Page 2 of Eternally Theirs

“Stay with me,” she begged him. But she understood he had no choice now.

Tears poured down her face. She wiped them with the back of her hand, and it came away red with his blood.

“What have I done?” She sat up, held him in her arms, rocking him, and felt him begin to slip away.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. “Forgive me for doing to you what was done to me. It’s too late to do anything else.”

She lifted her arm, tore open the flesh of her own wrist and held it to his lips.

Immediately he began to suck, drawing her blood in. A few drops at first, then more as he pulled her back down onto his chest. She grew dizzy and knew he was taking too much. But did it really matter? She didn’t want to live like this, with what she had become.

Black spots danced before her eyes. Beneath her, she felt the strength return to his beating heart, and knew she had changed him. Forever.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her tears falling onto his shoulder. She could hear the soft splash against his skin. “Please…I’m sorry. So sorry…”

London, four months later

The music pumped like heat in Ever’s veins, hot, heavy, sinuous as a snake. He had often thought of music in this way, comparing it in his head to some sort of primal animal. Sensual. Tactile. The idea seemed to fit well there at the Midnight Playground, London’s exclusive vampire sex club, where despite the luxurious surroundings, everything was about those most basic, primal drives. The need for flesh. For sex. For blood. Where everyone, on some level, was as cool and sleek as a snake. Including him. Possibly even more so, in his case. He’d lived too many years not to be a little cold at the core. And the force of his appetites often reduced him to a purely animal being, where everything ran on instinct. He didn’t believe it was a bad thing necessarily. He’d been a vampire for far too many centuries not to accept that aspect of his nature. He still managed to maintain the small shred of control that prevented him from killing anyone. For the most part. Not that it concerned him very much. He was, after all, a vampire, and this was his club, his palace of carnal appetites in Soho’s old Palace Theater.

He loved to think of it that way—his palace—this beautiful old building that once had housed the grandest theater in London. The country’s aristocracy had watched the finest in entertainments from the gilt-edged theater boxes, among the black-and-white marble-paneled walls. And now, twenty-nine years after the fall of the monarchy, this lovely structure served the more wicked entertainments of the immortals. His kind had taken over most of the nicer homes and other structures left standing after the riots. The vampires were the only ones the street thugs and roving gangs wouldn’t dare to approach, the only ones who could safely keep what they laid claim to. Oh yes, that had been proven effectively enough in the early years of the cultural and governmental collapse happening all over Europe. The financial crumbling of the world’s economies. It was what had allowed the vampires to come out of the dark, to become known, with most of the world in too much a state of chaos to protest.

It was, finally, a rather grand time to be a vampire.

He leaned into the hard, cool marble surface of the bar and gave a sharp nod. The leather-clad bartender, a young human beauty with a gorgeous swell of cleavage over the top of her red corset, came instantly to refill his wineglass. He smiled at her, holding the fragile crystal between his fingers, rubbing at the smooth surface. Her returning smile was brilliant, full of want. She would do anything for him, this one, like any of those humans who came to the Midnight Playground. She would have sex with him, certainly, let him take the whip to her in the club’s dungeons. Drink from her. And yet, he couldn’t find it within himself to want her. Or anyone, lately.

He’d even let his latest matched set go a few weeks earlier—Franco and Julian, a pair of dark-haired Italian beauties whom he’d Turned less than a year ago. He’d sent them off to the Midnight Playground in Rome with his recommendation. He’d never parted with one of his sets so quickly, but he hadn’t been able to bear it any longer—to be with them and feel so little, not even the desire that normally drove him as hard as it did any of his kind.

He sighed quietly, sipped at the dark red wine he favored, but he barely tasted it.

Why was he so restless? Why could he no longer appreciate all life had to offer? And why did the idea of living forever in the lap of utter luxury fill him with dread these last months?

He watched the humans and vampires milling around the long, polished bar, undulating on the slick marble dance floor. Beautiful, all of them. Stunning, as only the vampires and those few humans they allowed into their space could be. Shining hair and gleaming skin. Desire so thick in the air it was palpable. But he was entirely unaffected by any of them.

He hated when he was morose. It had happened all too often of late.

And now, he was waiting for the arrival of a problem, one he’d volunteered to solve.

If he’d been capable of having a headache, he was certain his head would be pounding.

“Ever.”

A touch at his elbow and he turned to find Calam, one of his new assistants, at his elbow. Gorgeous, with his hulking musculature, his short crop of dark red hair, the auburn goatee framing his lush mouth. He’d had Calam a number of times, played the beautiful human male in the dungeons over and over. He’d been a longtime favorite. Calam’s love, Ilana, was a more recent favorite. The two of them had been the last humans he’d felt any real desire for. He adored them both, in his way, but he was beginning to feel that limitation too acutely. It bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

“Ever?” Calam asked, making him realize he’d been wool-gathering, as the English called it.

“My mind was wandering, Calam. What is it?”

“I just got a call. They’ll be arriving shortly, your new guests,” the Scotsman said, his accent giving his deep voice a lovely, rumbling edge.

“Ah. Thank you.”

“Will you see them in your office?”

Ever nodded. “Yes. Please call for Aleron. I’ll see him before the others.”

“Aleron is just getting out of his car, I believe,” Calam told him.

“Ah, so he is,” Ever said, casting his thoughts out and finding his old friend’s essence nearby. “Thank you.”

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