Immortals After Dark 12 - Lothaire

she spoke of him. . . .
    “Hey, you don’t think Lothaire’s . . . dead?” Ellie asked, confounded that she almost felt worried about her captor’s safety. Captor and soon-to-be executioner.
    “He will come back, Elizabeth.”
    And how should I feel about that?
    “I would know if he were dead,” Hag said as she checked her timer.
    The fey was working on a potion, an experimental one she hoped would counteract a spell that protected one of Lothaire’s enemies—some Valkyrie named Regin the Radiant. Upon discovering that Regin had a protection spell, Lothaire had hissed, “Nïx, that bitch!”
    Whatever that meant.
    “He might have grown distracted and lost his way temporarily,” Hag added.
    Ellie could believe that. He’d been deteriorating mentally. One sunrise when he’d arrived to collect her, he’d been covered in blood and raving about his enemies: “Following me! Isn’t safe for you.”
    Two nights ago, she’d awakened in her spot on the sofa to find him kneeling beside her, stroking her hair.
    He’d murmured, “Harder and harder to tell when I’m awake . . . can’t live like this much longer.”
    Sometimes he spoke to her in Russian, as if he fully expected her to answer in the same.
    She’d never questioned him again other than to occasionally ask, “Am I going to die tonight?”
    “Not yet,” he would answer distantly. But last sunset, he hadn’t replied, just gazed away.
    Ellie opened another beer, plugging the bottle with a lime wedge. “Can you tell me why Saroya isn’t even trying to rise? Shouldn’t she be worried about him right now? Why isn’t she hankering to see him? If I was evil and Lothaire had showered me with jewels and clothes, I’d be all over him.”
    “Would you?” Hag studied her face. “Even after all he’s done to you?”
    As ever, Ellie replayed the vampire’s mocking voice in her head. “Youcan’t compare to Saroya.” She’d thought herself immune to insults, but for some reason, his had struck home. “You are demonstrably my inferior in every way. Intelligence, wealth, looks, bloodline . . .”
    The scorn in his tone, his smirk. She sighed. The truth of his words.
    Her ego had taken a hit.
    But then there’d been those glimpses of a different side of him. The seductive, charming Lothaire whose kisses set her blood afire. The vampire who made her toes curl with his accented, old-fashioned phrasings. “Be my dear . . .”
    “Are you wondering if I could fall for him?” Ellie asked, trying to imagine what it might be like to be loved by Lothaire. But she knew better than to dream of things that would never be. “Even if by some miracle he felt more for me, I’d never love him. Only a fool would fall in love with her captor.” She met Hag’s gaze. “I’m no fool. My interest in him is purely life-or-death.” She took a long pull from her beer. “On that note, is there any chance that I’m his Bride?”
    Seeming to choose her words very carefully, Hag said, “Mortal mates are extremely rare for Loreans. I’m thinking now of all the couples brought together this Accession and can’t cite a single one with a human in the mix. In any case, Lothaire despises mortals more than anyone I know.”
    “Why?”
    “I won’t say, and I don’t suggest asking him.”
    “But it is possible that I’m his. Why don’t you oracle-up and find out for certain?”
    “You know I only have so many rolls a day.”
    Ellie had asked Hag how bone-rolling worked. She’d answered that it was like scanning text in a book, but if done too often, the words would grow blurry.
    “What if I am his?” Ellie insisted. “If you serve Lothaire’s interests, then how do you think it’ll affect him once he realizes he killed his one and only Bride? You think he’d be pissed?”
    Hag’s gaze flitted away. “I trust Lothaire’s judgment.”
    “Tell me why you owe him so much.”
    “Very well.” Hag retrieved another beer, easily popping the top with her thumbnail. “Centuries ago, I began working for a powerful sorcerer and his sisters. He didn’t like one of my foretellings, so he cursed me to appear as a repulsive crone, captive to his will for as long as he lived—a particularly dire predicament, considering how difficult it was to kill him. He was known as the Deathless One.” Her fingers tightened around her bottle. Just when Ellie thought it’d shatter, Hag loosened her hold. “If not for Lothaire, I’d still be trapped in a dank castle