W
hen Jane opened the door to the mezzanine, a cacophony of voices and banging almost drove me back inside. I hesitated in the doorway before carefully stepping out to look over the railing into the salon below.
And then I really did have to stop myself from running back into my bedroom.
The salon
teemed. Dozens of people crisscrossed the room, men in sharp black suits threading their way among various tradesmen. Some were carting in great armloads of flowers. Others carried screens, urns, and statues, even rolling in ice sculptures and fountains. Pacing around the chaos, a woman with a tablet and a notebook snapped orders as she orchestrated the groupings of furniture into a different configuration. At her direction, two men rolled out a long red carpet from the foot of one leg of the stairs all the way to the center of the room in front of a massive object that reached halfway to the ceiling, hidden under a black drape.
My heart beat a little faster.
The introduction had not seemed quite real before—it was hard to imagine the echoing mausoleum of a mansion filled with light and noise and people. Now the immediacy of it settled over me, and I realized that the scale of it was beyond anything I’d imagined. I would be standing with Dorian in that room soon, facing how many agnates I couldn’t even guess, including, quite possibly, more than one who wanted me dead.
What had I
gotten myself into?
Clarissa and another agnate stood
on either side of my door—more guards, I realized, just to make sure that I was safe amid the bustle of preparations. Clarissa shot me a grin.
“Just keeping you in one piece until the party,” she said brightly.
“But there’s nothing to worry about. More of Dorian’s paranoia.”
Right.
The other agnate didn’t even acknowledge me, but they both fell in behind as Worth led the way downstairs, stepping carefully around the runner to the colonnade passageway. I padded behind her in my robe with the guards following. No one seemed to notice me. It seemed strange to be so invisible since the introduction was, at least supposedly, all about me.
I
guessed that I would only matter once I came out to play my part, an actor in a set piece.
“The mistress, Mr. Thorne,
” Worth announced sententiously as she opened the door to the study that Dorian had interviewed her in two nights before.
“I’
m nobody’s
mistress
,” I said automatically as I stepped inside.
At my entrance, Dorian stood and crossed the room to meet me, his hair perfectly
combed as always, a smile of greeting on his inhumanly handsome face. My breath felt squeezed in my chest. He was wearing suit pants and a matching vest with a real-life smoking jacket over it. It had a deep cowl collar, silk tassels, and everything.
The sight of him brought back a too-vivid flood of memories—his mouth on mine, his hands across my naked body, writhing beneath him as he filled me—
His expression left no shadow of doubt that his mind was in the same place when he looked at me.
I shook my head to clear it and then said, lightly,
“Channeling Hugh Hefner?”
“What?”
He followed my gaze downward, then scowled. “I’ll have you know that the smoking jacket was the preferred loungewear of gentlemen long before that panderer corrupted it.”
A tiny giggle escaped me, and h
e looked up sharply. His eyes narrowed with the realization that I was teasing. I got the sense that he wasn’t used to anyone joking with him in that way.
He put on an expression of mock sternness
. “And what does the wardrobe of a woman of your elevated sartorial sense look like?”
“You’ve pretty much seen it. Mostly jeans and yoga pants and t-shirts,” I admitted. “Some sweaters and sweatshirts, too, for variety.”
Dorian
hooked his arm in mine in the easy, old-fashioned mannerism that he had, and a shiver went through me. It was so peculiar, like something out of a movie, that it should have felt awkward. But it didn’t. I was with him again, breathing the air of the same room, touching him, if only through our clothing. My body prickled with a glad awareness, my breath coming quicker despite my attempt as self-control.
He led me to
the leather sofa, positioned between the two club chairs that Jane and I had occupied two nights before. I sat at one end, cautiously. He took a seat diagonally against the wide arm, hooking a leg up onto the cushion between us with careless grace.
“
You must keep the tabloids busy,” he said.
I
shook my head ruefully at the memory of the djinn Finnegan and his camera. “I guess I do, if Finnegan’s got any company. Are there such things as vampire tabloids?”
“There are underground presses of various sorts,” Dorian admitted.
“But you don’t go to the papers for the truth. If you want to know the real news, you have to be among the people who create it.”
“
And you’re one of those.” It wasn’t a question.
“
Of course.”
“
Today—this introduction is going to be news, too,” I said. “Because of your research.”
“Yes.
There will be much gnashing of teeth among my enemies.”
My smile was tight.
I knew that Dorian had meant that as a light sort of joke, but given that we were talking about vampires, the figure of speech made me just a little queasy.
“Do you approve of Worth’s efforts?” he asked
after a moment, his wave encompassing my hair and makeup.
“Whatever you’re paying her, it’s not enough,” I said
fervently.
He fell silent again
, and I fidgeted, knotting my hands in my lap. There must be something important, something he’d decided to tell me, or else he wouldn’t have called me down here just before the party. However good his staff was, there must have been a hundred other things for him to do.
But he just propped
one hand under his chin, tracing the aquiline bridge of his own nose with his eyebrows drawn together in a way I had begun to recognize as unease.
I waited, shifting uncomfortably, afraid of what he didn’t want to say.
Abruptly, he motioned to the coffee table, which was set with a tray with various pots and arrayed with a variety of finger foods. “Tea? Coffee?”
It was
an offer to fill the silence between us, the closest that he had ever come to betraying uncertainty around me.
“Thanks.”
I hadn’t developed the usual college student coffee addiction, so I poured a cup of tea instead.
What could be so awful that he didn’t want to tell me?
I swallowed too quickly, and the hot tea burnt my tongue and throat, making me cough as I hurriedly set the cup down.
Still, Dorian was silent.
“So. My first vampire party,” I said. “I’m hoping that people-eating is not involved.” I was joking. Mostly.
“Not in a
Lesser Introduction,” he said dryly.
I could hear the capital letters, and I frowned as
I sipped the tea again—this time with more care.
“I thought that ‘lesser’ would mean, you know,
less
.” I waved toward the door to encompass the preparations that were taking place outside. “That doesn’t look like less than any party I’ve ever been to. Maybe less compared to Times Square at New Year’s, or maybe less than some sort of crazy Roman bash where they ate flamingo’s tongue and hummingbirds and then threw it all up in a vomitorium before going back for sevenths, but not less compared to the sorts of parties normal people imagine.”
That teased a slight smile out of Dorian, the crease between his eyes easing fractionally.
“It’s not lesser because it’s a small party. It’s lesser because a Grand Introduction is considered more important. A Lesser Introduction is when a cognate—in this case, you—is formally introduced to agnatic society during a party that generally features a greeting period, a buffet dinner, and dancing.”
“Like a
debutante ball from hell,” I said without thinking.
Dorian ignored the
from hell
part and said, “Almost exactly like a debutante ball, except in this case, the debutante is always already taken.”
It was all about me without being about
me
at all. I again had the sense of being pushed into a blank space that had been waiting for the first person who happened to fit it. It was like a Cinderella story that started with the glass slipper instead of ending with it.
“
So what would a Grand Introduction be?” I prompted.
Dorian’s expression went very still.
“A coming-of-age party for a vampire.”
“Com
ing-of-age?” I asked, making a face over such an archaic phrase.
“When a member of our society is considered to reach full adulthood, which among us is judged to be age
forty,” he said with equanimity.
“Forty.
That’s like half a lifetime,” I said.
“For humans,” Dorian pointed out.
Not for agnates, of course. And not for cognates, either.
I’d seen all too clearly how terrible age could be
through my Gramma, as much as she’d tried to hide it. To be spared that, to have a body that would never fail me the way hers had failed her—hell, the way cancer had caused mine to fail me….
Would it really be such a sacrifice?
All I would be giving up would be…myself, giving myself over to be shaped to Dorian’s will. And after a while, there wouldn’t be a single person left in the world who even remembered Cora Shaw, the human. Only what Dorian would turn me into.
The thought of it made a cold, hard knot in the pit of my stomach.
“Point taken,” I said.
“Forty is the age at which most vampires must begin
to consume human blood,” Dorian continued. “It used to be a more…primal ceremony among many of our people. Now it is simply a dinner and dance, not too much different from a Lesser Introduction.”
I shu
ddered, visualizing all too clearly what he meant by
primal
. But even that couldn’t prevent the re-emergence of the thought that had kept rising in my mind over the past three days.
“You
still haven’t told me how vampires are born. And don’t try to deflect me this time. It’s not going to work,” I added, even though I knew it wasn’t true.
Dorian
looked at me for a long moment, and I realized that this was the information he had summoned me here to tell me all along.
“
This you must know before your introduction begins, for you would surely find out during it. Cognates are more than just nourishment and pleasure, Cora.”
M
y stomach dropped, and I set my teacup down so hard that some of the hot liquid sloshed over the edge. It wasn’t that I didn’t suspect. There were only a limited number of answers he might have given, and that was one of them. I’d just refused to allow myself to fully think about that possibility.
Until now.
I put my hands protectively over my midsection. “You told me that I couldn’t get pregnant!”
“You can’t,” he said quickly.
“Not yet, at any rate. Not so soon after a bond is formed. It takes years for that part of a conversion to take place—always at least five, often as long as ten.”
I glared at him.
“I didn’t trust you, you know. I went to the Health Center for birth control pills.”
“I know.
They won’t hurt you—give you a headache, perhaps—but they won’t have any effect on you now, one way or another.”
Right.
The headache I’d had since taking the first pill yesterday afternoon. “You could have said something.”
“Would you have believed me?
Do you even believe me now?”
I stopped.
He was right. It didn’t really make a difference because he had already told me that I couldn’t get pregnant, and I hadn’t trusted him then—had not trusted my own trust in what he had said.
But now a new thought came
to me, the realization slow and terrible. Not only could I get pregnant by him, eventually at least, but any child I had with him would be another vampire. A killer.
A
ll my old dreams seemed to mock me. The job, the house, the husband, the kids….
To be a cognate, tied to Dorian forever, living in his great, cold, echoing mansion and bearing him children that would grow up to be monsters just like him
….
“I won’t do it,” I said
, standing abruptly. “I can’t. What kind of person would give birth to a child they’d know would grow up to be a murderer?”
“It’s not murder, Cora,” he said
, looking up at me.
“Yes, because you’re not human,” I snapped.
“I’ve heard it all before. I don’t care. You still kill people to live, a lot of people. And I’m not going to make more of you.”
“Do you suppose your existence would be a threat if
you didn’t?” Dorian said. He hadn’t moved, but his casual posture was now belied by the tension in his frame. I could sense the darkness seething around him, wrapped tightly to him as if grasped in an iron control.
I didn’t understand him.
“What do you mean?”
“
Think,
Cora.” His words came out rapidly, like gunfire. “This is a war of ideology, one that I was bound to lose through the tyranny of arithmetic. Those agnates who believe that humans should be used for their pleasure, who give human life no value—they eat whenever they feel the urge, not restricting themselves to what it takes to maintain life and health. So they find cognates, and they have children, children they raise to be like themselves. An agnate who restrains himself would have to live more than two thousand years, on average, to find a cognate. Most of us don’t even last that long!”
“So?” I demanded.
“Until you, Cora, our ideology has been doomed to extinction because we cannot reproduce ourselves. To take our stance would be to say that all vampires, everywhere, should eventually die out—and as much as you despise us, that is something very few of us want. And if those of us who share my beliefs die out, there is no one to oppose those who wish to be humanity’s rulers. Whatever you think of how agnates live now, how I live, without the agnates like me, it would be a thousand times worse for humans.”
The logic was merciless, leading to a single conclusion.
“No,” I said, not because he was wrong but because I wanted him to be.
Dorian continued. “But now you’re here, proof that there is another way. You promise an end to the killing of humans and also a future life for us. We are born to crave you, Cora. Without a cognate, we are like half a soul. There are agnates who have restrained themselves for hundreds of years, who have gone without that other half because they could not stomach the killing any longer, but it is hard for us, harder than you can believe. And we want children, too, just like every living thing does. We fear our end perhaps even more than humans do because our lives are so much longer, and our children are how we, like you, can make something that continues long after we’re gone.”
T
he full and terrible implications sank into my mind.
I was
the symbol of his ideology, and bearing his children was an integral part of that role. Perhaps the most important part. In other circumstances, in another time, perhaps I could have convinced him that what he proposed was beyond what I could stand. But as it was, I couldn’t hope to escape the full obligations of a cognate. The stakes were too high.
It was, as it had always been, far bigger than me.
And now I knew what it would take for Dorian to deliberately change me. Because there was no way I could ever agree to this.
I should stay silent, I knew.
Even objecting was dangerous. I could feel it, but I couldn’t hold my peace. Not about this. It was too important and too horrifying.
“
You expect me to…” I pointed from him to me and back, unable to even say it. “With you.”
“To bear my children,” he said.
“Yes, Cora, I do.”
“So I’m breeding stock,” I said.
“I’m supposed to make more of you. More monsters. God, Dorian, don’t you see what’s wrong with that? You say that the other agnates view humans as cattle. You think a…a broodmare is any better? You think that I’m here to make babies for you, babies who will all grow up to be serial killers!”
“No,” he said
quietly. “That is what my research is for. They will not have to kill because they will find cognates, perhaps with their very first feeding. They won’t have to continue the cycle of death. We can all break free.”
“One in one hundred, Dorian,” I said.
“Those were my odds of survival.
That
is supposed to break the cycle? How?”
His jaw tightened for an instant.
“It’s only the first step. At first, our research could only eliminate half of those who wouldn’t survive, then it could screen out ninety percent—by the time you came, ninety-nine. Soon, we’ll be able to eliminate ninety-nine point nine, and one in ten will make it. And the other nine, like you, will chose to take the chance rather than face certain death. How is that not a good thing?”
“
Because the other nine will still die, even then,” I said. “And if it was my child who took that life, my heart would break.”
“What if your
human child became a doctor who only worked on the most lethal cases?” he returned. “What if he developed a procedure that would save some who would otherwise die, but would hasten the death of the remainder?”
I shook my head.
“It’s not the same. You forget that I lay there, on that couch, and I could feel…I could feel everything. I have a better idea of what you are than you think, and I can’t have that for my children.” I closed my eyes. “I can’t even believe I’m talking about this. Children. Like it might be real. Like it could happen. I’m not having babies with anybody right now. Not you, not anyone.”
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“Not yet. Ten years is a very long time for someone as young as you.”
Ten years.
Ten years with him. In that time, he could persuade me of almost anything, without even meaning to do so. Black what white, good was evil. Ten years as his cognate—I couldn’t even imagine how much of myself could be eroded in that time, by the force of his will.
He wouldn’t have to bend
my mind at that point. It would already be bent to him.
I thought of the preparations for the party that were taking place just beyond the door to the study.
The celebration of my arrival, of a once-human to put in the hole carved out for me so long ago—mate, blood-giver, and mother.
I opened my eyes.
“No,” I said aloud.
“What?”
His gaze raked across my face. I could feel the force of his will around me, and he seemed to grow, tendrils of darkness extending out from him.
But
I couldn’t sit back while he shaped me, slowly, and pretended that he’d done nothing. I’d been too afraid of what he might do to defy him before. Yet he might as well have scrambled my brain already if I was too frightened to resist him. I had to stop this, if I could, before it was too late.
And I had to find out exactly how much of myself was at risk
, to what measures he would go to force my obedience when the stakes were so high.
What if he
makes you want to stay, want to have his children?
a voice whispered inside my head.
What if he messes with your mind and then makes you happy about the change?
I took a breath.
“No,” I repeated. My voice was high and clear, each word carefully chosen. “No. I won’t be introduced tonight. I can’t do it. And if it means being the mother to your children, I’m not going to be your cognate.”
“
It’s not something you can choose,” he said, sounding more weary than angry as he stood.
I shook my head, backing toward the door.
“It has to be. The world is full of choices. Maybe…maybe I’ll go crazy without you. But I’ll just have to, because even that’s better than the alternative.”
He stepped toward me, the power gathering around him.
“The time for choices was the night you arrived here. If I had told you all this, then, would it have made a difference?”
I thought of the madness that had come over me that night, the recklessness, my willingness
to let everything go—and my desperation to live. And I couldn’t say for certain that it would have.
Dorian started to re
ach out. I jerked back out of his reach because I knew what would happen if he touched me. I could feel his influence over me, almost palpable, calling me to him, but I hardened myself against it.
“I won’t stay, Dorian.
I won’t be a part of this.”
“The guests will be arriving in less than two hours.”
His mouth was hard, his pale skin like marble, and the darkness pulsed around him, reaching outward, reaching for me. There was nothing human about him now, nothing tender in his pale, flat eyes, nothing for me to hang my hope on as he closed the space between us. “Whether you like it or not, you are a part of this world now. You have a role to fulfill. A role you
must
fulfill.”
A role as his
cognate. My mind balked at the ludicrousness of it, but I could feel his influence washing around me, swallowing me in it, taking my will apart piece by piece. I struggled to hold onto my determination, but the harder I grasped for it, the faster it slipped away until only the memory remained.
He didn’t even have to touch me.
My will dissolved at his merest desire.
I had my answer.
I knew now what he’d do, what he’d take. I had been selected for a role, and he would not permit me to do less than fulfill it completely, because it was only in that role that he desired me.
And my heart ached with the weight of that knowledge
.
Dorian
stopped a foot away. He raised his hand and brushed my cheek softly, and in spite of everything, I leaned into his touch, even though I hated myself for it.
“
I am sorry, Cora,” he said. “This is greater than both of us.”
And the remnants of my resistance were gone with that, torn from my mind, and I knew I would do whatever he asked of me.
I blinked back tears.
“Stay.
It is only one night,” he said gently.
He didn’t need to demand
any longer. I couldn’t refuse him because he’d taken that away from me. But it wasn’t just one night—it was the first night, the first of thousands that would lead me, one step at a time, where I didn’t want to go.
“You know I
have to,” I said. “You’ve made me. And you don’t even understand that there is anything wrong with that.”
Dorian pu
lled me against his chest then, and my body yielded to his, as it must.
He spoke into my hair.
“You still don’t understand what’s at stake, Cora. You might think that you do, but you can’t. Not yet. I hope you’ll forgive me when you do.”
“Will I have a choice
?” I whispered.
He loosened his hold and stepped away, his eyes shadowed with a grief I couldn’t name.
“Yes,” he said. “I promise. This is going to be a difficult night for you. I can’t help that. This is a tradition that I must honor even as I insist that you honor it. But I want you to listen to me closely, and keep these words in mind no matter what you see tonight.”
A chill went up my spine, and I started to speak, but he placed a finger across my lips.
I swayed slightly at the touch, and he looked down at me with such intensity that I swallowed.