The Hunger (16 page)

Beatrix loved Stephan with an intensity she had never thought possible. Stephan made love to her almost every day, carefully, lovingly. True, he always shushed her when she tried to tell him how much she loved him, but she could see his own love in his eyes. To think that after all the women in his long life, Stephen had chosen her to love forever was . . . was delicious
.

She had taken special care in the last months to be kind to Asharti. Asharti must not know about her and Stephan. Asharti liked to spend long hours alone, which was very convenient when you thought about it. And Stephan was most careful never to show Beatrix preference when they were all together. Still, Asharti would be hurt if she knew. How could she not? And Beatrix had grown to love Asharti, too. She loved Asharti’s feistiness, her determination to get what she wanted from the world
.
Asharti was a strong person, not just physically, they all were strong that way. Asharti was a survivor who would make the best of where she was. Beatrix was sometimes jealous of her, sometimes just admiring, but in all but loving Stephan, she let Asharti take the lead. Sometimes she thought Asharti must know. How could see not see Beatrix’s bliss? But if she knew, Asharti would have confronted her about Stephan. When it happened, as it must, she only hoped she would not lose Asharti’s friendship
.

Beatrix burst into Stephan’s quarters, where she had spent so many nights writhing in ecstasy as he showed her new ways to reach bliss and how to help him reach it, too. The bed was neatly made. Fire crackled in the grate. Two goblets of figured glass waited in anticipation of her return. The room smelled like the myrrh he imported because she liked the scent
.

Her gaze returned to the wine glasses. A tiny circle of wine shivered in the bottom of each. She walked slowly to the little table that held the goblets, not wanting to think But she couldn’t help herself. She raised a wine glass to the light
.

The dregs of wine floated there in red revelation. The goblets supposedly waiting for her had already been used, in this, the most intimate of Stephan’s rooms. She stood, transfixed. How amazing that the world could change in a single moment over something like wine. She stood somewhere far away, looking at herself and marveling. Then she smashed the goblet with a shriek against the hearth, raised her heavy wool skirts and took off at a run for Asharti’s room
.

She was crying by the time she pushed open the heavy oaken door. The panting pleasure on the far side told her everything. She stood, shaking, in the entryway. Stephan looked over his shoulder and raised himself on one elbow. His other hand slipped from Asharti’s darkly furred mound. Asharti herself shuddered one last time and opened her
eyes. They widened at seeing Beatrix, and then her expression grew sly
.

“You . . . you . . . betrayer!” Beatrix hissed, tears coursing down her cheeks. She could not say she thought he loved her only. She was ashamed that she had felt sorry for Asharti. How naïve she had been! How foolish
. . . “
I
. . .
I hate you!” She was not sure which of them she meant
.

Stephan got deliberately up from the bed, and picked up a robe of oriental silk she knew only too well. He wrapped it around his nakedness, but not before she saw that his erection was subsiding only slowly. The fact that his cock had risen for Asharti made her blush with shame. How had she not realized?

“I am sorry you had to find out this way,” Stephan said with maddening calm. “I thought you were almost ready to understand.”

“Understand?” Beatrix said, her voice rising, “You thought I would understand?”

He held out a hand. “Let us go to the solarium. There are things I would tell you.”

“Nothing you can tell me will make a difference.” She practically choked on the words. All she could think about was getting away. She turned on her heel and stumbled from the room and down the stairs, the sobs in her chest growing. She was not quite certain where to take refuge. Stables. She would go to the stables while she thought how to make her escape more permanent. She couldn’t stay here. Not when Stephan betrayed her so calmly, so heartlessly
.

She was halfway across the cobbled stable yard when a growing darkness, blacker than the night around her, whirled in front her. She turned and ran for the gate into the forest. He was after her in two enormous strides. His hand clamped on her upper arm. She spun, growling, her eyes red with her Companion, her teeth bared. She clawed at him and struggled in his grip
.

“Bea, Bea,” he cooed. She scratched his face. Blood dripped down his cheek before the wound closed. She struggled, shrieked in anger and frustration. Still his voice never rose above a whisper. “Shush now. I understand. Shuuuussssh.”

All at once the fight went out of her. She was not the only one for him. He didn’t love her. Her life force drained onto the cobblestones. She would have fallen if he had not held her. Sobs came up from her belly and keened in her throat. She struggled for breath. The blackness at the edge of her vision had nothing to do with her Companion
.

Stephan swept her up in his arms. She clung to him as he took her into the greater darkness of the stable, into a vacant stall piled with hay. They sank there while she sobbed and heaved for breath. But you couldn’t cry like that forever even if you wanted to. Soon she realized he was kissing her hair and rocking her, his arms around her. She could feel his heart beating in his chest. Animals moved in adjacent stalls. The comforting smells of warm horsehide and musty hay enveloped her. She felt dry, like dust floating away, lost in the wind
.

“I know you are hurt. You think I don’t care for you. But I do. God above, I do,” Stephan whispered in the darkness, his breath warm on her neck. “You are important to me. Far more important than anything else in my life. But you are also part of something important for our kind, a grand experiment if you will, that will set the course of our race for millennia to come.”

“I am an experiment.” Her voice held no outrage. The time for outrage had passed
.

“In some ways. You and Asharti
—
a treasured and precious experiment.”

His words pounded nails into her coffin
.

“You know our Elders think that those who are made are not as good as those born with the Companion. They would
kill those like Asharti. Understandable in some ways, since those made so often go mad, killing indiscriminately.”

“I used to kill,” Beatrix said in a small voice
.

“Exactly my point. You were born vampire, but you were no better than one made. It made you perfect for my purpose. And so few of us are born now, my choices were limited.”

Hardly a flattering description of the reason he chose to rescue her
.

“I want to prove,” he continued softly, “that with nurturing, with training, born and made are equal. Not that we should make others willy-nilly. But if one is made accidentally, that one must not be killed. You and Asharti are my chance to show that. I will teach you how to go on. I will train you for full and productive lives.” He lifted her chin. “You do see, don’t you?”

“I see you do not love me.” The words were torn from her throat
.

“But I do,” he said, looking straight into her eyes as though that proved his sincerity. “I love you both. And when you two prove that born and made are equally capable of taking their places in our society, others will be saved, now and in times to come.”

She did not care for saving lives in years to come. She wanted Stephan to love her now. But her throat closed around any words she might have said. She rocked there in his arms, dry and hollow. After a while she managed to croak, “How can you love us both?”

“Ahh, that is complex, Bea,” he whispered. “You will know yourself someday. It is because I have known love in all its permutations. I have loved so many, in so many ways, that I can select the way I choose to love. I choose to love you both, in different ways, so I do.”

“You do not know love at all then,” she accused, sitting back. “I do not choose to love you, Stephan. I just do.”

He smiled. “For now. I am your first taste of the simplest
kind of love. There are others, Bea, which you will know in all the countless years ahead, long after you have forgotten me.”

He thought she could
forget
him? He put a finger to her lips to stop her protest. “I hope you will remember your love for Asharti. You will be her anchor after you leave my protection.”

Leave. Silence stretched while she gathered her courage. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” he whispered. “Of course not. But you will.”

She did not reply but simply blinked at him in disbelief
.

“You have so much to experience, so much to offer. Men will worship you. You can shape the world if you will. You will leave me far behind.”

She turned her face up to confront him. It was the first time she had ever done so. “It is not I who would leave you,” she said, dry inside. “You betrayed me. Is that not like leaving?”

He smiled tenderly and stroked her hair. “Someday I hope you feel differently.”

“Don’t say that, Stephan.” She did not want to hear this. How could he not see that sleeping with Asharti was a betrayal? And he was not telling Asharti all this about leaving. “What about Asharti?”

“She will go, too.” He sounded so weary. “Was I right? Have I done you both an injustice?” In spite of her anger a moment ago, all she suddenly wanted was to comfort him. She leaned in toward his body and took his face in her hands
.

“You took me out of a bestial life, Stephan.”

“Yet I have hurt you,” His eyes were infinitely sad. “It was inevitable. There is so much hurt ahead for you. It is all so inevitable.”

Maybe, maybe she could make it right between them. Perhaps this experiment was the excuse, but he must have loved her all these months. He just needed to remember
that. Her newly wakened sensuality rose in her. The soft flesh between her legs swelled in anticipation. She must put it back the way it was between them. She reached up to kiss his chin. “I don’t hate you Stephan. I love you. Take joy in that tonight.” She let her eyes go wide with promise. “Asharti is up in her room. And I am here.”

He slid his hand around her nape, turning her face up, his strength held carefully in check. “Oh, Bea, Bea.” He examined her, as though he could tease out some truth that would turn pain into joy. She took the initiative and brushed her lips against his
.

She pushed away Asharti, and her anger, and her anxiety. Stephan needed her. The tingle of his lips against hers sent shocks down to her now-swollen loins. The inevitability of what would happen here overwhelmed her. Stephan needed her
.

“Leave me alone!” Beatrix shrieked. “Can’t you just leave me alone?” She threw herself out of bed and heaved on the bell rope again and again. The room was spinning; the sounds were beginning to resemble an off-kilter carousel.

A startled footman opened the door. “My lady?”

“Is there any laudanum in the house?” she panted, her night dress clinging to her sweating form as she steadied herself against the writing desk.

“I . . . I don’t know.” He was flushing and going pale in turn.

“Well, ask Mrs. Mossop, and if she doesn’t have any then get out to a chemist, or call a doctor or something. I need laudanum.” She pressed her hand to her forehead.

The footman scurried out the door.

If she couldn’t get the memories to leave her alone, she’d drug herself out of any memory at all. She
wasn’t
going to keep getting dragged back to a time that was so painful, or to people who had hurt her so much. Let laudanum stop the spinning. And laudanum would keep her
Companion quiet about wanting blood as well. A perfect solution all around.

It was four days before John managed to take his exercise under the derisive jeers of the guards. He could not yet wear the rough canvas shirt of the prison uniform Reynard had so carefully mended, so he was naked to the waist, welts lacing his back. The corpses of the escapees were gone. But John had not forgotten them. There would be no help. Faraday must have been a figment of Barlow’s imagination. Or something had gone wrong. It was up to him alone to do the impossible and manage a successful escape for himself and for Dupré.

He watched carefully as barrels of supplies were loaded over the side with the boom the sailors called the cat’s-paw. Neither he nor Dupré were in any condition to make the four-mile swim to shore in icy waters. Indeed, Dupré had been unable to take his exercise today.

The prisoners shuffled around the freezing deck. There was a dense and chilling fog in the harbor. “You survived, you bugger.” The familiar gargoyle face of Walton, the guard who had lashed him, loomed out of the mist. “Nobody survives a lashing and that long in the Hole.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” John muttered. The bell sounded the end of their exercise.

“Talk back like that, and maybe you’ll have another go,” the guard threatened, grinning. “Someday soon we’ll see just how far you’ll go to avoid the lash, now you’ve tasted it.”

John wiped away emotion and staggered below. He’d better get off this ship soon if he was going to survive. And if he did, he wanted to plant a little bomb for Rose that would explode after he left. Useless, he knew. If not Rose, then some other would take over the hulk, likely as bad. Nevertheless, he stopped to see if the scheme he had put in play was likely to bear fruit.

Garneray was the richest of the prisoners, since his paintings commanded a pound apiece, and since his belongings had not been tossed overboard. A rough curtain was drawn around his painting space. John called a greeting and was invited inside the luxurious thirty square feet.