Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (20 page)

“What if I ask you to?” I whispered. “I don’t want to be changed. I don’t. But I don’t want to hurt, either, and I can be weak and stupid, and in a rash moment—”

He kissed me, gently, stopping my words. My entire body ached at his touch, but I only stood there, frozen, like a rabbit that had seen a fox. “I won’t, Cora, I promise. Even if you ask.”

He pulled my head against his chest, and I leaned into him, his strength supporting me. “Not even for your damned Adelphoi?”

His arms tightened fractionally. “I do only what I must.”

I whispered, “Must is such a funny word. If you do change me, the only thing you risk is your principles. I could lose myself.”

I could feel his words in his chest as he answered. “Sometimes principles are the most important thing. Sometimes, they are the only thing.”

“The only thing?” I echoed, looking up at him.

His smile was disarming. “Between me and madness.”

I felt a slight chill because I knew, despite the lightness of his words, that he was deadly serious.

“And you’re not mad,” I said, both a statement and a question.

“Not yet,” he agreed. “And I never will be, as long as I have you.”

How long would that be? I wondered. I wanted to demand why he hadn’t told me that the bond could be broken. But Dorian had been hiding it from me on purpose, and whatever reason he had, he might consider it one of those troubling cases of the greater good that I not find out or that I forget that I ever knew.

I took a shuddering breath. With all my willpower, I disengaged myself from him and stashed the toilet scrubber and cleaner in the vanity, then wiped down the counter a final time. The ring of lime around the toilet was slightly lighter now, but it was still there.

“Thanks for worrying about me,” I said, grabbing the kitchen trash can from the back of the room. I was surprised to realize how much I meant it. “It’s just a bit weird to have someone sense my feelings psychically and fly to my side. I’m not actually sure how much I like that.” I’d never grieve alone with him, not really, and sometimes, grief didn’t want to be shared. “But I’m glad you care.”

“Of course I care.” He stepped out of the way so that I could leave the bathroom.

“Would you, though?” I asked, going to the kitchen. “Without the bond, I mean.”

“That’s like asking a human if they would love if they weren’t in love,” he objected. “It makes no sense.”

I put the trash can in its place under the kitchen sink and turned to face him. “This isn’t the first time you’ve said that word. Love. What does it mean to you? What can it mean?”

He stepped up to me so that I was trapped between his body and the sink, pulling me to him. “What does it mean to anyone, Cora? You tell me. What is this love that you want to talk so much about?”

I stood there, in my Gramma’s kitchen, my body against this man, this falling angel or rising demon who had claimed me as his own. And I thought of my Gramma, Sally Lowden, who had given so much of herself.

“Love is caring,” I said. “Self-sacrifice. Kindness. Patience. Connection. Compassion and sympathy.”

“And romantic love?” he pressed. “What more is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You do,” he countered. “You must, or you wouldn’t be asking me about it.”

I closed my eyes. His arm around me was sending small flutters through my body that I did not want to examine too closely. That I couldn’t examine, right now.

“Desire is a part of it, but it has to be more than that,” I breathed. “A sense of being one with another person, like you found the missing part of yourself. Wanting them and wanting their happiness like it’s your own. And a connection again—”

“A bond,” he said.

My eyes flew open.

He said, “In humans, you could choose to classify love as a mere physiological reaction, a cascade of hormones, serotonin and oxytocin and a touch of adrenaline for desire. At times, such things strike, as the cliché goes, from across a crowded room.”

“But that’s just the desire part,” I protested.

“It’s the start of love,” he said. His arms tightened around me. “When I first saw you, I almost lost control of myself for the first time in several centuries. Don’t tell me that you didn’t feel it, too.”

“But you influence all humans,” I said. “There was nothing special about me.”

“I can influence all humans to varying degrees, but not often like
that
.”

I rocked softly in his arms, remembering the power he held over me even then, the awareness and wanting that he had sent through my body to befuddle my senses, clouding my mind like nothing I had ever felt before.

“I’m not sure what I felt. You were very overpowering. I don’t know really what it was. I’m still not sure.”

“I think you are just afraid of giving it a name,” he said. “Even then, I wanted you to be the one so badly that it hurt.”

“And when you bit me—” I broke off, unable even now to talk about the hideous, glorious, ecstatic madness of that night.

“The potential was made fully real,” he said.

“The bond,” I said. “But it’s so arbitrary. It might have been anyone!”

He shook his head. “Any
one
in ten thousand. How many boys did you expect to date before finding one you could love and settling down? Three? Five? Twenty? Not ten thousand, I’m sure.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, unable to counter his point. Everything rose up together to overwhelm me, my battered emotions, the strangeness of the past week, the insanity of my position—and most of all him, holding me, stroking me.

Maybe even loving me, like I was afraid that I wanted him to.

“Just kiss me,” I whispered. “Kiss me now.”

A
nd he did, taking my mouth with his own. I looped my arms over his neck, clinging to him, needing him, wanting him like I had never wanted anything in my life as he caressed me with his hands and tongue until my body was consumed in his rhythm and his strength.

Finally, slowly, I pulled away. He rested his forehead against mine. For a long moment he just held me, and we breathed.

He broke the silence. “You’re wearing the necklace.”

“Yeah.” My hand strayed to my neck, where the lump of the pendant lay under my shirt. I had put it on the night before as soon as Geoff had left, and I hadn’t taken it off since.

I didn’t know what I meant by it. I didn’t know anything, right now.

I took a shuddering breath and changed the subject. “I’m done here. I should probably head back to my apartment.”

Home. I should have said home. But I wasn’t really sure where my home was. This house had been my home for so many years, but now it was empty, barren, ready for someone else to make it theirs. My apartment was where I lived with Lisette, but nothing about it was truly mine. And Dorian’s house...he wanted it to be mine, too, I knew. But as huge as it was, I wasn’t sure there was room for me there.

“I’ll drive you,” Dorian said.

“What about my car?” I said.

“I’ll have someone drop it off at your apartment,” he said. “We’ll leave the keys under the doormat here.”

I hesitated for a moment. “Okay, I guess,” I said. It seemed a waste for him to come out here for nothing, I rationalized.

But I knew that really, I just didn’t want him to go. Not when I’d come so close to losing him.

I looked around my Gramma’s empty kitchen one last time. If nothing she had wanted for me came true, would everything she’d given me still matter?

Shaking off that thought, I bundled up, and we went out through the garage. I stopped at the sight of the car behind mine in the driveway.

“Seriously?” I asked. “How many cars do you have?”

He chuckled, coming up behind me. “Is it wrong to say that I’m not really sure? That’s my newest Aston Martin.”

“I don’t really know much about cars,” I admitted.

“Keys?” He held out his hand.

“Let me get the garage door first,” I said. I ducked into my car and hit the door opener clipped to the visor, then locked the car, pulled the key off my key ring, and handed it to Dorian. I watched as he slid it under the front doormat.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He opened the door for me, and I climbed into his car.

“Aston Martin,” I repeated as he swung in and shut the door. “I’m Bond. James Bond.” Which pretty much exhausted everything I knew about the manufacturer.

“I’m afraid this car is lacking in the high-tech weaponry department,” he said dryly.

“Ha! So you aren’t entirely oblivious of pop culture,” I said.

He backed out of the driveway and turned down the street. “Not entirely, no.” He paused. “So, the house....”

“It was my Gramma’s. Mine, too. Where I grew up,” I said, glad to be talking of something less dangerous than love. “She died last year, right after Thanksgiving, and it took me months to go through probate and to get it ready to sell. It finally went on the market in October, but no offers yet. There were some renters across the street who’d really junked up the place, but they got kicked out, so my real estate agent is hoping that we’ll get a bite if we do a showcase this weekend. I was cleaning it up for that.”

“And she was the last of your family.” His voice was perfectly neutral. Of course he knew that—he’d said that he’d known from my medical records that I had no next-of-kin.

I recited the canned explanation that I’d given so many times before. “My parents were both only children. They died in a car crash with my grandfather. It had been raining, and there was a low spot on the road with too much standing water on a curve. It was dark, too dark to see the water, and our car hydroplaned and crossed the center line into a semi. My mom survived just long enough to give birth to me, four weeks premature, and Gramma raised me alone.”

“Do you not have any extended relatives? Distant cousins, great-aunts and uncles?”

I shrugged. “My grandfather had two brothers. I met their families a couple of times, but that was all. My dad was estranged from his family. I tried to track them down once, when I was a teenager, but they didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”

“So it truly was just you and your grandmother.”

I couldn’t quite tell what he thought of that—whether it meant anything to him at all since he had forgotten his own family in the mists of time.

I said, “It was enough. It really was. She was sixty-three when I was born. Eighty-two when she died. I was so sure she would live to be ninety, or maybe a hundred. I don’t know why. She just always seemed so full of life. I wanted her to see me married. See my kids. I wanted her to hold them, to know that everything had worked out in the end.”

Dorian looked over at me, compassion in his fathomless eyes. “I couldn’t imagine that she was disappointed.”

“I know she wasn’t.” How could I explain how my heart ached for what she hadn’t seen? “I just wanted her to see me have all the things my mom never got, all the things she wanted me to have. So she’d know it really was okay.” I took a shaky breath.

In the long silence, Dorian reached out and captured my hand in his, squeezing it, the contact as comforting as it was arousing. I blinked away the sudden tears, grateful that he left the easy platitudes unsaid.

Wishing I knew what I should do.

When he finally spoke, his words took me by surprise. “You don’t have to sell the house if you don’t want to.”

My breath froze in my lungs. “What?”

His eyes did not leave the road. “My resources are at your disposal. Whatever money you need, I can supply. You don’t need to sell your grandmother’s house to pay for anything.”

I considered it for a wild moment, taking down the For Sale sign and just locking the door and all my memories inside, hoarding them inside my heart....

Then I sighed. “No. I’m not going to live in the house again, and Gramma wouldn’t want it to sit there empty. It’s time for it to be a home to someone else’s family.”

“Fair enough,” he said, his voice gentler than his light words. He freed his hand to shift gears, and I tried not to feel the loss of his touch.

“What about you?” I asked, studying his aristocratic profile. “Surely you remember something from your childhood. Anything at all.”

The sadness was back again, and an expression of such distance that he seemed to be a world away. “I’ve already told you that I don’t have any memories, only their echoes.”

Gramma had always told me how excited my mother was to have me, how much she’d loved me, how proud my father had been. It had never been fully real, just words to go along with the happy wedding pictures in the living room.

But I’d had Gramma, twenty years of memories with her, and I had never lacked for love. And I’d never forget it, no matter how many years went by.

Dorian looked over at me. “Come home with me, Cora. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

I bit my lip. Always, I had yielded to him, either because of the undeniable reasonableness of his arguments or because he forced me to. Even when he’d taken me home after the Lesser Introduction, it had been at his prompting. I needed to have my way just this once, just to know that I could.

“No,” I said. “I want to go to my apartment.”

He appeared to think about it for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

And that was it.

It was, I decided, a bit of a letdown.

“I don’t really know that much about you, you know,” I said aloud. “I mean, considering that you’re supposed to be my one-and-only.”

He lifted a shoulder negligently. “We are learning about one another together. There’s no rush.”

But there was, and I couldn’t tell him what it was, couldn’t confess that for me absolutely everything was at stake....

The headlights flicked on automatically in the gathering gloom, and he pulled his sunglasses off. Self-consciously, I did the same.

“It’s a bit easier for you, I think. There just isn’t that much to learn about, with me,” I said.

“You sell yourself short,” he said.

I snorted. “I’m twenty-one. You’re, what, fifty times that? One hundred times?”

“More,” he said evenly. “How much more, I don’t know.”