Black Swan Rising (32 page)

“Without you becoming like me? It’s . . . difficult. If we make love, I’ll want to drink from you. But you’re not under my power here.” He waved his hand at the silver dome above us. “This dome is of your making. I have no power here. It’s your choice. You don’t have to become like me.”

“Even if you drink from me?”

He inhaled sharply, a gasp that made his skin tremble. “Not if I’m careful . . . only . . .”

“Only what?”

He buried his head in my neck, grazed my throat with his teeth. I strained against him.

“Only it will be hard to stop once I start,” he said, his voice hoarse.

I shivered and closed my eyes. I saw Marguerite again, standing at the shore of the dark lake calling a supernatural creature to make her mortal so she could be with the man she loved. I didn’t have half as much to fear as she’d had.

“I trust you,” I said, opening my eyes. “I trust you not to hurt me.”

He raised his head. His eyes were wide and burning red at the center, his skin glowed gold in the firelight, his lips were parted, the tips of his fangs showing. With one swift motion he slid me down onto the ground and pressed himself against me. I ran my hand down his back, feeling his skin beginning to cool despite the heat of the fire. I stroked my hand along his hip bones to the waistband of his pants. He guided my hand to buttons and zippers and then below his waistband. I understood then why the rest of his skin was cooling and where all his blood had gone. I felt the length of him rub against me and I arched up to meet him. And then, just as he entered me, I felt his teeth pierce the skin at the base of my throat. A flood of heat coursed through my body . . . then I felt the same heat moving through him. He was inside every inch of me . . . just as I was inside him. We moved like one person rocked by one tide, like water moving again and again against the shore.

When he pulled his mouth away from my throat, we both cried out with the same voice. It was the cry of the swan that rose from the lake when its mate was shot, the banshee cry that rocked the castle walls of Lusignan. A cry that turned every bone in my body into water.

We lay together by the fire until it burned down to ashes, Will’s coat draped over both of us us now like a blanket. I lay on my side, his body curled protectively against my back, his skin warmer than the fire in front of me. I told him about finding Dee’s lair and how he’d ejected Melusine and me into the water after he vanished.

“He may not have been physically there at all,” Will said. “Over the years I’ve found that he’s able to project himself into different surroundings. He uses each place as an observation post.”

“But then we’re no closer to finding him?”

“There might be clues in what you saw there to find where he really is. It’s remarkable that you found one of his observation posts at all.”

“It seems a small gain for the price.” I told him how I’d dragged Melusine to the island and watched her melt, and of the vision I’d had of Marguerite kneeling beside a pool looking down at Melusine. I showed him the Poland Spring bottle that held Melusine’s essence.

“I suppose they could have been sisters,” he said. “Marguerite
told me very little about her origins, but it would explain . . .” His voice trailed off. He was quiet for so long that I turned to look at him. He was staring up at the sky, but he looked as though he were contemplating scenes farther away than the stars.

“Explain what?”

“Remember when I told you that I followed Marguerite to France?” I nodded although he still wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t need my response, though, the story was already calling him. “When she left London, I went to her abandoned lodgings. There I found a painting of an old church in Paris. It was the only clue I had, so I went there. I spent weeks visiting that church, hoping that she would come, but there was no sign of her. Just as I was going to give up, I received a sign there that led me to another site. I thought she would be there, but instead I found another sign . . . that led me to
another
place. I believed that she had left these signs for me and devised the chase as a test of my love and that once I found her she would relent and grant me immortality. I followed her all over France. One of the places the signs led me to—not the last, but near to it—was the Château of Lusignan, the legendary home of Melusine.”

“You think she left that sign because she was related to Melusine?” I asked.

“It’s possible. Several of the places the signs led me to were springs . . . or sacred wells above which churches had been built. The place where I finally found Marguerite was a tower beside a sacred pool in which lived a creature who could grant eternal life . . . or take it away. I think that creature had been one of her sisters too.”

I thought of my vision of Marguerite standing beside a
pool, summoning a creature who lived beneath the water to make her mortal. “I think I dreamed of that place,” I told Will.

“I dream about it every day when I close my eyes at dawn. It was the last place on earth where I was ever happy. I spent three days there with Marguerite, convinced that I had found the fountain of youth.” He laughed bitterly, a sound that made me feel suddenly cold. “On the third night she made me stay in the tower while she spent the night beside the pool. She came back exhausted and fell into a deep sleep. While she slept, I stole the silver box and the ring and took them to John Dee. I thought it was what I had to do to become immortal and live with her forever.”

“But she had already become mortal,” I said. “That night must have been when she summoned the creature from the lake to make herself mortal. That’s the vision I saw. I could feel how frightened she was, but she did it because she loved you.”

He looked at me for the first time since he had begun his story. “You must think I’m a fool.”

“We all do foolish things. It seems to me you’ve suffered for your mistakes more—and for longer—than most.”

He laughed. “Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. The night she found me in Paris she told me that she’d given up her immortality for my sake and she was pledged to destroy my kind was the worst moment of my then short life. I spent years—decades—searching for her. I waited for months in the church where I had found the first sign, but no sign appeared to me. Marguerite had told me that the path to the Summer Country always changed and that unless you started in the church and followed the signs, you could never find it, but still I tried to find the pool by which we had spent those three nights, but in vain. It was as if it had never existed. It was maddening. I truly
thought at times that I
had
gone mad. I wondered if I had dreamt up Marguerite.” He cradled my face in his hand and looked into my eyes. “When you walked into my apartment, it was the first time in four hundred years that I felt anything resembling hope—hope that I could be mortal again.”

His eyes burned into mine, but the hand that lay against my face was cold. My blood was already cooling in his veins. Soon he’d feel the cold of the grave again. It was unbearable to think of him suffering that.

“Is there any reason why you can’t just continue to”—I struggled for the right phrase—“feed from me?”

He stroked my hair away from my neck and touched his lips against the new wound there. “It will get harder and harder for me not to drink more each time. Already I’m addicted to your taste.” He ran his tongue over the bite marks and I felt a tingling sensation on my skin that crept into my veins. “And the more I drink from you, the more you will grow dependent on the venom I release into your system. Now it heals your skin and takes the pain away, but like an opiate you’ll want more and more of it. I’m afraid that vampire/human intimacy doesn’t usually end well for the human.”

I thought of what it would be like to never walk outside during the day, to hunt for blood, and to live forever. Last night I had thought it didn’t sound so bad, but since then I’d experienced Melusine’s consciousness and felt how weary she was of eternal life. In the brief glimpse I’d had of Marguerite standing on the shore of the Swan Pool (as I’d begun to think of it), I’d felt her willingness to give up her immortality for one lifetime with the man she loved.

“If I can get the box away from Dee, can you use it to make yourself mortal?” I asked.

“I think so . . . only your friend Oberon won’t like the idea. He’s always blamed me for Marguerite’s decision to become a mortal. He won’t want me to have the box—even for a second.”

I thought of what Dee had said about Oberon—that he wanted the box for himself to control the human race and to make the fey powerful once more. “Well, it won’t be up to him,” I said, clasping the hand Will held to my face with my own hand. “If he needs me to get the box, then he has to listen to what I want done with it. And what I want”—I pressed my lips against Will’s—“is to be able to do this over and over again.”

“Again?” he asked, stroking his hand down the curve of my hip. “At this rate you’ll be a vampire in a week.” He wrapped his arms around me and drew me hard against him. “We’d better find that box soon.”

Although I couldn’t see any change in the sky, Will knew when dawn was approaching. “We have to go,” he told me. “I have just enough time to get you back.”

The fire had burnt down to ashes, but the four spiral eyes still glowed in the grass. I wasn’t sure at first how to put them out, but when I waved my hand over them, the silver faded to gray, then white, and then turned to mist, leaving no sign on the grass. Then I picked up the water bottle that held what was left of Melusine and turned to Will, wondering for the first time how exactly he was going to get me home.

“The boat’s just around the bend,” he said.

“Boat? I didn’t know you came on a boat.”

“As I may have mentioned, I don’t fly. But I do keep a boat at the West Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin and it’s very fast.”

When we reached the dock, I saw what he meant. Every
line of the sleek craft had been designed for speed. Even moored, it rode the waves impatiently. The name on the bow was
Marguerite
.

Will helped me on board, then went down below. He came back with a pair of jeans and a striped fisherman’s sweater, which I put on over his shirt. He made a call on his cell phone before untying the boat and steering out into the bay. “I’ve told my driver to meet us at the Chelsea Piers. He’ll take you home from there. I regret that I won’t be able to escort you there myself.”

“You’re very old-fashioned, you know,” I said, laughing and shaking my hair free in the sharp salt breeze. “I hardly need an escort.”

“You tracked Dee down to one of his observation posts. He knows you’re getting closer. Once he realizes you’re still alive, he’ll try to kill you before you can find him again. I don’t like the thought of leaving you alone.”

“I won’t be alone. My friend Jay’s at the house.” I laughed. “I guess he’s not the best protection.”

Will shook his head. “Your friend Jay is very fond of you. I believe he would defend you to the death—only I’m afraid he wouldn’t last long against John Dee.”

Will’s words came back to me when I got home. I called Jay’s name as I walked up the stairs, my voice echoing hollowly in the stairwell. No one was in the living room or the bedroom, or the little room that my father used as a study. The door to the bathroom was closed.

“Jay?” I called, knocking on the door. “Are you in there?” Visions of Jay falling asleep in the bathtub, slipping under the
water, made my hand clammy as I turned the knob. My eyes went straight to the old-fashioned claw-foot tub. The shower curtain was pushed back far enough that I could see it was empty. Someone must have used it recently, though, because there was a pile of wet towels on the floor. . . . Had Jay brought his own towels with him? I was pretty sure my father used only white towels, and these were a floral red and pink. And soaking. I noticed then that the shower curtain was moving slightly, stirred by a breeze from the open window above the tub, which was half-hidden by the shower curtain. Maybe water had gotten in . . . although it hadn’t rained on Governors Island last night . . . and Jay had put the towels on the floor to clean up.

I closed the window, then knelt down to pick up the towels. The floral pattern on one turned into splotches of blood. I looked down at the floor. The tile was smeared with blood, even the grout was red with it.

My heart pounding, I got to my feet and left the bathroom, still holding a bloody towel, then crossed my father’s living room to the phone. My idea was to call an ambulance, but when I got the phone in my hand, I realized I couldn’t call an ambulance for a bloody towel. Then I looked down at the phone and saw that the message light was on. I jabbed at the
PLAY MESSAGES
button with a shaking finger. The machine’s digitized voice told me I had twenty-two new messages.

I let out a relieved breath when I heard Jay’s voice.
He’s okay,
I thought, as I listened to his characteristic hemming and hawing, maybe he’d cut himself shaving or . . .
something
. . . and was calling to tell me not to freak out when I saw all that blood in the bathroom. “Um . . . Garet . . . I’ve been trying your cell phone . . . yeah, this is Jay.” Jay, God bless him,
was the master of the long rambling message. He’d once left me a fifteen-minute voice mail telling me the plot to a silent movie he’d just seen in his film class. “But I guess you’re not getting those messages, because I think we would have heard from you by now. So when you get this message . . .” A sound in the background interrupted him, something that sounded like a loudspeaker making an announcement in an echoing hallway. “Uh . . . yeah . . . well . . . you should get over here as soon as possible.” The message ended.