One With the Darkness (38 page)

“You know much about working the land.” He was full of surprises. “I shall add the title of farmer to soldier and geographer.”

He shrugged. “I was the eldest before I turned to soldiering.”

“Why did you go? You could have stayed and worked your father’s land.”

“The Romans threatened. Someone had to go. The next eldest of the boys was born with a twisted hip.”

And Jergan was the one with courage, with honor and a sense of duty. She could think of nothing else to say. Shouting out that she wanted to make him vampire didn’t seem an option, even if the servants had not been present.

The dinner was finished in silence.

She rose and Jergan rose with her. “You have been spending your days awake. Perhaps you would like to sleep through the night. Tufi can show you to a room.”

Jergan looked up at her as though she had betrayed him somehow. Then he looked away. “That would be fine,” he muttered.

Tufi bowed and grinned and motioned Jergan to the back of the house. Jergan stalked out of the room. Livia watched with dead eyes.

She couldn’t go on like this.
Do you remember it being this awful, Donnatella? Tell me it gets easier. Tell me we can find love for at least a few years even if he refuses me.

I don’t know. The voice was faint. I … I don’t remember….

Or maybe that was just herself, answering her own questions.

Then that was it.

Donnatella couldn’t help her. But when had she relied on others for help? She was a woman of action. That’s what she did. She took action. All this wondering and being torn between possibilities wasn’t like her in the least. She shook herself mentally. She was only a woman. But hadn’t she made herself a soldier in the fight to make a better world a dozen times? She’d been feeling tired and dispirited lately. But that was no excuse. If she could fight for the world, she could fight for herself. She had to make a push for what she wanted, and if she ruined everything and he left her entirely, or if he flat refused her, she … she would take the consequences and deal with them, too.

She strode after him.

T
HE ROOM WAS DARK.

“Don’t light the lamps,” he growled at Tufi.

Darkness matched his mood. How could he be worthy of Livia? He should just go back to Centii. But how could he live without her? He felt as though he had been in a fog that lasted weeks as he recovered, floating without thought. Only in the last days had the impossibility of his situation become clear.

Tufi closed the door.

Jergan unstrapped the belt that held his sword and dropped it on the floor. If he stayed, he would have only a half-life, knowing he was useless to her. She had a large soul, a large life, and his was suddenly very small. She already grew tired of him. He hadn’t realized that was why she kept her distance during the journey. But her ploy became
clear now that she gave him a separate room, like he was some guest with whom she was barely acquainted, instead of his lover. He unlaced his boots and unbuckled the wide belt at his waist, then pulled his tunic over his head.

The door opened behind him. A channel of light cut across the room.

He turned, holding his tunic to his loins. Livia was outlined in the doorway.

She just stood there. She didn’t enter. Her vibrations coruscated over him in the darkness. The scent of cinnamon and ambergris hovered in the air. He didn’t know what to say to her. Perhaps she finally wanted his body. Maybe that was enough. He’d take what time he could for as long as she cared to dally with him. He dropped the tunic to the floor.

He saw her take a breath. Her silhouette moved into the room. She closed the door. Darkness enveloped them like some comforting old friend.

“I can’t go on like this,” she breathed.

She wanted his services.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said. Her voice sounded small.

“Ask.” He didn’t mean it to come out so roughly. But he was standing here naked in front of her.

“I can give you eternal life, Jergan.”

That wasn’t a question, but he didn’t say that. “I never wanted eternal life.” She couldn’t give him eternal life. Did she think to lure him to her bed with empty promises? They could never be on equal footing.

“Oh.” Hurt suffused that one syllable. “Well, then …” She was actually turning to go.

“You needn’t promise me anything,” he said. He couldn’t let her go. “I’ll bed you for as long as you’ll allow it.”

“I don’t want that,” she cried. Her voice sank to a whisper. “Not only that.” He could feel her distress.

“Oh, I love you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He couldn’t help the bitterness that soaked his words. “You own me, body and soul. I’m more a slave to you than ever.”

Silence. “You love me?”

“Brid help me, yes,” he muttered. He had made himself entirely vulnerable to her.

“Then let me make you vampire, Jergan.” She rushed forward and gripped his biceps. “We can live forever.”

The proposal was shocking. “You can do that?”

“By giving you my blood. It will make you sick. But I will give you my blood many times, until you are able to live with the Companion in your blood as I do.” She was pleading with him.

He should have been shocked, but he wasn’t. He had accepted what she was long ago. And it was but a short step from that to accepting it for himself. She wasn’t evil. And the revulsion to taking blood seemed only a superstition at this point. But he could imagine nothing more bleak than knowing you would live forever in this perpetual state of longing for someone who did not return your feeling.

“Why would you do that?”

She looked up at him. Her face glowed with distress in the dark. “Do you know why Donnatella came back?”

He didn’t. In the fog of his weakness after the disappearance of the bronze machine, he had never even asked. A flame kindled inside him. He dared not feed it fuel. “I assumed it was to tell you how to make your plot successful.” If he thought about it at all. Which he hadn’t. He was thinking about it now, though.

She sucked in a breath. “She came back because she
lived with more than a thousand years of regret that she hadn’t made you vampire.”

“I’m just a soldier, Livia,” he warned, fighting against the flame. “I don’t bring down empires.”

“Neither do I, apparently,” she sighed. “But you have courage and honor. You figured out that it was Chaerea behind the attacks, not me. And you know how to make the land feed the people better than it does today. There are so many things you could do with time.”

“You have seven hundred years of experience I do not.” There were so many reasons why he was not worthy of her.

“And I need to look at the world with fresh eyes. I’m tired, Jergan.” She let him go and started to pace the dark room. “I’m weary of having to keep my secrets. I want someone to depend on. A partner.” She turned on her heel.

“A partner.” The words struck to his core. Her regret was for the things he could do for the world. It wasn’t for what he could do for her. Donnatella had told her to admit love just to bind him to her purpose. It wasn’t true. The thought echoed through an empty soul.

Not true. She didn’t love him.

“Gods, man, does a woman have to say it?” She threw up her hands and stalked to the window. Her silhouette was a darker blot upon the night sky and the moving trees outside. The stars were thick and winking clear as they had not been in the noisy, lit city.

The flame of hope leaped up from the ashes in his soul. “Sometimes, yes, Livia.”

He waited as though his life depended upon it. Which it did.

She heaved a sigh of resignation. “I loved you from the first instant I saw you. And maybe that was because
Donnatella was inside me and I had already loved you for more than a thousand years.” She held up a finger of warning. “But don’t go mad with wondering if I would have loved you without Donnatella coming back. It doesn’t matter. By the time I’d owned you for a few hours, I trusted you with my life. By the third day I knew I couldn’t live without you. The hardest thing I ever did was free you, thinking you would go back to Britannia.”

The flame engulfed him, heart, soul. He could not breathe. Yet his eyes could fill. “I wish I were worthy of that.”

“Don’t you dare say you won’t stay with me because you’re not worthy.” Her voice was imperious and cross. “I’m a woman. I’ve been lonely for centuries. And I need you. Not someone else. You.”

That was the Livia he knew. Three strides and he could take her in his arms. She lifted her head and he kissed her, hard. He wanted to devour her, make her a part of him so she could never leave him.

She might leave him. Forever was a long time. But she had made a commitment. Without an equal commitment on his part, his life was over.

“Make me vampire,” he breathed into her mouth. “Let us tempt the fates.”

She held herself away from him. “How so?”

“Let them be jealous of our happiness.”

S
OMEHOW, ALL THAT
possibility of happiness made her cry. She hadn’t cried in five hundred years. She should be hard and strong and triumphant. She had what she wanted. There might be regrets, but there would never be the one soul-destroying regret.

Jergan put her head against the shoulder that wasn’t wounded and she sobbed into the smell of his flesh.

“I’m sorry,” she hiccupped at last. “I didn’t mean to cry.”

“I liked it,” he rumbled, and kissed her hair. “It reminds me that you are just a woman.” He looked down at her. “Do it now, Livia. Make me as you are.”

“You will be sick for a while.”

“But you will care for me as you always have.”

“Yes.”

“Then I am ready.”

He didn’t know what it meant to be vampire. But he was willing to take a leap of faith with her. Well, she would show him the way. And perhaps he could show her the way back to innocence. One of the gods had blessed her. She would raise a temple to whichever one it was. She’d think about just which god later. Perhaps Venus. Or maybe the Christ in whose catacombs the time machine had hidden. If Donnatella had not used the time machine to come back and give her courage, even the possibility of happiness would be denied her.

She thought about all that lay ahead of Jergan. “You will feel alive, my love. So alive. And strong. You will see and hear and smell and taste more acutely than you do now. And you will be even more easily aroused.”

“And will I be able to make love to you with more vigor?”

She pretended to frown. “I am not certain I can stand any more vigor from you.”

He turned her chin up. “But will I?”

“Yes.”

“I think I will like this.” She could feel him rising against her thigh. It had been too long since she had made love to Jergan. “You told me once that sometimes you took blood from your partner as you made love, that it was a most sensual experience.”

She nodded, examining his expression. All she could read was softness there. No horror. No revulsion.

“Take my blood as you make love to me, Livia, and mingle my blood with your own.” He kissed her, tenderly this time.

She would make it tender, too. She let him lead her to the bed. She unwound her
stola
as she went. He pulled her tunic over her head this time. She pressed her breasts to his naked chest and belly. The hair on his chest prickled against her sensitive nipples. She’d have to be careful of the healing wounds in his side and his shoulder. He lay down and pulled her down beside him. His erection strained against his belly. She lay down in his arms, and ran her hands up around the nape of his neck, under his thick black hair. His green eyes glowed. He cupped her head and kissed her, gently, yet she could feel his need, barely restrained. He was a strong man, a man worthy of centuries. Together perhaps they could do what she could not alone. Or perhaps not. Perhaps history would do what history would do. Whatever they did, they would do it together.

“You make me whole,” he whispered.

That whole was about to get much bigger. He was courageous enough not to be frightened of what would happen to him. He would encompass it and use it to do good things in the world.

“Make me whole,” she whispered in return, and he rolled on top of her, holding himself above her, his rod lying between her thighs. She spread them. She was wet and ready and she wanted him inside her
now.
He felt her to see that she was ready for him. She was so ready. He entered slowly, easing himself into her until she was filled. “Yesssss,” she hissed as he began to slide in and out, slowly, almost tenderly, in spite of the passion she could feel in him.

He kissed her shoulder. Then he threw back his head, baring his neck to her. She wouldn’t take much blood. The last thing she wanted to do was weaken him for the ordeal ahead. But she would show him that this most intimate exchange of fluids could mirror and augment the other exchange they were performing. She placed her hands on his buttocks, feeling them clench as he pushed in and out of her. She breathed faster as she pushed in counterpoint.

Companion.

Power rushed up her veins and the world turned red. She felt her canines run out. She had done this thousands of times, yet it felt as though this time were her first. The pain would be minor for him. Like being pricked by thorns, no more. He quickened his pace. Her own sensation ramped up. She must wait for exactly the right moment. She kissed his strong, muscular neck right over the artery under his jaw. Her Companion thrilled in anticipation. Jergan thrust inside her. She wrapped her thighs around him and held his head, her fingers burying themselves in his thick hair. His breath hissed in and out. The time was near.

Blood throbbed in his artery beneath her lips. Carefully, she placed her canines. She must be gentle with him. As she punctured the skin, he tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Blood welled, thick with life. She sucked at his neck and he thrust into her. She could feel his climax rising along with her own. She pulled away and bit her own lip, then sucked again at his throat, feeling their blood mingle. He groaned as he spurted inside her, and the sensation of him coming and his blood welling in her mouth as he gave her everything, his life, his future, the essence of his being, sent her over the edge. She contracted, not only with her body, but also with her soul, and then exploded outward, transformed.