By My Side ... (A Valentine's Day Story) by Christine Blackthorn Read Free Book Online

first few times she had toddled into the room
which seemed to hold all the treasures of the world to her. The
night before her nanny Greta had finished the book they had been
reading and Elena had thought to find another, not satisfied with
the speed with which the overworked woman was able to fulfil her
demands. The first sight of the library had robbed her of her
breath, the first look at the scowling Vampire Lord growling at her
had sent her running. But she had come back. Nothing would have
kept her away after that first view of those rows and rows of
books, of stories -- or the man she secretly dreamt of as her
father.
    And she had worn him down,
eventually. By her next birthday, the fifth of her life, she was
ensconced deeply within the Vampire Lord's life, court and library.
She would most likely have turned into the most spoiled, most
demanding child on the planet from all the attention she received.
After all, she was only a child, and one surrounded by an
assortment of supernaturals, many centuries old, for whom
biological imperatives meant they were rarely able to carry, or
create, many offspring. And in some ways she was spoiled -- spoiled
in attention, in stories told, in games played -- but less so in
material matters.
    Whoever thought Vampire Courts
were rich and opulent affairs had never come to visit the court of
Innsbruck. Adrianus was too bad a manager to stray far from
bankruptcy, and too ethical to force his followers to take the
brunt of his mismanagement.
    A pang of homesickness had let
her heart skip a beat. She missed Adrianus, the absent-minded
scholar of her childhood. She missed the stories, missed the man
who had spent hours upon hours explaining to her some obscure poem,
some long forgotten verse form. It mattered little that over the
last few years she had come close to hating him. She still missed
him, talking to Reschkar, relating one anecdote after the other,
only made her realise how much.
    But she had begun to miss him
long before leaving the court. Her inability to bond, and the ever
increasing pressure on her, mixed with the barely veiled
disappointment in the eyes of all who met her, had destroyed more
than just her self-confidence. It had destroyed the intimate
strands of love holding her to her family.
    Elena answered his inquiries
openly, not only in honour of the promise she had given, but from
her innate sense of fairness. She spoke even when her words
revealed her own inadequacies, her failure to bond on so many
occasions. She had long since learnt to separate herself from her
pain, to live with the failure she was. Not even when he began to
quiz her directly on the bonding process and the different measure
that had been taken, did her voice waver from its deliberate and
passive tone.
    "I have failed to bind each
year since the age of sixteen, though it was attempted during the
traditional binding periods and outside. It is considered unlikely
that I will bond in future. However, there is a chance that a
change in the preparatory methods might break my shields and allow
for a bonding."
    And if not, then he could still
use her blood, for as long as it lasted at least. It was the
unspoken corollary to that sentence. His large hands began to
smooth along the tense strands of muscles under his hands, his
thumbs digging into the tension in her thighs, making her realise
how stiff her body had become. His voice, though, showed no sign of
any excitement or anger.
    "Preparation?"
    It was easier to speak about
the ErGer bond as if it was an academic topic, wholly divorced from
her own life.
    "Common wisdom suggests that
even around Valentine's Day, when an ErGer's mental walls are
compromised by the bonding agent accumulating in the blood, it is
wisest to impose physical and emotional limits of endurance on her
before attempting a bond. The theory is that an ErGer will then, in
an instinctive form of self-preservation, initiate the bond herself
in order to make her survival a priority to