Local lifestyle magazines dubbed him William the Preserver. While he previously had a permanent seat at clubs that catered to men who made (and in some cases lost) their fortunes in stocks and bonds, he now found myself sitting in a different type of club with a different type of gentleman. Gone was crassness driven by the desire for more – more money, more cars, more homes, more women – replaced by a group of men and women who were slaves to the past, trying to recreate what would have been the Ireland of their ancestors. Those who gave tirelessly and monetarily for the pure joy it brought them, not the recognition they might receive for their efforts. Sure, there were those who would buy up an estate and turn it into the a beautiful bed and breakfast, but the fame to be found in those endeavors extended no further than a feature in a travel magazine or a good review on a travel site.
William felt relaxed in that group of like-minded individuals in a way he hadn’t in a very long time. Unfortunately, because of his time with Nadia, he had learned never let his guard down lest he risk revealing his true self. He told them what he knew of his “ancestor,” William Macauley, and his wife Ceara, repeating his own memories as if they’d been handed down through the generations.
One night he had told the group the tale of his ancestor, Mad William, who had gone insane and in a state of hysteria had tried to burn down the castle with his wife still inside. When she escaped, Mad William had ranted and raved that she was a witch before killing her and then himself. It was close enough to the truth that he would never forget the details of the story, but far enough away from the reality of what had happened that no one would think to dig deeper into the real history. And so the tale lent a great deal of mystery to the castle and before he knew it, William was becoming a sort of legend as well.
After a time, the local papers asked him if they could write about the castle’s history and how he was trying to bring honor back to the family by restoring his ancestral home. He declined the requests over and over again – except once. William didn’t know why he had changed his mind; he told himself it was because he had naively thought that if one story was written it would reduce the intrigue he’d unwittingly created with his fireside chats. And so, about three months prior, he had invited one journalist and one cameraman to visit the castle during the day, their tour to be lead by his closest confidante Seamus.
Seamus was a mortal man who three years into his acquaintance with William saw him for exactly what he was. Rather than trying to kill him or turn him over to those who would, Seamus simply accepted William’s nature and had remained by his side ever since. That Seamus had seen William drink from a mortal woman who came to him occasionally to satisfy mutual carnal desires had never fazed him. In fact, because William never killed those he drank from – at least those that Seamus knew of – he seemed to regard William’s appetite as just another type of sexual fetish despite the fact that he was well aware that it was blood that kept William alive. Seamus viewed William’s needs in much the same manner as someone living on tofu instead of meat.
After Nadia, William had grown to abhor the idea of fucking a woman he didn’t care about in exchange for her blood. Truthfully, he would never understand what was so broken in the women who sought out vampires to fulfill their fantasies instead of the mortal, human men they could spend their lives with. He’d been told more than once that there was something different about his kind that made a woman’s sexual experience unlike anything they could ever achieve with a human man. He realized he’d simply have to take their words for it.
Much to his chagrin, by this point in his life sex and feeding had become so tied to one another – his very survival linked to coupling – that the eroticism of the feeding, while not completely erased, had diminished greatly for him. On more than one occasion the notion that he was fucking his food made him very nearly stop in the midst of the act. Once he taste the blood, however – once his fangs had pierced the soft flesh of his donor – he went to another place where the how or the why was gone and all that existed was the blood, into his mouth, down his body, and into his soul.
Not long after becoming vampire, the body learns how long and deep one can drink before bringing death to the victim. For those brief few seconds before he needed to pull away, William was able to let go of all restraint and become the vampire of most people’s fears. That women got off on it was a mystery to him; that he could bring them to orgasm without his fangs ever penetrating their skin, the anticipation of his bite being enough to make them quake with desire, was beyond William’s comprehension.
But then he would remember how it used to be before, when he had routinely killed the people he drank from because he could do so without reproach. He would remember the thrill of the hunt and his elation as his victims’ fear became palpable, their heartbeats increasing, the sound of it screamed into his ears as surely as their own shrieks. And then his rapture as he’d pin them down and drink until he was full on their death, itself almost an orgasmic experience.
Maybe those women got off on their own fears, or maybe they were hoping that William would be the one who to finally push them to the brink.
One of the women he fed from, however, was different than the rest. William knew exactly why she came to him and while at first he had been hesitant to couple with her, it had made his life so much easier because he no longer needed to worry about any of the random women he’d tasted revealing his secret.
In the time that he had known her, Elizabeth had become more than just a source of blood for him. Like Nadia before, Elizabeth had become a friend and a companion of sorts. They would go months without seeing one another and then just as easily they’d spend weeks together. So different from other humans – both men and women alike – that if William didn’t know for sure that she was a human, he would have named Elizabeth vampire. She both craved and rejected all forms of intimacy, bound to her dark secrets. The two of them couldn’t be around one another for longer than a couple of weeks at a time, but they always returned to each other as if no time at all had passed.
From the moment William had met Elizabeth and she had explained to him what she wanted from him and what she would give him in return they’d never spoke of it again. Instead, they would stay up the whole night speaking of other things and yes, they had always shared each others’ bed.
Unlike William’s relationship with Nadia, what he had with Elizabeth was based on a fierce and abiding loneliness they both felt, coupled with – but not driven by – wanton passion and lust. William never fed on her while he was inside her and she had never asked him to, although he knew she likely wouldn’t protest if he tried.
It was Elizabeth William had taken with him to an awards gala in Dublin earlier in the year and had been photographed with, something they had fought bitterly about afterward. She had been furious with his carelessness in putting them in that situation and in her indignation she had left him, not giving any indication when he’d next see her.
William didn’t – nor could he ever – love Elizabeth, and she felt exactly the same way about him, which had helped to assuage some of the guilt he sometimes felt over how he had handled the situation with Nadia. While Nadia had wanted everyone to know about her relationship with William, he was often angry with her because she preferred that no one ever know of their connection. He had known she was reluctant not to be tied to him in the public eye, but the day she saw the photograph in the newspaper had brought out a reaction in her that William hadn’t anticipated.
Regardless of how many times he explained to her that he hadn’t invited the paparazzi into his life and that he could no more stop them from photographing him when he was out in public than he could stop them from writing about him, his explanations had proven futile.
It was as William was stewing over Elizabeth’s hasty departure from his life, vacillating between anger and acceptance, that an American writer wrote to him asking to tour the castle. While he could understand the architecture magazines and home design rep
orters wanting interviews, he found it rather irritating that a romance novelist was interested in his home – Ceara’s home – as inspiration for what he assumed was a rather bourgeois, insipid storyline. None of the people the author wrote for would actually care about the history of the place or the people who had built it and then re-built it, and he certainly didn’t want to become the basis for the portrayal of an idealized, aristocratic version of Lord of the Manor by some upstart American writer.
As soon as he learned of the request he had dismissed it, albeit not how he should have. Rather than contacting the author directly, he had ignored the request altogether, figuring that his silence would be answer enough. Unfortunately it wasn’t and he had received several more emails requesting a conversation, or some pictures – anything, she had said.
Over his long, long life, William had found that Americans as a general rule were a pushy lot – they knew what they wanted and they’d do everything to get their way, even if it meant irritating others in their wake. He ignored the requests and hadn’t thought about her again for several weeks, instead focusing his time and energies on getting the castle’s outbuildings finished, but as the restoration neared its completion William was becoming more and more agitated and he couldn’t understand why. Shouldn’t he be happy that he’d done what he’d set out to do? He had pushed forward under the assumption that his herculean efforts would atone for the sins he’d committed all those years before, but as the completion date came and went he realized that it had been a foolish wish - it never could and anger filled his soul and became his constant companion.
How stupid he had been to think that if he could just bring back the home he’d had with Ceara that everything would be rectified. He had killed his wife and destroyed their home and nothing he ever said or did would make the act of a desperate, newborn vampire okay.
CHAPTER 11
William wasn’t sure if it was that his true, vampiric nature could no longer be denied, or if it had been because his humanity had finally given way to the monster within, but he had spent the previous night yearning for the thrill of the hunt and the ecstasy of the kill. He sat in his library, whiskey in hand, going over all the reasons why he shouldn’t contemplate his overwhelming urge to kill. He told himself that giving in to his blood lust would scratch away the remaining shreds of compassion and empathy that were held over from his mortal life, and how, more importantly, if he were to give in to his baser desires, he would be turning his back on his more civilized self.
Unfortunately none of the arguments against his innate barbarism were enough to stop him. As William had learned many decades before, there was simply no way to rationalize his behavior when he was in the midst of a blood fever. The only thing he could do to justify his actions was to feast on someone who had deserved to die, but who hadn’t yet met with justice. He acted as judge, jury, and executioner.
William drove like a mad man possessed, making it to Dublin in record time. Because he could not die by conventional means, the rules of the road meant little to him. Arriving in the city in a cloud of mist and fog, he drove his Audi to an area of town where he would easily find those who were far too intoxicated to conceal their true thoughts: men drunk on their poison of choice who were looking to get laid and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Being a telepath, it wasn’t hard for him to locate the scumbags and degenerates who thought their desire for sex trumped a woman’s right to say no. William planned to find a pub and then watch and wait for one of those men to make their move. Only then would he strike, making the miscreant beg for the mercy he would have refused to show his victim. And then, once he had shown the man what true and utter terror felt like – the terror he would have inflicted on an unsuspecting would – would William end his suffering by draining his body of its useless life.
William didn’t know if his certainty stemmed from the hundreds of years he’d been reading minds, or because he had spent the majority of that time watching how humans interacted with one another, but he could always pinpoint in a room full of people which man would be the lecher, and which woman would be his victim. In this regard the task of choosing his own victim held no joy, and at that point in his long life, absolutely no fascination. He would simply wait until the scenario inevitably played out in front of him. When it invariably did, he knew what he would do.
Around two in the morning, his wait was over. He watched a young male, likely just out of university, stealthily maneuvering a young, shy girl out the door of the pub, his intent clear to anyone with a pair of eyes. William moved quicker than anyone could have possibly seen and followed the man and his conquest down the alley beside the pub. Having perfected the art of moving without being seen or heard, neither of them knew that William was lurking in the shadows. Once up close, he detected a trace of Rohypnol coursing through the female’s blood stream, which explained the slightly dazed look on her face. William could hear the male, Aiden, filling her muddled head with flattering tales of an instant attraction.
At least this one is taking the time to charm his victim instead of merely assaulting her at his first opportunity.
In her drugged and inebriated state William didn’t think that the girl, Jessica, fully comprehended the words Aidan was saying. However, instead of walking away as she should have done if she were half as smart as William wished her to be, she gave in to the cur’s advances, kissing him back tentatively and telling him that he was the most handsome man she’d ever met. It was a disgusting sight and it made William angry that women of this era were so seemingly naïve and gullible. Not for the first time this decade he thought that had he had a daughter, he would have done everything in his power to instill her with self-respect and a healthy skepticism over men she met at a bar, as well as several years’ worth of self-defense courses.
While he knew precisely what was going on, and what was going to happen, anyone else who might stumble on the scene would only see two drunken people enjoying one another. Jessica would never have been able to prove that she hadn’t been a willing participant to the seduction, and so her rapist would get away with it while she’d be forced to live for the rest of her life with the shame of having been used so indomitably.
As Aidan kissed his way down her neck to her exposed, heaving chest, William could hear her sharp and staccato intake of breath. The lust emanating from her was palpable to his preternatural senses, and as the seconds ticked by he began to smell her arousal.
William was so busy focusing on the drugged girl that he nearly missed Aidan’s next thoughts. He turned his attention to the scum, listening for his cue to end the sick and twisted pursuit … finally, there it was, Aidan’s thoughts as clear to William as if he had said them aloud.
This is far too easy. I had hoped she’d put up a fight. If she is going to fuck me willingly, I’ll have to inflict a little pain and humiliation to make it worth my while.
The reprobate pushed harder against Jessica then so that her back was completely flat against the brick wall with no room to maneuver her body away from that of her pursuer. As Aidan reached down under her skirt and cupped her most private part, William heard her moan with pleasure. The boy kissed his quarry brazenly, and then he bit her lip forcefully, drawing blood. This time when she gasped it was in pain, not pleasure. Aidan had her hair wrapped around his left fist and was using the leverage to push her down to her knees in front of him, while he used his right hand to undo his pants so that she could take him into her mouth.
She was begging him to be gentle but every time she whimpered it just excited him more. By the time Aidan had her down on her knees, he was using her long brown locks as a harness to keep her head in place so that he could force himself in and out of her as he wished. Even as she gagged and tears came to her eyes, William didn’t intervene. Who was he to stop the pillaging taking place in front of him? Had anyone ever tried to stop him? William took no great joy in the realization that the raping of this girl was in many ways no different tha
n what he had done at many points in his long life – taking the blood he wanted, when he wanted it, without regard for his victim.
William didn’t necessarily care what became of the girl - after all, she was nothing to him - but neither did he have any interest in seeing her left a bruised and bloody mess. William waited until Aidan was near to climax from her forced oral ministrations before he made myself known. He was panting like a dog, beads of sweat breaking out on his brow, as William silently moved in for the kill. The cur was so into the job he was forcing the poor girl to do that it took more than a moment for him to realize that they had company. Once he did, however, Aidan pulled himself away, flinging Jessica into the brick wall as he to face William.
“What the fuck do you want, man? Get out of here, or at least wait until I’m finished with her.”
Aidan turned back to Jessica and yanked her cowering body toward his engorged, throbbing head, shoving it forcefully back into her mouth. William squeezed his shoulder and heard the bones give way under his grip before he heard the screams of agony. Aidan stopped his thrusting in mid plunge, threw the girl away from him, and fell to the ground, gripping his injured bones. He looked up as William stepped out of the shadows so that he could see his face full on in the dim light of the street.
William wanted Aidan to know what was coming for him, what he had wrought by his actions – death made real, the eerie paleness that was more pronounced when William was hungry and at the brink of frenzy, his fangs extended to pierce the boy’s skin, his eyes anything but human. William could see comprehension move across the boy’s face and into his eyes before he began whimpering himself.
A Time Apart: Book One of The Macauley Series Page 9