Cold Blood: Vampire's Choice 2

Cold Blood

Vampire’s Choice – Book 2

by V. M. Black

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Aethereal Bonds

AetherealBonds.com

Swift River Media Group

Washington, D.C.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

E-Book Distribution: XinXii

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All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

Book Description

Dorian Thorne’s thousand-year wait is over. The ageless billionaire vampire has finally found his consort in the form of a dying young woman named Cora Shaw.  His blood kiss heals Cora’s broken body and unites them in an eternal bond. With her, Dorian is finally complete. But far from enjoying a blissful union, he discovers that the demons inside himself are not as easily laid to rest as he had believed, and his enemies have deadly plans for his consort.

This book contains a free bonus copy of Taken: The Alpha’s Captive #1.

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Taken by the Panther

Start with Out of the Darkness

Chapter One

She had lived.

The sound of my own laughter was startling as it bounced back at me from the hard marble walls. It did not seem to belong in this house. It did not seem to belong to me. But I was drunk on relief and on the fierce sense of victory that surged up from the darkest corners of myself, and once I’d begun I couldn’t stop. I howled, cackled, guffawed as I pulled the girl’s limp body against mine.

Limp but warm. Limp but breathing.

Cora Shaw had survived, and she was cured—and I was whole.

I had thought that her mere presence had roused me from the stupor in which I was being slowly suffocated, but now that a bond was coursing between us, I realized how wrong I’d been.

Now I was living. Now I could feel. Before, there were mere echoes of sensation. Now I was awash in them, and they plunged through disused regions of my brain, making me dizzy.

Seizing control of myself once again, I grabbed her right wrist with my free hand, looking for my bond mark on it, the visible proof of what had happened. Of my possession of her. There it was, scarlet like all bond marks but unique in its shape and placement: a blood drop no bigger than a fingernail, still very faint but growing perceptibly darker with each passing moment.

My movement had tugged my own sleeve up slightly. Her bond mark’s twin was barely visible on my own wrist, peeking above the edge of my cuff.

It was something I hadn’t seen on my body in many human generations. Something I’d feared I would never see again. I felt almost sick as I eased the girl back against the chaise, as one does after realizing how narrowly one has just escaped death’s claws.

When Cora had agreed to an insanely dangerous, experimental treatment for her terminal cancer, she could not have known what she was agreeing to:  the blood kiss of an agnate, a vampire, which held the power to kill...or to cure.

My blood kiss.  Her blood gift.  My research was able to discard most potential candidates from consideration, all those for whom such a transaction must mean death.  But even with the newest screening, her chance had been a mere one in one hundred.

But she had survived.  That meant that she was transformed.  And that she was mine.

There was a sense of silent expectation in the room. My staff could not have failed to hear me, not even with the thickness of the heavy oak door between me and my nearest thralls’ active monitors. They must know something had occurred, but they were waiting as they had been trained to wait. Waiting for me to announce which step in the protocol was to be followed: the disposal of the candidate’s body in the case of failure or the summoning of the medical team in the improbable case of success.

I didn’t want to summon anyone. The idea of anyone else touching my Cora Shaw filled me with a black rage. She was mine and mine alone, and I wanted only to lock the door and stand guard over her slumbering form until she regained consciousness. And then I wanted my face to be the first that she saw, and my kiss to rouse her into full wakefulness before I pushed her back onto the chaise again and showed her exactly what it meant for her to be mine.

But I knew that way was too dangerous, especially at my age. It was the old way and something the wise agnates of the Adelphoi and Kyrioi had turned their backs on now because of its repercussions. Lazy Jean Morel might have indulged himself only a century and a half past—but that was why lazy Jean Morel spent many of his days in a study that he had claimed in my own house, drinking my wine and gambling away his cognate Hattie’s salary with the friends he called in to keep him company.

So with fierce self-control, I took out my cell phone and tapped through to Hattie’s line.

She’s alive. Those were the only words I said. The only words I could say because anything more would choke in my throat, though a thousand thoughts clamored in my head.

I could hear Hattie’s gasp over the phone. Thank God, she breathed, a rare moment of piousness from the usually worldly cognate. Instantly, her tone turned practical. The team is on standby, as always. We’ll be there in moments.

No, I wanted to say, but instead I just punched the cell phone off. It was right for them to come. It was smart. That was why we’d created the protocols, to support the new cognate’s swift recovery while gathering as much data about it as possible and keeping the bond from devouring us both. I’d already squandered precious moments of crucial early information. I should have called them instantly.

But it was all I could do to keep from hurling the phone against the wall.

As promised, Hattie arrived in a bare minute, trailed by her medical team and pushing a gurney ahead of her. The enthralled humans looked slightly stunned as they came into the room. Many of them had been gathering once every few weeks for decades, only to be sent home again without ever having left the staging area. Never having been called to treat a human after conversion, because there had been none who had survived.

Hattie nodded crisply to me as she breezed over to the chaise where Cora lay. I stepped farther back. I needed the distance to keep myself from pushing the cognate away.

Congratulations, Dorian. You managed not to kill this one, she said, but despite the dryness of her words, her tone contained her suppressed excitement. With her gloved hands, she took a compression bandage from a waiting nurse and pressed it against the girl’s throat, which was still oozing blood.

I was covered in it, I realized. It had smeared across my hands and my jacket when I picked her up.

A burly nurse slipped an oximeter sensor over Cora’s fingertip, and two frighteningly low numbers jumped onto the device’s screen as it beeped an alarm.

As long as she doesn’t bleed out, he muttered.

Another nurse slipped a mask over the unconscious girl’s face, and there was a hiss as the valve was opened to provide positive pressure.

That won’t happen, Hattie said sharply. Don’t scare her. She might be able to hear you.

Another of the doctors was trying to get an IV needle into the back of her hand. She’s got no pressure. I can’t get a vein. Are you sure we shouldn’t do a transfusion? His voice was edged with concern.

No! I surged forward, barely stopping myself before I could fling him away from Cora’s vulnerable form. The blood would not be compatible. She wouldn’t survive.

Hattie shot a quelling look at us both and took a position at the girl’s side as the rest of the team crowded around. "She’ll get through this. We always do. Ready, now? One, two, three!"

They lifted her easily together and transferred her to the gurney. I swallowed my protests—cut off the orders I wanted to give them to get away from her, from what was mine. I could have carried her slight body in one arm. I could have taken her to the medical room, full of all the state-of-the-art equipment that had never before been used, waiting for her.

But if I had touched her then, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself let her go. I would have taken her in my arms and run where no one would ever find us and no one would ever touch her again except for me....

I hung back as the team pushed the gurney past and out the door to the surgery, my head throbbing, my gut aching. I couldn’t give in. Not now. Not even when I saw that Cora’s eyes were half-open, blinking blindly at the ceiling above.

I want six milliliters of blood taken every hour, Hattie instructed. She did not even spare me a backward glance, so focused was she on her new patient. This is a historic moment, people. Let’s make the most of it!

It was the end, I realized as the door swung shut behind them. The end to all my waiting. All my aimless wanting.

But I knew even then that it was only the beginning of a new age for all of us.

***

I waited in the surgery alone after Hattie had left, listening to each of my racing heartbeats as they measured out the time since Cora Shaw had been wheeled away. My head was throbbing already; my bones were aching. And it was only going to get worse.

I should have been heading to the car that I knew was waiting to whisk me to Baltimore. But it was all I could do to force myself to stand there and not move. If I’d taken one step, it would have ended with me at Cora’s bedside. And that was the last place I should be.

It could have been a minute or an hour before the door swung open, revealing Etienne and Tiberius. The two old agnates exchanged meaningful looks, and I snarled, I’m bonded, not stupid.

At your age, there isn’t much of a difference, Etienne said flatly.

We came to help you to the car, Tiberius added more gently.

It always surprised aethers, even other vampires, to learn that Tiberius was as old as he was. The name that he used, as far as I knew, had been his first, from the age when such names were popular. He had a youthful cast to him, with his tousled blond hair and blue eyes, that defied that age, and he seemed not to accrue the hard edge of cynicism that so many of us had. Not even when he had lost his Atib.

Now in his forthright concern, he grasped my shoulders, knowing that he was one of a very few who could touch me without repercussions, and he steered me out the door.

I let my stumbling feet take me where he wished to guide me. As long as I did not think about it, I could pass through the echoing, darkened corridors down to the vast vault of the garage below the garden.

Almost there, Tiberius urged as my steps dragged.

I knew that, and that was exactly why it was so hard to move. But I still did, shuffling forward like a half-dead thing as my heart drummed ever harder and faster and my stomach clenched in rebellion—visceral, biological reactions to being taken from my new cognate while the bond was still forming.

The back passenger door to my newest Bentley sat open. Tiberius practically lifted me inside. My skin was clammy against the leather, and when I passed my hand over my face, it came away slick with sweat.