Read Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer for Free Online Page A

goes out.
    No matter, I can still see him clearly, his pale skin luminous as the moon, radiating light. His eyes beneath sweeping brows are wide, dark, aglow with fierce intelligence. His forehead is high, his nose a straight blade leading to a chiseled mouth, his chin square and firm. Terror grips me. I hear his name in my mind but I would have known him under any circumstances—
Mordred
. Yet he fits nothing of what I have been told. This scourge of evil whose very existence violates the natural order appears to be the creation of a master sculptor intent on evoking nothing less than perfection in form and manner. He is, quite simply, the most beautiful being I have ever seen. I, poor fool, can only gape at him as he steadily closes the distance between us.
    The unrelieved blackness of his garb shimmers with his inner light. He smells of wind and night, and something deeper, imbued with power that I cannot identify but which I yearn for as iron filings will lean toward a lodestone. His voice, when I hear it at last, is deep and compelling.
    “Elizabeth. How glad I am that you have come to me.”
    He holds out his hands, the palms turned up in invitation. A fierce need to feel his skin against mine sweeps over me. The lamp begins to slide from my fingers.
    Evil.
    Absurd! No such word can describe this being of vivid life and beauty, this dark prince who waits, smiling, silently bidding me to take the few steps necessary to put myself within his reach. My feet, no longer frozen, feel light as air. I have only to move the slightest distance—
    An hour and more ago, my mother’s diadem was removed from my brow, tucked carefully away back into its velvet case, and returned to the lead chest where my jewels are kept. Yet just now I could swear that I feel its weight upon my head. So vivid is the sensation that I almost reach up to confirm its presence.
    Instead, I tighten my grip on the lamp. Just as I do so, it springs back to light.
    “Mordred.” At the sound of his name, terror flickers again at the edges of my mind. But at the center, where all my attention focuses, is my own will, honed in the years of danger and death, warring with the strange, inescapable attraction to him that seems to grow with every passing moment.
    “Whatever magic you think to work on me,” I say, “it will avail you nothing.”
    Or so I tell myself. Mordred appears less convinced. He frowns and drops his hands.
    “Elizabeth,” he chides, “you should not listen to your supposed confidants, Dee and Cecil. They are small men who would make you small as well.”
    The familiarity with which he speaks of my counselors makes me frown in turn. How can he know what passed between us?
    “Let me guess,” he says. His gaze flicks over me, lingering as though he sees straight through my garb to bare flesh. I fight a blush, schooling myself to stillness, and watch him unflinchingly.
    “They told you that I am evil incarnate, a deadly danger to you and your realm. They claim that you and I are fated to be enemies, and they at least implied that you can win the struggle between us. In every particular they have lied to you.”
    “My counselors do not lie.” Cecil and Dee might be mistaken from time to time, but neither man has a mendacious bone in his body. Moreover, if Mordred believes that I will take his word for anything, he truly does think me a fool.
    “Men consumed by fear cannot recognize truth,” he says. “They are weak, unlike us. I can feel the strength in you. It is … seductive.”
    He steps closer, and I feel in turn the strange attraction drawing me to him. But I resist, determined as I am to stand my ground.
    Boldly, I raise the lantern. “Stay where you are.”
    He stops, but he also smiles, as though being patient with a child. “I am no threat to you, Elizabeth, to the contrary. I am here to help you become what you are truly meant to be.”
    “I am Queen by grace of God and all that is holy.”
    “You are indeed, much