Blood Marriage (44 page)

She choked back a scream as the candlelight shone on her mother's severed head. The eyes blinked at her. The mouth worked without producing sound. Elizabeth swallowed hard and tapped the head with the toe of her boot, sending it spinning toward Randall's limp form. 

Lucy, fangs bared, struggled to close the last few inches to Nicholas's throat. Sweat poured from Nicholas's head and dampened his black shirt as he held her off, trying to force her closer to where the sword lay on the floor. Elizabeth held the skirt panel above the candle flame. For a moment it seemed the wool would refuse to ignite, and then the flame flashed across the fabric. 

With the flaming skirt stretched between wide spread arms Elizabeth launched herself at Lucy's back. She lifted the flaming wool over the demon’s head, wrapping its face and hair. Lucy shrieked, releasing Nicholas. Its hands clawed frantically at the fabric melting into its skin. The stench of burning flesh and hair was overpowering. Smoke filled the entry hall, stinging Elizabeth's eyes, blinding her.

"Let go!" Nicholas shouted.

His arm wrapped her waist just as flames singed her fingers. She realized she was clinging to Lucy's back, holding the skirt tight against the demon's head. She let go and felt herself lifted and carried up the stairs. She watched the demon stumble out the door and into the night, thrashing and shrieking. Finally freeing herself from the flaming material, Lucy rose into the night sky in a clumsy spiral, her screams dying away into the distance.

Nicholas sat down on the stairs and drew Elizabeth into his lap. He snatched her hands up, examining them carefully. He ran his fingers over her face, and even lifted her hair to see if it were burned, reassuring himself she was unscathed. 

"You fool. You sweet idiot," he murmured, dotting rapid kisses across her cheeks and chin and nose, her raw fingertips, then finally finding her mouth with an urgent and possessive tenderness. Elizabeth returned his kiss with a raging hunger borne more of relief than of passion. Tears formed at the back of her eyes and her body trembled. He pulled her tighter against his own warmth.

"Elizabeth, I need you to help me now. Can you do that?" he asked.

She laid her cheek on his shoulder and nodded, knowing she would do anything for this man. Anything except become like him. She loved Nicholas Devlin, would always love him, would willingly accept who and what he was. But after the horror she'd just witnessed, everything in her recoiled from the idea of becoming a vampire, a blood-craver. Even for him. 

Nicholas lifted her from his lap, sat her beside him on the stairs. "Wait here for a moment. Then I'll take you up to your room where you'll be safe." He descended the stairs, retrieved the chains, and took Amelia’s squirming corpse by the legs. Elizabeth wanted to look away, but found she couldn’t.

"You're going out again tonight to burn it, aren't you?" Elizabeth pointed to her mother's body. Its hands still thrashed and groped, searching for its head.

"I have no choice."

Nicholas worked fast, winding the chains about the corpse and clicking the locks into place. Elizabeth sat on the stairs watching him pin her mother's flailing arms tight against her body. 

"I don't want you to go out there again," she said. 

The severed head stared at them with furious eyes, its lips pulled back in a mute snarl. Elizabeth needed to cover that horrible visage, hide it and erase its memory from her mind. She started down the stairs. Vlad's burlap sack would hide it. She froze.

"Vlad." She whispered his name at the same moment Nicholas snapped the last of the chain locks in place. 

"What?" Nicholas said.

Elizabeth ran for the kitchen, her heart pounding at the thought of what she might find. But the kitchen was unchanged. It remained as quiet and shadowy as when she'd passed through it earlier. 

"Father Vlad?" Elizabeth called softly. 

Nicholas's voice rang out loud and strong from behind her. "Vlad!"

A muffled reply came from the larder. Nicholas shoved away the chair that had been wedged against the doorknob and opened the larder door. 

"We must find Elizabeth!" The priest sounded frantic. He came out of the larder and, at the sight of her, the expression on his face transformed from fear to pure joy. "Oh, my dear! Thanks be to God you're safe! I've been terrified for you." 

Elizabeth found herself wrapped in the priest's crushing embrace, her face buried in a beard wet with tears. Had the old man, trapped helpless in that larder, been crying for her?

Nicholas didn't wait for Father Vlad to release her. He reached into his pocket and pressed something into the priest's hand. Elizabeth recognized it as the bottle of holy water that had fallen from the cart as they'd fled through the woods earlier. A scrap of waxed leather had been tied over the opening with a string, sealing it.

"I found it in the middle of the forest road and knew something was wrong." Nicholas reached out and touched Elizabeth's cheek, his eyes tender with relief. She left Vlad's embrace and went to him.

Father Vlad re-entered the larder and knocked on the wall to Cook's room. "Hilda? Everything's fine. You were right to stay in your room. I'm sorry I put you through such a trial." 

Elizabeth imagined the priest, locked in the larder, not knowing what had become of her. He'd been in a horrible situation. If he'd managed to convince Cook to leave her room to release him so that he could help Elizabeth, he might have unwittingly lured the old woman to her death.  

"Vlad, we need to hurry," Nicholas said. "Leo is hurt. Probably dying. He's in the village church and he needs whatever help you can offer."

"Leo's dying?" Elizabeth thought of her friend Amanda and a new surge of fear shot through her. "What happened?"

"Explanations must wait," Nicholas said. "There's no time to waste." 

"I'll need my book. And the sword. The sword alone will probably be enough." The priest tucked the bottle of holy water into his robes and smiled at the question in Elizabeth's eyes. "Remind me to tell you about that sword sometime, child."

"I know where the book is," Elizabeth said. She was back in the entry hall reaching for the book she'd thrown on the floor before she realized she'd been talking to the priest with the front half her skirt missing, her lacy white shift showing. Apparently Vlad was accustomed to the strange goings on at Heaven's Edge because he hadn't even raised an eyebrow.

Nicholas retrieved the sword and returned it to its scabbard. When he took the book from Elizabeth, his eyes met hers. "I'll going to take you to our room now, Elizabeth. Promise me you'll stay there until I come for you."

"No." Elizabeth raised her chin at him, lifting her eyebrows in challenge. "I'm going with you. Wherever you go. And if you try to leave me behind, I'll follow you."

"Elizabeth."

"If Leo's dying, Nicholas, do we really have time to argue? Besides, haven't you noticed I get into trouble when we aren't together?"

Vlad came through the kitchen door. Keeping his eyes politely averted, he held one of Cook's large nankeen kitchen aprons out to Elizabeth. Nicholas snatched it from him, holding it just beyond Elizabeth's reach. Vlad looked surprised, but didn't comment as he accepted the sword and book from Nicholas in return. The priest tucked the sword into his belt and the book under his arm. 

Nicholas continued to hold the apron out of reach, scowling. Elizabeth stared back, one delicate eyebrow lifted. Finally, he ran his hand through his hair, then raised his palms upward in frustrated surrender.  

"Shall I harness Princess?" Vlad asked.

"No," Nicholas said. He dropped the voluminous apron over Elizabeth's head, wrapping it nearly twice around her slim figure before tying it closed. The heavy yellow cotton created a modest new dress over her old one.

"We'll need to travel fast," Nicholas said. "My stallion will carry Elizabeth and me. You'll ride my father's roan." He picked up the headless body and settled the wriggling corpse across his shoulder. "We'll strap this to the back of one of the stable stock." Holding the corpse in place with one hand, he reached out with the other. Elizabeth put her hand in his.

Vlad retrieved his burlap sack from the floor beside the still unconscious Randall. Then he picked up her mother's severed head and tsk-ed at the mute obscenities it was mouthing before tucking it into the sack. 

"Let's go save Leo," the priest said cheerfully, and led them back through the kitchens and out of the house.

Chapter Forty-Five

The trees flew by in a shadowy blur and the forest sounds were drowned in the thunderous pounding of hooves. Nicholas allowed the stallion its head, knowing the roan could keep pace easily and forcing his father's best stable mare to do the same. He kept careful watch on the canopy of trees above them as well as the forest to either side, all his senses alert, waiting for an attack. Lucy's fury would be un-containable. Regardless of its injuries, it wasn't likely to wait another night to avenge itself. He would have to face it again tonight and find a way to destroy it, for Elizabeth's sake and his own.

He'd been a fool. He knew that now. He'd allowed his sympathy for Bergen, and his own reluctance to kill, to stop him from slaying the creature when it first entered his home, while it still wanted him, while he still might have been able to trick it, to lure it to its destruction. But Bergen had pleaded with him to wait, wanting to delay, to have a chance to study the books in the library. 

They were the doctor's own books, the ones Vlad had taken from Bergen's home when he believed the doctor dead, like his sister. The priest had brought the tomes with him to England when he'd pledged his life to mentoring Nicholas. Bergen had hoped the ancient texts would reveal some secret that might vanquish Lucy and allow Lucretia to return to him. Vlad had been adamant that Lucretia's soul was gone from her body forever. Yet still, Bergen had held on to hope. 

And Nicholas, knowing he'd have done the same if it had been Elizabeth who'd been lost, had given the doctor the time he'd asked for. He'd lent Bergen his support in convincing his father to tolerate the
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under his roof, and in doing so put the entire household at risk. By the time the stable master had been killed, Lucy had become too sly and entrenched to be easily removed. 

He'd been a fool. Now Grubner was dead, Amelia's body defiled, and Elizabeth knew the truth of what she'd married.

As if sensing his troubled heart, Elizabeth shifted in the saddle before him, slipping her hand between the buttons of his shirt to rest her palm flat against the skin of his chest. The tender intimacy of the gesture warmed Nicholas and he marveled once again at how readily his bride had accepted him for what he was. Though they had not spoken of it, she knew, had known since that night beneath the oak. Yet she'd not pressed him for answers or explanations or even apologies. After the initial shock of his attack on her had worn off, she hadn't pulled away from him in horror. She'd remained with him, and even defended him.

Nicholas searched the leaf canopy above them again, remembering how Elizabeth had fussed over him in the stable as he hurried to prepare the horses for the ride to the village. She'd insisted on examining the wound on his arm where Lucy had bitten him. At first he'd put her off, telling her it was nothing. But she'd been insistent, retrieving a kit of bandages and ointment from the stable master's office while he saddled his stallion and the roan. She'd been so serious, so worried, that he'd finally stood still for the few seconds it took her to dab at the wound through his torn sleeve with a clean cloth. 

It was a pointless mercy. All evidence he'd ever been injured would be gone tomorrow, one of the advantages of his vampire state. But he liked the tender concern in her eyes and the gentleness of her hands on his flesh, so he allowed her a few seconds to satisfy herself he wasn't seriously injured. Then he strapped her mother's body to a stable mount and covered it with a blanket. 

Now as they galloped through the night, he couldn't help admiring the fact she hadn't disintegrated into a puddle of vapors at the sight of her mother's headless form draped over the horse, twitching and straining at the chains that bound it. After all she'd been through over the past days, after the battle she'd fought tonight for her life and his, she remained steady. Her too white skin and the strain in her eyes told him she wasn't unaffected, but she wasn't hysterical either. He was grateful, and awed. Would his mother have been so unflinching in the face of such terror? He knew the answer. She'd been a good woman with a gentle and loving spirit, but she'd been fragile. Elizabeth was not.

Vlad and Bergen were right, Elizabeth wasn't like his mother. But even if she had been, he'd been wrong to deny her the right to choose. His shoulders tensed at the thought. If he allowed her to choose, would she choose the vampire's bite? Would she choose him? 

She'd said no words of love since their marriage but neither had he. And yet there were times when he was sure she felt what he felt, what he'd felt since the moment he'd looked into her eyes on Mrs. Huntington's dance floor and lured her out into the rose garden. It was there in her unquestioning acceptance of his vampire condition, in the way she breathed his name when she lay beneath him, in the eagerness with which her body welcomed his. It was also there in the way she'd shielded him from the runners and fought courageously with him against Lucy. Good Lord, the woman had set her skirt afire and leapt onto a demon's back, risking her life to save his.

Suddenly Nicholas was weary of deceiving his wife, of fighting demons, of being a vampire. He wanted Elizabeth in his arms and in his bed. He wanted to be like any new groom, an ordinary man without a care in the world other than pleasing the woman he loved. 

His eyes kept sweeping the trees around them, but he dropped his chin, pressing his lips to the silky dark hair on the crown of Elizabeth's head, savoring the feel and sweet scent of her. And suddenly he felt the horse couldn't travel fast enough. He was impatient. Impatient to deliver Vlad to Leo and this
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to its funeral pyre, to find and destroy Lucy, to remove every barrier between him and Elizabeth and the future they would share. He was also eager. Eager to sink his teeth into his bride's sweet flesh a third and final time, to ensure she was his and remained his forever, to lie with her in their bed and do with his body all the things he couldn't stop doing in his mind.