Shock clamped Mariana’s chest and locked down her breathing. She could feel her eyes widening, then the sensation-dead black of the jump dropped around her and the arrival chamber at the villa formed, taking the place of the black.
Mariana completed her gasp.
Brenden looked down at her as he let her go and stepped back away from her. “Sorry, was your landing too heavy?”
Mariana shook her head. “I’m just not used to it, like you are,” she lied. Tendrils of anger were curling through her, gathering energy. Growing. So she gave Brenden a huge smile. “Thank you for the tea and the travel. I always enjoy going back in time.”
Then she got herself out of the arrival chamber as quickly as possible and hurried through the villa to her room and shut the door on the world, just as she had wanted to.
Only then did she let herself vent any of her fury. She walked her sitting room in tight circles, her hands in hard fists.
Brenden had made it as plain as day that he and Billy were together. The timber of his voice, his expression, the words themselves all said the two of them were intimate. Billy’s pleased response was mere confirmation.
Vampires, particularly agency members, were sexually promiscuous—it was a facet of their nature. There were not many true emotions and feelings that remained when a human was turned vampire. Sexual pleasure was one of them and vampires tended to compensate for the loss of sensitivity with their other emotions by taking multiple sexual partners. Mariana had always known that about vampires and she had always secretly admired them for their lack of inhibitions.
But the flip side of that was that vampires were the most discreet partners on the planet. They never spoke about their partners, about sex, or even about the ones they loved. Secrecy had been bred into them by millennia spent trying to look as human as possible. Mariana hadn’t been aware of Deonne’s long relationship with Justin until Adán, Justin and Deonne had announced her pregnancy and their threesome in one public declaration. She had only grown aware of just how in love Ryan, Cáel and Nayara were through observation of details—and there were very few details to spot, for those three were more furtive than thieves.
And now Brenden almost openly declares he and Billy were…what, exactly? They could be anything, including all the way to the far end of the spectrum of deep love. With Brenden keeping Billy in the past and jumping back there himself, they could have spent months or even years back there and no one at the agency would know. That was plenty of time to fall in love.
But why had he let her see it? Was she so unimportant in Brenden’s estimation that he simply didn’t care if she knew or not?
Mariana dropped onto the loveseat and gripped her hands together. “He did it because you care,” she told herself.
Brenden had made no secret of how he had felt about Laszlo when he had first appeared and his disgust had been even less subtle when he found out Laszlo was dating her.
Was this Brenden’s way of…what? Getting even?
Why would he want to get even with her? It was Laszlo he had disliked and he’d never had any trouble communicating exactly how he felt about Mariana, so why the passive-aggressive pay-back?
Mariana was tempted to contact Laszlo and finalize the dinner date she had agreed to. Tit for tat.
She stood up and looked out at the roses through the tall, narrow window, blowing out her breath and deliberately reaching for the sort of serenity that Nayara always seemed to exude.
What was she thinking? Using Laszlo to get back at Brenden for a slight she had only inferred? She could have imagined the entire sub-text of their short exchange, along with the way they had kept deferring to each other at the café.
This was crazy-thinking. Human knee-jerk emotions were driving her and the emotions were all wrong and mixed up. She needed to think.
“So think,” she commanded herself, dropping her gaze to her toes.
What was the right thing to do?
Chapter Seventeen
Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2265 A.D.
After Gawaine shut the door on their latest visitor, Marley pulled out the battered kitchen chair and sat with a tired sigh. The table was holding up a staggering array of things. There were half-a-dozen instant lottery cards, all of them medium-to-major prize winners. There were a dozen eggs, a freshly cooked pecan pie that was filling the apartment with the smell of spices and making her mouth water. Lying over the back of the other chair was a denim and fleece-lined coat that fit her perfectly and would replace her torn and worn coat when the weather turned.
Behind her, two men, both of them vampires, were washing dishes and scrubbing the backsplashes. She had tended both of their minor scrapes and bruises, the result of street lynchings by angry humans who had spotted them as vampires. The DRS was a city full of prejudices even though everyone in it was a refugee of one kind or another and should know better.
In the two days since Karoline had told Gawaine to buy a lottery ticket with the coin he had discovered in his pocket, there had been a steady stream of visitors. Most of them were unobtrusive, tapping softly and not drawing attention to themselves as they came and went from the apartment building, but as the foyer didn’t have any sort of security, strangers could let themselves into the building unremarked.
All of the visitors had needed medical attention of some sort. The vampires behind her were not the first to find their auto-healing abilities hampered by whatever malevolent control Gabriel was putting out there. But she had also tended to psi-filers and humans.
“The psi-filers are scary,” Gawaine told Rhydder, who was sitting on the chair at Gawaine’s desk, giving off steam clouds of fury. “They just know what we most need. And it’s not something we’re even consciously in need of. I didn’t know Marley’s coat had been torn.”
Rhydder had appeared in the corner of the apartment reserved for jumpers as Marley had been finishing up with the teenager that had just left. The teenager was a psi and already feeling the effects of psi-dementia.
Rhydder had a small melt down when he realized that the teenager was not the first patient Marley had dealt with and that there was a psi-filer in her bedroom, recovering from child-birth. He had waited out her treatment of the teenager while Gawaine gave him a rundown of the cottage industry that had sprung up overnight.
“The vampires pay cash—hard currency and credits,” Gawaine added. “The humans…well, they’re as poor as the psi-filers, but they don’t have their skills. But we’ve got groceries for a month in the cold cupboard that they’ve brought here in dribs and drabs, including some of the best home-cooking I’ve ever tasted.”
Rhydder shook his head. “You can’t keep treating them.”
“Psi-filers, vampires or humans?” Marley asked coldly.
“Any of them,” he said flatly. “Word will pass. Gabriel will find out.”
“These people need someone like me,” Marley pointed out. “There’s probably not a single legitimate doctor in the city and any real doctor would turn them away—especially the vampires and the psi.”
“You’ve already got a practice,” Rhydder countered.
“And now it has expanded.”
“We can’t protect you here,” he growled. “In fact it might be better if we moved you to the villa permanently.”
Marley got to her feet. “If you’d asked a week ago I might have considered it. But not now. I am helping these people.”
“You help the agency.”
“Do I?” she asked dryly. “I doubt any member of the agency even knows when I’m there. But that reminds me. I’m out of a number of items, including a whole pharmacy of antibiotics and nano-steriodals. I’ll have to raid the agency supplies.”
Rhydder’s jaw rippled. “That’s something you need to take up with Nayara.”
“You don’t think she will agree to this sort of direct charity?” Marley asked softly.
His expression grew stony and Gawaine grinned. She had Rhydder cornered and everyo
ne knew it.
“Gabriel!” Gawaine uttered and leapt to turn up the volume on the screen that faced the kitchen table.
Marley turned to look at the screen. It was Gabriel and he looked worse than before. “What now?” she wondered aloud.
* * * * *
Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2265 A.D.
When Brenden arrived in Nayara’s office, summoned by her direct implant-to-implant communication, the first person he saw was Mariana, sitting on one of the visitor chairs in front of Nayara’s desk, her legs crossed and her feet tucked neatly underneath her. That told him exactly what was going on.
He stopped three long paces away from Nayara’s desk and the other chair that was waiting for him and hissed. “She fucking told you?”
Nayara got to her feet. “Mariana told me what you should have told me the moment this happened.”
“I don’t tell you about every little thing that happens around here,” Brenden growled, “because you’d never get anything done. Besides, you have enough on your plate right now.”
“It is not your role to choose for me what I should or should not be privvy to,” Nayara replied evenly. “This could affect the Agency at the highest level. It should have been brought to me immediately.”
Mariana had not turned in her chair to look at him and that bothered Brenden more than anything else, including the fact that she had gone behind his back to Nayara. “Sorry,” he told Nayara shortly. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree over the scale of this. It’s a blip. And I’m working on it.”
“I want to talk to Wolffe,” Nayara replied.
“Which one?” he asked.
“Both of them,” she said, her tone grim. “We’ll get to the bottom of this in five minutes with both of them in the room.”
The door to the rose garden opened. Stelios moved into the room. “Gabriel is on the nets again,” he said and picked up the remote for Nayara’s screen.
Brenden studied the Assemblyman curiously. He had come from the direction of Ryan’s office, which was next to Nayara’s with doors connecting it to the rose garden, too. It wasn’t unusual for Stelios to be in either office, but the tone he had used just now was odd. Authoritative, whereas normally Stelios was hyper-sensitive about appearing to use any sort of authority at all, here at the agency. It was a delicacy that Brenden had appreciated.
Had something changed?
Then he saw Gabriel on the screen and forgot about everything else, including Mariana. He sent out an all-hail alert to everyone on his team. They’d be assembled in the command center by the time he got back there.
“…have failed to meet my simple request last month,” Gabriel said. One side of his mouth didn’t look like it was working properly.
“What request?” Mariana asked the room in generally, getting to her feet. “He didn’t demand anything!”
“Every human has the right to vote,” Gabriel continued. “Even vampires have representation in the Worlds Assembly.”
Brenden frowned. “Since when?” he demanded. He caught Nayara’s quick glanced at Stelios where he stood with his arms folded, watching the screen with a heavy frown marring his forehead. Ah…Brenden said to himself, silently. That’s our unofficial representative. But how had Gabriel known that?
“Psi-filers only ask for simple equality. The right to vote. The right to be represented in the governing bodies of the nine worlds. And now we will demonstrate a little of the inequality and injustice we currently suffer. We will continue with such demonstrations until there is no longer any need.”
Brenden braced himself, his heart leaping, but it was hard to know what to brace for. He’d rather be facing down a million pissed-off Persians right now, than the intangible and unfightable danger Gabriel represented.
“John, Jane, are you listening?” Gabriel asked, his tone sickly sweet. His smile was almost a grimace. “John and Jane, I want you to go to sleep.”
The screen went blank. Then, after a second or two, the studio anchor came back on, looking flustered and unprepared.
Stelios turned the screen off. “Are there any human Johns or Janes in the agency?” he asked urgently.
Nayara held up her hand. She was staring into mid-air, which told Brenden she was using her implant to communicate with someone, or a computer. Then she blinked and refocused on the room. “Kieran is throwing out as wide a shield as he can, but he can only cover the inner suburbs of Rome and there’s not likely to be a lot of Johns and Janes here, anyway.” She moved out from behind her desk. “We’d better move to the command center. Deonne will meet us there.”
* * * * *
After an hour of people shouting at each other in the over-crowded command center, Mariana reached the point where she’d had enough of the claustrophobic hysteria. It was clear from the monitors that every John and Jane in the world had fallen asleep as commanded and nothing was going to wake them until Gabriel decided it was time.
Mariana couldn’t help with that. Nor could she help with the communications and PR disaster that the agency leaders were facing. Vampires were utterly immune to Gabriel’s command and humans were even faster to notice, this time. In addition, they were noticing vampires who were passing as John or Jane and who hadn’t fallen asleep on command. Gabriel was outing them because of their immunity.
“A side bonus,” Rob had said dourly. “Or so Gabriel will reckon it.”
Mariana had nothing to offer anyone, so she moved around the edges of the room and headed back through the big doors to the admin office that the command center was next to. No one was in there, but she kept going anyway. There was a cavedium just on the other side of the admin block that would be empty right now because everyone was in the command center. There was an ancient apple tree in the middle of the courtyard, spreading its wide boughs and casting a fragrant shade over the yard, for the apples were nearly ripe and some early fruit had already dropped.
It was mid-afternoon and it was a blazingly hot and dry day. The air was still and the silence in the yard broken only by the buzz of bees and other insects taking advantage of the apples.
She ducked under the branches that hung low, burdened with fruit. Underneath and farther in toward the big, gnarled trunk, constant pruning had developed a canopy of green shade that lifted high enough from the ground that she could stand and walk without danger of hitting her head on anything. The air was cooler, a heavenly relief from the heat of the day.
“Mariana!”
It was Brenden’s voice and it sounded like it wasn’t the first time he had called out.
She whirled to face him as he ducked under the edge of the tree and stayed bent until he was inside the canopy enough to stand up and face her. “Didn’t you hear me calling?” he demanded.
“Clearly not.” She said it as calmly as she could, but her heart had jumped and now it was leaping about in her chest, making her feel a little sick from its frantic pumping. “But I know why you’re here and I can save you some time. Nayara needed to know about Laszlo. Billy, I mean. Both of them. Especially Billy.”
“Why especially Billy? He’s the innocent one in all this. It’s Laszlo who has the agenda.”
“You’ve really separated them in your mind, haven’t you? It’s like they’re two different people to you.”
“They are. Laszlo is working from motives we don’t understand.”
“But they’re the same man!” Mariana shot back. “It’s just Billy, but weeks, months—who knows?—years from now!”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“If you do, then why are you fucking him?” she shouted.
Brenden’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Even his eyes widened.
“Oh, please, spare me,” she said dryly. “You did that entire performance back in New Orleans just so I would know.”
Brenden was breathing heavily. She could see his chest rising under the soft, clinging fabric of his shirt. “It wasn’t a perfor
mance.” He sounded dazed, like his thoughts were miles away.
“I don’t care what it was,” Mariana shot back. “It doesn’t negate the fact that you jumped back here from New Orleans to screw up my relationship with Laszlo, so you could go back there and fuck him yourself. Then you made sure I knew. I don’t know what that makes you but you’re not the ethical man I thought you were.”
He seemed to wince.
“Why do you hate me so much?” Mariana demanded.
“I don’t hate you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dislike. Distrust. Think I’m stupid. Merely human. Pick your metaphor, I don’t care which. You distain everything I am and everything I believe in.”
“You’re wrong.”
“If I am, it’s because you made sure I was. That makes you a hypocrite to boot, but I already knew that.” She moved passed him, but his hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.
She looked up at him. “Let me go.” He could break her arm just by squeezing and if he didn’t let go, she would never free herself. Not with his strength. But she didn’t care about any of that. He was going to let her go or by Hades’ demons she’d make him. Somehow.
Brenden’s eyes were black and unreadable. “Not until you listen to me,” he growled.
Mariana laughed. “I’m standing here because I listened to you. I got my heart kicked around because I listened to you. I won’t listen to you now. It hurts too much.”
She tried to wrench her arm out of his grip, hoping that if she struggled enough he’d pity her and let her go, but he just pulled her arm up high over her head, stilling her resistance by almost dangling her from her wrist.
“What do you mean, it hurts?” His voice was hushed.
She was so tired of double-meanings and sub-text and not understanding. She was tired of guarding her tongue. And her heart. So she lifted herself up on her toes, rising up until she could reach his lips and kissed him. It was the sum expression of everything she couldn’t say, that needed to be said but shouldn’t be spoken of because someone would get hurt…and she would, too.
She fully expected Brenden would shove her away and stalk off, his temper roused beyond boiling point. It was what he should have done.
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