The Mark of the Vampire Queen (37 page)

“My lady, it's time. You need to drink now.”

She raised her head, feeling Brian's light touch. As she heard the terrible words, she met Jacob's eyes, inches from hers.

“No,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears anew, thinking of life draining out of that clear gaze. She knew what death looked like there, the cloudy glassiness. She couldn't bear the idea. How had he come to mean so much in such a little time? She was sure everyone in the room thought it the distorted effect of the disease. Thomas thought it was because they shared a link that extended far beyond the past handful of months. But her head was filled with everything Jacob had said or done during the short time in this life they'd had together. From the very first he'd made an impression like a launched arrow, and the shaft of his presence had embedded itself more firmly every moment since then.

She didn't care that they saw her tears. Brian was shifting, obviously warring with the need to press her and the automatic reaction of their kind to draw back from an emotional display, give her the courtesy of privacy. She felt him exchange a glance with Mason, and Mason start to step closer to her again.

“Do not push me on this,” she said.
You can lead a horse to water…
The menace in her voice was enough to push them back. She kept her gaze on Jacob's suffering form, those beautiful blue eyes no longer able to pay attention to what was going on in the room. He was just staring at her as if memorizing every feature in her face, just like the first time she'd seen him at the Eldar.

“I almost walked out that night,” she said. “Impulsive, brash man. You know that?”

I knew you wouldn't leave. You wanted me too much.

The trace of humor that flickered through his eyes broke her heart further. His voice in her mind had become as erratic and harsh as his breathing now. She laid her hand on his chest, watched it shake with his movements. “Liar,” she whispered. “You were nervous. You lie to your Mistress now, even on your…”

“Deathbed.” He finished the sentence when she couldn't. Threading his trembling fingers in her hair, he began to apply downward pressure to her nape, even as she began to resist. “Please…my lady. Come let me nourish you…once more, give you life. It will be…my honor.”

He sucked in an abrupt, laboring breath. His body began to ripple, the precursor to a convulsion. His hand clutched involuntarily against her throat and dug into the rotting skin there.
Hurry. Please, my lady.

The muscles of her face were going to shatter with the force of the grief that swept her. With a cry of animal pain, she pressed her face to his throat and bit, cupping his neck to hold him, to convey her presence, her awareness of his sacrifice even as she took what he offered. His life for her own.

The serum was there, a taste that made the blood even more metallic and somewhat bitter, interfering with the taste of Jacob she loved, that she wanted uncorrupted. She remembered her first taste of him had been spoiled by the medicine that had staved off the virus for a while. The beginning was the end. Full circle. She'd seen that proven throughout her life. Now she knew it held an important key, if she could struggle through the agony of this moment. Beginnings and endings…Beginnings.

Her hand found his other hand, lying across his bare stomach. Their fingers intertwined once more. She gripped hard, and he gripped back. She knew she was giving herself an unwelcome barometer, for that grip would slacken as life left him.

No one lived up to expectations, most especially herself. But once the soul could find a way to swim out of that defeatist quagmire, it would reach a quieter plain. See someone as they really were, not as the artist intended him, not the interpretation of the viewer, but what he was, the simple truth of a soul…A still place where things were simply as they were.

There was a poignant beauty in the finding of that reality, because so much of life was seen through the mind-numbing, deafening cacophony of illusion. Hell was noise, and Hell could close in every day.

In the silence that descended upon her, the pain was just a backdrop, a roaring wall like the water at the mall that evening when she gave Jacob the second mark. It stilled everything outside of where she sat next to him. The only thing that lived was her and the man on the table.

A soul is a soul.
Thomas's words.

Jacob was Jacob, whether in the body of a samurai guard, a knight or a young man carrying both mantles as his legacy. Even as he spun the tires of his bike and made Bran chase him, Bushido had been his life and his philosophy, whether he knew it or not. The way of the warrior, spiritually, physically.

Serious, amused, sometimes even shy or naive, though he would be disgruntled to hear her think of him that way. He would apologize for none of it, only challenging himself to be and do more for her well-being. No, he wasn't appropriate to be a servant. Not by the definition that existed in the vampire world. But when the expectations fell away, disappointed, there he stood inside her, everything she'd ever wanted. He also was exactly what she needed, and she wished she'd realized it sooner, so she wouldn't have made him fight so hard to earn her realization of it.

She was a queen, and a vampire. Daughter of a Fey lord. She had her compass, and it did not answer to anyone surrounding her now, only to the man whose life she was taking, who'd given it freely. To whom she'd given her heart in a way she hadn't to anyone else, not in her entire long life. As a vampire, she didn't possess the humility that mortals with their short life spans had to cultivate. She expected things to occur the way she wanted them to occur, and by God she wasn't going to accept this outcome.

“My lady—”

“Can it hurt her, to keep drinking?”

“Perhaps she needs the additional strength…She was so close to the end…”

Disparate voices, worried murmurs, irritations only. The lesion on her hand disappeared. The one on her breast closed, healing into smooth skin. She felt the burns on her face receding like their worries. Their awe and amazement vaguely reached her, as did Brian's sense of triumph.

She released the serum from her fangs, felt it speed through Jacob's body and merge with the antivirus serum as she opened herself to what was going on inside him, his body nearly drained of its blood. It caught her heart in a fist, the feel of those systems failing, the process of death she knew intimately, but she also saw the serum winding through those passages, quicksilver mixing with the blue among empty passages that had been filled with blood she'd drained from him. Just a little more…

The effect of Brian's potion was rocketing through her like a hallucinogenic, only in reverse. The clarity of her reality was now so sharp it was as if everyone in the room but her and Jacob were moving and speaking in extreme slow motion.

His fingers were loose. No responding pressure as she held them. Somewhere his soul was hovering, wanting to go to the place he deserved, but he would still want to see he'd done what he swore to do. Protect her to the end.

But I haven't released you. You are still my servant, and I command you to come back to me, Jacob. I won't let you go.

Silence. A void. Her soul suddenly emptied as if it had been tipped over, obscenely quick. She knew what having a servant die felt like. Thomas had been the worst of all those she'd lost, until now. A never-ending emptiness, the very definition of loss.

What she wanted didn't appear to matter. She looked, searched desperately within him for any indication, but now her serum glittered in his system like malachite on rock. Inanimate, sparkling but inert.

“He's gone.” Debra's voice, soft, compassionate. The stethoscope was pressing over his heart, just above their linked hands. His hand was heavy, wanting to fall, drop away from hers. Lyssa wanted to kill Debra, silence her forever for saying those words. “Lady Lyssa, it's over.”

Lyssa lifted her head, her fangs marked with the remnants of his blood. Traces of ethereal silver mixed with it.

“She…” Uthe's eyes widened, flicked to Jacob. “She turned him.”

“She tried to turn him.” Mason stepped forward before panic could sweep the room. “She was unsuccessful. The man is dead.”

A pause, where she could hear her heartbeat. One, two. Thump. Thump. Something was…odd. The physical pain was gone, but she wasn't going to survive the tearing agony of Jacob's death. He was gone, no longer in her mind. She was alone. Completely alone. Something was dying…something important but she couldn't seem to care…

Energy exploded through her. Lyssa arched back, screaming as the transformation clamped down on her, tore her into pieces. The dress split. Her fingers, rising to untangle herself from it, lengthened with the razor-sharp claws of her talons.

It was as if by emptying her reserve of conversion fluid into Jacob's blood, there had been a reaction between Brian's serum and hers that had kicked back through her own system and overloaded it. Her Fey form was the only one strong enough to take the reaction. Like Mason and the Council, her own body had ignored her wishes and was forcing her to grasp at life.

Whenever she transformed, the exponential melding of her two forms was something she could control with careful precision, as Jacob well knew from the night she'd taken him on the forest floor. She'd transformed portions of herself between human and Fey as needed without effort.

Not now. Her other self literally exploded out of her vampire-humanoid form, tearing her flesh to ribbons, tearing screams from her throat as she inadvertently dropped Jacob's lifeless fingers. His hand flopped to the side, his blue eyes staring, glazed over. She snarled, her fangs lengthening to curve over her chin. With serpent-quick movements she lunged onto the table as Brian started forward with Uthe and Belizar. Now they stopped as she hissed, going to a crouch.

“You will not touch him.”

Her wings cut from her back as if coming into the room from a different reality. Ten feet from tip to tip, she filled a good portion of the chamber with her physical presence, though the mental impact was far more considerable. The Council members were up against the wall.

“Holy Christ,” Brian murmured. “My lords, I didn't take into account…There was no time. She isn't full vampire. This must be a mutation of the serum because of her Fey blood. My lady, stay calm. We can figure out what has happened…”

The wildness of her soul manifested itself, throwing off all yokes of restraints. She had nothing left to lose. She laughed, the rasping sound of a harpy's deadly hiss whispering through the trees at a soulless hour of night. “I am calmer than you can imagine, Lord Brian. I am as calm as death.”

For years, she'd exercised rigid control over her words and actions to achieve her goals for her own species, to protect her servant, to try to love a husband unable to accept love. Always knowing what was expected of her, never resenting it, knowing the advantages that power gave her to live her life as she chose. Until now. They would know what it meant to try and wrest power from a queen.

Lord Belizar's eyes narrowed. “It is not a mutation, Lord Brian.”

Cocking her head, she placed her claws on either side of Jacob's head, covering him completely, like an eagle guarding her young. “If you are clever enough to figure that out, Lord Belizar, you are clever enough to let me take my servant without attempting to molest me further.” Her voice was a rough growl.

“Lady Lyssa,” Helga said, “you cannot convert a servant. It breaks our most basic law. And there is no telling what he could be, particularly converting him with the serum in his blood.”

“She's no longer Lady Lyssa. Perhaps she never was.” This from Carola.

“She is your queen,” Mason snapped, despite the fact his attention was riveted upon her, his expression one of fascination and amazement.

“She just abdicated.” Belizar threw out an arm, gesturing angrily in her direction. “Look at her. She has deceived us, for how many years? We cannot follow one such as this. Nor will anyone follow a Council that does. As head of this Council, I order her execution for her deception. Her servant's body should be burned and so should hers.”

“Over my dead body.” Mason moved so he was at her side.

The Council shifted, muttering. “With all due respect, my lord…” It almost made Lyssa laugh, Brian observing courtesy when the air was rife with barely suppressed violence. “A human body cannot take the serum. She has not converted him. I tell you without doubt that Jacob is dead. I could study the effect of the serum on him. If you burn him—”

Lyssa blinked. “You think I would let you dissect him?” The harsh menace of her voice in this form would have been intimidating even if she was in a mild mood, so she appreciated that he squared his shoulders and met her gaze when he began to respond.

“My lady—”

“She is not to be addressed thus.” Belizar was practically frothing at the mouth. It took visible effort for him to look at her. Lyssa remembered how Jacob had looked at her the first time she'd changed. Touching her sleek, muscular gray skin with wonder. Making her shiver with longing.

“We have not voted,” Lady Helga said. Over the shouts and arguments, in which she could smell the tension moving to boiling point, Lyssa met Brian's confused but not unsympathetic eyes. But they would not get Jacob's body. Would not set fire to it. Would not cut it up. None of them.

He was cold. All the steps of mortal death, followed by the slow rot of his corpse. The blue eyes would decay and disappear. How could God bear the inevitable end to one of His most beautiful sculptures? Did none of it matter? Were all the noble principles simply the fantasies of living beings who assigned them to a Divinity who didn't care? If that Divinity didn't care that Jacob's body had been destroyed, then Lyssa couldn't imagine It would care if she turned the walls in here red with the blood of the very Council she'd created.