My Immortal (29 page)

There he fell into the dark wet dirt, finding yet a deeper reserve of pain, wailing from the pit of his soul long, mournful, guttural sounds of true suffering w
hich words could never express.

He opened his hand, shaking with rage, to see the ruby ring
he’d placed on her finger, its sharp edges cut into his skin. He remembered how she’d glowed when he had first slipped it onto her finger, tears of happiness flying from her cheek as she threw herself in his arms, screaming yes so loud even the angels could hear it.

He remembered the plans they made, the dreams they shared, the plans for children – lots of children – to share in their love. And now she was gone, taking all their dreams with her.

All he had left was a ruby ring she’d never wear again. Every single promise they had made had been broken. With a yowl of rage he hurled the ring into the murky water. He stumbled home in a stupor.

Though it was hopeless,
Nicholai could not keep away from her. He returned that night and slept beside her yet again. Again the storms raged to drive him away, again he woke to sunshine and fresh footsteps. This time he did not go into the house, he could not bear to see that dress again. On the third night he was riding over the terrain to sleep beside her once more when something spooked his horse and threw him into the brush, knocking him unconscious. He did not wake until the following morning.

He slept right through Natasha clawing through her grave, as well as her first kill – a hunter camped out in the forest who counted out the jewels he stole from her family.
His new riches were the only way to live down the nightmare of how things had turned on him when he’d tried to claim the oldest child.

He had tried to forget the sound of the fluttering wings and the yellow eyes of something not human and not animal.
They were eyes he saw again before his death, when Natasha, now undead, had come to extract her revenge.

Nicholai slept right through
Natasha’s return to her home, walking up the grand staircase, and meeting Thaddeus in her personal suite. Nicholai also missed Natasha bowing down to the man who was now her master, whose long fingers caressed her bloody chin. He was proud of her first kill, motivated by anger, fulfilled by a lust for vengeance. He knew she had been perfect for his wife when he first saw her riding across her father’s land, wearing trousers, straddling the horse as good as any man.

Thaddeus
had reminded him of his first love, the one who had created him and given him the bounty of immortality. Dying had been worth it to be with her, Thaddeus thought at the time. But as the centuries passed he realized Eve had many loves, and Thaddeus was not one of them. She’d turned him into a killing machine and left him to his own devices while she preyed on those for whom her lust truly burned – women not unlike herself.

When Thaddeus first saw Natasha it was Eve who appeared before him, her long red hair covering what patches of black lace and silk did not. She leveled those incredible cerulean eyes on him.
“You have found another, Thaddeus.”

He had smiled at her then
. He knew Natasha would get Eve’s attention. Her spirit would arouse his Mistress and how much it would pain her to watch Thaddeus take possession of her, when Eve herself could not. Perhaps that was why he threw himself into pursuing her with such vigor. Not only would he have a bride much like his beloved, his beloved would feel the sting of loss and rejection. It was the best of both worlds. Revenge and lust – life’s great intoxicants.

Eve stalked them both as time passed and Thaddeus attempted to convince King
Desislav to let him marry the Princess. Eve’s unrequited lust turned into intense hatred for the young dark haired beauty. There was something in her that threatened Eve somewhere deep down. And she didn’t like it.

She would have killed Natasha herself, but something in the girl frightened her. Instead she leaned on her strengths and attempted to woo Thaddeus back to her. He used her cruelly, as cruelly as
she’d used him, and returned to his chase.

Before long Eve had been sufficiently been replaced by another obsession. Thaddeus would not stop until Natasha not only became his, but loved him in a way no one had ever loved Eve, or could.

As Thaddeus’s new bride knelt before him he knew he could control her. When they made love he knew that Eve would feel each caress, every kiss. And she would burn for both of them then, in the same way he’d burned for her for four hundred years. She would envy him the younger beauty until her soul rotted inside her. Perfect punishment, Thaddeus thought.

He wanted to take Natasha immediately, but he knew she still pined for Nicholai. Bloody mortals, he thought to himself with a scowl as he watched her curl into her window seat and stare at the moonless night. Thaddeus hoped the horse that had thrown Nicholai had killed him. Once he was gone, Natasha could give herself totally to him. It was only a matter of time. And they had plenty of that. He was nothing if not a patient man.

After all, he had pined for Eve for nearly three hundred years.

What he
didn’t know is that Nicholai had only been stunned, and when he awoke the next morning he finished his lonely, faithful trek to Natasha’s grave.

When he got there he discovered her grave had been disturbed. Panicked he used his bare hands to dig his way to the bottom to find her. She was gone. Not only she was gone, but so was the wooden box in which she lay.

Again he looked up at the castle. There was no movement in the windows. Nicholai remembered then the two holes on the side of her neck. He wiped the dirt from his hands and made his way toward town.

There in the middle of town
was a body hanging from a tree. It was the body of a man involved in the revolt, who had been drained of blood, and his head slumped over to the side. Through a gaping hole in his neck one could see how his neck had snapped, the skin around had been torn through like an animal.

But an animal had not tied him up for the rest of t
he village to see, at least not the four-legged kind.

That night Nicholai was on his way back to the castle when a gypsy grabbed him from the shadows and pulled him into a shack. Her strength was sur
prising for a frail, old woman.

Normally he steered far clear of their superstitious flights of fancy, but when she uttered
Natasha’s name she had his complete attention. He grabbed her fragile arms and cried, “Do you know where she is? She’s not dead, is she?”

“
Nor is she alive,” the old woman told him. “She is undead. Cursed.”

“
I do not understand,” he said, shaking her slightly. “Tell me where she is.”

“
She is with him,” the woman told him cryptically before lowering the boom. “She is a vampire. She feeds on the blood of the living.”

Nicholai released her with a savage,
“No!”

“
Your destiny is clear, Nicholai.” He spun around when she spoke his name. “You must kill her master and set her free.”

Even Nicholai had heard the legendary tales. He understood exactly what the old woman was saying.
“If I do that, she’ll die,” he said, his heart unable to wrap itself around the thought of losing her twice.

“
She is already dead,” the woman told him. “Do not let her soul die as well.”

As Nicholai raced from the strange old woman, she morphed into a beautiful redhead. Eve's laugh bounced off of the darkened walls.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Adele squirmed in
Nicholas’s arms as she wandered the dark halls of her past. In her dream she relived the awful days after she’d been turned by Thaddeus. The lives she took, and how gleefully she took them, satisfying a lust for revenge that had been reborn with her.

Every night when
she’d return, she’d bow before Thaddeus and he would praise her. Every night she’d go silently into her room, sit by her window and pray that the nightmare would be over soon; that she’d wake up wrapped in Nicholai’s arms and all of this would just be a distasteful dream.

That day did not come. Instead Thaddeus grew more insistent in his affections. She squirmed in his arms as he tried to embrace her, and his kisses fell everywhere but where he wanted. She turned from him and tried to keep her distance, and Thaddeus grew impatient with her game of cat and mouse.

Finally he had had enough. She had pulled away from him when he tried to hold her close, wiggled out of his arms and walked back to her place by the window. It was where she stared into the darkness each and every night until the dawn threatened to appear and she took her place in the coffin he’d placed beside his own.

This time he would not give her the space she silently requested. This time he walked to the window and sat beside her.
“Why do you look so sad, my love?” he asked, running a finger along her flesh, leaving a trail of goose bumps behind.

She moved away from his touch. She knew what he wanted, and she also knew she would never give it to him.
“I do not love you, Thaddeus,” she said quietly, not looking him in the eye.

Thaddeus was angered, but tried to hide it as he turned her face to look at him. His eyes, one blue and one brown, tried to seduce her.
“Don’t you know I would do anything for you? Whatever you want, I will give to you.”

She steeled her spine against the seductive pull of his gaze.
He had taken her life when she had let her guard down before; that was all she was willing to give him. “You cannot give me the love I had. You cannot give me the life you stole.”

“I give you something better,” he told her. “I give you immortality. There are no limits to the loves and the lives you will have.” He grabbed her by the neck with his bony hands. “And take,” he said as his mouth turned up in an evil grin.

She simply shook her head as tears flowed down her cheek. She wanted the life she had. “I want Nicholai,” she had said, turning away from the anger in Thaddeus’ face to sob quietly into her arms.

T
ears stretched over the centuries to escape from Adele’s sleeping eyes as she tossed and turned in Nicholas’s lap. He held her close, knowing her journey through her past was nearly through. Soon she would remember how it all ended and why they had met again. He willed his strength into her body as his own mind recalled their last meeting as Natasha and Nicholai.

Nicholai spent an agonizing week trying to figure out a way to save her life and still kill the monster that had contaminated her. He spoke to priests, he spoke to mystics, and he spoke to his own heart. Finally he concluded that the only loving thing to do would be to set her free. He’d already lost her; he couldn’t allow her to lose herself. She was no longer Natasha, neither was she a monster. She was a lost soul that needed to be freed from her chains.

Bodies were still
showing up all over town. The entire village cowered in fear, not knowing the source of their threat. Natasha’s grave had been filled in before anyone else realized it had been disturbed, and although the gypsies were vocal about the vampire lore, only the gypsies believed it. They were the ones who took precautions; everyone else wanted a manhunt to find the murderer. Their search parties went everywhere but the one place Nicholai knew the murderer was.

Finally Nicholai made the agonizing decision to kill her master.
He’d go at night, he decided, even if that meant he’d have to face Thaddeus as he arose to feed off of the living. All that mattered to Nicholai was that he’d get to see her just one more time. He would face her master and all the dangers that involved, he’d walk through the gates of hell itself if it meant that he could hold her once more. He needed to tell her all the things he should have told her before.

He had taken a cross fashioned out of wood, each point sharpened, and
he’d taken his sword, meant to cut the head off of her master. It was the only way he would be truly dead. And in that act he would be able to set Natasha free.

Nicholai arrived at the castle just after sundown. As he made his way through the bottom floor, he heard movement up above as the undead were reanimated with the darkn
ess of night. He braced himself. He was angry, frightened and longing to see her again even if he didn’t know who she would be.

When she flowed down the staircase his breath caught in his throat. He was rooted to the spot, unable to move as he watched her seemingly float across the room. She did not see him. She did not see anything. She moved as though in a trance.

Her face was white and gaunt. Two sharp fangs protruded from her lips and her eyes were milky and vacant. Yet still the sight of her took his breath away. He wanted to call out but could not, and before he could find his voice she was gone.

He pulled the cross from his coat. He knew he had to do something now before she could kill again. With each feeding her soul diminished a little more and he
couldn’t allow it. The God he had spent his whole life worshipping would surely hold him accountable one day.

Nicholai raced up the stairway and found Thaddeus in her room. He stood in front of her bed, where her wedding gown still lay, as though he were waiting for her to return to him as his bride.