Bitten By Mr. Darcy

Chapter One

“DARCY,” SAID MR. Bingley.

Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley realized, abruptly, that his friend had been saying his last name over and over, at least thrice. He turned to the other man, finally. Darcy was not really his name.

However, he really ought to be more adept at answering to it.

After all, he had been using it now for nearly a decade.

With regard to names, Darcy’d had many, and he changed one for another with regularity.

Whatever his name had been when he, long ago, had been a human child, it hardly mattered now.

He was Fitzwilliam Darcy for all intents and purposes.

“Yes, I am listening,” Mr. Darcy said to Mr. Bingley.

“You are not,” said Mr. Bingley.

“Even now, I am. You have been trying to get my attention. What is it?” Mr. Darcy realized he sounded a bit peevish.

It was the atmosphere.

He had not wished to come to the country at all.

He preferred the city. His kind typically did.

The city was quite the best place now, in the fall, when the night hours stretched out, darkness lingering later in the morning, falling earlier in the evening.

He and his kind were creatures of the dark, after all.

But no, Bingley had wanted to come to the country, and now they were at some dreadful country ball, held in a public house, and the air was smoky with candles, and the music screeched, and the room was crowded, and he would much rather be gone from this place.

What was the use of being trapped with this many humans and not being able to taste a single one of them?

At least in the city, one might nip out and find some anonymous neck to tap and drink from, someone who could be charmed into forgetting the entire experience, going on their way and never thinking of it all again. But here, in the country, the population was much sparser.

“You are in an abominable mood,” said Bingley. “Didn’t you have anything to drink before we left for the ball?”

“How could I have?” said Mr. Darcy. “There isn’t anything to drink around here.”

“Well, I won’t have it,” said Bingley, lifting his chin, looking Darcy over. “I cannot have you moping about here in this stupid manner. If you’re thirsty, Darcy, drink.” Bingley gestured around at the dance floor.

“I can’t,” said Darcy, groaning. Bingley knew very well that they did their best not to drink where they socialized.

Charming a victim worked best if the person being charmed wasn’t reminded of the thing they’d been convinced to forget.

Seeing the person who’d bitten one’s neck and drunk one’s blood over and over again had the tendency to break charms.

“Why not?” said Bingley.

“You know why not.”

“I would not be as fastidious as you for a kingdom,” said Bingley airily.

But then, that was just like Bingley. The man and his sisters took too many risks.

Not that Bingley and his sisters were really related, anyway.

They’d had the same maker, Darcy understood it, but they certainly didn’t behave as if they were siblings.

Darcy himself preferred to be solitary.

Well, much of the time he did.

Then and again, he missed the company of his own kind. This was why he was in the country with the Bingleys, he supposed. He had grown so lonely he had decided it would be worth it to subject himself to the country in the fall, of all things.

“Ask one of them to dance,” said Bingley. “Then, moving through the line of dancers, you can get the scent of each of them and decide which you would like a little taste of.” He smirked at him.

“There’s no one to dance with,” said Mr. Darcy. “You are dancing with the most handsome girl in the entire town, likely the entire county, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“She is an angel,” said Bingley, grinning at him.

“Well, you’re not going to taste her.”

“She has sisters. Quite a lot of sisters, actually.”

“Yes, I remember this from the interminable introductions we have had to go through. If we were back in London, we should already be acquainted with everyone and—”

“There’s one of the sisters,” interrupted Bingley. “That’s the second oldest, Miss Elizabeth.”

Darcy caught sight of the girl and he furrowed his brow. She was pretty, in fact, a light and pleasing figure, a playful expression on her face, and a countenance framed by brown curls. “Not handsome enough to tempt me,” he said.

Bingley laughed.

The girl, Elizabeth, turned away, a look on her face of amused shock.

Oh dear, I think I may have said that too loud, he thought. I think she heard me insult her.

“—if you take my meaning?” Bingley was saying.

Mr. Darcy turned back to him.

“You aren’t listening again.”

“Apologies,” said Mr. Darcy, clearing his throat. “But I think we are speaking too loudly. We are here going on and on about tasting and drinking and—”

“And what? Who heard?”

“The pretty sister.” Darcy was watching Elizabeth moving through the crowd, going directly for one of the other women he’d been introduced to that night, one of the Lucases, he thought.

He could not keep all of the various families straight, nor keep straight all of the girls who had looked him over with an eager gaze, thinking him human, the sort of man looking for a bride.

“Well, what did we say?” Bingley’s voice was quieter. “It might have sounded odd, but I’m rather sure neither of us said anything about…” His voice dropped even lower. “Blood.”

“I shall intercept her, question her,” said Mr. Darcy. “Make certain.”

Bingley laughed knowingly. “Oh, yes, that’s all you’ll do.”

“Charm her, if necessary, I suppose.”

“And if you’re already going to the trouble of charming her…” Bingley let out another knowing laugh.

Darcy sighed.

“Not handsome enough to tempt you, my foot,” said Bingley.

Darcy was already moving through the assembly, however, thinking to himself that perhaps loneliness was preferable to the Bingleys.

He hadn’t always known them as the Bingleys, of course, but he had known them a long time. They’d been companions, sometimes more than companions, over the interminable centuries that their kind spent together. He had a long history with them all.

Sometimes old friends were a comfort, he supposed, but sometimes they were a torment.

I’m going back to London, he decided firmly as he stepped into Elizabeth’s path. No more time with the Bingleys.

She looked up at him, surprised. “Pardon me, sir,” she said, and there was a haughty undercurrent to her voice.

“You overheard me just then?” He raised his eyebrows.

She took a step back, clucking her tongue. “If you are only apologizing because you know that you spoke too loud, I shall charge you not to bother, sir. We do not know each other, after all, and there is no obligation on your part to flatter me.”

“This is all you heard, then? Nothing else that—” He stopped talking because he had just then gotten the scent of her.

Mr. Darcy was a vampire, and his senses no longer worked like human senses.

He could smell, but the smell wasn’t necessarily like smelling what a thing actually smelled like, it was more that his brain translated the smell into something that he remembered as enticing.

He could not find any of these things actually enticing anymore, however.

He did not taste food the way he once had, for instance.

So, Miss Elizabeth Bennet smelled of cinnamon and honey, but he could not enjoy cinnamon or honey anymore.

She smelled like the sweetest thing he thought he’d ever smelled, in all of his centuries-long life, and he was robbed of the ability to form words by the scent of her.

“If that’s all then?” she said in a withering voice.

He leaned in, closer, breathing her in.

She jerked back. “If you don’t mind, sir—”

“Let’s go for a little walk,” he said.

“What?” She gave him a very odd look. “That’s highly irregular. I do not tend to go walking in the night with strange men. That you would ask such a thing—”

He took her by the arm and started walking, pulling her along with him.

He had to taste her. He was thirsty already, and the smell of her was so tantalizing that it was driving him out of his head.

He would slake this mad thirst that had risen in him and then he would charm her to forget all of this.

“What are you doing?” she said, and there was a thread of panic in her voice.

He wanted her so badly he didn’t even get her outside. He pulled the two of them out of the ballroom and into a dark corridor. There, he pressed her body into the wall and ran his nose over her neck, drinking in the sweet, cinnamon scent of her. He might have let out something like a groan.

She was breathing very fast. “Sir, if you please, let me go,” she said in a high-pitched voice.

He gently adjusted her head, tilting it to the side to give him access, and his fangs were just there, of course, right at the ready, and he sank them into her vein, and the taste of her blood filled his mouth, and—

Damnation.

He was in trouble, he knew.

She tasted far too good. He could lose control and glut himself on her if he weren’t careful.

A vampire never needed to drain an entire human body of all of its blood to survive.

Little drinks were really all that were necessary to sustain creatures like him.

So little that it barely weakened his victims. A vampire could drain and kill a human, of course, but it was rare that this happened, and when it did, it was typically borne out of this, what he was experiencing, blood madness, something that sometimes overtook a vampire when he tasted something delectable.

Must stop, he told himself. If you kill her, you’ll never have the chance to taste this again.

With effort, he detached from her, letting out a long, soft moan.

She was dazed, still breathing hard, her lashes half-lidded, but she wasn’t frightened anymore. The bite tended to have a pleasant effect on victims, after all. His fangs injected something into humans which made them feel sleepy and good. “What was that?” she whispered.

He feathered his fingers over her chin. “You are exquisite,” he said. He did something ill-advised, but he was feeling out of sorts. He leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.

It wasn’t always this way, the confusion of romantic desire with the desire for blood, but sometimes, it happened and the human victims seemed like romantic conquests. He knew that Louisa had taken her little human Mr. Hurst that way, letting him marry her and everything.

Of course, such things never ended well.

Humans lived such short lives.

One was faced with the choice of turning them, and then pulling them into this unending life of darkness and difficulty, or of watching them fade away and die.

She gasped. “You just kissed me.”

He sighed, and then he rested his forehead against hers, capturing her gaze with his, their eyes so close that the vision crossed. “Look at me, then. Listen to my voice. Are you with me, Elizabeth? Are you listening?”

“Yes,” she replied, her voice a little odd in the way that the charm affected human voices.

“Good,” he said. “You shall forget this. You shall forget that I spoke to you. You shall forget that we were alone together.”

“Forget the kiss?” she said, her voice still odd, but a bit of disappointment creeping into it.

“Definitely forget the kiss,” he said sternly.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “All right, then. I shall forget it all.”

“HOW DID SHE taste?” came Bingley’s voice in the darkness of the carriage.

The ball was over, and they were going back to the country estate that Bingley was letting.

It was called Netherfield. There were only a handful of rooms in the entire place that could be navigated safely without the rays of the sun, so Darcy hadn’t seen much of it, actually, though he could have explored after sundown.

“What is this?” spoke up Caroline Bingley. “You are out there tasting girls, are you, cor meum?”

Darcy wished she would drop that term of endearment.

She always rendered it in Latin, and it had been since before the fall of the Roman Empire that he had dallied with her.

It meant “heart of mine” and he would wager to say, even when they were lovers, neither of them had thought of the other as their heart.

“Darcy was in a mood earlier,” giggled Louisa. “I daresay he needed something to improve his constitution.”

“I was not in a mood,” said Darcy, aware he sounded sulky.

Louisa giggled more and Bingley joined in.

“Which girl did you taste?” said Caroline, her voice sultry.

“One of the Bennets,” said Bingley. “They are the clear diamonds in the rough of this little country town, I think.”

“You were dancing with one all night,” said Caroline.

“Not all night,” said Bingley. “Two dances is all.”

“That was the eldest,” said Caroline. “Which one was Darcy putting his teeth in?” She leaned forward, and he could see her smile in the scant light. “How did she taste, cor meum?”

“She was…” Darcy had the odd intention to conceal what she tasted like, but then he decided that it would be more prudent to let them all know. “She was a sirensong for me, actually. The likes of which I haven’t ever encountered.”

“Truly?” Caroline chuckled. “More than that little orange-haired thing in Ireland back during the de Courcy invasions?”

“A great deal more,” he said.

“A great deal more than that one?” said Bingley. “Are you quite serious, Darcy?”

Darcy sighed.

“Well, how astonishing,” said Bingley. A long pause. “I wonder if you ought to go back to London.”

“No, no, it’s nothing so dire as all of that,” said Darcy, who had already decided that he wasn’t going back to London after all. Elizabeth Bennet was intriguing and delicious, and he didn’t wish to go far from her at all.

“Speaking of that orange-haired girl, though,” said Louisa. “That went badly.”

“I didn’t do that,” said Darcy, huffing.

“It’s been quite some time,” said Bingley. “You may admit it now, surely, old friend. None of us would judge you. We know how it may come upon you with a sirensong. All of us have experienced it.”

“I tell you,” said Darcy, “I did not kill her.” But the truth was, it had been a near thing with that one, too close too many times.

“Yes, even so,” said Louisa, “with a sirensong, one can’t stop oneself from going back for more, and that will expose us all here.”

“Not if I’m careful,” said Darcy. “Not if I’m diligent about charming her.”

Bingley scoffed. Louisa scoffed. Because everyone knew that charming grew less effective the more often one did it to one human, and that if he was going to drink her blood again and again, she would eventually become immune to his charms.

“They are called sirensongs for a reason, cor meum,” said Caroline softly. “If you wish someone to accompany you, I shall go to London with you. We can go on the morrow.”

“I am not going back to London,” said Darcy firmly.