Summoning Shadows: A Rosso Lussuria Vampire Novel (2 page)

I took a shaking step back, and seeing nothing but Justine behind my lids, said, “No.”

Renata did not respond, not to me and not to dismiss the boy. She perched on the edge of her bed and simply waited. How much time passed, I do not know, but I knew she waited to see if my will would break.

I fought with every fiber of my being not to lunge, not to give in to the hunger.

When at last she was convinced, she rose and went to the double doors of her room, summoning Dante and Dominique to escort the boy back to safe quarters.

Renata had come to me then, offering the comfort and solace of her body and blood. And so, I learned as she had said I would.

I learned to control my thirst.

America, Present Day

Gold eyes slashed with veins of onyx lightning watched me as I climbed into bed. Her nude body shone like selenite, framed by the black, knee-length tresses of her hair. A small tuft of fur shielded the mound at her groin as she reclined, marvelous and striking. I straddled her, careful of the leathery wings that spread from her back and across the bed.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” she spoke with human lips.

“How so?” I asked while I settled my body over hers. I brushed my sex over her, letting her feel that I wore nothing beneath the silk robe. The small node of flesh between her legs stiffened against me and sent a shivering wave of pleasure through my lower body. The black sigil at my wrist tingled with warmth. Once, only a few weeks ago, the sigil had itched and burned whenever I had been close to her. Now, it simply grew warm and tingled ever so slightly.

We were bound together, she and I.

The Dracule, the Great Sires and Sirens of the vampire kind, are a breed unto themselves. Iliaria had never been mortal, and though her current guise mimicked that of human, she was not. She was female, most definitely. The Dracule have a form that is anatomically similar to human, but there are still differentiations. The spur-tipped leathery wings that arched from her back, the long, spaded tail, and the
Nod Dragoste
between her legs set her apart from truly appearing human. It marked her as something beautiful in an otherworldly sort of way. Mayhap for some, it marked her as the stuff of nightmares. For myself, well…

I rolled my hips forward to dance my skin across hers. “Have you any word on the traitor Damokles?” I asked.

It appeared as though it took her an effort to concentrate. She touched my hips to bring my dance to a halt and I obliged.

Damokles had been a very naughty Dracule who had conspired with two overly ambitious Elders to overthrow the Rosso Lussuria Queen, my lover, Renata. Iliaria had initially been summoned by the traitors to kill us. But she had taken an interest in me, and Renata and I had bartered with her.

I took Iliaria to my bed and she spared us. She offered to give me her mark as a truce and symbol of an alliance between us. I had taken it, and so I bore the black flowing lines at my wrist like an elegant tattoo. The mark is Iliaria’s name, odd and flowing in the tribal alphabet of the Dracule.

The Dracule tell a story of the beginning of our kind. Menelaos, one of the first kings of the Dracule had taken a mortal woman to his bed. Yet, the Dracule are not a race made for mortal lovers, for bodily lust can awaken in them darker lusts. In the throes of passion, Menelaos had slain his human lover. When he realized what he had done, he wept. The angel Azrael, guardian of death, heard the Draculian king’s cries and offered to return the mortal woman to life if Menelaos would give up his own immortality in exchange. Thus, to save his beloved, Menelaos sacrificed his own immortality, and Lilith, the mother of our kind, was created.

The King’s Sacrifice
, they call it.
The Origins of Vampire
.

It was some hours after dawn and Renata had already died for the day, giving me time to enjoy Iliaria’s company. I wore a delicate ring on the middle finger of my right hand, the same side of my body on which I bore Iliaria’s mark. The ring was set with a dainty tear-shaped gem. When held to the light, a small prick of crimson showed in the center of the gem’s smoky blackness. The ring had been a gift from Iliaria. The gem set within the band is a Stone of Shadows. It is a stone forged from the blood and magic of the Dracule. Its power cloaks a vampire and protects us from sunlight. Oddly, the Dracule do not have to worry about sunlight or dying at dawn. A lucky lot they are, for the ring was the only power that kept me from dying like the rest of my brethren.

I fingered the ring idly as I awaited her reply.

“I am sorry, Epiphany. I have no word on Damokles’s whereabouts.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, and my words were met with a heavy silence. With Damokles alive and well, we were still in danger. Iliaria feared his hatred for the vampires would rouse some of the other Dracule to rise against us.

Granted, the Rosso Lussuria are not the only vampire clan in existence. There are others like us throughout the world. We simply choose to keep to ourselves, living in our underground kingdoms and away from the prying eyes of humanity. In our daily lives, the Cacciatori, the vampires who hunt for us, are the only ones who venture outside the walls of the Sotto. I should know, for it was the Cacciatori who had kidnapped me and brought me to this world.

It was Renata’s mercy that had kept me. I was dying from the consumption when first I had been brought to the Sotto. That was in England, before we made the long and arduous journey to America. For fifty years, I had been Renata’s lover and pet. She had cast me out for a hundred and fifty, and I had only recently discovered why. In her own way, she had been trying to protect me. There were those among us who perceived our love as weakness.

Now, I am an Elder. I no longer live a life of servitude. I no longer try to move as quiet as a mouse or cast down my gaze. I am Renata’s Inamorata, her lover, her consort, and was declared such before the whole of the Rosso Lussuria. To raise a hand against me is to raise a hand against her.

Inamorata or no, if someone decides they want you dead, I have found they will not stop trying until they succeed. And when one is immortal, they have a very long time to keep trying.

Iliaria’s nails dug into the fabric over my hips, bringing my attention back to her.

“You are deep in thought this morning,” she said. “Is your little fox speaking with you?”

“Not right now.”

Iliaria shifted her hips and her sex pressed against that sensitive spot between my legs. My eyes fluttered closed as a tendril of pleasure unwound within me.

“Epiphany.” She released me. “Take off the robe.”

I obeyed and loosened the sash, shrugging and sending the silk spilling from my body to pool across her legs.

In the short amount of time that we had been together, there remained certain acts of the bedchamber that Iliaria had not allowed me to perform. She, like Renata, was a dominant by nature, and though they had shared me, neither commanded the other. Iliaria, however, was not the same kind of dominant as Renata. Renata often took the reins of our lovemaking, unless swayed with good reason and the promise of pleasure. Even with the promise of pleasure, Iliaria was not so easily swayed. When I began marking a path down her smooth stomach with my mouth, she caught hold of my hair and forced me to meet her gaze.

“What are you doing?”

I bit back a childish retort fueled by my own selfish frustration. Iliaria would not take kindly to it, nor would I gain any ground with her by using sarcasm.

“Will you not let me please you as I wish to?”

I could feel the emotional battle raging inside her. She knew what I
wanted
to do, a large part of her even wanted me to do it, but some sort of insecurity that I could not fathom kept crawling in the way. She looked away from me, a signal that told me the beast of insecurity was winning.

“I can sense your desire, Iliaria. Why will you not let me please you with my mouth?”

“It is a very intimate act, Epiphany.”

I couldn’t keep the corner of my mouth from rising slightly. “And we haven’t been intimate? I’ve revealed nearly all of myself to you and Renata.”

“That is different.”

At that, I raised my brows. “Oh? How so?”

“You are vampires, not Dracule.”

“I was a virgin when Renata took me,” I said, not quite comprehending what she meant.

“Were that the case,” she said, “you would still be a virgin. Do not lie to me.”

I sat up on my knees, straddling her while keeping our skin from touching. “Perhaps I should be more to the point; I was a virgin the first time Renata made love to me. I was no longer such when she gave me the kiss of death.”

It was true. Renata had given me a choice, something I eventually learned she had not been offered. When she had taken me that first time with the olisbos, a kind of phallic sex toy, she had been gentle, but still, it had not spared me the agony that came with the loss of virginity. To this day, I was ever grateful she had given me a choice and that she had deflowered me before turning me. Had she waited until after my rebirth, my body would have continuously healed and I would have experienced the excruciating pain of that loss every single time she used her toy. I liked some pain in the bedroom, of a certain variety, but the pain of that night was one I preferred to keep a distant memory.

“The act of love between women is nothing new,” she said. “It is so among the Dracule, but what you request is not our custom as it is between you and your queen.”

“You’re beginning to make me feel as though I am asking you to do something vile, Iliaria. I don’t like it.”

Her spaded tail thumped the mattress below us, a sign of her growing frustration. She released a heavy sigh. “I do not know how to explain it to one such as you.”

“One such as me?”

“You are a vampire. You see no shame in it. I am Dracule,” she said as if it explained everything.

“Vampire. Dracule. What does it matter? What difference does it make? If I can take you into my mouth and please you, why shouldn’t I?”

“It makes me uncomfortable!”

I flinched at her words but didn’t give ground. I had seen Renata in her anger. If Iliaria thought she could scare me with it, she was very much incorrect.

“Why?”

Iliaria wiggled out from beneath me, her movements jerky and impatient. “You are acting like a child.”

“Your attempts to verbally degrade me because of your own insecurity won’t work. You’re running from a phantom fear instead of turning around and banishing it.”

She stood, slamming her leathery wings around her like a shield to hide her nudity. I wondered if closing her wings that hard around her had hurt, but doubted it. Her eyes narrowed when I moved to lie back against the pillows, mirroring how she had been lying only moments ago.

“So that is it then?” she asked. “If I do not allow you to perform, there will be nothing between us this day?”

It sounded as if she didn’t like the idea.

“You’re the one who climbed out of bed in a tizzy, not me.”

“You upset me.”

“I have feelings too, Iliaria, and by rejecting me and something I want to do before even giving it a chance, you hurt them.”

“You’ll not manipulate me.”

“You do realize you’re arguing with me simply because I want to bring you pleasure? Can you not at least try it?”

She let out a deep breath. “I do not know, Epiphany.”

“We’re alone,” I said. “It’s just you and I. What do you have to be ashamed of? You know I would not intentionally seek to hurt you.”

“No,” she said. “I do not know that.”

“Then give me the opportunity to prove it to you. Have you heard me once complain about anything you and Renata will of me?”

“Again,” she said, “we differ.”

“What?” I asked. “Do you think of it as an act of submission or something?”

She turned away, and I knew I had finally hit close to the truth.

“It is viewed as weakness among the Dracule, Epiphany.”

“So is bedding a vampire, to a great lot of them. There comes a time when we have to release preconceived notions and form our own opinions based on personal experience. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Her expression turned thoughtful, not as if she were thinking entirely too hard on the subject, but more like she was trying to find the trap in my words.

It was my turn to sigh. “Come to bed,” I said, “and have of me what you will.”

She put a knee on the side of the bed. “That sounds heartfelt.”

“What do you want, Iliaria? Ask for what you desire and I will try to give it.”

“Do you mean that when you say it?”

“I would not say it if I didn’t.”

“I could ask anything from you and you would give it?”

“If it is within reason and within my reach to give, I would at the very least try.”

She bowed her body and crawled to me, bringing our faces close. “If I allow you to do this, Epiphany, I will find something that is not so easy for you to do and I will expect compliance when I request it of you.”