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

by Maria Isabel Pita

  There were so many questions she needed to ask they created a bottleneck in her throat; breathless, she entreated him with her eyes to help her understand what was happening.

  “Not here,” he said as if he heard her loud and clear. Keeping her hands firmly pressed against his chest, he reached down and picked up her purse. “I’m taking you home.”

  She thought she had spent hours in a limousine with Falkon yet she didn’t appear to have gone anywhere. She wasn’t really surprised, which was the most astonishing thing of all. When she was a child her father had sometimes brought out his telescope, and she was reminded now of how the slightest touch on the viewfinder either knocked the moon out of her visual orbit or brought it into full awe inspiring focus. Something similar had happened to her life—magical possibilities that had seemed too far fetched, too distant from her normal daily life, had suddenly become undeniable facts.

  “Don’t try and think right now, Audrey.”

  The ground slipped out from beneath her as he lifted her up in his arms, forcing her to hold on to his shoulders and quickly slip her arms around his neck as he cradled her body against his chest.

  She protested, “You can’t carry me all the way home.”

  “You think not?” He was walking so fast the church’s crumbling stone walls were already behind them.

  “No,” she admitted, “I’m sure you can, but you don’t have to.”

  Sighing, she closed her eyes and rested her head gratefully on his shoulder. The moment she became aware of it, exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her, like standing on a peaceful beach when the tide suddenly surged in and knocked her over. Her eyes felt gritty, as if she hadn’t slept in days. Also, her body seemed oddly light. She was reminded of the Taj Majal and of the grieving lover who ordered wind instruments carved from the bones of the woman he built it for…

  Jonathan shifted her gruffly against him. “Don’t let your thoughts wander. We’re not completely out of it yet.”

  She opened her eyes and gazed up at his face. It looked beautiful to her from any angle. His jaw was set in an angry, determined way that contrasted most appealingly with his soft and very kissable mouth… which smiled suddenly, as if he really could hear what she was thinking. Embarrassed, she said quickly, “You mean out of the mist? The Dragon’s Breath? I always knew there was something special about that burned out church.”

  “There’s something special about you, Audrey. Your thoughts, feelings and dreams mingled with the site’s already potent energy and helped create a kind of doorway. And just as in so-called real life, it’s often necessary to lock your doors so they’re not so easily forced open by thieves and other unsavory creatures.”

  “But how could I have locked it if I didn’t even know it was there?”

  “You just said yourself you knew there was something special about that place. What you didn’t truly know was yourself. These days it’s the custom not to take full responsibility for everything that happens to us, which is a big mistake, trust me.”

  “But so many things are beyond our control.” She forgot how tired she was as indignation made her stand up for herself; the self she had grown up with and was familiar with; the self who had lived in frustrated but comfortable ignorance of how magical every day life could be and how much power her imagination actually possessed. “For example, people can’t help it if they happen to be somewhere when a suicide bomber shows up.”

  “Right. And what happens to them after they’re blown up? No life ever ends even if it appears that way to our physical senses. There’s no random evil in the world only in people and how they treat each other because they don’t really know—because they don’t love—themselves and as a consequence have no idea how to love anyone else.”

  “But humanity isn’t responsible for earthquakes or hurricanes or other natural disasters that kill thousands of people all the time.”

  “Are you telling me, Audrey,” he looked down at her, “you believe you can comprehend God’s will with your thoughts, which depend on your physical brain and how it determines and limits your perceptions? Your brain sees only this frequency of being so that people appear to be heartlessly and meaninglessly wiped out by natural disasters. But the physical body is only one layer of who you are. Perhaps when thousands of people perish together as the result of a tsunami, for example, they’ve been mysteriously honored with an invitation to a cosmic bash, the exceptionally enjoyable kind where everyone strips off their clothes and races into the water drunk on their new freedom because death is only a transition from one state of being to another.”

  “Jonathan, that’s a lovely idea but you can’t ever prove-”

  “You either choose to believe in God or you don’t, Audrey, and it’s faith that empowers you. You can measure your growth by how much less important your need for proof becomes, until you finally rid yourself of it like a crutch your fears depend on. As a toddler you stumbled and fell countless times before you learned how to walk and then to run, proudly and joyfully, towards those you loved the most. Love and exertion are the two sides of a single coin worth the whole universe, and more.”

  “Jonathan, that is such a brilliant thought and in my heart I totally agree with you, but-”

  He set her down. “You’re home.”

  She saw they were standing by the back door that opened onto the corridor where Darlene’s office was and from there led straight to the kitchen. Intent on their conversation, she had paid no attention to the journey or to their surroundings and now she simply couldn’t believe where she was. She clutched his arm, afraid her house might vanish and him along with it.

  “It’s all right, love, you’re really home. Let’s go inside.”

  He opened the door—it was never locked during the day—and led her down the hall into the kitchen, where Darlene and Consuelo stood side-by-side staring in their direction as if they’d been expecting them. The Spanish chef’s eyes were so large you could see the whites all around her dark irises as she crossed herself. Darlene, her hands crossed sedately over her apron, looked perfectly calm, as usual. Audrey had once cruelly teased their housekeeper about secretly keeping leeches in a jar in her bedroom, which she applied to her chest every night to suck all the feelings out of her heart.

  Consuelo whispered, “¡Mi niña!”

  “Buenos dias,” she replied, feeling as though she’d walked onto a stage where two of the most important actors in the performance of her life were already standing waiting for the director to tell them what to do. She glanced up at Jonathan.

  He said shortly, “We need to eat.”

  Consuelo sprang into action.

  Like a professional dancer leading a new and awkward student, Jonathan twirled her in the direction of the table, gently tugged her down into a chair and sat down beside her. Her muscles were all a little stiff, as though she’d spent hours at a gym lifting weights and doing aerobics on every single piece of equipment.

  Consuelo set two steaming bowls of liquid before them—her home-made chicken soup redolent with fresh vegetables and garlic, lots of garlic.

  “¡Gracias, Consuelo!”

  “¡De nada, mi amor!” She sounded intensely relieved, as though she had feared Audrey would hiss and shove the bowl away from her.

  She blew passionately on her first few spoonfuls, unable to wait. She shouldn’t have been hungry, she’d recently eaten a big lunch, but the fact was she was ravenous. And the way Jonathan attacked his own soup seemed to imply carrying her all the way home from the burned out church—not to mention whatever he had been doing there—had taxed some of his considerable strength. She was no longer inclined to think of him as only human and yet he was much more like everyone else than Falkon…

  Her chest tightened and the sensation moved frighteningly up toward her throat…

  “Audrey?!”

  She swallowed convulsively from the shock—Darlene had never shouted her name with such unrestrained emotion.

  Jonathan sai
d quietly, “She’ll be fine,” and kept wolfing down his soup.

  Consuelo banged some pots around in the sink but Audrey still heard her murmur, “¡Por favor, ayudanos, Dios Mio!”

  She was trying to think of something to say to reassure her when a phone rang—her phone! She slammed her spoon down on the table, almost more disturbed by her cell phone's unexpected reappearance than she had been by its theft.

  Jonathan pulled it out of her purse and flipped it open. “Yes?... This is her boyfriend… She’s indisposed at the moment. I’ll take a message... I see… Of course… Yes, she’ll let you know if she hears from her. Stay calm, man.”

  “Who was that?” She had feared at first it might be Falkon, or her mother, calling from wherever the hell they really were.

  He closed the phone and set it gently down on the table. “That was your best friend’s husband.”

  Darlene muttered, “Oh Good God.”

  “Jonathan, what’s going on? Is Aapti all right?”

  He looked at Darlene, whose grim expression reflected his. “She’s missing.”

  “What?!”

  “She went out last night and never came home.” He met her eyes. “But don’t worry, we’ll find her.”

  Her thoughts scattered hopelessly as she suffered an abysmal sensation of shock, horror and grief—an emotional earthquake in which the only fixed and sinisterly meaningful thing was the scene from the dream Aapti had told her about in which she was lying naked in the dark penetrated by a shaft of moonlight transformed into a sword… the dream in which she was lying in a pool of blood possessed by a desire so intense she couldn’t fight it, even though it threatened the life of her unborn child.

  “Falkon,” she whispered, then glancing at Darlene and Consuelo added furiously, “He’s a vampire! And so is my mother!”

  Darlene, her eyes averted, said nothing as Consuelo continued noisily washing dishes, clearly desperate to pretend she hadn’t heard; she never made so much noise in her kitchen. Audrey wondered if they thought she was losing her mind and that was why they were both so upset, but at once she recognized the desperate last stand her reason was making. Quickly, with a new-found clarity, she suppressed this evidence of how weak-minded she still was, because she simply couldn’t afford to be, not anymore. Her best friend was missing and her intuition told her, in no uncertain terms, that her disappearance had everything to do with the woman who still mysteriously lived in her own blood…

  “Falkon has been sampling generations of women in search of his wife,” Jonathan stated abruptly, once again apparently responding to her thoughts. “He’s been at it for centuries, ever since the night she was killed… by a wolf.”

  ⊕

  Out of consideration for Consuelo and the household dishes, Jonathan, Audrey and Darlene regrouped in the latter’s office down the hall.

  The housekeeper sat behind her desk. Judging by her phlegmatic expression, they were merely there to discuss a small glitch in the smooth running of the estate.

  Audrey didn’t know whether to feel grateful for her calm demeanor or exasperated by it. There didn’t appear to be anything on heaven and earth capable of breaking Darlene’s stiff upper lip. If discovering the former lady of the manor and a recent guest were vampires hadn’t shattered her composure she had no idea what could.

  She turned her head and focused on Jonathan where he sat in the comfortably worn old chair beside hers. He was looking at Darlene. He did that a lot.

  “Are you communicating telepathically?” she snapped. “What is it with you two, anyway? I get the impression you’ve known each other for years.”

  Darlene replied, “We have. Before I became your housekeeper I worked for the Eckarts, like my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and countless generations before me. My family has served Jonathan for centuries.”

  And to think she had believed there couldn’t possibly be any more surprises in store for her. “But then why did you leave them to come and work for us?” This was only the first of so many questions, if it hadn’t been for the chilling knowledge Aapti was missing she would have been tempted to go to bed to try and forget everything.

  “Because I asked her to,” Jonathan replied.

  “When you were a little boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? What about your father? Didn’t he have a say in it?”

  “I am my father.”

  “Oh! Well, why didn’t you just say so?” The seed of hysteria was taking root inside her and threatening to bloom into a full-fledged tantrum. If she kept getting answers to her questions she couldn’t understand she would give her growing anger free reign and start yelling.

  Darlene said matter-of-factly, “You’ve heard of the Dalai Lama, Audrey, and how his soul is reborn over and over again.” It wasn’t a question.

  She felt like a child at a carnival where the adults accompanying her kept leading her from one wild ride to the other without seeming to notice, or care, that her head was spinning. The thought made her giggle. Her amusement quickly escalated into a breathtaking laughter she couldn’t control and which rang in her ears like the hooves of a powerful horse running away with her. She couldn’t seem to find the reigns of sobering thoughts to stop it…

  Jonathan pulled her to her feet and slapped her.

  She gasped. “How dare you?!” all the laughter knocked out of her as she slapped him back.

  He said gently, “Feel better?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She stared at him, seriously craving the sensation of his skin against her palm again. She longed to caress the firm but yielding tenderness of his flesh. She wanted to scratch him hungrily and sink her teeth into him. She was dying to grab his cock and shove it into her mouth and gag herself with it. She’d never seen his erection and she couldn’t wait anymore. Disregarding Darlene, she ripped open his coat, sending buttons clattering across the floor, and clutched his belt.

  “Audrey,” he spoke quietly, his hands falling over hers, “you need to get a hold of yourself.”

  No she didn’t, it was him she needed to get hold of! She was sick of herself. She didn’t trust her self. She was ashamed of who this self had been and how weak it still was. The only time she was truly at peace lately was when she was cradled in his arms, but that wasn’t enough anymore, she needed to feel him inside her, to experience his strength and energy filling her…

  Darlene said peremptorily, “Sit down, young lady, and pay attention.”

  Reminded of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and prim school teachers smacking children’s soft little hands with rulers, she would have ignored the command if it hadn’t been echoed much more persuasively by Jonathan’s stare. What shoved her back down into the chair was how much she saw in his eyes, and how drunk with happiness they made her feel. Lust was merely a shadow of the love they felt for each other… and for everyone else… for everything!

  As he removed his coat she feasted on his broad shoulders and lean hips. How loosely his black sweater fell over his stomach told her how firm it was, and his black slacks did the same for his buttocks. His casual elegance was devastating; he didn’t need to wear tight shirts and jeans to show off how toned he was. Before she could stop herself from thinking out loud, she asked, “Are you really my boyfriend?”

  He draped his coat across the back of the chair. “If you’ll have me.” He sat down again.

  “Are you kidding? I’m honored!”

  He flashed her a smile that made her go blind for an instant even as she clearly perceived how fortunate she was. She wondered if Stuart would be pleased with the son-in-law she had chosen for him…

  “Where’s father?!” How in bloody hell could she ever tell him what she believed she had learned about Wilona? “Is he feeling better? He was indisposed when I left… it was yesterday evening, correct?”

  “Yes, it was,” Darlene assured her. “Your father is in good health and paying one of his regular visi
ts to the Reading Room in the British Museum. He was disappointed you weren’t able to ride to London together.”

  Thank God! The last thing she could handle right now was worrying about her father.

  Turning slightly in his chair, Jonathan leaned toward her. Gently, almost hesitantly, he grasped both her hands in his and stared down at them.

  She thought he would say something but he remained silent, his posture relaxed yet expectant. The warmth of his grasp was soothing, reassuring… and demanding. He was waiting for her to speak, to stop pretending to be so scatty and shocked by everything. She had been lining up questions like bullets, preparing to fire them at him, her reason completely on the defensive, furious at all the violations it was suffering. But she wasn’t truly at war with herself. She understood what was happening much better than she cared to admit, she just kept fighting it. She was seriously frightened of taking full responsibility for herself and for everything that happened to her… and not just to her but to everyone she cared for, all the people she loved… there was no separating her feelings from everyone else’s and her thoughts either served to strengthen this profoundly wonderful relationship or to hinder it, there was no in between, no ethical gray zone.

  She asked softly, “Are you like the Dalai Lama, Jonathan?”

  It was Darlene who answered her again, “Not exactly. There’s no need to scour the countryside searching for signs of his rebirth, thank goodness. You see, my dear, in his most recent former incarnation Jonathan was my lover, and in this life he’s my son. My bloodline has served him for generations but we didn’t just cook and clean.”

  She struggled to pull her hands free.

  Meeting her eyes, he held onto her.

  She said tensely, “Bloodline is the operative word here, isn’t it? My mother told me all about telomeres and how they’re in great part responsible for the aging process. She also told me her blood wasn’t a perfect match for hers. She was referring to the woman I was in a past life, wasn’t she?”