Beloved Vampire (39 page)

She shook her head. “No, I want to be awake.”

“With his blood, it’s going to be quite painful.” Amara’s hand touched her head.

“I know. But that’s okay. I want to feel it. I’m not afraid.” She turned her face so she could look up at the other woman. “I know he told you to make me, but he did it so I wouldn’t feel afraid or hurt too much. I promise, if either of those things happens, I’ll ask you for the sedative. Please. Let me have this choice.”

Amara’s gaze rose, obviously meeting Robert’s over her body. “Let’s respect her decision on this, Robert. I’ll take the consequences if Lord Mason is displeased.”

Shallow breaths, shallow breaths.
As Jess heard the whir of the needles being tested, she gripped the metal table frame beneath the cushioning. A burr in the steel cut into her finger.

The cuffs on her wrists and around her throat warmed, sending their intertwined strands of pleasure and reassurance, a mild electrical jolt of rebuke. Her lips curved. Even better than sedation. It reminded her of his hand in her hair, his mouth so close to her throat.
I will demand your surrender
. . .

There were two ways to surrender. One was by coercion, as Raithe had done. Taking her by brutal force, threatening those she loved, subjecting her to unspeakable pain and humiliation. The other way was by willing desire, knowing being enthralled to a particular Master held something that could not be found somewhere else. A fulfillment, and oddly, a tranquil peace. She saw it in Enrique and Amara, and though she’d never experienced it directly, the understanding of it was there, in a culmination of things. The activation of her restraints, the design she’d chosen, the choice Amara let her have.

She tried it again, pressed her finger against the sharp edge, a patient administering her own morphine, a tiny, secret dose of pain followed by pleasure. As the shiver went through her body again, she imagined his touch, comforting and demanding at once.

Amara rubbed Jess’s shoulder. “I’m going to fold back the sheet for Robert. Are you ready?”

Jessica nodded. She heard Robert draw in a breath. While she’d sketched what was there, this was the first time he’d seen the reality of it.
Please don’t ask me, don’t ask me
. . .

“The world is a terrible place,
cherie
,” he murmured at last. His gentle fingers lighted on the center scar. The emotion pouring from his voice wasn’t sympathy, but rather cold outrage. “If whoever did this is not dead, I hope to God that Lord Mason leaves no strip of skin on his cowardly body.”

If Raithe still lived, she believed Mason would have done exactly that. She’d seen it in his face, more than once, when he’d tapped her memories. As gratified as she was by that, she wanted more than his vengeful honor toward a damsel in distress.

As Robert bent to his task, began to wipe her down with a cleansing solution, she turned her head back toward Amara with an expectant look.

“Yes, love?” Amara leaned forward. “Have you changed your mind?”

Jessica shook her head. Letting go of the table on the nonburred side, she threaded her fingers into the beautiful fall of Amara’s tresses, enjoying the pleasure of touching it, almost as much as she enjoyed Amara’s pleased expression when she offered the spontaneous affection.

“The night we go to the club, I’ll need help, getting ready.”

She might not be sure what she wanted long term yet, but she was quite sure what she wanted short term. And she wasn’t going to wait for it anymore. For five long years she’d waited for her life to change, until she’d given up that it would ever happen. She wasn’t going to waste any more of it agonizing.

When Amara nodded with a knowing look, Jess closed her eyes and let Robert take her a step closer to owning her life again. Or having the ability to give it to whomever she chose.

20

M
ASON rubbed his eyes. “I hate politics,” he stated emphatically. “All politicians should die lingering, torturous deaths. Ants should gnaw living flesh from their bones.”

Lord Brian, barricaded by racks of test tubes and microscopes, glanced up from his notes. A faint smile crossed his usually serious features. “Then you have placed yourself in a masochistic position, my lord. Taking over in Lady Lyssa’s capacity, and now challenging Council law regarding human servants who take the lives of their Masters. However, I still don’t understand why you’d want to know about our Cleves research.” He nodded to a sheaf of papers. “If the girl’s Master is dead and she wasn’t third-marked, research on reversing the third mark wouldn’t be relevant.”

“I third-marked her to save her life.”

“Oh.” Lord Brian considered that. “And you do not wish to keep her for your own. Understandable. Keeping a servant who’d staked her previous Master could be discomfiting, to say the least. You’d feel compelled to stay in her mind constantly, afraid she might get in a pique and stake you for a glass of wine demanded at the wrong moment.”

At a delicate cough from the other end of the room, Brian sent a narrow look toward Debra, his research assistant and third-marked servant. “I’m sure that was lab dust.”

“Of course, my lord.” She sent him a beatific smile and bent to her work again.

“That’s not why I’m interested,” Mason snapped. He slid onto one of the stools across from the vampire scientist. “She deserves a choice. She didn’t choose this life.”

He waved a hand at Brian’s raised brow. His annoyance wasn’t with the scientist. As Enrique had predicted, word had leaked out, and the halls were crawling with the fifteen made vampires Raithe had sired. While, in recent years, the Council had severely curtailed the practice of making vampires, it was a few decades too late, in Mason’s opinion. Made vampires were notoriously more volatile, with far less impulse control.

Mason understood that the incidence of born vampires was dwindling, so population concerns were not entirely unjustified. Still, he didn’t see that any vampire needed more than a dozen “offspring,” particularly when it seemed they didn’t have enough brain cells between them to constitute one intelligent being.

Mason gestured to the papers. “What does the name mean?”

Debra lifted her head. “Cleves, after Anne of Cleves, the wife Henry VIII divorced after six months because she was too ugly.” A smile touched her lovely pink mouth. “He thought she looked like a horse.”

“Debra came up with the name for the serum. Clever, if a bit impudent.” Brian’s eyes glinted, but his gaze lingered on the slim nape of his assistant as she measured a viscous substance from a beaker. It reminded Mason that Brian was still fairly young. Debra was likely the first servant the born vampire had chosen without his parents’ input.

However, while Brian was not yet a century old yet, his dedication to scientific inquiry for their kind, begun when he was little more than a teenager, had led to an entire division of the Council’s headquarters being committed to his research. He was now spear-heading at least eight different projects, handled by a variety of like-minded vampires, their servants and even some humans carefully recruited from the scientific community, an unprecedented step.

“Can you tell me how it works in a way I’ll understand?” Mason’s dry tone brought the younger vampire’s attention back to him.

Brian slanted him a grin.

“Probably not. Suffice it to say, we use different composites to remove the three different marks, essentially washing the blood clean of the vampire’s presence. No bond left between him and the human. So far it has shown guarded success in the cell modeling, but it will only be effective on third-marks during their first ten years.” Brian frowned suddenly at something in his notes, lifted a test tube to the light and made another note. Mason waited through several minutes of scribbling. Debra glanced up a few minutes later and cleared her throat, a faint amusement in her expression.

Brian’s gaze came up, and Mason realized the male had gotten lost in his research again and forgotten he was even there.

“How soon can it be used, Lord Brian?” He couldn’t help the edge in his voice, but since it focused the other vampire’s attention, he didn’t regret it.

“Oh, very soon. It took some time to get the Council’s agreement for the test, but your interest has come at an opportune time. My two volunteers and their Masters are en route to Berlin.”

“Good. I suppose you don’t have any idea when the Council will sanction its usefulness, if it works?”

Brian lifted a shoulder, a shadow crossing his handsome face. “Unfortunately, you are the first to see the usefulness. Most of the Council believes an impetuously marked servant should be killed, to protect our world. However”—he brightened—“I have a theory, based on the mind-link between vampires. I believe it’s possible that the vampire Master or Mistress could impose a memory block by tapping into that region of the brain before the serum is administered. Debra and I have been working up possibilities, and if the Masters coming are willing, we’re going to try it. I don’t see how the Vampire Council could oppose its use then, if we’re successful.”

“Hmm.” Mason propped his crossed arms on the counter. “So the servant would remember nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“And if that’s unsuccessful, do you think putting the servant down is the best course?”

Brian lifted his head, met Mason’s gaze. While not the most physically impressive vampire, he wasn’t fainthearted, and Mason appreciated that in him. His hesitation appeared to be due to careful consideration. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “The scientist in me is often far more interested in the challenge of doing the impossible than the implications of overcoming that challenge. I leave that to the politicians, such as yourself.” That smile twisted his lips again.

“Careful, boy,” Mason growled. “Or I’ll snap you like one of those test tubes.”

“I don’t fear you, Lord Mason.” Brian gave him an arch look, reminding Mason as well how often the two of them had communicated during the volatile period when Jacob, Lady Lyssa’s former servant, was transitioning to his new powers. “I know I’m useful to you.”

“Yes, but my temper has been known to exceed my good sense.” Mason settled back on the stool. “What’s the background of the two volunteers?”

“We were very fortunate. Their marking was an impetuous decision made by a pair of forty-year-old vampires who hunt together.

Now their Masters no longer want them. They were contemplating the termination solution, but they were open to another option, if presented, and came to the Council for guidance. The humans are willing, for of course this may be their only chance to get out of this alive.”

“Half of our kind need babysitters,” Mason muttered. “Or an ethics committee.”

“To promote the façade that we’re civilized, the same way humans pretend to be?”

Mason studied Brian’s dispassionate expression. “A cynical scientist.”

Creating a new slide, Brian shrugged. “Cynics and optimists both consider themselves realists, my lord. Perception is everything. At your age, I expect there are very few methods of brutality you haven’t seen inflicted by the strong upon the weak.”

Remembering Jessica, the marks on her back, the scars on her mind, Mason’s fingers tightened on the counter. She’d gotten the tattoo yesterday. He remembered how she’d said she didn’t want him there. Or rather, she did, but she didn’t. He should have been there.

“I’ve studied the mythos of religions,” Brian continued. “The Genesis tree of the knowledge of good and evil was of particular interest to me. At some point, the first humanoid life form took a step out of the natural order, toward the wells of knowledge beyond survival and instinct. They couldn’t resist exploring them, because that is how our brains are wired. Whatever that first humanoid embraced—call it evil symbolized as a serpent or whatever you wish—it infected us. The shadow companion of our so-called advanced intelligence is the temptation of sadism, a compulsion the nonhumanoid world does not seem to experience . . .

except as an aberration. Or as the victims of it.”

Brian paused as Debra brought him her results. Mason watched their heads bend together over the data. As she murmured something to him about vectors and isotopes, her hand naturally rested on his thigh. Leaning over him, she pulled a sheet of paper closer to point something out. He nodded, pursed his lips and ran a casual palm down her back, lingering on her hip. “Try this run again.” He indicated something on the sheet. “Use the control group this time.”

She nodded, glanced briefly toward Mason and retreated. All servants knew the potential to be shared with another vampire was a courtesy their Master or Mistress might offer, even in an unusual setting such as this. Mason suspected not many vampires were tempted, though, due to the lack of comfortable places to sit, let alone recline. And this lab was a reminder of the weaknesses they faced, as well as the strengths. It was not a place to indulge sensual pleasures, at least not for him.

Watching the two of them together, however, he suspected this was their second home. There likely wasn’t a surface where Brian had not exercised a vampire’s carnal needs on his pretty assistant and servant. Why did the thought irritate him, like a deep, recurring itch he wanted to scratch but couldn’t reach? Or worse, as if he knew that scratching it wouldn’t ease the cause of the abrasion?

Turning his attention back to Mason, Brian added, “I’m not as cynical as I appear, Lord Mason. Vampires acknowledge their need for power and control more honestly than humans do. They embrace it, give it outlets. Humans still try to pretend their core nature is that of some peaceful guru sitting on top of a mountain, calling out ‘ohms’ to the sky. While it is something to strive for, at least vampires recognize it is a highly disciplined state, contrary to our true natures, not a route back to them.”

Mason gave him a grim smile. “Know thyself.”

Brian nodded. “Exactly. Anyhow, to more practical matters. If effective, the serum would be viable for use in less than a month, but it will depend on Council. Unless I can figure out a memory block, they are not likely to endorse it.”

Mason studied the vials again. “Brian, have you ever employed magical systems in your work?”