by Rye Brewer
“You’ve come to be married? Right now?” Allonic asked, a smile making an appearance.
“I know you have other things on your mind at the moment,” I murmured, not wanting to come out and share his business with the others. What if Felicity didn’t know what he planned to do? What would Gregor think if he found out?
My brother shook his head. “This is important,” he reminded me, as if I needed reminding.
“I suppose we ought to get to it, then.” Gregor ran a distracted hand through his hair, shaking his head. “I had so many plans, too…”
“So long as we can all be here, together, that’s all I need.” I touched his arm, hoping to calm and convince him. The long look we exchanged seemed to do the trick.
“The grove!” Felicity rubbed her hands together. “Come on. It will make the perfect spot.”
And it did.
A small grove of young trees, blooming with white and pink flowers, petals fluttering gently to the ground whenever a breeze stirred. Gregor waited between the two tallest trees, their branches weaving together over his head to form a natural arch.
Jonah stood at his left, watching as Allonic walked me to them with his arm through mine. Tears threatened to spill over as I looked at Jonah and remembered how far we had come from where we started. I was supposed to be his killer. We were never supposed to fall in love.
Yet here we were, about to be married by the father I was unaware of when Jonah and I first met.
Felicity’s eyes shone with tears as she watched us, though I thought they might have been more for Allonic than for me. The fact she kept staring at him with a sort of wistful expression told me so.
Allonic stepped aside when we reached the makeshift altar beneath the flowering branches and allowed Jonah to take my hand.
We were dressed in jeans and there were weapons tucked into the insides of my boots, as always. We wouldn’t get a honeymoon. I wasn’t sure when we would see each other again once I left for Hallowthorn Landing.
Even so, I couldn’t have been happier.
Gregor’s smile stretched from ear to ear. “It isn’t often a father has the honor of performing his daughter’s wedding ritual,” he murmured. “And it isn’t often a father has the pleasure of knowing his daughter has chosen someone worthy of her. Someone honorable, decent, responsible. Someone I believe will do everything in his power for the rest of his life to create something real and lasting. No matter where life takes the two of you, my dearest hope is that you work together to build a safe, soft space in which your love can thrive in spite of anything the world sends your way.”
I wiped away the tears threatening to spill onto my cheeks.
Felicity sniffled from where she stood on my left, holding a handful of fresh wildflowers which looked a lot like the bouquet she’d hastily put together for me.
“Jonah, do you pledge your life to Anissa?” Gregor asked. He held a hand out to Felicity, who withdrew a long strip of white silk from one of the pockets in her robes.
“I do,” Jonah smiled, wiping one last tear away from my cheek with his thumb after sliding a thin, platinum band on my ring finger. “I pledge my life, my fidelity, and my love for as long as I live.”
“Anissa? Do you pledge your life to Jonah?”
I nodded at first, since emotion threatened to choke me. “I pledge all of me, every day. All of my love, all of my energy toward whatever makes you happy. You’re the reason I’m alive, and you’re the reason my life is worth living. I owe you everything.”
Gregor motioned for us to join hands. I watched intently as he bound us together with the silk strip, wrapping it around our hands and down to our wrists.
“Let this serve as a symbol of the devotion you share, now and always. No matter how far life takes you from one another, remember this binding cloth and how it holds you together.” Gregor rested his hands on our bound wrists.
“And now,” he said with a tearful smile, “there is only one more thing to be done before I can officially call you husband and wife.” He looked at Jonah. “I believe you know what that is, son.”
Son.
My heart caught in my throat as Jonah leaned down, his free hand cupping my cheek, waiting the most infinitesimal of moments in order to lock eyes with me. And what I saw there was everything. My entire life, my future, my happiness. All of it, in Jonah’s eyes.
My tears dampened both our cheeks when we kissed.
“Their union sealed with a kiss, I’m pleased and honored to call them husband and wife,” Gregor announced. He pulled me into a tight hug the moment the silk strip was unwrapped, followed by a hug from Allonic and one from Felicity.
There were tears and laughs all around, and I couldn’t get over the sense that this was all very surreal. That it couldn’t be happening to me.
I was married. I was someone’s wife. Someone I loved so dearly, I was sure my heart would crack open from it.
Even in the middle of my foggy-brained happiness, I couldn’t help but notice the long, looks Felicity and Allonic kept exchanging. I guessed they were thinking along the same lines and hoped things would work out for them. I wanted everyone in the world to be as happy as I was just then.
Allonic nodded, and Felicity turned to me. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright. “Anissa, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to steal your thunder…”
My breath caught. “Yes?”
She looked to Gregor. “Allonic and I would like to be married as well.”
My brother’s smile told me what I needed to know.
“We truly did not plan it this way,” he said by way of apology.
“I would never accuse you of stealing my thunder!” One look at Jonah told me he agreed, as I knew he would.
“You really wish to do this, right now?” Poor Gregor was beside himself with everything happening so quickly.
Felicity’s smile dimmed somewhat as she turned to him. “This was what we were coming to tell you earlier; not that we wanted to be married right away, I admit Anissa’s wedding gave us the idea, but that I was going to leave you.”
It was as if the air went still. Even the breeze was afraid to stir the blossoms.
“You’re leaving?” Gregor asked, blinking rapidly.
“I’m going to ShadesRealm, to be with Allonic,” she explained in a soft voice. “I’m sorry to announce it this way, really, I am. So suddenly. And to leave you when there is so much happening…”
Gregor held up a hand, shaking his head. “You needn’t worry for my sake, or for the sake of our people,” he assured her. “You have been all I could ask for in an advisor, more than I could have hoped for in my wildest dreams. I give you my blessing, my hopes for your future—and, yes, I would be pleased to perform the ceremony. That is, if the happy newlyweds don’t mind sharing their day with you.”
“Mind?” I slid an arm around Felicity’s shoulders. “It would be an honor to share with you two.”
My gaze met Allonic’s, and there was more in one shared look than we could’ve spoken in a thousand words.
Gregor clapped Allonic on the back. “All right, then. It’s time for another wedding.”
19
Genevieve
I could finally rest during the flight, leaning my head against the leather seat and closing my eyes. I had never so wished for the ability to sleep. Sleep would at least be a respite from the chaos in my mind.
The flight to Paris was estimated at roughly seven hours. If the pilot or small crew of the chartered flight thought something was amiss, they hadn’t shown it. I supposed they were accustomed to seeing people in my state of dishevelment.
Humans had stopped knowing how to dress themselves long before. Especially for travel, which had once been a special event. Nothing was special to them anymore.
I fit right in with my unwashed hair and wrinkled dress.
Would that I might have secured a flight straight to Belgium, but the pilot swore he could only take me as far as Paris unless
I wished to wait overnight, until morning.
I was in no position to complain, and flying during the day was out of the question. So long as I was able to place an entire ocean between myself and the League, the rest could be negotiated along the way.
It would mean coursing the entire route to Belgium. To Anton’s arms. But I could manage it, so long as I kept the end result in mind all the while.
When I allowed myself to relax, to truly let go and float along on the edge of consciousness, I could remember those first few days with Anton, after we’d first met. When the early, white-hot passion had faded enough that we finally had the opportunity to ask questions, to explain ourselves.
When I’d learned who he was. What he was.
Not that it had ever mattered. Those who knew me might have laughed had they seen me then. I’d never made a secret of my distaste for those of other races—I’d believed for so long in the superiority of vampires, in our right to rule over all others. Even humans.
Perhaps especially humans.
Anton shouldn’t have inspired anything more than disgust, then. I’d sensed his otherness from the first but had ignored it—until he’d told me the truth. He was a shifter.
I told myself then that this was a comfort. He was better than a mere werewolf. His shift was not controlled by the presence of the full moon. He was not a mere animal, content to live as animals did. As werewolves did.
On the contrary, he was sophisticated. Urbane. Rare was the man I considered worthy of my affections. He was everything I’d ever wanted and more. And his bloodline was pure, unsullied, hence the full control over his shifting. He was special. Just the sort of man I deserved.
Though I would be the only vampire who believed this, and I knew it. Pure-blood or no, our consorting with each other was forbidden by both of our kinds.
Then again, I had never cared for rules set by others.
It would be hours before my chartered flight landed, then the matter of coursing to Anton’s family home. He would be waiting there for me. I was certain of it, just as I was certain of him.
“Anton,” I whispered, picturing his mahogany-brown hair and piercing gray eyes. His taut body, so tall and powerful, always holding the threat of violence and blood whenever the whim struck him.
Who wouldn’t find that exciting?
I smiled, the first real, true smile I’d borne since the day of Lucian’s murder and my imprisonment.
We would be together soon.
20
Anton
Genevieve, Genevieve, where the hell are you?
My hand clenched in a fist of its own accord, the frustration at being completely cut off from Genevieve simmering near the surface of my mind. Not the time to allow distraction to color my thoughts, but it had been weeks since I’d last heard from her and my impatience was at an all-time high.
Combined with the impatience I was currently battling—thanks to my mother—it was a miracle I hadn’t lost control and shifted into my wolf. As it was, he lingered just at the edges of my consciousness. Ready if I needed him.
“I told your father how many times about him?” My mother paced back and forth, her high-heeled shoes clicking sharply on the polished wood. How she managed to keep from slipping and breaking an ankle, I still hadn’t figured out. Father demanded the floors always be polished until they gleamed, and she had always insisted on wearing those ridiculous, mile-high pencil heels.
“I know,” I muttered, clenching my fist ever tighter under the desk. I’d only just sat down to check my messages in the hopes of seeing something from Genevieve when Mother had burst into the room without so much as a knock at the door.
Not that I needed her to knock. I’d heard those heels of her coming all the way down the hall.
“Always doing whatever he wanted,” she raged, her high cheekbones going a darker shade of red than the makeup she normally brushed over them as she focused on her favorite topic—how much she hated her stepson. My half-brother.
My late half-brother, Dietrich. She had never made a secret of her distaste for him. No, perhaps distaste would be the wrong word.
She’d hated him from the first. Not only was he the child of another woman, a reminder that she had not been my father’s only wife, but he was wild. And his personality was the type that he’d deliberately done exactly what he’d known would boil her blood.
“And what does he go and do?” she asked, tossing lustrous brown hair over one shoulder in a practiced gesture, rubbing her hands together hard enough to spark a fire. “He gets tangled up with vampires and gets himself killed. The idiot, the stubborn, hard-headed, spoiled brat.”
“I know,” I muttered again. Generally the only words she’d allow me to get in edgewise when she was on a rampage about Dietrich, and this was the rampage to end all rampages.
Because he was dead, and he had exposed us in America. And there was no telling what might happen as a result.
“What was he even doing in America?” she demanded.
It was a rhetorical question, since I didn’t have anything to tell her. Only the vaguest idea, and I certainly wouldn’t add fuel to the fire by sharing.
Not that she was listening to anything I said, too far gone to pay attention to anything but her fury.
“I told your father. Did I not? I told him time and again that something must be done about your brother. How different you always were from him, and why? Because I made certain you were raised differently, that you were not permitted to behave like a wild animal, with no thought to the consequences. I cared about the damage your brother did to our name, to our entire race!”
“I know you did.”
“And did he listen?” she snarled, tossing her hair again when she turned. “No. Never. Never when it came to that son of his. Anything else, he would defer to my judgment, but not when it came to his precious, spoiled, vile son.”
I cared little for what he’d done to the family name or about what he may or may not have subjected our kind to, thanks to his lack of discretion. I barely cared that whatever he’d done had cost him his life, brother or no.
I cared that his stupidity and subsequent death had resulted in my not being able to get on a plane to America to look for Genevieve. I’d been under virtual lock and key ever since we’d received the news.
Not only did my father need to know his surviving son and heir was safe, but America would be the worst place for me to visit now.
After all, we were no longer a secret. The vampires now knew we existed, when we’d worked so hard for so long to remain anonymous.
“He and his entire crew or gang or posse. Whatever those idiots called themselves,” she whispered, her thin nose wrinkling in disgust. Thin like the rest of her. “All of them. Good riddance if you ask me, but why did they have to reveal themselves? The last thing we need is a war with the vampires, damn it.”
The door opened a split second after there was a knock upon it. I straightened in my chair and cast a warning look her way, hoping she would remember to hold her tongue while my father was in the room. It was one thing to vent over Dietrich’s many flaws while in my presence—he was a bad apple, no doubt about it, and we’d never really gotten along on a more than superficial level—but Dad loved his son.
Perhaps even more than he loved me. The squeaky wheel did get the most grease, after all.
To her credit, she rearranged her lovely features into a more pleasant expression. She no longer reminded me of a screaming harpy bent on vengeance.
Now, she merely looked like the dominating, overbearing woman she was.
My father cleared his throat, hands clasped behind his back as was customarily the case when he was about to speak of business. He raised his chin, the light from the window at my back catching the golden glints in his eyes and in the stubble which covered his cheeks. He was normally so well-groomed, too. The turmoil of the days since we’d gotten word of Dietrich’s murder had taken its toll.
“Anton, now that t
he customary period of mourning for your brother has passed, it is time to discuss what your ascension to his place in the family line means,” he informed me, his tone clipped and almost formal. While we’d never exactly enjoyed a warm relationship, he did not normally speak to me this way unless under a great strain.
I asked myself who was behind this meeting, him or my mother, but there was no sense in inquiring. I knew the answer. She had pushed him into this sooner than he’d been ready to acquiesce. Still mourning his eldest, the one remaining tie he had to his late wife.
She wasn’t the type to wait. She wanted to ensure the safety of her son’s position in the De Clerq line. In the end, as always, she was right—and, as always, I was loath to admit it even to myself. The family line would need to be secured, then more than ever thanks to my late brother’s foolishness. What if one of the other families decided to usurp us as a result of his stupidity? What if they used his indiscretion against all of us?
“You have a duty to this family,” my mother informed me, as though this was the first time I’d ever heard such a thing. As though she hadn’t driven the idea into my skull a hundred times since we’d received word of Dietrich’s death.
Murder.
“I’m aware of the duty you’ve placed upon my head,” I murmured, barely holding on to sanity—much less civility. Not for the first time did my wolf imagine the pleasure of tearing into her neck.
Mother or no, she was a burden I was tired of shouldering.
Thick, false eyelashes fluttered in front of eyes the color of cloudy ice. Eyes so like my own. “I’ve placed it? I have? I believe you’re a bit confused as to the nature of the situation.”
“Margaux…” my father warned, but a wave of her red-nailed hand closed his mouth. As always.
I’d often wondered at the nature of the hold she had over him. It took next to nothing for her to shut him up, and he, the head of a powerful clan of the most powerful creatures imaginable.
