A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(8)

“Power, of course. To know oneself, one’s limits and abilities, is its own power. To know how one may best subdue another with similar abilities is another.”

My heart lurched in my chest. Your words were like splinters of light through the darkness of a tomb, the promise of life in the world outside.

“Another? There are others like us, my lord?”

You hadn’t mentioned others. You spoke of us as though we were the only two creatures like us in the known world, like we had been hand-picked by fate to meet.

“There are never only two of any species. Consider how I sired you, Constanta. You have experienced firsthand how we are born.”

“Does that mean I could sire another?” I said, pressing my hand to my abdomen in shock. An old habit, associating birth with a womb. But it wasn’t childbirth I had in mind.

You gave me one of your surveying glances.

“No, little Constanta. You are too young, your blood is too weak. It would take a thousand years for you to even be able to make an attempt. It’s a weighty power, siring. Best to leave it to those who can manage the responsibility.”

My head was swimming with so much new information, crowded with questions the way your study was crowded with the baubles you had picked up on your travels.

“That means someone sired you, then,” I said, racing to keep up. “If you’re looking for our originating principle, you were made just like I was. Where is your sire now?”

“Dead,” you said, dismissing my question with a wave. “He was not as kind as I am. I was his slave in life and he sired me to be his eternal servant. He did not live long after that, unfortunately.”

Your irritation was manifest now, warning me to mind my place. I was there to ornament your home and soothe your mind, not bludgeon you with questions. So I gathered my skirts in my hands and stood quietly while you narrated your instruments, your studies, your small discoveries to me. Feeding me tiny tidbits of what you believed I was ready to know, a crease of annoyance still written between your brows.

You always hated it when I overreached the carefully drawn limits of my knowledge.

Probably because you so enjoyed dangling the promise of revelation just out of my reach, the way sailors dangle kippers to make cats dance for their supper.





Questions. I had so many questions, and I should have asked them all. I should have worn you down like water dripping away at a rock until I learned everything you knew. But you must understand, I was only a girl. I was alone, and I was scared. I had no home left to speak of.

It’s easy to hate myself for my ignorance now, when I have the hindsight of centuries behind me, but in those first years I was only concerned with surviving. And the best way to survive, I believed, was to surrender myself to you with total abandon and adoration. And God, how I adored you. It went beyond love, beyond devotion.

I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, to obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or black expanse of sky.

I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn’t care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.

You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need.

I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.





Our first visitor to the home was our last, and although it still feels like treachery, I can’t help but admit that I still think fondly on our young harbinger of doom. Maybe it was because I hadn’t spoken to another person in decades, possibly even a century by then. I had grown starved for the sound of a human voice that wasn’t just the gargled screams of the victims you brought home to teach me how to kill. By then, I was better acquainted with the jugular vein, the forearm’s tender ulnar river, and the beckoning femoral artery hidden in the soft cushion of a thigh than I was with pleasant conversation.

That’s why I was so startled by the knock on our door that came one heady summer evening. The sun had barely set and I was still sleep-grogged, but I pulled on my dressing gown over my chemise and hurried down the main stairs. You were nowhere to be found, so I stepped into my role as mistress of the house and opened the door.

He shuffled into the dim of our home, a figure wrapped in stiff oilcloth. The hem of his robes dragged along the floor, smearing dirt through the entryway. Most notably, he wore an eerie mask under his wide-brimmed black hat, long-beaked in the Italian style and battered as though it had been dragged through a warzone.

“Can I help you?” I asked, unsure of what else to say. He was neither pilgrim nor beggar, and certainly not anyone from the village below. He smelled of strange waters, drying herbs, and the slow rot of disease. The scent of sickness quickened my heartbeat, inflaming a deep-rooted self-preservation instinct. Vampires learned to fear the smell of infection early on in their second lives, to keep them away from meals that might putrefy the stomach. We don’t die of disease, but infected blood makes for foul meals.

The stranger inclined his head at me politely.

“I seek the lord of this house, my lady.”

“He is not available.”