Biting the Bride (17 page)

He stayed well back on the beach, watching her as she came toward him. He had a blanket in his hands, which he threw over her shoulders.

“Where’d you get the blanket?” she asked.

“I broke into someone’s car,” he said.

“Are we allowed to do that?” She rubbed her hair with the blanket.

He laughed. “You mean is it against our laws? ”

“I don’t know what I meant. I don’t know what I meant by ‘we,’ for that matter.”

He scooped her up, blanket and all, tucked her into his arms and ran. He glided as if on invisible skis across the beach and the road that led to the bridge. When he reached the forested hill on the other side he took it in leaps like a deer or a mountain goat, bounding in a zigzagging pattern around the trees and boulders. She had been feeling quite smug about her accomplishments, but this display of dexterity made her humble again, especially given that he was carrying her as nonchalantly as she carried her briefcase.

At the top of the hill was Fort Point, built during the Civil War to deter a Confederate attack that never came. Jacob paused briefly in front of its red brick façade, contemplating the arched windows marching in regulation across its surface. Sunni started to put her feet down, but he just tucked her under one arm and used the other hand to scale the building. When they reached the roof he placed her down gently on a pile of dry leaves. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

She fell on her back, laughing harder than she had since she was a child. She laughed until tears poured out of her eyes and she could scarcely catch her breath. Jacob leaned over her, watching with a bemused expression.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

She shook her head, desperately trying to form words around her helpless chortles. “It’s … not … funny …” she choked.

“Oh, I see,” he said, although he clearly didn’t.

Finally she managed to control herself, although the laughter still bubbled up like hiccups. “It’s fantastic, don’t you see, Jacob?”

He tapped his chin with one finger. “Fantastic. As in wonderful, or unbelievable?”

“Yes,” she breathed. Her heart was still pounding, and her breathing was shallow and quick, but it was no longer a consequence of laughing. Now it was an acute awareness of Jacob leaning over her, his dark wavy hair falling across his forehead, his blue eyes reflecting the moonlight. He licked his lips and his pearly teeth glinted with moisture. Her heart lurched. Were those fangs she had glimpsed before he closed his mouth? He moved closer. She felt her face soften, her lips parted, her chest lifted. She moved inexorably toward him, unable to resist even if she wanted to.

“Sunni, I can’t do this,” he said, his voice strangled in his throat. He grabbed her shoulder, but whether it was to pull her forward or push her away she couldn’t tell.

“Yes, you can,” she whispered. “I’m not human. You just saw that. You can’t hurt me.”

“Oh, I can,” he said, still resisting.

“But you won’t.”

He closed the distance between them. Slipping his hand behind her head, he lifted Sunni to him, his mouth meeting hers with force. His other arm encircled her back. She heard and felt a thrumming sound that filled her head and body. Her skin vibrated with its rhythm. It was their hearts beating in unison, as if they had become one being, incapable of existing without the other.

He pulled away, drawing back so that he could look at her.

“Do you want to bite me?” she asked.

He nodded, his face contorted with suppressed desire. “But I don’t want to frighten you, or have you think ill of me.”

“Who do you bite, men or women?”

“Mostly women.”

“How do they respond when you bite them?”

His cheeks flushed and he glanced away. “It is an enjoyable experience, if we desire to make it so. It is part of our predatory adaptation that we can make humans desire to be taken by us.”

“Do me a favor. Don’t ever say predatory adaptation again.”

He smiled. “All right.”

“So go ahead. Do it. I want you to do it.” She pulled him down to her. His lips grazed her neck. She felt her blood rise up to meet him. When his fangs entered her a tremor of pleasure rolled through her body. She shook like a small animal caught by a predator, but he held her tight.

He was correct about the pleasure she would feel, but he hadn’t warned her of its intensity. She was poised on a precipice, exquisitely balanced between life and death, experiencing every sensation magnified a thousand times. Every nerve ending in her body had come to life and she felt excitement from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes. No body part had primacy; she was one organ of pure sensation. Yet deep at the center of all of this sensation was a core of emotion. She felt herself connecting to Jacob in a deep and indescribable way, felt their hearts entwining as firmly and as surely as their bodies. As Jacob drank, Sunni felt her life turning on its axis. Whatever happened after this, she would never be the same.

Chapter 14

Jacob ran, dodging eucalyptus trees with bases wider than a car, leaping over fallen branches and shrubbery, his feet barely touching the ground. Sunni was asleep on the roof of the fort, and he couldn’t just sit there and watch her. Every muscle in his body was taut as a bowstring, and he hoped to release the tension with a bit of hunting. But even as he ran he obsessed: about what was going to happen next with Richard and the Council, and about his overwhelming desire to take Sunni fully and entirely, body and soul.

He was in pursuit of a six point stag. Every sound registered in his heightened senses, from the tapping of a woodpecker to the grinding of a termite. The stag crashed through the undergrowth, zigzagging wildly in its effort to lose the predator on its tail, but there was no contest between them. Jacob was simply enjoying the hunt, appreciating an opportunity to exert himself. The stag was getting tired, though. It was time to take him down, drinka little bit, and let him go back to the herd. Jacob leaped into the air, feeling buoyant as a bird.

Then, as suddenly as if he’d hit a trip wire, Jacob pulled up short and dropped to the ground, on his feet, but barely. The deer continued to run, unaware in its panic that it was no longer being pursued. Jacob’s fangs dropped, his legs and arms tensed, every nerve stood at attention. He turned toward the sound of footsteps.

Enzo Rizzoli stepped from between two trees, adjusting a wine red tie against a cherry-colored shirt with a hand that sported three rings and a heavy gold bracelet. He and Jacob bowed to each other, performing the greeting that had been standard when each had been alive.

“That was quite a show, Jacob,” Enzo said. “I haven’t seen hunting like that since Napoleon’s time.”

“You mock me,” Jacob said, but mildly.

Enzo clapped him on the back. “You
were
rather slow. ”

“I was taking my time, enjoying the chase,” Jacob grumbled. “What do you want, anyway?”

“Scipio wants to see you,” Enzo said.

“Where is he? ”

“He is very close.”

They walked to the edge of the woods, where a black Escalade idled in an empty parking lot. Jacob could see two other vampires inside: a tall female with chestnut hair was driving, and in the passenger seat sat a blond male whose highly developed musculature made his suit jacket look like it was stuffed full of potatoes. He was wearing dark glasses, even though the sun was only a glowing half sphere rising behind the eastern hills. Around the vampire’s neck was a ring of angry red scar tissue.

“What happened to the young yeoman?” Jacob asked.

“Lazarus used a chain on him.” Enzo sighed. “Poor boy. He didn’t even know about such things. He thought by becoming a vampire he’d be invincible.”

“Where’s Scipio?” Jacob asked, feeling adrenaline pump through his limbs and torso. He had no intention of fighting Enzo and the other vampires, but his body didn’t seem to know that.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Enzo replied.

“Come now,
ragazzo,
what’s going on here?”

Jacob knew that Enzo couldn’t lie to him. They had been friends since they were young yeomen together in Europe. At about the same age, both had been forcibly converted by an unscrupulous vampire. In Enzo’s case it was his own mother, who had turned her whole family in a hopeless attempt at preserving the domestic bliss she had known as a human. Both had been military men, and both had joined the Council to restore order to a life that no longer made any sense.

Enzo sighed. “You are summoned before the Council. They are meeting in the secret place.”

Jacob thought of Sunni, asleep in the leaves on the roof. “I’m in the middle of something.”

Enzo smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

“Do you know what they want? ”

He shrugged, pushing out his lower lip. “It is not for me to say.”

Jacob climbed into the backseat. The car headed east, with the beach on one side and rows of boxy, pastel-colored houses on the other, everything aglow in the fiery light of the rising sun. The woman vampire drove very fast, barely applying the brakes, weaving in and out of traffic, both on her own side and in the opposing lane. Several times she avoided obstacles by driving on the sidewalk. In a human this would have been dangerous, but vampire reflexes were so fast that the other cars seemed like wagons drawn by mules. There was the possibility of being pulled over by the police, but then she would just glamour the officer and be on her way. It took less than two minutes to arrive at the Palace of Fine Arts, a gorgeous beaux arts temple left over from the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915. The female vampire dropped all her passengers off without a word and sped away.

“Cloak yourself,” Enzo said, but Jacob already had. The young vampire was having trouble. He flickered in and out like a dying lightbulb until Enzo thumped him on the back.

“Concentrate, Patrick,” he growled. “Your mind is distracted.”

Patrick stopped walking and squared his shoulders. In an instant he was fully cloaked. Two joggers passed within inches of him, causing him to jump back to avoid a collision. The three vampires skirted the pond that flanked the Palace and entered the center of the monument. Enzo smiled as he looked up at the circle of Corinthian columns, each one adorned with a maiden in Roman dress, splayed over the top of the column as if she was resting from the climb. Jacob knew the Palace, in its ruined splendor, reminded Enzo of his native Rome.

“Buona sera,
ladies,” Enzo murmured to the statues. He led the small procession to a cement wall flanked by two columns. He felt around the mossy, pockmarked wall until his hand found its quarry. He pulled, and a door appeared. He waited for the other two men to enter and then he pulled the door closed behind them. They were at the top of a narrow, damp staircase that descended straight into the earth. There was no light, but none was required.

They walked down the stairs and along a low-ceilinged hallway. Eventually they emerged into a vast, circular room that roughly mimicked the dimensions of the monument above them. There was an empty area in the center, tiled with marble, surrounded by ascending rows of seats, benches for spectators and chairs for the members of the Council.

It was a small assembly. Four vampires sat in the lowest tier, facing a platform supporting a chair and a lectern. A glass and a pitcher of water sat on the lectern, as if they were expecting a speaker who would lecture at length. Jacob hoped he wasn’t the speaker they were waiting for, for he had very little to say in his own defense. He was a farmer, after all, not a lawyer.

At the far left of the group was Scipio. Even though he and Enzo were both Italian, Scipio possessed none of Enzo’s sartorial flair, as evidenced in the nondescript dark suit and white shirt he was wearing. He appeared as tired as a vampire was capable of, but he sat ramrod straight with his head forward, the very picture of dignity and nobility. He gave Jacob a small nod of acknowledgment. Next to him was a vampire named Nasim. He was Moroccan, if Jacob remembered correctly, and was dressed in traditional garb, a galabiya, its mandarin collar edged with gold braid. Nasim had been vampireborn in the mid-nineteenth century and had risen quickly in the ranks of the Council because he was a consummate negotiator and harbored no allegiances toward any of the old European vampire clans. Nasim was leaning over, whispering to a woman Jacob didn’t recognize.

It was rare to encounter a vampire who had been turned in the twilight of their years, as this woman had been. Jacob didn’t know the reason for this: perhaps a lack of access or simply a lack of interest. After all, humans were usually turned for romantic or sentimental reasons, and it was the rare old man or woman who was capable of making a young heart flutter. The female’s wrinkles had been erased by the conversion process, but her shoulder-length hair was as white as a swan’s down. She was slender, pale even by vampire standards, and wore a plain black dress topped by a thick shawl.

It was cold in the underground chamber, and although vampires couldn’t be harmed by cold, it bothered most of them, especially the ones who had lived before central heating. Jacob remembered too well the winters in Providence, when his wife drew the curtains on their bed and they huddled together under their blankets. It was some-times so cold that they couldn’t sleep for shivering. In the morning frost would rime the insides of the windows and the water in the washbasin would be frozen solid.

The last Council member was a man Jacob knew well. Looking at Isaiah Eddington was like staring into some strange mirror, in which you could see not only your own image, but also the reflection of your whole family. It was a mirror that also reflected back your sins. In Isaiah Jacob saw his own face, tinted with the African blood of the slave who was Isaiah’s mother. He had Jacob’s aquiline nose and blue eyes, but his lips were fuller and his skin was the color of caramel. Isaiah didn’t acknowledge Jacob, only stared straight ahead as he waited for the proceedings to begin.

Scipio stood as the three vampires reached the platform. “Jacob, please take a seat,” he said, in a formal tone.