Henry had been waiting for over an hour outside of Vicki's apartment. The windows were dark and he could sense that she was nowhere in the vicinity. Of all of the heartbeats that he could discern, none was the one he longed to hear.
He was cold. Not that it mattered; the cold was uncomfortable, but it would not substantially harm him and even now the hunger was beginning to burn in him at any rate. He waited across the street in the shadows, watching. He drew back deeper with each set of headlights that came along the road, his attention sharpening and then relaxing as the vehicle passed.
He had just decided that he should leave to hunt, when the squeaking brakes of the taxi pulling to a halt across the street changed his mind.
He watched as they exited the car, the steam of the exhaust in a roiling cloud around their knees, as they stood side by side on the sidewalk. He watched as Celluci moved close beside her, lifting his hands to her arms. He watched as he bent to softly kiss her lips. She shivered visibly in the cold air and Mike opened his trench coat, pulling her to him and wrapping the coat around her. She raised her face as his rival bent to kiss her again.
Henry could have heard the words that passed between them, even from the shadows and across the intervening roadway; his hearing was acute enough to hear every nuance of their conversation, to gauge the reaction to their words in the beating of their hearts. Instead he chose to concentrate on the mechanical hum of the taxi's engine and the tuneless whistling of the driver as he waited. They were his and he owed them their privacy.
He could not shut out their scents, the warm and seductive scent that Vicki cast into the cold night air, like a gauntlet cast down to his vaunted control. The tendrils of the musk of the detective's arousal wound through the dark, and Henry knew that even now, Celluci pressed a growing hardness against the soft skin of Vicki's thigh.
His face ached with the effort he expended in keeping his appearance human, the effort he expended in pushing back the rising hunger that the vampire used to batter at him.
He knew now that tonight, whether Celluci got back into the taxi and drove off or not, he could not allow himself the luxury of her company. His control was too shredded by hunger and desire.
So he watched, and when the cab door slammed and the engine revved higher, when the machine bore his rival away, disappearing from sight in a flare of red tail lights, then the painful pressure on his heart eased, and he was able to turn away into the arms of the night.
Henry felt the vampire slip past him, as always, in the final second when he broke the surface of the skin. Try as he might, he could not maintain any amount of control on his nature, in the initial seconds of feeding; the first few, adrenalin laced, heated swallows were the vampire's due.
After nearly five hundred years, he could not, could not, were I to be staked through the heart in that instant, or were the sun to climb into the sky, he thought, still, the vampire would claim his due, even as oblivion took him.
He clutched the strong body closer, allowing the sustenance he needed to slip in a delicious, warming flow into his body. It was right; it was right. He knew that it was right that his prey bent helpless before his will. It was right that their own hearts pumped their life past his waiting lips, their life…manifest in his flesh. His world narrowed to the pause between each strong and fragrant burst of that rich, red potency, savored and then swallowed to drown the clamoring of the hunger inside.
When, at last he became aware again of his surroundings, when his consciousness expanded outwards, the vampire receded, and "Henry"…was…once more, then he was aware of the being that he held in his arms. Then and only then, was he able to balance that being's life against his own.
The length of the winter nights took their toll. He needed to feed, more frequently, more deeply, when less time was lost to the day.
Henry was deliberate in his selection of prey, choosing younger, stronger humans as the days waned into winter.
Tonight outside a twenty-four hour fitness center he had hunted. The windows with their gaily painted candy canes and presents were outlined by blinking colored Christmas lights and totally opaque with the humidity trapped inside the building. That he could not see inside did not matter to the vampire as he sat in his car, parked close to the door.
When he had first arrived he had sorted carefully through the thundering heartbeats that he could hear from inside the building until he had marked a single strong heart, beating quickly in effort.
He sat with eyes closed as he followed that heartbeat as it slowed to a strong rhythmic pulsing. At length he could hear that heart move closer and he opened his eyes to watch, as a well muscled twenty-something male pushed through the gym door and out into the night. Henry got out of the Jag, closing the door softly. He had the scent that belonged to that heartbeat now.
The male crossed the lot to a car parked at the perimeter and hefted his gym bag in one hand as he fished in his coat pocket for his keys with the other. Henry was behind him in a moment.
The vampire bled into the voice which captured his prey. The male stiffened in a brief resistance which was stifled by Henry's hand on his arm. "Open the back door and get in," he instructed, removing the gym bag from his hand.
The male, wide-eyed, obeyed, the fear scent spiking in an instinctive and irresistible invitation to the vampire. Henry opened the passenger-side door and tossed the gym bag onto the front seat.
Then he slid into the back seat beside his prey, closing the door carefully behind him. The enclosed space echoed with the pounding of the human's heart. The air grew thick with the ripe, sweet fragrance of the fear that was his homage.
He did not permit the male to speak; he wanted to hear nothing but the siren song of the pulse that pounded at the juncture of the muscled neck to sculpted shoulder.
"You will not resist," he whispered as he cupped a hand behind the male's neck, drawing him forward and across to expose his throat. He lowered his lips to the trembling flesh and the vampire slipped past…
When Henry was once more in his own car, he watched as the human male drove away. He smiled grimly to himself, perhaps it is a little risky for me to hunt the gym that Celluci frequents, but the feeling of—is it irony?—well that is hard to resist.
The floor of the condo was littered with crinkled paper excelsior and rumpled tissue from the trunk. The small blue spruce stood in its foil wrapped tub on a mahogany round table. Henry had taken a page from Bettie's book, in that he had decided to position it against the window to the balcony. Of course this high up there was no one to see it, but the stars in the clear night sky made a beautiful backdrop.
He eschewed Christmas lights for his tree of memories; somehow a trailing twisted cord with an electrical plug hanging off the lower boughs just seemed… inappropriate.
He knew that in the bottom of the trunk were two dozen antique brass miniature candleholders, which he would add to the branches when the tree was completed.
As always he had festooned the tree with long lengths of crystal beads on silken thread and secured the silver filigreed star to the top. Then he began to place the decorations.
Each came one at a time from the trunk, carefully unwrapped from the protective tissue, considered with a smile and hung lovingly in place among the branches. Each was made by his own hand.
All depicted the faces of his memories. The oldest were more than two hundred years of age. It was then that the urge to capture these faces had come to him. By then he had been confident enough of his abilities to produce the miniatures.
The earliest were renderings in egg tempera on small hardwood disks, the full frontal view of a beloved face on one side and the profile on the other.
He had first attempted those he was still involved with, friends and lovers, now long gone to dust. There were a series of silverpoint renderings, tiny and in perfect detail, displayed in double-sided miniature silver frames, small ovals of canvas with visages captured in transparent oils in tiny wooden gilded frames, a number of bas relief bronze pieces slightly larger than a silver dollar.
There were several encased in the traditional locket shaped frames, suspended by silken ribbons. Over the year's passage, his ancient memory had provided him the detailed images all the way back to his days as a human.
There were perhaps sixty in all. Sixty faces beloved and lost. All hung on his tree of memories. Their faces looked out at him, his father the King, robust and handsome, his Mother, Elizabeth, Surrey, Mary, even his childhood nurse and Martin the groom.
He placed a tiny jewel-toned watercolor of Ann Chadwick amid the branches next to a black and white ink rendering of James Sagara's face. All were smiling in memory.
The next he unwrapped was Christina, the raven haired beauty…
"Pay attention Princeling!" she said harshly as she laid a stinging slap on the cold plane of his cheek. His growl in response, echoed around the small stone chamber, though he dared not display his fangs in challenge.
She turned in a sweep of red burgundy skirts, and she slapped him again hard enough to throw his head to the side. He knew better than to try to avoid the blow, though it left him dizzy.
"I swear," she said lazily, regarding her manicured nails, "I sometimes wonder why I bothered with you at all, Bastard. I had higher hopes."
Henry clutched at the beast, holding it back, holding it down, though his muscles knotted at the effort, and his heart beat a slow and tortured tattoo beneath his ribs.
Though his eyes were slitted, he modulated his voice carefully as he said, "Forgive me, my love. The smell of blood so close at hand tempts me to indiscretion."
She glanced down to the long slice in her forearm, where the blood still sluggishly flowed, and then across to the human male who hung in shackles from the wall. With a delicate baring of her fangs, that passed for a smile, she asked him, "His or mine?"
"Yours my love, I know you will not permit me to…feed."
The scent of the human's fear was overpowering; it hung in the air around him, and the hunger writhed in his grasp.
She would not permit him human blood. She bound him ever tighter to her, sustaining him on her own blood, just enough to keep the hunger at an almost bearable level. He was always, always hungry, and he spent most of his waking hours attempting to master the urges that robbed him of rational thought.
She crossed to the human and lifted the lolling head; her fingers tight on his chin, she turned the face side to side, as she considered her prey. Turning to Henry she said, "A pretty thing is he not?" She ran her hand over the naked chest and the human began a low moaning at her touch.
Henry could tell by the bruises and the heavy scent of blood in the room that Christina had already had her…fun.
Afterwards, as he fought off his panic, alone in the cramped dark prison in which she had confined him, he could not say what it was that suddenly hardened in her, but the voice she used next was one of compulsion. He could not help but obey.
"Come here," she said in a cold command. When Henry had crossed to her she took him by the arm.
"I can feel the hunger in you; you know that don't you? You are made from my blood, Henry. I made you. I made you."
She smiled without warmth or humor and shook him slightly to emphasize her repeated words. "You are a Bastard, no more. I acknowledge you as mine, my chylde, my creation, my heir."
Henry shrank from her words and in his thudding heart, all that remained of the human by-blow of the King cringed away from, her declaration, even as the beast surged to the limit of his control.
She pushed his body forward until he was resting against the vibrating flesh of their human prisoner. Henry could feel the tremors flickering over the human's skin. He could hear the heart, beating like a trip hammer against his chest. She held him there with one hand between his shoulder blades and she took Henry's own chin in her bruising fingers, turning his face to hers.
"Show me," she said. "Show me what you are."
He felt his fangs extend and his eyes darken to jet, as hard and as glittering as his Sire's.
She placed his lips against the human's shoulder. The compulsion was so heavy in her voice that it should have been a visible force in the room.
"Bite him here," she said.
He could not resist, his fangs sliding effortlessly into place and the flood of warm sweet blood passed his lips, his own groan as loud as the human's.
Her hand was still on his chin; she cupped her palm around his throat as he drank his first human blood, and she felt it pass down his throat as he swallowed. Physically she pulled him away, his fangs tearing out and leaving a gaping wound in the human's shoulder, which fountained blood.
She maneuvered his face against the human's muscled chest.
"Bite here," she said.
A few swallows and she moved him on to the forearm, then the thigh. The human was keening now, and Henry's shirt was drenched in blood.
When she at last released Henry from her compulsion, she shook him like a doll in her grasp then cast him stumbling away from her. The human hung, unconscious, in his chains, his heart stuttering in his chest and his body painted crimson with his own blood flowing from a dozen or more bites.
"Are you satisfied, Vampire?" she asked him, with a leer.
Henry looked at her from beneath his lashes. "Are you?" he replied.
Her face clouded with anger as she said to his horror, "Tonight, you will go to ground, until you learn to control your tongue and the next time, we will take a woman."
He watched with unblinking black eyes as she broke the human's neck with a sudden jerk.
The vampire's eyes slowly closed and when they opened again he was looking at a small potted spruce with branches festooned with crystals and the faces of his past.
He had been drawn from memory by the approach of the dawn at his back.
His right hand groped at the silver cross that hung at his throat and his lips moved in a breathless prayer. His left hand lifted the portrait of Mary Howard's saucy face from the branches, and he lurched to his feet.
Retrieving the remote control, he lowered the shades, crossing to the doors of his sanctum, the tiny portrait held against his heart.