The red mist swirled around both Zayan and Miranda for seconds, twirling around her throat, making her shiver. It slithered down her breasts toward her belly and hips; then it vanished.
It was the exact same deep, intense scarlet as the light that had shot from her hand. In its wake, it left images in her head. Visions from her dreams with Zayan. She was flooded by memories of the things she had done with him, with this naked man who stood before her.
“You did that, didn’t you? You sent that burst of red light from my hand to hit Lukos.”
He paused for a moment, and she believed he’d deny it. Then he slowly, reluctantly, nodded. “I had to, Miranda.”
She should be exasperated, but gazing on him, she couldn’t be. She understood the inspiration of the artists of Rome, who had turned marble into exquisite male bodies. Zayan possessed a warrior’s body. Shoulders that must be as wide as the doorways in the castle and formed of straight planes of bone and solid muscle. His chest was a play of light and shadow, revealing taut ridges and two dark bronze nipples that puckered as he looked at her. She wanted to run her hands down his chest and touch the cobbled beauty of his muscled abdomen. Then grasp his amazing erection, for the thick, heavy shaft lifted proudly to his navel, and the head looked taut enough to burst.
He was beautiful. Every inch of him. Yet, she was cautious now, uncertain if she could touch him.
He grinned and emerald green stars flew above his hands. They darted to her, and pressed quickly to her lips, tickling her, then danced at the base of her throat.
Desire rushed through her, giving her bravery. She stepped forward and touched Zayan’s heart. She pressed her palm to his bare flesh. His erect nipple teased the sensitive center of her hand. And suddenly, she was looking up at Zayan; but she was in the shadows, and Zayan was reclining on a chaise. She could glimpse his thoughts—he was thinking of the profile of a beautiful woman. Miranda could see what he remembered—lush black hair elaborately dressed and long-lashed eyes that flashed with anger but never with love for him.
Beware Gaius, a man’s voice said. He would sacrifice a victory of Rome to see you dead. He would pay any price to destroy you, Praetonius. The emperor fears you. You are too strong and too popular. With an army at your command, you could take Rome….
In her vision, Zayan disregarded the warning with a laugh. He was not afraid of Mucius Gaius. The man was not ruthless enough to make a true grasp at power—he was weak. And he was thinking of his children. His daughter had defied her nurse to embrace him, and how he had loved the feel of her slim body in his arms. How he had delighted in her ingenuous show of affection. He loved them both, his children.
He had everything he could wish for—success on the battlefield, the ear of the emperor along with the man’s fearful respect, immense wealth, precious children, and a beautiful, sensual wife.
What he did not have was a woman’s unconditional love.
But no great man, no powerful warrior, worried about such a thing—
Miranda moaned in surprise as Zayan’s green lights lifted her. She floated two feet off the ground and began to move toward his naked body.
In dreams, she had shared intimacy with him. In her visions, she had seen a glimpse of his family life—the wife he loved but believed did not love him, his adored children.
She had even glimpsed a sense of emptiness. Victory on the battlefield had left him void of hope and love. She had seen that Zayan realized he had been losing the sense of invulnerability of a successful general. He had begun to realize that he was not unstoppable and untouchable. That he could die at any time.
He hadn’t cared, she’d realized, as long as he left his legacy—his children.
What are you thinking, Miranda? Zayan asked. Your thoughts are a jumble to me—I can’t see inside them. But I sense you are thinking of something that hurts you very much.
She could not speak of what she had seen. Not as he stepped toward her and began to caress her breasts through her dress. His hands cupped and gently kneaded.
In her dreams, this had made her wild with desire.
The reality was so much more intense, more pleasurable, more delicious. Zayan was more than just a vampire or a demon—he was a complex man capable of great honor, deep love, and fierce hurt and anger. She tipped her head back languorously and savored the pleasure. It seemed to last forever.
Then he slid his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Instinctively, she locked her legs around his lean, hard waist. Her thighs rested on the hard ridges of his hipbones.
I want to make love to you. As in our dreams. There is a reason we dreamed of each other. It speaks of a deep and special connection. I’ve never dreamed of any woman like that. No woman but you—
He left her breasts, which were swollen and tight with pleasure, and slid her skirts up. The green lights held her up with her heels locked together against Zayan’s low back. She was truly flying.
Then her drawers vanished on a wisp of magic, leaving her nether curls and her wet lips pressed to Zayan’s shaft.
This would not be shocking at all in her dreams. But here—
There is nothing shocking. We desire each other and have shared this already. Do you not believe linking our thoughts in dreams is as intimate as sharing our bodies?
Yes, she whispered in her thoughts. It was, wasn’t it?
Zayan used his magic to rock her on his shaft. Her heart pounded like the pulse of frantic wings. He shifted his hips beneath her, and she felt his—
My cock, angel. My cock is going to slide deep inside you. Just as you’ve loved to have it in your dreams.
She held her breath. She did want this, but…
But she had already been intimate with Lukos. She had felt her heart open to him. She couldn’t make love to another man just hours later. She couldn’t.
She began to struggle.
A band of pinkish light spilled into her room.
Faint light, soft and pure. A ray of dawn. But how was that possible? Had she truly been locked on Zayan’s hips for hours, letting him caress her breasts?
Zayan abruptly let her down. Where the light had struck his cheek, smoke curled there. Miranda stared at him. “You must go.”
He nodded, then bent and gave a lingering kiss to her hand. One that made her breath come quickly and her toes curl. But there could be no more.
Zayan stepped back. Darkness began to swirl around him, a blackness that winked with tiny lights, like firelight reflecting on polished jet. He vanished and she felt a brush of air and heard the soft flutter of wings. Before she could see him, she felt a breeze and knew he had gone.
“No!”
Miranda bolted up in her bed. At her side, the candle had burned to a stub, the fire was now only glowing embers in the grate. She was wearing her dress but was under the bedcovers. She did not remember anything after…after she had come to her room.
But she strained to hear. She thought she’d heard someone shout.
She wasn’t certain. Had she really heard it, or had it been part of a dream?
She fought to remember. Slowly, it came back. Zayan had kissed her passionately, and she had touched her hand to him and had glimpsed inside his past—and into his heart. He had told her he did not know who had murdered his children, yet someone had told him to beware of a man named Gaius.
Then he had gone because dawn was coming.
Miranda got out of bed and hurried to the closed drapes in the room. She pulled them open. A gray light spilled in. Not the soft pink and gold glow of dawn. She glanced out and saw thick, dark clouds massed in the sky. But it was still daylight.
She heard another sound—a scraping, followed by another sharp cry. It came from beyond her door.
Cautiously, she unlocked her door—the window was also locked, though she didn’t remember having locked it again after Zayan left her. Why was all that time a blank? It had disappeared from her mind. She made her way down the gloomy corridor, straining to hear.
All was suddenly eerily quiet.
She came to a junction of corridors. There was more light to the right, so she went that way, and had gone around another bend when she saw a crumpled body on the floor.
Miranda crouched down. He was a young boy, perhaps twelve. His face was ashen and his limbs limp. His eyes were shut, and fear—inhuman fear—was the last expression etched on his young face. His head had flopped to the side, and red droplets stood out against the white skin of his neck. Blood.
Miranda reached out, her fingers trembling. She brushed back the unkempt locks of hair. There, in the middle of his young throat. Two puncture wounds.
One of them had done this: either Zayan or Lukos.
She had seen Lukos feed from a woman and not hurt her. Did that mean Zayan had done this? Or had Lukos lost control here—?
She shook her head. It shouldn’t matter which one had been the killer. They were both vampires. They were both capable of this.
Miranda touched her hand to the boy’s heart. Had he been gone too long? Her arm began to feel hot—a scorching heat that seeped out her fingers. Her body began to hum, and she felt vibrations throughout her.
And suddenly, before her eyes, the boy’s chest jerked. He sat up abruptly. He stared at her with wide, frightened eyes. She sat back, amazed at how quickly he had begun to move again. Her hand lifted from his chest and he rolled away from her. He scrambled to his feet and ran away down the corridor.
“Wait, please!” she cried. “I don’t mean you harm!” She wanted to know who he was. Did he live in the castle?
But he’d vanished into the shadows farther down in the hall and she could no longer hear his light, frantic footsteps. Chasing him wouldn’t protect him.
She had made love with Lukos and almost with Zayan. She had let her heart be swayed by the pain in their pasts.
The visions she had seen had made her forget they were vampires. Even Aunt Eugenia, who tried to understand vampires, had told her that they could not fight the compulsion to drink human blood. That was the real tragedy, Eugenia had said. Vampires had to be killed for a craving that was not their fault and beyond their control.
But then she had seen Lukos merrily feed from the maid. They were not even willing to try to control their cravings.
And she now knew she must stop them.
Staking Lukos and Zayan while they were trapped in sleep would be her only chance, but the thought of making a stake, then driving it into each man’s chest brought bile to her throat. She had made love to them. How could she kill them?
Because she was the only one who could.
Slowly, Miranda rose to her feet. She did have another choice. She could escape and bring help to the castle. If she could get out, she could take the road down to the village at the base of the hill.
She shivered. She could be racing out in the open. But the vampires would be asleep now that it was day. This was her only chance.
Unease prickled along Miranda’s spine as she hurried back to her room to dress. Hadn’t Lukos and Zayan thought she would try to escape with daylight? Why hadn’t they imprisoned her in her room?
Or did they think that she had been seduced by them and wouldn’t leave?
As she hurried down the corridor toward her room, her half boots clattered on the floor and broke the quiet. She could feel the brisk, icy air seeping through the stone wall from outside and knew it must be bitterly cold outdoors. She rushed back to her room and pulled a pelisse from her wardrobe. Quickly, she pulled it on and crammed a bonnet on her head.
Now she had to find a way to escape.
She crept down to the main foyer of the castle, a cavernous room of stone decorated with embroidered tapestries. Her heart hammered furiously as she reached the double front doors—twin slabs of oak. She pulled on the iron handle of the door on the right. It didn’t budge. And neither did the left when she tugged desperately on it.
The doors were locked, the key missing. Miranda made a rushed search of the corridors and rooms close by. There were no servants, no one who could fetch a key to open the door. She swallowed hard as she turned slowly in the huge, empty entrance hall. Were they all dead? She raced down the servants’ stairs to the kitchens in the bowels of the castle. Heat wafted from the large rooms and voices within had her panic subsiding.
She rushed in to find the cook and two young girls busy at a large wooden table. The cook rolled out pastry with a wide, heavy rolling pin. One girl was laying out a plucked bird, the other placing herbs on the table.
“Good morning,” she said, trying for normalcy. But the women continued on with their work as though she were not in the room.
“I wish to go out.” She spoke louder, but again she was ignored. She walked past them and the cook relentlessly rolled, flattening the pastry. The other girls focused only on their tasks.
Miranda picked up a china dish and smashed it to the table. But no one flinched or jumped at the sharp sound and the flying shards except she.
Somehow, Lukos and Zayan had taken control of the servants’ minds and she could not break through.
Miranda reached the narrow door that must lead to the outside. She lifted the iron bar that bolted it shut and tugged. Of course this door, like the front door, was locked and it also required a key to open it. Blast.
With no other choice, she rushed back to the main floor of the large castle and searched the rooms there. She found a gallery off a room that had been changed from an immense dining hall into a ballroom. Large windows looked out onto a small stretch of manicured gardens before the wild of the woods encroached.
Miranda grabbed the back of a chair and dragged it to the gallery windows. She hefted as best as she could and half-threw, half-rolled it.
Glass exploded, and glittering pieces rained down on the flag terrace.
Miranda felt triumph for all of one heartbeat. She was free—but would anyone believe her story of vampires? Would anyone come back with her to save the castle?
And she felt a sharp, awful pain at her heart. She was going to betray Zayan and Lukos. She was going to bring about their destruction.
To save innocents like that young boy, she had no other choice.
Miranda ran down the winding, rutted road from the castle, her boot soles skidding on the uneven ground. The road dipped and rose, following the contours of the rocky hill on which the castle perched, and she found herself quickly clear of the trees, with a panoramic view of the village below and the surrounding tilled fields.
She had to slow down, her skirts clutched in her hands to lift her hems so she could run. She’d had no choice but to try to get to the village on foot. But she’d been raised to be a lady, which meant she hadn’t hiked up her skirts and sprinted for years. Already her lungs were burning and her legs ached. She rode well, but when she’d tried to approach the horses in the castle’s stables, they had reared and rushed against their stalls, terrified of her—as though they feared she was a monster. She’d never had that happen before. She wanted to believe that the vampires had controlled the horses, just as they had controlled the humans. She did not want to think the horses had sensed something evil about her.
Her lungs were burning.
Miranda stopped to suck in breath, but what she saw stole that breath away.
Fog hung over the village, but it was like no fog Miranda had ever seen before. At the bottom it was a normal grayish white, but higher in the sky it appeared to be red. It was like the eerie look of the sky when Zayan and Lukos had stopped her carriage the day before.
From this vantage, high above the village, Miranda could see the mist was centered on the village, and it swirled around with the cluster of buildings in its vortex.
Had the vampires brought this eerie red mist? She remembered Zayan fighting a creature that had come out of it. And a mist the same deep blood-red color had swept around both her and Zayan in the castle.
Was it dangerous? Was it going to hurt the people below?
With her hand on her heaving chest, Miranda started off at a run again.