Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2)

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Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2) Page 34

by Telep, Trisha


  “History does not support your claim.”

  The creature’s bereft cry creates a crack in the invisible glass ball of frozen reality behind her. “He was almost mine, before a vampire gypsy turned him. I assumed a foul, stumbling, stinking form here and sought for two years to lure him to the Sinkhole, where my powers can flower. That human female is with him now and weak and soft and powerless.”

  “But I am not.”

  “You! You are nothing but a meddler.”

  Midnight Louie has been called such a thing before, by those who underestimated me. I hope that Miss Delilah Street is being underestimated too. I know better than to interfere. Sometimes it is wiser to be Zen than kung fu.

  I notice something glitter at Miss Delilah Street’s right wrist. The finest silver chain . . . changeling silver. It could harm Wasp-Wing if not undercover and under control. Are Vesper and I going to be treated to a manifestation of the infamous silver familiar born from the long lovelock of the Inferno Hotel’s albino rock star owner, Christophe? Who knows what powers he commands? Not anyone in Vegas.

  “When meddling is successful in my world,” Miss Delilah Street purrs at this horrific entity, “they call it ‘case closed’. Get out of here.”

  A roar and shattering echoes all around us, Vesper and I cling together, clawing our shivs into the floorboards to stay put, our coats rippling. Nice.

  “I am queen,” our invader declares.

  I notice the fine silver chain is spinning and turning on Miss Delilah Street’s wrist as if her bone and body were a loom. A glittering web is churning up her arm and shoulders and down her other arm, shining like the full moon.

  Vesper’s and my pupils become slits, as against the morning sun.

  Vyrle’s engorged furious figure spits thorn darts and daggers in a blinding blitz from the cold flames of her cloak of many colours.

  Miss Delilah lifts her arms across her body and above her head unfolding lacy silver metal wings that look as delicate as cracked crystal. The queen’s weapons stop, fall into nothing as her final wail peaks and fades and the glass behind her cracks from side to side and she vanishes into the bluster and rowdy noise and commotion that is Wrathbone’s.

  Nothing is left behind but her wooden platform spike shoes, which I had rubbed my face against to draw attention to the thorn nubs that pocked them. Miss Delilah Street’s powers of observation and deduction are all that I could wish for in a temporary partner.

  Miss Delilah fists her hands on her hips as a silver tinsel rain evaporates into the air around her. She is bare of all jewellery.

  “Good riddance! What a witch!”

  She bends to pick up a shoe, running her finger along the newly clawed platforms.

  “We are seeing her true ‘sole’. These have sprouted acacia thorns like the one that skewered Damien. I had my suspicions when I removed the clawed dart from Damien, but you detected the strong acacia scent of Vyrle’s wooden platform shoes in their harmless guise,” she tells me. “Many plants have both benign and malign applications. The thorn tree is used in perfumes, medicines and herbal preparations. It is also protected by the Fey, who can use its poison qualities, as you sensed. You and I and little vampire Vesper have just met the Dread Queen of the Fey, Louie. I guess a cat may look at a queen, after all, and rat on her too.”

  “Ooh,” Vesper purrs in my ear. “You are much better than you look.”

  That is more than somewhat promising.

  * * *

  By now the bedroom door has opened and the bedazzled lovers are creeping out.

  “We heard a kind of mewing out here,” Nelda says, brushing back her hair with a blush.

  All that storm and fury. Were they dead to the world!

  “Not to worry,” says Miss D. “I was just shopping for a new pair of shoes.” She waves one. “You will not be seeing the imposing and possessive Vyrle any more, Damien. You may be a vampire, but she was not of this world.”

  “She was the one who staked me with a claw?” he asks.

  “Wooden, from the acacia tree.”

  “How did you know?” Nelda asks, shuddering. “Also about my deepest secret feelings?”

  “The deduction process was simple. If someone hates Damien enough to kill him softly and slowly, someone must love him enough to make that would-be murderer jealous.”

  “Of me? Or of my . . . companions?” Damien asks.

  “Of you all. Of us all, humans and unhumans. Vyrle is something else, something greedy and merciless. Fey. She almost had a handsome abbot in her power at Gracethorn Abbey centuries ago, but vampires are immune unless they venture into a former Fey touch-point, like the Sinkhole.”

  “Miss Street,” he says, “grateful as I am for your detective and matchmaking talents, you assembled all my appointments. I could have sipped from the innocent five you dismissed tonight. We will have to continue as usual anyway, and find Nelda clients in addition.”

  “Call it a couple’s practice.” She shrugs. “Look, Damien, I go for long-term satisfaction on my cases. Even humans would rather drink deeply of life than sip it up in instalments.”

  Damien remains silent, but I do believe he blushes. Fresh blood will do wonders.

  Miss Delilah adds, “To keep from killing your victims, you gave up centuries of celibacy to become a daylight vampire. If you can’t be celibate, you can at least have a life partner, and Nelda will benefit from being a daylight vampire. Research shows vitamin D in sunlight is good for people with MS, which is not a blood-related malady. Come on; you and Nelda have too much love and compassion not to share it with others. You can live on love.”

  Nelda nods. “I lived on two hours a week. Now I have eternity.” She smiles seductively over her shoulder – nervous Nelda! – and returns to the bedroom.

  Damien is torn, but lingers to question my partner more.

  “I was pretty out of it, but what did you mean in the alley when you first arrived and said you ‘brake for butterflies’?”

  I give Vesper a lick and a promise to keep her attention and wait for the Divine Miss D to answer the vamp. I have been wondering about that myself.

  Miss Delilah Street smiles. “To understand, you need to know about Dolly.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “Sort of. She is four thousand pounds of shiny black Old Detroit metal and wears chrome like Mae West draped herself in diamonds.”

  “A car?”

  “Oh, please. She is a 1956 Cadillac Biarritz cream puff I got at an estate sale when I was on a scholarship in college. She can outrun a Porsche and outmuscle a Hummer.”

  “Kind of like you,” he says with his own smile.

  Nice fangs. Shiny and white. I always admire a guy with good grooming.

  “Maybe. Anyway, when your messenger pixie, Wasp-Wing, came barrelling straight for me and my ‘changeling silver’, on the Strip, she got caught in Dolly’s slipstream and almost crashed on the windshield, except that she looked like a butterfly, and I always avoid hitting them.”

  “You have my thanks, but I remain curious as to why.”

  Miss Delilah folds her arms and cocks her head. I smell a reminiscence coming on.

  “Before I found Dolly and could drive myself,” Miss Delilah Street says, “I was on a road trip with some college classmates heading for an out-of-town basketball game. A monarch butterfly hit the windshield. It got caught in the windshield wipers, its wings totally intact. They fluttered there at sixty miles an hour, looking alive.

  “I asked the guy driving to pull over so we could at least free it. The monarch had to be dead, but those wings were so alive as they fluttered, so beautiful and miraculously whole.

  “He would not even slow down. We would be ‘late’ for the precious ‘game’. Sick at heart, I watched those wings flutter and kiss the windshield as if performing a dance just for me for forty damn miles.”

  “But the butterfly was dead,” the vampire says. “Why would you care?”

  “It was stil
l beautiful, and so alive in its way.”

  “That story says something remarkable about you, Delilah Street.”

  “It says something remarkable about you.”

  He gets the point and nods. Humbly.

  “I have secretly hated my lot in undead life all these centuries,” the vampire confesses. “Even when I could convert in recent years to sipping human life rather than taking it. I divorced myself from feeling, as you had to while you watched, the sole attentive audience, while the butterfly wings did their fatal danse macabre. But you are right. The imitation of life is life in its way.”

  He turns to regard the doorway to Nelda. “I hated the idea of her losing and wasting her precious life on loving a dead thing, but you say love is immortal.”

  “I say to each his and her own,” Miss Delilah Street answers. “Should I leave Midnight Louie with Vesper, or return him to his usual haunts along the Vegas Strip?”

  “I say we should leave it up to them,” he says with a smile while Wasp-Wing dances above everyone’s heads in excitement like a butterfly, expecting many interesting future fetches.

  I nuzzle Vesper’s perfect pink nose. I say that Damien Abbott is one stand-up vampire.

  Crimson Kisses

  Diane Whiteside

  Annapolis, Maryland, 31 December 1865

  “May I have your blessing upon our marriage, sir?” Edmund Devereaux injected a coaxing tone into his request, rife with hope and a nervous suitor’s eagerness.

  Silence echoed on the other side of the room, bitterly suspicious. The room was like a banker’s boardroom rather than a relaxed family parlour.

  For the first time during Edward’s long-rehearsed speech, terror pricked Sarah’s spine and her smile thinned. Was Edmund’s request more than her father was able to grant? Certainly not. Besides, he’d given his word to listen and Edmund, normally so cavalier towards the opinions of others, was trying very hard to be humble on this all-important occasion.

  They stood in the library, the very heart of her father’s power at the family plantation outside Maryland’s capital. A single chandelier focused all attention on her father – the great estate’s lord – where he sat enthroned behind the immense desk, its mahogany gleaming like old blood from decades of polishing. Inlays of ebony and swirls of brass accented more mahogany climbing the walls to meet the enormous collection of medieval daggers, their blades a veiled warning.

  The gaslight from the library’s chandelier lovingly burnished her lover’s dark hair and lit flames in his blue eyes until he seemed an angel come to earth. Tonight he wore American-made evening dress, not his native London-made clothes, and he stood before her father’s desk as politely – if not quite as meekly – as a political crony, come to buy a favour from Maryland’s mightiest broker of votes.

  Only an expert eye could have discerned the knife hidden up Edmund’s sleeve and George Calvert, her father, had always hired that type of skill.

  Sarah tilted her chin just a fraction higher, denying the demons of fear and doubt. She smiled at her lover even more warmly, to deliberately, silently, unite his request with hers. The crystalline music of a Chopin waltz whispered through the door, inviting them to better places.

  “No,” said the Calvert patriarch and folded his arms across his chest, arrogant with an assurance that came from generations of never losing a serious fight. “My daughter is far too young to settle down.”

  She gaped at him, unable to speak. He regularly lied in political circles but he’d never reversed a family pledge before, let alone one given as recently as a few months ago.

  “You promised us last spring, sir, that if we waited until after Christmas,” Edmund began, diplomacy shading into anger in his deep voice.

  “I said I would consider your suit.” Her father’s thick beard folded over his crisp shirtfront like a pagan sanctuary’s veil, concealing wisdom only its initiates cared about. “She has seen too little of the world to know her own mind.”

  “I am nineteen, sir.” Sarah forced herself back from an angry retort. “By the laws of this state, that is more than old enough.”

  “You asked for my permission and I will not give it. More than that, I insist on protecting my daughter from a misalliance with an older man.” His stare was knife-studded.

  Dear heavens, Sarah thought, if he only knew how much older. . .

  “She has lived outside a war-torn city for the past five years. How much more of the world does she need to see to become an adult?” Edmund demanded.

  “She needs to spend at least six more years under her father’s roof, as his hostess.” The old autocrat bared yellowing teeth at them in a smile’s mockery, certain of his advantage.

  “In six years I’ll inherit my trust fund from Mother and you won’t have the interest to live on any more!” Her future would be acid-etched without her lover.

  “You scurrilous, money-loving whoreson,” Edmund finally, neatly summed up her father.

  Sarah stomped her foot in agreement – and destroyed any chance of obtaining George Calvert’s consent to her marriage.

  South of Annapolis, Maryland, summer 1866

  Hoof beats threaded the night like a spiked chain. Metal rattled and clanked in accompaniment, singing of their riders’ guns and sabres. Salt gritted the heavy mist of the marsh, clambering among the thick groves of trees. It probed the two faces of the riders beneath the deep hoods of their cloaks, just as the few glimmers of silvery moonlight did.

  A hound howled and was answered by another, then a third, and finally the entire pack.

  Ice sliced through Sarah’s veins more strongly than the late summer’s night heat would account for. Mother of God, her father had brought the entire kennel out to hunt her. He was angry enough to want more than the troops his political connections at Washington City had sent him.

  The familiar sound of the hoof beats made her mare falter and try to turn back to join the horses pursuing them. Sarah checked her mount instinctively, ruthlessly, her heart beating somewhere in her throat.

  Edmund’s hand shot out to grab her horse’s reins but she’d already brought Daisy back on course. They galloped on, side by side. They had to reach Baltimore before dawn to catch the tide and the next boat to Europe.

  But how could they escape the dogs she’d helped whelp and train, and who knew her scent better than their own?

  Cassius and the other hounds bayed again, the high piercing notes which meant they’d found her trail. The hoof beats behind them sped up and her pulse stumbled. She’d never thought her father could string together a farrago of lies sufficient to draw troops out of Washington, no matter how nervous they were after Lincoln’s assassination last year. God willing, they wouldn’t be so hot on the chase that they’d shoot her and Edmund, no matter what their orders might be.

  She glanced sideways, desperate for the reassurance which had never failed her.

  Edmund rode beside her, his big body as perfectly poised as any cat, his long-fingered hands relaxed on Firedrake’s reins. His crooked smile flashed for a moment below his broad-brimmed hat and he waggled a single finger at her.

  Warmth glided over her skin, sweet and golden as the single drop of his blood he sometimes let her taste. She turned towards him, forgetting the rutted track and the tree branches grabbing for her cloak, the gibbering moonlight and her unhappy mare, or the Chesapeake Bay only a few feet away. She might be too young to settle down, according to her dictatorial father, but she knew where her future lay.

  The road swerved diagonally in front of their pursuers. The mist melted towards the ground, trapped in a dying bramble bush.

  BANG! A giant fireball slammed into her right shoulder and she tumbled forwards, over Daisy’s neck and almost out of the saddle. An agonizing, ferocious, bestial pain overwhelmed her senses.

  “Ahhh. . .” Sarah bit her lip before she could scream. Daisy stumbled, unbalanced by her rider’s strange antics.

  Edmund snatched Sarah out of the saddle and swu
ng her up in front of him onto his horse, sending another jolt of fire-bright agony lashing into her.

  She would not scream, she would not.

  His arm was iron-hard around her, promising safety, and she turned her face into his chest, instinctively making herself into the smallest, easiest to carry bundle possible. She would stay with him for ever, no matter what happened.

  Edmund gave Daisy a single, ferocious slap on her flank and the poor mare, who’d never been treated with anything but kindness before, galloped desperately away. Sarah closed her lips on a protest.

  Cursing under his breath, Edmund wheeled Firedrake and sent him through a tiny gap between the trees and across a small creek. Soon the big stallion stood in a clearing at the centre of a thicket perhaps a hundred feet from the road, his master’s unyielding hand on the reins forcing him to remain still. The moonlight was clearer here but scattered by clouds scudding across it and tree branches clawing at its edges.

  Sarah closed her eyes and wondered how Edmund was keeping Firedrake silent. It was better to think about that than about the thousands of demons still digging the bullet into her shoulder, or about how much blood she had lost to make her cloak, dress, corset cover, corset and chemise cling to her skin within so few minutes. She reached to pull the sodden clothing away from her aching skin with her wounded arm but it wouldn’t move. A moment’s ferocious concentration only encouraged the demons to pound harder and she managed to make her fingers brush across Edmund’s arm. Nothing more. She was helpless.

  Oh no, no, no.

  Hoof beats pounded down the road towards them and went past, following Daisy. The dogs hesitated but her father angrily called them to heel.

  Terror washed over Sarah, its crystalline bite cutting through her shoulder’s agony. She stiffened and tried to pull away from Edmund so she could hear more easily, but he held her closer, his body curving to place himself between her and the road. His heartbeat, which had been steady even while guiding fugitive slaves out of Virginia, thudded fast and hard under her cheek.

  She kissed his chest, nuzzling his brocade vest. No matter what happened now, she had to believe they would remain together.

 

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