Masters of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

she lived, she
would taste his knowledge, his appetites, his memories.
    She would know how to sail, how to ride stallions in the wind, how to
choose and enjoy fine wines.
    All the things she had never experienced …
    Lifting her into his arms, he carried her from the mausoleum and began
to fly with her toward a distant steeple.
    “I hope I don’t regret this,” he muttered to himself as he lighted and
laid her gingerly on the rectory porch. For if she lived, she
would also taste—his power.
    He hammered the buzzer, then stepped back and yelled at the upstairs
window. “Stephen! Get your butt out of bed!”
    A light came on in an upper story window, filtering to the stairs, then
the foyer. Henri backed in the darkness below the porch steps.
    The porch light came on and a young priest opened the door, looked out,
then seeing no one, stepped out, almost stumbling over
the crumpled form that lay in front of the door.
    Quickly bending down, the priest turned her face to the side to check
for a pulse. His hand jerked back and he gasped in shock at the blood on his
fingertips. Then he looked wildly around, looking for the assailant, looking
for—the vampyre .
    Grabbing the unconscious young woman by her wrists, he dragged her body
inside, then banged the door shut and began waking the house with urgent
shouts.
    Henri moved away, dissolving into the last edges of twilight.
    But as he hurried to daysleep , the power the
mystic had brought to him began to flow like starlight in his veins. Intense. Magnificent. He was but a
vapor in the night. He was the night!
    Ecstasy? What was ecstasy
when compared to living power? Ecstasy was for the moment. But this, this strange
new strength washed through the chambers of his heart in fierce surges …
    If she lived, would Angie feel the same? From him?

 
 
 
    5.
    Golden light
streamed into Angie’s eyes. Then nothing. Slumber
called her back.
    Dreams—a blur of violent blue eyes with flames in the pits, passed
through her sleep; blue eyes with feral red flames burning behind the pupils,
burning into her own, making her ache to be with him.
    He leaned over her and as he pricked her, her veins felt hot and odd,
as though the flow was reversing backward into a northern sky. She fell from
the sky, through the clouds, into a park pond where the ashes of the dead had
been scattered across the stars.
    Veils of blue gossamer, a shroud of death, floated down across her body
and she drifted on the pond’s stars. She was drowning. And he was becoming
powerful, commanding the tributaries from the chambers of her heart to flow,
and replenish his. He called to her to join him, to share his eternal misery,
to live condemned in darkness with him and run through the black rain of night.
    Her sorrowful sob broke through the stars—and into the suctorial heart sloshing like a languid sea …
    Angie opened her eyes.
    Her body felt like lead.
    She willed her arms to move; they refused. She tried to turn. Her body
ached with deep pain.
    Her veins were in spasms, but she could not cry out, only lay in her
prison of pain, a stone.
    The golden light was in her eyes again. A golden
cross gleaming in the rays of a sunset.
    She averted her eyes from the brightness. She needed to focus, needed
to think. The strange weakness invaded her very bones.
    Someone near her was speaking in low, even tones. What was he saying?
    “She will heal, somewhat, if we were not too late.”
    So that’s it. I’m hurt. I’m all busted up inside. I must have been in a
car wreck or something. They’re giving me the last rites.
    “I’m not Catholic,” she said. Or at least, she thought she said it.
    “But are you a vampyre ?” a voice asked close
to her.
    Her eyes shot open wide. The voice was—
    French.
    He was back! The vampyre was in the room! Waiting to tempt her again.
    She threw back the covers writhing and fighting, slapping at the hands
that tried to force her to lie back down, tried to command her against