Beloved Vampire (9 page)

As Jessica reached the proper dosage of blood, the power of the binding that came with the third mark rushed through him. It shimmered in his blood, caused an acceleration of his vital organs as they accommodated the meshing of souls. He closed his eyes, his hand sliding down to rest on the sweet curve between shoulder and neck, his thumb teasing the base of her throat, an instinctive proprietary response. The third mark would put her under his protection for the duration of her life.

Surprised at his strong reaction to the thought, struggling through the physical transition, he reminded himself she was going to present quite a challenge, what with the whole vampire world looking to kill her. But once he got that resolved, he would figure out a way to set her up in a situation where she could reclaim as much of the life she’d wanted for herself as possible. He didn’t intend to keep her, after all.

He had a pair of third-marked servants who served him well. They were husband and wife, so they fulfilled each other, while his emotions were kept out of the equation. That was best, when it came to humans. If no other lesson had proven that to him, Farida’s death had. He owed it to her, to honor her that way.

But those rational thoughts faltered when the third mark appeared, high on her inner thigh. After a third mark completed, there was always a visible reflection of it on the servant’s body, something that looked like a cross between a scar and a tattoo. It was a mystical thing, for the vampire had no control over it. To date, none of them knew why it occurred. The husband and wife’s marks had been a pair of mated wolves, appropriate to their relationship with their Master.

But Jessica’s gave Mason pause, for it was a silhouette he knew far too well. It was a small replica of the decorative scarring that had been carved into his back, using his own blood, centuries ago. The mythical desert tiger. Only one servant had ever carried it for him. Farida, in exactly the same place.

He almost dropped her, recalling himself just in time to keep holding her. He supposed, as old as he was, perhaps the marks recycled themselves. He was not given to mystical fancy, and he was not going to imagine that the woman he’d lost three hundred years ago was sending him a message through this woman’s flesh.

Fortunately, when he shifted Jess, something else caught his attention. Frowning, he drew her up to his chest, leaning her against his shoulder to see what his hand had touched on her back.

His mark would take away the sickness that Raithe’s death had inflicted on her, and the gunshot damage. Wounds on a third-marked servant disappeared within days, hours or minutes, depending on the age of the servant, the severity of the wound and if the blood of the Master was available to the servant. A servant would heal from most everything except a heart staking with metal. But a third-marked servant
would
scar, if the wound was touched with the Master’s own blood. Some vampires branded their servants, holding the brand with that blood. He knew Lady Lyssa had done that to Jacob, just above his hip bone.

What he was looking at took him a moment to digest, and then when he did, Jess stirred restlessly in his arms, probably feeling the wave of fury from him, even in her deep, unconscious state. Eleven scars, running from her shoulders to the rise of her buttocks, like the evenly spaced bars of a prison. Raithe had skinned her, and marked each strip with his blood to hold them there.

The number of scars broke something else loose in his memory. The background data on her said she’d run away from Raithe, unsuccessfully, eleven times. She stirred again, emitting a cry, and jerked. “Enough,
habiba
,” he said, firm but gentle, and she settled.

Immediately. Her body became almost pliant. On top of the shock of the tiger mark, and the scars, something else clicked into place. He rolled the lingering taste of her blood in his mouth, thought about her attachment to Farida’s memories. Her delusional mur murings.
The way a woman
wants
to be possessed.

Oh, Allah.
What if she’d been a natural submissive, but innocent to it when Raithe took her, the bastard? It was the kind of virgin that was almost irresistible to a vampire, a woman who intuitively sought to serve a man’s love with her own, willing to trust the touch of the right Master. Seeing the abrupt, relaxed ease of her face, the idea even stirred his imaginings. He could see her sweetly on her knees, her total surrender tempting a male to never let her out of his sight.

It would explain why Raithe had to have her, though a wiser vampire would have exercised impulse control.
Son of a bitch.

Whether true or not, Mason wished he could reach through the veil of death, jerk Raithe through it and devise ways to make
him
scream.

Ah, hell. He needed to learn to control his emotions. “Easy,” he whispered as she made a fearful whimper in her oblivion. He adjusted her, cradling her in his lap as she slept on. The press of her soft backside against his thighs hardened his restive cock, awakened by his unbidden thoughts. Good thing she wasn’t awake.

If it was true, it was useful only as a key to getting her back on her feet again. If it wasn’t true, it was all the same to him. The point was to help her.

He turned his mind to more practical matters. Usually a third mark invigorated a servant, but he expected she would be in restorative sleep for the next day or so as her body readjusted. He was glad for it, because it would give him time to get her away from here.

He would take her to his home in South America, a place where he would be better equipped to deal with her. Regardless of her sexual nature, when she woke and discovered she’d killed one Master only to be bound by another, her reaction was likely to be far from sweet
or
submissive.

7

F
OR so many months, Jess had fought her way out of sleep. When it took her down, it tried to keep her there, help her follow the natural order and slip into the waiting hands of Death. Though she recognized it as the one friend she had, she treated it as an enemy. She’d fall into the arms of forever slumber as soon as she slept by Farida’s tomb.

Now, though, something was different. She was floating out of sleep, light, easy, becoming aware of sunlight on her face, a warmth that made her press her lips together as if holding the heat of a lover’s mouth there. As she turned over on the soft mattress, her flexible limbs held her weight, shifted her, twined around pillows without protest. Her palm flattened, fingers spreading out.

No pain. She didn’t hurt anywhere. She could be dead. Or it could all have been a dream. A horrible, horrible nightmare, and she’d open her eyes and be in her one-bedroom flat in Rome. On her way to the bathroom, she’d stumble over one of the stacks of books she kept piled up around her bed, watched by the mysterious yellow eyes of the many stray cats that she fed. They tended to wander in through open windows to perch themselves on the larger, heavier reference materials. She’d pull on her running clothes and head out for a quick five miles before getting ready for her workday at the university, dreaming of the day when she would go with the professors on the digs.

It was the only way to process it. It had to have been a nightmare, one of the most hideous in the history of all nightmares. It had seemed like five years, because one could live a lifetime in a five-minute slumber. Proof that bending time was possible, since it happened in dreams all the time.

Though the rest of her was light, supple, ready to shake off that dream and head out on her daily routine, her eyes were still caught in that other reality. Heavy, unwilling to open, as if they knew it was best to stay like this, in this suspended state of belief, where everything was still possible.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, reassuring them. “It was just a terrible nightmare. Wake up now.”

Reluctantly, her lids opened. She saw a hazy, pale blur that didn’t clear as she blinked, but then she realized she was in a canopy bed with gauzy curtains drawn around it. The covers were all white, but when she looked up, she found the canopy was open and she was staring at a painted blue sky, where a pair of swans flew, their bills and bright eyes glossy as they twined about each other in the surreal sky.

She swallowed. The curtains were moving, caressed by a gentle breeze coming through a pair of open French doors. The murmur of the ocean, the smell of salt, reached her senses.

Blood. Harry screaming.
Help me, Anna
. . .
for pity’s sake.
Sheltering a dead woman with her body. A man’s hands on her, lifting her. No, not a man.

Yes. A man, a man, a man, a man—not a vampire; vampires don’t exist. It was a dream, it was a dream, it was a dream
. .

.

She closed her fists on the blanket, her breath shuddering in her chest, hyperventilating with a young woman’s healthy lungs. But as she shifted, she felt the stiff pull of the scars on her back. Amber eyes had watched her die, his voice comforting her with romantic imaginings.

I kiss your mouth, your breasts, worship every inch of you even as I declare you mine, the way my heart and soul and
breath are mine
. . .

His mouth on her throat. Her head tipping back, surrendering . . .

Dropping the cover, she closed her hand on her neck. Two puncture wounds, not quite healed over, because a marking took longer to heal than a Master’s simple feeding bite. Swallowing, she tried to ignore the yawning abyss opening in the base of her mind. But it was impossible to ignore a Hell pit, filled with writhing maggotlike bodies. She’d fall into them, and they’d squirm all over her flesh, feeding while she still lived, while she cried for mercy. Raithe would laugh at her, raise his wineglass and tell his house slave to bring him a different vintage.
Bordeaux goes so much better with her screams
. . .

A girl born in quiet, middle-class America hadn’t been prepared for such casual cruelty, something she’d seen depicted only in the dramatic world of movies and books, or histories that happened then, not now. Not to her.

“Stop it.” She made a strangled sound, grappling with her reeling mind. What . . . what had she been doing? The bite on her neck.

She had to look, see if he’d done what she’d feared. She tore back the covers.

She was naked, and it was a distracting shock to see smooth skin, long limbs, straight and strong, ready to serve her. No, not her.

A new Master.

For so long, her body had been a compendium of desecrations, scars, disease, putridity. Now, it took only seconds to find an aberration. She stared at the tiger mark high on the inside of her thigh, one paw resting with provocative intent on the crease next to her sex.

“Miss? Lord Mason said you were stirring. Can I draw you a bath?”

Jess raised her gaze to the slender form of a woman, standing on the other side of the sheer curtain. She had an impression of dark hair, beauty. Of course. Vampires didn’t believe in ugliness. She’d learned to hate beauty. It was the strongest weapon evil had, for the fucking mind refused to believe something beautiful could be all bad, no matter how often predators used it.

A laugh croaked out of her throat. Jess scrambled to the side of the bed, stumbling off the high perch and tangling in the gauze like a shroud. She saw tall windows, beveled glass inlaid with gold and steel dividing lights. Beautiful. More beauty. She was surrounded by it. And she was beautiful again, which meant she had value.

“Miss?” The woman had circled the bed, was trying to help her as she spun in the veil. Instead, Jess ripped it down, took it with her. Her gaze swept the walls.
Ah, there. Perfect.

Vampires were used to being on guard, rarely having a room where they didn’t keep a weapon of some kind. It was too bad the human world didn’t believe in vampires, because she’d become such a student of their sociology in the past five years she could have headed her own research department.

Lord Mason believed in subtlety, or multipurpose interior decorating. The weapon was a wall vase, holding a spray of fresh tropical flowers, lush fuchsia blooms. Ten inches long, made of beaten metal, the vase had a point at the base, perfect if a vampire needed to seize something from the wall to fend off an attack. But since it was metal and not wood, it couldn’t be used against him.

Fortunately, it could kill a servant.

The woman was moving more swiftly now, but not fast enough. Jessica lunged, snatching it off the wall. The blooms and water showered her as she plunged the lethal tip toward her own breast. It was sharp, and would plunge through the tangle of gauze, through flesh, to the wildly beating heart. So strong and healthy. She was laughing again, and she couldn’t stop. She’d die with that laughter on her lips.

We will die the same way, Raithe. You should get some pleasure out of that, you sadistic bastard. If you’re waiting in Hell,
I’ ll consume myself in the fires before I will ever be bound to you, or the likes of you, again.

She was seized from behind, a large hand closing on her wrist just as the tip pinked her flesh. She howled, struggling, fighting. “No.

You won’t . . . do this to me . . . again. No!”

“Manacles,” he barked, and her howl became frenzied screams. She spun, tearing at him with her fingers, striking at his face, kicking his shins, knowing her skills were too rusty. She’d taught herself to fight, but during her sickness she’d barely had energy to walk most days.

It didn’t matter. At the height of health, she stood no chance toe-to-toe with a vampire. He took her to the ground, pinning her on her stomach, resting his hand on her nape, a knee in the small of her back.

Dignity abandoned, rationality gone, she kept screaming, the shrill, thin cries her only comfort. Saliva whipped into a froth on her lips. As metal cuffs clamped onto her wrists, her legs were parted enough to lock a thigh cuff on each leg, the wrist manacles then locked to them, keeping her arms immobile at her sides.

Her struggles increased, her mind willing to dislocate bones to get free. Those strong hands pressed her shoulders to the ground as he shifted his body to hold the rest of her still, preventing her from hurting herself. Her vocal cords burned; her eyes were blinded by tears. Her nose had begun to bleed, for she tasted it on her lips.