Christian took a deep swallow of the flask while Rob tried to encompass his revelation.
“And now you are giving up,” Christian said dryly.
Rob clenched his fists. “If I give up it is only because you two have finally convinced me of the futility of trying to keep her.”
Christian cuffed him across the back of the head. It was a light blow, but Rob jerked around, his fists raised, surprised into it.
One fist, the one closest to Christian’s chest, smacked into the vampire’s open palm. He had been ready for Rob’s reaction. Rob could feel Christian’s strength from the way he controlled Rob’s arm, even as he raised the flask and drained it of the rest of the contents.
Christian put the flask carefully aside. Then, his fingers still wrapped around Rob’s fist, he turned to face Rob properly, lowering his leg and resting it on the stone. “I don’t want you giving up, highlander,” he said, his words quite clear and sober.
Rob’s heart seemed to squeeze. “You say that because you are worried for Tally.”
“And for you.”
Rob tried to find a response, but none came.
“Now who cannot speak?” Christian chided softly.
“Why would ye care about me at’ll?” Rob asked.
“Ah…and your brogue is back. I’ve got you on the defensive at last,” Christian replied. He lowered Rob’s fist and let it go. “Tally loves you. Quite desperately. That’s very unusual for our kind. Did you know that?”
Rob shook his head. His heart, his whole body, seemed to be thundering.
“Especially with a human from so far in the past as your time. There’s usually too many differences for a serious relationship to take root.”
“You mean I’m an ignorant savage? I heard the construction workers, when they were repairing the building. I’m not all that ignorant.”
“Is that where you picked up that phrase?” Christian murmured. “I wondered. It’s nothing Tally and I would ever use.” He held out his hand, flat, as if he were pleading. “And yet you demonstrate exactly my point right there. They were speaking modern English. You still heard enough to figure it out.” Christian shook his head. “It’s not just the agility of your mind, Rob. Tally is a very smart woman and she doesn’t suffer fools. She chooses her friends with the utmost care and she is loyal to those friends, once she has chosen them. She is loyal with a ferociousness that keeps you warm in the depths of the coldest winter.”
“I’ve felt that warmth,” Rob said.
“So have I,” Christian said, “Although I’ll be damned if I know why. I just try to my best to continue to deserve it.” He pointed at Rob. “I know why she chose you.”
Rob felt something jump inside him. “Why?”
“Because you’re the type of man who will insist you will find a way to keep Tally, no matter what. Despite knowing the odds. Despite seeing an end that everyone else thinks is impenetrable.”
“Where I come from,” Rob said, feeling a fine trembling starting inside him, “That’s just called being a stubborn son of a whore.”
“You’re no whore’s son, Rob MacKenzie,” Christian replied.
The judgement warmed him, although Rob didn’t want Christian’s opinion to matter so much.
Christian plucked at the ties to his boot, studying the leather in the dark like it would reveal new meaning to his life. “She never would let me travel back with her, you know.”
Rob stared at the top of Christian’s head, which gleamed softly in the little moonlight that existed, wondering why this revelation seemed to be such a profound one. There was something he didn’t understand beneath the simple statement.
Rob gave up. “So Tally wouldn’t let you travel with her. So what?”
Christian lifted his head and Rob saw the hurt in his eyes. The anger. “We were lovers once. You guessed right, highlander. But only ever in our real time lines. As vampires. Do you understand that? Or should I paint a more specific picture for you?”
Rob shook his head slowly, genuinely bewildered.
Christian began to laugh, the sound coming from down low in his belly. It sounded harsh and strained. “Lo and behold!” he said. “Something Tally hasn’t whispered in your ear yet!” He sobered. “Of course, she would fail to mention it. It would make her look less than perfect in your eyes.”
“Nothing Tally could tell me would make her imperfect in my eyes,” Rob replied.
Christian tilted his head. “She might be afraid it would, though.” He sat up straighter. “Here is the thing you do not know about us yet. When we come through time, highlander, and turn human again, all our senses come alive. We see, we hear, we feel once again—more than when we are vampire. That is because our bodies are working again, just as they are supposed to. We feel emotions the way humans are supposed to feel emotions—with the body reacting to those feelings. It’s not just a mind-game for us anymore. Because we’re not used to it, those feelings and emotions and sensations are bright and lovely. Shiny and sharp as a newly honed blade.”
Rob pointed to the empty flask. “You don’t have another of those tucked away, do ye?”
“I’m not done with the truth yet,” Christian warned.
“I know. I thought to brace myself, that is all.”
“You may like this truth,” Christian said, his voice low.
Rob held up his hand. “No. Don’t speak it. I already see what you will say. You’ve laid the path clearly. I have it now.”
Christian rested his hand over his boot, no longer plucking at the ties. “Do you? I understand how hard it has been for you to watch your wife be fawned over by endless traipsing strangers who steal away your time with her, when that time is running out. But do you really understand how I feel? To finally be back in the past, in human form, with Tally and she is with another man?”
Rob cleared his throat. “Perhaps that is fate’s way of telling you Tally isn’t meant to be yours.”
Christian shook his head. “I don’t believe that,” he said flatly.
Rob straightened, startled. Christian was smiling. Rob could see the faint shine of his teeth in the moonlight.
“Your arrogance—”
“Certainty,” Christian corrected. He dropped his hand onto Rob’s shoulder where it lay heavy and hot. “It’s the same certainty that is in you, Robert MacKenzie. The small voice inside that is telling you that despite everything you have learned these last few weeks, despite every known and unknown law of man and magic, you are going to find a way to keep Tally. And you are, aren’t you?”
Rob licked his lips. “Have you been reading my mind?”
“I can’t,” Christian replied. “But I don’t have to. I recognize that certainty in you because it is in me, too.”
“The certainty that Tally will be yours? We can’t both be certain of this and both be right.”
Christian smiled again. “Time is a wondrous thing, Rob. Have faith in your own ambition.”
Rob didn’t know what made him do it—Christian’s hand on his shoulder, warm and comforting, or if it was the powerful words of hope Christian was speaking. Perhaps it was the whiskey warming his gut, or Tally’s mind-broadening lessons in sensuality. Rob didn’t pause to think it through. He simply leaned forward the few inches that separated them and pressed his mouth against Christian’s full lips, trying to convey the wash of emotions and feelings sweeping through him.
Christian stiffened, for one brief moment. Then his lips opened and his hand slid up into Rob’s hair, to hold his head steady.
As a kiss, it was tentative. Gentle. Barely even arousing.
But when Rob sat back, his heart was hurting, so hard did it beat. His entire body was so tight with tension, it was ready to shatter like ice in winter.
Christian’s breath rattled unsteadily as he stared without word at Rob. The silence was thick between them, while Rob counted his frantic heartbeat.
Christian sighed and rested his hand on Rob’s knee. “You should call
me Lee.”
Chapter Ten
Stelios emerged from the shed in the small hours of the morning and found Ryan where he sat on a stile over a drywall.
It was so silent Ryan could hear the wind in the tops of the trees. Ezra’s gasping groans had stopped.
Stelios put his foot on the bottom step of the stile. It was a while before he spoke. “I tried basic medicine when he first got sick. But all I know is human stuff. Like I said, I didn’t think you people got sick.”
“We don’t. This isn’t sickness, Mr. Stelios,” Ryan told him. “It’s stasis poisoning. When we come back in time, the symbiot in our blood that makes us vampire goes into stasis. From that moment on, we are human again. But there is a price for that humanity. All the years and decades and centuries we have lived begin to attack our human form. It is entropy at light speed.”
“So when you guys come back in time, you start dying?”
“At a vastly accelerated pace, yes. We pay for the time we have lived. Death from stasis poisoning is the most painful death anyone can imagine. And despite medical research we still don’t know how to stop it, or delay it. We don’t even know how to alleviate the symptoms.”
“Can’t you just take him back? To our time?”
Ryan sighed. “It is too far gone now. His skin—you saw the cracks?”
“Like a dried-out lake bed.”
“His skin is breaking down now. To try the jump back would be just like stepping onto the surface of the lake bed. Jumping on it, in fact.”
“Jesus,” Stelios whispered.
The silence stretched between them while Ryan listened to the wind and held Ezra in his thoughts.
“Why didn’t he just cancel the tour? Take us both back home?” Stelios said at last. “I’m a reasonable man. I would have understood.”
Ryan sighed. This was the point that had troubled him since he had seen Ezra’s extinguishing form in the shed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I looked at Ezra’s tour journal before we came. He had completed too many tours, too close together, but he was one of our best and one of only a few that know this era and the regency era well. And Ezra was a proud man. He would be the last to admit he was tiring. Besides, he would have found it too embarrassing to explain the facts of his vampire existence to a human. Then…” He looked at Stelios’ shadowed form. “There was the pressure you put on the agency to give you the tour. I only know Ezra a little, but I know his twin sister much better and they’re stubborn. If you had insisted on your tour he would have insisted you complete the damn thing, come what may. He’d rather risk a bit of stasis poisoning than admit he couldn’t give you what you wanted. But I think it came on too quick, this time.”
“He did this to spite me?”
“You misunderstand,” Ryan said quickly. “He did it to spite humans, who have hounded him and his sister all their lives. Travelling was where, finally, he was the expert. The master. And you, the human, needed him.”
Stelios absorbed that. “He had a hard life, then?”
“Both as human and vampire,” Ryan agreed. “As a human, he and Ophelia were born in medieval Ireland, virtual slaves to their English overlords. As vampire they have dealt with prejudice of a different sort.”
This time the silence between them was thicker. Stelios seemed to be watching him, sizing him up.
“Do you know who I am?” Stelios said at last.
“I have looked at your file,” Ryan admitted.
“Then you know that I am likely to be selected for the Worlds Assembly next session.”
“I am aware of your political status,” Ryan said.
“And I’m aware that you’re not just another Traveller, like Ezra, or his sister. His sister keeps looking to you for responses and direction. If she’s such a stubborn sort, there’s a hierarchy involved you haven’t revealed to me.”
“You’re very perceptive.”
“Who are you then?”
“I’m the President of the Chronologic Conservation Agency.”
“Ryan Deashumhain,” Stelios concluded. Unlike most humans, he didn’t shorten Ryan’s last name to ‘Desmond’ to avoid the awkward pronunciation. And his rendering of the ancient Gaelic wasn’t too shabby, either. “Did you come to get me to make sure I didn’t piss all over your agency when I get back?” Stelios asked.
“Ophelia is Ezra’s sister and when he dies, she will be in a highly emotional state, something we vampires find hard to deal with in our human forms, back here in history. We’re out of practice, you see.” He got down off the stile and Stelios stepped back to give him way. “One of the factors that lets us navigate through time is our memories of where we want to go. Clear, sharp, focused memories.”
“Ryan!” Ophelia called from the opening of the shed.
“Coming!” he called back. He looked at Stelios. “I came back just to make sure you made it home at all, Mr. Stelios.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he turned and went to watch a friend die.
* * * * *
Natália slid onto the chair and looked down at the food on the platter before her.
Lee sat next to her. “Good morning.”
Tally picked up an apple and stared at it. “I never thought I’d get sick of eating,” she said. “But this constant flow of meals after food after snacks…it’s a wonder humans ever get anything done.”
Lee rested his hand over Natália’s wrist, then picked up his own spoon. “Preparing it is even more of a continuous chore,” he said.
Natália tried to smile.
“Has he returned yet?” Lee asked.
She shook her head and took a deep breath to quell the tears rising up. “It’s been over a week….”
“Give him time, Tally. You must have known that asking him to accept and adapt to your real identity would be difficult enough. The men of these times, they’re so protective of their kith and kin that handing over control to ‘experts’ is a terrible challenge for him.” But his gaze slid away from her face.
“What is it?” she demanded. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
Lee pushed his plate away and sat back with a heavy, gusty sigh. “This is my fault,” he said.
Tally tried to stay calm, but fear leapt in her chest. “What is your fault? What do you mean? Lee?”
Lee grimaced. “I think Rob fled because of me.” He pushed his long fingers up against his temples, rubbing hard. “I think I scared him into leaving.”
“How?” Tally demanded sharply. Her imagination was painting all sorts of scenarios and images. Lee with his hand about Rob’s throat. Swords locked together. Threats. Blows. Worse.
Lee looked at her steadily, his green eyes frank. “He kissed me.”
Tally’s breath escaped her in a rush. “Not what I was expecting you to say,” she breathed. And even more images cascaded through her mind, swiftly building in eroticism. Lee and Rob together. Kissing. And more. She drew in a lungful of air, trying to dismiss the thoughts and looked at Lee. “Rob kissed you?”
Lee frowned. “I was as surprised as you are, Tally.”
“How long did you remain surprised?” Tally asked dryly. “Is that the point you are making? You responded and now Rob has departed for a highland glen where we’ll never find him because it was too much for him to cope with?”
“Exactly what was it you two were doing in that tent of his before I arrived, anyway?” Lee challenged.
Tally felt her cheeks heat. “Nothing I care to share with you.”
“Perhaps you should,” Lee replied coolly. “Because I don’t think coping was an issue for him. It’s something else that’s keeping him away.”
“And now you’re an expert on Rob MacKenzie?” Tally shot back.
Lee cursed. “He was aroused, Tally. How much plainer do I have to be? Those kilts don’t hide much.”
Tally sat back in her chair. This was too much to absorb. Too much to take in. The images were crowding her mind. Tally swallowed. Her throat w
as parched. “Did you…was it…did you like the kiss?” she asked.
Lee shrugged. “It was tentative.” Then his eyes narrowed as his gaze roamed over her face. “I didn’t know you had any voyeur tendencies.”
“I don’t,” she assured him hurriedly.
Lee cocked his head a little, his gaze not letting her go. “You seem overly curious about the kiss. Is it that you like the idea of Rob kissing me?”
Tally stood up abruptly and picked up the heavy shawl that she threw about her shoulders most mornings when she went outside. “I’m going for my walk,” she told Lee.
Lee grinned. “Enjoy the damp air,” he told her.
Tally strode out of the building, angry with Lee and herself and even with Rob. She missed Rob with an ache that grew with each passing day and the constant busy-ness of people from her timeline surrounding her night and day had begun to grate on her nerves just as it had bothered Rob.
These walks were refreshing.
She followed the meandering sheep trail that wound around the sides of the valley, letting her mind drift. The monastery was out of sight when she heard the muffled beat of hooves behind her and stepped off the trail to let the rider through. A galloping horse in this area could only mean trouble of some sort. Like the people around here had long ago learned, she wanted to stay out of trouble’s way.
She pushed herself up against the rocky slope, giving the yet-unseen rider as much room as possible. Then the horse appeared around the bend she had just passed and her breath caught in her throat.
It was Rob, bent over the neck of his horse and riding toward her like a man in battle, his eyes fierce and focused. He barely slowed when he reached her, but his arm caught her across the chest. She was picked up off her feet and put across his saddle.
“Put your arms around my neck,” he told her.
She obeyed, bewildered. “Rob, what on earth…?”
“D’ye trust me, Tally?”
She barely hesitated. “Of course I do,” she said fiercely.
“Good then. I’m taking you away from that army of experts who know nothing. You can be my wife and we can face whatever comes together and we’ll bring the barn into the world together, the way it should be done.” His lips brushed her cheek. “I have a plan, Tally.”
Bannockburn Binding (Beloved Bloody Time) Page 10
