Eternal: More Love Stories With Bite (13 page)

The stone coat
of
arms of
the
House of Montague, which
had
adorned
his family's
crypt until
the
nineteenth century, hung over
his head
like a crown. Fashionable apartments now stood where the palazzo had sprawled lavishly down the hillside. In fact, that was where he had found the old man, swaying in a doorway, drunk, starving, and crying for
his
cat—
which,
it turned out, had died five years before.

Romeo
had invited
the
miserable old man
home to
have
dinner,
and he had fed
him
well, too—better than he himself had eaten, when he had
still
eaten,
though
he was the
only son of a
noble family and therefore accustomed to the best. Romeo wasn't being kind;
he
did it to fatten up the old man's blood, so to speak, so that his own blood when he shared it would be full and rich. He wanted his love to have the best—
or
at the least, the best that he
could
give her under
the
circumstances.

The
old man would be Romeo's antipasto;
it
was Romeo's intention that
a
slew of better
dishes
—
healthier veins
— would follow. Until Juliet was
changed, he
had to lay low.
It
was difficult
to hunt
in these days of
cell
phones, Google Earth, and security surveillance cameras—especially since he didn't show up on any of them—and Romeo had been very distracted of late. Distracted meant careless, and vampires could not afford to be careless.

But he wasn't so much careless as
lovesick.
The
people of
the 1300s had believed that
love
at first sight was a kind
of
lunacy, and
Romeo now
believed
that
they had been entirely correct. His love for Juliet Capulet had driven him mad. Imagine loving, wanting, for seven hundred years. Living the life of a fiend to pursue the sweetest of angels. Believing in God and in magic and then in nothing and then believing again, and then losing faith in everything. The unrelenting loneliness. How did one still hope, after the first century, the second?

That was the nature of love. Utter madness.

Romeo wore a black silk shirt, black jeans, and black boots. His black hair was cut close to his head, and his cheeks were scruffy with five-o'clock shadow. He had dark eyebrows, dark eyes, and darker lashes. Women swooned over him. But he didn't take advantage—didn't kiss them, didn't kill them. He was married.

He was married!

Juliet.
Her name was the answer to centuries of prayer, and bargaining. During bad times—wars, famines, and the continued, utter absence of any sign of her—Romeo assumed that if there was a God, He despised him. Why else deny him his wife, when he had suffered so much for love of her?

But he was alone no longer. Claire Johnson, the reincarnation of Juliet, had been living in his house for six months, and tomorrow night, she would be fifteen years old. Back in the day, Lord Capulet had betrothed her to Count Paris, insisting that he wait until she turned fifteen to marry her. So this time, he would wait for the magic number, fifteen, in hopes that things would fare better.

Drumming his fingers on the table while the old man devoured a steak and a plate of pasta, Romeo had asked him questions. His staff bustled everywhere, putting up canopies of white silk and lilies, dusting, sweeping. Polishing the silverware and the crystal. Preparing a sumptuous feast for her last meal as a human.

When he was certain that no one would miss the toothless old
signor,
he had attacked.

And now this . . . outrage.

"Who poisoned his blood?" he thundered.

Snarling, he let the body fall to the floor. Night's candles had all burned out; the oldster's face was as gray and pale as a dead rat, and his bones cracked as he hit the hard marble.

Tomorrow night,
he thought, staring at the drugged man's blank eyes,
she'll feed for the first time. And I was about to suck down poison. If from my unholy blood, she takes offense . . .

He rammed his fist into the wall as his fangs retracted. He was hungry and angry; was he, the lord of this place, to be denied a simple meal?

"Romeo," Lucenzo said, bowing low as he approached. He was Romeo's lieutenant, and he had hopes of becoming a vampire himself. "What's the matter?"

"Someone gave this man tetrodox," Romeo said.

Lucenzo's dark Italian eyes widened. "Surely not," he countered. "Who would dare to do such a thing in your house?"

"Who, indeed? Someone who has more will to be kind than to live?"

"He must have had it before he came here."

"Impossible. Where would he have gotten it?" He glared at Lucenzo. "Find out. And when you do, bring him, or her, to me."

Lucenzo grimaced. "Romeo, it's one night before the
Signora's
birthday. She's not used to . . . there's so much she's had to adjust to. A death like that would shock her."

"She knows what I am. What I do. What I'm like."

But did she? He had explained. He had even fed in front of her. But he had softened all of it—using Lucenzo as a willing donor, whom he left very much alive. Swearing a silent vow that, with her at his side, he would return to the gentle hunt he had employed when he'd first been turned. Once more, he would become the soft youth he had been before her death—and not the angry, tormented—

—
Monster—

"I won't kill whoever did it," he informed Lucenzo. "But there
will
be consequences."

"Si," Lucenzo said.

"And clean it up." Romeo gestured to the old man. "He's still alive. Take him back to his doorway. He'll think it was all a dream, with all that tetrodox in his bloodstream."

"Of course," Lucenzo said.

Romeo turned his back on the mess and slammed down the hall. Livid, he pulled out his cell phone. And there he saw his wallpaper picture of Claire, grinning at him between glasses of Chianti. Her hair was wound into two little topknots, and she was wearing the Italian
Twilight
T-shirt she had bought as a joke.

His anger softened. In the past, he had used a poison very like tetrodox to paralyze his victims and numb them from pain. Friar Lawrence had taught him to distill it. But it had been a pain to make. He'd had to buy hundreds of gallons of the puffer fish derivative and store it in his crypt. And it fouled the blood and made him sick. Sometimes he hallucinated. So ultimately he had banned it, although he hadn't disposed of it. What if someone beyond the world of his villa discovered it, and traced it back to him?

When he'd awakened that evening, he'd impulsively carried one gallon of the stuff from the crypt up to the kitchen. He'd thought to show it to Claire, as she seemed quite intrigued by the idea that seven hundred years ago, "she" had drunk poison to feign her own death. There were servants everywhere, preparing for Juliet's big night, and he had discussed using a sedative and painkillers for her transformation with Lucenzo. They'd chatted about the tetrodox in the kitchen within earshot of the cook and a dozen other of Romeo's staff. Maybe someone had gotten confused and thought he meant to use it on the old man. Still, one did not make such assumptions in the home of a vampire.

He looked down at Claire's picture again. Was she counting down the hours, the way he was? Seven hundred years of waiting.
Seven hundred.

ILY. R,
he texted. He smirked. Look at the son of the House of Montague, texting. He wasn't big on it. There was no grace in it.

The era Romeo and Juliet had been born in had been violent, yes, yet graceful in its way. Duty and honor were as real as love at first sight. The twenty-first century was more complicated, with murky rules, coarse language, and coarser behavior. There was sex everywhere. If their story had begun now, instead of back then, they would never have had to kill themselves for the sake of their innocent passion. Very few people these days believed in the kind of love they had—a love that conquered the grave.

He waited. She didn't text back.

J?
he added, with a flash of irritation. Or was it fear?

There's nothing to fear,
he reminded himself.
She is Juliet. My search is over.
But the fear wouldn't go away. It washed over him like the horror of finding himself buried in unhallowed ground, behind the sanctuary of his family's vault. He was a suicide, after all, destined for hell, and a suicide did not deserve to lie with the faithful sons and daughters of the church.

He balled his fists. Sometimes he wanted to lock Juliet in her room, as
men
had done back in his time to protect their women. The world outside was dangerous.
Look
what had happened to Juliet herself, sneaking out to meet him. Her father had been too permissive. And his daughter had come to grief.

Nothing could have stopped us,
he thought.
Not locks, nor fathers. We were fortune's fools.

He'd thought long and hard about recapturing those days for her. About making sure nothing happened to her. He could move them to a more old-fashioned, isolated villa—a place
in
the Italian countryside, where people lived slower, simpler lives. Maybe
in
Mantua; he hadn't minded his brief exile there. The sunsets there had brought tears to his eyes.