His gaze fell, then returned to her face. “It’s a mind trick, a sophisticated variation on the one my father used to read children’s thoughts without permission. It was outlawed by my people. . . . I never thought Luk would stoop so low. He never did before, even insane.”
“I sensed pain,” Elizabeth whispered.
“Oh, yes. He found the pressure point unerringly and hung on there. It is painful, but more than that, it renders the victim immobile, both mentally and physically, while the perpetrator can root around and do more or less as he likes. In the mind and out.”
“Did he damage you?”
“No,” said Saloman, moving past her toward the cabinet and the wine decanter. “Although I did lose my temper and break a perfectly serviceable glass.”
Elizabeth’s throat closed up. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?” she said huskily.
He paused. “What?”
“What he said. Pushing me even farther away. Because of what I heard him say, I’m unbearable. Is that it, Saloman? Is that it for me?”
She stuffed her hand into her mouth and bit down as if that would stop the words from flowing, as if it would haul back the ones she’d already uttered so unwisely. He didn’t need this now. Trauma had shaken the words out of her; his own trauma made him incapable of dealing with them. She was just speeding up the inevitable parting.
She tore her gaze free, knowing he would turn away from her and continue pouring the wine for both of them. But he didn’t move, and when she lifted her gaze to his face, it wasn’t distant at all, but racked with some turbulent emotion so intense it hurt to see. As if forcing himself, he began to move, not away from her after all, but back to her, until he stood close enough to bend and touch his forehead to hers.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered. “Elizabeth, I am raw. . . . Don’t kick, not yet.”
She reached up blindly to touch his face, his lips, with trembling fingers. “I won’t. It doesn’t matter. I love you.”
“Don’t be hurt by what he said. It was nothing you didn’t already know; nothing he didn’t already know without invading my mind. I am so old, Elizabeth, and you are so new. You shine so brightly, so briefly, while I go on and on. It is hard to give and give and lose. . . .”
“I know,” she whispered, unable to stop a tear from escaping from one eye. “I know.”
His thumb slid over the tear. “All I have, I give to you. All that you want.”
“All that you can give is all that I want.”
He kissed her mouth once, slowly, tenderly. “And he lied. I do love you.”
She smiled a little tremulously. “‘For this moment, this night,’ ” she quoted. “I know.” And I so wanted it to be more. I so ached for you to love me as I love you. . . . The thought escaped without permission, and inevitably he heard it.
No two people love the same. You can’t limit feeling with time or quantity. You are precious, Elizabeth, and I will not lose you.
This time, his mouth came down on hers hard, demanding, almost desperate. Emotion swamped her, her own and his, vital, consuming, overwhelming. Blood and sex and Elizabeth. Of the three, for this time if for no other, it was Elizabeth he needed, and she could only give herself with gladness.
When the storm of urgent loving was past, Elizabeth slipped into a doze. She didn’t mean to. There was so much to discuss—things to do with Luk rather than with herself and Saloman—that she was determined to stay awake. Especially when, despite his hunger and her offer, he didn’t bite her. He stroked her throat, staring at it with fierce yearning as she came, but he didn’t drink, merely distracted himself with his own climax. And then, moved by his abstinence and secure in his strong arms, she had fallen asleep.
She woke with a start when the front door slammed, and stared up at Saloman’s averted face. He still lay with her on the floor, on the soft rug by the empty fireplace. They were both naked.
“What . . . ?” she began in sudden fear.
“Dmitriu.” His voice was too carefully calm. “And someone I’ve been forgetting to watch for.” Abruptly he reached over her body for her robe and wrapped it around her.
“Will they come in here?” Elizabeth asked, alarmed.
“Oh, yes,” Saloman said serenely, and rose to pull on his trousers. By the time the drawing room door flew open, Elizabeth knelt by the fireplace, modestly covered in her silk robe, and Saloman was pulling on his shirt by the sofa.
Dmitriu came first, stake in hand, eyes darting.
“He’s gone,” Saloman said.
Dmitriu relaxed, throwing the door completely open. “We could smell him. Everything all right?”
“Certainly. You’ve brought me a visitor.”
Dmitriu stepped aside and a tall, dark vampire with a shock of unruly hair came in. Elizabeth had seen him before, though only briefly. It took a moment to place him.
“Maximilian,” Saloman said.
Maximilian, the first vampire he’d created, who’d betrayed and killed him for the sake of a power he’d failed to hold on to. Maximilian, who’d isolated himself for centuries, hidden in the mists of some Scottish island, emerging only once, so far as Elizabeth knew, to stand by Saloman’s side against the alliance of Zoltán, the hunters, and Elizabeth herself.
“I told him he was pushing his luck,” Dmitriu said, strolling across the room. “Just because you didn’t kill him in Scotland doesn’t mean you’ll never do it. ‘Max,’ I said, ‘you’re a treacherous bastard. You deserve to die.’ ”
In the tense silence, Max met his creator’s gaze. “The last bit is true,” he murmured at last. “He did say that.” He had a pleasant enough voice, deep and strong, but with a slightly husky intonation and careful pronunciation, as if he were unused to speaking.
“Well, if he drove you from the airport, I’m surprised you didn’t die,” Saloman said. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Luk,” said Maximilian briefly.
Saloman’s gaze flickered between him and Dmitriu. He turned away from them as if irritated, but with relief, Elizabeth caught the smile curving his lips. “I see,” he said, sinking onto a sofa. “You consider yourselves my bodyguards, despite the fact that I’ve never had any and never needed any. I have another proposition for you. Consider yourself her bodyguards.”
He nodded toward Elizabeth, who sat up straight in alarm. “Forgive my remissness,” Saloman said politely. “I realize you haven’t been formally introduced. In case you haven’t already guessed, this is Maximilian. Max, my friend and companion, Elizabeth Silk.”
Maximilian inclined his head, according her a brief if penetrating stare. “I have heard of you.”
“I’ve heard of you too.”
A flicker of something that might have been a rueful smile sparked in Maximilian’s gray eyes and faded.
“What happened with Luk?” Dmitriu demanded. “How did he get in? Where did he go?”
“He tried and failed to kill Elizabeth. He got in by unraveling my supposedly unravelable enchantments, and I don’t know where he went. He masked as he hit the street. For once, I didn’t feel like following him.”
Dmitriu threw himself down beside Saloman. “Then nothing was achieved for him or us. We’re exactly where we were before,” he said in frustration.
“Not exactly,” Saloman said. Elizabeth looked at him. So did the vampires. He crossed his legs. “There was an instant, when I spoke to him, that he forgot to guard everything.”
Elizabeth’s lips parted. “You saw into his mind? Then?” So full of excruciating pain that he couldn’t move, could only speak by some massive act of will that had taken even Luk by surprise?
“No,” Saloman said regretfully. “Not Luk’s. Dante’s.”
Chapter Fourteen
After carrying Elizabeth to his bed and covering her, Saloman paused a moment to gaze down on her sleeping face. She’d always moved him; now the thought of being without her was almost unthinkable. She’d come to mean so much so quickly, and he
mustn’t, he really mustn’t, make the mistake of assuming that the speed of the emotion precluded its importance. If he lost Elizabeth now through aloofness—and Luk had been right about that; there were depths he simply didn’t reveal to anyone—how tragic would that be?
Afraid to touch her in case she woke from the sleep she needed so badly, he turned the focus of his mind inward instead. He wasn’t a rebellious teenager anymore; his father’s painfully spiteful assessments had been proven wrong many centuries before. There was little need for his obsessive isolation. Elizabeth knew what he was, roughly, and still loved him far beyond the sexual infatuation that he’d once set out to exploit for the pleasure of them both. And if she felt shut out, was that not just as bad as being shut out?
She sighed in her sleep and stirred, altering the position of her head on the pillow. Saloman let the emotion rise up. He refused to lose this woman either to Luk’s poison or to his own pointless secrecy. In keeping her, he risked himself, of course. Insanity, the scourge of the Ancient undead, could be triggered by profound grief, and as Elizabeth grew old and sickened and died, that was what he would have to face. But was not his own philosophy and his people’s to enjoy every moment to the extreme? It was a crime not to seize experience with this amazing woman to the full and treasure it.
Perhaps his real crime was that it had taken Luk to show him what he was doing. Or not doing.
Saloman turned away. There was everything to give, everything to share. And as time went on, maybe, just maybe, she would decide that eternity with him wasn’t so bad.
That was a long-term goal. First, he had to deal with Luk. And with Maximilian, who appeared to have come to help.
The drawing room was empty. Dmitriu had retired to his own temporary quarters, but Saloman could feel Maximilian closer by. Opening the door into the hall, he saw the top of Maximilian’s untidy head, unmoving, halfway down the stairs.
Their conversations had been brief and few since Saloman’s awakening. And the only meaningful one had been largely to ensure that Maximilian did not join Saloman’s enemies. On a cold, misty island off the coast of Scotland, Saloman had found the shell of his once-vital, brilliant creation, in hiding from the world and himself. Yet Max had come to St. Andrews and fought at his side in the now legendary battle—before melting back into the mist once more.
Saloman walked down the stairs until he came to Maximilian’s step, and sat beside him. He waited, but Maximilian had never been exactly verbose, and his isolation seemed only to have cast him further into the way of silence.
Saloman said, “Why did you come, Max?”
Maximilian shrugged. “Dmitriu said I should.”
“And you have always been so slavishly influenced by what Dmitriu says you should do.”
Maximilian’s lips stretched. It might have been a smile. “It depends what he says.”
“I’m trying to work out,” Saloman explained, “whether I should be flattered or frightened that you’ve turned up to support me against Luk.”
“Neither. I just . . . chose it.” Maximilian turned his head, his gray eyes as direct and turbulent as they’d been in the old days, and yet overlaid now with something that looked very much like desperation. This, then, was to be the conversation they should have had a year ago on the island. “Some debts are too great to pay. For what I did there can never be recompense, and I won’t even try. But you gave Luk peace, and I’ll help you give it back to him.”
“Because you failed to give it to me?”
Maximilian’s eyes closed. The last time Saloman had brought the subject up, even obliquely, he’d done the same thing. “Don’t,” he’d said, in a clear anguish that had given Saloman hope that Maximilian, his Maximilian, was still present in the vampire who’d let overriding ambition rule his heart and his head.
This time, Saloman said nothing to turn the subject. He said nothing at all.
Maximilian said low, “I meant to. When the others had gone. I wasn’t sure I knew how, but I thought if I dragged Dmitriu with me, between us we could remember or work out how to give you peace. But the human battle outside drove us into the open. The vampires revolted, and while I was away, Tsigana and János moved your body.”
That much Saloman had always known.
Maximilian swallowed. “No excuses, Saloman. I tried. I killed János for not telling. Tsigana tried to barter the information for eternal life, which was when I first began to understand what I’d done. I couldn’t make any of it right.”
“Dmitriu worked out where to find me. But he never knew I wasn’t at peace.”
“Dmitriu and I did not speak. It doesn’t matter. As time passed, I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’d done. It was hard enough just to hold on to the reins of power. You know all this. I can’t explain or exonerate myself for any of it. ‘It was all a mistake. Sorry,’ just doesn’t seem to cover it.”
He stopped talking. He swallowed again, convulsively. His gaze, which had had strayed to the artwork on the walls, to the sunlight filtering through cracks in the curtains, finally resettled on Saloman’s face. “But I am,” he whispered. “Sorry.”
In the detached, aloof part of his mind, Saloman wondered why he needed to hear that so much. Perhaps because the betrayal of a born son could not have hurt him more than Maximilian’s. He wanted Max to be sorry. And more than anything, he wanted him not to do it again.
“Halfway there,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing. There is a room here for you. Always.”
Maximilian turned away, as if he couldn’t bear the kindness. “I never understood why you didn’t kill me.”
“Some punishments are worse than death.”
Maximilian closed his eyes again, and Saloman laughed. He put his hand on Maximilian’s tense shoulder and rose to his feet, letting his grip linger there as he added, “I meant yours, not mine. I had three hundred years to think and plan, and this time, I intend to do it all properly.”
Elizabeth found István, Konrad, and Mihaela all together in the hunters’ library. She had meant to catch them early in the morning, somewhere neutral, like Mihaela’s flat or the café, but unfortunately, after the many excitements of the night she’d slept in.
In fact, she’d fallen asleep in the drawing room while Saloman, Dmitriu, and Maximilian talked in low voices around her. She woke up in Saloman’s bed late in the morning, rested but shocked at the time. Of Saloman himself there had been no sign. Only the silent Maximilian had been left in the house, and she discovered him by almost tripping over him on the shadowy staircase on her way out of the house.
After politely greeting the assistant librarian who was on duty, Elizabeth came upon the three hunters huddled around a table near the back of the cavernous room. At least they were quiet there, not too likely to disturb other researchers.
“Busy?” she asked lightly.
With more relief than respect, Mihaela let fall the ancient-looking tome she’d been reading. “Yes, sort of. Trying to find some clues as to Luk’s whereabouts by finding out his old haunts. Not easy after several hundred years. Also, trying to get a lead on the Turkish vampires from Istanbul—see if any of them know Budapest.”
“It could be a total waste of time,” Konrad grumbled. “We don’t even know if they’re still in Budapest. Would it not make more sense for Luk to go somewhere else, somewhere safer, to recruit his strength and prepare to do battle with Saloman?”
“It might make more sense,” Elizabeth allowed, “but he hasn’t done it.”
Three pairs of eyes regarded her expectantly.
“There’s been a development,” she said, low-voiced. “Luk broke into Saloman’s place last night.”
“Shit,” said Mihaela. “Were you there?”
“Oh, yes. Apparently, it was me he was looking for.”
“Was there a fight?”
“Sort of. Between us, Saloman and I saw him off. He’s not strong enough yet to win a one-on-one battle with Salo
man—which is good for us, I suppose—but he’s gaining power very fast.”
“He’s an Ancient,” Konrad said ruefully.
István frowned. “Was he testing the water? If he knew he wasn’t strong enough to face Saloman, why did he risk the confrontation? Just to get at you?”
“And why?” Mihaela added. “Why go after you?”
Elizabeth sank into the chair István obligingly hooked over for her with his foot. “Because, as an Awakener, I’m capable of killing him single-handedly. Because it would piss Saloman off. Because it would boost his status in the vampire community. And add a significant amount to his strength, I suppose.”
“Fair enough,” Konrad said. “But what the hell gave him the idea he could do it under Saloman’s nose?”
Elizabeth hesitated. She didn’t want to reveal Saloman’s earlier reluctance to kill Luk in Turkey, nor the vulnerability it implied. It seemed too personal. And yet, in the upcoming fight, the hunters needed to know everything.
At last, she said, “I think he knew he’d take Saloman by surprise. Luk can do this mind trick that temporarily paralyzes his victim, even Saloman. While doing it, he certainly doesn’t have the strength to kill another Ancient, but he figured he’d have enough strength to kill me and bolt before Saloman got him.”
Mihaela’s face had whitened. “He paralyzed Saloman ? How in God’s name did you get out of that?”
Elizabeth gave a quick, self-deprecating smile. “I think he underestimated me. But he knew I could kill him, theoretically, and when I threatened him, he wasn’t prepared to take the chance that I wouldn’t.”
Konrad’s frown deepened. “The question is, did Luk gain anything by this incident? Did he drink your blood?”
“A tiny drop. I doubt it could make any real difference to him. I think he mainly gained the prestige of breaking into Saloman’s stronghold and surviving. The vampires will all know that now.”
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