Beatrix emerged from under the stairs a moment later, retying the apron over a long gown, and she came swiftly to the bed, her eyes averted from him.
“I suppose you saw Dunstan and Freda,” she said as she took hold of the two ragged edges of pants surrounding his wound. She ripped the tear wide, revealing the whole of his leg.
Alder nodded. “Laszlo’s work. I could smell his evil stench at the cottage earlier.” His words sounded awkward to his own ears, his lips trying to shield his elongated eyeteeth.
Beatrix turned a bottle of some unknown liquid onto a wadded-up rag and then began to blot firmly at the gash alongside Alder’s knee and thigh where the falling timber had torn his skin.
“He’s nae playing with us any longer,” the Levenach observed.
“Nay.”
She set the rag aside and picked up a needle threaded with thick gut. Alder’s leg twitched in anticipation of the stitches. His leg would heal well enough without them, yet he did not stay the Levenach’s hand, relishing even this opportunity for Beatrix to touch him while she continued to speak.
“He’ll end it soon, then.”
Alder nodded. “If he does not, then I must. Beatrix, the sun’s dawning means that today is All Hallow’s Eve.”
“I ken that, Alder. The day of the dead is an important one to witches, as well.”
What she meant by that statement, Alder could not discern.
“I’m sorry should you feel any pain,” she said quietly, not meeting his eyes. Then she bent over his leg and poked the needle into his flesh.
Alder’s leg stiffened reflexively, but the discomfort was slight. He spoke through clenched teeth. “The next sunrise must find Laszlo destroyed and me far from the Leamhan forest. When I seek him this night, you must not follow.”
She did not respond, only continued her ministrations with her brow knotted in a heavy frown. Her stitches were small, quick, expert.
“Best that you leave the Leamhan forest, as well,” Alder suggested. “Before nightfall. The folk will not be denied now.”
“I willna flee,” Beatrix said distractedly. “My family’s oath forbids it.”
“Then you will die,” Alder hissed and reached down with one hand to still her wrist and force her to look at him. “Either by the folk or by the fang. Beatrix, you cannot stay in this place alone.”
“I’ll nae be alone—I’m going with you.” She pulled free from his grasp. “Be still,” she commanded. “I’m nearly through.”
He let her finish the stitches in peace, although his mind raced with how to convince her she could not accompany him to Laszlo’s lair. Once she had knotted the string and cut the needle free with a short blade, Alder grasped her wrist once more.
“Heed me, Levenach,” he implored, the effort of concealing his fangs making his words slurred. “I ken that you have a duty to your family, and already you have fulfilled your promise—you’ve held the beasts at bay until my arrival, and now it is I who must finish it. Alone. I am also being hunted, by a creature that is not vampire, but neither is he mortal. If he finds me this night—and you with me—we are both damned. And even if he does not—” Alder swallowed. “Beatrix, I told you no falsehood the day I arrived. I am your greatest threat. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand!” she snapped in a low voice and held his gaze steady with her eyes. “Alder, I know you are a vampire.”
Beatrix let Alder keep hold of her wrist while her confession of knowledge of his true nature hung in the cool air of the cellar. She saw his throat work as he swallowed, the warm candlelight playing over his pale face.
“You knew before I came?”
“Nae before you came,” she admitted. “But as soon as you touched me, came near to me in the clearing.” She let a smile come over her face, although the last thing she felt was merry. “I am a hunter, Alder. ’Tis in my very blood. Think you that I could not sense what you are just because of your handsomeness? Or because you were prophesied to come by my family’s oldest legends?”
“You knew, and yet you did not slay me,” he observed, and his hand tightened around her wrist.
Beatrix twisted her arm until she could pull her fingers through the tight circle of Alder’s palm and lace their fingers together. She had made up her mind.
“Nay. You’ve already saved me once, Alder. I hold nae fear of you. I trust you. With my life, and with my soul.”
His face took on a pained expression. “Beatrix, no. Listen to me, on this day when the veil between earth and eternity is thinned, once Laszlo is dead I—”
She leaned over him quickly and placed a finger over his mouth, stopping his confession, whatever it might be. She did not want to know. She let her fingertips bumble over his lips, feeling the raised outlines of his fangs, and shook her head.
“I have lived in the Leamhan forest the whole of my life, and knew from a young age that I was to be the Levenach. I am sworn to give my life in protection of the Leamhnaigh, and that duty I willna shirk. But, Alder, you are the first man, the first person nae of my blood that I would willingly die for. I canna explain it, I doona understand it myself. And I doona care. If I must die tonight, then let it be by these hands, by this mouth.”
She leaned closer to him, her hunger for his body inflamed now that she knew with certainty that their hours together were few and dwindling fast.
“I don’t want to harm you, Beatrix,” Alder whispered.
She smiled at him again. “Could it be that you love me, Alder?”
He frowned, looked away from her face as if shamed. “It is not in my nature to love.”
“Oh, but I think it is,” she argued, and drew her body alongside his on her narrow bed. “I’ve never wanted a man before you, and now that you know I am not ignorant of who or what you are, you may take me with a clean conscience.”
“I have no conscience, either,” he nearly growled, and Beatrix could see his black eyes dilating in the flickering light, could hear his accent thickening as she ran her free hand up his chest and neck to caress his face.
“Then take me,” she said simply. “Give me what I ask for and let us have these last hours together.” She kissed his mouth lightly. “Alder, I am inviting you in once more. Doona refuse me.”
He took her mouth in a rush, plunging his tongue between her lips and pulling her roughly to him with both strong, lean arms. They were facing each other on the mattress now, and Beatrix drew one leg up to hook around his hip, careful of his injury. She longed to feel him inside her once more, to at last gain the release of desire he had built in her while the fire had sprung around them in the common room.
At her encouragement, Alder pulled her beneath him fully and reached down to drag the long skirts of her apron and gown up around her hips. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and she turned her jaw away to give him access.
“Don’t allow me to do this, Beatrix,” he said, his voice strained.
“I am making you do this,” she said, and arched her hips, pressing into him, taunting him. “You must. I command it. Make love to me, Alder.”
Then he did growl, sounding like his other four-legged self, and he snaked an arm between their bodies to free himself. “I will obey, Levenach,” he threatened hoarsely. In a blink, he slid inside her, and Beatrix cried out, matching Alder’s moan.
He drove into her rhythmically, firmly, steadily, filling her and more as he jarred her body with his length and his power. She panted up into his face, saw the gleam of his bared fangs, and the sight of them set loose her forbidden climax like an explosion. She cried out over and over as he pumped his hips faster, relentless in his pursuit, and when he dropped his open mouth to her throat, she cried out again, partly in fear, partly in anticipation.
She felt the initial prick of his fangs as he climaxed deep within her, felt them threaten and then abruptly withdraw as he screamed with his release. Beatrix’s head swam as if she was drunk, Alder’s cries sounding distorted, her own body quaking,
her eyes blind with silver and white starlight in the cellar, and she took his vampire seed hungrily, willingly, gratefully.
They slept tangled together while the sun rose slowly to its pinnacle outside the crippled White Wolf Inn and hiked across the dome of sky, then began to sink over the treetops once more.
Neither roused when the stone slabs in the floor slid apart with a scrape, and the soot-dusted cats paced agitated circles around the bed legs. Bo and Era yowled mournfully, but neither their cries nor the light escaping the Levenach well caused the slumbering pair to wince in their sleep. The well’s single black eye shut tight once more before dark had fully fallen.
Chapter Eight
The bodies were gone.
Beatrix squinted through the thickening gloom of dusk at the front door of the White Wolf Inn, but the corpses were not just hidden in shadow. The mortal remains of Dunstan and Freda were no more.
In the place where the bodies of husband and wife had leaned together was a pile of herbs, bent twig talismans hastily assembled by the looks of the ragged knots, and bowls of coarse salt. A ragged X was scratched in the charred soot of the front door.
The folk had returned to claim the couple, and left the warding objects for Beatrix, perhaps thinking the charms to keep them safe from her. The knowledge caused a pinch in her heart. The people her family had protected for generations were using her own talismans against her. The symbol on the door was clear. They thought her a killer of the innocent. A murderer.
And now they would kill her if they had chance. Alder was right—she was no longer safe here.
As if the thought had summoned him, she felt his hand upon her shoulder. She’d not even noticed that night had come.
“Will you heed me now?” he asked quietly, the dark snuggling around them both like a cold blanket.
Beatrix shook her head. “Naught has changed. I still have a duty to fulfill.”
“How can you feel you owe them anything when they would kill you?” His words were gentle, yet demanding of an answer to his cool, vampire logic.
“I doona owe the Leamhnaigh, Alder—I owe my family. My father. If my oath was only of my blood and nae by my lips, mayhap I could flee. But I knew what I promised when I took the vow of the Levenach years ago. And I will honor that vow.”
His hand fell away, and if it was possible for one of his nature, his tone grew even cooler. “What will you do, then?”
“I will go with you to find Laszlo, and kill him.”
“I won’t take you with me, Beatrix, I’ve told you already—”
She spun around to face him, at last dragging her gaze from the pile of damning evidence against her. “Then I will go alone! Your reasons for revenge against Laszlo are your own, Alder, and you may keep them if you wish, but mine are clear and not to be denied. I have nae choice. I may have shared my body with you, but it doesna make you my laird. I am the Levenach, and in this place, I rule. You are a vampire, and you have no power over me, tonight of all nights.”
“No power?” Alder challenged, seizing her shoulders and pulling her to him. “Not even over your tender, mortal heart? I don’t believe you, Levenach. You would have killed me long ago.”
She shoved him away. “What of your own heart, Alder, white wolf of vampires? Does it beat for me? Would you shirk your vengeance upon Laszlo to flee the Leamhan forest with me and be my man?”
“My heart is not tender, nor is it mortal,” Alder replied quietly, stiffly. “Our future together would be a sad one, Levenach. And for you, very brief.”
“Perhaps not,” Beatrix argued. She looked into his eyes for a long moment, contemplating the gravity of what she was about to suggest. “If we succeed—if we seek Laszlo together and slay him, you could make me one with you.”
“Make you a vampire?” he asked in disbelief and then shook his head. “Never.”
“You would rather leave me?”
“Than to condemn you to a soulless eternity, hunted like an animal for your evil thirst? Yes, I would rather leave you!”
The black woods around them were eerily silent as they stood in the midst of their heated emotions. No wind stirred. And yet Beatrix could feel an impatience radiating from the elm trees on this night of magic, urging her, but she could not discern its intent.
“Then we doona have much time,” she said quietly. “This night, and only this night, which is already upon us.” She cocked her head and looked slightly over her shoulder as she heard the muffled voices of the crowd of forest folk coming through the thick wood for her. Her eyes found Alder’s again. “Go inside and collect our weapons. I have visitors to attend and ’twill nae aid my cause for them to see you in a temper.”
“Are you so foolish as to have forgotten the feel of the noose around your neck?”
“That was a different day, Alder,” Beatrix said and smiled in the dark. She knew she would never convince him with words.
Beatrix left him and walked to the inn’s door, bent down, and raked a handful of chunky salt from a wooden bowl on the ground. She stood and turned, crunching the mineral tightly in her fist until it burned and bit into her palm.
“Tonight, I am truly the Levenach. On this night, I am”—she swung her fist, spraying most of the salt in a wide arc over the clearing. Where each tiny grain landed, a white spark of light sprang up, until the clearing seemed alight with a mirror image of the starry, black sky above them—“a witch,” she finished simply. The sounds of the approaching folk grew louder. “I canna die at the hands of the Leamhnaigh tonight.”
Alder looked at her display of glamour sparkling on the ground for a long moment but said nothing. He turned and began walking back to the inn.
Beatrix now faced the wood alone, the bright orange glow of advancing torches blinking through the trees at her like malevolent eyes.
The kitchen had fallen pitch with the outside, and Alder laid a trembling hand upon the old quiver that had once belonged to Gerald Levenach. Then he picked up the sling that held Beatrix’s weapons. He held these things before him, studied them both with his vampire eyes. These were the tools that had allowed the Levenachs and the Leamhnaigh to survive these one hundred years since the slaughter that Alder had helped instigate. One hundred years ago this night, he had stood in yonder clearing a mortal man, an ambitious, power-hungry man, unwittingly unleashing an evil over this land and these peoples.
And Alder had sacrificed his own soul in payment, been sentenced to one hundred years of servitude to the hellish band of monsters led by a vengeful archangel who had used Alder like the animal he had become. Soulless, heartless, a cold shell of a body housing the rotten remnants of his memories of life and warmth and love. A killer.
It was supposed to end tonight. He was supposed to kill Laszlo and then take the lifeblood of the last living Levenach witch, regaining his soul and his human nature for the rest of a natural life. Setting to rights those old, evil wrongs. Ridding the land of both vampire and witch, forever and ever, amen.
A breath of mirthless laughter escaped his lips.
Alder let the quivers of stakes and magical talismans fall back to the worktable with a startling clatter and squeezed his eyes shut, his fists clenched before him. Beatrix’s lovely, mortal face was clear in his mind.
He would get at least part of it right.
The hair on the back of Alder’s neck prickled as the first inhuman howls reached his ears. He turned his head toward the back door of the inn, and the rotten, burned stench of old vampire wafted in on a frigid breeze. Alder’s fangs erupted, and he felt his eyes dilate as screams of the Leamhnaigh fell like stones through water.
Laszlo.
Alder moved through the door once more, this time as if in a dream. The Levenach’s weapons lay forgotten on the table.
The clearing beyond the inn was still lit by the Levenach’s white witch fire, and enhanced by the score of torches carried by the woodland folk gathered in a mob some distance away from her. The light burned the images onto Alder’
s vampire eyes and he reflexively hissed, his anger, his bloody hunger ignited like an oil-soaked cloth. He swung his gaze to the sky, to the tree line, to the shadows that stalked the mortals in the clearing. He could see no sign of Laszlo.
But he could smell him, feel him and his minions.
He barely registered the Levenach commanding the forest folk, who clutched at one another and scanned the cold sky above the clearing before turning their attention back to Beatrix.
“You must flee now,” her voice called firmly. “’Tis nae safe for you here—there are killers afoot, and soon, this place will be awash in your own blood do you not heed me!”
“The only killer afoot is you, Beatrix Levenach!” a Leamhnaigh man accused, angling his torch at her, but fear was bright in his eyes. “The claim that you and your kin were the protectors of our people was naught but a lie! We were your own herd of sheep, were we nae? To cull and have sport with as you saw fit?”
“That’s nae true, and you well know it,” Beatrix said.
“It is true!” The man shook his torch at Beatrix again. “You’re evil! Evil! Ev—”
The man’s words were abruptly cut off as a black skeletal shadow swooped from the night sky and snatched him off his feet, leaving his torch to fall and roll on the dirt.
The crowd gasped and one by one the faces of the Leamhnaigh turned upward once more, their eyes as big as their fists, and they saw the swarm of vampires circling like the birds of prey they were.
Screams broke out as two more vampires broke rank to dive into the mob of mortals and, like herons at a lake, snatch up their food from the depths.
“Behind me!” Beatrix shouted, her own face turned skyward, keeping a wary eye on the hungry flock above her clenched fists held high. “Leamhnaigh, come to me!”
“Do it!” a woman shouted. “The Levenach is our only hope!”
Alder watched from the corner of the inn as nearly two score of woodland folk crowded between Beatrix Levenach and the front of the White Wolf Inn. He was deep into his own hunger now, so much that he could not help the mortals being preyed upon by the swooping and diving vampires. But he could feel clearly the glow and power of the Levenach, and his hunger trebled as she spoke.
Born to Bite Bundle Page 14