B00AO57VOY EBOK Page 17

  Don’t ask! I bit my lip and closed my eyes, trying to obey that voice in my head that knew I should leave well enough alone. I had to know, though, no matter how terrible it was. At least I didn’t have to ask out loud. Nathan knew what I needed to hear. Even if he hadn’t been able to read my thoughts, I really think he still would have known.

  “You die, baby,” he said, his beautiful voice hoarse and broken. “You never live to see twenty.”

  I made him stay right there in the back yard and tell me everything from beginning to end—after I finished having a total nervous breakdown. I pretty much had to force Grams and the others to give us some privacy, but I was finally able to get them back in the house. Somehow, I didn’t think Nathan was going to want an audience for our trip down Nightmare Lane. And a sadder story I had never heard. By the time he was finished I was completely heartbroken.

  He had fallen in love with me and watched me die three times. Four centuries—give or take a few decades—of searching for and finding fleeting moments of absolute happiness only to have it snatched away again and again. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to be on the same continent with me the fourth time. Personally, I think I would have buried myself in a cave to stay away from me.

  The first time we met I was the daughter of a French nobleman. I had been promised to someone else, but I had refused to marry him. My father hadn’t thought much of that. He had threatened me, tried to bribe me, and finally, in a fit of rage, had locked me away in my room until I agreed to be reasonable. What my dear old dad hadn’t counted on was the friendship I had formed with my maid. She helped me escape at risk to her own life and her family’s. I ran away from home and changed my name, selling my jewelry for the money to keep myself hidden.

  I had never understood how a parent could bear to do that to their own child. How do you just promise your daughter to someone without giving her any say in the matter, without even caring if she would be happy or not? And for what? More money, more land, the honor of being related to the right people with the best names and the biggest fortunes? Yeah, real sound reasons for selling off your own flesh and blood.

  I had always wondered why I felt so irritated when I read about things like that. As I listened to Nathan, though, I thought maybe it was because part of my subconscious remembered what it was like to be the one sold to the highest bidder.

  “What was my name?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I was getting into something I really didn’t want to get into. You know that old saying ‘Less is more’? Well, that saying would apply to almost everything in my life.

  “Evangelique de Benet.”

  My nose wrinkled up in distaste at that. I hoped that was my given name and not the one I had picked for myself. It was…well, not me.

  “No, that wasn’t the name you chose for yourself,” Nathan said, laughing sadly, his gaze far away. “I knew you as Simone Mercier, the name you preferred.”

  Simone? Now, where had I heard that name before…?

  “So…” I prompted him, letting my voice trail off meaningfully.

  I wanted to know what I looked like, who I’d been, how we had met. I wanted to know all of it. But, Nathan continued to stare off into the distance, his expression growing sadder by the second.

  “You were beautiful.”

  His voice was an agonized whisper and I got the impression he wasn’t really talking to me anymore. He was somewhere else, somewhere so far away that I didn’t stand a chance of reaching him. Just as suddenly, though, he was back with me. He smiled down at me, the expression so weary and pained that I wanted to hold him and make it right, but I couldn’t. Not yet.

  “You’re always beautiful,” he continued, running a finger down my cheek, “Always so delicate on the outside and so very strong on the inside. Your hair was dark then, so black that it seemed blue in some lights. Peaches and cream skin. And that amazing scent, more potent than any perfume could ever be.”

  With his description, I suddenly remembered where I had heard the name Simone. He had called me that in my dream the day he kidnapped me. Simone had been the girl in the maze. She had been the one wearing my necklace, the playful one.

  The one who’d burned tied to a post.

  “I think I fell in love with you the moment I laid eyes on you.”

  Nathan reached over and twined his fingers with mine and I jumped. I was glad he wasn’t looking at me, that his gaze was far away, watching his memories, so he wouldn’t see the fear I was sure was shining in my eyes.

  “You were dancing down the street, unmindful of your audience,” he continued, oblivious to what every word that left his lips was doing to me. “You were radiant. And that smile! It was like you had reached inside me and stolen my heart.

  “I always believed you were born to the wrong social class. A life of silence, of always watching what you said, what you did, would never have been a happy life for you. You were far too spirited for such an existence. You wanted to dance, to laugh, to argue—heatedly. More than that, you wanted to fall in love, wanted to marry someone of your own choosing whom you couldn’t live without. You were as passionate then as you are now, quick to anger and almost as quick to forgive. You were every dream I had ever had and every dream I hadn’t been creative enough to conjure. You were perfection.”

  I blushed scarlet and trained my eyes on our twined fingers. Passionate. Did that mean we had made love in that life? I hoped so, because it sure wasn’t looking like we were going to reach that point in this one.

  “I always thought I would lose you because of what I was,” he said softly, staring down at our hands. “It took me almost two months to get up the courage to tell you. I will never forget the way you looked at me. It was like you were seeing something beautiful and amazing. And then you asked me to bite you, to give you my mark.”

  “And did you?” I asked, reaching up to touch my own mark.

  “No.” I turned to look at him, startled by the harshness of his voice. Seeing this, he softened his tone and squeezed my hand. “I have my own…issues…with my mark, baby. I have never marked a human before you and I shouldn’t have done it this time.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it,” I told him with a sad smile.

  “But you shouldn’t have had to,” he whispered. “Anyway, when you realized I wasn’t going to give you what you wanted, you went out and had that cross made. You said that if I had to bear the burden of that accursed mark, that you would bear it with me. From the day the jeweler handed it to you, you never took it off.”

  He touched the cross at my throat and I reached up to hold his hand against my chest over the heart that belonged to him. I couldn’t take away the pain of his past, no matter how much I wanted to, but I could give him a future full of happiness it he would let me. I could love him enough for all of us, me and the women I had been.

  “I should have known it was never meant to last,” Nathan said, his voice turning bitter. “The damned aren’t meant to be happy, you know? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be damned.”

  “So…what happened?” I asked.

  I mean, I already knew, but I still wanted to hear the gory details. The details were important. I felt like I was on the edge of an epiphany. If I could just get all the details, I would know what to do.

  “Your fiancé finally caught up with you,” he whispered. The tormented look on his face was terrible to behold. “I had only left you for a little more than an hour to feed. I was on my way back to you when I felt it. It was like someone had reached into my chest and torn out my heart just as surely as you had stolen it. I knew then that you were gone.

  “All the light faded out of my world the second you did. It was the worst pain I had ever known. It was worse than watching Mikhail slaughter my family. It was worse than being turned and realizing I was a monster. It was…”

  He glanced over at me and saw the tears falling down my cheeks that I couldn’t hold back. Holding my gaze, he reached out and gently brushed them away with his fingertips b
efore bringing them to his own lips. I watched in utter fascination, devastated by his story and still holding it together enough to realize how amazingly tender that gesture was.

  “That fire burned half the city, but nowhere was it as hot as it was in the house you had lived in. No matter how much water they threw on the flames, they just kept burning. When they finally burned out, I found you tied to one of the support beams,” he said, closing his eyes and looking away again as he continued. “The second I touched you, you just…disintegrated right there at my feet. I fell to my knees, gathering all that remained of the only light I’d ever really known in my hands as I howled my anger, my torment, to the heavens, uncaring who might hear me.

  “I didn’t realize I had an audience until he started laughing. I never thought the bastard would stay and wait for me. I had only been a vampire for a little over four decades then, so I didn’t realize what he was. I attacked, so blinded by grief that my only thought was to make him feel as terrible as I did, to make him feel the pain I felt. But, every time I would attack, he would evade me.

  “He hadn’t stayed to fight me, baby,” Nathan said, hearing my gasp of horror. “He stayed to taunt me. He was a demon. That was the only way he could have evaded the wrath of a vampire, especially one in the kind of blind rage I was in. He made a prophecy to me that night that I would never have you. Never.”

  But, he did have me. And my guess would be that he’d had me each and every time. Honestly, I couldn’t see how anyone could resist him. God knows I had tried, but even I hadn’t been able to deny him. I would be his until the end of time. My heart and soul belonged to him. Nothing Bastian could do would change that.

  The second time we fell in love, I was a ballerina in the Russian ballet by the name of Elena Bogdanov. I had been delicate and graceful and kind of ethereal with long, flowing, blonde hair and an amazing sense of what I wanted and who I was.

  “I searched for this for years,” he said, opening his partially healed fist and staring down at the locket he still hadn’t let go of. He held the locket up so I could see it without touching it and I saw that, like my cross, it was engraved with the same trinity-heart design as the marks both Nathan and I had engraved in our skin. “I had it made for you the day before I revealed what I really was to you. I knew what you would ask and I knew I would deny you. So I gave you my mark the only way I felt I could.”

  “What happened that time?” I asked, almost whisper-soft, when Nathan stopped speaking again and dropped his head into his hands.

  “You attracted the attention of the wrong fan. You were so beautiful and you radiated such light. You were irresistible,” he mumbled, his hands making his words sound garbled.

  “I was waiting for you after your show one night and you didn’t come out when you should have. The other dancers had already left, and still I waited. Worried, I finally went inside to check on you. He waited for me to witness it that time.”

  The anger in his voice had me scooting away from him, but he laid a hand on my knee to stop my retreat. His jaw was so tight that I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t in pain and his eyes were closed again. When he opened them again, they were glowing white, his anger too much for him to hold inside.

  “You were tied to one of the props, a tree of all things, and the moment I set foot on the stage, he…”

  He didn’t have to tell me what had happened; I had seen it firsthand when Grams had given me that locket. I had burned and he had been forced to watch it. I knew he had because I had heard his agony…and the laughter of the sick, twisted monster that had lit the match.

  I shuddered as the vision decided to play out again in my mind. I’ve read about the witch hunts. When we had gone over it in History I had actually had to leave the room in tears. I had refused to go back to class until the section was complete. It was the only section in History I had ever failed. My parents had had a field day with that.

  The memory of that horrible chapter in History got me thinking, though. Had I been a witch even then? Was that why the evil, sadistic little shit kept burning me? Or had he simply known that I would be a witch eventually? I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what had prompted his actions. Maybe demons knew more than we gave them credit for. I would have to look into that.

  “What about the last time?” I asked, wanting the trip down nightmare lane over and done with. “You said we’ve done this three times before. What was I like the third time?”

  To my surprise, he actually smiled and there was a devilish gleam in his eyes when he looked back at me. Without any warning, he jumped to his feet and jogged into the house. He was back a few seconds later, holding a small square of fabric in his hands that looked like a handkerchief. Taking his seat next to me again, he unfolded it to reveal a piece of wood that had the shape of a heart carved into it and handed it to me. The edges of the wood were jagged, like it had been gouged straight out of a tree. I almost smiled at the romanticism of it all when I realized it had been.

  I peered closely at the carving in the wood and the smile that hadn’t quite made it to my lips finally reached them, even if it was a sad smile. Inside the carved heart were the initials N.A. and E.B. and one other word.

  Inseparable.

  “I met you in May of 1901. Your name was Emily Bowden,” Nathan said, brushing the hair from my cheeks. “I’ve kept that piece of wood safe for more than a hundred years. I wanted to have something to show you, a piece of our history, if I ever found you again. And now I have.”

  I stared at the carved initials in the bark, my mind working overtime. Nathan had said we had to look for patterns to unravel the mystery of our demon, and I was seeing patterns everywhere. First, the initials. My initials had always been E.B. Then, there were the ways I had died. I couldn’t seem to shake that section of History on the witch trials. I had been burned at the stake—or fake tree—twice. Coincidence? Maybe. But, I didn’t think it was. I thought it was all part of the pattern, part of the plan. I couldn’t be sure of that one yet, though. I hadn’t heard how I died the last time.

  And the demon Nathan had met the night I died the first time had made a prophecy that he would never have me. Now I was being hunted by yet another demon. If I had a million dollars, I would have bet it on the fact that the guy who killed me the third time hadn’t been any more human than the first one and I knew for sure that the second one hadn’t. Otherwise, my locket wouldn’t have ended up in a box of demon treasures.

  “So, tell me about…me,” I murmured, holding out his memento of another lifetime I hadn’t gotten to finish out.

  “You were the only child of a very wealthy rancher in Montana, spoiled to the point where it was almost criminal. You were the rudest, most pigheaded woman I had ever encountered in my life,” Nathan said, actually laughing. “I was madly in love with you from the first words that left your lips. Why, I don’t know, considering they were far from friendly.

  “You were asleep in the grass next to a stream when I first saw you,” Nathan said, taking the piece of wood from me and wrapping it back up in the handkerchief before pulling me into his arms. “You were a vision. You had taken your hair down and it was flowing around you, a veritable sea of mahogany silk curls.

  “My welcome was less than warm,” he continued, starting to laugh again. “You shot me in the leg.”

  “What?” I wailed, totally embarrassed even though I had had no control over anything my former self had done. “Please tell me you’re joking! I actually shot you?”

  “Yep, right in the thigh. I think I might still have the scar. Want to see?”

  He reached for the button on his jeans and I blushed so red that I was pretty sure the air around us warmed by ten degrees. Yeah, like he even had a scar. He was just being a perv. Vampires don’t scar. I had figured that out the day he used his own arm to prove to me that he really was a vampire. If there really was a scar, it was something he’d already had when I—well, the other me—shot him.

  Laughing, he r
emoved his hands from the waistband of his jeans and instead wrapped his arms around me again. I settled back against him, listening to the story unfold in my ear in that wonderful voice.

  “No matter how charming I was, you continued to detest me,” he whispered, chuckling softly and sending these really delicious chills down my spine. “It took me almost a month of practically stalking your every move to wear down your resistance. And, if it hadn’t been for the horse…”

  He just left that little tidbit hanging and I waited with bated breath to hear the rest of the story. When he hadn’t said anything for a few seconds, I gave him a not-so-gentle nudge with my elbow to let him know that I was tired of waiting.

  “You lost control of your horse one afternoon when you were riding,” he said, really laughing now. “Of course, it was partly my fault. If I hadn’t stepped out in front of you, it might never have happened. You might not have sensed what I was, but that stallion certainly did. No gentle mare for you, my love. You had to have the wildest of the lot. I caught you just as the damned animal bucked you off. If I hadn’t been there, you probably would have broken your pretty little neck.”

  Okay, now you have to admit that was romantic. My Nathan, always the Knight in Shining Armor. I couldn’t help but giggle at the mental picture I had of it. I could almost envision myself dangling from the saddle and Nathan smoothly catching me just as I slid off. Obviously, I have read way too many romance novels.

  “Romance novels are usually pretty accurate, if a little dramatic,” Nathan breathed in my ear, making me blush again. “That was pretty much exactly how it happened. I caught you just before you hit the ground. And, boy, were you pissed. You ranted and raved at me for ten solid minutes before I gave up and just kissed you.”

  God, I could only hope I had slapped him last time, too. I had a pretty good idea that I hadn’t, though, and his next softly whispered words confirmed that suspicion.

  “I’ve only ever had one other kiss like that, and you gave it to me the day you finally gave up and admitted you weren’t immune to me after all. In fact, if you’re interested, I’d be happy to see if we can improve on it.”