Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (24 page)

“And there is the other reason,” he continued, breaking into those thoughts. “The personal one.” He didn’t look at me, and the pitch of his voice didn’t change, but the conviction in those words made me swallow hard. “I’d hurt you, even though you wouldn’t know that you were hurt—break what you are now, forever. I couldn’t do that to you, Cora.”

“What about your ideals?” I challenged. “What if it’s the higher good to scramble me around until I didn’t know whether I was coming or going? What if you were convinced it was the only right thing to do?”

“It isn’t.” His jaw tightened.

“But what if it was?”

He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, heavily, “I don’t know.”

I shivered. “What should I make of you, Dorian?”

“Falling angel or ascending demon?” he offered. He smiled ever so slightly, but his eyes were sad when they finally met mine.

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak.

“Perhaps a little of both.”

I lifted one shoulder. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He had nothing to say to that.

Dorian pulled down a street a block short of his house. I frowned, but then I saw the familiar holly hedge on either side of a wide, arched garage door, and I realized that his property extended the entire depth of the block. The door opened at the touch of a button, and he drove in.

The floor sloped steeply, and then the room opened up on either side to reveal a vast subterranean garage containing a mind-boggling fleet of cars. The floor was tiled in black and white, the room lit by recessed lights that flicked on automatically as we entered.

“Jay Leno would be jealous,” I said lightly, changing the subject as he pulled into an empty parking space.

“As I mentioned before, I collect cars,” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes.

“Where are we now?” I asked. “Under the house?”

“Under the garden,” he said. He unbuckled and turned off the car. “Coming?”

“Right behind you,” I said, ducking out of the passenger door.

He met me on the passenger’s side of the car. Catching me with one arm, he pulled me in to him. In spite of everything, I tilted back my head for his kiss, thorough and expert, waking the half-banked fires inside me.

“I want you to be happy with me, Cora,” he murmured into my hair.

“I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’m afraid that I can be. I’m not sure I should.”

He held me against his side as he led me to a door in the wall of the garage. Beyond it, the floor turned from tile to wide slabs of granite, with matching walls. The great arches above reminded me of my dream, those many weeks before.

“Where are we now?”

“The cellars,” he said.

“What’s down here?” I asked as we passed by tightly shut wooden doors.

“Wine cellar. Cheese cellar. Coal and furnace room, which I had converted to a boiler and general mechanical room some time ago. Scullery. Larder, though now of course there’s a proper fridge and freezer. And the laboratory, with the clean rooms for research.”

“So your research actually is being done here? I mean, in your house?”

“It’s safest to keep it near,” he said.

I had a sense of being hidden in the wings as crucially important things were happening all around me. Or under my feet, as was the case with the research lab that had decided my fate without my ever having interacted with a single staff member responsible for the test that sealed my future.

“Do you really trust me, Dorian?” I asked as we reached a flight of stairs.

“I must,” he said.

But he didn’t really have to, not the way I had to trust him. At any moment, he could change me, wipe me clean, as Isabella had been wiped. All that stopped him was a promise. I rubbed the new silvery marks on my arm. Or he could turn me into his toy, like Lucretia. And I would be powerless to stop him. I was very much afraid that I might want him to.

“That’s why I want to show you something else down here,” he continued. He guided me down a short hallway with more nondescript doors. He stopped in front of a blank section of wall. No, it wasn’t blank, after all. There was the shape of a doorway, but it was bricked over with stone in a slightly different color, all except for a narrow slot about three inches high and a foot wide.

My stomach felt suddenly uneasy.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Alys’ room,” he said. “And now her tomb.”

I
recoiled but was brought up short when I ran into Dorian’s chest.

“Who was she?” I managed to ask, backing quickly away. Some dire foe? Some would-be assassin?

Some ex-cognate who had rejected him?

“One of my oldest friends,” he said heavily. “The closest thing I had to a sister. A casualty in this war of ours. She couldn’t stand the killing anymore, couldn’t stand the human waste, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself, eventually, from feeding when the urge got strong enough. Madness would set in, eventually irreversible, and she, like all of us, would become the monster you name us in truth. No longer a thinking, rational creature—just a beast, who knows nothing but hunger and is never full.”

The full horror of what I was looking at came upon me. “So you bricked her up in there. Alive.”

Dorian reached out and placed his palm flat against the bricks, his shoulders bowed as if under a great weight. “Alive and sane, at her request. She was determined to take her own life by more immediate means if I would not agree to it.”

“But this amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?” I asked.

“It was not suicide,” he said—almost angrily. More calmly, he added, “Not exactly. Her death was the inevitable result of her choice to kill no more, but it was not her main aim. For three months, she took food and water through the door. I talked to her daily—pleaded with her at first to change her mind, told her that the test was getting better every month, that if she just kept the faith for a while longer, we could all be free. But she said, ‘Not at the cost of another life.’”

“God, Dorian,” I said. I wondered if I could be so noble. I thought of how desperate I’d been to live, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me.

But he didn’t even seem to see me anymore, staring at the mute, cold wall as if he were telling it its own history. “Our conversations changed as she lost herself gradually. The wit and humor that I’d so loved about her went first. Reason followed, and for a while, she babbled nonsense when I tried to speak to her. And then speech went altogether. She stopped eating, stopped drinking, and made noises like an animal in mortal pain.”

The hand against the wall turned into a fist. “I wanted to let her out so badly. But there was nothing of my Alys left in her, then, and I would have been releasing a monster that I would have then been forced to put down, if it did not overcome me. So instead, I sat here against the wall and waited for her to die. For three long weeks, I waited for her to die. And when she did, I left her there, behind this damned wall, because I knew she didn’t want me to see what she had become.”

And then he hauled back his fist and hit the wall with such force that the sound struck my ears like another blow, and a web of cracks spidered out from where his flesh met the brick.

I jumped back reflexively—then forward again, because when he dropped his hand, his knuckles were covered in his blood.

“Dorian,” I said, a protest in his name as I stepped forward to grab his hand. By the time I’d wiped his knuckles with the tail of my shirt to assess the damage, his skin was whole again, nothing but the faintest marks betraying what he’d done, already fading in front of my eyes.

I looked up at him, tried to see the seeds of a mad beast behind his grieving eyes. I could too well imagine him sitting there, listening to her noises grow fainter, knowing that he had the same creature inside himself. Man and monster.

And I understood for the first time what this fight meant for him in the personal sense rather than in the greater abstraction of evil and good.

“We have to win, Cora,” he said, turning his wrist in my grip so that he held my hands in his. “We must. This can’t all be for nothing.”

“It won’t.” I made the promise before I realized I was going to say anything at all.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, and the sadness disappeared as if a curtain had been pulled over his face.

“Come, now,” he urged. “Dinner is waiting.”

And not knowing what else to do, I let him guide me up out of the cellars into the main part of the house. Dinner was laid out for us at a small table in his bedroom, every detail carefully attended to, as always. As we ate, I struggled to make small talk, but the weight of Dorian’s revelations was too great for me.

My world had been so simple, so straightforward. When I looked into my future, it encompassed my job, my family, my friends. I wanted to make my Gramma proud, but nothing else depended on me. Certainly not the future of humanity.

“I’m sorry,” I said abruptly, breaking into Dorian’s answer to my question about the landscape painting over his fireplace.

He stopped and looked at me across the table. “Yes?”

“I...I think I may have been selfish,” I said.

“In what way?” he asked carefully.

I made a face involuntarily. Some part of me had wished that he’d flatly contradict me. But that wasn’t in Dorian’s nature. So I answered his question.

“You want this,” I said, making a motion to indicate him, me, everything. “And I’ve been pretty hung up on that, that you chose it and I didn’t. But you want this at least partly because of the bigger thing you want—winning, I mean, not just for you but because it’s so important to everybody, everything.”

I realized I was babbling, and I tried to clarify. “When you do what you need to so that you’ll win, you don’t really have that many choices. I mean, you had one big choice, to be an Adelphoi, but once you made that choice, you had to do all the things that that one big choice meant. It locks you into a path. Am I making any sense at all?”

Dorian raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly.”

“I want all my choices, though,” I continued. “I can’t really have them all. But I want them anyway. And I don’t think I can make just one big choice, like you can. I have to make the little ones—the ones for me.”

“We all start somewhere, Cora,” he said.

That should have irritated me. It was terribly condescending, wasn’t it? To him, well, maybe there had been a similar start at some point in the distant past. Maybe it was only his intangible ideals that stood between him and the darkness within. But where did that leave me?

I was still just an ordinary college student with ordinary dreams and ambitions. I had to be, or else I might become someone my Gramma didn’t know. If I changed too much, strayed too much from how she’d seen me, it’d be like losing her all over again, or maybe like she’d lose me.

Suddenly, I rebelled from that, rebelled from everything. Here I was, telling Dorian that I had to make my decisions for myself, that I couldn’t consider myself as just another tool in the Adelphoi’s goals, and not a minute later, I was thinking of myself in the terms of what my grandmother wanted for me. Not what I wanted for myself. I’d thrown myself into her vision of a perfect life, embraced it as my own dream, but was it?

I thought of Geoff. I liked him a lot. Almost loved him, just a little. And I loved the college student life, not because Gramma wanted me to but for myself. All that was good.

And yet when I dug down deep, into my heart, there was a seed that wasn’t my own—my grandmother’s determination that my life would be happy in a certain way.

What if I chose a life that was happy in another way? Would she really reject it because it had no resemblance to the happy picture she’d kept so sacred in her mind?

And, I thought brutally, should I change my life just because she might? If I was choosing for myself, I had to choose completely for myself, one way or another. Not for her.

I looked at Dorian, idly twirling a fork as he watched me finish dinner. He still wore the gaping shirt missing the buttons that he’d pulled off. I realized that I was tired of being acted on. I was tired of responding. And I was damned tired of being everybody’s pawn. It was my turn to act, to decide, to take charge.

I still didn’t know what I wanted for myself tomorrow, much less in five years or ten. But right now, at that moment, I wanted Dorian.

And I would have him.

I pushed back from the table and stood up, and he instantly rose, too—some kind of chivalrous reflex that didn’t allow him to sit when there was a woman standing in the room. I circled around to him and stopped. Whatever my expression was, my intent must have been clear because his eyes went shadowed and he caught the back of my neck and pulled me to his lips.

I let myself get lost in his kiss for a long moment, his mouth hot and hungry on my own. But then I pulled back.

“No,” I said. “This time, it’s my turn.”

I reached for his belt. He closed his hands over mine, but I looked up at him.

“Let me do this, Dorian.”

He let go, standing with his feet planted while his gaze roved across my body, devouring me.

My turn. My turn to act, my turn to decide, my turn to choose—and right now, I chose him, I chose this, the one act that I could do to him in which I was in complete and utter control.

A little astonished at myself—not at what I was going to do but that I was going to do it to him, to Dorian, the powerful vampire—I loosened his belt, then the zipper and the button beneath. I pushed his pants over his hips, sliding them down. I was confronted by his boxer briefs, the bulge of his hardness already stretching the fabric. I slid them down, too. His erection sprang away from his body as the fabric cleared the head. I reached down and took it in my hand, making a circle with my fingers around the shaft.

It was faintly warm, which surprised me, because Dorian’s skin was almost always cool to the touch, even in the throes of passion. His skin was oddly velvety, soft over the hardness beneath. I moved my hand slowly, experimentally, the skin moving over it with each stroke.