Bastien lay back.
Thank you for the comfortable coffin, brother. I realize I hadn’t shown
my appreciation.
Damn Bastien’s irreverence, his refusal to be serious about anything.
Do you understand
that you have to help me fight Zayan?
And risk my own bloody arse?
For Althea’s sake, yes. I’ll accept nothing less from you, Bastien. If you don’t, I swear I’ll
destroy you myself—
Leaving no one to protect Althea? Tell me, Yannick, why would Zayan go after Althea? He
told me that if I let him live, he would give her to me.
And you believe a demon who tried to renege on his deal with the devil?
Yannick felt his brain grow more sluggish. Concentrate. Fight the sleep for just a little longer….
He will
kill
Althea because if he doesn’t, you will find love with her and he would lose you for eternity. He’s
not going to accept that. His bond with you is too deep.
Yannick felt a blackness steal around his heart. A pain that he’d never known before. He remembered watching women he cared about look at Bastien. Surreptitious glances they thought no one else saw—but they gazed at him with eyes sparkling, lashes fluttering, lips parted in breathless adoration. He saw the longing in their eyes. They loved Bastien, all those women.
They chased him for his wealth and title, but Bastien was the one they truly wanted. He was too cold, too reserved. He had always distanced himself with women. Except Althea. No, with Althea, he didn’t care about getting his heart broken. It was madness, but he wanted her too badly to worry about pain.
Two nights left—
Did Althea love Bastien the most, just as the others had done? What if they did conquer Zayan? Was he willing to walk away if Althea loved Bastien more than him? Could they share her and make that work? But what about the happy mortal future Althea deserved? What of her determination not to be turned into a vampire?
He only wanted Althea to be happy. Hell, he was willing to condemn himself to an eternity of pain to ensure that she was.
* * * * *
Bastien had to admit Yannick had a point. Zayan had made a deal with Lucifer and had then tried to destroy the devil himself. An impossible task, but Zayan had been Marius Praetonius in his mortal life, a Roman general who defeated impossible odds. Arrogant enough to believe he possessed the intellect to outstrategize Satan, Zayan had nearly won in their battles.
Bastien closed the lid, enveloping himself in safe darkness, and remembered….
Zayan had turned him into an immortal but Lucifer had been the one to give him the power he craved….
Blood Red by Sharon Page ©2006 Advance Reader Copy www.SharonPage.com 169
The whip flailed his back. Jolting him awake with a scream, the lash parted his skin. A
fresh welt across healed scars.
Bastien tried to raise his head but the whip landed again and he fell back on the mattress
against the onslaught of pain.
He slept nude, and the sheets were tangled around his hips, leaving his back bare and
vulnerable. He felt a warm trickle of blood, felt it run beside the bumps of his spine.
He heard his father’s voice. Condemning him for some transgression or other. He couldn’t
listen. The angry, lacerating voice flayed him along with the whip. He gritted his teeth, and
moved to roll over, only to find his father had bound his blasted wrists to the bed posts. He
wrapped his hands tight around the ropes and willing himself not to show any emotion at all.
Not anger. Not despair. Not shock or fear. And damnation, he wouldn’t allow himself to cry.
Father, he knew, had lost badly at hazard, and he had made a mistake—he’d impregnated a
young dairymaid. Since his father had left a trail of bastards across England—he usually
planted
one or two at hunting parties and house parties—Bastien couldn’t see that his was worth
a whipping.
The whip struck again. Eyes shut, he strained at the ropes, choking back a cry. His head
arched back with the force of the blow, the goddamned pain of it.
Goddamn him, he was five and twenty. Too old to let his father whip him—and even though
he was tied up and couldn’t move, he still felt he was allowing the beating. What in hell was
wrong with him? Why would he submit to this? Why in the name of Jesus had he come home at
all?
He lay there, immobilized by guilt and shame and an anger he was too afraid to give in to,
and he submitted like a weakling.
Some of his father’s words began to penetrate.
“Damnation, I can’t believe I’ve raised such a pervert. To touch another man in that way—
makes me sick.”
And the whip rose again. So somehow his father had found out about Zayan and knew
about Bastien’s forays into clubs where pleasures between men were the norm.
His father had indulged in orgies, was a well-known patron at most London brothels, beat
his sons merciless—but called him a pervert.
And for some mad reason, Bastien lay face down on his bed and cowed to his father’s
opinion.
Bile and hatred rose. But at himself…
By that night he’d returned to London. He went to Drury Lane, charmed the drawers off the Duke of Ormston’s mistress, the pretty little actress Maria, and fucked her in her dressing room.
He still remembered the feel of her derrière slapping wet and hard against his groin and the horror in her eyes as she saw, reflected in her mirror, Ormston opening the door.
The old goat had looked a lot like his father, far too old for a saucy little nineteen-year-old vixen like Maria. His explosion, deep in Maria’s snug cunny, had been the greatest of his life.
Imminent death had that effect. He was so soused with brandy he could barely stand, much less Blood Red by Sharon Page ©2006 Advance Reader Copy www.SharonPage.com 170
shoot straight. Still, he’d accepted Ormston’s challenge to pistols at dawn, named his second, and with the matter of his death settled, he had strutted out into the night.
He never reached the dueling field. Never made it more than a block from the theater—
never even reached his carriage. Two footpads held him while the third carved him up with a knife. Dimly, he remembered likening himself to the Christmas goose.
Then he’d fallen face first in the muck and the horse dung. He’d planned to die with some dignity on the field, not in the gutter.
Zayan had been less than pleased at his revolting state. Apparently, he’d vomited in the ditch he was lying in and also on himself.
Even as his last drops of blood had leached into the dirt, Bastien had known humiliation.
Deep, cold, bitter shame.
But then Zayan had cradled his head. He’d thought his lover was caressing him one last time before he died. He’d shamed himself further as tears pricked his eyes. Not even his mother had ever cradled his head, had ever lovingly stroked his cheek.
Before his fading sight, Zayan’s pointed teeth had lengthened, had grown into long, curving fangs. He’d thought it a hallucination—because he was dying. He’d closed his eyes. He was ice cold, and wet, and filthy. The hot wetness on his lips had taken him by surprise. As the tinny taste hit his tongue, as the fluid filled his mouth, he drank. Weak as he was, he gulped at the stuff, not even understanding what it was.
“Drink,” Zayan had urged, stroking his hair. Feebly, his eyes had opened and he saw Zayan’s bared arm, realized his mouth was at Zayan’s wrist and he was suckling like a babe.
Suckling blood.
Revulsion hit and Bastien had fought to stop. But Zayan’s powerful arm held him in place, and he drank and drank, until Zayan had ripped his wrist away from his questing mouth.
“Do you understand what you are now?” Zayan had asked.
Amazed by the strength he felt flooding back to his frozen, numb limbs, he hadn’t cared.
Hadn’t given a damn what he now was because it appeared he was alive.
Suddenly, he’d heard Zayan’s voice in his head.
You are now Nosferatu.
By stealing death from his grasp, Zayan had prevented him from finding the escape he’d craved, and at first Bastien had hated Zayan for that. But it had been a pleasure to find Ormston and drink his blood. Not that Ormston hadn’t owed him death. He’d poached the man’s mistress, after all, and he would have been glad to accept death had it been dealt in an honorable manner. But being cut down by surprise in a filthy alley behind Drury Lane had been an insult.
On his second night as an immortal, he’d run wild throughout London. Crazed and furious, he’d gloried in his newly found power and strength. But damn, he still hated Zayan for forcing him to live an eternity condemning himself for letting his father whip him.
And he hated himself for giving in to tears when he admitted to Zayan how he had submitted to his father’s beating. Zayan had seen the evidence, the fresh, swollen slashes on his back.
Wounds that had miraculously disappeared after he drank Zayan’s blood.
God, he remembered the first taste of blood. How much he’d hungered for it. Craved it.
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neck. His cock had gone rock-hard at the pressure of flesh against the tips of his fangs. The warmth, the tang of sweat, the first rich tantalizing droplets as his teeth cleaved through skin.
Then the rubbery feel of the artery, the moment of resistance, the pop as he punctured. The ecstasy of blood flowing into him, a hot, coppery river into his waiting mouth.
He only wished his father could have witnessed him drinking another man’s blood.
Yes, indeed, he was a pervert.
But the third night after his transformation, his father had died. An attack of the heart in his bed. Bastien had wondered afterward if Zayan had paid his father a visit.
On the night of his father’s death, Yannick became the new lord. Yannick took all—title, wealth, power. And his father, while whipping him, had told him Yannick had been the one to tattle about Zayan.
Blinded by jealousy and rage, he’d killed Yannick. With a knife.
But he didn’t let Yannick die. He turned his brother, while Yannick lay bleeding to death, shocked at his twin’s betrayal.
As he forced his brother to take that first swallow of his blood, he’d thought he wanted to take everything from Yannick. How could Yannick be the lord now?
But deep in his heart Bastien had suspected his father had lied—he knew his valet had always been his father’s spy. He’d turned Yannick because he’d been scared and angry and was afraid to be forever parted from the brother who condemned him but also loved him.
He hadn’t realized that Lucifer had manipulated his anger, his jealously, his fear. He thought he’d willingly murdered his brother.
And killing a brother—even to resurrect him—was a sin. A mortal sin.
Which made him the perfect candidate to do the devil’s bidding.
“A Mr. Zayan?” Lady Peters rested her knife and fork by her plate as she considered. “No, my dear, I don’t believe I have heard of any member of society by that name.”
Althea sighed, and speared a slice of roast without enthusiasm. She had not expected success from Lady Peters. At breakfast she had asked Sir Randolph about Zayan—it was her only chance to speak to him before nightfall, since he normally took lunch at his club.
They had been alone in the dining room. “You needn’t fear Zayan,” he had said, in a highly patronizing tone. He was a handsome, austere man, and after giving her that reassurance, he had returned to his newsheet.
“No,” Althea had replied, pouring coffee. “I want to hunt Zayan.”
Her host had exploded at that—decreeing that she wasn’t going to do any such foolhardy thing—and she knew she would be kept on a tight leash.
She took a sip of her wine. At Lady Montrose’s musicale tonight, she would ask the ladies of society about Zayan. He existed openly and he lived well and she suspected he didn’t preclude debutantes from his choice of victims, so he probably ensured he had entry to the fashionable world, to the
ton
. She suspected he was like Bastien. He enjoyed walking amongst the mortals as a demon—it was his private joke.
But while Bastien hid a gentle, loving nature behind his joke, Zayan hid evil. Althea Blood Red by Sharon Page ©2006 Advance Reader Copy www.SharonPage.com 172
reached for her glass of wine but as she took a sip, Ridgeway, the butler, entered.
“Sir Edmund Yates has arrived, my lady.”
Father! She pushed her chair back and stood. He must have received her letter, in which she explained her meeting with the so-called queen of the vampires.
Lady Peters smiled. “Do bring him in, Ridgeway.”
And there was Father, looking weak still, but so familiar, in breeches and tweeds, a wide smile on his weatherbeaten face. Beneath his hat, his wiry white hair was in its usual disarray, and his spectacles were smeared with fingerprints. He clutched a leather bound book under his arm.
And how overjoyed she was to see him.
“Oh, Althea, lass, I’m so glad to be with you, again.” He held her tight to him and stroked her hair. “And you’re looking a fetching beauty, I might add.”
She was just so happy to see him safe and well, even as he beamed with pride and approval at her new clothes and her elegantly dressed hair.
There was no chance to speak of any personal matters—not in front of Lady Peters, and David, and the female cousins, and the aunt.
But when David, with a twinkling eye, remarked that Althea in her fine gown had set the
ton
on its ear, the aunt, a Mrs. Horatio Thomas, had harumphed. “Seems she’s settled on the Demon Twins—though I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them for years. Running wild on the Continent, I’ve heard, though it appears to agree with them. They don’t look a day older than the last time they graced society with their presence. Though there’s rumor that Brookshire has been in England for years, living as a recluse. Too lofty, still, to pick for husband material, even with his eccentric behavior.”