Embrace the Twilight (8 page)

Sarafina drew away from the cool touch of his palm on her cheek. “Forgive you? Bartrone, you saved me from certain death. Already I was weakening with the symptoms of the illness. And had it not killed me, my faithless sister surely would have. She and my betrothed—plotting against me all along. You showed me the truth. You gave me the power to outlive them all. So don't ask me to forgive you. I can only thank you for the gift you gave to me.”

He smiled slowly, though the sadness he'd been describing still shadowed his eyes. “So alive. Such a fiery thing you've become. Maybe for you it will be different. By God, I hope so, Sarafina. But for me…it's over.”

She stared at him, her entire body having gone still. “What do you mean?”

“I've taught you well. You'll be fine on your own.”

“On my own? Bartrone, you are making very little sense. Perhaps you need to feed, or rest.”

“I've fed for the last time, Fina.” He glanced at the clock on the mantel, as its pendulum swung slowly back and forth. “It's nearly dawn. I intend to see the sunrise today.”

“Don't be foolish. You can't. You mustn't even try.” She dropped the deck of cards as if she had completely forgotten them. Letting them fall and scatter upon the carpet, she took his hand, drew him to his feet. “Come to bed, love. You'll feel so much differently when you wake tonight. We'll do something fabulous. We'll take a trip, that's what we'll do. We can travel into the desert lands, and you can tell me about Babylon. What it was truly like to live there. You see? There is still much you have to teach me.”

As she spoke, she drew him across the room, through a doorway that led down into the basement. She looked back as she did, toward the cards that had fallen upon the floor. For just a moment, she stilled, her gaze riveted to the two cards that had fallen faceup. One depicted the pathway between heaven and earth as a beautiful woman with her feet in the one and her head in the other. The second card showed the reaper in a black cloak, wielding a scythe.

She wrenched her gaze from the cards, her mind shouting a vehement denial. It meant nothing, she told herself, and she drew Bartrone on.

He followed without argument, nodding and muttering, “All right, my love. All right, I'll come with you.”

Will could feel the fear in Sarafina's heart. Fear of being alone, it was nearly paralyzing in its power. She was trembling, close to tears at the thought of it.

She drew Bartrone into the basement, through a hidden doorway, into a pitch-black room with a dirt floor. Will gasped in surprise when she lifted part of the floor upward, and he realized it was a hinged trapdoor, only made to look like the rest of the floor. Another set of stairs was below, spiraling downward into the belly of the earth itself.

“I have had word from my spies,” Bartrone said. “Your wretched sister is old now. Her husband died young, fulfilling the first part of the curse you placed upon them. The second part has now come to pass.”

She moved only a few steps down, staring back up at him.

“A child has been born, a great-great-grandson to your sister. His name is Dante, and he is one of The Chosen.”

Her heart quickened. “I have family again?” she whispered.

He nodded. “His blood is like ours. He is one of the few who can become one of us. But he is still a suckling babe. Think carefully about what you do with this information, Sarafina. Allow the child to grow to manhood, and remember what I've told you—that this life we live is as much a curse as a gift. Think on that before you decide whether to bring him with you into darkness.”

Blinking, she shook her head. “The only alternative is to watch him weaken and die in the prime of his youth, Bartrone.”

“That may be his preference. Let him decide.”

She nodded, thinking it through. “I'll think on it. We have many years during which to discuss this. It will be a long while before he's adult enough to even consider…” Her head came up, eyes bright. “Oh, but we must visit him! To have family again. Real family, from my own Gypsy clan.”

“Your sister is the elder woman as well as the
Shuvani
now, my love. She won't likely let you near him.”

Sarafina's eyes turned dark, her face deadly. “Nor will she stop me.”

He nodded. “Remember the things I've told you. And remember that I love you, Sarafina. In all my centuries of life, I have never loved another the way I have loved you.” He held up his free hand. “No, don't reply in kind, my love. I know it has never been the same for you. It doesn't matter. You've been kind to me, been my companion, my friend and my lover. I'm only sorry that I have to repay you so cruelly.”

And with that he yanked his hand from hers, and, with his other, he shoved her. Sarafina stumbled down the stairs, falling the last few steps. She scrambled to her feet at the bottom, hiking her skirts in her fists and racing upward even as the trapdoor slammed down. “Bartrone!” she cried. She pushed against the door, but he had apparently blocked it from the other side. “Bartrone, don't do something foolish! Please!”

“Goodbye, my love,” he called.

She heard his footsteps retreating back up the stairs. “No,” she shouted. “No! I won't let you do this!” Turning, she ran back down the spiral staircase, seeing as clearly as a cat in the darkness. She was moving with such speed that the walls around her blurred. The sensation, to Will, who felt as if he were being propelled along in her wake, was dizzying.

Then she was at another door, jerking it open.

Sunlight streamed in on her, burning her as if she were on fire. Will
felt
it. Her arms flying up to shield her face, she staggered backward into the shadows. And then she lowered her arms slowly, breathing hard. There were burns on her skin. Will heard her thoughts. She would be all right. The burns would heal with the day-sleep, as all wounds to her kind would do. As Bartrone's would, if she could only get to him in time.

Then she looked up, through the open doorway, that threshold of yellow light, and she saw him. He stood on a small, grassy hillock in the distance, his back toward her, arms wide-open to the rising sun. As that glowing golden sphere rose higher, his form became only a dark silhouette. And then…a flaming one.

A cry burst from Sarafina—the keening wail of one in unbearable pain. She fell to her knees, watching in anguish as her companion seemed to dance in the flames, turning this way and that as his flesh was devoured. He never made a sound. He burned alive and never made a sound.

Then his form was no more, and the flames grew lower, nearer the ground. They flickered there only a moment, then died altogether, leaving only a scorched patch of earth where he had been.

Sarafina curled onto the cold floor, sobbing.

The door was still open, the sun rising ever higher in the sky. Its rays crept across the floor, closer and closer to where she lay.

“Sarafina,” Will said. “Sarafina, you have to get up. Now, dammit, or you'll burn as he did!”

“Leave me alone, spirit,” she whispered, the words coming very slowly, broken by sobs. “Allow me my grief, for I've lost my only companion.”

“No. You haven't. I'm here. I'm with you.”

She shook her head where it lay against her folded arms on the floor. “You lie. I've not heard your voice nor felt your presence for fifty years. I don't even know…I don't even know what you are.”

“For me, it's only been two months, Sarafina. And I'm not a spirit, I'm a man. I live in another time, a far distant time in the future. In a place called New York. I don't know how or why I find you this way, no more than I can understand why I love you so desperately. But I do. I do, Sarafina.”

Sniffling, she lifted her head. “Everyone who has ever claimed to love me has betrayed me. They win my heart, my trust, my love, and then they take theirs away and leave me alone.” She closed her eyes.

“I won't. I swear it.”

Shaking her head, she lowered it again, weeping. “Oh, Bartrone, why? Why did you leave me all alone?”

“You're not alone.”

“You do not count, spirit. Who knows when I will hear from you again? A day for you could be a century for me!”

Will racked his brain to think of something he could say that would give her something to cling to. Anything. And then he hit on it. “There's the child,” he said quickly. “The one Bartrone told you about. Dante. Surely you can't give up without at least seeing him?”

She was silent for a moment, except for the sniffling. Then, finally, she struggled to her feet, pressing her palms to the walls to help her stand. Will wished with everything in him that he could help her, put his arms around her and hold her, carry her away from that dangerous sunlight.

She went to the door and closed it, secured the bolt from the inside, then slowly made her way into the depths of the underground lair. “Spirit? Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Stay with me until I sleep. And…try to come to me again—sooner, this time? Can you do that?”

“I don't know if I can. But I swear I'll try.”

She nodded, then stopped beside a huge hardwood box. It wasn't a coffin. It was twice as wide, nearly twice as deep. She opened the lid, and he saw that the thing was lined with white satin sheets and pillows. And he knew with a stab of pain that Bartrone used to lie there beside her.

She lay down, lowered the lid and closed her eyes. She whispered Bartrone's name as she fell into a deathlike sleep.

Will let himself slip into sleep, too.

S
arafina had her driver drop her at one of her favorite places, a little bar on the lower east side. It wasn't quite lowbrow enough to be called seedy, but it was hardly uppercrust. She spent hours in this place, or places like it, when she was in the city. And she was in the city often.

Stupid, perhaps. It wasn't as if that imaginary lover had been real. It wasn't as if his words, about being an ordinary man, living in New York in the early years of the twenty-first century, were anything more than a dream created by her broken psyche as a trick to give her reason to go on.

He wasn't real. He hadn't come to her in a hundred years. He wouldn't appear now.

She spent hours in the bar that night, sitting in a dark, secluded booth, watching people, in between writing in her journal. She was trying to remember the exact details, to get them down on paper in a way that was true to what she had been feeling at the time.

What she had been feeling at the time was rage. Oh, not at first, not right away. There had been confusion, and there had been fear that night of her rebirth into a strange, new life. But when she returned to the camp, when she faced her sister, pretending to weep for her in Andre's arms, claiming to the tribe that the vampire had come to claim her sister at last, she had known only rage.

She had summoned every ounce of
Shuvani
magic in her blood, and she'd screamed her curse from the darkness for all those warmed by the firelight to hear. Andre would not live out the decade. But Katerina would—she would live long enough to see one of her own offspring, or theirs, become what Sarafina was. That was her curse.

And it had come to pass just that way.

At length Sarafina leaned back in the padded seat, setting her pen down and closing the velvet cover of the book. The journals she had chosen were not antique, nor leather bound, like her precious Dante's had been. They were new. She had made a quest out of finding just the right ones to fill with her memories, the tales of many lifetimes, and she had settled on these. The covers were coated in purple velvet. The pages were heavy, cream-colored velum, and each volume had a violet satin ribbon with a silver cradle moon dangling from the end, to keep one's place.

She liked to do her remembering in places like this one, though she hadn't analyzed her motives too closely and had no desire to do so. She found the smoke-filled bar comforting. She liked the smell and taste of tobacco, and sometimes indulged in it herself, not being likely to die of lung cancer anytime soon. She enjoyed the taste of vodka, as well, the burn of it on her tongue, and though her system could not digest the alcohol, she would often order a shot, just to swirl it around in her mouth for a while. She liked the din here. So many people lingering about, interested only in themselves and what they could get from each other. And the music, with the bass so loud it reverberated in her chest and behind her eyes with every pulse.

She liked this bar. No one knew what she was here. No one cared. And if they interrupted her work by hitting on her, it took only a look to send them scurrying away.

Something had happened to her, she supposed. Seeing Dante's story brought to life on the screen, seeing the way his life had become truly immortal, had made her long to share her own. But of course she had no one with whom to share it. Nor did she want anyone. Writing it down was an acceptable substitute. Though even if some future writer found her journals and shared them with the world, that wouldn't make Sarafina truly immortal. None of them were truly immortal, not really.

Some went mad and had to be destroyed. Others went mad and destroyed themselves. Like her dear Bartrone. So strong, so wise, so ancient. Even he had succumbed to the inevitability of death in the end. Others—far too many others—were killed by the vampire hunters. Stiles and his thugs had built up an impressive organization over the past several years.

Dante's journals had become fodder for films, and though it had nearly been disastrous for him, Sarafina had begun keeping her own journals almost immediately after he turned his back on her, the woman who had borne him into darkness. He'd chosen his kitten-weak fledgling over her.

Her journals, Sarafina vowed, would be well guarded. She wouldn't leave them to molder in some dusty attic, and she wouldn't trust their well-being to anyone else. They represented her thoughts, her life, her history.

Someday, she would leave this body. And when she did, her stories would remain. Perhaps, if she were very lucky, she would find someone worthy of taking charge of the tales. Or she would bury them somewhere to be found in a few generations.

Closing the journal, she knew she was finished for tonight. Time to find an amusing diversion. She was hungry.

Tucking the journal into her shoulder bag, Sarafina slid from the booth and got to her feet. She came here often enough that she knew all the regulars. And she knew it would spoil her fun were she to hunt here. Should someone come up missing, the others would notice, questions would be asked.

She wore silk, burgundy silk pants with legs that draped as elegantly as any skirt. The blouse matched, and it was tiny, with spaghetti-thin straps. She wore diamonds at her throat and wrists. The coat was Arctic wolf—it had been a pet.

She took it from the back of her chair and slid her arms into it, and then she walked slowly through the crowded bar, feeling the eyes on her, the appreciation, the interest. She ignored it.

Outside, rain had speckled the sidewalks and glittered from the cars. It still fell, a light, fine mist. She walked a block, then two, then three, enjoying the kiss of the rain on her face. She felt the night's dampness and chill, felt it more intensely than any mortal would, but she didn't shiver or feel in any way uncomfortable with it.

She kept walking. It wasn't a great neighborhood to begin with, and it got steadily worse in this direction. Garbage, rats, crumbling bricks, broken fire escapes and streetlights that didn't function were the scenery here.

It was one of her favorite places to prey, when she was in the mood to prey. She didn't have to. She had a pair of perfectly willing slaves at her house, who would feed her any time she commanded it. But sometimes you just needed a fresh kill.

The streets were dead tonight, she thought. Where was her next meal hiding?

“Hey, baby, that's some coat you got on.”

She stopped in her tracks, smiling, turning to face the young tough who had come up behind her. “There you are,” she said, looking up at him, since he was a good deal taller than she.

“Here I am,” he said, grinning. He had a knife in his hand. “I'll take the coat. And that sparkly necklace, too.”

“You think so?” she asked. She shot her hand forward far too fast for him to observe and gripped his wrist—hard. A bone cracked, and she eased off just a little as the blade clattered to the broken sidewalk.

“What? Jesus, what the hell…?”

“Shhhhh.”
She put a finger to her lips, still holding his wrist. “I'd like you on your knees. I think that would please me very much.” She squeezed, and he fell to his knees.

Then she stood, looking down at him. He had skin like bronze, deep brown eyes with thick, pretty lashes. A scar crossed the bridge of his nose, and a ring pierced his eyebrow. He had full, thick lips. He was young, strong.

“What are you doing, lady? Come on, I'm sorry, okay? I was only joking around, you know? Come on, let go of my wrist, man. You're killing me.”

“Oh, I don't know, maybe not. God, you're going to be good,” she whispered. She put her free hand on one side of his head, tipped it sideways, then bent low and put her mouth to his neck.

He shivered, tipped his head farther. She tasted his skin, felt the blood rushing just beneath the surface. Her stomach clenched in anticipation as she bit down.

He yelped, and then he relaxed. She released his wrist, knowing he wouldn't fight her now. No. He loved this. She drank, and he was as good as she had known he would be. Sweet and young and just bad enough to give the blood a luscious kick.

She drank while he melted against her, and when she finally stood up, he fell over sideways and lay there on the concrete, his eyes open, staring at her. He was too weak to move.

“You've been a very good boy,” she told him. “Now Fina's gonna give you a little reward, hmm?” She drew a tiny blade from her pocket, slit her forefinger just a little and watched the blood well up in the cut, warm and red. Then she reached down and slid the finger between his lips.

When the blood touched his tongue, his entire body jolted in reaction to its power. He blinked, shocked, and began sucking, as hungry for the force as she had been. But she withdrew the finger before he'd taken more than a few eager sips. “Ah ah ah, that's all for now. More later, though, hmm?”

He was quivering, craving her already. It was so easy with some. Others took longer. But eventually she could reduce any of them to mindless drones, living only to please her, utterly addicted to the few precious drops she gave them when she felt like it. Enough to keep them alive, relatively healthy and utterly addicted.

“Can you get up?” she asked him.

He struggled to his feet, even as the limo pulled to a stop at the roadside. Edward got out, came around the car and opened the rear door for her.

Sarafina rewarded him with a kiss that let him taste the blood on her lips.

“Are we to keep this one, my lady?” he asked.

She glanced at her new acquisition as he stood swaying, weak. He was drooling. How utterly unbecoming. She sighed in stark disappointment. “No, Edward, I suppose not. He's not even a slight challenge, and I think I'd tire of him far too quickly.”

“To the hospital then?”

“Why? Do you think I took too much?” Again she looked at the man. He was supporting himself by leaning on the car door. His skin was very white, and his eyelids tinted blue. “Oh, my. Yes, the hospital, I suppose.” She rolled her eyes, gripped the young man by the front of his shirt and pushed him into the back seat. Then she got in beside him. “You're not to steal or use weapons against the innocent. Not ever again. Do you understand?”

He smiled at her, his lips wet. “Anything you say.”

“No drugs, either. I've allowed you to live, and I won't have you wasting that gift. You're to get a job, support yourself through legal means, make something of your life.”

“Yes, yes…” He reached weakly for her hand.

She pulled it free and turned her attention to the sidewalks they were driving past. Searching every face, a habit she couldn't seem to break. Her spirit lover had told her once that he was just a man. Had he died, then, as men were prone to do? Or had he simply abandoned her, the way everyone else she'd ever loved had done?

She sighed softly. It didn't matter. No one would abandon her again, because she wouldn't let them. Her only companions were her servants—and she owned them, body and soul. They were incapable of leaving her. The very thought of it would be more than they could bear.

It was better that way, she thought as she silently scanned the faces they passed. At least she knew she could trust them. It was the only way she could imagine ever trusting anyone.

 

“Mom, come on, will you talk to him?” The eighteen-year-old pleaded with her mother but didn't expect it to help her case.

Angelica lowered her eyes and shook her head slowly. “I'm sorry, hon. Your father is right. It's far too dangerous.”

“I'm
eighteen!
”

“If you want to see New York, you can see it with us,” Jameson insisted. “And if you'd rather not be chaperoned by your parents, then I have no doubt Rhiannon or Tamara would be more than happy to—”

Amber Lily closed her eyes, clenched her hands into fists at her sides and stomped one foot. A vase flew from its stand, straight across the room, smashing into the wall on the opposite side.

“That will be enough of that, young lady,” her mother said.

“Young lady,” Amber repeated. “God, Mom, do you realize that you don't look a day older than I do?”

“Neither does your aunt Rhiannon, but she's several
centuries
older than you. And what does that have to do with it, anyway?”

Amber rolled her eyes. “Everything! I'm an adult. I can do what I want, and I will—with or without your permission!”

Her parents sent startled glances to each other, and Amber fully suspected they were exchanging more than a look. It frustrated her to no end that she couldn't hear their thoughts unless they wanted her to. Who the hell had parents like this? Why couldn't she just be a normal teenager, with a nice, normal, middle-class family in the 'burbs?

“Look, I've lived my entire life under your over-protective, smothering rules. I'm an adult now, and I've made up my mind. High school is over, college starts in the fall. I'm going to have some fun this summer. Alicia and I are going to New York City for two weeks. We're going to stay in a nice hotel, and we're going to see a show and we're going to shop and tour, and do things that normal teenagers would do. For once in my life, I just want to be normal.”