With his first objection out of the way, the innkeeper then insisted that Helena not leave his household without first being married. That was not a hindrance because Baka had brought with him several persons empowered to perform wedding rites.
All the way home to Cozio, Baka marveled at the way her chestnut hair looked when the sun was shining on her. It seemed to him that a visible halo of gold shone all around her. Whenever she looked at him, her amber eyes sparkled and he experienced a wealth of feelings he had never had before. His young bride had no experience with sex. He had no experience with love and would give up his humanity without ever admitting to it.
He would not have said that he was in love, but he would not have traded places with any other man. Helena loved Baka as much as a woman can love a man and would have done anything for him. She embraced his children and nurtured them as if they were her own. She went out of her way to make him comfortable and loved nothing more than making him smile. He could not wait until the cottage was quiet, the night fire built, so that he could get under the covers with his beautiful, young bride and quietly make sweet love to her.
Baka had been familiar with the clinical basics of intercourse for nearly two decades, but in many ways he was as new to sexual pleasure as the woman whose body greeted him with hunger when he lay with her. She was eager to please him to the point of being a little wicked. The fact that she delighted in the intimacies they shared made him putty in her hands. She was willing to remove all her clothes under the covers and, even more astonishing, urged him to do the same.
She made Baka feel young again. Even more surprising, he became aroused whenever he thought about her, at any time of day no matter what he was doing. Certainly that should not be happening to a man of his age.
At night when the children went to bed on the far side of the one room cottage, Baka and Helena would engage in a conspiracy of silence, to keep from waking them. The newlyweds explored each other's bodies slowly and thoroughly. She moaned softly into his ear when he touched her thus and so and he quickly learned the difference between what appealed to her and what excited her. Sometimes he knew she struggled to muffle cries of passion as his fingers learned to deftly stroke between folds hot and slick with desire for him. Even that wetness was something new and surprising. The feel of a naked woman pressing against him, skin on skin, her body begging for his, was an ecstasy he never could have imagined.
Once their instincts were freed from internal judgments of scandal regarding husband and wife finding joys and delight in sexual acts, nature's course led him to explore her body with lips as well as hands, going lower and lower while she writhed until he nuzzled the triangle of honey-colored curls.
When Helena realized what he was doing, she protested for the first time and tried to stop him. He hesitated just long enough to smile into those curls before going lower. Her silent protests were interrupted by a gasp as she felt his breath on her core for the first time. She stuffed a fistful of sheet into her mouth to muffle the subsequent sounds of ecstasy and wished that just once she could scream his name with abandon until her voice went hoarse.
As the winter nights passed, they cuddled and snuggled and played and reveled in the feel of each other's bodies and the naughty ways they pleasured each other. Occasionally Baka made a sound that he was sorely afraid might be described as a giggle.
He could not have been more pleased with his pretty, young wife and her sensual ways. In addition to being salacious in the most delicious way, she was kind and generous of spirit with his children. She was a good cook and seemed to want nothing more from life than their quiet existence. In other words, Helena was everything a man like Baka could hope for.
On spring and summer evenings he would stop on his way home to gather wildflowers growing close to the path. The first time he brought them home Helena's face lit up with surprise and happiness. Her eyes shown with love as she asked him what each was called. He didn't know. So he made a point of pressing Brother Paisius into service, accompanying him along the path to teach Baka the names of each and every bloom. Romanian bellflower, Alpine primrose, yellow foxglove, pink dobrogean, Balkan peony and many more. If his bride wanted to know the names of petals, he would procure this information and take it to her as a gift, as proof that he liked her very much and wanted to please her as much as she had pleased him.
After they had been together for a year Helena began to suspect she was pregnant. Tragically, she never had a chance to share the wonderful news with the man she worshipped.
When Istvan Baka was infected, he was practically elderly for medieval times. At thirty-three he had seen his share of death and sorrow, had lost two wives and five children. Such things were expected and accepted as part of life then, but that didn't mean it was easy.
One day in midwinter he was caught up in what he was doing. As the room grew darker, instead of putting his paints and brushes away for the day, he lit more candles and continued. When he stopped for the night, it was dark outside. He left the monastery wanting nothing more than to hurry home toward the warmth of a fire lit hearth, a pot of stew, two children, and a wife that made him smile with anticipation and hunger for her.
Istvan Baka had pulled his coat around him. The night was still, but the dark made it colder than his usual homeward trek. There was a waning moon, half bright, but it was almost impossible to see the path through the forest without a lamp. He had to go slowly or risk a misstep. He was thinking about the warmth in his cottage where Helena would have something wonderful, perhaps lamb stew, warming on the hearth.
His thoughts were thus occupied when he heard a rustle and a whimper in the woods.
He stopped abruptly, turning his ear toward the sounds, but heard nothing more. After a few more steps, he decided it was an overactive imagination replaying tales of horror from childhood. The first indication otherwise was a woman’s scream. He ran toward the sound, but was brought to an abrupt halt by a deep gash sliced open in his neck. That was followed by another and another.
He was left alone on the cold mountainside to freeze to death or bleed out. Baka did neither. When the sun rose the next morning his body had not died, but his humanity had. His brain had regained control of a body too weak from loss of blood to respond. With great effort and exertion of will, he slowly dragged himself to a crevice behind a rock and covered himself with branches.
There he stayed for a time. Days perhaps. He did not grow stronger, but his weakness was overcome by a thirst he had not experienced before.
Helena was beside herself with worry. She had been to the monastery three days before and was told that he hadn't been seen. She began searching the mountain between the monastery and the cottage, praying all the while she looked for some sign of what had become of him. There were rumors that people were sometimes attacked by wild animals. Some such thing might have occurred, a wolf perhaps. So she looked for signs of blood or torn clothing or worse.
Distraught as she was, she had not noticed the sun was low in the sky. Being caught in winter after dark on a Romanian mountainside was dangerous by any standard because the temperature plummeted at sunset. It was the pink moment called gloaming, when twilight turns to night, that the unfortunate young wife walked close to where Istvan Baka was hiding. It was then he knew what his body craved and he was taken over by instinct.
When Helena drew near his hiding place, the beast occupying Baka's body marshaled his remaining strength and grabbed her ankle. She was frozen by surprise for an instant which was all it took to jerk her to the ground and underneath him as he sank his new fangs into the neck of the woman he had loved with his heart if not with words. She was instantly paralyzed, as Baka had been, but, unlike Baka, she was drained of every drop of blood until she was past pain and, supposedly, past the concerns of this life.
Baka felt no regret. He did not recognize the person whose life was forfeit. He felt only that he was stronger than at any time in memory. The lifeless body that would have soon been mother to his child was carried to a deep gorge nearby and thrown over. By the time it was found, if ever, people would assume she had died from a fall.
And so began Istvan Baka’s new life as a vampire.
***
CHAPTER_7
Elora had fallen in love with her husband's forest. It was everything she'd longed for as she'd spent the first decades of her life in another dimension, mostly confined to palace grounds, closely watched, guarded, and restricted at every turn. The New Forest was a dream come true, its wilderness a balm to her spirit. It represented what she needed and treasured most - freedom.
She first fell in love with the Forest when it wore snow in deep winter. She had crossed an ocean to reunite with her mate, not knowing that he would give her the home she craved on so many levels. In spring, she was enthralled by the spectrum of greens as new leaves sprouted, not to mention the riot of random color, wild flowers so abundant it would seem they had been deliberately seeded. In summer, the streams and wild life settled into a rhythm of slow contentment as the sun lingered longer in the north with welcome warmth and light.
Elora proclaimed each new season at the cottage to be her favorite, but at that very moment, she was certain it must be autumn. She enjoyed every part of it, watching the leaves turn fiery colors then reluctantly let go of branches, and feeling the air turn crisp enough to put an extra bloom in her cheeks. Instead of riding, she was walking the forest that day, partly because Ram was so afraid she would take a fall while pregnant and partly because she loved the sound of leaf crunch under her boots.
Every day he was gone for several hours overseeing the renovation of the house. He still thought it was a heap, but when it came to making his mate happy, he was all in. A year before, after he had watched the video of her hearing before the triumvirate at Jefferson Unit, he had sworn that she would have the best of everything from then on.