My thanks to all of you absolute angels who reviewed - I loved hearing what you thought! Thanks: Starwisher, Tough Fluff, Night Goddess, Persephone, Dark Angel, Me, Myst, Aquilla, Dead Flower, WolfGrrl, Keya, Delphine, Cynical Leaf and last but never least, Kittykatt.
Lyrics come from Tomorrow Never Dies by Sheryl Crow.
Remember Part Three
Fascination's got allure; how you tease, how you leave me to burn...
The elegance and finery of the court had stunned Ana when she was a child. The ladies had seemed to her like the brilliant birds of paradise that spread their wings and created rainbows. The men were dashing and gallant, and all she ever wanted was for a handsome man to sweep her off her feet.
She got her handsome man.
She remembered the fist time she had been introduced to her comte. She had been fifteen, and by now used to the corset that pinched her waist and levelled her back, used to the heavy skirts and perfectly versed in all aspects of etiquette. Used to the fact she was now a marriageable commodity. She had already been betrothed once, but her intended had died before she had even met him.
And he had been seventeen, and not then a comte, but a boy with cool dark eyes and a poise that no one so young should have, she knew now. The stone had not set so deep in him then; he still smiled and laughed, and except for an odd watchfulness that sometimes flickered in his eyes, was like anyone else.
Then, he was an idol to her, a wistful dream.
He had watched her throughout the meal, staring for an impolitely long amount of time, and saying little.
And afterwards, when she had curtsied graciously, and retired to her rooms at her father's dismissal, she somehow missed the fact that her comte had slid from the room; no one had noticed him leave. But leave he had, for when she entered her rooms, her maid trailing after her, he had been standing in the centre of her room.
Ana stopped. "What are you doing?" she said, scandalised. Even at fifteen, she knew how to draw herself up, and look down her nose at him, though as he was taller, it wasn't terribly effective. "Get out!"
"Demoiselle," her maid had said, her voice puzzled, "Who are you talking to?"
Was the girl blind? "What do you think? That...that man standing in the middle of the floor!"
The girl had backed away, her eyes flicking from side to side. "I can see no one, Demoiselle."
"You'd best send her away," he said quietly. "She can't see me. No one can...except you."
She watched him for a moment. He had been good at guarding his expressions, even then. "Go," she ordered the girl. "I think I will lie down. It has been a strenuous evening."
"Demoiselle," the girl said, scuttling away. No doubt gone to laugh over her mad mistress.
The raw power of his stare froze her still. Moments passed, of a tense and unhurried silence as she looked him over carefully, from the grey eyes that were curious and closed, across the long dark hair that was curling gently, down to the fine clothes and odd contrast of his hands, which were calloused and bronzed.
"You've worked?" she asked, puzzled.
A one-shouldered shrug. "I thought it would be interesting."
"And did you think creeping into my room would be interesting too?" She fixed him with her eyes, a pale green that darkened in joy and bleached in sadness. They were a flushing forest now. "It isn't honourable."
He smiled, but something that surprised her – he ducked his head as he did it, so she couldn't see. As if he was afraid to show it. "You don't know much about the Court, do you?"
"I have been a member of it for four years now," she declared proudly, deciding to put this arrogant boy in his place. "And honour plays a high part."
"In public, perhaps, but behind closed doors...honour gives way before desire," he answered.
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about." She hated the uncertainty that slid into her voice. But he was so confident, and so handsome. "Why are you here?"
"I wanted to see if you were as innocent as you act," he said, still not moving an inch. "And you are."
"I am not!" she said, unable to stop the childish reaction. "I've been betrothed."
"To a man you never even saw. He would have hurt you, mon ange."
"I am not your little darling!" she flared up, her eyes glittering furiously. "And I never will be!"
His laugh cracked through the room and fearful someone would hear, Ana glanced at the door. Shut still. When she turned back, he was right in front of her. She yelped and stepped back, tripping over her skirts in her haste, and was only saved from an indignant tumble by his swiftness.
She was aware he should not be holding her, though his touch was dulled by the layers of clothes and corset. Those enigmatic grey eyes should not be quite so close, nor so intense. "Haven't they told you?" he murmured. His mouth looked surprisingly soft, she found herself thinking, and blushed at her thoughts. Ladies didn't think such things... "We are to be betrothed."
"What?"
"Mon ange," he continued, "your family went to see a witch, to see what the future might hold for their angel-voiced one. And your future holds me. As, one hopes, will you."
Her face was opening like a flower as she stared at him. "Truly?"
"We are meant," he answered.
She stood in her grand rooms, and for the first time, she wanted to sing a merry song, to sing a song of love that would not evoke the old lonely ache, but a new, warming we. "Meant?"
He brought his hands up, inches from her face, as if he didn't quite dare touch her. In those eyes, so like smoke wavering behind glass, she saw the miasma begin to draw back until an odd new heat shivered there.
"Vous êtes mon âme," he whispered, as his hands touched her face, and his soul touched hers.
X - X - X - X - X
In another part of the school, the girl who had sat so calmly discussing death was looking up. Not squinting. Not blinking. Her black eyes stared directly at the sun, seeming to suck in and destroy the rays.
"Therese."
The chains in her lobes and her nose flashing bronze as she spun. "Bane. Have you seen Aspen yet?"
"You read my mind," the lamia boy said blandly. Blue Malefici rarely used his first name. It had been given to him by his Redfern side of the family, a side he had made suffer for their treatment of a bastard.
"Not this time. You're harder to get into than Crime and Punishment, darling."
The blue eyes tugged at the answering darkness in her soul. Before she met Blue and Aspen, she had never met anyone else who savoured the kill so much, who understood that one could court death, like a lover, and cuckold it at the same time. "My favourite."
"I never saw you for a Dostoyevsky fan."
"We were talking about the book?"
Her black eyes, shiny as olives, leapt with amusement. "Enough chat." Talking with Blue was playing Russian roulette with her life. "We need to discuss the future. This place is perfect for what we want."
"I wouldn't say perfect," the boy murmured, leaning back against the wall and folding his arms. She remembered another time he had done that, when there had been blood turning his hair as shocking violet, and a body at his feet. "But close enough. I tried to reach Martin...and we have a problem, Therese."
"Problem?" she inquired, her voice sharpening like the air before a thunderstorm. The sunstones in her ears flashed a glassy orange. She had the supple, slender build of a reptile, and indeed, a legion of snakeshifters danced in her vampire blood. They were all she fed from.
"Martin's found his soulmate."
Lightning sizzled from her eyes. "They don't exist."
"My sweet spider," he said mildly, a sudden smile making him radiant, "I assure you, they do."
Something rang like a tuning fork on Therese's soul then, and she stared at this calm, cold boy. The certainty was in his eyes, almost tangible, and in his voice. Blue never did anything unless he was certain.
"You..."
"I," he confirmed. "Being launched into someone else's being is rather a shock to one's system. And considering Apsen is about as balanced as a misshapen turnip, I think it's fairly safe to say there may be trouble ahead. Minus the moonlight, love and romance, though we're still going to have to face the music."
"Damn him," she said angrily, tugging the chains at her nose until it hurt. "Who is it?"
"A vermin girl by the name of Tamara Slone," he said with a shrug. "Best leave it a while."
"Knowing Aspen, he'll have his usual reaction to anything he doesn't like. Better hope Ms Slone isn't waiting for him to sweep her up in his arms," Therese drawled, mentally readjusting her plans.
"She'll have to wait until he's got them out of the straitjacket," Blue agreed. Therese watched him, that face with its sharp lines and bladed eyes. She didn't know the sensual curve of his mouth had come from, or that smile that was as sudden as sunlight on a rainy day. "I'll speak to him tomorrow—"
"Vermin alert," she said softly, pursing her lips as a human approached, a tentative smile on his face.
It was that blond boy who seemed to believe Blue was a friend. Rob something. The one with the grey eyes that were too trusting. She wondered idly what he'd taste like...
Maybe she would find out.
X - X - X - X - X
Rob felt his thoughts spinning into the crazy, angry knot he always seemed to tie himself in when he started wondering just how Ellie had managed to hold him and Tam prisoner so long.
Why didn't they just tell someone?
Because he had seen what Ellie could do. She wasn't some senior playing games. She was a killer. Killer. It was a word people threw around, Killer smile. Killer dress sense. Killer whale.
Thief would have been a better word. Because she stole lives. She took other people's existence, snuffed them out like they were candle flames on an altar.
He was glad that at least he'd had Tam through all this. They'd been friends so long now, he thought of her as more than a person. She had become an angel for him, his guardian angel.
It was a little known fact that Rob Slivan, popular, tennis star, basketball star, was an emotional screw-up.
He still had the scars on his wrist. He'd gone for the traditional method, and might have succeeded too if Tam hadn't decided to drop in because she thought he'd seemed a little 'off' that day.
He'd been euphoric. Delighted that he had finally found a way out of his pit of a life that made him someone he didn't want to be, but didn't know any other way to be. And she had known, somehow, and found him passed out on his bed while his parents had gone out to a barbeque, with his hands smothered in blood after she got in with her key. Yeah, she even had a key to his house.
So he'd lived. His parents had hushed everything up, and Rob had explained away the bandages by telling everyone he'd sprained both his wrists playing basketball with Tam.
She was his angel. Sometimes he wondered just why she stuck with him, but loved her for it all the same.
She'd saved him more often than she knew, just with a smile, or a word, or a blink of those dark, humorous eyes. Everyone always thought that saving someone's life had to be some cliffhanger stunt. It wasn't. It was the little things that would pull you back, time and time again, that would make you look outside yourself and see the sun shone on you just like it did everyone else. No more and no less.
"Mal, you seen Tam?" he said lightly. Why Blue Malefici was keeping company with Therese Orage, he didn't know. She didn't seem like Blue's kind of person at all. Too weird and psychotic. And a vampire.
The girl gave a low, throaty chuckle. "Try the principal's office." It might have been Rob's imagination, but he thought he saw Blue shoot the girl a piercing glower. "She's a bit wrapped up at the moment."
As he walked away, he thought he heard someone say, "You mind if I play with that one, Bane?"
Who the hell was Bane? Unless...oh hell, Blue was Nightworld? Time to start panicking. If he could read minds...Rob stopped that thought at once. Trouble. Huge trouble. And as he turned the corner to the principal's office, he saw even more trouble than he wanted to think about.
X - X - X - X - X
Tam stirred slowly, wondering what time it was. Shouldn't she be getting up? Someone was speaking, a shadow leaning over her. She struggled to focus, but finally the sounds cleared into anxious words.
"Vermin girl, wake up! I didn't mean to hurt you...I didn't know what you were. Who you were, or I was, or anything! I didn't know anything! But I know now, please wake up!"
Her neck hurt...touching two fingers to it, she found sticky warmth, and alarmed, pushed herself up, hindered by hands that were trying to help and only managing to annoy. She brought her fingers to her eyes. Scarlet splatters.
"Blood?" she said aloud.
It hit her.
Her eyes flew open, and stared at the pale, dazzling face of Aspen Martin. He was breathing raggedly, hovering close to her as if he wanted to touch her but was too afraid.
He had bitten her.
She punched him.
"Ow!" He leapt backwards like a scalded cat, his eyes locked into a searing orange and a deep, sinking blue. She moved as quickly as she could, feeling strangely light-hearted, following his steps and slamming her hands at his face. "Hey! Quit that! Vermin girl! Don't!"
I am not going to faint, she told herself, a surge of anger making her face heat. I don't let anybody do this to me. She was moving faster than she knew was sensible, motions a mere blur.
And he was blocking her moves, those wild eyes a little more feral with every instant. Only sheer suicidal rage was winning this fight, and when their hands met, fireworks exploded in the depths of her mind.
She wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but suddenly he had stopped blocking and simply stepped into her strike. She wasn't thinking, only feeling, primal and ardent as thunder and lightning made flesh and she had realised that she was fighting him to stop herself doing something else.
Something she did then.
She moved forward, forward, let their mouths meet with a bruising force and a passion she would never have suspected lay inside her. The conformer, the follower.
Her hands caressed his shoulders, and then she was utterly swamped by a far sweeter battle, as the cosmos itself seemed to be reborn in her heart, and reality hit her hard.
She jolted back, terrified. She could feel his thoughts, dear god, his thoughts like a great whirlpool pulling at her, wanting to drag her in and drown her in him.
"It's all right..." He was soothing her, she realised somewhere. She had cut his face where a ring had caught him, and she stared at the wound that was already just a thin red line. "It's all right, sweetling..."
"I am not your sweetling!" Tam said angrily, pushing back, trying to get herself free from his grip. But whenever she prised one hand off, he'd simply resettle it somewhere else. "You bit me!"
"You kissed me," he protested. His hair was disarrayed, and it had been sleek under her fingers.
"When?"
"Hello, about ten seconds ago?"
I did, Tam thought, searching for an answer to that. Oh god. I actually did. She wasn't like this! She was calm, and ordinary. She didn't kick guys and then kiss them. And she certainly didn't get free pyrotechnic displays every time she touched them. "Coincidence. I was...trying something."
"Yeah, trying it on." He gave her a satisfied smirk. "You could just have asked."
She snorted, her dark eyes regaining a little of their poise. "You drank my blood." She had figured it out. "Of course I'm going to be light-headed. I'd have to be."
"You're my soulmate," he stated. The word hung on the air, quivering like a hummingbird.
She gave him her best scornful look, glaring down at him. "No, I'm your victim. There's a difference. Now would you please let me go?"
The strange eyes stared at her. "Don't you know what that means?" he asked urgently. "You're destined for me. You're the other half of my soul."
He was serious. His hands were holding her tight, so tight Tam couldn't move. If anyone turned up, this would be...embarrassing. "Prove it."
"What, the ability to read my mind isn't enough?" he said incredulously. He frowned suddenly. "Something...happened a minute ago. We both blacked out...I remember something. I think."
He had dreamed something too? She watched his face, a face strangely young and flawless. It was different to her now, she realised. It was a face she knew; the fierceness in his eyes, the shark-quick smile, the way his hair fell...she knew it.
"Mon ange," he said suddenly, looking at her. And as he said it, she heard another voice with a soft, rich accent saying it, ringing in her ears. And as clear as if she had walked back into that memory, she heard the same voice. "You are my soul."
Silence hung between them, so all Tam could feel was herself quaking, and the weight of Aspen's eyes on her. "I know," she said finally. "I know."
He let go of her with a sigh, reaching out to run his hands through her hair. "You're mine, you know," he told her softly, the honey in his voice running through her like a wire. "I want this. You're mine to love."
The intensity in his voice frightened her. She was a teenage. Love was for years ahead. Lust was for now. "Look, I don't know what this is, but you can't own me."
"Yes I can," he said simply. His teeth glinted, and he was looking at her with hungry eyes. "Do you know what my life is? Do you know what I have to live with being every day because I can't stop myself?"
She didn't know what he was talking about. "Do you know what mine is?" Tam said angrily. "You're a vampire, Aspen. You're Nightworld."
One hand cracked out and caught her throat, forcing her to stare into his eyes. Tam fought for breath, he was choking her, and his eyes were a wild yellow, hard against a festering green. "You're human. How do you know that? How?"
Her heart was in her mouth; she had no answer, only the truth, which was terrible as he was in that moment.
It's so deadly, my dear, the power of wanting you near.
X - X - X - X - X
Thanks for reading! Thoughts adored.