“Are you saying that to convince me, or yourself?” Christian asked.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Brenden shot back. “He clears our checks and our checks are more thorough than most. His DNA matches public records, he’s who he says he is and he has the money to pay for his time trip. That’s all we care about.”
But his scowl had deepened.
Christian slapped his arm in farewell and strode back through the courtyard to the south cavedium. The rooms Mariana had arranged for them were at the far end of the villa, giving them as much privacy as could be arranged while still living in the agency. Christian didn’t mind the close quarters. He had grown up with a large family in a small house. Rob had grown up even poorer.
But they had each other and even though it sounded like such a cliché when spoken aloud, deep in his heart, Christian held a happiness that seemed to grow with each day that passed with Rob and Tally in his life and baby Jack to punctuate it.
Jack was asleep by the time he got back to the suite. Christian could tell before he got inside the door, because silence lay beyond. Perhaps Tally and Rob were already in bed, which meant he could interrupt and include himself. His body grew taut at the idea and he pushed the door open as silently as he could.
They weren’t in bed. Tally sat on the sofa, her feet tucked up underneath her, her glowing hair swinging around her shoulders and her sharply pointed chin up. She was upset and every line of her body spoke of it. Christian’s heart stirred and he closed the door just as softly as he had opened it.
Rob looked around at him. He was standing barefoot, his legs spread and his kilt half-unravelled. Tally must have been half-way through pulling Rob’s clothes off when something had interrupted them. Rob’s bare chest gleamed in the soft light, but his arms were crossed. He was a tense as Tally.
“What’s wrong?” Christian asked, alarmed.
“‘tis nothing wrong, exactly,” Rob said. His gaze caught Christian’s and there was a warning there that Christian didn’t understand.
He looked at Tally, hoping she would explain.
Tally’s chin lifted a little bit higher. Defiance. She was expecting him to take Rob’s side. But even as she stiffened, bracing herself for argument, her big brown eyes seemed to fill with sorrow. Christian’s gut tightened. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, or perhaps would have already been crying, if she was capable of tears.
“What is it?” he murmured, sitting next to her.
“Tally wants another bairn,” Rob said, his accent thicker than usual. “She wants yers, to be exact. And she wants my blessin’.”
Christian drew in a sharp breath as fear stabbed him. “After last time, when you came so close to dying, Tally? You would risk that again?”
Tally dropped her gaze. “I would,” she said softly, “if it meant having your child.”
“But the risks!” He picked up her hand. “It’s not just the stasis poisoning. Even if we mitigated that risk as much as possible, there’s all the dangers of living in the past—wars and revolutions and disease.”
Rob hadn’t moved from his taut posture. “Tally proposes she live three minutes in the past, like Rhydder does. Did. Then she could have the best of both worlds. A babe and modern medicine.” His mouth turned down.
Tally was looking at Christian, hope in her eyes. “Don’t you want a child of your own?” she asked softly.
“I have one. He’s called Jack.”
She flinched.
“He’s not my blood, but it doesn’t matter. He will grow up knowing me as one of his fathers.”
Her hand pulled away from his. “But I want another child,” she whispered.
Rob picked up the trailing end of his kilt and flung it over his shoulder, then crouched down in front of them. He rested his hand on their knees, one each. “This is too fraught a matter to deal with it in one sitting,” he said, his voice low. “I propose we all think about it for a wee bit. Later, perhaps when this thing with Gabriel is over, we can figure out a way so that everyone gets what they want.”
Tally shook her head. “No. If we wait until Gabriel is contained, then something else will come along that threatens our peace. There’s always something. There’s always a reason why raising a child right now is a bad idea.”
Christian picked up her hand again and this time, he gripped it when she tried to tug it away. “Tally, you’re upset. Neither of us understood how badly you wanted this.”
“Aye,” Rob agreed softly.
“Can you give me a few days at least, to think about this?” Christian asked her.
Tally remained stiff. Unresponsive.
Christian smoothed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I promise we will talk about this again. And in the meantime, I’ll do some research. And I’ll go over the risks with Marley and Fahmido.”
“I can have a chat with Rhydder,” Rob asked. “Find out how he lasted all that time living back in the past, without keeling over from stasis poisoning.”
Tally threw her arms around them both, drawing them to her and Christian gladly held them. But no matter how hard he held them and even later, as they gradually moved from the sofa to the bed, their bodies warming and their lips touching, Christian couldn’t rid himself of the kernel of fear Tally had planted.
The fear of losing her.
The fear of losing all this, which he loved.
Chapter Thirteen
Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2265 A.D.
Kieran found him in the kitchen around four the next morning. Brenden dropped the board he was reading onto the pile on the table in front of him and sat back. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he demanded.
“Because Rob’s busy and you couldn’t be found,” Kieran said. His tone was mild. “The Englishman. The new one, Devon. He came to my room. He didn’t know what to do.”
Devon was one of their new recruits. He’d been a vampire only a little longer than he’d been an agency member. He’d only been made barely twenty years ago, which wasn’t long enough to make him useful as a traveler.
“That’s one thing this business with Gabriel is good for,” Brenden said. “It’s bringing a lot of vampires out of hiding and to the agency’s doors.”
“Do they think the agency will protect them?” Kieran asked. He sounded genuinely curious.
“Some,” Brenden said. “Others are just pissed at Gabriel.” He gathered up the reading boards. “Time to find a new bolt hole,” he groused. Hiding out in the kitchen after humans were long abed had been a way of finding five minutes of solitude.
“Your bolt hole is secure,” Kieran said. “I found you this way.” He tapped his temple. “Everyone else can do their own detective work, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Why did Devon interrupt your sleep?” Brenden got to his feet. Whatever it was, he was probably going to have to go back to the command center to deal with it.
“Wasn’t sleeping,” Kieran said shortly. “I don’t do that much.”
Brenden glanced at him, surprised.
“Dreams,” Kieran said.
“Not good ones, by the sound of it.” He swept up the pile of boards. “Devon?”
“He thinks there may be someone loitering around the front gate, monitoring traffic in and out. We don’t have sensors covering the public paths and the roadway, of course, but the house across the road is empty and usually registers as cold, except for minor heat signatures from doves that roost in the roof.”
Brenden headed for the kitchen door and Kieran turned to keep up with him. “There are no doves?” he guessed.
“Not for about twelve hours now,” Kieran confirmed.
Brenden made a mental note to give Devon a verbal pat on the back. For a beginner, it was a good pick up. He glanced at Kieran. “Did you scan? Can you scan from here, if you’re shielding the villa?”
“Not very well,” Kieran said apologetically. “There might be someone there. That’s the best I c
an do. I thought I’d check physically, but it’s your arena.…”
Brenden appreciated his deferral. If it had been something to do with the army Kieran and Rhydder were recruiting and training down in the catacombs beneath the villa, then it would have been just as inappropriate for him to stick his oar in. Although Kieran cared enough about the agency in general to come dig Brenden out and draw his attention to it, rather than roll over and go back to sleep, so Brenden nodded. “Sure. Come with me. I’ll quarter the area, figure out what scared the birds away. Then you can sleep easier.”
He dumped the boards on the desk in his office and glanced at the monitors through the glass. All quiet. There were a few of his people working at desks around the edges of the room, including Devon.
He glanced at the wall of weapons. Most people visiting the command center assumed the weapons were all display items, but only some of them were. He briefly considered grabbing something, then mentally shrugged. It could be a bat that scared the birds away. It could be nothing. And if it wasn’t, he was just in the right mood for some hand-to-hand combat, if fighting was needed.
“I can jump us there,” Brenden suggested to Kieran. “It’ll save time and save the walk down to the gates, too.”
“Fine by me,” Kieran said. He glanced around the compact office. “From here?”
“I only need room for landing and I know exactly where to land that can’t be seen from the road.” He brought his arm up around Kieran’s broad back and jumped.
The villa gates faced onto a quiet side road that ran off Lungotevere Tor di Nona. The house across the street, taking up the corner lot, was an ancient grey-walled building with small windows and only one street door. It had been empty for many years. It wasn’t common knowledge that the agency had bought the house not long after acquiring the villa and had left it deliberately empty.
Brenden aimed for a clear patch of grass just inside the gates and hidden behind the fat brick posts that held them up. The posts housed the scanning and opening mechanisms.
“Over the fence and around to the back of the house?” Kieran asked, glancing carefully around the posts.
“Good plan.” Brenden jumped the fence one-handed and slid along the shadows at the foot of it until he was well past the end of the house across the road. He didn’t move fast, but he didn’t slow down much, either. Kieran didn’t seem to have any issues keeping up with him.
They flitted across the deserted road. The air was cool with the first hint of the coming morning. At this time of year, it was only in the last hours of the night when any relief came from the belting heat of the day. Most Romans fled the city in August, heading for the countryside and beach resorts. At this time of day, all the tourists would be tucked up in their hotel beds, too. They had the city to themselves, almost.
A tall concrete wall separated the tiny yard at the back of the house from the alley that ran past it. Brenden tried jumping for the top, but couldn’t reach it, so he bent and threaded his hands together. Kieran understood. He stepped onto his hands and Brenden boosted him up to the top. There, Kieran rolled until he was lying along the top of the wall, then held out his hand and pulled Brenden up high enough for him to grip the edge of the wall and haul himself over it. Then Kieran dropped down silently into the yard.
The yard was empty, except for discarded pots whose plants had long since died from neglect. Dust lifted, disturbed by their feet. The dry smell wafted upwards.
Brenden considered the dust. There was a faint track through it to the back door, a rough wooden structure that was silver with age. The track would be invisible to the human eye.
He lifted his head to look at the second floor. There were small windows looking out onto the yard, including one at the far end that was only six feet above the wall, where it met the corner of the house.
Kieran lifted his chin to look, too, then touched Brenden’s arm to get his attention. He tapped the middle of his chest.
Brenden nodded and bent to hoist him back up onto the wall. Once there, Kieran rose to his feet and walked around the narrow edge like he was strolling along the Pont Sant’Angelo, to the corner of the house. He jumped to grab the broad window sill and drew himself up. He was surprisingly agile, for a human.
As Kieran eased the window open, Brenden took up position by the back door and opened up his hearing. Kieran was phenomenally quiet. Brenden didn’t detect a single squeak or shuffle from the second floor, until sixty second later, when a single board gave way with a sigh.
Immediately, there was a soft sound from the floor below, so soft a human might not have heard it. Brenden tracked the almost silent steps through the empty rooms mostly by the faint echo. Kieran had spooked whoever it was with his deliberately noisy footstep.
The door opened a few inches and held.
Brenden stayed silent against the wall beside it and waited.
When they came out, they moved faster than he had expected. They were several steps from the door before Brenden could push himself off the wall and launch himself after them. He didn’t bother running forward. He threw himself through the air, slamming into the small of their back and bringing them to the dirt by taking them right off their feet.
They struggled and Brenden fought to stay on top of him and control his thrashing. Then he flipped him over, just as Kieran moved swiftly out into the yard. Keiren helped Brenden pin him down. Only when the stranger was completely immobile was Brenden able to look at his face.
It was Laszlo Wolffe.
“What the fuck?” Brenden said.
Wolffe blew out a breath. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in bed, tucked around Mariana like you’re supposed to be?” He kept his voice as neutral as he could manage.
Kieran was staring down at Wolffe, his eyes narrowed. “He is in the villa,” he said quietly. “I have almost everyone in the villa keyed so I can track them wherever they go, including Wolffe after tonight. He’s in the villa with Mariana.”
“Which was something I hoped you might be able to explain to me,” Wolffe said. “Would you mind letting go? I’d like my arms back.”
Brenden leaned back, taking his weight off the man, trying to figure it out.
“You’re vampire,” Kieran said, sounding surprised.
“Of course I’m a bloody vampire,” Wolffe said dryly.
Brenden sat on the ground and propped his arms on his knees. “Vampire?” he repeated, trying to catch up.
“The one in the villa is human,” Kieran added quietly and glanced at Brenden.
Wolffe sat up and pushed his hand through his hair. “Human?” he asked with the same tone of disbelief that Brenden had just used. “Who the hell is impersonating me? And why?”
“Wait,” Brenden said, holding up his hand. “If he’s human, that puts a different spin on it.”
“Time travel?” Kieran asked, proving he was as fast mentally as he was physically.
Brenden looked at Wolffe. “Why were you watching the villa?”
Wolffe let out a deep breath. “Three days ago, I got back from Evergreen. Early. My date…the woman I took there to get away from all the craziness, well…” He gave a tiny shrug.
“She left you for a richer man,” Brenden finished.
“How did you know that?” Wolffe demanded. “I didn’t tell anyone.” He hesitated. “Too embarrassed,” he added. “I sneaked back to Earth and figured I’d hide out somewhere no one would think to look for me. Think things through. Only when I got here, every media stream I came across was blathering about me and a woman called Mariana Jones, a human working for the agency.”
“So you came here to see who was posing as you?” Kieran asked.
“Exactly. I couldn’t figure out why someone would want to be me. Not at this point in time, anyway,” he added dryly.
“You mean, your sterling reputation with women?” Brenden asked.
“I’ve had a shitty streak lately,” Wolf
fe said, sounding sincere. “It doesn’t help that I’m still passing as human. Actually, I think that’s probably what’s tripping me up the most. It palls, after a while, the basic hypocrisy.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Brenden said shortly. “I came out over two hundred years ago.”
“It’ll be six centuries of passing, for me, next decade.” Wolffe sighed. He grinned suddenly, quickly. “You passed longer than I did, before the Revelation.” Then his grin faded. “So who is it in the villa with the lovely woman I saw on the nets?”
“You,” Brenden said shortly.
“His DNA matches the central bank record under your ID,” Kieran added. “Every other ID test passed. He is you, but he’s human.”
“How can that be?” Wolffe asked frankly. He did not dispute them or demand proof. It might have been Kieran’s flat assurance that convinced him.
“How much do you know about the agency and the travelling we do?” Brenden asked.
“Not huge amounts,” Wolffe confessed candidly. “I absorbed everything that was made public, of course. It’s only the last year or so that I’ve started taking serious notice. I think that in the back of my mind I was already deciding a change was in order.” His smile was self-deprecating. “Of course, by then I’d met Karen and things got complicated.”
Brenden realized he was smiling. Just a bit. He couldn’t help it. This version of Wolffe seemed much more…well, human. It was hard not to like someone who was fully aware of his own faults and foibles and regretted them.
“So the joker in bed with…um, Mariana, right? He’s me, from the future?”
Kieran squatted down next to them. “Brenden, I should head back. My absence might be noticed and my returning from the gate in broad daylight certainly will be. Under the circumstances it would be best if this news didn’t become general knowledge around the villa. At least, not until we understand what the other Wolffe wants.”
“My thanks for your help,” Brenden told him.
Spartan Resistance Page 18
