by Kannan Feng
“All my love, mon cher,” she murmured. “Until we meet again.”
She made her way to the docks, looking over the ships until one caught her eye. It rode high in the water, and under the cargo of fine brocades and sweet lavender, she smelled clean timber and a brisk eastern wind.
By dawn, Genevieve was safely ensconced in La Sirène’s only guest chamber. The ship was bound for Venice, and that pleased her well. Wherever she went, Daniel would follow, and she smiled at the thought of their game played out in Venice’s beautiful towers and dark canals. It was a good game, and after the close of one play, she was ready and hungry for the next.
She wondered briefly what he had been trying to say before he drank her drugged wine, but she tossed the thought away. He would come find her. And she would know soon enough.
* * * * *
The faint ache between his temples told him it was dawn, but beyond that, all Daniel knew was that he was somewhere in Paris and that he was completely naked. He sat up in the rumpled bed before he realized that one wrist and both legs were still shackled to the bed frame. Genevieve had been kind enough to undo his right hand at least, and he freed himself with abrupt, irritated motions. He could tell that she was no longer present, and that irritation surged toward anger as he remembered trying to speak with her the night before.
“Damn woman,” he growled to himself, and it only made him angrier that his throat was raw. He dressed hurriedly, pausing only to glare at the two livid bite marks Genevieve had left on his chest. They were purpling even against his bronzed skin, and he knew that a bite from a woman of his own race could last weeks.
Memories of the previous evening were coming back, of the alley where she had finally found him, the revolver she had shoved to his spine and her lips just inches from his ear, commanding him up to the room. Fury mixed with arousal as he remembered her ordering him to strip, and commanding him into the bed like any well-paid strumpet.
His mouth was still thick with the taste of the drug she had given him. It had done what she wanted it to do. She had her head start, but the fact that she ran off so gleefully when he had been trying to speak with her raised his hackles.
Daniel nearly rushed to the door to pursue her, but the ache in his body reminded him that it was dawn. The sun would not care for his rage or his revenge, no matter how justified.
His fine white fangs slid from their hidden sheaths in anger. He was of an old family, one that was already immortal during the time of the Ceasers, and his fangs were sharp as glass and strong as steel. Genevieve’s own line was murkier, with ties to the Turkish Beys and the Merovingians, and her fangs were shorter, almost kittenish. Still, those fangs of hers were powerful, and he had the marks to prove it.
The memory of those sweet sharp teeth made him rouse uneasily, and he forced himself away from the door. There would be plenty of time to chase her no matter where she went to ground, whether it was to Berlin, San Francisco or Budapest. There would be time to humble her, to make her beg, to make her regret ever crossing him. Then, perhaps after that, there would be time to speak with her, to tell her that this game, while satisfying, while exciting, was beginning to tire him. He needed more from her, and there was the faint thread of dread that she might refuse him. He pushed it away, angry with himself, and frustrated with her. She was feckless and careless at times, and he could easily love her while still wanting to strangle her sometimes.
He paced the room’s length and back again. It was large enough, but even so it felt like a cell. There were hours until night, and by then Genevieve could be anywhere. Every moment could be taking her farther away from him. He clenched his hands into fists, resisting the urge to wreck the room like a madman.
It wasn’t until close to noon that he saw the tattered piece of paper on the floorboards by the bed.
Beloved,
I wait for you. I long for you. I ache for you. Show me what kind of hunter you are.
G
“What kind of hunter I am?” His voice was harsh in the small room and if she had been in front of him, he would have thrown her to the floor to show her exactly how sharp his teeth were. He could almost feel her cool body underneath his, the way her mouth would open heedlessly as he rutted against her.
In a fury, Daniel crumpled the paper in his hand, but before he could throw it in the dying embers of the hearth, he paused. Instead, he smoothed out the paper, taking in her flowing spidery script, the simplicity of her words and the challenge, tossed down as lightly as one of her delicate gloves.
The letter smelled of her jasmine perfume, heady and wild, and perhaps underneath it, there was the cool-water scent of a woman of his kind. Slowly, Daniel kissed the elegant G of her signature and folded the scrap of paper, tucking it into the pocket of his waistcoat. Her fingers had been on it. He wondered if she had kissed it as well.
Then Daniel sat down to wait out the torturous day. He had business in Paris, accounts to close and debts to pay, but he knew he could be quit of the city before the next dawn. After that, it would be down to the docks to see if anyone had seen a small woman with honey-colored hair and a bewitching scarlet smile.
If she wanted to see what kind of hunter he was, then by God and all His saints, he would show her.
* * * * *
Beautiful Venice, decadent Venice, decided that the days between the end of December and Shrove Tuesday were not enough time for their beautiful masks, and now citizens and foreigners alike went disguised from October until February.
This city is dying, Genevieve thought, touching her red and gilt half-mask. But it will take a hundred years or more, and oh what a wake it shall be.
She had taken up lodgings in the former home of one of Venice’s most famous courtesans, and her balcony overlooked a narrow stone footbridge carved with trailing vines. Venice was never quiet, and at her window, gowned for an embassy ball and with her hair done up in golden ringlets, she listened to the sounds of the thousand-year-old city.
Genevieve wasn’t sure what prompted her to linger at the window for an extra moment, but then a man stepped on the bridge, one among the dozens she must have seen cross, and it was as if her spine was shot through with lightning. A ragged young linkboy lit his way with a lantern, but even without that poor light, Genevieve would have recognized him.
She knew that slow stalk, and as she watched, heart in her mouth, she saw him stop and glance in her direction.
Can you tell I am here? she wondered, bringing a quivering hand to her mouth. Can you feel me, love?
Whether he knew her precise location or not, she knew that time was scarce, and that mask or no, he would recognize her scent among a thousand. There was no time to waste, and she started to rush for the door before looking down at her dress in dismay.
The gown was one designed specially for her, with wide skirts in stiff midnight-blue silk and embroidered with thousands of mother-of-pearl beads. It was worth a fortune, but more problematically, it was enormously heavy. She couldn’t run in it, and she certainly couldn’t hope to evade a vampire as strong and clever as Daniel in it. With only a single pang at the beauty of the thing, she started to tear it off.
Her strong hands ripped through the beautiful silk and in bare moments, three hours’ work was undone and she stood in corset and petticoat alone.
There was a gentle rap at her bedchamber door, and Genevieve froze, her nerves achingly taut. Had she been too slow after all?
“Donna Vitelli? There is a gentleman asking for you at the door.”
Genevieve cursed fluently in French before finding a sweeter tone for her maid.
“Be assured, he is expected,” she called in Italian, shoving a fistful of gold lira into her silk purse. “Give him refreshment in the gold room, and I shall attend him immediately.”
In her undergarments and a pair of embroidered slippers, she must look like a most peculiar sort of whore, but the excitement of the chase was in the air, and she opened the window, ready to jump and see wh
ere in the great city she could run.
Or at least, that was what she’d meant to do if she had not been pushed back and clasped by a pair of terrifyingly strong arms the moment she undid the latch.
“Kind of you to welcome me so eagerly, sweetheart,” he murmured huskily. “Though the mask is less beautiful than your face.”
He released her so quickly that she stumbled back holding the mask instinctively and defensively to her face.
As she watched, he leaped down into the room, moving like a hungry panther. He was dressed all in black, like the figure of Death in an old play, and slowly he removed his own plain white mask. Daniel had strong features, similar to the statues of the gods she had seen in the city, but his sensual mouth could belong to no one besides Lucifer himself.
Their last encounter in Paris had been conducted entirely in the dark room she had rented. Now, in the well-lit bedchamber of her Venetian apartment, she drank in the sight of him. There was a powerful ache in her, and a small part of her wanted to surrender on the moment, to give him what he had been hunting for. Her hands ached for him, but her competitiveness kept them still. It had been so long for both of them, and now that she was so close, she saw that he practically shook with the effort of controlling himself.
“Take off the rest of your clothing,” he said, and in the ragged edge of his voice she heard her chance. He had been hungry for too long, and that would make him careless.
“Why should I do such a thing?” she asked, stalling for time. “Flamina is preparing a fine brandy for us in the gold room, and we have so much to talk about.”
For a moment, Genevieve thought she wasn’t going to get her chance, that he would simply catch her up by her corseted waist and throw her to the bed, but he restrained himself, removing his hat and showing off that sinfully dark midnight hair, caught at the nape with a velvet ribbon.
“Take them off,” he repeated. “Or I will.”
Genevieve shuddered with a delicious thrill, and thoughtfully, she raised her hands to the back of her head to untie the ribbons of the mask. The motion stretched her body, brought her breasts up high and taut. He followed her every motion with a hunter’s eagerness, and she knew how much he wanted her.
She tossed the mask on the bed behind her and swept her hand briefly over her body, thinking frantically. She feinted at the hooks at the front of her corset, touching them, loosening them not at all.
“You’ve been more than three months,” she said, keeping her voice idle. “What kept you?”
“I thought you were in Turin, and then I heard that you were in Milan.”
Daniel’s voice was edged with impatience but then Genevieve swept her hands along her hips and her waist. She smiled with private pleasure, watching him swallow hard.
“Your hair. Take it down.”
Slowly, Genevieve reached for the jeweled hairpins that held her hair up and slid one from her tresses. It was gold and nearly as long as her hand. She thought that it might be sharp enough.
“I missed you,” she murmured. “You should have been faster.”
Daniel snorted at that, and it looked like his patience was nearing its end as he took a step closer to her.
“I’ll show you how much I missed you,” he started, and shouted in surprise when Genevieve sent the golden hairpin arrowing through air toward him. A mere man would have found himself bleeding, heavily cut or even stabbed by the object’s sharp tip, but Daniel’s quick reflexes allowed him to fall back and knock it out of the air, practically in one motion.
His moment’s distraction was all she needed, and in a flash she was by him and perched on the open window, glancing behind her with a sweet smile.
“Too slow, my love,” she called mockingly. “Perhaps next time you will be quicker!”
She threw herself off the wall of the building, and though he was to the window as quick as a lick of fire, she was off and away.
Genevieve heard his furious snarl loud in her ears, but then she was darting into the maze-like alleys, tracing paths that she knew like the back of her hand.
A pair of gondoliers shouted approvingly at her bare legs and streaming hair, and she flashed them a grin that was surely too sharp for a human woman, stunning them into silence as she ran past.
The moon was up and Venice’s streets were filling with people. Men and women in masks greeted each other under the pools of lamplight and Genevieve darted between them, a bright laugh bubbling out of her throat.
From Genevieve’s window, Daniel stared out into the night. The first shock of being so close and losing her was gone, and now his head was clearer. She had been so close that he could see the pulse at the base of her throat. The thought made him want to howl.
Instead, he laughed, at himself and at his clever Genevieve. The sight of her in her underclothes, bright hair spilling over her shoulders, was enough to make him ache for her. He needed to feel her in his arms, to speak with her about his need for the game to change, but that would happen soon.
Next time, he decided, he would not give her enough time to be clever. Next time, he would not let her speak at all.
She would not leave the city, not now that he found her. It was the same when she found him in Paris. After the first contact, the prey’s ability to flee was limited to the city boundaries. There were rules, and she would no more break them than he would. Venice was the world now, and somewhere in the city, she was running.
Thoughtfully, he stroked the gold hairpin she had flung at him. The spot where it had grazed his knuckle was already healed, leaving only a smudge of blood on his skin, and he licked it absently.
“First blood to you, Genevieve,” he murmured.
Chapter Three
The crowd’s cheering was deafening as the decorated gondolas wended their way down the canal. Even in her plain brown cloak, the hood pulled up well over her face, Genevieve still felt shockingly exposed.
He was here, she knew he was, and it was driving her mad. She had managed to scent him twice over the last few weeks, but she had not seen him at all. Daniel was approaching like a storm, but he did not strike, and her nerves were stretched to the breaking point.
“You’re stalking me,” she muttered to herself, and there was a rich laugh right behind her ear just as she felt the prick of something very sharp directly under the soft flesh of her chin. In the heavy press of bodies, she could barely detect Daniel’s scent.
“You’re right,” he whispered. “And now I’ve caught you.”
They were crushed together in the crowd, and in the midst of the cheering and screaming no one could hear them speak to each other. He pressed close to her back, and his heartbeat was loud in her ears.
“Is that my hairpin?” she murmured, striving to be nonchalant. “How kind of you to bring it back to me.”
“I’ll do that and more besides,” he promised, laying one heavy hand on her hip.
The crowd was pressed so hard around them that she could not have moved, or indeed lifted a hand against him. Instead, she had to stand as firmly as she could while his hand traveled from her hip up to her waist. Her back was pressed flat against his chest, and his cock was blunt and hard against her soft flesh. He caressed her side slowly, making her squirm. He cupped her breast through the fabric of her gown, brushing her nipple with an insulting slowness and attention.
“You ache for me,” he murmured in her ear. “You would let me take you here.”
She made no response as he bit at her earlobe, teasing nibbles that nonetheless showed her how very sharp his teeth were.
“You’re teasing me,” she said, unable to keep the huskiness out of her voice. “Have done, Daniel.”
He pressed closer against her. The golden hairpin never wavered against her tender flesh, and he dragged it down the elegant line of her neck, just lightly enough to avoid drawing blood. He didn’t stop until it was directly over the great vein in her throat, where stolen blood ran hot and thick through her. She shuddered hard against him.
“Do it,” she hissed, and she no longer knew if it was a plea or a demand.
He started to say something, but then the crowd lurched, opening up before her, and almost against her will, she pitched forward. For a moment, Genevieve paused, dazed, then she was off, darting through the crowd. When she spared a glance over her shoulder, Daniel was trapped again in the press of bodies. For a moment, she saw his face, dark and furious, before the crowd swallowed him again.
Her hand sought the scratch at her throat, raw almost to the point of bleeding and just beginning to throb. She dashed at it with the heel of her hand, knowing that it would stop bleeding soon enough, and she darted into one of the narrow alleys.
Genevieve stumbled into a couple kissing in darkened doorways, swearing as they turned to look at her. They wore ragged skirts that were hiked up to their thighs, marking them as two of the city’s many prostitutes. Genevieve could see that their show of passion was for no one except themselves, and when she was less in a hurry, she would have liked to stop and speak with them, perhaps to buy them a drink and spend the night. As it was, she knew that Daniel was likely hot on her trail.
“Are you in trouble?” one girl said, and Genevieve was warmed by the concern in her voice.
“A man,” Genevieve agreed. “He’s chasing me.”
“Come here, we can hide you…” one woman began, but she yelped instead when Genevieve caught her up in her arms.
The woman’s body was warm and soft from her lover’s embrace, and Genevieve pressed her close. The woman’s scent would mask her own, and Genevieve chuckled at her own cleverness.
“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing a coin into the woman’s hand, and with a leap and a grab, she pulled herself into the low window above the doorway where the prostitutes stood.
Not a minute later, Daniel came around the corner, sparing only a single glance for the women who called invitations to him from the doorway. Genevieve held her breath, waiting to see if she would be found out.