Blood Rites (6 page)

“I’m a romantic. I have dreams. Do you pity me, Helen Wells?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should. Or maybe I should assume this is some sort of complicated seduction.”

“No, just the truth disguised as a convenient lie. Besides you’re the one seducing me. Isn’t seduction the Austra game?” He filled the new glasses, then his own, put down the bottle, and handed one glass to Helen, then held out the second for his daughter. Hillary refused to take it, staring at him with stony disapproval. “That’s good wine,” he bellowed. “Show some respect for your French blood!”

A few faces at other tables turned to see what the commotion was about, then returned to their own conversations. Hillary, her eyes filling with tears, lifted her glass, tasted the wine, and shuddered. Apparently satisfied, Philippe turned his attention back to Helen.

As Helen sipped her wine, her control began to weaken. The din in the room increased. The bodies added to her confusion. She noticed their scents, their heartbeats, her own desire. She put down her glass too quickly and it fell, spilling the wine. She didn’t care. Panicked, uncertain, she began a mental call to Stephen, then halted, understanding. She could handle this problem herself. All she had to do was leave the café and stay away until her head cleared. “I’ll take Hillary home,” she said, surprised at how evenly she could speak. Phil drained his glass and grabbed the bottle. “I think I’ll call it a night myself,” he said and followed the two women outside.

Stephen had heard the beginning of Helen’s cry, merged with her thoughts for a moment, then withdrew. Her courage, her independence, made him strangely sad. No matter how the night ended, Helen would never be completely his again.

He wove his way around the edge of the dancers, pulling Emma onto the floor, hiding his concern. Alex Massier was here. There were others in the crowd who also knew Helen’s secret. Any would be safer than Philippe Dutiel. The anger in the man troubled him, as did Philippe’s long-standing dislike of him. He dismissed the worry, thinking that he probably wouldn’t wholly approve of any independent choice Helen made. He wanted so much to control her and now he tried so desperately to let her go.

As he watched Helen leave with the Dutiels, he thought it strange that he no longer wanted another woman. Coming home each evening, he would find a new surprise in paint on canvas, would share whatever joys and frustrations her work and his had brought, or just sit without need of speech and hold her. He did not cherish these things any longer; rather, he expected them.

Perhaps it was habit that made him so possessive of her. Yes, that must be what made her different from the rest of his family. He never considered romantic love. Familial love-that he knew—but centuries of experience had convinced him that he was incapable of any other.

I

The Dutiels’ cottage lay on the edge of the Colony. It seemed older than the rest of the buildings. Someone had remodeled it, adding the modern necessities pouring time into finishing the old beams and floors, repairing the plaster, and sealing the cracks in the outside wood. But that had been done years ago and the house once more showed neglect. There were new cracks in the plaster, windows in need of repair. But everything a child could do had been done. The worn fabric in the furniture had been sewn, the floors and woodwork sparkled.

Hillary, clearly unaccustomed to being up so late, said good night immediately. Helen was about to do the same when Paul thrust a glass into her hand, spilling some of its wine on her skirt. She went into the kitchen to dab water on the stain and Phil followed her, politely keeping his distance. “Don’t go just yet, Helen Wells. Enjoy the silence first.”

“The silence?”

“I saw how you looked when you came into the café tonight, like you were standing under an icy waterfall. Take a break from the burden the Austras have thrust upon you. Forget your work and all their lessons. Be young for a while. Be irresponsible.”

For the first time that night, Helen glimpsed the man Philippe Dutiel had once been and she smiled. “I suppose you’re good at that.”

“Good! I used to be a master of irresponsibility. Then I acquired a daughter. Thank God her disease isn’t contagious.” He drained his glass and poured another, walked into the next room and sat on a chair arm.

He looked at Helen standing in the kitchen doorway, at her disapproving expression. “You’re a lot like Hillary, you know. No wonder she’s so infatuated that she talks about you constantly. I think she just wants to be an adult too soon while you’re trying to be a thousand years old.”

Helen put her glass next to the sink. “I think I’d better leave,” she said coldly and started to walk past him.

He grabbed her wrist and she stopped midstride. “Let me go!” Helen ordered, strengthening her words with a simple mental command. Neither worked. Instead, he pressed her against the wall and kissed her. She wanted to push him away but pity stopped her, then something more, much more.

She saw herself through his eyes, felt his mind open to her. He was awake. He knew what she was, yet he wanted to give. So perfectly right; so clearly what human partners were for.

Half-formed instincts warned her to leave. There were other possibilities and any would be better than this man. She didn’t want to share his bitterness, to devour his pain.

“If you must go at least do me the honor of staying for one more drink,” he said and smiled.

She rested a hand on the side of his face. She wanted him—blood, need, soul. As she kissed him again, she sensed the joy deep within him buried beneath losses far more complex than his arm. She would touch that joy and make it surface; this would be the gift she left him tonight. As she knelt beside him, she tried to convince herself that she need do no more than she had done before.

“No tricks, Helen Wells,” he said. “Just promise me that.”

He kissed her again and she was rocked by a passion whose purity astonished her. Every carefully ordered vision she had given the others would only be a distraction now. She devoured his need for her and found it inexplicably growing. At last, convinced that she would destroy him completely if she continued, she pulled away. He looked less damaged than puzzled by her sudden recoil.

“Enough,” she whispered when he asked what was wrong. His blood seemed too potent, a heady addictive drink she could consume until there was no life in him left to give.

Well after midnight, she left Phil sleeping in his bed and padded through the four small rooms of his cottage, reveling in the efficiency of her new night vision as she roamed through the dark. Hillary slept in a narrow room off the kitchen. A woman’s photograph was tacked onto the wall above her bed. A crucifix hung beside it as if this juxtaposition could give rest to her mother’s soul. Hillary moaned in her sleep and mumbled something in Portuguese. As Helen had done with her cousins not so long ago, she moved to Hillary’s bedside, intending to give a consoling brush of her hand on the girl’s back, a calming mental touch. At the last moment, she pulled back, not wanting to startle the girl, but let the mental bond form.

And folded slowly to the floor, her legs pressed against her chest, her arms hugging them, as if by protecting her body, Helen could somehow shield her mind from the abuse and the evil she shared. Sold and used and sold again. No wonder Phil was attracted by his daughter. His instincts told him what the girl had been too ashamed to admit.

It would be so easy to feed on Hillary, to merge with her and dull the sharpest edges of her memory, but Helen’s instincts warned her back. There were feelings she must not touch—magnificent in their intensity, poisonous in their pain.

“You become what you take,” Stephen had warned. He hadn’t needed to say anything at all. Helen left Hillary with one quick mental suggestion, then silently retreated from the room, from the house, from the town, and walked slowly up the mountain toward home.

Even before she crossed the low stone wall separating the private Austra estates from the rest of the AustraGlass property, she sensed Stephen waiting for her. She adjusted the belt on her dress, ran her fingers through her tangled hair. Concealing her thoughts as best she could, she walked into the house past where he sat waiting. She reached out to touch him, then pulled back. Touching would strengthen their bond and she only wanted to hide.

He stood and walked to the open door and looked out at the trees and sky, his long arms stretched above his head, fingers hooked into the molding. Her spider. Her web.

Helen fell into a chair beside the oak table and buried her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t,” he said harshly without looking at her. “Don’t ever apologize for what you are. Especially not to me.”

“You expected it, though. You wanted to hear me say I was sorry.”

“
Tske
!” He hissed the denial in his own language, then sat on the table beside her, reaching down to pick a piece of leaf from her hair. “You should be smiling, laughing, telling me how much you enjoyed him. You did enjoy him, yes?”

“Yes . . . no. I don’t know. There’s something so sad about him.”

“What you should have felt when you met him was need. What you should have received was life. None of the rest was necessary.‘’

“Even sex?”

“He didn’t force you. He could not.”

“Couldn’t! He knew. Do you think there was any way to avoid what happened?”

“He’s good at arousing guilt. And pity, yes?”

“I never thought about myself; I wasn’t raised to think about myself,” she said honestly. “But I have to be that way now, don’t I? Cautious. Secretive. Alone.”

“Yes. But you have the family. I brought you here to learn from them.”

“And now they make it harder for me. I feel like I have a dozen extra people inside of me and every one of them is giving me different advice. That would be confusing in itself but I don’t even know who I am.” She felt her anger rising, took a deep, calming breath, and went on. “Once you were my teacher, and while I resented being treated like a child, I always understood what you wanted. That isn’t true anymore. Now you don’t state things clearly and when I do what I think you’re suggesting, you get angry.”

“Not at you. Never you. I only find it infuriating that I must teach you the very things that will draw you away from me.” ,

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because my family cannot live on one another. And what we take from the humans we use binds us to them so tightly we no longer wish to be intimate with one another. Our mental ties are strong but our sexual bonds are frail at best. Only on nights when we have blood rituals or on occasional isolated hunts when the lust of the kill excites us do we ever have sex with one another. Then it is magnificent because the passion unites us all.”

Helen had already sensed this. Since her changing, Stephen had lost much of his allure. Except for the night of the family bonding, sex had become satisfying but mechanical, as if they had shared fifty good years together. She didn’t want to accept this truth especially when, at the core of it, lay some incredible contradiction she could only glimpse. “And when you have children, what then?” she asked.

“Sometimes a couple will live together for years before the woman conceives but it is a joining for convenience. After the woman gives birth and dies, the children are raised by the father with the help of all of us. That has been our way . . . and our curse.” He stood beside her and took her hands. “Until now.”

Though she wanted to hold him, the shame of what she’d done was still too strong in her. Knowing it was foolish, she stood and forced herself into his arms. Once there, she relaxed, rubbing her cheek against his black silk shirt, smelling the melange of scents, all the people he had danced with, all the ones who had brushed against him in the crowded cafe“, the unique musky perfume of his skin . . . and overpowering it all the reek of Philippe’s sweat and semen on her body.

Though he fought his jealousy, the emotion was too new, too strong, and he could not hide it from her. He gripped her arms when, frightened, she tried to push him away, ignored the stab of her nails in his shoulders as he moved down her body. Her shame turned to anger when, exasperated with her struggles, he pulled her down beside him, trapped her body with his mind, and pushed her limp legs apart.

—Stephen, please!—

—Quiet, my love. This is nothing I haven’t tasted before.—

He devoured her shame, her anger, and as her hands clawed the carpet and her back arched and she begged him to stop what he was doing, move up and enter her, she felt him bite—and passion, Philippe’s passion, flowed through her and into him.

And all the while, she heard his challenge in her mind. —Where is apology in this? Why should there be guilt in what you feel, in the passion you can force a mortal to give?—

She almost believed him, almost, but the more he forced her to feel, the closer she came to the truth until, furious, pushed beyond even her new endurance, she broke free of his mental hold, kicked him away, and bolted for the door. At the portal, she turned back to him and screamed the reply, “You make me feel guilt. You!” and ran into the comfort of the darkness.

When she realized he didn’t intend to follow, she slowed her pace to a walk and wandered through the dense woods of the Austra estates, oblivious to her torn and soiled dress, to the blood seeping slowly down her thighs. Though she did not see another of the family, she sensed them around her, knowing she wished privacy and keeping their distance. And inaudibly weaving through it, she heard Laurie’s music as if this place where he did not wish to be had already become his domain.

But not hers. Not yet. And not Stephen’s, not any longer. He only stayed because of her.

She returned to their house and found Stephen standing on the catwalk, looking down at the valley below, waiting for her. “I am sorry,” he began, clearly uncomfortable with this apology. “I don’t understand the emotions inside of me. If I did, I could control them, but, believe me, I have no wish to hurt you.”

“I understand how you feel, Stephen. It’s not even a new feeling to you. No, it’s too akin to when one hunter steals another’s prey.”