Blood Deep (6 page)

“Tempting,” Lukos agreed. And he actually leaned to her BLOOD DEEP / 41

neck and sniffed. Like a
wolf
. “This man you are traveling to see, you are in love with him. You intend to marry him.”

Sheer horror raced through her blood. Lukos had read all of that in her thoughts. Would he see the rest—that it was her intention to marry Blackthorne because she had no other choice?

“No, none of that is true,” she lied in a desperate, blurted rush of words.

Zayan shook his head. “So you are traveling to your fiancé, but unprotected.”

“No, I had the servants, of course.” Servants who had been somehow compelled or hypnotized by these vampires to do their bidding and drive the carriage. They were traveling in this direction only because she had foolishly looked this way along the road when Zayan had first asked where she was going. She had revealed the truth even as she refused to speak.

Lukos lifted his hand. A swirl of red light flowed from his palm. It danced through the air toward her. She screamed and pulled at her bonds, but the twinkling light encircled her neck.

It touched her like a caress. Pleasure, terrifying pleasure, shot through her every nerve. She moaned with it.

Lukos grinned, his white fangs flashing. He bent to her neck.

Dear God, no.
But the red lights were delighting her, as he pressed his warm lips to her throat. His touch made her skin ignite with sensation.

He lifted. “Just a kiss. Nothing more.” The magical light disappeared. She was weak with relief, even as her body was heightened and aware. Heaven help her, she wanted another touch.

Stop, Miranda. You
must
fight.

The mad thought struck her that Lukos was also astonishingly handsome. His silvery eyes, almost violet in the soft light, compelled her to watch him. He looked so young, perhaps younger than she was, but he seemed ancient at the same time.

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Behind his wicked smile, she could sense his emotion—pain so acute she winced with it.

“I would not hurt you,” he promised softly. “Nor will I drink from you until you ask me to.”

Miranda pushed aside her connection with his emotions. “I would never ask you,” she cried. “No matter what you do. And I won’t kiss either of you willingly. I-I’ll spit on you if you try to kiss me.”

Lukos’s deep, rusty laugh rang in her ears.

“My turn.” Zayan stood, and despite the swaying of the carriage, he wrapped an arm around her waist. She squirmed but to no avail. He scooped her up and carried her across to his side.

God, this was so . . . humiliating and awful. They were taking
turns
with her.

Zayan’s touch reminded her of how strong these men were.

Lukos had carried her over his shoulder as though she weighed nothing. And Zayan’s hand spanned her waist, nipped in by corset and snug pelisse.

The shades rattled at the window; Miranda could see the light fading beyond. The sun was setting. Soon it would be nightfall, which meant her best chance of escape was now. They could not chase after her in the sunlight.

Though they’d lasted in the sunlight for long enough before.

Zayan’s hand neared her face.

She shook. “Tell me who you are. When did you become a vampire?” She thought of every tale Aunt Eugenia had told her about vampires. Her aunt wanted to know the entire story of a vampire’s background. That, she claimed, was what gave a slayer power over a vampire. Not weaponry, but understanding. Most slayers did not bother to know their prey, which was why many died. “Who made you?” Miranda asked, trying to look at the clasp of Zayan’s cloak and not his magnetic eyes. “When were you turned?”

BLOOD DEEP / 43

If she could make him talk, she could keep his mouth off hers, couldn’t she? She could play for time.

“I have been Nosferatu for many centuries, love. I have lived an eternity.” He spoke with a touch of weariness. She had the sense that he really had no interest in her. If this was a game to him, it bored him.

“But what happened to you? Who were you as a mortal?

You didn’t choose to be a vampire, did you?” She fired her questions out in a tumble, one atop the other. Anything to keep him talking to her. To postpone the moment he would bite her or ravish her. “I want to know. I know I won’t survive this night.

But I need to . . . to think of things. All I have left is curiosity.”

Zayan’s black straight brows jerked up at that. He laughed.

The sound was as smooth as the deep velvety night, like the ripple of a nighttime breeze through the trees. The other vampire, Lukos, had a lusty throaty laugh, one that implied he was thinking very rude thoughts.

Miranda shook her head. Why did she think these things?

“I have lived for almost two thousand years,” Zayan said dispassionately. “I was a Roman general. My name, in my mortal world, was Marius Praetonius. I took most of Europe in the name of Rome. I was celebrated, worshipped. Your fiancé might have read about me in his schoolbooks.” Lines were suddenly carved at the side of his mouth as he smiled more deeply.

I sense a great power about you. . . . You intrigue me. . . .

Miranda heard his deep voice in her head, felt it in her entire body, the way music would vibrate through her. She heard it and went ice-cold. Could he guess that she had special powers—

a power she couldn’t even understand? That she possessed some kind of magic? She shivered. What would that mean?

Would it spare her life? Was any of what he had told her true?

“Of course it is true,” he said in answer to her thoughts.

“What do you think—I’m some insignificant slave who concocted a fancy tale?”

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She recoiled from the sudden anger in his voice. His lower lip thrust out, in the way her brother would do when she had caught him making some foolish mistake, such as gambling.

Vampires were once mortal men. That is the critical thing to
remember when hunting them.
Aunt Eugenia had told her that over and over again.

She remembered her response to Aunt Eugenia:
I am a gentlewoman. I am supposed to even fear the power of mortal men.

But Aunt Eugenia scoffed at that.
A woman is as powerful as
she believes she can be.
The words had almost made Miranda laugh—she painted watercolors, diligently perfected her embroidery, strolled the gardens with a dainty parasol. How could she be powerful? But she had wanted to believe her aunt. And Eugenia’s words had a strange power attached to them. As though, by thinking them, they could give her greater strength.

Zayan stretched his arm along the back of the seat. It was such a masculine gesture—such a normal, human one—that it caught Miranda by surprise. “Does knowing who I once was make you more willing to kiss me?” he asked, amusement heightening the allure of his looks.

She fought the instinctive tug of feminine admiration at his chiseled jaw, full lips, at even the crinkles at the sides of his mirrorlike eyes.

“Of course not!”

“Wise girl.” Across from them, Lukos had propped one booted foot on the velvet seat of the coach. “He’s a vampire.

He’s taken the blood of thousands of innocent women and children.”

She froze, horrified.

“As have you,” Zayan growled. He was watching her, his gaze hot and intense. “I would like to know what you are. Not a normal, flighty, empty-headed woman of society, are you?”

Miranda twisted her bound hands. Her entire body tensed, BLOOD DEEP / 45

but she tried to look rather stupidly at Zayan. “Of course I am just an empty-headed, ordinary woman.”

But he held her gaze, seeing through her, she was certain, with his mirror-like eyes.

She had slid along the seat to put as much space between them as she could. But he reached out and caught hold of the bindings at her wrist. With two fingers, he tore the cloth. She wrenched her arms apart, fighting at the fabric, even as he unwound it.

Oh.
Her hands tingled as feeling returned.

Zayan reached for her hand. “Isn’t a kiss on the hand the way a proper English gentleman begins his seduction of a lady?”

His hand clasped hers; his fingers threaded through hers.

Like a perfect gentleman, like a man she might have dreamed about, he raised her hand to his lips.

“No, don’t do this.” She could not bear a mockery of courtship before she was killed and her blood taken. “No, I know nothing of magic. I didn’t even really believe in vampires!”

Soft and full, Zayan’s lower lip touched the back of her bare hand. A jolt of warm pleasure ignited there at the brush of his mouth. He kissed her hand as no man had ever done before—a tantalizing play of mouth and tongue. She’d had no idea a kiss to her hand could make her blood rush madly through her.

Could make her nipples lift against her shift.

But Lukos was not going to simply watch, she realized. He had moved to their side—he was on his knees. It startled her that a vampire, a demonic creature, would be on his knees for her. “I do not share,” he growled, looking like a defiant boy. “We could have her choose—”

“Choose!” she cried. “I’d never—”

“But we can both compel her thoughts,” Lukos continued, ignoring her outrage. “I propose a competition. An amusement for a long journey.”

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The fiends were speaking as though she were not even there.

And butterflies took flight in her belly at the word
competition.

“No magic?” Zayan asked.

“Magic is allowed, but only for seduction, which will begin like this . . .”

Miranda held her breath. Lukos bent to her neck. She felt him approach. Her skin seemed to anticipate him, tingling before he touched her.

His lips brushed her, and she moaned with desire. What was wrong with her? Zayan suckled her fingers one by one, and the sensations left her dizzy. She could not fight the . . . the heated desire rising in her. They were competing for her, like she was a prize.

What if she touched them? What if she touched them as she did to others who had died? Could she bring them back? Could this mysterious power she possessed do that—to men who had been vampires for centuries?

Did she dare try? If she could change them, they couldn’t kill her.

The shade rattled away from the carriage window. Barely any light filtered in.

The sun had set. She had to try now. She did not have any more time, and this might be her only hope to live.

London, at that moment

“An innocent from a good family will cost you, sirrah.”

James Ryder drew out a handful of gold sovereigns and dropped them, one by one, into the greasy silk glove on the madam’s outstretched hand. “Gentlemen pay at least five hundred pounds for my virgins, sir.” She reached out to return his money.

Five hundred.
He had it, but he hadn’t wanted to part with BLOOD DEEP / 47

so much. There were houses where that handful of coins would buy him the use of every cunny in the house. That amount of money would let him do whatever he wanted to the girls.

But he wanted to dip his wick here. In this place that was the exclusive domain of earls and dukes. In this place where he could take the maidenhead of a woman he would not be allowed to address on the street.

Tonight, Miss Miranda Bond had evaded him. To ease his frustration, he had destroyed a vampire, and the excitement of battle now sang in his veins.

He wanted the best. And he could pay for it.

He caught the madam’s wrist. “That is a small gift for you, madam. I am willing to pay the price for quality.”

“Who are you, then, sir? You are not known to me.” She sniffed and looked down her beak of a nose at him.

How in bloody hell did she dare look down at him?

“I am a son of the Marquess of Hiltshire.” The truth, though he was a bastard son. He pulled out a wad of notes and pushed those into her hand, forcing her to drop the sovereigns on the gleaming parquet floor.

The coins clinked. Her hand squeezed around the money.

She stared down, her hand-drawn eyebrows arched in surprise.

He made a move to pick up his hat and start for the door.

“Wait!”

He turned to see her stuffing the money between her large, plumped-up tits, wadding the notes down below the scooped neck of her bodice, between the sweaty lumps of her flesh.

“I have a girl available. A vicar’s daughter, left homeless. She is most definitely a virgin. A true innocent, quite frightened and apprehensive, even though she goes willing to her fate for the welfare of her younger siblings. She was promised to the Earl of Huntingdon. She could, however, be yours, for one thousand pounds.”

Christ, it was a bloody fortune. But to steal the virgin who 48 /
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would have spread her thighs for the Earl of Huntingdon? It would be worth it. He wrote a vowel for the rest, and to his surprise, the madam accepted it.

No doubt, she thought he would return after he’d sampled the vicar’s daughter. He’d crave another virgin, just as her noble clients did. With a snap of her fingers, she sent a brawny footman to lead him to the bedroom. He found it empty. He sat on the edge of the bed but would not begin to undress until the girl was brought to him.

He’d trusted once—bought a virgin and stripped down in preparation, only to find the brothel was more interested in stealing his money, beating him blind, then throwing him out.

But the stupid madam and her brutes had not understood what a vampire slayer was capable of doing with a weapon.

Ryder drew out a cheroot. He moved to the fireplace and lit the smoke from the licking flames. The room was opulent, a sign that it did cater to refined tastes.

God, he was hard with anticipation. His John Thomas strained against his linens. His arousal made him restless, angry. He should be in pursuit of Miss Miranda Bond tonight.

But he knew where she was headed. He would be on the road after he’d had his little treat, and he would travel faster than her.

With a click, the door opened. He swiveled on the bed as the footman brought in a tall, slender girl who wore a ghastly gray dress. A dress she’d worn from her home, or a costume? Her face was plain—freckled nose, pink cheeks, ivory skin. Her lashes were as mousy brown as her hair, but her skin and hair promised to be peach soft.