State of Grace (Resurrection) (27 page)

‘You didn’t make me forget,’ I pointed out, my mind whirling with possible reasons why.

‘No, I did not.’ He was curt. ‘I could not. Although you readily fell under Viktor’s spell.’ He was cross. I could tell. A thought occurred to me.

‘Did Viktor drink my blood?’ I was horrified. ‘And then make me forget?’

‘Eryres, calm yourself. He has not taken blood from you.’ His eyes were full of smouldering passion. ‘Only I have drunk from you.’

‘But…
I… you…’ I was speechless.

‘Viktor could enthral you, but I could not,’ he said succinctl
y. ‘Neither of us has ever known this. Either a human is susceptible to being enthralled, and many are, or they are not. It does not matter who the vampire is.’ His frustration was evident. ‘But you, you are different.’ He looked at me intently and I could read a number of emotions coming from him: curiosity, desire (either for me or my blood), annoyance and, so fleetingly I must have imagined it, respect.

‘We generally choose those who we can enthral to feed from. If we have no choice, we drink, then we kill.’

‘You haven’t killed me,’ I pointed out.

‘No.’ His lips twitched, and I knew he was holding back a smile.

‘Why not?’ I closed my eyes, wondering at my own stupidity: I was forcing him to examine his motives.  He might just decide to re-evaluate them.

‘You intrigue me. You are like no other human I have ever met.’ Then he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him
, ‘Or vampire.’

‘Aren’t you worried I might tell?’ Why, oh why, was I doing this?

His gaze was direct and honest. ‘No,’ he said and then he did smile. ‘No one would believe you – not here, anyway. You would be thought of as mad, or a witch. You wouldn’t like what they do to witches.’

Yeah, burnt at the stake, I recalled, and grimaced. Not a good way to go. One long arm reached out and his hand closed
over mine. ‘I am serious, Eryres. You do not want to draw attention to yourself.’

I thought of Sibyl. ‘It might be too late for that,’ I murmured, then added one word as I saw the question in his eyes. ‘Sibyl.’

‘Ah.’ He knew what I meant immediately. ‘I will not let her, or anyone, harm you,’ he stated and I heard a deadly promise in his voice. ‘She is too old to remain unwed and she has fixated on me,’ he explained. ‘Many women and men do.’ He said this without a trace of pride, he was merely stating a fact. ‘The attraction we hold for some helps us hunt.’

‘Have you…
with Sibyl?’

‘No. It would be reckless. I do not touch virgins who are so well guarded. Others may, but I do not seek that kind of excitement.’ He paused, then
he added, ‘Not now.’

I didn’t want to consider what he meant by that, or what he had done in his past.

He continued, ‘She does not like you because of your association with me. She wants me to herself, however impossible that may be.’ He saw my bewilderment and went on to explain. ‘I am a bard. I have no status, no lands, no wealth. Her father would not contemplate a union between us and he would kill me, or try to, if he knew where his daughter’s thoughts lay. He has kept her unwed for too long, in the search for a political alliance that marriage to her would entail. He intends to wed her to further his own interests but so far has not found a suitable husband. Suitable for him, that is, not her.’

‘If she
was already married, would you –?’

‘Probably,’ he admitted. ‘She is beautiful and I am attracted by the scent of her blood.’

‘You can smell her blood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you smell mine?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does it smell like?’

‘Sweet.’ He inhaled deeply, his head lifted as he sniffed. ‘Mouth-watering.’

His fangs had lengthened and he ran the tip of his tongue over them. I shivered with dark passion. Thirst darkened his irises to glittering ebony. My heart fluttered in my chest and I forgot to breathe.

Pulling himself
together with a visible effort he said, ‘I would not mate with her now. It would destroy her.’

I
stared blankly at him, without understanding, still reeling from his onslaught on my senses.

‘She is a virgin,
as she should be. Her father is trying to use her as a bargaining tool when he finds her a husband that meets his needs. Such a husband will be well-versed in the ways of women, and will know if she has been with another man.’

‘But you can make her forget, can’t you?’

‘Yes, yes I can. But mating with her would change her, even if she did not remember. She would lose her maidenhead, and I am certain her husband would notice. Even if he did not, her reaction to him would be too knowing. She would not act like a chaste maiden should act. It may also be that people who are close to her, who know her well, would notice the change in her even before she reached her marriage bed.’

‘You do have compassion,’ I said.

‘You still do not understand!’ he roared, and I flinched back, scared once more. He was controlling his temper with difficulty and I shrank away from his anger. ‘I am not doing it for her. I am doing it for myself. For my kind. To make it easier for us to walk amongst you. We do not want to draw attention to ourselves. What would happen to her, how it would affect her, is meaningless to me.
She
is meaningless to me. I do not leave her alone because it would ruin her. I choose not to drink from her because I do not wish to complicate my life.’

‘Is there nothing human left in you?’ I was truly appalled, seeing him clearly, perhaps for the first time.

‘I have told you there is. I have emotions similar to yours but they have been tempered by time and by what I am and what I do. You may think I am monstrous, but it is your race that wages war because of greed or belief, your race that dreams up instruments of torture, that rapes women and children, that thrusts spears into intimate parts of a body to leave a man impaled to die slowly. It is your kind that burns innocent women on a fire for entertainment, that kills mothers and fathers in front of their children and forces those same children to become slaves. It is your kind that kills for pleasure, for the thrill, for gold, for lands, for status. And you don’t just to this to each other – you teach bears to dance by dragging them over hot coals, you throw your dogs into a pit with a badger to see which animal will be torn apart first. You –’ He stopped, breathing hard, hands clenched into fists, eyes tightly shut as anger swept through him.

Eventually I spoke and
my words were a mere whisper. ‘We are not all like that.’

Slowly his eyes opened and I could sense his anger dwindling. ‘No, you are not. But it irritates me to be portrayed as a monster, an evil being spawned by the devil, when humans have enough demons of their own. I do not kill for fun – none of us do. We try not to kill at all, and when we do it is an accident, or a necessity. It is not from greed o
r lust, or just because we can. There are a few of us who would do such things, but the majority do not. We try to resurrect only those who we feel will benefit the vampire race.

‘Do you care nothing
for us?’ I persisted, aware I might provoke him again, but unable to stop pursuing the thread, even though he had told me, several times, that humans were no more than fodder to him.

‘I did,
’ he sighed. ‘It was too painful so I stopped.’

‘Painful?’

‘I have told you that our emotions are the same, less quick maybe, but perhaps deeper than yours. Humans are so…’ he cast around for the right word, ‘intransient. You change, grow old, die, almost as soon as we become attached to you. It is not worth the heartbreak.’

‘You are attached to Viktor
,’ I said.

‘Of course. He is vampire. He is older than me and was my guide
, my mentor. He taught me and guided me when I was resurrected. I love him like a father, or a brother.’

I hesitated to ask, but did anyway. ‘Has there been a woman in your life?’

‘Human or vampire?’

‘Either – both,
’ I shrugged.

‘I was married when I was human. I also had a mother and four sisters.’

‘What happened to your wife?

He snorted at my stupidity. ‘She died,’ he said, stating the obvious.

‘I gathered that – unless she became a vampire, too,’ I retorted.

‘That was unfair of me,’ he admitted. ‘She did not die of old age. She died in childbed, trying to give life to our son.’

‘I am so sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It was centuries ago. As for vampire – yes, there have been many. It is the way of our kind to mate for a while, then to separate. Some pairs have stayed together for c
enturies, but mostly it is for a few tens of years.

‘
Vampires don’t get married, then,’ I joked, in rather bad taste.

He looked at me oddly. ‘What would be the point? Marriage is a human invention for the control of wealth, the protection of women and the raising of children. Vampires do not have a great deal of wealth: it is difficult to acquire gold and lands when we have to move from town to town. Female vampires are as capable of protecting themselves a
s males, and as for children –’ He let the rest of the sentence go.

‘Th
ere is no ‘happily ever after’ for your kind, is there?’ I observed sympathetically.

‘That is because there is far too much ‘ever after’,’ he replied. ‘Til death us do part has little meaning for vampires. It is not as if we could be married for the normal span of twenty or t
hirty years. If vampires marry we could be bound together for millennia. It is a long time to spend with one mate. Anyhow, there is no such thing as vampire marriage. Our society, such as it is, does not recognise this human invention.’

‘It is not very romantic,’ I countered
, then I had to explain the whole concept of romance to him. When he understood he reflected, ‘It is, if I understood you rightly, a mixture of courtly love, chivalry and getting a woman into bed.’

‘Close enough,’ I agreed. ‘So, no romance?’

He shook his head in wonder. ‘I talk about the undead, drinking blood and living an unimaginably long life, and all she can think about is romance. Woman, you perplex me.’

‘That’s ok, I perplex myself.’

I stood, easing my back and stretching my legs. In an instant he was beside me, his nearness making my heart beat erratically, his scent strong in my nostrils. I knew my reaction to him was because of the vampire’s attractiveness to a human, but it didn’t make my response any the less disconcerting.

‘Don’t,’ I said, taking a step backwards.

‘I will not harm you,’ he vowed. ‘I have given you my word. I will not take your blood if you do not wish me to.’

‘I don’t,’ I stated firmly, but I’m not adverse to you taking my body, I thought. Hell, I must be stupid!

‘You are different from any other woman, human or vampire.’ Now he was all intense good looks and charisma.