Steal Your Soul Away

by Elizabeth Coldwell

  “So, tell me what brings a guy like you to a burlesque club,” Angelique said.

  “Oh, that was Lucas’ idea. He reckons I’ve been shut up with my work far too much recently, and I needed to come out and play.”

  “And what is this job that’s taking up all your time?”

  “I’m a sculptor. I’m just putting the final touches to an exhibition that’s going to be held at the Pavilion. Part of the Cities After Dark project—I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it?”

  So that was how she knew the name. She’d seen details of the event on a poster fixed to some railings near the Clock Tower.

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Oh, I could bore you with the details for hours, if you wanted. This is my first major exhibition, and I’m so excited about it.”

  They turned the corner, and in moments were standing on Angelique’s doorstep. As she put the key in the lock, Tom encircled her waist with his hands. He dropped a kiss on her collarbone, where it was left exposed by the shawl, and that was all it took.

  They half fell through the open door and into the hallway, colliding with a bicycle that one of the students who lived in the ground floor flat kept chained up there.

  “Merde, now we’ll have woken everyone in the building up.” Angelique barely knew her neighbors, though she occasionally saw one or other of the students if they were staggering home at the same time as she arrived back from Club Peekaboo.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Tom paused on the stairs to kiss her again, on the lips this time.

  His mouth was warm and soft, and she realized with a shock just how long it had been since she’d been properly kissed.

  By the time they reached her front door, Tom had pulled off her shawl, and she had loosened his tie and undone half of the buttons on his shirtfront. Need pulsed through her veins, and when she gazed into his eyes, she saw that the pupils were wide with lust.

  Angelique dragged Tom into her flat without effort. Her strength and muscularity didn’t seem to surprise him. Perhaps he put it down to her gymnastic dance routines.

  She pushed him up against the wall and quickly undid his shirt the rest of the way. He shrugged his jacket off, then the shirt, and Angelique smiled at the sight of his bare, brawny chest. His skin was tanned an appealing shade of honey. A small, deeply buried part of her envied his ability to spend time in the sun.

  Tom drove the thought from her mind by mashing his mouth to hers, while with one hand he groped for the zip on her dress. She went limp in his arms as he stripped the garment from her, only stepping out of it once it had dropped to the floor.

  This wasn’t how she’d envisaged the seduction. She’d planned to take him up to the roof garden, where they could have drunk wine and maybe enjoyed a few stolen kisses. But his blood was roused, and she could scent his excitement, more subtly masculine than the sharp, intoxicating stink of his friend, the wolf.

  Don’t think about him. He has no place here…

  Tom brought her back to the moment by reaching for the fastening on her bra and pulling it open.

  “Gorgeous,” he murmured, looking at her breasts with stunned admiration.

  So funny of him to be so in awe of what he’d already seen on stage, but she supposed he must be trying hard to separate her fantasy persona, the distant and untouchable Clair de Lune, from the woman who stood before him now in nothing but lace panties and heels.

  “You’re pretty easy on the eye yourself,” she responded, pressing herself tight to him as she worked to unbuckle his belt. His cock, long and virile in his clinging trousers, was imprinted in her mind, and she was desperate to hold that big, beautiful thing in her hand.

  She nipped at his neck, playfully at first, but as he responded to her caresses, she felt her canine teeth begin to lengthen. They pricked at his skin, hard enough to draw blood. The rich, coppery aroma awakened her need to feed on him, and she fought the urge to sink her fangs deeper.

  “Hey, what are you…?” Tom, obviously reacting to the pain she’d caused him, broke away from her.

  Angelique put a hand to her mouth, but she knew what he’d seen, what he’d felt. “Tom, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Already he was searching around for his discarded shirt and jacket. “What kind of fucking freak are you?”

  She had to do whatever it took to stop him from leaving. “Please, this doesn’t have to be the end between us. Let me explain. Perhaps you’ll be more sympathetic once you know how I became what I am.”

  Chapter Two

  She had fangs. He thought he’d imagined it at first, thought Angelique was one of those women who simply got off on giving their partner sharp love bites, but when he’d felt blood trickling down his neck, he’d known something was very wrong with this picture. She still had a drop of the stuff on her lower lip, and even as he shrank away from her, he couldn’t help thinking that it somehow made her look even sexier.

  Fuck, what was he doing? He needed to get out of there right now.

  “Tom, let me explain. I don’t mean you any harm, I promise.”

  Angelique took a step towards him, with no attempt to cover herself up. Even though he was terrified, he couldn’t tear his eyes from those gorgeous breasts of hers, with their taut damask nipples.

  “My name,” she continued, “is Angelique du Pre, and I was born in Paris in 1773.”

  “No, that can’t be possible.” He shook his head. The woman standing before him appeared to be barely into her twenties. If she spoke the truth, what kind of perverse magic had kept her looking like that for over two hundred years?

  Only one explanation made sense, ludicrous as it was. She was immortal, her beauty frozen forever at the moment when she’d become one of the undead.

  How could this be happening to him? He’d allowed himself to be lured into a vampire’s clutches, and he was never going to get away. Now she would drink his blood and drain him dry. That was how these encounters ended, wasn’t it? God, if only he’d had the sense to stay at home tonight, busy in his studio, rather than letting Lucas persuade him to visit that burlesque club. The last piece for the exhibition still wasn’t finished, and now it seemed they’d be displaying his work posthumously.

  “My life changed with the onset of the French Revolution,” Angelique said. “Until then, we had been such a happy family. I never knew what it was to go without food…without love. But my father was a prosperous cotton merchant, one of the middle class, and that made him a target for the revolutionary mob. One night, our house was ransacked, and he was taken away, along with my mother, my younger brother, Pierre, and our governess, Estelle. I only managed to keep myself safe by hiding under the floorboards in my bedroom. Sometimes, I can still hear the sound of their feet as they tramped above my head, so close to discovering my hiding place…” She gave a small shudder.

  “So what happened to your parents and the others?” Despite his fear, Tom needed to hear more of her story.

  “I never saw any of them again. I can only assume they perished under the blade of Madame la Guillotine, like so many others. As for me, I had to survive by living on the streets, though I was sure I would die there. Can you imagine what it was like, Tom, knowing you might be forced to sell your body for a crust of bread? However, I was lucky enough to be spotted by an Englishman named Hogarth. He rescued me from my plight, smuggled me out of the country, and brought me to live here in Brighton. He was older than me, and such a charming and sophisticated man. What I did not realize was that Hogarth was…a creature of the night.”

  “You mean a vampire?”

  Angelique nodded. “He never told me straight out, of course. He waited until I had fallen deeply in love with him, then he…turned me, so that we could be together forever. He drank from me until I was weak and in need of sustenance, then he fed his own blood to me. That action bound us together. Hogarth became my protector, my master, the only man I would ever need.”

  “So wh
ere is he now? If the two of you have this unbreakable bond, why am I here?”

  She looked away for a moment, as if this was the hardest part of the story to tell. “He was killed, less than a dozen years after we first met. Staked through the heart by a vampire hunter as he slept, then beheaded.”

  “You know, this is starting to sound like a bad horror movie.”

  “I’m pleased you take my life so seriously,” Angelique snapped. “Tom, do you know how many people I have revealed my true nature to since I lost Hogarth?” When he shook his head, she said, “Only you. I’ve spent the last two centuries and more pretending to be someone I’m not. I stay in one place just long enough that people don’t begin to wonder why I don’t look a day older than when first I arrived, then I move on.” She shrugged. “But somehow I keep coming here. This is the one place where I feel truly at home.”

  If she were telling the truth—and the puncture wounds she had left in his neck gave him no reason to doubt her—he could not begin to imagine how hard that must have been for her. How could she bear to put down roots, make friends, find a lover, knowing all the time that whatever life she created for herself was only temporary and would one day have to be left behind? And where did she find the strength to keep repeating the process, century after century?

  The fear Tom felt at being in Angelique’s presence had not faded entirely, but now he began to see her not as a monster, more a lost soul. Assuming, that was, she still possessed a soul.

  “Tom, I’ll understand if you walk away from here and never come back. All I ask is that if you do, you keep the truth of my nature a secret from everyone. Especially from Lucas.”

  Why him? He didn’t know what impression Angelique had picked up of Lucas, but if he casually mentioned to his friend that he’d come within a hair’s breadth of having sex with a vampire, the reaction would be one of gently mocking laughter. He’d never met anyone more grounded in the real world than Lucas Canning.

  “Of course,” he assured her. He cast another look at her glorious body. “But—I want to stay. Even if it kills me, Angelique, I want to be with you.”

  Angelique raised an eyebrow. “You really think I would do anything to harm you? Non, mon chéri, if that was my intention, you would have been dead before we ever left the back streets. Drained of life in a heartbeat.”

  A strange, fierce look crossed her face, and Tom realized there were dark secrets to this woman, choices she’d made that he would be safer never knowing. But still he felt reassured. Whatever code this vampire operated by, he had gained the impression that she believed in truth and honour. She’d sworn she wouldn’t hurt him, and he trusted her.

  His erection had subsided in the moments after her fangs had pierced him, when he’d been wondering whether to fight or flee. Now it returned, stronger than ever. Every fibre of his being seemed to scream at him to throw her on the couch and sink his straining length into her pussy.

  She hooked her fingers into the waistband of her panties, and eased them down, offering him a teasing glimpse of her sex. The hair on her mound had been shaved into the shape of a heart—for her own amusement, he supposed, since that was the one part of her body Lucas had told him she never revealed in the course of her burlesque performances.

  “You want me?” she purred. “Well, come and take me.”

  Such submissive words, but he knew she was the one orchestrating this scene, the one controlling his desires. He didn’t care. If he didn’t fuck her, he would surely go insane.

  Tom finished the job she had started of undoing his belt. He kicked off his shoes, pulled his trousers and underwear down together, then made swift, hopping progress towards her, removing his socks as he went. There couldn’t have been a greater contrast between Angelique’s elegant disrobing, both here and on stage, and his own clumsy, hurried strip, but she seemed to like the results, if the smirk on her pretty face was any indication.

  “Is that all for me?” she quipped, indicating his hard cock, which bounced in time with his movements as he walked over and scooped her up into his arms. “What a lucky girl I am.”

  “Where’s the bedroom, Angelique?”

  She nodded to a door on her left, and he took her through it. He flicked at the light switch, but nothing happened. When he looked up, he saw there was no bulb in the ornate Tiffany lampshade overhead. The moon, hanging low in the sky, offered enough brightness to allow him to take the few steps to the bed and set Angelique down.

  “Light those,” she told him, pointing to the half-dozen fat, partially burned votive candles arranged on the nightstand, trails of crusted wax running down the side of each. “And pull the drapes.”

  He did as she’d instructed. The curtains were of heavy burgundy velvet, with a thick blackout lining. Once they were closed, not a sliver of light could penetrate into the room. The candles provided a soft, seductive glow, though the shadows they cast over Angelique’s face couldn’t help but remind Tom that he was not in the presence of an ordinary woman. He knew he could still be taking a risk that would ultimately prove fatal, even though she’d sworn she wouldn’t hurt him, but he was beyond caring.

  “Kiss me.” Angelique reached up to pull him down on top of her.

  He closed his eyes and let his tongue explore the contours of her mouth. As he played its tip along her teeth, he touched her sharp little incisors. How easily they had become the lethal fangs he’d seen protruding after she’d bitten him. He put the image from his mind as their kiss deepened.

  Angelique tangled her fingers in his hair, sighing as he rubbed his body against hers. He broke their lip-lock to press kisses down her neck and along the upper curves of her tits.

  “Mmm, that’s good,” she breathed. She let her thighs loll apart, inviting him to position himself between them and enter her.

  All in good time. First, he wanted to taste those luscious dark nipples. Taking each one between his lips in turn, he sucked till Angelique moaned and writhed against the bed covers. She linked her hands at the back of his neck, pulling him harder onto her firm breast, letting him know without words that she needed more stimulation.

  Happy to oblige, he slipped a hand between the two of them, and found first her wet sex lips then the tiny bud half hidden between those damp folds.

  When he rubbed, she exclaimed, “Mon dieu! Oh, Tom, just keep doing that, je vous en prie…”

  She sounded so soft, so vulnerable when she begged him, and he sensed this was the side of her she only revealed to her lovers. And from what she’d said, there hadn’t been too many of those over the centuries. It made him feel special, wanted.

  “Whatever you say, my lady,” he replied lightly. At once, he feared he’d made a mistake.

  Angelique was looking up at him, her eyes wide and her lips parted as if in shock.

  “Hey, are you okay? Did I say something wrong?”

  “It’s just… No one has called me that since Hogarth. It was his private term for me.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” What a stupid thing to say. How could I possibly have known? “Don’t worry. I won’t use it again.”

  “No, Tom, it’s fine. I like it. It’s just such a strange coincidence. Maybe it means we were meant to find each other. Twin souls, searching for each other through time…”

  He stopped her fanciful talk with a kiss, and gave her clit the gentlest of strokes once more. Again, she convulsed beneath him, as though the tremors of a small orgasm were shaking her.

  She pulled her lips from his to whisper, “Don’t tease me any longer, Tom. Take me. Make me yours.” And she took hold of his shaft and guided it to the entrance of her pussy.

  All he had to do was give one gentle push and he was home. Like her skin, her inner core retained a slight chill, unlike the liquid heat he was used to when he entered a woman, but the sensation only aroused him further. He gazed into her dark, unfathomable eyes, and began to thrust.

  At first, he was gentle, letting her get used to the feel of him ins
ide her, but she quickly made it clear that she wasn’t looking for a slow, tender fuck. She raked her nails down his back and hissed at him to go harder, faster.

  Her wildness awoke some primitive response in him, and he gripped both her wrists in one hand and held her hands above her head while he pistoned his hips. The bed, with its ornate wrought iron frame, rattled under the force of his thrusts, and as Angelique found her voice and screamed out in pleasure, he reckoned that if they hadn’t already woken the other residents of the building, this would have done the trick.

  “Oh yes, Tom. I’m coming…” She lapsed into her native French, and though he didn’t understand a word she babbled, the look on her face was unmistakeably that of a woman transported by ecstasy.

  Her inner muscles grasped him even tighter, and he lost what little self-possession he still had. She nipped at his neck again, not hard enough to break the skin but still reminding him of the threat those fangs possessed. The thought that she might choose to drink from him as he came had him spilling his seed inside her.

  They rolled apart, panting and gasping. She gave a little sigh as he brushed a hand over her belly. He wanted to fall asleep with her in his arms, for her face to be the first thing he saw in the dawn light, but he knew that wouldn’t be possible. Not for a creature of the night like Angelique.

  With reluctance, he hauled himself up off the bed. He looked round for his clothes then recalled that he’d left them scattered across Angelique’s living room floor in his haste to get naked. He went to collect them then brought them back into the bedroom, wanting to spend a few more moments in the vampire’s seductive presence.

  “Will I see you again?” he asked, as he pulled on his underwear.

  “I would like nothing more than that,” she assured him.

  “Well, why don’t you come over to my place next time?” He took his wallet from his trouser pocket, and hunted through it for one of the business cards he always carried. “I’d love to show you my work.”

  She took the small, white card from him and traced her fingers over the raised lettering on its surface. “It’s a date.”