The Trelayne Inheritance

by Colleen Shannon

  He nodded.

  Angel wandered, seeing the long wall of books covering every conceivable category of science: biology, chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, and of course virtually every respected book written on blood in the past twenty years, including the one she’d help edit.. He even had a signed copy of that subversive book that had the entire scientific community in an uproar: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

  Angel said sincerely, “I am most impressed. I had no idea you were of such a scientific bent.”

  “I wanted to be a scientist before…I became the last Trelayne heir. And took up the mantle of my inheritance.”

  Angel knew he was speaking of more than estates and assets. He always spoke of his inheritance as if it were a curse. “Why did all your brothers die?”

  Max swallowed harshly. “One by one, they were killed trying to catch the Beefsteak Killer. Her first victim that I know of on English shores was my only sister.”

  Angel gasped. What a horrid mantle to have to carry. This explained so much. His determination, his struggle between the joy of his humanity and the dark legacy of the vampire. He straddled both worlds but fit comfortably in neither.

  Yet another link between them.

  He turned away from the look on her face and offered her a signed edition of an Isaac Newton text on gravity. She admired it accordingly.

  His good humor had apparently returned. “I should have realized the best way to seduce you was not with jewels or furs but with microscopes and books.”

  She was too busy operating the largest microscope to heed him. The magnification was so good that she could define individual corpuscles.

  “I want to show you something, Angel. May I?” He lifted her finger and pricked it with a pin. For a long moment, he stared down at the bright red dot of healthy, welling blood. His breathing quickened. His tongue licked his lips. He started to bring her finger to his mouth, but because she wanted to feel the touch of his mouth sucking her blood so badly, she knew she didn’t dare. She was acutely aware of how alone they were. It was the middle of the night, no one knew she was here and she still wanted him desperately. She was struggling enough against the spell he’d woven about her mind and body without letting him form a blood link, too.

  She jerked away, wrapped the tiny prick in her kerchief and stuck her hand in her pocket.

  Out of temptation’s reach.

  Seeming to recall himself to cool scientific study, he removed the plate from the microscope and separated the two glass slides. He held his hand out for her own.

  Reluctantly, she gave it to him. He pressed the tiny cut, which had already coagulated, and forced a small bead of blood on top of the other sample. Then he took a stopper out of a small vial and dripped some strange glowing solution on top of both blood samples.

  “What is that?”

  “A formulation that isolates the components of your blood into discrete elements. If my theory is correct, your blood will now interarct with this sample.” He put the glass slides back together and inserted them again in the instrument. “Look, Angel.”

  Angel pressed her eyes to the viewing pieces and carefully focused. As she looked, the brighter, fresher blood–her own–seemed to seethe and foam, separating between clear serum and bright red corpuscles. To her astonishment, as she watched, her darker, fresher blood began to well around the paler hemoglobin, surrounding it, and then…

  …consuming it. With amazing rapidity, the paler sample was absorbed by her own bright red proof of life. One moment there, full of vitality, the next…gone. Stunned, Angel looked up at him. “Whose blood is this?”

  “Mine.” Ignoring her expression, he took a small vial of her blood from her wrist, licking his lips as he did so, but stoppering it before it had time to coagulate.

  Numbly, Angel looked down at the blood on her wrist, back at the deep red vial “But I don’t understand.”.

  “You are my one weakness, Angel mine. I suspect the killer knows this and was somehow instrumental in bringing you to England. And the more vampire you become, the more dangerous you are to me.”

  Angel leaped up. “But how? It’s you, the vampire, who are a danger to me, surely.”

  He removed his pocket watch, absently rubbing the gold case over and over with his thumb. “When I became a Watch Bearer, I was warned that while I would have most of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of the vampire, I had one fatal flaw: because I accepted the conversion willingly, and my abilities rest partly upon my devotion to my vow, to retain my powers I cannot drink of fresh human blood. Human blood will weaken me.”

  He tilted her neck up and finished his sentence against her throbbing jugular vein. He whispered, “And most dangerous of all to me is blood from someone half human and half vampire. It is not I who threaten your existence, Angel. It is you who threaten mine.”

  He finished the words on a groan, and she felt the brush of his teeth, the trembling in his body as the blood lust took him. He wanted to sink his teeth into her, to share with her the great intimacy of his kind.

  Whether to protect him or herself Angel didn’t know, but she wrenched away and backed toward the door. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Why was he baring himself to her this way? She’d surely given him no more reason to trust her than she had to trust him….she inhaled sharply. And felt his answer in her mind.

  ‘Because you are mine, Angel. By the blood of your mother, whom I loved and could not save no matter how hard I tried, you are a fulfillment of my motto and hers: a blessing sent to me for today.’

  Tears came to Angel’s eyes as this bright, bold being, the best of vampire and the best of man, bared himself to her. She felt unworthy, she felt shamed, but most of all, she felt exalted. The touch of him in her mind became so sweet, a tender caress, that she walked straight into his opening arms. And softly he finished, with both his lips and his mind, “No matter how the killer tempts you, I cannot believe you will betray either my confidence or my faith that the blood you carry of your mother calls to the blood that made me vampire. And yet there is much of the human left in each of us, and that, too, cements our bond. We are both unique, yet two of a kind. Meant to be together. If I have to risk my very existence to keep you safe as I could not keep her, then so be it. I give you this knowledge to do with as you will.”

  As she willed. Angel wished for only one thing at this moment: to meld with him in body as they had in mind and, though she feared it still, perhaps even in the unique souls they both had, part vampire, part human, they could find a way to be together.

  She pulled his head down to her level and kissed him full on the mouth. A flaming kiss that held little of the innocent she’d been but much of the temptress she was becoming. His reaction was immediate and tangible: the root of his masculinity swelled into her abdomen. His mouth teased hers open for the intimate caress that presaged that complete immersion of souls that allowed no barriers and no denials.

  Truth here, at last, in this cold scientific place. They could mete in equal measure, trusting the organic, immutable chemistry between men and women, if not each other.

  When he swept his notebooks and even a small microscope off his table, Angel could no longer doubt that part of his declaration, at least, was true. He wanted her, as he’d wanted her mother. Badly. As both vampire and man.

  The microscope fell with a clatter, its fine optics shattering. Angel felt the sting of glass embed in the side of her knee, but the physical pain only made the pleasure of what he was doing to her with tongue and teeth all the more puissant. He’d been gentle the other time, easing her into the powerful sensual delights so many virgins found overwhelming.

  This time, he suckled her mouth so hard that he sucked her lips between his teeth. For a long moment he tasted the gentle softness, his wildest instincts urging him to bite. She felt it in the trembling of his body, saw it in the fiery connection between their minds.

  “Bite me,” she begged into his mouth, not knowing
or caring where the urge came from. But it was as deeply immutable in her as the emptiness in her womb that begged to be filled.

  For an instant, she felt the graze of his fangs, but then with a queer little half sob, half groan, he pulled away, caught his hands in the neck of her high night rail and robe and ripped downward with all his unnatural strength.

  The sturdy garments fell in shreds to her feet. It was chilly so far beneath the hillside, but she was burning. Burning at the look in his eyes, the touch of his hands, the sensual promise in his fulsome smile. His pupils expanded, leaving only a bright rim of green that beckoned her like hope.

  His hands started at her collarbones and coasted downward, barely brushing, but leaving a trail of molten desire that made her emptiness expand. She felt as if her entire body were a receptacle, craving the fluid of their mutual fulfillment. She knew now the pleasures of sin, and she was so lost to him that it seemed good and right that she revel in them again.

  Making the same queer sound, she wrenched open the front of his pants. Buttons went flying. She scarcely noticed, for he sprang free into her hands. The first time she’d hesitated, but now she explored him without reserve. Were all men so magnificent? He was velvet without flaccidity, iron without hardness, wildness without threat.

  Man, at his most mesmerizing.

  All the more bewitching because he quelled his own vast strength to let her know him in this most intimate of caresses. The veins on his neck stood out with effort when she glanced up at him through slumbrous, half-closed lids. His neck was thrown back, open and vulnerable to her. She felt her own fangs growing, and not heaven nor earth nor fear of hell itself could have stopped her natural urge.

  She sank her fangs into him and sucked with tongue and teeth. As she drew his essence into her mouth, the fluid emptiness in her midsection began a primitive aching that bordered on the edge of pain.. The taste of him, the blood so thick and sweet and warm, made the power of what she held that much more mind boggling. She pulled at his manhood, milking him with her hands as she knew she soon would with her body. The tactic made his strong legs almost buckle, weakening him so that his feeble efforts to get away from her bite were aborted by the firm imprimatur of her possession.

  For an instant more he tried to resist. “No, Angel, stop. If you drink my blood it will make your transition go faster.”

  Greek, Swahili, Hottentot, his words made no sense.

  She had to taste of him, to know him, to sustain her femininity on his masculinity pulsing above and below.

  She fed on him, the consummation of joining with his blood making the sexual frenzy all the greater. Then she was rubbing the hard, hot head against her flushed lower belly, lifting one leg to slide him between the moist vee of her legs. But he was too much taller.

  Her mouth still full of his blood, she begged, “Lower, put it in me--”

  He took the plea from her mouth, kissing her deeply, insatiably, tasting his own blood on the sweetness of her lips and tongue. The shared intimacy made their passions soar out of control. With a fierce strength that made her feel invincible because she knew she, and she alone had incited this storm, he lifted her hips to the table, pressed her legs widely open with his knees and thrust deeply home.

  Impaling her, but the golden stake he used this time filled her, fulfilled her, and made her yearn for more. Harder. Faster. Further. She squirmed on him, around him, filled to the brim but it still wasn’t enough.

  She didn’t say the words, but she didn’t have to. He heard them in his head, felt them in that wordless communication of their kind. Lifting her legs over his shoulders, he cupped himself in the intimate cradle of her body, giving her no respite, and no quarter.

  She asked for neither. The wildness took her.

  Instinctively she lifted her hips to try to force him deeper, though in this position she felt him pulsing at the very lip of her womb. They touched everywhere, no space, no reserve.

  No tomorrow. Not even today. Only the…

  Now.

  This moment snatched from the evil forces trying to pull them apart would link their fates as it linked their bodies. And fortify them for the time yet to come. Pausing with his strength pulsing high between her legs, he turned his head to kiss her leg. She felt him stiffen as he scented her blood. He pulled the bit of glass out and watched delicious, bright red well up to fill the tiny hole. Still nestled moistly in the welcoming clasp of her body, he licked at her wound. Just the tip at first, the tiny dab of moisture and heat so slight she scarcely felt it.

  “Angel,” he groaned. His fangs baring with a grimace of desire and pain, he ringed the tiny hole with his teeth and bit into her flesh at the same time that he pressed to his fullest extent into her body.

  In the most erotic experience she’d ever had, he suckled the fluid of her life and gave her his own at the same time. Her head fell back over the edge of the table, her long hair falling to the floor as she exulted in the violent spew of his release. She welcomed it with her own dewy convulsions, breaking apart in the undertow of murky half truths, doubts, and fears. As she shook with release, she felt as if she climbed out, complete again, on an unknown shore where truth, at last, was hers for the reaching.

  As she sagged under him, complete, the world forming again into a cold hard table and cold hard reality, one verity was still emblazoned in her mind: this moment had been destined the moment she set foot in that cemetery where her mother lay buried and saw him standing sentinel over her grave. Whether Max was friend or foe, whether he’d killed her mother or not, she had no regrets for the virgin blood she’d given him. In return, he’d endowed her with the natural strength that was her heritage.

  A fitting end to their human copulation. As the sensations faded and the roaring in her ears abated, she finally realized he was still drinking insatiably at her leg. She welcomed this final consummation, feeling her own fangs growing. She sank her teeth into his neck and drank deeply.

  Forbidden sustenance, but she had neither strength nor will to deny him–or herself. It was right that they bond this way, too.

  He collapsed on top of her, kissing her still, her lips, her temples where tears seeped, inspired by the powerful emotions consuming her.

  But then, to her shock, she felt him sway, still standing between her legs. Yet he couldn’t seem to help himself. Even as his knees buckled, he latched more firmly onto her leg, suckling, drinking…and weakening himself.

  Appalled, remembering his earlier words finally about his weakness as a Watch Bearer, Angel pulled her leg away from his mouth. He tried to hold onto her and bite her again, but she shoved hard with her free foot against his chest. He went sprawling.

  The last little twinges of glory faded all too quickly to shame as she saw what her blood did to him. Even as he licked the last morsel from his lips, he slipped sideways to the ground, his breeches around his knees, his eyes cloudy. She felt the mind link with him break and knew only that he was alone now, in some far away dream or nightmare she could not fathom. As she watched, his fangs receded back into his mouth.

  Unmindful of her nakedness, Angel knelt over him, patting his cheeks. “Max! Max, wake up.”

  For several more wrenching moments he remained in a near fetal position, but when her hot tears of anguish welled up and fell onto his face, he blinked back to awareness. Huskily, his voice still weak, he said, “Do you see now why I brought you here?”

  Angel pulled her tattered robe over herself before she could frame an answer. “I…hurt you. You make me strong, and I make you weak.”

  Hearing the awful truth in her own shaky voice was more than she could bear. Oh yes, she understood. He’d risked everything in an effort to get her to trust him, revealing his worst weakness to the one woman who could emasculate his powers as a vampire and leave him helpless to the killer.

  And she could not bear it.

  Fleet of foot now, more fleet than ever before, she ran out, bounding up the long staircase in two strides and opening
the casement window at top to leap to the ground. Unhurt, she ran, and ran, her heart bursting in her chest.

  But not with exertion. What terrible blood right was this? This man who made her long to share everything with him, heart, soul and deepest truth of who she was, and all she dreamt of becoming, could lose his very life in the melding that could have made them each whole. The sexual congress between them made their urge to share their blood well nigh uncontrollable.

  He wasn’t dangerous to her.

  She was dangerous to him.

  And somehow the killer knew it and had lured her here to use her to get to Max.

  A few minutes later, still weak but able to move, Max forced himself up off the cold floor, but he knew Angel was long gone. He’d brought her here to risk everything in the bold gamble that, like her mother, the natural kindness of her nature would overcome her vampire instincts if he only showed her how vulnerable she made him. And it might have worked if passion hadn’t swept him away, too. If he hadn’t broken the microscope in his haste to take her and smelled her blood. If…

  Despite himself, he licked the inside of his mouth, still reveling in the forbidden taste of her. His body was sated but his mind was tormented.

  For he knew that neither his sacred vows nor the luminous glow of the watch that had always been his talisman would fortify him against this powerful lure. No matter how many of his brothers died, passing the blood oath from heir to heir, no matter if he was the last Earl who could fulfill the grisly Trelayne inheritance, if he was given the chance, now he’d tasted her, he’d drink of Angel again.

  She was meant to be his. Every vampire and strong male instinct in him demanded he brand her as such. Again and again, until the exchange of bodily fluids drew the best of him to her and back.

  The fact that the exchange could make him easy prey for the killer wouldn’t stop them.