"I want to know how you knew my name." That seemed like a simple request. I wish I had a simple answer for him.
"I don’t know." It wasn’t a romantic or even educated response, but it was all I had to offer. Take or leave it, it was the truth.
He nodded his head, approvingly. "Well, it was more than I could’ve hoped for." He put his legs down. I jumped and backed up.
"I’d never hurt you, Valerie." He looked away as he said it, suddenly very interested in his black boot. Could I trust him? Could I trust anyone? Guytano had revealed himself to be an honest-to-God vampire. I’m sure God had little to do with it, but still. I smiled at the irony of Guy living amongst us under the guise of being an actor who took his career seriously.
The man from the bar had been a vampire too. I tightened my hand into a fist when I thought of holding Dustin’s heart in my hand.
"Are you a vampire?" I asked.
Gregorios sat straight up. His eyes widened. "No, I am not a vampire." He shifted in his seat a little. "I serve a greater good--one that destroys things like that."
"Terminator for the undead? That’s a new one."
He nodded his head. That explained why he was at the bar. I wondered if Dustin was his target, or was he after Guytano? "You’re not in town for Guytano are you?"
"Would it matter to you?" he asked. I thought long and hard before I answered. I was growing found of Guytano. Seeing what he truly was should’ve scared me. It didn’t.
"Yes," I said. He looked at me and bit the corner of his full lip. "I’ll go out on a limb and say that he’s a friend of mine now. I wouldn’t want you hunting him down and killing him."
This made him laugh. I didn’t find much humor in killing people, apparently he did. "What makes you think I kill the things that cross my path?"
It was my turn to laugh. "The very fact that you refer to them as things says that you don’t value their lives, and I’ve never heard of a vampire on trial for a crime. I’m assuming that they are just dealt with. Hell, I didn’t even know they existed until last night."
"No, you knew they were real. A part of you knew they were real," he said, poignantly.
I walked up and took a seat next to him. I was positive that he wasn’t here to kill me. I was still not sure how safe Guytano was from him. He had done some sort of mojo magic thing to free Guytano from whatever the hell I did to him. Maybe, just maybe he didn’t mean any of us any harm. I knew I was being naïve. What else was new?
"You know me, don’t you?" I said, anxiously awaiting his response.
"Yes, I’ve known you for many, many years." His voice grew softer, and he avoided making eye contact with me. He was my key to the past and I wasn’t sure I wanted to unlock that piece of me.
"You should know that I have no memory of you. I haven’t got a freakin’ clue how I knew your name but I don’t remember you. So, you could lie to me and I wouldn’t know it."
He turned to me and put his hand out to touch my knee. I pulled it away a fraction of a second before he touched it. This hurt his feelings. I could see it on his face. "If you could remember our time together you wouldn’t be afraid of my touch."
Our time together?
Had we been intimate? I looked Gregorios over. He was a thing of beauty. His looks were a little on the side of androgynous. His blond hair was pulled back into a tie behind his head. He had a dark green bandana tied around the top part of his head. He had the distinct look of being a baby-faced biker. His face was soft, and there were no real hard edges to him. He looked like he could’ve been the front man for a band. He was hot, I’d give him that much, but I found lots of men good looking.
"How’d you do that last night?" I looked hard at him, willing myself to remember him. "How’d you free Guytano?"
"The same way you bound him to that spot. I used magic."
"Are we witches?" I asked, gravely.
This made him let out a small laugh. "No, well, yes and no... I mean, you are part witch, I think. There were rumors amongst our people that your father was a wizard. I don’t know if they were true. Your mother never told a soul who your father was. It was all pure speculation." He stopped and rubbed his palms on his knees nervously. I would’ve been, too, if I was trying to explain to someone about having magic in their paternal gene pool.
"I’m a Fey, a creature of magic. I lived a quiet life as a solider for the Roman Empire. I’d always known that I was different from others, in the sense that I could make things happen with my mind or control the elements at will. I had to hide this from all or I would have been thought to be a sorcerer and would have been executed. I loved Rome and always will. I served under Emperor Constans and his son Constanius II. When Magnentius murdered Constans, we were outraged. A battle occurred in Mursa that would go down in history as the bloodiest battle of the century, and I cannot argue with that."
Gregorios shifted in his seat and moved his feet to the floor. I wanted to stop and verify what he was telling me. If it was true than he was really, really old, and that made me wonder how old I was. I racked my brain for a timeline and then it hit me.
"September 28th, AD 351," I said this slowly, but with much conviction.
Gregorios looked up at me and smiled. "Yes, Valerie, that is the day of the battle of Mursa, and the day I met you."
That made me move in closer to him. Somehow, I knew that he was telling the truth. I stopped trying to make sense of it all and just listened to him. "It was a horribly bloody battle, as I already told you. Fires burned, and the stench of death was all around me. I found myself backed into a corner by six of Magnentius’ guards. I didn’t expect there to be any witnesses, so I went ahead and summoned some of the surrounding fire. It came at me but did not burn me. It spun around in my hand. I flung it out at the men as I rammed my sword deep into one’s chest. I had never done anything so horrific in my life and never wish to again... Sometimes at night, I still wake to see the skin melting from their faces as they screamed out in shock and horror at what I was and what I’d done."
I had to swallow to avoid throwing up. If I hadn’t had just come off ripping a guy’s heart out of his chest, I might have been judgmental, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on. "You said that we met then. How could I be on the battlefield? I was a woman then, right, Gregorios?" Suddenly, I wasn’t too sure, what I’d been. With my luck I was a reincarnated male monk or something.
He laughed softly. "Yes, you were the same beautiful woman that sits before me now and Gregory or Greg is fine. Gregorios is a bit dated. You were the one who told me that, remember?"
I smiled at him and wished that I did remember renaming him. His eyes softened and he moved his hand toward mine again. I didn’t yank away this time as he told me how we’d met. "After the men had perished, I fell to my knees to pray for forgiveness. I knew that I’d been given the power for a reason and I doubted that it was to maim my fellow man. I’m not sure how long I was there before a bright light appeared before me and you walked out of it. I’d never seen a woman of such beauty before, not even at the grandest Coliseum events. Your black hair hung to the back of your knees and it blew slightly in the wind. Your tunica was different than I was used to. It was shorter, much the way a miniskirt is by today’s standards, and you wore no stola. Normally, only whores went without the proper attire, but I knew that you were no whore. The gold cording that wrapped around your tunica was too ornate for you to be a plebian and your glorious body held many daggers and other weapons, none of which a commoner could afford. You walked toward me with your sword drawn. I thought perhaps that you were a goddess, come to punish me for misusing my magic and to take my dead body from the field. In many ways that’s what you were."
He paused to catch his breath and to choke back what looked like tears that were forming in his eyes. I squeezed his hand, encouraging him to go on with his story. "You told me that I was one of the bravest warriors that you’d ever seen and that you’d been watching me since I had joined the army. I asked
about your eyes, they were, are, so different from anyone else’s I’d ever seen. You laughed and explained that where you were from that your eyes were thought plain. I told you that I couldn’t understand how anyone in their right mind would think you plain. You came to my side and helped me up. You told me that you were a..."
"Valkyrie, a Falkyr and that I’d been sent to collect your soul." I finished his sentence for him without thought, yet I’m not sure how I knew what to say. I couldn’t remember any of the events that he told me about, yet somehow I knew. "You thought I had said that my name was Valerie, and that made me laugh. I hadn’t laughed in so many years and I couldn’t bring myself to do as I had done so many times before, take your soul back to Valhalla, the heaven from which I hailed from.
"I had grown tired of the Valkyrie’s ways and their customs, and I had longed to find that perfect someone, that match for me. I’d watched you from afar for many years and suspected that you might be the one, because, I too, had the gift of magic, and wanted desperately to have someone to share that power with. I’d suffered an enormous loss once already and could not bear to continue living with the void in my heart, so I did something that I’d never done before. I gave you the choice to come with me, or to stay where you were. I explained that you were not destined to die for many years yet, and could, in theory live out a normal happy life in Rome."
Greg’s fingers wrapped tight around mine. "I fell in love with you the moment I laid eyes on you, and I had no one to require that I stay earthbound. I begged you not to leave me, that I couldn’t live another day knowing that I had passed on the chance to be by your side. You agreed and instead of taking my soul, you shared your life force with me and made me one of your own kind."
It was my turn to laugh. "Oh, I did anger the elders with that little stunt, didn’t I?"
Gregory pulled my hand to his lips. "It was worth every second of it, at least that’s what you told me then." He kissed the back of my hand lightly. It was a simple gesture that should not have made my nipples as hard as they were. I exhaled in a pathetic attempt to chase the horniness away.
I smiled up at him and knew that I had indeed been in love with him and most likely still was. He put my hand into his lap and caressed my arm softly. "The name Valerie stuck and you went by that. Your given name was Linnea, but it was your mother’s name too, and you hated going by it.
"Everyone would comment on how inseparable the two of us were. They rarely saw one of us without the other. We were so very in love. I asked you to be my wife and you accepted. The elders had never heard of such a thing. It was bad enough that you’d brought a man into their midst as an equal, but now you were expecting them to sanctify the union. They were outraged. You were equally as angry. You talked me into leaving Valhalla with you and we surfaced in Italy in 1780.
"I didn’t understand what was going on at first, you then explained how Valhalla was without time constraints and that Valkyries were free to move about time to collect the souls of warriors."
I sat still as he told me all of this. As unrealistic as it sounded, I knew that it was the truth. I knew that Valhalla possessed the magic to be free from the constraints of the time-space continuum, and that I’d spent many years moving in and out of the past and present collecting the souls of warrior men. The men that were brought back trained with us and fought by our sides during key historical battles. They were never thought of as equals. They weren’t slaves, but not equals.
My knowledge of the Valkyrie culture surprised me. I even knew that once you set foot upon Valhalla’s sacred ground, you never aged again, no matter if you left immediately or not. There was one tiny portion of the island reserved for the growth of children. Valkyries were able to have babies and the children needed to grow to adulthood, so they were born and raised on that portion of the island and allowed to touch sacred soil on their eighteenth birthday. I had been stubborn. I’d refused to go to join my mother until I was pushing twenty. I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. I also knew that I’d never gone to the future before. It was considered dangerous for even a Valkyrie to try that.
I also knew without being told that Gregory and I had shared a bed hundreds upon thousands of times in the hundred plus years that we were lovers. I knew every inch of him without laying a hand on him and I’m sure that he knew every inch of me, too. The way he stroked my arm with such gentleness and knowledge of every dip in my arm told me that I was right. He did know me well.
"How did I end up here? What happened to us? Why weren’t you with me?" I had so many questions to ask him. He moved my hand to his lips and kissed it softly.
He smiled. "It is me, this time, who has been watching you from afar for five years. And when I would play this moment in my head, it was you taking one look at me and knowing what we’d meant to each other. I knew that would never happen. I knew the spell that was used was too powerful to allow you to remember." He leaned toward me. I didn’t back away this time. I wanted to interject and ask what spell and they who, but he kept going. "My magic is powerful. It would take someone equally as powerful to break it. I did hope that if anyone could, it would be you, Val. You always had something special about you. You were always different. When you said my name at the club, I thought that you remembered me. I was elated but the levelheaded side of me is happy that you don’t remember everything about us, Valerie."
I sat there letting everything he’d just said soak in. Magic, powerful, a spell, collecting souls, it was a lot to be hit with all at once. "Why are you happy that I can’t remember you?"
"Things changed, you changed, and we parted ways for a while. Our paths crossed again, and ... and..."
I brought my hand down to meet his. His hand was rougher than Guytano’s and a great deal warmer. My hand looked so small on his. I looked up to see into his eyes. I looked hard at them. I reached my other hand up to touch his cheek. He closed his eyes and tipped his face to meet my palm. When his smooth face touched my hand I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to lean forward and offer him a piece of my heart. It trusted him and that was all I had left to rely on. I leaned closer to him.
"I hate to interrupt..." I pulled back quickly at the sound of Guytano’s voice. Gregory jumped to his feet and a gun materialized from his back. He pointed it directly at Guytano’s chest. I jumped up and put myself against the barrel. I would die before Guytano. I was putting my life in the hands of a stranger. I really hoped that I wouldn’t regret this. I didn’t turn around to see Guytano’s face. I could feel his presence near me. The cool static energy pushed against my skin.
Gregory looked at me. "Move, Valerie."
"No," I said. I pressed my body against the gun barrel harder. Gregory’s finger eased off the trigger. It took him a minute to lower the gun, but he did. I sighed. One thing was certain. Gregory had no love for Guytano.
"What? Not in the mood for target practice this fine evening? Letting the little lady dictate what you can and cannot do. I thought immortal warriors were real men." Guytano said. His tone was so horribly condescending that I almost asked for the gun to shot him in the foot myself. I rounded on him. My look must’ve spoke volumes because he backed away and smiled.
"Enough, both of you!" I yelled. Guytano winked at Gregory. Gregory’s body moved in an attempt to charge at Guytano or possibly shoot him. As much as I wanted to deck Guy myself, I wouldn’t let the two of them fight. I stepped to the side. Some part of me knew that Gregory would not hit me. His body pressed into mine and grabbed my shoulders. He held tight to me in an attempt to keep us both from falling.
"Stop protecting him, Valerie. He’s a monster." Gregory said, his voice laced with pain. I looked at Guytano. He flashed me a fangy smile and winked at Gregory again. I pointed my finger at him and heat rose from my body.
"Guytano, no more, do you understand? No more." The porch was getting very warm very fast. Guytano looked around and then back to me. He nodded and backed up to the porch swing and sat down quietly. I turned in Gregory
’s arms. This left us in an almost hugging position. He had so much rage in his face that it scared me. I touched his baby soft cheek and the hate dissipated before his eyes locked on me.
"You had the opportunity to kill him last night. Why now, why not then?" I asked. Guytano moved. I didn’t turn around I put my hand up. He stopped. I was creeping myself out.
"I didn’t know much about him. I knew he was like some others in the past. He’d struck out and went public. We’ve been keeping an eye on this group of undead that seems to think going public is the answer. What is the whole Vampyre Productions thing anyways, a taunt?" Gregory looked past me at Guytano and glared. "I had no idea who his creator was. I didn’t come here looking for Guy. I had no reason to look up his history. I never dreamt that the two of you would meet."
"Why does who created him matter?" I asked. "Why should who his mother is be any reason to want to kill him?" This brought laughter from the both of them. The tension on the porch eased up. I hadn’t meant for my question to be humorous. After I said it, I realized how silly it sounded. If half of the way Hollywood portrayed vampires was true than Guytano was old, really old. And I was betting that by creator, Gregorios hadn’t meant Guytano’s mother, he’d meant sire. I laughed too.
"Okay, strike the part about his mom. Why does his sire matter?" I asked.
Gregorios looked past me at Guytano. "A vampire’s master can say a lot about the vampire itself. If the master is not a threat, than normally those that they sire are non-threatening as well. The opposite is also true. A powerful, evil master can create powerful, evil offspring, and Lucha is evil."
I turned and glanced at Guytano. He didn’t seem evil to me. The whole vampire-thing did tend to hang over him like a cloud a bit, but hey, we all had our faults. I tried to find signs of him being some wicked demonic monster. I found none. I tried to picture him murdering masses. I couldn’t. I could, however, remember my very vivid vision of the piles of dead bodies. I shut my eyes and counted to ten slowly. I did not want to be sick in front of two very hot looking males.
The Valkyrie Page 11
