Byzantine Heartbreak

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Ryan fought to control his mounting excitement, to make it last. He watched Nia dreamily accept Lathe into her. She clearly felt no pain for her eyes had narrowed into aroused little slits and her lips were parted as her breath escaped in little gasps and moans. She clenched around Ryan as she reacted to the sensations they were producing in her.

  “I never dreamed...” she whispered.

  “Nor I,” Ryan replied.

  Salathiel came to a rest inside her and kissed her cheek. “Nor I, love of my life. But we have you to thank for this.” He glanced at Ryan. “Together,” he said.

  Ryan took a better grip on Nia’s waist and nodded.

  Together they lifted Nia, easing their shafts from her, then sliding back in. Ryan expelled a quick breath of air as the sensations swamped him. “Oh...lord.”

  Nia’s grip on his shoulders tightened. “It’s wonderful,” she breathed. “Again.”

  They thrust carefully into her again. Salathiel groaned. “This will be the end of me. I cannot think of anything better than this.”

  “More of it is better,” Ryan breathed.

  “Yes,” Nia answered breathlessly.

  Then he had no words and no air to speak them. The pleasure was too great and his time had run out. The excitement spiralled. He caught Lathe’s glance and saw the furrow between his brows that signalled he was close to climaxing, too. Ryan let the thrill envelope him and take him. He shuddered through his climax, his whole body feeling the sparkling intensity of it.

  Nia’s hand were squeezing and working his shoulders. Then she screamed, as her peak hit and her body clenched around him. Ryan could feel the waves of her climax passing through her just like waves in the sea. They left her limp against Lathe’s chest.

  Lathe looked at Ryan. In the last of the daylight his eyes looked very blue, almost fierce. “There’s no argument now. You’re staying.”

  Ryan wasn’t sure where the laughter came from, but he let it free and it felt good.

  Chapter Nine

  Bourbon Street, New Orleans, 2003 A.D.

  The barman was a three hundred pound black man in a black silk shirt. The only colour on him was a thick gold earring that glinted in the dim light of the bar. He poured two of the stiffest freehand shots Cáel had ever seen, from a bottle of Irish whiskey he had pulled out from beneath the bar. He nodded at Ryan, stoppered the bottle and put it back under the bar and walked away. Cáel didn’t miss the speculative glance the man sent him as he left.

  Like Brenden, the barman was light on his feet, despite his size. So the bulk was deceptive. There was a lot of muscle under there.

  Cáel made a mental note not to piss the guy off.

  He settled on the stool next to Ryan. The stool was not an average bar stool. It had arms and a back to it, even though it was tall enough to belly up to the bar. It was a serious drinker’s stool, comfortable enough to stay seated for a good long while. There was plush red leather padding on the seat and a cushion of leather on the back and the rest of the stool was a dark, deeply grained and polished wood, that glowed with the same care and attention as the wood of the bar and the glass racks overhead. The stemware hanging from the racks gleamed, too.

  Despite the late hour, ten p.m., there was a three piece jazz band just setting up in the far corner of the bar, on a handkerchief sized stage. Most of the tables in the bar were empty, but they were starting to fill up.

  Someone waved. “Ryan!” he called.

  Ryan lifted his hand in greeting, with a smile of recognition.

  “You are a regular here, then,” Cáel said.

  “Every Friday and Saturday night as far as they’re concerned, even if it’s weeks or months for me,” Ryan replied. He swivelled the stool to face the bar again. “They keep that bottle under the bar just for me and my friends.” He tapped Cáel’s glass with the back of his fingernail. “Drink up.” He picked up his own glass and waited.

  “I’m not really a whiskey drinker,” Cáel warned him.

  Ryan looked offended. “It’s not whiskey.” He lifted the glass a little higher, displaying the contents. “This is Irish malt. You haven’t tasted whiskey until you’ve tasted this. It comes from a distillery less than a mile from where I was born.”

  “Where was that?” Cáel asked curiously.

  “The village is long gone now. There’s a city where it used to be. Killarney.” Ryan waved his glass toward Cáel ’s. “Drink,” he insisted.

  Cáel grinned. “Only if we get to do this in Athens next time.”

  “Deal,” Ryan agreed.

  Cáel knocked the huge shot back. It burned outrageously for fifteen seconds, but then the peaty, smoky taste came through and he breathed it into the back of his throat. He nodded, aware that Ryan was watching him. Judging.

  “Not bad,” he ventured.

  Ryan grinned. The barman had appeared like magic and was pouring another round. Ryan curled his fingers around the bottle. “Leave it,” he murmured.

  The barman grinned. “It’s your hangover, Irishman.” He held out his hand. “Keys.”

  Ryan shrugged. “I’m walking.”

  “Keys,” the barman repeated stoically.

  Ryan grinned and dug into his pocket. “Going to take my friend’s keys, too?” He pulled out a small metal ring that had old fashioned keys on it and threaded a single key off from the several that were strung on the ring. He put the key on the barman’s hand. “I need the others, don’t I?” he said reasonably.

  The barman turned and placed the key on the shelf behind the bar, in front of a row of glasses. “It’ll be there tomorrow morning,” the barman said. He looked sharply at Cáel.

  Cáel held up his hands. “I’m from out of town,” he said. “I just got here. I left my keys at home.”

  The barman frowned. “It’s your life,” he said and floated down to the other end of the bar.

  “Keys for what?” Cáel murmured.

  “Car,” Ryan replied quietly. “No autopilot here and now.”

  “Ah.” Cáel picked up his glass. “Salute.”

  “No. Slainte,” Ryan replied.

  Cáel shrugged. “Slainte.” He knocked the shot back and watched Ryan drink his. Ryan shook his head in reaction to the bite of the shot and put the glass down.

  “It looks strange, seeing you drink. But yet, quite normal, too,” Cáel told him.

  Ryan’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Drinking? Well, I’ve done a lot of it. Especially here.” There was a gleam in his eyes. “I should warn you. Drink hits us quicker than humans.”

  “Because your metabolisms are so much faster when you’re back in time? I figured that out for myself.”

  Ryan blinked, surprised. “Did you figure out the rest of it, human?”

  They were speaking softly and keeping their heads closer together than normal so no one would overhear them. But it was safe enough, for no one else was sitting at the bar yet and the nearest table was a good ten feet away from them.

  “The rest?” Cáel repeated. He thought it through. “I imagine if alcohol hits you faster, you also recover faster, too. You get to do it all over again, same night?”

  “Exactly,” Ryan replied. He poured another round, clinked his glass against Cáel’s and drank. “Feicfidh mé deoch dall tú, agus bodhar, mac Hellas.”

  Cáel picked up his glass. He wasn’t entirely sure what Ryan had said, but he was an old hand at these sorts of situations and guessed Ryan had probably issued some sort of challenge. Something about out-drinking him. Well, Ryan could be in for a surprise. “Brace yourself, Irishman. You’ve picked on the wrong man tonight,” he said in his family’s private language.

  “Is that right?” Ryan replied in the same tongue. He grinned. “Prove it.”

  Cáel tipped his head back, drained the glass and thumped it on the bar. “Next,” he said in English. “And while you’re at it, do you think your barman there can rustle up something to eat?”

  Ryan raised a brow. “Hungry?”


  “Not yet. But you have a natural advantage I have to offset. Food will slow the absorption of the alcohol. This is New Orleans. They must surely have a pot of gumbo or jambalaya on a stove nearby?”

  “My woman does a mean jambalaya, boss,” came the soft-spoken interruption.

  Ryan and Cáel both looked up. The barman was standing opposite them, on the other side of the bar. He had arrived silently, unnoticed by either of them.

  Ryan sat back. “Do you think she would spare a couple of bowlfuls, Barney? I’ve heard about Delores’ jambalaya before.”

  “I’ll ask.” Barney moved away, cat-footed.

  “Boss?” Cáel repeated.

  “Figure of speech,” Ryan said, dismissively.

  The band on the tiny stage swung into a quiet tune, finding their way into a mood and atmosphere they and the building audience liked. Cáel watched for a few bars then turned back to the bar. His glass had been filled once more, telling him Ryan was serious about taking his measure.

  Cáel was more than happy to oblige. It gave him the perfect opportunity to peer inside Ryan Daniel Deasmhumhain. A headache in the morning would be worth it.

  * * * * *

  The Agency satellite station. 2263 A.D.

  Nayara let her boot heels hit the floor with less grace than usual, as she thumbed through the next page or two of manuscript.

  “Oh, for...” she breathed. Horror was curling through her. Impending scenes of greater and greater disaster painted themselves in her imagination, the results of this garbage in her hands.

  “Ryan!” she called, knowing that he would hear her even through the wall between their offices.

  When there was no answer, she strode over to the door and into Ryan’s office. It was empty. She hesitated for a moment, then went over to the door to his private quarters and hammered on it. It was rare she imposed even that much on Ryan’s privacy, but what she had been reading outweighed any relationship delicacies.

  There was no answer.

  Vexed, she turned back to Ryan’s desk and jammed her forefinger against the comm link and sent the pulse for Brenden’s office.

  “Ryan?” Brenden asked, sounding confused.

  “Nayara,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Clearly, he didn’t. Why? Is his location a state secret?”

  Silence. Nayara counted to three.

  “I suppose not,” Brenden replied. “He’s in New Orleans. He’s usually only gone five minutes or so. You’ve just missed him.”

  Nayara held back her impatience. “Fine. Is Stelios with you, then?”

  Again, the silence. “He’s with Ryan,” Brenden replied.

  “These stupid drinking games,” Nayara muttered. “Men!” She cut the connection and went back to her office to finish reviewing the size and shape of the disaster so that when the two of them arrived back in the 23rd century, they could help her deal with the fallout.

  She certainly wasn’t going to handle it alone. It had been far too long since she had spilled violent blood and she didn’t want to start again now.

  * * * * *

  Bourbon Street, New Orleans, 2003 A.D.

  “The bloody Normans swept in and changed everything, almost overnight it felt like,” Ryan said, staring at the lights behind the bar through the whiskey in his glass.

  “Normans?” Cáel asked. He had his head propped on his hand, his elbow on the bar. “That was...they was...” He couldn’t narrow down the century, except that he knew it was early medieval. A bloody long time ago, to use Ryan’s word. He also knew he was absolutely feeling the effects of the whiskey. Except that it just seemed to be his body being affected. His mind was operating independently and was clear and clean of baffles. Thank heavens Ryan had slowed down the pouring of the shots. The bottle was just about empty, but Cáel guessed there was another one under the bar, where that one had been tucked away. He didn’t mind going shot-for-shot with the man, but it had been a very long time since he had pulled a stunt like this.

  Remarkably, he was enjoying himself immensely. If he had to revert back to college behaviour he couldn’t have better company to do it with than Ryan’s.

  “That was in twelve hundred and one,” Ryan said. “That was the year I left. So did Órfhlaith and Ezra, a month behind me.”

  They were using old Greek, to avoid being overheard, so the names, spoken with Ryan’s native accent, made Cáel jump. He recognized one of them. “Ezra,” he said. “That is the one who died of stasis poisoning. The traveller who took me back to France last year.” He sat up. “He was as old as you?”

  Ryan shook his head, still watching the light dance through his whiskey. “I was he and his sister’s maker.” He drank back half the shot and glanced at Cáel with a sideways look. “Her name is Órfhlaith Saoirse, but most people can’t get their tongues around it, like they can’t with mine.” He spelled it out and Cáel lifted his brows.

  “That doesn’t look anything like the way you said it,” Cáel pointed out. “You called her ‘Or-la Seer-sha’.”

  “That’s the way an Irishman says it,” Ryan replied. “But Órfhlaith gave up on trying to explain that and changed her name to Ophelia. You’ve met her, too.”

  Cáel nodded, remembering the tall, sad, distant woman who had accompanied Ryan when they had found him wandering the streets of Imperial France. “I remember her well.” He lifted his glass and drank half the shot. “I didn’t know you had made anyone, Ryan. Certainly not anyone at the agency.”

  “It was an exception,” Ryan said. He grimaced. “They were starving, being beaten by the English family who were using them like virtual slaves and when the master had finished with Ezra...” His expression was grim. Then he stretched his shoulders and glanced around, like he had just remembered where he was. He gave Cáel a small smile. “There wasn’t much of a decision to make.” He finished the shot with a jerk of his hand.

  “So you headed for Europe to get away from the English, after that?” Cáel picked up the bottle and poured again.

  “Aye. A long, slow wandering journey that ended in Constantinople, two hundred years later.”

  “Where you stayed, for centuries more.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Did you turn Salathiel?”

  Ryan drew in a deep breath. “No,” he said, letting it out. “Neither of us would turn him. We refused.”

  “He asked, then?”

  “Of course he asked.” Ryan rolled his eyes. “It does not take too many years for a human who lives near us or with us to watch us never age and never change, while the human sees all the little signs of age accumulate in their own body, before panic sets in.” Ryan lifted his glass again and turned his chair so he was looking at Cáel. “Salathiel was already thirty-five when I met him. He lasted another five years before he asked. For a man that age, in those times, he was considered to be old. It was his advancing mortality that drove him to act.” He grimaced. “He didn’t want to leave us.”

  “Why did you refuse him? Surely, you wanted him to stay, too?”

  Ryan put his glass down and stared at it. “Of course I did. Who would not? Salathiel, the human Salathiel...” He rubbed at the bar with his thumb, removing a particle that only he could see. “Lathe was a different man, when he was human. Full of life, laughter, joy. He always had a plan for the day, a scheme. A way to bring novelty or spontaneity into it. For a vampire who has seen too many days, that was a remarkable thing.”

  “Then why not turn him?” Cáel asked gently.

  “No one deserves to become one of us,” Ryan replied. “It’s not a gift.” He lifted his head, drank his shot and turned to look at Cáel. There was a deep bitterness in his face. Pain. Sadness. And for a moment, Cáel caught a glimpse of the long years and centuries Ryan had passed through in the weariness in his eyes.

  “Immortality is not a gift?” Cáel asked.

  “It’s not immortality,” Ryan replied. “We can still die. We just go
on, unchanging, until we do. After long enough, that unchanging state can grow to be unbearable.”

  “And that is why you refused?”

  Ryan picked up his glass. “I thought it would be enough for Lathe that we didn’t want him to suffer the pain and loss we had to suffer, but he was a stubborn, wily son-of-a-bitch. He went and found himself another vampire and set up a blood pact. She got to feed from him until he died, gratis. In exchange, she would turn him when he died. He didn’t tell either me or Nia and for the next five years, we thought the matter had been shelved.”

  “Then he died,” Cáel concluded. “When the Turks broke through the walls.”

  “Fourteen fifty-three.” Ryan sighed. “It took the invention of gunpowder to bring the walls down and we were so complacent, sitting behind them. We never thought anyone would get through. Well, serves us right. The Turks killed anyone of influence those three days they sacked the city.”

  Cáel’s shock made him jerk. “You?” he breathed. “Nia?”

  Ryan nodded. “Their version of killing us was to push a sword through our guts, which didn’t do more than tickle either of us, but we had to pretend to die, right alongside Salathiel.” Ryan frowned. His hand, Cáel realized, was gripping his glass hard enough to make the knuckles whiten, even though he was speaking casually. “Once it was dark, we pulled Salathiel out of the pile of bodies and tried to steal out of the city. That was when—well, she turned up and insisted she abide by her bargain with Salathiel.”

  “And you let her?”

  “It was a blood promise. We could not put obstacles in her way.”

  Cáel leaned closer. “Did you want to, Ryan?”

  Ryan took a deep breath. Then another. “No,” he said, his voice low. He closed his eyes and turned his head away.

  Cáel silently refilled his glass.

  “Politics has a lot to do with timing,” Cáel said firmly, lifting his voice a little to compete over the sound of the raucous jazz and the audience that were clearly enjoying it.

  Ryan snorted and filled his glass again. “Your timing is off. I’m up one shot on you. Drink.”