Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (14 page)

Around the perimeter of the dance floor, the nearest patrons stood up leisurely and moved back to tables closer to the walls. But the rest of the clientele watched with incurious eyes as the brawl continued, the bartenders behind the shiny copper bar doing little more than glancing up before returning to their work.

“What the hell is that about?” I demanded, wheeling around to face Cosimo.

“Ah, the exhib. Exhibition dancing—a combination of capoeira, danse apache, dirty swing, and various street styles,” he said easily. “It’s very popular. Earlier incarnations have been around for centuries. This is what we’re like when you’re not around, Cora. When we don’t put on our pretty clothes and wipe our faces clean of all the things that might upset you.”

“Dorian isn’t like that,” I said.

“That’s because Dorian was dying,” Cosimo snapped. “Inch by inch, year by year, he was dying,
cara
. We agnates don’t get old and we don’t get sick. We just shut down. Dorian didn’t come here only because he couldn’t feel enough for it to make a difference anymore.”

“He doesn’t seem to be dying to me,” I said, his words making a heavy, angry knot in the pit of my stomach.

“Because he has you.” He lifted a hand to brush against my cheek, and I shied away. “He’s a vampire—a parasite. He feeds on your life. Without a cognate, don’t think he’d be too damn noble to find life on his own, like these people are.”

“Like the rushers you left me next to during the introduction,” I said.

“That was very naughty of me,” Cosimo admitted. “But I knew that if Dorian got his way, he’d hide all the unpretty parts of our society away from you until it was too late.”

“It’s already too late,” I said.

“It’s close,
cara.
Too close. Once he has his hooks in you good and solid—and don’t pay any attention to what he says, because he will get his hooks in, just as we all do—you won’t even consider dissolving the bond and returning to your old life. But right now, perhaps, it still has some attraction for you.”

Like Geoff and the University of Chicago....

The brawl was subsiding, some fighters slinking away, others being dragged by friends or enemies away from the dance floor.

“So you’re bringing me here...to scare me straight? Like some kind of anti-drug program, but with vampires?”

He laughed then, a bright sound in the dark room. “Brilliant! I wish I’d found you before Dorian did. You’re wasted on him.”

“You wouldn’t give me that choice, though, would you?”

He cocked his head. “Why would you assume that?”

“You’re a Kyrioi. You have to be.”

Now there were only three figures left on the dance floor, a djinn and a vampire pummeling an unconscious form on the floor. I tried not to look at them.

If anything, Cosimo looked more amused. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Kyrioi don’t respect humans,” I said stiffly.

The last two fighters finally tired of their attack and stepped away, leaving a broken body sprawled at the edge of the dance floor.

“But you’re not human,” Cosimo pointed out. “At least not any more. And what would be the fun of that? You’re much more adorable as a spitfire.”

“So Etienne and Isabella—”

He cut me off, shuddering. “Disgusting. A blow-up doll with blood.”

Good and evil. Black and white. It was already muddled in Dorian’s world, and now it seemed that all the colors were running together.

I couldn’t think straight. The Kyrioi were Dorian’s enemy. They despised humans. But Cosimo, for all his contempt, seemed more humane than some of Dorian’s allies.

“May I buy you a drink?” he said then.

“Do they have anything here that won’t kill me?” I asked, eyeing the bar suspiciously.

He snorted. “There’s not much that would, here. We aethers are remarkably derivative in our tastes.”

“Aethers?” I echoed. It was the second time he’d used that word.

“Nonhumans,” he said. “Or, more correctly, super-humans. Agnates. Djinn. Shifters. Elves. Faes, in all their variety.”

“Okay,” I said, filing away that list for later consideration.

“Anyhow, Mortensen stocks just about anything you could desire—not just booze,” he continued, stepping up to the bar between two other customers. “The Plant is an unconventional institution for an unconventional clientele. Care for a latte? Juice?”

I decided to take a gamble. After all, if he wanted to kill me, he didn’t need to use poison to do it. “You can buy me a chai.”

He signaled to the nearest bartender, and the man stepped over. No, not a human man, I realized as I joined him, and not an agnate or a djinn either. His face had an almond-eyed beauty to that was almost feminine, and a peculiar, almost blue cast to his skin. I blinked, and he looked ordinary again.

“A peppermint white chocolate mocha, double whipped cream for me,” he said. “And for my friend, a chai—and a banana pecan muffin, because she’s looking peaky.”

Wordlessly, the bartender busied himself at a coffee station a short distance away.

“Take a good look around,” Cosimo said. “You’re still human enough that you might not be able to see everyone as they properly are, but you should be able to see more than an ordinary human can. Take a good, hard look.”

I did, noticing for the first time the tables hidden away under the catwalks, booths with high walls between them. The figures there sat in groups of two to four, never next to one another, heads bent close as they whispered. And I noticed too how everyone else in the room carefully avoided looking their way.

The power brokers. Not human, because no humans were allowed here. Because the real power wasn’t in human hands at all....

I turned my attention to the man perched on a stool next to Cosimo. At first, I was afraid he’d find my attention rude, but he didn’t seem to notice it any more than he had the fight on the dance floor. I stared until my eyes watered, and for a long time, he looked just like a man, ordinary silver-shot brown hair and a middle-aged face with a nose like a lumpy potato. There was nothing that was the least bit unusual about him.

I was about to give up when he turned slightly and my vision...shifted. I had the sensation that he hadn’t turned a different portion of his body toward me so much as rearranged the part that I could see. I pushed away from the bar, and keeping my eyes fixed on him, I stepped carefully in a wide half-circle around him.

Again I had that sensation, like the part of him I was seeing was being created for my view as I looked at it. And I had the sense that the other parts of him, the parts that I couldn’t see, were simply...not there.

And still the man didn’t give the least impression of noticing me.

“You can see it, then, can’t you?” Cosimo asked.

I pulled my gaze away from him with difficulty and looked past him to where Cosimo still stood at the bar. “You’re on the other side. What do you see?”

“The same as you. It affects everyone the same.” He shrugged. “As far as I know, they’ve never spoken to anyone. They don’t eat. They don’t sleep. They mostly live among the homeless in the streets, but sometimes they come in here and sit.”

“But why?” My gaze was dragged back to the man. He sat with his chin in his hand, blinking slowly at nothing.

“No one knows. No one is even sure they’re alive. Some people think they’re a projection or a program of some sort. But I will tell you one thing—don’t touch them. They don’t like it. Those who have survived say that when you touch them, you can sometimes feel...nothing. The parts that you can’t see just aren’t there.”

Carefully, I circled back around again to stand by Cosimo. Compared to that thing, even he felt safe.

The bartender set two tall white porcelain mugs in front of us, plus a small plate with a fat muffin next to mine. A tower of whipped cream stood above the rim of Cosimo’s absurd confection.

Cosimo took a deep drink of his coffee and made a noise of appreciation, licking the cream from his lips.

“What will those humans think of next?” he said, holding up the cup.

But I wasn’t thirsty anymore—because when I looked around the room, my shifted vision remained.

Two women appeared to be sitting at one table with an appetizer sampler between them. To ordinary vision, they appeared to be eating—or at least, they appeared to have eaten, because the food was disappearing, and there was the impression in my mind that this had happened because they ate it. But when I looked closely, I could see some kind of shadowy shape that joined them, like a thick black rope, and the food that was disappearing was being torn with rhythmical motions into tiny pieces that then were simply absorbed.

A movement under one of the catwalks pulled away my horrified gaze. A man was standing there—or had been standing there, because suddenly his face shifted, dissolved into iridescence, and a flurry of butterflies exploded from it, leaving a hole behind as they circled quickly around his disintegrating head and then settled back again, rearranging his features into another shape.

The fat tabby cat slunk up beside him and lunged at a stray butterfly, catching it out of the air. The insect seemed to writhe, the body swelling in the cat’s mouth as the wings shrunk down into itself, and the man stooped with a fluid motion and caught the cat by the nape of the neck, giving it a sharp shake until the surprised feline dropped the erstwhile butterfly with a yowl.

The insect flopped on the ground for a moment like a black grub, but the man bent to scoop it up—and it seemed to slip into his fingers and was gone.

“You think you know the world?” Cosimo said softly. “You don’t even know the beginning. All the old stories, the fairytales and the legends, they all have a kernel of truth. But the reality is far darker than you can imagine. Do you think that vampires are the stuff of nightmares? Compared to most of the fae, we’re a happy bedtime story.”

I turned back to face him. “What’s all this supposed to accomplish?”

“I’m trying to show you that even after every shock, every horror that you’ve experienced so far, you don’t know the first thing about our world,” he said. “You don’t know what kind of life Dorian is inviting you to join. And you have no idea how much it will cost you.”

I pushed away from the bar, leaving my chai and my muffin untasted. “Okay. I came. I saw. Take me home now.”

Cosimo lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “As you wish.”

He finished his mocha confection in one more swallow and left a folded twenty on the counter, then led the way back through the curtain without another word.

I didn’t speak until the car was going back through the chain link gates.

“So tell me now. You’ve been hinting at it since you picked me up. How do you break a bond?”

“I don’t,” he said. “But you can.”

“Tell me.”
My heart was so loud that I could hardly hear the words.

“Unfaithfulness,” he said succinctly. “If you know another human man—in the biblical sense—then the bond is shattered. Forever. It can never be restored. You go back to being human, and you live your life as if nothing had ever happened.”

“And the cancer?” I pressed. I felt lightheaded Could it be that easy?

“Pardon?” he asked.

“I had cancer when I was...changed. Bonded. Whatever. Would it come back?” I had to know.

“Those sorts of things are healed at conversion. They don’t magically reappear if you go back to being human. A cognate who is three hundred years old doesn’t suddenly dry up and turn into dust, either. You simply revert and pick up living as a human where your body is now.” He shrugged negligently. “That doesn’t mean you can’t get a new cancer later. Human is human. You could die of kidney failure or a heart attack, too.”

Gone forever, he’d said. “And if Dorian...bites me again?”

Cosimo’s answer was simple. “You both die.”

“If I’m human, then Dorian will look for another cognate.”

“Well, yes, that is pretty much the point,” Cosimo said condescendingly. “When the bond is broken, you no longer have a bond.”

“More women will die, then.” How could I damn them to that? That was my hesitation, surely. I wasn’t thinking about what those other women might do under Dorian’s mouth, in Dorian’s bed. Those thoughts were too dangerous to entertain.

Cosimo’s laugh was mocking. “Altruism can only take you so far, and if you aren’t interested in what Dorian has to offer.... Well, you know yourself that there are reasons someone like you would gamble her life for a vampire’s kiss. Sure, you might be sparing some...more hurried deaths by staying bonded to Dorian, but you might also be keeping another girl from being saved like you were.”

“But I would lose him.” I didn’t realize I was going to say those words until they had already escaped.

God, that thought hurt. I knew that no one could ever make me feel the way he did. Make me want the way he did. Need the way he did. But why did that thought hurt...like that?

It wasn’t just lust. Even if I decided breaking the bond was what I wanted, I knew I’d wound him deeply with my betrayal, and that hurt, too, which was the craziest and scariest thing of all.

But how could I betray him by breaking a bond I’d never agreed to? And how could I keep the bond, keep him, when it meant I’d have to lose not only everything I’d ever wanted but my very self? How could I even want to?

“Do you really want him?” Cosimo asked. “That’s what you have to ask yourself. Do you really want him? Or is it just the bond? Does he just want you to want him?”

I sat in silence for a long moment. My life had seemed to be closing in around me, shuttling me down a single pathway to my destiny even as I fought against it. Now I had a choice. I had thought I would do anything to escape the road that I had been set upon.

Now I wasn’t so sure.

If I took the path back to humanity, there was no going back. Perhaps all my cravings were just the bond or Dorian’s twisting of my mind or both. In that case, I could shake them off once I was out from under his power, and I would consider myself lucky to have escaped such a dark fate.

But if they were not, then what we had was real, and I would be left holding nothing but a handful of regrets.