She had lived.
The sound of my own laughter was startling as it bounced back at me from the hard marble walls. It did not seem to belong in this house. It did not seem to belong to me. But I was drunk on relief and on the fierce sense of victory that surged up from the darkest corners of myself, and once I’d begun I couldn’t stop. I howled, cackled, guffawed as I pulled the girl’s limp body against mine.
Limp but warm. Limp but breathing.
Cora Shaw had survived, and she was cured—and I was whole.
I had thought that her mere presence had roused me from the stupor in which I was being slowly suffocated, but now that a bond was coursing between us, I realized how wrong I’d been.
Now I was living. Now I could feel. Before, there were mere echoes of sensation. Now I was awash in them, and they plunged through disused regions of my brain, making me dizzy.
Seizing control of myself once again, I grabbed her right wrist with my free hand, looking for my bond mark on it, the visible proof of what had happened. Of my possession of her. There it was, scarlet like all bond marks but unique in its shape and placement: a blood drop no bigger than a fingernail, still very faint but growing perceptibly darker with each passing moment.
My movement had tugged my own sleeve up slightly. Her bond mark’s twin was barely visible on my own wrist, peeking above the edge of my cuff.
It was something I hadn’t seen on my body in many human generations. Something I’d feared I would never see again. I felt almost sick as I eased the girl back against the chaise, as one does after realizing how narrowly one has just escaped death’s claws.
When Cora had agreed to an insanely dangerous, experimental treatment for her terminal cancer, she could not have known what she was agreeing to: the blood kiss of an agnate, a vampire, which held the power to kill…or to cure.
My blood kiss. Her blood gift. My research was able to discard most potential candidates from consideration, all those for whom such a transaction must mean death. But even with the newest screening, her chance had been a mere one in one hundred.
But she had survived. That meant that she was transformed. And that she was mine.
There was a sense of silent expectation in the room. My staff could not have failed to hear me, not even with the thickness of the heavy oak door between me and my nearest thralls’ active monitors. They must know something had occurred, but they were waiting as they had been trained to wait. Waiting for me to announce which step in the protocol was to be followed: the disposal of the candidate’s body in the case of failure or the summoning of the medical team in the improbable case of success.
I didn’t want to summon anyone. The idea of anyone else touching my Cora Shaw filled me with a black rage. She was mine and mine alone, and I wanted only to lock the door and stand guard over her slumbering form until she regained consciousness. And then I wanted my face to be the first that she saw, and my kiss to rouse her into full wakefulness before I pushed her back onto the chaise again and showed her exactly what it meant for her to be mine.
But I knew that way was too dangerous, especially at my age. It was the old way and something the wise agnates of the Adelphoi and Kyrioi had turned their backs on now because of its repercussions. Lazy Jean Morel might have indulged himself only a century and a half past—but that was why lazy Jean Morel spent many of his days in a study that he had claimed in my own house, drinking my wine and gambling away his cognate Hattie’s salary with the friends he called in to keep him company.
So with fierce self-control, I took out my cell phone and tapped through to Hattie’s line.
“She’s alive.” Those were the only words I said. The only words I could say because anything more would choke in my throat, though a thousand thoughts clamored in my head.
I could hear Hattie’s gasp over the phone. “Thank God,” she breathed, a rare moment of piousness from the usually worldly cognate. Instantly, her tone turned practical. “The team is on standby, as always. We’ll be there in moments.”
No, I wanted to say, but instead I just punched the cell phone off. It was right for them to come. It was smart. That was why we’d created the protocols, to support the new cognate’s swift recovery while gathering as much data about it as possible and keeping the bond from devouring us both. I’d already squandered precious moments of crucial early information. I should have called them instantly.
But it was all I could do to keep from hurling the phone against the wall.
As promised, Hattie arrived in a bare minute, trailed by her medical team and pushing a gurney ahead of her. The enthralled humans looked slightly stunned as they came into the room. Many of them had been gathering once every few weeks for decades, only to be sent home again without ever having left the staging area. Never having been called to treat a human after conversion, because there had been none who had survived.
Hattie nodded crisply to me as she breezed over to the chaise where Cora lay. I stepped farther back. I needed the distance to keep myself from pushing the cognate away.
“Congratulations, Dorian. You managed not to kill this one,” she said, but despite the dryness of her words, her tone contained her suppressed excitement. With her gloved hands, she took a compression bandage from a waiting nurse and pressed it against the girl’s throat, which was still oozing blood.
I was covered in it, I realized. It had smeared across my hands and my jacket when I picked her up.
A burly nurse slipped an oximeter sensor over Cora’s fingertip, and two frighteningly low numbers jumped onto the device’s screen as it beeped an alarm.
“As long as she doesn’t bleed out,” he muttered.
Another nurse slipped a mask over the unconscious girl’s face, and there was a hiss as the valve was opened to provide positive pressure.
“That won’t happen,” Hattie said sharply. “Don’t scare her. She might be able to hear you.”
Another of the doctors was trying to get an IV needle into the back of her hand. “She’s got no pressure. I can’t get a vein. Are you sure we shouldn’t do a transfusion?” His voice was edged with concern.
“No!” I surged forward, barely stopping myself before I could fling him away from Cora’s vulnerable form. “The blood would not be compatible. She wouldn’t survive.”
Hattie shot a quelling look at us both and took a position at the girl’s side as the rest of the team crowded around. “She’ll get through this. We always do. Ready, now? One, two, three!”
They lifted her easily together and transferred her to the gurney. I swallowed my protests—cut off the orders I wanted to give them to get away from her, from what was mine. I could have carried her slight body in one arm. I could have taken her to the medical room, full of all the state-of-the-art equipment that had never before been used, waiting for her.
But if I had touched her then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself let her go. I would have taken her in my arms and run where no one would ever find us and no one would ever touch her again except for me….
I hung back as the team pushed the gurney past and out the door to the surgery, my head throbbing, my gut aching. I couldn’t give in. Not now. Not even when I saw that Cora’s eyes were half-open, blinking blindly at the ceiling above.
“I want six milliliters of blood taken every hour,” Hattie instructed. She did not even spare me a backward glance, so focused was she on her new patient. “This is a historic moment, people. Let’s make the most of it!”
It was the end, I realized as the door swung shut behind them. The end to all my waiting. All my aimless wanting.
But I knew even then that it was only the beginning of a new age for all of us.
***
I waited in the surgery alone after Hattie had left, listening to each of my racing heartbeats as they measured out the time since Cora Shaw had been wheeled away. My head was throbbing already; my bones were aching. And it was only going to get worse.
I should have been heading to the car that I knew was waiting to whisk me to Baltimore. But it was all I could do to force myself to stand there and not move. If I’d taken one step, it would have ended with me at Cora’s bedside. And that was the last place I should be.
It could have been a minute or an hour before the door swung open, revealing Etienne and Tiberius. The two old agnates exchanged meaningful looks, and I snarled, “I’m bonded, not stupid.”
“At your age, there isn’t much of a difference,” Etienne said flatly.
“We came to help you to the car,” Tiberius added more gently.
It always surprised aethers, even other vampires, to learn that Tiberius was as old as he was. The name that he used, as far as I knew, had been his first, from the age when such names were popular. He had a youthful cast to him, with his tousled blond hair and blue eyes, that defied that age, and he seemed not to accrue the hard edge of cynicism that so many of us had. Not even when he had lost his Atib.
Now in his forthright concern, he grasped my shoulders, knowing that he was one of a very few who could touch me without repercussions, and he steered me out the door.
I let my stumbling feet take me where he wished to guide me. As long as I did not think about it, I could pass through the echoing, darkened corridors down to the vast vault of the garage below the garden.
“Almost there,” Tiberius urged as my steps dragged.
I knew that, and that was exactly why it was so hard to move. But I still did, shuffling forward like a half-dead thing as my heart drummed ever harder and faster and my stomach clenched in rebellion—visceral, biological reactions to being taken from my new cognate while the bond was still forming.
The back passenger door to my newest Bentley sat open. Tiberius practically lifted me inside. My skin was clammy against the leather, and when I passed my hand over my face, it came away slick with sweat.
Etienne took the wheel as Tiberius swung in beside me. They had been chosen to drive me rather than a thrall that I could order back or overpower, just as I was on call to take Tiberius away if he should ever bond.
“I’m too old for this,” I muttered.
“Not if we get you out of here, you aren’t,” Tiberius said flatly as Etienne slapped the car into drive and pulled out of the garage.
I began swearing before we even reached the first stop sign as my heart beat so fast that I thought it would tear from my chest. My body was wracked with shivers, and I bit my tongue as I spat the curses out.
“Hang in there,” Tiberius muttered.
I would survive this. I clung to that thought. No agnate had died from a few days’ separation from his cognate, even at bonding.
But no one had ever tried this before. Not with someone as old as I.
By the time we turned onto 395, I had stopped seeing the outside world as anything more than a blur through the darkly tinted windows. The pain of every muscle screaming against the bones that knit my body began to shred through the centuries of willpower I’d built up around me. The curses turned to orders, directing Etienne and Tiberius to take me back to Cora, and then they turned to threats and to pleas and finally, when my mind and tongue surrendered to the pain that destroyed everything that it touched, into nothing but screams.
The other agnates were not swayed. Whether they even flinched, I was in no condition to recognize. I only realized that the car had stopped when the door next to me opened, and I struck out, ripping the door from it hinges and sending it pinwheeling through the air as Tiberius danced out of the way.
Tiberius said something—whether to me or to Etienne, I didn’t know, for it was just noise amid the rushing of my blood in my head. I came out swinging, bursting from the car in my agony and my rage. I stumbled even as I tried to land a blow, my pain-wracked body unable to respond as I meant it to in my delirium.
I swung and swung again, but it seemed I was fighting ghosts or water, for their faces seemed to float among hallucinations of other times and other places. I looked back, and there was no car but instead a cliff at my toes and the wind whipping around my body as I looked into the crevasse that had just swallowed my captain on his horse. Then my stomach clenched and I leaped forward at Tiberius, but instead I found myself tangled in the ratlines of a ship that pitched sharply as the whistling wind sent lances of rain into my face. I screamed at the Portuguese sailors and battled the swells, fighting to lash the sails down before the masts were snapped off and we were all thrown into the deep—
And then I gasped, blinking, and I realized that I was standing fully clothed in a tiled shower with the icy water sheeting down on me.
“Are you back with us again?” Etienne asked mildly as Tiberius looked worriedly over his shoulder.
I cursed again, this time in English, and cut the water off. There was no shower door here nor even a curtain. I could snap off the faucet handles if I chose, but there was little damage that I might then do with them.
I was in a prison. Etienne’s prison. Tiberius would be in the case of his bonding.
“For now,” I said, slicking the hair back from my face. The shock of the water had chased away the hallucinations for the moment, but I still felt them gnawing at the edges of my awareness. I knew that all it would take was the merest moment’s distraction and they would cascade over me again and carry me away with them.
Etienne nodded. “Good. Remember to fight it. With everything that you can, fight against it.”
“You should be fine,” Tiberius said, giving Etienne a quelling look.
I nodded at them both, shoving down my irritation at Etienne’s slightly condescending reminder. I knew he was right, and I knew that in my current state, I couldn’t be trusted to remember it. I would have done the same if our positions were reversed.
But it didn’t make me hate him any less for it, my hands curling into fists at my sides.
“When she begins to emerge—” I began.
“Hattie said I will be the first to be called,” Etienne said flatly. “We will bring you to her, as promised.”
I groped for my phone and pulled it out of my soaked pocket. It woke to my touch, undamaged in its waterproof case. The voices were louder now, the voices of those who were not there, and I thrust the phone at Tiberius before I could change my mind. I did not know what I might do when the delirium came back. I could trust him more than I could my own judgment at that moment.
“Keep apprised,” I said.
“I will. We shall leave you here, then,” Tiberius said softly.
I nodded and swallowed. I could see in his angelic, crystalline eyes now the deadness that I had felt only hours before. Breathing and thinking but not fully alive.
“It will be worth it,” I forced out even as another spike of pain doubled my body over in its grasp. “For all of us.”
Tiberius’ smile was humorless. “For all our sakes, I hope it is so.”
And then they were gone, leaving me in the bare rooms of Etienne’s fortress.