And had no interest in relieving them from their box.
Not when I heard something I might only describe as singing, not when I felt drawn forward through that nightmare. Following the siren song, I became impatient of the debris, crushing what I might, tossing it haphazardly behind me for Malcom to dodge.
I moved without his direction straight to a wall where the bricks didn’t match and the mortar was sloppy and thick.
And knocked three times for good measure.
At my back, Malcom confessed, “I put her in here. Ordered the masons to brick it shut… and forgot that very night I’d ever laid eyes on the waif. Everyone forgot. This whole area just… disappeared.”
Ah. Perhaps dear Malcom was worthy of my granddaughter after all.
As if to soften what he thought to be a disappointing blow, the male muttered, “There is no guarantee she’s still inside. He could have taken her anywhere.”
Oh, but Darius had not. Not if he’d gone to such trouble to have something so unusual right under my nose. “I can hear her, singing an old tune. Not asleep and not awake.”
And ready to be uncovered. Brick… something as inconsequential as brick was all he’d needed to cage a true daywalker. Breaking through the mortar with black extended claws, pulling apart a wall that whined with the removal of each stone, the whole slab having settled and grown accustomed to its missing support, I found a door like any other prison door. Unremarkable and built to make the prisoner know they were there to suffer.
Moments later, that wood was dust, fragments crumbling with little more than a swipe of my hand. And on the other side? The back of a massive gilded, gaudy, ornate, and hideous mirror. A huge monstrosity of a mirror that completely covered where the door had been.
Tempted to break it, so eager was I to enter, I held back the urge and slid it gently to the side.
To feast my eyes upon a prison cell transformed.
Darius… so predictable. So petty.
To keep this from me! Here.
Underground with the rot. To know what he had wasn’t his. To have dared lie about the origin of his child!
He and I would have words about this. Most especially to think that all his golden candelabras and expensive furnishings were good enough for what had been trapped inside. The crypt still stank of blood and sex and tears and longing. Priceless paintings gone to mold in the dank, Persian rug half eaten by fungus and mildew.
Four poster bed, dressed in tatters. Red rags splattered black from old dried blood that still smelled of sunlight, even down here.
Jewels, treasures, secrets.
A room for pleasure derived from pain.
This was a place in which Malcom was entirely unwelcome, and I cast him back before he might set his eyes to the lovely corpse on the bed. “Leave us. Return to your bride, for her time of rest is almost at an end.”
“My lord.” Retreating into the dark, he moved with superhuman speed, as if aware how utterly possessive I was of this uncovered treasure. And how tempted I was to kill him just for standing too near.
Pity I had not chosen finer garments for this moment. That I had not brought gifts. My beloved had always loved flowers. Beautiful horses. The scent of pine.
“Here you are, as gorgeous as I remember,” I murmured to her withered skull, gently placing my hip to the bed so her remains might not be disturbed. “How long I’ve waited. Countless centuries searching.”
Smoothing back hair that fell from her skull, I leaned over my darling one. “What it means to me to know you kept your promise…” Overfull with a sensation I’d almost completely forgotten, my voice shook. “You swore to me you’d be reborn. And here you are. Sleeping, waiting for me to find you.”
Under my nose for a century. Here where she could have been crushed and lost again while I’d let Jade wreak havoc on the building.
My own displeasure was shaking the foundations as it was. Setting a rainfall of dust motes to cloud the room. Leaning over to kiss her mouth—or where her lips would have been had they not shriveled back over her teeth, I tried so very hard to be gentle. “Tell me you knew I’d come?”
The corpse, eyes long ago withered, said nothing. Failed to move. Failed to do anything but lie on a bed stained with her blood. My poor beloved had been alone since Darius had been dismembered, and from the state of the room, alone and suffering. Perhaps I would go into the garden later and have more than a talk with the head on a pike.
Perhaps if the smells under the rot of this place were any sign of what he’d done to her, I’d crush that skull to jelly and eat it.
Blind, my love was blind. Her hearing, the eardrums, I suspected might be intact enough that she at least heard the cadence of my song to her. That she knew I was here, would never allow her from my sight again.
The nubs of her fangs far too short for the work of slicing through my flesh were inconsequential. My true worry was that any attempt to part her jaw might break it, desiccated as it was.
Problem easily solved. I kissed her mouth again then sliced my wrist with a quick flick of a black claw. “Drink and wake. Come back to me.”
My blood was poison, laced with nature’s contempt for our kind. Yet it contained eternal, monotonous, never-changing life. Pouring it down a throat that could not swallow, I sat with her for the endless hours it took to reinvigorate her, cell by cell.
Nothing was more glorious than seeing my gifts reconstitute lovely blue eyes.
They had been blue in her last life too.
Her daughter’s had been that very shade before I changed her into something more. A clue I should have recognized had I paid more attention to the fact that Darius kept my grandchild from my sight.
She took a breath that rattled her half-reformed ribcage. There was pain in those sky-blue eyes.
A flush to cheeks that were fair and high. Dark hair, long and luxurious.
She drank every drop I might squeeze from my veins, swallowed as I gathered her close.
And was so very afraid of me.
That wouldn’t do. So, ever the charmer, I spun our tale. Starting at the beginning—this new beginning. “Your name in this life is Pearl. Mine these days is Vladislov. And I have been waiting for you for an eternity.”
Chapter Two
Vladislov
Brittle in my arms—half corpse, half goddess—I carried my soul’s new form from dust-laden catacombs. As I was in a bit of a mood, any who happened upon me during our jaunt had the unfortunate luck of finding out what they too might one day become should they truly embrace what they were… what human nightmares were born from.
Leathery wings dragged upon the floor at my back, arched over my shoulders, protectively encasing what blindly fought to be free of my care.
It was not just the potency of my blood that had driven her mad. A great deal had been done to my bride. Horrors that were creative—that might have impressed me—had they been unleashed on another.
The lack of effort required to see just how mangled the mind, how traumatized the body, how wrecked the spirit… it was difficult to control my anger.
My gift of blood had left me with a thirst that had not burned the back of my throat in centuries. My veins were bone-dry, and still she was broken.
But I sought no meal. Such irrelevant urges could wait an eternity.
Those curious vampires peeking from their rooms saw what should not exist, and then they saw no more. It took less than a thought to pop their little skulls and leave a mess for another to clean once my path was happened upon. For my darling was too fragile—hundreds if not thousands of years away from learning how to mist through space. More fragile even than the rags on her body flaking away with every writhe as Pearl fought my hold.