Blood Kiss, page 1
Blood Kiss
M Kenyon Charboneaux
_____________________
MacDonald, Barclay & Co., Little Elm, Texas
274
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Copyright © 2012 by M Kenyon Charboneaux
ISBN-13: 978-0-9858730-2-8
PROLOGUE - SPRING, 1991
Black ocean, tipped and streaked by moon-white here and there. Wheels and time and the smell of old blood on the wind, and I thought I saw Mae standing there, at the sea's edge, as she used to do ... small and slender in white lace, her blond hair washed to silver by the moon, her skin to alabaster.
I had seen her die, yet here stood one so like her, that I must move to her, walk the yards that separated us, with legs like a dead man's and a heart singing like that of one who has finally found his lover after searching for her years along the freezing corridors of hell.
I must reach through the thickened air to touch her shoulder, stand trembling as she turned to me, and breathe out heavily and sharply with shock, in spite of myself, when she presented the perfect face of a Botticelli angel to me.
Perfect eyes, lips, cheekbones, but not Mae's eyes, nor her lips, nor her cheekbones.
Not Mae, and not one of her children, for she had made none during the period of her undeath, yet so very like her, in the porcelain perfection of skin and hair and shape, in her voluptuous, scintillating vampirism.
"Pardon me," I said gently, "you resembled someone, standing here alone in the moonlight."
"Mortal or immortal?" she teased. Her eyes were violet, the color of dreams induced by the poppy. Unlike Mae's, they were open and clear, as innocent as it is possible for any vampire's to be and I stepped closer to her.
"I am Michel de Brissault," I said, with a small bow.
"And I am Celine Robards," she answered, holding her hand out to me.
I took it carefully in mine where it lay lightly, faintly warm with the lingering traces of a recent feeding, and perfectly, heartbreakingly formed.
"Of whom did I remind you?" she asked, her eyes still teasing.
"A woman I once loved," I said, and released her hand. The hurt of Mae was suddenly new and vicious.
I turned to go and she stood uncertainly in the sand, the incoming tide brushing her toes with sea-foam.
"It sounds like a long and romantic story with a sad ending," she said, a small falter in her voice. Like a child, she put her hands behind her back, bowed her head, and kicked at the sand.
"It is," I answered. "Although the ending was less sad, than tragic. I am sorry to have interrupted you." I bowed again, and began to walk away from her.
Instantly she was at my side. She reached out to touch me, then hesitated. I stopped and faced her. "What is it you want?" I asked, not gently.
"You are one of the Old Ones, aren't you?" she said wistfully. "I've never met an Old One. Won't you stay with me awhile? Talk to me? I haven't been changed for very long and I am alone."
"What of the one who changed you?" I asked sternly, for it is a foolish thing to transform a human being into a vampire, and then leave him or her to make their own way in a literal darkness.
"I did not know him," she said without emotion. "He was a rock star, one of those splatter-gore punkers who pretend to be undead for the benefit of their fans, but this one was not pretending. My company assigned me to him as his chauffeur. He took me from behind, there in the limo, then left and I have not seen him since that night."
I nodded at this story whose general outlines was dismayingly familiar, if not its details. She might yet survive; he certainly would not if he continued to make others in such a shockingly careless fashion.
"You are lonely," I said at last. "You must learn to cope with that. You will be lonely for centuries. If you live so long."
"Like you?" she asked, and now her eyes were not teasing. They were solemn and full of purple shadows like clouds before a storm.
"Yes," I said shortly.
"Then can't we spend this night together? Be lonely in company? I will tell you my story and you will tell me yours. You can learn nothing from me, but I could learn everything from you. One night only, I swear to you. I will not cling to you after tonight," she pleaded, yet with dignity and grace, and, I saw, hopelessness. I slid my arm through hers.
"Shall we walk here along the beach," I asked, "or do you prefer to sit somewhere, have drinks, listen to music?"
She studied my face for a moment, finally saying, "Let's go to a quiet park and sit on wooden benches and watch the moon set through Royal Palm leaves. We will pretend we are lovers, once parted, now together again for just these few hours."
I had never done such a thing with Mae. Perhaps she sensed it and that was why she suggested this quiet interlude, rather than some other, more frenetic, frantic place, and I nodded, tucking her arm securely beneath mine.
"You must not say I can learn nothing from you," I said as we walked to my car. "I may, in fact, learn very much from you before this night is over."
"I would like that," she smiled.
I opened the passenger door of the Lotus and she slid onto its fine leather seat as if she had never ridden in a car before ... much like Tony the first time I persuaded him to ride in my, then hot from the factory, Model A Ford.
We drove through the night, not speaking, to a small park in Matheson Hammock. I choose a bench, well shielded by Royal Palms, through which the moon silvered her hair as it had on the beach, and she sat still and silent beside me while I remembered Mae for her.
My too beautiful, flaming, and, finally, monstrous Mae.
CHAPTER 1
I was not looking for Mae. I was not looking for someone like Mae. I was not, in fact, looking for anyone or anything.
I believe that it is always better, if one has enough to sustain existence, to be content with that, for anything more has its inescapable cost. Seven centuries have taught me that there is a curse in life attached to the good things as well as to the evil or the unnatural.
Love, of course, and in point of fact, always exacts its price. Immortality, also, but being nosferatu is, on the whole, a satisfactory thing, and so it is that in every major city of the world you may find them, those mortals who, for whatever reason, have seized upon becoming not-dead as a panacea for their ills, be these of the spirit or of the body.
Walking in their silences, amid the secret pulsing of their human hearts, spurred on by movies and books and late night television, they cry out for a vampire to come to them, to give them this aloes gift of immortality, and in return, they promise eternal love.
They throw aside the very lessons their movies and books attempt to teach them ... that earnest belief that vampires are evil, loveless, and incapable of love ... choosing instead to believe that it is love which bestows the gift, love the lure which attracts it.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is solely loneliness that drives us to create another of our kind, and better to transform a friend, even an enemy, than a lover, for the passing of the centuries dulls even the fiercest
love to friendship, the most hallowed hate to mere indifference.
More importantly, it is easier to keep an eye on a friend during that crucial first year of transformed existence and an enemy will always have his eyes fixed firmly on you, few being willing to die to satisfy their desire for your death.
Nevertheless, we still ... I still ... believe that somewhere, a great love is waiting for us; a soul whose fire will catch our own and set it to blazing with the very stars overhead.
Tony and I used to play a game together. Standing in a crowd, we would look into each face and say, "Is she the one?" "Is she?" In my nearly seven centuries of existence, I had found love like that twice and both times, her heart cried to mine in an audible voice. It is this heart's cry I have come to associate with both love and death, the curse and the Kiss, and I avoid such cries; I flee from them.
I first heard Mae call as I strolled the wet streets of Florence. The rains that had fallen since dusk were not completely past but the theater district was alive with wet, reflected light in the puddled walkways, the squeals of ladies holding their gowns up and off the moist sidewalks and the essence of blood and living flesh drifting to me on the damp breezes.
I, too, drifted among these tourists, feeling a pleasurable affinity with the people, a kind of peace that only so many centuries among humans can bring to us. In that peaceful state, I was more inclined to listen to her call, to muse upon it, to play the game Tony and I had used to play at country fairs and on market days, back in 14th century England.
The world, I thought, hearing her heart's wail, is not as simple as it was in 1323, when I was first changed. How much easier then to believe in all things, even in love that could last throughout all time.
In 1323 I would have heard her even had she been a prisoner of wealth in Tangier and, I, dancing at Whitehall. I would have run to her despite the risks. Now, I would only safely amuse myself by trying to guess which she might be of all these people pressing their succulent flesh against mine.
The fat lady with her graying hair and fatter husband just entering the dinner club, or that wealthy woman, there, with her diamonds and fold-draped neck, wrists and hands alight with emeralds, topaz and ruby, lipsticked mouth laughing, eyes blank as she gazed upon her hired companion with his model's face and weightlifter's body; was that weeping heart within either of these women?
Or perhaps it was the schoolgirl, hanging with sullen tightness to her father's hand, glaring about her with eyes full of angry tears, wishing fervently to be anywhere else, anyone else? Or it might even be, and I smiled at the thought, that American woman, bespectacled and bunned, her sensible shoes belying the madly flowered print dress with plunging neckline that she wore with careful nonchalance.
Whichever she was, among this pre-midnight crowd, she was one of them: one with their laughter, their wide gestures of pleasure, yet she was alone. Alone in her weeping, rapt in the silence of her heart's begging for one such as I to set her free from death, from mortality with all its fears and failings, with no true understanding of what it was she wished for and no belief that there was anyone to hear her anguished plea being sent out into the newly washed night.
I felt compassion for her, pity for myself. Had I not also once been mortal, dreaded King Death in his myriad disguises ... the plague infected sailor, the pock-nosed highwayman, yes, even the innocent child with her long teeth and beguiling song? Feared age and hunger and war and prayed most mightily that the God in whose existence I hoped, would prove Himself real to me by protecting my life and saving my soul?
Once I had been as she was, believing in love, believing its possession worth its price, afraid of death, wanting, wanting ... but not now. Now I dared not open myself to her, dared not want her, could not bring myself to risk her, so I closed her pain and desire out of my mind, and walked on into the brilliant Florentine night.
In Venice, some weeks later, I again heard her.
Leaning on a balustrade, of the Scalzi Bridge after midnight, watching the black waters of the canal spread lazily before a gondola lit with red and blue Chinese lanterns, I felt her whisper through me like wind among wheat, golden and clean.
Seductress, I thought, with wry and rare humor. Is your tourist bus now here in Venice? Do you follow me, woman? I immediately regretted allowing myself to reach out to her, even for an instant, for her wail intensified, becoming very nearly a taste in my throat, very nearly true contact from which I could not easily have drawn away.
I fled to Cairo then. Tours of the European continent rarely include a stop in Egypt and I freely admit thus running from her, to putting even more distance between her desire and my own growing one to answer. Too, I knew Tony would be in Abu Simbal at that time of year and I yearned to see him, to take advantage of his always prudent mind and great love for me, to seek refuge in his practicality.
We always sense when our own kind are near, especially those to whom we are bound by the passing of blood through the Kiss. Within three hours of my arrival, Anthony Tinsley IV, only scion of the Earl of Wiltmanshire, my fostered brother and childhood friend, came striding into my Cairo hotel suite, mouth stretched in laugher, his two Afghan wolfhounds tittering at his heels.
"Michel, you gadfly," he cried, swinging his arms around me with more good fellowship than good sense, for though it requires much strength, whether applied by mortal or vampire, to hurt those as old as we, Tony had always been, even in life, stronger than most. With the heightened strength of the undead, he is dangerous without meaning to be so. He has broken my ribs before with his playful hugs, and once my nose, in anger.
"God's Nightgown," he whooped, "but it is good to lay my eyes upon your sweet face, brother. It's been nearly half a century since last we hunted together. You'll tell me, of course, everything you've done, everywhere you've been, what new sights you have seen, and I shall bore you with the same, although after so many centuries, there are not many new sights to see, eh?" He bellowed laughter and love over me like a wave breaking on a near and hungry shore. "Where have you been, my Michel?"
"Not where you've been, it seems," I said, hugging him in return.
"I've been right here," he assured me solemnly, holding me away from him by the forearms so he could examine my face with his bold eyes. "You could have stopped in to chat me up anytime. You know I do love Egypt despite her hellish sun. I never leave her, for she never changes."
"And you are still a liar," I smiled. "I was in Akhenaton's old city last year and you were not anywhere along the Nile then. Tell me, now, what lady were you pursuing in what land, for you were nowhere in Egypt a summer ago."
"Oh, well, perhaps I had gone to ground," he grinned, for he never did any such thing. He released me and waved the air about with his hands. "Or yes, I think I was in Nairobi, which is still Africa and so very nearly Egypt. As for the ladies, they are a prey too dangerous for me." He roared out his laughter as once the lion of Egypt had roared among the marshes, but his eyes had caught mine now and they were uncomfortably speculative.
"I am hungry," I said to kill, with distraction, that speculation.
He grasped both my hands and squeezed until I felt the bones crack. "Have you not fed then? Why, the streets here are a feast! No one cares a rap for these poor fellahin. They belong to no one now feudal times are gone, and there is no one to miss them when they, too, are gone. I tell you truly, Michel," he said, shaking his head in disgust and squeezing my hands again, "this is a cold age in which a man can be so easily lost among the crowds."
I would have answered him, reminded him all ages have ever been cold, made some jibe at his perpetual philosophizing, but she called for me, and her cry passed from my mind to his, running down my arms and onto his hands, like the passing of human sweat during lovemaking.
"God's Blood, Michel!" Tony swore with the same exuberance with which he did all else, but there was now horror beneath his apparent gaiety. "Another one? How do you still manage to attract them, and at your age?" he asked with consternation.
What he meant was, how could I still manage to allow myself to be open enough to receive these summons when I was old enough to know better? How could I tell him there was no defense against one as strong and determined as she?
"Your choice of expletive dates you as well, my friend," I said absently, really listening to her for the first time.
She was quite as audible here as she had been in Italy and Venice. An impossibility in these times of unbelief, I would have thought, for she was so very distant, in terms of miles, from me.
She was not in Europe, nor in Africa. I could feel that distinctly now as I reached for her. She was in America. The amount of psychic energy she must be expending, I marveled and reached again down the echo of her cry.
She was an American. Their taste is different from that of Europeans. Younger, cruder, more alive, less resigned, and I was intrigued at her strength and her passion, indicating as these did a faith deeper than I had seen in two centuries, a faith more desperate to be proved substantial ... but I will not answer her, I told myself firmly, and shut her out.
Still I had blundered in allowing myself to taste her, for in doing so I had, in turn, brought her close enough to sense my reality. She would weep for me all the harder now, and I must be more cautious, less accessible. Antarctica, perhaps, I mused. Yes, that would likely be far enough away.
Tony threw himself into an armchair and lit a slim, only marginally foul smelling, cheroot. "If I recall, you were born in 1290 and I in 1291. You were transformed in 1323, yet you forgot all about me until 1325. Me, your truest friend. Your only friend, if truth be told, Michel, my brother," he said, grinning around the cheroot.
