Blood Red. Sharon Page
to hide her unsteady gait. Her fingers traced chiseled dates and names. Anthony Austen 1612 (d) 1705. Francis Smythe 1512 (d) 1705.
The third from the last was the oldest but the letters were still crisp. Stephen of Myrlyn 1100 (d) 1706.
The date of creation as a vampire. The date of destruction. These vampires had already been destroyed.
Zayan was estimated to be two thousand years old, but to see the evidence of Stephen of Mrylyn’s long existence sent a shot of pain through her heart. To walk the night for over six hundred years!
In six hundred years Yannick would still walk the earth, while she would be long buried. Long turned to dust. Long forgotten.
Guilt slid through her like poison through blood. She’d lied to Yannick. She’d looked away from his penetrating, glowing eyes to hide her lie, but still she feared he knew. But that didn’t matter because he would know for certain tonight. What would he do?
Would he come to her in a rage or would he not come to her at all? Which did she fear the most?
The next coffin made her want to cry. It was not dated as the others, with the date of the transformation to undead and the date of destruction.
William. 1700–1708.IN HOPE OF ETERNAL SLEEP.
An eight-year-old vampire?
Heart in her throat, she moved on and stared down at the front of the last coffin. Blank. Her fingers, in brown kid gloves, skimmed over smooth, cool, white stone. A hum began beneath her fingertips. A soft, light vibration that strengthened and took on a rhythm. Low and steady, with long gaps during which her heart seemed to beat a hundred times. A vampire’s heartbeat.
“Which is the one we want, sir?” O’Leary asked.
She knew even as her father spoke.
“The end one. Where Althea is standing.”
She glanced up. O’Leary strode toward her carrying a long iron bar and a second lamp. Her father stood in the far corner—near the entrance, with the young, brawny workmen. One pushed with another bar and stone grated over stone in the far corner, setting her teeth on edge.
“Burned to ashes,” her father announced, his voice matter-of-fact.
Had even eight-year-old William been destroyed that way?
As O’Leary reached her side, Father called out, “Don’t be so blasted impatient, O’Leary. Put the bloody bar down for the moment.”
Despite his wounded leg, Father reached them in a mere moment. Again her father stared at her, as though he knew she could feel the presence of Sebastien de Wynter inside the coffin. Her hand still rested on the lid. Energy seemed to pulse into her hand, up her arm. She couldn’t move her hand away.
Though she was certain, she found it all so impossible. “How did Zayan bring him in here? The entrance looked untouched for a hundred years. So did the hillside. Did he truly pass through earth and brick to bury Sebastien here?”
Father gave a curt nod. “He could do that. Or he could open the entrance with a wave of his hand and seal it up afterward with mere thought.”
“How is that possible?”
“How is it possible that the dead walk, love? Just because we can’t understand, doesn’t mean we can’t accept the existence of such power. And that we can’t recognize how dangerous it is.”
Father pointed at her case. “Lay that on the next coffin, please, love, and open it.”
She had only seen inside it once, just the briefest glance. She’d caught a glimpse of gold fashioned into a thick, flat necklace of some sort. As she flipped up the lid, she saw two such necklaces sat within, surrounded by a sand that was made of small pebbles of silver and gold. Two necklaces.
Shocked, she turned. Father was laying out strings of dried herbs along the white lid in a crisscross pattern, like a diamond-paned window. He was chanting and she knew she couldn’t interrupt him now.
“Avia aura. Avia solari. Avia noctus.”
The words made no sense. Not Latin or English or any other language Althea recognized.
As he spoke, he touched each side of the coffin, walking slowly around it. “Aura se selen. Aura se nordum.”
Father lifted a hemlock branch, whittled to a sharp point, and traced the shape of a cross from the foot of the coffin to the head and side to side.
“Bey ara nonum.”
He traced a circle over the pattern of herbs.
“Ecta enta aura. Ecta enta decum.”
Father lifted his head. “Open the coffin.”
5
Liberated
“His eyes are open.” A woman leaned over his coffin. A woman who smelled of lavender and spring flowers, of fresh-baked bread and country air. Rich and throaty and soft, her voice was pure femininity and his body, even though inert, responded. His instant erection was insistent, demanding, but he was damnably incapable of movement.
“Yes, but he can’t see,” an elderly male voice answered.
Not true. He could. Not well—his eyesight was still weak—but enough to detect soft, pretty red lips. Red hair, too. A dark and beautiful color like rich, intoxicating wine. Tendrils dangled over her alabaster skin. Golden light glinted over her eyes, shielding them. She wore something over them. She pursed her tempting lips to blow one curl away.
Althea. He knew her name from his dreams. A lovely name for a lovely wanton.
Bastien de Wynter tried to follow Althea, his savior, with his gaze as she moved but he couldn’t. Warmth began to prickle through his long unused limbs. A surge of triumph rushed through him. Damn, he’d wiggled a toe.
He smelled daylight. As a nocturnal creature he knew the difference between night and day in the way the air tasted on his tongue, in the way it filled his nostrils, his lungs.
Damnation, was he going to be toasted by daylight after a decade of hell?
He listened intently for an answering heartbeat. A slow, almost silent one to match his own.
Nothing.
So where was Yannick? Still buried somewhere in England?
How in hell, then, had Althea awoken him?
She returned and leaned over him. Once more his long-denied senses gorged on the sweet aromas of fresh bread, rushing blood, feminine sweat, lavender, and wildflowers. Before he’d been entombed, he’d never let a night go by without burying his face—and his teeth—into a woman’s perfumed skin.
Yes, sweeting, lean a little closer.
In his dreams, she bewitched him. Wrapped her sweet innocence around his heart and drove him mad with need and lust. For ten years he’d been unable to move but his mind had been alert and aware every night. Goddamned agony…
He ached to touch her now, but he could not move more than his toes, his fingertips, the muscles of his face. His lips twitched. He blinked.
Had she seen?
No, she had her attention fixed on her hands and the object she held there. Those plump little breasts amply filled her tight-fitting bodice. With fetching sweetness, they rose and fell beneath the beige muslin.
Zayan had buried him naked. He saw her gaze flit down his body. Felt it pause at his crotch. On his cock, which was not immobilized.
Her eyes widened behind the lenses of her spectacles.
Touch me, darling, please. He wanted some of that lush spring scent on his flesh. Needed her touch on his long-unsatisfied prick. But she looked up.
Cool metal touched his skin at the top of his chest, below the hollow