Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

  The young woman I saw reflected in the mirror, her dark eyes glittering in the moonlight, really did look like a princess.

  Strong. Determined. Unafraid.

  There was a knock on the door, and Dorin called in to me, “Your guests have arrived. Are you ready?”

  “Come in,” I urged him.

  Dorin poked his head in the room, and his merry, crinkled eyes snapped wide open. For a long moment, he simply stared at me, finally saying, “Yes. You are ready, indeed.” Then he stepped aside, allowing me to walk through the door before him. I noted that he bowed to me, just slightly, as I passed.

  Chapter 62

  THEY WERE WAITING for me at the foot of the curved staircase, every face turned in my direction as I descended, and I watched as their looks changed from skepticism and concern to appreciation and wonder—and hope. And the fact that they were beginning to believe in me gave me confidence, even as it terrified me, too.

  Who am I to be anyone’s savior? Anyone’s princess?

  You are your mother’s daughter . . . beautiful, powerful, regal . . . Dorin’s reassurances and Lucius’s ode echoed again in my mind, giving me courage.

  One by one, my vampire relations approached to meet me as I paused at the foot of the staircase. Dorin introduced them, and as each of my Dragomir kin—cousins close and distant—came near to bow or curtsy, I saw echoes of myself in the curve of a nose, the arch of an eyebrow, the slant of a cheekbone. They were attired in good clothes, but I noted that the dresses were a bit outdated, the suits sometimes ill-fitting. What has become of us since my parents’ destruction?

  “Come,” said Dorin when we had all been introduced. “Let us dine.”

  I led a small procession into a long and lofty dining room, chilly in spite of a fire that blazed in a cavernous fireplace, and, at Dorin’s indication, claimed my seat at the head of a table glittering with silver and candlelight. We Dragomirs were in difficult financial straits, but all the stops seemed to have been pulled out for my return.

  “Sit, sit,” Dorin said quietly, pulling out my chair. “I am afraid I must serve . . . We are short on servants right now, and it is difficult to draw anyone from the village, anyhow, given the current state of things. No one wants to be working late at the Dragomir estate . . .”

  “It’s fine,” I reassured him, taking my seat.

  Toasts were raised to me, in Romanian, and Dorin translated for me. To my health . . . to my return . . . to the pact . . . to peace.

  A murmur went around the table as the last toast was concluded, and Dorin bent to speak to me. “They wish to hear from you. They are too eager to eat. You must tell them your plans.”

  For the first time since I’d donned the red silk dress and begun to settle into my new royal role, I felt a flash of genuine panic. I didn’t prepare a speech. I should have prepared a speech. What can I tell them? God, what do I even plan to do? “I can’t do it,” I whispered to Dorin, leaning close to him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You must, Antanasia,” Dorin begged me. “They will expect it. They will lose confidence if you do not.”

  Confidence. I cannot afford to lose their confidence. And so I rose, facing my family, and began, “It is my honor to be among you tonight, back in our ancestral home . . .” What can I say? “It has been too long.”

  Dorin translated for those who didn’t speak English, glancing at me now and then with more than a little dismay in his eyes. He knew I was struggling, and looking at my relatives ringed around the table, I saw uncertainty creeping back into their minds, too. I was losing their trust as quickly as I’d gained it.

  “I intend to ensure that the pact is honored,” I added. “As your princess, I promise I will not let you down.”

  “Tell me, Jessica,” someone began. A deep voice.

  Oh, thank goodness . . . a question.

  “Yes?” I searched the faces, trying to find the speaker in the dim, candlelit room.

  “How do you intend to keep the bargain? Stop the war? Because I understand the Vladescus have no interest in the pact anymore.”

  The voice came from behind me. The familiar voice.

  I spun around, knocking over my chair, to see Lucius Vladescu standing in the doorway, leaning against the door frame, arms crossed over his chest, a bitter smile on his face.

  “Lucius.” My heart stopped in my chest, and all the blood drained from my face. It was Lucius. Alive. Standing not twenty feet from me. How many times had I dreamed of seeing him again? Dreamed of touching him? How many times had those dreams nearly devastated me with their futility? But now, he was so close. . . .

  His smile faded, as if he couldn’t maintain his coolly ironic demeanor at the sight of me, and I heard him murmur, just faintly, “Antanasia . . .” In that one word, I perceived longing, relief, tenderness, eagerness. The same emotions I was experiencing. He hesitated, uncertain, one hand extended as though he might approach me.

  “Lucius,” I repeated, blinking at him, as the reality of his existence slowly sank in. “It’s really you.”

  When I said that, Lucius’s hand dropped to his side, and he regained his ironic smile. “Indeed, there is only one,” he joked bitterly, all traces of tenderness fading. “And the world is better for it.”

  I began to run for him, then, nearly tripping over the train of my gown, wanted to hurl myself at him, tackle him, and kiss him again and again for the joy of seeing him. And then scream at him for lying to me and abandoning me. But then I saw his face up close, and I stopped short, in midstride.

  “Lucius?”

  It seemed as though he’d aged years in the few months we’d been apart. All vestiges of the American teenager were gone— and not just because he’d resumed wearing his tailored pants, his velvet jacket. His black hair was longer, drawn into a careless ponytail. His mouth was set more firmly. His shoulders had broadened. Stubble shadowed his usually clean-shaven jaw. And his eyes were blacker than ever, almost as if they had no soul behind them, animating them.

  Behind me, the Dragomirs seemed frozen in place, to find their enemy in their midst.

  “Security’s a tad lax,” Lucius noted. He pushed off from the door frame and strode past me into the room, not meeting my eyes, assessing the obviously timeworn furnishings with the same disdain he’d exhibited months ago in our farmhouse kitchen. Only this time, he seemed not just arrogant, in the innocent way of someone who’s known nothing but privilege, but deliberately dismissive. “I was going to sign up for the tour,” he added. “But I couldn’t wait until ten A.M. to see you, Jessica.”

  I stared at him with a mixture of dismay and fury. He knew that using my American name was an insult in this place. And he was being so cold. “Don’t speak to me like that,” I told him. “It’s cruel, and I know you are not cruel.”

  He still refused to meet my eyes, deliberately averting his gaze. “Am I not?”

  “No.” I moved toward him, refusing to let him control every moment of our meeting. This wasn’t a high school dance, where he could assume the lead. He was in my family’s home. Shaken as I was to see him so unexpectedly, to find him so altered, I would not be cowed, like my relatives behind me, quaking in their chairs. “You are not cruel, Lucius.”

  We were standing close to each other now, near enough that I could smell that aromatic, exotic cologne he’d gotten away from wearing sometime during his transformation into an American student. Lucius the warrior prince was back, in every aspect. Or so he wanted me to believe.

  “Why did you come here?” Lucius asked me, softly so that my relatives would not hear. He still didn’t meet my gaze. “You must leave, Jessica.”

  “No. No, Lucius, I won’t.”

  He turned to me then, and there was a flash of misery—of humanity—in his eyes, but it was momentary, and he stepped around me, putting physical and emotional distance between us again. I could tell that he was struggling to keep his emotions in check. To keep me at arm’s length. At least, I hoped he was s
truggling. The coldness, the distance: They seemed so real.

  “You were watching my house,” he noted, circling the table like a hawk looking for the rabbit that didn’t have the good sense to stay still. As he passed behind each of my vampire relatives, they cowered visibly. I wished, desperately, that they’d stop doing that.

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s wise, on the eve of a conflict, to stay alert,” Lucius advised, voice growing even flintier as he talked of war, slipping into his role as a general. Slipping away from me. “Of course I have guards on the perimeter of my property. Your family pesters me endlessly, whining about the unfulfilled pact, claiming that I never wanted to share power . . . And the more they say that, the more I realize, Why share what I can take by force? I am not averse to a little spilled blood, if it achieves my ends.”

  “Lucius, you don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do,” Lucius said, placing his hands on the back of Dorin’s chair. My uncle locked up with a full-body spasm. I knew he was terrified that Lucius would destroy him, right then and there, for bringing me to Romania. “Have you ever known me to jest about power, Dorin?”

  My uncle said nothing.

  Lucius leaned close, speaking right into Dorin’s ear. “I shall deal with you later for defying me and bringing her here.”

  “Step away from him,” I ordered. “You’re here to see me. Don’t torment my family in our own home.”

  Lucius surveyed the room again. “When all this is mine, I shall have to make some serious changes. Giving tours. It shames all of vampiredom!”

  I stared at him, refusing to become visibly upset or tearful, even, over just how callous he was acting. The Lucius before me was even icier and more inaccessible than he’d been after Vasile had ordered him beaten so severely. Lucius . . . where is my Lucius?

  “I want you to leave now, Lucius,” I told him, deliberately calm. “I won’t talk with you when you’re like this.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Is this not the reunion you hoped for, Jessica? Is this not what you came thousands of miles for? Are you disappointed to find your family weak—and your former betrothed more despicable than ever?”

  “You can’t make me hate you,” I said. “No matter how hard you try. I know what you’re doing. I know you’re trying to drive me away from you. You think you’re beyond redemption because you destroyed Vasile. You’re convinced that you’re just like him—or worse because you betrayed your family. But you’re not like Vasile.” I dared to stroke his arm. “I know you.”

  Lucius pulled away. “Do not touch me like that, Antanasia!”

  “Why not?” I asked, dropping my voice so my family would not hear. “Because you’re afraid that you’ll lose control, like you did in my bedroom back home?”

  “No,” he countered. “Because I fear that I shall lose control as I did with my uncle.”

  “Lucius, you had to do that.”

  When I said that, his eyes shifted, and he glanced at my relatives, still sitting in unsettled silence, staring at our exchange. “Come with me.” He clasped my elbow in his firm hand and led me across the room, out of earshot of my family. “We speak of private things in front of others. It is not right.”

  We stopped in front of the fireplace, and the firelight cast soft, flickering shadows across Lucius’s face, making him look younger again. I nearly reached out to touch his cheek. But his eyes were still too distant. Too black. “I shall tell you this, and then you shall pack your bags and go home, Jessica.”

  “I’m not going—”

  “You think you know me,” he spoke over my objection, still clutching my arm, fingers digging in. “For some reason, although I clearly abandoned you, although I obviously wanted you to think that I was gone . . . in spite of this, you cling to some desperate hope that there is a future for us. It is time I disavow you of that, once and for all, because we are no longer in civilized Pennsylvania, attending high school, playing at war on a basketball court. This is a war, Jessica.”

  “It doesn’t have to be, Lucius. I know you love me.”

  “The Vladescus never acted in good faith, Jessica,” Lucius continued, his mouth a grim line. “We had a plan. For you.”

  “A . . . plan?”

  “Yes. I was to win you over, marry you—innocent as you were, an American teenager ignorant of vampire culture—and bring you back to Romania. The pact fulfilled, we would have waited a reasonable time, until none could accuse the Vladescus of violating our part of the obligation—”

  “And then?” I already know.

  Lucius stared deep into my eyes. “And then we would have discreetly dispatched you. In secret. Acting as though we mourned your loss, but quietly pleased to have the last, inconvenient Dragomir princess out of the way.”

  “No, Lucius.” I shook my head, horrified. I wouldn’t believe it. “You wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Oh, Antanasia. You are still so absurdly innocent. Do you think the Vladescus ever intended to share their sovereignty with an enemy?”

  No. Of course they hadn’t. “How . . . how was it supposed to happen?”

  “I was not privy to those details,” Lucius said. “But perhaps by my hand . . . I would have had so many opportunities, alone with you in our castle.”

  No, Lucius, not you.

  He gazed into the fire. “It was so perfect for us, that you had been raised in America. In their attempt to keep you safe, the Dragomirs actually doomed you. A true vampire princess would have understood the risks of marrying me. She could have protected herself, remained always alert. But you, you would have come with me willingly, never even suspecting . . .”

  I took a ragged breath, forcing myself not to cry out, cognizant of my family not far away. They were watching. I had to maintain my composure, although betrayal ripped through me. “You knew all this when you came to my parents’ home? When you lived with us? When you kissed me?”

  Lucius, too, was aware of our audience. The misery that had seeped into his eyes was not reflected in his regal posture. “Oh, Antanasia . . . when did I know? From the beginning? Only toward the end? I am not sure. Perhaps I was innocent myself at first. Or perhaps I just deceived myself, not wanting to see the truth. But there came a time, yes, before I kissed you, when I knew that I was complicit.”

  I choked back a sob, swallowing it down hard, keeping my shoulders straight. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Does it not make sense, Antanasia?” He glanced to my family. “Look at them. The Dragomirs are diminished. Vasile could have duped them easily and controlled them without the loss of a single Vladescu. Without a war. The only blood shed would have been yours. You were to be sacrificed in the interest of Vasile’s little coup.”

  “That was Vasile’s idea,” I pointed out, desperate not to believe Lucius capable of destroying me. He cared for me. I felt it in his kiss, seen it in his eyes. But he’s dangerous, Jessica. He doesn’t want to be a Vladescu, but perhaps he always will be. “This was Vasile’s plan,” I repeated. “Not yours.”

  “And when I saw the whole scheme in its entirety, I was thrilled by its simple brilliance. Does that sicken you, Jessica? Because it should.”

  “You wouldn’t have destroyed me, Lucius,” I insisted. “You love me. I know you do.”

  Lucius shook his head. “Only enough to tell you that I would have destroyed you. That is as much as I can give. Now go home, Jessica. Go home and despise me. I had hoped to leave you with a happier memory of me. But you have come here, and now I cannot even do that.”

  “I won’t leave, Lucius. If only for my family. The Dragomirs need me.”

  “No, Antanasia. You give them nothing but false hope. Look at you.” His gaze traveled up and down the length of my body, and again his eyes came to life, this time with deep admiration. Admiration I’d seen there before. “You are beautiful. Amazing. Inspiring. They will fight harder, to think that they do so for their returned princess. To think, foolishly, that you have been wro
nged by the failure of the pact—when in fact I saved your life by breaking the pact. They will go on believing that they have been cheated out of peace and shared power, and they will rally to fight for you. But in the end, the Vladescus will prevail. Do not prolong their agony or increase their losses.”

  “They are already angry,” I pointed out. “I can’t change that. They want a war, too, unless the pact is fulfilled.”

  “If you tell them to yield to me, they will,” Lucius pointed out. “You are their leader. Tell them to submit to me, and then go home.”

  I hesitated for a moment, considering his one-sided bargain. If I told my family to yield, perhaps they really would. I was their leader. I could save lives. I fingered the bloodstone at my throat, hearing my birth mother. Don’t do it, Antanasia. . . . Don’t make your first act one of submission, even to Lucius. Especially, now, to Lucius . . .

  “No,” I said firmly. “You did destroy the pact, you are to blame for ruining the peace, and the Dragomirs will not kneel before a . . . a bully.”

  Lucius smiled at that, a small shadow of his old mocking smile. “Is that what you think me to be, Jessica? That I am a bully, like pathetic Frank Dormand?”

  “You’re worse,” I said.

  His smile grew sad. “Indeed I am. Frank, for all his faults, for all his small cruelties, never even dreamed of destroying a woman as magnificent as you.”

  I was still struggling to find the right words to reply when Lucius turned on his heel and left us.

  Chapter 63

  AFTER MY FAMILY departed, none of us having even touched the feast that had been carefully prepared to celebrate my return, I retreated to my room, where I sat for several hours, pulling a chair up to the leaded windows, just staring into the darkness. I couldn’t even think about sleeping.

  What can I do to save my family? To save Lucius? Can I still save Lucius—or is he really beyond redemption, as he believed?