Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (23 page)

“I wasn’t thinking,” he said when he finally pulled back. His hands were tight, too tight, on my shoulders. “I’m sorry, Cora. I like to flatter myself that by now....” He broke off and pulled me against his bare chest again.

And I felt at home there. Even after everything, even with all my fears, it felt so right. I wondered how I’d ever lived without knowing the smell of his skin. I didn’t know where he’d been going with that sentence, and I didn’t care—I, who always cared too much, who was always afraid that I wasn’t doing the right thing—I just didn’t care.

He loosened his hold on me—gradually, as if reluctantly. He caressed my cheek, his eyes so deep I thought I could lose myself in them. He looked like he was about to speak, but even as his lips parted, he shook his head.

Instead, he said, “Say the word. If ever you want me to stop, I will. I promise, Cora.”

“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to want you to stop. Ever.”

“I will keep you safe.” The words carried the weight of a vow. “Even from yourself.”

I took a shaky breath. Safe. Dorian was the exact opposite of safe.

But all I said was, “Let me change and pack an overnight bag, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, and he stepped back far enough that my beating heart could return to its normal pace, and the world returned to some semblance of its steady state.

I ducked into the bedroom and pulled on some clean clothes, then grabbed my duffel and stuffed it with my toiletries, picture, laptop, and my stuffed rabbit Nibbler. I went back into the bathroom and got my pills and shoved them into the outer pocket. My hand hovered over my toothbrush and toothpaste, but I decided to leave them this time. For some reason, I didn’t mind using the ones Dorian had provided. It wasn’t the same as wearing his clothes.

Or his necklace?
I thought. But I pushed that aside.

When I came back into the living area, Dorian was lounging against the back of the kitchen peninsula, wearing the remains of his shirt under his suit coat. He looked perfectly at ease—until I looked at his hands, which were gripping the edge of the counter tightly enough to make his knuckles white.

“I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I found my keys on the kitchen counter and led the way out. I avoided his gaze in the elevator, remembering too keenly how his body had felt against mine, pushing me hard into the corner, that corner, wanting him to do it again....

I was glad to escape into the crisp night air. The bite of it cooled my flaming cheeks. I put my head down and walked next to him toward his car. He held the door open for me, and I mumbled a “thank you” as I took my seat, tossing my bag in the back.

He broke the silence as he backed out of the parking space. “I called while you were dressing. Dinner will be ready when we arrive.”

I looked at the dashboard. It was already 6:30. “Thanks,” I said.

“Unless you want to eat in a more public setting,” he added, the words careful, studied.

“Unless you scared me that much, you mean.” I wished that he had. My choice would have been much simpler then. “No. It’s fine. I’m okay.”

“I want you to be more than okay,” he said. His eyes were locked on the view through the windshield. “It’s been a very long time for me, since I’ve had...this. I hadn’t intended....” He gave a laugh. “Anything. I didn’t plan. I always plan.”

Dorian sounded amazed, almost bewildered. I looked sharply at him. Of all the things I’d expected from him, confusion wasn’t one of them. I was always the one to be confused, torn, battered—and powerless in the grip of his certainty.

Now that he didn’t have that certainly, I was lost at sea. I couldn’t even think of anything to say. What was there that I
could
say? The cracks that I had seen the night of the introduction, they had deepened, and now the mask was falling away. And I was no less frightened of what I’d find underneath.

Frightened that it would bind me even closer to him.

“Whatever happens, understand that you never need to fear me, Cora,” Dorian said. “I won’t let you be truly hurt.”

I rubbed my wrist where he had drunk from me. Nothing that wouldn’t quickly heal, he meant. The image of the woman’s back rose again in my mind, crisscrossed with layered scars, and I shuddered.

“Do you want to?” I asked. “Truly hurt me.”

Dorian was silent for a very long time, so long that I began to wonder if maybe I’d only thought that I said the words aloud.

Finally, he spoke. “We are demonspawn, Cora. Some impulses are not to be indulged. Ever. With anyone.”

My lungs felt suddenly tight. My own monster. A monster with a conscience, a moral code that he had forged out of...what? Vampires apparently didn’t get prophets or books from God. That meant they had to borrow their ideals...from us.

I thought of how terrible humans could be. My stomach clenched.

“I met a woman at your Lesser Introduction,” I said, not realizing that I was going to tell him until the words were out of my mouth. “She was the reason you found me at the other end of the ballroom—because she frightened me, I mean. A cognate. She was covered in these marks.” I held up my forearm where the silvery lines left where his teeth had cut the skin stood out in the streetlights. “Everywhere. All over her body.”

Dorian looked at my arm, and his face went hard. “Lucretia. It’s no wonder she succeeded in terrorizing you.”

“You know who I’m talking about?” I asked.

He snorted. “Everyone knows Lucretia. She makes sure of that. She’s Cosimo Laurentis’ cognate, and for sheer spite and horribleness, she would be a close second to Veronica only because there is only so much damage a cognate could do on her own.”

“Cosimo?” I blurted.

“You’ve met him?” The question was as sharp as a whiplash.

“I...yes....” Suddenly, that night took on an entirely new context. Lucretia, sent to frighten me into Cosimo’s waiting arms, to prepare me for his message of escape....

“I’m so stupid,” I blurted. “Oh, my God, he planned it all along—”

“Planned what?” Dorian demanded, his hands tightening on the steering wheel.

“Lucretia scared me, and I ran for the stairs. Cosimo stopped me, talked me into staying, and then left me where you found me later....”

Cosimo had positioned me next to the rushers on purpose, abandoning me where I would, at the least, be a witness to an ugly scene. And if that hadn’t frightened me enough, he’d planned the field trip to The Plant to top it off. All so that I’d be eager to listen when he told me how a bond could be broken.

And I’d sat in the car next to him, just inches away from an agnate who had layered abuse after abuse on his cognate’s body. He’s touched me with the same hands that had done that to her, smiled at me, pretended concern, pretended even to be my friend.

“Stay away from him,” Dorian ordered. “He’s dangerous. And he is most definitely not on our side.”

“I thought it was a coincidence,” I said. “I should have realized—”

“No.” Dorian cut me off. “You didn’t know any better. It was my job to protect you. I didn’t do as well as I should.”

“You keep secrets,” I said, thinking of what Cosimo had said about breaking bonds. “How can I stay safe with all your secrets?”

He ran a hand through his hair—a rare response that I’d come to associate with tightly controlled frustration. “They aren’t secrets, Cora. You have an entirely new society—a new biology—to take in, and on top of that, a thousand years of rivalries to understand. You’ve only been conscious of this world for a week. These things take time—to learn and to understand, both.”

“But if there’s a danger now, I need to know,” I objected. “I need to know everything.”

I need you to tell me about this bond-breaking. I need to hear it from your lips. And then, maybe I can begin to trust....

“And you will. In due course,” he said.

I made a noise of irritation, scowling at his patrician profile. “I’m not your possession to do whatever you want with,” I said. “I deserve answers now, not when you think it’ll be best for me. Don’t tell me it’s for my own good. You don’t get to make that decision.”

“I think that my experience and position in this world would give me some judgment on this matter,” he countered, suddenly cold.

“If I accept that reason for you protecting me or hiding things from me or coddling me, then it’ll never have an end. You can say that as easily a century from now—that your experience is far vaster than my own, that your knowledge is greater than what I can have built in my insignificant life. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter. I can’t live like that.”

His mouth was hard. “What do you want? A course book? I’m telling you things as fast as I know how.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “I asked you how vampires are born, and you refused point blank to tell me.”

“Because you weren’t ready to know,” he said.

“That’s not your decision to make,” I said again.

His knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “You have no idea how hard you make this for me.”

“It won’t get easier,” I said. “Not with me.”

“What did you want me to say, then? Did you want me to lay out the entire socio-political landscape for you? How many years of study do you have?” he demanded. “Even now, you barely understand. Do you think Veronica’s ambitions extend no farther than self-gratification? That’s not why she bears children as fast as she possibly can.”

I remembered the agnate from the introduction, her belly swollen with pregnancy.

Dorian continued, “She’s breeding an army, and until now, the Kyrioi have been able to handily out-produce us. Their goal is the subjugation of humankind under an agnatic world order, in which all humans are reduced to a state of serfdom with no purpose other than to enrich their betters.”

The words were ugly. I hated Dorian’s world—hated its brutality and its demands. “And I’m supposed to—to outbreed
her.
I’m supposed to live a thousand years. Save four thousand humans from death at your hands. And bear you soldiers for your cause. More vampires, who will kill more humans. When does it stop?”

“When we find the perfect test and no more humans must die.” Dorian’s voice sounded weary.

He didn’t have a right to be tired of this argument. It was my future that he was talking about—the future that he required of me. “That’s what I am to you, isn’t it? Your baby-maker. All the rest of this—it’s just trappings. It’s the drug that keeps me hooked on you, so I’ll do what you want.”

“No.” He didn’t raise his voice, but all his power was in that single word, rocking me in my seat. “Not unless you’re my drug, too.”

My head was pounding. He was the agnate, the master of this bond. I was its victim. Wasn’t he?

Wasn’t I?

“Why do you insist on seeing evil where there is none?” he continued.

“No evil?” I protested. “Agnates kill people, Dorian. You can’t get around that.”

“Was it evil for me to give you a chance at life when you had none?” he asked. “Knowing everything, would you choose death by cancer over a chance of life with me?”

“You know I couldn’t,” I said. “I want to live.” But which life? My old one, with all its possibilities—or my new one, which must revolve completely around him?

“There are thousands of others dying every day who would take the same gamble,” Dorian said. “Would you deny them healing?”

I shook my head.

“Every Adelphoi will be able to offer other humans at least the same chance you had,” he pressed on. “If you accepted it, it can’t be evil.”

“I don’t want my children to kill,” I said.

“Maybe they won’t have to, by that point. And maybe we’ll discover other ways to help people live.”

“Other ways?”

“Perfecting the test is only the first step. There’s so much we don’t understand about the process of conversion. If we could at least harness some part of that and, for example, create an injection that converts cancerous cells back into a noncancerous form, or repairs the marrow where misshapen blood cells are produced in sickle-cell anemia, or even repairs more fundamental DNA errors—”

I’d stopped listening at the first item in his list. “You could cure cancer.”

“We could cure all genetic disease, too, and so much more,” Dorian said. “There are two possible futures, Cora, and one of them will happen, whether or not you want them to. In both, there will be agnates, and we will either live peacefully alongside humans and even help them as we are able, or we will live as their masters.”

And I would be living in one of those worlds, whether or not I was with Dorian. If I went back to my ordinary life, my human life, everything that he was working for would still happen—or else everything he feared. I could choose to be ignorant, and I could choose to not play a role. But I couldn’t stop it from happening.

“What would you have done if I had told you all this on the first day?” he said.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know what I’d do now. “If this is all so important, so much bigger than us, why aren’t you making sure that I can’t screw it up?”

“You mean by turning you into an Isabella.” He was silent for a long moment, and in the flickering streetlights, I saw an internal struggle play briefly across his face. “There are two answers, the political and the personal.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me, then.”

“Politically, you’re not just a symbol for the success of my research. You’re a symbol for everything we stand for—respect for humans and respect for cognates.”

“That’s a big gamble,” I said. “If you fail—”

“If
we
fail. You’re with us now, Cora. And I believe—I must believe—that you won’t let all this be destroyed.”

D
orian knew. He had to know what I had almost done the night before. He must have felt it, like he felt my grief.

And he hadn’t come after me. He could have tried to come, tried to arrive in time to stop me. But he didn’t.

Why did he trust me? Did he really believe in me? Or in the bond? Or in what he’d done to me through it? If he wanted me as badly as he claimed, he had the power to make it so that he never, ever had to let me go....