A Dark Heart (The Elders and Welders Chronicles) Read online

  She reeled with horror, her strange arousal suddenly doused by his stark words. "Elijah, no! No!"

  She reached out to him, but he shied away.

  "I've stabbed myself through the heart. I've jumped from the tallest buildings in the city. I've shot myself here, again and again," he said, pointing to his temple. "But I always wake up."

  Her stomach roiled with every horrifying revelation he made, her eyes pricking with tears.

  "I always wake up," he repeated, "and I'm always the same. A monster."

  "You're not a monster. I must have made you immortal, like me..."

  "Not like you," he insisted. "I crave blood, Lady Christiana. Human blood. The night you ... turned me and I ran away, there was this fire in my body, growing and growing. And all I could think about was finding you again, taking you and drinking you dry."

  She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "Taking me..." she rasped.

  It spoke to her rising hysteria that she focused on that part of his speech, rather than the part about drinking her dry.

  His eyes pulsed even brighter. "I tried to resist, but in the end I couldn't. I returned to the alley where you'd found me. You weren't there. But the body of that woman was."

  Christiana nodded numbly, remembering the woman that night – one of the Ripper's victims, whom Elijah had been too late to save. Her stomach sank. She had a bad feeling about what he would say next.

  "She was cut open. Dead. But the blood ... The blood was everywhere, and the moment I scented it, I couldn't control myself. The thirst was too much." He paused and looked away, unable to meet her eyes a moment longer. "I found out that night that the best tasting blood in a corpse is in the liver and the heart."

  She couldn't help it. The tears flowed down her cheeks, and her heart felt as if had been mortally bruised. What had she done?

  "And the next night, when I had my fangs buried deep in the neck of someone living, I discovered that I liked the taste of it fresh and warm even better," he finished bleakly.

  "No!" she cried, "Tell me you didn't..."

  The dark look he gave her made it impossible for her to continue. Sobbing, she took his face between her hands, made him focus on her despite his attempts to look away. And as if he couldn't help himself, he leaned in close, so close their foreheads were almost touching. She could see the dark stubble on his chin, the deep groove of the mysterious scar on his cheek that hadn't healed, and the way his nostrils flared, as if he were absorbing her scent into his blood.

  And she could see the fangs, gleaming in the moonlight. Long, thin and metallic, they weren't of the natural world. She just didn't understand how it was possible, how her blood could change him so profoundly.

  "My God, Elijah, I'm sorry," she murmured, sliding her hand towards a fang. She couldn't seem to help herself.

  She gasped as the skin on her finger ripped apart at the barest touch against the razor sharp edge. She pulled her hand away, or at least she tried to. But she wasn't fast enough.

  With lightning-quick speed, he caught her by the wrist with one hand, and with the other hand jerked her body tight against his own. Something dangerous flashed over his glowing eyes. With a moan, he took her bleeding finger into his mouth and sucked the blood from it.

  Shocked and more aroused than she'd ever been before, she slumped helplessly against him. She couldn't take her eyes off the sight of her finger between his lips. She couldn't stop the slow, delicious burn deep in her core at the feel of his hot, wet mouth against her skin, his hard, lean body pressed against her own.

  Then he slowly released her finger from its prison, his tongue snaking out to lap up the last drops of blood from her rapidly healing cut. "So sweet," he murmured, and she moaned in response as he rolled his hips against her own.

  Dear God, she could feel him. All of him.

  When the wound was no more, healed as if it never was, he released her wrist and gripped the back of her head. Holding her tight to him – too tight – he tilted her boneless body back, lowering his head towards her neck, his entire body shuddering against her. And in the last corner of her mind not overcome with the fog of desire, she knew that she should start to worry. She was fairly certain he was going to bite her with his fangs.

  And she was going to let him.

  "All the blood I've had this week, and still it's not enough," he murmured against her throat, each glance of his lips against her skin sending gooseflesh all over her body. "I want more. I want yours, more than my next breath." He pressed his hips against her own again, sending a shockwave of sensation through her lower body. "I want to strip you bare and come inside you, again and again, as I suck you dry," he whispered against her ear.

  She didn't know whether to be aroused or horrified by his words. She was a confusing mix of both, as she swayed helplessly in his arms.

  But she had to believe one thing of him, for if she didn't, if she couldn't, she might as well let him do his worst there and then. She'd turned him into a dangerous, unpredictable creature she'd not even begun to understand, but he was still Elijah. He was still the little boy she'd befriended a lifetime ago.

  He was still the man she loved.

  "You'd never hurt me, Elijah," she said softly.

  And – this time at least – he proved her right. With an anguished whimper, he released her, tracing in the blink of an eye to the other side of the room.

  She reeled in place for a moment, regaining her equilibrium, before she turned to face him again. He was thrumming with tension, his broad shoulders heaving beneath his shirt, his eyes burning her down to her toes.

  "Don't tell me I'm not a monster," he hissed, still trembling, still on a knife’s edge. "You did this to me. You made me into this ... thing. This craving, horrible, deathless thing. Make it stop. Please."

  "I don't know how," she whispered through her tears.

  "Rowan must..."

  "They'll kill you! If Rowan and the others know what I've done, they'll kill you!"

  "Good. Then there is a way," he said, relieved, and he actually started towards her bedroom door, as if prepared to seek out Rowan immediately – to seek his death. And after everything he’d told her, she knew he would.

  She'd never been so terrified – for him, for herself. She had to stop him, and she could think of only one way to do so, though she knew he would hate her even more for it.

  "They'll kill me!" she cried.

  He stopped in his tracks and slowly, reluctantly, turned back to her. The fangs were gone, and his eyes were no longer glowing. He looked as if he'd been kicked in the gut.

  "Tell me this is another of your lies," he breathed.

  She shook her head. "I made an oath when Rowan bonded me, and breaking it is punishable by death."

  "I don't believe you," he whispered. "How can I believe a word out of your lying mouth?"

  She wished she were lying. As much as Rowan loved her, as much as she loved him, his duties as an Elder would force his hand. Now that she saw with her own eyes the horrifying consequences of her actions, she knew deep in her bones that Rowan and the Elder Council wouldn't let this betrayal slide.

  "I would not lie about this. Rowan would have no choice. He's a powerful man, but there are others like him who are even more powerful. They'll kill you, and they'll kill me."

  He believed her. She could see it in the complete bleakness in his expression, the sudden stillness of his body. As if she'd snatched the last of his hope away. The sight of his defeat was soul-wrenching.

  He truly wanted to die, but he couldn't condemn her to the same fate. And it destroyed him.

  It nearly destroyed her.

  He drifted away from the door and towards the open casement window as if in a fog. She followed, careful to not touch him. She suspected that if she did so now, he wouldn't be able to control himself.

  "We'll figure this out. We'll find a way to fix this," she said, cringing at the ridiculous inanity of her words. There was no way out of this nightmare, and t
hey both knew it.

  He stopped, gripping the edge of the sill until his knuckles were white with the strain, his head bowed. "There is no fixing me. And there is no we, my Lady," he said coldly. "You've done quite enough. Stay far away from me. I've restrained myself tonight ... God knows how. I cannot guarantee I will do so again." He leapt upon the windowsill, his massive body blocking out the moonlight, his white shirt billowing in the wind.

  "I just wanted you to live," she murmured to his back.

  He shook his head. "Bloody hell, you're selfish, just as you were all those years ago. You and your bloody father, wanting to save me. You never stopped to ask me if I wanted to be saved. Because I didn't." He shot her a look over his shoulder, and she recoiled from the anguish blazing in his eyes. "I wanted to die then. And I wanted to die last week, and I'll hate you forever for not letting me."

  Then he jumped from her window, at least thirty feet above the back garden, and disappeared into the deep, impenetrable darkness of London as if he were no more than a shadow.

  And all she could think for the longest time as she stared, freezing and hopeless, into the black gloom, was that he should have just tossed her out the window with him, alongside her shattered heart.

  1

  HIS mother had loved him enough to earn the blunt to pay for his Iron Necklace. She’d loved him enough to give him a name of a beautiful prophet, but she hadn't loved him enough to stay alive. She'd died before he could remember her face, her voice, even her name. But he doubted it would have made any difference had she lived. She couldn’t have saved him from his fate. She was just a whore, after all.

  He'd not understood why the other whores had abandoned him after she’d died either, but he understood now. They'd been doing him a kindness, in their own way, even though that kindness had been accompanied by cold winter nights and an empty stomach. They'd thrown him out of the brothel because he had inherited his mother's beauty and their pimp had begun to take notice ... and make plans.

  He'd been four years old.

  He'd survived two winters on his own, living on the fringes of the vicious flash house crews along the Strand, before the pimp had found him again. It had been inevitable, because the man had expanded his business and practically owned every whore, thief and bullyboy in the East End. Everyone called him Newgate Nick on the streets and Mr. O'Connor to his face. Elijah called him Sir, because he'd learned what happened when he didn't.

  Newgate Nick called him the Molly, or sometimes Laddie in his thick Irish burr when he was feeling generous, but never the name his mother had given him. He’d probably forgotten it. And when he was selling Elijah to a rich nob, he called Elijah words like beautiful, lovely, and eager to please, even though the latter was a lie. Elijah was not eager. He was broken.

  But when Newgate Nick used Elijah for himself, the names the pimp called him were too awful to repeat, even in Elijah's head. He knew they were awful, because they made him feel awful, almost as awful as the things the man did to him.

  Elijah wished he'd known what would happen if O’Connor found him again, wished he’d understood what the whores had tried to explain to him when he was a four-year-old boy. He would have tried harder to disappear, to never be found. Now it was too late for him.

  Two years of this life, and he could barely remember a time before he was Newgate Nick's Laddie, when he was as green as the boy and girl he watched from the doorway of Newgate Nick's private office. The two children had come in with the meanest of O'Connor's foot soldiers – the ones who liked to hurt Elijah when they were bored – and the giant, pale stranger with the horrible yellow wolf eyes who often visited.

  The stranger frightened him more than the bullyboys, even though the man had never raised a hand to him, or taken him into the back room, as most of O'Connor's visitors did. It was the sound of the man's voice, the barrenness of it. It was the way even Newgate Nick, the monster of all of Elijah's dreams, seemed to flinch when the man so much as lifted an eyebrow.

  Elijah didn't want to attract the attention of the man who could frighten a bastard like O'Connor. So he always kept to the shadows when the stranger visited, his eyes trained on the floor.

  He'd long ago learned to avoid eye contact with monsters.

  But it was hard to do so tonight. The stranger's arrival was so unexpected that O'Connor had been forced to stop in the middle of smashing Elijah’s face against the sticky burled wood of his desk and ripping his trousers down his legs. When O’Connor had heard the stranger calling his name, he’d cursed and practically run from the room. The man was still rearranging his own untidy clothing over his paunch as he eyed the stranger's two captives.

  The children were bound with ropes, just as Elijah had been when O'Connor had brought him here two years ago. That was not what drew Elijah's unwilling interest as he hovered in the shadows of the doorway, however. The sight of someone bound – or worse – was nothing new under this roof. But the fact that the two were twins was a novelty. They were identical, save that one was a boy and one was a girl, and they were dressed in clothes only a nob's children might wear, all thick, fancy velvets, fragile lace and sparkling gold buttons. They were younger than Elijah, with curly hair the color of moonbeams, so pale it was almost white, and wide silver-gray eyes, set in bloodied, tear-streaked faces.

  Elijah shivered as he finished fastening his torn trousers. Now he knew what terror looked like. He'd felt it often enough – had felt it seconds before, in fact, inside Newgate Nick’s office as he’d braced himself for the pain he knew was coming – but he’d never seen it in another person.

  And he knew now what love must look like, from the way the twins both strained towards each other, despite their bonds, despite the turmoil around them. They weren’t even able to touch, but they wanted to desperately, as if somehow they could save each other if only they could hold hands. It was ridiculous, and even more ridiculous that Elijah imagined such a story at all, for while he was old friends with terror, the idea of love was a stranger to him. More than a stranger. A fairytale. And as Newgate Nick had demonstrated time and again, a fairytale was just a fancy word for a lie.

  Even so, something shivered down his body as he watched the twins, something made him twine his arms around his torso and edge further into the shadows in the doorway, filled with shame. The bond between them was so … bright, despite their bruises and scrapes. Bright and clean … and good. He knew he had no business going anywhere near them, for he was none of those things. He doubted he’d ever been.

  “So you found the little buggers,” O’Connor was saying, tucking in his shirttails.

  “No thanks to you,” the wolf-eyed toff said coldly, looking disgusted by O’Connor’s slovenliness.

  O’Connor was scared, even more so after the stranger’s cutting words. Elijah could feel the fear clear across the room. But as usual, O’Connor tried to brazen his way through it. “I would have had them by the week’s end, if you’d given me a chance.”

  “Not good enough,” the man murmured, producing a wicked looking knife from the folds of his dark cloak. “Your incompetence is beginning to bore me. I do not like to be bored with my investments. And I like inconveniences even less. Shall I demonstrate what happens to those who inconvenience me, Nicholas?”

  O’Connor looked as if he was prepared to argue further, but he didn’t get the chance. The toff moved almost too quickly to see – definitely too quickly to be real. When he was done, one of the twins – the boy – was falling to the floor, a look of shock on his young face, and the girl was screaming.

  Elijah had seen horrible things all of his life, but even he had to look away from the boy’s writhing, gurgling body. The toff had gutted him, wide and deep. And it seemed to take forever for the twitches to stop and his pale gray eyes to glaze over in death.

  O’Connor had gone pale beneath his swagger, but Elijah couldn’t even find satisfaction in this. He was too frightened himself, too stunned. The boy had been no older than he was when h
e’d first come to this place.

  “Damn it. I could have used that lad!” O’Connor growled.

  The toff’s lips curled at the edges, and he glanced down at the girl, who continued to scream, her eyes trained on her brother’s now lifeless body. He raised the bloody knife over her head, and Elijah sucked in his breath, clutching the edge of the door to keep himself from…

  He didn’t know what he wanted to do. Push that girl from harm’s way before the man killed her too. Run away. Scream. Anything. But he was petrified with fear, just as he’d been for two years.

  All the man did was cuff her against the side of the head with the wrong end of the knife until she was so disoriented she stopped crying. Then he shoved her towards O’Connor.

  “Take this one,” he said. “I should kill her too, but I think giving her to you shall be more … fitting. She’s given me more trouble than her sniveling brother. She needs to learn she’s nothing.”

  Nothing. That was how Elijah felt…

  And as he met the girl’s giant silver-gray eyes, filled with such devastation and defiance, across the room, he suddenly knew he couldn’t let O’Connor have her. He couldn’t let that horrible yellow-eyed stranger win, or allow the girl to endure even a second of what Elijah had endured. He’d rather the stranger gut her alongside her brother than see her turned into a gutter whore like him. It would be kinder.

  It would be kinder still to save her from either fate.

  He had become an expert at moving through the brothel like a shadow, so no one paid any notice to him as he skirted the edges of the room, towards the old fireplace with its stand of wrought-iron tools next to it. No one paid attention as he upturned every gas lamp that he passed, the flames jumping to follow the spilled fluid across dry wood floors and dusty carpet. No one paid attention as he retrieved the sharp, pointed poker from the hearth and walked in O’Connor’s direction. They were all too busy arguing with each other.

  By the time they noticed the smoke and flames beginning to fill the room, Elijah was within arm’s length of his tormentor, and he was shaking. With rage. Pure rage. He’d stopped feeling fear, stopped wanting to run away the moment he’d looked into the girl’s eyes and saw her inevitable fate.