Whatever question he was expecting, it had not been that. Perhaps he expected something banal or predictably related to her current situation. His moment of surprise turned into mirth, and he laughed. A real, authentic sound. One that seemed as though he had not done such a thing in a very long time. After his laughter faded, he watched her with a tender look in his eyes. “I found it immensely endearing. I do not think anyone has come to my rescue in many thousands of years. You must forgive me, for it was a rare fantasy that I could not stomach to shatter in the moment.”
“And I don’t believe anyone has ever described me as endearing in—” She stopped talking as her mind pulled to a full stop. “Pardon me. Did you say thousands of years?”
He nodded. “You sensed this when you went rummaging about in my mind uninvited.”
“To be perfectly clear, you were the one responsible for that, not I. I warned you of what I was capable and what would happen when you touched me. You did not listen.”
“Touché.”
“Regardless.” She was not certain where she found the gall to argue with the King of Vampires. She found it far more enjoyable than her terror. She would hold on to her indignity as much as she could. “I was not certain what it was that I saw. Merely flashes of places. A sense of time stretching on to the horizon. I had no knowledge of numbers.” She watched him, fascinated and horrified in the same moment. He was older than the church. Older than any civilization, living or otherwise. “You are the first of your kind,” she guessed.
“Yes.”
Neither of them said anything for a long moment. He seemed content to let her grapple with the magnitude of her situation in silence. She was the vague prisoner of the King of Vampires…and a creature older than she could possibly fathom. She reached for her wine and downed the glass in one go. She coughed. “I believe I will need more.”
He laughed again and gestured for the waiter to refill her glass. When the young man was gone again, she sat back in her chair. Tears pricked her eyes unexpectedly, and she fought hard to swallow them down.
This is hopeless.
She squeaked, startled, as he touched her face. His emotions rushed over her as he did. Regret. Hope. Amusement. Pleasure. Hunger. Sadness at her fear. His soul brushed against hers, but she felt it go no farther. A touch, but nothing more.
He had reached across the corner of the table and placed the crook of his finger underneath her chin, lifting it to look at him. His red eyes were boring into hers, staring deep through her, and for a moment she was afraid he might put her under a spell once more. “Do not despair.” His thumb trailed along her cheek. The touch was tepid, but it bothered her surprisingly little. The pad of his thumb was that of someone who had worked with their hands. He was a warrior, after all. “You are strong, Miss Parker.” He sat back again, removing his hand from her face, and watched her with a strange and eager expression. “That is such a unique sensation.”
She shivered and sat back. “I wish you wouldn’t do that so candidly. It is unnerving. Each time you do, I…”
“You what?”
“It will sound like nonsense.”
“Try me.” It came out as a low and hungry growl.
She swallowed. There was no point in hiding. “I feel the night sky itself. I feel…time. So much of it. It stretches on like the sky, and in it are a hundred million stars, a facet of every life you have ever known. I see a forest, I see a desert, and I see countless fields of bodies. I see an ocean of existence. It is…disconcerting.” She stared down into her wine. “I warned you, it is nonsense.”
“It is anything but.”
She looked up at him, and he had a strange expression on his face. It was as though he had been stabbed in the chest. She furrowed her brow. “Vlad? Are you well?”
The expression fled, and he was his aristocratic, arrogant self once more. It was a shield, she realized, armor that he wore, reflexive as a second skin. He watched her through lidded, crimson eyes. “I promised I would tell you a secret if you came here tonight, did I not? That I would speak to you of a truth I have not told anyone in all my years if you admitted you are drawn to me. Can you admit that you come here willingly, not simply for the fact that you believe you have no choice?”
They had made a promise not to lie to each other.
And his words were simple truth.
She nodded once, barely. To him, she could admit what she would not say to the hunters or to his vampires. And not simply for the reason that Zadok had insinuated, either. While she was overcome each time he touched her, it was not for that reason alone. The feeling of the night sky—of him—of crimson velvet and satin, of violence and passion…it was alluring to her. It seemed to take her by her own soul and pull her in. “I am.”
“Then I will tell you what it is I wish for. What I desire more than anything else in this world. It is the reason I undertake all that I do. All the death, all the wars, all the torment I might pay you and others.”
She watched him, eager for his answer.
“Take off your gloves, Miss Parker.”
“I…”
“Please. Humor me.”
She swallowed again but did as he asked. She pulled the black silk from her hands and laid them on the table.
“Give me your hand.” He reached his out for her, skin as pale as white ash. His pointed nails looked as dangerous as they always had. She hesitated, and he asked again. “Please.”
Carefully, she laid her hand in his. She pulled in a breath at the sensation. At the feeling of him against her. Skin to skin. Soul to soul. He lifted her hand until he had his palm to hers, her fingers against his as if through a pane of glass. His fingers were long and powerful, and they dwarfed hers. He laced his fingers into hers.
Finally, he answered the riddle. “I wish to either live…or to die. I care not which.”
There came that hunger once more. A hunger not only for blood, but for life. For love, for happiness, and for solace. He wished to feel alive. Across from it was balanced with a hunger for the grave. For true peace. For rest that he had been denied.
“I am neither alive nor dead.” His voice was quiet. “When I said I had hoped my life might end when I touched you, I was not lying. To die is the greatest gift given a man, and it has been denied to me. I am spurned by the living and rejected by the dead. I am alone.”
“You have others like you. Walter and the others.”
“No. They are merely children of my poison. A perversion of both my curse and their former lives. They can die, Maxine. They can be destroyed. I cannot. Not even by you.”
“I…I’m sorry.”
“You pity me?”
“It isn’t pity. It is sympathy.”
“I am a murderer and a monster. Dozens in this city have died by my command. Thousands of your neighbors will be in the ground before my work is done. I have killed millions in my centuries. I will kill millions more. It is simply who I am. Do you feel such sympathy now?”
“I am aware of what you are, vampire.”
“Are you really?”
“The lives you have spent are the rain in a storm. Simply because I have not stopped to count the drops does not mean I do not comprehend the weather.”
“Such a poet you are.” He pulled her hand toward him, and she watched in fascination as he kissed her fingers slowly, one by one. “My precious Maxine. You have not yet asked me to spare your city.”
“Would you do it if I had?”
His lips twisted into a smile against her thumb. “No.”
“Then do not scold me for not wasting my breath.”
He chuckled and turned her hand to place a kiss against the sensitive spot in the center of her palm. She pulled in a hiss of breath through her nose. She shivered, and goosebumps crawled up her arm. He smiled at her reaction. “Do you want me, Miss Parker?”
“That is not an appropriate question.”
“Yet I have asked it all the same. And we have an accord.” He kissed her wr
ist, over her pulse, his lips lingering there for a long time. She watched him, her eyes wide, her pulse racing, knowing he must be able to feel it. He parted his lips, and for a moment, she was terrified that he meant to sink his fangs into her skin. Instead, he rolled his tongue along her vein slowly.
Her face exploded in heat. She must be beet red. She yanked her hand away from him, unable to take it anymore. She buried her bare hands in her lap. “Enough.”
He chuckled darkly. “Very well. But only because the meal has just begun.”
“No, I mean you are to stop—” She paused as another young gentleman arrived with food. The first course. She sighed. “I mean that you should stop such advances altogether.”
“Why?”
“Is it not enough that I have asked you?”
“You are afraid of what I make you feel, Miss Parker. It is cowardice that inspires your words, not revulsion.”
“I am not a coward.”
“Correct. You are not. And it is for that reason I refuse your request. It is a temporary fear. Like jumping from a cliff into a pond. It will pass once you realize you will survive the fall.” The vampire laughed and sipped his wine. “Eat, Miss Parker. Please.”
It was an arrangement of cheese and cured meats. It all looked quite tempting. They fell into another long stretch of silence as they ate. Finally, she worked up the nerve to ask a question she had spoken twice before and been denied both times. “I fear I must now ask you the question to which I know I will loathe to hear the answer.”
“Please do. If it is what I believe, I find myself quite eager to finally reveal it.”
The way he said it made her shiver. She knew that this was some manner of line that she was about to cross. Something was about to begin with her next words, and it was something that she could not avoid. After stepping past this boundary, all things would change.
She felt herself teeter on the end of a cliff. But the words must be said. She must take the jump. She swallowed down her fear and tried to meet her fate as best she could. I do not fear death. I will not let him change that. I will not give him that power. “What is it you want from me?”
“Oh, my darling Maxine.” He purred the words out in a dusky rumble. She felt goosebumps spread over her skin. “From you, I will have all that you are.”
13
She felt the warmth drain from her face at his words. She knew she must be staring at him in horror. His expression was juxtaposed perfectly to hers. Where she was frightened, he looked pleased. Where she felt small, he looked regal. He watched her with all the aristocracy of a hungry tiger—perfectly aware he was at the top of his food chain and eager to act upon it.
She folded her hands in her lap, clenching the fabric napkin between her fingers. “I am afraid I do not know what you mean.”
“Oh, but it is clear from those beautiful features of yours that you do.” He smiled and tilted his head barely to the side, a stray tendril of dark hair falling across his pale cheek. “But if you wish for me to provide specifics…very well.”
He lifted his wine glass and pondered it. “What I wish from you is quite simple, Miss Parker. I will have not only your fealty, but your undying loyalty. I will have your blood. I will take your body, your heart, your mind, and your soul. I will have all that I desire of you…and I desire it all.”
She shifted back in her chair and found herself sorely tempted to run from the restaurant. But where would she go? Where in the city could she hide? He was a demigod as old as civilization itself. He would follow her now wherever she might run. “And do you plan to take all this from me?”
“If I must.” He grinned slyly at her. “But I admit I prefer to be given that which I want.”
“And why would I be inspired to do anything of the sort?”
“For the very reasons you answered my invitation to dinner. You know it is pointless to fight me. Far more importantly…you do not wish to do so at all, do you? Give me your hand once more. Feel that which I can give you.” He held his hand out to her again. “Touch me.”
“No.”
He watched her, patient as a parent watching a child who fights against the inevitability of their curfew.
She cringed. “I think I despise you.”
“Yes, yes. You are not alone. Your hand, Miss Parker, if you will.”
With a pained noise, she gave in. He laced their fingers once more. The sensation of his soul washed over her, and she shuddered, feeling it intertwine with hers all the same. It did something to her. It pooled a heat in her body that wanted to join them in more physical ways. It called to him, begged for him, pleaded for more.
He had asked if she wanted him.
The sad and revolting fact was that, for better or worse…she did.
“I want to take everything from you, yes. But I do not come to this negotiation as a tyrant. I come as a merchant willing to trade. I can give you the one thing you have never dreamed possible—a connection with another.”
The image of claws in the darkness flashed through her mind. She had to shut her eyes to let the visions play out. Teeth, sinking into her. Her blood upon the ground. Snapping bones, shredded tendons. Another carcass in the mud. More meat on the table. “I would only be your prey.”
“No.” New visions took over. Instead of blood upon the muck, it was satin sheets. It was teeth, but they scraped and toyed. They worshipped and teased. They bit…but she felt pleasure at their touch, not pain and terror. “I will not kill you. I will not hurt you.”
“I am not special to you.”
“You may think that, but you are wrong. You very much are.” Dark wings spreading over the night sky, immense and ancient like a dragon. She found herself lost in the enormity of it all. “You can see me for what I really am, Miss Parker. In a way no one else ever has. You are my mirror. Your emptiness calls to my own. I am compelled to seek you, just as you are to me. You are already very special to me, Maxine…I do not think I shall ever let you go.”
She opened her eyes, meeting his crimson gaze. “Everything slips from your fingers like sand.”
He frowned. “Yes. You needn’t remind me. All falls away from me in time. Even my immortal children like Walter and the rest succumb to madness or death in time. I am the only thing that is immortal in this world. I am the one soul cursed with true eternity.” His grasp on her hand tightened, and he looked at her fingers twined with his. “What happens, Miss Parker, when you touch someone who is not I?”
She was glad to change the topic away from the enormity of his words. She pulled her fingers from his slowly. It was not in rejection. It was not because she did not want to maintain the link between them—in some strange way, she did. After a long moment, she formed the proper words.
“It is as though their soul is a soap bubble in my hand. I can protect it for a time. But it will falter. It will pop. I cannot control it. And when it happens, I take a piece of them into myself.”
“What…?”
“Not only their memories or their emotions. I rob from them a piece of their soul.” She rubbed her other hand over her heart, the reminder of an ache that had long passed but remained fresh. “It fades over time, but they are a deep wound that is hard to heal. It leaves a scar like it would in my flesh. I am still plagued by their dreams. For a time, it as though we were never different people.”
“It sounds terrible.”
“I worried it would drive me mad. Even the slightest touch, and I can absorb some of another’s soul. It is for that reason I avoid it so.”
“I feel different to you, then?”
“Yes. Your soul is unique. Instead of a soap bubble, I find myself holding a cannonball instead.”
He chuckled. “I am a heavy lead weight, thank you, Miss Parker. Quite flattering.”
“That is not what I meant!”
“Oh? I am a heavy lead weight whose only use is the destruction of life and property, then?” he teased, a mirthful and wicked smile on his lips.
“Y
es, I do think that is far more accurate.” She glared at him and sighed heavily. “You are bent on destroying this city, after all.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“I must.”
She watched him curiously. “Explain. What do you mean?”
“I am more than the curse of my soul, my dear. I am haunted by every life I have ever killed. You saw the beasts that attacked your friends last night at the gala? They dwell within me. I am to leave nothing but death and destruction in my wake. I can keep them at bay, but they hunger. They whine. They are incessant and loud. From time to time, I find myself inspired to feed them. And so, I take a city or two as my own, and let them do just that.”
She sat back, watching him, stunned. “I am not sure I know quite what to say to that. You say you are not merely plagued, but you claim to be the illness itself.”
He lifted his glass to her in a silent toast and sipped it again. “I tried to convince them to take up crochet or knitting, but I fear they did not listen to me.”
She put her hand over her eyes and sighed.
“I thought that was quite clever.”
“You are monstrous.”
“And?”
She shot him a look and found him smiling, laughter in his eyes. She couldn’t help it. She chuckled. He did the same. When they quieted, he was still smiling. “I do not wish to frighten you. I do not wish to harm you. I hope for the day you will run into my embrace, not away from it.”
Her face went warm again, and she looked down at the table. “Why? I know what you now want from me, but why do you wish these things from me? To what end? What would I become to you?”
He opened his mouth to answer then paused. It took another second for him to speak. “I will respectfully decline my answer for the time being.”
“Loyalty brokered by terror is a fragile thing. It shatters on the first display of weakness from he who holds the end of the leash.”
His smile broadened at her words. Something glinted in his crimson eyes. “How lucky for me that I have never shown such a thing as weakness, then. And I do own quite a number of leashes if you do care to try one on.”
Heart of Dracula Page 14