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Chapters
01: Toronto 1996
| 02: Brabant 1229 | 03: Toronto 1996
| 04: Brabant 1229 | 05: Toronto 1996
| 06: Brabant 1229 | 07: Toronto 1996
| 08: Brabant 1229 | 09: Toronto 1996
| 10: Brabant 1229 | 11: Toronto 1996
| 12: Toronto 1996
Chapter 01 -- 1996 Toronto
"May I have this dance?" The blond, mortal man laid his hand on Janette's gloved left arm where it rested on the bar, his traditional phrasing and polite smile somehow incongruous with the driving beat of the music on the Raven's sound system.
Even more incongruous, however, was Janette's reaction, as she ripped her arm away and snarled, all but baring the fangs that had dropped into place at his touch. Luckily, consciousness overcame instinct before her eyes could blaze or her lips part, before the man could see anything that would require either his mesmerism or his death -- luckily, because the Raven was currently the center of far too much official attention as it was, with mortal gawkers and reporters inevitably following the police on the Kharam decapitation case, and vampire Enforcers waiting none-too-subtly in the wings. Janette could not afford to have any of her patrons disappear under any circumstances for at least the rest of the year, and with all the effort she had spent drilling that into the fledglings, she could hardly believe she had very nearly brought it on herself. With an effort of will, she retracted her fangs, shook her head gently, bestowed a dazzling smile on the confused mortal who had had the temerity to ask her to dance, and strode out of the public areas of the club as fast as she could without lifting both feet from the ground.
Locking the doors behind her with an audible sigh of relief, Janette sunk onto the antique crimson davenport dominating her small parlor, and poured herself a goblet of undiluted blood from the bottle on the end-table. Outwardly, the man's offense had been light enough. Indeed, it had been no offense at all. She might have liked to dance . . . . Things had been tense -- very tense -- in the Toronto vampire community in general, and in the Raven in particular, for the past few nights, but that was no excuse. Shocked by her own unaccountable edginess, Janette made herself breathe deeply after every sip, a discipline that helped her focus on the sources of her feelings rather than their bubbling surface. She had been like this for a time after she had given up cigarettes for social reasons in January -- a purely psychosomatic withdrawal, given her vampiric constitution, though withdrawal all the same. But that had been over and done for months. And if the troubles Divia had brought down on them all were going to overwhelm her, either in herself or in overflow from Lacroix, they would surely have done so the night before last . . . wouldn't they? Janette shivered slightly, absently rubbing her left arm and deliberately not thinking about Urs and Vachon and the others who had died so horribly in the demon child's wake.
Quickly pouring herself another goblet of blood, Janette took it by its rim and climbed the stairs to the roof of the Raven. Feeling oddly trapped, pressured and pulled in two directions, like a rope being climbed and spooled at the same time, or a bit of metal caught between magnets, she was almost claustrophobic with the need to find some emotional space for herself. Once out in the cool night air, however, the sight of the unending sky soothed the threads vibrating so inharmoniously in her mind. Sipping from her goblet and staring out at the lights of Toronto, she briefly considered going up for a flight. It was an inviting thought, compelling and even insistent once it arose, as if she were not in quite the right place relative to something else. But she shook her head and decided against it, even so. She had made it a practice not to leave the club during business hours ever since Miklos moved on last summer, and besides . . .
Lacroix might need her.
Oh, he had said he did not need anything, when it had become impossible for him to remain silent. But they knew he lied. Even Nicolas -- mortality-obsessed Nicolas who, under most circumstances, would rather remove one of his own limbs than give the appearance of obeying their master -- had sat by him through the day. A small smile flitted across Janette's face at the thought of Nicolas's attitude that morning: an equal mix of the open compassion that was all his own, and the second-hand distress that she, too, was receiving as Lacroix's turmoil prevented him from maintaining his impenetrable lock on that side of their links. Ironically, Janette thought, the muted flow of images from Lacroix to his children was doing more to keep Nicolas at his side than any of his conscious efforts in past centuries, when he had kept that flow firmly dammed and Nicolas's rebellion had proceeded apace. Finishing the last dregs of blood in her goblet, Janette wondered briefly whether she would understand Lacroix as well as she did if she had never made a convert, a child. But Nicolas had done that more than once himself, and either understood their master not at all, or far better than she did -- a possibility that hardly bore thinking about, to Janette's mind. Perhaps some things are simply unavoidable, she thought, and from Divia on down no choice or decision could ever have made the family other than what it was.
The family.
Suddenly able to put a name and a face and, indeed, a blood scent to her odd mood of the past hour, Janette smiled in pleased satisfaction and started back down the stairs. Of course. Even vampire senses dulled with distance and disuse, apparently, and it had been so long since they had all four been together, but -- of course. Of course she was coming.
And of course she was upset.
With purpose but without haste, Janette returned to the club and ensconced herself in her favorite booth, subtly avoiding the mortal patrons to forestall any further incidents. Her long black dress and long black gloves left only her face and shoulders visible, floating ghostlike in the shadows beyond the swirling lights of the dance floor. She waited, watching, deliberately dampening the mixed emotions these reunions inevitably brought, until finally the door's opening made her features soften slightly, in a way only those few who could bring on that expression would ever be able to interpret.
That other irrevocable bond in her life, the one of her own making, the counterbalance to her master, her father, had just arrived.
Her convert.
Her daughter.
Fleur.
Appearing more than a little out of place, her cable-knit, gray sweater tucked into belted, khaki slacks, with a practical canvas pack slung over her shoulder, the young-looking blonde paused on the stairs of the Raven to allow her vampiric senses to adjust to the heightened volumes of information pressing in on every level. The voices, the music, the scents of blood and wine and sweat: Janette knew that while Fleur understood, intellectually, why she always created these sensual cocoons for herself, the younger vampire had never been able to identify. These places where Janette invited the human and vampire worlds to swirl briefly together held no appeal for her daughter, who preferred always to keep them separate. Like Lacroix, Fleur preferred individuals to societies; like Nicolas, she could rarely be made to stay still when there was yet a mountain of which she had not seen the other side; like her own, irrepressible self, Fleur was always ready to trade old knowledge for new with the reverence of an acolyte and the enthusiasm of a child -- but Janette did not see that trait in Fleur's eyes just then, as she descended the stairs and crossed to the bar. Instead, Janette saw weariness and worry, and she unconsciously cradled her left arm as she wondered if Fleur had been feeding properly.
Janette recalled herself from her distraction as she heard the mortal bartender ask Fleur, "Do you have any other ID, miss?"
"What?" the seven-hundred-eighty-five year-old teenager demanded, giving the man a look she had learned from Lacroix during the Inquisition. The huge mortal blanched visibly and returned her apparently-unconvincing license with a trembling hand, but still refused to serve her a drink. Janette heard her sigh, and knew that Fleur was not in the mood for smoothing it over either by batting her eyes or baring her fangs tonight. Fleur knew that something important had happened, something far more important than petty, mortal rules.
Something important enough to bring her home.
Fleur just did not yet know what that something was, Janette reminded herself, and rose to join her daughter at the bar.
"Look," Fleur rubbed her eyes wearily before attuning herself to the mortal’s beating heart, the British accent she had adopted for most of this century slipping through the cracks of her attempt to sound Canadian. She always had been better with written languages than spoken ones, Janette recalled with amusement. "You will bring me a glass of the house special."
"It is hardly polite to tamper with the help," Janette murmured in her ear, appearing at her shoulder as if from nowhere. "And since Don Constantine and your brother the homicide detective have both kindly sent down word that the police are instituting a crackdown on underage drinking . . . ?"
Fleur stared at Janette for a long moment. Uncountable emotions flickered across her face as she took in her maker's proximity, and a certain tension drained almost visibly from her slender form. Then she smiled, fishing her wallet back out of her pack and placing it in Janette's familiar hand. For some things, there are no words.
"Ah, 'Daisy Miller' again, I see. And here I had been hoping for 'Lily Bart,'" Janette teased lightly -- the century-old, age-related, literary barb going right over the bartender's head -- before showing him "Rose Clark's" impeccably-forged license and gesturing for him to fetch two drinks. "It is fine, Louis." In fact, the only possible problem with the identification was the extra decade unconvincingly added to her mortal tally; Fleur routinely resented her diminishing relative age, because of the diminishing respect it brought. By the time society had allowed women to openly do the things Fleur wanted to do, it had begun forbidding things to people who looked as young as she did. Janette had been much the same age when she had come across herself, but those years, more harshly lived, weighed more heavily on her appearance than they did on her daughter's. Snapping the wallet shut and returning it to Fleur, Janette wondered how she had convinced Aristotle to distort the number, or if she had simply done the job herself. "If it soothes your ruffled petals, 'Rose,'" the elder vampire cocked her head, "Louis's instructions do not usually include pressing those who properly request the house special, but we are already being watched rather heavily after some recent . . . irregularities."
Gratefully taking a goblet from Louis, Fleur echoed, "'Irregularities'?"
Janette shook her head, and gestured for Fleur to follow her back into the living quarters beyond the club. This explanation was something to be kept not merely from the ears of mortals, but even from vampires outside the family. Knowledge was power, and Janette had never been one to make herself vulnerable. Locking the doors behind them, Janette turned to find herself in her daughter's arms, and though she would not have initiated the display of emotion, it was several moments before she could bring herself to break the embrace.
"It's been too long," Fleur said, naturally lapsing into French while they were alone. As Janette stepped back, the brunette vampire thought she saw the faintest, moist shimmer of red in the corners of Fleur's eyes.
"You do not have to stay away, you know," Janette returned almost sternly, also in French, pushing a stray curl back behind Fleur's ear before walking across the room and seating herself on the crimson-cushioned davenport next to the empty fireplace.
"From you, no," Fleur agreed, seating herself in the opposite corner. "But they do make it difficult, you know. Where is he, Janette?" When her master did not answer immediately, Fleur added, "Please. What has been happening the last two nights? I've been feeling it, Janette -- from you both. If you do not need me, then it is Lucien, and he needs me very much indeed."
"Most weeknights, he would have been here. He began broadcasting his radio program from the club last autumn -- part of some plan to 'reclaim' Nicolas, I think. I did not ask."
"You never do," Fleur said quietly, biting back her impatience.
Janette inclined her head in acknowledgment, and sipped contemplatively at her drink, sorting thoughts of things long past and things recently past. Finally, she set her goblet carefully on the end-table and slowly peeled off her left evening glove. She offered her hand to Fleur, and the younger vampire gasped as Janette rotated her arm to expose the underside of her wrist, and the puckered, pink scar running from it to her elbow. It would have been the well-healed mark of a years' old wound, had a mortal borne it, but on Janette's milky, vampiric flesh it seemed almost to pulse with unnatural horror. Fleur put her forefinger in her mouth, bit it open, and then gently traced the length of Janette's scar in her own blood; but though Fleur's finger healed completely almost before she lifted it from Janette's skin, and that skin immediately absorbed every drop of the blood, both as all vampire injuries should, there was no change whatsoever in the scar.
"What . . ." Fleur began, her huge eyes wide with both fascination and sympathy. "How . . . ?"
Janette pulled back her hand and replaced her glove, not meeting Fleur's gaze. "Divia."
Fleur gagged slightly at the name, and, Janette thought, perhaps also at hearing it from lips other than Lacroix's. There were parts of his past that he had chosen to share only with Fleur, no doubt, but certainly others which Fleur merely chose to believe he had shared only with her. That there was little Fleur knew that Janette did not eventually discern was a fact politely ignored among the family when times were good, and too often wielded like a blazing torch when times were not. Being the master of her master's lover could sometimes be trying on its own, but dealing as well with Nicolas's shallowly-buried resentment at his unavoidable exclusion from that cycle . . . .
Divia's appearance, though, had forced from Lacroix something Janette believed he had tried to bury with her in Egypt all those centuries ago, something she doubted even Fleur had known.
"Divia is dead," Fleur stated firmly, nevertheless moving to the door with a haste that betrayed her agitated desire to be somewhere else -- with Lacroix, Janette knew, and though she had been pondering it since the moment she identified her edginess as the arrival of Fleur's plane in Toronto, she still was unsure what affect that reunion would have on either of them.
It was impossible to be absolutely certain, of course, but Janette believed that Fleur and Lacroix had not seen each other since they had quarreled over his burning of the Abbarrat -- the ancient "book of miracles" -- in 1966. It was the closest Fleur and Nicolas had been in the four centuries since he gave up killing and withdrew from the family, and the most bitterly Fleur and Lacroix had disagreed in the same period, though sometimes, long ago, it had seemed as if every decision in their lives pivoted on that immortal sibling rivalry. It was as if Fleur were the walking flashpoint of Nicolas's struggle with Lacroix -- and no wonder, as she had been the very first thing they contested . . . and an intensifier of every confrontation since. Would things be different between Nicolas and Lacroix if they did not have Fleur to fight over? Would things be different between Nicolas and Janette if they did not have Fleur between them? Fleur certainly thought so, claiming that as one of the primary reasons for her prolonged disappearances from the family.
Janette shook off the memories and musings, and gestured for Fleur to sit back down. "Divia is dead . . . now. Lacroix is alive, as are Nicolas and I. Others," she tugged at her glove, "were not so lucky." Fleur settled herself again on the davenport, and nodded for Janette to continue. "You knew, I take it, that Lacroix's mortal daughter, Divia, brought him across the night Pompeii erupted, and that he decapitated her some twenty years later? Good. Thus it was rather a shock when she arrived in Toronto two nights ago, left a decapitated body at the bar, murdered several young vampires, and attempted to murder Nicolas and me before doing the same to her father. She . . . injured . . . me, but chose to pursue Nicolas rather than finish me off, and was so eager to reach Lacroix that she made the same mistake a second time." It briefly flashed through Janette's mind to be grateful that Fleur had been in Edinburgh; Divia would no doubt have seen this young-looking, blond, female vampire of her own bloodline as doubly a rival, and would never have made that error a third time.
With that particularly in mind, Janette completed her relation of the story of Divia's rampage and its aftermath, holding back only one thing, the thing she suspected not even Fleur had known: the reason Lacroix had attempted to kill his own mortal daughter in the first place.
"Your arm?" Fleur prompted.
"Was cleansed and stitched and bound like a mortal's," Janette acknowledged. "Nicolas is . . . very good friends . . . with a mortal doctor, who cared for my wound. She is competent and discreet, and has taken care of various problems for the community, from time to time. And of course she is working on a 'cure' for him." Janette sighed resignedly. "It is inevitable that the Enforcers know about her, but I leave it to her to manage coming across before they kill her. Nicolas will not do it, of course. Although, interestingly, the last time he had human blood was at her behest, three years ago, to bring across her dying brother . . . a disaster, naturally, and it has only reaffirmed his self-denial."
"Nicolas is a zealot," Fleur noted shortly. "No, I mean, why hasn't it healed?"
Janette replenished the blood in her goblet and examined its color as if it were the most fascinating thing in the room. "How are things at the laboratory?" she asked disingenuously. "I know you prefer not to work so closely with mortals."
Fleur blinked at the bizarre change of topic, and answered impatiently. "It is difficult to be around them, of course, and no, I don't like it, but they are doing the cutting-edge biogenetics work that is behind my own projects at the moment. If I'm careful, and stay one step ahead of the university's computers, I should be able to remain up to another five years. Now -- your arm?"
"Nicolas has scars on his neck, now, where Divia bit him," Janette remarked conversationally, feeling out the subject by evading it. Subtlety had never been Fleur's strong suit.
"I've heard about the so-called 'Ontario plague' this winter," Fleur pressed. "The fever cases all seem to have been confined to North America, if rumor can be trusted, but no one is admitting to having had it, or even knowing anyone who had it. Did you catch it? Did Nicolas? Divia's other victims? Do you suppose this vulnerability is an aftereffect?"
Janette looked at her impassively, her face a perfect, porcelain mask of indifference. "Why do you suppose someone would not admit to such a thing?"
"I'm not an Enforcer, Janette."
"No." Fleur's master cocked her head to the side, and permitted herself a slight smile. "I am sure I would have noticed at some point if you had become one. But you considered it."
Fleur dropped her eyes, and a sharp shiver ran through her frame. "It was not worth it. I wanted to know what they knew, but it just was not worth it." Janette watched her fight down an unpleasant memory, and then look up. "They suppress knowledge. Fear of them suppresses knowledge. It is abominable."
Janette nodded; this was the Fleur she knew, the woman who had left Lacroix over the burning of an irreplaceable book, and finally driven Nicolas to animal blood by her eagerness to explore her vampirism. "I do not know why it has not healed, Fleur. I do not know. But I saw what Divia's poison could do; I saw a young vampire named Urs lying dead without sun or stake or decapitation. I am grateful to be here . . ." Janette paused for a moment, and tilted her head as she met Fleur's eyes. "And, I must admit, I am hoping that it will yet heal. After all, it has barely been forty-eight hours." Fleur nodded reassuringly, but Janette was not deceived for a second. She knew Fleur was humoring her, but as she was in a mood to be humored on that front, she did not question it. Natalie had promised to make a house call before the sun set and the club opened the next night, and perhaps the doctor would be able to tell her something more.
In tandem with Janette's thoughts, Fleur asked, "Is Nicolas's doctor friend working on this? Does she have a theory? Were any samples taken from Divia before she was burned?"
"I assume Doctor Lambert is working as best she can, yes," Janette answered. "My own supposition is that as Nicolas and I are Divia's descendants, so to speak, we had some resistance the others lacked. But that is only a supposition, and there is nothing left of the demon child but ashes."
Fleur set down her goblet, and pulled her legs up onto the cushion on which she sat, slipping out of her high-heeled shoes and hugging her knees to her chest. She looked very still all of a sudden, the impatience that had previously characterized her demeanor coalescing into a quiet intensity. She rested her chin on her knees. "And so, that is what has been happening."
"Yes."
A moment of silence stretched out in the wake of Janette's answer. Anticipating the end of Fleur's reflections, Janette stood, drained the last of her drink, and stepped back into the club proper to have a word with her staff. When she returned, she found Fleur sitting exactly as she had left her, but with the sound of the lock clicking shut, Fleur turned her gaze up to Janette's eyes and whispered, her voice as firm as it was soft, "Take me to him. Please."
Janette nodded, and led her up to the roof. The flight to Lacroix's townhouse was brief and direct, but the very speed with which it was necessary to rush over the lighted streets to avoid mortal detection suddenly made Janette wistful for the unencumbered dark they had taken for granted for so long: the nights lit only by stars and the skies inhabited only by bats and owls. Then, it had been so easy to float and play and drift, swimming through the air as through water. Today, under the ever-present fear of exposure and termination by Enforcers, she knew most of the younger vampires had never even imagined there was more to flying than moving at top speed in a straight line. She sighed as they alighted on Lacroix's fourth-floor balcony. In response, Fleur cocked her head and smiled at her master, sharing an equally-nostalgic image of the first night the family had attempted to teach her to fly -- Nicolas, ridiculously concerned that she would be hurt; Janette, nervous about her own ability to guide her first convert and hiding it under a mask of impatience; Lacroix, absorbed in concerns Janette had never been able to unravel, and which had all but disappeared in the following years of Fleur's companionship.
Fleur kissed her on the cheek, then moved immediately to the glass doors standing open to the night air, while the thick, ivory, outermost layer of curtains still billowed from the sudden wind of their arrival. Following Fleur, Janette grasped one side of the hangings and held them apart in the center. She stood on the threshold of the long room, which was lit only by the lamp on Lacroix's oak desk and the glow of his computer screen. He had been working, Janette supposed, or at least making the appearance of it, and despite the contemporary furnishings, the lengthy approach from the balcony to where he sat, with his plush, high-backed chair turned away from them, reminded her of nothing so much as the reception chambers of the thousand petty princes in which Lacroix had held his own kind of court through the centuries.
Janette remained at the entrance as Fleur advanced into the den.
The Brabantian vampire stopped only when she reached the side of the desk, near enough to touch him, but not to see him unless he turned. "Lucien?" she asked, though Janette knew Fleur was no more in doubt about Lacroix's presence than she was; no, it was an entirely different question contained in the name that, in this era, only she called him.
And when Lacroix swiveled around in answer to that question; when he exposed his damp, red-tinged eyes to the light and whispered, "My Fleur . . . ;" when she threw herself into his arms as if he were the very air she breathed and she had been suffocating for lack of him; when that happened, then Janette stepped back out on the balcony and let the curtains fall between her and them.
It was not that turning her back afforded them any significant privacy, she reflected, carefully resting her weight on her right arm rather than her left as she leaned on the wrought-iron railing and deliberately fastened her eyes on the view of the lake over the nearby houses. Janette sensed Lacroix as Fleur did her, and she sensed Fleur as Lacroix did her; it was at times like this, when those threads pulled taut, that she most missed Nicolas. If Fleur were going to comfort Lacroix's loss of Divia, then Janette would prefer the buffer of Nicolas's arms to any other . . . but the times in which he had been willing to play that role unconditionally were long, long gone, as tantalizing and ephemeral as the starlight reflected off the dark water.
She might have returned to the Raven immediately, but lingered instead as the moon set, the persistent darkness indicating that clouds had begun rolling in, stalling the first rays of dawn. Eventually, Lacroix emerged onto the balcony, as commanding and self-possessed as ever.
"I always forget how tiny she really is until I see her with you," Janette noted for no apparent reason, and knew an answering smile had flickered across his lips, too quickly to see even had she been looking. No one knew better than they how completely out of proportion Fleur's spirit was with her body.
"You wish to tell me something," Lacroix observed, joining her at the railing and fixing his gaze on the water as well.
"I did not tell her why you killed Divia in Egypt."
"Ah," Lacroix returned. "I see." His voice was low and smooth, his words presented with the slight hesitation that had become the Nightcrawler's trademark, the indefinable pause declaring each word specially selected for what he wished it to convey. "That is very . . . considerate . . . of you, Janette. But though I had withheld that from you and Nicholas, Fleur knows. She has . . . always . . . known."
Almost as inscrutable as her master, Janette did not alter her expression, saying merely, "Of course," before leaping into the air and racing the sun to the Raven. She knew that Fleur stepped out onto the balcony as she left; she knew Fleur would draw Lacroix's arms around her, and the two of them would watch the world around them like hawks -- like vampires -- until the dawn drove them inside. Beyond that, she turned her thoughts instead to when, exactly, Fleur had learned that Lacroix had killed his young daughter, his master, for attempting to force him to become her lover, and when, exactly, Fleur had realized what that might have meant for her, had Lacroix been the one to bring her across . . . had he ever seen her as one of his children.
In fact, Janette thought, perhaps that even explained a few things, after all.
Chapter 02 -- Brabant, 1229
[Please note that all dialogue prior to the overt continuity divergence is quoted from "Be My Valentine" by Diane Cary, in a synthesis of the broadcast version and the 11/02/94 script. Lacroix's narrative interpretation of that dialogue is my own, as are the punctuation and spelling.]
"Lucien, please, take me," Fleur asked, her voice full of suppressed anguish. "Take me with you. I cannot live without you." The mortal girl craned her neck to look up into his face as she made that admission, and Lacroix found himself drowning, once again, in her huge blue eyes, even as she innocently bared the throat so enticingly unprotected by her low-cut, blue gown. "Take me with you, or I may never see you again. I could not bear that."
Lacroix brought his hands up to her shoulders reflexively, and momentarily diverted his gaze to the torch burning at the castle wall, several lengths behind her. "It appears to be affecting me as well," he said stiffly, attempting to smother, with innocuous, formulaic words, the powerful, unfamiliar emotions taking hold of him at the thought of leaving her behind. The bond he had felt with her since the first time she touched him was unlike anything he had ever experienced as a vampire with a mortal; he had attempted to dismiss it, at first, as the similarity between her blood and her brother's, but when he had tasted her essence from the rose thorn's cut the previous night -- when he had known her as only a vampire could -- he had realized that the resonance was not with Nicholas, but with himself, and that to sever this connection would pain him as had nothing in centuries.
"I thought I was used to the pain of separation," Fleur continued, and he pulled her close as he heard her struggling to maintain control of her feelings, just as he was. She pressed her cheek to his chest, running her hands lightly over the black velvet of his tunic; he rested his chin on her hair and closed his eyes, almost unable to follow her words in the sensations of how perfectly her body fit along his, of how her vibrant mortal heart fluttered so close to his own sluggish one. "There have been so many from my family . . . my father . . . Nicolas to the Crusades once, and now again. But I have never felt such overwhelming sorrow. . . ."
"My only comfort is a vision I have," he began soothingly, welcoming the sensation of his fangs descending. "A fantasy that keeps playing in my mind . . . ."
"I think I know," she whispered back. "I dream that we will be together until our deaths."
"No, no. More exciting . . . much more satisfying than that," he promised, kissing her hair with his lips tightly closed. Was this decision only because he had tasted her blood once, and had to have the rest? he demanded of himself. Was this emotion mere sophistry masking simple physical needs? He rejected the thought. He had not bitten her; no predatory compulsion drove him to this. Oh, he did want her blood, but, even more, he wanted her companionship. There were so many things that he could share with her, which he had been able to share with no other. "I imagine . . . that you and I will never die . . . that we will have each other for all eternity."
"As if Jupiter had made us stars," Fleur responded wistfully, her self-sought education a link to the world of his mortality, almost as if she had been formed by the gods to understand him. "To live forever! What an impossible dream."
"There is a way," he said, opening his eyes to a golden haze and brushing Fleur's equally-golden hair away from her neck as he lowered his fangs to her pulsing vein, the arousing honey-and-peach scent of her blood making further thought impossible. "My precious flower."
"Don't touch her!" Nicholas growled, suddenly hurtling out of nowhere and grabbing Lacroix's shoulder. The ancient vampire spun on him, snarling: a predator challenged for his prey. He had known his son was nearby, but had been too absorbed in Fleur to care just where or why. Master and convert faced each other, eyes glowing and fangs extended; Nicholas quickly seized Lacroix by his tunic and flew them both into the nearest stone wall. "This is what he is, Fleur," the knight yelled roughly, holding Lacroix against the side of the building. "Look at him!" Nicholas kept his back to his sister as he exposed Lacroix's transformed visage to her, but finally turned to let Fleur see his own feral eyes and fangs as well. "This is what I've become."
Fleur looked from one to the other, her eyes wide, and Lacroix dropped his head to hide the unmistakable signs of his state. He had not planned for his. He knew that Nicholas expected her to see them as monsters; any woman -- any mortal -- would. But when she spoke, it was, amazingly, not with fear and repulsion, but wonder and fascination. "I understand now! The odd sensations, the pallor of your faces, the strange behavior: I have heard of this -- the vampire!"
"He will make you one of us," Nicholas informed her, "whether you desire it or not."
"My only wish is to be with the one I love," Fleur declared, and Lacroix raised his face. "Love." It was the first time she had applied the word to him, and her straightforward sincerity made even its passing use a coveted thing. "I am interested in so many things that are of another world. Why should this be so different?"
"Please, Fleur," Nicholas began, his features returning to normal as he crossed to her and took her hands. "Listen to me. I do not regret what I am. But if you do this, who will remain in time? No children. No grandchildren. No mortal soul. When I chose this, the future of our family fell to you."
"There is no future without Lucien!" Lacroix saw Fleur attempt to come to him as she made her objection, but Nicholas shifted his grip to her arms and held her firmly where she was.
"This is not right for you, Fleur! Or for our mother . . . to lose not only a son, but her daughter as well." Lacroix wondered if Nicholas even recognized the hypocrisy behind his earnest demands. It was not as if the Lady Marie would not be well-cared-for by the current Duke Henry -- her own children's older half-brother, whom Lacroix gathered she had raised from earliest infancy -- even away on a border patrol as he presently was.
"She will lose me to grieving, if not to Lucien," Fleur declared firmly, and wrenched free of Nicholas, her blue dress swirling around her ankles and her blond hair around her neck as she defiantly positioned herself in front of the ancient Roman general, almost as if to protect him from her brother. Lacroix settled his hands on her shoulders; she raised her right hand to cover his, and he looked at Nicholas with triumph. Fleur's decision was made. Neither the revelation of their vampirism, nor responsibility for the continuation of the family line, nor even appeals to her filial piety had swayed her in the least. She would do anything to be with the one she loved. He had won.
"Whose heart do you choose to break, Nicholas?" Lacroix inquired rhetorically. "Your mother's? Your sister's? Mine?"
"For you, this is just another conquest, another death to satisfy your craving!"
Lacroix looked down for a moment to keep from rolling his eyes. For all the man's good qualities -- and there were a great many -- perceptiveness was not among them. "Aren't you a bit confused, Nicholas? She is mortal. Therefore she will die, and all her beauty will die with her. I can preserve that. Forever."
"Bring her over and she becomes a killer," Nicholas insisted, pacing across the court in disgust. The fair-haired Crusader could almost have spat in his frustration at Fleur's stubbornness, Lacroix knew, but instead controlled his voice and directed his argument to his master. "Cold-blooded -- her purity annihilated."
Flexing his hands lightly on Fleur's shoulders, Lacroix dropped his face to her hair and briefly closed his eyes as she arched up into his touch. The intensity of her personality, of her response to him, was like only one other he had ever known, and yet so completely unlike. As pure in curiosity and compassion as the other had been in selfishness and evil. So fierce, but so generous. So . . . perfect. Opening his eyes to Nicholas, Lacroix asked, "You would rather see this beauty wither to old age, and die?"
Nicholas hesitated and shook his head slightly, groping for words. "It is the beauty of her innocence that you love." Lacroix might have laughed at the depth of misunderstanding inherent in that charge, but Nicholas continued with a quiet surety, "And that you will kill, with the first taste of her blood." For the first time, one of Nicholas's verbal thrusts had struck home, however mistakenly it had been aimed. In the light of experience rather than instinct, it burst on Lacroix what it would make her -- make him -- if he took her blood and then took her, and that shook him to the core. Lacroix knew that the knight could see his defeat in his face, and that Fleur had only the dawning satisfaction in her brother's expression by which to judge the course of the argument determining her fate. "If you truly love Fleur, Lacroix," Nicholas concluded with confidence, an infuriating, condescending misapprehension, "you will not destroy that. You will not."
In the infinite moment in which Lacroix made his decision, he knew Nicholas would never be able to understand the true reason for it, the choice he had made, the secret that one dare not share. Fleur would, of course -- it was in the essence of her -- but she would remain mortal and he would never have the relief of her understanding, the release of her exoneration, on the chance Nicholas's prediction should ever be borne out. Lacroix would not be able to bear it if the evil that ran deeper than his vampirism should be inherited by her through his bite; even less could he live with himself if she were to feel from him the compulsion he had felt from Divia. No: he would rather let her live and die as she was than risk becoming to her as his master had been to him. If he made her his daughter, he would not be able to allow himself to . . . no more than he would any of his children. The urgency to have her with him had blinded him to the nature of the bond he had thought to forge: an eternal torment of desire to be denied, rather than the comfort she had been born to offer. Bitterly ironic as it was, the only way to keep her was to let her go.
Her innocence? No. But her purity? Truly love Fleur? More than Nicholas might ever comprehend.
Fleur turned slowly to face him, her huge blue eyes questioning the way he stiffened and withdrew at her brother's words. Her mortal body was warm, so warm in his arms, and it took an act of will to remove his hands even as far as her delicate, determined chin. He looked down at her as if he hoped to drown in her eyes and thus never have to say the words. "It is a great irony, is it not?" he whispered. "That such a cold, still heart can feel such pain?"
"Lucien . . . ."
He kissed her then, one last time, pressing his cool lips lingeringly to her forehead, and turning away. It was all he could manage to raise a mask of dignified indifference; surely it would crack if he were to watch her go.
Nicholas took his sister gently by the shoulders, turning her face toward him and attuning himself to the beating of her heart. "You need to rest, Fleur," he said, his fledgling hypnotic powers blunt and his attempt to disguise them unsubtle, at best.
"No, Nicolas," Fleur shook her head, attempting to look back at Lacroix. "I don't want to go." Her attempt to struggle, expected though it was, made Lacroix's heart seem to leap into his throat. What if she were a resistor? What if, this time, there truly were no choice for him to make? What if . . . ?
But Nicholas grasped the sides of her head and made her look into his eyes. Bringing all his concentration to the task, believing he was doing what was best for her, he carefully prepared her mind to misplace all the things mortals could not know, and Lacroix gritted his teeth. "You mustn't worry. I promise that, after we leave, your life will be good again. Sleep now, Fleur. Sleep . . ."
"Sleep," Fleur echoed drowsily, her will overcome by her brother's raw power. "Yes, I need to . . ."
She began walking across the garden, to the entrance nearest the stairs leading to her own chamber. Nicholas watched her go as he tenderly delivered the final, key, hypnotic imperative: ". . . and forget."
As Fleur sleepwalked through the arched doorway, Nicholas slowly turned back to Lacroix, his expression not without compassion. "We will leave as soon as possible."
"Yes," Lacroix agreed at last, after a bitter, prolonged silence in which he lashed down emotion to rationalization once again. But vengeance . . . ah, revenge, the only emotion he dared hold to him, as before Fleur, so after. The very necessity of giving her up cut like a vengeance of Divia's from beyond the grave.
It would never end, now.
"You've probably done me a favor," Lacroix snarled at his interfering son. "But you must realize . . . I will demand retribution. One day, when I see that you have fallen in love . . ."
But the rest of the threat was left unspoken when a soft, woman's cry cut through the night air from just beyond the door Fleur had entered. It was a kind of cry familiar to them both, an inarticulate expression of pain and pleasure in almost equal measure, the last conscious sound that might be made as mortal life was drained away. Equally commonplace and unremarkable had been Lacroix's sense that Janette was feeding nearby, until he heard, in that cry, the voice of her prey.
Fleur!
Not caring if there were any mortals to see, Lacroix flew the distance across the garden into the castle, sweeping around the foyer corner with the strength of a winter storm. He found Janette and Fleur sitting on the staircase, their red and blue skirts spilling down from the landing like twin rivers of blood and water. Fleur's eyes were closed, her head slumped on Janette's breast, her bloodless pallor almost matching that of the vampire's skin beneath her cheek. Janette leaned her head back against the stone wall and trailed her fingers lightly over the two tiny punctures marking Fleur's neck; as Lacroix arrived, Janette opened her eyes, and he saw in them the dreamy languor that followed a satisfying feeding.
"What have you done?" he asked in a voice as hollow as death, ignoring the feeling of Nicholas stepping up behind him.
"What you ought to have done," Janette answered calmly, bending her head to kiss Fleur's neck, and then brushing the girl's hair back so that he could see, unmistakably, the neat holes left by Janette's fangs closing and disappearing. "I offered her the choice, instead of making it for her."
"Janette!" Nicholas began, outrage and betrayal unmistakable in his tone, but Lacroix cut him off.
"Hush, Nicholas," he said sternly, and began climbing the stairs at a mortal pace. Completely sated on Fleur's hot blood, and thoroughly enervated from her first attempt to bring a mortal across, Janette willingly allowed him to take the newborn vampire's body into his arms as he sat down beside them. Cradling Fleur to him, Lacroix settled his left hand over her cooling heart, and waited, waited, waited for its single pulse. When it came at last, he let out a breath he did not realize he had been holding.
"Nicholas, we will require a . . . meal for Fleur when she wakes. Fetch one."
"Not any of the household dependents," Janette instructed quietly. "She cares about them. If you can, Nicolas, find someone she does not know -- try the stables, perhaps, or, better yet, outside the castle and village."
"And do at least look for healthy, if not intelligent and attractive," Lacroix added, staring at Fleur while speaking to her brother. "It is her first time, after all."
Nicholas, displaced by Fleur as the "baby" of his family for the second time in his life, nodded stiffly and did as he was bid.
Lacroix left his hand on Fleur's breast through another pulse of her heart, now as cold and still as his, and kissed her forehead again, lingeringly, as if to take back into himself the farewell that now never need be. She would be a vampire, and not his child; he could love her. And she . . . she could choose whether to love him.
"Should she not wake?" Janette asked.
"Soon," Lacroix answered. "Soon. There is no question but that she is coming back to us." 'Us,' he repeated to himself. It passed unspoken between Lacroix and Janette that as far as he had brought over Nicholas for her, so far had she brought over Fleur for him. Just so far, and no further, for as far as he had made Nicholas for his own sake, so had she made Fleur for hers. It was understood. "Perhaps you should go see what is keeping Nicholas."
Janette nodded, gently freed her skirt from where it was trapped under Fleur's ankle, gave the sleeping girl in her master's arms a look inscrutable to him, and then all but floated down the stairs, so light was her step. It was far from the first time that Janette's motivations had been less than transparent to Lacroix, despite their familial bond, so the look was nothing new in that line, but it made him wonder, with a start, exactly what it would mean that Fleur was now Janette's daughter. It was all happening so fast, he thought, and then smirked internally at himself: as if his entire acquaintance with Fleur had not been a mere three nights, less than a blink in his long, long life! He was behaving foolishly, he knew, and yet could not help himself; every man passed through an adolescence, so perhaps a vampire passed through a second, and this could all be blamed on a stage of immortal maturation. Love at first sight, indeed.
But what of the connection he had felt with Fleur, the feeling that they had known each other since the beginning of time, the bond they had seemed to have from the moment she reached out to him and he first looked into her bottomless eyes? Did that belong to Janette now, or would it still be there when Fleur woke?
When Fleur's heart beat a third time without her stirring, Lacroix carefully shifted her in his embrace, and then ripped open his left wrist with his teeth. The scent of his blood reached beyond consciousness to Fleur's new instincts, causing her to suckle at his wrist with a ferocious, unthinking appetite. It felt wonderful. Her fangs had not yet manifested, so he was in no fear of her First Hunger draining him before his wound healed; as long as it lasted, he simply held her to him, and reveled in the joy of Fleur taking his blood into her, his body shuddering at the unique pleasure of her tongue, lips, and blunt, still-mortal teeth pulling at the edges of his wound in a futile attempt to keep it open. Closing his eyes and willing the sensation to continue, Lacroix recalled the opposite but almost equally sensuous feel of her healer's touch, when she had boldly entered his chamber while he slept his first day in her home; with a competence belying her years, she had laid her hands on his sun-inflicted wounds, and with a resonance belying her mortality, he had felt every touch even in the depths of vampiric repose. Surely this proved there was no justice in this world, for he could not deserve this happiness.
As the gash sealed itself, denying her access to his blood, Fleur whimpered softly and began to fight her way back to consciousness from the depths of her transformative sleep. Lacroix smiled in pleased anticipation as instincts yet-unexplored caused her to nuzzle the base of his neck, where the veins ran closest to the surface. "Mnmm," she murmured, her eyes roaming under her closed lids as she dreamed the images in his blood. "Lucius . . . father . . ."
Lacroix froze. He had not heard her correctly. He could not have heard her correctly. No. He could not already have passed on Divia's taint. He had not remade Fleur in his own, flawed image. There was so much he still did not know about what he was, Lacroix thought, and cursed Divia's shade yet again; but he had not made Fleur his fledgling by giving her his blood -- had he? No!
Nevertheless, he held Fleur's body perhaps somewhat less closely as he rose and carried her to the chamber that had been assigned Janette, depositing her quickly in the center of the red-draped bed, though not so quickly that he did not place a pillow under her head, or draw up the quilt to hold in the last of her mortal warmth. Having seen efficiently to Fleur's physical comfort, Lacroix withdrew to the farthest corner of the room and disciplined his exterior to a silence and stillness that no mortal sense could have discerned from a statue, even while his mind heaved on waves of guilt and fear. That was the one part of his past he tried to keep even from himself, and she had touched it with her first taste of his blood. The question tormenting him, however, was whether she had touched it as his child or another's, because only the child of another could be his equal; only the child of another could be free . . . could free him.
It was one more beat of Fleur's vampiric heart before Nicholas and Janette entered the room, a dazed-looking male mortal between them. Lacroix inspected him briefly: roughly clothed, well-fed, not much older than Fleur, his face and neck freshly scrubbed -- no doubt at Janette's order. Really, it was the best that could be asked on such short notice. Nodding gravely to Janette, Lacroix strode out of the room and pulled the wooden door shut behind him.
Chapter 03 -- Toronto, 1996
It had been a long day in room 106 of the Metro Coroner's Building, a long day following a long night, and an even longer day and night before that. Natalie was fairly sure she was suffering from sleep deprivation. But the anxiety that had propelled her through the twenty-four hours of her unintended vigil over Urs's body had been replaced last night, shortly after the girl's corpse had been sent for incineration, by a fascinated diligence, and since just before sunrise, a mounting excitement.
Natalie leaned back from her microscope and rubbed her eyes wearily, unable to suppress the smile that quirked at the edges of her mouth even when looking at her slides unaided. She was fairly sure she had taken a nap somewhere around eleven that morning, in the middle of her hurried completion of the Baker report -- if falling asleep on one's keyboard can be counted as a nap -- and the candy wrappers and pop cans overflowing her wastebasket testified to her many trips to the snack machines; so even if she had been too occupied to so much as make coffee, she had not been running entirely on empty. For every time her rational good sense had urged her to pack it all in for the moment, book off, go home, and make a fresh start in the next shift, her love of the puzzle and her love of Nick had combined to plead for just one more hour, just one more cycle of tests.
And, oh, it had been worth it! Divia's rampage had brought its own silver lining, indeed -- a silver bullet, even. Nat wondered suddenly if Nick had ever ingested mercury in his search for a cure, given all the things mercury had been supposed to treat in its day. What? Mercury was quicksilver, and she had been thinking metaphorically of silver -- boy, was she tired! She laughed at her inability to think straight. She laughed at her own laughter. She laughed at the world. In two nights, she had been all but handed on a silver platter something she had not been able to discover or create in six years of trying. Ever since Nick's narrowly-averted flight after Schanke and Cohen's tragic deaths, a creeping despair had been steadily suffocating her heart; since dawn, that choking gloom had been completely uprooted. In its place, almost-abandoned hopes were budding anew.
There was every indication that that two-thousand-year-old little girl had been better equipped for vengeance than even she had known. Her poisoned bite had not, in itself, been death.
It had been mortality.
Natalie raised her arms over her head and shook out her hands' cramped postures. How long had she been bent over her microscope? She stood, stretched and replaced the green scrunchie that had been slipping down her hair, before walking over to her desk and pulling out the center drawer, fishing around for another package of stick-on labels, some more graph paper, and her favorite pen -- a black ball-point with "Metro Toronto Police" emblazoned in gold on its side. Returning to her workspace under the cabinets, Natalie pulled her chair a few feet to the left of her microscope, over to a rack of full test tubes, and sat down, staring at them with a reverence that she slowly, embarrassedly, realized was tinged with a kind of greed. In one of them, yes, there was the cure for vampirism: freedom and even salvation for Nick and any others who thought as he did, not to mention a pinnacle of scientific discovery. But there, as well, was her hope for a future with the man she loved, a future of full days rather than empty, empty nights.
Guiltily, Natalie looked over her shoulder at the now-empty examining table, her expression clouding. She had long since become accustomed -- too accustomed, she often thought -- to creating plausible lies to cover deaths caused by vampires, to shuffling paperwork to disguise blood loss and making strategic incisions to destroy fang marks, but this was the first time it had been necessary to tamper with an identity. Oh, she had stalled identification of the Rebecca back-up singer who had been shot on stage, and signed a fake death-certificate for poor Bridgett as she had done for her brother Richard, but passing off Urs as a Jane Doe, fudging the date and sending her body unclaimed to the incinerator, the modern equivalent of an unmarked pauper's grave, was much harder for Natalie to excuse to herself.
She had only ever spoken a few words to Urs, and those words were only what she had said to the half-dozen vampires Nick had had Janette assemble for her to instruct on administering the ironically-lifesaving HIV injections during the vampire fever epidemic -- thus preventing the massacre of AIDS patients he had feared if rumor ran unchecked -- but, even so, it felt like a betrayal. It was only natural that a race whose members rarely died, and generally turned to ashes instantly upon doing so, had never developed a cultural response to death, but Natalie would have felt much better turning Urs over to a friend or family member -- a fledgling, a master, whatever the heck constituted family to a vampire.
That Nick had solemnly assured her that none of Urs's family had survived her only made Natalie feel worse.
Attempting to banish those thoughts from her mind, Natalie bent to work again, carefully labeling each one of the vials with the elaborate code she had developed over her years of combining her research on Nick's behalf with her work for the citizens of Toronto, and neatly recording more disguised data on the graph paper for each completed test-tube.
She had taken samples from Urs's corpse, of course: fluid, tissue, bone, everything she could manage. She had been delighted as well as mystified at her first chance to autopsy a vampire -- something Nick had continued to insist should not be possible throughout the examination. In the end, it had turned out that he had been right.
Urs had no longer been a vampire.
The body that had lain on Natalie's table a mere forty-eight hours ago had been that of an eighteen-year-old human girl who had died of a severe beating -- or perhaps a wild animal attack -- one which had broken her neck and included slashing and biting and blood loss. Nothing more, and nothing less. Urs had been human. It was a miracle. A hideous, horrible, twisted, perverted miracle. And as the full impact of it had dawned on Natalie two nights ago, alone in the morgue in the last hours of darkness, knowing that Nick and his family were even then being hunted by the psychotic demon who had murdered Urs, she had done something she had not really done since her parents' deaths when she was a child.
She had prayed.
Not merely mouthing words as she had long done twice a year, accompanying her brother's family on Christmas and Easter: not merely meditating on the world of her senses and how to decipher it: but sincerely and unquestioningly, Natalie had prayed with a faith she had never suspected she harbored, all the barriers built up so carefully throughout her life vanishing in that moment as if they had never been, all the puzzles coalescing into a few clear truths.
"Not like this," she had whispered then, unconsciously falling to her knees in the same helpless manner in which tears fell from her eyes. "Please, God, not like this. Don't make Nick mortal like this. Please, God, not like this. Not like this." After a while, words had failed her, and she had just rocked herself in time with her silent, mantra-like pleading as she sobbed. She had lost so many, many people in her scant thirty-three years, but she had always believed Nick safe behind his vampiric powers, if not his gun. Not even the deaths of Urs and Vachon had truly shaken that reckless confidence until she had understood what caused them. They had not died in fair contest, vampire against vampire; they had died mortal, utterly vulnerable, for all that Nick supposed Vachon had made Tracy stake him . . . .
Tracy. Remembering the young detective, Natalie had been able to get herself under control. Nick might be . . . was . . . still alive, she had thought, but Tracy had already lost Vachon. The coroner had taken a deep breath and begun to plan what could and could not be done for Nick's bereaved partner. Standing up and reaching for her outdoor coat, Natalie had resolved that if Nick did not come back from this, she would tell Tracy everything she knew about vampires. It had flashed through Natalie's mind that if no one in Toronto stopped the demon child, the Enforcers would soon come, in force, in her wake -- and that wake might extend around the world, wherever there was a descendent of Lacroix. There would be nowhere to run. Natalie had hastily shrugged into her coat and checked her pocket for her car-keys.
Before she had been able to leave, however, Janette had appeared in the entranceway, looking pale, even for her, and slumping against the door-frame. "Natalie, I am afraid I require your assistance," the leather-clad proprietor of the Raven had managed before collapsing on the floor of the lab, her exposed left arm torn open to the bone in bloody strips.
Quickly examining Janette where she had fallen, Natalie had determined with relief that despite whatever she had been through, the vampire's supernatural healing factor was still functional -- a thought that had later made her stomach heave when she imagined how the gruesome wound must have looked when first inflicted. By the time the coroner had washed Janette's arm and was in the process of wrapping it in a temporary bandage to prevent further damage, the vampire had woken and hissed out a request for blood.
"No," Natalie had refused, boldly defying Janette's glowing eyes, and then patting her arm and efficiently moving Urs's body into the freezer. "Trust me, Janette, I haven't figured out exactly what this poison is yet, but it's like the fever virus; it may depend on the concentration of your blood to do its work. Don't help it! I didn't see any fang marks," she had continued, assisting Janette up to sit on the examining table. "You weren't bitten, were you?"
"No," Janette had whispered through clenched teeth, obviously fighting the urge to drain the coroner there and then.
"Thank goodness," Natalie had responded, reminding herself to suppress her fear as she might have when facing a wild animal. Look like a doctor, not a dinner, she had quipped lamely to herself in the back of her mind, as she had applied more antiseptic to Janette's arm and investigated the unusually-slow progress of her vampiric healing. "I suspect that the anti-coagulant that accompanies a vampire's bite is the medium of this poison in Divia. I don't know whether her system is damaged, or whether it mutated, or if maybe it's a competitive response to extreme malnutrition, a way of transforming potential rivals into a food source . . ." Janette had hissed impatiently, and Natalie had looked up into her still-golden eyes. "Point being, if you don't have any of that venom in your system, you should be fine as long as you 'stay out of the sun and avoid sharp sticks.'"
"And if I do have it in my system?" the vampire had asked, looking down at her unhealed arm. "Will I end as Urs and Vachon have?"
"You don't seem to have been bitten," Natalie had repeated, ducking the question. "But this central gash doesn't look as if it's going to seal on its own any time soon. I want to stitch it up for you."
Janette had blinked, her eyes suddenly going wide and blue, and had then nodded sharply. It had occurred to Natalie that the thousand-year-old woman had very likely never had stitches before, and certainly had not often felt pain in the past nine and a half centuries. The vampire had remained silent as Natalie had done her work, and the coroner had looked up to find that Janette's gaze had apparently been fixed on the needle the entire time.
"It's done," the human woman had said softly.
"Why am I not healing, Natalie?" the vampire had asked, just as softly.
"I don't know," Natalie had admitted, and then paused. Her patient cared for to the best of her ability, she had been unable to continue swallowing the question on the tip of her tongue. "What happened, Janette? Is Nick . . . ?"
"He is alive," Janette had answered, looking sadly into Natalie's eyes as the coroner sighed in relief. "But that is all I am sure of. I was not strong enough to fight Divia. I played 'possum' and she left me for dead. I was lucky. Nicolas is next on her list."
"Where is he?" Natalie had demanded, immediately striding toward the door. "At the loft? The Raven? CERK?"
Despite her condition, Janette had moved in front of Natalie faster than mortal eyes could follow and blocked the exit. "Were you not listening?" the vampire had hissed. "I am not strong enough to fight her; I would have been killed; you are less than nothing. Would you go and give her a hostage to use against Nicolas? Would you let him see you dead, so that in his first grief he would not care to live?" Natalie had felt the blood drain out of her face at the scenarios Janette described, and Janette had then dropped her voice and continued cajolingly. "His strength is no longer the vampire's. Tonight his strategy, his strength, must be what he has become these last six years -- what he has been becoming the last several hundred. We cannot do him any good out there. But surely there must be something here" -- she had gestured vaguely around the lab -- "that will explain what he and Lacroix are facing! Something they can use!"
Swallowing hard, Natalie had said decisively, "I'll need a sample of your blood."
Two days after that, finishing the labels and applying them carefully to the test-tubes, Natalie shook her head as if to dislodge those memories. There was no reason to relive those tense efforts to beat an unknown time-table. Nick had survived. That he had been bitten and survived had thrown her initial deductions into chaos, but the important thing was that Nick had survived. Lacroix had survived. Janette's stitches had been removed before she returned home to the Raven for the day. And though Natalie would have dearly loved to autopsy Divia, Nick had informed her of Lacroix's firm intention to reduce the child's body to ashes and scatter them on the wind. She had not asked for more details, and he had not offered them, but he had held her close for as long as she would let him before sending him home to rest, with bandages around his neck and zip-lock bags of protein-shake mix in his pocket. She had stayed in the morgue and worked, and if she had not been able to counteract Divia's tainted anti-coagulant when she had been thinking of it as a poison, she was almost able to do something even more miraculous now that she knew it was an antibody for the vampire virus itself.
Almost.
If she dared.
Natalie pushed back her chair from the counter and strolled contemplatively over to her desk with the sheet of graph paper. Yawning hugely and rubbing her tired eyes, she went over the columns again and again. There was no mistake. The . . . the . . . the "antivirus," she decided to call it . . . was a picky little thing, and outside, apparently, the vector of Divia's own body, only truly viable in living, human blood. The farther from that medium, the more it shut down, becoming sluggish and incapable of reproduction in human blood more than an hour old, until in animal blood -- well, pig, monkey, rat, cat and cow, anyway; everything she had been able to test -- it was completely dormant, and in synthetic blood and non-blood mediums it simply disappeared. Something in Divia had generated the antigens that triggered antivirus production in her victims, but all Natalie had was the antivirus itself, and it simply could not be reproduced in vitro.
It showed every indication, however, that it would grow in vivo, in the human bloodstream. And it showed every indication that, when transferred from human to vampire blood, it would neutralize and reverse the vampire virus, bringing the vampire back across as a human.
If it could be grown, and transferred alive, of course.
There were sterile hypodermics in the glass cabinet, Natalie finally allowed herself to think, and then bit her lip. Hard. She tasted blood. She knew better than that. Of course she did. What had she told Cal, just last winter? First trials? And that was for carefully-researched drugs already tested in animals! No reputable scientist -- no sane person -- would just go injecting some unknown foreign substance into herself, much less a mysterious vampire antibody discovered only the day before yesterday!
Natalie sighed, and laid down her head on her desk, folding her arms under her chin. This brought her face to face with her favorite photo of Nick, from that one wonderful, terrible day last spring when the lydovuterine had held the sun at bay. It was of him leaning against the caddy in the morning light, smiling as if his joy were as big and bright as the long-missed sun above. God, she loved him. She loved his laugh, and his hands, and his wicked sense of humor, and his inability to tell the difference between proper toast and singed bread; she loved his nose, and his predilection for remote controls, and the way he was willing to argue all day about the immutable questions that would outlast them both; she loved the way he loved life. More than anything, she wanted him to have the joy of that day in the sun every day. But at what cost had it come then? she thought, remembering how that supposed freedom had revealed itself to be a lie, one enslavement traded for another. She had not dared propose another cure since then. Instead, she had carefully, obsessively, phrased every tentative advance as a "treatment," or a "step," ruthlessly squashing his tendency to take them for more. She had even stopped building castles in the air aloud for fear of breaking his heart when the foundation stones proved too heavy for the clouds.
Turning her head on her arms, Natalie wondered if that had not been a mistake in itself. Had she just been contributing to his loneliness and unhappiness by refusing to feed his hopes? She looked at the ring on her right hand that he had given her on Valentine's Day 1995 -- like a silly, high-school, "promise" ring when she had tried to explain it to others, but worth everything between the two of them -- when they had decided to stop pretending that platonic friendship was enough, and start pretending that unconsummatable love was enough. Hope was the very essence of Nick, the lifeblood of his soul, and to make him live sedately, day to day, without anticipation in order to avoid disappointment . . . no wonder he had been so restless and discontent these past several months. On the other hand, could she bear to see him crash again, to fall into the hopeless self-hatred of the times he had nearly been driven back to human blood?
If she told him about the antivirus, he would spend all his fortune and the rest of her life looking for a way to activate it outside the human body.
If she did not tell him . . . or did not tell him until after it was done . . . .
"Are you asleep, Nat?" Nick whispered suddenly, directly behind her. She shrieked and all but jumped out of her skin. "Apparently not," the vampire detective grinned under his sunglasses, and then sobered. "But you look like you should be. You haven't been here all day, have you?"
"All day?" Natalie repeated, looking at the wall clock and then her wristwatch. "All day? Nick, the sun can't have set already, can it? What are you doing here?"
He shrugged. "Glasses, hat, gloves, thick cloud cover -- and the sun will be all the way down in minutes. I'm fine. How are you?"
"Exhausted," she admitted, yawning behind her hand. "I've found out what killed Urs and Vachon, and I'm pretty sure that it spared you because of your miracle diet of protein shakes and ketchup."
"The ketchup makes all the difference, of course," he said solemnly, seating himself on the edge of her desk.
Natalie swatted him. "I'm serious, Nick. You got through the fever because you had no human blood in your system; same for this. Your attempts to save yourself saved you. Although," she paused, "if we want to cure you this way, we're going to have to unsave you a bit somewhere along the road." She yawned again.
Nick looked at her, and then at the contents of her wastebasket. "Is that you talking, or the massive overdose of gummi bears and Diet Coke?"
"A little of both," she acknowledged. "You're off tonight, right?"
"Right," Nick agreed, suddenly sweeping her up into his arms and smiling as if this were quite the best use he could think of for vampiric strength. "So I can take you home, and fix you some decent food -- no coffee -- and put you right to bed."
"Mmmm. Sounds good," Natalie said, leaning her head against his chest and carefully arranging her hands on his shoulder to avoid the bandage at his neck. "You'll stay there with me?"
Nick kissed her forehead. "I'll stay on the couch," he said softly, his light tone almost completely hiding the pain that admission cost him. No matter how careful he was, no matter how close to humanity he had come, he did not dare tempt the beast within, the irresistible hunger that was the vampire, by physical intimacy; he had told her so a dozen times, and apologized for it a hundred. Natalie winced. If she were not so tired, if she could think straight, she would never have been so careless as to scratch the scab off that scar . . . .
Scar.
"Janette!" she gasped. "I promised Janette I'd come look at the scar on her arm before the club opened tonight! Put me down, Nick. What time is it?"
Setting her securely back in her chair, Nick picked up the phone from her desk and began to dial the Raven. "Relax, Nat. We can stop by on the way to your apartment. Believe me, if anything had changed for the worse, she would have made it known." Natalie opened her mouth to respond, but quickly shut it again when Nick signaled that the phone had been picked up on the other end. "Yes, is Janette available? Tell her it's Nick Knight. . . . Yes, she's here, Janette. We're just on our way over. . . . No. . . . No, I didn't realize; I suppose I should have expected it. . . . Of course I won't. . . . Right." He replaced the receiver on its hooks.
"What is it?"
"Nothing much," he replied with a studied carelessness. "My sister is in town."
Natalie squeezed his hand reassuringly, quickly beginning to clean up the remains of her experiments and gather some things she might need when she saw Janette. She did not know much about Fleur, except that she was Nick's mortal sister as well as vampiric . . . niece, Natalie supposed . . . and that he always had a certain sad catch in his voice when he mentioned her, and a way of closing off the subject. Natalie hesitated for a moment over the contents of the crocheted, drawstring sack that she had begun using in place of her old-fashioned black bag -- less conspicuous, less likely to be stolen -- since Joey had found his way into her car outside the wrestling stadium. Finally, she gave in to the impulse to include one of her samples of the antivirus. She already had hypodermics. Guiltily tying the bag shut, Natalie gestured for Nick to precede her out of the lab, and asked lightly, "So what is Fleur like?"
"I haven't seen her in about thirty years," Nick said almost wistfully, shutting off the light and holding the door open for her. "But a long, long time ago, she was a lot like you."
Chapter 04 -- Brabant, 1229
Fleur woke slowly, drifting for a while between dream and sensation before she became able to tell the difference. When she could, sensation prompted her to open her eyes and try to sit up. She was hungry.
She could not sit up, however; something was gently pressing down on her shoulders. "Careful," she heard her brother say quietly, and then he leaned over her face from where he was sitting on the bed behind her. Nicolas looked odd, as if she were seeing him through a sheet of golden flame. He also looked . . . sad? . . . she could not tell. She could not seem to hold a thought except for how hungry she was, though she knew she had had a veritable feast at supper, and that could not have been so very many hours ago. "You've been through a lot. How are you feeling?"
"Hungry!" she almost laughed. How could there be any other answer? But Nicolas did not smile back at her.
"Of course she is," Janette said, appearing next to the bed inside the enfolding, red curtains. At least, Fleur thought the curtains were red; like everything in her sight, they appeared through a strange, gold haze. Nicolas released Fleur's shoulders as Janette neared, and the young woman sat up, almost surprised to find that she was still wearing the same blue gown. Surely she would have changed it before going to sleep? No, that was not right. If only she could think about something other than the gnawing ache inside her.
"Where is Lucien?" she finally managed, and was unable to interpret the glance that passed between her brother and Janette at her question. "I want Lucien!" she demanded. "I want . . ."
"What do you want?" Janette asked patiently, leaning close to examine Fleur's neck.
"I . . ." In a sudden rush of memory, the newborn vampire raised her hands to her throat; the holes were gone, completely healed. "I . . . what is that sound? That pounding?" She looked wildly from Janette to her brother, and Nicolas gravely tied back the bed-hangings, revealing a peasant apparently sleeping in a chair across the room.
The volume of the regular beat increased in Fleur's ears, pounding as if in time with her steadily rising hunger, and almost without conscious volition she slipped off the bed and began to cross the chamber to the young man. He smelled so good, so enticing . . . no, it was not him. It was his blood, the hot, wet river she could sense just under the surface of his skin. She needed that river like she had never needed anything in her life. Fleur reached out for him -- and then suddenly stopped, crying out in anguish at a spurt of pain. She looked back at Janette and Nicolas in confusion, and raised her right hand to feel her upper jaw. Her fangs had emerged for the first time, her canines tearing through her gums as they lengthened and found their proper places.
"It will not hurt again," Janette murmured reassuringly, unnecessarily, as Fleur had already turned back to the man, her newly-emerged fangs having become the aching, pulsing center of her hunger. Drink. Drink. Drink, his blood seemed to call her. And so she did, yielding entirely to instinct as she bent over his neck, sweeping his dusty-brown hair out of her way and plunging her fangs into the soft flesh of his throat.
It was over all too soon. Almost before she knew it, the pounding that she now understood to have been the peasant's heart ceased, and with it the ecstatic flow of his living essence into her mouth, the eruption of pleasure that had come as each beat of his heart forced his blood into her body. Sighing in wistful satisfaction, Fleur rose from his neck and turned toward Janette and Nicolas at the bed, perching herself on the arm of the chair. She realized with a start that her vision had returned to normal in the candlelight, and her fangs had retracted into her jaw. Reaching up to feel the sharp points of her reformed canines, she trailed her fingers across her face and discovered that blood had spilled down her chin, neck, and breasts, leaking wastefully from her inexperienced bite. Eagerly scooping up the thick liquid with her fingers, she learned that though not nearly as affecting as live blood, it, too, tasted better than anything she had ever imagined as a mortal, and it, too, went straight to the hunger she could still feel coiled deep within her, rippling throughout her body like . . . like . . . like Lucien's kiss. Fleur briefly closed her eyes as the thought of him combined with the blood she was sucking from her fingers to make another, milder wave of pleasure roll through her.
"I shouldn't have stayed for this," Nicolas choked, and moved quickly toward the door. Fleur looked up at her brother in surprise. His wide, blue eyes, so like her own, held an expression she could not ever remember seeing in them before, much less directed at her. It was . . . guilt, yes . . . and . . . disgust?
"What?" she asked in confusion, trying not to see herself as she was reflected in her brother's eyes: wanton, degraded, savage, a fallen woman, a murderess, a carnal demon dripping with innocent blood.
"I shouldn't have been here," the knight repeated, dropping his gaze and reaching for the door handle.
"If you are going to go, Nicolas," Janette said, placing herself between them, "take the body with you and dispose of it." The brunette vampire turned to her convert and placed her arm around her shoulders, urging her to stand and then guiding her to the bed. Fleur heard the heavy door swing shut as Janette let down the bed curtains and blew out the last of the candles.
"I can still see," she noted dully as Janette settled herself beside her, one part of her mind still seizing on all the wonders rising up before her, while the rest sank into what had been in her brother's eyes.
"Of course," Janette replied softly, reaching up to undo the ribbon that kept Fleur's hair back. "You are a vampire now, and vampires are the people of the night, the darkness. You have heard this, of course," Janette continued, loosening Fleur's thick, undisciplined tresses and beginning to smooth them with a brush she had produced seemingly out of nowhere, "but you must know it to be true. You may live forever, but you are not without vulnerabilities. Wood through your heart will kill you, as will a blade severing your neck. You may drink wine and ale in time, if you like, but other foods are simply no longer edible to you, and garlic -- even the smell will make you exceedingly ill. The sun will rise soon, as it rises every day, but you must never go out in the daylight again. It would burn you to ashes in an instant, as would the touch of Christ's cross. And you are far too important, to Lacroix, to Nicolas . . . and now to me . . . to be traded for ashes."
"I killed him," Fleur said, just as dully as before. "His name was Denis. I saw it in his blood. He was a farmer. Recently brought in to train as a groom. Even more recently wed to a brown-eyed girl named Adele, who is going to bear a 'seven-month' baby around Epiphany --"
Fleur stopped her recital at the feeling of Janette's nails digging deep into her shoulder, and turned to look at her. "Yes," her master agreed coldly. "He was mortal, and you fed from him. How did it feel?"
Staring into Janette's pale, blue eyes, Fleur admitted, her voice low and desperate, "Wonderful. It felt wonderful!" She collapsed into the older vampire's lap, sobbing blood tears.
Janette allowed her to cry for a while, gently rubbing her back and murmuring soothing, ageless nothings. Finally, her tone still soft as her words turned exceedingly practical, she said, "Come, dear one, you do not want to put all that blood into tears. Here." She handed Fleur the brush and began removing the combs holding her own hair.
Wiping her eyes, Fleur set the brush in her lap and moved behind Janette, helping unpin the shiny, black locks before lifting the brush to them, and she wondered if Janette knew that combing her hair one hundred strokes was her own nightly habit as she prepared for sleep, her way of settling herself among the cares of the day. The familiarity of the ritual comforted Fleur at first, until it occurred to her strongly that Janette did know -- but how? Fleur had believed that she had chosen this existence -- Lucien's existence -- with her eyes open, but he was not there just then, and her hands began to shake slightly as she strove to rein in the doubts Nicolas had ignited like Greek fire.
"It is all right," Janette said serenely, and Fleur started again at the uncanny sense that the woman was responding directly to her thoughts. "It is what you are now. It is what you are becoming. This turmoil will leave you as you leave your mortal bonds." She paused a moment, as if planning her words, and then continued, "Consider: the mortal you fed on this morning is no different than the deer you fed on when your cooks prepared it last night. And what you felt, you will feel again, and again, and again, forever. Their rules are not ours. Their limits are not ours. We are not like them; we are more than mere nobility, more than royalty. You will learn to fly, Fleur. You will see and do things of which even you have never dreamt. And you will never be completely alone."
Fleur set down the brush, leaned her face against Janette's shoulder, threaded her arms loosely around her master's waist, and was silent for a moment. Then she asked, again, "Where is Lucien?"
"He will come," Janette evaded, and though Fleur somehow knew it was an evasion, it did not bother her because she also knew, somehow, that it was true; he was nearby, and he was thinking of her.
"When he does come . . ." Fleur began, and then discarded that question. First things first. "Janette, what are we?"
"Vampires."
"No, I mean, you and me."
"I know, dear one, but that question is much more difficult than the other," Janette said, and Fleur could all but hear the faint smile in her voice. Then the older woman sighed, and disentangled herself from Fleur's embrace as she turned to face her. "And the answer does begin in our vampirism. Lacroix explains it like this: you are my student, and I am your teacher -- eternally."
"Lucien considers you and Nicolas his children," Fleur noted, and wondered how she knew that.
"Yes, he does. Very much so." Janette looked at her strangely for a moment. "But I do not perceive the relationship quite in the way that he does, and you will have to see, as time passes, how you look at it yourself. Encourage them to believe what pleases them about what you think, but always decide what you think for yourself, Fleur. Do not ever let them decide for you." Janette's expression had been almost fierce as she said this, like nothing Fleur had seen from her since her final moments of mortality, but in a blink the emotion was gone and the unreadable mask restored. "We cannot have children as mortals do, so this is the basis of our . . . families. The relationship is irrevocable this side of the grave. The usual term for a new vampire is 'convert.' One metaphor is of child and parent; another is of slave and master; another--" Janette cocked her head and allowed the corners of her mouth to creep up, if ever so slightly "-- is of fledgling and bird."
Fleur smiled, and allowed the final comparison to soften the quickly-glossed-over second one for the moment, as she knew Janette meant it to, but she kept it in mind, nevertheless; she would consider it later, when her understanding of the world had ceased to melt and remold with every word. The same consideration prevented her from asking aloud why Janette had brought her across, until she could make sense of the clues in what her -- maker? -- had already said so fervently. Setting those no-less-serious concerns aside, Fleur returned hesitantly to Lucien's anticipated reappearance. Staring intently at her hands as she picked diligently at the quilt covering the bed, she asked, "If we cannot have children as mortals do, can we . . . that is, how do we . . ." She looked up hopefully at Janette, but saw no hint that the other woman intended to supply the words for her. She sighed, and forged ahead. "Can Lucien and I make love?"
"As mortals do? If you like." Janette paused, pursing her lips. "And no doubt, you will like. But our release is in the flow of blood -- equally in biting and being bitten -- and the ultimate union is the circle of the two at once." Janette did not laugh, hedge or condescend, and Fleur was immensely relieved. She had the modesty of her inexperience, she would admit. But she had been what passed for a physician for her people for two years, ever since Henry had appropriated dear old Father Condes, the leech, for his roving ducal entourage, and any interest she had ever had in the storied modesty expected of noble maidens had worn away in poultices and stitches and midwifery. Good and bad, she had learned a great deal about men and women in those years. And in the last three days, she had learned a great deal about herself.
She was unsure of what the vampire in her wanted, but the woman wanted Lucien.
And if that was as frightening as it was thrilling, well . . . it was her choice, was it not?
"The sun is up, and we both need sleep," Janette observed firmly, breaking deliberately into Fleur's troubled reverie. Janette leaned back on the pillows, and draped her arms loosely around her fledgling as Fleur lay down close, her back to her maker. The silence did its best to soothe them both into slumber, but though Fleur willed herself to rest, the life she had chosen and the death she had caused continued to chase each other through her mind until they collided.
"It is just that I'd never seen that in Nicolas's eyes before," Fleur whispered.
"Neither have I, dear one," Janette whispered back. "I suspect no one has. I suspect he has never looked at anyone that way, because never before has anyone been his baby sister, and become a vampire before his eyes. He would have given anything to keep you mortal, and innocent."
"It is unfair!" Fleur burst out. "Why is it all right for him, for you -- he does not look at you that way -- but not for me?"
Janette was silent for long moments, and Fleur began to wonder if she would respond. Finally, Janette said, "My brother abandoned me in the gutters of Paris after our father's death, because I was not worth paying to feed. Nicolas would starve himself rather than do that to you."
That silenced Fleur, if it did not seem to answer her, and she raised Janette's right hand to her lips, hoping that her maker -- mother? That was a "mortal bond" with which she had yet to deal -- could feel her sympathy, and gratitude. They fell asleep in that expression, and Fleur's repose was deep and dreamless as her body completed its metamorphosis into vampiric immortality, preparing her mind and beliefs to follow.
Fleur woke late in the afternoon. Though the chamber was still sealed in darkness, something told her precisely where the sun she would never see again was in the sky, and with that instinctive awareness came others, less simple to identify. Slipping carefully away from Janette so as not to disturb her, Fleur crossed to the chair where she had made her first kill -- and realized that she no longer thought of it that way. She could not afford to think of it that way. She had fed, as she had needed to feed, and she would do so again; she would do anything to satisfy the overwhelming hunger she could feel clawing at her insides -- again, already, almost as strong as before -- and she wished the sun would set so that she could do something about it.
Settling herself in the chair, Fleur hugged her knees to her chest, as if she could reduce the intensity of her hunger by reducing her relative size, and tried to concentrate on her other senses. She could see in the dark, as she had noticed before; she could distinguish one color from another as clearly as daylight would reveal them, although . . . differently. She could hear anything she wished, apparently, focusing her hearing first near -- to Janette's breathing -- and then far -- to a room below, where her maid Therese was explaining to her mother, apparently for the third time, that Fleur had stayed up all night with Sir Nicolas and his companions, that the Lady Janette had asked they not be disturbed until dark, and that Sir Nicolas had agreed. And she could smell -- oh, could she smell! It was no wonder that Janette and the others bathed so unusually often -- twice since they had arrived at the castle -- if this was what assaulted their noses on a regular basis. But under the intensified odors she had known before, Fleur also found some to which she could put no names, and some for things that she had not previously realized had scents at all -- like that which she instinctively knew was Janette's blood, its strangely tart and sweet, raspberry-like essence propelled sluggishly through her body as her heart pulsed once in the time it would take to read five pages of text aloud . . . .
Her heart propelled her blood.
The heart propelled the blood! Through the veins, it went away from the heart clean and strong, and returned back to it thin and weak, in a cycle! Fleur had understood that instinctively when she fed, but it was only when her body had stabilized and she could again focus her mind beyond its demands that she realized the implications of that instinct to pierce one set of blood-bearing vessels rather than the other -- new knowledge, something she had never read or heard, something that it might yet take ten mortal lifetimes for humans to discover! Oh, it was too wonderful! And Lucien's sharp mind would appreciate the significance, for anatomy, for physic; she could not wait to discuss it with him. Indeed, she realized, putting together her new understanding with Janette's explanation, it was because the heart propelled the blood that a mortal could be so easily emptied, and yet a bite was as little a death to a vampire as sex to a mortal; the rare, slow pulses of the vampiric heart would make a bite an experience of savoring, not draining. Fleur laughed aloud, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. She did not want to wake Janette.
But Janette had barely stirred at the sound; her lips turned up slightly, more as if she were aware of her fledgling's delight somewhere in her dreams than as if she had consciously heard the expression of it. Fleur concentrated on the other vampire's presence, and realized that must indeed be the case, if this connection went both ways, as she could stretch out without sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, and still somehow discern Janette's nearness, and feel her untroubled sleep. She closed her eyes, and tried to ignore all her intensified mortal senses in favor of this faint, new vampiric one. She reached first into herself, and came face to face with a new stillness she did not yet wish to confront; a price of eternal life was barrenness, it seemed, as Janette had said. Skirting the edges of that void, Fleur wrapped herself in her instinctive awareness of the woman who had brought her across; it was like being touched without touching, she thought, and as she explored the metaphysical threads binding her to Janette, she found another set -- like, but not alike; not as tightly wound, but somehow grown rather than tied; familiar . . .
Lucien.
It was Lucien she felt when she reached out deliberately to follow those strains of awareness to their source -- Lucien, her beloved, who had promised, with Nicolas as a witness, that they would have each other forever, pledging his troth in a way no authority could make more binding.
The supernatural realization of his presence shattered her concentration, her longing for him becoming one with the driving hunger she was trying so hard to ignore. Fleur laid her head on her knees and held her breath, trying to endure the hunger like a headache; she could not imagine that anything could be done until the sun set and released them from the sheltering, imprisoning walls, but if it became any worse she would not be able to avoid waking Janette in the desperate hope she was wrong. If only she dared step out into the hall and pass the few doors down to the chamber given Lucien! She did not know what he could do, but . . . . It did not matter. She could not. A window-slit on the far wall faced out into the forest, and at this time of day there would be a low, yellow rectangle of light stretching down past this room, a shaft of sun that had once seemed to echo all the soft promise of the turning year in its progress across the floor, but which would now pierce her like an unchanging, un-dulling blade. She was beginning to feel the threat of the sun, instinctively, beyond the logic of Janette's warning--
The door to the room opened, breaking off Fleur's haphazard chain of attempted self-distraction. She did not stir from her position on the chair as Lucien stepped in, draped from head to toe in an immense, black cloak, securing the door behind him before she could so much as glimpse the dust motes no doubt drifting through the daylight. He put back the hood from his face and looked at her silently, for a long moment. Whether from this new vampiric link, or from the bond they had seemed to share even when she was mortal, she could sense that he was in some kind of pain despite his stony expression, and it was only the intensity of his restraint that kept her from rushing to him. Finally, shrugging almost self-deprecatingly, he whispered, "You wanted me."
He met her eyes then, his gaze searching, and Fleur saw that, whatever the source of his distress, it was not entirely unlike what she had seen in Nicolas, and that bid fair to break her heart. Feeling confused and alone, she blinked hard to hold on to her dignity and hold back the blood she dared not waste on tears.
"Fleur?" Janette asked. "Lacroix?" She rose and pushed the bed curtains aside, apparently awakened more by the tension filling the room like a fog than by the few, soft words.
"Fleur has been . . . upset . . . and awake for the past hour and more," he noted curtly, turning his probing gaze on Janette. "This did not wake you?"
"She did not want to wake me," Janette replied calmly, almost shrugging.
"Careless!" Lucien hissed. "She came over less than a day ago! And how often has she fed? And on what? A fledgling needs--"
"My fledgling," Janette interrupted smoothly, "will receive what she needs, as I see fit. Is that not the Code as you have taught it to me?"
Lucien seemed taken aback, though whether by Janette's words or her attitude Fleur could not tell; she could feel that Janette's bold-faced assertion was a tactic she had never before used on her own master, and the weights and measures of power were shifting all around them in ways neither of the elder vampires had expected. "Lucien," Fleur began, uncurling her legs but not rising from the chair, "Please allow me to speak for myself. Whatever you have found wrong, I could have woken Janette easily if I had wanted to. I feel as if I could have touched her, somehow, even from across the room."
"Could you? Good. I am . . . glad." His sharp expression softened slightly, and he came over to her chair and picked up her hands. "But -- can you touch . . . me . . . like that, with your mind?"
Puzzled, Fleur attempted to reach out to him again across the intangible threads that defined her vampiric senses, closing her eyes in concentration. It took a slight effort -- much more than it had with Janette -- but she found him, his intensity and intelligence and possessiveness and need and . . . fear. He was afraid of something -- in himself, in her: a memory of someone he had once loved, and hated . . . . Her eyes snapped open, and she brought his hands to her lips, kissing his palms. She did not know any other gesture to make; she did not know any way to invite him back through that link and reassure him. His vulnerability was almost shocking, most especially in her sure conviction that she was the only one he had willingly allowed to see it. The guilt and disgust she had sensed in him were not directed at her, but at himself.
"Well?" Janette inquired.
"It is not the same," Fleur replied, her gaze fastened on Lucien's even as she addressed Janette. "It is not like my sense of you -- that comes from you, somehow, and I cannot do anything but bend and submit to it. It is in my blood. My sense of Lucien is . . . my own, I think. It is in my . . . soul."
That distinction seemed to make an impression on him far out of proportion with Fleur's sense of its complete lack of novelty. He knelt beside the chair to bring his face even with hers, and asked intently, "As when you were mortal?"
She nodded, pulling one hand from his grasp so she could trail her fingers along his jaw. She was still so very hungry, which made it hard to think, but this was obviously important to him. "Just as yesterday, only more clear."
"And Janette is your . . . mother?" he insisted in a low voice, watching her expression closely.
Fleur looked at Janette, and saw the older, but eternally youthful, vampire tilt her head mockingly at that, answering Fleur's unarticulated question. Her mother was Lady Marie, second wife and surviving widow of Duke Henry I. Janette would not ask that title; but neither would she reject it, the fledgling realized, if that was how Fleur finally chose to see their relationship. A child has more than one parent, and a vampire more than one birth. "Janette is my maker," Fleur agreed gravely, and watched some of the tension drain out of Lucien at that affirmation. He brought her hand to his lips, and then rose and removed his cloak, handing it to Janette with a look Fleur could not translate.
Unsure what had just occurred, Fleur rose as well. "Lucien, Janette . . ." Her maker swirled the cloak around her shoulders, and Fleur helped her arrange it to hide her hands and face deep in its folds, as she searched fruitlessly for a natural segue from the obscure and intense discourse of a moment before to the most mundane of concerns. Securing Janette's hair under the hood, Fleur gave up and simply blurted out, "I'm terribly hungry."
"I know, dear one," Janette said, laying her hand on Fleur's shoulder and turning her back to Lacroix. "But you are too young to risk any sun at all. When it is dark, we will hunt, I promise. It will be all right." She trailed a finger down the side of Fleur's neck and smiled. "If you need me, which you will not, I will be with Nicolas." Janette kissed her fledgling on the forehead and was gone in a sweep of trailing, black fabric, Lucien stepping between them to block any stray light from the swiftly-shut door.
"Well," he said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, as he had been when he handed her the rose whose thorn had pricked her finger in the garden. He stretched out his hand. She took it eagerly, crossing the space between them in two swift steps. Fleur embraced him and lay her head on his chest, knowing now why she had not been able to hear the beating of his heart the last time he held her so.
She tried to keep her mind on all the things she wanted to tell him, to ask him, but the rich, bittersweet, walnut-like tang of his blood teased her fledgling hunger from just below his skin. As she felt him slide his hands down her back, she saw the world again obscured by the filmy, golden haze that she had learned to associate with one kind of desire the night before. She turned her face up to him hesitantly at first, but when she saw that his blue eyes reflected her yellow gaze with acceptance and even anticipation, she immediately laced her hands around his neck, the position both holding her up on her toes and urging his lips down to meet hers. She kissed him hungrily, trusting love to make up for inexperience for the present, and reveled in her right to do so; he had pledged himself to her, and she to him. Only nobles marked unions with Church ceremony, and that was only a matter of state; vampires were beyond states, beyond nobility, and Lucien had promised that they would have each other forever.
But that had been when he had intended to bring her across himself . . . .
"Lucien?" Fleur murmured against his ear, suddenly putting her hands on his chest and rocking back on her heels. Her mixed hunger and desire screamed at her not to stop for this, but she pushed her way through them to form coherent words. "Lucien, does it matter to you that you were not the one to bring me across?"
He had his eyes closed, she discovered as she looked up into his face, and he kept them so for a moment as he shifted his hands to her forearms. When Lucien opened his ice-blue eyes, his gaze was steady and clear, and she could feel the truth of his words resonate across their bond. "I am eternally indebted to Janette for bringing you across," he said firmly. "And I am thankful that Nicholas prevented me from doing so myself." Fleur raised a hand to his cheek, which he caught and brought to his lips. "This is the way it should be. Always." Keeping his eyes locked on hers, Lucien kissed her palm, and then the ball of her hand, and then her wrist, bending her hand gently back in order to expose the veins.
Fleur gasped as her fangs emerged in unison with Lucien's touch. He smiled slightly before returning his attention to her wrist. Lacing her free hand with his, she rose again on her toes to kiss him. But she stopped at his neck. His neck. Whimpering, she froze. She clutched his tunic for balance. This was making the hunger worse. Much, much worse. And it had already been almost beyond bearing. "Lucien, I . . . need blood. I cannot wait until sunset."
"You do not have to," he said. Suddenly, Fleur found herself swept up in his arms and deposited on the bed. "Much easier to reach this way, is it not?" Lucien's eyebrows arched expressively as he sat down beside her, the significant difference in their heights suddenly made meaningless. He brought his face even with hers, his mouth moving deliberately along the line of her lips. Then her jaw. Her throat. The low neckline of her dress. Warmed by his cold touch, Fleur rubbed the back of his neck. She unlaced the front of his tunic by touch. She attempted to imitate his actions -- until her oversensitized hearing picked up the sound of his heart's single beat pushing his blood on its slow course through his body. Oh! She whimpered again with the demands of her hunger. Lucien stilled his attentions to look up at her, his eyes now yellow as hers began to turn red.
"No -- don't stop," she said instinctively, and then changed her mind, pulling back and sliding off the bed. "Or, rather, I mean --" Only the lack of blood in her system kept her from blushing fiercely, she knew, and she appreciated the gravity Lucien was able to maintain while she groped for words. For several moments, even as her hunger tore away at her control -- having long since demolished her sense of propriety -- she stood next to the bed and looked everywhere but at him: the blankets, the curtains, her own hands.
Finally, Lucien took her left hand in his, first bringing it to his lips and then simply lacing his fingers tightly with hers. In a voice so low that she would not have heard it as a mortal, he declared that which he had never put in so many words to her before, but on which she had staked everything: "I love you." He repeated himself, more intensely, in his own native tongue, "Amo tu . . . animus."
"I have never done this before, you know," she admitted wildly. Her anxiety not to disappoint him at last outbalanced her embarrassment on the strength of his statement, even as she lisped awkwardly around her unfamiliar fangs. "I always thought, as a mortal, that I knew what to expect . . . but everything is different now, and I am so hungry --"
He leaned forward and silenced her with a deep kiss, deliberately caressing each of her fangs with his tongue. She shuddered. "You are perfect," he said. "Hunger is perfect." He trailed his fingers along her throat. "You fed, last night. Feed again."
Fleur allowed herself to be pulled gently back to the bed. And when Lucien's slow, still heart beat again, she sank her fangs into his throat for the first time and was overwhelmed as his thick blood, rich with lust and love and the memories of ages, flowed between them. Unlike when she had drained the mortal the previous night, her pleasure did not crest and recede in one swift, crashing wave. Instead, it lasted until his blood all but stilled in his veins, the pulse spent. Throughout, though his memories were a tangled briar of emotions and images, his pleasure was clearly readable in his blood, as palpably intense and satisfying as hers.
Because his fulfillment was so inescapably evident, it did not occur to Fleur until much later -- after his blood had become a part of her own and her blood-borne knowledge of him had faded, taking the answers to her questions with it -- to wonder why he had not completed the circuit, and matched her bite with his.
Chapter 05 -- Toronto, 1996
"You delayed opening just for us?" Nick asked Janette, the only person visible in the unusually bright and empty Raven, as he shut the main door firmly behind him and Nat and followed her down the stairs into the club. The sealing of the door cut off the noise of the crowd outside like a thrown switch, leaving only the noise coming from the speakers over the dance floor -- CERK, Nick noted with some surprise, still playing the same, bizarre, techno-operatic selection with which Lacroix had opened his nightly program, and which Nat had asked Nick to turn off in the caddy on the ride over. It was not like Janette to play something as unpredictable as the Nightcrawler's show in her establishment, despite Lacroix's broadcasting booth in the back; in fact, it was not like Janette to vary routine and put off opening, either.
"The line out there isn't exactly thrilled, you know," Nat observed as they approached Janette at the bar. "Your bouncer is having a tough time."
"Durant is a professional," the club owner nonchalantly informed the two civil servants. "It is a business strategy. This is good for them. These bottle-fed youngsters need to be reminded what it might be like to have to fend for themselves, every now and again. They are always the more appreciative of . . . civilization and community afterward. As long as it does not rain." She returned Nick's quick kiss on her cheek, and then shrugged slightly, the ripple across her shoulders easily visible under the spaghetti straps of her black gown. "Besides which, this business does not go beyond the family. C'est la verite? We do not need any more Enforcer attention."
Nick appreciated that Janette had just implicitly included Nat in "the family" with that comment, a subtle gesture simultaneously generous and ominous -- Janette's specialty.
"Natalie," Janette addressed the coroner, who had apparently rejected the bar as a place to examine her patient and was looking intently around the rest of the club. "We can go into my living quarters, if you like."
"That would be fine," Nat replied. "Or even a booth, since the lights are all on in here, if there isn't anything other than your arm. There isn't, is there? How are you feeling?"
"As well as can be expected," the black-haired vampire replied, tossing back the last of the contents of her wine glass before leading the two over to her customary booth. While Nick did not see any practical reason why Nat did not simply examine Janette's arm there at the bar, he was just as glad to be heading away from the open bottle of blood on the counter. He had built emotional barriers to the constant temptation of the humans among whom he worked and lived, but the casual accessibility of the superficially morally-innocuous blood in the club always made the Raven a trial of his resolve. Maybe Nat understands that, he thought gratefully, though he had never articulated that particular struggle to her.
Janette slid in to the back of the booth and began to peel off her long, black, left glove as the coroner joined her. "There is no physical distress," Janette informed the mortal woman, "but the scar has not altered since you removed the stitches. I will admit I find that somewhat mentally distressing."
Leaning against the wall and looking at the tinted glass of Lacroix's broadcastin