Incarnation (22 page)

CHAPTER 16

A
s we made our way through the crowd, Edward said, “Lady Blanche has told me something of your unorthodox origins. It is hardly any wonder that you feel confused. Please believe that I will help in any way I can.” The smile he bestowed upon me should have made my heart flutter, had I still possessed an organ capable of such a response. Instead, it merely stiffened my suspicion of him.

No doubt Delacorte was popular with the female acolytes who would vie for his attention. No doubt as well that he found it easy to make use of human women when that urge was in him. But a halfling born of blood and desperation, incarnated by the great Mordred himself, risen from the grave to claim her place in the world of man and vampire alike—that was an entirely different matter.

With grim amusement, I girded myself to make use of his vanity and folly. Seeing him with such clarity as I did, I had no doubt that he was exactly what I had first thought him to be, a vicious, violent boy whose vanity blinded him to all reality.

It was almost too easy.

“Be honest with me,” I said.

He frowned as though the idea was foreign to him, but then answered as though amused. “Of course.”

“What do you think of Lady Blanche?”

He would have been wiser to answer at once, to swear his devotion and his loyalty, but instead he hesitated and I saw the calculation behind his eyes. Finally, he said, “She is magnificent, of course. You are most fortunate that she has taken you under her wing.”

“I am indeed, yet I cannot help but worry . . .”

“About what?” He ducked his head a little, moved a little closer, inviting my confidence even as he plotted my seduction.

“She must have told you that Mordred incarnated me just before he disappeared.”

“I believe something was mentioned to that effect. . . .”

“Did she tell you that I am linked to him?”

This was new indeed, vital news that he could carry to Lady Blanche. But first he had to know more. “Linked? How?”

“Don’t ask me to explain it. I only know that he exists still and . . .” My voice trembled with feigned fear and excitement. “He is still incredibly powerful. I can
feel
it.”

I leaned a little closer. He had fed recently; his breath smelled coppery. I only just managed not to recoil. “What if he comes back. Do you think he will be very upset?”

Edward lurched back a little as though I had stung him. “Comes back? Do you really think he could?”

“How could I possibly know? It is all so . . . strange. But if he did, wouldn’t he be upset?”

“What do you mean, upset? Why would he?”

“You don’t think Mordred would consider that Lady Blanche had . . . overstepped herself?”

His eyes darkened with alarm. “He might . . . it’s possible. Do you think he would?”

“I’m far too inexperienced to know, and yet the brief time I spent with him . . . Let us just say that I am afraid.”

“For Lady Blanche?”

“Of course! I owe her so much, but for all of us as well.” Fighting the repugnance I felt, I bent closer still and laid my hand on his arm. “There are even times when I fear this is some terrible plot on his part to sniff out who is loyal and who is not.” I sighed and offered him a wan smile. “No doubt I am wrong.”

“No doubt,” he repeated but he no longer appeared entirely aware of my presence. Instead, he seemed to be imagining the havoc that would follow if I was right. A vengeful Mordred let loose upon his kind, culling the disloyal. Truly, that was the stuff of nightmares.

Having gone as far as I dared to raise doubts about the likely success of Lady Blanche’s plans, I turned away from the hapless Delacorte. For a time, I pretended an interest in cards. I enjoyed whist and could hold my own in quadrille, but the patrons of the Bagatelle played a game I had never seen before. It used not the deck to which I was accustomed, but a set of tarot cards.

When he had recovered himself sufficiently, Edward tried to explain the rules to me but I did not grasp them, most likely because I scarcely listened. My attention was diverted by the wages that were changing hands across the green felt tables. Gold coins, pearls, other precious gems flew back and forth as luck ebbed and waned. So, too, did acolytes who were exchanged as currency. I stood behind Edward, watching as he played, clumsily, for clearly he had other matters on his mind.
I was still trying to grasp the complexities of the game when Felix appeared at the entrance to the card room. Catching my eye, he gestured to me.

I edged away, not wishing to draw Edward’s attention, but he was sufficiently distracted not to notice. When I reached Felix, he grasped my elbow and drew me into an alcove.

“Something is happening,” he said, very low so only I could hear him.

A dozen or more thralls had just appeared. Moving in the odd, shuffling way they had, they drew back a pair of floor-to-ceiling curtains covering a wall. Behind stood large double doors. The thralls opened them, revealing a wide corridor lined with stone that I had not seen before. They stood aside, as though in invitation to enter.

At once, the mood in the club changed. Ripples of excitement spread out in all directions. Feral smiles and eager glances replaced the raucous conversation of a few minutes before. As one, the crowd moved toward the doors. Felix and I were carried along. I saw Delacorte nearby but he did not notice me, so absorbed was he in what was happening.

The corridor twisted downward. I smelled the river and was struck by a sudden possibility—did Lady Blanche have Mordred after all? Was she about to reveal him?

But what then of his conviction that a human held him?

Turning to Felix as best I could in the press of bodies, I murmured, “You don’t think that she—?”

His eyes dark with apprehension, he said, “I fear we will wish that she did.”

While I was still puzzling over that remark, the corridor ended in front of another pair of double doors. At the crowd’s approach, thralls threw them open. Beyond lay darkness lit
only by fires burning in iron lattice baskets set on high tripods.

“What is this place?” I murmured to Felix as we entered. Unlike elsewhere in the club, the air was warm, thick with the scent of burning coals.

Felix put an arm through mine, linking us together. He spoke in a low, urgent hiss. “Whatever you do, don’t make a scene. It would mean the end of us both.”

A sense of dread grew in me, deeper and darker than mere fear. Instinctively, I tried to step backward but the press of the crowd made that impossible. Instead, we were both pushed closer to the center where, I saw, a stone table had been placed. Before it stood Lady Blanche, garbed in white as always with her pearls draped around her slender neck. She had been beautiful before in her own glacial way, but now she glowed from within, incandescent with power and determination.

“Come,” she called out, beckoning to us. “Let us celebrate together. The time of scarcity is over. The era of denying our true selves is past. Let us all rejoice in our strength, our cunning, our superiority above all others on this earth!”

As the crowd cheered, a door on the far side of the chamber opened. Two vampires entered—one male, the other female, both of whom I recognized from the club. Between them they supported a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties, clean-shaven, with thick auburn hair neatly trimmed. Unlike the acolytes I had seen, he was fully dressed in a gray riding coat, jodhpurs, and boots so well polished that the gleaming black leather flashed even in the dim light. Tall and broad shouldered, he appeared very fit yet he made no attempt to free himself from the vampires. He seemed dazed and unaware of his surroundings.

“What is this?” I asked Felix, but already in some sense I knew. Nothing could more clearly declare the beginning of a new reign than to openly violate Mordred’s accord with the most powerful of earth’s humans. The young man was clearly British and from the upper class. To take him captive and feed on him against his will amounted to a declaration that the vampires would no longer accept any limits on their behavior. If the likely consequences of that concerned anyone in the crowd other than Felix and myself, no one showed it. To the contrary, the vampires were shouting Blanche’s name, praising her, and vying to declare their loyalty.

Even so, I tried to remain calm. For all her ambitions, surely Lady Blanche had been far too close to Mordred for too long not to understand that he had ruled as he had in order to prevent a war no one could win. She would make a gesture to win the vampires but she would know better than to go too far. Undoubtedly, this would be a terrible experience for the young man, but the supplicants were fed on all the time and they seemed to come to no harm. When she was done, she would let him go. Perhaps there was some means to keep him from remembering what had happened. He would recover, go on with his life, and be none the wiser.

That was how it would be, wasn’t it?

Lady Blanche flicked a hand. At once, the vampires seized the young man and tore off his clothing with such violence that they even shredded his boots. Through it all, he remained too dazed to offer any resistance. A part of me wanted to look away, if only to leave him some shred of dignity at least in my eyes. But the other, stronger part of me flicked the thought away. He was, after all, merely a human, albeit an attractive one. As I had guessed, he was very fit. Muscles rippled across
his flat abdomen. His shoulders and arms were well defined, as were his thighs. He clearly was no idler.

“Very nice,” Lady Blanche said. She approached him with a smile. He looked at her, blinked, and smiled in turn. A warm, open, innocent smile that would have wrung a groan from me had I not managed to press my lips together just in time.

“What is his name?” she asked.

The female vampire answered. “Lord Harley William Charles Langworthe, recently come up from Oxford, heir to an earldom in Essex. His mother was a Carlisle.”

Her pale hand tipped in carmine painted nails traced a line along the young lord’s chest. “Not a first-rank lineage, we would need a duke for that or a prince of the blood, but not bad either. I believe he will do.”

At her nod of approval, the pair seized Lord Harley and lifted him onto the stone table. Even then, he showed no alarm.

“Why doesn’t he resist?” I asked Felix. “Is he drugged?”

“Of course not. He’s under some sort of compulsion.”

Just as I was. I felt a sudden and most unwelcome kinship with young Lord Harley. Not that I should compare what Mordred had done in a desperate effort to save himself with what Lady Blanche was about to do. Not at all . . .

She stepped back a little and looked at him critically. “He isn’t usually this passive, is he? “

“Not at all, milady,” the female vampire said hastily. “The effects should be wearing off as we speak.”

Lady Blanche nodded. “Then let us assure that our guest cannot harm himself.”

I had failed to notice that shackles dangled from the sides of the stone table. As his lordship was secured at wrists and
ankles, the vampires pressed even closer. I had far too good a view of his sweet smile that wrung what passed for my heart. A moment later, a flicker of alarm darkened his gaze.

“I . . .” He attempted to rise, only to discover that he could not. “Where . . . ?” His gaze fastened on Lady Blanche . . . her lovely figure clad all in white, the silver sheen of her glorious hair, the perfection of her features . . . her unsheathed fangs . . .

“Oh my God! You . . . what are you? Where am I?” Struggling against the shackles, Harley twisted in horror. “Let me up! Let me go!”

I fought the instinct to try to help him, telling myself again that he would be all right in the end. The acolytes vied to be fed upon. I had seen with my own eyes the ecstasy they experienced. Yet there was a difference. They were willing and the young lord was not. Nor did Lady Blanche seem to care.

Even as he strained, trying to break free, she raked both her hands from his shoulders to his naval. So sharp were her nails that they left a trail of bloody welts in their wake.

Laying her palm against his chest, she said, “So much warmth . . . such life. I can feel his heart beating.” She turned and smiled at the crowd. “It feels like a trapped bird desperate to escape.”

“He is afraid,” someone shouted. The others cheered.