Page 2 of The Lost Prophecy

The angel in question stood among a group of young ladies near the upper end of the room, her fair colouring softened by the candlelight and her manner composed despite her mother’s highly audible efforts to direct the entire county’s attention towards her. Bingley halted dead in the middle of an introduction. His lips parted, his pupils dilated to swallow his irises, and the sharp points of his canines descended half an inch before he remembered himself.

Darcy moved swiftly into his path and adjusted the fall of Bingley’s cravat with the brutal efficiency of an assassin.

“Your promise has survived exactly seven minutes.” Darcy kept his hands at the cravat as precaution as well as restraint.

Bingley pressed his tongue firmly behind his teeth, his eyes wide and wholly unrepentant. “She is extraordinarily beautiful.”

“She is also surrounded by her mother, three sisters, and half the neighbourhood.” Darcy measured the distance to the nearest uncovered throat. Four feet. Three, when the set turned.

“I had noticed the lady herself, no one else,” Bingley whispered, as though the admission improved his position.

“That is precisely the difficulty.”

Bingley recovered sufficiently to request a formal introduction, then secured Miss Bennet for the first dance. She accepted with quiet pleasure, and the musicians began before Mrs Bennet could provide a public, itemised inventory of her daughter’s virtues. Bingley led the angel into the set, maintaining an admirable distance from her throat and an utterly indefensible grin on his face.

Miss Bingley approached Darcy and followed her brother’s progress with narrowed eyes. “He becomes attached so easily.”

“He has requested a dance, not announced an engagement.”

“Charles has never understood the distinction.”

Bingley missed a step because Miss Bennet had smiled at him. Darcy conceded that Miss Bingley might, on this single occasion, possess a valid point.

He surveyed the remaining company, intending to identify any further threat to Bingley’s fragile restraint before the evening deteriorated into an accidental massacre. Then the doors opened behind him, admitting a party of two more ladies from the cold passage, and an unfamiliar fragrance entered the room.

It reached him before he turned.

It passed beneath the beeswax, the cheap floral perfume, and the heated wool. It was distinct from every other human scent in the room, striking a craving he had kept disciplined for longer than the building around him had existed. His fingers closed around the head of his cane with such force that the metal began to dent under his glove.

The pulse behind him quickened, not through fear, but laughter. Its rhythm travelled directly through his senses, rich and singular, carrying a promise that no ordinary blood had. Warmth stirred inside his chest, where his heart kept a rhythm slower than the turning of seasons. It beat once, out of its ancient order, sharp enough to hollow him, then fell silent again, leaving his body colder than before.

Darcy turned slowly to see two young ladies who had returned from the retiring room. One was a sensible woman whose composed features suggested that she had already measured the assembly and found it unlikely to improve. Her companion was slighter, with dark hair, intelligent eyes, and colour brought into her cheeks by the cold of the passage. She was laughing over some private observation, her eyes fixed on her friend, unaware that she had just entered a public ballroom carrying the destruction of an ancient master in her veins.

True Blood.

The name rose from a place older than memory. Darcy had encountered references to it in crumbling manuscripts kept in the deepest vaults under Pemberley, among accounts written by masters who had destroyed kingdoms, founded dynasties, and eventually gone mad from the staggering weight of their own existence. Most rational vampires dismissed it as a gothic legend. A few claimed to have found it, although none had survived to prove the boast.

The law itself was brutally simple. A master who drained the True Blood would surrender immortality at the exact moment the victim rose again. The master would become human. The human would awaken hungry, cold, and eternally condemned to the existence from which her destroyer had just escaped. Unless...

Darcy had never expected to find such a woman. He had certainly never expected her to arrive at a Meryton assembly after repairing her hair in a retiring room.

Her gaze moved from the dancers and settled on Miss Jane Bennet. Deep affection softened her expression before mischief returned when Bingley missed yet another step. The sensible friend followed her line of sight, and the two exchanged a few words that disappeared under the scraping of the violins. The young woman laughed again.

Hunger tightened through Darcy’s body like a coiled spring. He heard the blood moving beneath the delicate skin of her throat and knew precisely where he would place his mouth. The knowledge arrived without his permission, accompanied by the imagined, intoxicating warmth of her blood, the final beat of her heart, and the first breath his own lungs might draw out of necessity rather than habit.

He forced his eyes to the musicians with a violence that made his neck ache.

Miss Bingley’s fan ceased moving. “Mr Darcy, has someone offended you?”

Darcy loosened his grip on the cane before the silver gave way beneath his fingers. “Nobody has approached me.”

“You seem displeased.” Her voice had acquired the careful sweetness she reserved for information she intended to keep.

“I am perfectly well.” The lie cost him nothing. Every other word in his head concerned the woman standing by the door.

Miss Bingley studied him, then turned her attention to the two ladies. Her fan resumed its measured motion, although suspicion sharpened every single sweep. “The taller woman is Miss Lucas. Her father received his knighthood during his mayoralty and has never truly recovered from the distinction. The other must be one of the younger Bennet daughters.”

Darcy did not enquire how she had acquired so much detailed information about people she considered fundamentally unworthy of notice.