wrath like a brand in his chest. The predatory, possessive wrath of the blood, so much like lust as to seem identical. Jack's dalliance with Phoebe, he could accept.
A wampyr would be different.
David's hands clenched tight on Sebastien's upper arms, creasing the fabric of his coat. Sebastien could have torn free, but instead he drew up, glowering down his nose at David.
Passion filled him, terrible and sweet, a craving as fierce as ever. It was not something one could turn on a courtesan—that wanton cupidity—and expect him to live. But another wampyr was not prey, was not a courtesan. Another wampyr was an equal and a rival, though David might be less than a quarter Sebastien's age, and quite capable of surviving his unalloyed strength.
And of course David meant to evoke that fury. He delighted in Sebastien's jealousy and anger, and always had.
Sebastien wondered if David knew he hadn't touched another of his own kind since they parted company, more than a century before.
"Sebastien," the Englishman purred, hurt or feigning. "What would I have done? He wears your ring, my love."
"I don't trust you."
David's nails scratched Sebastien's neck, tracing the spine from skull to shoulders. Sebastien shivered.
"Don't trust me," David answered. "I need your goodwill. Use me." He turned his head aside, offered Sebastien his throat, his fingers curled
and urging.
Whether he had the power to resist, he did not care to. Sebastien moaned and let his fangs slip into David's cool flesh as David clung against him. Then a twinned mouth was on his own neck, need-sharpness hot where the kiss was cold, the urgency sweet and rich as the old blood that filled Sebastien's mouth. David was a featherweight in his arms, a frail thing that smelled of citrus-musk and lilac cologne and filled him with a rasping, heated pulse. David stifled a sob against his throat, jaws working, lacerating Sebastien's skin as Sebastien bore them both down on the couch.
It would heal.
It would heal quite perfectly. And the sensation of the thick salvaged blood beating from his wounds into David's mouth as David knelt over him, his blond locks stuck willy-nilly between the clenching knuckles of Sebastien's hand—that was a passion worth anything.
* * *
Sebastien lay with closed eyes and listened to the silent, cool pressure on the couch, more an absence than a presence. It was as if a ghost lay down beside him. He knew without looking that David would be leaned on one elbow, studying Sebastian over the narrow bridge of his nose. "You left me," David said at last.
"You were angry company."
But the fingers that traced his brow and cheek were anything but angry. "I wasn't angry with you."
"No." David had been angry with the Church, the King, himself, the tissue of lies that he'd been raised on. But not with Sebastien, not except briefly and at first, when Sebastien had taught him that the desires David had been raised to consider anathema were not merely a matter of unconfessable groping in filthy alleys, of lewdness and whoring.
If pressed, Sebastien was certain he could summon up a list of fates worse than being Puritan and a fairy. And effeminate.
But it would take doing.
David had his reasons to be angry. But after a century or two, one did grow tired. Mortal lifetimes were a mercy to love, Sebastien thought. It could endure that long.
His lips brushed Sebastien's cheek. "I wasn't sure you'd see me."
"You sent a ring. You came alone. How else could I respond?"
His nose and lips brushed Sebastien's ear now. Lazily, Sebastien lifted one hand to stroke David's disheveled hair back into place. "You are not like the rest of us, Sebastien," he said. "It never pays to be too sure—"
"I was."
David's hand rested on Sebastien's shirtfront and cravat, over where his heart would have beat when he still lived. The pressure felt like a trap, suddenly, and Sebastien pulled away and stood, flicking his suitjacket straight with his thumbs.
"I was like the rest of you," he said. "I just grew old."
"And now you're the Moggy Molly of the bloodsucking set," David said, coolly, rolling onto his back with one arm cast languidly on the pillow sham. "Picking up half-starved tabbies from the gutter and carting them home to a teeming house."
It was a smarting double entendre, but Sebastien had the self-control not to return the serve. Epaphras had been one of those half-starved "tabbies," a runaway whore in a molly-house, who had had a flat choice between rotting of syphilis or accepting