Blood Deep by Sharon Page Read Free Book Online Page B

him talk, she could keep his mouth off hers, couldn’t she? She could play for time.
    “I have been Nosferatu for many centuries, love. I have lived an eternity.” He spoke with a touch of weariness. She had the sense that he really had no interest in her. If this was a game to him, it bored him.
    “But what happened to you? Who were you as a mortal?
    You didn’t choose to be a vampire, did you?” She fired her questions out in a tumble, one atop the other. Anything to keep him talking to her. To postpone the moment he would bite her or ravish her. “I want to know. I know I won’t survive this night.
    But I need to . . . to think of things. All I have left is curiosity.”
    Zayan’s black straight brows jerked up at that. He laughed.
    The sound was as smooth as the deep velvety night, like the ripple of a nighttime breeze through the trees. The other vampire, Lukos, had a lusty throaty laugh, one that implied he was thinking very rude thoughts.
    Miranda shook her head. Why did she think these things?
    “I have lived for almost two thousand years,” Zayan said dispassionately. “I was a Roman general. My name, in my mortal world, was Marius Praetonius. I took most of Europe in the name of Rome. I was celebrated, worshipped. Your fiancé might have read about me in his schoolbooks.” Lines were suddenly carved at the side of his mouth as he smiled more deeply.
    I sense a great power about you. . . . You intrigue me. . . .
    Miranda heard his deep voice in her head, felt it in her entire body, the way music would vibrate through her. She heard it and went ice-cold. Could he guess that she had special powers—
    a power she couldn’t even understand? That she possessed some kind of magic? She shivered. What would that mean?
    Would it spare her life? Was any of what he had told her true?
    “Of course it is true,” he said in answer to her thoughts.
    “What do you think—I’m some insignificant slave who concocted a fancy tale?”

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    She recoiled from the sudden anger in his voice. His lower lip thrust out, in the way her brother would do when she had caught him making some foolish mistake, such as gambling.
    Vampires were once mortal men. That is the critical thing to remember when hunting them. Aunt Eugenia had told her that over and over again.
    She remembered her response to Aunt Eugenia: I am a gentlewoman. I am supposed to even fear the power of mortal men.
    But Aunt Eugenia scoffed at that. A woman is as powerful as she believes she can be. The words had almost made Miranda laugh—she painted watercolors, diligently perfected her embroidery, strolled the gardens with a dainty parasol. How could she be powerful? But she had wanted to believe her aunt. And Eugenia’s words had a strange power attached to them. As though, by thinking them, they could give her greater strength.
    Zayan stretched his arm along the back of the seat. It was such a masculine gesture—such a normal, human one—that it caught Miranda by surprise. “Does knowing who I once was make you more willing to kiss me?” he asked, amusement heightening the allure of his looks.
    She fought the instinctive tug of feminine admiration at his chiseled jaw, full lips, at even the crinkles at the sides of his mirrorlike eyes.
    “Of course not!”
    “Wise girl.” Across from them, Lukos had propped one booted foot on the velvet seat of the coach. “He’s a vampire.
    He’s taken the blood of thousands of innocent women and children.”
    She froze, horrified.
    “As have you,” Zayan growled. He was watching her, his gaze hot and intense. “I would like to know what you are. Not a normal, flighty, empty-headed woman of society, are you?”
    Miranda twisted her bound hands. Her entire body tensed, BLOOD DEEP / 45
    but she tried to look rather stupidly at Zayan. “Of course I am just an empty-headed, ordinary woman.”
    But he held her gaze, seeing through her, she was certain, with his mirror-like eyes.
    She had slid along