Demon of Mine (36 page)

“
And I suppose that’s where you came in?”

Griffith began
to nod, wincing as he apparently thought better of the motion.
“Yes, but I am not wealthy enough to suit her tastes.” A brief
flash of animosity caused his eyes to glitter. “She wanted the
money that comes from your family’s factories, so she developed
this scheme to ransom you for the capital we would need to
construct our own.” He broke into a shuddering cough that might
have been a laugh. “We were to build an industrial empire to rival
yours.”

“
She is a stupid woman, and you’re a fool to have humored her
scheme.”

Griffith said nothing. Damon shot a worried glance at Elsie,
but didn’t dare to let his gaze linger. He forced himself to look
away. Griffith was dying and he knew it. Soon his time for asking
questions would be over. “You’re the perfect pair,” Damon said,
looking Griffith in the eye. “You’re both stupid, wicked people,
and you’re both going to die for it.” He stated the accusation
dispassionately, untouched by pity. The sight of a dying man could
not make him forget the terrible things Griffith had promised to do
to Elsie. His fall through the window was a fitting end. Justice
–
nothing more and
nothing less.

Griffith
breathed a little harder, sending a trail of blood leaking from one
nostril. He was still afraid. Damon pressed his advantage, letting
his knife flash in the moonlight. “What have the two of you done to
my wife?” He pressed the tip of the blade between Griffith’s eyes.
“Don’t lie to me. I’ll know if you try.”

“
Nothing, nothing. Only the vervian.”

“
Only the vervian? Look at her hands. Look at her feet. You’ve
chained her like a bloody warship.”

“
Nothing else,” Griffith wheezed. “We let her rest in an empty
room while we awaited the ransom. That is all. I swear to God that
is all. I swear it.” He went cross-eyed as he tried to stare at the
blade that had just barely breached the feeble protection of his
skin.

“
How much vervian did you give her?” Damon did his best not to
betray the way his heart clutched and wrenched as he waited for the
answer. Vervian, a tiny purple flower, was a vampire’s bane. It
weakened the body, plunging it into a sleep as deep as death if
enough was given. It was clear from the way Elsie lay, unconscious
on the alley floor, that they’d given her quite a lot. An undrugged
vampire could fall from the top of the Tower of London at night and
arise unharmed.

“
Two spoonfuls steeped in hot water every four hours, more or
less.”

“
That much?” Damon eyed Elsie again, letting his gaze linger
for a few moments this time. “Cowards. It wasn’t as if she could
have escaped those chains, even without any vervian at all.” The
urge to bash Griffith’s head against the hard-packed dirt alley
floor caused Damon’s hands to cramp as he continued to grip
Griffith by the collar. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected
anything more from someone who murdered his own brother for the
sake of replacing him as the family heir.” On the way to the
townhouse, Jenny had relayed the entire conversation she’d
overheard between Véronique and her then unknown accomplice. It all
made sense, now that Damon was staring hard into Griffith’s pale
eyes, blue windows to his miserable soul. “And tried to frame an
innocent man to take his punishment for him.”

Griffith
didn’t deny it. “I wish I’d succeeded. If I’d won the court case,
I’d have had plenty of your money without having to resort to this
scheme.” His tone of resignation made it clear he knew he was going
to die, that there was no point in keeping his secrets any
longer.

“
You are disgusting,” Damon spat, hands trembling with the
desire to spill the man’s brains.

“
That’s easy for a man who’s been handed the best of everything
throughout his entire life to say,” Griffith retorted, a flash of
anger joining the fear in his eyes for the first time.

Damon slammed
Griffith down against the earth, knocking the breath from him. “You
resent me for what has been forced upon me while you take whatever
you want by murdering and stealing? You are—”

Griffith
erupted into a bout of violent coughing. His lips turned crimson as
he sputtered, spraying blood everywhere. Time was running
out.

“
It
doesn’t matter,” Damon said. “You will never achieve immortality.
That is what Véronique promised you in exchange for marriage, isn’t
it?”

Griffith gave
a ghost of a nod.

“
You’re dying. You’d better start praying that God will have
more mercy on your soul than you’ve shown your victims.” Damon
finally abandoned Griffith, turning instead to his sleeping wife.
The man sputtered and wheezed, prompting Damon to gently lift Elsie
and carry her a few yards away, where he could hold her in some
semblance of privacy. Her body was limp, her limbs weighed down by
the chains. He draped her across his lap and removed his coat,
wrapping it around her near nakedness. He said her name and stroked
the fine curve of her cheek, receiving no response. How long would
it take for the effects of the vervian to wear off? Her body had
probably broken during the fall. Repressed by the herb, it couldn’t
heal. He had to remove the chains. Fastened with steel locks and
too thick for even him to break by hand, he would need the key. He
cradled her in his arms, rising.

He walked
around the side of the townhouse and approached the gaping doorway
cautiously, ready to defend Elsie. When he’d leapt out the window
there had been sounds of combat coming from the house, but he’d
lost track of them as he’d questioned Griffith, and now they were
gone, leaving the place eerily silent. “Lucinda?” Worry pricked his
conscience. God send that Lucinda and Jenny were all right. He’d
had no choice but to leave them to face Véronique alone.

“
Here,” his sister’s voice rang out from the back of the
house.

Damon turned
to his left, striding through a short hall and into a small
kitchen. Two bodies lay on the floor. Lucinda stood over
them.

“
What happened to Jenny?” He didn’t ask what had happened to
Véronique. The vampiress lay still and silent, and he could see the
gaping hole in her ribs. Not dead – perhaps rendered unconscious by
the shock of having her heart cut out, just as she’d removed her
victims’.

“
Véronique cut her,” Lucinda said, her voice tight and a little
higher than usual. “She picked up the knife you dropped and pulled
it across Jenny’s throat.”

Jenny moved
suddenly, a blur of dust-smeared skirts and disheveled red curls.
“It’s only a surface wound,” she said, pushing herself halfway to a
sitting position. A long line that sliced across her white throat
had spilled a liberal amount of blood down her front. Damon
marveled at her as she spoke, looking like the living
dead.

“
Only a surface wound? It looks serious.”

Jenny opened
her mouth to reply, but slumped onto the floorboards before she
could manage, her eyes drifting shut.

Lucinda
stooped down to help, repositioning Jenny so she could lie more
comfortably. “It’s true her throat wasn’t cut, but she’s lost a
great deal of blood.” She looked uncharacteristically nervous,
though she certainly wasn’t squeamish – no vampire could
be.

“
Is
the smell affecting you?” Damon asked knowingly, recognizing the
gleam in his sister’s eyes.

She cast her
gaze down to the dirty floorboards, carefully avoiding looking at
the limp figure at her feet.

“
Go,” Damon said. “Hurry to the house and have a carriage
brought here. Have Tom drive – he won’t breathe a word to anyone.
I’ll stay here with these two.”

Lucinda
nodded. “All right.” She laid Jenny back down, took a step forward
and paused. Stooping, she picked up Véronique, hefting her limp
body in her arms with none of the care she’d shown Jenny, as if the
other vampiress were no more than a sack of flour. “I’ll finish
what I’ve started with her along the way.”

Something
glimmered as Lucinda shifted, exposing Véronique to the faint
moonlight that was just barely filtering in through a grimy window.
“Wait. What’s that around her neck?”

“
This?” Lucinda wrapped her hand around a dangling cord and
pulled, snapping it easily. “It looks like a key.”

“
Give it here.” Damon took it eagerly and slid it into the
padlock attached to the chain that bound Elsie’s arms. He breathed
a deep sigh when it clicked and turned. As he tossed the lock
aside, the heavy chain fell away, freeing Elsie’s slender wrists.
The steel links had worn deep grooves into her flesh. He ran his
fingers over them, tracing the peaks and valleys of her abused
skin.

“
I
shall return soon.” Lucinda stepped out into the violet night,
disappearing around a street corner with preternatural
speed.

Damon sank
down against the wall, draping Elsie across his lap and freeing her
feet. Her ankles were just as damaged as her wrists. He smoothed
her hair back from her forehead and brushed a kiss across her
temple. He would have her home and in their bed before midnight, as
promised.

****

Damon sat in
the armchair by the bed, shoulders drooping wearily as he read, or
at least pretended to, by the violet light that spilled through the
window. Flipping a page, he was vaguely aware that he hadn’t
absorbed a word of it. Come to think of it, he had to struggle just
to remember the title. It slipped out of his mind’s grasp, a few
words he didn’t have room for in his thoughts. Try as he might to
provide a little entertainment for his frayed nerves, he couldn’t
distract himself from the figure lying still in the center of the
large bed, head tipped back on a mountain of pillows with soft
brown waves spilled around her face.

One of her
wrists lay on the blanket at her side, slender and white. The
grooves the chains had left in her flesh were gone, leaving her
skin smooth and perfect again. It had been nearly twenty-four hours
since she’d fallen through the window, and not a minute passed that
Damon didn’t glance at her face, searching for any sign of
wakefulness. Most times he let his gaze linger, drinking in the
graceful lines of her features. Little more than a day ago, he
would have given anything just to see her, and he hadn’t forgotten
it.

Admiring her
naturally caused him to burn with the desire to touch her. He’d
given in more than once, seizing any opportunity to smooth her hair
back from her face or brush a collarbone or wrist while adjusting
the dress he’d replaced her shift with. The garment had been torn
in a dozen different places when she’d fallen through the window,
then splattered with Griffith’s blood and smeared with dirt from
the alley. He’d burn it or toss it in the river later, when he had
a chance. For now, leaving her side was out of the question. He
looked to her face again. Her eyelids might flutter open at any
moment. The vervian her captors had forced into her had affected
her body, leaving it weakened, and her fall had hurt her in ways it
shouldn’t have. She’d been healing slowly, but it could have been
much worse – had she been human, the impact likely would have
killed her, as it had Griffith.

Surely the
effects of the vervian were wearing away – her healed wrists were
evidence of that. Too exhausted from worry and lack of sleep to
keep up the pretense of reading, Damon closed the novel he held in
his lap and let his mind wander. His thoughts inevitably turned to
the reunion that would occur whenever Elsie would finally emerge
from her slumber, and before he knew it they’d blurred to dreams
that made his cock harden as he slept, his head lolling against his
shoulder.

****

Elsie drifted
out of sleep and into consciousness, relishing the last little bits
of her dream before it slipped away from her entirely, the details
forgotten all too quickly. She’d been dreaming of Damon again –
that was all she could remember. His pleasant scent still filled
her nostrils, the heady combination of musk and spice she’d come to
know so well. She wanted to inhale deeply and greedily fill her
lungs, but if she did that the smell would be gone, revealed for
the phantom leftover of a dream it was. She forced herself to
breathe normally, savoring her husband’s scent.

It never faded
away. After what seemed a lifetime of shallow breathing, Elsie
noticed that the scent hadn’t faded. She wasn’t in pain anymore,
either. The heavy, pinching weights around her wrists and ankles
were gone. She tentatively flexed a hand and found it free and
perfectly mobile. Her fingertips brushed something soft as she
wriggled them – certainly not floorboards. She opened her eyes,
finding herself back where the ordeal of her kidnapping had begun –
the large four-poster in her and Damon’s London bedroom. This time
there was no one in the bed with her, though there was someone
slumped in a nearby chair.

Swinging her
legs over the side and sliding out from under the sheets, Elsie
abandoned rest. Her body felt spry and supple despite the fact that
memories were beginning to come back to her, including a vivid
recollection of plunging through a shattered window and to the
ground below. She’d been counting on the resilience that came
naturally to vampires to protect her from the impact. It seemed to
have worked, though why she remembered nothing after hitting the
ground was a mystery. She didn’t take the time to contemplate the
matter. The man asleep in the chair in front of her captivated her
thoughts completely, leaving no room for anything else.
“Damon.”