Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 Read online

  The words were meant to be tart, I was sure, but a note of indulgence had crept in.

  “Yes, Miss Goring,” said the girl resentfully. She clambered out, too, all smeared with chocolate frosting, and Miss Goring walked off with them on either side.

  As I watched, she petted the boy’s head affectionately, then absently hugged the sticky girl against her hip. The last traces of irritation faded from her face to be replaced with a soft smile. I caught a glimpse of the boy smirking at the girl around the woman’s skirt before they were swallowed in the crowd.

  I pushed the plate onto the chair next to mine, no longer hungry. Those children were budding sociopaths, with their slippery, reflexive manipulations that eroded the wills of every human they came into contact with.

  Yet they were the future that Dorian had planned for me.

  I emptied my wineglass quickly, setting it down again a little too hard. The lights, the music, the glittering crowd—it all ran together then. I hugged myself as the swirling skirts turned into a whirling muddle of color, the strains of the orchestra bleeding into the murmured conversations.

  And over and over, the same thoughts circled in my mind: There had to be a way out. Whatever the cost, there had to be a way out.

  Chapter Five

  I opened my eyes, and for a disorienting moment, I didn’t know where I was. I blinked at the silhouettes of furniture, encircled by the shadowy bookcases around the perimeter of the room.

  Dorian’s study, I thought sluggishly, though it was now shrouded in darkness, the only light coming from a fire burning in the grate. And I was lying on the sofa, still dressed in the green ball gown with a heavy blanket laid over me.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you were asleep for the night.” Dorian lounged in a club chair near the fire, his feet up on an ottoman and a brandy in his hand. His tailcoat and vest were tossed over the arm of the chair, his white tie dangling loose from either side of his open collar.

  I had the vague memory of a firm chest against my body, strong arms lifting me up, and the words in my ear: “Hush, now.”

  “Is the party over?” I asked. The dread I had felt was still there, deep in my gut, but it was dampened now by the drug of Dorian’s presence. The firelight played over the planes of his face, gilding the prominence of his cheekbone and the line of his nose and jaw.

  “More or less. Some of the guests will be here until they are politely ejected at dawn,” Dorian said, regarding me steadily over the rim of his glass.

  “You left them? Even though I was asleep?”

  His shrug was negligent. “Our duties are over now. My allies can make sure that the guests who remain do not get into too much trouble. I thought you’d like to leave, awake or not. And I also thought you might have a few questions for me.”

  “A few,” I echoed. That didn’t even begin to cover it.

  A shadow of a smile passed across his face. “Where would you like to start?”

  “Etienne and Isabella,” I said immediately, straightening up and pushing the blanket off. “How could you be friends with a man who would do something like that to his—his cognate?” I stumbled a little over the word.

  Dorian sighed, looking suddenly ancient and remote. “Not all agnates agree with my research. Etienne sees the value in it. His endorsement carries a great influence among many. He is a cornerstone of the Adelphoi.”

  “Adelphoi. What is that?” I asked.

  “The Adelphoi are my allies,” he said. “Versus the Kyrioi, who believe that agnates are properly the lords of humans. The history of our people goes back long before our memories hold out. But we believe that we are the creation of the union of men and angels—fallen angels, who wished to create a beautiful, corrupt race to have dominion over the race of men.”

  “We believe,” I repeated. “Do you believe it, too?”

  His mouth twisted slightly, an emotion passing over it so quickly that I couldn’t identify it before it was gone. “It isn’t something that you human-born can understand. Your kind are born and die in the space of only a few years, and everything is changed or forgotten in a few repetitions.”

  He turned the brandy glass so that the firelight glinted off the cut facets of the crystal. “Our traditions are stronger. Eighty of your generations would have been born in the time it takes one agnate’s memory to unravel, and our retellings change less, as the overlapping of our lives into the distant past leads to a greater consistency. Some of the youngest agnates think our origin story just a peculiar myth, but it is something that I and all those of my age have held as a certainty as far back as my mind disappears into the fog of time.”

  “So you actually believe that you are...demonspawn?” I said. “I mean, that’s what fallen angels are supposed to be, right? Demons? That’s...that’s terrible.”

  “Why else must we kill to live? We were made for evil,” he said heavily. The darkness seemed to knit itself more tightly around him, the pulsing agnatic influence almost tangible.

  “Some of us embrace it, believing that we must be true to that nature, as the natural lords of men.” His gaze transfixed me. “No human can refuse us, Cora. They all go willingly to their deaths. Humans are masters of the beasts of the field, and those creatures don’t even give themselves up. Who is to say that what we do is wrong? And even if it were, is wrongness not defined by those who are opposed to our own creators?”

  “But we aren’t animals,” I protested.

  “And we aren’t human. It’s not my argument, Cora. And it’s not my belief, but that of those who oppose what I do.”

  He took a drink of his brandy, emptying it swiftly, and set the glass on the table next to his chair. “These others, the Kyrioi, believe that to defy our natures is misguided at best and self-destructive at worst. And they were right about the self-destruction, because many of us would not live long enough to find a cognate if we restrained our feedings to what our bodies demanded. Until now.”

  “Because of your research,” I said.

  “Because of you,” he corrected. “The result of my research. The first of many. The Adelphoi believe that we might have been created for evil, but we still have the chance of redemption, the same chance any man might have. We have to. We can’t be damned by our births.”

  “The rising angel,” I said, remembering the statue.

  “The rising angel or the falling demon,” Dorian agreed. “We must have the power to choose which to be.”

  “Then how can Etienne be one of you?” I demanded, standing in my restless irritation. “How can he think that brainwashing Isabella will...will redeem him?”

  Dorian tipped his head back, looking up at me. Even as he sat with the loose-limbed grace of a cat, he looked no less dangerous. No less compelling.

  “To have a consort saves lives. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, depending on how long he or she lives. Etienne believes that human lives matter, and he also believes that many lives matter more than one. And what he’s done has kept her safe and subjectively happy for twelve hundred years. She may be the oldest cognate in the world.”

  Twelve hundred years. For twelve centuries, she had been a husk of a woman, emptied out, a blood donor kept one step above a vegetable. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around that length of time, even as my brain kept going through the brutal arithmetic: sixty of my lifetimes, forty of my mother’s, twenty of my grandmother’s....

  Dorian continued mercilessly. “At a minimum, we must feed three times a year for sanity and life. Four a year for functional health. Her survival has spared at least that many. ”

  My mind shifted thoughts abruptly. And he had lived how long? Older than empires, he had said. Older than memory. Two thousand years? Three?

  How many had he killed?

  “And you?” I asked, the question dragged from me by my need to know. “How many lives a year do you—did you—take?”

  “Four.” The answer was flat.

  I rubbed the mark on my wrist. Thousands of lives,
then. Many thousands. The man to whom my life was bound had killed more people than Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, or the Son of Sam—or all of them combined. He made Jack the Ripper look like a dilettante. Only a tyrant or a war criminal could match his monstrosity.

  And yet I could feel the pull of him from here, his dark beauty like a drug in my veins, calling to me in a way that no man ever had. I had let him do things to me that no one ever had done before, and I’d do it all over again.

  Even if I knew every name. Even if I saw every face of those who had come before me.

  What kind of monster was he? I scoffed at the question. He, at least, was what he was born to be. The real question was, what kind of monster was I?

  “And that’s what you want me for,” I said. “To give you blood. To give you children. So that your damned Adelphoi win.”

  “That’s part of what I wanted a cognate for. But also...to be whole. Alive.” He held out his hand in the firelight, studying it as if it belonged to someone else. “Like waking from a long dream.” His eyes snapped back up to my face. “But you—no, that’s not all I want you for. Though I would feel for any cognate, that does not mean it would be the same feeling, Cora, nor are rational motives identical with emotional realities.”

  I shook my head, not understanding. “You don’t even know me. You don’t even care who I am.”

  “Don’t I?” he returned.

  “You’ve never met my friends,” I said. “You don’t know my hobbies. I don’t even think you know my major, or my high school, or my grades, or anything about my family. All you know are a few things that I did.”

  “The other things, they’re minutiae.” He made a dismissive gesture with his fingers. “They’re details about your life. They don’t say anything about who you are or who you will be.”

  “What does, then?”

  “Your actions, of course.” His gaze raked across me. “I know you more intimately than you imagine. You’re the girl who fights with every fiber of her being for the dreams she made into her reason for hanging on to life, even when tempted with wealth and pleasure beyond her imagination. You’re the girl who defeated a djinn and escaped an agnate’s mind-slaves. You’re the girl who looked at the woman who nearly killed her and forgave, completely and instantly, when she understood that the woman had done nothing with intent. You’re the girl who tried to defy her own agnate when she found his terms intolerable to her sensibilities.”

  “And when I tried to refuse to do that one thing, you just about popped off the top of my skull and rummaged around, like it was nothing,” I said, the bitter edges of my words hurting my throat.

  “If I hadn’t, you would have died.” His answer was quiet.

  “Died? Because you would have killed me?” I scoffed, circling behind the sofa.

  “My enemies would have seen to that. If you hadn’t shown up tonight, you would have forfeited the temporary protection the invitations afforded you.”

  “But what if it was only the Adelphoi’s victory that was at risk?” I asked. “Would you have let me walk away then?”

  Dorian looked at me, and I knew he could make me believe anything he said. Why did I imagine that he’d give me the truth?

  But he surprised me. Because he did.

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t let you walk away. We have only two choices, Cora. We can reach for heaven or fall to hell.”

  I wanted to shake him in frustration. “What does that have to do with me?”

  His words were heavy. “If I made the selfish choice, the choice that would please you, at the cost of my ideals, it would be that much easier to go against them the next time. And the next time, the breech may not be something that you would choose.”

  “If,” I said. “What does that even mean, if?” It seemed to me like a coward’s word, something that could be used to justify anything.

  “The next time, perhaps I wouldn’t please you. Perhaps I would please my baser instincts instead,” he said evenly.

  I glared at him. How dared he act like he’d been doing me a favor? “You did please yourself, though. You made me go, and that’s what you wanted.”

  Dorian unfolded from his chair and crossed to where I hovered between the sofa and the door. He stood so close that I could feel his legs against my skirt, and I half raised one hand to touch his chest before I caught myself and dropped it again.

  He looked down at me, his eyes hard and bright in the shadows. “No. I didn’t want you merely to go. I wanted you to be happy to be there with me. To be happy to be with me always.”

  Always. I shivered at the finality of the word.

  “I took the least evil path that I could see,” he continued. “I kept you safe. And I worked for the greater good while requiring as little from you as I could.”

  “Requiring little? You want me to have your children!”

  “It won’t be against your will,” he said. He reached out and brushed my cheek with the barest touch of his fingers, and a deep, keening need wound through me.

  “You’ll change my will.” The words were a whisper.

  He shook his head. “No, Cora. I won’t. Ten years—that’s half your lifetime now. How can you be so sure what you will want in ten years? Or twenty? Or fifty?”

  I could feel in my body the desire to please him, a yearning for his approval. And right and wrong always seemed so slippery when I was with him, everything I thought I knew shifting under my feet. How long would it be until even that final step seemed like a small concession?

  And would it be him who caused the change, then? Or the bond? Or me? Could I ever even know?

  “How can I want you?” I didn’t realize I had said the words aloud until they reached my own ears. “God, this bond—it’s crazy.”

  “You may look upon what we have in horror, but how do you think we regard your human relationships? Your affections wax and wane.” Contempt dripped from every word even as he trailed his hand down my neck and across my shoulder and arm, his touch sending shards of desire through me as he seemed to drink me with his eyes. “You marry for love but also for convenience, from tradition, for stability and companionship, for money, for children, or simply because people expect it of you.”

  I swayed in the force of his regard, but I couldn’t deny what he said.

  He continued, “And what you feel on your wedding night and what you feel five years later, ten, twenty, forty—even true love may not last, or it may blossom and fade several times over. We are as constant as the sun. Our hearts are not our own to give, but once they are taken, they do not—they cannot—waver.” He reached my hand and took it, clasping it in his own.

  Another jolt went straight through my body even as my mind rebelled at his words. He was equating a bond—our bond—with love, but there was nothing that I had seen that night that was anything like the kind of love I believed in. Not even Jean and Hattie, with him acting as if she were a child to be indulged and talked around.

  “How can you talk about it like that? A heart—what can you even know about a heart, other than its blood? That’s not love,” I protested.

  He might believe it was, but being a vampire, how could he even know what love should be?

  “You know better than that, Cora. There’s more than blood between us. Humans pretend to value unconditional love, but that’s not something full humans could ever understand. There are always conditions—lines that cannot be crossed, words that cannot be unsaid.” He raised the back of my hand to his lips, and my skin came alive under his touch.

  “But with you, no line is too far,” I said faintly, through the sensations that he stirred in me. “It never can be. Nothing is too much, even if it destroys me. ”

  “I would sooner destroy myself,” he said, and his next kiss fell on my lips.

  I clung to him, my body pressed against his, my parted lips inviting him to take me. But the kiss was too soft, over too soon as he moved lower, along my jaw and down my neck.

  Need flared u
p in the core of my being, pushing up my spine and into my brain. I knew what was going to happen next—I knew it, and I wanted nothing else but him. Even though I refused the names he wanted to put to what we had.

  Chapter Six

  Flames of desire licked across my skin, following his mouth as it traced the neckline of my dress and swirling into my mind. I struggled against its influence, trying to keep a clear head. Maybe my surrender was inevitable, but I wouldn’t give up easily.

  “This—this is just lust,” I said. “Chemicals. Like an animal in heat.”

  He straightened, standing over me, and my hands tightened slightly, involuntarily on the fabric of his shirt.

  “Your greatest poets would disagree,” he said. “Those who are supposed to be able to put words to the human condition with more skill than any.”

  I shook my head even as one of his hands found the zipper of my dress and pulled it down, sending a shock of anticipation through me. “I don’t believe you.”

  “‘Let not the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’” he recited as the stiff fabric of the dress’s bodice came away from my body. “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

  He tugged at the gown, and it slid over my hips to puddle at my feet. His hands came to rest lightly on my waist, still encased in the heavy foundation garment.

  “That’s not what those words mean,” I protested even as my body inclined toward his involuntarily. He was changing things around, just like he always did.

  “Isn’t it?” Dorian stepped around, behind me. I stood with the dress billowing around my ankles, caught in the force of his darkness. My body felt stretched, tense, waiting for his next touch.

  And then it came, and I gasped as his lips touched the nape of my neck, moving down across the prominence of my spine, smooth and cool against my skin. The heat in my center pooled low, where my legs joined. I leaned into him, closing my eyes, losing the edges of myself in the electric reaction.