called a carriage again and left for Aloysius’s home.
The servants showed him in, one of them bearing eyes red with weeping, and she clutched at a neck scarf as she led him in. She gestured at the double-doors of the parlor, but would not open them. “The master is in there,” she whispered, then curtsied and ran away.
David fought the sense of unease and wrongness that seemed to permeate the house. He strode down the hall, calling for his friend. “Aloysius? Are you in there?”
No answer. A soft moan came from behind the double doors and he hesitated, not wanting to interrupt a private scene. But that sense of unease crept over him again, followed by the faint tingle against his nerves that could only mean one thing – magic. He thrust the door open.
What he saw there rocked him to his core.
Aloysius bent over the red velvet settee near the fire. Sprawled on the settee, arms over her head, lay the naked form of Miss Olivia Rhodes. Her long, lovely hair gleamed in the 37
Slave To Her Desires
firelight and her head was flung back, her expression slack. Dried blood stained her throat.
Between her spread legs, Aloysius pumped, fucking the girl even as she lay there in a stupor.
It didn’t make sense. Aloysius had stolen his sweet, innocent little mistress? But his servants had said that she’d left last night with her patron. But how…? No Serim could go about in darkness. That was the domain of…
Vampires.
Aloysius thrust into the girl cruelly, and then turned to glance at the door. Dried blood had crusted around the edges of his mouth, and his eyes were bright red. The shirt he wore over his back was lumpy and tight, as if holding the black wings at bay.
“No,” cried David. “What have you done?” His friend, his dearest friend, the only one that understood millennia of pain and abandonment…now had given his soul over to darkness.
Aloysius withdrew from the girl’s body, pulling up his trow. “A present for you, brother,” he said, grinning and showing far too much fang. “I’ve turned her.”
Turned her? David stared at the girl. She hadn’t moved despite the rough fucking that Aloysius had given her, and she looked almost…dead. But as he watched, the bruises on her thighs disappeared, and her skin smoothed, the freckles vanishing.
“Transformed…her?” David could barely talk around his horror.
“Into a succubus. A plaything for both you and me.”
No! The last thing he wanted was to damn another misfortunate to the fate that he and his brothers were forced to endure – eternity shackled to the curses brought down upon them. He stared into Aloysius’s red eyes with horror. “And yourself? How could you do such a thing?” 38
Slave To Her Desires
“The queen has promised me the freedom denied our kind, and I grow weary of the rules of the Archangels who have seen fit to cast us off.” Aloysius moved forward, grabbed David by the arm. “Come. Fuck your sweet whore. She will be yours now for all eternity. Ours.”
David jerked away, repulsed by Aloysius’s touch. “Just because you have embraced evil does not mean that I shall do the same.”
Aloysius’s smile was cruel. “Why not? Do you think anyone cares if you play by the rules, David? You cannot undo what has been done to us.” He gestured at the woman sprawled on the settee. “No more than you can change what I have made her.”
“I cannot undo, but I can make amends.” His mind began to whirl with horrific options.
Retrieve the other Serim in London and have them dispose of his oldest friend? Do it himself?
Or…hide Aloysius’s secret and somehow live with what his friend had done to an innocent woman? Could he somehow convince Aloysius to leave the path he had chosen?
They were all equally impossible. He gave his friend one last sorrowful look. “You must renounce this evil path, my friend. I cannot let you do this.”
The vampire sneered, all blood and fang. “And if I do
Robert J. Sawyer, Stefan Bolz, Ann Christy, Samuel Peralta, Rysa Walker, Lucas Bale, Anthony Vicino, Ernie Lindsey, Carol Davis, Tracy Banghart, Michael Holden, Daniel Arthur Smith, Ernie Luis, Erik Wecks