dose of culture shock to move between the human realm and the Vampire world.
He glanced over to the one person who was not lying about as if she were bored out of her mind. Instead, Jasmine was standing in an attentive position, looking out of the window, her legs braced apart so that the muscles were flexed, accented by the tight fit of her breeches and boots. He approached her, stepping over a couple of pairs of legs in his journey to reach her.
“Jas,” he greeted her, coming up close to her back so he could push past the tangled cloud of her black hair and follow her gaze to see what she was looking at. He inhaled the aloe and persimmon scent of her shampoo as an additive to his greeting.
“My lord,” she greeted him back, her nose twitching as she took in his scent as well. “You need a bath,” she remarked.
“Why bother until after tonight’s hunt?” he pointed out.
“A fair point,” she said absently.
“What are we staring at tonight, Jasmine?”
“Besides sloth, lust, and a variety of other deadly sins?” she asked, cocking both her head and an amused brow back toward the other occupants of the room.
“You are facing in the wrong direction for that, in any event,” he taunted her, knowing very well that Jasmine did not express her boredom in the usual ways of their people. She was a thinker. She was always contemplating far deeper issues than immediate gratification. Just like her brother Horatio, by whom she had been raised. He had declined the invitation to accompany them to England. In fact, it had surprised Damien when Jasmine had accepted in his stead.
“I am looking into the future, Damien,” she said softly, her tone giving him a chill as it joined her distant gaze out of the window. “And it occurs to me that I know why some of us go to sleep for decades at a time.”
“Why, Jasmine?” he asked, though he had lived long enough to discover the answer himself after four hundred or so years.
“To keep ourselves from going mad, I believe. Either from boredom or because the turmoil of all the species mixing about on this planet can be so complicated. It exhausts me and makes me want to sleep just thinking about it.”
“Puss, you are only fifty-four. A mere child, if you will not take that as an insult. Too young to be thinking about the hunger for entertainment in your old age, and far too young to worry about the fates of all the species crammed onto this planet.” He reached to pull back her hair, kissing her baby-soft cheek fondly and stroking an affectionate finger down the side of the flawless, youthful skin of her face. Like all Vampires, she had not aged a day beyond her full sexual maturity in her twenties. “If it makes you feel more content, however, I think I can promise to give you a good entertainment should you ever need one. All you have to do is ask.”
“Watching that ugly, freckled woman dodge men and assassins is not my idea of an amusement,” she retorted wryly.
“Ah, but there is a method to my madness, sweet.”
Damien smiled and turned to face the room. He cleared his throat and gained everyone’s attention. A couple of them even sat up in hopeful expectation.
“My time in court has been rather fruitful. There is a bit of a religious uprising taking place in France. Protestants and Catholics and the usual nonsense.”
“Oh! Are they sending young men?” Jessica asked excitedly.
“Is it an army or merely a pack of rebels?”
“Yes. You must quantify ‘a bit,’ Damien,” Lind insisted.
“Let us just say it is enough of a bit to cover up our arrival and our hunting for a good while,” he said with a chuckle. “We will leave in a week’s time.”
The next night, Damien arrived at the palace only to find out that Elizabeth was ill and would not be holding court that evening. The Prince was concerned. London, even in wintertime, was a breeding ground for terrible plagues and other treacherous diseases. Elizabeth Tudor did not strike him as the sort to get sick or the type to take to her bed even if she was. She was a feisty, stubborn thing; it was the very reason why Damien enjoyed her so very much.
The Prince took it upon himself to find another way into the Queen’s household after Robert Dudley took a bit too much pleasure in turning him away. Damien could have easily influenced him to the contrary, but he was bored with Dudley’s ideas of what constituted a play for power.
He made his way with unerring surety to the wing that housed Elizabeth’s personal quarters. He came close enough to the worried whispers and scurrying going on around the Queen’s chambers to listen for what information he could get, using both the perception of their speech and the divination of their thoughts to construct a full picture of the situation. Once he was certain Elizabeth’s illness was minor and she would soon be well again, he would leave, gather his entourage, and head for the battlefields of France, where a number of new entertainments awaited them.
It only took him a moment to realize Elizabeth was not going to be all right at all. In fact, she was probably going to die before the night was over.
She had contracted the deadly smallpox.
Damn lethal nuisance of a disease, Damien thought angrily.
He left the wall he had been leaning against and quickly moved across the room. No one stopped him because no one was even aware of his presence. He walked right into Bess’s bedroom and marched over to her bed, thrusting the curtains aside impatiently. He looked down on her, frowning with furious disgust. She looked weak, so deadly pale…almost as if she was not even the same woman who had laughed, danced, and flirted with him the night before.
There were two women sitting watch very close to the bed, and Damien turned to them. He held each by the chin for a brief moment, staring hard into their eyes until he had sufficiently manipulated their thoughts and perceptions. Then he turned back to Bess, kneeled on the bed with one knee, and scooped her up against the support of his chest. She lolled against him like a limp china doll as he shoved back the tangles of red curls covering her neck.
Then he reared back his head for a moment, fangs stretching and flexing out of his mouth with a wicked, sharp gleam for only a second before he drove them into the throat of the young English Queen.
The Vampire Prince felt her blood, superheated with fever, flowing over his tongue. He had not hunted earlier, so there was that sudden pleasure of the release of hunger that always came with the first infusion of prey blood.
Despite her illness and fever, Elizabeth reacted to his intrusion. She groaned softly, reaching blindly to grasp the arm banded tightly around her ribs beneath her breasts. He could not ignore the stroke of her fingers as they brushed over the fine hairs on his arm, and the twist of her body against his chest and thighs. The stimulation enhanced the pleasure of his feed, just as the act of nourishment always brought out the instinctual sensuality of the prey. The only thing that could have made it sweeter would have been fear or rage or anything that pumped a human full of the spice of adrenaline just before the skin was pierced.
She was already weak, so he did not take his fill. Nowhere near it. But he kept his mouth over the wound he had made. Her carotid pulse beat madly against his tongue, sweeping the effects of his second bite into her throat as his fangs injected her with the clotting agents that were stored within them, just as venom is delivered through the fangs of a snake.
