Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (2 page)

Applause again, quieter, and this time, there were expressions of naked outrage on some of the agnates’ faces.

The orchestra struck up a spritely classical piece. As if that were some kind of a signal, the crowd shifted, the bubble of space around us collapsing as the agnates turned their attention to each other.

“I only caught about half of that, but I think you just made a whole bunch of really dangerous vampires really mad,” I whispered.

“We’ve won,” Dorian said, contempt naked in his voice. “Those who don’t accept that will be passed by.”

“Well, one of
those
has already sent an assassin after me,” I reminded him. They had wanted to erase the evidence of my existence before I could be presented to vampire society. “Making them angrier doesn’t really seem like a healthy choice.”

He glanced down at me, and something shifted behind his eyes, like he was really looking at me for the first time. His face softened instantly. “I know you’re afraid, Cora. But you’re untouchable now. The introduction makes you as safe as you can be. It’s been centuries since an agnate harmed another’s officially recognized cognate.”

I looked over the glittering crowd, wondering which of them might choose to make an exception. In contrast to their opponents, Dorian and his allies believed that agnates should not exploit humans indiscriminately. But to restrain their feeding had meant drastically reducing the chances of finding a cognate. Now Dorian’s research changed all that. And that made his enemies hate me, the living proof.

“Let’s not test that,” I said. “What happens next?”

“Next?” Dorian nodded at the company. “Next we greet those of our guests who wish to congratulate me or be introduced to you.”

As if summoned by his words, a silver-haired man headed straight for us, an ethereal woman clad in diaphanous nude draperies drifting behind him. He was one of the few vampires who wore obvious signs of age—but they seemed to be just that, worn, like I might wear a coat.

“Very subtle, Dorian.” The man nodded toward the statue. “Maybe you should put sparklers on it, or a loudspeaker. Truly drive home your point. Someone might have missed it.”

“Like it, do you?” Dorian said. There was a small, smug lift at the corner of his mouth.

“Others don’t,” the man said dryly. “How long have you had it sitting in storage, waiting for this day?”

“Thirty-four years.”

“You know that some will say it is just luck,” he said.

Dorian’s gaze went icy. “It wasn’t luck. It was a great deal of time, effort, and money. The balance of power will shift to our side now. It’s inevitable.”

“It will go worse for you if the Kyrioi believe in your success,” the man predicted. He waved at me. “Take care with that one.”

I could feel Dorian’s body stiffening through his arm. “Etienne, you know that we have ethical disagreements about how that should be accomplished.”

“To humanity’s cost,” Etienne said. It sounded like a rehearsal of a very old argument.

“Might I introduce my cognate?” Dorian said then, pointedly.

Etienne smiled at me then, a dazzling, toothy smile that I recognized had the force of all his persuasion over it. But it washed over me and I felt nothing.

Reluctantly, I extended my hand, and he took it, his grasp cool and dry.

“So pleased to meet you,” he said.

I pulled my hand back as quickly as I dared. Dorian’s friend or not, the man disturbed me.

“Is that...?” I ventured, my eyes straying to the dreamy-looking woman who floated behind him. I had never met another cognate before, but what else could she be?

She had the false, flawless youth of the agnates but none of the dark power. She cocked her head to the side, and I noticed a red, heart-shaped mark on her neck. Etienne had a matching one just above his collar. Bond marks, like the teardrop-shaped ones that Dorian and I bore on our wrists.

“My own cognate,” Etienne said. “Isabella d’Erte.”

“Welcome, Isabella,” I said, hoping that the expression I wore looked more like a smile than it felt.

The woman just stared at me for a moment, no reaction or recognition in her face, and then her gaze turned back to roaming aimlessly around the room.

“Isabella does not speak English,” Dorian said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“She’s from Venice,” he said briefly.

“She’s Italian?” I probed, sensing his reticence. Her reaction had not seemed like that of someone who simply didn’t understand the language. It had seemed...empty.

“Byzantine, actually. So her mother tongue is something between vulgar Latin and modern Italian.”

Etienne snorted. “Quit coddling the child, Dorian. You’re such a hypocrite. If you really wanted your Cora to understand, you would tell her that Isabella no longer speaks at all.”

He gave us both a sketch of a bow and strolled off, the woman bobbing mindlessly in his wake.

My stomach clenched.
Run.
I wished I could want to run.

“Dorian....” I said, staring after her in fixated horror.
Isabella no longer speaks at all
—but once, she had. Once, she had been a woman like any other. But then Etienne, through the power of the bond, had changed her into the mindless doll she was now, a woman’s body with an empty mind.

“I’m sorry you saw that,” he said with soft intensity, putting his free hand over mine. “As I said, we’re not all the same.”

They weren’t the same, but Dorian had already changed me with his very presence, my desires tied to his, and he’d also changed me deliberately, when the stakes were high enough.

What would it take for him to turn me into an Isabella—maybe not today or this year or this decade, but a century from now, half a millennium? To live forever in a twilight existence....

Clarissa materialized in front of us. Her auburn hair was swept up into an elegant chignon, her body clasped in a canary yellow sheath that was slit up to her thigh and widened to puddle in a train behind her.

“Enjoying your party?” she said, clasping our hands in turn, her smile edged and her eyes bright.

She was feeding off the tension in the room. She could sense the danger, too—and unlike me, she loved it.

It was a measure of my state of mind that I found Clarissa’s presence almost reassuring. She, at least, was something like a friend.

“I think I’ll survive,” I replied.

She let out a musical peal of laughter. “You’re just
infuriating
them. It’s fabulous!” she crowed, and just as quickly as she’d appeared, she ducked back into the crowd and was gone.

Reassuring. Right.

A man in a stiff silk robe popped in front of us before I could say anything, bowing with exaggerated courtesy over my hand.

“Ah, the famous new cognate,” he said, every word edged. “What a pretty story you spin about her, Thorne.”

“It’s no story, and you know it, Timur,” Dorian countered.

“Perhaps. You take too many gambles. Throw the dice once too often, and they’ll come up snake eyes, and then where will you and your precious Adelphoi be?” With another contemptuous bow, he faded back into the crowd.

I was still reeling when an agnatic woman approached wearing three dead parrots arranged in a macabre tableau on her head. I stared at the budgies as she talked to Dorian, unable to focus on her words, not even to process whether there was bile behind her smile before she left.

“Dorian! And Cora!” A woman came up on the arm of a bored-looking man, her wild blond curls scarcely confined by a silk band.

I blinked because even though it was the woman who spoke, it was the man who had the air of an agnate about him. He wore an expression of bored indulgence.

“Good evening, Dorian,” he said.

“Jean, Hattie,” Dorian returned. “Allow me to present to you my cognate, Cora Shaw.”

I could feel a slight change in his body through my hand on his arm—the tiniest relaxation, and only then did I realize how tense he’d been before.

“A pleasure,” Jean intoned, pressing my hand briefly.

“It’s excellent to see you up and about,” the cognate said briskly as she squeezed my hand in turn. “I wanted to call on you before, but Dorian banished me to the labs as soon as you were awake.”

There was something familiar about her, the pretty round face and the mass of curls....

“You were there,” I blurted. “When I—I changed. You were there, and you took me away.”

Hattie’s smile broadened, and her agnate patted her arm with the kind of affection one would show to an excited pet. “You remembered,” she said. “I hope Perry Connor didn’t frighten you too much.”

I shook my head. There had been too much pain for there to be any room for fear.

“Well, enjoy your introduction.” She gazed adoringly up into Jean’s face. “I certainly loved mine.”

“I expect cocktails and baccarat at your New Year’s party,” Jean said to Dorian over her head. “You know what I think about parties with neither gambling nor mixed drinks.” He frowned at a tray of champagne as a waiter passed by.

“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Dorian said.

They turned and left, the parade of greetings continued, each accompanied by varying degrees of enthusiasm or hostility. At times, I couldn’t even tell whether their congratulations were meant with sarcasm or sincerity.

Nearly a quarter of the agnates had a cognate in tow. Some of these had the vacant look of Isabella. Others were silent but looked on with intelligent eyes. A few—a very few—spoke to one or both of us, but they all seemed uniformly, almost disturbingly content. I couldn’t help but wonder how old they all were—and whether that contentment came of themselves or was a happiness imposed by their agnates.

It was like a bizarre kind of slideshow, a presentation of all my possible futures. My head swam, my stomach roiling. My hand on Dorian’s arm began to cramp with the force that I was clinging to him, and my other hand shook when I extended it to be briefly pressed by yet another dazzling agnate. The night had hardly begun, but all I could do was to look forward desperately to the end.

But even when it did, I would be no less trapped, because I feared the futures themselves, not just the presentations of them, because one of them would be mine....

Servants circulated with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres. I took a flute of wine and drank it too quickly, snatching up a second when a waiter came near again and downing it just as fast. Under the sound of the orchestra, the drone of hundreds of conversations echoed through the room.

As Dorian exchanged earnest observations with an older agnatic woman, two children came tumbling up the carpet between the adults, a serious-looking boy with a much younger girl. They stopped short as they realized that I stood in their way.

I stared, my attention pulled from Dorian’s conversation. I hadn’t noticed any children in the crowd before, the press of adult bodies too great to see smaller ones between them. Somehow, their presence made the gathering more real—and yet more fantastically bizarre.

Both children were astonishingly beautiful. The boy noticed my attention and smirked ingratiatingly under a shock of brown hair, his smile perfectly tuned with complete self-awareness as to its effect. He had his own tail suit, down to the white tie and the wingtip shoes, and he already carried traces of the shadowy authority of the adults and turned its full force on me.

The little girl’s velvet skirt stood out like a perfect bell around her, so stiff with petticoats that it rustled with every motion. Her black hair hung in perfect ringlets under a bright purple tiara. Staring at me suspiciously, she rattled the dozen or so plastic beaded necklaces that she wore around her neck, but even that childlike motion was peculiarly, inappropriately elegant.

“We’re going to climb that statue,” she announced, her tone edged with the contemptuous certainty that I would not dare to cross her.

“Come on,” the boy muttered to her, keeping the smile plastered on his face as he stared me down. “She’s not human. Let’s go around.”

“I want to climb up at the
end
of the carpet,” the girl said, digging in her heels as he tugged at her hand, little tendrils of will, sensed but not seen, emanating from her. But the older boy overpowered her and dragged her back into the crowd.

Children. Vampire children. The too-perfect facsimiles of humanity in the adult agnates were disconcerting enough, but the children seemed almost like actors, poured into small bodies and playing a role, skillfully hitting all the right notes with the jaded eye of a master manipulator. I was immune, but any true human not under another agnate’s thrall would have had her mind turned into mush by one look at those pretty faces.

I shuddered.

“Dorian, darling!”

My attention was jolted to an agnatic woman who came sailing up to us, her dark hair clasped in golden bands. Her goddess-style dress was all white draperies and crisscrossed gold cords that served to emphasize her breasts and the swelling of her pregnant belly.

She was flanked by two muscular, bare-chested men—both non-agnates, I realized—an absurdity even among the varied attire of the other guests. As she advanced, other agnates muttered or stared, and she preened under their disapproval. The men each had an oval mark over their right hip. Both cognates, then? The woman must have a matching mark, invisible beneath her dress.

“I am so glad you finally found someone. Two hundred years of abstinence cannot be healthy.” She smiled toothily, thrusting her hand at him.

Dorian bowed over it, wearing a chilly smile. “As delightful as always, Veronica.”

“You’re such a clever boy,” she said. “Now all you need is a second little plaything.”

She patted the nearest man proprietarily on the shoulder with one long-nailed hand. With a chuckle, he caught her hand and kissed it, and her expression turned blatantly carnal.

“One is fun, but two are better,” she purred.

“You can stop terrorizing my cognate now,” Dorian said through his teeth, his smile unwavering. “It isn’t gracious to bully your hostess.”

“Why, heavens forfend!” She put her hand to her heart and took a deep breath as she turned to me, not coincidentally drawing attention to her generous breasts. “Oh, my dear, are you still such a prude? Don’t worry. It never lasts long.”