos lifted the cello and carefully, his back to her, placed his fingers and the bow on the strings. Pensive in his stature, he began to bow a few notes. After a few bars, Lark recognized the piece, which could be echoed by violin, but she felt no desire to intrude on his rendition.
And as the notes grew fluid and more emotive, she closed her eyes to the exquisite sound this tormented soul produced. The empty room grasped the notes and amplified them, spreading them out and swelling the gorgeous tones beautifully. No wonder there was no furniture in here; he must have once used this room for practice because of the acoustics.
And now as the lightning flashes ceased and the rain pummeling the roof quieted, a master commanded her sensory world, bringing Lark down, sliding along the wall to crouch there. Her lover’s soft shirt spilled over her bare legs, and her still-moist hair soaked the shoulders of the fabric. She set the violin bow on the floor, dropped her arms to her sides and tilted her head back against the wall.
Drowning in his music, and so happy for that death.
Suddenly silence.
Lark glanced up from where she crouched. The vampire held her gaze. He stood in a beam of illumination cast by the moon, newly revealed by parted clouds. Not knowing what to say, she simply looked at him. There was nothing she could say because she was out of her ken and didn’t want to risk touching the darkness that loitered along his edges, waiting for the chance to envelop and pull him down.
With a tilt of his head, he nodded and placed the bow on the strings, turning completely to face her. “My own composition,” he said, and began a different tune, more modern, like none of the classical pieces Lark could recognize.
A deep mournful tone was lulled by a higher melody that was not too quick or fluttery. A dark winged insect soaring through a mist in search of brightness. Lark closed her eyes and allowed Domingos’s song to soar into her, permeating her skin, her muscles that had been used to slay creatures, the blood she had given to a hungry vampire and the bones that held her together after so much struggle and pain.
And there, deep in her core, the music opened her wide and up spilled tears that glistened silently over her cheeks and down her jaw. She’d not cried in so long. It felt...renewing.
Bending forward, she went onto her hands and crawled forward, seeking the lure of her savior, wanting to touch the sound and embed it into her heart. She touched the masculine curve of the cello body, feeling the vibrations of Domingos’s song against her palm. And when the melody slowly landed with a final beat of wings, she pressed her face to the body of the instrument, reverent and lost.
His fingers stroked through her moist hair, tickling sensation down her neck and spine and finding her humming core to clasp it gently yet firmly. Holding the cello aside, he opened himself to her.
Lark knelt up and reached for him, resting her hand on his bare chest. “I love you,” she whispered.
He bent to draw her up into a kiss, one hand wrapped about the back of her head, the other holding the cello. His fangs grazed her lips, and his tongue softened the minute sting of his teeth. Breaths shared, and heartbeats mingling, her lover gasped out a sigh as he moved high to kiss her nose, her brows, her eyelids; then finally, he knelt before her.
“You are mine,” he said, “and so is this.” He clasped the neck of the cello firmly.
“You’ve taken your music back. That was the most beautiful song I’ve heard. I felt it here.” She pressed a palm over her stomach.
“I’ve never played it for anyone, had only composed it in my mind.”
“Really?” That was an amazing feat, for any musician.
He nodded. “It just came out. I think I made it for you before I knew you would need it. We both needed it. I really have taken my music back.”
“You have, lover, you have.”
Heads bowed to each other, they knelt there in the bright darkness. Lark ran her fingers along the body of the instrument, dipping down into the sexy C-shaped curves and tracing the F-holes that arabesqued nearby.
“Make love to me as if you were playing this,” she whispered. “I want to be your instrument.”
He dipped her backward across the floor, cradling her with one arm while he stroked her hair aside with the other hand. Fixed to his shadowed gaze, she gasped as the bow moved across her stomach, ever so lightly, and only the edge of the strings where the rosin was not so thick, and did not catch against her skin. The elegant wood bow tilted against her body, and he lifted the shirt with the tip of it. Domingos bit open the single button placed between her breasts, and then laid the shirt aside with deft strokes of the bow.
The narrow wood glanced along the undercurve of both her breasts. Lark inhaled
as anticipation giddied her to instant desire. When the fine bowstrings tickled across her areolae, she gasped.
Domingos pressed a kiss to her open mouth, tonguing her teeth, and then he retreated. Back to exploratory strokes across her nipples with the bow. He touched her lightly, carefully, because to draw out a long note would probably irritate more than excite her, and he seemed to be aware of that.
Spreading her legs, she wrapped them up and around his hips. On all fours above her, her vampire lover composed a symphony of silence punctuated by her wanting moans. She drew her fingertips carefully along his torso, ever cautious of his tormented skin, but wanting to touch him, to play harmony to his melody.
Dipping his head to her nipple, he swept his tongue over her slowly as he moved the bow aside. Heat and fire at his mouth. Lark arched up her back, taking it all, pleading for more, more and more.
“Thank you,” he murmured at her breast. “For trying to slay me.”
“No problem, lover. But you actually have the wolves to thank for that.”
He hissed and bit playfully on the mound of her breast.
“It’s true,” she said.
“No talk of puppies. I’m going to make more music.” He slid his fingers down between her legs. “You will sing the solo, yes?”
“Oh yes.”
Chapter 17
Lark took a phone call in the bedroom while Domingos lingered in the kitchen. He should see to stocking some food in here if she was going to stay over more often. Which he hoped would happen.
They could create music together, both in and out of bed.
He’d been compelled to pick up the cello earlier, to play a few notes. Testing. To see if it irritated him. It had not, until he’d realized Lark was listening. Then the forces inside him, that angry phoenix, had protested and had wanted to smash the instrument, not allowing him to share that part of him with anyone.
But she had been insistent and firm with him, and while he had relented the moment she’d walked into his life, only when she’d held his bow hand down, away from slashing out at her, had the noise inside him coalesced and taken pause.
Someone who cares, he’d thought. All of him had come together in that moment and had only wanted to please her.
By playing the composition he’d designed in his head for the first time, he’d cemented his need for music in his life once again. And Lark’s approval, her loving acceptance of his art, had only burnished that deeper into his soul.
She’d said she loved him. Had it been a reaction spurred on by the emotional moment?
Probably. He wouldn’t ask her about it. If she’d meant it, she would bring it up again.
“I have to run home,” she said, pausing in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was pulled back into the sleek ponytail he associated with her hunter persona, and the dark, fitted clothing further detailed that kick-ass mode.
“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t return home.”
“I know, but I need to claim a few things.”
“Let me go. I’ll get your violin and stakes and—”
“No, I, uh...” She waved her cell phone as a means of explanation, before shoving it into her pants pocket. “It’s not something you can pick up for me. Just a, uh...project I need to deal with concerning the Order. I’ll be back soon. Promise.”
She blew him a kiss and left him waiting for a real kiss, that connection they seemed to achieve so easily. But no, she’d been reserved, closed off for some reason.
And Domingos wanted to know why, so he grabbed his goggles, pulled on his coat and gloves and set out after the hunter.
What he witnessed half an hour later brought the bile to his throat.
Crouched upon a rooftop, the sky still gray after all the rain they’d had, yet the ceramic tiles dry in most spots, Domingos watched as the bald vampire, sporting a centipede of silver hoops along the outer cartilage of both ears, shoved a mortal woman behind a garbage bin and slapped her face, demanding her silence.
This had been the real reason for Lark’s sudden need to leave, and not allow him to come along to protect her. The project? She’d gotten a call from the Order to dispatch a vampire.
The urge to leap down and take out the vampire for his cruelty toward the mortal woman stung in Domingos’s veins, but to do so would put him next to Lark and he didn’t want to reveal that he’d followed her.
Quickly, she approached the vampire, titanium stake ready to plunge into his back. She grabbed the vampire, spun him about and landed a high knee kick in the gut, setting him back against the wall. Without pause, she slammed the stake against his chest.
The vampire grunted at the painful intrusion. The mortal woman screamed and ran off. And Domingos clutched his chest, feeling as if the stake had just cut through flesh, bone and muscle.
A murky plume of vampire ash dusted the air about Lark as if hell had just coughed up darkness. She shook off the ash from her arms, holstered the stake and, without a glance skyward, took off down the alleyway. Tugging out her cell phone, she must be calling in the kill.
“Number seventy-two,” he muttered.
Domingos lay back on the roof, eyes closed behind the goggle glass. He winced at the tightening in his chest. She had been clean, efficient, like a machine.
Would she be so when she ultimately staked him?
* * *
The knock on her front door was followed by Domingos announcing, “It’s me, Lark.”
Surprised he hadn’t come up the back way, and curious as to why he was here, Lark opened the door, and her stalker vampire wandered inside.
He walked right past her.
Not even a kiss? A curious beginning to his house call.
He strolled through her living room, hands in his pockets, and veered away from the windows, which were shielded by sheer white fabric and only allowed muted sunlight inside.
“I told you I’d be back after I took care of some—”
“You staked him without a care,” Domingos said.
Staked—ah. So he’d followed her. She hadn’t been as careful as she’d thought. Hadn’t expected him to follow her. Her mind hadn’t been in the right place, seeking only to secure a kill to prove to the Order she was still a damn good hunter.
“It’s my job,” she said, not wanting to get into an argument about it when she was already feeling conflicted over the staking. Truly, had she gone after the kill just to prove herself to an organization she was now questioning having joined in the first place? That dug at her morals, but only until she got to the part where she had saved a life. “He would have killed that woman.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I received a report from my supervisor.”
“Rook?”
“Yes. That vampire had been noted twice in the area. Both times he left behind victims, one near death, the other with her throat torn so horribly she’s now on life support at the Hôtel-Dieu. You still think I should have given him a Hail Mary pass?”
Domingos lifted his head, and his lean frame was silhouetted before the window, an imposing figure of darkness haloed by the pale illumination. “Will you be so quick with me when the time comes?”
“How dare you ask such a thing? Domingos, you know I would never—”
“I know, I know. But what if you receive an order from your supervisor?”
“I’ve been taken off your case. It would never happen.”
“But if it did? Don’t answer that.” He gripped his fingers back through his hair, then thrust out his hands before him. “Just know, when the time comes that the stake is for me, I hope your hands wield it. It will be the sweetest death.”
She plunged into his arms, and held him so tightly she knew it must hurt the damaged skin on his back, but she didn’t care, she needed him to understand. “Never, Domingos. I...” Breaths coming lightly, she remembered saying it to him earlier, when she’d been enraptured by his music. And now it felt even more important to say it—and mean it. “I love you.”
He found her mouth with a wanting, greedy kiss, and she answered with abandon. Wrapping a leg high about his hip, he lifted her and carried her across the room toward the dark side and pressed her against the wall. They tangled within each other, arms, legs, lips and tongues.
“I love you, too,” he said. “Wasn’t sure if you realized you had said it earlier.”
“Oh, I knew. Love is not something I take lightly.”
“I am undeserving.”
“Don’t say that. And I don’t want you to think I could ever stake you. It is what I am. But you are fast becoming what I am also.”
“Not anymore. You’ve changed, Lark. You’re not the hunter you were trained to be. You know that.”
She nodded, wanting to surrender to that easy abandonment of what she had been branded to accomplish, but feeling as if the task she had been given was too immense. Could she ever give up slaying? If she did not protect innocent, unknowing mortals from vampires, then who would?
Could Lisa have freedom while Lark continued to exist?
“I don’t know what to do, Domingos. Someone has to keep them safe.”
“Keeping innocents safe is a noble thing. So long as it’s no longer for revenge.”
“It isn’t. I swear it to you. I wasn’t even thinking of...him, when I went after that bastard. I think I need this still. The stake. For a while, anyway.”
She glanced to the couch, where she’d dropped her coat and the stake. Domingos pressed his head to her chest, his hands at her waist, and her legs were wrapped about his hips. He nodded.
“I can’t ask you to change for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. And I agree that innocent mortals need protection from those of my breed who think they’ve the right to take lives. We don’t need that. We can take blood without killing.”
“I know. But some vampires are wilder than others. Undomesticated.”
She winced to use that word. It was an awful way to describe those vampires who killed. They were not animals; they were intelligent beings who surrendered to their hunger, and the more they took, the darker and more violent they became. It was called the danse macabre, and it infected those who killed. Eventually they lost almost all their control. Almost.