Siri pressed her hand against her stomach. Beneath her fingertips, the rough sensation of scar tissue smoothed as it was reabsorbed by her body. Flesh and muscles layered through the internal injury. She touched her neck, tracing the remembered shape of now-absent injuries. She looked up, her gaze darting to Elken’s body before meeting Rafael’s gaze. “Daeva blood—”
“Aconite infused daeva blood…both the poison and the cure.”
Siri drew a shuddering breath. “Aconite was, as you suspected, a catalyst, suppressing the body’s ability to purge it until it was concentrated enough to trigger a transformation. It changed you…” She trailed her hand down his chest. He was stronger than he had been as an elder vampire. What had he done to himself?
“The madness took me—”
“But you found your way back.”
“No, you found my way back.” He gritted his teeth and shuddered. “It’s still there, behind my eyes, pushing against the inside of my skull—”
“Shhh.” She pressed a finger against Rafael’s lips and relaxed into a smile. “We’re together. We’ll figure it out.”
“You came back for me.” Wonder infused his voice.
“I always will.” She swallowed hard against the familiar ache that had dogged her for the past three years—the ache that she now knew, with absolute certainty, was love. How much had he suffered because she had not trusted the strength of his love and set out to look for him earlier? “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“I would have gone to you.”
She nodded. “I know.”
Did her smile reflect the peace and relief she saw in his smile? Rafael leaned forward to touch his forehead to hers. In that moment, it was enough to be together, alive and whole, in the midst of the carnage.
Tera’s snarl ripped the serenity out of the moment. Siri glanced up. The icrathari warlord looked out into the distance, her gray eyes searching the horizon. “He’s gone.”
Erich Dale had apparently made good his escape. Siri shook her head. It was hard not to, on some level, pity the immortali. “He must have known he could not win.”
Tera’s expression was inscrutable. “He’s not interested in winning. And he’ll be back.”
Epilogue
A cluster of lights glowed in the otherwise darkened city of Aeternae Noctis. In Rafael’s cottage by the river, flames crackled in the fireplace, spreading warmth through the small room.
Siri stood by the stove where a pot of soup simmered next to a kettle of hot water infused with a sprinkling of herbs. She listened, comforted by the sounds of the ordinary—the soothing sound of running water, the crack and pop of logs as they settled in the flames, the raspy sound of Stefan’s cough.
In one of the two small bedrooms, Rafael knelt by Stefan’s bedside and held a cup of herbal tea to his son’s lips. The final occupant of the ark had finally been released back into his father’s care. The reunion had been matter-of-fact on Stefan’s part—as if he had fully anticipated waking someday. Apparently, the undying hope and optimism that made Rafael so remarkable was a part of Stefan too.
Siri did not think Stefan’s long-term prognosis much improved, but Rafael was hopeful that the many herbs he had found in the caverns would palliate, if not cure, Stefan’s feeble health.
The only thing that mattered was that they were together for now, a family once more, against the odds.
“Yuck.” Stefan stuck his tongue out and swiped at it with his hand. “I hate that one.”
Siri judged the herbal tea suitably steeped and poured the fragrant liquid into a cup. She offered it to Stefan. “Here’s a chamomile lavender infusion to get rid of the horrid taste of the other tea.”
Stefan reached for the cup with a haste that made both Siri and Rafael chuckle. He took a long, careful sip and then looked up at Siri with his most endearing smile. “I finished the yucky tea. Does that mean you will take me flying tomorrow?”
Siri shot Rafael a glance. “Only if your father says yes.”
“How could I say no?” Rafael said.
“That means yes,” Stefan supplied helpfully.
“Then yes, it is.” Siri leaned down to tug the blanket over Stefan’s chest. “Flying’s very strenuous, so you should get some sleep.”
“Okay.” Stefan snuggled down into his bed and closed his eyes. “I’m asleep. Look, I’m asleep.”
“Good try. Now do it for real.” With a laugh, Rafael ruffled the hair on his son’s head, and then pushed to his feet. He ushered Siri out of the room ahead of him before closing Stefan’s bedroom door. “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “Happy to help.” She glanced over her shoulder at the closed door. The boy’s easy acceptance of her—a Night Terror—made her quiver in awe. “He makes love look easy.”
“Love shouldn’t be hard.” Rafael reached for a bottle on the top shelf of his pantry and poured two cups of a red liquid that shimmered in the firelight. Siri caught the fragrance of currants fermented into sweet alcohol. He smiled at her, the curve of his lips rueful and self-deprecating. “And then there always has to be someone—or two someones—to prove theory wrong.”
“Like us?” Siri asked, amused at how he had recalled something she had said to him in the early days of their friendship.
Rafael picked up the two cups and offered one to her. “Let’s drink to an easier, second chance at love.”
Siri’s wings beat down and lifted her into the air, into Rafael’s arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck and smiled at him. “I don’t need wine to toast the future. I have everything I need here and now.”
Two cups were set aside as Siri drew Rafael into a kiss infused with the tender sweetness of mutual surrender, of two longtime lovers finally finding middle ground.
Tera paced slowly along the curve of the balcony on the highest floor of Malum Turris. Beneath the tower, the city was shrouded in darkness, except for a cluster of lights on the edge of the forest—Rafael’s home.
For a moment, Tera’s thoughts lingered on Rafael. Only the Creator knew what he was now—a hybrid rebirthed from the blood of an icrathari and two daevas. He was stronger, faster, and deadlier than any elder vampire or immortali could lay claim. Yet all he apparently wanted from the rest of eternity was to putter around in his herb garden with his beloved son and Siri.
Siri appeared to have no objection to setting aside twenty-second century technology to live in the relative squalor of an eighteenth-century cottage. Tera had never seen her more content. Absolute happiness manifested in strange, yet common ways.
For Tera, happiness had once been as simple as sitting next to Erich Dale in the city square beneath the light of the full moon. All around her, vampires went about their unpleasant tasks of tearing five-year-old children from their homes, but she ignored the flurry of activity as she leafed through Erich’s poems—none of which had been particularly good—or watched images come to life beneath the tip of his pencil. He had always been a better artist than a poet; he had been her connection to the rare slivers of beauty and art that survived the ruin of human civilization.
When he had been human, she had inspired his art, but now, he was an immortali, and she inspired only his hate. Somewhere, in the desolation that was Earth, Erich Dale commanded an army of daevas with only one intent—to destroy her.
Tera’s wings flared to their full ten-foot span. She stared out at the darkness that concealed him. I’m ready for you, Erich. We will end this.
Along the horizon, night conceded to day. The sun crept across the sky, its unstoppable light slicing through the curved dome of Aeternae Noctis to rest upon the leather-clad icrathari warlord who stood watch over the city. Dawn had come to the city of eternal night.
THE END
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Ready for the next installment in the Aeternae Noctis series? Check out ETERNAL DAY.
Eternal Day
Aeternae Noctis #3
Two hundred and fifty years earlier...
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br /> Darkness sliced, swift and precise, across the amber curve of the full moon.
The flame in his lamp flickered. Shadows danced over the rough-hewn stones of his low seat beside the fountain in the city square. Erich Dale lifted his quill from the parchment balanced on his lap and raised his gaze to the sky. An easy smile creased his face as he visually traced the spread of the bat-shaped wings across the back of the slender, humanoid form soaring over the city.
His breath caught; his throat closed around the gasp of awe. Too lovely.
The icrathari’s beauty—perfect and pure—evoked matching emotions. His chest ached as tears pricked at his eyes.
A pity he was the only human to witness the icrathari’s flight. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the city of Aeternae Noctis. Its cobblestone streets were empty; its homes and shops darkened, a defense against the pale-skinned vampires who roamed the city each night of the full moon.
His people’s defense was psychological, not physical. Vampires did not need light by which to see. Erich had watched them for years—long enough to understand their strengths, of which there were many, and their limitations, of which there were few. Vampires who inhabited a city of eternal night had nothing to fear from the sun.
They were, however, curious about how openly he observed them from his favorite seat by the bubbling fountain. Several months earlier, one of the vampires had stopped to ask him, in the politest manner possible, why he was not cowering in the shadows, hiding like the other humans.
Erich had laughed and shrugged. “I’m a poet, not a warrior. The people of Aeternae Noctis tell me I’m of no earthly use to man or beast. I don’t think the vampires will take any interest in me either.”
The vampire’s chuckle was low and amused. “I suppose not.”
He was right. The vampires paid him no attention other than to nod in acknowledgment when they walked past him.
On his part, he made no move to defend the struggling humans the vampires dragged from their homes. He did not attempt to save the weeping five-year-old children seized from their mothers’ arms and carried into the vampires’ stronghold, Malum Turris, the black tower that cast its cursed shadow over Aeternae Noctis.
Like a man transfixed, he waited only for glimpses of the icrathari, the vampires’ overlords.
There were, he knew, more than one, but the one who entranced him wore her hair in a braid. From the moment he laid eyes on her several months earlier, he could think of little else. Her predatory grace proclaimed her a monster, but the indefinable expression in her eyes declared otherwise.
Erich shook his head, his smile wry. As a poet, words should not have eluded him, but they did. He knew only that her eyes were not the eyes of a demon. He looked up, searching the sky for her.
The gust of chill wind heralded the silent beat of massive wings. Shadows flickered through the air and unfurled to reveal an ethereal creature. Scarcely five feet tall, it was so slender it seemed almost delicate. Its skin was pale, and its silver hair woven into a long braid it wore down its back. Large gray eyes slanted upward in a finely featured face that mirrored the murals of angels in the cathedral. Bat-like wings stretched ten feet from wing tip to wing tip, and the horn-shaped bones that emerged from each juncture between the flaps of the black leathery wings were encased in studded metal. Dressed in a leather bustier, pants, and matching boots, the icrathari strode past silent vampires to stand in front of him.
“Beautiful.”
He had not realized he had spoken aloud until the icrathari’s lips curved in a smile.
“Who are you?” His voice sounded thin even to his own ears. Did courage or stupidity inspire his question? There wasn’t much difference between either in the presence of an icrathari who commanded hundreds of vampires with a wave of her hand.
Her eyes narrowed, but she answered. “Tera.” The husky and rich timbre of her voice did not match her seemingly fragile appearance. She glanced at the parchment on his lap. “And you’re an artist, Erich Dale.”
He tilted the piece of paper to catch shards of light from the pale glow of the moon. Black ink captured in stark relief the curve of the impenetrable glass dome that separated the city of Aeternae Noctis from the outside world and trapped it in eternal night. Within the dome, an icrathari spread its wings in flight. The painstaking detail of the icrathari contrasted with the crude sketch of the dome. Erich held the parchment up to Tera. “I’m a poet, an artist. Beautiful things inspire me.”
She accepted his gift. “You do not fear the night, and you do not fear me.”
He rose. At six feet, he towered over her, but he did not doubt for a moment her superior strength. Several months earlier, he had seen her flip her wrist, sending an attacking human flying through the air. The man crashed into the wall of the smithy. He stumbled to his feet and shook off his disorientation. With a snarl, spittle forming on his lips, he seized the blacksmith’s heavy hammer and charged at Tera.
Her calm expression did not change. She reached out and caught him around the neck. Her fingers tightened.
Bone snapped. The hammer toppled from the man’s suddenly nerveless fingers. Tera’s grip loosened, and the man collapsed in a crumpled heap. She turned away, but not before Erich caught a glimpse of the regret that flashed through her eyes.
She’s not a demon.
A panicked cry of a child recalled him to the present.
Erich turned his head at the desperate wails that shattered the silence of the night. Five-year-old children screamed and flailed in the unyielding arms of the vampires who carried them across the drawbridge into the tower.
He closed his eyes and wrapped his mind around the certainty he knew in his heart. The icrathari are not demons even though they take our children from us. Even though they have imprisoned us in eternal night.
The people of Aeternae Noctis perceived the icrathari and vampires as more than captors; the inhuman tormentors were the Night Terrors—demons who possessed the power to block out the light of the sun.
In the fields surrounding the city, crops thrived beneath artificial light emanating in twelve-hour intervals from the tall columns interspersed in the fields, but humans were less resigned to darkness even though no one could remember any differently after centuries and generations of imprisonment. Sunlight was a story whispered to children at bedtime, a tale repeated by drunks in taverns, but it was also fact. Sunlight was the hope, the certainty that kept his people strong through the despair that should have otherwise consumed them.
Beyond the dome, everyone knew that sunlight blessed the Promised Land, cradling it within its benevolent warmth.
The chill of the eternal night cut through his thin cotton shirt, and he shivered. Erich understood the hate and fear that swamped his people, but standing face-to-face with Tera, he could not find those emotions in himself. Sunlight be damned. He would endure an eternity of darkness for the privilege of looking upon her. What was that look in her eyes? Deeper than loneliness. More profound than sadness. Why couldn’t he find the right words?
“I’m not much of a poet,” he confessed.
She turned to survey the silent city. “What in Aeternae Noctis could possibly inspire you?”
His jaw dropped. Couldn’t she see that inspiration lay all around? Erich lifted his face to the sky—the pale perfect circle of the moon; an endless parade of stars, each one a distinct sparkle in the dark of the night. Aeternae Noctis glowed beneath the moon’s eternal orbit; the polished stone walls of its buildings and cobblestone streets glistened like living silver. The stained glass in the cathedral shone with ghostly light, as if the radiance emanated from within.
“I find inspiration in the unaffected beauty of the night,” he whispered. “In the peace and silence.”
“Which is why you come out here, every night of the full moon.”
He nodded. “The night is most beautiful then. The city is silent.”
“But not at peace.”
“No.” How many adul
ts and children had the vampires taken this night? How many families wept, brokenhearted, in their homes, their choking cries stifled against further discovery or retribution from the vampires? His shoulders rose and fell on a quiet sigh. “Necessity compels you, but you’re not at peace either.”
Her eyes flashed wide and then narrowed into slits.
“Isn’t it true?” he asked.
“No one has ever dared say so.”
“I know more about the Night Terrors than my people do. I see more. The vampires ignore me. Instead, they seize the most talented humans—our most skilled warriors and hunters, our scientists and engineers. The useless ones—our poets and artists—are left unscathed. You take with purpose, which implies a necessity at work. I see it, even if I don’t understand it.”
Tera tilted her head, the gesture challenging. “And the children?”
“I don’t understand why you take some five-year-old children and leave others behind, but there is a purpose too, isn’t there?”
Her wings ruffled. She nodded, her jaw tense.
He shrugged. “You don’t owe me an explanation, although others would say that the truth is ultimately inevitable.”
“You don’t care to know much.”
“I care to know only what matters to me. My poetry, my art. Beauty.” You. “The truth will come in its own time. Everything else is irrelevant.”
She frowned. “Even though you’re trapped in the city with others of your kind.”
He turned and followed her gaze beyond the curve of the dome. Outside the glass dome, moonlight washed over waterfalls cascading from cloud-enshrouded mountain crags. The few trees that claimed the mountain’s highest ledges expanded into the abundance of pine forests before thinning as forests gave way to lush fields scattered with wildflowers. If he closed his eyes, he could hear the crash of water and smell the fragrance of pine and cedar. His fingers twitched, instinctively reaching for the rough bark of the trees and the velvet softness of wildflower petals.
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