Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (21 page)

I drew a breath. Despite everything, the answer still threw me a little off guard. “How about we take turns, then?” I kept my voice light. “You ask me a question, and then I ask you one.”

He looked amused. “That works for me.”

I pushed my hair back behind my ear. “I’ll go first. What exactly do you do for a living? You’re obviously well off, and I met you at your office, but you were here on a Wednesday when I woke up, so you don’t exactly seem to be working eighty hours a week.”

“I work in investments and real estate, mostly, and of course the medical research, but the last is more an expenditure than income, at least for now.” He glanced at me. “Before you came, I was working...perhaps too much.”

There seemed to be a wealth of things unsaid in that last sentence, but his expression was inscrutable.

“But not right now,” I pressed, seeking confirmation.

“Things change. You’ve changed them.” Before I could follow that up, he changed the subject abruptly. “My turn. Where do you want to go to grad school, and why not the University of Maryland?”

“Chicago,” I blurted. He’d remembered about that, and I was grateful for that even as I was afraid of my own gratitude. “I’ve been accepted. It’s got a better program, one of the best in the country, and definitely the one with the most interesting schools of economic philosophy.”

“You can get a job at any one of my companies without it,” he said, casting a sideways glance at me.

I shook my head. “I’m not going to work for my boyfriend’s company.”

Boyfriend. I had said the word. Why had I said that word?

“I’m not your
boyfriend
, and you could consider them all to be your companies, as well,” he said.

“Vampires don’t do prenups?” I joked to distract myself.

“They are not necessary.”

All traces of amusement fled. No, when an agnate had such utter control over a cognate, a prenup would be redundant.

“The bond never falters, Cora,” he said as if he could read my mind. “As long as it persists, it never changes and it never fails.”

“So a cognate would never betray an agnate,” I said, thinking of what I had almost done with Geoff the night before.

“That is not what I said.” His eyes went through me.

He knows,
I thought.
He must know.

Then he returned his gaze to the road, and I chided myself for letting my guilt send me spiraling into paranoia.

“It’s your turn,” he said after a long silence. “The question about prenups hardly counts, I think.”

“Of course,” I said.

I had too many questions, most of which I didn’t even know how to ask. I chose one that, as trivial as it was, had been niggling at my mind for a while. Every time I pictured Dorian alone, he was brooding over his laptop in the cavern of his office or in the great stone mausoleum of his house. No one could really live like that. Could they?

I remembered something that Cosimo had said about Dorian not being able to feel anymore without me. Maybe that’s all there had been to him then, that maybe he had...worn thin, over the years. Grown hollow.

Aloud, I asked, “So what do you do for fun?” That sounded stupid, so I tried again. “What are your hobbies? Your entertainment?” What I really meant was,
What were you, before I was here?

“Fun.” He said the word as if he were trying it out, his expression remote. “I haven’t done much for fun in...a while.”

In years,
my mind substituted for those two words. Perhaps a lifetime.

“I suppose I fell out of the habit,” he continued. “In the past, though, I frequented every kind of diversion, high and low. Movies, the theater, the opera, concerts. Aviation, boating, riding—racing practically anything in my more reckless days. I still collect cars, out of habit, I suppose. Music. Drinking and gambling, even, once. At some point, I’ve been through every recreational activity that humans have invented and then some.”

I hugged myself, thinking of the wilder vampire gatherings that I had seen. But I could refer to only some of it, or else I’d have to confess to Cosimo’s field trip. “Drugs? Like those agnates who got in the fight at your party?”

Dorian’s reply was steady. “I chased the rush, too, once, when I thought I had nothing left to live for. But my last descent predated the poisons that humans and agnates alike now pursue. Still, any human drug is positively benign for an agnate compared to the risks of, say, early aviation.”

“I can’t imagine you like that,” I said.

“When every day feels like you’ve already been through it a thousand times, and even the air tastes like you’ve breathed it before, and still the days keep on marching, one after the next, forever, without end.... It’s just existence. Tedious. Interminable. Some sink into that, lose all ability to feel and, eventually, even think. Most rebel, trying anything in the world to feel alive again....” His face briefly creased in a frown, a fleeting expression passing across his face that contained the echoes of a pain I couldn’t fully understand.

A pain I’d almost added to.

Watching the string of taillights down the tree-lined monotony of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, I tried to imagine my Dorian, so calm and collected, flinging aside his enormous self-control and chasing the rush with the same intensity that he devoted to everything else. It was an unsettling thought.

“Do you feel like that now at all?” I asked. “Like the air is old and all the rest, I mean.”

He looked at me. “No. Not with you.”

The words were simple, almost blunt, but I was suddenly excruciatingly aware of him sitting so close to me and the power that his inhuman beauty held over me. My breath tangling in my lungs, I clenched my hands in my lap to keep from reaching out to touch him.

He turned back to the road and continued. “I found a cause, a reason for living, in my research. But you remind me now of the hobbies I cultivated once—not as a rusher but merely as an amateur in the oldest sense. They fell away, so gradually that I didn’t even realize how far I’d gone, but I suppose that’s always the way of it, our eroding of the mind. It starts as indifference and ends in senility, a living death even as our bodies continue on.”

I remembered the agnate at the buffet during my introduction, mumbling to herself as she scooped food messily onto her plate. My mind shuddered away from that thought.

The buildings outside the car window were familiar—the red brick of the College Park campus. We were almost at my apartment. Time had passed quickly, too quickly. Dorian pulled into the mostly empty parking lot, like he had the other night.

“Inviting yourself up again?” I asked.

“Only if you want me to,” he said. He pulled into a space and put the car in park. Unbuckling, he turned to face me.

The impossibility of my situation came over me again. How could I let him have all of me?

How could I possibly refuse? 

“What’s your end game, Dorian?” I asked abruptly.

For once, I seemed to surprise him, and his eyebrows rose. “What do you mean?”

“What’s your goal? What’s your plan for me?” I asked.

“I don’t make plans for you, Cora.” Dorian touched me lightly, just his fingertips brushing against the back of my hand, and my entire body thrilled with it.

I pulled away. “No, you just have huge parties where I’m the main attraction. You’re weaving your webs, you monsters with a conscience versus those without, and I’m a symbol for you in it. I know you can’t afford to have this go wrong. So what will you sacrifice to make sure that it doesn’t?”

“It won’t,” he said simply.

I scrubbed my face in frustration. “How could you know that? I could be a terrible person. You could have bonded with anyone, and you’d gamble everything on that person being just right for you?”

His hooded eyes never left my face. “I bonded with you, Cora, not just anyone. And I know what you are, perhaps better than you know it yourself. What we have—it will work. It must work.”

“But what if I don’t want it to? I want to finish my degree, go to grad school, get a job.”

Dorian shook his head. “I won’t stop you from doing any of that.”

“Even if I want to go to Chicago? You’ll change me,” I said hopelessly. “You do change me.”

“I’ve given my word that I won’t...mess with your head, as you call it, not unless the alternative is unthinkable.”

How could I make him understand? If I left him—when I left him—he needed to understand why I had to do it. Maybe then I would hurt him less, or at least the wounds would heal a little faster.

I said, “You mess with my head all the time. You might not be deliberately rearranging my thoughts, but you still do it. Every time I’m near you, I can feel your will and your desires, wrapping around me. I’m helpless in them.”

“I may be the stronger, Cora, but I feel yours, too,” he said softly.

“It’s not the same.”

“Perhaps not.” He reached out, placing his palm flat above my left breast. “But I can feel how your heart is torn. I can feel you yearning for me but afraid. I can feel what you desire most, Cora, and I want to do everything in my power to fulfill those dreams.”

My heart thudded against his hand. “But you’ll still change me. You can’t help it.”

He look old suddenly, as old as mountains. “All meaningful relationships are transformative.”

“More than any human relationship,” I insisted.

He shook his head. “And that I can’t help. But just because it is a change doesn’t mean that it’s bad.”

I had to make him understand, somehow, why I couldn’t live with that. “I want a normal life, Dorian. You can’t give me that.”

“Do you, Cora?” he asked softly. “Do you really?” His gaze grew intense, and I couldn’t answer him.

Because I didn’t know.

D
orian’s hand slid up to cradle my cheek. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, I turned my face into it, kissing his palm. It smelled of him, the scent that had covered my body a few days before. I thought of all he had already done to me—with me. It was overwhelming, even the memory of it almost too much to bear.

And I wanted more. More of his touch but also his presence. His smiles. His solemnity and the ineffable sadness that came of regrets I didn’t understand. I wanted to lay those haunting memories to rest.

I wanted his body, his kisses, his sex. And as foolish as it was, I wanted his love.

With a low sound, he pulled me toward him, meeting me across the high console that separated the seats. His mouth was impatient, hungry against mine. The dull heat in my abdomen roared to sudden fire, my groin aching with every touch of his lips and stroke of his tongue.

“Cora—” he said roughly as he broke off, a warning in his voice.

“I want it, too,” I assured him.

But he shook his head. “You don’t understand. It’s been almost two weeks, Cora.”

Two weeks? My mind went back.
Oh.
Two weeks since I had first given him my blood.

“I thought you could go for months,” I said faintly, my heart accelerating.

His chuckle was ragged as he caressed the line of my jaw. “It is one thing to avoid all temptation and quite another to indulge some desires and ignore others.”

I could feel his need now. It washed through me, calling up an answer from my own body, one I couldn’t refuse. I could feel my breath come faster, my blood rushing through my veins, and I knew I would give him what he asked. I must. I wanted nothing else.

“Would it be like the first time?” I asked quietly. “Will I be unconscious for days?”

“No, of course not.” His frown was a flat rejection. “Conversion only happens once.”

I swallowed, closing my eyes, feeling the expectation twisting tighter and tighter inside me. I was going to do this thing again, knowing what was coming. I remembered the insanity of that first night, the madness and the pain and the ecstasy, the glory and terror all flowing together until I didn’t know where one stopped and another began.

It really was going to happen. Again. Tonight.

“Then show me,” I said, opening my eyes and meeting his gaze. My vampire. There was nothing human about him now. And somehow, it made me want him more.

Desire flared deep in his eyes.

“Your arm,” he said, and he held out his hand.

I unbuckled then and turned in my seat, putting my hand in his. My insides shivered a little at the contact, my skin flushing. He pushed my sleeve up my arm, and I was reminded of our first encounter, when he had drawn my blood.

“You’re willing?” he asked, looking at me with those haunted eyes.

“Yes,” I breathed. “You know I am.”

He lifted my wrist to his mouth. I didn’t realize how tense I was until I felt the first brush against my skin, and a sizzle of reaction jolted through my body.

It was a kiss—only a kiss, a gentle caress of his lips against my skin. I took a shuddering breath. Holding my gaze, he moved up, toward my elbow, deepening his kisses until I shivered with need, heat from my center running in prickling waves across my skin.

The pressure increased, and I felt his tongue and teeth working across my arm. My breath came raggedly. And then, just above my wrist, the sudden, sharp pain as he cut into my skin.

I gasped as the heat roared up, tangling with the pain, consuming and transforming it as it surged up into my brain. His mouth set a rhythm against my arm, sealing the wound, sucking against it, and my body was seized with it, throbbing in time, need mounting higher and higher.

And his eyes never let me go. I could feel him inside my mind, could feel his need washing into mine as he drank from my veins. Finally, he broke the kiss and lowered my arm. I blinked, breaking away from his eyes, still reeling with unfulfilled desire, as he turned my wrist toward me.

My skin was whole already, only bright silvery lines showing where he had taken from me with a few faint blood-streaks on the unbroken skin.

“We’re made for each other now, Cora,” he said, and then he pulled me across the console into his embrace.

I could still taste the faint, metallic tang of my blood in his mouth. The need was battering me now, driving me to crazy heights. He pushed back his seat as he pulled me into his lap.