Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 (3 page)

“
Do you think, after all the trouble I took to find you, that I would just...send you away?” he asked, standing from the chair.

He looked even taller and darker halfway across the room, taking up far more space than his frame gave any justification for.
The light in his eyes was sharper now, and in it I could see need—need and something more, a kind of desperate hunger that I feared to name, something that was more than physical that he kept caged deep inside.

I found it difficult to breathe
, afraid of that caged thing. No one knew where I was. I could just vanish forever into this great house. Only my doctor and Lisette could have any idea where I’d gone, and how easy would it be for a man like Mr. Thorne to make a single, parentless girl disappear?

“
Am I your prisoner, then?” I managed.

“
Of course not,” he said, approaching me. “Do you really want to go, Cora? Put on your clothes, take your jacket and disappear from this place, never to see it again? Never to see me again?”

“
Yes,” I lied reflexively. The thought of leaving was like a sickness in my stomach. I stood, transfixed, as he approached, unable to put even another foot of space between us. “What do you want from me? More blood?”

He
stopped, his body only inches from mine.

“
Your cure—and my nourishment—is only the beginning to the changes that the conversion has wrought,” he said. “And only the beginning of what is between us.”

“
What do you mean?” I whispered, swaying slightly as I fought the warring urges within me.

I wouldn’t let my life be changed, whatever he said. I wouldn’t give up the very thing I’d wanted so desperately to save.

He reached down and enclosed my unresisting hand in his own, raising it so our clasped hands were in front of my eyes. I could see a mark, like a tear-drop of blood, on his inner wrist. I stared at it uncomprehendingly, and he twisted our hands so that I was looking at my own inner wrist, and there was its mate. It looked like a port wine birthmark, not a tattoo, except it hadn’t been there before.

“
What have you done to me?” I demanded.

“
I have changed you,” he said. “That is the bondmark, Cora. It appears when a human survives feeding and is transformed. It shows that you belong to me now. In every way. Forever.”

I shook my head, unable to summon the words to deny him.

Dorian released my wrist and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, a motion I might have called tender if it had come from someone else. Some
thing
else.

“
It’s a great gift, Cora. More than a cure. Not only can you never again develop cancer, but you will never suffer any other human illness. And, like me, you will never grow old.”

I gaped at him.
“I’m...immortal?”

For some reason, the question called up a deep grief that flickered over his face before disappearing again.

“
No,” he said. “You can die of starvation and thirst, exposure or heat or cold. And if an injury is sudden enough and catastrophic enough, it will kill you. Agelessness—isn’t that gift enough?”

I felt dizzy.
How long might I survive in that case? A hundred years? Three hundred? My Gramma had died at eighty-two. Would there be a time that I would look around and find that everyone I had known in my first fifty years of life was dead?

Everyone except for
him
, of course—the creature who was now claiming me as his own.

“
And you? Can you die?” I asked.

He shrugged.
“I, too, am not immortal, but my ability to heal is considerably greater than yours, and my ability to tolerate extremes and deprivations similarly stronger.”

“
How old are you?”

“Older than empires,” he said, “but memory fades.”

The perfection of his skin no longer looked young to me.
It looked ageless and hard, like the beauty of a diamond.

“
I don’t want to forget my past,” I protested. “I don’t want to lose who I am—who I was.” I didn’t want the coldness that I felt in him.

Again, that brief sadness.
“Despite everything that I will do to protect you, it is unlikely that you will live so long.”

I could feel his influence rolling over me, sweeping me up in it like a twig in a flood, but I pulled back, away from him.

“No. I don’t care what some mark on my arm says. I’m not...yours. I didn’t agree to it. I don’t want it. All I want is my life back. School, a career, marriage, a nice house in the suburbs, kids.” I rattled off my list, so often rehearsed. “Normal things. Sane things.”

That was the whole point of saving my life.
I had a plan, a plan to have all the things Gramma had sacrificed so much for. I wasn’t going to give that up. There had to be a way to get out of this, whatever it was, and back to my old life. My real life.

“
What is between us now is deeper than choice,” Mr. Thorne said. “It is biology. You can no more deny me that I can resist you.”

He
pulled me toward him, and I melted into his embrace before I could tell myself to resist. His mouth came down over mine, hard and soft at once, sending a deep shock into my center and lower, at the juncture of my legs.

His arms were around me, sliding up into my hair and down to the small of my back so that my entire body was pulled against his.
My hands clung to his jacket, my lips and teeth parting to let him in. His tongue stroked me, and I shook in his arms.

Have you lost your mind?
part of me demanded.
He’s a monster!

But I couldn’t listen to that part.
Not now. Not even if it meant he would take my blood again.

He pulled back slowly, and I made a soft,
whimpery sound and opened my eyes to see him looking down at me. I knew he had kissed me only to prove his point, driving home his claim on me, but it didn’t change anything.

“
For however long you live, you will want to give me yourself and your blood, and no more women will have to die,” he said.

No more would die, because I could give him all he needed.
No more would give themselves to him. And no more would arch against him, begging him for satisfaction, pleading to be filled...only me. I was frightened at the triumph of that thought.

“
It isn’t fair,” I said, knowing that I sounded like a child. It didn’t matter. “All I wanted was to not be sick anymore. Was that so much to ask for?”

“
You asked to live,” he said. “These are the conditions. Would you have said no?”

I pushed against his chest, and his arms loosened around me, and he stepped back.
“I couldn’t have. Dammit, you know that I couldn’t have refused—couldn’t have said no to anything. But you should’ve told me anyway.”

“
It wouldn’t have made a difference,” he said.

I pu
shed my hair out of my face.
There has to be another way
, I thought, even as I ached for him, longed for him, craved the slightest touch. I knew he could wash away all my warring thoughts and all my fears. I knew he could make me glad of anything he demanded of me.

But I didn’
t want him to. They were my fears, just as they were my dreams, and I had a right to them.

I shifted.
“Look, if you need my blood, I’m sure we can…work something out. As long as it isn’t too often. As long as that’s all that you want.”

His gaze held me.
“No, Cora, that’s not all that I want. It never has been.”

My throat went dry.

“
Why now?” I asked. “Why not...before?” I would have given everything to him then. My body, my life. Why had he held back?

He gave a hiccoughing kind of laugh,
and he reached out so quickly that I couldn’t react. Suddenly, I was against his chest, his arms around me, his hold as fierce as the light in his eyes. He froze in the next instant, as if his own action had taken him by surprise. I felt the breath he took before he loosened his hold again, taking one deliberate step back, away from me.

“
I did want you
before
, more than you can imagine. Just as much as I wanted your survival, your change. I believed in it, and dared fate to damn me as a fool. But the part of me that knew the harsh mathematics under the hope feared I was already taking your life. I could not—should not have taken more than that.”

I remembered the heavy blanket he had put over me, the barrier he had thrown up between us as a white wall.
A wall for him, not just for me.

He said,
“You were the first time I violated the promise I had made to myself for many, many years.”

“
But it’s different now.” It wasn’t a question.

Dorian
captured my hand again, holding my wrist up so that I saw the mark, one no tattoo needle could have made, even as his fingers caressed it.

“
We are bonded. There is no wrong in it now, whatever we might do.”

Whatever we might do.
Oh, damn, I could imagine too well what that might be. And I was very much afraid that, at that moment, I would agree to anything.

I looked up, into his eyes, and whatever he read in mine made him drop
my wrist as if I’d burned him and retreat to the other side of the bed, keeping his back to me. The hand that had been holding mine curled into a soft fist, as if he were holding the memory of the touch.

T
he darkness was seething around him again. “Get dressed. Have breakfast. Give yourself a little time to make some sense of everything that has happened. We have all the time in the world.”

I nodded
even though he couldn’t see me.

“
You will find clothing in your dressing room,” he said, indicating a door with his chin. “I will be awaiting your company in the breakfast room. We can continue
talking
there.” He put a special emphasis on that word, and I wondered whose benefit it was for.

I nodded again, not really believing that it would end there, not sure whether it was him or me I distrusted most.

Dorian crossed to the door he’d come in by and opened it, then paused in the doorway . He turned back, perfectly collected again, a stone image of a man. “By the way, you will find your phone on the dressing table.”

He shut the door.

C
rap. My phone. Lisette!
How long had I been out of contact? She was going to kill me!

I ran through the doorway he had indicated, blowing past rows of empty wardrobes to reach the dressing table.
There it was: My phone, sitting on the center of the table with a plug trailing from it.

I snatched it up, pulling the plug out in one sharp motion, and pushed the button to wake it up.

8:47 AM Wednesday, December 24
, it read.

Wednesday.
Five days had passed. Lisette would be hysterical. I unlocked the phone and was greeted with the message that I had sixty-two unread texts and thirteen voicemails. Most of them were from Lisette.

Yeah.
She wasn’t going to be happy.

But what could I tell her?
At this point, not much, unless I wanted to seem crazy. There wasn’t much that made sense to me.

I could at least send her a text.
I paged through her text messages, scanning them quickly. First came a few “good luck” messages and some casual observations about her family and her “dickwad” brother. Then were requests for an update, growing increasingly urgent. Finally came the announcement:
If I don’t hear back from you in 12 hrs, I’m calling the Mont. Co. police.

That was a day ago.

Awesome sauce.

I hit the reply button urgently and typed,
I’m fine. The drs had me in an induced coma in Georgetown. Just came out 1 hr ago. Treatment worked. Will call as soon as I can.

I hoped that would satisfy her, at least for the moment.
As I shoved my phone in my pocket, an incoming call announcement lit up with Lisette’s name. I didn’t answer. I would talk to her—and, oh God, the police—later. I had the sudden image of the cops tracking my cell to Dorian’s house, banging on the door, forcing their way in past aghast servants, cornering the vampire in his lair....

But would that be a bad thing?
I wanted out, after all. And anyway, now I had my cellphone back. I could call for help if I needed to.

Except that Dorian Thorne knew I wouldn’t call f
or help when I most needed it. Not with him in the room.

I really was losing my mind. I shook my head and stepped back from the table and looked around the dressing room for the first time.
Two broad windows let light flood in, revealing a closet that would put most celebrity house tours to shame. Only a small section of it had any clothes, perhaps eight feet in all, but it still represented four or five times the size of my entire wardrobe. There was a note taped up to the wooden divider between the full section and the next one.