Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (30 page)

“Pleased to meet you,” I said stiffly, feeling that something was expected of me.

“Oh, likewise,” said a red-haired agnatic woman with a smile that was probably meant to put me at my ease.

“Good to see you again, Cora,” Hattie added warmly.

“Indeed,” said Jean, sounding bored.

Dorian guided me toward a sleek fawn loveseat, and I tugged at the edge of my sweater before perching on the edge, my legs clamped together self-consciously.

Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. I’m not wearing any underwear,
I thought.

As soon as I sat, all the men in the room took their own seats, agnate and cognate alike. Dorian settled next to me, taking my hand between his own.

I realized then that I had an answer to a question I’d wondered about some time before: Dorian’s old-fashioned manners were that of a gentleman to a lady, not an agnate to a cognate.

I filed away that piece of information for later, when I could decipher what it meant or even if it mattered.

A tiny cognate with olive skin and waist-length jet black hair exchanged a meaningful look with her agnate before turning to me with a bright smile.

“You are a student, I heard? At the University of Maryland?”

I glanced at Dorian, but his expression was unreadable.

Then I chided myself. I didn’t need his permission or reassurance to speak.

“Yes,” I said, lifting my chin. Then, in hopes that I didn’t appear curt, I volunteered, “I’m studying economics.”

“Oh, yes!” the long-haired cognate said. “What a fascinating field it is. So many changes! New ideas, new models, but it does seem that economists never can agree on anything.”

“As they say, when you put two economists together, you get three opinions,” I joked weakly.

The sound of the yacht’s motors increased, and out of the windows, I could see the dock slip slowly away.

The red-haired agnatic woman chuckled. “As long as the twin beauties of diversification and compound interest continue to work, I’m happy enough and don’t care if I never learn more.”

“That’s because you are a sybarite,” her cognate teased affectionately. “You only care about what directly impacts your own physical comfort.”

She shrugged, accepting the charge.

“So, what do all of you do?” I said, for lack of anything else to ask.

“We are most of us idle rich,” said a blonde agnate in a thick Russian accent. That would be Svetlana, I thought, retrieving the name.

“Some of us are more idle than others,” an agnatic man said dryly. “Portfolio management can take a fair amount of time. And, of course, there’s the scheming. We spend a great deal of time scheming.”

“But Hattie works. Doesn’t she?” I asked, casting a look between her and her agnate Jean. “I mean, he lets you work?”

“Oh, most definitely.” Hattie smiled at him as he lounged against the cushions of their loveseat. “I had my doubts, but Jean insisted, certain that I’d love it. You see, I was studying chemistry when we met, but chemistry was a very different science so long ago, and I didn’t know how much help I could be.”

“But after just a few years of study, she had become the most indispensable member of our team,” Dorian put in.

“With all the hours she puts in, sometimes I wonder whose cognate she is, after all.” Even Jean’s grumble was tinged with ennui.

Hattie rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not something you’re likely to forget any time soon. And Will works with us, too.”

She nodded to the cognate who had called the red-headed agnate a sybarite, and he shrugged.

“When Elizabeth chooses to spare me,” he said.

They were all so comfortable with each other and with their world. I wondered how many years they had known each other. Fifty? One hundred? Longer? They were trying so hard to make me feel welcome that it made me even more self-conscious that I didn’t fit in with them.

Couples. Every one of them. Unbearably beautiful people, monsters and angels. And Dorian and I....

I looked around, trying to see us in one of the pairs of guests, not sure whether I was more afraid that I would or wouldn’t.

A parade of white-uniformed stewards appeared then, bearing trays upon which a variety of tantalizing refreshments were laid out. I welcomed the interruption. I wasn’t used to being the focus of the room, much less a room full of vampires and their consorts. I was always the “and”—Lisette and Cora; Geoff and Cora; Hannah, Sarah, and Cora.

Everyone loaded small plates, and a bartender took orders for cocktails and champagne before retreating to a bar in the corner to prepare them. I watched the guests as they selected their delicacies. Their movements were almost like a dance. I realized suddenly when I’d seen something like it—in a documentary I’d watched once about geishas in Kyoto. They had the same grace. But with the agnates and their cognates, there was nothing that seemed contrived about it. The habits of movement had been ingrained untold years ago.

I smiled politely as the first steward reached me and picked a few of the most delectable-looking appetizers. Each of my movements seemed clumsy and awkward in comparison to the balletic elegance the others gave even the slightest motion, and in my self-consciousness, I tried to hold as still as possible.

“Now that you know your research works, you should come away for a while,” Jean was saying to Dorian. “Take a vacation. You haven’t been to the Riviera since it was full of Russian noblemen. Rhodesia, Brazil, Tibet—you used to be so much fun.”

“It’s Zimbabwe now, not Rhodesia,” Dorian said dryly. “And this is only the beginning of our research. I’m sure Hattie’s been filling your ears with it all.”

Jean shook his head. “Most likely. But I never listen to her when she talks shop. It’s so dull.”

Hattie gave him an unsubtle pinch, and he smiled indulgently down at her.

“I’m saving the world, and he acts like I have an orchid obsession or I’m into stamp collecting,” she complained, but her eyes twinkled with suppressed humor.

“Jean, you pay attention,” Svetlana chided gently. “Is important.”

“One-in-one-hundred is significant. It’s the magic number that makes our side far more attractive than that of the Kyrioi,” Dorian said. “But it’s only the beginning.”

“As long as we control the technology,” Elizabeth said shrewdly. “Are you sure your labs are secure?”

“The laboratory is inside Dorian’s house, and we prove every worker weekly,” Hattie said in a tone that said they’d rehearsed this argument many times before. “Every phone and computer belonging to any of them is bugged. Every home, too. I don’t know what more we can do.”

“We’ve foiled three attempts since Cora’s introduction,” Dorian said. “But you are correct. The Kyrioi probably will eventually gain control of the technology, too, likely within five hundred years. Not even the silkworm was kept a secret forever. We must use the time until they do to persuade more people to our cause.”

“Hearts and minds,” Svetlana’s cognate said.

“Indeed,” Dorian agreed. He looked over at me. “But we didn’t come here to discuss such weighty matters.”

“Every conversation with you turns into a weighty matter,” the long-haired cognate said, nestling against the side of her agnate. He hushed her, and she gave him an impish smile. “Señor,” she murmured at him and subsided.

The third male agnate shot his cognate a significant look. They had both been silent so far. The green-eyed woman looked back at him for a long moment before turning a timid gaze my way.

“Are you from the area?” she asked. Her voice was so soft it was almost a whisper.

“Yes, I’m from Glen Burnie,” I said. “That’s where my grandmother raised me.”

“It’s such a...lovely area,” the cognate attempted.

“Oh, Marie, you could at least try to sound convincing,” the long-haired cognate broke in.

“No, it’s quite all right,” I said. “It’s not a great part of the state, but it’s not downtown Baltimore, either.”

The stewards returned to collect the plates and wineglasses, and then a man entered in hospital scrubs, pushing a cart loaded with medical-looking supplies.

“Oh, Dorian, you never can just enjoy yourself, can you?” said Jean, rolling his eyes. “Every time you get us together, it’s research, research, research.”

Dorian spread his hands. “You know we’re out of samples again. We seem to be near another breakthrough—we just need a little more.”

“Now that you have your own cognate, I hope you don’t suck her dry,” said Marie’s agnate.

Svetlana waved gracefully. “Keep watch on Dorian, Cora. He’s prone to bit of...hyper-focus.”

The long-haired cognate looked up at her agnate through her eyelashes. “Why don’t you all run along? Keep you away from temptation.”

Because of the blood, I realized, remembering Dorian’s reaction to my blood on another occasion.

Elizabeth chuckled throatily. “Wish to keep the gathering rated PG?”

“We are supposed to be welcoming Cora, not frightening her, and having you drool over me while I’m getting blood drawn is not the way to do that,” Will said crisply.

“We’re going,” said Dorian. Standing, he looked down at me and explained. “The phlebotomist is collecting blood for my research. You don’t have to participate if you don’t care to.”

I shrugged. At this point, it was hard to get too worked up about a needle. “I’ve donated blood before. I guess this is for a worthy cause, too.”

His lips curved. “The worthiest.”

I watched Dorian lead the rest of the agnates from the room as the phlebotomist approached the first of the consorts.

“Well, that got rid of them,” the long-haired cognate said. “I’m Francisca, by the way, in case you missed it. But everyone calls me Paquita. My other half is Raymond.” She flopped against the back of the sofa with a kind of gamine unsophistication that was, I decided, entirely conscious, pushing up her sleeve to bare the crook of her arm.

I wondered if it had to do with how long the agnates and cognates lived, that they had enough time to decide not only how old they wanted to be but how they smiled, how they walked, how they waved their hands. Or maybe it was just because so many of them came from an age when posture and deportment was drilled into middle and upper classes from birth. Either way, I wondered if they were now capable of a genuinely graceless movement.

“I have heard all about you, of course,” Paquita said as the phlebotomist set up a blood collection bag and inserted and taped the needle on her arm. “It’s probably rather unnerving to have everyone you meet already know your background, but your conversion is such a milestone for all of us.”

“Dorian said that it’s a justification of his research,” I said.

“Oh, certainly, and more—it is the first conversion to ever be studied with any scientific accuracy. The data that was collected could really be a breakthrough.” She laughed. “Of course, that’s more Hattie’s domain than mine.” She nodded to the blonde cognate, who was already lying back as well.

“Dorian didn’t tell me that his research team included cognates,” I said. “Before we met, I mean.” It occurred to me for the first time that maybe Dorian’s offer to give me one of his businesses to run was more than just a bribe meant to buy my acceptance of our bond. If Hattie had a vocation in addition to her position as Jean’s cognate, perhaps he really meant for me to lead one of his ventures, not just pretend to be the CEO.

“Don’t let Dorian fool you,” Hattie said. “He likes to play at the amateur gentleman or wealthy patron, but he gets his hands dirty, too. He’s unusual among agnates. So few of them ever make anything at all. The first few years, he barely stopped to eat or sleep. He was a man possessed.”

“I can imagine,” I said. And I could. It fit neatly into my growing picture of him—a driven man who clung to his scruples, haunted by old angers and old griefs. The rising demon....

I realized that every person in that room likely knew more of Dorian than I did, despite our bond. I had met him not even six weeks before, but Hattie and probably several of the others had known him before I was born.

It was an unsettling thought. I was closer to Dorian than I ever had been to any human in so many ways, and yet he was still so much a stranger to me. A phrase from somewhere came swimming out of my mind:
The past is a foreign country.
Dorian’s past spanned empires, and I could never visit there. No matter how well I came to know him, there would be parts of him that remained far beyond my reach.

The phlebotomist moved to Hattie’s side as Paquita’s collection bag slowly filled with blood.

“You probably didn’t get all our names the first time,” Hattie said then, perhaps misinterpreting my silence for shyness. She went around the circle again, and with the three women now clear in my mind, I only had to assign Oleg’s name to his long face.

“How are you handling it?” Will asked. He was the only one other than Svetlana who bore a recognizable accent, an upper class British drawl. “The conversion, I mean.”

“It’s been very...strange,” I admitted.

I thought of my desire and fear, my struggle to keep myself intact and my driving attraction to Dorian that had somehow turned into something more. I didn’t know how to put any of it into words, not even with these people, who should be able to understand if anyone could.

The cognates were looking at me expectantly, so I continued. “As I’m sure you’ve heard, I agreed to a medical procedure because I was terminally ill. Dorian...well, you know...and I woke up nearly a week later to realize that I’d just been bitten by a vampire and turned into...something else,” I finished lamely. “I don’t hardly even know him, still, and I don’t know what I feel about everything—what I should feel about it.”

The phlebotomist moved on to Will, who just rolled up his sleeve without bothering to lie down like Paquita and Hattie had.

“You mean you don’t know if you should love him. Oh, you spoiled modern children,” Paquita said, smiling at me affectionately. “For me, conversion was a gift from the Holy Mother, nothing less. I never deluded myself that I would choose the man I was to marry.”

Hattie made a slightly offended clicking sound, but Paquita ignored her.