How Do I Love Thee? (31 page)

Odd how much it pained me to watch that tiny flame snuffed out by my breath, as if I was human.

‘God loves us all, Sylvie. I know you believed that once.’

‘Yes,’ I said, putting the matches back. I watched the last wisps of smoke curl away into the air, the burnt sulphur of the match head an acrid tingle in my nose. ‘But not anymore.’

‘He wouldn’t suffer your existence if you were truly an unnatural creature.’

Loathing slithered up my spine in a cold bubble of sweat at the unintended echo produced by his words, and instantly I was plunged back. Fife, 1704, the maddened shouts from the mob and my mother’s rasping cries following me through the heather as I fled for my life. They’d strangled her most of the way to death before they’d bound her to the stake, but they’d left enough life in her to feel the hungry lick of the flames, if not enough voice to give full cry to her terror.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Even if she’s a simple God-fearing widow guilty of nothing more than poor judgement.

I wrenched myself back to the present with an effort. Dan didn’t know about that. He knew my mother was long dead, having accompanied me on my occasional pilgrimages to her crypt. But nothing of how my mother had died or why I’d agreed to be turned. He knew of my vigilante slayings, but not what drove me to it, and he certainly didn’t know how far
they stretched back over the years. The long parade of dead men, evil men, who trailed their filthy shades at my heels.

I’d started with the man directly responsible for my mother’s murder, the man who’d sent a good woman to death because he was a fool as well as an ingrate. My mother had only ever tried to heal with her herbs and simples, but when the man’s wife, my mother’s patient, died despite her best efforts, he’d turned on her.

No, Dan didn’t know what I’d chosen or why. He didn’t know the burden of guilt that had turned my heart to ash even before my maker stopped it in my chest. I had run away when my mother bade me flee, and left her to the mob.

God had forsaken me, and I was damned.

So I had nothing to lose.

‘I love you, Dan.’

‘I love you too.’ His eyes narrowed as I came towards him. He knew me too well.

‘Then please. I don’t want to lose you.’ Another oft-visited gambit.

His face closed down, all the light and joy that made him so attractive to me seeping back beneath the skin, leaving a stranger in its place. Once again, I saw his mortality writ in the lines of his face, the barely discernible silvering at the temples of his tawny lion’s mane. Unbearable to lose him.

‘No, Sylvie, I don’t want it. How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘Of course you want it. How could you not?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, as he’d done before. But this time I heard him thinking something else. He was tempted.

Hope lit a tremulous spark beneath my breast. I fell to my knees before him, caught his hands in mine.

‘Please, please, Dan. I can do it, I’m ancient and I’m strong, it will be easy. It won’t even hurt. Please, how can I bear it if you don’t? How can I let you die?’

‘Because it’s what I want.’

‘You want to die? I don’t believe it. Nobody wants to die.’ Careful, careful. Don’t let him know I can hear his thoughts. It’s wrong, so wrong, I shouldn’t be listening.

‘You do,’ he said softly.

I stared at him, shocked. How could he know that?

I managed a laugh. ‘Don’t be silly. I never have to die.’

‘But you can. You can walk out into the sunlight, if you want to.’

I shuddered. ‘Don’t even joke about it.’

His hands shifted, the long fingers curling around mine.

‘And don’t you think about turning me against my will, or that’s what I’ll do.’

I couldn’t hide the fright it gave me, and I knew he’d
felt the tremor pass through my body. He didn’t have to be willing. Not that I’d ever told him that, though.

‘I wouldn’t,’ I lied. He couldn’t be serious.

‘Sylvie, if you turn me, I will walk into the sunlight. I swear it.’

‘No. You wouldn’t,’ I said, terror rising to thicken my throat.

He squeezed my hands, not gently. Not that it mattered; he could use his greatest strength against me and I wouldn’t even feel it. At my age, only fire and full exposure to sunlight could do me any lasting harm.

‘I love you, and I want to live a long life beside you. But a mortal life, Sylvie. That’s my lot. It’s all I want.’

‘But—’

‘Don’t go against me in this,’ he said, his face intent, eyes boring into mine. I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again, as some more of what he was thinking leaked into my senses.

He was afraid. Underneath his insistence that he wouldn’t be turned, he was afraid. Afraid I’d do—something. I couldn’t tell what.

I sat back on my heels, reeling. Dan, afraid of me? Of what I might do to him? I abandoned my earlier reluctance to snoop and tried to focus in on his thoughts, extending my senses, tilting towards him …

And a wave of lust tangled with a soupçon of tenderness blasted over me like a tempest.

Yanking my hands free of his, I grabbed his shoulders, forcing myself to relax my grip when he winced, but he was with me, eyes heavy-lidded with desire. He twined his hands in my hair, and pulled me roughly to him.

When his mouth claimed mine an agony of pleasure burst through my body, lit fires in my loins and sent flames licking along my skin, as my muscles clenched and my skin tightened. Dan shoved the kimono off my shoulders with impatient hands and bent his head, mouth battening on the skin of my shoulder, sucking at my neck, nipping the length of my collarbone.

I thrust my hands beneath the waistband of his shorts, took him in my hands and squeezed him in the rhythm I knew he liked best, fingers stroking until he whispered my name against my skin and pushed me down onto the rug.

I tilted my hips to meet him, more than ready, and as his weight came down on me I lifted my knees, curled my calf across his back, raised my body to receive his. When he plunged himself inside me I sucked in a breath and then used it to cry his name, so he could feel my words and my love pour out, against his body. He sank his length into me and I let my head fall back as the delicious tug of his flesh
within mine sent sparklers of sensual energy skittering along my nerves. His hands curled around my shoulders as he pulled me against his thrusts and he filled me, loved me, drove me screaming over the edge into chaos, and made me feel whole, and human, in the only way that still mattered.

But when I opened my eyes again the following night and I looked at the empty bed beside me I was reminded all over again that I wasn’t human. Not now, not ever again.

I rolled over onto my back, tugging the sheets up to cover my bare breasts. My perky, eternally nineteen-year-old breasts. Of course, they only looked nineteen.

I pushed the thoughts away, unsettled. I was dwelling on it too often lately. I wondered where Dan was, but when I extended my senses nothing happened. I was back to normal.

Whatever that was.

I reached for Dan’s pillow, and squeezed it against my chest, letting his scent rush over me. Lifting my hand to my face I could detect the special aroma we made when we came together, a mingling of both our individual scents. My loins twinged, reminded of the lovemaking we’d continued in this bed, until the sun rose high enough beyond the heavy metal shutters to send me to my rest.

It wasn’t easy on Dan, this enforced nocturnal existence. A natural early riser, he still found it hard to get into a decent sleep pattern. It was no surprise to find the bed empty, but unease seeped into my bones.

Despite the passionate release of our loving, tension hung in the air like a minute vibration, an awareness aching in the bones of my skull.

I pushed the sheet down with my feet, hugging the pillow, driven to rise and reluctant to do so. But there was no resisting it. My sleep cycle, if you could call it that, was almost entirely involuntary. When the sun rose, I sank into slumber. I awoke when it set. You could set your watch by me.

Damn it. I laid Dan’s pillow back on his side of the bed and left the rumpled sheets. Sunday, our day of rest. We had a couple of young guys, uni students, who took the Sunday night shift so we could have one day off a week. Sometimes, Dan would go to the last Mass of the day, while I still slept.

I wondered if he’d been today. It seemed likely.

Skipping a shower, reluctant to wash his scent from my body, I wriggled into undergarments and Levis, and then pulled a hand-knitted hoodie on over a cotton tee. I found my flat shoes under the bed and slipped my feet into them.

A brief detour into the bathroom to splash water on my
face, and I was ready. I went looking for Dan, pretty sure where I’d find him.

In the doorway of the garage at the rear of the house, I drank in the sight of Dan hunched over the grille of the old Holden he was restoring. I raised my hand to shield my sensitive eyes from the glare of the floodlight suspended over his work space, and admired the long muscles in his back, clearly visible as he reached into the depths of the engine bay.

‘Want to pass me that spanner?’ he asked casually.

‘Sure.’ I crossed the threshold into his realm and delicately picked up the spanner from the other side of the vehicle. I handed it to him.

‘Thanks.’ He reached into the unknown innards of the old EH and tinkered mysteriously.

My appreciation for modern inventions didn’t really extend to cars. They were transport, nothing more. I missed horses. Missed the warmth and strength of the strong creatures, yes, but I also missed the long journeys. You had time, then, to have a conversation. If we’d come home by carriage last night I could have made love to Dan within that shuttered, swaying bower, and held the argument at bay.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was as inevitable as the tension that thickened the silence between us now.

He wanted me to stop killing, but without that what was the point of my existence? Why should I be granted this long life if not for a reason? I’d been powerless once. My mother, too. All the years, all the evil men I’d slain, didn’t begin to compensate for all the women and children I’d seen betrayed, abused and murdered over the years. Men too, sometimes. Good men, like Dan.

He leaned forward, and I stared as gold glinted at his throat when his tiny crucifix swung into the light.

No, that’s a myth too, crosses don’t burn my flesh. But normally he only wore the crucifix when he went to church. When he felt in need of comfort. God’s grace, he called it. It was unlike him to leave it on when he was working around the cars.

Troubled, I watched him in silence. Could he be right about God still having a care for me? Dan’s beliefs were deeply rooted, unshakeable. I’d sometimes wondered how he could reconcile his love for a creature like me with his love for God. But I’d never dared ask him.

No. God had abandoned me—us—when He let my innocent mother be murdered. A loving god would never have allowed it, nor the thousands of other women strangled, burned, tortured, drowned.

I’d agreed to become a vampire so I could claim the justice
denied me by the law. In doing so I’d cut my last ties with God and never regretted it, or any of my choices.

Until now. Until Dan.

‘Keep thinking that hard and you’ll break something, Sylvie. Want to share?’

A good question. I didn’t, really. But this sense of wrongness, growing these past months between us, was fast becoming unbearable.

‘Do you love me?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Then why won’t you let me turn you?’

Dan straightened up and looked at me with candid blue eyes. I blinked, shifted my feet uneasily. Sometimes I can barely stand to look into his eyes. His soul shines there, plain to see, reminding me of what I see when I’m foolish enough to gaze into my own eyes. Nothing.

‘You would imperil your mortal soul,’ Dan said.

My skin crawled even as a startled laugh ratcheted out of me.

‘I don’t have a soul.’

‘Of course you do.’

I stared at him. How could he be so naive?

‘Dan. I’m a vampire. No soul. Remember?’

He scowled. ‘Don’t patronise me. You may be centuries old but that doesn’t mean you know everything.’

‘Sor-ry,’ I said, stung, not meaning it.

‘You wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t have a soul.’

‘But I’m not alive,’ I reminded him softly.

Doubt flittered across his face before his features set once again into the stubborn expression I knew so well. But it was too late.

‘I don’t have a soul, but you do. Is that it, Dan? Is it your mortal soul you’re afraid for?’

‘No,’ he said, but his face, as always, betrayed him.

‘Oh, Dan.’

‘Sylvie, no, you’ve got it all wrong.’ I jumped as the spanner clattered into the engine bay, but then his hands enclosed mine, thumbs stroking my knuckles. I crumbled at his touch. His hands on me.

‘I am afraid,’ he said, swallowing. Reluctance etched the lines around his eyes deeper into his skin, and a sickened thrill played along my nerves to see this proud man admit fear.

‘I am afraid,’ he said again, ‘but not for my soul. The only thing I’m afraid of is sooner or later you’ll leave me.’

For a moment all I could do was gape at him. I swear my jaw would have been swinging in the breeze, if there’d been one.

‘That’s rich. It’s you who’ll leave me.’

‘Never,’ he said. For a moment his utter conviction thrilled
me to the core, before fury rushed up through my bones and enflamed my skin.

‘You will leave me. You’ll die.’

‘Sylvie, I can’t help that.’

‘Yes, you can.’ I ground the words out, my fingers clenching on his. I saw Dan wince, the tendons standing out on his neck, and I gazed at the marvellously masculine line of his throat. The blood pulsing beneath the skin.

I could do it. I could squeeze harder, force him to yield, bend his strong body against the grill of the car and drink from him, force him to drink from me, until we were one, until it was done. If I just pressed a little more—

I flung away from him, horrified. What was happening to me? That I could think of bending him to my will, appalled me. My hands shook, my mind turning almost numb with shock. And still, my eyes strayed to his throat.