The Vampire Narcise

about Scotland, and Giordan was on his way to meet her at the pleasure house when he spied Narcise. He had no choice but to follow her.

“Giordan, bless the Virgin, what has happened?” Rubey said when she came rushing into the private chamber he’d taken over, ordering one of the girls out. As the current favorite of the mistress, and soon to be investor, he had that power. “Are you ill?” she asked.

Even here, in this place, he could scent Narcise…and the very aroma made his insides unsteady. “Not anymore.”

Rubey came over and brushed the hair from his temples, which clung to the warm, damp skin. She tsked when she yanked at his shirt collar to reveal the bitemarks. “And you’re about lying to me, Giordan Cale.” She smelled of rose and gardenia—sweet and floral, without being too cloying.

He closed his eyes at her touch, trying to subdue the sharp, sudden yearning for something else. Something more.

Something he’d once had.

He’d betrayed his own heart and soul by fairly attacking Narcise. He’d wanted to hurt her—with words and deed—even as he desired her. Craved her.

How shameful and ironic that he’d resorted to such a frenzy. He would have sunk his fangs into her, taken and seized what she’d offered…but somehow sanity had at last reigned.

The destructiveness had come not only from mere thoughts, but from his body. He’d been in control of such fury for so long…what had happened tonight?

“What’s gone on, Giordan? Will you not tell me?” Rubey, who should have been very busy attending to her girls and clients, sat next to him, giving him her full attention.

“There is nothing to tell,” he said, suddenly wondering why he’d come here. He should have gone back to his rooms and sent for Kritanu.

It was the elderly Indian man who’d helped him understand what was happening to him after that pivotal, sunny day in the alley when his Mark had burned. Drishni, one of the vintages at Château Riche, had done her best to help him when he came back and kept vomiting every time he fed…but it wasn’t until Giordan spoke with Kritanu that he’d begun to understand how he’d changed.

His body weakened and abused, he’d spiraled so far down into darkness and despair, violence and devastation…hopelessness…Kritanu had told him, that his mind had opened to moksha. Enlightenment.

That some strong bit of that powerful serenity and peace had found its way past the darkness of the Devil.

“And you’re after lying to me, Giordan Cale, but I can see you won’t change your mind.” Rubey offered him her wrist as she eased herself back onto the bed next to him, propping up on the other elbow. “I can also see that you’re in need of me in another way.”

Giordan swallowed and hesitated…but she was right. His body felt so battered and tormented that he knew he needed sustenance. And although it wasn’t what he craved, it was what he needed. And so he took her arm and slid his fangs in to drink.

Back when he was still recovering from the event in the alley, it was only by accident that Giordan had discovered he could still feed…if he were careful. This after three weeks of violently expelling the contents of his stomach after any attempt to gain sustenance. He could keep nothing down—and the lifeblood he ingested spewed forth with debilitating force, leaving his belly sore and his throat and mouth raw and parched.

His body was rejecting anything related to violence.

But at last, the tiny, dark Drishni came to him and offered herself. And when he felt the rush of her lifeblood in his mouth, pure and clean and sweet, Giordan nearly wept at the relief…because he knew. He knew she was the answer. It wasn’t until later that he learned why: because she ate only vegetation, nuts and grains.

She ate nothing that had been acquired through death or violence—and it was that addiction to death and violence that his body was fighting, now that the white light of peace had found him.

During the anguish of the aftermath, Giordan could close his eyes and find the light. The same light that had flashed into his mind when he succumbed to the burning sun in the alley. “Choose.”

Now, as Rubey’s warm, clean blood flushed into his mouth, Giordan thought again how thankful he was that she could help him. And that she was willing to do so, and was intelligent and pragmatic about it all.

It would have been a great deal easier if he could have loved her.

He drank without greed, easily dismissing the little tingle of awareness and arousal that began reflexively during the process. Although her breathing shifted, and he felt her body begin to respond to him, Rubey made no attempt to touch him as she might normally do. It was as if she realized he couldn’t.

“Corvindale is here,” she said after a short time, perhaps after judging that the color had seeped back into his cheeks. “He has news.”

Giordan withdrew immediately and looked at her in surprise. “Why did you not tell me at once?” he said, swallowing the last bit.

“I could see you were in no good mood for it. You must be attended to first.”

“I’m no fragile flower,” he snapped, sitting up.

Rubey offered her arm for him to finish off and patted his cheek with the opposite hand. “If you could have seen yourself, Giordan, my darling, you wouldn’t say such foolish things.” She ended the little pat with a tender caress over his jaw.

He frowned, but attended to her wound with his lips and tongue. She tremored a bit beneath his mouth now, and her eyes sank half-closed. He could scent the heightened musk wafting from her body and his own gave a little shiver in response.

“By the Virgin, if you weren’t ruined for any other, I’d be tossing my glove into the ring for you, Giordan, rich and handsome and kind as you are,” she said, her voice dusky and filled with the Irish. “But you are ruined,” she said, sitting up and sliding her legs off the bed. “And so I’ll tell you the bad part. That Corvindale’s news is about Narcise.”

“Where have you been?” Chas demanded as he burst into the chamber where Narcise was sitting.

He’d been frantic, looking for her first throughout the pleasure house, and then trying to find her by searching the streets nearby, interviewing servants and pedestrians to see if they’d noticed her. No one had, and he’d begun to be certain that somehow, Cezar had managed to take her from beneath his very nose.

Narcise leveled a calm stare at him. “I went for a walk.”

There was something in her eyes, something different.

“You went for a walk without telling anyone where you were going? Did you not think I might be worried that something had happened to you?”

“What can happen to me in London? I’m a Dracule, and use a sword better than any man I’ve ever met,” she replied, still calm and unemotional. “No one can harm me. Nor do I answer to anyone any longer.”

“What if Cezar were here? What if he’d sent his makes after you?” Chas continued, uncaring that he sounded almost as shrill and controlling as his bossy sister Maia.

Narcise—God in heaven, how could anyone be so utterly breathtaking?—fixed him with those blue-violet, black-ringed irises. Her hair hung in a long, single braid over her shoulder. He knew that it would still be smooth and straight as a bolt of silk, shimmering like a blue-black waterfall, when the plait was undone. His heart thumped and swelled, thinking about the moment they might share later, when he did just that.

Her cheeks were flushed a bit more pink than usual, and the hem of her gown was dirty and damp. The filthy, worn toe of a slipper peeped from beneath and her face had a smudge of dirt—and…blood?—on it. On her lips, too. As if she’d been cut.

“What did Sonia tell you?” she asked.

Rubey. Damn and blast. Chas sat in a chair next to the sofa on which Narcise was sitting. He’d known he had to tell her…he just hadn’t been ready to so soon. He’d needed time to think about it all.

And as he sat here now, looking at her, he knew things were about to change.

“When you gave her the button from Cezar’s coat, what did Sonia say?” Narcise asked again. “You told me