Beloved Vampire (51 page)

You have an aptitude for it, because I’ve let the bond grow between us. If I was being more honest with you than I should be, I’d say I don’t think I did it consciously.” When she took another step toward him, he shook his head, stilling her.

“If I keep letting that bond strengthen, it would become even deeper, until you would feel as if you rode inside the protection of my own soul. I’ve never allowed the bond with Amara and Enrique to progress to that stage. For one thing, it wouldn’t be fair. I want them to enjoy their love with one another, and while what I demand of them is certainly unconventional for a marriage, there are certain lines I respect. Because I remember what it was to have that utter sense of bonding.”

And because he couldn’t bear to share that with another, ever again
, she thought. The acknowledging flicker of his eyes was reflected in the pang that went through her heart.

“Now,” he continued in a voice that became chilling, prickling gooseflesh on her arms, “imagine Raithe with that power over you.

How he could intensify your tortures, your fears. He could have done it for the centuries of your life, because, short of steel driven through your heart, nothing would have killed you. Knowing that, it’s a miracle he held off giving you the third mark as long as he did. But I suspect watching your terror grow over the anticipation of it was giving him a sadistic fix he wanted to milk as long as possible.”

Jessica swallowed. “What does this have to do with Farida?” There was no moon tonight, she noted. As the night deepened, only the torchlight ringing the balcony gave light. The ocean had disappeared, only the rushing sound of it on the salt-laden breeze indicating its presence. But he could see it, she knew, because vampires could see many things humans didn’t see.

“Let’s go down to the garden,” Mason said abruptly. “I’d prefer to be there.” Rising, he gestured toward the stairs. When Jessica hesitated, his gaze flickered. “It doesn’t have to be tonight, Jess. If you’d rather not . . .”

“No. I asked, and you’re willing to tell me. If I don’t do it now, you’ll likely change your mind again and never tell me.” She forced a smile. “And if I agree to Lord Brian’s serum, I won’t remember whatever awful thing you’re about to tell me anyway, right?”

“Correct.”

She hated that flat tone, the way his face could go so blank. But she preceded him down the stairs, noting he stayed close enough to provide her a steadying arm in the darkness, but otherwise didn’t touch her. An ominous tension was gathering around him.

He took her to one of her favorite places, the fountain with the horse sculpture. After he seated her on the wall, inside a cloud of cooling mist, he moved to a bench, sitting alone. When he said nothing for several moments, Jessica warred between waiting him out and giving him a gentle prod. “I noticed you don’t have any pictures of her.”

Mason shook his head. “Images of living beings were a sin against her faith. I honored that, and I never needed them, anyway. She is in my mind, always.” Abruptly, he stood, paced away and leaned against a tree, staring out into the darkness. “She was pure, delicate. I never should have been overwhelmed that way. I felt responsible, just for loving her, but I was helpless not to. I thought I could resist, until the day when she washed my feet.” A muscle flexed in his jaw.

“I know you’re still coming to terms with it in yourself and in others, Jess, but a vampire is irresistibly drawn to willing, loving submission. She was as innocent as a jasmine bloom, but some part of her knew the things that would lower my guard. When she knelt at my feet that night, I was tempted to spirit her away then and say to hell with any of it.”

“You made her your servant, but you married her.” Knowing vampires as she did, it still amazed Jessica to say it aloud, to see him acknowledge it.

“She wanted to be bound to me as closely as was possible, and once she found out about third servants, she pretty much demanded that.” He lifted a shoulder. “As with most things concerning her, I capitulated. I was weak. But it never crossed my mind not to marry her.”

He looked toward her. “In many different cultures, even yours historically, the bond between husband and wife was not so very different. The wife was asked to honor and obey, the man to honor and cherish. She belonged to him and served his needs, but she also could rely on him for care and protection of hers. And this was three hundred years ago, in a highly patriarchal culture,
habiba.

Marrying her was not necessarily antithetical to the relationship between vampire and servants.”

His voice softened, his eyes distant. “I knew if I didn’t marry her, it would fester in her mind, a wound suggesting she was what her father labeled her. I wouldn’t tolerate that.”

“You weren’t weak. What the two of you had wasn’t weak.” Jessica drew his attention from what he was seeing in the dark.

“Farida recorded your love in her journals. That endured, all these years. Whatever my life will become, whatever it is you’re going to tell me, her writings, your love together, gave me the strength to reach this moment.”

She felt it, fiercely. Mason studied her face, his jaw held in that tight set that told her she’d moved something within him. But then he took a seat on the bench again, leaning forward with hands loosely locked between his splayed knees. “If Allah is far more merciful than I deserve, you will feel the same way when I’m done,
habiba
.”

The deadly stillness that settled over him skittered coldness up her spine. The unwavering focus of his preternatural eyes brought to the forefront of her mind the stories about Farida’s village, her family. The decapitated first son, dragged back home behind his camel.

“Prince Haytham betrayed me,” Mason began. “He alone knew where Farida and I were living in the desert. While he was forced by politics and his father to reveal our whereabouts, I could not forgive him, for surely he knew what would happen to her. In my kinder moments, I have thought, perhaps because he knew what I was, he thought that I could elude them. But that is hindsight.”

“You never saw him again? Never spoke to him?”

He didn’t shift. Not even a facial muscle twitched, reminding her forcibly that the male she faced was not human. “I killed him,
habiba.
I killed everyone involved with her death. Prince Haytham, his father. Farida’s father, her brothers. I left no man in the camp alive. Even the women . . . those who spit on her, threw things at her, cursed her dishonor, I killed them as well.”

Jessica’s breath caught in her throat, her fingers closing into tense balls on her knees. There was no emotion in his voice. Just complete detachment. “But it was a male-dominated culture. Even if they didn’t want her to die, they likely had to pretend—”

“I didn’t care. Still don’t. We all make our choices.” His tone made it clear there would be no further discussion on that, cutting off whatever else she might have said. The man who’d held her with such gentle demand had used his hands, all that power, to take female life. Repeatedly, and without remorse. Rationally, she knew a human male was as fragile against a vampire. Yet the core morality of the Mason that Farida had described, that Jessica knew existed, would have been shattered by committing such an atrocity against a female.

Maybe it had shattered, she realized, staring at him. Like the Jessica who had risen from the ashes of Raithe’s brutality, the Mason before her was a different man from the male who’d loved Farida. That core still existed, yet something had cracked it, never to be as strong and resolute in its faith again.

Mason rose and went back to the tree, so his words came over his shoulder, brought by the fitful breeze. “Farida’s father was a smart man, even if he was a fanatical traditionalist. He’d sensed the same thing Farida had, that there was something different about me. He employed the talents of what you would call a shaman, or wizard. My life”—his lip curled in disdain—“was spared only because that wizard didn’t exactly know what I was. He concluded I was some sort of djinn and as such, he assumed my essence couldn’t be killed, only contained. He also decided I had some kind of mental bond with Farida.”

Jessica studied the pale line of his shoulders, the way strands of his hair lifted and swept across them with the movement of the breeze. Other than that, he’d gone motionless again.

“He created a spell, a complex, impressive one. With it, they were able to ambush me in the desert at night, not far from home. The wizard wove the spell over me so I couldn’t move, then they wrapped me in chains and dragged me, with ten horses and a fifty-foot length of chain between them and me, back to her father’s village.”

“Mason.” She began to rise, but he made a sharp noise, stilling her.

“Stay where you are,
habiba
. Let me tell it here, to the dark, where tales like this should always be told. And it is not I who deserve your pity. Not even an ounce’s worth.” One arm lifted, his palm bracing against the tree’s rough bark, fingers digging in.

“She was at the cave. I tried to reach out to her with my mind, but that damnable spell blocked the connection. I nearly lost my mind then. I didn’t know it was just the beginning. Because though I couldn’t reach her, I could still hear her every thought.”

He glanced up at the bark, noted a nocturnal spider crawling down the trunk, moving over his fingers. Keeping them still, he watched the creature’s progress. “She was making her dinner. Tuning into her thoughts was always like a lullaby,
habiba
. She was happier in that cave than she’d ever been in her whole life, and it was the truth for me as well. I felt such peace with her. Perhaps it made me stay longer than I should have there. I should have spirited her away to my family home right away, the night she came away with me, but I didn’t want to take her from her desert too soon, hoping her father might eventually see reason, so she could have us both . . .”

He straightened, cleared his throat, though he stayed averted from her. “She sensed something was wrong. My horse escaped during my capture, and so when he arrived at the cave, her panic, and worry . . . I thought that was unbearable.” He gave a harsh laugh, the laugh one heard in a graveyard in the darkest part of night. It made Jess shiver again. She was afraid her distress might stop his story, so she tried to quell it, but Mason’s mind was elsewhere now.

“I expected them to track the horse to her, which is why I panicked when I couldn’t warn her. But the wizard suspected I had enchantments on the cave that could destroy them all. He said, because of my hellish bond on her soul, she would come to me, and then they would have us both. On that part at least, he was correct.” The bitter anger in his voice was undisguised.

“I taught her how to track. I thought it would enhance her ability to survive in the desert. Better I’d have left her innocent, defenseless. She realized I’d been taken to her father’s camp, but she came anyway. You know the next part, how she rode into the camp disguised as a man and then declared herself, and her love for me.”

Jessica couldn’t tear her attention away as he squatted. Running his fingers over the soft, willowy branch of a jasmine bush, he disrupted the fragile flowers. “I wish I’d taken more time in that final moment to really look at her, to appreciate what she did.

Farida never thought of herself as brave; did you know that? But everything she did, from the moment she met me, was an act of courage.” He hesitated then, and Jessica’s fingers scraped stone. “She said I made her feel so safe, she wasn’t afraid of anything.”

Oh, Mason
. She closed her eyes. She’d been irritated with him for not telling her this story, and now she realized she’d been as immature as a child, thinking her parent was depriving her of a story simply to be mean. She was starting to understand the cost of his telling, but she knew she had to hear it. Opening her eyes again, she let him see he had her full attention.

“My horse, Bastion, was exceptionally large. Seventeen hands high and fractious. I’d always been cautious about her handling him.

She rode in as confident as a Berber raider, back straight and hands firm on his mouth. No fear at all when her father came out to meet her. She got off the horse, prostrated herself at his feet and begged for the right to die with me. As my servant, she knew if I died, she would die, but she wanted to be close to me when we went.”

He straightened again. “They had me chained and guarded in the middle of the camp, so dawn would have ended me. But it was midnight when she arrived. The lovely, idealistic little fool saved my life.”

As he turned his head to look at her, Jessica met his gaze briefly, but then he swung away, paced the length of the garden, came back. When he put a booted foot on the edge of the bench, seeing the tension in his jaw, she thought he might smash it to bits, but he didn’t.

“They’d gagged me, so I couldn’t tell her they’d blocked our link. We were never allowed to touch. When they put a hood over my head and dragged me away, I heard her cries to me, but I could not answer her. Even on her way to the village, she was trying to talk to me in my mind. To her, it was as if we were thousands of miles away from one another. While to me, it was as if she was right before me, just beyond the grasp of my fingertips.”

Dread was gathering in Jessica’s stomach, an understanding of where this was leading. What Mason was intimating was worse than horrible. Thanks to his earlier, chilling demonstration of the third mark, she was in a position now to understand, more than she had been before.

“If they had ungagged me, I would have told them how to kill me. If I could have found a way to stake my heart, take off my own head, set my flesh on fire, I would have done it. But I was never given that chance. They took me out to a pit they’d prepared, threw me into it wrapped in the chains, and buried me under rock, reinforcing the spell over it. The irony was, they finished the task barely an hour before dawn broke and would have ended me.”

Mason was on the move again, making a circle around the fountain, moving in and out of the shadows. Instead of following him, Jess closed her eyes, listened to his voice, the shift between helpless male rage and the raw sound of loss, and grief.