Page 6 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
“I quite agree,” said Mr. Darcy, who was sitting down, pouring glasses of port for the four of them. As vampires, they could drink, but they could not become inebriated. Even still, they imbibed alcohol nearly daily, as well as tea and even morning chocolate. It was always easier to drink than to eat. Food took quite some time to be broken down by their vampire bodies. It often sat quite uncomfortably for days in their stomach before it was eventually broken down and absorbed. Liquid was easier.
“Oh, I thought I would not have to,” said Caroline, who was running her fingers over the back of one of the chairs. “I simply got careless, I suppose, with whatever it was coming out of my mouth. It will not happen again, I assure you.”
Caroline had started saying all manner of things about sirensongs and blood-drinking and teasing him about how much he wished to drain Elizabeth entirely dry, and there had been no choice but to charm both Elizabeth and Sir William, make them forget whatever it was she had said.
“Now that I think about it,” said Bingley, “you were this way the last time Darcy had a sirensong.”
“I was not,” said Caroline, sweeping across the room to take her glass of port.
“You were, actually,” said Darcy, picking up his glass, leaning back in his chair to level his gaze at her.
She sat down, sighing. “Well, we all know how it often goes, don’t we? I have done it myself, after all. You remember that time in France in the 1350s.”
“I’m not going to turn Elizabeth Bennet,” said Mr. Darcy. “I have never turned a sirensong, Caroline.”
“You have never turned anyone,” she countered, witheringly.
Turning a human could go badly sometimes if one didn’t take care. One had to take the prospective vampire all the way to the point of death, and if one went too far, sometimes certain things got, well, damaged. Then, the resulting vampire would be nothing more than a hungry, mindless, raging beast. Those sorts of vampires gave the rest of all vampires a bad name, because they would kill indiscriminately, nothing but rage and hunger. They were monstrous.
This was what had happened with Caroline’s sirensong. She had tried to turn him, done a bad job of it, and then the resulting monstrous creature had gone on a rampage, killing a number of people.
They had restrained the creature but Caroline had prevented them from killing him, clutching him and begging him to come back to her. She had fought to keep him alive for longer than had made any kind of sense.
“Which is why I have no intention of starting now,” said Mr. Darcy. “I am not going to turn her, and you needn’t worry that I shall.”
“Indeed, it seems that Darcy showed remarkable restraint tonight,” said Bingley to Caroline. “You, on the other hand, did not.”
Caroline pressed her lips together and looked away.
“What is that face you are making?” muttered Bingley.
“It is foolish, Charles,” she said, calling him the first name they had adopted for this incarnation of themselves. They had created themselves out of whole cloth, something that they usually did not do, but it did afford them more freedom, pretending to be new money upstarts who had made a fortune in some sort of trade. It was an expedient for them, something that Darcy did not have, not in his identity, which was stolen from a person who had actually existed. “You have no reason to be jealous, you know.”
“I am not jealous,” said Bingley, stopping his pacing momentarily to get a glass of port, and then resuming it immediately, drink in hand.
“Jealous of whom?” said Darcy. “Of what?”
“You may do as you like,” said Bingley, gesturing with the hand not holding his wine glass. “You may call him whatever you like. You may make your eyes at him and simper that he is your heart as often as you wish. I have no interest in you at this current time, Caroline.”
Caroline rolled her eyes. “So you say.”
They were not actually brother and sister, Darcy knew. They traveled together, and they all did… things together. Even the women. Darcy could not say he had not been drawn into it all himself at various points.
Not in some time, however, he had to admit.
It all seemed like a relic of something long lost, something that he remembered, something that belonged to humans, not to them. His vampire body was capable of carnal things, kisses and caresses and more than that, all of it, but he had not used his prick for anything at all in decades.
“Jealous of me?” he said now, amused, surprised.
“No,” said Bingley, stopping his pacing to round on Darcy and glare. “I tell you, you and Caroline may do absolutely anything you like—”
“I do not wish to do anything with Caroline,” said Darcy, laughing.
Caroline shifted on her chair. “And I do not wish to do anything with either of you.” She laughed. “Bloody hell, boys, I find all of that to be rather boring now, I must say. I am tired of all of it.”
She swore sometimes when they were alone, though she wouldn’t say things that proper ladies shouldn’t say when they were in public. But this swear, the force of it, it struck Darcy as something else, that she was trying to convince them both of something that wasn’t entirely true.
He supposed he knew it, deep down.
