Silken Rapture: Princes of the Underground, Book 2 (7 page)

“Psychometry is a type of psychic ability where an individual can telepathically receive information about an object or person through touch. Ms. Lanscourt can pick up a discarded newspaper and tell you where the trees grew that make up the paper, where it was printed and details about the man who just touched it that would likely make the gent blush. She can touch a weapon and tell you details of how it was manufactured, the people who used it and the violence it wrought. She’s a walking miracle. There was a very talented Russian psychometrist I studied along with the Society for Psychical Research back in the 1890’s, but Ms. Lanscourt’s abilities blow that case away. What’s wrong?” Aubrey interrupted his own enthusiastic explanation when he noticed Blaise’s expression.

“She must exist in a living hell.”

Aubrey’s expression sobered. “Well, yes…I suppose it must be difficult at times, having all those images and perceptions invade the brain. Rather like a madness, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps that explains her isolation and depression after she left the hospital. Good thing Dee happened upon her, poor girl.”

“That’s why she wears the gloves,” Blaise said. Too late, he realized he’d been staring at the painting mounted over the fireplace of a woman wearing a topaz, ermine-bordered gown, a slender diadem resting on her dark brown hair.

“Isabel Lanscourt looks nothing like Elysse,” Aubrey observed.

“Why do you keep bringing up Elysse?” Blaise blurted out in rising anger.

“Because I know you. You’re comparing the two women in your mind. Who wouldn’t?”

Blaise stood frozen, both shocked and infuriated at his friend’s audacity. “Are you saying that
you’re
comparing the two?” he asked in an ominous tone as he stepped toward Aubrey.

Aubrey stood with the alacrity conferred by his paranormal nature. “I am. All the Literati are, Blaise. It’s not only you who sees Isabel Lanscourt’s grandeur. She’s like a blazing comet in all of our eyes. The fact that we see her for what she is, that we feel her pull, isn’t what’s got you upset right now.”

Blaise approached him so that they stood eye to eye. Fury boiled in his veins. Aubrey was an inch away from being beaten to a bloody pulp, and damn his tendency to go easy on him in a brotherly sparring match. He was so mad that Aubrey had the nerve to compare the woman to Elysse out loud that he actually hoped his friend would dig himself a deeper hole.

“Go on. Enlighten me,” he prodded.

“You’re upset because she’s more powerful than Elysse. You’re pissed at finding yourself a thousand times more attracted to Isabel Lanscourt than you ever were Elysse de Gennere.”

For a moment, Blaise experienced a very satisfying fantasy about planting his fist in Aubrey’s face. He conquered the lure of it, but with extreme difficulty.

“Get out of here.”

“Don’t be such a son of a bitch about this, Blaise.”

“I am no one’s son. Now
get out
of here.”

Regret sliced through him when Aubrey moved hastily, obviously taking the ominous threat in his tone seriously. He stumbled and caught hold of himself on the arm of the couch.

“I don’t know why I put up with you half the time,” Aubrey said, eyes blazing and his fangs fully extended. Blaise stepped toward him. Aubrey retreated. They were like brothers, but there could only be one alpha in a pack of wolves.

“I don’t know either. You’re the genius. Let me know when you figure it out,” Blaise said before he walked toward his private quarters, shutting the door behind him with a click of finality.

After Aubrey left, Blaise once again wandered out of his bedroom. He felt edgy and restless. After five seconds in his study he was all too eager to avoid Elysse’s portrait, all too desperate to prevent recalling what Aubrey had said.

You’re pissed at finding yourself a thousand times more attracted to Isabel Lanscourt than you ever were Elysse.

He winced at the memory.

He sought out David Kwan in the gym. An hour and a half workout with David didn’t ease his anguish as it should have. Smashing his fists, knees and feet into David hadn’t calmed him, and having David return the favor hadn’t worked either. The image of Isabel Lanscourt’s luminescent face would not be dislodged from his mind even by David’s brutal blows to his skull.

After he got out of the shower in his private quarters, he felt weak. He should have visited the apex room where they’d housed the crystal. He needed to feed. His flesh was not nourished moment to moment by a soul. He required vitessence to survive, and he had not tasted blood or a woman’s sweet juices for forty-eight hours now…since before they stormed that unused Tube platform and found the crystal and the female.

Isabel Lanscourt.

He felt too fatigued to dress completely. Instead, he fastened the brown leather harness that fit snugly around his hips and below his testicles and buttocks. He sheathed his heartluster next to his outer left thigh. Even if he were at death’s door, he would strap on his heartluster. It was as integral to him as his arms or eyes…as much a part of him as his clone.

Morshiel was a cancer he couldn’t completely cut off his body. They were two parts of the same whole. Aubrey didn’t understand that. No one understood that fact, save for Blaise, Morshiel and Usan, their Magian creator. Blaise fought desperately against his clone just as he battled with his own savage, parasitic nature.

He lay on his bed and stared at the frescoed ceiling, seeing nothing but a pair of large, animated, black eyes. One second, the expression in those eyes was dazed, bewildered…soft. The next moment, they might have belonged to a spitting tomcat backed into a corner.

After she’d fainted and he’d laid her in her bed earlier, he’d allowed himself five full seconds just to stare at her before he’d resolutely turned and walked out of her suite.

Her aura was in constant movement—alive, golden and glorious. Blaise had the ability to tune out vitessence in his visual field in order to focus on the physical body. In Isabel Lanscourt’s case, her body was possibly more distracting than her brilliant life force.

Blaise and the other five Sevliss princes in existence were as sensitive to energy fields as a farmer was to his crops. They required vitessence to live, after all. They were also deeply attracted to the corporal body. It was their acute awareness of humans as energy beings that made them so physically adroit—brilliant fighters, keen observers…knowing lovers.

He shifted restlessly on the bed when the image of Isabel lying naked on the silken pane flashed into his mind’s eye yet again. Her long hair wasn’t as dark as her eyes, but a lustrous chestnut brown shot through with strands of dark gold. It’d looked like waving silk spread on the amber pillowcase. The vision of her smooth belly and the dark pubic hair between slender, shapely thighs had been electrical somehow. He kept having the most brazenly illicit fantasies of filling her with his come, seeing that flawless skin dripping with his essence.

It was strange for him to envision such things. He did not typically have intercourse with women. Because of his wolf-nature, his penis grew painfully swollen following ejaculation, locking him to a female for a short period of time. He pleasured women, and they gave him pleasure, but he found intercourse too difficult…too intimate, especially in those moments when he became fused to a female’s body. There was always the possibility that he might have to watch, with no escape possible, as disgust eventually entered a woman’s eyes at the evidence she had just had sex with something inhuman.

An animal.

He couldn’t banish the image of Isabel from his mind. His cock stiffened next to his thigh. He felt weak, unable to muster the energy to control his rebellious brain.

She’d been so helpless lying there, so vulnerable, so beautiful, like a fertile virgin field waiting to be harrowed.

His cock wasn’t just erect now, it was a heavy, plaguing ache. His upper lip and abdomen had grown damp with sweat. He felt a strange combination of sharp need and listlessness. He needed to feed, yet he didn’t move. It was as if he thought the vivid image of Isabel Lanscourt that had taken root in his brain could nourish his very body.

He barely had the energy to blink his heavy eyelids when his bedroom door opened and a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair entered, shutting the door behind her. She smiled as she approached his inert form. Her grayish-gold vitessence moved sluggishly, reminding Blaise of dawn peaking through a London smog.

“What do you want?” he asked with great effort. His jaw had grown as heavy as his eyelids.

“I would think the question is what you want, my Lord,” the woman said in a husky, knowing voice. She fleetly removed her robe, baring apricot-hued skin and large, firm breasts. “Mr. Cane sent me to you. He said you would be…hungry by now.” Her avid, green-eyed gaze lingered on his swollen erection. She laughed seductively. “I see he was right.”

“What’s your name?” he grated out. He’d never seen her before. He never fed from a woman twice. His need was vast. He would harm a human if he took from her too greatly. Besides, she would become attached to him if he saw her more than once. Worse, he might become attached to her, just as he had Elysse.

Blaise had vowed never again to need a woman beyond nourishment. Why desire what would eventually be ripped away from you by the inevitability of fate? Of death?

“Margarite,” the woman said as she began to make a show of herself, palming her breasts from below and plumping them as she ran her fingertips over the peaking nipples. Aubrey knew Blaise’s tastes and he’d chosen well for him tonight. Aubrey often joked over the fact that playing pimp for Blaise was not the least favorite, even if it was the least respected, of his many professions. His friend had taken on the role centuries ago when he realized that Blaise occasionally fell into a malaise because he resisted the urge to feed.

Anger began to trickle into his awareness at the temptation Aubrey had offered him.

“Margarite,” he muttered as he watched her finesse her nipples. He doubted the name was real, although the breasts definitely were. The women Aubrey brought him might be nothing more than very expensive whores, but they were typically of the highest quality flesh. Aubrey saw to that.

“Yes, Lord Delraven?” she whispered, a hint of a smile on her pouting lips.

“Get out.”

Circling fingertips paused. “What?”

He lifted his head off the pillow. “Leave.”

The single word had barely come out as a hoarse whisper, but she must have seen something in his expression, because she started back in alarm. Her gaze flickered down over his cock.

“But—?”

“You heard me. Find Aubrey. He will pay you.”

She hesitated. Her gaze remained on his cock. “I do not need pay,” she whispered. She glanced up at him, beseeching.

He bared his fangs.

She reached for her robe, keeping her wary gaze on him as she bent. When he heard the door click shut behind her, he lay back in mixed regret and relief.

When he closed his eyes, Isabel was back to haunt him. The throb in his cock escalated to a sharp ache. He winced and wrapped his hand around the warm, tumescent member.

He had never hated anyone or anything before. Passions did not typically rule Blaise Sevliss. Duty did; that and the daily dread of his fate.

His hand moved on his cock as he envisioned her exquisite face. He damned Isabel Lanscourt for doing the impossible, and making him feel again.

Chapter Four

She had witnessed wonders beyond belief in her tour of Sanctuary—an arboretum so vast and so lush that Isabel mentally mocked Margaret Turrow’s ridiculous claim that they were far below the surface of the earth. She’d seen what appeared to be an entire field of the white mulberry. (No, no…they simply could
not
be underground.) Jessie told her the white mulberry was cultivated in Sanctuary to provide silk for Lord Delraven’s factory.

She had stared in wonder at a gravity-defying fountain featuring water that flowed up instead of down. She’d seen a vast aquarium that was the size of a large room and contained colorful fish and creatures she’d never seen or imagined. Jessie had shown her a swimming pool surrounded by lush tropical wildlife and an expensively equipped exercise facility, which was apparently chiefly used to practice combat. There had been men there. Her cheeks had warmed when two sets of males fighting, along with one trio in a third ring, all paused in the midst of stunning displays of athleticism and violence in order to stare at Jessie and her as they passed.

Well, not at Jessie, precisely. Just her. She’d felt their gazes on her like burning lasers.

They had seen no one else in the large, luxurious rooms, each one more amazing than the last, every one filled with priceless frescoes, tapestries and sculptures. As they had passed a hallway, Isabel had paused and commented on the brightly painted crest at the center of the entrance.

“It’s Lord Delraven’s coat of arms,” Jessie said.

Isabel studied her companion covertly through lowered lashes. She had found him to be a pleasant escort and liked him. There could be little doubt that he was not mortal, given his aura.

“How old are you, Jessie?” she asked pleasantly.

His cheeks reddened. “I-I am older than you think, Miss.”

He glanced at her in surprise when she laughed. “Believe it or not, I know it.” He went rigid when she stepped toward him. “I can see your unusual life force,” she said delicately, not sure what else to call the energy field that surrounded him. “I can see that you aren’t mortal. How old were you when you became so?”

“Nineteen, Miss. I was turned at the same time most of the Literati were. I’m not one of the Literati—not really—but I served Aubrey Cane, and he valued me. After my master was turned, he embraced me so that I could continue to serve him.” His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. Isabel realized too late she was disturbing him by her nearness and she took a step back.

“Embraced
you?”

“He took my blood, Miss.”

“Were you made this way against your will?” Isabel whispered.

Jessie blinked. “Against my will?
No.
It was my greatest wish to continue to serve my master. He was—and is—the greatest genius of the age. Besides, I did not want to submit to the plague.”