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

by V M Black

  “They’re not vampires,” I whispered after they had passed.

  Dorian looked amused. “Whatever made you think that they all would be?”

  At that, I was somewhat stumped. “Well, only agnates and cognates came to my introduction.”

  “That was different. This party is one of the premier New Year’s Eve social occasions in the city. People fight tooth and nail for invitations. Agnates, senators, lobbyists and various hangers-on, captains of industry—you’ll find them all here.”

  I had a sudden suspicion. “And how many of them are under your thrall?”

  The corner of his lip twitched. “Before tonight or after?”

  I shuddered. “That’s not a funny joke.”

  “Who said I was joking?”

  “Where are we going, then?” I asked, changing the subject as we reached the parking lot. “Home?”

  He smiled down at me. “You’ll see.”

  A familiar low-slung yellow car rolled up, interrupting my retort. The driver’s door opened before I could react, and Cosimo stepped out, sporting a flamboyant designer suit.

  “Ah, Dorian, Cora, my dear,” he said.

  My hand tightened reflexively on Dorian’s arm. At least his awful cognate Lucretia was nowhere in sight. She and Cosimo had tried to scare me into breaking the bond with Dorian and so discredit him.

  But whatever I chose, it wouldn’t be because of them. I could only choose what was best for me, for my own life. Whatever meaning others chose to attach to it was not a concern of mine.

  “I don’t remember your name on the guest list,” Dorian said coldly.

  “Oh, if I waited for invitations from you....” Cosimo waved airily. “I was so looking forward to the evening with you. But it looks like you aren’t staying. What a shame.”

  “Isn’t it?” Dorian said, walking right past him to where his Bentley idled, waiting for us. I held too hard to his arm. “Good evening, Cosimo.”

  “Good night,” Cosimo called out after us.

  I looked back. He was smiling. I didn’t like that at all.

  Chapter Five

  The chauffeur pulled out of the parking lot, turning onto the street with no orders from Dorian.

  “One side has to win, Cora,” Dorian said quietly. “The Kyrioi or the Adelphoi. Perhaps not forever, but this century will be shaped by one force or the other.”

  I hugged myself despite the warmth of the leather seat. Whatever the outcome, I told myself, it wasn’t my responsibility. I had to make a good decision for myself. And Dorian’s hand-picked friends were one thing, but I’d seen plenty of Adelphoi who frightened me every bit as much as Cosimo and Lucretia did—perhaps more.

  “You’re important to us,” Dorian continued, his piercing eyes fixed on me. “I know it’s hard for you to believe how important symbols are to agnates.”

  “To us,” I repeated. “To you, as an Adelphoi.”

  “To me, as myself, as well. I have never hidden how I feel from you, Cora.”

  No, he certainly hadn’t.

  He reached across to stroke my cheek. My skin heated at his touch, and I leaned into his hand reflexively.

  “You looked so small and sad and so terribly young all alone in that bed when you first woke from your conversion.” His voice was a low murmur, and it sent little prickles of awareness down my spine. “And so alive. Like holding fire in my hands. I could hardly remember such a feeling, and it went to my head like a madness. I didn’t want to frighten you. I almost frightened myself.”

  “It was the bond,” I protested automatically.

  He caught my chin, tilted it so he could look directly into my eyes. “It was you. It was always you.”

  And then he kissed me for a very long time, and I clung to him as my body answered to his demand, need pooling low inside me until I throbbed between my legs, chafing against my naked thighs.

  Finally, the car stopped, and he pulled back. I looked up, bemused, to discover that we were in front of the W Hotel. Doormen jumped forward to swing the Bentley’s doors open. Still drunk on Dorian’s kisses, I stepped out onto the sidewalk under the covered awning, feeling heavy and light all at once.

  Dorian came around to my side and offered his hand. I took it, leaning slightly into his strength, wanting him against me.

  “A hotel?” I asked him. His own house in Georgetown could be no more than twenty minutes away.

  “You will see,” was his only reply.

  The doormen swung the doors open, and Dorian led me through into the lobby. I halted just inside, blinking.

  “This doesn’t seem much like your kind of place,” I remarked, surveying the flashy modern space. Black chairs and bright red sofas were arranged on a self-consciously contemporary black and cream rug. Through an arcade was the reception area, a row of lighted white plastic and Lucite desks against a black wall and checkered floor. It seemed far more like Cosimo’s scene than Dorian’s taste.

  “We’re not here for the lobby,” he said.

  Dorian led me past reception with a wave at one of the staff, who nodded, and over to a bank of elevators. We stepped in, and he hit the button for the tenth floor.

  “Not the penthouse, then?” I said, trying to provoke some response from him to satisfy my curiosity.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  The doors opened, and he led me down the hallway, pulling a key card from his pocket. He stopped at a door and opened it.

  “Corner suite,” he said, flipping on the lights as he stepped into the room. He held the door so that I could pass him. “Though we didn’t come for the décor here, either.”

  I stepped inside and immediately giggled. The room was extravagant and edgy in a rock star kind of way, all purple and gold. It looked like it belonged on an MTV tour. I started across the dark herringbone wood floor. Then I got a good look out of the bank of windows, and I stopped mid-stride, my jaw dropping.

  “Wow,” I managed.

  “That’s why we are here. At least partly,” he amended.

  The hotel towered over its neighbors, the city spreading out beneath us. The room overlooked the long rectangle of the National Mall from one end to the other, and not a single building obstructed the view to the Potomac. The lights glittered across the dark city, as distant and beautiful as stars, and the Washington Monument rose like a white spear over it all.

  “Now that’s lovely,” I said. Impulsively, I went over to the door and turned all the lights off, casting the garish furniture into shadow as the city filled the windows. I sighed.

  “So you like it,” he said.

  “Who wouldn’t?” I returned. I pulled off my coat and flopped onto the curved sofa, hurling faux-fur-covered pillows out of my way before toeing my shoes off.

  Dorian stepped into the room and crossed to look down at me, his eyes crinkling in amusement. My heart beat a little faster. He was so damnably, sinfully attractive. He hit every button I had without even trying, as if he’d been designed to do just that.

  But his smile was touched with more than amusement. That same unreachable sadness lurked there, underneath, a faint echo of old grief.

  “What is it?” I asked. I’d seen that look so many times, but I’d never dared to ask before. “What is it that makes you so sad when you look at me?”

  He shook his head and swung my feet off the sofa for a moment to sit, replacing them in his lap. He began to work against the arch of one foot with the pad of his thumb through my stocking, and the tension in my muscles flowed out, replaced with delicious awareness of his hands and body.

  “Age,” he said finally. “Just age. I can’t help but think that this is, after all, only a moment, and it will soon be over, like every other moment that has come and gone.”

  “You said we will have plenty of time,” I said, feeling suddenly cold. “Plenty of time for anything.”

  His hands moved to my other foot, continuing their work. “And we will, until the day the time is all used up.”

&nbs
p; “There have been others,” I said. “Before me, I mean. You’ve had other cognates.” He’d said as much, but I’d never stopped to really consider it, too wrapped up in the here-and-now to give much thought to Dorian’s past.

  “Yes.” His voice was heavy, and he kept his gaze fixed to his hands on my feet as they went still.

  “Did you love them?” I asked softly. I didn’t know how I felt about it, sharing Dorian with the memories of long-dead women. Which was ridiculous, because I hadn’t even decided that I wanted him at all.

  Hadn’t I?

  His shadowed eyes met mine, and now the pain was naked on his face. “Every bit as much as I love you.”

  The words went through me like a knife, stealing the breath from my lungs as my heart squeezed hard.

  He loved me.

  He had said so obliquely, telling me that a bond required love, or that it engendered it, but never had he directly spoken those words. And, God help me, I believed him.

  He loved me. And he had loved them, too. Had they loved him back?

  I looked at the beautiful creature holding my foot in his hands. How could they have resisted any more than I could?

  “How many? Who were they?” The words slipped out without my bidding.

  “Two,” he said. “I can remember two. Hawisa was the first. For seven hundred years, we were together—violent times, turbulent times, those were, and for seven hundred years I kept her safe. Until the day I didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a stupid local squabble. Not even a proper war.” Bitterness dripped from every word. “Hawisa was born just before Romulus Augustulus, the last little emperor of Rome, was deposed and the Western empire faded into chaos and dreams.”

  Dorian continued, “She witnessed the rise of despots and kingdoms and their fall. But in one brief moment of inattention, when I was away on king’s business, a neighboring baron of one of our Navarre estates, a man I called ally and friend, tore through our lands and beat down the great gates and murdered her in our bed. By the time the news reached me, she was gone. It was too fast, too brutal for her to survive.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, hugging myself.

  I saw the echoes of Dorian’s wrath still etched in his face. “It was a harsher time, and I was a harsher man. The baron and his line are forgotten to history. The graves of his forefathers were obliterated, and every brick and stone of his residence was lifted and carried away, even the foundation filled in.” There was no pity in his voice and no regret.

  “And the other?” I asked softly. “Was she killed as well?”

  “That was Charlotte. A little French vixen, once a pickpocket dying of smallpox. She was always a reckless one, and I am sorry to say that she did it to herself. A fall from a bridge she had no business climbing, if you can believe it.” He shook his head, his smile fond but sad. “She had neither Hawisa’s nobility nor your strength of spirit.”

  Yet he loved her, too. I could hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes.

  And he loved me for my spirit. I tried that idea out in my head. It felt strange, as if it didn’t quite fit there.

  I discovered that I wasn’t jealous of these ghosts, these other women who had held Dorian’s heart so long ago. Instead, I felt ashamed—ashamed of myself and my doubts of Dorian’s ability to feel the emotions I had considered so exclusively human. I wondered if I was even capable of the kind of love that would mourn a partner a hundred years after his loss. Given enough time, could I feel that way about anyone—say, Geoff? Could I feel passions so strong they carried across centuries?

  I didn’t think so. Except, perhaps, with Dorian. If something were to happen to him right now, with the bond between us, I could hardly think what I would do.

  “And...children?” I said, as much to interrupt that thought as anything else.

  He shook his head, the sadness receding. “You have met Clarissa already. She has too much of her mother in her. If she doesn’t find a cognate soon to ground her, I fear she won’t last long.”

  I gaped at him. “She’s your daughter? Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t she say?”

  “Such relationships mean less after the first century or so,” Dorian said. “She still has a filial tenderness, but she has been an adult for a very long time.”

  “Right,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

  “We aren’t like humans,” he said. “We don’t drop a litter of children over a period of ten or twenty years. One child a decade at most is all we produce.”

  “Good thing, too, or otherwise we’d be neck-deep in vampires.” I wasn’t sure where that came from, but somehow, I was able to joke about it now. Maybe it was because the nightmare of a faceless vampire-child had been replaced with the idea of Clarissa. Despite her wild streak, it was hard to hate her.

  I thought of my Gramma and the grief she had endured by outliving her only child. The mother of a vampire would almost never be faced with the same pain. And a cognate would never wear herself out, working herself to death as old age crept up on her....

  “I’m sorry, Cora.” His voice broke into my reverie. “Tonight was supposed to be a celebration. Our celebration. I didn’t mean to burden you with my memories.”

  I met his eyes, with their icy clarity and their murky depths. “Your past isn’t a burden to me, Dorian. There’s far too much of you that you hold back, away from me. Too much that I don’t know.”

  His hands began moving again, sliding up to massage my calves. “There’s too much darkness in the past. It’s best not to dwell on it.”

  “Your past makes you what you are now,” I pointed out. “All of it, not just the happy bits.”

  “And your past, such as it is?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to reject the idea, then closed it. He was right, of course. The picture-perfect future I’d wanted wasn’t just for me. It was for my Gramma, who had wanted it for me more than I ever had.

  I’d never really missed having a mother or a father, except in an abstract sense, because I didn’t know what it was like to have them. Gramma had been the one to care, though she did her best to hide it. I’d shed most of my tears for my mother in my preteen years, when I had believed, with typical eleven-year-old selfishness, that if my mother had lived, she would have understood me in a way Gramma couldn’t. But I’d realized the stupidity of that before I’d even graduated high school.

  “I’m afraid of failing Gramma,” I said then, before I realized that I’d planned to say anything. “I’m afraid that I’ll lose her all over again.”

  Turning from the path I’d been on when Gramma had died seemed like betraying her memory. I was afraid that maybe she wouldn’t recognize me anymore, and I’d somehow lose her twice that way. Since she’d died, I’d felt locked to the dream—and only now did I realize why.

  “Do you really think so little of her?” Dorian asked gently. “If your happiness and success was her goal, do you really think she would care if it looked different than what she expected?”

  I shook my head. Gramma wouldn’t understand my connection to Dorian. How could she? I hardly understood it. And if she suspected anything about his age, she certainly wouldn’t approve of it, at least at first.

  Of course, no merely human disapproval could survive her first meeting with an agnate.

  But even without that factor, I believed that she could become used to the idea of my relationship with him once she became convinced that he wasn’t setting out to use me and break my heart.

  He was handsome, rich, and suave, and he wanted to cherish me forever. And he would effectively protect me from any of the griefs she had suffered. Could I really believe that she would oppose all that?

  It wasn’t the future she’d imagined for me any more than it was the future that I’d wanted. But it was a future that she would come to accept—one that she might even be proud of.

  If it was what I wanted. And I still didn’t know whether it was.

  “I
suppose I have my own ghosts,” I admitted.

  “Not tonight,” Dorian said. “Let them rest for a few hours. They can go back to haunting you in the morning.”

  And with that, he slid up my body and kissed me.

  Chapter Six

  His mouth met mine, and I opened to him, leaning back onto the cushions and pulling him with me, on top of me, into the cradle of my arms and thighs. His lips tasted like everything I had ever wanted, his tongue pushing past my lips and teeth, into my mouth, taking me.

  The heat roared up at his touch, lancing down between my legs. My body sang for him. I tilted my hips toward him reflexively, the slick silk of the knee-highs sliding against his pants. He was with me in this moment, seeing only me when he broke off to search my face with those burning eyes before kissing me all over again. But I could still feel the sadness in him, in his hands and body and mouth, and I wished that I had the power to drive it away.

  His hands tangled in my hair, his elbows on either side of my head, holding me at the mercy of his mouth. My arms tightening around him, I pulled him to me as I gave him everything—and took from him, too, drinking his adoration as my due.

  At this instant, I was his, completely and utterly. And I would make him mine.

  After an eternity that wasn’t nearly long enough, his hands slid under my skirt, up my legs, ignoring my thigh-highs, clasping my hips with his thumbs, his long fingers curling around to cup the naked flesh of my rear. His mouth moved under my jaw, lingeringly caressing the curve of my neck.

  But I wanted more. I took his face in my hands, pulled him away, up to my mouth again, kissing away the sorrows and the memories. I kissed his cheeks, his jaw, his neck, and the strong line of his throat down to the hollows of his collarbone as his hands roved across my body, cradling my butt, sliding over my hips, my belly, loosening my bra and skirt.

  Dorian pushed off me long enough to pull the sweater over my head, and my bra came with it. I attacked the buttons of his shirt as he tugged my skirt over my hips, wanting to touch his body as he touched mine. The last button came loose, and I pushed his jacket and shirt off his shoulders as he pulled the cuffs loose. As he dropped the shirt to the side, my hands freed his belt and fly. He stood up and peeled the rest of his clothes off as I rolled down my stockings and tossed them aside.