Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6

by V M Black

  Cora’s Choice

  The Complete Bundle, Books 4-6

  by V. M. Black

  Aethereal Bonds

  AetherealBonds.com

  Swift River Media Group

  Washington, D.C.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6

  Aethereal Bonds Series

  Blood Rites Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  If you liked this book....

  Blood Bond Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

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  Blood Price Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  If you liked this book....

  Master Table of Contents

  AetherealBonds.com

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  Stand-Alone Short Stories

  Heaven’s Price

  Kiss of Memory

  No Gentleman

  Blood Rites

  Cora’s Choice – Book 4

  by V. M. Black

  Aethereal Bonds

  AetherealBonds.com

  Swift River Media Group

  Washington, D.C.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Blood Rites Table of Contents

  Blood Rites

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Afterword

  Blood Bond

  Blood Price

  Chapter One

  “It is my honor to present Dorian Thorne and Cora Shaw.”

  The words were soft but resonant, filling the room from hidden speakers to announce my arrival on Dorian’s arm. The hum of the crowd dropped into silence.

  My eyes were fixed straight ahead as we took the last few steps down to the balcony landing, where the single flight of stairs split into halves that doubled back to continue down on either side.

  I didn’t want to run. Not anymore. Dorian had taken that desire from me, and in the process, he’d shown me that he could take everything. He’d proven that I belonged to him, utterly and completely, and any faint resistance I could mount against him was only at his whim.

  At least, I thought bitterly, he allowed me to still feel my fear.

  I’d avoided looking over the railing into the grand salon as we descended the first flight of stairs—I had that much choice left to me—but as we turned on the landing, I had to face the room and the guests who were gathered below, waiting to meet me.

  My hand tightened convulsively around Dorian’s arm.

  Hundreds of faces were turned to look up at us, eyes glittering, lips red gashes that were parted in smiles of varying shades of sincerity. The impression of falseness was overpowering. They looked human, but their appearances were so calculated to hit every note of physical beauty that they seemed like a gallery of mannequins that had been given life.

  They were vampires—or agnates, as they called themselves—and a few of their not-quite-human consorts. And at least one of them wanted me dead.

  “There are so many,” I whispered, freezing on the top step. I couldn’t force my legs to move.

  “It’s a special occasion,” Dorian murmured. “Every agnate who could come is here, from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.”

  I looked up at him. His tone was almost conspiratorial, like that of one outsider to another. But he was one of them. He looked like one of them, moved like one of them, with his aristocratic features under his dark, waving hair. He even smiled like one of them right then, a reflex that didn’t reach his eyes, a public face meant for the benefit of the assembly below.

  And yet I craved him every bit as much as I feared the others. It was an ache in my bones, a hole in my chest, a sense of a phantom missing limb that was only eased when his touch sent electric awareness coursing through my body to bring me to life.

  His children, I reminded myself. That feeling was a trap to make me want to bear his children and make more creatures like those below. And the very thought made me want to scream.

  But I didn’t, because only a short time ago, it had also made me want to run away. Then he’d plucked that desire right out of my mind while I stood there, helpless to stop him. So even though my head spun and my breath dragged inside my lungs, I didn’t dare to even protest out of the fear of what else he’d take from me.

  The guests applauded at our appearance, a polite and restrained sound that was pitched to be continued for minutes without flagging. Dorian put his free hand over mine where it creased the sleeve of his tail coat.

  “Come on, now,” he said, his blue eyes capturing me. “We shouldn’t leave them waiting.”

  There was something in his expression that I
’d never seen before. Victory. Exhilaration. Was it me that caused these new emotions? No—no, it was only what I meant to his cause in the role of his consort, his cognate.

  He took the next step, and I came with him even though my heart felt so tight I thought it would choke me. I would follow him to hell because I had to. My feet wobbled in their heels.

  A blast of trumpets accompanied our advance, the opening to an exultant processional played by the chamber orchestra perching upon the far end of the mezzanine above the salon. And the clapping continued as we reached the edge of the red carpet that ran from the foot of the stairs to the center of the room.

  The dazzling assembly swirled before my eyes, as if Tim Burton had been set loose on the Academy Awards. Couture fought with costumes that must have been centuries old, hoop skirts and Louboutins, knee breeches and Armani. Rubies battled lamé, diamonds clashed with sequins, and feather boas rivaled stuffed foxes, all thrown together with a mad abandon that crashed in my senses.

  The guests melted away on either side as we followed the strip of carpet. I risked a look over my shoulder. The crowd closed up behind us as soon as we passed.

  Surrounded. Trapped. My heart skittered madly out of control. If I had been able to run then, I would have.

  The carpet ended at the foot of a towering, black-draped object in the exact center of the vast room. Dorian came to a stop in front of it, and he turned us around to face the crowd just as the orchestra let out one last chord and fell into silence, the applause dying with it.

  He had timed our arrival with theatrical precision, making the most of the moment. And I was the prop, swaying on his arm.

  “Today marks two beginnings.” Dorian’s voice rolled out over the assembly. His face was perfectly composed, but I could see the cold flash of triumph in his eyes as he looked across his friends and enemies. “One is personal, the beginning of my bond to my new cognate, Cora Shaw. The other is a new beginning for us all, because I found Cora not in the old way but through the new reproducible, scientific screening techniques developed by the research that I and my compatriots have been funding these last thirty years.”

  Applause erupted again, this time far louder, though it came from fewer hands. Some agnates didn’t clap at all, and some of the fake smiles turned into something that more closely resembled snarls. I could feel all the eyes on me like a weight—a sense of hope from some, hate from others.

  I shuddered away from all of them. I was just...myself. Not a symbol. Not a tool. I hadn’t chosen this dubious honor, and I didn’t deserve the burden of their emotions.

  Agnates like Dorian had to feed on blood from a living human to survive, but only one human in thousands would normally survive the feeding—and in the process be transformed into an ageless cognate, bonded to the vampire who bit them and able to provide blood as needed forever after. Dorian’s tests screened out those who couldn’t be turned, improving those odds to one in one hundred.

  An ordinary college student, I’d been dying from leukemia. The transformation cured human illnesses, so when Dorian’s tests revealed that I was an excellent candidate, I’d taken the chance—without knowing that he was offering more than a cancer treatment. Without knowing the nature of the change until it was far too late.

  I wished I could hate Dorian for it, but any time I reached for such an emotion, it slithered away, out of my grasp.

  A noise and a sudden breeze behind us made me look back. The drape was falling away from the tall object, revealing a black marble sculpture more than twice life size—a nude winged man surging up from the base, wings extended and arm uplifted as he rose, his face turned up to the ceiling far overhead.

  Dorian continued, speaking over the applause. “In commemoration of this historic event, I commissioned a work, Angel Rising. Let it be a representation of the new age that we are about to enter.”

  The angry muttering rose in volume, but other agnates clapped louder, some even cheering in support.

  “Bravo! Bravo!” called a soprano voice, and I saw Clarissa, one of Dorian’s friends, deep in the crowd with her hands cupped around her mouth.

  Dorian held up a hand, and gradually, the noise died away. “And now let us observe the venerable institution of the introduction of a new cognate in the spirit of harmony with which it is traditionally kept.”

  Applause again, quieter, and this time, there were expressions of naked outrage on some of the agnates’ faces.

  The orchestra struck up a spritely classical piece. As if that were some kind of a signal, the crowd shifted, the bubble of space around us collapsing as the agnates turned their attention to each other.

  “I only caught about half of that, but I think you just made a whole bunch of really dangerous vampires really mad,” I whispered.

  “We’ve won,” Dorian said, contempt naked in his voice. “Those who don’t accept that will be passed by.”

  “Well, one of those has already sent an assassin after me,” I reminded him. They had wanted to erase the evidence of my existence before I could be presented to vampire society. “Making them angrier doesn’t really seem like a healthy choice.”

  He glanced down at me, and something shifted behind his eyes, like he was really looking at me for the first time. His face softened instantly. “I know you’re afraid, Cora. But you’re untouchable now. The introduction makes you as safe as you can be. It’s been centuries since an agnate harmed another’s officially recognized cognate.”

  I looked over the glittering crowd, wondering which of them might choose to make an exception. In contrast to their opponents, Dorian and his allies believed that agnates should not exploit humans indiscriminately. But to restrain their feeding had meant drastically reducing the chances of finding a cognate. Now Dorian’s research changed all that. And that made his enemies hate me, the living proof.

  “Let’s not test that,” I said. “What happens next?”

  “Next?” Dorian nodded at the company. “Next we greet those of our guests who wish to congratulate me or be introduced to you.”

  As if summoned by his words, a silver-haired man headed straight for us, an ethereal woman clad in diaphanous nude draperies drifting behind him. He was one of the few vampires who wore obvious signs of age—but they seemed to be just that, worn, like I might wear a coat.

  “Very subtle, Dorian.” The man nodded toward the statue. “Maybe you should put sparklers on it, or a loudspeaker. Truly drive home your point. Someone might have missed it.”

  “Like it, do you?” Dorian said. There was a small, smug lift at the corner of his mouth.

  “Others don’t,” the man said dryly. “How long have you had it sitting in storage, waiting for this day?”

  “Thirty-four years.”

  “You know that some will say it is just luck,” he said.

  Dorian’s gaze went icy. “It wasn’t luck. It was a great deal of time, effort, and money. The balance of power will shift to our side now. It’s inevitable.”

  “It will go worse for you if the Kyrioi believe in your success,” the man predicted. He waved at me. “Take care with that one.”

  I could feel Dorian’s body stiffening through his arm. “Etienne, you know that we have ethical disagreements about how that should be accomplished.”

  “To humanity’s cost,” Etienne said. It sounded like a rehearsal of a very old argument.

  “Might I introduce my cognate?” Dorian said then, pointedly.

  Etienne smiled at me then, a dazzling, toothy smile that I recognized had the force of all his persuasion over it. But it washed over me and I felt nothing.

  Reluctantly, I extended my hand, and he took it, his grasp cool and dry.

  “So pleased to meet you,” he said.

  I pulled my hand back as quickly as I dared. Dorian’s friend or not, the man disturbed me.

  “Is that...?” I ventured, my eyes straying to the dreamy-looking woman who floated behind him. I had never met another cognate before, but what else cou
ld she be?

  She had the false, flawless youth of the agnates but none of the dark power. She cocked her head to the side, and I noticed a red, heart-shaped mark on her neck. Etienne had a matching one just above his collar. Bond marks, like the teardrop-shaped ones that Dorian and I bore on our wrists.

  “My own cognate,” Etienne said. “Isabella d’Erte.”

  “Welcome, Isabella,” I said, hoping that the expression I wore looked more like a smile than it felt.

  The woman just stared at me for a moment, no reaction or recognition in her face, and then her gaze turned back to roaming aimlessly around the room.

  “Isabella does not speak English,” Dorian said.

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “She’s from Venice,” he said briefly.

  “She’s Italian?” I probed, sensing his reticence. Her reaction had not seemed like that of someone who simply didn’t understand the language. It had seemed...empty.

  “Byzantine, actually. So her mother tongue is something between vulgar Latin and modern Italian.”

  Etienne snorted. “Quit coddling the child, Dorian. You’re such a hypocrite. If you really wanted your Cora to understand, you would tell her that Isabella no longer speaks at all.”

  He gave us both a sketch of a bow and strolled off, the woman bobbing mindlessly in his wake.

  My stomach clenched. Run. I wished I could want to run.

  “Dorian....” I said, staring after her in fixated horror. Isabella no longer speaks at all—but once, she had. Once, she had been a woman like any other. But then Etienne, through the power of the bond, had changed her into the mindless doll she was now, a woman’s body with an empty mind.

  “I’m sorry you saw that,” he said with soft intensity, putting his free hand over mine. “As I said, we’re not all the same.”

  They weren’t the same, but Dorian had already changed me with his very presence, my desires tied to his, and he’d also changed me deliberately, when the stakes were high enough.

  What would it take for him to turn me into an Isabella—maybe not today or this year or this decade, but a century from now, half a millennium? To live forever in a twilight existence....

  Clarissa materialized in front of us. Her auburn hair was swept up into an elegant chignon, her body clasped in a canary yellow sheath that was slit up to her thigh and widened to puddle in a train behind her.