Tainted Love Read online

  The hunger was building, and she was tiring of this chase. She longed to be home, safe inside the slate and tile-roofed house she shared with Papa, walled in with hand-forged wrought iron, where the midnight air carried the aroma of Belizean orchids and jasmine and not the scent of blood.

  Her bonnet ribbons flapped in the breeze as she followed the man into a cobblestone alley running between the Cabildo and the cathedral. Raucous sounds issued from a tavern lining the alley, a haven for the pirates who smuggled their goods into New Orleans from the marshes of Barataria. A sign swinging above the shingled roof read The Snapping Turtle in peeling paint. The tower of the old cathedral shielded the alley from the light of the moon, and the delicate clang of its half-hour bells could not obscure the voices of drunken men.

  The man’s footsteps grew faster. He knew someone was following him. She sensed his fear as acutely as if he had screamed right beside her. It was time to strike. In a movement too swift for mortal eyes to see she surged past him, rustling the sleeve of his shirt as if a wind had passed overhead, and was waiting for him at the end of the alley.

  Stepping out of the shadows, she stopped his flight.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  He looked at her suspiciously, his ebony skin shining like glass in the moonlight, dark gaze darting about, no doubt looking for an accomplice.

  “I have nothing,” he said.

  “I do not mean to rob you,” she told him. At least, not of your purse.

  His eyes narrowed as if with understanding, and he smiled, showing crooked white teeth.

  “And I am not some bored white woman looking to couple with a slave.”

  “I am a free man of color,” he said.

  She shrugged her shoulders beneath her pelisse. “Nor that.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “What were you doing in the bayou?” she asked. “Do not bother to deny it. I followed you there.”

  “You saw?”

  “Oh yes, I saw. Tell me about that woman. What is her name?”

  She did not have to describe what she had seen for him to know of whom she was speaking. He swallowed hard, and answered hesitantly. “Her name is Sabine Sejour.”

  She could not shake the image of the woman’s contorted hand, fingers flexed like talons, looking like…Lienore, the witch who had killed her mother and inhabited the body of her poor Aunt Vivienne. The witch who had nearly choked the life out of her and sent her crashing through the window. The witch who could chant the spell that would reclaim the soul she lost upon her making. “What is she?”

  The man drew back in fear, reluctant to say more.

  With a swift motion she reached forward and grasped him by the neck, using her inhuman strength to pull him closer. She brought her face near to his and sniffed. There was no telltale odor of alcohol or disease hovering about him. He would do. She could satisfy her burning thirst and rid the world of—what was it Nicolae called it? Oh yes, the dregs of humanity.

  He clawed at her hand in an attempt to loosen the grip, and when he could not, he gave a shaky, compliant nod of the head.

  She eased her strangling hold, and asked again, “What is she?”

  He answered in a scratchy voice. “She is the voodoo queen.”

  “Where will I find this voodoo queen?”

  “She sells sweetmeats in front of the Cabildo.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “On Rue Ste. Anne, near Congo Square. But you do not want to go there.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “The slaves meet there. It is a dangerous place for a white woman.”

  The sound of her laughter caused him to shiver. “I have no fear of them.” Or of anything human. Unless, of course, it aimed a hawthorn stake at her heart. “She is a slave?”

  “Voodoo queens are never slaves. They are free women of color.”

  “And how did she become so?”

  “It is said she was brought to New Orleans from Santo Domingo and bought her freedom by selling herbs and spells. She used to hold ceremonies at an abandoned brickyard on Rue Dumaine. Then she moved them to the bayou.”

  “Yes, I would imagine the residents of Rue Dumaine would not look kindly on murder in their midst. Why did she kill that man?”

  He shivered. “The man came too close and touched the queen while she was dancing.”

  “I suppose that’s as good a reason as any to have your heart ripped out,” she said wryly.

  “If that is all you want—”

  “That is not all I want.” She ran a finger along his neck, pausing at the pulse that throbbed there. Her fingers crept slowly, snugly around his neck. “I am thirsty.”

  “There is that place over there.” He nodded nervously toward the tavern whose windows glowed from the play of candlelight within.

  Pirates, she thought with distaste. She had no wish to meet one. Not that she had experienced better men than that over the years. The image of Edmund de Vere loomed, the London pewterer she almost wed, the vampire hunter who used her as bait to trap Nicolae. There were others after him, but men, she had learned, were a weak and sorry lot. Except for Nicolae, her vampire lover. There was nothing weak about him, neither in his nature nor his capacity for sexual pleasure.

  “The convent,” she ventured. “It means something to you, does it not?”

  “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

  She gave him a knowing look, and said, “I know what you wished for.”

  He stared back blankly.

  “At the cemetery. Ah, I can see how you might wonder how that can be when you scarcely uttered the words.” Her melodic voice belied the tightening grip at his throat. “You wished for no one to find out what you did to that nun, the one whose body you ravaged and then buried in the bayou.” He sucked in his breath, and she laughed. “I can make your wish come true.” But to do that she would have to kill him, and then no one would ever know his secret.

  She saw a glimmer of hope spark behind his frightened eyes. In the next moment it was gone as she dragged him behind a banana tree. Her bonnet slipped from her head as she sank her fangs into his throat. The man screamed, the sound rising from the depths of his being. But the scream, as well as the sucking sounds of her mouth against his jugular, were lost amidst the boisterous voices coming from the tavern.

  A gurgling sound erupted from his chest. His eyes were wide with terror. His body flailed. But it was no use. He was trapped in her inhuman embrace like a fly caught in a spider’s web. She drained him to the point of death. When she had been new to this, she had often left her victims alive, although barely, until she got the hang of it, and then, like now, she finished them off.

  She had tried to subsist on animal blood like Papa did. Dear, kind-hearted Papa who had not the nature to take a human life. But the dark hunger that rose from the pit of her being craved more than ox or chicken blood. The need that welled up from within was for human blood. As she drained the last drop of blood from the nun-murderer she wondered distractedly why she was so different from Papa and so much more like Nicolae. What had Nicolae done different when he’d made her that he had not done when he made Papa?

  She let the lifeless body fall from her hands and with her foot rolled it behind the shrubbery. It would not be found until it began to stink, and then no one would want to get close enough to it to see the bite marks on the neck or notice that all the blood had been drained from it.

  As her victim’s warm blood coursed through her veins Pru felt a perverse satisfaction in knowing that he would never kill another innocent. The streets were a tiny bit safer now, and she was feeling the rosy flush of fresh blood tinting her cheeks. Straightening her clothes, she wiped the crimson traces from her lips and bent to retrieve her fallen bonnet. Emerging from behind the banana tree, she started back down the alley toward Rue de Royal.

  The sky had turned a pale shade of violet. She breathed in deeply, drawing the sultry air into her lungs. There were no street lamps to g
uide her way, but the light coming from the tavern cast a warm glow across the cobblestones.

  She was feeling strangely serene in the aftermath of her feeding. Perhaps it was the sweetness of orange blossoms lacing the air, or the thought of seeing Papa’s smiling face when she returned home. Home. There had been so many places to call home since they left London more than seventy years ago. Madrid, where women in colorful swirling dresses whispered behind their fans, “That woman, look how pale she is”. Venice, where there had been no place to dispose of the drained bodies except to toss them into the canals where they floated to the top and created a mood of hysteria throughout the city. Paris, where the blood from the guillotine ran more frequently than the blood of her victims, and where she had last seen Nicolae. And now here, to the new world, where she had hoped to find a bit of the happiness that eluded her, first in Boston, then New York, and now here, in New Orleans.

  New Orleans, a mystical, magical city, where one such as she could move virtually unnoticed beneath the street lamps, where the French and Spanish lived among a medley of slaves and free men of color, where people from the islands sold baskets of shiny fruit along the banquettes and Indians lingered up and down the levees, where arrogant Americans and old-world planters drank side by side in the taverns all along the narrow streets, where pirates sold the smuggled goods that the gentlemen purchased for their shops and homes.

  To someone like herself, whose senses were heightened beyond any mortal’s imagination, it was a city of sounds and smells. Church bells rang, cabriolets careened down the streets, horses’ hooves clopped in the mud-filled streets. Huge oleanders scented the great courtyards, wisteria grew over whitewashed walls and honeysuckle twined along wrought iron balconies. There was no shortage of unsavory characters to feed her sanguinary need, and like London’s sordid East End, the seedy part of the city gave up its prey with scant notice.

  Here in this city of wrought-iron lacework, of spells and potions, of beautiful women both light and dark, and men of mixed blood and pure blood, she had everything she could want—evening gowns, a shining landau to transport her and Papa about, an abundance of their favorite foods from the French market—all paid for with the money from the sale of their Spitelfields house in London and the purses she helped herself to from her victims. Yes, she had everything, except the thing she longed for most—love. Not the fatherly love lavished on her by her doting papa, nor the tainted, unchaste love Nicolae once claimed to have for her, but the love of a man who was good and honest…and mortal.

  All thoughts of love vanished when the tavern door suddenly swung open as Pru was passing, throwing bright light into the alley and momentarily blinding her.

  “Sortez, vous misèrable Amèricaine!”

  A body came hurling out. He rolled over several times and came to a stop face down in a puddle at her feet. She hopped back to avoid falling over him.

  She wasn’t afraid—there was little she feared save a stake to the heart and never finding love—but the mud that splashed onto her dress leaving an unsightly blotch brought her temper immediately to the fore.

  “Now you’ve done it!” There was no need to address him in French despite her fluency, for the man who tossed him out had called him a miserable American. “My dress is ruined. I don’t suppose I can expect the likes of you to pay for the damage.”

  He lifted his face from the puddle and coughed. “The likes of me?” he echoed.

  “Yes. You are nothing but a pirate, and everyone knows pirates have no money. How do you expect to pay for the damage?”

  He planted both palms on the ground and pushed himself to his feet. As he straightened his clothing with his back to her, she realized that perhaps he wasn’t such a pauper after all. He brushed the dirt from brown velvet breeches and adjusted a waistcoat of crimson damask shot with silken threads of gold and silver. Beneath it he wore a shirt of white linen whose sleeves billowed in the midnight breeze. He bent to retrieve the coat that had been tossed out after him and smoothed his palms over the ornate braid trim. A sliver of moonlight glinted off the buckles on his shoes. A ribbon held his dark shoulder-length hair tied at the back of his head. Spotting his tricorn on the ground, he swiped it up and slapped it on his head. The exotic red feather it was decorated with danced about in the breeze.

  He turned to her then. “You were saying?”

  The first thing she noticed was the brightly colored sash slashed diagonally across his shoulder and the knife protruding from it. A cutlass hung from the wide leather belt at his waist, the candleglow from the tavern sparking along its curved cutting edge.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he exclaimed. “Good evening, ma’am. Stede Bonham at your service.” There was a slight cadence to his speech, a drawl and a lilting accent that were strangely appealing. He took off his hat and gave her a low, sweeping bow, although Pru could not dispel the notion that she was being sorely mocked.

  She was about to voice her displeasure when he stood upright again, and just as the moon was emerging from behind a cloud, she saw his face. She controlled the impulse to moisten her lips nervously. He was appallingly handsome. Unlike Nicolae’s ethereal beauty, this was a raw animal-like appeal that made her feel like she was strangling on her own breath.

  There was no softness to his solidly built frame. Beneath a shelf of dark brows his eyes were gray, as bright as silver pennies, and ringed with impossibly thick lashes. His nose was straight, his chin strong. His skin was smooth and darkly tanned by the sun, and she struggled against the temptation to touch it. His face was impassive, and were it not for the smile playing teasingly across his lips, she might have judged him to be a cruel, implacable sort. In spite of the polished veneer, the gray eyes regarded her with the undisguised lust of a common pirate. And one who’d had too much drink, if his swaying posture was any indication of it.

  “You, Sir, are drunk,” she said disapprovingly.

  He offered a lopsided smile. “Happily so,” he said with a laugh. “With compliments to la fèe verte. But not so drunk that I don’t know a beautiful woman when I see one.”

  She could feel the carefully controlled energy flowing through his muscles in much the same way the warm blood of the free man of color flowed through her veins. He took a step toward her and she jumped back, unsure of his motive.

  “Your bonnet,” he said. He reached up and straightened it upon her head. “What have you been doing to turn it half around?”

  “I—I—” What could she say? She couldn’t very well tell him that was drinking the blood of her latest victim, and in the struggle, her bonnet fell from her head and she put it back on in haste. “Don’t change the subject,” she said. “If you think to distract me from the damage you have done to my dress, think again.”

  “That’s a delightful accent you have. English, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Yes. London. Now, if you would please—”

  “What are you doing out and about at this hour?”

  “Sir, you ask too many questions,” she said with a huff.

  He laughed. It was a smooth, contagious sound from deep in his throat. “My dearly departed mother used to tell me not to ask a question for fear of the answer.”

  “Indeed. I was merely on my way home from visiting a sick friend.” Lying, which had once been so difficult, came easy to her now.

  “Then you must permit me to escort you home. These streets are dangerous for a woman alone.”

  That’s what Nicolae said to her the first time she’d met him on the London Bridge. She should have known from that experience that it was unwise to accept such offers from strangers. Look where that fateful meeting had led. But there was something about the way those gray eyes were watching her that brought warmth to her cheeks, and she heard herself say, “Very well. You may escort me home. And we will consider that an even exchange for the soiled dress.” And if he attempted to lay one finger on her, no matter how handsome he was, she would devour him before he could utter a prayer to his dearly
departed mother.

  Chapter 2

  Stede Bonham’s first impression of the woman walking beside him was of solemn eyes a dusky shade of blue, like the twilight sky just before night descends, and hair the color of dark ale, the tendrils escaping her bonnet tinted gold beneath the light of the street lamps. Her profile reflected a straight nose, a determined little chin, and lips that were firm and slightly pouted.

  There was nothing noticeably strange about her features except for an alluring pallor and a rosy stain on her cheeks. She walked with uncommon grace and an unusually quiet step, her shoes making practically no sound on the damp cobblestones. It seemed almost as if she were floating, a notion no doubt fostered by la fèe verte. The Green Fairy often made him imagine things that weren’t there. He blinked his eyes to clear them. She looked innocent and yet not innocent. Fresh and naïve and yet somehow as old as time. She wasn’t as starkly beautiful as some of the quadroon girls who strolled the Place d’Armes, with their dark, flirtatious eyes and pecan-colored skin, yet there was something about her that made him steal quick glances at her as they walked. It made him smile.

  “How long have you been in Nawlins?” he asked.

  She looked at him with unblinking eyes that seemed to hold some secret wisdom, and said, “We arrived in April.”

  “From where?”

  “Boston, New York, and before that, Paris.”

  “Paris, huh? It must have been some bloodbath over there.”

  Pru pulled in a breath and let it out in a low sigh at the memory. It wasn’t the image of all that blood that was so disturbing she still dreamed about it, but rather the sight of all those heads chopped off, a punishment striking too close to home for her comfort.

  “Yes, Papa and I were fortunate to get out when we did.”

  “You have no other family?”

  His questions summoned too many unwanted memories. “My mother is dead,” she said without offering further explanation. There was no need to tell him that her mother had thrown herself off the London Bridge, or the terrifying reason that had led her to such an act.