A Deep Dark Call Page 10

“I won’t tell you these things aren’t true, because you already know they aren’t,” he said. “But I want to tell you that you’re safe. That you’ll always be safe. I promise you.”

  She nodded, but the next thing she said nearly broke his heart. “But will you be safe?” she asked.

  And Ioan saw what he had been too blind to see in these past months—that his daughter was really afraid, but not for herself. For him.

  “I promise you,” he told her, hugging her tight.

  He did not know what else to tell her. He just felt that he’d utterly failed her. But the look Alexandra was giving him did not betray fear. It seemed strangely reassured.

  “Lucy will keep you safe,” she said calmly.

  “Of course,” he quickly said, swallowing hard.

  Lucy. He did not have the heart to tell his daughter how angry and disappointed he still felt with Lucy. So he assured Alexandra that things would be all right. They were to have a wonderful Christmas. The three of them. Together.

  Chapter Nine

  Christmas Eve had come, but Lucy did not feel like Christmas. It was only Alexandra’s presence that salvaged her mood. She did try to put on a happy face for the child’s sake, and noted that the girl seemed to have let go of the fear she’d shown before going to the village. She seemed strangely cheerful, but Lucy began to worry. What if Alexandra was just in shock? She chastised herself again for taking the child to the village, and resolved to talk to her. She’d always believed that things left unsaid might poison one’s mind—just as this new silence between herself and her husband did to her own mind.

  Alexandra seemed happy. She was wearing a luminous white dress that made her look like a fairy and dancing around the Christmas tree. Gone was the solemn, timid child Lucy had met almost a month ago. She sighed. She hated to spoil the child’s pleasure, but she felt she needed to make her apology, before Christmas was upon them. She took advantage of a moment when Alexandra came to ask her to set an ornament high up in the Christmas tree.

  “Alexandra, that day in the village...it was wrong of me to take you there, and I’m sorry. Those things the priest said, they are not true, and you should not be afraid,” she told the little girl.

  Alexandra smiled. “But I am no longer afraid. I was, but now I am no longer,” she said.

  “You aren’t?” Lucy asked in wonder.

  “No.” Alexandra shook her head.

  “Why not?” Lucy persisted, afraid that the child was still unwilling to reveal her fears to the adults.

  “Because I sensed it, in the village,” Alexandra said.

  “Sensed what?”

  The child shrugged. “Your anger. Anger is sometimes good. It protects. And I understood that there was nothing more I should fear now that you’re with us. You will protect us, Papa and me. You will protect us when we need you.”

  The child was not making sense, Lucy thought with a shudder of fear, and wanted to question her some more. But Ioan came in and the two of them started the happy task of arranging the tree. She did not have the heart to ruin their Christmas.

  He was lavishing all his attention on his daughter, and she almost liked him when she saw him with Alexandra. To Lucy, he was surprisingly polite, his conversation innocuous and pleasant, the veneer of the polite gentleman back into place. She almost laughed—he was not fooling her. The predator was lurking beneath, and the smell of blood was still there, lingering on his skin, along with her own scent.

  He’d been true to his word. He’d come to mate with her and she hadn’t been able to refuse him, knowing that it was the musky scent of her own desire that had summoned him. Their matings were passionate, shameless and consuming. Last night he’d claimed her three times before he’d gone back to wherever he slept now. She told herself she did not care.

  She did care, however. Her mind was beginning to tell her she might have married a monster, and her nose and tongue keenly felt the scent of blood clinging to him.

  The trouble was that she found this scent tantalizing, which also made her a monster. Blood. Sweet blood. But not human. Not human, just prey, an unknown part of her was whispering. She was obviously losing her mind. Her father had told her she was insane, but she had not wanted to believe him then. Now it was truly happening.

  It was on Christmas Eve that they had an unexpected visitor. The weather had been cold, but no blizzard had visited them, so Lucy supposed it was still possible to travel on the roads to Valcele. She was surprised when Ioan told her that it was his aunt Sophie that he had not been expecting. She’d foolishly assumed that Alexandra was the only kin he had left. But, of course, he came from an old and well-connected family, so she expected there’d be more aristocratic relatives, even if he hadn’t taken the trouble to tell her about any of them.

  Tante Sophie was a handsome woman in her late fifties. She spoke flawless French and heavily accented English. She was tall and graceful, sophisticated and cold. To Lucy, her scent simply felt devoid of real warmth. Tante Sophie kissed Alexandra’s cheek without warmth. She didn’t look at her nephew and the brief glance she cast Lucy was one of sheer contempt.

  Lucy felt grateful when Ioan told Alexandra that it was past her bedtime. Christmas morning would soon come, he added, kissing his daughter’s cheek. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief when the child was gone—the atmosphere was so cold it could be cut with a knife. Naturally, Tante Sophie had come to show her displeasure over her nephew’s marriage to a scheming little nobody.

  “So this is the English governess you saw fit to marry,” Tante Sophie said drily.

  Lucy had expected this. The next words that Tante Sophie uttered, however, caught her completely by surprise.

  “But is she even a governess, I wonder?” She laughed.

  Lucy’s heart went still. She knew. Tante Sophie knew.

  “I have my own contacts in London, and you should have taken my advice when you hired a governess for your daughter. You should not have put so much faith in that man, Hawthorne. What he did was find you a fake governess for your daughter. A woman who’s not even fit to set eyes on a member of polite society.”

  Lucy cringed. A depraved, vile creature, her father had called her. And probably this was what she really was.

  She was surprised when she heard Ioan’s voice. It was firm and steady. “She is my wife now, and I know everything else that she is. This is all that matters.”

  He’d spoken the words with cold finality, leaving no room for further argument. Tante Sophie delicately shrugged her shoulders, attempting to hide the obvious displeasure that was clouding her eyes.

  “Well, we all know how your first wife ended up. Let us hope there’ll be a happier fate to the second,” she said.

  It was some moments later that she excused herself, pleading exhaustion. Lucy was glad of her departure, but felt the absence of a third person keenly. The two of them were alone in the hall. She sadly glanced at the firelight. What a mess she had made of things!

  “I should tell you the truth,” she began, deciding that it was fair he should know what had happened to her. His green eyes were inscrutable. “It is not that I wanted to deceive you in any way. Deception never was in my mind!”

  He stopped her with a short laugh which sounded bitter. “It does not matter,” he told her.

  “It does, to me. I want to tell you the truth,” she said.

  He laughed again, the same bitter laugh. “The truth. Would you be able to know the truth even if it stared you in the face? Would you?”

  This was unfair of him, she thought resentfully. It was not as if he had offered to share anything about himself. He would not let her speak, however. He began to tell her passionately, “The truth is that you heard some ugly, vicious rumors, and that you now believe them. The truth is that you are afraid.”

  He cast her a contemptuous glance. “When you first came here, I did
not see an English governess. I saw a woman I wanted, and I thought that she wanted me. I thought that she saw me. Me. But now I understand that it was not me you really saw, but some sort of exotic savage. Cultured enough to entice you, but rough and dangerous enough to set your sex on fire. And now you feel ashamed that you let yourself be debased by this creature, by this strange Romanian, and you also feel afraid of him, because, after all, this strange Romanian could be some sort of monster.”

  “No!” she protested.

  His face was a cold mask. “Admit that you are afraid of me,” he spat.

  “No. You don’t understand. It is not you that I am really afraid of, but myself. Myself!” she pleaded.

  He laughed bitterly, rising to leave. “That is even worse.”

  “Wait,” she told him, determined not to let him turn his back on her. “You have to listen to me!”

  But he did not. And on Christmas Eve, Lucy fell asleep in her cold bed, where there lingered, viciously tantalizing, the scent of him and of yesterday’s lovemaking.

  She dreamt. But this time her dream was more vivid. She dreamt of the big black wolf and in her dream, the wolf was talking to her.

  “What is your name?” she asked him.

  “Emperor Wolf, I am called,” he growled arrogantly. “But I rule wolves and men alike. All the wolves in this valley answer my call. All the men in this valley bow to my rule.”

  “Do you protect men from wolves?” she asked him.

  “Sometimes. But sometimes I protect wolves from men.”

  He was still, gazing at her with his burning eyes that burned both golden and green. “What are you called?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told him sadly.

  He growled, and it seemed that he was laughing at her. “But you do.”

  They were standing under the blue tree of life, which bled blue blood, rich and intoxicating. Wolf blood. Not human, she immediately understood.

  “Bite into it,” he told her, “and you’ll remember your name. Just as I remembered mine.”

  “Why is this called the tree of life?” she asked.

  “Because it binds the sky to the earth. The sky is male, and the earth is female. It also binds the sun and the moon. Men walk under the sun. Wolves walk under the moon.”

  She bit into the bitter bark of the tree, oozing with blue blood.

  “I still don’t remember,” she whined pitifully.

  But blue blood spurted hot in her mouth and she found that she did remember. She walked under the sun at day and under the moon at night. Just as he did. Her name came back with a howl. And it was with a howl that she hunted with him and then mated with him. And she howled, her own name stabbing at the moon.

  Empress Wolf.

  * * *

  He loved the ache in his body when he shifted. It was not like the pain he’d felt when he hadn’t been able to do so.

  He was Wolf now. Arrogant wolf. King of the forest. Even Sharp Eyes, the leader of the pack, listened to him, most of the time.

  Before, Ioan had been able to link his mind with those of the wolves on his lands. They’d always been his wolves, his to command, and nothing was going to change that.

  But tonight he did not feel like joining the pack. He did not even feel the urge of hunting. Tonight, unlike before, he did not feel that the wolf part in him was stronger than the human.

  For the first time since he’d shifted, he had achieved a balance between the two. He was wolf, but also human, no longer letting the wolfishness inside him take hold of his emotions.

  Lucy. He’d been so angry with her. She was his mate, the one destined for him by the stars. The one who had set the wolf in him free. But she didn’t understand it. She was afraid of him, afraid of her own wolf self. Unable to join him. Unable to understand that they were both Wolf. That, deep inside herself, she had always been Wolf, just as he was.

  That first night when she hadn’t shifted, he’d been so furious. It had been their wedding night. He’d thought he’d made her completely his...his bride, his mate...but she’d failed to acknowledge their bond. It had made him feel betrayed, then immensely sad, then furious just like before, and impatient. He’d just wanted to go to her as Wolf and show her who he really was and make her understand who she really was.

  At first, he’d meant to go to her. If she saw him as Wolf, she’d recognize him, accept him. But he’d stopped himself in time. Even as a newly turned wolf, he’d retained a small fraction of the human, and the human inside him had desperately warned him she’d be too overwhelmed. She hadn’t been ready, not ready at all to acknowledge that she was his mate. So he’d kept away, hoping she would eventually accept who she was, but she hadn’t. She was still rejecting the bond they shared.

  Anger bit into him again, and he snarled. Lucy, who made love as no other woman he’d met. Who surrendered herself so completely when he touched her. Who urged him to love her so hard that everything around them disappeared, even the moon.

  He snarled so viciously that it hurt him. She was his. His mate. But she would not come to him. Lucy.

  The wolf in him was angry, but the human in him started reasoning again. He’d tried to claim her as his, but had he also tried to show her that he was hers? Had he truly told her anything meaningful about himself? Hadn’t he also been afraid to bond with her completely? Had he really called to her? Properly?

  Lucy. He howled her name, flinging it at the moon. Dream-calling. This was what the howl meant, because he knew she would be dreaming of him. Just as he often dreamt of her.

  So he howled, and in the howl he placed everything that was himself, black wolf and guardian, and every memory of the dream past of both wolves and humans that he held within himself. A Dreamtime when the god and goddess had joined to create the tree of life and to shape this world.

  And he called her real name, the secret name that was deeply rooted inside her. Empress Wolf. Mate. Forever.

  He called to her, really called to her. And she came, silver fur shining with the light of both the moon and the snow.

  * * *

  Lucy woke up before dawn to find her hair matted and tangled, and her body scratched. There was blood under her nails and blood on her teeth, and the scents of blood and her husband were clinging to her.

  She laughed and her laughter sounded almost like a howl. She laughed remembering what her father had told her. It’s the taint in the blood...

  She buried her face in her hands, and it was then that she realized that he was already lying in bed beside her. He was holding her and whispering soothing words in that strange tongue of his.

  “I am not crazy,” she repeated over and over again, trying to convince herself rather than him.

  “Of course you are not,” he told her, and the words infuriated her, especially because they were meant to be so reassuring.

  He must have sensed her anger, because he held her tighter. “I am sorry,” he told her. “I should not have left. You were alone. I left you so alone, and then I got so angry because you would believe the priest’s lies about me.”

  She closed her eyes. “It was the blood. You smell like blood,” she told him tiredly.

  “Of course. Prey. Just prey,” he replied, as if it was a natural thing for her to hear this.

  Yet again, she laughed. Hysterically.

  “I am mad,” she told herself. He was, of course, also completely insane. So two lunatics had found and married one another.

  “Stop saying so,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. My father knew it. That’s why he sent me away, to this faraway place. I still refused to believe him. I simply did not want to.”

  And she found herself telling him, first haltingly, then lost in her own story and in her own memories that were coming back to life.

  He
r father had been rich, but not so in the last years. The great fortune he’d amassed had scattered, almost like cinders. There was not much left to live on, just a modest income to keep up appearances. But she hadn’t cared at all, because losing the money meant that she would be free. It had meant that she wouldn’t have to make a brilliant match or an impression in society, as he’d always insisted she should.

  Instead, she had dreamt that she would travel. Maybe to America, or to exotic India. She could always support herself by teaching. She had, after all, received the best of educations and she had always been the best student in her class. But her father hadn’t ever been impressed by such achievements. He thought her vexing and odd. He was rather ashamed of her, she’d always thought, ashamed of her wild temper, of her unsociability, of her uncanny ability to catch the scent of things around her. He had forbidden her of ever speaking about it to anyone.

  Yes, she’d felt relieved they were now poor. That night she had finally told her father so. It had been a mistake. He’d slapped her, hard, and he’d never done it before. He informed her that he had already arranged for a visit from an eligible young man, prosperous and decent, and she had a chance to marry him if she chose to. She did not even have the opportunity to tell her father she did not want to meet this eligible young man. He’d already arrived, waiting to meet her, and her father asked her to receive him graciously. She had to do so, still rubbing her red cheek to take the sting off it. In her mind, she was already concocting a plan of escape.

  The young man probably was prosperous, but not decent. He took advantage of the fact that her father had left them alone. He tried to kiss her and fondle her breasts, and he would not desist when she pushed him away. She remembered a terrible rage taking hold of her then. And then, she remembered nothing.

  “Nothing,” she told Ioan. “I suddenly found myself locked in my room. They fed me bread and water. For almost a week nobody spoke to me. If it hadn’t been for my books, I would have probably slashed my wrists. But then my father came and spoke to me.”

  “What did he tell you?” Ioan asked.