One With the Darkness (13 page)

The sword came down.

She woke to a heavy weight on her left side, started to struggle, and quickly stilled herself. It was Jergan. With her vampire strength, she might have hurt him.

“Shush,” he whispered, stroking her hair as she gasped for breath. “Another dream, no more.”

The scent of human male surrounded her. His breath was warm on her face. He sat next to her and had pulled her against his body. The wool tunic was rough against her cheek. His heartbeat thundered in her ear as he held her against his chest. His hands moved over her back, and he made low soothing sounds deep in his chest. Slowly the tension drained out of her. She closed her eyes and deliberately slowed her breathing.

She’d had a dream. One that might be another premonition. Why did she have to wake before she knew how it ended? It had seemed sure that Jergan would be taken from her. She slid her arms around him. The muscles in his back bunched as he held her closer. This felt so right. She had known that he would feel like this, smell just like this.

He bent and kissed her hair, quite tenderly. She wanted to turn her face up. She knew just how his day-old beard would scratch across her face. She had always known. And his lips, so incongruously soft against hers …

And he would take that as a command.

She pushed herself away, a knot in her belly replacing the heat that had begun to bloom there. “Thank you,” she said brusquely. “That will be all.”

He reached for her in the darkness. “You needn’t …”

“E … enough!” Her voice hardly shook. It could have been worse.

He straightened. She could feel his affront hanging in the air. “As you wish, my lady.” He stood, looming over her bed in the dim room. Then he turned abruptly away and lay down on the carpet, his back toward her.

She ran her hand over her forehead, a feeling of hopelessness settling in her core. There was something she must do. But she didn’t know what it was. And all she wanted to do was bed her unconscionably attractive slave, not just because he was handsome, but because she felt she knew him, and maybe something more. It didn’t matter why. Even now she was tempted to order him to stand, remove his tunic and his loincloth. She had a feeling that when he did, she would see that he had been as aroused by their embrace as she was. She would study his chiseled body. Under her stare he would rise further, until his rod was straining to be sheathed in her. She would gesture to him to come and lie with her. And he would obey, eager….

She shook herself. What was wrong with her? She’d had many male slaves. When first she came to Rome, she’d had a houseful of them before she’d grown uncomfortable with owning slaves. Some were quite attractive. She’d never once had trouble controlling herself around them. She’d never once imagined ordering them to her bed. In those days she had amused herself with Roman citizens to satisfy her twin needs for blood and sex. But she hadn’t even done that in many years. It had all begun to seem the same, and as she denied her Companion’s sexual urges, they had grown dimmer—a faint flutter that seemed a distraction from her work, no more.

Until she encountered Jergan, she had carved out a rough truce with her Companion.

And now? Apparently that truce was over. But she needed a bodyguard for a few days. One who could give a pretense of protection so that no one would know she could protect herself so well. If she was attacked, she would raise her Companion and compel Jergan to forget what he would have seen her do. He was a tool for a few days, no more. She must bear the effect he had on her. She turned on her side away from him.

Everything was very disconcerting just now. His effect on her, the fact that she felt as though she had known him forever, the dreams, the feeling of urgency, the panicky knowledge that she must do something immediately, but not what it was.

Her world seemed to be changing. What she had built here in Rome was precious. She had come here posing as royalty from the province of Dacia, which in a way she was. And of course she was rich beyond belief. Romans respected wealth. She had used their reverence for the exotic to carve out a life and influence, waiting for the time when she could use that influence to push the world ahead.

She couldn’t afford to be distracted from her purpose. Not by dreams that seemed to foretell the future. Not by this strange feeling that she had done all this before. And certainly not by a slave who roused her sleeping vampire libido.

She could tell by his jerky breathing that he was not asleep.

It looked to be a long day for both of them.

J
ERGAN WASN’T QUITE
sure when he slept again. But it was good to have slept. His mind sifted lazily through his senses, her scent, spicy and exotic, the warmth coming up through the floor. He had a morning erection. With
all this stimulation lately and no relief, he was lucky he was not spilling his seed on her carpet in his sleep. He cracked open his eyes. It must be dusk, his new morning, for even the little light that had leaked in around the shuttered doors was gone. He couldn’t quite see, but he sensed she was looking at him.

He snapped awake. She had quite clearly rejected his advances last night, when it would have been natural to let his comforting embrace turn into shared passion. He knew she desired him. He smelled her lust underneath her spicy scent. And yet she pushed him away. … Was she afraid of him? He had to admit that was a possibility. She was tiny in comparison to his six-foot, three-inch frame. And he was as far from these effete and hairless Roman men as she had likely ever seen. It crossed his mind that she might have seemed so severe that first night for just that reason. He didn’t like the thought that she might fear him. He wanted to best her in the bedroom, but certainly not with violence.

Or maybe she knew that once she had bedded him, and once she wanted more (which he had no doubt she would), she would be as much in his thrall as he was in hers.

So be it. She did not intend to bed him. He almost let out a groan. He had been shocked when she had said she would supervise him spilling his own seed once a week. But now that seemed a mercy. Let him relieve his tightness and he might be able to stop reacting so to her.

Or maybe not. He grunted and sat up.

She rose, a darker blotch upon the night, and turned up a lamp, then went to the door. “Send Catia to me. I would bathe.”

He wondered if he would survive guarding her through another bath.

“Go and relieve yourself,” she murmured to him. Yesterday
she had gone with him to the marvelous room adjacent to the
thermae.
Did she trust him to go alone today?

“My lady.” He nodded and padded directly from the room on bare feet that were markedly improved. He hardly limped. When he returned, the servant girl had bathing items in her arms and was trailing after his owner.

“I shall not need you, Jergan. Catia can see to my needs. Bathe by yourself while she dresses my hair. One of the servant boys can scrape your back. See that you are thorough.”

He was not to bathe with her then. That was good. An hour of torture evaded.

So why did he feel so disappointed?

S
HE NEEDED BLOOD.
That was all. In a small polished metal mirror she watched Catia dress her hair. It was only a week since she had last fed, but this feeling of irritation must certainly be because she needed blood. It didn’t feel precisely like hunger in her veins. But what else could it be? She should be
doing
something. She just didn’t know what it was. And she had to stay away from Jergan. She had nearly taken advantage of him last night.

But if he was to be her bodyguard, she couldn’t stay away from him. Well, at least she could avoid bathing with him. She wouldn’t think of his body sweating in the heat, him rubbing oil on his genitals. Would he rise? Perhaps he was thinking of her as well. Oh, dear. She really shouldn’t torture herself like this. She’d find what she needed in a brothel tonight, and then perhaps everything would return to normal.

T
HIS WAS THE
opportunity he’d been looking for. A young man led the way to the bathhouse. Jergan would question this slave about her. If Jergan couldn’t be with her,
he could at least make use of the situation. And perhaps one younger than Lucius would be more forthcoming.

They stopped in the cold room to shed their clothing. Apparently the boy was going to bathe as well. “What is your name?” Jergan asked, as he untied the poultice from his shoulder.

“Tufi.”

They sat on opposite benches in the stifling heat of the
calidarium.
“How long have you been slave to her?” Jergan asked after a moment. He did not need to name her. Who else would they be talking about?

“I was slave only a few months before she freed me. Now I am called Tufi Lucellus.”

“She freed you, too?”

Tufi looked incredulously at Jergan. “All in her house are freed. You are her only slave.”

Jergan narrowed his eyes in disbelief.

Tufi laughed, a low chuckle deep in his throat. “She is very eccentric. A waste of money to free slaves, the Romans think. And they are right.”

“Why does she not hire freedmen in the first place and save the cost of the slaves?” The woman puzzled Jergan at every turn.

“We have all asked ourselves this question,” Tufi said slowly. “I think it is because our gratitude makes us more devoted than any hired servant. We keep her secrets even unto death.”

“Does she have secrets?”

Tufi merely smiled. “Even a lummox like you must have noticed a few of them.”

Jergan assumed Tufi was not talking about her conspiracy. Certainly she kept that secret close. She was stupid to have trusted even him with it. “If you mean the fact that she is sensitive to sunlight, everyone must know that.”

“Well, it’s early days for you. You’ll see soon enough. Let us just say that what she is has other consequences, and she must bend to them.” Tufi handed him an amphora of olive oil.

“What consequences?” Jergan poured oil over his chest and began to rub it in.

Tufi paused in rubbing his own lean body with oil, looking mulish.

“If I am surprised by them, I might offend her,” Jergan reasoned. “And if I offend her, she will not free me. Better I know and can prepare myself.”

Tufi thought about that. Jergan saw him wanting to relent. “But are you trustworthy?” he asked. “She has not yet freed you. You owe her nothing but the service of a slave.”

Jergan pretended outrage. “Do you question my honor? I have sworn my loyalty to her. I served my king and the general who protected my men even unto submitting to slavery.” He looked Tufi straight in the eye, unflinching. “I will not betray her.” Was he lying? He was half-surprised to find that he was not.

Tufi took a breath. “She drinks blood.”

Jergan frowned. “Do you think me gullible because I am not from Rome?”

“Oh, she’d love that reaction.” Tufi chuckled again. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Jergan thought about this while he rubbed oil over his thighs. “How do you know this?”

“Every two weeks or so, she goes to a specific brothel. They say she pays a fortune for an hour with some strong young buck. The prostitute comes out with no effect a few hours’ rest won’t cure. He doesn’t even know what happened.” Tufi lowered his voice. “But he has two wounds, just here.” He pointed to his jugular. “And he is pale. Once, blood was seen on her lips.”

Jergan frowned. “She wants reaming, that’s all.” He poured oil over Tufi’s back.

“Then why, once, when she was burned by sunlight, did she send Lucius with orders to cut a prostitute and bring her a cup of his blood?” Tufi looked triumphant. “Catia heard him get his instructions. And the goblet definitely had blood in it. Shortly after drinking, she rose from her bed hale and hearty.” Tufi poured oil over Jergan’s back in turn.

“If she drinks blood, why do you serve such a monster?”

“But does she seem like a monster?” Tufi snorted, rubbing oil over his arms. “She freed us. We are paid well. She is a little haughty perhaps, but otherwise considerate. I am buying my sister out of slavery to a fat pig of a Roman with my salary. What is a little blood from a prostitute to match that? She never takes our blood. We have nothing to fear from her.”

A ghost walked up Jergan’s spine. Children told stories around the fires at night in Centii to frighten one another about monsters drinking human blood. Could this woman be such a monster?

Of course not. The servants were just making up wild stories about her. He rubbed oil over his private parts. The one fact in all this blather was that she did free her slaves. That boded well for his future. Yet …

“How does she set the price a slave must pay to buy his freedom?” He thought of Catia’s mother, whose price was so high she could never be free without help from Livia Quintus.

“I think she bases it on what we can earn. Lucius’s price was much higher than mine. He could keep accounts for one of her friends. I raise a flock of ducks and sell their eggs. I saved seven dinars. That was my price.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Three years.”

Three years? An eternity. Jergan had thought to be a slave his whole life, set to an oar or breaking marble in a quarry. But suddenly he could not bear to be
her
slave for even three years. What would his price be and how would he be expected to earn it? Tufi wouldn’t know those answers. Jergan felt a kind of despair settle into his belly. The meaning of slavery was brought home to him as it had not been before. Three years as slave to Livia Quintus Lucellus. Three years before he could go home. Three years before he was a real man again. … And it might be longer. Who knows how long she would keep him?

Tufi handed him a tray of salt.

“W
HERE IS HE?
Is he not finished yet?” Livia groused. She put a wide golden bracelet around her upper arm.

“I am here, my lady.” His voice sounded … dull somehow.