The Hunger (33 page)

She realized she was slowly rocking the unconscious man. His breath was shallow against her breast. She must get his chains off. Chains would rouse suspicion and they were one more burden on her translocation. She laid him back on the spongy forest bed. She heard the rustle of a hare and farther away a stealthy fox. The leaves overhead cut out all moonlight. Still she could see his body clearly. It had been long since she had witnessed Asharti’s handiwork. Shame washed over her to think she had participated in the squalid romps that were precursors to this horror. John’s sweat had dried but his gashes still drooled and he was deadly pale. Twin marks of incisors dotted his neck, the inside of his elbows, the big veins that wound from groin to thighs. Slashes on hips, chest and shoulders, thighs, stood out black against his flesh.

She couldn’t let him die. She’d tend his wounds as soon as she got him to safety. The wounds to his mind from this experience were beyond her control, however. How would a man like John Staunton react to torture, humiliation, violation? That gave her pause. At least she could take away the shame of having betrayed his country. It was he who had been betrayed.

For the first time, she thought beyond getting him away from Asharti. He had seen her kill Quintoc and rip
LeFèvre’s throat. She did not regret her actions. But John now knew about her. He would be disgusted. They always were. So, in saving him, she had given up any hope of . . . of what? She blinked. There was never hope for anything except stolen moments of pleasure, and that only as long as he was ignorant of what she was. It startled her to realize she had been hungering for more . . . Foolish woman! After all these years to be trapped by hope?

She was muddled by the loss of blood. She glanced to her shoulder. The wound was drawing together. In a few minutes her flesh would be virgin, unscarred.

As she took hold of his chains and gathered strength, her thoughts turned to Asharti. Asharti was making vampires, lots of vampires, and she was bent on controlling Bonaparte, or dictating his successor when he had served his purpose as a military genius. She would change the balance of the world between vampire and human. The rules of vampire society, honed over centuries to preserve the status quo, would be washed away in a flood of chaos. Humans would become livestock, and war between the species was inevitable. What would Rubius say? He and the other Elders had established the Rules to preserve the precarious balance. Asharti’s world would have no rules at all. Could Pandora’s box be closed? She must send to Rubius for help.

She grabbed one of John’s shackles in her left hand and held the chain in her right. With a quick snap, the chain came free. She freed the other hand and tossed the length of chain and the heavy ring into the underbrush. She gathered him into her arms again and called on her Companion. Neuilly was ten miles at least tonight.

John’s nightmare was filled with Asharti and Quintoc. They took turns at him. He struggled, but he couldn’t get away and then he didn’t struggle and then Asharti told him he would come to like it and he lifted his lips to hers
and begged her to use him, his blood and his cock and his mouth, and God help him, his anus. She laughed and gave him to Quintoc.

With a cry, he woke to a darkened room. All was in shadows. He flailed, trying to escape, but something held him down. A dark silhouette hurried over to loom above him.

“Shush,” the silhouette breathed. He recognized her scent and struggled all the harder.

She sat on the bed and held him. He thrashed his head from side to side. “You’re all right.” Her voice more soothing than any he had ever heard. “She does not have you now.”

He relaxed in spite of himself. The sheets and quilts were what pinned him.

“A nightmare,” the rich contralto voice whispered. “No more.” It was Beatrix.

He was sweating. An itching along his veins tore at his nerves. She turned up a lamp that only partially banished the shadows with a soft glow. Then she took a cloth from a basin at the side of his bed and mopped his brow, his face, his neck and shoulders. “Let me cool your body.” She pulled down the covers. Her voice was so soothing, so sure, that he did not struggle even though he remembered what she had done to Quintoc and LeFèvre. She was like them.

But she was gentle as she washed him. “I stitched you up with some button thread I got from the landlady.” John looked down and saw the tidy stitches. How did a woman who lived in Berkeley Square know how to stitch up wounds? He looked up at her questioningly. “One learns surprising things in a long life,” she murmured. “I have clothes for you. We must go soon. The landlord has a gig that will take us to the posting station at Chambly. We’ll hire a closed carriage there.” The cool cloth moved over his belly, his private parts, his thighs.

“How long have I been here?” he croaked.

“Only since last night.”

He tried to sit up but she pushed him back firmly but gently into the pillows. His teeth chattered. She pulled the quilts up, examining him closely.

“I have a question,” she said calmly in spite of the intensity in her expression. “Think back. Did you ever come into contact with their blood? Asharti’s blood? Quintoc’s?”

“Blood,” he muttered. “There was s-so much blood. But it was mine . . .”

“Think,” she insisted.

He was shuddering now. “N-n-no,” he managed. “My blood.” He rolled his head to look at her. “Quintoc’s.” He thought of the splatter, but she had been in the way. “Yours?”

Her look of shock told him he was right. She glanced down at her shoulder then ran her fingertips over the gashes in his shoulder, his chest, swollen red flesh held by black knots like caterpillars winding over his body. “Oh, God,” she murmured. “I held you to my breast . . .” Her glance darted about the room, until she returned to his face and stared. She took a breath, as though she required all her courage. “You have been infected with the Companion.”

“What?” What was she saying?

She swallowed. “That which runs in our blood now runs in yours. You are vampire.”

Vampire? Vampire!
Sucking blood. Feeding on humans
. Was that what they all were? Was that what
he
was now? “T-take it away,” he stuttered, horrified. “I won’t be like you!”

“There is no cure.” She retreated somewhere behind a mask. “You will die a lingering, horribly painful death if you do not drink a vampire’s blood to give you immunity.”

He could not speak. His mind raced. Was he to be a monster, too? The last weeks had been so full of horror,
this final, ghastly truth was not hard to believe. Despair sat on his chest as he heaved for breath. “Then there is a cure,” he rasped. “The cure is death.”

She rose suddenly and began to pace the room, pulling first at a curl that had escaped the heavy knot of hair gathered at her nape, then at the ribbon just below her breasts. She wore burgundy with a wide square neck.
Bloodred
, he thought. As she paced back to him, he saw her shoulder where the pike had wounded her. It was new and whole. He had been longing for death rather than betray his country. How small that longing seemed. Now he needed death as he had never needed anything. “Kill me now,” he whispered. “Spare me the lingering death.”

One more turn, and when she faced him, her face contorted. Her breath came heavily, making her breasts heave with emotion. She shut her eyes tight and swayed her head back and forth. “I should,” she wailed. Then her voice sank to a whisper. “I should.”

He pushed himself up, shuddering and sweating at once. He could almost feel some alien force coursing through his veins, pumping with his heartbeat. “Do it. I forgive you. God forgives you. I cannot live like that.”

She approached his bed, her dark eyes big, her skin luminous. A red film came over her eyes. Now she would do it. Tear his throat like LeFèvre’s, rend him limb from limb . . .

The red faded. “I can’t.” She said it like a sentence, on herself, on him.

“You must, damn you! You got me into this, now release me,” he said hoarsely.

Her face was sad, resigned. She made the decision against her will, but she had decided.

“Bitch,” he said through clenched teeth. “If you don’t kill me, I’ll kill myself.”

She sighed. “No you won’t, John. Once the Companion takes hold in you, it has such a will to life it is almost
impossible to try. And it’s very hard to kill one of us. You saw the only way I could kill Quintoc. Unless the head is entirely severed, death is impossible.”

He clutched his sides, drenched in his own sweat. “You are . . . immortal?”

“Immortal,” she mused. “What does that mean? Quintoc was not immortal. But I have lived seven hundred and thirty-odd years, and I am one of the youngest born to my kind.”

“You . . . You have sucked blood for centuries? What kind of monster are you?”

“I told you. I am vampire. So are you.”

“I choose the painful death.” He almost hissed it.

She came to kneel beside him, eyes filled with pain. He shrank away. The room wavered around her. “I take it upon my head. Letting you die is killing you, and I cannot kill you. You will grow used to your new state. We are not all evil.” Her eyes shaded into red.

He felt acceptance wash over him, though he fought against it. He would submit, just as he had submitted to Asharti, to Quintoc. He knew he could not withstand her and he hated himself for it. She leaned close and kissed his forehead, smoothing a damp strand of hair away. Then she lifted her wrist to her mouth. Incisors flashed. Blood welled. She held it to his lips. “Suck, John,” she commanded. “The blood is the life.”

God help him, he did. The copper thickness filled his mouth with indescribable ecstasy. He pulled at her wrist even as Asharti had suckled at his throat or his thighs. He groaned, whether in protest or in fulfillment he could not tell. Peace welled up through his bowels and his belly to suffuse his heart and mind.

“That’s right.” She lay next to him as he sucked at her wrist. The shaking subsided.

The last thing he heard was her whisper. “The blood is the life.”

Eighteen

Beatrix watched John Staunton shiver and sweat, racked with the fever brought on by the Companion. Her gaze dwelt upon the girdle of muscle that rode over his hips and cradled his genitals. It brought back memories of their night together. She shook herself out of her abstraction and sat down beside him with a damp cloth. He was so weak he might not survive the invasion of the Companion long enough to absorb the immunity her blood could give him.

She wiped his body, careful not to tear his stitches. The wounds were not fresh. She hoped the stitches would hold. His body would be marked forever with the scars from any wounds healed before his reaction to the Companion subsided. If he lived long enough to achieve peace with his Companion, the others would heal quickly and leave no trace. The flesh against her fingers was hot with fever. She took some salve she got from a crone in the village of Neuilly and gently spread it over his wounds. He quieted under her touch. She turned him to treat the twin furrows on his buttocks, his shoulders. Asharti had always loved symmetry.

All the while she worked, Beatrix was thinking. The best place to hide from Asharti was Paris. Beatrix could conceal her vibrations in the surge of unruly life, unless Asharti came near enough to detect her. She must get John to Paris.

How could she plan calmly when she had just made him vampire? Had she not sworn never to make a vampire? It went against everything she believed since Asharti.

She turned to the window. A smiling moon floated among the fluttering leaves of an alder tree. She’d killed Quintoc in a rage at what he was doing to John, without a qualm. She’d killed Barlow because he refused redemption. Her hands were soiled with blood. Why couldn’t she kill Jerry? Because he seemed a victim and he might still be redeemed? And what of John? He had begged her for death. He was a made vampire, and the Rules said he should be killed.

Would John turn into a monster like Asharti because he was made? Would he make others, would he torture his victims and drain the last drop? His dark lashes brushed his cheeks. How little she knew of him! What made a man spy for his country? It was a dirty life that exacted a price that chilled the soul. He didn’t do it for money. For honor? What honor?

She took a breath and resolved to tell herself the truth. She refused to kill John because of how she felt about him. The truth was that John Staunton had crawled under her skin as no man had since . . . well, since Stephan. He had secrets like she did. He had been hurt by his life, as she had. But he had a core of goodness in him. A man who loved Blake and Turner could not be like Asharti. He struggled to serve his country, in spite of all he knew of men. Almost second innocence. She could not face a world that did not have the possibilities John represented in it. She might be wrong. God
knows she had been wrong about Stephan and Asharti. But she decided to believe in John.

Perhaps this was the real test of Stephan’s theory. Did being made vampire change your nature? Or was the effect of the Companion merely an attenuation of your natural tendencies? She was about to find out and so was John. He would not thank her for what she had done. Despise her for a monster and himself into the bargain, more like. But it was done. There would have to be more of her blood, even though she would have to compel him to take it.

But first they had to get out of Neuilly. Some clothes for John, a gig from the landlord, and they were for Paris, because Asharti would not be far behind.

Beatrix held John up to drink, though he was almost insensible. The small sordid room in a Marais garret was not a place she thought Asharti would look for them. Asharti would assume Beatrix demanded the rarefied atmosphere of a fine hotel or apartment. The Marais had lovely old homes, but the rich had gone elsewhere in the last century, leaving this part of the city to decay, subject to the inroads of the industrial impulse. Now it was filled with crumbling mansions turned into rooms or warehouses.

“John,” she called sharply, with compulsion. His eyes swam up through fog to the pain. He sucked in breath convulsively and bit back a small sound in his throat. “Drink,” she commanded. He gulped the water from her mug. She had never seen the making of a vampire. She had certainly never made one. Stephan told her that the process was horrible. He was right. It was humbling to see how much pain she had caused. John had been suffering for days now.