A Dark Heart (2 page)

Some of the tension seemed to leave his body, but only a little. His eyes
continued their eerie glow, and his fangs – his
fangs
! –
remained extended, glinting silver in the moonlight. He continued to track
every movement she made with a predatory intensity that was both alarming and
... strangely arousing.

Her cheeks – her entire body – still burned, but it was no
longer solely from embarrassment. It was from something primal inside of her
responding to something primal inside of him. He looked like he wanted to eat
her. And she didn't think she would mind all that much if he did.

Dear God. What was happening? What had she done to him?

For a long time, all they could do was stare at each other, their heavy
breaths the only sounds in the room, aside from the ticking of the old ormolu
clock over the hearth. She attempted to rein in the dark and confusing urges coursing
through her body, desperately trying to focus on their most immediate concerns.

Namely his eyes. And his fangs.

She took a deep breath and slowly approached him, careful to avoid the
direct moonlight again. He tensed and backed away a few steps, still breathing
heavily. But no matter his dire warning, or the mounting desperation in his
expression, she knew he'd never hurt her, so she continued towards him until an
arm's length separated them and stared up into his transformed face.

Her breath caught in her throat as a fresh wave of heat passed through
her, low and deep. She was a tall woman, but standing so close to his towering
height never failed to make her feel petite, delicate. Now his proximity made
her whole body sizzle. She'd always been madly attracted to him, but this ...
this
was new. And she realized that it was because he was no longer looking at her
with studied indifference, as he had for the past six years. He was looking at
her with barely leashed, desperate hunger.

"What am I?" he whispered, his glowing eyes burning her to her
soul. "What have you made me?"

"I don't know," she whispered back.

"I can't die," he continued, anguished. "I've tried a
hundred times this past week."

She reeled with horror, her strange arousal suddenly doused by his stark
words. "Elijah, no! No!"

She reached out to him, but he shied away.

"I've stabbed myself through the heart. I've jumped from the tallest
buildings in the city. I've shot myself here, again and again," he said,
pointing to his temple. "But I always wake up."

Her stomach roiled with every horrifying revelation he made, her eyes
pricking with tears.

"I always wake up," he repeated, "and I'm always the same.
A monster."

"You're not a monster. I must have made you immortal, like me..."

"
Not like you
," he insisted. "I crave blood, Lady
Christiana. Human blood. The night you ...
turned
me and I ran away,
there was this fire in my body, growing and growing. And all I could think
about was finding you again,
taking
you and drinking you dry."

She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "Taking me..." she
rasped.

It spoke to her rising hysteria that she focused on
that
part of
his speech, rather than the part about drinking her dry.

His eyes pulsed even brighter. "I tried to resist, but in the end I
couldn't. I returned to the alley where you'd found me. You weren't there. But
the body of that woman was."

Christiana nodded numbly, remembering the woman that night – one of
the Ripper's victims, whom Elijah had been too late to save. Her stomach sank.
She had a bad feeling about what he would say next.

"She was cut open. Dead. But the blood ... The blood was everywhere,
and the moment I scented it, I couldn't control myself. The thirst was too
much." He paused and looked away, unable to meet her eyes a moment longer.
"I found out that night that the best tasting blood in a corpse is in the
liver and the heart."

She couldn't help it. The tears flowed down her cheeks, and her heart
felt as if had been mortally bruised. What had she done?

"And the next night, when I had my fangs buried deep in the neck of
someone
living
, I discovered that I liked the taste of it fresh and warm
even better," he finished bleakly.

"No!" she cried, "Tell me you didn't..."

The dark look he gave her made it impossible for her to continue.
Sobbing, she took his face between her hands, made him focus on her despite his
attempts to look away. And as if he couldn't help himself, he leaned in close,
so close their foreheads were almost touching. She could see the dark stubble
on his chin, the deep groove of the mysterious scar on his cheek that hadn't
healed, and the way his nostrils flared, as if he were absorbing her scent into
his blood.

And she could see the fangs, gleaming in the moonlight. Long, thin and
metallic, they weren't of the natural world. She just didn't understand how it
was possible, how her blood could change him so profoundly.

"My God, Elijah, I'm sorry," she murmured, sliding her hand
towards a fang. She couldn't seem to help herself.

She gasped as the skin on her finger ripped apart at the barest touch
against the razor sharp edge. She pulled her hand away, or at least she tried
to. But she wasn't fast enough.

With lightning-quick speed, he caught her by the wrist with one hand, and
with the other hand jerked her body tight against his own. Something dangerous
flashed over his glowing eyes. With a moan, he took her bleeding finger into
his mouth and sucked the blood from it.

Shocked and more aroused than she'd ever been before, she slumped
helplessly against him. She couldn't take her eyes off the sight of her finger
between his lips. She couldn't stop the slow, delicious burn deep in her core
at the feel of his hot, wet mouth against her skin, his hard, lean body pressed
against her own.

Then he slowly released her finger from its prison, his tongue snaking
out to lap up the last drops of blood from her rapidly healing cut. "So
sweet," he murmured, and she moaned in response as he rolled his hips
against her own.

Dear God, she could feel him.
All
of him.

When the wound was no more, healed as if it never was, he released her
wrist and gripped the back of her head. Holding her tight to him – too
tight – he tilted her boneless body back, lowering his head towards her
neck, his entire body shuddering against her. And in the last corner of her
mind not overcome with the fog of desire, she knew that she should start to
worry. She was fairly certain he was going to bite her with his fangs.

And she was going to let him.

"All the blood I've had this week, and still it's not enough,"
he murmured against her throat, each glance of his lips against her skin
sending gooseflesh all over her body. "I want more. I want
yours
,
more than my next breath." He pressed his hips against her own again,
sending a shockwave of sensation through her lower body. "I want to strip
you bare and come inside you, again and again, as I suck you dry," he
whispered against her ear.

She didn't know whether to be aroused or horrified by his words. She was
a confusing mix of both, as she swayed helplessly in his arms.

But she had to believe one thing of him, for if she didn't, if she
couldn't
,
she might as well let him do his worst there and then. She'd turned him into a
dangerous, unpredictable creature she'd not even begun to understand, but he
was still Elijah. He was still the little boy she'd befriended a lifetime ago.

He was still the man she loved.

"You'd never hurt me, Elijah," she said softly.

And – this time at least – he proved her right. With an
anguished whimper, he released her, tracing in the blink of an eye to the other
side of the room.

She reeled in place for a moment, regaining her equilibrium, before she
turned to face him again. He was thrumming with tension, his broad shoulders
heaving beneath his shirt, his eyes burning her down to her toes.

"Don't tell me I'm not a monster," he hissed, still trembling,
still on a knife’s edge. "You did this to me. You made me into this ...
thing
.
This craving, horrible, deathless
thing
. Make it stop.
Please
."

"I don't know how," she whispered through her tears.

"Rowan must..."

"They'll kill you! If Rowan and the others know what I've done,
they'll kill you!"

"Good. Then there
is
a way," he said, relieved, and he
actually started towards her bedroom door, as if prepared to seek out Rowan
immediately – to seek his death. And after everything he’d told her, she
knew he would.

She'd never been so terrified – for him, for herself. She had to
stop him, and she could think of only one way to do so, though she knew he
would hate her even more for it.

"They'll kill
me
!" she cried.

He stopped in his tracks and slowly, reluctantly, turned back to her. The
fangs were gone, and his eyes were no longer glowing. He looked as if he'd been
kicked in the gut.

"Tell me this is another of your lies," he breathed.

She shook her head. "I made an oath when Rowan bonded me, and
breaking it is punishable by death."

"I don't believe you," he whispered. "How can I believe a
word out of your lying mouth?"

She wished she
were
lying. As much as Rowan loved her, as much as
she loved him, his duties as an Elder would force his hand. Now that she saw
with her own eyes the horrifying consequences of her actions, she knew deep in
her bones that Rowan and the Elder Council wouldn't let this betrayal slide.

"I would not lie about this. Rowan would have no choice. He's a
powerful man, but there are others like him who are even more powerful. They'll
kill you, and they'll kill me."

He believed her. She could see it in the complete bleakness in his
expression, the sudden stillness of his body. As if she'd snatched the last of
his hope away. The sight of his defeat was soul-wrenching.

He truly wanted to die, but he couldn't condemn her to the same fate. And
it destroyed him.

It nearly destroyed her.

He drifted away from the door and towards the open casement window as if
in a fog. She followed, careful to not touch him. She suspected that if she did
so now, he wouldn't be able to control himself.

"We'll figure this out. We'll find a way to fix this," she
said, cringing at the ridiculous inanity of her words. There was no way out of
this nightmare, and they both knew it.

He stopped, gripping the edge of the sill until his knuckles were white
with the strain, his head bowed. "There is no
fixing
me. And there
is no
we
, my Lady," he said coldly. "You've done quite enough.
Stay far away from me. I've restrained myself tonight ... God knows how. I
cannot guarantee I will do so again." He leapt upon the windowsill, his
massive body blocking out the moonlight, his white shirt billowing in the wind.

"I just wanted you to live," she murmured to his back.

He shook his head. "Bloody hell, you're selfish, just as you were
all those years ago. You and your bloody father, wanting to
save
me. You
never stopped to ask me if I
wanted
to be saved. Because I
didn't." He shot her a look over his shoulder, and she recoiled from
the anguish blazing in his eyes. "I wanted to die then. And I wanted to die
last week, and I'll hate you forever for not letting me."

Then he jumped from her window, at least thirty feet above the back
garden, and disappeared into the deep, impenetrable darkness of London as if he
were no more than a shadow.

And all she could think for the longest time as she stared, freezing and
hopeless, into the black gloom, was that he should have just tossed her out the
window with him, alongside her shattered heart.

HIS mother
had loved him enough to earn the blunt to pay for his Iron Necklace. She’d loved
him enough to give him a name of a beautiful prophet, but she hadn't loved him
enough to stay alive. She'd died before he could remember her face, her voice,
even her name. But he doubted it would have made any difference had she lived.
She couldn’t have saved him from his fate. She was just a whore, after all.

He'd not understood why the other whores had abandoned him after she’d
died either, but he understood now. They'd been doing him a kindness, in their
own way, even though that kindness had been accompanied by cold winter nights
and an empty stomach. They'd thrown him out of the brothel because he had
inherited his mother's beauty and their pimp had begun to take notice ... and
make plans.

He'd been four years old.

He'd survived two winters on his own, living on the fringes of the
vicious flash house crews along the Strand, before the pimp had found him
again. It had been inevitable, because the man had expanded his business and
practically owned every whore, thief and bullyboy in the East End. Everyone
called him Newgate Nick on the streets and Mr. O'Connor to his face. Elijah
called him Sir, because he'd learned what happened when he didn't.

Newgate Nick called
him
the Molly, or sometimes Laddie in
his thick Irish burr when he was feeling generous, but never the name his
mother had given him. He’d probably forgotten it. And when he was selling
Elijah to a rich nob, he called Elijah words like beautiful, lovely, and eager
to please, even though the latter was a lie. Elijah was not eager. He was
broken.

But when Newgate Nick used Elijah for himself, the names the pimp
called him were too awful to repeat, even in Elijah's head. He knew they were
awful, because they made him feel awful, almost as awful as the things the man did
to him.

Elijah wished he'd known what would happen if O’Connor found him
again, wished he’d understood what the whores had tried to explain to him when
he was a four-year-old boy. He would have tried harder to disappear, to never
be found. Now it was too late for him.

Two years of this life, and he could barely remember a time before he
was Newgate Nick's Laddie, when he was as green as the boy and girl he watched
from the doorway of Newgate Nick's private office. The two children had come in
with the meanest of O'Connor's foot soldiers – the ones who liked to hurt
Elijah when they were bored – and the giant, pale stranger with the
horrible yellow wolf eyes who often visited.

The stranger frightened him more than the bullyboys, even though the
man had never raised a hand to him, or taken him into the back room, as most of
O'Connor's visitors did. It was the sound of the man's voice, the
barrenness
of it. It was the way even Newgate Nick, the monster of all of Elijah's
dreams, seemed to flinch when the man so much as lifted an eyebrow.

Elijah didn't want to attract the attention of the man who could
frighten a bastard like O'Connor. So he always kept to the shadows when the
stranger visited, his eyes trained on the floor.

He'd long ago learned to avoid eye contact with monsters.

But it was hard to do so tonight. The stranger's arrival was so
unexpected that O'Connor had been forced to stop in the middle of smashing
Elijah’s face against the sticky burled wood of his desk and ripping his
trousers down his legs. When O’Connor had heard the stranger calling his name, he’d
cursed and practically run from the room. The man was still rearranging his own
untidy clothing over his paunch as he eyed the stranger's two captives.

The children were bound with ropes, just as Elijah had been when
O'Connor had brought him here two years ago. That was not what drew Elijah's
unwilling interest as he hovered in the shadows of the doorway, however. The sight
of someone bound – or worse – was nothing new under this roof. But
the fact that the two were twins was a novelty. They were identical, save that
one was a boy and one was a girl, and they were dressed in clothes only a nob's
children might wear, all thick, fancy velvets, fragile lace and sparkling gold
buttons. They were younger than Elijah, with curly hair the color of moonbeams,
so pale it was almost white, and wide silver-gray eyes, set in bloodied,
tear-streaked faces.

Elijah shivered as he finished fastening his torn trousers. Now he
knew what terror looked like. He'd felt it often enough – had felt it
seconds before, in fact, inside Newgate Nick’s office as he’d braced himself
for the pain he knew was coming – but he’d never seen it in another
person.

And he knew now what love must look like, from the way the twins both
strained towards each other, despite their bonds, despite the turmoil around
them. They weren’t even able to touch, but they wanted to desperately, as if
somehow they could save each other if only they could hold hands. It was
ridiculous, and even more ridiculous that Elijah imagined such a story at all,
for while he was old friends with terror, the idea of love was a stranger to
him. More than a stranger. A fairytale. And as Newgate Nick had demonstrated
time and again, a fairytale was just a fancy word for a lie.

Even so, something shivered down his body as he watched the twins, something
made him twine his arms around his torso and edge further into the shadows in
the doorway, filled with shame. The bond between them was so … bright, despite
their bruises and scrapes. Bright and clean … and good. He knew he had no
business going anywhere near them, for he was none of those things. He doubted
he’d ever been.

“So you found the little buggers,” O’Connor was saying, tucking in his
shirttails.

“No thanks to you,” the wolf-eyed toff said coldly, looking disgusted
by O’Connor’s slovenliness.

O’Connor was scared, even more so after the stranger’s cutting words. Elijah
could feel the fear clear across the room. But as usual, O’Connor tried to
brazen his way through it. “I would have had them by the week’s end, if you’d
given me a chance.”

“Not good enough,” the man murmured, producing a wicked looking knife
from the folds of his dark cloak. “Your incompetence is beginning to bore me. I
do not like to be bored with my investments. And I like inconveniences even
less. Shall I demonstrate what happens to those who inconvenience me,
Nicholas?”

O’Connor looked as if he was prepared to argue further, but he didn’t
get the chance. The toff moved almost too quickly to see – definitely too
quickly to be real. When he was done, one of the twins – the boy –
was falling to the floor, a look of shock on his young face, and the girl was
screaming.

Elijah had seen horrible things all of his life, but even he had to
look away from the boy’s writhing, gurgling body. The toff had gutted him, wide
and deep. And it seemed to take forever for the twitches to stop and his pale gray
eyes to glaze over in death.

O’Connor had gone pale beneath his swagger, but Elijah couldn’t even
find satisfaction in this. He was too frightened himself, too stunned. The boy
had been no older than he was when he’d first come to this place.

“Damn it. I could have used that lad!” O’Connor growled.

The toff’s lips curled at the edges, and he glanced down at the girl,
who continued to scream, her eyes trained on her brother’s now lifeless body.
He raised the bloody knife over her head, and Elijah sucked in his breath,
clutching the edge of the door to keep himself from…

He didn’t know what he wanted to do. Push that girl from harm’s way
before the man killed her too. Run away. Scream. Anything. But he was petrified
with fear, just as he’d been for two years.

All the man did was cuff her against the side of the head with the
wrong end of the knife until she was so disoriented she stopped crying. Then he
shoved her towards O’Connor.

“Take this one,” he said. “I should kill her too, but I think giving
her to you shall be more … fitting. She’s given me more trouble than her
sniveling brother. She needs to learn she’s nothing.”

Nothing
. That was how Elijah felt…

And as he met the girl’s giant silver-gray eyes, filled with such
devastation and defiance, across the room, he suddenly knew he couldn’t let
O’Connor have her. He couldn’t let that horrible yellow-eyed stranger win, or
allow the girl to endure even a second of what Elijah had endured. He’d rather
the stranger gut her alongside her brother than see her turned into a gutter
whore like him. It would be kinder.

It would be kinder still to save her from either fate.

He had become an expert at moving through the brothel like a shadow,
so no one paid any notice to him as he skirted the edges of the room, towards
the old fireplace with its stand of wrought-iron tools next to it. No one paid
attention as he upturned every gas lamp that he passed, the flames jumping to
follow the spilled fluid across dry wood floors and dusty carpet. No one paid
attention as he retrieved the sharp, pointed poker from the hearth and walked
in O’Connor’s direction. They were all too busy arguing with each other.

By the time they noticed the smoke and flames beginning to fill the
room, Elijah was within arm’s length of his tormentor, and he was shaking. With
rage. Pure rage. He’d stopped feeling fear, stopped wanting to run away the
moment he’d looked into the girl’s eyes and saw her inevitable fate.

“Sir,” he said in the quiet, breathy tone O’Connor liked best from him.
O’Connor turned absently in his direction while his men scrambled to put out
the fast-spreading inferno.

He knew he’d not have another chance to get it right, to have surprise
on his side, so he lunged forward with all of his strength and sent the poker
precisely where he’d dreamed of sending it in hundreds of his darkest
fantasies. The sharp end quickly tore through the thin fabric of O’Connor’s
trousers and kept going, straight in the direction of the man’s groin.

Elijah was rather shocked how easily it went in. He’d been certain
he’d not have enough strength to leave more than a small wound. But he’d had
two years of fury on his side, and absolutely nothing to lose. He could feel
the metal shaft tearing its way through flesh and sinew, hitting something hard
and impenetrable at the other end. Bone, perhaps.

O’Connor howled and fell down with the poker sticking out of his
privates, blood gushing everywhere. The sight was almost comical, almost made
Elijah laugh. It certainly made him happy.

Only eight years old, and he was
happy
to kill a man.

At least he hoped he’d killed him.

O’Connor’s men, even the yellow-eyed stranger, were too busy stopping
the fire to go after him, so he was able to move across the smoke-filled room
unimpeded. The girl, now free of her captors in the chaos, clutched her
brother’s body close, despite her bonds. Elijah’s heart did a strange flip at
the sight, but he ignored it and jerked the girl to her feet, unlacing the
ropes from her wrists.

When he was done, he pushed her towards the exit. “Run.”

She shook her head and tried to return to her brother, but Elijah
shoved her hard, angrily.  He didn’t know why he cared so much about
saving the girl, but he was not about to let her ruin everything now because
she couldn’t let go of her dead brother.

So he gave her a reason to live, the same reason he gave himself every
day when he was close to giving in to his despair. “Go now, or you’ll never get
to make them pay.”

The girl stopped struggling at those words and looked straight into
his eyes, sucking in her breath. Whatever she saw there made her nod her head
and straighten her shoulders. After bending down once more to her brother and
removing something from around his neck, she ran from the room.

Elijah moved to follow her.

But then the yellow-eyed toff stepped into his path, and Elijah felt
himself flying through the air, his vision going black. It took a moment for
the crushing pain to catch up with him, and for him to realize he’d been hit
hard, straight in his right eye. Before he could even land, the toff was there
once more, his angry face swimming in and out of Elijah’s stuttering vision.

“Worthless gutter whore,” the man spat from above him as Elijah
crashed against a wall. He felt fractured in a million pieces.

The man raised his hand, and somehow Elijah knew that one more blow
was all that it would take to finish him. The man was inhumanly strong, and it
would be so easy to just let the man end it all, to stop struggling in this
life. For it was clear now that he would not be leaving the brothel tonight
with the tow-headed girl.

He should have known things would end badly for him. They always did.

He spied something shiny sticking out of the man’s waistcoat. The
knife, still wet with the blond boy’s blood.

He couldn’t figure out how he managed to find the strength to reach
for the knife. Nor could he figure out how he managed to use the knife,
slitting through the man’s raised forearm in one deep pass of the blade.

The man cursed in surprise and pulled away, but not before Elijah
noticed something even more horrifying than anything else he’d seen that
evening. Elijah didn’t know what it was sizzling up through the rip in the
man’s jacket, but it didn’t look like blood. And when it spattered down one
side of Elijah’s face, it certainly didn’t
feel
like blood.

It felt like a thousand knives stabbing him all at once, down to his
skull.