Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
JULIAN
Whatever Maris is thinking about is big. She frowns and stares down into her wine. The pinched look on her beautiful face makes me forget all about my plans to go upstairs after she’s eaten and track down the squatter on the second floor.
“What is it, Maris?”
Her dark eyes come up to mine. “Have you ever been in love, Julian?”
Her question surprises me and it’s tricky work to surprise a vampire. Of course Maris would be the one to do it.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Once.”
“When?”
“1730,” I answer her without hesitation.
“Were you human then?”
I nod and pour myself a healthy glass of wine.
If I’m going to revisit my human life I’m going to need to get loaded.
My life wasn’t a happy one. “Yes, I was. 1730 was the year I was turned,” I add because I know it’ll come up.
When Maris does the math, she’ll wonder and she’ll ask again.
I’d rather get this shit over all at once.
Besides, there’s no real way to discuss my transformation from human to vampire without mentioning Claire.
She’s the entire reason I was turned.
Maris swallows hard. “Oh. Did you-I mean, were you together with her?”
I nod and drink half the glass of wine in one go.
“We were married.” Maris stays silent. She’s processing that.
Fair. It’s been three centuries and I’m still fucking processing it.
“Claire was the daughter of a nobleman and I was an artist. When I met her, France was in the throes of debauchery. The old King had been dead for over a decade and everyone had lost their minds with the freedom of it. The Sun King ran a very strict monarchy. War after war after war and the taxes to go with it. Absolutely no fun at all but the aftermath?” I grin and sigh wistfully, “It was a pure and adulterated decadence.” I tell her.
The Age of Enlightenment is what we called it, the history books too but I always remember it as an awakening.
Every desire and urge a person had was encouraged.
Life had been structured and severe under the old Louis, grandeur and ceremony had weighed us all down until life felt like a carefully directed play.
His death changed all of that in France.
I met Claire at a salon, the pretense of deep philosophical conversation in the setting of an intimate space, but it was really an orgy.
“The Sun King?” Maris’s brow furrows but a moment later her eyes widen when she gets it. “Louis the Fourteenth? You’re French.”
I’m lucky Maris is smart. What if the fates had chained me to an illiterate? That would be hell.
I incline my head. I don’t say anything stupid like ‘oui’ because this isn’t a hokey period drama, and I’m not French anymore, I was only French when I was alive. “I was,” I correct her. “I haven’t been for a very long time. Just like I’m not an artist anymore.”
“What kind of artist were you?”
“A painter. I worked at Versailles like we all did when I was younger. Moved on to teaching the Académie after.” I take another deep drink of my wine and immediately start refilling it.
“I met Claire at a party. It was love at first sight. We were married a month later,” I say, opting to leave out the orgy aspect of my meetcute with Claire.
Best not to go too much into the particulars of my first wife in front of my last.
“What happened? You said you were turned that year…is she a vampire too?” Maris asks, looking around like she thinks the ghost of Claire will appear suddenly and attack her. Claire would never do such a thing. Not even her ghost. She was gentle.
I shake my head. “No. She’s dead. Claire died two months before I turned.”
Maris puts her hand on mine. “I’m sorry, Julian.”
I lift her hand to my lips and brush a kiss across her knuckles.
“It’s long in the past. Another life. No reason to be sorry.
I was plenty sorry as a human. Everything I built with Claire, the home, my title and position at the Académie, all of it, I lost in those two months.
I was inconsolable. Half-mad. A sad, dirty, drunk. Gutter trash.”
“Julian…”
Maris sounds sad. She shouldn’t. Not for me.
“That’s how Rosanna found me. Passed out from a night of drinking and out of my mind.
She wouldn’t have come across me at all if I hadn’t passed out in the graveyard.
I went there because it was quiet. I could sleep off the bottle of gut rot I’d drank and no one would bother me.
No one went to the graveyard at that hour, or that's what I thought.”
“Rosanna is your maker?”
“Now where did you pick that term up?” I ask her with a smile. “A movie?”
Maris blushes and ducks her head. “Yes, but what else am I supposed to say? Your vampire mom?”
I laugh. “Never refer to anyone as a vampire mom. I beg you.” I lean in close and kiss her neck.
Her skin is soft and warm and the pulse of her blood beneath my lips sends a rush of need through me that goes straight to my dick.
I take a slow and steadying breath to keep myself from laying her back on the floor and fucking her.
I’m supposed to be giving her my origin sob story, not my cock.
There’s time for that later.
Maris leans into me when I kiss the spot beneath her earlobe. “Then what do you want me to call her?”
I nip her flesh and lean back to look at her. “Maker was right. I’m only teasing you.”
Maris’ eyes are bright, her pupils blown wide. She’s just as aroused as I am. She takes a deep breath and clears her throat. “Okay, then Rosanna was your maker?”
The second I’m done with this tale I’m going to fuck her.
“Yes, she was. She was there to feed. She’d lured two coachmen into the graveyard with the promise of pussy and coin. They were drunk, an easy mark, but even if they weren’t they wouldn’t have been a match for Rosanna.”
“She’s strong then?”
“Very, but crazy,” I tell her. “The second she saw me passed out in front of a crypt she changed her mind and changed me instead. Those coachmen were my first meal. She and I spent the better part of two hundred years together until I got sick of her shit. Remember what I said about crazy? She’s unpredictable.
I got tired of having to run from mobs to cover her sloppy decisions and struck out on my own.
I began studying medicine after I left.”
“Where is she now?”
“Seattle,” I tell her.
“Seattle? But that’s so close and-,” Maris stops and because my wife is smart, I know why. She’s working out the logistics of my arrival into town, “but you came from Seattle.”
“I did.”
“So you’re still in contact with her?”
“Sadly.”
“I thought you said you went out on your own.”
I move closer to Maris and brush her hair over her shoulder before I press my nose to her neck and breathe her scent in deeply. The florals and lemon of Maris work into my system as I speak.
“Vampires aren’t like humans. There’s no leaving your maker behind, they’re always there, inside of you. Even though I left, Rosanna always knew how to find me. From time to time, she does when the mood strikes her. She found me in Seattle this year.”
“Is that why you left and came here? Because of her?” Maris turns to look at me. I feel the graze of her chin against my cheek when she does.
I lift my head to look up at her. “Yes. I hate her.”
Maris nods. “Then we won’t talk about her anymore,” she says and lifts a hand to run her fingers through my hair. “She doesn’t exist.”
I lean my head on her shoulder, close my eyes and let her comb her fingers through my hair. “As much as I want to say she doesn’t, she does. At least for now. The Varcolacus will no doubt give her the Final Death for her last antic.”
“The what?” Maris bumps me with her shoulder to make me open my eyes. “What the hell is that?”
“Vampire Council. They run our world, run the human world too as a shadow council, but that’s more of a need to know thing. Rosanna made the mistake of being too greedy and attracted the wrong attention. She’s their problem now.”
“Shadow council? This is...alot.”
“You find the prospect of a shadow council to be a lot but not me being a vampire? That’s progress from earlier. I’d say we’re moving in the right direction, wife.”
Maris turns towards me and puts her glass of wine down beside my empty one. I can hardly feel a buzz from alcohol unless I’m drinking it from someone but miraculously I feel the wine tonight. I pick her glass up and down that too while Maris talks.
“People always claim there’s some Illuminati group running things, or lizard people, so a vampire council-”
“The Varcolacus,” I correct. “They’ll want you to know that when you’re turned and address them.”
Her face pales. “I-I have to meet them.”
“If you decide to become like me. Yes. A fucking racket is all it is. They want money and assets from the newly turned.”
Maris looks nervous. She bites her lip and looks down at her clasped hands. “What do you mean money and assets?” she asks, eyes on her hands. I reach for her but she’s like stone beneath my fingers.
What is going through her mind?
“They name a fee for entering our world. They call it Praes. It can be many things depending on the fledgling. Usually, it’s whatever the fledgling might have that the council finds useful or rare.”
Maris sits up tall and looks around her house before she looks at me. “Would Vesper House be something like that?” she asks and I understand the look of worry on her face.
“Yes, it would.”