PROLOGUE
"No, no you shan't take me you bloody demon," the anguished cry awakened Lucius from a sound sleep in his four poster bed with Louis II hangings. It sounded like it was coming from outside the window. Who would be outside at a time like this?
Lucius bounded out of bed and parted the heavy red velvet curtains to see a young woman dressed in a white nightgown ripped at the neck with blood streaming down her neck fleeing through his formal gardens. Behind her stalked a figure ominously dressed in black, a rapacious smile on his death pale face and blood on its lips.
'Twas the demon of the Long Night, rumored to come out only once a year on the longest night, according to ancient Celtic legend. Lucius did not believe in the demon but who was he to deny the proof before his very eyes!
He could not let the rest of his household know the dreaded demon was real. His maman would go into a decline even though the demon could not get in unless someone invited it, nor would it return until next year and when would be haunting another area in English soil.
Lucius slipped into black pants and a billowing shirt and tried not to waken the lass in his bed since the Long Night celebration. He grabbed his ancestral sword from the hanger above the vast fireplace in the Great Hall and exited Hawthorne Castle to put a stop to the Demon of the Long Night once and for all. He was England's finest duelist and surely a demon from the pits of hell who prayed upon innocent young women would be no match for his might.
"Help, oh, help!" cried the girl, her voice stirring his manly ardor with its sexy tones. Why had she been outside of the castle on the longest night? Was she a new serving wench or one of the guests, perhaps one of the many eligible maids who had attended the ball invited by his maman who longed for him to marry? After he dispatched the demon he would learn her name and take her to bed, an she was willing.
Lucius caught up with the demon and its prey by the gazebo near the lake which he could see glimmering in the moonlight. The girl sobbed helplessly as the tall, vicious demon in black grabbed her by her golden curls and bent her head back at an uncomfortable angle.
"And now, my pretty, I shall finish what we started when I found you asleep in his lordship's stable! If only you'd hidden in a crofter's cottage I couldn't have entered, but, a stable is only for horses."
"No, no!" the girl cried.
"Let her go," Lucius declared in ominous tones used to being obeyed. He drew the sword of his ancestors, the mighty Gildrang and the sound electrified the freezing night air.
"Ah, 'tis the master of the house come at last," breathed the demon in a husky evil laugh. He dropped the girl helplessly to the ground where her gaping neckline revealed two perfect marblelike breasts with blood trailing between them in a thin line. Who was this beauty who had been sleeping in his stable? He'd gladly let her sleep in his bed! The sight of her nubile form stirred his loins and made him rage against the demon who befouled her.
"Avast, foul demon, I shall dispatch thee to the hell from whence you came!" He lunged and ran the cruel figure through and the girl on the ground gasped.
The demon fell with a thud, its bony face frozen in shock. Lucius had heard that only pure wood or silver could dispatch the demon but apparently fine steel did the trick as well.
"Did he hurt you, m'lass?" he crooned to the maid. He extended a firm hand that quivered a little with excitement from her nearness. She was a fair maid indeed and her giant blue eyes widened as she met his eyes.
"I am sore bit, m'lord," she said. She indicated her neck. "You must chop off my head or else I'll be as cursed as that beast." A single, perfect tear fell like a pearl from her eyes.
"Nay, I will not kill such a beautiful maid." Lucius drew her to her feet and breathed in the luscious perfume of her natural scent like violents and flowers. "Come into my castle, I will rouse the footman to fetch the doctor from town."
"You must not allow me through your door!" she cried. "For then I can enter at will and slake my unholy bloodlust!"
"The only lust you should slake is your lust for my love." Lucius kissed her full, bee-kissed lips and she sighed with passion into his mouth.
And then she began to dissolve in his very arms. Another perfect tear fell from her eye and landed on his cheek, burning like brimstone as it left an oval scar. Soon the maid with her tragic, yearning gaze had dissolved into nothing in his arms, a mere ghost who had never existed.
"I hope you got a good look," said a cruel and harsh voice behind him. Lucius whirled around in a half circle and to see the demon who had risen to his feet and was adjusting his black waist coat and black cape with red silken lining to hide the sword slash. Scarce any blood dampened the fabric as the demon laughed, its sharp teeth glinting in the clear moon light.
"What did you do to her, you demon!" Lucius lunged with his steel sword again but the demon caught the blade in a bare hand and ripped it from his grasp.
"It was all part of my master plan to lure you from your castle where you hid safely from my influence." The demon threw the sword to the ground after breaking it over his knee. He inspected his hand a thin line of blood on it. "Oww, that smarts."
"Your bite enchanted her and sent her away. Who was she? I must know!" Lucius had no fear for himself or his immortal soul but for the precious tiny maiden who had been pillaged by the demon of the Long Night.
"She was nobody...yet. She will be somebody someday, though I canna say when. Perhaps in ten years or a thousand."
"I must meet her. Tell me or I will call the castle guards who will dispatch you with the pure wood of the hawthorn tree."
"I am shaking in my boots," said the demon. "I fear you not, Lord Hawthorn for I'm only here to bring you your destiny."
"You mean the girl, she is my destiny?"
"I hope you looked long and well at her for as long as you could. I hope you memorized her delicate, perfect features like the face of an angel. You'll need that mental picture in the eons to come. She's the only one who can save you."
"Save me from what? You?" Lucius scoffed.
"You cannot fight me. Look into my eyes."
The demon grew closer and closer and its red eyes mesmerized Lucius until he couldn't move not even when the vampire like creature drained all the blood from his body and made him drink from him. Lucius fell as dead to the ground, the fire of the demon burning through his veins in an agony that lasted through his burial, through an entire year until the next Longest Night. The curse of the demon was that he would be in agony for a year and a day and then he would rise from his grave. He had to dig his way out with his peternatural strength the whole while cursing the demon he had become with unholy bloodlust.
Why had the demon done this to him, he raged? He had done nothing except defend a beauteous innocent who was only a ghost, a ghost of the future. It was true that the demon had brought destiny to the Lord of Hawthorne castle for he would never leave until the girl came back. She was the only soul who could save him from his godless, pitiless existence.
****
CHAPTER 1
200 years later
Ok, he’d leave for a little bit. Surely she wouldn’t come while he was gone and he was getting really bored. He’d just check in every fifty years or so but right now he was sick of the bland British blood and wanted to dine on Italians.
*****
1010 years later, Hawthorne Castle
"This is the stupidest tour I've ever been on," complained Courtney to Amanda. She was so bored and not interested in Louis’s furniture or crumbling stone work. The young women were from America and had joined a romance writer's tour group to England to take in the sights, including several ancient castles.
"Oh, do hush, I like it. I might even set my next best-selling novel here." Amanda fluffed her long, blonde hair back behind her shoulders and wished she had affixed it in the sensible bun in which she usually wore it. Some sprite of mischief, some sense of destiny, had bade her to leave it free this morning as they got ready in the shared bathroom in the little country inn in Louchester on Whedon.
Amanda thought back to the excitement of writing her first novel, which hit the best selling list and stayed for months, based on an ancient vampire legend called the Lords of the Long Night. She had always felt drawn to write about the cursed beings known as vampires, even though they weren't real, and, her favorite interpretation was always the demon of the long night that had a Celtic origin. She had recently purchased an authentic Celtic text which she translated because she had a degree in medieval languages, it revealed that the last known location of the demon of the long night had been Hawthorne Keep in the wild north of England. Nothing would have it but that she would go on a tour to see the castle for herself and bring her best friend Courtney with her for companionship.
Courtney meant so much to Amanda, who had been orphaned at the tender age of twelve when her parents died in a car crash. They had had her late in life so her grandparents too were dead. She had an uncle Barney in Alaska somewhere but the gold camps were no place for a young girl on the verge of womanhood and so, Amanda had been shuttled from foster home to foster home with cold welcome. She spent her time daydreaming about the prince on a white horse who would come rescue her, those dreams eventually turned into full blown romance novels she was writing by the age of sixteen, the only spot of happiness in her dreary existence that never allowed her to settle in one place for long. That year too she finally landed in the home with Courtney and her parents. There she had stayed with her new best friend and they had gone to college together while Courtney studied to be a advertising executive and Amanda to be a writer.
And now finally here they were at Hawthorne castle at long last. The tour guide wasn't the greatest speaker. Courtney fidgeted again and wished she could be off flirting with the local lads in a tavern on the green, but dear, sweet Amanda had never been much interested in boys. Not in high school and not in college though many pursued her for her delicate beauty and sweet manner. Courtney would be jealous except enough boys pursued her for her tall, buxom figure and titian locks with a mouth like a sailor. Amanda lived her love life in the pages of her best selling novels, though you wouldn't know that from reading them that she was truly an innocent in the ways of love, which Courtney liked to tease her about. But she'd never reveal Amanda's secret.
"This armor was worn by Lord Lucius Hawthorne in the Crusades," rambled the tour guide, pointing at some armor standing in the corner.
"Oh, that armor looks newer than what they wore at the Crusades," said Amanda, revealing her degree in medieval history. "The gussets on the tabard, too, speak of a later date."
"Uh, uh, uh!" The tour guide, a skinny witchy woman with dyed black hair, glared at Amanda. "I know what I'm talking about! Do you want to lead this tour, Miss America?" Courtney felt rage surge within at this mean treatment of her friend who had just spouted off a fact is all.
"Oh, oh no," Amanda apologized, feeling very bad that she had hurt the woman's feelings. The eyes of all the other women on the tour glared at her and she shrank. None of them knew she was the best selling novelist Amarantha L'amour because she was traveling under her real name Amanda Ghost. They thought she was some newbie.
"Well I never," huffed one of the other women.
"That's totally obvious," quipped Courtney, a real smart-aleck. She liked to tell it like it was and it did most people good to hear it, in her opinion.
"If we could just move on, it's getting late," glared the tour guide, looking at Amanda and Courtney in a mean way again. "We will now go to the dungeons where Lord Hawthorne's ancestors were said to have captured their enemies and made them drink blood."
"Oh, yes that's where the origins of the demon of the long night started," Amanda thought to herself since the tour guide obviously wasn't going to point it out. "The Hawthornes raised the demon to gain power in their land and it eventually came back to haunt them, ending the Hawthorne line before Lord Lucius Hawthorne could take a wife and breed." The very name sent superstitious shivers down Amanda's spine as they followed the group into the deep, cool bowels of the castle. Lord Lucius Hawthorne had been discovered on the long night ravaged about the throat by wild beasts, or so the authorities said, and buried, and the title went to a second cousin. His maman died of grief and never recovered.
But then a year later, the new castle owners has reported sightings of a dark, frightening figure in the castle and on the grounds that haunted and bewitched young maids, particularly any with hair of gold and eyes of blue. Rumors abounded for at least two hundred years when they became scatty.
Just like me, Amanda thought. She paused before an age darkened portrait of Lord Lucius and the merry yet commanding look in his eye said that he knew secrets he'd like to tell her, secret things he'd like to show her, if only she'd lived a thousand years ago.
"Come on slowpoke," Courtney said. Why was Amanda staring at that old picture as if mesmerized? The dude in it was good looking yeah, but dead as a doornail. Of course that’s how Amanda liked her men, dead, historical figures she could write about so they said all the right things and made love without ever fumbling. Well that would have some advantages but, there was a bigger advantage in having a real man between your thighs.
Courtney and Amanda got into the dungeon last as the tour guide was finishing up her speech. The other ladies, freaked a little by the gruesome details the tour guide relished on, bustled past Courtney and Amanda and ran up the stairs. The two women were last except for the tour guide who gave them a mean look, her face strangely white in the dim dungeon.
"The troublemakers," she snarled. "I think I know how to cool your jets." She ran up the stairs before them and slammed the dungeon door with a clang.
"Oh, she's just joking. I'll give you the rest of the tour, I studied the castle in our tourbook last night." Amanda comforted a startled looking Courtney.
"I want my money back if the old bag isn't going to do her job," Courtney grumbled. "This isn't all it was advertised to be. And I should know, I write ads for a living."
"Oh, now you're being silly," Amanda chided. She peered into a deep cell that had nothing but blackness against the back wall and some chains that might have once ago held the enemies of the Hawthornes. Maybe even the ones drained of blood in succor to the demon they raised on purpose but didn’t mean for it to haunt them forever on the longest night.
Courtney tried the door. She felt her heart pound in her chest. "Hey this thing is actually locked! Let us out of here you British bitch!" There was no answer.
It had nearly been dusk when they came downstairs. As they frantically raced around the dungeon to find another door Amanda reflected on the fact it was probably full dark by now.
"There is no way out of here!" wailed Courtney. She wanted to kick the door down in frustration but it was thick with wood and bars and would only hurt her foot clad in expensive designer sandals. "I'm going to miss my date with Chauncey from the pub, before they find us in the morning and the damp dungeon air can't be good for my complexion."
Was it Amanda's imagination or were there red glowing eyes in the far back of the cell? The torchlight flickered against the torture apparatuses and the iron maiden and the rack and the other ancient devices. Oh, no, was it a rat?
Suddenly a mist rose across the ill-lit floor and Constance clutched onto her arm with a gasp. "What is going on, is it sleeping gas to rob the tourists? How did they know you were rich?"
"Oh dear, Courtney," Amanda whispered in a frightened voice. The mist all formed around a figure in the dark back of the cell. "We are not alone."
"Who is there?" Courtney said, her voice quivering with fear. "We are actually not rich at all, we are very poor and you can have my gold watch anyway."
"It's youuuuu," moaned a long, anguished voice, that cracked at the end as if long unused. Amanda felt it to the core of her marrow bones. The hair on the back of her neck stood at attention.
"It's uuuuuuuuss," Courtney said, irrepressible. She didn’t like to take guff from weirdoes in castles. "And who are youuuuu?"
A man stepped out of the shadows. There was a tear shaped scar on one cheek....
***
© 2005 Jody Wallace