Circle Unbroken

Ann Aguirre

One

Red bled from the guttering neon sign, greasing dark puddles with an oily shine. Zane stepped over, his boots near silent on the wet pavement. All around him, dark, broken windows in tenement buildings hung like the razor-sharp teeth of some patient, predatory beast. The rain had stopped an hour ago, but everything was still glazed with a fine mist, as if the world sweated in anticipation of what was to come.

Or maybe that was just his mood.

One solitary window broke the surface of the wall beside that sign, and it bore black wrought-iron bars. Crumbling stairs took him right up to a solid metal door. From within, he could hear the soft strains of piano music. The player was a dilettante, pausing every now and then to add some unnecessary flourish. Oddly, the human vanity of the performance made him feel a little better.

He had nothing to worry about, he told himself. Nothing on his person would give away his intentions. It wasn’t like he’d come bearing tricks of his trade. Even his cell phone was standard gear. This was strictly a recon mission, fact finding only.

Zane raised his hand and rapped in sequence with scheduled pauses and repetition. He’d gotten that much from one of the regulars before the man wound up in McLean, where they were studying his acutely paranoid behaviour. The skullduggery of it made him feel ridiculous, but it bore fruit when a metal plate slid back and a pair of dark eyes scrutinized him from head to toe.

“I’m here for a drink,” he said.

No response. The peep slot closed and someone opened the door from the inside. His source claimed that was the pass phrase and, if given in conjunction with the knock, would get him inside. Unfortunately, he had no way of verifying whether the information was still good.

“Come in. Enjoy.” From behind the heavy door, the voice sounded disembodied.

Zane shook off the chill and stepped through into the glowing warmth of the bar. He’d been investigating the place for months, but this was the first time he’d been able to get in the door. He took stock of his surroundings, and was oddly disappointed to find everything old-fashioned but tasteful. Mahogany panels lined the walls, softened with red embroidered tapestries. From the heavy, ornate bar to the chunky tables, there was something faintly Elizabethan about the place. In fact, he clashed with the décor in his worn army jacket and faded grey T-shirt.

He ran a hand through his hair, conscious of its uneven spikes in contrast with the suavity of the man closing the door behind him. The bouncer was enormous, biceps the size of someone’s head, but his hair was meticulously styled, and he wore a superbly tailored suit. Even the piano player dressed better than Zane.

His source hadn’t said anything about a dress code. But as he glanced around, he saw the other patrons didn’t fit their surroundings either. A man sat at the bar in a badly rumpled dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and tie tugged sideways. He nursed something amber in a glass, staring at his own sullen reflection. By the scruff on his jaw, he might’ve been there for days.

Zane nodded to the bouncer and made for the bar, where the ’tender came over straightaway. “What can I get you?”

“Kamikaze,” he said, pulling himself onto a stool.

When she began mixing his drink, he suffered a frisson of disappointment. He didn’t know exactly what he’d anticipated, but this was sedate in comparison with his inchoate expectations. Maybe he’d expected a scene out of Anne Rice with human slaves twined around their vampiric masters, while they fed in veiled alcoves. This just looked like a private club, but it was stupid to imagine they’d work in the open. Before he got to see anything newsworthy, he’d need to earn their trust.

Such things took time.

Two

“Who is he?” Ysabel asked.

She never entered the public area without speaking to Marceau first. His family had been loyal for hundreds of years, and she could count on his candour as well as his keen judgment. The man beside her appeared older than she by more than twenty years, a father figure some might say. Her mouth curved into a wry smile at the idea.

Marceau folded well-manicured hands before him. He was a slim, dapper man in his mid-forties. His hair had gone silver prematurely, making an attractive foil for his dark almond eyes. As always, he was impeccably turned out in a Boss suit, his shoes polished until one presumed he could see his own reflection. Beside her, he stared out at the room, where the herd congregated.

To her surprise, Marceau shrugged. “I am not sure.”

Ysabel’s brows lifted. “You surprise me. No dossier to hand? Generally, you have them blood-typed before they enter our domain.”

“He is nobody we’ve cultivated,” he said repressively. “But he knew the knock and the pass phrase. Perhaps it is time we changed them both.”

“To keep out the undesirables?” She mocked her retainer gently. “It would not do for our place of business to become sullied with those who wish to drink in anonymity.”

“What of our anonymity?” he asked. “Purges have started with less moment.”

Purges, crusades, hunters. Yes, she understood his caution.

Ysabel gave a short nod. “Make the change and inform Carvalo at the door.”

She noted a number of regulars in her visual sweep, but the young man at the bar drew her gaze back. There was a fierce, savage quality about him from his shock of black, spiky hair to his lean, angular face. This wasn’t a man who would bow to rules or regulations; she could tell that much from a single glance.

He shifted then, turning his face towards the wall through which she studied him. The man wore a diamond in his nose like a Barbary pirate. Ysabel had spent some time with a particularly roguish one in the islands; she recognized the type on sight. But where Jean Pierre had beaded trinkets into his hair, this one wore warpaint. Streaks of carmine and azure tipped the spiky points of his hair, like a peacock displaying plumage.

“It will be done.” In another age, his ancestor would have swept a deep obeisance in speaking those words. Ysabel remembered another Marceau doing so. They never used their first names with her. In every generation, they sent the youngest son to replace the elder. One had stood at her side since before the French Revolution.

His demeanour said he would prefer to adhere to the old ways, but she had learned to her cost that clinging to the past could be fatal. The only solace came from living in the present, not reflecting on all that had been lost. That way lay madness and death, a ceaseless fall into melancholy.

“Thank you,” she said, schooling her features.

She could not show weakness. Like a goddess carved from ivory and marble, nothing could touch her. Ysabel lifted her chin, watching the dishevelled man at the bar now. She could not feed from him again, no matter how he craved it. If she had any mercy, she would have barred him from the place, saving him from this desperate half-life, hoping against hope that she would call him to her private chambers again.

“Shall I have him escorted out?” Marceau asked.

At first she thought he was talking about the broken wreck of a man in the dingy white shirt. Then she realized he was looking at the fierce young pirate who had wandered into her lair. Ysabel smiled.

“Let him stay. I will speak with him myself.”

“Is that wise, m’selle?”

“No.” She laughed softly. “And that is precisely why I shall do it.”

Marceau favoured her with a grave, measured look, as if to say he did not find her reckless manner amusing. But he said nothing; it was not his place to counsel her. In her way, she was akin to royalty, and there was no one who dared rebuke her.

She had outlived them all.

Three

She had hair like moonlight.

The woman wore a red dress that clung to her like a second skin, and Zane’s next thought surprised him: blood and ice. Her smooth skin suggested that she was in her mid-twenties, around his age, but her eyes belied that initial impression. Those eyes were ageless, the deep grey of the sky just before a storm, and just as clouded with secrets.

Nothing in her demeanour hinted at violence, but he’d always possessed a strong sense of intuition. Though he had no proof, she was one of them. He’d stake his life on it.

To his surprise, she came straight towards him. She seated herself with liquid grace, putting an empty stool between them. Without taking her drink order, the bartender produced a glass of white wine. Zane watched her slim fingers curl around the glass, nails polished to match her dress. The crimson tips should have made her look hard and mercenary, but instead – well, he found himself unable to reconcile the conflicting signals.

“You’re new here,” she said without looking at him. Her voice carried the faintest lilt, not Irish, not Welsh, but as if ancient melodies danced on the tip of her tongue.

Something told him to be on his guard. “Yeah.” The only line that sprang to mind was, You come here often? So he swallowed it along with a third of his now watery drink.

“Ysabel.” The dishevelled man on the other side of Zane spoke for the first time.

So that’s her name. Inexplicably, Zane thought of nightingales.

Despair in his face, the other man reached towards her like a supplicant. “Do you—”

“No.” Though her tone was neither sharp, nor hard, it carried unmistakable finality. “You should go home, Steven. There is nothing for you here.”

“It is to be exile for me then?” Though he didn’t look poetic, Steven quoted verse nonetheless. “‘And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering . . . ’” He shook his head bitterly. “It was you, wasn’t it? ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Keats wrote about you.”

Zane didn’t see her gesture in any fashion, but the bouncer from the door stood beside them, levering Steven to his feet. “I’ll see that he gets home.”

The woman inclined her head. Once the other two had gone, she said, “I am sorry you had to see that.”

“Are you? Why?” His nerves tingled.

“I would not like to see you deterred from our company before you find what you’re seeking.”

He froze. “What makes you think I’m looking for anything?”

She faced him then, offering the full weight of her eyes, and he swore he felt the warmth of her touch. “We are all searching for something, are we not? Some gather wealth to stave off the long winter. Others yearn for power to leave their mark on the world. Yet others crave wisdom and knowledge. They are, perhaps, the most dangerous seekers of all.”

“You think so?” He felt as if she employed an archaic form of mesmerism to slow his thoughts and leave him unable to focus on anything but her mouth.

Ysabel smiled. Her canines were delicately pointed. So subtle that if he hadn’t known what he was looking for, he would’ve missed the slight variance.

“Who is more dangerous, the man who owns a bomb or the man who knows how to build one?”

He conceded the point with a nod. “One’s capacity for harm is finite. The other—”

“Could destroy the world,” she supplied quietly.

“I take your point.” Belatedly, he offered his hand. “I’m Zane. I already know you’re Ysabel, so it’s only fair to offer a name for a name.”

“Is it?” she asked, studying his palm like a fortune-teller. “How odd. I have seldom consorted with those who concern themselves with what is fair.”

“Then you must’ve had a rough life, lady.”

At length she took his hand and a sweet shock went all the way to his shoulder. It made him want to wrap his fingers around hers and draw her against him to see if the sensation would flood him from chest to knees. He restrained himself only through sheer will, pulling his flesh from hers quicker than was courteous.

She mused on that a moment, running her fingertips around the mouth of her glass, and a shudder went through him. He could feel her tracing circles on his skin. Desire rose, wholly unbidden, and he didn’t like the loss of volition.

“I rather think that you are right.” Sorrow wove through her storm-grey gaze like a colour. Cobalt, he thought, though equating emotions to the hues of her eyes shook him to the core. “They’ve changed the knock. And the password.” When she demonstrated softly on the bar, he found himself memorizing the cadence. Then she leaned in to whisper the word in his ear, and pleasure spilled through him, so fierce it felt like fear.

He had to get out of there.

Zane stood and knocked back the last of his drink. “I’ll see you around.”

“Yes,” she said. “You will.”

Four

He stayed away almost five days. Ysabel knew he would return, but the time between visits told her something about the strength of his will. That made a pleasant change in an age where people made a life of self-indulgence.

In the end, though, Zane had no choice, for she’d laid her scent upon him, and it drove him back towards her with a quiet compulsion. But he’d struggled against the inevitability. She imagined him denying the pull, finding other things to do to prevent his feet from retracing the steps back to her. For the first time in a long while, the game promised more than basic satiation. Anticipation coiled through her.

This time, she kept him waiting a full hour before she came down to the public rooms. Her kinsmen – Galen and Cyrus – lounged in a corner booth, cultivating the acquaintance of two bar hags who would feed them before the moon waned in the sky. Ysabel shook her head when they started to slip away, indicating she did not require their attention.

The place was nearly full this evening. Their regulars liked the cachet of belonging to a private club, one that didn’t choose its membership based on pedigree, lineage or bank accounts. No, Ysabel prided herself on operating the most eclectic – and the most deliciously varied – members-only club in the city. Whatever the pleasure, whatever the vice, one could find it here.

She was careful not to seek him out immediately, though she was aware of his every movement. Instead she flitted from group to group, making small talk with each party. It was her responsibility to make everyone feel welcome in her establishment. In some regards, things had not changed so much since she held intimate salons for the intellectual aristocracy several hundred years before.

By the time she made her way to the bar, he looked more than a little impatient. It was almost charming, the way he wore his emotions transparently. He’d never learned to school his face, and his gaze tracked her movements, as if he were a wolf with a rabbit in his sights.

The analogy amused her, when so clearly the opposite was true. Once more, he wore faded denims and the ancient army jacket. Beneath it, a black T-shirt clung to the lean muscles of his chest. Ysabel sat down beside him, and the bartender poured her usual, a glass of white wine. Red would make a stronger statement, but she didn’t favour the taste.

“Thank you,” she murmured to the server, then she shifted on her stool to face Zane. “I see you could not resist our charms.”

“Apparently not.” But he wasn’t happy about it.

This time, instead of the diamond in his nose, she noticed the fierce, electric blue of his eyes. He looked angry and dangerous, not someone who would turn into a docile pet. But instead of deterring her, it only intrigued her further. To captivate someone like him would require a great deal of guile and effort. Her breath came a little faster, and she tasted his essence through parted lips: fierce, questing, savage. The modern age very seldom offered specimens like him.

“Are you ready to tell me what you want, Zane?” It was a direct challenge, and she would not have employed the tactic with anyone else.

By the way his head came up, he was torn on how best to answer. “I’m just hanging out,” he finally muttered.

She was disappointed. Of all things, she would not have reckoned him a coward. Ysabel slid off her stool. “Then I shall leave you to it.”

“Wait.” The word sounded as if it came against his will.

She turned, one brow lofted in query. “Yes?”

Zane wore a hungry, frustrated look, as if he no longer understood what he wanted. “Can I talk to you? In private?”

Ysabel smiled. In answer, she curled her fingers around his wrist. The others knew what that meant: This one is mine. Touch him at your peril.

A little ripple went through the room as they speculated. What did she see in this one? How long would she keep him? Ysabel ignored the whispers.

She led him to her lair.

Five

Her touch felt unbelievably good.

Though she’d let go of him once they reached her room, the skin of his wrist still tingled. The heat seemed to be rising as well, spiralling out through his nerve endings to fire his entire body to a state of aching readiness. Zane wanted to strip naked, lie down on her luxurious white rug, and beg for her hands on him.

The strength of the desire left him suspicious. It couldn’t be natural or right. He had to fight it. He had to remember what he wanted of her – a story, not sex. That was getting harder to recall since he’d spent the last four nights dreaming about her.

She was every bit as delicious as he thought, that first night. Tonight she wore black, a striking contrast to her pearly skin and the moonbeam glimmer of her hair. He’d never encountered anyone more sensual, more able to set him aflame with a simple touch.

Zane tried to make good mental notes. If she turned her back for a minute, he’d snap a few quick pictures with his phone, but she didn’t seem inclined to wander away. Quite the opposite. She seemed downright intrigued by him, though he had no idea why.

They stood in an old-fashioned sitting room, decorated with gold and white striped damask chairs. There had to be several hundred books on the golden oak shelves that lined the walls. No mirrors, though. Was that more than an old wives’ tale? How could she possibly look so gorgeous if she couldn’t see her own reflection? A matching hutch offered basic wine and spirits. He’d give a lot to rummage around her room and learn her secrets.

This room had two doors, the one they’d entered through, and another on the opposite wall. He didn’t know where that led, but he could guess.

“My bedroom,” she said, smiling, as if she could read his mind. “Did you want to see it? I thought you wanted a word in private.”

Zane felt his cheeks heat. What was it about her that made him feel fourteen and tongue-tied in the presence of the head cheerleader? God help him, he did want to see her bedroom – and not for the story. He reined himself in.

“I do,” he muttered.

“Then why don’t you have a seat?”

Heartbreakingly graceful, she eased into the chair opposite him and sat waiting. Zane had no idea what he was going to say. He couldn’t start with, Are you a dangerous, immortal bloodsucker? Plus, even writing for Weird Weekly News, he still carried a certain burden of proof: blurry photos, bite marks, something.

Maybe that was how he could trap her. If he pretended to be into blood play, she might buy it. There were enough vamp fetishists who chased the lifestyle to make it plausible anyway. The only question was whether he could sell it.

He sat down, feeling more confident. At least he had an angle now. “Downstairs I couldn’t help but notice your teeth.”

Both her brows lofted. “And you want the name of my dentist?”

“I – no. I was just wondering what it meant.”

“It’s a cosmetic vanity,” she said, smiling. “It lends the place a certain mystique, don’t you agree? People like to feel they’re in the presence of something miraculous.”

“So they’re caps?” Of course she wasn’t going to admit she was the real deal, not until they’d built up some rapport – or maybe after she had him so enthralled he couldn’t conceive of outing her. Zane thought about the man’s face, Steven he thought his name had been. His eyes spoke of terrible addiction.

She gave a little nod. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“It’s OK,” he said. “I should’ve known it was nothing.”

“So that’s what you’re seeking? Someone to bite you?”

Zane kept his face impassive. “Is that so surprising?”

“A little,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that you want someone to command your will.”

He didn’t, of course. The very idea sent a thrill of horror through him. As a kid, he’d been subject to other people’s whims, a victim of capricious fate, and he never intended to let it happen again.

“Maybe I just want to see what all the fuss is about.”

“Do you truly think you can lie to me?” Her voice carried a queenly resonance, and he wanted to fall at her feet.

He didn’t.

“Why not?” he asked. “You seem to think you can lie to me.”

That surprised her. He saw it in the faint widening of her storm-cloud eyes. “You are a strange creature.”

“Lady, you don’t know the half of it.”

“I know this – you pose a danger to me and mine. If I owned equal measures of caution and prudence, I would bar you from this establishment.”

“But you won’t,” he said, smiling.

He saw her gaze linger on his mouth and he realized he was not without resources in this battle.

“I will not,” she agreed. “The game is met, and I stand eager to learn who rises as the conqueror.”

Zane touched her hand, his fingers light as the first snow in winter. “I am your undiscovered country, Ysabel. You have never met anyone like me.”

Six

Within a week, Ysabel knew everything about Zane Monteith. He had lost his mother young, and his father drank. At fourteen, his father perished in a car accident, and his relatives passed him around – aunts, uncles and distant cousins – until he turned eighteen. Despite the odds, he landed an academic scholarship and went to Salem State College, where he majored in journalism. He’d found it challenging to get a job as a real journalist with no experience, so he wound up working for Weird Weekly News.

Now he wanted a scoop on vampires.

She smiled over that. Writing for such a rag, it was a little surprising he’d had the investigative skills to track them down. If he worked for a more reputable periodical, she might have needed to do something distasteful. But this . . . this could function in her favour.

Ysabel did not wait for him this week. One of the advantages of the modern age was that she didn’t need to sit demurely in a tower, so she went to Marceau just before the club opened. By his tight expression, he didn’t anticipate liking her plans.

“I won’t be in tonight, Marceau. Leave Galen in charge. If he has any trouble, dispatch Carvalo to assist him.”

“Noted, m’selle.” Marceau hesitated, and she wagered with herself how long he’d take to voice his disapproval. No more than fifteen seconds; she counted. “Perhaps you should reconsider going out alone. Cyrus would be delighted to escort you.”

Cyrus raised his ash-blond head, fixing jade eyes on the two of them. Once she’d thought him beautiful beyond belief, like an angel from a Renaissance painting.

“I would?” he asked, raising a brow at Marceau. “Pity. I had intended to cultivate the lovely Lily this evening.”

“I do not think her garden requires any attention,” she said dryly.

His green eyes sparkled. “You only say that because you know me.”

Ysabel smiled despite herself. “True. But I will not interfere with your plans.” She turned to Marceau. “I’m afraid Cyrus will not prove of any use to me in this endeavour.”

“When have I ever proved of any use?”

“Fourth of January, 1857.”

He thought for a moment, and then his smile slipped. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. Be careful, Ysabel. It’s been a long time since you went out alone.”

She lifted her shoulders. “Things are different. The world has changed.”

“But no less dangerous for a woman alone,” Cyrus pointed out.

Her look chilled. “Then I misspoke. What I meant is that I have changed.”

“True enough.” Cyrus returned to his drink.

She left Marceau gazing after her, his brow furrowed in concern. If it were up to him, she would never leave the club without a full complement of bodyguards. But over the years, she had learned that sometimes all that did was give ruffians the notion that she possessed something worth guarding.

Ysabel did not go out the public entrance. Instead she passed through an inner door and stepped onto the street, rather than emerge in the alley. She had found that people enjoyed the hint of subterfuge as much as the exclusive feeling of the club.

Anticipation sizzled through her as she measured her steps along the damp pavement. If Zane had lived more than eight blocks away, she would’ve called for her driver, but he had a flat within walking distance, even on a night like tonight – perhaps especially on a night like tonight.

Rain drizzled on her lightly, leaving no marks on the white coat. She had bought it many years ago, after seeing Grace Kelly wear something similar in a film. She wore a pair of dark glasses to protect her eyes from the city lights. The world had become a place of neon and garish fluorescent beams when she could best tolerate candlelight or softly diffused bulbs specially purchased for their low wattage.

No one who passed her on the street would remember her tomorrow, though several men took a second look. She smiled as she paused at the crumbling brownstone. There was no security to speak of, not even an intercom system. Marceau would have a fit if he saw her entering such a place.

Smiling over that, she tugged the front door open. Inside, the air reeked of onions and peppers, underscored by a faint hint of mildew. The building reminded her a little of the tenements in New York at the turn of the century. They had left that city just after the last Great War. As she sought the stairs, she calculated. They had been in Boston for over six decades then, and she had not anticipated a diversion so soon in twice as many years.

Ysabel found the stairwell without mishap; Zane lived on the second floor. The second storey was divided in half. He had the flat at the end of the hall, 2A. She stepped lightly to the door and knocked.

When he answered, he wore nothing but a pair of old denims. They hung loose on his hip bones, showing the gently concave curve of his abdomen. His chest was lean and well muscled, fading bronze as if he had worked outdoors during the summer. Night-dark hair tipped in plumage stood in messy spikes; she could envision his restless hands working through it. He hadn’t shaved in several days, so his jaw bristled. She should’ve been repulsed by the pure animal dishevelment of him.

She wasn’t.

Seven

“You,” he said stupidly.

Surprise didn’t even come close. He felt like he’d been hit with a ball-peen hammer. Zane had thought Jablonski had come to ask him to fix something in her apartment again. Instead, he found an angel. It was madness that she would seek him out.

She looked like something out of an old movie: the debutante slumming with the gardener’s son. Zane had never seen anyone so lovely. He’d wanted to believe it was the romance of the club that made him feel so helplessly captivated. But no, seeing her on the worn carpet in his own building left him reeling the same way. Raindrops lay on her moon-kissed hair like a fine web of diamonds.

It hurt him to breathe, his chest oddly tight. This reaction had kept him away from her out of a desperate sense of self-preservation. He’d feared the challenge she’d thrown down and, instead of pursuing the better story, he wrote a throwaway piece about how a butter stain on a pancake looked like the Virgin Mary. But even as he avoided her, he’d thought about her, about the way her skin felt beneath his fingertips. Such a trivial touch – he didn’t trust wanting anything this much.

“Me. You’ve been thinking about me, have you not?”

Arrogant, he thought. But true. He nodded.

“I thought it time to give you what you want.”

Did that mean she was going to bite him? A shudder of reaction racked him, horror commingled with desire. That was the last thing he wanted. He could not imagine anything so wrong as living off other people like a ghoul, a parasite.

At length Zane recovered his composure. “Then I suppose you’d better come in.”

She brushed by him, smelling sweet and clean. He wondered what perfume she was wearing, for surely nobody smelled naturally of peaches, citrus, honeydew and water lily. He drew in a deep breath and fought the urge to touch her.

By the time Zane closed the door, he had himself more or less under control. He stood with his back to it while she strolled through his apartment, touching odds and ends as if she could know him through her fingertips. God knew, he wanted her to try, but not this way. Not through his things. His skin.

Distantly he knew she must be using vamp mojo on him. He’d never reacted to a woman like this in his life. Maybe he could use that in the story, make it a personal piece: I was a vampire’s love slave. His editor would love the confessional slant.

“Still working the angles?” she asked quietly.

“Always.” He managed a grin. “Now then, what really brings you to my humble abode? I kind of doubt you’re going to hand me a story on a silver platter.” It was a calculated gamble. If she knew where he lived, she likely knew other things as well.

Maybe things he’d rather she didn’t.

“I am, actually.” She shrugged out of her white coat, revealing a sapphire dress that clung to her lithe body.

His apartment looked dingy and cluttered in comparison with her gentle elegance. She drew off the glasses last, her eyes full of storm clouds. Ysabel gave off an air of fragility, but some women made an art of concealing their strength.

“What do you want?” Cynicism spiked his tone. He couldn’t help it. Nobody offered something for nothing.

Her gaze skimmed his bare chest. “You,” she said softly.

Every instinct leaped at the word. She could take her sharp little teeth to his throat as she rode him. It took all his self-possession not to say yes and reach for her. To take her to his bed with its sagging mattress and rumpled sheets. But caution came hard won, and trust, for him, not at all.

“What you want . . . would it do me lasting harm?” No story was worth that.

“No,” she said. “Not if we put a finite measure on our affair. You will recover your energies when I stop feeding from you.”

There, she admitted it. A thrill surged through him. Zane wished he’d had a digital recorder handy.

“How long?”

“Sixty days,” she answered. “I cannot take from you on a regular basis any longer than that without imperilling both your physical and mental health.”

“So I’d end up like that guy at your club,” he noted. “Steven.”

Ysabel shook her head. “He has an addictive personality. If I’d known—”

“You wouldn’t have used him.”

“Chosen,” she corrected.

Zane curled his lip. “So you’re doing me great honour right now?”

Though he wasn’t aware of her moving, she was suddenly much closer, close enough to touch. Her eyes caught his, and her scent swelled, going straight to his groin. “Does not it feel like one?”

God, yes. It did. He shook his head to clear it of sexual urges.

“The story. If I agree to this, you’ll answer all my questions fully?”

“I will,” she promised. “Thus, the bargain is struck. Shall we seal it with a kiss?”

Ysabel came up on her toes, and the taste of her went through him like white lightning. His head clouded. When he reached for her, he could no more have stopped that response than his own heartbeat. She felt unnaturally warm, as though she held fire enough to sear him to cinder and ash.

What was worse – he didn’t care.

She became manna from heaven, the elixir of life itself, and he needed more. With a low growl, he swung her into his arms, dimly surprised at some level that she permitted it. But there was no mistaking the hunger in her hands.

His bedroom was dark, the sheets as rumpled as he’d recalled. Books and magazines lay scattered everywhere, a messy paper rug on the wood floor. For a moment, he felt ashamed to have her here, but she shook her head. “I will brook none of that between us, my chosen. There is no other I would have in your place this night, nor any palace that could offer more delight.”

Chosen. The power of it rocked him. He’d never been chosen in his life. Everything he had, he’d earned or taken. Everything except Ysabel.

He set her lightly on her feet and she pulled her dress over her head. She wore nothing beneath it. The moon gilded her in argent and ivory, caresses that flickered over her skin in hypnotic patterns. In response, fire licked through him, tinged with a madness born of aching desire. If she was a dream, he did not want to wake. His hands trembled as he stripped out of his jeans, and then he came down to her.

Arms and legs tangled. They rolled, skin sweet and slick with yearning. Trembling, helpless, he thrust and found her hot, the loveliest thing he’d ever felt. He wanted her so that he couldn’t hear for his own heartbeat in his ears. Her mouth seemed to be everywhere, her hair spilling over his skin like silver flax, and yet he could not hold her. Infinite, racking waves tore through him, boundless, unbearable. He felt her teeth on his throat, or thought he did, but he was beyond caring. She took him.

Eight

Ysabel lay beside him, glowing with his essence. He was frighteningly still, but she hadn’t harmed him. It was rare for any chosen to surrender so completely the first time. Generally, such sharing only came after she laid the groundwork. She could not decide why he was so susceptible, though his claim she had never met anyone like him was valid.

She did not want to leave him, but she must return to the club before dawn, if not for the reasons he believed. His chest rose and fell in seductive rhythm, making her want to hold her cheek against his bare skin and bask in simple human warmth. As if in response to her thought, his arms came around her, drawing her against him. At first she thought it was no more than sleepy reflex, and then she saw his fierce blue eyes.

“Did you?” he whispered, fingers skimming his own throat. He winced when he found the sore spot.

“Yes.”

“And that’s it?”

She arched a brow, quietly amused. “Did you want there to be more?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I guess I just expected there would be.”

“You thought it would be worse.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen the movies,” he added, defensive.

Then she did laugh. He took no offence from it. Instead he nuzzled her throat. To her surprise, he still had the energy to pull her on top of him. She didn’t take from him again; instead it was pure pleasure that he gave. His slim, dexterous hands cradled her hips as she rode him. He lay beneath her, masterful in his submission, and she began to wonder in truth who would conquer whom.

The days and nights passed in a sort of divine madness, but Ysabel retained enough presence of mind to blur his perceptions when they tarried together. Despite what she’d said about answering his questions, she didn’t intend to allow him any truth save that which she supplied. It amused her to see him struggle against her influence. No matter how many times they came together, he remained fuzzy on the details – and it must be that way.

If the others knew the truth about her latest plaything, it would not end well for him. Of them all, Galen retained an awkward amount of noblesse oblige, and he would see it as his duty to rescue her from her own folly. Marceau would simply shake his head with weary resignation if he realized what she’d done. Sadly, it was not the first time, just her first lapse in a long while.

But then, she’d always enjoyed playing with fire, and Zane burned with such a fierce light, she couldn’t help but want a little warmth to kindle the endless ages after he fell to dust. She could see the fragile flicker of him, here now, and as quickly gone, no more than a shimmer in comparison to her kind.

Twenty-two of her self-allotted days with Zane had passed when Cyrus came knocking at her door. He’d fed recently, and that stolen energy sat on him like a nimbus, crowning his beauty with an incandescent glow. It was unusual for him to seek her out, but Ysabel made time for all the members of her camarilla, few that they were. Boston had not been kind to them, nor had the modern age. Without the glamour borrowed from writers of romantic fiction, they would have been hunted to extinction long since.

“You look well.” She stepped back to let him enter her sitting room. “What brings you to me this night?”

In answer, he prowled the room, seeming unable to settle. Such distress was unlike him. She watched him for a moment, and then caught his arm as he paced by.

“Enough,” she said gently. “Speak. There are no secrets between us.”

His jade gaze fastened on her face. “Is that still true? It once was.”

Cyrus alone knew how close they’d come to destruction, some 200 years ago. He alone had extricated her from the fearful truth. She’d thought the memory might have faded, blurred by years of pleasure, but she could see the spectre riding him tonight.

“It is still true,” she told him with grave dignity.

“Then I must tell you – people whisper of your favour to this nobody, Ysabel. You seem besotted, as if he is the one who feeds from you. You shine when he comes to you. And I remember all too well the last time you displayed such marked affection.”

Of course he would. The man had been his brother. Cyrus had killed him for her on 4 January, 1857. In return, she gave him what he craved most: immortality, a guarantee that his youth and beauty would never fade.

“And you think Zane is another Pierce, one who will gain my trust and betray me.”

“I fear that,” Cyrus admitted.

“Fret yourself not. Only forty-eight days remain in our agreement, and I shall not grant him anything that could harm us during that time.”

“Do you swear it?”

Ysabel nodded and lifted her face. “Taste the truth of it for yourself.”

Her kinsman took her lips in a sweet, lingering kiss. Though his mouth was lovely and warm, it left her quiet and still inside. Not even an ember stirred within her in response to his beauty, and that left her shaken, for it was wholly wrong.

“Dear God,” Cyrus breathed. “You’ve mated to him.”

Nine

Zane had no words to explain what was happening to him.

Over the past two months, he only lived when he was with her. Sure, he put in his time at Weird Weekly News, shopped for basic groceries and paid his bills, but it was work, all of it. Much as he didn’t trust the sensation, he only felt alive with Ysabel.

That meant their affair couldn’t be over too soon. He didn’t know if he could hold out any longer than that against her allure, and he didn’t want to end up like that guy, Steven. He didn’t want to spend his remaining days pining for the sight of her, begging for scraps of her time. Zane couldn’t imagine anything more pathetic.

No, when the agreed time period ended, they were done, and he was going to write a story that would make him famous. Probably not in any reputable way, but he’d long since given up on the dim dream of being the next Woodward. He’d settle for being the next Whitley Strieber.

Oddly, certain things didn’t add up. Apart from the puncture wounds on his neck, there was never any blood on the sheets. Either she was the neatest neck nibbler ever born, or he didn’t have the big picture yet. Still, maybe he was a victim of cinematic hyperbole. He’d give a lot to examine her teeth and see if they were hollow. Maybe she sunk them into his neck and took the blood straight through her fangs.

But she slept too lightly for him to check her dental work. The minute he stirred beside her, she opened her eyes. And once her gaze met his, he forgot all about his personal agenda. Cliché as it might be, the sex was earth-shattering.

Zane couldn’t doubt she was drawing his strength away. He’d lost ten pounds, weight he couldn’t afford to lose. In seven weeks with her, he’d gone from lean to thin. By the end, he would be gaunt and pale, visibly weakened.

The prize would be worth it.

He no longer needed a special knock or a pass code. Tonight he came via her private entrance. Night after night, he found her waiting when he finished his shift at the paper. It didn’t seem to matter what time; she was content to take what he offered, and that seemed wrong. After all, Ysabel could rule the world with her smile.

Oh God, he had it bad.

A thrill tightened his belly when he came up the stairs and she opened her arms. Though he’d wanted to ask some questions tonight, he couldn’t keep himself from her. He hardened as if in response to a silent command. For the first time, he could not wait for niceties; he could not wait for her to remove her clothes in languorous seduction. Zane had to have her or die.

He took her hard and fast against the sitting room wall. If she fed from him, he missed it in the blaze of wild rapture. Afterwards, he gasped into the curve of her throat, rubbing his mouth against her tender skin. “What’s happening to me?” he breathed. “You promised me no harm, Ysabel. You swore it.”

“You will take no lasting damage.” But she sounded shaken. “Rarely such a bond forms, but time will wear it thin. In a year and a day, you will no longer recall my face.”

Right now, Zane couldn’t imagine anything closer to pure torment. “I don’t want that,” he protested, before he could recall the words that gave too much. “But . . . I don’t want this, either.” This helpless compulsion, falling upon her like an animal bereft of higher thought, terrified him. He didn’t want to lose himself in her.

With some effort he straightened his clothing, but he couldn’t make himself let go. All too easily, he could understand how Steven had turned into a pitiful shell of a man. Though he suspected he might be following in the other’s footsteps, he couldn’t open his arms and go. Instead he carried her to a chair, where she curled into him like a flower seeking the sun.

“Your thoughts are well-ordered tonight,” she said, a note of surprise accenting the mysterious lilt of her voice.

She was right. There was no fuzzy euphoria clouding his mind, nothing to keep him from asking her anything he might wish. “Good thing,” he muttered. “I was starting to think you weren’t going to leave me a brain to interview you with.”

Ysabel tucked her head against his shoulder. “Ask. I will answer.”

“Do you mind if I record?” Taking her silence for acquiescence, he stifled his excitement at moving forwards. “I guess we should start with the basics. How old are you?”

“I have lived some five centuries.”

That gave him pause. He was holding a woman who had been alive when Queen Elizabeth I was born, a woman who pre-dated Shakespeare. He’d touched her, kissed her. There was something awful – unnatural – about that.

Steeling himself, Zane went on. “Where were you born?”

“Looe.” He didn’t recognize the name, so he regarded her blankly until she added softly, “Cornwall. The world was different, then.”

“How did you . . . ” He hesitated, unsure how to ask.

“You wish to hear the story of my change.”

Ten

Ysabel did not want to recall, much less share the callow young girl she had been. But she had said to him: Ask, I will answer. Such words had power when granted to a chosen. She could not deny him.

“Even in those days, Looe was old,” she said then. “Once, William the Conqueror held Pendrym Manor. I came long after, born to a distaff branch of the Bodgrugan family. I was the youngest.” She went silent, trying not to reckon how many years it had been since she’d even thought of them, so long gone. “My mother died in childbed, and I had seven older sisters. My father made a pet of me.”

She felt him nod to show he was listening, so she continued in a bloodless monotone. “One by one, I saw them marry. Men and childbirth stole their youth, their joy, and for some of them, their very lives. I feared it as I feared nothing else.”

“Marriage?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“You cannot imagine what it was like,” Ysabel said sharply. “A woman expected no more than to live to see her third decade – and by then, she would be a crone.”

“You were vain.”

She did not deny it, for she had been. Fertile ground for a chary tempter.

“I begged my father to let me stay in his house. He would need me in his old age, I said. As I have already noted, he cosseted me; thus, he agreed. I avoided my sisters’ fate, the constant swiving and breeding that would steal my youth and beauty. Then one night, a traveller stumbled to our door, blown by fierce winds and rain. There was naught natural in it. But he was passing fair and spoke with a minstrel’s tongue. My father bade me, ‘Unbar the door, daughter. Let us see what gift the foul weather has brought us.’”

A shiver rolled through her even now. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the man who had changed her. “He was pale, pale as moonlight with eyes like silver fog. He had a smile like a knife, and a wit that kept my father laughing long into the night. He invited the bard to stay.”

“And thus did you take the viper to your bosom.”

Ysabel had to shake her head. “For weeks, he entertained my father with his stories. By night, after my sire had dozed into his cups, this stranger whispered to me of places he should show me, marvels I might never see unless I gave him leave to tear the veil from my eyes.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “I thought myself wise in the ways of men. I thought it some double entendre. By then, the role of the ingénue had palled. I thought myself ready to play the seductress instead. I thought myself worldly. There was nothing he could do that would surprise me. I had seen the servants grunting in the back hallways.”

“But he didn’t want you for sex.”

“Not entirely,” she said, low. “There was that at first, and he was fearsome good. I loved him. Until he changed me, and left me with this hunger.”

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

At first she didn’t know whether he meant the loss of her virtue or the transformation. Either way, she answered the same. “Yes. And so I left my father’s house.”

“You went away with him.”

She inclined her head. “Indeed. He had such wonders to show me, after all.”

“Are you sorry?”

Ysabel considered for a moment. No one had ever asked her such a question before. “Yes and no. I have lived such a fearful span and, in that time, I have seen true miracles. But there is something wrong in it. I cannot survive without my chosen, and I miss the freedom of being beholden to no one.”

“Last question for now,” he said, as if she had given him a great deal to consider. “What happened to him?”

“He perished.” Her stark tone gave nothing away regarding the old one’s fate. She would never answer more.

His breathing deepened then, and she realized how tightly he’d leashed himself to focus on the questions instead of her body in his arms. Ysabel shifted on his lap, aware of his growing arousal.

“I lied,” he breathed. “I must know one thing more.”

“Ask.”

“How does this work? How is it that I cannot be sated with you?”

Once, she would have called it magic. Now, science had supplied the answer. “I exude pheromones,” she told him gently. “They stimulate the production of oxytocin, which increases pleasure, sexual stimulation, trust and reduces your fear.”

“Which makes it easier for you to feed.”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. I want you again. I need—” Words failed him, but he raised his hips, rocking against her.

“You needn’t feed me to have me,” she murmured, warmth glowing through her.

One hunger was sated, but another blazed in her like an inferno. She lifted her skirt, and he unfastened his jeans. In one motion, he took her. Undulating her hips, she watched his face. She had never known anyone to respond as he did. Though he appeared tough and cynical, when she touched him, he gave everything.

“Yes,” he whispered, lips parted. “Take everything.”

That, she would not do. They shook together, and later she lay against his shoulder, spent and boneless. There had never been another soul that fitted her so.

“I shall miss you,” she said softly.

“I don’t want you to. Stay with me.”

Ah, if only she could. She did not say this would be their last night together, unless – she hesitated, and then risked all.

“I cannot live in your world,” she told him. “But you could make a place in mine. I have the power –”

“No.” He stiffened.

“Not even for an eternity with me?” she asked lightly.

“No. I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t realize how deep his rejection cut. “Not everyone could turn down immortality so easily.”

Zane shuddered. “I don’t want that.”

Her heart ached. Nor do I. Now she wanted everything she had spurned, so long ago. She wanted the freedom to be with him and share his life. But she would never say the words aloud. Across the centuries she had grown allergic to pathos, particularly her own.

“Then forget I spoke it.” Prithee, do it now, before Cyrus and Galen learn what I have done. She brushed his temples and fogged his mind.

His hands sifted through her long hair, his fingers knotting. “I don’t think I can bear this,” he said unsteadily. “Our time is running out, and my heart aches with it. I want you as I’ve wanted nothing else in my life. Why can’t you be a woman I could love?”

The question broke her heart. Pleasure she could offer, but love was forever denied her. She would always need a new chosen, always, no matter how tightly she bonded to the old. It would destroy him to see her with another, and so—

She rose, graceful and fluid. Her skin began to cool, lacking his warmth.

“Do you have further questions?” she asked.

“I’ll ask next time, if I do.” Zane stood, seeming to realize he had been dismissed.

There would be no next time. She let him go, knowing Cyrus would take care of the rest. The bond required special measures, but her kinsman would blot it from Zane’s mind. For the first time in a hundred years, Ysabel the Untouched wept.

Eleven

Zane woke in a cold sweat. His head throbbed, but he couldn’t put a finger on what was wrong. He tore his apartment up, searching in vain, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d lost.

He went to work in a fog.

The building looked different to him somehow with its array of cubicles, worn brown carpeting and too bright lights. There was somewhere else he needed to be, but it wouldn’t coalesce. Bobby, the photographer, stopped him in the hall, tapping his arm twice in agitation. “Are you high? Rogers wants to see you.”

“Shit, why?” He tried to pull himself together. Having the editor-in-chief on your ass was never a good thing.

“I dunno, just go see him.”

So he did.

He listened with growing incomprehension. Taking the story from his editor, he raised his brows at it. The piece was covered in red marks, but Rogers seemed excited. Zane couldn’t remember writing the thing.

Which worried him.

“It’s great,” Rogers was saying. “Very hot. I’m using the headline you gave me.” Skimming, he found it: I was a vampire’s love slave. “It would be better if you had pictures, but we can use stock footage. You said she was blonde, right?”

“Did I?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Rogers shook his head in annoyance. “Anyway, I need you to get me these edits by the end of the day. Fix it up and send it to production, will you? I’m running it on the front page. Congrats, kid.”

“Uhm. Thanks.” Zane staggered from the office, peering at his own words as if he’d never seen them before. Had he been drinking? He’d heard of people bingeing into a blackout, but he couldn’t remember much of the entire last week.

The story, however he’d come to write it, made his fortune.

At first it was just tabloid TV shows wanting to interview him. Then more serious journalists started talking to him about his experiences with the paranormal. He did a few radio interviews.

Tonight made his sixth, and he was starting to get comfortable with the process. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d lost his heart somewhere. Dusk till dawn, he never stopped aching, never stopped searching the crowd for a face whose lines wouldn’t fully shape up in his mind’s eye. Would he know her if he saw her? Who was she?

Breaking his reverie, the young woman who hosted Boston Tonight leaned towards him. “Zane, are you telling me that you slept with a vampire and lived to write about it?”

By this point, his answers were smooth and polished. The truth didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what he remembered – only what they wanted to hear.

“She wasn’t a killer,” he said. “And I’m no danger to her.”

“So what was it like?” the woman asked. “Cold, I bet.” She played a laugh track.

No, she hadn’t been cold. She’d been quicksilver, love and lightning in his arms. Why the hell couldn’t he remember her face? Zane started to wonder if he’d been doing hardcore drugs, and then he considered doing them, if it meant seeing her again.

Groupies started popping up at his apartment. Usually they were confused young things with barbwire tatts and dyed black hair. They bore the sad eyes of the eternal victim, and they seemed to think he could shift their sorrow. Without fail, he sent them away.

But pretty soon he had what publishers called a “platform”. Most people seemed to think it was all a gimmick, which was fine with him. Wasn’t that the point of the whole business? Entertainment?

Within six months, he quit working at Weird Weekly News. He had a bizarre compulsion to write a novel. Though he’d never wanted to do fiction – always, always it had been journalism for him – he couldn’t get the heroine out of his head.

She haunted him.

Month after month, he banged out his magnum opus. The book was ridiculously long, epic in scope and spanning nearly five centuries. It began in 1513 with a girl in Cornwall. When it was done, it stretched to 150,000 words; the thing should’ve been unpublishable. Instead, he found an agent, who sold it at auction. To his surprise, Zane was credited with reinventing the vampire genre. He called the story Ysabel, and hoped that having written about her for more than half a year, she would leave him be.

Yet she still haunted him. Which was ridiculous because she wasn’t real.

She wasn’t real.

He tried to date, but the women never felt or tasted right. They didn’t smell of citrus and peaches, honeydew and water lily. Night after night, he found himself holding the book he’d written, stroking the cover as if the cover model’s skin ought to warm him.

He suspected he was going mad.

Twelve

“Still following him?” Cyrus asked with a touch of disapproval.

Ysabel knew he was right. It had been nearly two years, a wink of the eye to those such as they. Still, she should not clip articles from the paper about New York Times bestselling author, Zane Monteith. She should not watch programmes where he appeared as a guest. But she could not strike him from her mind.

Oh, he had served his purpose. He had gone away as she intended, swimming in false lore. She turned the jewelled pincers over in her hands then. They used these to mark the necks of their chosen, so they would not realize the true nature of the feeding: energy, not blood. That which flowed from sexual congress was the strongest, but they could feed off anger, grief, jealousy, terror – any of the fierce, dark emotions. In this way, they had hidden in plain sight for centuries. Not even John Polidori had gotten it right.

But Zane, Zane had been a particular coup. With one book, he had circulated more misinformation than she could have leaked in two human lifetimes. It was a pity she had made the mistake of falling in love with him; Cyrus had been correct in his judgment.

Once set, her kind could not undo the mate bond while the chosen yet lived. She had done her best to blot herself from his consciousness, but there was no such mercy for Ysabel. She must simply bear the loss. She’d offered him eternity, only to have him recoil in disgust. No, she had nothing he wanted. He was human, and proudly so.

Thus, she earned back her name, Ysabel the Untouched, and she fed on sorrow.

Belatedly she realized Cyrus was waiting for an answer. “Yes. I cannot help it.”

“I hate to see you repine so,” he said gently. “He is no one.”

She offered a half-smile. “And so I was, once.”

“What can I do?” He knelt beside her chair, sombre as he almost never was.

Ysabel ignored the question. “Do you know, Steven once quoted ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ at me?”

“Steven,” Cyrus repeated. “The suicide?”

At that, her burden became a bit heavier. “Yes. But I hear those lines and marvel that no one ever wonders what became of her, whether she ever mourned for the loss of her poet, or if she sent him from her in kindness.”

He inhaled sharply. “I mislike your look, Ysabel. I do not like it when you speak this way.”

She lifted her shoulders. “If I must bear it, so must you. Or . . . you can leave me, Cyrus. You are more than old enough to start your own demesne.”

“I will not,” her kinsman said quietly.

“Why?” she asked. “Why stay now? My house crumbles, and I cannot find the will to care.” It was true. They were down to three now. Antoine had yielded the melancholy, and she should be looking for someone to replace him.

She could not. She no longer believed perpetuity was a gift.

He lowered his lovely face, unable to hold her gaze. “All this time, you never knew. I never spoke it. But anything I have done, anything over these long years, I have done for love of you.”

Even to the murder of your own brother. I ought to have known. Alongside his twin, Cyrus had been her chosen, once.

“‘Hell is empty,’” she breathed in self-loathing, “‘And all the devils are here.’”

He shook his head with doleful tenderness. “‘There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with’t.’”

“Mayhap so,” she said, sighing. “Mayhap so. Yet I cannot help but weary of it all.”

She remembered trying to persuade her sire otherwise. Tonight she heard his voice, whispering down the centuries. This, this is the beginning of the decline. First, you gorge on sorrow, and then the melancholia fills your soul. From this, my love, there is no return. You have cheered me these many years, but I can stay no longer.

Now, this too she would inflict upon Cyrus. He would bear the burden of her death.

But he knew her too well. “No. That is the one thing I will not do for you. Is this so dreadful? Would you be mortal again, truly? Would you give up eternity for him?”

Bowing her head, she acknowledged she had asked too much of him; her silence formed her answer. Ysabel went to don her white gown. To feed, she spent her nights at the hospital, ministering to those who were sick unto dying. There, she ate their misery like candy, and they lived three days in peace before passing on. They whispered in the wards of the White Lady, and some prayed for her to ease their pain.

Three years after she had sent Zane from her sight, Marceau came to her. She had not known Cyrus had confided in him, but she was not surprised by his knowledge, only his demeanour. She raised her brows expectantly.

“M’selle,” he said, unwontedly diffident. “For the last year, I have been seeking an answer. I am your man in all things, and thus, I delved into the old books. Today, I come to say – there is a way. But there is risk. You . . . you might die of it.”

“Marceau,” she told him gently. “I am dying anyway. Will you try?”

They told her only that Cyrus must drain her energies completely, and then she must be laid out on hallowed ground, anointed in olive oil, holy water and myrrh. At the end of three days, she would be mortal or dead. She was willing to take the risk.

On the appointed night, she went to the cathedral and was surprised to find Cyrus waiting. Candles flickered all around, glazing the marble. He paused in his pacing when she entered. Gently, he took her hands.

“Are you certain this is what you want?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

He nodded grimly and drew her to him. Ysabel felt everything she was rushing towards him. Memories, brightness, love. She had to struggle not to fight. Cold now. Weak. Her body went limp.

As through some distant tunnel, she heard someone burst in, but she could not open her eyes. Galen’s voice, angry. “What have you done?”

She could not explain. Marceau spoke then. “You must go, monsieur. Only Cyrus can stay with her now. Three days and three nights must he hold her, and when that time is done, he will bear her hunger as his own.”

Oh, no. No. They did not tell me that. It is too much. But her eyes were weighted with lead, and all had gone dark.

“We are too few already. It’s bloody fucking stupid,” Galen raged.

Something crashed nearby.

“No,” said Marceau. “It is love. And the key to all magic is sacrifice. Go now, Galen, and drink to her memory. She will not remember you if she survives.”

She felt Marceau knotting a cord around her wrist. Symbolic. It joined her to Cyrus, and offered the umbilical of rebirth.

Epilogue

Their eyes met across a crowded coffee shop.

Zane felt as though he had been looking for her his whole life. She was lithe and fair, smiling as if she knew him. It could be that she recognized his picture from the back of a book jacket, but she didn’t demand an autograph.

The thundercloud grey of her eyes took his breath away. Before he knew what he meant to do, he found himself beside her. He offered his hand and, when she took it, pleasure went straight up his arm, leaving him reeling. Breathless. He’d felt like this before.

Sometime. Somewhere.

“I’m Zane,” he said.

“Ysabel.”

And somehow, he knew, beyond remembering. Truth bore him up. It was she, the woman who had haunted him for years, who held his heart fast and would not let him go. She seemed equally transfixed, her fingers twined through his.

He kissed her, and it was right. He held her to him fiercely. She was heaven on earth, and the fear that she was no more than a figment of his imagination finally receded.

“I thought I dreamed you,” he whispered.

“And I, you.” She swallowed, seeming to have trouble finding her voice. “I do not remember everything I should, and yet I know this as truly as my own name. I have but one thing to offer you, and I am afraid you will not want it.”

“What’s that?” he asked, gently.

“My heart. Will you have it?”

“Lady,” he said in an odd, courtly tone, “I will.”

“Linden?” she breathed.

He remembered coming to her door on a rainy winter night, and how the rushes in her father’s hall smelled of rosemary. He had recognized her then, too, and tried to keep her with him at any price. That cost him her love; he was glad she had not repeated his mistake. Over the centuries he’d known many names – and known her by many as well – but this time, they came together in the way that was right, destined to live and die together.

And then, and then, they would find each other again, a circle unbroken.