Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (9 page)

“I will have that, too, in time,” he said, the words a promise. “And you will give it to me. Gladly.”

H
is hands moved up my back then, caressing the red marks, already healing, on my hips and moving up to my shoulder blades under my hair.

There were no lines of my making, I thought. The only limits were his. Each time we were together, he pushed me a little farther. I denied him nothing—and I never would.

The end would be wherever he decided. And I knew it would be far beyond anything I would choose.

He stepped away and retrieved a bottle of shampoo, and the thoughts fell away. They were so slippery in his presence, my fears too hard to hold onto. And that was, perhaps, the most frightening thing of all.

“That’s girly stuff,” I said, distracting myself as Dorian poured a dollop of shampoo into his hand.

“This is your bathroom,” he said. “What do you expect it to be?”

He motioned at me to turn away. Heating with the memory of what had happened the last time I’d done so, I obeyed. He began to massage the shampoo through my hair, and I tipped back my head so that it would run down my back and not into my eyes.

“So you even picked out a shampoo for me?” I asked, some part of my bitterness seeping into my voice.

“Worth did. But she’ll buy whatever brand you desire,” he said evenly, his fingers moving through my hair. “She couldn’t predict what you would like.”

I felt a small twinge of relief at that—and then an even smaller echo of horror that I had reached the point of fearing that even my choice of soap would be taken away.

“So she defaulted to Fekkai?” I asked lightly, covering my reaction.

I could hear the smile in his voice. “Only the best.”

“Did she buy them after you...we...the bond happened?” I finished lamely. “Like the clothes? That seems quick.”

His fingers stilled in my hair for a moment, then resumed their motion. “This room has been ready for you since before you were born,” he said quietly. “Once every two years, the toiletries are replaced. Every ten years, I order it to be redecorated. Every twenty, the bath is remodeled.”

Again, I was reminded of how I had stepped into a place that had been waiting for the right person to fill it. All those years, lying empty, waiting for Dorian to find a cognate. And then I came, only to try to reject everything. I insisted that I would continue my old life at the university, and the future that had been laid out for me, so neatly, so long ago, would sit unused.

But would it? Already, I’d asked to stay—for the night, maybe, but how hard would it be to stay for another and then another? To stay with Dorian, to let myself be spoiled and pampered, to wear the beautiful clothes and claim the great, cold mansion as my own.... How long would it be before I gave up any pretense of maintaining my old life?

How long would it be before I gave up my innermost self?

I stood silently as he worked conditioner through my hair and finished cleaning my legs and feet. He turned me back to face him and, with a soft cloth, washed the remnants of makeup from my face, punctuating his actions with kisses that sent small tremors of sensation through me. I giggled involuntarily as he plucked the individual false eyelashes from my eyes and dropped them to the shower floor.

“Still like what you see with the mask gone?” I quipped.

He looked down at me, the quirk of his lips sad. “You have no idea.”

My breath felt tight in my chest. But what other answer could he give?

He dropped the cloth onto the shower shelf a moment later. “There’s a towel on the warmer on the wall,” he said—permission and an invitation in one.

“I know. I found it two nights ago,” I said. A fresh one had replaced it each morning.

I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in the thick, toasty bath sheet that went nearly to my ankles. I looked back at the shower. Dorian was soaping up under the shower panels. Girly products or no, it was a sight to behold. Tearing my eyes away, I passed into the chilly dressing room and flicked on the light.

I opened a drawer in one of the low built-ins. My hands lingered over the froths of lace and silk, but I put on the plain cotton hip-huggers and the t-shirt bra I’d packed. Then I went to the hanging section of the closet to dig between the Marc Jacobs and BCBG. Even the fabric of the designer clothes was heavier and softer, and next to them, my own clothes looked worn, shabby. I pulled them on anyway. I couldn’t say yes even to a t-shirt, because once I started saying yes, I didn’t know that I would ever stop.

When I returned to the bathroom, I had a pang of disappointment to discover that Dorian was gone, and the disappointment sent a second, more sinister pang through me—one of fear.

I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t want. I shouldn’t crave. If I couldn’t resist him, there was no hope for me.

The jewelry still sat on the counter where I had left it, the emerald pieces and the ruby teardrop pendant that was secured to the center of the necklace. Dorian had given it to me—a Christmas present, he had said. I unhooked it from the necklace and held it in my hand. It was the twin to the mark on my wrist, the mark of our bond.

“Cora.”

I closed my fingers around the pendant and looked up.

Dorian was standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom, wearing a plain white dress shirt, open at the throat, and a sports coat.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

Reflexively, I shoved the pendant into my pocket. I still didn’t want to leave, but I wanted to wish to leave. And in that convoluted state, I knew I had to go, or I risked losing even more of myself than I had already given.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked instead of admitting any of that.

“It’s as safe as it ever will be,” he said.

So. Home—or hide in his shadow forever.

I knew I had to choose home.

I nodded and came out of the door to join him in the bedroom, grabbing my keys, wallet, and phone and stuffing them into my pockets with the pendant. Dorian opened the door onto the mezzanine and waited for me to pass though, looping his arm over my shoulder as I went by.

It was disturbing how good it felt there. Like it belonged.

“Do I have a secret staircase, too?” I asked to distract myself from that thought as we passed by the door to his bedroom.

He smiled. “It’s a servant’s stair, and yes, there is one to your bedroom that leads from the drawing room to a hidden door.”

“Drawing room? Really?” I looked askance at the archaic name.

He chuckled. “You can call it the keeping room or the family room if it makes you feel better. It’s off the dining room.”

“Do you have a billiards room, too?”

“Of course,” he said as we reached the head of the stairs and started down. “And a library, a music room, several parlors, a breakfast room, conservatory....”

“Miss Scarlett in the conservatory with the candlestick,” I quipped.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.” It still all seemed so unreal. “When did you buy this monstrosity?”

He looked down at me, an inscrutable expression flickering over his face. “I designed it, Cora, modeled somewhat after a palazzo in Tuscany that Palladio designed for me.”

I let out a puff of air, deflated.

“I forget,” I said. “I know, but at the same time.... I must seem like such a child to you.”

“All humans do. I can’t remember being as young as a human.
Thinking
as young as any human.” He shook his head.

“How can this work, then?” I asked, my mind revolving inevitably back to the bond that was between us. “You. Me. Everything.”

“It just will, Cora.” He raked his fingers through his still-damp hair. “Do you think you’re the only one to change?”

We arrived in the foyer. I could hear, faintly, the sound of the orchestra still playing below, and the butler materialized with my jacket and a long wool coat for Dorian. I shrugged mine on.

“You just accept everything. How can you do that?” I demanded.

His gaze was piercing. “Not everything. But I don’t reject happiness just because it doesn’t match my expectations.”

Dorian turned away at that, striding out the door that the butler held open, and I was left to follow in his wake.

Happiness. What he offered me wasn’t happiness. It was a bondage of the mind. If I couldn’t feel anything except contentment, that contentment couldn’t be real.

Could it?

The courtyard garden was blanketed with snow, only the flagstone walk swept bare. The low boxwoods were white hillocks, and the snow was still coming down, flakes slipping around the neck of my jacket to melt against my skin.

Dorian stalked between the walls of holly. When I passed through, I saw the car at the curb and stopped.

“What is that?” I asked. It was all angles and edges, a dark color that seemed to suck in the light.

“Lamborghini Murciélago,” he said, swinging open the passenger door. He treated me to a narrow look. “It means ‘bat.’”

“Subtle, as usual,” I said, ducking in. He shut the door. The seat was narrower than those in the Bentley, with a wide, complicated-looking console between the driver and passenger.

I looked at Dorian as he swung in, a thought striking me. “Vampires can’t really...I mean, real ones....”

“No, agnates cannot transform into bats,” he said dryly, “any more than we turn into dust in sunlight or at the touch of holy water. Another human myth.”

“I didn’t think you did,” I said a little stiffly. “I just wanted to make sure.”

“Hmm,” he said, a smile playing at the edges of his lips, and I realized that I’d been baited as he pulled away from the curb, the car leaping forward at the lightest touch.

This new side of Dorian, this lighter side, always took me by surprise. It would appear from nowhere, then disappear as quickly as a rock dropped into a pond.

“I have another question,” I said.

“Yes?”

“It’s about the woman with two cognates.”

“Veronica.” Even in the streetlight, the disapproval was clear on Dorian’s face.

“Her,” I agreed. “The other agnates didn’t seem to like her very much.”

“Even the more depraved currents among agnatic society believe that it is not in good taste to continue killing when one already has a cognate, if for no other reason than because you might take a cognate that perhaps could have bonded to another,” Dorian said.

“But she did it.”

“Veronica enjoys flaunting our customs.”

“It’s possible, I mean.”

“Very possible,” he agreed as he took a turn smoothly onto New Hampshire.

“Does that mean that if Etienne had bitten me, I would have bonded to him, instead?”

He shrugged. “No one knows. No one can know. With my research, I’ve been able to determine that most humans will never bond to any agnate, no matter what the circumstances. But though I hope to narrow the one-in-one-hundred further, it appears that there are factors at play that cannot be accounted for by mere blood compatibility—which means that no human could bond to every agnate.”

“So we might really be made for each other,” I said. “Sort of.”

He kept his gaze fixed on the road. “It seems more and more likely. It can’t be tested directly, though, even if anyone would risk it. Once you’re bonded to one agnate, you can never be bonded to another.”

“Do you still want to, you know, bite other people?” I asked hesitantly. “Like, other human women?”

“No,” he said flatly. “Veronica does it just because she can.”

“And when she bonded again?” I pursued. “What does she feel for her second cognate?”

“It is a bond,” he said simply. “So she feels the same toward both.”

“Love?” I said dubiously.

“I don’t know that she is capable of love,” he said. “But whatever she can feel, she feels equally.”

I looked up at his face, all shadows and highlights in the streetlights. His face had settled back into the impassive expression that he usually wore—no more open smiles, no soft glances. It made my heart ache, and I tried not to think about why.

“And you?” I asked, speaking before I could stop myself. “Are you capable of loving someone?”

He turned to look at me. “To the ends of the earth.”

I bit my lip and hugged myself, hard.

W
hen we arrived at the University of Maryland, Dorian pulled into the parking lot instead of stopping at the curb outside my apartment building. In response to my quizzical look, he just motioned to a scrap of paper on the dashboard and said, “I’ll walk you up. I have a daily permit.”

Uncomfortably, I remembered that Geoff, my human not-quite-boyfriend, had said something similar only a week—and a lifetime—before.

Geoff.
What was I going to do about Geoff? I looked at Dorian, and I couldn’t seem to even keep the two of them in my mind at the same time.

He parked, and I popped open my door automatically as he was still circling the car. Dorian caught the door and closed it after me. He extended his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I took it, the familiar thrill going through me, and we began walking toward the building.

It was strange, him being there. It seemed wrong. Dorian belonged to his top-floor Baltimore office and his great old house in Georgetown. He didn’t belong here, on the College Park campus, stepping up onto the sidewalks I traveled every day to class.

I wasn’t sure if it was because Dorian was too real for the university or the university was too real for him. Either way, I was feeling my worlds collide, and it definitely wasn’t comfortable.

It hadn’t hit me the other day when we’d come here with Clarissa and I’d packed a bag to take back to Dorian’s mansion. Maybe the paparazzi djinn lurking in a parallel dimension had something to do with it. That day had been too chaotic and confusing, a madness that had begun the day before with the attempt on my life.

I swiped my access card to get into the building and hit the button for the fourth floor. We stepped into the elevator, and I let it rise in silence. There he was, Dorian, my vampire, standing in the elevator to my apartment. And this time, I had all but invited him.