by Maria Lima
Adam didn’t answer right away, instead, he crouched down to read a stone half hidden by some dried-out blooms, fancy ribbons torn and faded. Other dead bouquets encircled the marker and the plot as if someone had wanted to embrace their departed loved one by surrounding him or her with flowers. “Guadalupe Rivera de Caminante,” he read. “Beloved wife.” A distant look crossed his face as he brushed the top of the stone marker. “Beloved by many.”
“Adam?” Niko ventured a touch to Adam’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”
With a shake, Adam straightened and came to me. “I may know this priest,” he said, answering my question. “But if he is who I think he is, then there are more questions than answers.”
“As if that’s any different,” I muttered. “Where do you know him from?”
“I believe that should be ‘when.’” The priest’s voice came from behind us. Startled, I whirled, a hand outstretched, a protection spell at my lips. Adam grabbed my wrist.
“No, don’t.”
The small man, now decked out in black, his priest’s collar glowing white against the starkness of the shirt, stepped forward. “Nightwalker, it’s been a long time.”
“It has.” Adam sounded grim. I didn’t take my eyes off the priest, all sorts of wrongness pinging my Spidey-Sense. “I see she is buried here.” He indicated the grave he’d just been at.
“She is.”
“You tend to her.”
The priest bowed his head. “I must.”
Adam studied the small man, who remained with head bowed, hands folded in front of him, like some penitent, some petitioner waiting for an answer from his liege. Though, that couldn’t be the case. Adam was no priest’s liege—that was impossible. This old man was no vampire, either, nor fey. I would have known. Even if in some strange way, Antonio de Olivares had been sworn to Adam somehow as a child, a young man, when he’d swore his vows to the Church, all other allegiances became null and void.
“How?” Adam finally spoke.
“A curse.”
“You were cursed to live?”
“I was.”
Seriously? Was he truthful or just crazy? I’d never heard of this type of curse. Before I could figure out how to politely phrase “gee, how the hell did that work,” Fray Antonio opened his eyes, his gaze pinning me.
“I know what you are thinking, child.” The priest addressed me. “All you have known up to now was your world and that of Faery.”
“You know of Faery.” I stumbled over the words that, until now, I’d never uttered in front of any human other than Bea.
“He knows of many things,” Adam said. “If my calculations are correct, this man is more than two hundred years old.”
“Wait, explain,” I insisted. “Back to square one. I need the whole story. Obviously, you two know each other.”
“Back in the olden days…” The priest chuckled. “Although, I suppose that term’s gone out of fashion.”
“It has,” Adam said. “But do go on, explain. Keira has a right to know the entire story.”
“As do we all,” Niko muttered. I had to agree with him. Hell, right now, I might settle for even part of the story, instead of cryptic conversations between my centuries old vampire and this human man who looked to be in his late sixties, but Adam said was more than two hundred.
“Yes, I suppose,” the priest mused. He stopped speaking for a few breaths, then began again. “I wasn’t a very good priest. Like many of my brethren, I caroused. I took women, took what they offered. I lived a very happy life.”
“Women?” I asked. “Aren’t Catholic priests supposed to be—”
“Celibate? Yes, we are. And I am. Now, at least.” He shook his head. “We were so far from the Church, our own origins. So lonely in this rather rough place. So few women, so few luxuries. I was never of an order that embraced full poverty, you understand. I took my vows later in life, after…” A worn hand rubbed against his collar. “I fell in love. I wanted to keep her, but…”
“Then why didn’t you marry her?” I asked. “It’s been done. Men leaving the priesthood for love. To marry and raise children.”
“I couldn’t. I was a priest… am a priest. Though I broke my vows in the past, I could not abandon my vocation. My calling is no different whether or not I love secularly. God came first. She did not like that.”
“And she was married already.” Adam’s words fell like an anvil. Beloved wife.
“Her?” I pointed to the grave. What was he trying to say? So what, he fell in love, it didn’t work out. Not the first priest, nor the last, I was sure. After a moment, he continued.
“When I told her that we had to stop, that we had no future as man and wife, that I could not live as husband to her, she wouldn’t accept it. She ran off, crying. Three days later, we found her body washed up on the banks of the river. She’d thrown herself in. She left behind a husband and a young daughter.”
“The San Antonio River? Isn’t it pretty shallow?”
“We’d had days of hard rain back then, following a severe drought. The land couldn’t take the water so fast, so the river flooded.”
I stared at the man, not knowing what to say. Sorry? It sucks?
“I went to her family to request her body, so I could give her the last rites. But to no avail. She’d told her sister of our love. Her sister told her abuela. The old woman practiced Brujería. She’d never converted to our faith.”
The plot thinned. I could guess what had happened next.
“She cursed you,” Adam said. “The old woman.” He stepped over to the grave again.
He bowed his head. “With eternal life. My penance to live and know that I’d caused her granddaughter to commit a mortal sin; her soul to burn in Hell forever.”
“A bruja? A witch? Was your lover one of mine?” I had to ask. Humans couldn’t work magick. They tried, but only those with fey blood had the ability.
“I believe she was of mixed blood,” he said. “Not Kelly by name, as the family had come from Spain, but indications are that they came from a branch of your clan.”
“Indications?”
“About fifty years ago, I met your leader, Minerva Kelly.”
“Here?” Adam looked startled. “You know Minerva?”
“I know many people.”
“Can’t be family,” I told him. “Kelly blood can’t mix with human blood.”
“Fey, perhaps,” Adam said. “Many of the local fey mixed with the incoming humans, the Spaniards as they settled here. It was a diversion.”
Diversion. Shit, is that what he called it? No wonder we’d had so many half-bloods and mixed-bloods at our Reception. I didn’t really care that much, but damn, couldn’t they have at least practiced some birth control?
The priest spread his hands out, raising his gaze to meet Adam’s. “Here is where I am cursed to live. Here is where I must stay. I grow older and more feeble in tiny increments.”
I gasped. That was one hell of a curse—eternal life, but not eternal health. I’d not wish that on—no wait, I might actually wish that on Gideon, except I didn’t want him to live. Too damn bad that he, like the rest of us Kellys, already had the near-immortality thing as part of our genetic heritage. None of us could die naturally. We could choose death, or die from beheading or exsanguination, but that was about it.
“Minerva tried to lessen the curse,” he continued. “But to no avail. She succeeded only in ridding me of some of the pain of aging.” He twisted a hand in front of him. “Some days it hurts less than others.”
“That’s evil—“ I began.
“Not evil.” Father Antonio came forward and took one of my hands in his. “Deserving.”
“No one deserves this kind of punishment,” I argued, pulling away. His skin felt of crepe, thin, broken blood vessels below chugged slowly. The stain of death was everywhere on this man, yet he still walked and talked, was solid. “No one.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” he said. “But it is
my cross and I shall bear it as long as God sees fit to make it mine.” He gave Adam a look that I couldn’t interpret. “Unlike some of us.”
I didn’t respond. Held my tongue on my first instinct which was to say that I believed in no god, no ultimate power other than that of nature and biology. I used to want the pagan gods, the ones that governed my life’s beliefs as a youngster. But frankly, recent events had turned me into practical thinker Keira, who believed in the power of honor and loyalty and love, not in some amorphous “being.”
“I did nothing wrong,” Adam said.
“You preyed on them.”
“I did no such thing. They offered themselves, willingly.”
The priest’s eyes flashed anger. “Willingly? That is what you name it?”
“It is what it is,” Adam said. “I preyed on no one. I came here for shelter and was given it.”
“You took my daughter away.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“For those who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work.”
—Bhagavad Gita
“Antonia was yours?” Adam strode over to the priest. “You lie.”
“I can no longer tell falsehoods. Lupe and I were lovers for nearly a decade,” he said. “Her husband was impotent.”
“Not impotent,” Adam said. “Infertile. We vampires cannot sire children. When she died, I placed Antonia in a school in Europe. She completed school and married well. She had a good life.”
I sat, flat on the dusty ground. Holy crap. This entire exchange now made sense. “You, Adam, Guadalupe was your wife?” The other shoe dropped; de Caminante—her last name translated to Walker. Some Spanish women added the husband’s name onto their own patronymic. Evidently, she’d been one of those.
“For a time,” he said. “She was a lovely woman. I was lonely in those days. I’d wandered to America, to find whether or not I liked it enough to remain. Found the Rose Inn. Niko stayed behind to run my estate. I met Guadalupe at a dance. She liked me, I liked her. Though I knew that as a mortal human, we could only be lovers for a few years, she didn’t seem to care. She came up pregnant. I knew the child couldn’t be mine, but she wouldn’t confess as to her other lover, so I married her to keep her from being shunned by the community. Her daughter was born and she insisted on naming her Antonia, after the parish priest, whom she said had been a comfort.” He snorted a laugh. “I hadn’t quite realized what kind of comfort until now. I’d assumed her lover had been one of the local soldiers.”
Adam peered into the priest’s face. “Before she killed herself, she told me she was having an affair. I didn’t begrudge her it, how could I? When I told her that, she burst into tears and told me she was pregnant again. I’d have been willing to keep up the farce for as long as needed.”
“She was pregnant?” The priest’s voice was only a whisper.
“Two months along.”
“Then why?”
“You told us why,” Adam said, his voice hard. “She wanted you. She loved you. You could have left the church, gone somewhere else to start over. I do not blame myself for her death.”
“No, nor should you.” The man sighed. “This burden is my own. I carry it knowingly.”
Niko muttered something I couldn’t hear.
Okay, well, this had been a more than interesting night. I stood, brushed the dirt off my ass and approached both Adam and the priest. “Father…” I stumbled over the word, not used to formally addressing a priest.
“Call me Antonio, please.”
“Antonio, then.” How to phrase this? “So I get all this mea culpa of yours, but considering this woman died, when?”
“In the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and twenty-two. She was thirty. I was forty-two.”
“Don’t you think your penance has long been paid?” I asked. “Have you ever researched how to end the curse?”
He smiled, as if amused. “Countless times. Countless resources.”
“And?” I prompted.
“I have found no definite answer.” He shrugged as he motioned us both forward. “Only vague hints.”
“So you remain here,” Adam said.
“I remain. I tend the graves and the spirits.” Antonio made a vague motion, indicating the cemetery. “They are restless. All except her. I bind her with flowers.”
“Flowers?” I looked at the dried blooms, trying to identify them. I could feel no spells, nor had he admitted to having any magicks other than this curse of long life.
“Amaranth for immortal love, blue violet for faithfulness, lavender for devotion,” he chanted, ticking the names off on his fingers. “Circled with honeysuckle for bindings of love, wound with witch hazel, a magickal spell, sprinkled with fennel for strength.”
A remedy for a human. The language of flowers used to love and bind a restless spirit. It could work. The magick was in nature, not in the person. A homely solution but plausible.
“You speak of restless spirits,” Adam said. “Keira spoke of the darkness that invaded here earlier, of the spirits bound within this inn.”
“There is darkness here,” Antonio agreed. “It is rising. Something has stirred it, has coaxed it from sleep.”
“What has happened here?”
“Not just here. I feel it in the bones of the earth. A deep unrest.”
A shiver ran through me. “Adam, I want to get out of here,” I said. “He’s right. Something’s stirring and it’s not good.” I reached a hand out. “Antonio, come with us. The chapel seems to keep much of it out.”
He shook his head with a sorrowful look. “I cannot. I can no longer enter that which was mine.”
“The chapel?”
“Yes. When the old woman cursed me, she denied me the comfort of those places that are God’s. I cannot set foot on consecrated ground.”
“But you told me you say Mass.”
“I can still act in persona Christi—in the person of Christ. That other place is only a building I use, nothing more,” he said. “It was never consecrated by the Church nor is my small group of worshipers officially sanctioned by Rome.”
Niko’s choked voice interrupted. “But they believe you are still a priest—the sacraments…”
“I am still a priest. Yes, my position is… unique. I have never asked to be laicized; the Church has never dismissed me.” The old man stood straighter. “At ordination, a priest is told ‘You are a priest forever.’ The bruja’s curse may restrain me, but God made me a priest. And, even a lay person can give the sacraments if there is no one of the Church available,” Antonio chided. “The old women are happy to hear Mass, to take communion, to give confession. This does no harm. The Church tells us that the effect of a sacrament comes ex opere operato.”
I furrowed my brow as I attempted a translation. “By the work done?”
He nodded. “It is the principle of the sacrament itself, not the holiness or otherwise of the person giving it. If I am wrong, then the sin is on my head, not on theirs.”
“Antonio,” Adam’s voice was gentle. “Come with us. The chapel underground is no longer consecrated. We could not use it if it were so. Come, rest. The spirits will wait and you can do little to tend the ground now. Come sleep.”
With a reluctant sigh, Antonio took my proffered hand. I winced at his touch, my nerves raw with his emotion. Guilt, grief, sorrow all tangled in the sucking blackness of despair. I gritted my teeth and led him forward.
Once inside, I made up one of the cots for him. Within minutes, he was asleep, a peaceful look on his face. I cast a simple do-not-disturb spell around him, just enough to make sure he wasn’t bothered by our coming conversations.
“He can stay here as long as he likes,” Adam said. “It doesn’t matter that he knows what we are doing. There is little he can do to affect us.”
I watched the priest sleep. “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching over and placing a kiss on Adam’s forehead. “I’m sorry about all of that.”
He
knew what I was talking about. “It was a long time ago. I regret not knowing the truth then, perhaps I could have helped.”
“Or not,” Niko said as he sat down next to us, a brimming mug of ice cold beer in one hand. He handed it to me and I gulped it down with pleasure.
“Thanks, where’d you get this?”
“The sisters had mugs in the freezer,” Tucker said. “I appropriated them for our drinks.”
“Excellent.”
Before I could settle in to enjoy the wonderfully cold libation, Adam handed me my phone. “Call.”
Damn it. I knew I had to. I wasn’t just avoiding this because I was lazy. There was history there that none of these men knew about. When I’d come home, tail tucked between my legs, frightened out of what little wits I had left, neither Adam nor Niko had been there. Tucker had only seen the aftermath.
I girded my mental loins, then dialed. One ring. Two. Three. I took a deep breath and mentally prepared a message for his voice mail.
“Keira, darling, what on earth possesses you to call me of all people?” Gideon’s smarmy smile came across in his tone as he answered. “Do you miss me?”
“Hardly,” I said. “Look, Gideon, I don’t care for this situation any more than you do, I’m sure, but some-thing’s come up.”
“I’m sure a lot of things come up around those lovely men of yours,” he drawled.
“Don’t be more of an asshat than you normally are. We read the Challenge. We know the score. Adam and I are willing to talk terms.”
“Terms?” Gideon dropped all pretense. His voice grew hard, angry. “What makes you think that there are any terms to discuss? You’ve interpreted the Challenge, well, bully for you. Kudos, too, since I didn’t expect you to do that so quickly. But there are no terms, Keira. None. The Challenge stands as is.”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to avoid catching Adam’s gaze. I didn’t want to get distracted. “What do you want, Gideon? To rule? To take the land from us? That doesn’t make sense to me. You could’ve ruled alongside Drystan, been part of the Unseelie Court, gotten your jollies there. What changed?”
