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

One of the sixteen had been her newborn son.

And that didn’t begin to take into account the number of people she’d murdered by way of madness since she’d been freed from a curse that bound her spirit within her sarcophagus. The director of the museum had ordered that countless relics be relocated to the unused British Museum station tube-tunnels for safety during the Nazi blitz of London during World War II. A clumsy employee had liberated Shirian’s spirit from an Egyptian priest’s curse by tripping as he carried her sarcophagus down some stairs, dropping Shirian’s coffin and jolting the ancient, magical seal that protected the living from her virulent spirit.

Shirian had taken her share of human lives since that time.

She sulked too much, granted, but there was no doubt in Morshiel’s mind that she
was
Shirian the Magnificent.

Her skin glowed as luminously as her dark eyes. Her breasts heaved as she tried to catch her breath. Morshiel plucked at an erect nipple, spying a blue vein beneath golden-brown skin.

“I see your vitessence glow around you like subtle moonlight,” he crooned to her. “I smell your blood.”

Her pulse leapt at her throat, making his mouth water.

“It is true? I
live
?” she asked.

“We
both
live. I have a soul and you have a body—as long as we have the woman and crystal to sustain us.”

He had shivered at the hollow, ghostly sound of Shirian’s laughter in the past. Now it sounded low and sultry as it vibrated through blood-warmed flesh. He joined her in her mirth as he bared his fangs and pushed a tender breast toward his mouth.

“Yes, taste life on your tongue, my beautiful prince,” Shirian murmured huskily as she arched her back. She palmed her breast from below, freely offering the miracle of her reborn flesh and blood. He leaned forward, greedy to taste the paradox of ghost’s blood, hungry for her vitessence.

Her triumphant moment was interrupted by a fierce cold wind, the tramping paws and pants of wolves, and the furious howl of an attacking beast.

Blaise gave the signal for attack. Aubrey Cane leapt in human form and transformed to a wolf in midair. Most of his faithful followers, the Literati, also shifted into wolves, but he himself remained as a man, his heartluster gripped tightly in his hand. He rarely fought as his wolf-self when his clone was near, and Morshiel was definitely in the vicinity. He sensed his clone’s location behind six Scourge revenants—three canids, two bloodboars and a prowler that guarded the unused portion of tunnel near the British Museum platform. The Scourge were only capable of shapeshifting into these three types of foul, deadly creatures, while their master—Morshiel—could transform into many forms of demon animals.

Blaise sensed something else besides his clone, an energy that stunned him and left him wary…disbelieving. The low, melodious hum of the earth singing thrilled his flesh.

Nothing
could create that much power. What in hell’s farthest reaches had Morshiel done?

He grasped the handle of his heartluster—the magical short-sword was the only thing that could weaken and subdue his clone—and charged through the melee of snarling wolf-Literati and Scourge revenants. From the periphery of his vision, he noticed that David Kwan had also chosen to fight in his human form. A bloodboar opened its slimy maw from behind David, about to sink its razor-sharp teeth into his shoulder as David fought a canid with a scimitar. Blaise slashed with his heartluster in a sideways motion, never pausing to see the effect of his action because he knew he’d just decapitated the bloodboar as sure as he knew the foul scent of revenant blood and decaying flesh in his nose.

“Thanks,” David called before he slashed with his scimitar and the canid howled in fury and pain.

“Don’t thank me. Fight,” Blaise shouted, not looking back. He broke through the crumbling revenant defenses and strode onto the tube platform. What he saw there confused him. A crystal protruded between the rails of the unused train track, the pointed end of it thrusting up next to the concrete platform. It was enormous, the exposed portion sixteen feet long and three feet wide at the bottom.

What truly shocked him was the vision of the woman touching the crystal. She glowed like a captured star. He had a fleeting image of another woman, this one naked. She gave him a quick glance—both haughty and curious at once—before she disappeared. Had she been a ghost? For a split second she’d looked so real.

Morshiel sprang up from the platform, his fangs protruding between a snarl. He grasped for his pants, which had been shoved halfway down his thighs, and extracted his heartluster in one fluid motion.

Blaise roared and flew at his clone. They crashed together like two opposing tidal waves, rebounding backward before they sprang again, teeth bared in bloodlust. They thrust and parried so rapidly that the sound their heartlusters made blended into a seamless metallic hiss, a sinister background noise for the vicious cacophony of growls and shrieks that bounced off the tunnel walls. Morshiel fought with uncommon strength and fervor tonight, shocking Blaise.

What had made his clone so strong?

Morshiel forced him back against the edge of the platform, a manic, wild expression on his face. The concrete beneath Blaise’s boots crumbled and he lost his balance. Morshiel pushed his heartluster with so much strength that Blaise tottered at the edge of the platform. Blaise halted the blade a mere inch away from his chest, but it took all his strength to hold the block. He was falling…falling. His heart pounded against his breastbone frantically, as if it suspected it was on its last beats.

He’d dreamed of a moment just like this countless times over the centuries. What would it be like to die beneath Morshiel’s blade? It was the only thing that could end Blaise’s life, after all. The mandate to control Morshiel had been set into his very blood—a biological order he could not ignore—but his clone was the only one who could grant Blaise relief from this endless, pointless, soulless existence.

He met his clone’s eyes in that stretched second and saw not his murderer, but the beneficent angel of death. He longed to embrace him, to be comforted in turn. His gaze flickered ever so briefly to the vision of the luminous woman. Although she stood completely still, her body vibrated with energy.

“She’s mine, you freak of nature,” Morshiel grated out between clenched jaws.

A white-hot fury erupted in Blaise’s brain. He roared like a cornered lion, the sound drowning out the noise of battle that surrounded them. He let his body move with the momentum of his fall, pushing mightily off the platform away from Morshiel. His feet flew over his head in a somersault, only to strike the far side of the tunnel. He vaulted back toward the platform like a missile, causing Morshiel to retreat, a surprised expression on his face. He struck a hammering downward blow on Morshiel’s raised sword hand and plunged his heartluster toward Morshiel’s chest. He grunted at the sensation of the metal tip sinking into flesh.

As a Sevliss prince—one of the surviving six—it had been predetermined by forces greater than Blaise that he could not kill his clone, but he could weaken him.

Morshiel let out an unearthly shriek. Suddenly he was changing, altering form and rising off the tube platform. Blaise stood and watched as the giant demonbird beat its membranous wings and headed away from the platform down the dark tunnel. Morshiel let out another blood-curdling shriek in his shifter form, calling his followers to him.

Blaise leapt onto the platform in time to behead a canid and a prowler in two vicious passes of his heartluster. Dark red, viscous blood flew into the air, but Blaise sidestepped both sprays with the ease of long experience. Revenant blood burned exposed skin like acid.

He stared at the man and woman who took the loathsome creatures places, recognizing Morshiel’s soldiers—Anthony Shrivencraft and Amory Doyle.

They would not be rejoining their master now.

He anxiously counted the remaining Literati—both wolves and men. Aubrey Cane transformed back into his human form, his clothes intact. Blaise wished he could master that trick, but Aubrey was a gifted magician—had been since the moment Blaise first met him three and a half centuries ago. Transforming into human form fully clothed was the least of Aubrey’s manifold skills.

Aubrey knelt next to a large pale gray wolf that lay inert on the platform. He touched the blood-matted fur and muttered some words in Latin. The wolf jerked and whined.

“Mallory will be all right. He got the worst of us all,” Aubrey said as he walked from one wolf to another, assessing and bringing each creature relief like a doctor on a battlefield. He stood and approached Blaise after a moment. Aubrey was one of the few males Blaise knew who matched his height, putting them eye to eye.

“We did well, thanks to you. Shrivencraft, Doyle, Allenshare, Mason and Solerin,” he said, referring to the revenants—walking, blood-drinking, sentient corpses—they’d killed.

“Morshiel turned Shrivencraft five hundred and thirty-two years ago,” Blaise said flatly, his gaze now glued to the awesome sight of the woman touching the crystal.

“He suffers no more,” Aubrey said, following Blaise’s stare. “Who…
what
is she?”

“I don’t know. But whatever she is, Morshiel wants her. So that means I’m taking her.”

Aubrey nodded. Blaise had stated the obvious. They would never consider leaving such a powerful creature in Morshiel’s hands.

“The amount of vitessence coming off her and that crystal,” Aubrey mumbled. His gray eyes narrowed and glazed as he stared. “It’s not possible.”

They both approached the light-infused woman. For the first time, Blaise noticed she wore one long black glove on the arm that hung at her side. He bent to pick up its mate which had been discarded on the concrete platform. He gripped the cheap, synthetic fabric convulsively. His nostrils flared.

Her scent filled him.

She was so illuminated he had a strange feeling that if he removed the purple evening dress she wore, he’d be able to see inside her, see her very heart beating out a rapid, desperate tattoo. His own heart felt as if someone had just reached into his chest and squeezed it without mercy.

“The connection is hurting her.” He reached to detach her from the crystal, but Aubrey stopped him with a hand on his forearm.

“No. I don’t believe the soulless can touch her without harm.”

Blaise understood. If they were the soulless, this woman was the very essence of a rarified soul. Differences repelled. His heart throbbed in pain. He threw his friend’s hand off his forearm. His eyes sprang wide when he grasped her wrist. He had the disoriented thought that the crystal was an electrical conduit, for an enormous shock went through him. The woman’s back arched and she screamed.

For the eternal second before he broke the conduit, a rapture filled him unlike anything he’d ever known. It was as if her very soul slammed into his consciousness in one powerful pulse of energy.

He blinked. The woman fell limply into his arms, unconscious. He checked her pulse, exhaling in relief when he felt her rapid but strong heartbeat.

She will never be able to leave Sanctuary
, he thought numbly as he lifted her limp form. Her days of freedom had come to an end the second Morshiel had learned of her existence. From now until the end of her days, this woman would either be hunted or captured. Better that he—Blaise—was the one to hold her captive.

He moved his hand subtly on her hip. The dress she wore wasn’t expensive. As the owner of the largest silk factory in Europe, Blaise knew fabrics. He knew the sensation of vitessence better. The dress might be cheap, but that couldn’t begin to disguise the purity and strength of the woman’s soul-energy.

Michael Lord, one of the Literati, approached, buttoning up the jeans he’d dropped on the platform before he’d transformed. He paused a few feet away, staring at the woman in his arms in opened-mouthed awe.

“No,
don’t
—” Blaise uttered harshly, but too late. Michael strode forward and placed his hand on the woman’s upper arm.

He flinched back in pain.

Aubrey grabbed Michael’s hand and examined the reddening palm, looking alarmed and interested at once. Fear could never completely diminish Aubrey’s vast scientific curiosity. Blaise craned to see what Aubrey examined.

A small blister broke the surface of Michael’s palm. Michael appeared to be in no great pain or distress, merely confused about what had just happened.

“He’ll be all right,” Aubrey declared, releasing Michael’s hand. “It’s a small burn, almost as if the woman was radioactive to him. The burn is already healing, given Michael’s nature,” Aubrey said, referring to Michael’s status as one of the Literati. Near immortality and the ability to heal rapidly were only two of the Literati’s inhuman powers. The humans Morshiel embraced might transform into bloodthirsty, foul Scourge revenants. On the rare occasions throughout the centuries when Blaise had embraced a human, however, the man retained the nobility of his human spirit and gained the savage grace of the wolf.

“Why did you do that?” Blaise growled at Michael. “She might have destroyed you.”

Michael flushed and looked downward, showing him only the crown of his chestnut brown hair.

“Don’t blame him too harshly,” Aubrey said. “He did what any of us would do. She beckons like a magnet to Literati blood. She’s like a fountain of vitessence that would never run dry.”

Blaise’s nostrils flared in anger when he noticed Aubrey’s hungry stare on the female. Maybe Michael’s impulsiveness wasn’t for naught. Better the Literati knew the truth. Nature had given the woman some form of protection from immortal hunger.

“Do you think she can harm the Literati from a distance?” he asked Aubrey.

Aubrey shook his head. “No, you shouldn’t take my analogy of radioactivity too far. Only touching her will cause cellular damage at the site of contact,” his gaze flickered curiously over Blaise’s hands cupping the woman’s hip and waist, “at least for most of us.”

A strange sense of satisfaction tore through Blaise, twining with his bewilderment over the fact that he could touch the woman. He was as soulless as the Literati, whom he had turned immortal to save from the ravages of the bubonic plague. He was as soulless as the revenants Morshiel daily created through murder by excessive blood drinking. He was as damned as Morshiel himself.