Blood Deep (17 page)

She was alone now—utterly alone. She could not go back to her brother and his family, or Aunt Eugenia—not without putting them at risk. All she’d had were dreams and fantasies of Blackthorne. Fantasies of love and marriage. Of hope. That’s what he had been for her—hope she could have a normal woman’s life.

But she couldn’t. Not here. Not anymore. It appeared all the dark, scandalous rumors about Blackthorne were true.

She shuddered as she looked around the dungeon. This did not arouse her. It made her sad.

Had Blackthorne sensed, even in her letters, that she was not normal? Was that what had drawn him to her? Or had it been that he’d known, once she was here, she would have had no escape?

Zayan gently cupped her cheek. “I am sorry. I know what the betrayal of a loved one feels like.” Below the dark slashes of his brows, his beautiful eyes revealed anguish, and her heart gave a small leap. He caressed her face and brushed his thumb to her lower lip, making it tingle.

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His mouth lowered toward hers and she arched up. Wanting his kiss. Needing it.

She fell forward and her hand touched his chest above his heart—

They were sleeping. He padded softly into the chamber
in which the boy reposed. He could not assign this task to
anyone else. He could not put himself in anyone else’s
power. Wearing a slave’s robes, he had entered the house.

He was believed to be far away, on his way home from
battle. It would never be suspected that his was the hand
that struck—

The boy stirred. He was small and frail. It would be an
easy task. A hand to the mouth to muffle a scream, a quick
slash with the blade. As his hand clamped down over the
face, the boy’s eyes opened, showing first confusion, then
recognition, then—with the wisdom of the young—frantic
fear and the knowledge of impending death.

Blood sprayed. He had pulled a dark cloak on top of the
servant robes. This he would discard when he was finished.

There. It was done. All he had to do now was find the
girl—

“Miranda?” Arms surrounded her; hard muscle pressed against her back.

Blinking, Miranda focused on the present, not the past. The horrific image had disappeared. She had fallen against Zayan’s broad chest and he had embraced her. She heard one slow, languorous beat of his heart. Then she dazedly remembered what she had seen and struggled to break free.

She had seen what had happened to Lukos. Was she seeing what Zayan had done?

He let her go and she glared at him, hurt and furious. Her 138 /
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heart must be thumping as loud as a drum. “You told me you were a Roman general. Is that the truth? In which case, you have blood on your hands.”
Her
blood was moving like mud through her veins. “Did you kill children?”

Zayan had lit a torch in the cell with his magic lights, and his eyes were mirrors in the wavering light. Reflective eyes hid so much. “I have a great deal of blood on my hands. And though it was said that I fed from children, that I took their blood to keep me eternally young, that was not true. I would never hurt a child.”

His eyes might be shielded, but his words were tired, and his voice held a heavy quality that sounded like regret. A vampire was without a soul, but Eugenia had told her that the “poor creatures” did experience emotion, and that the Royal Society was wrong in its belief that vampires could not feel anything.

Eugenia believed they carried the pain of their mortal lives into their undead existence.

The images she had seen haunted her. She wanted to know what they were. “Were you forced to become a vampire? Or did you willingly become a vampire?” Wouldn’t a general want to embrace immortality? To be able to fight with preternatural strength and never die? “Why did you give up your soul? To win battles?”

“Any man only embraces death when he has nothing left to live for. Even on the battlefields, when the pain is beyond belief, a man will welcome death.”

“Were you dying on the field and you became a vampire to escape?”

“I saw my children dead in their beds and knew I had nothing to live for other than revenge.”

His words, thrown at her without a trace of emotion, stole all the air from her lungs. The small boy she had seen—had that been Zayan’s son? “H-how did they die?”

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“They were murdered. Someone had entered my house and slit their throats.”

Dear God, she had seen it. And she had heard the killer’s thoughts in her head. This had never happened to her before.

She had seen through a murderer’s vicious, coldhearted eyes. The whips and instruments of torture around her dropped away.

They did not matter anymore. “Who murdered your children?”

She was not sure why she was determined to push to find the truth.

His silvery eyes turned oddly black, like the shiny surface of a smooth plane of coal. He turned away from her and contemplated the other whips hanging upon the cell wall. Midnight black and gleaming in the torchlight, his hair rippled around his shoulders. Suddenly, he launched forward and slammed his fist at the wall. Chips of stone flew into the air. He had drilled a three-inch-deep hole with his fist, and Miranda froze at the sight of such rage.

“That is something you do not need to know,” he said, but he did not turn. He ripped several of the whips from the wall and broke the thick handles, scattering them to the ground.

“By the gods, it is like I can see them again—”

She was scared. By touching him and seeing the murders, had she brought the memories back to him? She was afraid to approach him.

“I’ve never known the truth of who did it,” he said. “I became a vampire, possessing unearthly strength and powers, but I could not prove who murdered my children. I believe one of my rival generals had them killed. My innocent children were slaughtered to destroy me. You asked if I became a vampire to escape.

I did—to escape pain.” He turned. “What need had I for a soul?”

“Slaughtered. I am so very . . . sorry.” She had never seen a man look in so much agony—only Lukos when she had witnessed his torture in a vision.

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She had not seen the face of the killer of Zayan’s children because she had seen through his eyes. What would it do to Zayan to tell him what she had seen? It would not help him. And she could offer him no clue to the killer.

He pushed off the wall, and he faced her hollowly. “When immortality and strength were offered to me, I saw I could get the vengeance I craved. That’s why I chose to become a soulless demon, my love. I got my vengeance and thousands of frightened, weak mortals paid the price.”

Before she could respond—before she could think whether she should be angry, or sorry, or outraged by a man who selfishly hurt others to ease his grief—the long echoes of a gong filtered through the dungeon.

“Dinner,” he murmured. “You were denied the chance to eat at the inn. You must be ravenous now.”

It was as though the sound had broken through his anguish.

Pain no longer distorted his features. He was as handsome as ever.

“Dinner? In the middle of the night?” Then she understood.

Zayan had compelled the servants to serve a meal for her.

What did food matter? If only she could have been there for his children. She could have touched them and—

“You are thinking that if you had been there, you would have changed everything,” he said coldly. “You would have given me my children back. You would have stopped my heart from breaking. You would have stopped me from making a pact with the devil. You might have spared so many lives.”

That had been her thought, and he had seen it. “I know it’s impossible, but I don’t deserve your anger for thinking it.” He strode to the door, then turned, waiting for her to follow. But he did not compel her to do it. As with Lukos, she went to him to ask questions. “Has it haunted you for all these years? For centuries?”

She saw a quick flash of anger. He did not want to talk about BLOOD DEEP / 141

it. Which surprised her then, when he said softly, “I can still see the wounds. I can see the pools of blood behind their heads.

But I can’t remember what their faces looked like. I’ve forgotten. I’ve spent almost two thousand years trying to remember, but with each moment, the memory of them becomes harder to grasp. I will forever see them dead. I’ll never again see them as they were alive.”

His words speared her. Pain etched lines around his mouth and slashes of shadow across his forehead. She thought of the shock and the futile anger that had almost drowned her when her older brother had died. Even after she had saved him, terrible fear and grief had consumed her, as though he had died and not lived. She had wanted to do something dangerous and mad to expend all that fury and pain that had no outlet.

If Simon had died, and if someone had appeared and offered to make her a vampire, what might she have done?

You understand . . .

The words echoed in her thoughts. Miranda realized Zayan now stood in front of her. Her hair still rippled with the slight breeze of his impossibly fast movement.

He cupped her cheek again, his bare skin smooth as velvet.

“No magic this time,” he murmured. Then he bent to her mouth.

Aching for his broken heart, his sorrow and pain, she let his mouth cover hers, a mouth that was impossibly warm for a man who should be dead. Zayan was tortured. He had been driven to madness by an unthinkable crime. She saw that Aunt Eugenia had been correct. Zayan had the capacity to feel regret and know sorrow.

She let her lips part, shamelessly encouraging him. Her upper lip bumped his fangs and she felt the prick to her toes. Silky and hot, his tongue touched her lips, sending another jolt of sensation that streaked down through her and seemed to burst into fireworks between her thighs.

His hand tightened on her back, pulling her up to his mouth 142 /
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as his lips ravaged hers and his tongue filled her mouth with heat. Each teasing plunge of his tongue made her pulse between her legs. He kept kissing her and didn’t seem to ever want to leave her mouth.

A sharp clang jolted Miranda back from the kiss. Lukos had thrown the door to the cell wide open. He stared pointedly at her corset and shift—revealed because the cloak had fallen open. Then he snarled, baring his fangs.

Miranda strode down the corridor toward her bedchamber—

and clothes—clutching the fur-lined cloak around her. She felt a ripple of air; then Lukos materialized in front of her and in front of her bedchamber door. His long strides and preternatural strength had easily allowed him to catch, then pass her. He braced his arm on the wall. Bolts of vivid light seemed to flash in his silvery violet eyes.

“You kissed him,” Lukos growled. “You went with him to the dungeons and let him kiss you. You enjoyed it. I heard the rapid, excited beat of your heart—”

Miranda threw up her hands. Lukos’s lower lip had jutted out into a boyish pout. She could not understand. He had willingly let Zayan kiss her nipples in the carriage. And now, rage crackled off him like lightning sparked by colliding clouds.

He would not step aside and let her pass. He was jealous.

This was all about possessiveness. “You shared me in the carriage,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Why are you behaving now like a petulant boy?”

“I was in control in the carriage—I was part of the game, allowing you to explore. In the dungeon, you were opening your heart to another man. That’s a different thing.”

“I sympathized with the tragedy that Zayan had experienced. Just as I felt horrified by what had happened to you—”

“You pity me?” Lukos roared in disbelief. He reached for her cloak, but she held up her hand. To her amazement, a red BLOOD DEEP / 143

glow shot from her palm and hit Lukos squarely in his chest. It shoved him back and he stumbled sideways.

Heart pounding, Miranda pushed open her door and rushed into her room. She paused before closing the door. “What would you prefer? That I am afraid of you? That’s not what either of you want, is it? For some reason, you both want to seduce me. Why? For my magical power? We’ve already proven I cannot return your souls. What is it you want from me?”

He said nothing. So she pulled off the cloak and flung it out into the hallway, then shut the door hard. At which point the shock of the dungeons, the horrifying images, the battle with a vampire in a tantrum all did their work, and shaking, she sank to the bed.

She felt close to them both—to two
vampires
. Again, that mad belief returned. That this was where she belonged. With them.

Lukos had the last word—in her thoughts.
Not my soul,
angel,
he whispered in his beckoning, beautiful voice.
Someone
else’s.

Why had he told her about his children?

Zayan tucked Miranda’s hand in the crook of his arm and led her toward the long, laden table in the center of the dining hall. He had felt her turmoil of emotions in the dungeon’s cell.

She’d hated him for what he had shown her about Blackthorne.

She had felt lost and alone. And then she’d pitied him, and now that emotion was strongest in her heart.

A growl from her stomach chased away some of his anger.

He had not wanted to talk of his children, but sympathy had begun to open her heart to him. It wasn’t seduction that would make her fall for him, he realized, but his vulnerability. She wasn’t going to love him for his strength, but very possibly for his weaknesses.

He was going to have to open his own heart, slice open his 144 /
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own old wounds. And he was going to use her compassion against her because he had no choice.

It was the only way to bring his children back.

Lukos already sat at the table, arrogantly sprawled in a high-backed chair. Flames flickered on candles on the table and reflected in crystal glasses. Steam wafted from the food; he remembered the aroma as being good, but food held no interest for him.