The Vampire’s Guide to Wooing a Scholar (Fated Vampire Mates #2)

Prologue

“What do you mean, you’re leaving?” Marcus Deville asked as the Turkish rug beneath his feet seemed to pitch and heave like the deck of a ship. He couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly.

The black-veiled woman standing in front of the smoldering fire in his drawing room rolled one of her billowing, gray silk sleeves up to the elbow, revealing pale skin mottled with deep-purple bruises. “I must.”

Marcus sucked his teeth. “Who did that to you?” He would track them down and rip out their still-beating hearts with his bare hands. Despite all the terrible things Marguerite de la Valencia had done to him over the decades, he loved her as much as he resented her.

She restored her sleeve, then crossed the room and cupped his cheeks with ice-cold, skeletal fingers. “No one, my dearest.”

His eyes burned with unshed tears as he took in the pallor of her face, her sharp cheekbones, and her sunken eyes. She’d once been so beautiful that emperors and kings had clamored for her attention. Now she looked like she belonged behind a glass case in a museum.

“Tell me what to do,” he said in a hoarse voice.

She lifted her veil and pressed her lips to his forehead. “There is nothing to do.” She pulled back and ruffled his short, light-brown hair. “Do not make the same mistake as I have and let atrophy consume you.”

He swallowed past a lump in his throat. His maker, the woman who had been his lover and then his closest companion for more than a century, was dying, yet still she clung to her ridiculous stories.

She used her long, hooked nails to pluck a stray thread from the shoulder of the black, linen suit jacket his valet had selected for the evening’s entertainment at the opera.

“My sweet, logical Marcus.” She toyed with the fabric of his snowy-white cravat.

“There is nothing I could say that would convince you to begin searching for your mate, is there?”

Her voice was calm, but the way her green eyes deepened to a vibrant blue betrayed her growing anger. She was the dominant vampire in the nest and more than fifty years older than him. Even in her weakened state, she could kill him with a snap of her fingers.

He didn’t care. Her fury at his insubordination was preferable to this unusual, almost-oppressive level of affection.

“There is not,” he said. He would admit she was afflicted by some manner of illness that had stolen much of her strength over the past year, but the idea that the only cure was to find and form a bond with the singular individual who was fated to be her mate was absurd.

Fate had no place in the orderly, scientific world.

She unpinned his cravat, tugged it from his neck, then wrapped it around herself like a scarf.

“You will believe, in time. I have already seen it.” She twirled around the room with her arms spread.

“She is a lovely woman, your mate. I could not have chosen a better match for you. I only wish you did not have to suffer so much before you find her.” She sauntered over to a table, removed the stopper from a crystal decanter filled with thick, red liquid, and sniffed.

“Animal again?” She pursed her lips. “Do you have anything more appetizing?”

He did not dignify her ominous premonition or her question with a response.

First, she was always speaking in riddles, but nothing she had “foreseen” had yet come true.

Second, she already knew the answer, even if she’d never understood his resistance to drinking from humans.

Vampires, she often said, were predators.

A wolf did not ponder the ethics of killing a sheep.

Except he had never wanted to become a wolf.

She had thrust his condition upon him without his consent, turning a pacifist blacksmith into a soulless creature that had unceremoniously snuffed out the lives of dozens of men, women, and children in his village before his fledgling bloodlust had faded.

Not that she cared. The few times he’d expressed his remorse and anger that she hadn’t stopped his murderous rampage, she’d only laughed and called him sentimental.

“Please don’t do this,” he said. Begging her not to abandon him and his siblings was pointless—once she made a decision, she never changed her mind—but for the sake of his siblings, he had to try.

The bond between maker and fledgling was stronger than parent and offspring.

When others of their kind realized what had happened, there would be immediate petitions for Marcus’s siblings to be absorbed by competing nests, as if they were spoils of war.

To face those challenges and prevent his family from being torn apart, he would have to become as cold and ruthless as his maker.

She pranced back into his arms and took his hands. “Dance with me.”

“Think about Jonathan,” he said as he led her through the steps of a waltz. There was no music, but neither of them needed it after spending hundreds of hours in ballrooms across Europe. “He can’t survive without you.”

Marguerite had made five vampires after him, but young Jonathan was still dependent on his maker for feeding.

Marcus feared what would happen when the rest of his family learned what she planned.

Her icy detachment had united them for more than a century, reinforcing the strict hierarchy necessary for seven vampires to live in close proximity while also projecting an aura of strength that other nests feared.

Which made her current passivity even more unsettling. He would have preferred her to slice him apart with her nails or order him to walk into the sun. Instead, he was cradling her fragile frame as they danced beneath the flickering lights of a dusty chandelier.

She rested her head on his chest. “I am tired, Marcus. I wish to rest.” She yawned. “You will watch over your brothers and sisters for me, won’t you?”

He cupped the back of her head. “Of course.”

She exhaled a soft breath, then sped out of the room in the blink of an eye.

Hours later, as he sat in a leather chaise drinking his fifth glass of wine, the double oak doors flew open and his younger brother staggered inside.

Cordon’s loose, brown hair was in disarray, his black, silk shirt was untucked, and he was missing a shoe.

He was the third-eldest in the nest, but Marcus had never seen him look so devastated.

“She’s gone,” Cordon whispered. “Our maker is gone.”

Marcus’s first instinct was to rush across the room and envelop the taller man in his arms, but if the nest was going to survive, he would have to give up being the soft-spoken older brother who was always available for a reassuring smile and a hug.

As the new head of the family, he needed to remain firmly in control.

Then his siblings’ vampiric natures would urge them to fall in line, order would be restored, and the risk of another nest declaring war on them would fade.

“I know,” Marcus said.

Cordon ran a hand through his hair. “What are we going to do about Jonathan?”

Marcus swirled his wine around his glass. “We tell him the truth. There is no other option.”

Tears dripped down Cordon’s cheeks. He removed a scarlet handkerchief from his pocket and wiped them away. “I will do it.”

Typical Cordon, always taking responsibility. Marcus was glad he was the eldest, as he couldn’t imagine Cordon bearing the burden of authority. He would surely have taken every minor problem in the nest on his shoulders until he buckled beneath the pressure.

“No,” Marcus said sternly. “That is my duty now. I will awaken him at sunset.”

Then Jonathan would be less likely to go after Marguerite and they would have time to calm him down before sunrise. If it became necessary, Marcus could restrain him with blood shackles, but he did not enjoy using his power over his siblings. They were not a military unit.

They were a family.

And he intended for it to stay that way.