Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (27 page)

Jane set the tray on the table where Dorian and I had eaten dinner the night before. It had been cleared, I noticed, while I was sleeping. The clothing that had littered the floor was also gone.

Exactly how many people had been through here while I was sleeping?

“Your robe,” Jane said, coming to the side of the bed and spreading it so that I could turn my back to her and slip into the arms, keeping up a pretense of modesty.

I did so, wrapping myself in the thick terrycloth as I slipped out of bed and tied the fat belt, taking the opportunity to survey the room. The one set aside for me was next door to it, a study in neutrals in contrast to the rich colors of this room. But this room didn’t look much more lived in than mine had when I’d first arrived. Everything looked designed, planned, the mark of the decorator much stronger than that of the person—the agnate, as vampires called themselves—who inhabited it. The books on the shelves had been chosen for the colors of their spines, and the baubles could have been from any magazine. But more striking than what was present was what was absent. There were no photographs, nothing imperfect or out of place, no objects at all of a recognizably personal nature. It looked more like a set than a bedroom.

I found that vaguely sad.

Sitting at the table, I raised the lid of the breakfast tray. Fruit blintzes, eggs benedict, some kind of savory French toast, bacon and sausage, hash browns, and a fizzy sort of juice cocktail to drink. Once again, I wondered if the chef had any expectations that I’d finish it all. I hoped not, because it was enough for four of me.

Jane had retreated to stand against the wall in a kind of modified parade rest. She still had a slightly pinched expression on her face. I’d unintentionally insulted her—multiple times, actually, with a complete lack of social grace—and she hadn’t forgiven me for it.

I’d ignored her hurt feelings because I’d viewed any kind of relationship with her as no more than temporary. I’d been determined to find a way to escape my bond to Dorian, even if his every touch set my body on fire, even if his gaze seemed to be able to see my soul. He wanted too much of me—he’d change too much of me.

Now.... Now, I wasn’t sure about anything.

“Look, Jane,” I said, my fork suspended in midair, “if you’re going to be my lady’s maid, you can’t hate me.”

Jane’s face spasmed in horror. “I don’t hate you, m—Cora!”

“Then why the—” I almost said
attitude
, but I caught myself just in time. Yeah, insulting her again would be a great way to reach an understanding. “Why don’t you seem happy?”

“You disapprove of me and of my work,” she said, staring fixedly at the opposite wall.

“No, I don’t,” I said. Then I winced as I went through the catalogue of my interactions with her in my mind. I’d refused the wardrobe she had selected for me except when I absolutely had to wear something other than what I owned. I’d brought my own toiletries without commenting on her selections. I’d even insisted on hauling my own luggage up to the room.

Right.

I set down my fork. This was going to take some work.

“I
’m sorry,” I said. “Look, none of it was about you or what you’ve done. It’s just that I woke up here, after the change, and I was told that I had a new life when I already liked the one I’d had before. Dorian wants to give me all these things, and a lot of them are wonderful, overwhelming, even. But they’re too much.”

“They’re your due as his cognate, madam,” Jane said frostily.

I sighed. “That’s just it. I know you’ve been waiting years for a cognate to show up—that’s your job, after all—but no one consulted me about...about any of it. I didn’t exactly read a contract and sign on the dotted line. I just woke up, and I was here with all this waiting for me.” I gestured to indicate my rooms, my wardrobe, the entire house.

Jane still didn’t meet my eyes. “Any woman would consider herself lucky to be in your place.”

“No, she wouldn’t, because I don’t.” I took a breath, telling myself that jumping down her throat wasn’t helping the situation. “I didn’t. You work here, and you see all that a cognate gets, and maybe you’re even a little jealous. But you don’t think about how much she has to give up—how much
I
have to give up. I’ve got another life, and it’s real, and it’s as important as anything. That’s the life I wanted to save, not this one. This one belongs to someone else. It’s been waiting for someone to swallow up since before I was born. And if I let it do that to me, then I didn’t really save my life at all.”

“Don’t you love him?” Jane demanded, sounding horrified. “You have to love him, though. You’re his cognate. You have to be his cognate, and you have to love him.”

I rubbed my forehead. Did I love him? Last night, I had thought that I did. Dorian was icily remote, terribly controlled, but beneath that was a fire that burned so brightly I feared it would consume me. And that was mixed with his peculiar tenderness and consideration, and finally, under everything, that sadness, that deep well of grief that I could hardly touch.... I felt that I would give anything to wipe away that sadness, even though I sensed that I was, already, part of its cause.

Was that love? I didn’t know, but I was very much afraid that I couldn’t live without him anymore, with or without the bond.

But how could I accept it, if it meant that I’d never truly be free?

“I don’t know,” I said finally, heavily.

Disappointment flashed across Jane’s face.

“As you say, madam,” she murmured.

“God, Jane,” I snapped. I couldn’t deal with this, but I knew who could. Lisette, my best friend, was never at a loss for words. I knew just what she’d say. “I can’t be your imaginary dream cognate. I am who I am, okay? And I can’t—I won’t just throw myself away to make you or anyone else happy.”

“I don’t want you to make me happy,” Jane blurted. “I want to make you happy. That’s my job. Don’t you like your room? It may be too bland, I know, but I couldn’t know what you’d like.”

“I like the room just fine,” I said.

Jane didn’t seem reassured. “And you’ve hardly touched the clothes I picked for you except when you’ve had to. I really did try to get a wide selection because the clothes you came in were, well, very neutral in style.”

“The wardrobe was amazing.” I realized that we were already getting far off track. “Look, everything you’ve picked out is great. But it’s not mine. And you’re, well.... ” Oh, God, now I was dancing on the edge of a knife blade. I spoke carefully. “Dorian’s the one who arranged for me to have a lady’s maid. I’ve never had any servants or staff or anything like it, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to ask for a maid, not in a hundred lifetimes. It’s weird, okay?”

Jane’s face froze. “I fail to follow.”

Open mouth, insert foot. Okay, time to try again. “I mean it’s weird for me. Not weird, period. You’ve had the idea that you’d be my lady’s maid for years. I’ve had the idea that I’d have one for less than a week.”

She nodded fractionally, her eyebrows drawing together as she considered that. It was a start.

“You didn’t just become the perfect lady’s maid overnight, right?” I nudged.

She relaxed a little, her expression brightening. Who says flattery doesn’t work? “No, Cora. I’ve been working for years, always studying, keeping abreast of the latest fashions, and all that.”

“Right,” I said encouragingly. “Well, I think maybe being a...mistress takes practice, too.” I almost choked on the word. I didn’t know yet that I was going to be her mistress even a week longer, but I wouldn’t tell her that. “And I don’t have any. Practice, I mean. So please, just give me some leeway here, some benefit of the doubt. I’m trying to do right by everyone.”

The mask over her face slipped a little more. “I guess I forget that you haven’t studied all the same books that I have.”

“Exactly.” I decided whether I should press my temporary and unaccustomed advantage, and I decided to go for broke. “Maybe a lady’s maid is a friend, and maybe not, but you should at least be my ally.”

Jane looked startled, then stricken. “I’m sorry, Cora. I do want to be your ally. I just feel that you’re working against your own best interests. Against your heart.”

Of course she did. How else could she feel? She was in Dorian’s thrall. She would die at his word. “I know you feel that, Jane. You and Dorian both. I’m sure that we’ll work out something in time.”
If we have the time,
a little voice whispered in the back of my head. “Until then, I need you and all the rest of the staff here to not hate me.”

Jane looked scandalized. “Oh, we never would.”

“Right, then,” I said, hoping that she meant it. “So then—relax a little. Sit down.” I pointed to the chair across from me.

Jane instantly went rigid. “I don’t think that’s quite proper.”

“You’re supposed to be working for me, right?” I said. “Well, I can tell you right now that I’m absolutely not proper, and as long as you keep hoping that I will be, you’ll be disappointed. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way,
sit.
You make me nervous, standing over me.”

Jane crossed to the table and sat. Then, abruptly, all the remaining stiffness went out of her frame as if a barrier had been broken.

“I’ll still let you do my makeup and tell me what to wear, okay?” I promised. “Just don’t make me feel like I’m living in
Downton Abbey
. Seriously, I’d be no good at that.”

Jane cracked a smile. “Yes, Cora.”

“Have you had breakfast? Eat some of mine. I’m sure I’m letting down the chef every time I send back a platter more than half-full.”

She eyed the tray. “I’ve eaten already.”

“Then at least have a piece of bacon.”

I held the plate out toward her, and she stared at it for a long moment. Finally, almost as if it were against her will, she plucked a single piece off the top and nibbled it fastidiously.

“There, now,” I said, hoping that my bossing had done some good and I hadn’t just bullied a maid for no reason.

I dug into the cooling breakfast. The food tasted every bit as good as it looked. Jane still seemed at least moderately thawed, so I chalked up my first victory: Cora, 1; Dorian Thorne’s staff, 100. Or something like that.

“How exactly did you come to work for Dorian?” I asked after a moment of silence. “Did you answer an ad? ‘Ageless vampire seeking staff. Please apply only if adaptable to a Victorian lifestyle and undisturbed by the occasional puddle of blood.’”

I couldn’t help but see the parallels between Jane’s situation and my own. But I’d been forced into my arrangement with him—the bond that was formed when he first drank my blood had cured me of my terminal cancer even as it had sealed me to him as his consort.

Like all those who worked for Dorian, she was under a lesser kind of hold, a thrall, created when she consumed a tiny amount of her own blood mixed externally with his. This increased the agnate’s influence on a human so that he could control them even outside his presence by placing a compulsion on her to think and act a certain way.

I couldn’t quite handle the idea that someone would give someone else that power willingly without the kind of stakes that I had faced.

Jane finished the bacon and wiped her fingers carefully on a spare napkin. “My parents were in service,” she said. “When I was old enough, I chose to join them. The old lady’s maid was retiring, and there was a big competition for the position, but I won it in the end.”

“So...did you go to school? Like—” I was about to say
a regular person
, but I stopped myself and took a quick swallow of juice to cover my near-slip.

Jane’s lips twitched as if she were trying very hard not to smile. “Yes. My parents own a house in Gaithersburg, and I went to school there. Back then, of course, not quite as many girls went to college, but Mr. Thorne has demanded high standards of his lady’s maids forever, and even the one who was retiring had a home economics degree. So I applied at sixteen for the scholarship, you know, so I could take all the fashion, design, hospitality, and family and consumer sciences courses at the university.”

“What do you mean,
back then?”
I asked, a bit of blintz dangling on my fork. Jane only looked slightly older than I was.

“I graduated from high school in eighty-three,” she explained.

I looked at her again. No, it wasn’t possible—not even Hollywood stars managed to age that gracefully. “Okay, so what part am I missing about this going-into-service thing?” I asked. “Dorian said something about a thrall slowing aging somewhat, but that much?”

At that, she did smile. “It’s dependent on how often the thrall is renewed. One of Mr. Thorne’s researchers has been studying it in his spare time. We don’t heal as fast as you do, and we’re not as strong, and we have only slightly more resistance than regular humans to things like colds and the flu, but the slowed aging is considered one of the biggest perks of the position.”

“And that’s worth it to you? To let him into your head?” I pressed.

“Mr. Thorne only uses the thrall to ensure that we are perfectly loyal,” she said stiffly. “But of course, I would be, anyway, so mainly his thrall means that other agnates won’t try to corrupt us very often.”

“Like the one who caught you in the Best Buy parking lot did,” I said.

“Right,” she agreed, her face clouding. She’d been forced to betray me under the involuntary thrall of one of Dorian’s enemies, causing an assassin to be sent after me. “That hardly ever happens these days since everyone knows it will be discovered in a few weeks at the most when the original vampire’s thrall is renewed. But if Mr. Thorne didn’t use a thrall, all of us would constantly be in danger of other agnates pressing us into their service as spies.”

“And what happened to you was...different from Dorian’s thrall?” I was afraid that I was pushing a sore point, but she had nearly gotten me killed.

“When it’s something you wouldn’t want to do normally, it’s like a hand around your brain, making you think other things. It feels...wrong,” she explained, casting her eyes down at the breakfast tray.