Chapter Twenty
Jonathan wiped sweat from his brow as he placed the last of the artifacts onto the only remaining space on his dining room table.
It had taken several trips to carry everything from the Sloan House after breaking the warding spell with his blood, but his strength and speed had been bolstered by fury.
Not at Felicity. He’d known all along that she’d never be able to guarantee him immunity.
The person with whom he was angry was himself for putting her in such a difficult position.
When she’d looked at her great-uncle in that alley, he’d seen the longing in her face, and he’d known he could not force her to choose between him and her family.
So, he’d made it easy for her.
He took a cigar from his pocket and popped it, unlit, between his lips. She was still a hunter, no matter what had come between them. He had been the one who had been distracted by the way she’d made him feel.
He chewed the end of his cigar and tried to banish her from his thoughts.
With the crucifix removed and the codex in his possession, he no longer needed her.
Helena was already hard at work translating the ancient text, having promised to inform him the moment she found anything that might ease his symptoms.
“Quite a collection you’ve gathered,” Seraphina said.
He looked up to find his nest sister examining the artifacts.
As usual, she wore a black, long-sleeved blouse that buttoned all the way to her neck and a black skirt that brushed the floor as she walked.
She flipped her long, black braid over her shoulder and picked up a tenth-century ceramic vase shaped like a satyr’s head. “We should catalog these.”
As she scrutinized the piece, he remembered how Felicity had carefully organized the items on tables in the museum. She would be heartbroken when she realized what he’d done. Her face appeared in his mind, lips twisted in dismay, eyes shining with tears.
She’d never let him get away with robbing her.
In a day, perhaps two, she’d seek him out, and because he’d been foolish enough to bring her to his haven, she’d know exactly where to start.
What would he do when she arrived at the door with her hunter family in tow?
“We have to leave,” he said.
Seraphina curled her arms around the vase as if the satyr were a dance partner and spun in a circle. Her braid swirled with her like a scarf.
“Did you hear what I said?” He snatched the artifact out of her grasp.
Seraphina sighed. “Oh, Jonathan. So innocent.”
He felt a familiar wriggling sensation in his head, like fingers had reached through his scalp. She was trying to read his mind.
“Sera, please.” He dug his fingers into his hair. “I hate when you do that. The hunters will come. We can’t stay here.”
The wriggling stopped. His sister’s irises glowed so bright that he couldn’t see her pupils. “Do you really think we’d let you play your game unsupervised? Yes, they will come. And we will be waiting.”
He should have been furious that he’d once again been excluded from whatever plan his nest had created to deal with the Sorrow family, but his failure weighed too heavily to permit any other emotion.
After demanding to deal with Felicity on his own, he’d allowed himself to become subjugated with the crucifix of St. Samuel, nearly died in a filthy alley, and revealed the location of his haven to her hunter family.
They were right to treat him like a fledgling.
“Precisely,” Seraphina said. “Now let’s see what else we have.” She returned to the table but only made it halfway through the collection before she suddenly fell silent.
“What is it?” he asked.
She lifted the dagger with the golden dog’s head.
Her eyes were wide, and when she spoke, her voice was shaky.
“Do you know what this is?” She curled her fingers around the hilt, then brought the blade to her wrist. The moment the metal touched her skin between the edge of her sleeve and her glove, a thin tendril of smoke rose and floated up to the ceiling.
Jonathan snatched the weapon out of her grip. “What the hell was that?”
She ran her fingers over the rapidly healing wound. “It’s a hunter’s blade. Do you not recognize it? It once belonged to our maker.”
Marguerite.
He held it in his hands, trying to remember if he had seen her with it before.
Nothing came to mind. The dagger was as unfamiliar to him as any of the other artifacts.
But if Seraphina was right, then he had to consider the possibility that Marguerite was responsible for everything.
The attacks, the bruises on the fledglings’ bodies, the coincidental discovery of the cane in the brothel, even the deaths of Felicity’s parents.
Seraphina twitched her sleeve back into place. “You truly believe our maker lives?”
He scowled. “Are you incapable of staying inside your own head?” He was growing weary of having to guard his thoughts whenever she was around. She should have known better than to invade the privacy of her own siblings.
“It is not something I can simply turn off,” she said. Then she stepped closer. “You think of the hunter often.”
He winced but did not reply. She would see through any lie he offered, and he was not prepared to face the truth of how important Felicity had become to him.
“Take my advice,” Seraphina said. “Stop resisting.” She tugged off her left glove, revealing a golden band wrapped around her fourth finger. “I would do anything to go back and have one more day with my beloved.”
“I’m sorry,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say.
He’d known she’d cared for her husband but hadn’t realized how deeply.
Her situation was different, though. She’d married a human who’d been unaware of her nature.
The nest had not approved of the match, but they hadn’t tried to stop her.
Felicity was different. She was a hunter and part of a family that had attempted to murder Marcus and Winifred.
He could not allow himself to care for her.
Biting her had been a mistake. He’d been so cocksure that he’d failed to consider that his own body might come to crave hunter blood.
That had to be the reason he was no longer interested in drinking from anyone else.
Seraphina replaced her glove. “Perhaps you are right.” Then she shuffled out of the room, leaving him to study the artifacts that were now free of the taint of hunters.
Restoring them to their proper owners would take months.
A week earlier, he would have been thrilled at the prospect of a mission that would occupy his time and keep him from thinking of Marguerite.
But now that he knew she’d been alive ten years ago despite his siblings’ insistence she’d died decades before that, all he wanted to do was find her and demand answers.
Mordecai had also declared that she was dead. It had to have been a lie. He would have felt it in his soul if his maker had died.
Why had she left? Had she been watching them all along? If she was also the one who had made the crazed fledglings, what was she trying to accomplish by letting them roam free?
Then there was Felicity. His feelings for her were entirely different from those he held for his maker. Marguerite’s abandonment had carved a hole in his soul, but the thought of never seeing Felicity again made his skin clammy.
A shooting pain in his hip made him double over. When it passed, he gingerly lifted his shirt and winced at the mess of bruises and oozing wounds. He could hardly go an hour without drinking blood before they returned, and each recurrence was worse than the last.
The codex was the answer. If he was going to survive long enough to find Marguerite, he needed a cure.
He limped through the house until he found Helena in the library with the codex open in front of her, her lips moving silently as she read.
A stack of paper sat next to her, filled with lines of neat text.
He picked up the topmost one. “Have you finished the translation?”
She spread her arms across the table. “No!”
He felt his eyebrows rise. “Are you sure?” He touched a corner of the codex beneath her elbow. There were only a few pages left. “I know how quickly you read.” Nearly as fast as he could run.
She turned her head away from him. “I’m sorry, Jonathan. I’ve been through it twice already. There is nothing in this book that will help you.”
Before she’d finished speaking, he was already shaking his head. “That can’t be.” He picked up the mess of her notes and tapped them into an even stack. “There must be something.”
“Jonathan…”
“No!” Darkness crept into the edge of his vision.
He clutched the stack of paper to his chest. “Thank you for translating. I’ll—I’ll check these myself.
” Then, before she could say anything else, he turned around, ran back to his bedroom, slammed the stack of paper onto his desk, and read until he reached a promising entry.
I have seen countless men and women taken by this illness.
It is a fearsome thing, striking vampires approximately fifty years after their creation, and growing worse with each passing year.
Ava is the beating heart of my world, and the other half of my soul that I did not know was missing until we met.
Jonathan scowled and skimmed through several paragraphs of the author elaborating on how much they adored their human companion.
He already knew that Felicity’s blood would heal him.
That was not an acceptable solution. She was young and healthy, but no human could survive the amount of blood he required to stave off the symptoms, nor would he ever ask her to make such a sacrifice.
A miracle happened. I have no other words to describe it. I was holding Anna in my arms, and it was like my mind expanded, encompassing both of us. She was there; our souls entwined. I know now that this is the bond that my maker spoke about.
“No,” Jonathan whispered. Bonding with a human couldn’t be the only way to rid himself of the affliction. There had to be something else. He refused to let mating change him as it had Cordon and Marcus, nor would he allow anyone to supplant Marguerite in his heart.
His fingers began to prickle as he continued reading.
Identification of a fated mate.
After extensive consultation with other nests, I have compiled a set of signs to be used by a vampire searching for their mate.
A list followed this paragraph. Jonathan was about to throw the whole damn set of papers into the fire when a line caught his attention.
An increase in libido and appetite around the compatible human, combined with a decrease in interest in consuming the blood of anyone else.
That was exactly what he’d experienced after meeting Felicity. Even now, thinking about biting another human or taking one to his bed made him queasy. Felicity was the only one he wanted. He reluctantly sat down.
A general improvement after consuming the blood of the target human, followed by a significant worsening of symptoms.
He swallowed thickly. Two confirmations in a row. Cordon and Marcus had described something similar, but Jonathan had not wanted to listen to his siblings. It was much harder to dismiss the writing of a vampire who had lived hundreds of years ago.
The mental bond that forms between the human and vampire pair is the final definitive proof.
Unfortunately, the exact trigger that results in the formation of this bond is unknown.
Several subjects have reported the emotional connection between themselves and their mates as a critical factor, but there is no scientific basis on which to test this theory.
Once the bond has formed, symptoms decrease and eventually disappear.
Every mated subject who showed symptoms prior to forming the bond has not had a recurrence.
This author is forced to admit there is some basis for confirmation of the hypothesis that mate atrophy can be cured by the identification of a compatible human donor, and the formation of a mating bond.
However, I have recently discovered a written record of a subject that makes me question my findings: a French vampire who lived more than three centuries after the tragic death of her mate.
If the record is genuine, it raises a terrible question: what manner of wretched creature would result from such a lengthy period of suffering?
Jonathan rose from his desk, approached the fireplace on trembling legs, then slammed his fist on the mantel.
So much work trying to get the codex, only for it to confirm what his nest siblings had been telling him all along.
He didn’t want to believe it, but it was hard to deny that his relationship with Felicity matched the book’s description perfectly. There was only one plausible answer.
Felicity was his fated mate.