by V M Black
But I was only here in the first place because he had forced me to attend. How big was the concession, really, when I was giving my life? And how desperate was I, to give him as much credit as I could?
He cupped my cheek briefly, flashed a smile that was edged with possessiveness and a hard triumph, and then he turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
I stood rooted at the edge of the dance floor, hugging myself, feeling more alone in the magnificent crowd than I had all those nights I’d cried myself to sleep in my bedroom after my Gramma died.
Etienne whirled by, Isabella in his arms. Her expression was ecstatic—his was fierce and adoring. I shuddered. How could he look at the mindless doll-woman like that?
“Would you care for some dinner?” Tiberius asked, dragging my attention away from the floor.
The smell of food from the buffet hit me at his words, and I realized that I was hungry. My oversized lunch seemed a very long time ago. I wondered if there was some kind of Gone with the Wind-like expectation that ladies would eat delicately. I decided I didn’t care.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Tiberius held out his arm, radiating charm, and hesitantly, I took it. No reaction went through me at his touch; it appeared that I truly was immune to other agnates. Everyone except Dorian. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Just sit here,” he said, escorting me to one of the armless side chairs against the wall a short distance from the buffet. “I shall bring you a plate.”
“How will you know what I like?” I challenged.
His grin was infectious. “I’ll get you a little of everything.”
There wasn’t much to say to that. I sat, the staff members taking positions a short distance away, and Tiberius went off to the far end of the table where the buffet plates were stacked.
My attention was captured by a woman at the buffet whose unkempt hair was haphazardly scraped into a twist. Her ball gown was faded and bedraggled, and she moved with small, jerky motions, muttering continually to herself as she loaded her plate. She was filthy, and my nose burned with her smell as she reached the near end of the table, but her skin shared the peculiarly flawless quality of all the guests, and she had the cast of an agnate about her. Her eyes, when they briefly met mine, were unfocused and confused.
Abruptly, she dropped the fork that she was holding and scuttled away, looking around wildly and clutching her plate with both hands. I shrank back as she passed my chair, so preoccupied that I didn’t notice the guest next to me until she spoke.
“Lucky me. I get to sit next to the newest cognate.”
Chapter Three
I jumped slightly at the voice so near my ear. A woman had taken the chair next to me, a person I didn’t remember being introduced to. Human, I decided—or rather, cognate. She had heavy blonde hair piled on top of her head with tendrils artfully escaping to frame her face. There was something peculiar about her, something unsettling, but I couldn’t decide what it was.
“Good evening,” I said neutrally, casting a glance at Tiberius.
“I remember my own conversion like it was yesterday,” the woman continued. “God, I was so naïve! Fifty years old, and yet I knew nothing.”
“You don’t look fifty,” I ventured. In fact, like all the cognates I’d met, she had the same slightly false, plasticky look of youth as the agnates.
She let out a crow of laughter. “No one does unless they want to, sweetie. We look as old as we wish. Eventually, at least. It took thirty years for me to grow young enough for my tastes.” She gave a negligent shrug. “Or my master’s tastes. I can’t remember which.”
“So, what, I could be whatever age I wished?” I asked. “Eighty? Or even eight?”
“You can look whatever age, within limits,” she said. “I believe the youngest cognate I ever met appeared to be approximately fourteen—really, you can’t reverse adolescence entirely. The oldest....” She nodded to the floor. “Sixty seems to be as old as most people can manage. A well-preserved, handsome sixty, of course. Wrinkles are hard to maintain, though, so most of them are just showing off for a while. When they get tired of all the effort, they’ll go younger again, too. Maybe keep some silver streaks in their hair to look distinguished.”
“Oh,” I said, not really sure what the proper response was.
The woman rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t have any justification for my reaction, but it remained. I considered manufacturing some excuse to move away, this was still my first chance to speak to any cognate alone. And anyhow, Tiberius was still loading my buffet plate, and I didn’t want to lose him in the crush.
“But however you look, you will actually be whatever age you really are,” the woman continued. “Which is now—ageless! Of course, I wasn’t this gorgeous, either, back then,” she added in a conspiratorial tone, her motion taking in her elegant face and curvaceous body. “None of us were, but if you bring it up, half the cognates will deny they ever looked any other way.”
Which meant that I, too, would change over time. I freely admitted that I found the beauty of all the agnates and cognates intimidating. And there were certainly parts of myself that I didn’t much care for, like my nose. But the thought that even my features would inevitably change over time, reshaping like putty, filled me with a slow horror.
“So how did he find you?” The cognate dropped her voice and leaned toward me. “Mr. Thorne claims that his new screening test identified you as a prime candidate. Personally, I think he lost control and went on a bar-raiding rampage but won’t admit it.”
“I passed a blood test,” I said, trying not to bristle in Dorian’s defense. “He gave me an opportunity, and after a lot of thought, I took it.”
“Knowing the odds?” The woman was openly skeptical.
“I was sort of dying of cancer at the time,” I said stiffly. “It was my only shot.”
“How very mercenary,” she said in a scandalized tone. She took a long drink of her wine. “My story was much more romantic. He was the captain of an Australian prison ship. He had been calling women prisoners in to his cabin, one every night, since the second week of the voyage, and they never came out again. I was so terrified when the boatswain led me in that I pissed myself.” She laughed again, as if the story were hysterically funny.
I edged away from her, trying to keep my face blank.
She continued obliviously. “But then he turned those eyes on me, and I was his. Even if I’d been another body to be heaved over the side in the dead of night, it would have been worth it, just for that time again.” Her expression was dreamy. “Every time he marks me, it’s just like the first time.”
She bent to adjust the ankle strap on her shoe, and the recessed light directly above us shone down on her bare back, revealing a butterfly-shaped red spot just above her waist.
But there was something else, too—a silvery pattern of lines against the snowy expanse of skin. They formed an intricate tracery, brighter lines over fading ones, the layers running together.
As she straightened, I realized that these marks were all over her body, not just her back. Her arms, her throat—even her face bore a few of them.
I had seen something like that before. I tried to think of where. My hand strayed to my neck, and suddenly, I remembered—the healing marks of Dorian’s first bite.
My stomach flipped over. It had taken a week for mine to fade away entirely. I tried to imagine the amount of damage that the woman must have sustained to leave so many layers of evidence on her skin. My mind rebelled. I jerked back, and she looked up at my movement, following my gaze to her skin.
“Ah, my love bites,” she said, smiling with a languorous sensuality. “Don’t you like them?”
“No,” I said, standing up so hurriedly that I almost stumbled.
She gave a girlish giggle, raising her wineglass in a half-salute. “Oh, but you will.” She threw back the wine, then wrapped her hand around the bell of the glass and squeezed.
“Damn,” I breathed, backing away.
She smiled up at me and then opened her hand, the piece of glass falling free as her skin closed up again, pushing them out. Her expression was almost ecstatic.
“Oh, Cora,” she said. “You don’t know what you have to look forward to.”
Her words went straight through me, and my guts knotted, hard. It was all too much—the music, the crowd, the awful woman in front of me. Tiberius was headed toward me, carrying an overloaded plate, and his approach was enough to kick my fight-or-flight impulse into overdrive.
Whatever compulsion Dorian had placed on me to stay had faded now. I’d fulfilled my obligations, standing at his side, forcing a smile at his friends. I was done. All I wanted now was to escape—to go back to my campus apartment, hide under my comforter, and pretend that none of this had ever happened. I just wanted my old life back, with my friends and my future and all the hopes and dreams the cancer had taken away from me.
I turned away and fled, charging blindly between agnates and cognates alike.
“Cora!” Tiberius’ concerned voice rang out over the conversations.
“Madam. Wait!” I heard the outcry from the other servants behind me, but I ignored them all and pushed onward, bolting for the stairs.
I ducked between two startled agnates, and there it was—the staircase leading up to freedom. Almost woozy with relief, I ran forward—
Only to be caught up short by a hand on my arm.
Chapter Four
“Ho ho! It wouldn’t be much of a party without the guest of honor.”
I spun around.
A male agnate held me, his expression at once avuncular and amused under his carefully tousled light brown hair.
“Let me go,” I said tightly.
He dropped my arm immediately, holding up his hand palm-out in a sign of surrender. I got ready to flee again, but his smile was so disarming that I hesitated even as I felt the wave of his persuasion wash over me and leave me untouched.
“Dorian can be a bit of a boor,” he said. “Such a stickler for propriety. He could have waited a week or two before throwing you into all this, to let you get your bearings. But he just had to go by the rules and introduce you within ten days of your conversion.”
It was the first I’d heard of any such rule. As far as I knew, the date had been picked to put an end to people trying to kill me.
“Who are you?” I asked bluntly. I was pretty sure he’d not joined the line of congratulations earlier, and his jocular familiarity now made me wonder why.
He held out his hand. “Cosimo Laurentis.”
I took it suspiciously, but he gave it a perfectly polite shake.
“Cora Shaw,” I said.
“Cora Shaw, Cora Thorne, it all depends on your preference now,” he said. “And of course Dorian’s. But that goes without saying, cara. Come back to the party. Dorian will be so disappointed if you leave.”
“I don’t care,” I said, backing toward the stairs.
“But you will,” he pointed out with a smile. “As soon as Dorian finds you.”
I stopped. I couldn’t deny the truth of that. His caring would make me care. And that horrified me almost as much as the marks on that woman’s skin.
“Come now, bella,” he cajoled. “I know it’s stressful, with all the worst members of agnatic society here. But chin up, and all that. It’s only one night.”
“The worst?” I repeated, still feeling slightly nauseated. “Do you include yourself in that description?”
Cosimo chuckled. “Oh, most definitely.”
He offered me his arm. Better the devil you know, the old phrase went. Except I didn’t know Dorian’s world. Not yet. If I was being dragged into it, I needed to—even though that was most definitely not what the saying meant.
I hooked my arm around his, and he led me back through the crowd at the edge of the dance floor to the shelter behind the colonnade. “There you go, cara. I’ll get you some food and champagne.”
I nodded, taking the nearest seat, and Cosimo disappeared into the crowd.
The crowd was thinner this far from the buffet. I saw no other cognates, but a clutch of agnates laughed uproariously a short distance away, having commandeered several bottles of wine and pulled some of the chairs into a circle at the edge of the dance floor. Several were slumped over, blinking slowly, and as I watched, one produced a syringe and casually filled it, tapping her vein several times before plunging it in.
That couldn’t possibly be legal. I tried to make myself invisible against the wall, but they showed no interest in anything that happened outside their group.
With a flourish, a male produced a baggie with a line of white pills in the bottom. He poured the contents into his hand, and he tossed them up in the air to whoops and hollers of delight. As the agnates scrambled to catch them, two men collided hard.
What happened next was almost too fast to see. One moment, they were crashing drunkenly into each other—the next, the large one had lifted the smaller one by the neck and flung him a good twenty feet onto the ballroom floor.
The dancers dodged with inhuman nimbleness, all except a consort who ended up being clipped by the man’s flailing leg, but even he was caught before he hit the ground and lifted out of the way of further harm.
The orchestra broke off, and the thrown agnate lay still on the ground. A sudden silence spread like a shockwave through the room.
Was he dead? I stood up, not knowing what to do. Should I call 911? Could paramedics even help a vampire?
But then the man lurched to his feet, shaking his head, and he gave a roar and rushed back toward his attacker with the same inhuman speed.
The room seemed to implode as other vampires rushed toward the two brawlers. In an instant, both the assailant and the victim were pinned under the weight of a dozen bodies, then dragged to their feet and unceremoniously hustled up the stairs.
Dorian appeared at my side, his eyes blazing. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I was getting away from a horrible woman—”
He took my arm, sweeping me along with him. “Did I not tell you that all society would be coming tonight? Most of these people are not my friends.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted, frightened by his fury.
He stopped. We were now at the other end of the ballroom from where the fight had broken out. “No, Cora. I am sorry. I was trying not to scare you, and I put you in danger.”
“I thought you said I was safe now,” I said weakly. “Safe from any agnate here.”
“Against deliberate attempts to harm you. That group, though, in their current state....” He shook his head.
“Who were those people? Those agnates?” I corrected.
“Agnates are people, too,” he said. “And they were one of the more unsavory elements of society. You have drug addicts and daredevils—we have rushers, who are all that and more.” He squeezed my shoulder gently. “I will answer all your questions later. Introductions have conventions that are broken only at our peril, but it does you a great disservice. Please, Cora, stay here, with the servants and Tiberius. He will chase away anyone who is bothering you. Just give him the chance. I have obligations that I must fulfill, but I’ll come for you as soon as I can.”
I blinked at him as I realized that despite the intensity in his voice, there was no force of compulsion behind it. He wasn’t making me stay—he truly was asking. Had my plea on the dance floor really meant something to him, then?
“I just want to leave now,” I said. “I’ve seen enough. Heard enough. I just want to go.”
His expression softened. “That would not be a good idea. Be brave, Cora. I promise you that our cause is worth fighting for.”
He kissed me gently, chastely on the lips and le
ft me with my nerves jangled, standing next to the buffet table, Tiberius at my elbow and a circle of servants around me.
Alone again, though in the crowd. Trapped again.
Numbly, I ate the dinner that Tiberius had brought, drinking far too much from the wineglass I put at my feet. The guests paraded through the buffet near me, and Clarissa joined me briefly until my short answers and long silences sent her restlessly into the ballroom again.
The two children I’d seen earlier reappeared, hovering near the buffet until one of the servers looked away. Seizing the opportunity, they swiped an entire plate of finger-cakes and ducked under the edge of the heavy table skirt with their plunder. There was no sign of them except the occasional giggle until a woman in a plain black dress suddenly appeared. I straightened slightly as I realized that, like the servers, she was fully human.
With unerring direction, she went straight to the table and jerked up the edge of the skirt.
“There you two scamps are!” she exclaimed in a crisp British accent. “Come out this moment.”
“Go away.” The boy’s voice was clear and firm, and in it, I heard every ounce of influence that he could muster.
The woman swayed for a moment, and then an expression of indignation crossed her face. “You little monster! You tried to enthrall me. I don’t know where you got my blood, but I’m telling your mother, and you’ll be on restriction for a month.”
“I told you it wouldn’t work.” The little girl’s whisper carried easily from under the table.
“Shut up, Anna,” the boy snapped. He climbed out, looking shamedfaced. “I’m sorry, Miss Goring,” he said, every word infused with a sincerity I was certain he didn’t feel.
“Oh, you will be,” the woman said, but already the conviction in her voice was slipping—the thrall had some effect, after all. She stooped to peer into the shadows of the table. “Your governess is looking for you, too. You’d best get out, or your father will hear of it.”