Vampire Darcy's Desire (2 page)

“You brought it into
mine,
Darcy.” Wickham stood, trying to judge his next move. He knew in a fight to the end, the man in front of him stood no chance of survival. But, sensing no fear of the supernatural from the intruder,Wickham questioned what else this confrontation held. Absent of all volition, he hesitated only a moment before moving in a whirlwind to a point of advantage, but the man framed in the light of the doorway did not move.

A dramatic black eyebrow lifted quizzically.“You forget,Wickham, you and I already share certain characteristics. You cannot infect what is already infected. I will not follow you into the darkness, nor will I allow you to convert my sister.This madness ends here. The curse—the wicked allure—will die with us.” The deep rumble of his voice filled the room, and a gleam entered his ice blue eyes, intensified by his opponent’s muteness.

Wickham glowered. “I have not given up taking my fill of beautiful young women.” A squall-like eruption pushed Wickham forward, his arms extended to his sides, sending Darcy rolling along the floor and scrambling to avoid the chasm—an abhorrent shudder of death. “I am coming for you, Darcy,” the voice boomed through the room as cold blasts flew from sinewy hands.

Sucking noises filled Fitzwilliam Darcy’s ears, and he realized that the tall, pale form loomed over him in an infuriating counterattack. Sliding against the far wall, it was all Darcy could do to bite back a scream, but he ducked first and came up, arm flung overhead, preparing to unload.“
Now,
Wickham,” he hissed, and then he released it.

A vial of clear liquid tumbled end over end through the air, splitting the silence surrounding them. Each figure moved in slow motion, playing out its part in a swirling montage.

And then the stopper exploded, and the transparent fluid rained down on the apparition of George Wickham. An agonized scream—full of old blood and dark radiance—filled the room.The shadow hissed in the moonlight, and the odor of burning flesh wafted over both of them.

Fitzwilliam Darcy’s smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “Holy water,” he whispered in affirmation.

“You will rot in hell!” Wickham threatened. “I will see those you love ruined—see them lick the blood from your body. Sharp fangs jutting from their mouths—smelling of death and decay—ghoulish nightmares!” He started forward again, but Darcy anticipated the move. Pulling the double crucifix from his pocket, he met Wickham’s intent with one of his own. “Iron,” he said mockingly, unfurling the chain and reaching out to his enemy.

Panic showed in Wickham’s fever-filled eyes as he backed away from the symbol of the Trinity, stumbling—recoiling—and suddenly, he was gone in a grey shadow moving across the lawn, a highly combustible howl billowing upon the breeze in his retreat.

Darcy stood motionless for several long minutes, needing to clear his head. He took a slow breath, trying to control his anger, and then he smelled it—smoke. Against his better judgment, he rushed to the bedchamber’s open door. “Wickham!” he cursed. The house he rented in Ramsgate heated with a fiery blaze, which started at three separate points of entry on the bottom floor.Thick black smoke, fueled by heavy draperies and fine upholstered furniture, rolled from the doorways of the lower rooms and rose in a blackened drape to cover the stairway.Acrid smoke drifted his way. Immediately, he turned toward the body still reclining on the bed where George Wickham had left her.

“Georgiana!” he called in a panic as he scooped her into his arms and pulled his sister tight to his chest. Darcy grabbed a towel on the washstand and dipped it into the tepid water she had used earlier. He draped the wet towel over her head and face, repeating the procedure for himself.Then he made his way to the top of the stairs. Thick smoke covered the lower half of the rise. He took a deep breath and lunged forward.

Surprisingly, a pocket of air existed once he stumbled his way to the bottom of the steps. He felt Georgiana slipping from his grip as he fought his way past flaming lips, consuming doorways along the
corridor. Using the last of his strength to lift her to him again, Darcy braced his shoulders along the wall leading to the servants’ entrance, the only door not blocked by flames. Forcibly, he shoved his way into the night—into the shelter of the open air. Heaving from the weight of her—from the fear—from the effort—from the deadly murk filling the night sky, he staggered forward, trying to get away.

When the explosion hit, he was far enough from the house to escape the brunt of the debris, but not far enough to go unscathed. Splintered doorways and shards of glass flew like deadly projectiles, many of them lodging in his arms and legs and back, but Darcy kept moving, trying to get his precious Georgiana to safety. Finally, he collapsed to his knees, laying her gently on the dewy grass before uncovering her face.

“Georgie,” he pleaded as he patted her hands and face. For a few long moments he prayed, and then she caught a deep breath and began to cough uncontrollably. A soft moan told him that she was well; only then did Fitzwilliam Darcy allow the exhaustion to overtake him, collapsing—face first—into the dirt.

“Mr. Darcy!” his valet, Henry Sheffield, called as he rushed over to tend to his employer. Covered with ashes and soot, his clothes torn and disheveled, Darcy lay in a defeated heap upon the soft earth.

Georgiana righted herself and crawled to where he lay. “Fitzwilliam,” she begged between fits of coughing. “Oh, please… please…talk to me.”

“He is hurt, Miss Darcy,” Henry told her as he jerked off his coat and wrapped it around her light muslin gown.

“
Help
him,” she pressed.

By that time, footmen and neighbors had rushed forward, carrying lamps. Mr. Phelps, the owner of the house to the left, examined Darcy’s body.“We should not turn him; he has several lacerations—no telling what might be in the wounds.”As the man spoke, Darcy’s body arched, seeking air before choking on the same gulping breath.“Georgie,” he managed to say between barking gasps.

“I am here,” she assured him, draping her soot-covered arm over his shoulder.

Mr. Phelps took charge. “Lift him to his feet, and be careful about it,” he ordered. “Jemmy, go for the doctor.You others help Mr. Darcy to my house.”

Two footmen shoved themselves under his arms, arranging them about their shoulders and supporting his weight as they nearly dragged him towards Phelps’s open door. Townspeople scrambled to the bucket brigades to put out the fire. Darcy’s head hung low, and he tried to recover his senses as the servants struggled under his weight. Finally, he forced his gaze towards the gathering crowd across the street. Then, intuitively, his eyes fell on George Wickham, a figure wrapped in a long black cape and sporting a beaver.With a wry smile and a nearly imperceptible salute, he disappeared into the crowd.

Darcy could do nothing more tonight; he stopped Wickham this time; he was lucky. Could he do it again? Could he kill the man who plagued his family? “Come, Georgiana,” he urged, demanding that his body relax back into the arms of the rescuers. Then he allowed the men to help him up the steps to Phelps’s town house.

It took more than a day to explain it all to Georgiana. At first, she did not believe him, but the truth lay all around them. He explained what he knew of her acquaintance with Wickham—how she met the pretender one day in a village shop—how she saw him several times about the estate—how she thought him to be a friend of her brother’s. Slowly, with Darcy’s explanation, Georgiana realized Wickham offered her no future.

His seduction held no dignity. Instead, the man provided a ghastly corruption. He had promised marriage, and Darcy’s darling Georgiana naively thought his to be an honest proposal. The shame she felt at knowing she had succumbed to Wickham’s deception was bad enough, but the truth Darcy later provided of the man’s real reason to target her—he feared might complicate Georgiana’s recovery.

Darcy secured her safety away from others, and he reinforced his sister’s London home with every known amulet to protect her. If others knew to what extreme he went in order to ensure her unassailability, they might think him deranged.Yet the opinions of others never swayed him—call it
lunacy,
but he chose alchemy to fight perfidy. Georgiana promised to wear her half of the iron double crucifix. Darcy inlaid it with jewels and placed it on a finely woven chain. He explained that he would wear the other half, keeping them connected.

Finally, he hired Mrs. Lillian Annesley as his sister’s companion. Besides being well educated, the elderly woman possessed one quality that placed her above all other candidates for the position. She was a psychic, a Seer. In fact, she was the reason he went to Ramsgate in the first place. He passed Mrs. Annesley on a street near St. James on a cold, windy afternoon. Immediately, this
stranger called out to him, and Darcy’s good breeding made him stop and listen to her lurid tale. She warned him of the danger to Georgiana. It took him only a few moments to understand that Mrs. Annesley spoke the truth. He ordered a horse and rode at breakneck speed to the seaside resort in Kent. If not for this chance encounter, Georgiana might now be under George Wickham’s control. Therefore, Darcy freely trusted his sister to the old woman’s matronly care.

 

He spent the six months following his confrontation with Wickham trying to find his enemy again; and although he had various detective agencies searching for just a sighting of Wickham, his rival disappeared into the bowels of London’s underworld. He would resurface eventually; Darcy knew that to be a
fact,
just as it was a
fact
that Darcy would kill Wickham when he found him again.

After his face-off with George Wickham, Darcy reevaluated his own life and his plan to bring this malediction to an end. As a member of the British aristocracy, he had inherited his estate and his position in society from his father.Through a system of primogeniture, he should pass it on to his heir, but Fitzwilliam Darcy planned something else with his position. Besides the land, he had inherited from his ancestors a propensity for evil. Since learning at the age of sixteen of this quirk of nature, he fought against it taking over his life. Because of this struggle, most of his peers saw him as an eccentric; yet the aristocracy easily overlooked eccentricity, and even depravity among its members.

Society expected Darcy to take a wife, but he held no such plans. He pretended to want to marry; he attended social functions, but hung on the perimeter of the group, making it appear that he looked on the season’s offerings with a discerning eye. In reality, his search would never come to fruition. Darcy would have no wife—no children—no love in his old age. He would simply never marry, allowing his “eccentric” character to be the excuse. Instead, he would make sure Pemberley thrived and then leave it to Georgiana’s heirs. He would not pass on the
unnatural
to a
child—to his firstborn son. It would end with him, and if God gave him the strength to do so, he would stop this eternal feud by killing Wickham.

As such, he claimed problems on his estate kept him from London during the spring and early summer season. However, he knew that he had to make some social appearances to keep the tongues from wagging, so in late summer, he joined a friend, Charles Bingley, at a house party given by the Havershams in Sus-sex. During this time, Bingley repeatedly pressed him to help him acquire a piece of property.

“I need your counsel, Darcy,” Bingley pleaded.“Caroline wishes for me to take an estate to establish our family. I found one in Hertfordshire, which I let for the year, but I possess no expertise in this area. Please consider coming with us—help me to determine whether this is a sound investment before I choose to buy it. It will be just Caroline, Louisa, my brother Hurst, and I.We will meet my neighbors and have a quiet time.”

Darcy quickly agreed. He could hide away from social obligations for several months because Bingley offered him the perfect excuse. Hertfordshire was close enough to London that he could make the periodic day trip to check on Georgiana and Mrs. Annesley. Luckily, Bingley, one of his closest friends, good-humoredly tolerated Darcy’s need for solitude and his other idiosyncrasies. The only downfall to the plan was maneuvering around Caroline Bingley, Charles’s sister, who had set her sights on Darcy when her brother became one of Darcy’s closest acquaintances several years earlier. Of course, avoiding one woman’s attentions was a superior plan to a ballroom full every evening of matrons pushing their daughters into his path.

Michaelmas, therefore, found him with Bingley’s family at Netherfield Park. Over the first few weeks, he and Bingley spent their days riding out across the estate, examining the out buildings, visiting with cottagers, planning renovations and repairs, and enjoying each other’s company. Darcy cherished these moments of normalcy, although they were often peppered with torment.When
Bingley and his neighbors returned from hunting, he stood with the other men as they butchered a deer. Seeing the blood being drained from the carcass, Darcy held tight to the hitching post—knuckles white from the surge of revulsion shooting through him. The blood spread through the dirt, creating new veins—new paths—still living even though the animal was dead. It crept closer to his boots, and he stepped back in a show of fastidiousness, but his eyes never left the blood—the lifeline. Unconsciously, he licked his lips, although his mouth suddenly felt very dry. Every nerve in his body screamed for action, but Darcy held himself immobile: He must appear a man, and men enjoyed such sport, and he would repeat the required gestures to fit into the group.“It is a fine kill,” he muttered to one of the older men close by.

A member of the landed gentry, Mr. Bennet, noticed his paleness. “Are you all right, Mr. Darcy?”

“Something I did
not
eat,” he responded with an ironic smile.

Bingley came to his rescue.“My friend eschews meat.”