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

by Maria Isabel Pita

  Fortunately, she didn’t run into anyone on the way up to her room. Whispers was sleeping on her bed, curled up into a little black ball so that only her faux diamond collar and pointed ears gave away the location of her neck and head.

  With a preternatural calm—that made her feel like an actress on a stage obeying the blocking assigned to her by an unseen director—she slipped the envelope out of her purse. Armed with a silver letter opener, she seated herself on the edge of the divan Aapti had reclined across that morning. The envelope was sealed closed by a circle of dark-red wax imprinted with a form of the Welsh dragon. She sliced it open at the top, leaving the seal unbroken, and extracted a single folded sheet of firm, expensive, cream-colored paper covered on one side in a flowing black cursive:

  Dear Audrey,

  First let me say that I have missed you every second of every day. It has also been my abiding hope you would one day find it in your heart to forgive me for abandoning you as I did. My reason for doing so, and for continuing to stay away, is compelling. I realize my letter must come as a great shock to you, but I must share with you what you might think of as my “excuse”. Please, whatever you do, do not tell anyone, especially your father. I can never expect to receive the blessing of his forgiveness. The man to whom I entrusted this letter will bring you to me. Forgive me, my love, but I can’t tell you where I am although I can give you a clue—I’m not very far from you at all. I trust you to keep my secret, Audrey. When we meet you’ll understand everything and be able to judge for yourself if the choice I made was worth the pain I’ve caused my family. I know it’s impossible for you to believe, yet, that there can be any justifiable reason for hurting those you love, but I know there is, if it means giving at least one of them everything they can possibly desire. Please come to me, my baby! You won’t regret it.

  Wilona

  When she looked up from the impossible paragraph, Whispers was sitting up in her perfect cat statue pose gazing at her with her large golden eyes half consumed by the gently rounded spades of her pupils. They stared at each other, and just when Audrey was convinced her pussy knew mysteriously more than she did, Whispers jerked her head urgently to one side and began licking her shoulder. Direct eye contact with a person always had that effect on her, as though glimpsing the pathetic limits of the human mind made her feel unclean. Even knowing there was no hope of a response, she cried out loud, “What am I going to do? I have to tell father!” but already she knew she wouldn’t, not yet. His reaction would be impossible for her to handle; she was having a hard enough time dealing with her own feelings.

  Chapter Five

  By tea time, Audrey was pretending the letter from her mother was someone’s horrible idea of a joke. It wasn’t important whether or not she really believed that, she had to think that in order to face her father. All she was doing, she told herself firmly, was sparing him the pain of dealing with a terrible hoax. She would sort it all herself, with Jonathan’s help. She knew he would help her. She had no idea what he might be able to do, but the thought seriously comforted her.

  Still wearing the lavender sweater dress and knee-high black leather boots she had donned for her lunch date, she braced herself and then knocked politely on the door of her father’s study. She didn’t wait for him to tell her she could come in; Darlene would already have brought in the tea tray and he would be expecting her.

  She saw right away as she entered the spacious room that he wasn’t at his desk. He was already sitting by the fire pouring himself a cup of tea. But instead of raising the cup to his lips he handed it to someone else. She realized there must be someone sitting in the wing-backed chair across from his and was immensely relieved. She would have a quick cup and then leave Stuart contentedly chatting with a colleague. She would be obliged to look her father in the eye only for a few minutes before she could take refuge in her room again and try to think straight.

  “Ah, there you are, love.” He stood.

  “Good afternoon, father…” Her voice faded away.

  His guest had also risen, turning in her direction, and every single one of the cells composing her body instantly recognized those black boots and jeans, those narrow hips and broad shoulders. If she ran from the room she wouldn’t know how to explain her behavior to her father without giving away the awful truth. She had no choice but to smile like a doll as, this time, they were properly introduced.

  “Audrey, this is an old friend of mine. Well, we’ve never actually met but we’ve corresponded for years. No one knows as much about the history of the Byzantine Empire as Falkon here.”

  The hand Falkon offered her was pale, the fingers long and slender but she already knew how strong they were. Her father was watching, she had to continue to follow the proper blocking so he wouldn’t suspect they were no longer acting in the same play, no longer living in the same world.

  The man who was ostensibly serving as her mother’s messenger held her hand for a cool, brief moment and then let it go. Nothing happened. Her boots remained solidly planted on the Oriental rug and his eyes didn’t mysteriously forbid her to look away from his. Nevertheless, she stared at his face because it was too arrestingly attractive not to look at. His goatee was very neatly trimmed, a boldly defined ink-like frame around a thin yet sinuous mouth that smiled at her as she sat down in the chair closest to her father, who had already begun pouring her a cup of tea. Her throat was so tight she wasn’t sure she could even swallow but it was nice to have something to concentrate on besides the man sitting across from her.

  She hadn’t intended to speak, she had planned on letting Stuart and his guest continue their conversation wherever they had left off, but instead she heard herself ask, “And what, pray tell, is so brilliant about the Byzantine Empire that you felt possessed by the desire to learn such a great deal about it?”

  His smile deepened. “It’s difficult to say. I was, as you put it, possessed by it, and ever since then the desire to learn even more, as well as to share all I know with those able to appreciate it, only keeps growing.” On the table between them his tea remained untouched.

  Stuart said, “It is a mystery why some people are born with such a passionate love of history,” Stuart agreed.

  “History is our collective memory.” Falkon looked around him, an appreciative light in his large, dark eyes, which would have looked right at home in Constantinople. Following his gaze, she saw eyes very similar to his staring blankly out of a wooden Medieval triptych from which most of the once vivid paint had faded. “If we forgot everything we experience and feel from one second to the next, who would we be? Without memory no thought can survive and no feeling live forever.”

  “Well said, my man.” Stuart helped himself to a cucumber and watercress sandwich. “Audrey?”

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry. I had a big lunch.”

  Falkon inquired softly, “Did you?”

  She blushed. His tone sounded insinuating to her, as if he somehow knew all about Jonathan. Obviously he wasn’t going to tell Stuart he had already “met” his daughter at the Red Fox Inn. But what was really blowing her mind was knowing that, for years, her father had been corresponding with a man who knew his wife, his wife who had gone missing twenty-two-years ago. It was all too unexpected, too strange, too sinister to take in, like suddenly realizing the perfectly innocent tasting tea she was drinking was actually spiked with poison, but it was too late, she’d already drunk half her cup, there was nothing she could do about it; running away wouldn’t help. Her only hope was that the persons responsible would be kind enough to provide her with an antidote. Her mother had promised her one, had promised her much more than that… anything she could possibly desire…

  “I do hope you’ll be in town for a few days,” Stuart was saying. “I’d love to pick your brain without the back and forth of e-mails.”

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here.”

  He didn’t need to look at her for Audrey to feel he was addressing her. With just th
ose two words, “Did you?” he had made her feel warm and wet between the legs, it didn’t matter that his sexy insinuation was probably only her imagination. Then suddenly it struck her as potentially quite dangerous to apply the qualifier only to her imagination, the power of which this extremely strange day was serving to highlight in dramatic ways. She couldn’t count how many times she had imagined her mother was still alive somewhere and would contact her one day and explain why she had left, and here it was actually happening.

  “Are you engaged this evening or can you stay and chat?” Stuart’s cup chiming brightly against its saucer perfectly expressed his innocent scholarly eagerness.

  “No, I’m not engaged. Of course I’ll stay.”

  Audrey saw her opening. Setting her cup down carefully, furiously willing her hand not to tremble, she stood. “Well, then, I’ll leave you to it. It was a pleasure to meet you, Falkon.”

  He was up and blocking her path before she even saw him move; he seemed to have risen with the same effortless swiftness she blinked and yet, remembering it now, he hadn’t appeared at all rushed. It was she who must have been moving slowly, as though reluctant to leave his presence, because suddenly her memory told her he had risen from the chair with unhurried grace and was merely being polite when he said, “I hope we’ll be seeing each other again soon, Audrey.”

  It was happening again, his eyes were emanating a silent command she could not disobey. The desperately sarcastic retort she had planned, “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again” died before her mind could even relay the signal of this intention to her vocal cords. Once again the only words she had the ability to form were, “Yes, my lord” spoken in the same faint, helpless whisper wrested out of her at the Inn. Nevertheless, Stuart heard her.

  “That’s very perceptive of you, dear. Falkon is, in fact, a lord.”

  ⊕

  “¿No to gusta mi arroz con pollo?”

  “Of course I love your arroz con pollo,” Audrey reassured Consuelo.

  “It is that young man who came to dinner last night who is destroying your appetite?”

  “Yes!” she sighed, glad of the excuse, because she couldn’t tell anyone about that bloody letter.

  Consuelo nodded. “Es muy bello.”

  “Si, muy bello.”

  They were alone in the kitchen. Stuart was still in his study with the man she had twice addressed as “my lord” before she had even known he could trace his ancestry back to some royal bloodline or another. This fact could not be reasonably explained nor, unfortunately, could it be denied. That left her between the proverbial rock and hard place. Which thought got her to wondering again why Jonathan hadn’t called her yet. Was his definition of “soon” going to turn out to be completely different from hers?

  Kissing Consuelo goodnight, she went upstairs, brushed her teeth, and took refuge in her bedroom again. She felt on edge. As long as that man was in the house, she couldn’t rest, couldn’t think, couldn’t eat, couldn’t take a deep breath. She felt strangely suspended in space. Not even the prospect of a long hot bath or shower offered any comfort, which was serious indeed.

  Mommy is alive. Mommy is alive. Mommy is alive!

  The thought was becoming indistinguishable from her heartbeat. One second she felt blessed by a miracle and the next she felt cursed because she couldn’t share the earth-shattering news with her father. Did he believe Wilona was dead or did he secretly harbor the suspicion that she hadn’t been adducted, that she had willingly run away with another man? She could never ask him this question. It would be like deliberately stepping on a landmine they had always walked carefully around. She was taking the full force of the explosion herself now, protecting him from the blast that had burned her life as she knew it down around her and smoldered now as a hot confusion of feelings in her chest. She longed to see her mother again and yet she hated her. She was afraid of Falkon and yet she knew that if he commanded her to go with him—silently with those eyes—her body would be irresistibly tempted to obey no matter what the rest of her thought about it.

  The rest of her…

  Was she really more than just a body gradually running itself down into the grave? Wasn’t anything else just a comforting fantasy?

  It had dawned a gloomy morning but that afternoon the clouds had dissipated and the waning moon was shining down on her balcony like a spotlight, illuminating every single ivy leaf and imbuing the bare branches of the trees with the aura of a timeless calligraphy her heart almost felt capable of reading…

  She parted the French doors just enough to step outside. She hugged herself but the cold air felt good, cleansing. In the profound quiet she distinctly heard the hoot of an owl followed a few heart beats later by a response from the other side of the woods. Even owls, that could see perfectly well in the dark, liked to know they weren’t alone.

  Standing at the edge of the stone railing, she stared down at a small cleared area between her private wing of the house and the trees. The moon, already high in the sky, lit up the neatly cut grass as though shining on a stage, onto which an actor slowly stepped from the darkness of the wings, his face turned up toward the balcony from which she watched him, hoping he would perform for her like no man ever had before. Then a cloud drifted across the face of the moon and she lost sight of Jonathan just as she realized he had brought his pet with him. The massive dog ran across the lawn straight toward her balcony and thrashed in the ivy just beneath her almost as if it was attempting to climb it. She scarcely had time to register the unnerving thought before a huge four-legged shadow leaped over the left edge of the balcony straight toward her.

  She screamed and ran back into the room but was too terrified to stop and turn and close the doors behind her, it would have taken too long and the creature would have leaped on top of her, it was right behind her now, she was going to die, all she could do was whimper as it caught her by one ankle and tripped her. Her upper body landed across the bed and her instinct was to bury her face in the mattress and lay perfectly still in the vain hope it would break off its attack if it believed she was dead. But it was already on top of her. She stiffened with dread as the sound of a viciously deep growl was accompanied by the sensation of her panty being ripped off. This couldn’t possibly be happening! Shock cushioned her more effectively than the bed. Help me God! She thought. Help me! even as she waited for the violent, agonizing sensation of fangs sinking into her flesh and the horror of her life’s blood being drained around them. But that wasn’t what she experienced. Shock was an amazing, a wonderful, a blessed thing. What she actually felt was unbearable but unbearably pleasurable. She felt herself penetrated with such force she couldn’t breathe for a moment she was so filled up by something that felt even more vital than oxygen. At once her body grew submissively languid and she moaned feeling a warm breath against the back of her neck followed by the possessive grip of what she knew at once were human teeth. It was as though one of God’s virile angels had plunged down to earth and into her, making the experience of her violent death feel positively divine. She was flung into the mysteriously mauling forces of a climax so powerful she couldn’t possibly bring herself to care if she survived it or not…

  A timeless while later, Jonathan murmured in her ear, “Audrey…”

  “Mm?”

  “I’m sorry, Audrey, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop it.”

  She smiled and murmured, “I didn’t want you to stop” but she couldn’t seem to open her eyes.

  “Rest now.” He kissed her forehead just as he had in her dream. “Rest and forget.”

  “Oh no, I never want to forget.”

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “And you always will be!”

  She opened her eyes. She had spoken those exact words to Merlin last night. She was lying on her back on her bed and as she sat up she saw that the doors leading out onto the balcony were closed.

  It had all been a dream!

  Her face fell into her hands for a despair
ing moment, until the ache she suddenly became aware of in the back of her neck offered her a perverse glimmer of hope. She got up, turned on the bright overhead light she hardly ever used, and gathering her hair up with one hand stood as close as she could to her full length mirror, half facing away from it. A wicked love bite had suffused her pale skin with the vivid dark-red and violet hues of a desert sunset.

  She ran to the French doors, flung them open and stepped outside crying, “Jonathan!” but there was no answer and a cloud had extinguished the moon. His performance had exceeded her wildest expectations and even though he had urged her to forget, he had also left her proof it hadn’t been a dream.

  Chapter Six

  A front blew in during the night, rattling the French doors as it moaned between the branches of trees that Audrey kept thinking—turning restively from side to side—were like X-rays of the human spinal chord branching up into the seemingly infinite veins and arteries of the brain…

  In the morning she was tired. She had always enjoyed listening to the wind howling like tormented spirits around the chimneys and balconies of the large old house; because it never found its way in she had felt even warmer and cozier, safe. She felt differently now. She was learning that unrestrained forces could, in fact, blow the doors of her room, and of her perceptions, wide open. She lingered in bed, gazing over at her black purse where it rested on her dresser—her personal little universe into which yesterday an impossible letter had blown.