Blood Guilt (4 page)

Mihaela dragged the stake from her pocket, at the same time wrenching her hand free. He let her go, closing his eyes once more, and abruptly, she understood.

Maximilian was dying. For him, there would be no tomorrow.

She sank down onto the other bed, staring at his white, closed face. “What will happen?” she blurted. “Will you just turn to dust in the night?”

There was another pause, going on so long she thought he might be asleep. Then: “I suppose so.”

“Don’t you care?” she demanded. She didn’t know why it made her so angry.

“Not very much, no.” His eyes opened, regarding the stake she still held poised and aimed at his heart. “You can use it if you like. I will make you much stronger.”

“I’m strong enough,” she retorted, annoyed to be granted permission for something she was sure she couldn’t do anyhow. “Hell, how can you just die? Vampires don’t die from injury!”

“They do if they have no blood to heal.”

She stared at him. “Then all you need is blood?”

Once again, his gaze dropped to her throat. Her vein tingled as if he’d actually touched it, and her breath caught.
Oh no. I’m not doing that.
And yet, when his eyes moved deliberately back to hers, she couldn’t look away.

She’d never seen hunger like it. It flooded his eyes, darkening them like tarnished silver, dragging her into their bottomless depths. He needed blood more badly than an addict needed a needle. She could live with that, since there was very little he could do about it. Or would do about it. What hurt was the strange, personal link forming between their eyes, the knowledge that his hunger wasn’t merely impersonal but focused on
her
, and deeply, disturbingly sexual.

She’d felt it before, the weird, physical attraction of older vampires, but never this strongly. His sheer beauty made it so much worse, as did the flood of dream memories that hit her without warning. The hot, shameful dreams that had disturbed her sleep in the months since the battle against Luk in Budapest.

She jumped to her feet, as if movement could dispel past and present desires. He never needed to know much she’d wondered… Would still wonder.

If she left now, by morning, he would no longer exist. He wouldn’t even make it to biting the chambermaid who’d been worrying Mihaela since she’d decided to take him to a hotel. But there were still questions to be asked.

Something changed in the vampire’s gray, reflective eyes. A different kind of pain that she couldn’t begin to guess at. Then his eyelids closed, and a faint smile formed on his full, sensual lips.

“We’re both running away,” he observed. “I can’t blame you.”

Mihaela’s heart thundered in her breast. She could
not
run away. She had the power, for good or ill, to keep this very odd vampire in existence.

She could die.

I could find out what the blood drink is truly like…

Appalled, she strode to the bedroom door, and grasped the handle. Maximilian had saved her life. Was it a fair return just to let him die in greater comfort than he’d have found hiding behind a barrel in the backyard of a pub?

Elizabeth didn’t believe Maximilian was evil. Whatever he’d done in the past, he’d shown loyalty to Saloman since the Ancient’s awakening. But what did Maximilian owe Mihaela?

With my blood, he could recover and drain me in an instant, if he chose.

If he dies, there are things I’ll never know.

“The vampire who led the others,” she said abruptly. “Would you help me find him?” She wouldn’t consider the other things she’d never know; she wouldn’t let them in her mind. She listened instead to the beats of her heart. One, two. Three, four.

“If you wish.”

She closed her eyes, shocked by the rush of yearning that came with the fear.

He said, “I won’t kill you,”

She drew in a shuddering breath, snapped her eyes open, and spun back round to face him. “Damn right you won’t,” she said grimly, and drew the stake from her pocket to show him.

One corner of his mouth tugged upward. She shrugged her coat off, over the stake, and threw it on the floor before walking purposefully toward him. He lay perfectly still, watching her every move. Despite his tattered, modern clothes, he looked like some decadent, talented Renaissance youth. Which he probably had been.

Mihaela sank onto the bed beside him, and, willing her hand not to shake, she placed the point of the stake over his heart. Still, he didn’t move. It was possible that he couldn’t.

“I’ve killed many vampires,” she warned him, and wished her voice didn’t sound so husky.

A spark of humor, so faint as to be almost indistinguishable, lightened his pain-wracked eyes. “Then you have another advantage. I’ve never killed a hunter.”

Watching him for any sign of sudden attack, she leaned slowly over him, angling her head to offer him her throat. As his face disappeared from her vision, her tingling skin seemed to grow tighter. Since he had no breath, there was no warning before he touched her throat. She couldn’t suppress her gasp or her jerk of surprise. But still he didn’t move, just waited for her to settle and return to the same position. Again, his cool lips touched her neck. Shards of fear sprayed outward to every nerve-ending she possessed. At least she called it fear, because even that was easier to bear.

Tensing even further, she curled her fingers into a fist, around the air, around the stake, and waited for the pain of his bite.

Concentrate on the stake. It’s all that could save your life.
Her neck prickled with sensation. It was his tongue, licking over her vein.

Oh Jesus Christ, help me…

“It will numb the pain,” he said unexpectedly, and the movement of his lips against her skin made her shudder. She managed to nod, and then his lips closed more strongly, like a lover’s kiss. It was hard to keep still, to ignore the damp heat forming between her thighs. His teeth grazed her vein, and bit.

Her mouth opened without permission, but at least her cry was silent. There wasn’t even pain to speak of, just the shock of his teeth sinking into her, and then the faint, strangely sensual pull of his mouth against her skin, scattering novel sensations through her entire body. Her vein seemed to contract; she could feel the blood being drawn out of her and into him. It was weird, cold, intriguing…and achingly pleasurable. His lips moved on her skin, his tongue lapped, his suck deepened and strengthened; and everything inside her, her very womb, seemed to pulse under the insistent tug of his mouth.

A tiny sound gurgled deep in her throat. She clung on to the stake, as if to sanity, while her free hand clutched at the quilt and then at his shirt for support. And then, it seemed, it was over.

The draw of blood stopped; his teeth detached from her throat, and he raised his head to examine her. His face seemed cloudy; his gray eyes had darkened and yet somehow blazed almost silver with a lust that drove straight between her legs.

“Hunter blood is sweet,” he whispered. “You taste…good.”

Without warning, he pushed her down onto the pillow and loomed over her. Panting, she tried to reposition the stake, but he was too close, and he gave her no time.

“More,” he said huskily and returned to her throbbing throat.

Since he half lay across her, heart to heart, there was little she could do. Her stake lay on its side between them, useless until she could draw it free and plunge it into his back. Except, God help her, she didn’t want to.

The slow, delicious pull of his mouth on her throat began again, but stronger this time and more rhythmic. It couldn’t have been more different from the act of violence she’d witnessed earlier when he’d killed a vampire almost instantly with his bite. The strong, slow, beats of his undead heart vibrated through her chest, as if speaking to her own, galloping pulse. Cords of pleasure seemed to have formed between his mouth and her sensitized breasts, squashed beneath the hardness of his chest, and all other pleasure points of her body. Between her legs was throbbing, aching lust. She began to move under his mouth, rubbing her breasts against him, circling her hips in search of the comfort she needed deep inside her.

My God, I’m going to orgasm from his bite. This isn’t possible. Oh God, he’s killing me, and I love it.

She couldn’t just give in to this urge to do nothing, to reach for more. It wasn’t in her nature to surrender, but she had never imagined it would be this hard to resist being slaughtered. Forcing herself, she dragged her hand and stake free from between their bodies. She found his back, and through his T-shirt, counted his vertebrae with her fingertips until she found the position of his heart.

His back, his whole body moved, undulating with the passage of her fingers, as if he welcomed her attentions as caresses. Delicately, she placed the pointed end of the stake.

His lips moved on the crazily sensitive skin of her neck, making her gasp. The bastard was smiling. She should hate him for it, and yet she couldn’t help the surge of disappointment when his teeth withdrew. Unhurriedly, he licked the wound. She shuddered. If she hadn’t been so terrified he would see, she would have closed her eyes to deal with the sensation.

He raised his head.

“No more,” she warned. It came out as little more than a shaky whisper. Although the intense, terrible lust in his eyes sparked some wild response in the darker reaches of her own desires, if he tried to bite her again now, she would stake him.

He didn’t move, just gazed silently into her face. There was no pain in her neck, yet it seemed to throb in perfect time with the pounding blood between her legs. In panic, she wondered if he could feel it, if he could somehow know about the shameful dreams as well. His head lowered again, his lips parting as if he would kiss her mouth. Her whole body surged with excitement and fear and something very like yearning. Her lips seemed to tingle, just from his nearness.

She couldn’t allow it.

“Get off me,” she managed.

His brows twitched together. “There’s no need to pretend you’ll kill me now,” he said, although he rolled back to his original sitting position with perfect grace. Mihaela’s body protested its loss, even as her head acknowledged relief that he obeyed her.

“I still might,” she warned as she scrambled into a more dignified position. “If you don’t keep your end of the bargain.” Her head swam, and she gripped the quilt tight as if that could dispel the dizziness.

“Sit still,” the vampire advised.

“How much did you take from me?” she demanded.

“A little more than a donation. You’ll be fine.”

“I’d better be.” Struggling to concentrate, to avoid all the insidious, seductive sensuality of what had just happened, she said, “Tell me about the vampire leader who tried to take Robbie.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Does he have a name?”

Maximilian appeared to think. “Gavril,” he said at last. “He’s Romanian, like you.”

“How old is he?”

Maximilian shrugged. “More than a decade, less than a century.”

“Does he have a piece of his ear missing?”

“I have no idea. Why does it matter?”

“Robbie said his ear was broken. When they first met.”

“It should have healed by now. Unless a piece of his ear was actually removed and kept separate from the rest of his body. Drink the water.”

Mihaela blinked at the glass on the bedside table that she’d originally brought for him, and picked it up. A long drink helped. Lowering the glass, she looked at him. “Will you survive now?”

He straightened his broken arm, supporting it with his other hand. “The healing has begun.”

Of course it had. The lunge that had brought her under him for the second bite was pretty positive testimony.

“Thank you,” he said unexpectedly.

Suddenly unable to bear the intimacy of sitting on the bed beside him, she slid off it and stood still, giving the dizziness time to catch up if it was going to. It didn’t.

“I have to go,” she muttered. She walked carefully to where she’d dropped her jacket on the floor and bent to pick it up. “Do you know where Gavril is now?”

“Later I will.”

When her blood had time to make him stronger. Already, the scores and gouges in his face were fading. Some of the blood spattered about his skin had disappeared, as if his body were once again absorbing it. The hugeness of what she’d done—revived one of the most powerful vampires in the world when her clear hunter duty, at least according to Konrad, had been to dispatch him if not simply to let him die—overwhelmed her, and she had to press one hand to her forehead as if the pressure could preserve her sanity.

“Will you tell me?”

When he didn’t answer at once, she glanced across at him and found his intent gaze on her. He nodded once.

“How?” she asked, almost angrily.

He shrugged again. “I can find you.”

That wasn’t a comforting thought. No wonder her quietening heart began to race again. But once more, his eyes closed, and he rested his head back against the pillows. His skin was so pale that the shock of his wild, dark hair between the pillow and his face looked almost violent.

For some reason, her throat closed up. If he had been a human, she would have cleaned his wounds for him, found him painkillers to ease his agony. But he wasn’t human, and for a vampire, she had already given too much.

Unexpectedly, his eyes opened, and once again she felt like a mesmerized rabbit in the glare of his headlamps. “What is your name, hunter?”

“Mihaela. Go to sleep. Vampire.” Stupid words, but they got her outside the room. Somehow, she walked out of the hotel on trembling legs and set off in the direction of Prince’s Street. She wondered if he was asleep, or if he watched her from the window, but she refused to turn and look.

She was glad she’d followed Elizabeth’s advice and left the car in St. Andrews, because in this state, she didn’t think she could drive.

Chapter Three

When she’d gone, Maximilian closed his eyes and inhaled the echo of her scent: her perfume light and fresh like a distant memory of flowers in the sunshine; and beneath that the much heavier, darker scent of her seductive hunter blood, racing through her veins and into his mouth.

For once, Maximilian welcomed the lust, not just because it drowned the pain of his healing wounds, but because it affirmed his existence. And it seemed, in spite of everything, that he wanted to go on existing.

The hunter’s strong, heady blood filled his senses, a timely reminder of the pleasures of the world as well as the pain and the responsibilities he’d been hiding from for so long. She’d been paying a debt, of course. A life for a life. She didn’t have to like him, and she clearly didn’t.

She’d liked his bite, though. Involuntarily, his lips curved into a smile as he remembered her helpless, sexual response. If he’d had enough strength, he’d have done something about that too, for he had the feeling the hunter’s passion would be as sweet and powerful as her blood. The thought excited him in a lazy, comfortable way, as he drifted toward the semiconsciousness that passed as sleep in older vampires.

Vampire dreams were more like memories or imaginative plans of the future rather than the confused tumble of disconnected and bizarre happenings that made up human dreams. Mostly, Maximilian preferred the darkness, the blessed nothingness of a switched-off brain. Only when he’d starved himself for so long that his existence was in danger, when he was so weak he couldn’t control it, did he have the memory dreams, and those were usually of the moment he finally threw away his honor for ambition and plunged the wooden stake, disguised as a steel sword, into his creator’s heart.

Of course, Saloman was too old and powerful to simply lie down and die. The Ancients didn’t, in any case, turn to dust like modern hybrids. The stake merely immobilized them in sleep, provided it drove straight into the heart. And it had taken six of them to do that to Saloman, three vampires and three humans, in an endless vicious rota of biting, draining, and hammering in the stake.

It was Saloman’s shock that had made it possible, of course. He’d known his human lover, Tsigana, was always scheming, but he’d never expected her treachery to go so far. And as for Maximilian’s betrayal… That had been doubly unforgiveable. Maximilian had taken the existence that had made his own possible, had ended the last of the pure-blooded vampire race. Vampire patricide. Vampire genocide. That was what he dreamed of, when he couldn’t prevent it—Saloman’s hurt, Saloman’s shock. Worse, even, than the moment a century later when Zoltán had stood victorious over his own broken, defeated body, and all Maximilian could do was flee.

All in the past. Elizabeth Silk, Tsigana’s descendent, had accidentally awakened Saloman more than a year ago now. Zoltán was dead, and Saloman was back as though he’d never been away for three hundred years.

The hunter’s blood was doing its job. Maximilian’s strength was building, but he let his mind roam anyway, because he found, almost to his surprise, that he didn’t want to seek the blackness. He wanted to remember the bright colors of life, the human vitality and passion that the hunter had stirred up in his memory. And weirdly, the brightest part of his own human life had also contained Saloman…

Saloman strode across his vision, at once dark and brilliant, splendid, erudite, talented, wealthy…and such bloody good fun that Maximilian had never been able to resist his company.

Shimmering into detail behind his eyelids came Pisa in 1496, newly liberated from the Florentines, full of high spirits and confidence, like Maximilian himself. Maximilian hadn’t much cared about politics. He’d come from Vienna five years before, supposedly to study theology, and instead had apprenticed himself to a master sculptor. His family had disowned him, but he hadn’t minded that either. Although he had nothing but a room and board at his master’s house, he spent his days doing a job that obsessed him with one of the finest teachers of the day; he had like-minded friends and the opportunity to mix with the rich and the powerful who visited the workshop.

That was how he’d met Saloman in the first place. And after a gap of almost a year, his heart had soared with excitement when, late one spring afternoon, just as the light was fading, the tall, graceful figure, dressed in burgundy velvet and gold, had strolled into Giacomo’s workshop. Saloman was a known friend of the Medici of Florence, whose yoke Pisa had just broken, and yet somehow that was forgotten by everyone in the elation of his return.

Saloman had to see all the new work, finished and in progress, which he examined with critical and appreciative detail; and Maximilian’s proudest moment was when Saloman had stood behind him, his cool hand on his shoulder, and admired his sculpture of the fallen angel, which Saloman himself had commissioned the previous year. It was to decorate the fountain in his country palace.

“You have a rare pupil, Giacomo,” Saloman said to the master craftsman at last. “He will rival you, you know.”

“He will be better than me,” Giacomo replied matter-of-factly. While the other apprentices and workers gathered round to watch and listen, he reached out and touched the smooth, anguished lines of the angel’s face. “At times, he already is. He has a gift for expression. Have you ever seen such mischief, such wickedness, combined with such regret?”

A thoughtful smile played about Saloman’s lips, and yet his profound, dark eyes were serious as they gazed from the sculpture to Maximilian. “On a work of art, no.”

“Of course, there are some errors, some roughness,” Giacomo said with considerably less pleasure. “Those I will fix for you before it is delivered. Will two days’ time be acceptable?”

Saloman’s considering gaze returned to the fallen angel. “No,” he said at last. “I’ll take it as it is. It reminds me of your Maximilian—unfinished, yet with so much potential. So —you will allow me to take him away with me to reward him with supper?”

There was no more work to be done in the fading light, only clearing up and preparation. And Giacomo, clearly in the glow of an easier than expected sale, waved one indulgent hand.

Moments later, Maximilian and Saloman spilled out onto the bustling street, two young men in search of fun and mischief. Or so any observer might have thought. Certainly it was what Maximilian thought. Saloman appeared to be only a few years older than himself, which was one of the many fascinating things about him—so young and yet so wealthy, so powerful in his friends and his knowledge, and yet, mysteriously, no one had heard of his family. He was exotically foreign, and just enough older—so Maximilian had thought in his innocence—to be glamorous and exciting company for a young man with no connections.

Saloman veered around a cart pulled by a donkey and piled high with oranges. He jumped up and grabbed a fruit from the top.

“Hey!” yelled the man at the donkey’s head. Saloman tossed him a coin with one hand while throwing the orange across the cart to Maximilian with the other. Grinning, Maximilian caught it and bit into the skin before peeling it. It was sweet and juicy, and quenched both his thirst and the worst of his hunger.

Saloman threw one arm around his shoulder and steered him into a tavern, calling for wine and supper.

“So you really like your angel?” Maximilian said eagerly.

“I do. It’s more, far more than I’d hoped for. That’s what I like about you, Max; you can always surprise me. I only asked for an angel, and you gave me more. Why did you carve his face like that?”

Maximilian shrugged. “Perhaps my knife slipped.”

“I don’t think so.”

Maximilian picked up the rough cup and drank. The wine was far better than the cheap, watered-down stuff he was used to, and he took a moment to savor it. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “It just came to me that’s how I’d feel if I’d done something really bad and was glad of it, and yet sorry I had disappointed my Maker.” A little like he’d have felt murdering the journeyman Pietro who’d defaced his work more than once through jealous rage while pretending it was anger at Maximilian’s poor workmanship. He’d thought about that quite seriously, with ferocious pleasure, before Giacomo had sent Pietro on his way.

Saloman twisted the cup in his long, perfect fingers, regarding him. “You’d make a good priest, you know, in later life,” he said unexpectedly.

Maximilian grinned and toasted him. “When all my sinning is done?”

Saloman’s lips quirked in response, and he returned the toast. “Perhaps. You have a deeper understanding of human nature than you want to admit, a capacity for compassion combined with an immovable will. Together with your talent, those things could make you the greatest artist in Europe.”

“I thought I was to be the greatest churchman?” Maximilian mocked.

“No reason why you can’t be both.”

“Would I suit a red cardinal’s hat, do you think?”

“In between bouts of sackcloth and ashes.”

A large tureen of fish soup was set on the table, together with a bowl of sweet-smelling asparagus and a plate piled high with newly baked bread.

“Aren’t you eating?” Maximilian asked, tucking in with a vengeance.

Saloman smiled and shook his head. “Eat up. I know a countess—two countesses—who are desperate to meet you.”

“I’m not dressed to mingle with countesses.”

“It’s a private party,” Saloman said blandly. “And it won’t be your clothing that interests your hostess or her guests…”

Maximilian’s vision blurred and whizzed, his memory and his pleasantly aroused body eager to move forward to a later scene from that same night, when he lay sprawled among the cushions on a large couch with the beautiful, semi-naked, young countess Caterina in his lap. They were in a private room of her opulent palazzo with the doors firmly closed, and as well as the pleasures of the flesh, Maximilian had the countess’s fantastic murals and delightful glass ornaments to appreciate.

On the periphery of his vision, half in shadow, Saloman and their hostess were making love on another couch. Saloman’s body moved with slow sensuality, his mouth buried in the woman’s creamy neck. She whimpered and mewled with pleasure, and the sounds aroused Maximilian almost as much as the girl in his own arms.

“Is he a friend of yours, that man?” Caterina whispered in his ear. Her breath stirred the tiny hairs on his lobe, and he smiled as he reached for her mouth.

“Yes.”

“He frightens me,” Caterina whispered. “Be careful around him.”

“He introduced me to you,” Maximilian pointed out, toying with her exposed breast. Deliberately, she reached over him, pushing her breasts closer into his eager hand, his face, and returned with a silver goblet of wine.

“So he did,” she said and dipped her finger in the blood red liquid before rubbing it sensually into her nipple. “But I’m married and wicked.”

Maximilian smiled and followed her finger with his tongue.

And the memory went on through the night of sex and laughter until it was almost dawn and he swaggered home through the streets with Saloman by his side. Life had seemed almost perfect.

****

Sensual warmth on his face drew Maximilian from the healing sleep. The pale, wintry sun was up, filtering through the thick curtains onto his bed. Not enough to burn, just enough to rouse him with a rare sense of wellbeing. And an even rarer sense of purpose. The unnatural earth tremor. The unusual congregation of vampires. The psychic child who leaked enormous power like a damaged battery. The hunter who’d freely given him her blood.

Bizarre incidents, and not necessarily connected. But enough to whet more than his curiosity.

Maximilian stretched his limbs in an experimental sort of a way, wiggling his toes and fingers. Everything seemed to work. His ribs no longer hurt where the vampires had crushed them with their feet, so he had to assume they were also healed. His body had fully absorbed and used the hunter’s blood. Although he was hungry again, he had grown used to feeding little over the preceding decades, and he could wait for a suitable meal.

He needed to find the boy. But first, he rose from the bed and sent out a few feelers, checking for the threat of the vampires who’d attacked him yesterday.

Yesterday had been a low point. He’d set out to get drunk because he’d finally realized he couldn’t keep running away, and yet the thought of his planned return to the world appalled him. Although he hadn’t deliberately left himself an open target, he hadn’t much cared when the vampires had taken the chance.

Until the tremor which shouldn’t have happened. And the hunter who paid her debt. Intriguing creature. Strong blood. Prickly. And the memory of her hot little body crushed under his, writhing with arousal as he drank her blood, was enough to make him uncomfortably hard all over again. It was a long time—a very long time—since he’d experienced such powerful lust. It might even be good, when he had time, to track her down and act on it again. After all, he had promised to find her Gavril, and he saw no reason not to keep that promise. He was, he realized with some surprise,
interested
.

Gavril and the other vampires were not hard to locate. He found their presences together, some distance across the city, far enough away not to concern him until he chose to act. But another consciousness touched him, from far closer.

Maximilian walked to the window and pressed his face into the curtain. In the street below, among the few scurrying pedestrians, a much smaller figure stood perfectly still, gazing up at his window. An innocent, open mind, revealing all to whoever cared to look.

Slowly, Maximilian drew back. It seemed the mountain had come to Mohammed.
Come up
, he invited telepathically, and felt the boy’s rush of excited pleasure.

While he waited, he picked up the hotel’s cheap notepad and pen, sprawled back on the bed, and began to draw.

The boy didn’t take long. He didn’t even knock, just pushed at the door, displaying no surprise when Maximilian manipulated the lock for him with his mind. It was an old trick of Saloman’s that Maximilian was glad to discover still worked for him.