Her Last Words [The Pacts Series] Page 6

  So cruel, too, sometimes.

  He held on to his resolve as he carefully checked her ribs, and kept his touch strictly about her healing. He couldn't tell whether she was fully healed; if her arm was any indication, she probably would need to remain bandaged.

  "You had three broken ribs as far as I could tell, maybe more. Do you want to keep the bandages a little longer?"

  Her headshake was answer enough, and he didn't insist when she reclined again. Wrapping that bandage around her again would have been torture for him. And speaking of torture...

  "Hungry?"

  Almost without conscious thought, he drew the sheet to cover her and noticed her frown at his actions. She didn't reply for long seconds, to the point that he wondered whether he had spoken aloud or not. Finally though, she nodded, and he presented his wrist to her. As a Childe, he had always offered her his neck; doing so now would have been too hard, which was why, even though she was conscious, he preferred to give her his wrist. Ritually, it was from their wrists that Masters fed their Childer, and he wondered if Gabrielle had picked up on the significance of his gesture.

  She might have, because she bit hard, almost angrily, and took very little blood from him, as though reluctant to do so. It was this, more than anything else, that made him look back after he had walked away. If she didn't want to rely on him, he certainly wasn't going to impose his presence on her.

  "Can you stand?"

  He watched her, immobile, as she tried and succeeded.

  "Good. I've got places to be. Can't stay here when you can take care of yourself."

  Keeping his eyes on Gabrielle's face, Erik waited for an answer, for a plea, a request not to go. Nothing came, and he simply nodded, trying to hide his disappointment and berating himself for even feeling disappointed. He had known it would end this way, hadn't he?

  "Right then. I'd better be going."

  Blinking away the tears he refused to let come to his eyes, he turned around and walked out of the room. He only stopped in front of the door, one hand on the handle. Gabrielle was going to be fine, he repeated to himself. She didn't need him by her side to heal fully, and if she wanted to be dust, she would eventually manage to do it, whether he was there or not.

  It didn't matter that Erik was lonely enough to long for the sunrise again himself. It didn't matter that he had missed Gabrielle so much, hated her so violently, loved her even harder. It didn't matter, because he didn't matter to Gabrielle. Deluding himself into thinking otherwise was simply begging to be hurt once more. He wouldn't stay here only to have Gabrielle walk out of his life. Not again.

  Shaking his head at his own stupid hesitation, he took a deep breath, breathing in the scent of his Sire one last time, and walked out without a look back.

  Chapter 7

  Moonlight pierced the light clouds, and Gabrielle's gaze was drawn to the suddenly bright head in the middle of a group of patrolling humans a little ahead of her on the road. She only realized she had urged her horse to a trot when she was already halfway to them. But then the blonde girl laughed, head thrown back, and the illusion shattered. She gave the group of young people a last glance, deemed them safe as long as they would remain together, and directed her horse on another path. The night was still young, the predators, humans and demons alike, still in need of being found and dealt with.

  Her spirit was heavy as she let her mount choose its way; it always was when a sound, a flash of blond hair, the blue-gray of a sharp eye made her think of Erik.

  She had last seen her Childe ten months earlier, as Erik had walked out of her home without so much as a word of goodbye. She had hoped in the days, the weeks that had followed that Erik would be back, that his leaving was just a flare of temper, a revenge of sorts for Gabrielle doing the same to him so long ago. She had hoped, and her hope had sustained her, allowed her to keep fighting, keep living, keep searching, night after night. Keep searching for the one person who knew her, what she had gone through, what she had lost. The one person who could understand her, and whom she could understand. But even though she had acquired a horse to cover more ground as she looked for him, even though she had approached more humans in these few months than she had in the previous decades to ask them if they had seen Erik, she had found nothing but blank stares.

  She had eventually stopped asking. Had stopped hoping. Had tried to stop thinking about what had happened, what she could have said to convince Erik to stay. There was probably no answer to that. They had a history far too long to be solved with a few words. It had all started with the way Gabrielle had chosen him as her first Childe and, to her own shock, fallen in love with him. It had continued as she had lived many happy decades with him always at her side, even when she had made more Childer. The end had come when she had finally realized she had to let him go and become a Master, create his own clan. He would never have listened to her if she had said it that plainly, and so she had found another way, and chosen someone else to share her bed. She had known she would hurt him by doing so, and she had in truth hurt herself just as much, but the break had allowed him to start looking beyond their clan. He had slowly distanced himself from her, then from her other Childer, and started hunting demons on his own. He had even found a human lover, in time, and Gabrielle was sure that, if the girl had survived their last battle, she would have been the first of Erik's Childer when he left the clan's lair for good. Gabrielle had often wondered what would have happened to Erik and to the girl if, as a last caprice, she hadn't demanded her first Childe's presence at her side for the spell that had freed the Primal Forces and the battle that had followed.

  As much as she could, she tried to avoid thinking of that battle, but the memory popped in to the front of her mind with frightening regularity. In the first years, she had dreamed of it every day, had relived the battle, the deaths, and awoken with the shouts and screams still ringing in her ears. The nightmares had slowly become less frequent, less vivid over the years, and she had been grateful. But since she had seen Erik, they had resurfaced, and were becoming more and more regular. She wasn't sure how long she would be able to endure it all now that her hope had faded again. What she knew, however, was where her life would end once she gave up.

  Never, since it had been destroyed when the Primal Forces had turned against her, had Gabrielle gone back to the village that had been the first to take her as Master. It had been ravaged by both demons and the Primal Forces that should have stopped them.

  When the anniversary date was close, like now, she invariably felt the need to return there, but she resisted it. She would return to the village, some day and she would wait for the sun there. It would be a fitting grave.

  There, she had fought, survived, and lost so much, more than she could afford to lose. What was left of the village was hers, somehow, her legacy, but she didn't want to, couldn't go there alone to pay her respects, not until her final night, nor could she go with anyone who hadn't shared the experience. That only left Erik. And Erik was nowhere to be found.

  And again—always—her thoughts were back to Erik. Was her Childe even still alive? His attitude—so cold, so distant even as he had saved Gabrielle's life—reminded her of herself. Loneliness, despair, and no prospect of anything getting better as day after day, decade after decade passed without changes other than the world disintegrating around her.

  "Mistress Gabrielle?"

  She tensed at hearing her name pronounced aloud. She couldn't remember the last time she had told someone what she was called. She couldn't remember either when she had last been given her title. Only those vampires who had met her before the battle knew her name, and there weren't many of them left. Stopping her horse and directing it to turn toward the voice, she discovered a girl who looked as if she had barely reached seventeen, dressed in the red and white robes of the humans who practiced magic.

  "Do I know you, child?"

  The girl's heart was beating faster than was normal and she held herself quite stiffly on her horse
, yet there was no scent of fear coming from her, merely a sense of deep determination.

  "No, you don't. But you know the Master of my village. He is Master Lukas, from the northeast clan.” She waited for Gabrielle's slight nod of recognition before continuing. Lukas and she had the same Sire, and he had gone to establish his own lair a good century before she had. “My name is—"

  Gabrielle cut her short. She wasn't interested in the child's name, or in anything the girl had to say, really, but she figured she would be left alone once she had allowed the girl to tell her why she was there.

  "What do you want?"

  The child let out a dry laugh that reflected the hard glint in her dark eyes; her body was young, but she seemed to have lived beyond her years.

  "I want you to fix what you destroyed,” she said flatly. “Because of what you did, humans are being chased and treated as slaves or food. Sooner or later, we'll be extinct and..."

  Gabrielle's mind shut off at the words, like her eyes, shut tight, and her hands closed into fists on her reins. Did the girl really think she didn't know all that? Wasn't she thinking about it enough already, and regretting that decision every day and every night?

  "How ‘bout you listen to what the child has to say before you take a nap?"

  Shock hit Gabrielle like a bucket of icy water, and she opened wide eyes to find Erik coming closer, his horse stopping next to the girl's. She had been so focused on the human, she had not even noticed her Childe. Before Gabrielle could make eye contact, the girl leaned over to lightly punch Erik's shoulder, drawing his attention to her.

  "I'm not a child, old man,” she protested, but the faintest smile drawn on her lip was proof enough that they were teasing each other.

  Gabrielle felt as if she was about to be sick, a very odd sensation for a vampire. Erik was here. He was back. After all of these months of Gabrielle searching for him, he had come back. With a lovely young woman who seemed to have the same feisty spirit his human lover had had, two hundred years earlier.

  "I don't want to hear about it,” Gabrielle said blankly, directing her horse with her knees to turn away from them. “Whatever it is, I don't care."

  "You don't care?” the girl repeated, raising her voice. “You turn the world into hell, you cause the death of almost every single member of your clan and..."

  "I warned you,” Erik growled. “Do not bring them into this."

  "And what do you suggest..."

  The two of them continued to argue, but Gabrielle wasn't listening; she refused to listen. She pressed her mount harder, never looking back. What was the point of fighting, again and again, the same battles?

  She had already lost this one.

  Chapter 8

  + Two hundred years earlier

  For months now, Gabrielle had been watching her favored Childe with different eyes. She tried to see, in him, the same young man she had sired more than a century and a half earlier, but the more she tried, the more she realized how much he had changed. She had known it would happen; she had just hoped it would take longer than that.

  Sunrise was close, as she and five of her Childer rode back from battle, but they didn't need to hurry, the lair was only a few minutes away. They had been chatting like excited children when they had gone out to hunt that evening, but now they rode in near silence. The night had been long; together they had cleared a demon camp farther inside Gabrielle's territory than had ever happened before. The demons had been becoming more daring and unstable for years, but this was downright worrying. Gabrielle was both impatient and anxious to hear from the other clan members that had gone out to hunt that night, to see if they had found demons in such numbers and so deep within her territory, too. Something would need to be done about the situation, and soon. She had started thinking about old legends that might have a truth to them, but so far only had the mere beginning of an idea, nothing that she could call a plan.

  While earlier she had been leading the group, she was now riding behind her Childer, where she could keep an eye on them, and she could not fail to notice the way Erik went from one of the Childer to the other, sharing a few words with all of them, praising them for the way they had fought, or pointing out a flaw in their technique that could have proved deadly. It was only when he pushed his mount closer to Diana's, riding as close to her as he could and extending his arm to her, that a realization struck Gabrielle. He was acting as Gabrielle would have herself, had she not been so preoccupied with the demons’ attacks.

  Diana was the one amongst them who had been the most badly hurt tonight, when a demon's horn had speared her side before she could kill the beast. Someone had bound her side with a crude bandage before they had started riding again so she wouldn't lose too much blood while she waited until they reached the lair to ask one of the older Childer for blood; she could even have waited for the humans from the allied villages to bring their tribute the next day. But as far as Gabrielle could tell, before she had even asked, Erik had offered his wrist to her.

  Childer didn't share blood that way. Masters did. And by acting like this, more obviously than ever, Erik left Gabrielle no choice.

  The rising day, she decided, would be the last they would spend together. She had delayed it as long as she could, but now it was time.

  Still, even after having made that decision, she kept delaying. She took her time, once they reached the lair, gathering reports from the three other groups that had gone hunting, and even offered blood to two of her younger Childer who had been badly hurt. Her blood would help them heal faster. She had twenty-two Childer now, enough to keep her territory and its villages safe, but she couldn't afford to leave too many of them at the lair to heal while the rest of them went out to hunt.

  When at last she entered her bedroom, Erik was already in bed, clearly waiting for her. A fire was roaring in the fireplace, warming the air and her skin as she undressed, but it was nothing compared to the heat in his eyes. Any other night, she would have joined him right away and fucked the stress of the battle out of the two of them. This night, though, she took her time, using the water that had been put to warm by the side of the fire to clean the dust and bloody scratches that marred her skin. And all the while, she could feel her Childe's eyes on her, as passionate and loving as they had ever been.

  His fist was loosely stroking his cock when she finally joined him, and she shook her head when he let go to reach for her.

  "Don't,” she requested, forcing a smile to her lips. “Just show me how gorgeous you are when you come, Childe."

  The amusement in his voice was clear, even as he answered with a perfectly polite, “As my Sire wishes.” If anyone other than him had talked to her like this, they would have learned their place in an instant. Maybe it was her fault, if she had to let him go so fast. Maybe she had hurried things by giving him too much freedom.

  Kneeling on the bed by his side, she watched him pleasure himself, her gaze sometimes following the hand that stripped his cock in a fast pace that she knew he wouldn't be able to sustain for long, sometimes drifting to his other hand where it alternated between stroking his balls and coming up to scratch at his flat nipples. She hadn't exaggerated, when saying he was gorgeous. His body was arching under his own touch, a melody of motions made even more beautiful by the shadows and light the fire cast over him. The whole time, his eyes remained on her, and it was finally with a word of her, the last order she intended to give him, that he came with a sigh.

  Lying next to him, she kissed his face and lips as he slowly drifted down from his pleasure, and caressed his body lightly, barely brushing the back of her fingers to his cock until she could feel it respond under her touch.

  Oh, how she would miss him...

  Her awareness and his ignorance that it was the last time they would make love made every caress, every kiss bittersweet. Gabrielle tried to learn one last time everything that was him, as their bodies danced with the familiarity given by thousands of nights and days spent together. She tried to
fix in her memory the feel of his hand, sliding from her neck, over her breast and down to the apex of her legs; calluses from wielding a sword, and strength, but always so much gentleness. She tried to capture, also, the way he kissed her, her mouth or her skin, but had to give up on that; every single one of his kisses was different and unique. She memorized the way his body twitched under her caresses, the way his nipples peaked as she ran her thumb over them, the way his cock pulsed in her hand or seemed to complete her so perfectly when, at last, she stopped torturing the two of them and guided him inside her one last time. Then it was too late to try and remember, and all she could do was feel.

  They had fucked thousands of times since she had turned him; they had made love even more often than that. But this last time felt like the first, all over again.

  Afterwards, he fell asleep with an arm draped over her, and his cheek pressed to her shoulder. For the best part of the day, she remained awake, thinking on how lucky she had been to find him; few Sires kept the same Childe as a favorite for so long. Few were as blessed as she had been.

  When the time came to go out and hunt, the next night, she sent Erik with another group. They had fought separately before, and he didn't question her. When she returned to the lair before him, she chose another Childe practically at random and took him to her bed. That was a first, and all of those present in the lair when she made her choice stood still in shock until she had closed the door behind her and her soon to be lover. She had no doubt that Erik would be informed as soon as he returned, and although she expected him to enter her bedroom and demand an explanation, he didn't, nor did he say a word when she came out of her room to feed by mid-afternoon.

  She sent him to fight with another group again that night, and this time, he reacted, the surprise in his voice battling the hurt in his eyes. She refused to listen. They slept apart again.