He went to her instead of touching her mentally from across the room, as he might have done had he not been so thoroughly bewitched. And when he stood face to face with her, so close that he could literally feel the beat of her heart in his own senses, she reached out and began lifting his heavy fisherman's sweater up, revealing his midsection, then his chest.
Finally she pulled the garment off over his head and tossed it aside.
Aidan braced himself for her horror when she saw the alabaster whiteness of his chest, but it never came, instead there was a sort of reverent tenderness in her eyes as she touched him, spreading her soft palms over musculature as hard as the finest marble.
She looked up at him in loving surprise. "Oh, Aidan," she whispered. "You're so beautiful-it's like touching one of Michelangelo's sculptures."
He was unbearably moved by her acceptance-he was the Beast being transformed by the Beauty's tenderness- and he feared for a moment that he would break down and weep.
But then Neely opened his trousers and boldly stroked him. Aidan's senses, all of them, were infinitely keener than any mortal's, and he groaned in ecstatic misery as she grew even more brazen and closed her strong fingers around his staff. When she teased the tip with the pad of her thumb, he thought he would go wild with the need of her, but he took care to remember that she was flesh and blood, that the bones and tissue beneath her moist, supple skin were fragile. He drew her close against him and kissed her, softening his lips by a trick of the mind, and knew a stunning joy when she whimpered in pleasure and fell onto the bed, pulling him with her, as eager and wild as a female panther in her season.
Aidan kissed her deeply, once, twice, a third time, but his control was tenuous indeed, for he felt as though he'd dreamed of this woman, yearned for her, since the foundation of the world.
He tasted her breasts, frantically, and delighted in her cries of pleasure as he nipped at their hard, sweet little peaks.
"Take me," Neely pleaded finally. "Oh, Aidan, take me, or I'll die-"
He found the musky, warm entrance to her body and prodded gently with his rod, as much to warn her of its size and its hardness as to tease her into wanting him even more.
"Now, then," Aidan said gruffly as he glided slowly, carefully into Neely's tight depths, "we can't have you passing on for want of something I would so willingly give you-"
She clutched at his shoulders, spread her fingers over his chest, stroked his buttocks in fevered urging. "Aidan," she whimpered. "Do it to me-really do it to me-"
He began to move upon her, and her magic encompassed him, and her sweet sorcery tormented him, and he was a man again, not a fiend. His tears-tears born of a joy so fierce he feared he could not contain it-fell softly on her cheekbones and sparkled like diamonds in her hair.
Neely arched beneath him, pleading, in stark Anglo-Saxon terms, for what he and he alone could give her. And when she came, Aidan climaxed as well, and lost his mind in a maelstrom of light and sound and pleasure so intense that it seemed, for a few moments at least, that he had been pardoned and admitted to Heaven after all.
"I love you," she whispered breathlessly when their love-making was over and they lay still, their limbs entangled.
Aidan kissed her forehead, wanting to hold the truth at bay as long as he could. "And I love you," he answered. "Whatever happens, Neely, I want you to remember that."
Her fingers traced a pattern on his chest, and she gave a combination sigh and moan, since they were still joined and he was still steely. The tip of his staff rested against that very sensitive place deep within her, the one scientists had only just given a name to, though lovers had known of it forever.
"Can I-can you-?" Neely paused, and gave an involuntary shiver of rising pleasure.
"Can we make a baby together, Aidan? Is that possible?"
Aidan felt a grief as expansive as his earlier jubilation. "No," he said raggedly, grateful that he could not plant an abomination such as himself in the receptive, nurturing flesh of a mortal woman.
She stirred again, her body deliciously soft under his, and spoke shyly, breathlessly. "I-I think I need you again-" He rotated his hips, and she gasped and clutched at his shoulders.
Soon the maiden had turned into a demanding little wench once more, and Aidan marveled at the way she abandoned herself to pleasure and at the same time gave it with such generosity.
Aidan loved Neely again and again that night, until she was exhausted, her lush body flexing with climaxes even in sleep. He withdrew from her gently, kissed both her plump, well-suckled breasts, and rose from the bed. For a time he stood there in the moonlight, admiring her, worshiping her, lusting after her even though she had satisfied him over and over.
He sat in a chair near the bed and watched over Neely, a guardian angel from the wrong side of the universe. Aidan did not leave Neely's side until just before dawn, when he took himself off to the dark chamber in Maeve's cellar.
There he crouched against the wall, lowered his head, and slept.
Far away in his lair, within the crumbling ruins of the abbey, Valerian stirred uneasily in his own comalike slumber. She had found him, he could feel her presence stretching over his prone form like a smothering fog.
Lisette, he thought, despairing.
Valerian heard her laughter. So you remember me, do you? she trilled, her voice seeming to come from within his skull. Isn't that touching.
Having been dormant for several weeks, swallowed whole by his despair, Valerian was feeble. His strength was gone; he had no means of self-defense.
What do you want with me? he asked. We were never lovers. Never friends.
You poisoned Aidan's mind against me, Lisette's voice answered, burrowing deeper into Valerian's head like some hard-shelled parasite. You loved him. Deny it if you dare! Valerian's sigh was not physical; it came from the very depths of his spirit. I deny nothing, least of all my affection for Aidan. I would have died for him.
How very dramatic. As it happens, my darling, you shallboth die. Horribly.
Do what you will to me, Valerian responded, but leave Aidan be. You've already robbed him of the one thing he held most dear, his humanity. How can you ask more?
The whole of the supernatural world seemed to quake with the ferocity of Lisette's fury.
Her final words reverberated through Valerian's wasted soul. I ask. And I will not be denied.
Chapter 15.
Neely awakened bemused, hardly daring to believe that Aidan had truly visited her the night before, fearing that she might have dreamed the entire encounter. Whether real or strictly fantasy, however, the experience had left her with a vibrant sense of well-being, and she was already up when Mrs. F. knocked at the door of the suite and entered with a tray.
The housekeeper took in the princess's skirt and the soft blue sweater Neely wore with it, and smiled. "Very nice," she confirmed. "Are you going out again today, then?"
Neely nodded. She wanted to visit at least one museum before her lunch date with Wendy Browning and Wendy's boyfriend, Jason.
Mrs. F. set down the tray and glanced toward the windows, where a gray mist was shifting and flowing, a cloud come to earth. "Well, it's typical London weather we're having, and that's for certain. Have a care that you dress warmly, miss, because an English wind will go straight to your marrow and take hold there, if you let it."
"I'll be very careful," Neely promised, feeling at once mellow and energetic. She knew a fresh, fragile new hope that things would be all right, though she couldn't imagine how.
By the time Neely left the house for a waiting cab, having fortified herself with one of Mrs. F."s substantial breakfasts, the wind was mixed with icy slush, and the charcoal skies promised snow. The trip into the heart of the city was harrowing because of the narrow, perilously slick roads, and Neely felt lucky to be alive when she finally stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of a famous art museum.
She paid the driver hastily, rushed up salted stone steps, and, inside the building, paused to rub her reddened ears with her palms in an attempt to restore circulation.
"Good morning," a gracious gray-haired woman said from behind a podium. "We ask all our visitors to sign our guest book."
Neely nodded, handed over the price of admittance, and signed with a flourish. When she stepped into the museum itself, she was stricken by a kind of delighted reverence. It had been a long while since Neely had visited such a place.
She viewed sculpture and paintings of various sorts, along with furniture from the medieval period and pottery from the time of the Romans. Neely indulged herself that day, reading every sign and studying each piece closely, and before she knew it the morning was gone.
She had about twenty minutes to find Willy-Nilly's, the club where she and Wendy and Jason were to meet for lunch, but even so, Neely didn't rush. There were still some tapestries she wanted to see.The first three were pretty prosaic-plump, cherry-cheeked maidens with flowing hair and crowns of flowers, frolicking with unicorns, angels, or fairies-but the fourth creation all but wrenched Neely forward onto the balls of her feet.
She stared up at the eight-by-twelve-foot hand-loomed tapestry in amazed fascination.
It showed a beautiful, dark-haired woman-plainly Maeve Tremayne-enfolded in the flowing cape of a handsome vampire-plainly Valerian. There was a castle or an old monastery in the background, along with an oak forest so realistically wrought that delicate veins were visible in the leaves on the trees.
Neely raised one hand to her mouth, both fascinated and repulsed. She studied Maeve's face, creamy white with the merest hint of pink in her cheeks, and saw joy in the wide blue eyes, as well as a touch of fear.
The tapestry was a cruel reminder that there was much to be resolved before Aidan and Neely could hope to share a life; it left her stricken and supplanted her lingering satisfaction with the old, familiar terror.
"Isn't it magnificent?" asked a woman standing beside Neely, startling her anew. Neely was flustered and would have babbled if she could have spoken at all, which she couldn't.
She bit her lower lip and nodded instead.
The woman, wearing a severe brown dress, pearls, and a name tag that identified her as Mrs. Baxter, an employee of the museum, smiled, showing large grayish teeth that arched high into mauve-colored gums. "This tapestry is close to two centuries old, you know.
We've taken great pains to preserve it."
Neely finally found a fragment of her voice. "It's- it's-"
"It's quite horrible," said Mrs. Baxter cheerfully. "But the weaving itself reveals an almost supernatural talent, don't you think?" She paused, studying the ominous work of art solemnly. "One would almost believe in vampires, when looking upon such a piece."
"Almost," Neely agreed, shaken. She knew from Aidan's journals that it had been Valerian who had transformed Maeve from a woman to a vampire, and that Maeve had wanted to be changed. Still, it was jarring to see a near-perfect rendering of the actual event, as if the moment were frozen in time, existing, always, as an unutterably tragic truth.
It was knowing that the art depicted a very real event- that the travesty had happened before and would happen again, no doubt-that nearly crushed Neely's spirit on the spot.
She made her way out into the museum lobby, fearing she would either vomit or faint, her program rolled tightly in one sweaty hand, and found a fountain. After several sips of tepid water, she felt a little better and, by means of grim resolve, set out to find Willy- Nilly's.
She had to keep functioning, stay in touch with the ordinary world, give herself time to assimilate facts she had been taught since infancy to regard as fables.
A blizzard greeted her at the threshold of the museum's outer door, and Neely was actually grateful for its biting chill. She drew the shocking cold into her lungs and was a bit less light-headed.
There were no cabs, but fortunately the combination club and restaurant she sought was only a few blocks away. By the time Neely rushed down a set of stone steps "to a basement establishment swelling with music, she was numb.
Wendy was there, however, smiling her brilliant smile, her long auburn hair gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Wearing a funky black chiffon dress, a flowered vest, and high-top shoes from some thrift store, she looked delightfully theatrical.
They embraced, and Wendy's dark blue eyes shone as she introduced her tall, handsome actor-student-bartender boyfriend, Jason Wilkins.
Neely felt sane again, and real. She knew the sensation might be temporary, but she grasped it and held on tightly.
Over mugs of dark amber beer and orders of fish and chips served on newspaper and sprinkled with malt vinegar, Wendy and Neely chatted, being sure to include Jason in their conversation. Wendy described her life in London, then propped one elbow on the table, cupped her chin in her hand, and demanded, "Okay, so what was this you mentioned on the telephone, about the senator and some drug cartel?"
Neely drew a deep breath, then told the story, beginning with her first suspicions, a year after going to work as Senator Hargrove's assistant, that something shady was happening.
She told of copying files, letters, and memos, and finally turning everything over to the FBI.
Wendy's eyes were bigger than ever. "They didn't help you?"
"I approached the wrong people the first time. The evidence I gave them probably went no further than the office shredder."
"Did you contact the police?" Jason asked.
Neely shook her head. "No. After the debacle with the Bureau, I was afraid to trust anyone else. I hid the duplicates I'd made of everything-" She paused, blushed, then met Wendy's gaze. "I drove to your cottage up in Maine and hid the papers under a floorboard in the shed. Then I took a bus to Bright River, Connecticut, where my brother lives. I wanted to lay low for a while, for obvious reasons."
"Maybe it wasn't smart to go straight to Ben that way," Wendy observed. If she'd caught the connection between Neely's purloined evidence, the cartel's determination to silence her, and the explosion that had leveled the cottage, she didn't let on. "I mean, that would be the first place they'd look."
"I know." Neely sighed. "I wasn't thinking straight-I was so scared and confused." She would leave the most astounding part of the story-falling wildly in love with a true vampire-for another time. Say, some future incarnation, when such phenomena might be commonplace.
With regret Wendy glanced at her watch. "As fascinating as this is," she told Neely, "Jason and I have a class in ten minutes." She nodded toward the narrow windows that afforded a view of passing feet and deepening snow. "Have you noticed that we're having the storm of the century? You'd better stay in the city tonight-public transportation will be hell."
Neely nodded distractedly; a little snow was the least of her problems.
"I'd invite you to stay at my flat, but all I've got is a fold-out couch," Wendy said, rising from her chair. Jason helped her into her coat before donning his own, and Neely felt a stab of envy. Jason and Wendy were living ordinary lives, sharing days as well as nights. They would probably grow old together, unlike Neely and Aidan; only Neely would age. Aidan was immortal, for all practical intents and purposes, though he was not invulnerable.
Neely said good-bye and promised to call soon, and then her friends were gone, and she felt as if she'd been abandoned in an empty universe.
All her carefully cultivated bravado deserted her.She toyed with the remains of her french fries for a while, then left the restaurant to brave the frigid streets. She rented the last available room in a shabbily elegant old hotel across the street-apparently quite a few Londoners had decided not to risk the commute- and called Mrs. F. to let her know she wouldn't be returning that night.
The doting housekeeper warned her to keep her feet warm and put extra lemon in her afternoon tea, and Neely promised to follow instructions.
After hanging up, she ventured as far as the gift shop in the hotel's gilt-trimmed lobby, where she purchased several newspapers, that week's issue of Time, and a paperback romance novel. Back in her room she ordered hot tea and biscuits from room service and settled in to wait out the storm.
The air in Valerian's cramped hiding place fairly throbbed with Lisette's presence. He felt her energy and her boundless hatred, but he was half-starved now, and far too ill to do battle with such a powerful creature.
She became visible at twilight, curled up beside him, as if they were twins sharing a stony womb. He looked at her bleakly, too spent to speak aloud or with his mind.
It made everything infinitely worse, the fact that Lisette was so beautiful. Valerian had always cherished beauty, whether he found it in a woman-creature or a male, and the reminder that sometimes pure evil was lovely to look upon was like a fresh wound to him.
Lisette laughed, curling a finger playfully under Valerian's chin, where the flesh was paper-thin and dry as fine ash. "So you think me evil?" she chimed in a merry voice. "How very hypocritical of you, Valerian-you, who have always sought pleasure wherever it was to be found."
Slowly, and at great cost, Valerian shook his head. "No," he croaked. "I have no taste for innocence."
She smiled, but her aquamarine eyes were hard with anger. "So very noble," she taunted. "Wasn't the lovely Maeve Tremayne an innocent when you found her? And what of your many and varied lovers, Valerian? Were they all vampires when you seduced them, or were some of them hapless humans who had no idea what sort of fiend they were consorting with?"
Valerian closed his eyes for a moment. "Stop," he rasped. "You will gain nothing by torturing me."
"I will gain everything," Lisette snapped. "And the torture has only begun." With that, she glared at the outer wall of Valerian's narrow lair, and the stones themselves seemed to explode, bursting outward into the purple-gray chill of a winter evening, scrabbling onto the ground.
Briefly Valerian yearned for life, and for mercy, but these frail wishes were soon swamped by his despair. What good was there in saving himself, even if he had been able?
What right had he, who had fouled what was holy, to live forever?
He did not move but remained curled up inside the crumbling wall.
Lisette scrambled over him, being purposely ungraceful, he was sure, and stood in the soft, powdery snow, the night wind playing in her coppery hair. With a murmur of irritation she reached into the chasm and clasped Valerian in both hands, using her legendary strength to wrench him out like a baby torn too soon from its mother's belly.
He was fragile, like something broken, and lay helpless in her arms, his head against her cold breast. For a time she just stood there, cradling him, crooning some demented lullaby, but then she began to glide over the ground.They must have traveled that way, a hideous pair abroad on a winter's night, for the greater part of fifteen minutes. Then Valerian recognized the unsanctified ground beyond the outer walls of the abbey, the forgotten place where heretics and murderers had been buried. The weeds and the soft ground had long since swallowed up all but one of two of the few crude markers that had been there in the first place, but Valerian was aware of the moldering skeletons and half mummified corpses beneath the earth, and he shuddered.
Lisette laid him in the center of that desolate place, and he still had no strength to resist.
She spread his arms and legs wide of his wasted body and pinned him there, with a mental command, a bond stronger than any steel manacle. He felt the first faint stirrings of fear.