Eternal Blood - Books 1-3 Wolf Shield, Sword of the Blood, Vampire Bride

by Maria Isabel Pita

  Audrey cried, “That’s blinding!” but Consuelo got to Aapti first, embracing her and murmuring, “Felicidades, querida” and then kissing her twice on both cheeks before she finally relinquished her to Audrey, who hugged her friend fiercely. Grabbing her hand, she led her up to her bedroom. She was reluctant to steal the spotlight, but she simply had to borrow it for a few minutes to tell her about Merlin’s visit.

  “Oh that’s smashing!” Aapti declared as she quickly removed her shoes and socks and lay on her side across a cream-colored divan. Her slender feet were paler than the rest of her body and resembled a fine layer of gold accented by shining silver toenails. “I’m only surprised it took him so long to visit you!”

  Audrey hadn’t mentioned Jonathan’s presence in the dream because she couldn’t quite bring herself to talk about him yet. In a sense she felt pregnant as well—with the future, where she glimpsed what it might really feel like to be truly accompanied, heart and soul, by the person she’d been longing for…

  Aapti was saying, “I did the test three times. I’m going for the official test next week but I’m sure of it, Audrey, I can feel it.” She rested both hands over her womb and gazed down at it.

  “I believe you. There’s magic in the air.”

  Aapti’s radiant expression was abruptly eclipsed by a thought. “I had a vivid dream last night as well… but not a good one.”

  “Tell me about it,” Audrey said eagerly. She enjoyed interpreting people’s dreams. She seemed to have a knack for deciphering them, much like the ancient Egyptians had effortlessly read their hieroglyphs, which to the untrained eye appeared to be randomly arranged pictures. “If you already knew you were pregnant, I’m sure it was merely what some psychologists call a ‘release’ dream. You’ve never been pregnant before, never felt responsible for another life as you do now, so naturally you’re going to experience all sorts of fears dreams can help you deal with by taking out the subconscious garbage, so to speak.”

  “No, Audrey.” Aapti sat up, sitting cross-legged and resting her ringed hands on her knees as she often did to calm and center herself. “I can tell the difference between those kinds of dreams and real dreams like the one you had with Merlin last night on the full moon, traditionally a time when the line between the worlds is more easily crossed. I think we were both some place in between.”

  “Yes...” And Jonathan had come with her. Or had he in fact led her there? Had Merlin visited her last night because Jonathan had opened some mysterious door and let him in?

  “I don’t know where I was,” Aapti began quietly, staring out at the stone balcony overgrown with English Ivy and surrounded by leafless trees, “I just know it was dark and that I was naked and lying on the floor in a place that felt like it was underground even though moonlight was streaming in through some opening above me… a straight, narrow shaft of moonlight that shone directly down on my womb. I don’t know how to describe it… the light was condensing, its edges were becoming more and more defined, and suddenly I sensed there was blood everywhere… I was lying in a pool of blood and the moonlight had transformed into a sword…”

  Audrey said matter-of-factly, “And you were impaled on it?”

  Aapti’s back slumped and she studied her French manicured fingernails murmuring, “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  “Did you feel any pain?”

  “No…”

  “What did you feel? You described what you saw but not what you felt. You need to tell me what you were feeling.”

  Aapti sat up and looked outside just as a raven landed on a branch and spread its glossy black wings while calling to an unseen companion, or maybe just talking to itself. In either case its harsh voice was clearly audible through the glass before it flew away impatiently.

  Audrey insisted gently, “Tell me what you were feeling, Aapti.”

  “Desire!” she snapped. “I was so excited, so incredibly turned on, I was afraid it would kill my baby. I knew it would kill my baby!”

  “Oh sweetie!” Audrey went to sit beside her and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “It’s natural to be nervous-”

  Aapti shook her off with uncharacteristic gruffness and stood up. “I don’t want to think about it anymore! You’re right, I’m sure it was just a release dream, or whatever.”

  Audrey followed her up and quickly pulled a book out of one of her shelves. “Listen to this, Aapti. I think you may be confusing a good dream with a nightmare. Symbolically, a sword can represent many positive things, for example power and protection, courage and strength. ‘It is also the masculine principle,” she read out loud, “the active force, and is phallic with the sheath as the receptive feminine’. In Celtic mythology, it’s ‘associated with the supernatural underwater powers’. And the Hindu definition reads, ‘the wooden sword of the Vedic sacrifice symbolizes lightning’.(3) Get it? These are all positive symbols of sexuality and the quickening of your womb by your husband’s masculine principle. And you said you felt pleasure not pain, right?”

  Aapti stood with her back to her, staring outside. Yesterday the snow had melted even as it fell and today the world was merely dark and dreary. “I didn’t feel pleasure.”

  “But you said-”

  “I felt desire, a sexual desire so bloody intense I was willing to sacrifice anything for it! You see, I didn’t fight it, I couldn’t, it was just too powerful!”

  Audrey thought about this for a moment. “Maybe what you were feeling was what the soul who just took root in your womb was feeling, the desire to take physical form and be born.”

  Aapti whirled around to face her, her expression suddenly hopeful. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I thought I was being so selfish!”

  “Those were your subconscious fears talking. You always need to look at your dreams objectively. Sexual desire is a very natural part of conception. The drive to incarnate in a physical body must be incredibly powerful and maybe you picked up on what we all feel when we dive into a womb!” She grinned.

  “Yes…” Aapti sounded as though she was still trying to convince herself of this but she no longer looked quite so disturbed.

  ⊕

  Aapti had just left when Jonathan called and asked her if she wanted to meet him for lunch at The Red Fox Inn.

  A fire was burning in the stone hearth and most of the wooden tables were occupied, by tourists from the look of them. She wondered if her date had chosen this location precisely because it didn’t cater to locals. Strangers seeing them together wouldn’t launch into speculations about their relationship and start the gossip wheels spinning out of control.

  She was early. It was a bad habit of hers, but even when she made an effort to be fashionably late she usually just ended up being on time. She requested a table near the fire and ordered a glass of tea before leaving her coat draped across the chair to go wash her hands and check her appearance. Cold weather tended to dry out her lips and another coat of gloss was never amiss. Satisfied with her loveliness, she pulled on the heavy door which opened inward, forcing her to slip quickly past it out into the narrow corridor, where she collided with a man who had just exited the adjoining toilet. She was wearing high-heels and was thrown off balance. He hadn’t gripped her arms and pinned her back against the wall.

  “I beg your...” She looked up at his face and the polite exclamation dissolved like ashes on her tongue. She suddenly lost her voice and for the life of her couldn’t seem to find it. In the dim light his eyes looked pitch black. The sounds of conversation and laughter flowing down the corridor toward them were damned abruptly by a thrumming silence that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside her… His fingers became talons digging into her skin as the ceiling above them exploded soundlessly open. Without moving, as if paralyzed by the speed of their ascent, they soared together above the Inn and the village and artery-like spider webs of roads and highways, ascending beyond the gray veil of the sky into the endless darkness beyond it alive with stars that were somehow really h
er blood cells as the whole time she also retained a sense of their two bodies pressed against each other in a narrow little passage on earth. Then his hands slipped slowly down her arms and she felt herself being pulled back. Sounds rushed into her ears again in almost deafening waves, flooding her head and overwhelming her with how clearly defined each individual voice and word was in the kaleidoscope of noise. Until the beating of her heart anchored her back in a blessedly contained progression of moments, enfolding and protecting her senses from the unrestrained power she understood, the instant he released her, had flowed into her through his fingers. She thought he smiled but she was so dazed it might only have been her imagination.

  “Did you enjoy that?” he said, or at least she thought he did because his lips hadn’t seemed to move. She was hopelessly confused. Why should she enjoy running into someone in a corridor? But of course she knew that wasn’t what he meant. Already it was like trying to remember a dream but something had happened—how fast her heart was still beating made this fact abundantly clear no matter how desperately her reason denied what it couldn’t understand.

  “Answer me.” That time she knew for a fact his lips hadn’t moved—the command emanated from his eyes and she absolutely had to obey it.

  “Yes, my lord.” Immediately, she wondered what the hell she had just said. Had she actually said that? She knew she hadn’t thought about saying that; the words had simply flowed out of her. She has no idea what would have happened if he hadn’t pulled his stare out of her soul and left her there, subject to the curious gaze of an American woman who asked her if she was waiting for the bathroom. She shook her head but remained where she was staring at the painting that hung on the opposite wall, able to see it now because the darkness that had fallen over the corridor, and trapped her as if in the eye of a tornado, had walked away on two long slender legs quite ordinarily dressed in black jeans and knee-high black leather boots.

  It came as a surprise she was able to walk a straight line as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. She felt as though hours must have passed and she had missed her date with Jonathan but when she returned to her table her tea was still hot and her watch told her less than five minutes had elapsed. She had just sat down when she saw her date walk in and look around for her. Her relief was so great, and the happiness the sight of him filled her with so intense, she felt safe enough to let go of a part of her that had been stubbornly clinging to its pathetic blinkered existence: there really were more things on heaven and earth that had been dreamed up in any philosophy she was familiar with.

  Spotting her, Jonathan headed her way just as she heard the sound of a powerful engine turning over. She glanced out the window just in time to see a black silver-lined blur race past, admired by a group of young women who all turned to watch it—him—go.

  Jonathan pulled out the chair to her left and before he even sat down said urgently, “Tell me what happened, Audrey.”

  “I have no idea.” It was as honest a reply as she could muster while gazing at him hungrily. He was tall and looked incredibly fit but he was only human. Then she heard what she had just thought, only human… “I ran into someone as I was leaving the toilet and I must have knocked my head against the wall because everything felt really strange for a few moments, like I was here and yet not here… I was just dazed, I guess. I’m fine now.”

  The waitress appeared with menus and to take his drink order. When she left he asked, “Who did you run into?” and glanced around the restaurant.

  “He’s gone. Drove away on a motorbike, I believe. Anyway, what does it matter? I’m fine now.”

  “You certainly are fine,” he agreed in an undertone, staring fixedly out at the street. “Much too fine.”

  “Thank you.” She was both pleased and unnerved by the compliment since his expression was anything but flirtatious; grim was a more appropriate word for it. “Why do you make it sound like a bad thing, Jonathan?”

  “Have you ever been to a place, Audrey,” he met her eyes, “where you weren’t the top of the food chain?”

  “No!” She laughed, anxiously. Her effort to pretend this was just a normal afternoon was failing miserably; her pulse refused to cooperate by slowing down.

  “It’s not a pleasant feeling, believe me. You experience the world differently after you know what it’s like to be prey.”

  “I once saw horrifying footage of killer whales tossing seals around like footballs before they devoured them. It seemed so cruel to toy with them that way.”

  “Compassion is a human trait.”

  “But what about the dolphins that surrounded that little Cuban boy who ended up adrift in the ocean after his family was drowned when their boat capsized? Those dolphins protected him from being eaten by sharks, until the Coast Guard arrived and rescued him. Were they just instinctively protecting him as they did their own young?”

  His beer arrived and he took a hearty swig before replying, “Could be. Maybe, maybe not.”

  “That’s not an answer, Jonathan.” She pretended to study the menu even though she already knew the selection by heart, as did he, apparently; he hadn’t even picked his up.

  “Why isn’t it, Audrey?”

  “Because, dolphins either have compassionate spirits or they don’t.”

  “Why? Isn’t it conceivable that, as is the case with people, some dolphins are en-souled and others aren’t?”

  “All human beings have souls,” she said passionately.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Christ came for everyone.”

  “I thought you had to be baptized into the Christian church in order to be saved.”

  “That’s ridiculous and you know it.”

  “I do, but millions of other people don’t.”

  “Oh forget it.” She slapped her menu down on the table. “I don’t want to discuss religion or politics or anything depressing right now. We are all one in the eyes of God and I really believe that.”

  “Unfortunately, people just can’t seem to agree what God that is.”

  “God is God the way language is language, whether you speak English, French or Italian,” she argued impatiently. “The thoughts and concepts you express may differ slightly in flavor and feel according to their unique environment but everyone is feeling and saying essentially the same things no matter what language, what religion, their minds and hearts were raised to speak and prefer.”

  “My lady!” Firmly grasping her left hand he raised it to his lips and held her eyes as he kissed it.

  ⊕

  Jonathan walked her out to the lot at the back of the Inn where she had parked her car. He himself had walked all the way into the village from the guest house she learned he lived in on his father’s estate. She offered to drive him back but he said he preferred walking. She didn’t insist, wondering if he had already transformed one of the rooms in his house into a gym. She hadn’t seen his arms yet but she could feel them beneath his coat and they were definitely not natural; a man had to work hard for muscles like that. Every part of him except his lips and his tongue felt hard as he pulled her to him and gave her a proper goodbye kiss this time. She was afraid for an instant, afraid his kiss might be too wet, too greedy, too selfish or, just as bad, too hesitant, too insipid; there were too many ways a kiss could disappoint. But the second his mouth opened against hers she knew her worries were completely unjustified. She slipped her hands up his chest and clutched the back of his neck with one hand while hungrily caressing his roughly smooth skull with the other. His arms tightened around her waist but their coats remained frustrating barriers. She wasn’t remotely ready to let go of him when he pulled away, ignoring her moan of protest.

  “Go now,” he said almost angrily.

  “But when-”

  He cut her short by cradling her face with one hand and pressing his thumb against her lips. “Soon.” He wasn’t wearing gloves and he stared intently into her eyes as she sucked on him hungrily.

&nbs
p; As he left her, she savored how slightly rough and salty his skin had tasted. Apparently, walking across unforgiving expanses of desert had trained him to use his long legs with maximum efficiency—he looked perfectly relaxed and yet he disappeared from view almost immediately.

  Her hand was trembling from a debilitating combination of disappointment and anticipation as she reached into her black leather purse for her car keys. She encountered an unexpected barrier. She examined the inside of her handbag, unable to make sense of the stiff white envelope dividing its contents. She had not put that there herself.

  As usual, her heart beat her brain to the punch—the man she had run into, accidentally she had believed, must have slipped this letter into her purse. It didn’t make sense. Nothing about the encounter had made sense in the way she understood it. But the stiff white paper in her purse was clearly there, and whether or not she had imagined anything else she had experienced in that dark and narrow corridor she was not imagining this. Right before leaving the house, she had transferred all her vital statistics and possessions from the handbag she had taken to Chelmsford into this one and it had been in her possession the entire time. There was no question about it, the man she thought she had heard herself call “my lord” must have slipped this letter into her purse. Remembering the experience, she saw herself in her mind’s eyes pinned like a butterfly against the wall by his penetrating stare. What she had seen in his eyes were like images in a dream now, easy to doubt, to relegate to fantasy.

  She clutched her keys, got in the car, and set her purse as far away from her on the passenger seat as possible. Once she began driving, it was too late, she was obliged to wait until she got home to open the envelope and see what lay inside, if anything. The suspense was going to kill her, it was like the point of a knife pressing more and more painfully against her heart ready to stab her with disappointment if there turned out to be nothing at all in the envelope. There was nothing written on either side of it, it could conceivably be empty. But she had suffered the same fear about Jonathan’s kiss, that it might leave her feeling empty if it wasn’t just right. No, she knew there was a letter in the envelope and that it was going to have a profound effect on her life whether she liked it or not.