Summoning Shadows: A Rosso Lussuria Vampire Novel (3 page)

“Within reason,” I said.

“Within reason.”

She had let me touch her once, but only briefly. I had learned that in the bedroom, she preferred that I kept my hands and mouth above her waist. It was an odd thing to me, that the Dracule would consider such an act a sign of submission. Then again, who was I to cast stones when the vampires with whom I lived often frowned upon me? I heard their whisperings, still. Becoming an Elder and Renata’s consort did not erase them. Queen’s whore, they’d begun calling me. Well and good, let them continue to call me what they would. I would not bear the mantle of their shame.

I hoped Iliaria would do the same.

I traded places with her, careful of her large wings. We had learned it was easier with her on bottom, for she had to be cautious of her whip-like tail, which was not solely for balance, but also for defense. The tip of her tail hid a venomous spine-like barb. The venom was strong enough to kill a vampire when dealt a mortal blow, enough to sicken an immortal when dealt a shallow wound. In the bedroom, we’d learned it was more dangerous to nearby furniture.

I knelt between her legs and she did not protest. The fur covering her groin was like silk against my cheek, but it was not the softness of that fur that I sought. It was what the fur shielded I was more curious about.

I traced her with a finger, and her flesh shivered and stiffened in reaction to my touch. Truly, she did enjoy it. Her arousal was a visible thing. I continued to trace her slowly, gently, marking the path of her inner folds with surety and patience.

I pushed my fingers inside her and her body tightened around me. She stretched her arms above her head, her nails scraping across the stone wall.

I found a slow rhythm and she groaned my name.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Too much foreplay,” she grumbled.

It was true, she was rigid to the touch. I smeared the honey of her desire across that knot of flesh and her spine bowed.

“For someone so adamantly against this, you seem to be enjoying yourself.”

Iliaria’s only response was a low, rumbling growl. The growl vibrated throughout my room. It coaxed the hair at the back of my neck to prickle pleasantly.

I pressed my lips against the tip of her then and licked her slowly. At the light touch of my tongue, her body jerked as if she’d been dealt a blow.

“Mmm, you’re very sensitive there,” I whispered, my breath against her making her shudder again.

“Yes,” she said, a growl swallowing most of her words. I managed to make out the words, “vulnerable flesh.”

“You’ll not have to worry about my fangs, Iliaria. If I must tuck them behind my lips, I will.”

If she was going to respond, I didn’t give her a chance to do so. I sealed my mouth over her, and her skin between my lips was like a ripe cherry, full and ready to burst. I traced her tentatively, trying to discern what she enjoyed and what she did not. I found that to take all of her in my mouth, I did have to curtain my fangs behind my lips, and the sweet taste of my own blood trickled across my teeth. I ignored it, surrendering myself to her pleasure.

I sucked gently, and she screamed. I paused.

“Keep doing that,” she panted. “Lightly, though. Keep it light.”

I placed my hands flat against her thighs and continued, minding her request and trying not to apply too much pressure.

At some point, the flow of pleasure took me until I was only distantly aware of the sound of the wooden headboard protesting beneath her grip. I withdrew my hand from her thigh and entered her, eliciting yet another cry. I quickened my pace and the creaking ceased, drowned out by Iliaria’s moans. Something brushed the left side of my body, and that too, I ignored until it coiled around my waist and constricted, threatening to crush me.

I pushed at her tail with my free hand, trying to get her to move her tail lower. I didn’t need to breathe, but air was something I appreciated, most especially when I had a mouthful of Dracule.

Immortal or no, forced suffocation isn’t exactly my idea of a rollicking good time. Iliaria seemed to come back to herself for a moment. She loosened her tail and lassoed it lower across my hips and buttocks.

The closer she came to orgasm, the more tightly her tail cinched around me, and the more I had to focus on her and not being crushed. Being vampire, it would be harder for her to crush my bones, but she was Dracule and preternaturally strong. I was hesitant to discover just where that limit lay.

Iliaria climaxed, her hips bucking and forcing me to rise or lose my hold over her. I followed the movement of her body until at last, she cried out and fell back limply, her tail unfurling from around me.

I collapsed with my head between her thighs and licked clean my blood from my teeth and lips. After a few moments, Iliaria looked as though she was about to say something to me but hesitated.

“What is it?” I asked.

A knock sounded at the door, and Iliaria spilled to her feet out of pure instinct. I found myself standing near the dresser, caught in the midst of sword magic and reflex. In my mind’s eye Cuinn stood alert, his ears pricked forward to listen.

“It’sss Anatharic,” a hissing voice whispered from the other side of the door. “We have a problem.”

“Căcat!” Iliaria said heatedly. “Couldn’t you have chosen a better time?”

She rounded the bed while I tied the sash of my robe. She glanced at me briefly, courtesy alone to make sure I was covered, before she flung open the door to admit the Great Sire into my room.

*

I stood in a hallway narrower than most of the other halls within the Sotto. Anatharic had been correct. There was a problem and it was a very bad one.

The heavy wooden doors that led to the Donatore’s private quarters had been reduced to a mess of splintered wood, as if someone had placed a bomb nearby and set it off. Nothing, not even a bomb, should have been able to penetrate the entrance.

“I’m confused,” I admitted. “No weapon known to man would allow anyone access into the Donatore’s chambers. This area of the Sotto is strictly forbidden to anyone except the queen and her guardsmen.”

Anatharic stood just to my right in the less human of his forms. Though once I thought about it, I realized I had never seen him change form like Iliaria. He was tall, taller in Draculian form than he would have been in his other guise. That much I knew. He had his wings folded around his furred body, a stance obviously comfortable to their kind. Only the obsidian fur of his feline-like face and glimpses of the fur on his legs and tail were visible.

His onyx eyes met mine. “I sssussspect they did not ussse human weaponsss.” His speech was slow and hissing, a product of the ribbon-flat Draculian tongue.

“Indeed,” Iliaria said.

All three of us had placed a careful distance between ourselves and the splintered doors. Renata had found a mortal witch to place magical wards on the Donatore’s keep as a measure to keep the humans safe from the Rosso clan. Neither vampire nor mortal could pass through them without queen ’s blood. Technically, the Donatore were nigh undetectable. No one within the Sotto would have heard a sneeze from the other side, the warding went so deep.

How then, had someone found their quarters? To my knowledge, none of the others, save the queen and her guards, even knew how to find it in the labyrinth of hallways. I had only seen it once, when I had accompanied Renata to the door before feeding time. If it weren’t for Anatharic’s senses, the coppery tinge of mortal blood and the salt of human skin, I might not have even recognized it as the Donatore’s quarters.

“The lassst ssscent I had ended here,” Anatharic said. His elongated ears swiveled as if he were trying to hear something I could not. The spurred tips of his wings twitched.

“I smell human blood, not queen ’s blood,” I said. “How do you think it possible that Damokles broke through the warding to attack the Donatore?”

“That I have yet to figure out,” Iliaria said, rising from a kneeling position where she had been examining the floor. “We need to go in. If he’s destroyed the doors, no doubt the wards are no longer functioning.”

I saw Cuinn, my fairie fox trapped in a spirit blade, fold his ears back in the way he had of appearing as a vision in the back of my mind. The sword belonged to me after I had chosen it during a duel, and now, he was essentially stuck in my head and could communicate with me telepathically whenever he wanted to. Which, I had learned, he greatly enjoyed.

Piph,
he said,
it could be a trap.

“It could be a trap,” I said aloud. “But we have to do something, Cuinn.”

Iliaria knitted her brows in concentration. She raised a piece of wood to her pale face and her nostrils flared slightly.

“It reeks of magic,” she said. “Not our magic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not of the Dracule,” Anatharic said. “Do you sssuppossse he isss working with a witch?”

That’d explain the door going kerplooey
, Cuinn thought.

“I’m going to go wake Renata,” I said, concentrating on her. Though I didn’t smell her blood, I hoped silently that Damokles had indeed used a witch and not—

I shut my eyes, refusing to think on it. The last time I’d thought Renata gone from me, I’d gone mad with fury. I needed to keep my wits about me.

“Not alone, you’re not,” Iliaria said. She turned to Anatharic. “Watch this entry. We’ll return. Summon if you need assistance.”

Iliaria followed me down the winding halls. I tried to keep my pace normal, though my instincts wanted me to run to Renata’s chambers. But I knew better. We still didn’t know what had happened or what might be lurking in the halls. Running face-first into a monster wouldn’t help the situation.

Iliaria kept pace with me, her eyes flicking this way and that.

“You’re guarding me,” I said, a bit surprised.

“Yes, why wouldn’t I?”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I shrugged.

Iliaria gave me a strange look. “You are my dragă,” she said. “I will always guard you.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me, really. Iliaria had once used her body as my shield. She risked her life for me every second that I bore her mark. She’d gone against her own people to protect the Rosso Lussuria. She called me her dragă, someone special and dear to her.

I twisted the ring on my finger again.

“If something had happened to Renata,” I said, changing the subject, “surely we would have heard the struggle. Dante and Dominique would have called for help—”

“Epiphany,” Iliaria brought me up short by catching me by the elbow. “If something has happened to your queen, you are not safe here. You must let me take you somewhere where you will be safe.”

“You shouldn’t speak of such things,” I said, refusing to meet her gaze.

“I want you to be prepared. The devil only knows what Damokles is about.”

“Dante and Dominique are not so easy to kill.” If they were, Renata wouldn’t trust them as much as she did.

“The Dracule are not so easily heard,” she said, not exactly comforting me.

The sound of Iliaria’s wings clapped open like thunder and the torchlight of the Sotto spun in my vision. The stone wall pressed against my back a second later.

Iliaria’s chest rumbled as if a drum played beneath her skin, vibrating against me.

“It’s just me.” Dante’s voice came from the other end of the hall, thick and sticky like syrup.

Iliaria let up, giving me full view of the figure that strode toward us. Dante wore a dark red shirt, darker than the red dyed locks of hair that fell over his eye. His black leather pants were tucked into short boots.

“Where’s Dominique?” I asked. “And Renata?”

“Your queen is safe,” he said.

Something about his expression made the hair rise at the back of my neck. The corner of his mouth curled slightly upward.

“Iliaria,” I said, hoping she would understand.

Whoever was walking toward us was not Dante. I could feel the knowledge crawling like ants under my skin. The fox blade in my hand blazed to life.

Whatever he was, whoever he was, Iliaria was faster. The arm-length blade he’d drawn went clattering to the stone floor as they met. Iliaria took him down in a matter of seconds, her movements a black blur of deadly grace.

“Eeeepiphannyyy,” Anatharic’s hissing voice sounded behind me, and I turned. He was running down the hall on all fours, nearly as tall as a small horse. His long ears were drawn back against his skull, his wings arched slightly, making his body something smooth and angular as he cut through the air.

I stood there like an idiot, no longer paying attention to the sounds of struggle behind me. Iliaria was questioning the man who looked like Dante. He was screaming as she did something to him.

And Anatharic was making a full-out run for me.

“Get on!”

I didn’t comprehend. It was happening too fast. Anatharic leapt in the air like a panther and slammed into me.

For a moment, I was falling in the dark, though I seemed to be falling far too long than was normal.

Anatharic released me and I landed in a heap on the floor.