Wren sighed, shaking his head. “You are unprecedented, but I don’t see the abomination in it. In fact, you make sense, after talking with Ash last night about…” He spread his fingers out before him. “Everything—the two groups joining makes sense. You are the first who can claim themselves half shinwa and half heikō. To me, that spells out a harmonious balance.”
“Not really sure that makes me feel better.”
Wren smiled affectionately. A little too affectionate.
Tristan moved back, putting on a cheeky grin. “Er, you’re not going to kiss me again, are you?”
Chuckling to himself, Wren gave Tristan’s shoulder a pat and a squeeze before stepping back. “Only if you intend to kiss me back…” Wren sighed, the playfulness leaving him. “Do you think he will recover?”
Tristan turned to look at the cell. There was only one small window, just big enough to fit a hand through. And sound. Lots of sound.
He winced, feeling the man’s thoughts rather than hearing them since Desmond wasn’t using a higher form of communication at the moment. Maybe he couldn’t. “He wants to rip both our heads off,” Tristan said. “And then crush them into applesauce.”
“If he doesn’t recover…” Wren frowned, looking away. “If he doesn’t, know I will do what needs to be done. That shouldn’t be on you nor Ash.”
It was a night for bold statements, wasn’t it? Promised violence against loved ones. “Wren…”
The vampire sighed. “He’d want that.”
Tristan shook his head. “I’m not losing my favorite rival to a fucking Were bite.”
Wren looked up and smiled, a slip of fang.
He glanced at the cell to see if the vampire even noticed. He didn’t. “And if you tell him I called him a favorite anything, I’ll make you cry.”
Wren stared a moment before breaking out into laughter. “Who says you haven’t already?”
Tristan chuckled, clapping the vampire on the back. “So, I guess this means you two made up?”
Wren shrugged, a sheepish expression washing away his normal confidence. “I wouldn’t go that far, but things between us are not so…” He suddenly smiled big, eyes shining with amusement. “Dire.”
Tristan shook his head, sighing. “I don’t think I’ll ever get you.”
Wren only smiled at him.
“I’m going upstairs, see if I can help Ash find a spell to fix this.”
“Very good, I’ll help, if I may.”
Tristan nodded his assent. As they climbed the stairs, Wren asked, “Is it rude of me to ask how you’re doing? Since—your transformation, as it is.”
“No, it’s not rude to ask. I—” Tristan huffed. “I don’t really know, man. I feel… different? Not quite myself but more myself than I’ve ever felt in my whole life. Which I know doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”
He stopped halfway up and turned to look at Wren. The vampire only smiled.
“Food’s not the same. But the being bitten part—” He grinned big. “Yeah, I’m definitely on board with that.”
Wren only chuckled, nodding knowingly.
He turned and continued up the stairs. “But outside of… of base instincts, emotions—fuck, I’ve no clue. I know it’s early days and things are still in motion to what I’ll ultimately be… And I’ve still got to drink Ash’s blood.” He sighed, rubbing his neck as they mounted the last step to the main floor. He stopped, taking in the woman standing at the kitchen island, engrossed in her spell book. She wore a short royal blue dress, looking completely human and sweet, gentle. And sexy as fuck. “Soon,” he groaned.
Wren chuckled, slapping a hand on Tristan’s shoulder. Tristan smiled at the man before joining Ash at the island, sidled up real close, pressed hip to hip. Wren took a silent post on the on the opposite side, waiting to be told what he could do to help.
Ensconced in the book before her, Ash said, “After Trevor calmed down and started making sense, he explained that he had no knowledge of side effects. I tried to reach Yukihime, in turn Lilith, but with no luck.” She finally looked up. “Even Lance seems to be out of reach.”
Tristan didn’t like the sound of that. He was worried for the fae. Hey, maybe the man listened to him and ran off with his wife, got themselves out of the line of fire.
“I think we have only two options now, wait it out and see what happens or—”
“Or spell it out,” Tristan supplemented.
Lips pursed, she nodded.
“But we don’t know what spell will work if we don’t understand what he was hit with.”
“Precisely,” Ash said, the disappointment in her voice unmasked.
“Okay, so what can I do?”
She sighed, slumping against the counter. Thought a moment. Shook her head. “Nothing at the moment. I need to spend time going through the biblos, page by page to see what possible options I have. I remember many of the spells in here, but there is so much more than I ever bothered over.”
Tristan nodded to the tome, more than a ream thick. “Good thing you read faster than everyone else.”
Ash smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes.
Nearly forgotten, the other vampire made a noise that might have been “excuse me for interrupting”, though he was doing anything but. He was a peer, no matter how he saw himself. “Have you tried to contact Hohenheim?”
Ash flinched. “Hohe—Oh, yes. Wren!” She looked suddenly hopeful as she rushed around to give him a big kiss on the cheek. “I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of him before. You’re brilliant.”
“Who’s Hohenheim?” Tristan asked, looking between the two vampires.
Ash was smiling brightly across the island at him. “You might know him as Paracelsus.”
“Para… The philosopher?” And, hell, Tristan only knew that from TV. God, what show was that…?
Ash showed all her teeth in a huge grin. “And alchemist.”
Suddenly understanding, Tristan smiled too. “You mean pythia.”
“Same difference,” Wren said and Tristan could tell by the way the man said it, it was an old argument that ruffled Ash.
But Ash was too giddy to let it get to her. “I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of him before.” She was already rushing off, talking over her shoulder. “He would be a very valuable asset to our team, should he still be alive.”
“Hey,” he called out and Ash stopped at the bottom of the steps, clearly tense to go up with one foot on the first step. “Do you even know how to find him?”
“No,” Ash said, still looking optimistic. “But I know how to reach Silas, who is never without Chrysanthe.”
Tristan frowned, not understanding. “Why the fuck do you want to talk to them?”
She sobered a little. Yes, Tristan was still bitter about Silas accidentally killing Mamoru. “Hohenheim was Chrysanthe’s teacher.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa… wait up. If he was her mentor, then how do we know it wasn’t him who fucked us in Greece?”
Ash’s smiled slipped and then she was frowning. Tristan hated that he’d done that to her.
She thought a moment, eyes roving over Tristan’s face, perhaps in his mind, before shaking her head. “While powerful, he’s not that powerful. Besides,” Ash took one step down and turned to face Tristan, smiling again, but sadly. “I know him, somewhat. He also mentored my Hong Kong contact’s mentor before he passed. While I’ve never actually met Hohenheim in person, Mei-Fen has told me of him. I believe he can be trusted. I tasted Chrysanthe in Greece and whomever was guiding her in that tragic production of humility, there was no face to this person in her mind.”
“Meaning, you don’t know for sure.”
Ash took in a deep breath looking like she meant to argue and ended up sighing and shrugging.
Tristan wasn’t happy about this new development, but there’d been few the last year of his life that he was happy over. He sighed, and turned to look at Ellie wrapped in her cocoon of blankets on the sofa in the front room.
“When you do find him and know you can trust him, she needs help too. Whatever it takes.”
Tristan would do everything in his power to keep her safe, whatever that meant. It was easy to blame Ash for bringing the girl in, but he also knew how deeply that had to hurt her, because she knew it too. It wasn’t on purpose, just shit luck. Which is mostly the only luck either of them seemed to have these days.
“She was speaking in her sleep earlier,” Wren said in a low, soft tone as if he felt bad talking about her while she was in the room, regardless that she couldn’t hear or respond.
“What’d she say?”
The man shook his head. “Incoherent, along with her unconscious thoughts. But, I think, a rather good sign.”
Ash nodded. “I’m going to track down Hohenheim. If he still lives, then I will do whatever it takes to garner his help. Hopefully he can arrive quickly. We can start a course of fixing wrongs.”
Tristan was nodding in return. “Fine. And you know I’ll do what I can. Just say so.”
Ash smiled as Wren added his own support and then excused herself to make phone calls. As he watched Ash scale the steps, hoping to catch a glance under her dress, that sick feeling settled into the pit of his gut. Something bad was on the way, something big. It was time he started trusting and listening to those feelings.
20: What Do You See
TRISTAN had a banana in one pocket and a clementine in the other.
“God, this is bullshit,” Tristan ground out through clenched teeth. Tilting his head up to the sky, he shouted, “Bull. Shit!”
Apparently, he was hovering too much, so Ash sent him outside, tasked with the job of checking on the animals. There were goats, back here somewhere, and Ash wanted to be sure they were all okay. Really, Tristan knew he was being gotten rid of.
And he didn’t mind the break, the fresh air, but stomping around in untamed brush, carrying a twelve-pound shotgun, wearing four handguns and two knives looking for two small goats over one-hundred acres wasn’t his idea of a leisurely stroll through the twilight woods.
Nastasia was still out here somewhere, wanting Ash’s head and anyone’s head Ash cared about. Kiba was out here too, maybe even stalking Tristan for all he knew. What he did know was that the Were wouldn’t be able to help him should the disgruntled vampire show up. Then again, as a vanilla, Nastasia was the last person Tristan was worried about.
Pollux hadn’t shown his true power, but Tristan knew he wasn’t a man to be fucked with when backed into a corner. The vampire was a Master, though not nearly as powerful as Ash—or even Desmond.
And, Christ. Tristan didn’t exactly feel exactly invincible at the moment, not the way he imagined he would after finally taking the big bite plunge. If anything, he felt more vulnerable. Him being bitten was only one step. Him doing the biting was the next and rather important in finalizing what he’d become. In making him stronger.
“It’s a rite of passage,” Ash told him earlier that night in the kitchen while going through the spell book. She’d already made several phone calls and was waiting very tensely for return calls. Wren was on his own phone in the dining room, but very obviously hyper aware of the others and their conversation in the kitchen.
“Me drinking your blood?”
Ash stopped what she was doing to look up, her expression serious, if not a little grim. “From what I saw in Mamoru’s blood, one’s considered a true awoken Uruwashi once they’ve been bitten by a vampire. But those who then go out, find a vampire within their four-day transformative period to drink of their blood were considered…” She shrugged, looking back to her book. “Sort of gods amongst the Uruwashi. They were the elite of the Uruwashi.”
Tristan harrumphed. “Okay, but I thought once bitten, an Uruwashi had all their host vampire’s power, within a day?”
She stopped reading, huffing softly and slumped, but wouldn’t look up. “As she has been with many things, I’ve come to find, Yukihime was wrong.” She looked him in the eye. “Humans require sufficient bites from their host, transmitting enough of the virus, and four nights in a coffin to change them into a vampire. The host vampire’s blood is simply given to aid in the scion’s healing. An Uruwashi on the other hand only requires a single bite and the blood of their host is not required for healing as the Uruwashi are already superhuman in terms of healing. And while they are not subjected to the hell of being buried alive for four days, they still must go through those same four days of transformation. Yes, you will gain my Earth seikonō in equal to my own, but not until your priming period has passed, your four days.”
“Priming period?” Tristan asked with a half smirk.
Ash gave a sheepish shrug like she found it an odd term too. “It’s what Mamrou called it. You are stronger now, and more in tuned to vampire in general—you may even start to feel the energy of the Earth, but you cannot call upon it. Your seikonō will not work until your four days has passed. However, should you feed on a vampire now, especially the one who bit you, then when your seikonō does set in, you will own in greater strength than the host vampire.”
“Wait—” Tristan held a hand up, trying to slow things down to think. “So you’re saying, if I drink your blood in the next eighty hours, then my seikonō will be stronger than yours?”
Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Wow,” he said, focus zoned off at nothing. “It’s amazing then that the Uruwashi were killed off, if they were so powerful.”
Ash was shaking her head, bringing Tristan’s focus back to her. “Most were not able to drink the blood of a vampire, even less so of their host, before their priming period was complete. Hence, those who were able to accomplish such a feat were considered with such high regard.”
“Mamoru,” Tristan said and was ridiculously proud of himself for not squeaking the man’s name, “he wasn’t an elite, was he?” The man could barely work his fire gift, would drop big globs of it left and right when he lost control.
“No. He was not. Nor was he much of an Uruwashi—on a genetic level, that is. He was more human than Uruwashi. In fact, he believed that you have more Uruwashi blood in you than any other modern Uruwashi… before Malik killed them off, anyway.”
“Why?” he asked, eyes wide in surprise.
Ash laughed sadly, looking down at her hands resting on the biblos. “Prophecy and faith. He wanted to believe that anyone special enough to have their own prophecy spoken by Lilith, well, they must be something extraordinary.”
And he was, something beyond understanding. Half shinwa, half heikō.
Tristan was silent for a long time, just staring at Ash. Wren in the other room, he hadn’t moved but his presence felt like an oppressive wave as all his attention now focused in awe on Tristan. Ash simply watched him in return, her expression passive, but open. She didn’t look at him with pity or fear, disgust or confusion, she simply saw him as Tristan, the one she loved. He wasn’t the abomination Lilith believed him to be, not in Ash’s eyes.
Finally, in a tender tone, she said, “Now that you understand the full extent of your bite, if you wish to drink from me before your time is up, then… yes, I do encourage that. Very much so.”
Tristan’s pulse jumped. His ardor stirred and he wasn’t sure, but he thought he growled a little.
She looked him in the eye, making sure he was really seeing her. “But it is your decision and yours alone. Take a little bit of time, think it over. We can talk about it again before bed.”
And something in her voice—God! Maybe it was his connection to her, but damn, he felt the heat in the word bed. Fucking bed—fuck on the bed, because that’s what she said without saying it and fuck, yes, he wanted that. It was just as well that he’d been sent outside shortly after that, gave him time to cool his head, and his libido, before he tore the clothes from them both right there and took her on the cold kitchen floor. Let Wren watch for all he cared.
So, yeah, when Ash suggested strongly a few beats later that he tak
e a walk, well, it wasn’t a suggestion and he agreed. But on the way out he stopped with his back to her and asked, “If I drank your blood, would I see your life in it?”
He glanced back just as her eyes slowly lifted to meet his, her lips parted with a bated breath. “Yes.”
“Everything?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly. “You are not skilled in guiding the memories to be organized, but yes, you will see anything and everything I’ve ever been.”
He stared at her a moment, the tension like humidity in the room, making it hard to breath. “And you… how did you put it? Encourage me to drink from you? Even knowing that?”
She didn’t even hesitate to answer, “Unequivocally.”
He left the house with a smile on his face. Even if he chose not to drink from her, knowing she welcomed it… ah, it softened his darkened heart. But then, there absolutely was no reason not to drink from her. Not only would it strengthen their metaphysical bond and make him physically stronger, but it would bring them together as a couple more than he’d ever had with anyone. And, he suspected, it was the same for her.
So now, having made his decision to take whatever she would give, he resigned himself to a long walk about his vast property, armed to the teeth and with fruit in his pants. There was time later to indulge in Ash, and her blood. For now, he needed to give her space to help her friend and an innocent girl.
Never would he have thought he’d be rooting for the big guy, but there it was, Tristan wanted Desmond to pull through. Too bad there were a million other problems at the moment.
Tristan dug his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the numbers Lance had programed in until he found the one wanted and dialed. His tension for the line to open fizzled out when after a dozen rings, nothing happened. Sighing to himself, Tristan shoved his phone away and just hoped Innokentiy would see the missed called and get back to Tristan sooner rather than later. The kodaijin was over in Asia or Europe, seeking out shinwa and heikō with “divine gifts”—making a list of innocent woman Tristan was meant to kill.
Primal Burdens: (The Uruwashi Series #5) Page 22
