Miranda had to find every ounce of strength to fight.
The vampire patted her derriere. “I hunger, sweeting. I have appetites that have been denied too long.”
“Yes, angel.” Zayan laughed. He gave the same naughty chuckle as the unseen man in her dreams. “We both hunger.”
2
Labyrinth
The Chamber of the Scholomance
875 A.D.
Impossible to believe he was here, that he now stood inside the labyrinth that led to the Chamber of the Scholomance. As his father had wished, he had been selected to be an apprentice to Lucifer. He would learn the timeless magic. He would learn to control the winds, the rain, to summon powerful bolts of lightning or baking heat. He would know all the mysteries of nature, alchemy, and death.
Candles burned in a ring on the dirt floor. He dropped to his knees and let his head fall forward in the pose of a penitent man. Feminine laughter rippled over him in response.
The woman who waited in the shadows stepped out. She carried a beautifully wrought axe with a sharpened blade, and she was nude. Stars were painted over her nipples. She was entirely shaved of her nether hair. Where the thick bush of her pubic hair should be, a circle had been painted in red blood.
Her hair was a rich red—almost the color of flame—and it spilled over her shoulders and down her back in soft, fragrant34 /
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smelling curls. When he breathed deeply, all he smelled was the sweet promise of new grass, fresh wildflowers, sun, and birth.
He could not believe, when he smelled her, that she was a demoness.
“Very good,” she murmured. “But I wonder if you will remain obedient for long.”
“I will,” he promised. But rebellion sparked deep in his soul.
He was twenty-one—the age when a man is fool enough to grab up a sword and launch a single-handed attack on an army.
The demoness laughed again, as though genuinely amused.
She paced gracefully in front of him. Just breathing in her smell made his cock rigid and thick. Already his juices gathered at the tip and leaked down the head. He was also nude, and she could see the response of his body. Her full, dark red lips curved in a smile. “You are very young.”
“I am not.”
“Your youth is an asset. Do not despair. For it means you will be forever as beautiful as you are now.” Humming, she laid her hand on top of his head. She stroked his hair.
His hair was long. It had never been cut. That had been the first clue in his realization that his father had always intended to offer him as an apprentice. He had realized his father had lied.
He was not being sent to Lucifer to ensure the Vikings did not capture Wessex and destroy the last English king—the last king who embraced God. His father had plotted his destiny for much longer than that.
His father believed in the God of the Catholic religion, and so he had believed in Lucifer. The devil, his father had said, was the true path to power. Their bloody battles with the Vikings could be won only if they harnessed the powers of darkness—
The demoness moved to him, her breasts swaying. He licked his lips as he watched them bounce from side to side. What did the paint taste like on her nipples? Would she let him put his lips there? He wanted to. Her breasts were heavy and full. They BLOOD DEEP / 35
hung lower than those of the young maidens he had bedded, and they entranced him. Through the thick cape of his hair, he watched them move.
She began to hack at his long hair, sawing through it with the blade. It fell in yard-long piles around him. “It is my duty to name you.”
He told her his name, but she shook her head. “You are not that young man anymore.” Her lashes were very long and ebony black. She smiled. “You are well endowed.”
“I hope that pleases you.”
“It does, but I will not be allowed to sample you. Once your head is shaved, you will never be allowed to have sex again.”
He jerked and the blade nicked his scalp. Pain shot through him, but he didn’t care. “What do you mean? I was told my seed would be precious.”
“It will be. But it will not be permitted for you to spill your seed in a woman.”
By all that was holy, what did that mean?
The demoness smiled. “Surely, you did not think that you would be accepted without a price?”
“I did not think the price was so high.”
Her laughter was throaty and rich. “Only a man would say that.” She cocked her head, considering. “I could be persuaded to wait before cutting your hair.”
He rose up from his knees until he was standing. She was voluptuous and petite, and she had to tip back her head to meet his eyes.
“What will persuade you?” he asked. He reached out and pinched one of her nipples. The greasy paint let his fingers slide around the hardening tip.
“Would this?” Emboldened, he slid his hand between her hot thighs. Already, her nether lips were slick with her juices.
They were like exotic silk to his touch. His cock bucked, and he knew it was dripping with its lust.
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He took her hand to his shaft. “Do you like this?”
“Young men. Obsessed only with their cocks.” She scraped her nails along his rigid shaft and he moaned at the pleasure and pain. She stroked his hipbone. He had to admit the caress was an arousing sensation. “I would like to touch you, to stroke and savor you, but I know you are thinking only of shoving your erect cock inside me as quickly as you can.”
Her words had made it only more important that he bury himself inside. Every breath was bringing him close to release.
There was something about the erotic smell of her cunny, of scents he could not describe, but that were feminine and lush and appealing, and that had him on the brink of orgasm.
He threw aside the pretense at being submissive, and he pulled her into his embrace. Fighting and warrior exercises had made him strong. Standing, he could lift her to straddle his cock, and he impaled her on his rigid spike.
She laughed. Her eyes changed to a vivid red, and she rode him until she tore at his neck with her teeth and ravaged his back with her nails. Climax after climax took her, then he surrendered to his orgasm. Laughing, she pulsed her cunny around him, sucking him dry with her muscles. His legs collapsed beneath him and he let them both fall to the ground.
She leapt up to her feet while he was still gasping for breath.
“I will name you Lukos, and your beast shall be the wolf.
You shall be a predator, sleek and swift, without mercy. You shall be a beautiful beast, my pet. And you will put behind you your mortal name, your mortal ties. You will give everything up—”
“Including pleasure,” he grumbled.
She smiled, eyes narrowed, her thick black lashes batting playfully. “A small price.”
“After that bout I know it is a great sacrifice.”
“Do not flatter.” She waved away his words, then went to a table in the corner of the vaulted chamber. She dipped her blade BLOOD DEEP / 37
into a gold dish of hot water. She stroked it along his head. He felt the scrape, the awareness of pain, of sensation. She worked, shearing his hair from his scalp.
“You will lead me there?” he asked. “Through the labyrinth.”
“Ah, there is so much you do not know. That is not the way you meet Lucifer.”
“How then?”
“You will find out very soon. Now, let me finish.”
After his head was shaved to his scalp, she bade him to stand.
He lifted his arms as she commanded, and she drew the blade on the skin beneath his arms. She pricked him several times.
He caught his breath as she shaved his chest, then took off the downy line of hair that ran down his abdomen.
“Stay very still,” the demoness murmured.
He stood like a statue as she drew the blade along the plane of his pubis to reach the root of his cock. She cooed and stroked his soft member until it swelled again, and his blood rushed into it. The scrape of blade over his skin aroused him, and made him harder than he’d ever been. He held his breath, afraid the slightest twitch would send the sharp edge into his flesh.
He’d always been proud of his thick, rigid organ. The maidens of Wessex all loved it. He wasn’t ready to lose it.
She gave him a wicked glance, then licked the head, running her tongue around and around as her hands deftly shaved his nether curls. He watched the hair fall to the ground.
Then he shuddered as she drew the shaving blade over his ballocks. She pulled the skin tight to shave and the pressure chased his balls around in their sac.
With a tap on his buttocks, she urged him to bend over, and she swept the sharp edge around his anus to take away the hair there. She cleaned the blade in the water and even shaved his legs, then finally, his arms. She took off the long golden hairs on his forearms.
“There, you are finished.”
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She stroked his hard shaft. “And now, your poor sweet organ will no longer be able to play.”
He did not believe that. He refused to. He reached for her breast, but she slapped his hand away. She still held the blade, so he jerked back quickly.
“Now you will take me to Lucifer.”
She gave him a robe of fine scarlet fabric, sensually soft. “Put this on and get down upon your knees.”
His scalp prickled where it had been shaved. His ballocks itched. But he forced himself to ignore the nagging desire to scratch his testicles, to ignore the stinging places where the blade had drawn blood.
“Close your eyes and tip your head back.”
A shudder passed over him. A shadow of wariness. But he had lived for this moment, the moment he became one of Lucifer’s ten apprentices, and he had to trust.
But his lids opened and he relinquished faith—
He saw the countess’s arm move in a smooth arc. The blade penetrated his throat, and her strength drove it through his skin to the bone beneath. He felt a pass of cold, then a spurt of warmth.
Panic flew up like frightened grouse. Blackness swirled in on his vision. He spluttered. He fought to breathe.
She had sliced his throat open.
Her voice sang by his ear. “This, Lukos, is how you meet Lucifer.”
Her hands were held together and a strip of her own petticoat was being wound around her wrists to bind her.
Miranda bit her lip, fighting to stay calm, but her chest heaved on a fit of panicked sniffles. The vampire with the white streak in his hair was tying her up. His breath whispered softly over her neck as he meticulously wrapped the cloth around and around her crossed wrists. His breath was surprisingly . . . warm.
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The shades were drawn, the carriage lamps were not lit. She sat in the gloom, a prisoner of two otherworldly beasts, trapped in shadow. Trapped in fear. To think she’d been terrified of poverty and the workhouse.
Miranda didn’t understand. Why tie her up? They were so strong. Wouldn’t they just plunge in their fangs, drain her blood, and leave her dead?
“Not too tight, Lukos. We don’t wish to harm her pretty hands.”
So the vampire with the white streak in his hair was called Lukos. She had seen her brother’s schoolbooks—
Lukos
was the Greek word for “wolf.” There were tales she’d heard of men who could transform themselves into wolves. Between the vampire and the werewolf, she would be torn limb from limb.
Wouldn’t she?
“Where were you traveling?”
The mesmerizing, silky baritone of the vampire Zayan compelled her to turn to him. Against her will, she drew in a sharp breath at his stunningly handsome face. She could not fight against the need to stare into his silvery, reflective eyes.
Could she break free, throw herself at the carriage door, and fall out? She ran the risk of being run over by the wheels. But wouldn’t it be better to die that way than by a vampire’s bite?
And if she forced the door open, she’d burn the vampires inside.
Zayan’s compulsion was pushed aside and another took hold. Lukos. She sensed anger between them—it was like sparks of lightning in the carriage. Fire shot from their glittering eyes at each other. She had seen gentlemen before a duel, struggling to keep rage beneath a restrained and refined exterior. She could sense things about people—their darkest fears, their most primitive emotions, the things they did not say but that they felt deeply. And she could almost taste the hatred between these demons.
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“Good plan, but it won’t work, sweeting,” Lukos growled.
“You’d never get the door open. Tell us where you were going.”
It was like a command, and inexplicably the words came to her lips. She couldn’t understand why they wished to know.
“To Lord B—” She stopped, battling the compulsion to speak.
She looked at Zayan again, was drawn to him.
He undid his cloak and let it fall from his shoulders. The thick cape was lined with dark, rich fur—an animal’s pelt that was as black as his long, untied hair. His burned skin had now repaired itself. Within moments of being inside the carriage, with the shades drawn, he had healed. “Are you going to your husband?”
“No!” She cried it out, afraid that these beasts would hurt Blackthorne if they thought him precious to her.
“Why does a proper lady travel to an English peer alone?”
Even in the shadows, his eyes glinted silver at her. “You do not look like a mistress.”
What did it matter to them? They were only going to kill her. She wriggled her hands; she pulled, but the cloth would not tear. Even though it had been ripped so easily from her skirts, it would not give now. Her chest felt as if it would burst out of her corset.
Lukos bent to her ear. “Relax, sweet lass. We mean you no harm.”
Her heart slowed, as though Lukos could control it. Fear slithered through her, but her body did not behave as if she were as terrified as she was. Her cheeks burned hot. Her body felt tight, but in a pleasurable way. And all she could think of was the pressure of the bonds at her hands.
“You are obviously innocent,” Zayan murmured. “And very sweet.” But he stared so deeply into her eyes, she felt he was searching for more.