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  Unbitten

  Copyright © 2012 Valerie du Sange

  Published by Fanny Bancroft Books, Inc.

  Unbitten is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and not to be construed as real. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book contains content that may not be suitable for readers under 18.

  Cover by Keith Damiani.

  cover photograph of château by stéfan. stéfan’s photostream

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all of you so much for your encouragement, your perspicacious criticism, and especially, your honesty: Martin Bass, Ivy Hackenberry Cramer, Heidi Eckstein, Michelle Damiani, and Deana Whitaker Greenberg.

  For your brilliance in formatting and other arcane computer matters, thank you Steve Greenberg.

  For special kinds of help, big thanks to Jutta and to Penny Norford.

  For that smokin’ cover, deep gratitude to Keith Damiani.

  This book is dedicated to Katherine M.,

  my patron saint.

  Prologue

  She went for a walk after dinner, like she always did. She was not about to let that man turn her into a scared little bunny.

  You could call Jo a lot of things, but “bunny”? No. “Bunny” was so far down the list as not to be on it at all.

  Please, did he really think she would fall for that line about being a vampire?

  Really?

  The night was the coldest so far. The wind was up and she wished she’d worn a hat–her hair was blowing all over the place and her ears were freezing. It was making such a racket, not quite howling but occasionally screeching, that Jo did not hear the crunching of the gravel, the footsteps on the path behind her. She was so busy telling herself how brave she was, that she failed to be scared at a moment when fear would have served her very well.

  Sometimes bunnies have it right.

  1

  The Marquis Henri de la Motte took his brother by the arm and pulled. Up several flights of stairs, down a long corridor, and up a stone circular staircase to a room that jutted out over the moat, with a fine view of the pond and the swans. Up where no guests could hear what he had to say.

  “David! You have got to get ahold of yourself! We will lose the Château if you keep this up! You cannot drink from every paying guest we have, or pretty soon we will have no more guests at all!” Henri was usually the calmer brother, the easy-going Marquis, the responsible vampire. But this afternoon he exploded, raising his voice and shoving David in the shoulder.

  David took a step back in response to the shove, but he was smiling. He made the step back seem like a bit of ballet, as though the brothers were playing a game, having a little sport before being called to dinner.

  No question that the brothers were impressive physically. Both powerful, nimble, and athletic. David was the younger, extroverted brother, who loved to show off and attract as much attention as possible. And Henri was a scientist, a man with ambitions–quieter, deeper, more reserved–not really a man to run a hotel, not at all.

  David turned away from Henri and looked out at the swans, and in the emerald pasture behind the lake, the horses. “Look,” he said, gesturing. “See how inviting it looks now, with the landscaping done. We’ve got more bookings than we’ve ever had before, thanks to me.”

  “I don’t dispute that,” said Henri. “But night after night, these poor guests–that jolly English couple who came on Tuesday, with the rosy cheeks and blond hair!”

  “Very, very tasty!” laughed David. “There’s something about that northern European flavor I especially like. Blondes,” he said, “are the absolute tastiest. And they are unbelievably hot,” he said, with a smirk.

  Now Henri turned away. “You’re disgusting,” he said.

  “You’re self-hating,” answered David. “Vampires love to bite, they love to drink, they love to fuck. You? What do you like to do? Read and go for walks in the woods? Play in your lab?” David’s voice rose as he spoke, and crueler thoughts tumbled into his head but he held them back. Henri was his brother, after all, and David needed him.

  Although Henri did not have much to do with the running of the Château or the chambre d’hote, he was a stabilizing influence on his brother. A modern influence. He wanted to figure out how vampires could live in the new millenium–live without constantly risking their lives by attacking human women and getting caught, by continuing with the old ways, the medieval ways. Henri’s method of working on this was by inventing various products in his lab that he hoped would give vampires more freedom once they were widely available. He left the work of the Château and the Château’s business up to David.

  Sometimes David felt a little like a show horse, like his purpose was to attract attention and prance around while Henri fiddled around on secret projects, while his parents–oh, don’t even get him started on his parents, those wizened creaking heaps who almost never came out of the basement–anyway, that English woman had been a bit of delicious last night and he wasn’t sorry for it. He remembered for a second how he had brushed the woman’s blonde hair off her neck before plunging his teeth into her soft rosy flesh, and felt himself get hard just thinking about it. It was going to be difficult to wait until tonight, when that new couple arrived and he could see what was on the evening’s menu.

  That is, if Henri would lighten the hell up.

  “I’m asking you to back off a little,” Henri said, in a conciliatory tone. “Of course I’m not saying don’t have a snack from time to time, I’m not saying you have to go straight to synthetics and that’s it. And you’re doing an admirable job of having a light drink and not killing anybody. I know that takes self-control.”

  Henri had learned over the years–around two hundred or so–that the best way to get David to listen to him was not to react to his insults and to slather on the flattery.

  “You’ve been careful to do a brainwipe before you leave them?” he asked.

  “Of course,” David said, sounding bored.

  “And the husbands–you’ve left them alone?”

  David just rolled his eyes.

  “And the new bandages I created, how are they working out?”

  “When that English lass came down to breakfast, did you see any problem?” David said, his voice full of annoyance. His brother was making him feel like a little boy taking orders, and he chafed at it.

  “Just…keep the risks in mind,” Henri continued. “Our family has kept this secret for seven hundred years. You don’t want to be the la Motte who gives the game away. If any of these women goes home and starts talking, we could have slayers breathing down our necks like that.” Henri snapped his fingers under David’s nose.

  “And not only that. It would be easy to get…carried away. To suck just a moment too long. To kill somebody.”

  “Right,” said David, nodding, but managing with his tone to show Henri that he worried too much, even as he was appearing to agree with what Henri was saying. “I’m not going to drink anyone out, that’s not my thing. Death is skeevy.” He shuddered a little and made a face.

  “Listen,” he added. “When’s that American girl getting here? There are some show trials early next month and I want her in the saddle.”

  “That American girl is an expense we should not be taking on,” Henri said.

  “This business works because middle-class people from around the world live their terribly mundane lives and they want, just for a week or even a night or two, to pretend they’re part of the nobility. Nothing says nobility like show horses, dear b
rother.” And with that, David gave a snort and was through the door and gone.

  Maybe it was her imagination, but it seemed to Jo as though the Air France airplane food was a little bit better than the airplane food she was used to. Not that she had had that much experience with flying or comparing one airline to another–she only flew when one of her rich clients paid for the ticket–but as she dove into her packaged meal with gusto, she told herself that the oddly-shaped hunk of chicken drowning in a pasty sauce was not that bad.

  Across the aisle, a man was watching her out of the corner of his eye. He was amused by Jo’s obvious enthusiasm, and he laughed out loud when she was working so hard to cut her chicken that her knife snapped in two and a chunk of plastic came sailing into his lap.

  “So sorry!” she said, looking around for more napkins, sure that the sauce had done something unforgivable to the man’s suit.

  He dabbed at the spot with his own napkin, after dipping it into the club soda he was drinking. “It’s no problem, really,” he said kindly. They got to talking, and before long, he had shifted over to the empty seat next to Jo, and found out that she had never been to France before, that she had a new job showing horses for a Marquis, and that she was going to be living at the Château Gagnon for the immediate future.

  “How in the world did you land a job like that?” the man asked.

  Jo grinned. “I won the National Championships in Jumping last year,” she said. “I can’t act all modest about it because even this much later I get so thrilled thinking about it, I can hardly stand it. I had a great day. My horse had a great day. Have you ever had that–a moment when everything you’ve been working for finally comes together?” She tore open the packet of cookies, all that was left of her meal, and began munching on one.

  The man just smiled. He was thinking of his granddaughter, the one who loved horses and was as irrepressible as Jo.

  “These cookies are not bad,” she said. “Really! So anyway…yes, I was out of work and trying to organize a job giving lessons at a couple of barns where I know people, and I got contacted by someone at this Château. I had a couple of interviews by skype with the woman who runs the place, but you know–I had the feeling it was my job to lose at that point, I just had to avoid making a fool of myself for a half hour or so and I was hired.”

  “I’m talking too much, aren’t I?” said Jo, laughing. “It’s just that I am so excited about getting there–the whole thing is something I never ever dreamed of, you know?”

  But the kindly man was asleep.

  Well, she had seen him take a sleeping pill, so she didn’t have to take all the blame. It’s not that Jo was an oversharer, usually, but this was an extraordinary moment in her life–even at the time, still on the airplane, it seemed that way. Even before everything that came after, the unimaginable that came after.

  Jo got out her tablet and started an email to her best pal, Marianne. She wanted to have it all ready so she could hit SEND the minute she was on French soil. Their last meeting had been hurried, with Jo barely able to tell her about the new job before having to rush off to the Consulate to pick up her expedited passport. And Marianne…well, she had not taken the news well. She had looked at the website of the château where Jo was headed, pronounced it “creepy”, and then pursed her lips and not said much else.

  Even when Jo had shown her the picture of David de la Motte, and come. on. that is one good-looking dude, Marianne had to at least admit that–nope, Marianne would not admit that. Muttered something about good hair not being all she wanted in a boyfriend.

  But Jo was broke and out of work, so no matter what misgivings her friend had–and admittedly, wisecracks aside, Marianne’s instincts were usually dead-on–Jo was going to go for it. She didn’t have much choice.

  She had been showing horses for a rich family in New Jersey, but when the owner had a stroke while riding, his wife sold every last one of their horses and burned down the barn. That was the end of that job. But David de la Motte–and she loved saying it the way he said it, Dah-veed–was giving her another opportunity to do what she loved and was so good at, and in France no less.

  Maybe it did seem too good to be true. But good things happen to some people, don’t they? Sometimes?

  After seeing Marianne’s reaction, Jo realized that some alarms had been ringing in her head too, right from the very beginning, and she had been ignoring them. Because the thought of riding in France–and getting paid for it–seemed so perfect that she did not want anything to derail the plan. So in a sneaky bit of business she had waited for Marianne to object instead of realizing it was her own inner voice she was failing to heed.

  And she was going to keep on failing to pay attention to it, for as long as possible.

  The kindly man had thrust his legs straight out, lolled his head to one side, and begun to snore. Loud enough that a flight attendant had come to offer Jo some disposable ear plugs, which she gratefully accepted.

  France. A wildly expensive show horse. Living at a château.

  Her thoughts bounced from one to the other, around and around that circle of excitement, until she too fell asleep, for the few hours until the plane met up with the sun over the Atlantic, just before the coast of France came into view.

  2

  After missing a bus at the airport and struggling to make herself understood at various ticket booths, Jo was finally getting off the train, in the village of Mourency, jet-lagged, apprehensive, and wanting some coffee. It was dusk. Mourency, with its ancient granite buildings, looked rather forbidding. Jo wondered, not for the first time, whether she was making a mistake by coming here.

  She tried to remember the travel arrangements–wasn’t she going to be picked up at the station by one of the staff of the Château? She dug in her bag, a rather worn bag now that she looked at it critically, a bag that had never aspired to be chic even when it was new, hunting for the instructions she had printed out back in her apartment, which felt like a lifetime ago already.

  Jo shouldered her duffel and left the station, and stood by the street in the darkening evening. She could faintly hear a television murmuring in the house nearby; she could see swallows swooping through the sky looking for dinner. It was quiet. Deadly quiet.

  The instructions said to wait at the small parking lot next to the train station, where she would be met by Angélique, driving a Citroën.

  Jo glanced at her watch, but she had failed to set it to French time and in her jet-lagged state it made no sense. The clouds over the village rooftops were glowing red, the air was clean and pure–she tried to pay attention to the beauty of the place to allay her misgivings. It was the quiet that felt so strange. The part of New Jersey she was from–you could describe it a thousand ways, but quiet would never be part of it.

  She waited. One car went past, a dusty battered model she didn’t recognize, with a man at the wheel who looked like he wanted to hit somebody. Jo stepped back a bit into the parking lot, murmuring, Come on, Angélique.

  Because of the quiet, the sound of the footsteps was magnified. It sounded like the footsteps of somebody–or something–immense, inhuman. Jo wanted not to look. But she had to. Slowly she turned to the left, and saw a man walking slowly towards her. He was not tall, but he was built like a fortress, like he was carved out of granite, like…someone who could do anything he wanted with her.

  He came closer, walking with slow deliberation. Jo imagined she could hear every single particle of gravel as they crunched under his boots. She prepared herself to fight, tensing her legs, ready to run or kick where it counted. Come on, Angélique.

  And then, just like that, the man passed her without looking in her direction. Jo realized that the sound of his footsteps must have been magnified by the stone walls surrounding the small lot where she waited. She watched him until he disappeared at the curve in the road, and he was gone.

  Jo laughed out loud. Since when do I act like such a scared little rabbit? she thought.

 
She was shaking her head at her fears, baffled at how she had so quickly fallen back to being that fearful child she had been so many years ago, when her unstable parents had given her plenty of reasons to be fearful.

  Jo was not good at waiting. She fidgeted. She put on lip gloss. She looked one way down the street and then the other. She considered going back into the station in search of coffee but didn’t want to miss Angélique. She hopped from one foot to the other, counted her breaths, thought about the magnificent horse she would be riding tomorrow morning.

  Drogo. Great name for a horse, she thought.

  She got so deep into thoughts of Drogo and their prospects for show ribbons, that she did not see or hear anything when the man sidled around the last house next to the parking lot, watching her.

  He pulled back out of sight. Then slowly his head appeared again, and he licked his lips. Slowly, he crept around the building and then, once around the corner, he moved with his back against the wall, circling behind Jo, out of her peripheral vision. He never for a instant took his eyes off of her. His eyes were very intent. So intent, so piercing, they seemed to change as he moved closer–to glow around the edges, as though lit from inside. He was able to move so quietly. With such physical assurance. With hunger.

  Jo was digging around in her purse again, hoping to uncover something that could amuse her for a few minutes. A cough drop would do, something to fiddle with, anything! In her jet-lagged, impatient state, she was completely unaware of her surroundings, and of the man coming up behind her.

  He was close now. He stopped for a few seconds, opened his mouth very wide and stretched his long, muscular arms out, and sank into a crouch. Something about the way he moved looked unhuman, reptilian.

  His powerful legs tensed; he was ready to spring.

  3