Much Ado About Vampires do-10 Page 12

  “Then the necromancer who you hired to raise me did it incorrectly,” Eleanor snapped.

  Alec looked at me with speculation. “Kris, what do you know about reincarnation?”

  “Not a lot,” he said with a shrug, then raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard that only a certain type of mortal can be reincarnated, that the mortal being dies, is judged on their purity of heart, and accordingly granted life again based on that purity. Oh, you mean—”

  “Yes,” Alec said, his sudden smile so brilliant, it made me clutch the couch to keep from flinging myself on him. “I think Cora is one of those beings. She was born as Eleanor, was killed, and reincarnated into her current form, soul and all.”

  I stared at him, caught in the green snare of his gaze, wanting to believe the joy he felt was due to the fact that there might be a future for us rather than I was merely a form of salvation.

  “That would explain why Eleanor doesn’t have a soul?” Pia asked.

  “No, it wouldn’t. It doesn’t,” Eleanor insisted. “If she and I are the same person—and really, the idea is ludicrous ; just look at her! She’s completely unlike me. If we were the same person, we couldn’t exist together in the same time and place.”

  “But you don’t, not really,” Kristoff said gently. “You’re a lich. Your existence is beyond the mortal world. Cora is mortal. You aren’t.”

  I dragged my gaze off Alec to look at Eleanor, wondering if I had really ever been her. What a pain in the ass I was.

  Alec laughed in my head. I wouldn’t say that, but I admit that I had only just met you when you were killed.

  “Even admitting that was possible—and I don’t admit that for one minute. But let’s say it is. Then all that means is that she’s a knockoff of me, and I’m the original Beloved, and she has my soul.” Eleanor’s eyes narrowed on me. “And she can just give it back!”

  “Oh, that is not going to happen,” I told her, amused despite the unpleasant situation. “Finders keepers, and all that.”

  “Faugh!” she yelled at me, and spent the next five minutes arguing that Alec owed his allegiance to her.

  “It seems to me that you’re just going to have to decide,” Kristoff told Alec when Eleanor wound down long enough for someone else to get in a word. “Cora or Eleanor. Which Beloved do you want?”

  Instantly, my eyes went to Alec’s, my heart beating with sudden urgency.

  “That is the question, isn’t it?” he said softly, smiling at Eleanor. She beamed back at him until he lifted her hand and kissed it. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you agreed to the plan to save me. You will have my eternal appreciation for such a noble act.”

  “No,” Eleanor snarled, jerking her hand from his and backing away, her face black with rage. “You can’t mean that! You can’t pick her over me. I was brought back to save you!”

  “I know you were, and I regret greatly—”

  “Nooo!” she wailed, and bolted from the room.

  An uncomfortable, highly charged silence fell upon us all as the sound of her footsteps racing up a flight of stairs, followed by the slamming of a door, drifted down to us.

  “Oh, Alec,” Pia said, her shoulders slumping. “I’m so sorry. We thought we were helping you—”

  “And I appreciate that you would do so,” Alec interrupted before turning to me. I struggled to keep my face placid, and not express any of the pleasure that I couldn’t deny when he obviously chose me over Eleanor.

  He said nothing for a minute, simply looking at me.

  “You knew that you were my Beloved, but you didn’t tell me,” he finally said, his voice as carefully neutral as his expression.

  Where were his expressions of undying devotion? Where was his declaration that he had picked me? Where was his arrogant statement that I was his Beloved, and he would fill my nights with endless passion, and my days with expressions of utmost gratitude?

  Rather than any of that, I got a sense of carefully masked anger.

  “Yes.” I lifted my chin a little. “I knew. I don’t like vampires. I never have.”

  “And yet you fed me.”

  “I didn’t realize who you were then,” I pointed out.

  “You don’t like vampires, but you fed me.”

  Kristoff and Pia sat opposite, their gazes shifting from Alec to me and back again, just as if they were watching a tennis match.

  “I explained to you about that. I thought you could help Diamond and me get out of the Akasha.”

  “You fed me multiple times.”

  “Well, you were hungry!” I said, slapping my hands on my legs, wanting desperately to know what he was thinking and feeling, needing the reassurance that he wanted me. “What was I supposed to do, let you starve?”

  “You didn’t leave me behind. You were worried about my wounds.”

  “Are you going to catalog every single one of my actions with regards to you? Because if you are, you should include me slapping you for trying to kiss me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You gave yourself to me. Repeatedly.”

  I glanced at the others. “OK, really, I’m sure they don’t need to hear about that.”

  Pia giggled.

  “You’re my Beloved.”

  “Well . . . yeah, I guess I am. I wasn’t quite sure about whether a reincarnated Beloved can be the same as the original one, but I guess that’s been proven.”

  “You’re my Beloved,” he repeated, and without another word walked out of the room.

  “Well, hell,” I said, now thoroughly miserable. “He hates me!”

  “I don’t think . . .” Pia looked at Kristoff. “I don’t think that’s possible, is it? Can you hate your own Beloved ? ”

  “No.” Kristoff got up, waving Pia back when she rose, as well. “He’s just a bit stunned is all, what with Eleanor, and now . . . this. I’ll go talk to him.”

  Alec? I asked, wanting desperately for him to reassure me.

  No, he said, and closed me out of his mind.

  No what? No, he didn’t want to talk to me? No, he didn’t hate me? No, he never wanted to see me again? If that was the case, why had he more or less dumped Eleanor ?

  “I could just cry,” I said, pleating the material of my pants in an effort to keep from doing exactly that.

  “Don’t, it’ll just make your eyes puffy,” Pia said, moving over to sit next to me. “Alec’s a man, and you know how they are—some of them don’t cope well with emotional things, and you have to admit, going from no Beloved to two in the space of a day could make the calmest vampire go a little bit nuts. I’m just a bit curious, though. You said you don’t like vampires?”

  “No, I don’t. I saw Alec kill that woman who beheaded me. It was . . . he just bit her and drained her dry. It was horrible. And then my sister married one, and although she seems to be really happy with Avery, it seems so wrong, somehow. He drinks her blood!”

  “Just as Kristoff drinks mine, and Alec feeds from you. Do you think that’s wrong?”

  “No,” I admitted, pleating and repleating the material of my jeans on my leg. “It’s very enjoyable, actually.”

  She smiled a slow smile that let me know that I wasn’t the only one who found the act of feeding erotic.

  “It’s just that—I never wanted to be with Alec. I wanted him out of the Akasha, because that was only fair—he saved my butt in there from a wrath demon, and Diamond was having a good time, so when the de Marco guy said pick one, I picked him.”

  “Of course you did,” Pia agreed. “I would have done the same. Not that I understand how you came to know the Ilargi, but we’ll get to that, I’m sure.”

  “But I didn’t want a permanent relationship with Alec. He’s . . . a vampire!”

  “You know, I think you’re going to have to move past that point,” she said gently.

  I sighed and slumped against the back of the couch. “I know. And to be honest, I think I have. I was going to tell him about the past-life thing, I really was. I just w
as waiting for the right moment, and then . . . then . . .”

  “Then we went and screwed it all up by having Eleanor brought back. Nothing like having your hand forced,” she said, nodding. “I’m sure that, given a little time to get over the shock of today, he’ll be right back in your hair, driving you crazy.”

  “Now probably wouldn’t be the best time to say that I’m not sure I want him in my hair,” I muttered, wishing I could rewind my life a few days.

  That would mean I never met Alec again. My heart grew sad at that thought. Oh, dear heavens, was I already past hope? Had I started giving in to all that charm and magnetism and smoldering sexuality that had every woman within a five-mile radius ready to rip off her clothing and throw herself at him?

  I looked at the woman next to me with a hard expression.

  She blinked at it. “What?”

  “You let Alec seduce you!”

  To my surprise, she laughed. “I was wondering if you were going to come back to that. I did, yes. Well, not really. It’s a little complicated. We didn’t actually have sex, you know. That is to say, he didn’t . . . we didn’t . . . it was more just some mutual groping. I mean, we were naked, but that was really all we did. And he didn’t even stay the whole night with me.”

  I stared at her, trying to sort through all of that.

  “I didn’t make it any better, did I?” she asked, still laughing.

  “No.” The word dropped like a lead weight.

  “Honestly, I think he was just lonely. The fact that he couldn’t have real sex should have warned me that he wasn’t the man for me, but I didn’t see it at that time. It wasn’t until Kristoff and I got together, and I thought he was still in love with . . . well, our rocky start is neither here nor there.”

  “You had a rocky start?” I asked, momentarily distracted from the painful thought of her touching a naked Alec.

  “Yeah, just about as rocky as they can get. I’ll tell you about it when you have an hour or two sometime. But first, you have to tell me about Alphonse de Marco, which means we need the boys. I think Alec has had enough time to get over himself. Let me run and check on Eleanor to make sure she’s all right—then we’ll go remind Alec how lucky he is to have you.”

  She rose and left through one of the arched doorways. My own feelings aside, I wondered if Alec truly wanted me for his Beloved, or whether he had just picked me out of gratitude for saving his life and springing him from the Akasha.

  And what would happen to Eleanor? Would guilt over her eventually taint his feelings for me? Was he even now blaming me for putting him in a position where he had to hurt one of us?

  “You really know how to screw up your life,” I told myself as I got slowly to my feet, and tottered off to find Pia.

  Chapter Ten

  Guilt pricked Alec. He didn’t like the sensation. “Dammit, Kris, she didn’t tell me. I thought the marking was due to the amount of blood she’d fed me. I almost drained her dry when she brought me back. I didn’t know.... She didn’t tell me.”

  “You’ve been around long enough to know how women are,” his friend answered, standing next to him as they both stared out into the shadowed garden. What Kristoff saw, Alec had no idea—all he could see was the look on Cora’s face when she made the verbal slip, and realized she would have to tell him the truth. “There are times when I give up trying to understand Pia. I just accept that some things are important to her that don’t mean a damn to me, and let it go at that. What matters to me is that she’s happy. I find it interesting, however, that your first concern is for Cora, not Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor . . .” Alec rubbed his nose as he thought about what to do with the extra Beloved. “She’s . . . not needed.”

  Kristoff gave him a rueful look. “I’m sorry we brought her back. We thought it was the only way that the council would sanction your removal from the Akasha. We should have just let matters lie.”

  “And left me there? I’d much rather be facing the problem of one too many Beloveds than that. It wasn’t at all pleasant.”

  “No, but I imagine you’re none too happy right now, either, faced with both your original Beloved and her reincarnation. What are you going to do about Eleanor ? ”

  “I have no idea,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I assume since I never even fed from her that she’ll be fine picking up a new life as a lich. Our bond, such as it is, is tenuous, and she shouldn’t be affected by it being severed. It’s Cora who concerns me. She has an aversion to Dark Ones. She saw me kill the reaper.” Alec cast his mind back to that horrible day. Odd, though, that the memory now carried with it no pain. After centuries of it causing him the utmost agony, emotion had been drained from the memory, just as if Cora’s admission had wiped it all clean. “Sorry, she saw me kill your wife.”

  Kristoff made a half-shrugging gesture. “Ruth was a reaper. She just didn’t mean to run down and decapitate Eleanor.”

  “No.” He knew that now. He hadn’t for centuries, but after the last time he tried to kill Kristoff, they had finally worked out what had really happened, and moved past it. “Did I ever apologize for killing her?”

  “No, but I never apologized on her behalf for killing your Beloved.”

  “I never apologized for turning you, either,” Alec said moodily, feeling that so long as he was going to lash himself with guilt, he might as well get all of it out at the same time.

  “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found Pia, and she was worth all those centuries I had to wait for her,” Kristoff allowed. “I could have done without you planning on destroying her, but since you couldn’t see it through, it’s all a moot point.”

  Alec couldn’t help but smile at that. “She smote me with that damned reaper light of hers. That was no fun, I can tell you. My chest hair hasn’t been the same since.”

  Kristoff laughed and punched him in the arm. “You had it coming. If Eleanor goes off without giving you any grief, what will you do about Corazon?”

  He sighed. “She’s my Beloved. What do you think I’m going to do with her? Bind myself to her and spend the rest of our lives convincing her I’m not a murdering bloodsucker. Assuming, that is, no one gets to her first.”

  Kristoff slid him a curious look. “Gets to her how?”

  “I’d tell you, but I believe we’re about to have company, and it’s probably easier to explain it once rather than twice.”

  “Have you gentlemen worked through Alec’s issues ?” Pia asked, appearing in the doorway, her gaze drawn, as ever, to Kristoff. He held out his hand for her, and she moved immediately to his side, snuggling against him with a private smile meant only for him.

  Alec watched them, wondering if Cora would ever cleave to him the way Pia did with Kristoff. “I have no issues. I was just . . . surprised.” And hurt, but it wouldn’t do to admit that.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

  He turned to find Cora in the door, her eyes wary. Eavesdropping, querida?

  No, she said, startled, and he realized she hadn’t picked up his thoughts. I just . . . I figured I must have hurt you when you left like that, and then didn’t want to talk to me. You’ve been put in a bad place, and part of that was due to the fact that I hadn’t told you the truth about me. I wanted to tell you about it. I think I probably would have, but then Eleanor was there, and she was your real Beloved, and I figured you’d want her.

  I don’t.

  No, I gathered that. But it didn’t seem fair to you to have to choose. I thought I might just make it easier on you by letting Eleanor serve her purpose.

  He studied her face for a few seconds, then decided to see what path his life would take. He held out his hand for her, just as Kristoff had done with Pia.

  Cora looked at his hand, hesitating. His heart contracted with the pain that accompanied the knowledge that she didn’t want him, truly did not want to be his Beloved. He was a convenient end to a means, that was all.

  Her hand was warm in his as she moved ne
xt to him, one delicious hip pressing against him. Hope flared deep in the empty space where his soul was meant to be, the hope that, after more than five hundred years, he might not be alone any longer.

  Pia murmured something about getting some refreshments before they got caught up on all the news, taking Kristoff with her as she left the room. Alec barely noticed them leave, so caught was he in the beauty of Cora’s eyes. “Mi corazón,” he said, rubbing his thumb down her silky cheek to that lush lower lip that begged to be tasted. “My heart.”

  “Alec, we need to talk. Eleanor—”

  “We will talk to her. I do not want her hurt any more than you do, but she must come to the realization that you are my Beloved, not her.”

  “I don’t know. It seems so heartless, somehow.”

  “Is your hesitation due to the situation with Eleanor, or that which is between us?” he asked, suddenly worried again. Was he misreading her emotions? She felt guilt with regard to him—that he knew—but whether it was about hiding the fact that she was his Beloved, or for the fact that Eleanor had been upset, was beyond his understanding.

  “It’s . . . it might be both. I feel like I stole you from Eleanor somehow, even though I know I really didn’t. She’s me, for heaven’s sake. Or a past version of me. So I couldn’t steal from myself, could I? And yet it feels like I did, and, Alec, I’ve never been the ‘steal someone else’s man’ sort of person.”

  “You didn’t steal me, love,” he said, amused despite the fact that she was obviously distressed. He wanted to kiss the worry right out of her mind, but knew she had to work things out for herself, or she would never be content to bind herself to him. “We were meant to be together. There’s no other explanation for the fact that you saved me in the Akasha.”

  “You were supposed to help me get out,” she said with a dark look. “That’s the only reason why I saved you.”

  “There were others you could have approached for help. That you didn’t abandon me after you knew who and what I was tells me that deep down you know we are meant to be, as well.”