Masters of the Night (4 page)

Twenty minutes later, she lay in his arms unconscious. Barely a murmur
of life pulsated through her veins.

Immersing his being with hers, he offered her at least a semblance of
life in his world.

She refused to accept the price.

He leaned back and gazed down at her. With the next and careful last
drink, as he left the one drop that could not be taken, her heart would stop.

But when he closed his eyes and leaned forward, all Henri saw were her
eyes—the beautiful jewel eyes, the beautiful sad jewels. He drew back and
looked at the face, still beautiful, but pale now, and cool. She was dying, and
she had never really lived.

He felt her heart.
Still a beat or two.

The beautiful mystic had been left so sadly stranded in the park.

Sighing, he slashed his wrist.

And broke Realm law.

In denial of the Realm’s precepts, Henri De
LaCroix
let red drops fall against her lips to give her his strength, knowing she would
not give her being to him. He should have known it was useless to offer a mystic
immortal hell. Even now, she could probably see hell’s gate opening in the
drops seeping past her lips. Yet—

He could not let her die.

He immersed her in his essence to preserve her life. Her human life … A
terrible conflict erupted within him.

He was a Royal.
Sworn to the Realm.
He had
walked the courts of kings in life, and the courts of
vampyre
kings after life.

He was not just a
vampyre
,
he was an Old World
vampyre
.
Key word “pyre.”
The funeral wood on which
the dead were burned, in a rage of fire.

He moved his lips toward the waiting punctures. He could not let her
live. A Royal’s essence could not remain within a mortal. If she lived, she
would taste his knowledge, his appetites,
his
memories.

She would know how to sail, how to ride stallions in the wind, how to
choose and enjoy fine wines.

All the things she had never experienced …

Lifting her into his arms, he carried her from the mausoleum and began
to fly with her toward a distant steeple.

“I hope I don’t regret this,” he muttered to himself as he lighted and
laid her gingerly on the rectory porch.
For if she lived, she
would also taste—his power.

He hammered the buzzer, then stepped back and yelled at the upstairs
window. “Stephen! Get your butt out of bed!”

A light came on in an upper story window, filtering to the stairs, then
the foyer. Henri backed in the darkness below the porch steps.

The porch light came on and a young priest opened the door, looked out,
then seeing no one,
stepped
out, almost stumbling over
the crumpled form that lay in front of the door.

Quickly bending down, the priest turned her face to the side to check
for a pulse. His hand jerked back and he gasped in shock at the blood on his
fingertips. Then he looked wildly around, looking for the assailant, looking
for—the
vampyre
.

Grabbing the unconscious young woman by her wrists, he dragged her body
inside, then banged the door shut and began waking the house with urgent
shouts.

Henri moved away, dissolving into the last edges of twilight.

But as he hurried to
daysleep
, the power the
mystic had brought to him began to flow like starlight in his veins.
Intense.
Magnificent.
He was but a
vapor in the night. He was the night!

Ecstasy?
What was ecstasy
when compared to living power? Ecstasy was for the moment. But this, this strange
new strength washed through the chambers of his heart in fierce surges …

If she lived, would Angie feel the same?
From him?

5.

Golden light
streamed into Angie’s eyes.
Then nothing.
Slumber
called her back.

Dreams—a blur of violent blue eyes with flames in the pits, passed
through her sleep; blue eyes with feral red flames burning behind the pupils,
burning into her own, making her ache to be with him.

He leaned over her and as he pricked her, her veins felt hot and odd,
as though the flow was reversing backward into a northern sky. She fell from
the sky, through the clouds, into a park pond where the ashes of the dead had
been scattered across the stars.

Veils of blue gossamer, a shroud of death, floated down across her body
and she drifted on the pond’s stars. She was drowning. And he was becoming
powerful, commanding the tributaries from the chambers of her heart to flow,
and replenish his. He called to her to join him, to share his eternal misery,
to live condemned in darkness with him and run through the black rain of night.

Her sorrowful sob broke through the stars—and into the
suctorial
heart sloshing like a languid sea …

Angie opened her eyes.

Her body felt like lead.

She willed her arms to move; they refused. She tried to turn. Her body
ached with deep pain.

Her veins were in spasms, but she could not cry out, only lay in her
prison of pain, a stone.

The golden light was in her eyes again.
A golden
cross gleaming in the rays of a sunset.

She averted her eyes from the brightness. She needed to focus, needed
to think. The strange weakness invaded her very bones.

Someone near her was speaking in low, even tones. What was he saying?

“She will heal, somewhat, if we were not too late.”

So that’s it. I’m hurt. I’m all busted up inside. I must have been in a
car wreck or something. They’re giving me the last rites.

“I’m not Catholic,” she said. Or at least, she thought she said it.

“But are you a
vampyre
?” a voice asked close
to her.

Her eyes shot open wide. The voice was—

French.

He was back! The
vampyre
was in the room!
Waiting to tempt her again.

She threw back the covers writhing and fighting, slapping at the hands
that tried to force her to lie back down, tried to command her against her
will.

A twinge in her arm, a quick pinprick.
She turned her
head to the side to see what had caused the tiny, sharp pain.

A syringe.

Sleep called to her again and she could not refuse its beckoning. She
fell back against the pillows.

The next time Angie awoke, she was calm. It was morning, and she was
clear-headed. She looked past the cross hovering over her forehead from its
leather rope to the somber face behind it—a handsome face, tanned and with a strong
jaw line, but tense. And his blue eyes were far too serious beneath a shock of
inky black hair.

“It’s broad daylight, Father,” Angie said, pushing the cross to the
side. “If I was a
vampyre
, wouldn’t I be in a dead
sleep by now or something, instead of coming out of one?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh.”

The priest left the side of the bed, went to the window directly across
from her, and gave the drapes a hard yank.

The room was splintered with light.

Angie threw her hand upward to shield her eyes from the sudden,
blinding brightness.

The priest glanced past her and spoke to the opposite wall. “She seems
adverse to the light. Could she be a minion?”

She followed his eyes. Another man was in the room standing by a chest
of drawers.

He was short, small-boned, with thinning dark hair, a goatee brushed
with
gray,
and beady black eyes that seemed to be
perpetually busy, watching every inch of the room.

By the way he leaned his elbow on the edge of the chest to make himself
look
taller,
Angie deduced he was probably
self-conscious about his height.

He was well-dressed.
A high collar black shirt and
black suit, but no tie.

Was he a doctor?

“I doubt she is a
vampyre’s
servile,” he said
as he stroked his goatee.

The voice startled her, as it had before. It was French.

“I—don’t know what that is,” she answered in a voice suddenly gone
small. There was no more sarcasm. She felt lost and alone and afraid. And she
could remember nothing beyond a pair of mesmerizing, sapphire eyes that had
stolen her from herself. “Perhaps I am.”

“
Serviles
, minions, live to
serve their masters, and to keep them alive.
You do not seem to
have any symptoms other than a bit of sensitivity to light, which may be
temporary.”

The Frenchman crossed the room and stood beside her. “He let you live,”
he said as he studied her with his beady, busy eyes. “Why?”

What did this Frenchman want with her? “I don’t know why. He didn’t
intend to, I don’t think. But I can’t remember much yet.”

“Only a master could have taken as much life from you as this one did
and still leave you with a heartbeat. Then he gave you a
vampirical
transfusion.”

“A what?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“He gave you a couple of pints of his best,” the priest said. “Or
worst, depending on how you look at it. In other words, he changed his mind.”

The Frenchman stroked his goatee pensively. “I seriously question
whether his decision to let you live was without malevolent motive.”

Malevolent motive?
Transfusion?
The words sent knives through her.

“You were badly beaten,” he continued. “
Vampyres
do not normally cause those kinds of injuries to their victims. Do you remember
what happened?”

Angie struggled to remember. “I was in a park, I think.”

He stroked his goatee. “The severity of the attack has caused a memory
lapse, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”
Angie felt her
limbs suddenly become icy. She began shivering uncontrollably.

The Frenchman took her shaking hands into his warm ones. “Stephen.
Bring another blanket. She is cold.”

His hands were slightly calloused, Angie noticed.
As
though he had worked in—carpentry perhaps.

As the priest smoothed a blanket across her, the Frenchman stroked his
goatee. “Do you suppose Sister Margaret could create some of that horrible
chicken soup she fancies the whole parish likes?”

“She’s tearing around the kitchen as we speak, God help us,” he
laughed.

The woman who shortly appeared at the door with a bowl of noodles
swimming in broth and carrots was not what Angie expected. There was no stern
black habit hiding her hair, no “sturdy” black shoes laced up to her
ankles,
and no saintly, thick black stockings. She was
sporting a bright smile, blue jeans—and she was pretty.

“She’s a street nun,” the priest explained in answer to Angie’s look of
frank surprise. “And she may have met your—assailant.”

The nun handed her a glass of carrot juice. “Closest thing to whole
blood nature has to offer.” Then she stood guard to make sure Angie finished
the whole glass.

She was a nun all right.

“You met him?” Angie asked as she handed her the empty glass.

“He caught me by surprise one night,” the sister answered, “but could
not seem to move toward me. He stood for a long time in front of me, puzzled,
as though he was trying to understand why he was being prevented from coming
any closer.” She paused. “I think I frightened him. He didn’t know what I was.”

Angie turned her gaze away from the bowl of soup. Something, she wasn’t
quite sure what, didn’t feel right inside her, inside her thoughts. They were
filled with places she had never been, people she had never seen, and murderous
monsters, brutal, without mercy—
vampyres
.

And she was looking at it all through a
vampyre’s
eyes!

Her heartbeat became runaway as she saw victims trying to flee, trying
to escape the horrible, beautiful blue eyes, and heard their screams—a
cacophony of agony. There were maidens, blood flowing down across the beaded
necklines of their medieval dresses. Young men in top hats, their waistcoat
collars spattered with red. The red hood of a Victorian cape hid all but the
violet eyes of a female
vampyre
. Carriages carried
music and death in the air, and wisps of dark shapes moved through thick fog,
moving silently, stealthily, toward the lone traveler, the solitary,
unsuspecting rider, the hapless homeless.

Gripped with terror, Angie wanted to cry out to her rescuers that the
vampyre
had done something horrible to her. But she
swallowed her voice back into her throat. The Frenchman with his glittery, iron
eyes looked for
all the
world like he would stake her
if he even thought she wasn’t human anymore. And even the kindly priest was
still wary of her, keeping the cross around his neck grasped tightly in his
hand as they spoke. Only the street nun seemed unconcerned.

Angie forced the hot, tasteless soup down her throat, perhaps more to
prove to herself, rather than them, that she was untouched by a
vampyre’s
world of darkness, that she had been violated,
but not corrupted.

That she was still human.

“You don’t happen to have any Merlot?” she asked.

The priest left the room, and returned with a glass of red wine.

Angie took the glass with trembling hands. She had asked for Merlot
without even knowing if she liked it! She knew nothing of wines. But as she
sipped the red-black liquid, she found herself richly enjoying it.

Henri De
LaCroix
had enjoyed this wine, she
thought, startled. A new knowledge flowed through her.
A
knowledge not her own.

With the last, terrible, delectable swallow, Angie knew what had
happened to her. She had been taken into irrevocable union with a master
vampyre
. And his tainted drops had sealed the deal.

Hide it, girl. Hide it, or they might kill you.

Keeping her terrified soul in check, Angie forced down the last of the
soup as though to remove any and all doubts for them that she was mortal. Then
she handed the emptied bowl to the nun, and said, quietly, “I would like to go
home now.”

All three of the people in the room exchanged looks she couldn’t read.

But she had a feeling she wouldn’t be going home.

Home.
She had left
California, driving alone to Seattle despite the overwrought pleas from her
overprotective grandmother, but she had felt she was suffocating in the tightly
sheltered life. She needed to breathe. And she deeply desired to find love,
real love. The problem was finding the right man in the twenty-first century.
The pickings were slim. No more meeting the “right young man” at a Sunday
Social, snaring the boy next door, or bringing home a date for dinner. For
Angie, there were only the noisy pick-up bars, the well-meaning friends
arranging introductions, and the internet dating services.

“Why do you suppose he let her live?” the Frenchman queried the air.

“To return for her later?” the priest shrugged.

Angie stared at them aghast, a new horror in her heart. He had said she
gave him power. Was it something he would want again? Like a narcotic drug?
Would his prison of want demand
he
return?

“Surely he wouldn’t!”

The Frenchman turned to her. “There has to be some reason De
LaCroix
let you live.”