by Nancy Morse
He hadn’t played for them. He played for himself, for the sense of triumph he would feel over the mortal world. Or so he thought. Now that it was finished, however, there was no victory in what he felt, only emptiness and confusion. Buried in the back of his mind was the staggering thought that it had not been for himself at all. It had been for her. He had been playing for her, damn it. For her pleasure. For the wondrous look he would see in her luminous blue eyes.
His body shook with anger. Why should he care what she thought? Why should he care anything at all about her? And yet, he cared enough to realize that she was in danger, not from Edmund de Vere or her own foolish innocence but from himself. He regretted having told her what he is, not because she did not believe him—because she did, every last sorry word of it—but because she did not truly comprehend the magnitude of it and the extent to which he could hurt her. Satisfying his physical lust for her was one thing, but sating the blood lust, that was something even he, with all the powers he possessed, could not control. It was only a matter of time before her beautiful white neck and the red blood that coursed through her veins became her undoing. Yes, even someone who imagined she had seen a soul in him was not immune to his particular form of depravity.
He wanted to get away as fast as possible, from the crowds and from her. Were there not so many mortals milling about, he would have transformed himself into a bat and flown off, a feat well within his powers but which his vanity permitted him to avail himself of under only the most dire of circumstances. Bats were such ugly little creatures, after all.
He hurried down a winding path. A female of doubtful morals dressed as finely as a lady of quality beckoned to him with her flirtatious eyes and a suggestive offer as he went by. At another time, another place, he might have stopped to partake of her wares and rounded out the adventure by drinking from her delectable neck. But tonight he had no appetite for whores or blood. He wanted only to escape this place. Behind him the orchestra was playing. All around him he breathed in the suffocating sweetness of wild flowers and the cloying fragrance of lavender and rose water. Before him stood the gate to the entrance. He moved toward it now with a singular purpose.
“Nicolae!”
The sound of his name called by a familiar voice from behind froze him in mid-step. Christ, he thought vehemently, as he turned slowly around.
She was standing in the middle of the path, her chest heaving from having run all the way after him, her bright eyes looking all the brighter in the illumination of the oil lamps. A transient wish flittered through his mind, that he could take her into the shrubs, drink from her heart and then tear the skin at his wrist and give her his own dark blood to drink, and then she would be like him, and they could fly away from this place together. But he had already offered the gift to her and she had not only refused it, but had been repelled by it. In the face of that sobering reality, all he could do was watch with cool disdain as she came toward him.
Her face was clouded with questions. “Where are you going?” she asked.
As far away from you as I can get. “Home,” he said.
“But—”
“Did it please you?”
“Very much. But—”
“But what?” In answer to her puzzled gaze he gave an elegantly forced shrug. “We accomplished what we set out to do. The concert is over. What else is there?”
“How can you be so cold, so indifferent? Have you forgotten our…our…” She cast about for a fitting description of what they had shared, and swallowing hard, ventured, “…friendship?”
“Have you forgotten what I am?” came his chilling reply.
She shook her head, rustling the tendrils that framed her face and glowed like tarnished gold in the lamplight.
“Then you should know why it is best if you forget our friendship.” The strain was visible on his face as he spoke. A scowl sifted over his features like a shadow. His voice was flat. “Go back to your safe little life, Prudence, and forget that you ever knew me.” His green eyes rested for a moment on her mouth, then looked quickly away.
“Forget?” she echoed, her voice brimming with incomprehension. “Better to ask me to forget how to breathe.”
“You place too much stock in something that can never be,” he told her. “Besides, you said it yourself, you’re not in love with me. Nor I with you,” he added, forcing a cruelty into his tone when what he really wanted was to take her hands in his and bring them to his lips. “I am a soulless creature. I can bring you nothing but heartache and doom.”
She looked at him with blue eyes wide and solemn. “But that’s just it. That’s what I was going to tell you when you came for your last lesson.” Her voice hardened a bit, the remnant of her wounded pride. “But you sent a note instead. If you had come, you would have learned that you are not soulless. You only think your soul has been lost. But it hasn’t been. It has only been misplaced.”
A dark threat blossomed in his eyes. “Be careful what you say,” he warned. “Mockery brings out the worst in me, and trust me, Prudence, the worst in me is something you never want to see.”
“I mock you not,” she exclaimed. “It’s true. I went to see the alchemist. He told me about the soul.”
He tilted his head and scrutinized her. “What made you think an alchemist would know anything about it?”
“It was you who put the thought in my mind,” she replied. “You said an alchemist would know about such things.”
“Well?” He shrugged. “What did he tell you?”
“That the soul can be reclaimed through a witch’s chant.”
He laughed, but it was a harsh, contemptuous sound from deep in his throat. “There is only one witch I know of powerful enough to reclaim a lost soul. Lienore. I told you about her.” His laughter dissolved into a fatalistic sigh. “But even if I did know how or where to find her, it’s not likely she would help me. Our history is, shall we say, less than amiable.”
He looked away as the memory flooded back. “The year was, oh, let me see, sixteen fifty-five, as I recall, at the court of Louis XIV. She was inhabiting the body of a voluptuous young creature who I happened to bed and bite. She didn’t like that one bit, no indeed. Just as I was drinking the last drop, she hopped into another host, a pretty little courtier, although not as striking as the other, and proceeded to hurl the most vile insults at me, claiming I had robbed her of the most magnificent body she had ever stolen. Our little body thief disappeared, leaving me holding her beautiful but dead host in my arms. No,” he said, shaking his head and staring into the night with a peculiar tightness about his mouth, “she’s not likely to favor me with one of her chants.”
He turned to her then, and said impassively, “Go home, Prudence. Tell your father I will send my man by in a few days to return the completed manuscript to him.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice sounding small and pleading.
“You can pride yourself in knowing that I am not always this benevolent to mortals. Go. Now. Before I change my mind and turn you into something very much like me for which you will be eternally sorry.”
Pru’s body went rigid, her face suffusing with anger. “I’ll not go. Not until you explain why you are being so horrid to me. And after I went to the alchemist on your behalf and told him—”
An alarm sounded in his mind. “Good God, Prudence,” he cut in. “Did you tell him about me? About what I am?”
“No, of course not. I would never do that. I lied and told him I was writing a novel about an immortal man and a mortal woman.”
“And he believed you?”
“Yes. He was very much intrigued and said he wished he could meet someone like you.”
“A novel. How, well, novel,” he scoffed. “And where, may I ask, did you find him?”
“In Clapham. Edmund does business with him.”
De Vere.
At the thought of that accursed slayer his lips curled in a snarl. “Be gone, Prudence. If you were a dog, I
would throw stones at you to send you away. Do not force me to be crueler to you than is necessary.”
Her ire perished in the wake of his caustic remark and she gazed back at him with an expression that told him she was suffering a thousand sorrows—the grief of losing her mother, the fear of losing her father, the betrayal of his nasty turn-about, the fury she felt at herself for succumbing to his lies and seduction. He was seized by an impulse to reach forward and grasp her by the shoulders and shake her hard enough to snap her neck with the ugly truth of what he was. Instead, he just stood there with a malicious grin on his face.
“You are a vile creature,” she said hotly as she fought back the tears. “Beyond vile.”
It was better to hurt her now, he reasoned, this way, with harsh words and cruel lies than to take from her the only thing she possessed that was of any value…her life. It wasn’t that he did not know how to be magnanimous. After centuries of killing and feasting on the blood of mortals, he had merely forgotten. Is that what made him push her away now? Magnanimity? Oh God, he made himself sick.
“We had a bargain.”
Her voice, small, spiteful, and yet unafraid, infiltrated the dark place where his self-loathing resided.
“Ah yes,” he said, snapping back to the moment. “Our bargain. Are you certain you want your father to become a vile creature such as myself?”
“He could never be like you. He is good and noble, and something else that you will never be. He is loved. Nobody loves you. Except perhaps for yourself, for some mistaken notion you have of your own importance. I do believe your story, every word of it, and I should feel sorry for you, but I don’t. I despise you.”
So, the little chit knew how to gouge and slash as fatally as an Ottoman’s kilij, the single-edged curving blade of her sharp tongue cutting as deeply as any saber could. But he had suffered worse, far worse than this.
“I fully intend to keep my end of the bargain,” he said, “but it will be at a time of my choosing, and only if you do not reveal to anyone what you know about me,” he added warningly.
“Fear not,” she said. “Your sordid secret is safe with me. I may be a lot of things—gullible, naïve, unworldly. But I am no betrayer of confidences. Besides,” she added flippantly, “who would believe me? Only I know that you only look beautiful on the outside but that your intentions are strictly dishonest. That you are ruthless and tyrannical and bent on domination. That you are—”
“Enough!” he cried.
Heads turned in their direction.
“For God’s sake, Prudence,” he hissed under his breath, “shut up and get control of yourself. You’re acting like a spurned lover.”
The fan fell from her hand unnoticed. There was a deep pause during which her angry blue gaze struck his threatening green one like steel striking steel.
He bowed stiffly, turned around and walked away, leaving her standing in the moonlight.
***
Pru did not feel the flagstones beneath her feet as she staggered back. She was not accustomed to being cruel, and only now did the words she had flung at him return to haunt her. Nevertheless, that did not absolve him for his hateful behavior. The man…the creature…whatever he was…was loathsome. She literally ached with fury. She did not know him at all. The man who played music with such sensitivity and emotion had never really existed. The being whose life had been ripped from him on a snowy night in Transylvania was no longer the tortured romantic hero she had imaged him to be. But the worst part of it was, he had never pretended to be anything other than what he was, a callous, clever seducer. This was a betrayal of the most devious kind, for it came not from him, but from herself. She had betrayed herself into believing the fantasy.
“I hate him”, she fumed. But it was not hatred she felt as she stood in the middle of the lamp-lit path, with people moving like blurred images all around her. It was despair, leaving inside of her a hole so deep and hollow that nothing could fill it.
Looking into his fierce eyes just now had been like looking into the eyes of a stranger, and Pru realized with a start that the man she had thought him to be was merely the man she had wished him to be. She ran her tongue over her lips and tasted salt, and became suddenly conscious of the tears that snaked down her cheeks. People passed by looking at her queerly. If there were anything in the world she could have wished for at the moment, it would have been for the earth to open and swallow her up.
For a haunting instant she thought she had seen a wince in his eyes as she had flung her terrible insults at him. She did not think she had the power to wound him, and a rush of empathy unnerved her. She was not used to such purposeful maliciousness, although, if the truth be known, it served him right and was no more than the scoundrel deserved.
Her hands fell to her sides, and only then did she realize that they were balled into fists. What a sight she must present to the passers-by, she thought dismally. Nicolae’s last words scorched her pride. A spurned lover. Is that what she was? How dreadful. How mortifying. How utterly common.
Aunt Vivienne had told her that lying down with a man would bring a joy such as she had never known, but she had failed to mention the pain that would come with it. Joy and pain, woven together on a shattered loom, such as the one that had lay strewn in broken pieces across the floor of her mother’s room.
Oh Mama, where are you when I have need of you most? Would you have counseled me to run headlong into the arms of a man I do not love to experience a physical joy to be found nowhere else? Or would you have cautioned me to keep my distance at the expense of my pride? But even as she thought it, Pru knew what the answer would be. Love, and only love, was worth the pain she suffered now. Yet she would be lying to herself if she said she was in love with Nicolae. His music, his aura, his power, thrilled her in ways she had not thought possible. His cold touch on her heated flesh drove her to irrational passion. But love? How could she say it was that when she did not even know what love was? Oh yes, she loved her papa and her poor dead mama, and even Vivienne when her aunt was not provoking her. But the love a woman has for a man that binds two hearts together as one, no, that was something that seemed destined to elude her.
As she turned away and lifted her eyes from the flagstones, her dismal thoughts fled when she saw a familiar figure watching her.
He came toward her.
“Edmund, how long were you standing there?”
“Long enough.”
A hot wave of shame coursed through her. “It’s not what you think.”
“Who was that man, Prudence?”
“That was my father’s pupil, the one I told you about. Did you hear him play?”
“No. I arrived only a short while ago. Why were you arguing with him?”
“It was a misunderstanding. Nothing more.”
“You look positively ashen,” he remarked. “Did he say something to insult you?”
“No,” she said. “It was I who said the insulting things.” A lie and not a lie.
“There was a time when I would not have believed that of you,” he said, “but you seem to have changed, Prudence. You have become, I don’t know, harder, somehow.”
Harder perhaps, but only because she was wiser now about the ways of men and the lies they tell. Even Edmund, standing there with a solicitous look on his face, as if her feelings were the only things that mattered, when she knew he had only his own self-serving interests at heart.
“If he treated you with disrespect, I will hold him accountable for it. But I did not get a good enough look at him. If I am to seek him out, you must tell me where he lives.”
An inner voice cautioned Pru to hold back. Maybe it was the way he was looking at her, with expectation written in his eyes, or the sound of his voice, a little too eager. It seemed he was after something, but what that could be, she had no clue.
“Thank you, Edmund, but there’s no need for you to do that,” she said dismissively. “I’m sure he feels as badly about the misunderstanding as I do.”<
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“Nevertheless,” he said, “you appear to be quite upset. Come, I’ll take you home.”
“My aunt—” she began.
“I saw her leave with a man young enough to be her…oh well, none of that. Come now. I have a carriage waiting just outside the gate.” He reached for her hand. “Why, Prudence, you’re trembling. Never mind. I have just the thing for you. A little tonic that should calm your nerves and make you forget all about this nasty incident.”
The footman jumped down from his perch to lower the steps for them to enter the enclosed cab of the carriage. Edmund offered his hand to help her and climbed in behind her.
“You know, Prudence,” he said, “I came to the gardens tonight looking for you.” As he spoke, he pulled the ring on the isinglass curtain beside him and lowered it.
Pru stared straight ahead, feeling numbed by her disturbing encounter with Nicolae. “Really?” she mumbled.
“Yes.” He reached past her to pull down the curtain beside her.
“What are you doing, Edmund?” she asked.
“I want to talk to you without any distractions,” he answered.
There was a queer note in his tone that made her look at him. “It sounds serious.”
He licked his lips nervously. “It is. But first…” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a closed palm. “I have something for you. It will calm your nerves.”
“My nerves don’t need calming, Edmund,” she said, growing a little suspicious.
“Oh, but they will when I tell you what I have learned about your father’s illness.”
Pru sat up straight against the tufted back of the coach seat. “Papa? What have you learned? Is it bad news? Oh Edmund.”