A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(34)

“Enough. Enough! He needs to stay conscious. Make room.”

Magdalena and I shook off the drunkenness of a freshly opened vein and moved aside so you could lay Alexi down on the seat. His golden skin was alarmingly pale, his breathing shallow and quiet. You gently pulled his head into your lap and I daubed the cold sweat from his forehead with my handkerchief, my fingers seeking his fading pulse. He was dying, and quickly.

Regret, cold and unyielding, settled into my stomach. What had we done?

Alexi moaned something incoherent that sounded close to your name. You shushed him and opened a wound in your wrist with your teeth, staining your white cuffs with blood.

“No need to speak. Just drink.”

He parted his lips and you dribbled your own blood, so thick and dark it almost looked black in the low lighting, into his mouth. Alexi took it onto his tongue like a communion wafer and swallowed obediently.

I had attended to Magdalena during her transformation, but that had not felt so much like sitting at someone’s deathbed. I truly believe I saw the light wink out of Alexi’s eyes before it came back again with renewed brilliance, before he pressed himself up onto his elbows and started lapping at the blood dribbling down your fingertips.

You let out a laugh, all silver and steel, and Magdalena clapped her hands for joy. We were witnessing a rebirth, after all, a dark baptism into a new and unending life. But I could not summon mirth. I had just watched a young boy sign away his life to a pack of demons he barely knew. And now, I believed deeply in my soul, he was my responsibility. I had to protect him from the cruelties of the world, the ravages of immortality. Even from you, my lord.

A lick of anger flamed up in my chest. I had told you not to do this, and here we were again, a growing family despite our incurable dysfunction. But when Alexi’s eyes fluttered open and found mine, the anger was smothered by a ferocious tenderness.

“Welcome back, little prince,” you said with a smile, smoothing a sweaty curl from his brow. “Where would you like to go?”

“Go?” Alexi asked, a little delirious. It takes a lot out of you, dying and coming back, and I knew the way your blood burned through the system like a wildfire. He was probably so disoriented he was tasting color.

“It’s a honeymoon!” Magdalena exclaimed, unable to contain her excitement. I hadn’t seen her so effervescent in what felt like years, but this still didn’t feel right. Alexi was a boy, not a wind-up doll to cheer up a sullen little girl.

But then again, maybe we would all benefit from some new blood in the family.

Yes, I thought of him as family right away. Even though I told you I wouldn’t welcome him into my heart like that. But you’ve always been able to see through my hopeful lies, haven’t you?

“Pick a city,” you said. “A country.”

“Anywhere?” Alexi asked, accepting my offered handkerchief so he could wipe the blood from his mouth.

“Europe is your playground.”

Alexi didn’t have to think about it. He just gave a huge, dazzling smile, and I realized with a horrible sense of finality that I was already falling in love with him.

“Paris,” he said.





Paris was happy, for a time. You rented us a three-story sliver of a townhouse right in the middle of the city, and Magdalena affectionately called it our layer cake. It really did look like one of those delicate French pastries, with a spiked iron gate out front and a wash of pale blue paint over the exterior walls. There was a floor for each of us, not counting the basement, which was set aside for your inscrutable purposes. The longer I spent living with you, the more I came to suspect that you weren’t looking for any huge breakthrough or eureka moment. You research had little other purpose than to keep your insatiable curiosity preoccupied so it didn’t devour you the moment you turned your back on it. It was a sort of narcissistic love letter to our species, to dedicate so much of your life to exploring the natures of vampires and humans, to draw distinctions between the two.

I tried not to wonder if you had studied your other brides the way you studied us. If you had studied the way they died as well.

Alexi took to the streets of Paris like a fish to water. He would leave for twenty minutes to run an errand and come home bursting with some news of some thrilling performance or political demonstration or literary salon he had been invited to. I have no idea how he managed to make friends so fast, but I was always charmed when he swept Magdalena into his arms and kissed her and started babbling about the newest opera he wanted to sneak her into. You permitted him to accept perhaps one in five of these invitations, but the invitations just kept coming. Paris in the twenties was a living, breathing thing, bursting at the seams with artists and writers and lovers. You and Alexi went out every evening for a walk and a cigarette along the Seine, leaving Magdalena and I two hours of privacy to rest or gossip or tumble into bed.

We took our dinners together every night, with you leading us out on our hunt like a father corralling his unruly brood of children after Sunday mass. Otherwise, you left us to our own devices. You and Magdalena disappeared frequently to hunt for sport, but Alexi and I preferred to do most of our killing privately. I, for my proclivity for stalking my prey into the darkest dens of their sins, and Alexi, for his proclivity to draw his prey into the den of his bedroom first.

I was not invited into his bedroom, at least not at first. That was not the nature of our relationship. We reveled in our love of you, of Magdalena, but the affection between us was more mother and son than lovers. Passion was a boundary line I dared not cross. I wanted Alexi as he was, bright and feckless, and feared jeopardizing the tenderness between us for a few hours of pleasure.