Chapter Ten #3
His only mistake had been failing to foresee Silvio’s ascension.
Felivar had not expected the Council would make him Coven Master.
He would have been equally pleased to puppet the Marquis, but now Silvio had the entire Coven, usurping the very throne Felivar had helped create. Not even he was that greedy.
No matter. He had his flesh now.
And the new Coven Master was ravenous. Even in his dreams Emerick appeared to serve him.
Silvio ran his hand through Emerick’s hair, pushing him down while he hissed and whimpered.
The texture of his hair felt somehow wrong, curlier, messier, shorter.
Though willing and eager, his mouth had teeth that were dull.
The skin was warmer, silkier; it pulsed with life, responding to every touch.
His lover did not smell of the blood and perfumes Silvio had bestowed upon him.
Silvio blinked down at Kyrillos’s face between his palms; he lay sprawled on the bedsheets.
He pressed a finger against the young man’s cheek, drawing a muffled moan that caught in his throat.
The heart of a human beat beneath his palm.
Silvio growled and flung himself back against the pillows, a little away, enough to let his servant catch his breath.
Kyrillos looked up at him, face flushed, panting, lips swollen and inviting.
The Coven Master noted the surgical scars on the mortal’s chest, remembered kissing them, running his tongue over them, memorising their pattern before biting down. Oh, how eager Kyrillos was… and so young.
Silvio cupped his face and drew him into a kiss.
He knew what Kyrillos craved: the man’s desires were vivid in his mind, laid bare and debased.
To be fed upon and touched by the dead. And what greater honour than to be desired by the father of the dead, to be claimed by the master of the dead?
To tremble like a moth, its wings spread and pinned against the sheets, Silvio’s teeth marks on its neck, between its legs…
Within him, Felivar burned with anticipation.
How would it feel, how would a child of the Blood—his and Silvio’s—turn out?
All his previous progeny, though strong, had disappointed him.
Kyrillos was the perfect specimen, not only to Silvio’s tastes, but ripe with naivety.
The young man had grown up among vampires, served them in different households, and had now been given a taste of what it meant to be the bedfellow of thirst.
Kyrillos would agree to the prospect of immortality; he would embrace vampirism beautifully.
The challenge for Felivar lay in getting Silvio to rip the vein.
How would he make Silvio agree—agree to turn another?
How to push him to the limits of his own maddening desires and bleak intervals of sanity.
Felivar had to turn him into a vessel overflowing with thirst.
Felivar looked forward to pushing Silvio towards the precipice. Poor starved Silvio, how delicious he would be when Felivar was through with him.
He walked the halls of the Berlin Coven, followed by Kyrillos, this new pet, and the gilded mirrors echoed his steps, the reflection breaking apart, vanishing as he passed. Felivar was coming undone again. He had to think of himself as Silvio now. I have to become Silvio.
The besieger.
The deserter.
Count di Flaviari.
The Regent.
Marquis Bracci.
The Drythen.
All these incarnations of the same man. All of them bearing the weight of desire. All starving.
The thirst was savage, it maddened him. The more he drank from Kyrillos, the less it quenched, the more it ruined him.
He hungered for another.
“My consort,” Felivar—no, Silvio—hissed, eager to reclaim the last remaining part of him. The part he had unwittingly sent away.
The smell was driving him mad. Lilac and leather reminded him of the dusty tomes kept in a church’s sanctum. His gloves and clothes bore persistent traces of the perfume. The bedsheets reeked of it, slowly overwritten by Kyrillos’s human scent of blood and sweat.
The Council had wronged him, cheated him of his lover. It had been a mistake to give France to Emerick, to make him Regent. The title of Marquis had never been meant for Emerick, it did not suit him. He was Silvio’s chosen one, his closest and most cherished. The Comte. Einvala.
Silvio was going to summon him back to the Coven, strip him of titles, lands and responsibilities, and keep him by his side as consort, next to the throne, close.
But what of the French coven? Scarlett and the others were going to ask.
Let them have it, Silvio clenched his teeth.
He would not weep for Béziers, his tower of wonders.
Like all physical things, it was temporal and fragile.
Silvio could easily replicate it, here in Berlin.
This mansion was bigger. True, it lacked the thermae—his precious gift to Rico—but it had a pool, numerous bathrooms and acres upon acres of land.
Silvio’s tower was going to fall, and from its ruins he would build a maze for his lover, have him bound and sated.
The Coven was full of so many vampires to bow and serve his consort, and of so many mortals to feed and entertain him. To drown him in pleasure.