Blood Deep (27 page)

She came. Before he was even inside her, the orgasm hit her.

She cried out. Her body writhed in their arms. Stars shot across the darkness of her shut lids.

Stars. Explosions. Pleasure that made her shout, laugh, and weep . . .

Blinking, she opened her eyes. She was alone, alone on a bed BLOOD DEEP / 221

that was now plunged into darkness even with the drapes open, and her quim still pulsed in the dying pleasure of her orgasm.

It had been a dream.

She was still dressed, in a gown brought by Aunt Eugenia from her home, and she’d fallen asleep on top of the counterpane.

“How did I get here?” She rubbed her head. Vaguely, she remembered that she had been too cowardly to confront the vampire slayers with her questions. And using her power to save the baby had left her exhausted. She had come to a bedroom to think. She must have fallen asleep here.

A rap sounded at the door. “Miss Bond?” called a maid.

Miranda bade the woman entry. The maid curtsied.

“Miss Bond, Lady Brookshire has asked if you would come to the library.”

“I want to know—” Miranda paused as she glanced from Lady Brookshire to Lady Sommersby. “Everything. I want to know how vampires can be vampire slayers. I want to know why you, who are members of the Royal Society, seem to want to protect me, not kill me. And I want to know everything you know of Zayan and Lukos.”

She saw Lady Sommersby bite her lip. And heard Lady Brookshire’s thoughts.
You were right. She is in love.

The two women were seated by the fireplace, and all around them, books reached to the high, arched ceiling of the room.

Two axes were mounted, crossed, above the thick, stone mantel, and a fire crackled merrily in the grate.

“I can hear the thoughts you send to each other,” Miranda said, “so you might as well speak aloud.”

Both women flushed guiltily. “Cards on the table then.”

Lady Brookshire placed her hands on the occasional table in front of her, faceup. “We fear that you have fallen in love with 222 /
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both Lukos and Zayan, but we believe that you do not know what they really are.”

Miranda was on her feet, too restless and nervous to sit.

“Then tell me,” she implored. “But you must remember that they did come to protect me, and they did choose to protect your child. I want to hear everything that you believe they’ve done.

In the past, my aunt has told me that tales about vampires are often exaggerated, because people
want
to be frightened.”

She feared Lady Brookshire and Lady Sommersby had accepted whatever the Royal Society had told them.

“These stories did come from the Royal Society, and I do recognize that obviously does not mean they are the gospel truth,” Lady Sommersby said. Then she added, “And you must call me Serena.”

Miranda swallowed hard. Lady Sommersby could see her thoughts. Miranda had not even thought of masking them. It was proof, along with the silvery glimmer of her ladyship’s eyes, that she was a vampire too.

“I want to hear them, and then I want you to tell me which stories you think are the truth,” Miranda demanded. If she
was
in love with both Zayan and Lukos, she wanted to face the truth about the men whom her heart was torn over. She couldn’t be certain if what she felt was love or just the need to save them.

This was her power—to rescue, to resurrect, to save.

And she wanted to do it with Lukos and Zayan.

“That’s very dangerous,” Lady Brookshire advised. “And of course you must call me Althea.”

Serena looked to Althea. “It is, of course, what we both wanted to do ourselves, isn’t it? Rescue our men.” She leaned back on her chair with one hand at her low back and the other on her rounded belly. Her black, waist-length hair was caught up in one long braid that lay over her shoulder. “I assume you have made love with them. That’s why they have both captured BLOOD DEEP / 223

your heart, I suspect. I would like to know what Zayan and Lukos have told you about themselves?”

Miranda paced along the long table that held stacks of books. She had never had such direct conversation with women about such scandalous matters. But she preferred this. This was much better than the gossip and whispers, allusions and lies that had been part of her life as a normal young lady of society.

Honesty. She wanted that. “Zayan told me that he was a Roman general named Marius Praetonius in his mortal life.

Lukos told me that Zayan had taken the blood of thousands of innocent women and children.” Did vampires feed each night?

Zayan had lived for two thousand years . . . Dear heaven, that must mean he had claimed seventy thousand lives. “But I never saw him feed. And he controlled himself around me.” She forced herself to stop defending him and just speak. “He told me that his children were murdered, and that was why he embraced the chance to be a vampire—to get his revenge.” She paused. “I also saw it. I—I saw the murders. They had their—

their throats cut. It was cruel and gruesome.”

Althea blinked and Miranda saw her hug herself. As a mother, Althea must be able to sympathize. “Those murders took place two thousand years ago,” she said slowly. “How did you see them?”

“I don’t know. I had a vision of them. It was as though I were looking through the eyes of the murderer. I also saw Lukos’s torture, when he was given to Lucifer as an apprentice.”

Serena stood, her hand at her back. “But with Zayan, you saw visions that he could not have seen.”

Miranda nodded. “That’s true. He said he did not know who killed his children.” She looked from auburn-haired Althea to dark-haired Serena. “Who did it?”

Althea’s brows drew together. “The truth of that is lost to the past, Miss Bond. My father is a vampire slayer, and I helped 224 /
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him with his research, combing ancient books. It was my father’s original intent to destroy Zayan. You see, Zayan sired my husband Bastien. He was the one who turned him into a vampire, when he lay dying on the street.”

Althea told her of how her husbands Yannick and Bastien de Wynter had been known as the Demon Twins. “I would like to tell you the truth,” Althea said. As she spoke, Miranda was amazed that Althea would reveal such personal things. Althea revealed they had hunted Zayan; then Bastien had asked for him to be imprisoned and not destroyed.

“After Zayan’s imprisonment, I had to learn as much about him as I could. Yannick—my husband—told me about his past.

It was said that Praetonius drank the blood of his victims, even as a mortal. Then he craved the blood of pure strong men, to keep him vital and strong. And as he aged, he sought the blood of the young to give him life.” Althea paused. “Like Countess Elizabeth Bathory, drinking the blood of young women in the belief it would keep her young.”

“It was said,” Miranda repeated. She had felt Zayan’s agony over his children’s deaths. How could he be the instrument of death to others? Lukos had said so—but she didn’t want to believe it. “But is there any proof?”

Althea pointed to one of the stacks of books on the long desk. “The one on top is a diary—the journal of a vampire slayer from the seventeenth century, who had battled Zayan. I brought it with me. It was in there that I learned about the murders of Zayan’s children. That slayer believed that Zayan’s wife was the lover of another general, a compatriot of Zayan’s. Mucius Gaius.

The slayer believed that Gaius was the man who killed the children.”

Miranda remembered that glimpse into Zayan’s thoughts.

“In the journal, the slayer wrote that he believed that Zayan’s wife betrayed her own children. That was different than the story Yannick told me of Zayan—it had been believed she had BLOOD DEEP / 225

been betrayed too. But it appears she knew of the general’s plan to murder them but did nothing to either stop him or protect them.”

Miranda was appalled. “Dear heaven, why? Why hurt her own children?”

“For power, it was believed. She wanted Zayan, who was then Marius Praetonius, to be crippled by grief and pain, and to lose in battle, to perhaps even be killed there.”

“But why not just . . . just have killed Zayan? As his wife, she could have done so and spared the lives of her children.”

Althea shook her head. “I cannot understand it, but that vampire slayer believed she did it because she wanted to destroy the children she had given to a man she hated.”

“I can understand,” Miranda said softly, staring down at the journal but not touching it, “why he might have become a vampire in anger, after he was so viciously betrayed, and so mad with grief.”

Althea rose from her chair. “Zayan became a vampire before his children were killed.”

But that was not what Zayan had told her. She held her breath as Althea glided to the table, then held the journal to her.

A strip of leather marked a page. Miranda opened it, forcing her eyes to become accustomed to the cramped handwriting.

The first paragraphs explained the tenuous hold on political power of Rome’s emperor. He feared the popularity and power of Marius Praetonious. Mucius Gaius had fed into the emperor’s increasing paranoia, until the emperor had begun to plot Praetonius’s downfall. Finding himself subject to sabotage, Zayan had faced losing a battle. And he had made a pact with Lucifer to survive. And to win.

Miranda looked up at Althea. “Did he become an apprentice to the devil, like Lukos?”

Althea shook her head. “Zayan bargained to walk as a devil among the human world, to enter into the service of Satan for eternity, and in return, he would turn living, breathing people 226 /
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into the undead, delivering their souls to the dark lord who craved them. But he began to believe himself stronger than the devil he served. And so Lucifer tried to have him destroyed.”

Her ladyship walked over and laid her hand gently on Miranda’s arm. “He was not driven into brutality by grief. He was always brutal. According to that journal and others I have found since his imprisonment, he was one of the most brutal of vampires. He never tried to control his urge to feed. We are vampires—all of us—but we do not kill for blood.”

“You should have some brandy brought for Miss Bond,”

Serena suggested.

Miranda thought to refuse, to prove she was strong enough for truth, but then she relented and nodded.

“You did know we are vampires, didn’t you?” Serena asked softly as Miranda tugged the bellpull.

“I saw your eyes. But I assume my aunt also knows, and if she trusts you, I believe I can too.”

Serena gave a little gasp and put her hand to her tummy. “A kick,” she explained. Her soft smile faded. “I must now tell you about Lukos. There is a prophesy, you see, and the end of it was only discovered last year.”

Before Serena began, Miranda stroked the book she held. The story told in this journal might not be true, she realized. The vampire slayer had not lived in Roman times. He was working from stories that would have been distorted over hundreds of years. And if the emperor had been afraid of Zayan, he must have tried to destroy Zayan’s reputation. If he wanted to kill Zayan, he would hardly object to spreading lies. What she was being told were stories. It was not necessarily the truth.

She laid the book firmly on the table. “And after you tell me about Lukos, I want to know what you meant by a love shared between three.”

“Oh, you overheard that?” Serena asked.

“Definitely brandy, then.” Althea managed a smile. “Both BLOOD DEEP / 227

Serena and I are married to two men. Two men each. My husbands are Lord Brookshire and Bastien de Wynter. And Serena is pledged to both Drake Swift and Lord Sommersby. English law believes we each have only one husband, but that is not the truth. To defeat our foes, we had to learn to harness the magical powers created by a ménage à trois. And our foes, Miss Bond, were Zayan and Lukos.”

He approached a placid pool of water. It was an elaborate bathing room, the pool itself in tile the rich blue of the
Mediterranean. The deck was startlingly white, and elaborate patterns had been created in the mosaic on the walls.

Naked women cavorted and giggled in the water. Some
pairs sucked at each other’s nipples. Two women lay face to
cunny, like the numbers six and nine, and they were . . .

were kissing each other’s vulvas.

Their play amused him. He had Praetonius’s wife, and
she was wild in his bed, obsessed with him, but he liked
this play.

This small pool was empty, and the mirror-like surface
of the water threw his own image back at him.

He saw it. Blood—spatters of it on his cheek. The
women would see it. They would be revolted by it. The
blood of Praetonius’s children. He kept seeing it on him,
though he bathed over and over—

He knelt by the pool, dipped his hand into the center of
his condemning image, scooped a handful of water, and
desperately scrubbed his face—

But he knew when he looked again, he would see the
blood. He would never be rid of it. He shuddered. As long
as he did not hear their screams again. They haunted him.

Miranda grasped the post of her bed to keep herself from falling forward. She had been standing by her bed one moment, 228 /
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thinking of what she had learned about Zayan, then the next—

the next moment she had been seeing a bathing room through the eyes of the blackguard who had killed two innocent babes.

She sank to the edge of the bed and drew up her knees. She shivered, hugging them.

She had seen the face of the man who had murdered Zayan’s children.

If she described him to Zayan, would he know who that man was? Would it help him to know the truth? Or wound him even more?

Her window rattled and she saw the subtle play of moonlight on large black wings. Zayan. He had come to her room.

He was always brutal, Althea had said. He was not driven by grief. . . . Althea and Serena had showed her many books that substantiated their stories of Zayan and Lukos. . . .