The Vampire Narcise (15 page)

He turned back to the table and finished removing the top to the box. As Giordan watched, his host removed a lacy, filigree object that looked like the same black lace of Narcise’s gown. It was a cloak or cape, and it shivered and flowed as Moldavi shook it out, holding it by the collars.

Then he turned it around so that Giordan could see the other side.

It was lined with brown feathers. Rows and rows of them.

“No,”
he whispered, turning to Moldavi in shock. “
No,
by hell.”

“Now, then,” he said. “Are you ready to negotiate?”

“Negotiate?” Giordan said. The numbness had eased away to cold fear and impotent anger. “You seem to hold all the cards.”

Moldavi liked that, and he laughed with delight. “I do hold most of them, that’s true. I spend much of my time arranging things.”

“I want Narcise,” Giordan said, his lungs aching, his knees watery. “Name your price. Whatever it takes to get her out of here.”

Moldavi showed his fangs, a light dancing in his malevolent eyes. “I want you.”

Even though he’d expected it, Giordan couldn’t control the sharp, dark twist in his middle. “Be more specific,” he managed to say.

“Three days and three nights. Naked. Willing.” Moldavi’s smile couldn’t even be described as maniacal; it was too calm and controlled. Satisfied. “Is that specific enough?”

March 1804

E
very so often, the memory came hurtling back into Narcise’s mind.

Although it was more than ten years since Giordan Cale had destroyed her, every nuance of the moment, every sight, sound, color, scent…even the remembrance of the way her being simply
stopped
and then imploded…it all came back.

As if it were happening again.

Anything could trigger it: the sight of a piece of charcoal on her drawing table. The sound when her maid dropped a handful of hairpins that scattered on the floor. The glimpse of a head of brown curls. The scent of a peach.

Whatever it was would send her mind shooting back to that moment when she walked into Cezar’s private chambers.

Even now, her belly shuddered, threatening to send her last meal spewing forth, but try as she might, Narcise couldn’t keep herself from going back there, reliving the very minutiae of a time she’d kill to forget.

She’d been looking for her brother—something she generally avoided doing, but there was no help for it, for she hadn’t had a fencing lesson or a painting session for three weeks, including a false one with Giordan Cale—and she wanted
to find out if and why he’d canceled the meetings with her tutors.

Cezar had been unusually absent since the night he’d brought her back after she seduced Cale, and Narcise had welcomed the reprieve, knowing how difficult it would be to hide her feelings about Cale in front of her brother. Fortunately Cezar had been in a relatively fine humor and had actually released most of the children he’d had captive. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign to Narcise, but at the time, she was merely grateful those lives had been spared.

She’d also expected to hear from or to see Giordan himself…but three weeks had passed since she seduced him, and she’d seen and heard from no one. Including Monsieur David and her fencing instructor. But it was Giordan’s absence, of course, that tortured her the most.

And that had her active mind making up scenarios and explanations—none of which were pleasant in the least. The worst of them all was the image of him with another woman, or
women
, perhaps…being the jovial, sensual host she knew him to be…and providing all form of hospitality.

Or perhaps now that she’d actually seduced him, that they’d actually been together, he’d moved on to another conquest. That was the Dracule way. Her heart grew cold at the thought.

Had she trusted him only to be betrayed and set aside?

At last, after neither David nor Cale appeared for her lesson for the third week, she went in search of Cezar, noting vaguely that all of the servants seemed to be otherwise occupied. His private parlor, where he kept the dish of sparrow feathers, was empty, but…

She stepped just inside the door, despite the deterrent of the feathers. She smelled him.
Giordan.
Giordan had been here recently.

The flush of a thrill warmed her and her heart began to
pound with hope. She had no doubt, no doubt at all that Giordan would find a way to free her from Cezar. He’d been here, recently, very recently. Earlier today.

It was at that moment that two things happened: the first—and now, much later, she understood the significance—was that the ever-present tray with feathers was not in the chamber. The second was that she noticed that, across the parlor, the door to Cezar’s private bedchamber was slightly open. And there were sounds and scents coming from inside…heavy, erotic, strong scents.

Even now, in her mind, her memory of it, Narcise screamed at herself
don’t go over there
…

But she did. Whether she realized what it was, whether it was the scent on the air, permeating the chamber, or whether there was some other reason she was compelled to walk on silent feet over to the chamber door…

To peer around the crack and to look in…
no, no, noooooo, don’t
…but she does it again…she looks in…

At first, she doesn’t realize what she sees. It’s the scent of arousal…heavy and thick…of lifeblood and eroticism and man…. It catches her, giving that little tug in the center of her belly that spears down low and causes desire….

The chamber is lit well enough by the blazing fire that Cezar always keeps, and several lamps, turned up to a golden glow. There is a massive bed, its curtains pulled wide, to one side. A large divan and two chairs are arranged in front of the fire. A table covered with glasses and bottles sits next to it, and even from here, she can see that three of the four bottles are empty. The scent of whiskey and blood mingle strongly with musk and virility.

There are two people, not on the bed, but on the divan, directly in front of the raging fire, opposite the door around which she peers. Since her brother’s varied proclivities aren’t unknown to her, she’s not surprised to see that he’s with a man.

She can’t see well, she’s not even certain why she’s compelled to watch—perhaps the scent hooked into her mind and dragged her there—but the first glimpse of a pale, slender hand curling over a strong, sleek shoulder makes her breath seize.

There is a cast of amber light over his skin, over the familiar golden curve of arms and shoulders now marred with bitemarks, shadowed by the flickering fire…the golden brush of lamplight over the strong profile with the patrician nose, so handsome, so perfect…the glow creating a nimbus from behind thick, dark curls, and an unholy halo around an even darker head adjacent to his.

She can’t breathe. The floor is falling away from her feet as if she is standing on a house of cards, and her body ceases. Everything halts: breath, heart, sensation, emotion.

His rich, tawny skin is slick with perspiration, shadowed from the hands on him…his face half turned from the door, etched tight with pleasure and pain. His lips, drawn back from his mouth in some sort of groan or grimace as fangs drive into his shoulder…

For all of the details of that moment, Narcise remembered hardly anything of what happened afterward. She must have made her way from the chamber, she must not have screamed despite the shrieking and wailing inside her, stumbling from the private parlor, somehow back to her own room before her body began to feel again.

Shattered.

And then, after that, it was dull and empty.

Sometime later—days, she thought, based on the number of times a servant came for her to feed…but she had no true concept of time for a while—Cezar sent for her.

She had no choice but to answer his summons, hardly aware of what she was doing. When she walked into Cezar’s private parlor, the conduit that had led to her destruction, Giordan was there.

Cezar was sitting in one of the chairs, looking complacent
and relaxed. “You have a visitor, Narcise,” he said with great congeniality.

“He’s not
my
visitor,” she managed to say. Despite her best efforts, her voice shook. Rage and pain threatened to erupt.

Cale turned from where he’d been standing in the corner, his back to the room, his broad shoulders straight with tension. His eyes were bright—too bright. And yet the skin around them was tight. He was fully, formally dressed, but his clothing was wrinkled, less than perfect.

He looked weary—and well he should, based on what she’d witnessed. Narcise’s stomach threatened to revolt just then and despite the fact that she hadn’t fed for who knew how long, she knew something would come up anyway.

“Narcise,” Giordan said. His voice was rough and low. But anger and command hummed beneath.

Why was he angry with
her?

She couldn’t—she fled the room, the world spinning into hot red nausea. She couldn’t think, couldn’t comprehend, could hardly feel. Nothing but the raging whirl of her emotions.

He came after her, out of the chamber into a corridor that was uncharacteristically deserted. “
Narcise.
”

His scent came with him—and with it, a revolting mix of opium, hashish, whiskey, blood. And Cezar. She steadied herself against the wall, trying to block the images that assaulted her, that matched the stew of debauchery emanating from him. The scents of his betrayal.

Somehow, from the depths of herself, she managed to find words. His words. “‘It’s you, Narcise. It’s only you.’” She threw them back into his face, the ones that had sustained her for weeks. “You disgust me.”

“By the Devil, you can’t truly believe—”

“I don’t have to believe. I
saw
. You.” Her voice broke and
she felt herself falling back into that chasm of desolation and grief, a whirlwind of blackness. Disbelief and pain. Such pain. She had to get away from him. A roaring filled her ears, the deep, dark roar of hatred and agony.
“Get away from me.”

He stepped toward her, grabbing her arm. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you?” His voice raw, his face, terrible, was close to hers. She hardly heard the words, for they were lost in the horrible swirling scent of blood on his breath, the smells of depravity and sweat and other darkness.

She talked over him, the roaring in her mind and heart blocking his words as she spewed her pain onto him. “You’ve completely destroyed me. Something even my brother wasn’t able to do, in decades.” She jerked her arm from his fingers with a sharp movement, turning away, starting back down the corridor. “Get away from me.” Her voice threatened to break, but she wouldn’t allow it. “
Get away.
”

He’d said she was strong. Oh, he had no idea how strong she was. Her hand closed over a doorknob and she turned it, not caring where it led, hardly aware of what she was doing.
Have to get away from him.

“By the Fates, Narcise, listen—”

“I can’t bear—” She shoved a hand over her mouth to hold back the vomit, and stumbled through the door. As she slammed it behind her, falling against it, trying to breathe something other than him and his depravity, he slammed against it, rattling it in its hinges.

And then he was gone.

He didn’t remember leaving Cezar’s subterranean residence after those nights of hell.

In retrospect, a decade later, Giordan wondered that the
man even allowed him to do so—but then, of course, by that time, Cezar had gotten all that he’d wanted.

At least, for the moment.

With Narcise’s hate-filled, witchlike visage burning in his memory, her acid words screaming in his mind, Giordan found himself raging blind and lost through the streets. Violence pounded through him, his abused body weak and overused, his hands, his very skin a reeking reminder of the hours and days past.

He had no real memory of where he went and what he did once out of Cezar’s place: it was dark, and his world became a hot, red rampage, filled with the taste and scent of blood, the heat and suppleness of living flesh, the rhythmic pulsing against his body, the slap and thud of flesh against flesh. There might have been screams, shouts, cries, moans and groans. There were certainly deaths and injuries.

Giordan’s vision burned with red shadow. It was as if coals had been shoved beneath his lids and seared into his irises, coloring his sight.

He supposed he went mad.

Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you?
His own hoarse words rolled in his brain, over and over, desperate and angry even as he sought relief. She wouldn’t even listen. She wouldn’t
listen.

He woke sometime, some hours, perhaps days, later in one of Paris’s narrow alleys. Tucked back in a corner. Alone.

That moment was clear in his mind even today, a decade after: that moment of reemergence, of clawing up from the depths of a heavy, dark sea. As if he’d dragged himself awake from the worst of nightmares.

But it had been no nightmare, those three nights of hell. And what he’d thought of as the light at the end of the tunnel, as the prize for his endurance and existence through
hours of torture, turned only into the slap of betrayal. And the hot memory of humiliation.

Narcise.

Giordan rubbed gritty eyes with trembling fingers that smelled of blood and semen and opium and filth. He saw that the alley was hardly wide enough for him to extend his legs, but so long that he could see only that it angled into nothingness.

The walls on either side of him loomed tall and windowless, like dark sentinels. The brick was cold against his bare back, chill and rough with dirt, sticky with unidentifiable substances. Even springy with a bit of moss. The ground below, uneven with cobbles and filtered with a random tuft of grass, seeped damply into his breeches.

All at once, Giordan became aware of the sun. It emerged from a heavy cloud as if a curtain had been drawn away. The golden light spilled into the alley next to him and would soon filter over the spot where he lay.

At first, he didn’t have even the energy to pull to his feet. Nor the desire.

His mind was stark and empty, devoid of thought, even emotion. Just…empty.

Finished.

She’d finished him.

But then, as the base need for self-preservation stirred with the shift of the sun, Giordan prepared to heave himself upright.

At that moment, he saw the cat.

She sat there, pale and blonde against the shades of indigo and violet and gray that filled the alley. Her blue-gray eyes were fixed on him in that way of her race, unblinking and steady.

But there was no miffed accusation in this feline’s stare.
Her tail, which curled comfortably around her, had no annoyed twitching at its tip. She exuded peace.

She looked just like the cat who’d stared at him from a nearby roof some weeks ago. Just after he’d met Narcise.

Giordan realized belatedly that some of the weakness in his body stemmed from the presence of his Asthenia, positioned just-so in front of him. She sat just far enough away that he wasn’t breathless and paralyzed, but close enough that he felt the essence of her presence like uncomfortable waves.

And he realized that, until she moved, he could not escape from the alley.

“Scat!” he said with as much sharpness as he could muster, but at the same time, a wave of grief for his own fat orange Chaton roughened the back of his throat. “Move!”