“You’re not ready,” Miriam pronounced, quelling Phoebe’s excitement.
“But I’m hungry.” Phoebe fidgeted in her chair, her eyes pinned on Miriam’s wrist.
Feeding from her maker was like getting a meal and a bedtime story all at once. With every drop of blood Phoebe swallowed, her mind and imagination were suffused with Miriam’s memories. She’d learned far more about Miriam in the past two days than she had in the fifteen months they had known each other.
Some of what Phoebe knew felt intuitive, a flood of scattered episodes from Miriam’s long life in which pleasure and pain were inseparable partners.
In subsequent feedings, Phoebe was able to focus on the strongest impressions in Miriam’s blood rather than being overcome by waves of blurry remembrance.
Phoebe understood now that the tall, rugged man with the wise, wary eyes and the wide, easy grin had been Miriam’s mate, and that she alone called him Ori, though others knew him as Bertrand and Wendalin, Ludo and Randolf, and his mother had called him Gund.
Miriam had sired more men than women in the centuries that led to Phoebe’s own conversion. She had to in order to survive, back when having men around you was some measure of protection against rape and robbery. Sons could pretend to be brothers, or even spouses in emergencies, and were a deterrent to both grasping humans with their incessant need for more wealth, and vampires with their desire for greater territory. Her sons, like her mate, Ori, were gone now, killed in the violent warfare that ran through Miriam’s memories in a dark ribbon of grief.
Then there were the daughters. First, there had been Taderfit, killed by her vampire mate in a fit of jealous rage. Lalla, Miriam’s second daughter, had been set upon by her own children, crushed and torn to death in a competition over who would rule their clan once Lalla was gone. After Miriam had disposed of Lalla’s feuding children, she stopped making daughters for a while.
But it was not only ancient history that featured in Miriam’s blood. More recent events had a place there, too. Matthew de Clermont, Marcus’s sire, was in many of Miriam’s memories. In the crowded city of Jerusalem, Matthew and Ori had turned heads and cleared paths, one raven dark and the other golden. The two men had been devoted friends.
Until Eleanor. In Miriam’s blood, Phoebe saw that the English woman had been a great beauty, with porcelain skin and flaxen hair that testified to her Saxon heritage. But it was her irrepressible enthusiasm for living that had made the vampires flock to Eleanor’s side. Vampire blood honed bones and muscles until they reached their greatest potential, so there was no shortage of attractive specimens. Vitality, however, was a different matter.
Miriam had been drawn to Eleanor’s joy just like most of the other creatures in the city: daemon, human, vampire, and witch. She had befriended Eleanor St. Leger when she arrived in the Holy Land with her family and one of the waves of crusaders. And it was Miriam who introduced Eleanor to Matthew de Clermont. When she did, Miriam had unknowingly planted the seeds of her mate’s eventual destruction.
Bertrand’s life had been sacrificed to save Matthew’s, a testament to bonds of friendship so deep that they bordered on the brotherly. Most vampires, however, viewed the warrior’s death as collateral damage in the de Clermont family’s rise to greatness.
Promise me you’ll watch over him. Ori had asked Miriam for the boon in the hour before dawn on the morning of his execution, as he belted his brightly colored tunic and donned his knight’s sword for the last time.
Miriam had agreed. Ori’s request, and her own promise to him, echoed in her blood.
Even now it bound Miriam and Matthew together. Matthew had Diana to watch over him, as well as his mother Ysabeau, Marcus, and all the other members of the Bishop-Clairmont scion of which Phoebe would soon be a member. But that did not lessen Miriam’s commitment—she would never disavow her mate’s dying wish.
Phoebe was so focused on what she had gathered from Miriam’s memories that she barely registered the closing of the door as Freyja and Fran?oise left them. But she scented Miriam’s approach and reached out, grabbing for her wrist.
“You don’t take.” Miriam’s voice was glacial.
Phoebe’s hand dropped.
Miriam waited for Phoebe’s hunger to climb another notch, standing so close that their two vampire hearts came to beat slowly as one. Finally, Miriam offered her child sustenance.
“Tomorrow you can take,” Miriam said. “But not from me. Never from me.”