“How…?” Jacob’s brow furrowed. “If they have the condition dormant in their blood, then wouldn’t he have contracted it almost immediately, the first time he drank from her?”
Debra nodded, her eyes somber, her tone telling him how revolted she was by the information she was imparting. “There’s research on this disease going on elsewhere. In the labs of vampire hunters. We believe they figured out a way to inject the dormant condition into a human. Lord Andrev was not a very compassionate man. Helina could have just killed herself to escape him, but apparently she …” Debra shook her head. “I love my Master, Jacob. I could never countenance such an idea, but I also know there are servants who are taken unwillingly into service. They come to accept the idea over time. But when Masters are like Andrev…Helina apparently was brave enough to decide she wasn’t going to let anyone else be brutalized by him.”
“She had to be extremely clever as well. Focused.” Jacob considered the effort it took him to misdirect his thoughts from his Mistress’s notice, even knowing he didn’t have a chance in hell of doing it when she was paying attention.
“That’s an understatement. Apparently, she did it by having thoughts of revenge and retribution constantly. Like staking him in his sleep, or setting vampire hunters on him, but she never followed through on the thoughts. A very deliberate ‘Peter and the Wolf ’ strategy. Her vindictiveness and apparent cowardice amused him. He used it to taunt and torment her further.”
“Why didn’t he just kill her?”
“Andrev took joy in her misery and suffering,” she said sadly. “He got off on punishing her for her wayward, disloyal thoughts. He didn’t take her seriously, overestimated his ability to read her should she actually try to do something to him.”
“Did she tell you all this?”
“No.” Debra clasped her hands together, fingers pressing white circles into her flesh. “When he started having the first effects, she told him what she’d done in front of a gathering of his territory overlords, like our dinner the other night. Laughed in his face. Spit on him right there.” She shook her head. “She had a knife with her Master’s blood—God knows how she got that—and was going to plunge it into her heart, one sure way to kill a full servant, but unfortunately they stopped her. He had her tortured to death. Because of our resilience to wounds, it was a good two months before she died. And when she did, she wasn’t recognizable as human. Some of the researchers were allowed to visit her, question her …” Debra swallowed. “I’m glad I wasn’t one of them, as cowardly as that sounds.”
Jacob closed his eyes. Remember how savage we are…His Mistress’s own words, when he was learning his role in her household.
“In the end, he went to extra lengths to help us understand the disease, even at the expense of his own comfort. I never knew if it was revenge on her, to make sure another servant couldn’t have this power over her Master again, or if he was trying to make amends, as people facing their own end sometimes do. It doesn’t matter now, regardless. Except to the two of them.
“Based on the tests those researchers did, we know that a human servant injected with the dormant condition will get what we call the Delilah-B virus. The symptoms are somewhat different, but from the samples of her blood they took, they estimated she would have died in less than two years. Unlike a human carrying the natural gene, who isn’t affected by it at all.”
Thomas had died in less than two years. Jacob forced himself not to react to the thought. Fortunately, Debra was focusing on the information sifting in her mind. “It also accelerates the Delilah virus in a vampire. They don’t have ten years. Lord Andrev was dead within two years as well. If he’d had a full servant at that point, it’s possible he might have lived longer without showing signs of the disease, for as you probably know, a vampire can draw off the energy of a full servant.”
He didn’t want to ask the question, but he did. “How does the disease progress, symptom-wise?” It was the most perilous question, and he knew he’d moved into those waters by the speculative look she gave him. He kept a quizzical expression, as if he asked purely for curiosity’s sake.
“It starts with a need to sleep longer. The vampire is more sensitive to the daylight and affected even when screened from it. As it advances, there are sudden spells of weakness that can cause fainting, vomiting of blood. You’ll remember Lord Richard talked about that with his friend Antonio.”
She sighed. “They start to lose the ability to control and guard their thoughts from a human servant. Andrev marked a volunteer human test subject so Brian could monitor the rate at which his ability to block his thoughts degraded. A vampire typically is a vacuumpacked can. Nothing will escape his mind if he doesn’t wish it. But a sick vampire will start to slip, revealing thoughts to those connected to his mind. Often he doesn’t realize he’s revealing them. As we know, in a healthy vampire, even if he’s upset about something, shutting down the path is as easy as closing a book for you and me.” She demonstrated with the novel in her lap.
Cold dread gathered in his lower belly as Jacob remembered the night Lyssa’s mind had projected an image of Rex, her late husband, torturing her. It was an image she’d obviously not intended Jacob to see. She’d reacted violently when she’d discovered him in her mind uninvited. His forearm still occasionally ached from the break she’d inflicted, despite the healing powers that came with the second and third marks.
“Because the attacks are so severe and abrupt in the first stages,” Debra continued, “it’s remarkable how completely an affected vampire regains strength and self-possession between them, as if nothing at all is wrong. Then suddenly the vampire doesn’t recover the same way anymore. At that point, he’ll start failing drastically. The time between the episodes will be harder to predict. They can happen daily, sometimes even more frequently. We call that Stage Three. Mood swings will be so sharp they can occur midsentence.”
Given his lady’s personality, Jacob reflected with grim amusement, it might take some effort to detect an abnormal mood swing.
“When the physical attacks come quickly on the heels of the emotional, the vampire has entered the final stage. It will be more rapid than any of the previous stages. In the fourth, impaired judgment will become significantly noticeable. There will be hallucinations, distorted reality, paranoia. Even bouts with suicidal thoughts, melancholy. Extreme emotional de pendency. Neediness,” she clarified.
“Wouldn’t that be normal for someone dying? Needing to feel a connection to someone, to feel they’re not facing death all alone?”
She raised a shoulder. “Yes, but it’s unusual for vampires, even under great stress. Being predators, they don’t gracefully depend on others.”
They also typically didn’t face the overwhelming emotional drain and fear that could come with the inexorable progress of a terminal disease. However, considering he needed Debra’s help, he held that layman’s thought to himself.
“Stages Three and Four are so close together and the symptoms can overlap so much, depending on the vampire, we debated whether to separate them. When the vampire starts losing control of the mind, there will be cycles of intense aggression, anger, followed by a total lassitude. Some have no interest in blood. They’d essentially starve themselves, but at that point they’re very close to the end. One symptom unique to Stage Four is some kind of flesh-eating reaction which starts burning away their skin. It eats its way inward until there’s nothing left to hold in the organs, the blood. It’s as if they’re turning to dust in slow motion, until the heart collapses, a self staking, so to speak. Then it’s over. Stage Four can occur and be over in less than a couple days. Sometimes hours.”
When Jacob spoke, he considered his even tone a major accomplishment, based on the visual overlay Debra had just put on his lady’s body. Her lovely face. “How close do you think you are to a cure?”
“That’s the million-dollar question for any disease, isn’t it?” She pushed her hair back from her forehead. “It cou
ld be today, tomorrow, twenty years from now. We’re more likely to find ways to prevent it, slow it, treat it, before we find a way to eradicate it. Like cancer. Though I’ll say Brian’s very excited about the connection between the servant and master. What they know in Tuscaloosa will be critical, how it meshes with his research.”
“Have you found ways to slow it down, treat it?”
Regret crossed her face. “So far, no. Just the basic techniques of pain management we use on humans, which have some limited success with vampires. As I said, having a full servant can help prolong the life of the infected vampire. While taking the one annual kill all vampires need in a timely manner helps, increasing the number of full kills in a year doesn’t seem to have any appreciable effect. That’s a good thing, of course, because you know some of the vampires would have used it as an excuse to up the annual quota, like a preventive vitamin supplement.” She managed a grim smile.
“And unfortunately, we haven’t figured out a way to test humans for the dormant virus. We don’t even know how vampire hunters isolated it, or if they even have. It’s more likely they found the blood source of an infected vampire and are using that human’s blood as a host to make up their vials. If they do, they could conceivably wipe out a significant number of vampires. Some of our best trackers are looking to find that research subject.”
“No wonder you’re concerned,” Jacob murmured.
“Yes. It’s one thing if the disease is contracted by an incautious vampire. Entirely different if the hunters choose to pursue a far more insidious and subtle method of hunting our Masters and Mistresses. That’s why finding a cure is more important in this instance than prevention, though limiting blood donors to one’s own servant and a carefully picked annual kill is the safest bet for the latter. We’ve had some reports that it’s only an isolated cell of hunters trying this out right now. The majority of them still seem to have a fortunate aversion to it because of its similarity to a biological weapon. We all know how those can backfire.”
Reaching out, she touched his hand. “The best thing you can do is to be very careful with your extracurricular bedsport, Jacob. You never have any idea who is watching Lady Lyssa, and she’s very powerful. Someone could drug you, inject you …”
“I won’t be with any other women.” Then, because the exception to the rule sat before him now, he added uncomfortably, “Unless she commands it.”
“Oh. So your Mistress requires fidelity. That’s interesting, considering how old she is.”
“No, she hasn’t commanded it. Not specifically.”
Debra cocked her head, considered him.
“You’re giving me that pitying look you just said you get from older servants,” Jacob observed darkly. “You’re right. It’s very patronizing. And annoying.”
“Do you know why I’m reading this?” With a faint smile, she lifted the romance novel. “Part of it is escapism. Part of it is to remind me what my relationship with my Master isn’t. The bond between servant and vampire is unique. Not family, not spouses, not lovers. The excess sex drive vampires have can force us into a deceptive intimacy. We convince ourselves we’re lovers, probably because the reality is beyond our ken and we don’t know how to classify it. Since we can’t reconcile the feeling with the reality, we use sex to Band-Aid it.”
She tapped the top of the book again. “If you allow yourself to believe it’s something different from what it is, you’ve fooled yourself in a way that will only bring you heartbreak. In the worst cases it’ll result in bitterness. They’ll drive that lesson home again and again, twisting the knife.”
At his speculative look, she nodded. “The first time I assumed more about our relationship than there was, Brian invited a vampire home from the lab and took her to his bed. He commanded me to prepare them a meal. Made me stand there holding the tray while he put whipped cream on her breasts and licked it off.” She glanced away, obviously embarrassed by the revealing picture. “Later that same day…he took me. He hadn’t even cleaned himself, so I could smell her. It was a lesson to show me the two acts had no relation to one another. Mind to mind, a vampire feels a closer bond to his or her servant than with anyone else. I can deny him nothing. Even that day I didn’t, knowing he’d been with another woman.”
“I would have pureed a full box of laxatives into the whipped cream.”
It startled a laugh out of her. She put her fingers over her lips, glancing around in apology at any readers close enough to have been disturbed. “You’re incorrigible.”
But then she sobered. “We’re toys in the beginning. Something new to play with. At first, even they indulge in the pleasure of mutual infatuation. They like our besotted reaction and get caught up in it for a while. But we’re tools. Very important tools.”
Hearing too much of his lady’s words in what Debra was saying, Jacob still wanted to deny it. “You’ve made it sound like a terrible fate.”
“Then I’ve spoken of it wrongly.” She shook her head. “I’m doing research I would never achieve on my own in the human world. Brian has opened my eyes to impossible things…experiences I never would have had. But in order to fully embrace and appreciate those things your Mistress can give you, don’t get bogged down in what she can’t.”
“You know what I think?” He covered her hand. “Maybe you should think about this as a scientist. Why did your Master go to such great lengths to convince you of your place? If he’s not an Andrev, who gets off on manipulating his servant’s emotions—”
“He’s not.” Debra’s response was quick.
Jacob inclined his head. “Then why did he feel it necessary to drive it home so cruelly? You’re bound to him forever. Why does he care what you think your relationship is, as long as you’re serving him? Maybe because he has to remind himself of it, and that pisses him off. So he’s cruel about it.”
She pulled free abruptly. “I need to go.” Putting the materials on her lap on the table between them, she rose and gathered her tote bag to slide the notebook and journal into it.
Jacob rose in automatic courtesy. He wanted to argue with her, but wryly he realized it was his Mistress he wanted to convince, not Debra.
“I think your desire to care for your Mistress is commendable. But just to prove the point …” She hesitated, then cupped his chin and kissed him briefly, her lips quiet and pleasurable against his before she pulled away. “That would offend neither my Master nor your Mistress. Now, in an attempt to grasp at some level of sophistication that would make Seanna and Liam proud of me, I thank you for the other night. We may not be on equal footing with our Masters and Mistresses, but we can be with each other.”
She shouldered the tote bag. “You’ll be treated with high regard, high value, because of who you serve, Jacob. But always as property.” She gave him an even look. “Don’t forget that.”
“Thank you for the information,” he ventured. “All of it.” As she turned away with a nod, he caught her elbow. “You forgot this.”
He’d picked up the romance novel she’d left on the table. Debra shook her head. “I think it’s time I leave that for someone else. Someone who can afford the indulgence.”
Before he could offer anything in response, she’d turned on her heel and strode away, hurrying for the door.
Jacob sat back down. Despite his resis tance to Debra’s words, he couldn’t completely erase the doubts they’d created. Could any evidence that Lyssa felt more for him than what a vampire was expected to feel for her servant be a symptom of the disease? Impaired judgment…hallucinations, distorted reality. Extreme dependency…
“Bullshit,” he muttered viciously. There had been no distorted reality the other night, after his lady gave him the third mark on the meadow floor of her forest preserve. But he was disturbed enough to take the time now to close his eyes, give himself back every detail of that precious memory, hoping he was trying to embrace reality, not escape it.
Chapter 3
They’d walked through the fo
rest together, naked like a gothic Adam and Eve. Jacob’s arm had rested across her shoulders, his hand tangled in her hair so he could hold her close. The night had seemed heavy with the presence of supernatural creatures, the most powerful one being the vampire queen walking with him. A low-level hum in all his senses created a tingling in his vitals, a simmering in his blood he was sure were effects of his new third mark. Her slim arm was around his waist, her palm on his bare hip. Periodically, she lifted her touch to his back to trace the visible evidence of the mark, a scar that looked like the prehistoric fossil of a serpent, twisting from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine.
A reminder of her claim on him. A reminder of what he’d willingly surrendered.
The first mark had given her the ability to track him geo graphically. The second mark had allowed her access to his mind whenever she desired it. With the third mark, he’d given her his soul. He was bound to his vampire Mistress on every level now, a full human servant.
Getting there had been a rough road, despite the fact he’d come into her service only a short handful of weeks ago. Before that, he’d trained to be her servant, tutored under the hand of her dying servant, Thomas. Because that had been done without her knowledge or consent, she’d resisted Jacob’s introduction at first. In the end, with nothing but Thomas’s sealed recommendation, Jacob’s own determination and something perhaps a lot bigger than any one of them, they’d reached this point.
When she stumbled, he realized shapeshifting from her Fey form back to vampire, a unique ability only known to him, had overtaxed the body that was more fragile than it should be. With barely a pause in stride, he lifted her. Accepting it, she linked her arms around his neck and laid her cheek on his chest, her face nestled under his jaw. Her nose tilted up to rub against the smooth trim of his beard.
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