Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4)

by Lauren Gilley

  “And stand in the way of true love?” Val asked, scandalized.

  “True love does what’s necessary.” A very Vlad-like sentiment, if ever there was one, Val thought ruefully.

  He finally bid his brother goodbye when Ramirez and Treadwell returned, creeping into the room, standing at the edges, but clearly impatient.

  “I shall say adieu for now, brother,” Val said, standing. He gave a lavish bow to the sergeant. “Lady Adela. Don’t be too discouraged. I imagine sparring is Vlad’s only means of flirting.” He stood, and grinned, and saw color flood her cheeks in the instant before he vanished; heard Vlad’s sigh of “Valerian.”

  Then he was gone.

  But not back to his body. To Mia and the bench and the sweet October rain. He had another visit to make, first.

  He found Liam Price in one of the manor’s second floor bedroom, a spacious room with soaring, painted ceilings and a monstrous four-poster bed draped in gold-trimmed green velvet. The same fabric covered the bench of a settee, and a small bench in front of a gilt-edged vanity. The mural on the ceiling was a woodland scene, done in greens from hunter, to emerald, to soft moss, and palest chartreuse: a doe and fawn drinking from a silver pool.

  The mage lay on a low couch beneath the window, as underdressed as Val had ever seen him in a rumpled white shirt and soft black sleep pants. His head rested on his wife’s lap, and she touched the first two fingertips of both hands to his temples. A soft golden glow emanated from the point of contact; it seemed to pulse, swelling and shrinking: an echo of a heartbeat.

  “Am I intruding?” Val asked with intentional, saccharine politeness.

  Liam’s eyes snapped open.

  The wife, Lily, lifted her head on a soft gasp, eyes wide and startled, as green as the room around her.

  Liam sat up, expression tight, pulling the loose collar of his shirt up higher on one shoulder. It was a brave show at dignity, but an unsuccessful one.

  “Prince Valerian,” he greeted coolly, his own eyes heavy-lidded, blue, and calculating. “This is a surprise.”

  “That’s obvious, given your state of dishabille.”

  Lily pulled the halves of her robe together over her nightgown, an ivory silk that shimmered faintly in the lamplight.

  “Do you ever let my brother see you so discomposed?”

  Liam bared his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “What do you think?”

  Val smiled back, and flashed his fangs. “I think I just walked in on the two of you attempting to break the binding that holds you to Vlad.”

  Liam’s laugh sounded like the scrape and grit of rusty door hinges. His throat’s still damaged, Val realized. He hasn’t fully healed.

  “Wouldn’t that be a trick?” Liam asked with a sneer. “Divesting oneself of an unwanted master.”

  “My Familiar tells me it’s possible,” Val said. “He’s done it, and so have you.”

  “Your Familiar–” Liam started.

  “Stop,” Lily said. She laid a hand on her husband’s arm, and he turned to her, the aggression melting off his face. “You’re tired, baby,” she murmured, and reached to smooth his shoulder-length curls off his face.

  Val knew she was Anna’s sister, but he realized he’d never heard her speak before; for some reason, her Southern accent surprised him. Two Southern sisters married to two very different Brits.

  “I’m not,” Liam protested, petulant as a child.

  “Shh.” She stroked his face. “You are. You need your rest.” She turned to Val, her hand resting at the back of Liam’s neck. “We weren’t trying to break the binding. Liam is – healing slowly.”

  Oh, Val thought. “And you’re…knitting him back together.”

  “I’m doing what I can.”

  “Are you a necromancer as well?”

  “No,” she said.

  The same moment Liam snapped, “I’m not dead.”

  Lily’s fingers massaged his nape, his hair rustling, and he sighed. “I have the power to make things grow,” she explained. “Plants, generally. Sometimes flesh…bones.”

  “Your dear brother broke every bone in my face, and very nearly crushed my esophagus,” Liam said, teeth bared again, without a suggestion of a smile this time. The shadows beneath his eyes lingered, still, dark and unhealthy. “And I–” He hesitated, and then sighed, shoulders slumping. “I’ve failed to return to my full potential after raising Mr. Dyomin.”

  “You’ve run out of magic?” Val guessed, hopefully.

  “I’m weakened. It takes an immense amount of power to raise the dead.”

  “It’s draining,” Lily said, softer. “It takes time to fully recover, after.”

  And then Vlad had broken his face, and he hadn’t been healing like he should.

  “I see,” Val said. “Perhaps you’ve learned a valuable lesson about dabbling with necromancy.”

  “Oh, sod off.”

  “And attempting to compel immortals much stronger than yourself.”

  Liam grimaced, and his gaze drifted toward the fire where it rippled and cracked in the grate. “I didn’t know he was resistant to that trick,” he admitted.

  “In my experience, Vlad is resistant to every trick.” Except for mine, he thought with a mild pulse of panic. He wanted to wrap Vlad’s love for him up tight and lock it away, hide it from view. I’m his weakness, and I always have been. A thrill, a curse. “He’s a rare creature, my brother.”

  Liam sighed, and leaned his shoulder subtly into his wife’s side. Her arm slipped all the way around his neck, fingertips pressed to his collarbone. They looked like a painting, like the room’s second mural: all red, and green, and cream bathed in firelight, lovely and overwrought and terrible.

  Faintly, tiredly, Liam said, “Why are you here, your grace?”

  Val eased his astral projection down onto the old steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. “What you told Vlad about needing three Romans – three emperors to represent the three Romes.”

  Liam perked up, turning his head to face him.

  “Is that just nonsense, or do you believe it?”

  He stared at Val a moment, blue eyes wide, face slack – and open. No artifice in his expression. Nothing cutting or calculating. He looked almost hopeful, but afraid to be so. “I believe it.” He sat up straighter. “It’s a theory, I admit,” he added, hurrying, like he was desperate to get the words out. “Your brother is skeptical, I know, but we as immortals know that not everything real is tangible.” He gestured to Val. “You sitting there, for instance. I could put a fire poker right through you, but you’re here. I’m not hallucinating. There is power in this world that makes its own kind of sense, and I think it’s no coincidence that our enemy is the founder of Rome – that the triumvirate is a Roman legacy – that the triumvirate exists still in the balance between vampire, and mage, and wolf – and that history tells us there were three Romes. Ancient Rome’s downfall was internal – as was the fall of Constantinople–”

  “I’m intimately familiar with what happened to Constantinople,” Val said tightly.

  “Yes, I know, apologies, but my point is this: a strong, financially secure Constantinople, united in religion, could have repelled that siege. The city was crumbling from the inside long before Mehmet turned his guns on the walls. Just like the monarchy in Russia was toppled by its own enraged citizenry. Think of it.” He scooted forward on the sofa, lifting his hands to gesture, gaze sparking with excitement. “Three Romes felled from the inside out. One Roman enemy – the Roman enemy. It’s time the sons of Rome turned on their own father. So to speak.”

  “It does sound logical,” Val agreed, outwardly calm, his heart pounding. “And yes, there is strength in numbers. I can see that it would take a large and powerful force to subdue my uncle for good. Or, as Vlad plans, he can just dig him up, and hack him into bits and burn the bones.”

  Liam made a face.

  “Or do you think there’s something magic and prophetic about a triumvirate of emperors?”


  “I’m a mage. Of course I believe in magic–”

  “No,” Val said, realization dawning. “No, no. Why not try the simplest method first? There’s something you’re holding back. Something you know.”

  Liam shot to his feet, unsteady. Lily grabbed for his hand but he paced toward the fire, rested a forearm on the mantelpiece and tried, unsuccessfully, to look composed.

  “Mr. Price,” Val said. “Tell me now, or I’ll go back to Vlad and have him break the rest of your bones.”

  Liam blanched, the bags under his eyes black as bruises. He looked like a redhaired skull, the torso silhouetted through the white shirt unhealthily thin. “You wouldn’t. You aren’t the cruel brother.”

  “I’m as cruel as I need to be. Tell me now, or wait for Vlad. Your choice.”

  “Liam,” Lily said.

  He let out an explosive breath. “God, I hate vampires,” he muttered. “Fine. Fine. Romulus is awake. I know because his Familiar told me.”

  “I’m sorry. It sounded like you said ‘his Familiar.’”

  “I did.”

  “He’s awake?”

  Liam deflated again, slumping back against the mantle. His pants leg was dangerously close to the fire, but Val supposed that wasn’t really a problem for him. “I assume he’s awake, at least. There was a mage.” He shuddered, and the motion looked helpless, automatic. “Bound, he told us, and incredibly, terrifyingly powerful. He made what I do look like parlor tricks.”

  Now Val wanted to shudder.

  “But all mages have refractory periods, even this one. He courted us – friendly-like, talked of an alliance, of sharing our knowledge with one another. He was lonely, he said.” Liam’s gaze turned inward as he remembered, his voice hushed. “He’d been locked up for a very long time, he said, kept imprisoned by fearful mortals. He’d been looking for his master, he said, and he wanted to enlist our help in finding him.”

  “And of course, you being the picture of helpfulness, agreed,” Val said.

  “We didn’t know he was searching out Romulus. It wasn’t until we got to Hungary, headed for Wallachia, that I realized we weren’t hunting just any vampire.”

  Val lifted his brows. “You thought he was after Vlad?”

  “At first, yes. He wouldn’t have been the first. Countless others – mortal and immortal – had gone questing for him. But you’d hidden him well.”

  Val snorted.

  “I admit to being curious: seeing a legend like your brother in the flesh? A notch on any historian’s belt. But I had, like you said, managed to sever a previous binding. The last thing I wanted was to go digging up and waking an even stronger vampire. I told the other mage that we would need to bow out of the hunt. Wished him luck and packed our bags.

  “He…he didn’t like that. He wanted to know why. When I explained about Vlad, he said that Vlad wasn’t his target; that he was looking for, in his words, ‘the godly uncle of Vlad the Traitor.’” He met Val’s gaze, his own haunted. “I knew then who he was after, and then I really wanted nothing to do with his search.

  “We tried to leave, and he attacked me.”

  “How did you get away?”

  Liam turned then to his wife, and for a moment, his face was suffused with the kind of love that made onlookers blush and look away. “Lily.”

  “He told us from the beginning that he was from old Rome, and he proved it when he doubted me,” Lily said. “Because I was a woman, he didn’t think I was powerful enough to worry about.”

  “You killed him?” Val asked.

  “No.” Her face was all regret. “But I wounded him, and we fled. That was when we finally answered one of the Institute’s requests for aid.”

  “I showed him a tracking spell,” Liam said, head bowing with shame, a long red curl falling across his forehead. “I didn’t know, when I did what he would – that he – and I do love to show off…” He lifted his face again. “He will have used it to find Romulus,” he told Val. “And if the bastard isn’t awake yet, it’ll only be because the mage hasn’t found a wolf to do the waking.”

  Val’s memories of his uncle Romulus were the fuzzy-edged recollections of early boyhood. Revisiting those few meetings with Vlad on their dream-walk had sharpened them, some. But, though he knew Romulus to be horrible, though he’d seen Vlad duel with him, cleave his head from his shoulders, Romulus was Father’s twin, after all, and he had Father’s face. It was hard to think of him without superimposing Remus over him; without remembering Father’s soft voice, and softer smiles, his beaky Roman nose limned in the golden light that filtered through his study windows, his dark curls unruly on his brow. Father had been a kind man.

  And a man who hadn’t risked his principality for the sake of his sons.

  Val feared Romulus – a bone-deep chill that he shied away from in his mind, not wanting to think about his own vulnerability, not wanting to remember the putrid taste of Mehmet’s blood on his tongue – but, sometimes…he thought the one he hated might be Father. Just a little.

  He shook his head to clear it. His chest was tight again. “So what you’re saying is that this war is your fault.”

  “No!” Liam drew up, affronted. “No, it isn’t, I’m–” His strength failed him again, and his eyes glittered before he blinked them clear. “It’s no one’s fault but Romulus’s. And his Familiar’s.” He reached as if to tug at his collar, but it was already open and loose. He curled his hand lightly around the base of his throat instead. “Will you tell Vlad?”

  Val stood. “No. I’ll leave that to you.”

  His eyes flew wide.

  “If I tell him,” Val explained, “then he’ll assume you never meant to tell him. That you’re toying with him. And trust me when I say that you don’t want to think about the ways he’ll punish you.” His own shoulder throbbed, a phantom pain along the scar that Vlad had left him. “Go to him, get on your knees, grovel and apologize, and tell him everything you’ve told me. Leave nothing out.

  “My brother means to destroy Romulus, no matter the cost. If you learn nothing else about him, learn this: Vlad will never stop. Never.”

  Liam nodded. “I understand.”

  “And, Mr. Price.” Val offered him another wicked smile. “If you fail to serve him properly – honestly – he isn’t the only Dracula coming to take a pound of your flesh.”

  Liam’s brows climbed to his hairline.

  “Don’t forget: Mars is my grandfather, too.” He turned away from his stunned expression and offered another bow to Lily. “My lady.” Then he turned loose of the projection and went hurtling back to his body.

  He opened his eyes with a start, and found that he was on his side. He’d slipped down so that he was lying on the bench, his head and shoulders in Mia’s lap, her hand cupping his cheek.

  Annabel sat on his feet, and Fulk stood in front of the bench, facing them; all of them held umbrellas, light drops pattering over the nylon, keeping all of them dry.

  He twisted his head, even that motion leaving him dizzy, and blinked up at Mia’s concerned expression.

  He unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “How long was I gone?”

  “Half an hour,” Anna said. When he glanced toward her, she smiled, close-lipped, her gaze worried.

  “You were really still at first,” Mia said. “But then you – were upset.”

  When the breeze touched his face, he felt the tightness of drying tears. When he swallowed, his throat felt raw.

  Upset, she’d said, but he’d been unconscious and sobbing.

  He reached up to touch her face; tucked a strand of honey-colored hair behind her ear. “An overabundance of brotherly emotions, that’s all,” he assured. “I’m fine.”

  She frowned. “What did he say to you?”

  A chuckle worked its way up his sore throat. “Good things, darling. I promise. I’m just a bit of a mess.”

  Her thumb swept across his cheek, across a tear track.

  “Can you walk?” F
ulk asked, expression set in hard lines. “We should move before we attract any more attention.”

  Val sat up, and his balance only wavered a little. Mia and Anna supported his shoulders on either side. Farther down the sidewalk, he noted two women huddled beneath an umbrella, watching them with troubled faces; one held a cellphone.

  “Ah,” he said, heat suffusing his cheeks. “I’ve made a bit of a spectacle it seems. I’m sorry.”

  “Nah.” Anna sprang to her feet. “We just told them you’d got hold of some bad ‘shrooms.”

  Mia huffed a laugh. “No, we definitely didn’t.”

  “You’re no fun,” Anna said with a big, pretend sigh.

  Fulk held out a hand, and Val let himself be hauled upright; Fulk’s palm, he noted, was clammy, and not from the rain.

  Poor mother hen.

  They made their way back to the hotel; he didn’t voice it, but Val was glad to get back to their warm, dry rooms. The rain had lost all its charm after his talk with Liam.

  He urged Mia to take the first shower – “Honestly, darling, I’ve already cried all over you on a public bench. Don’t unman me any more by letting me bathe first.” She looked on the verge of inviting him in with her, but then hesitated, bit her lip, and said, only, “Okay.”

  He traded his damp jeans for sweatpants, and padded barefoot next door to Fulk and Anna’s room.

  Fulk opened the door before he could offer his polite knock. His narrow face was drawn – and wasn’t it always? Val couldn’t say he’d ever seen him smile with anything like happiness.

  He stepped back and opened the door in invitation. “Good, you need to feed.”

  “Well, yes, thank you.” Val stepped inside and heard the water running behind the closed bathroom door. “But that wasn’t the intent of my visit. Anna’s showering?”

  “Yes.”

  “So is Mia. I wanted to speak with you.”

  Fulk sent him a wary look, and then set off across the room. He’d shed his jacket and pulled a soft, threadbare velvet dressing gown on over his t-shirt; its patterns, and the intricacies of its unraveling stitches lent Val the impression it was an old garment, that it was something he’d carried with him for at least a hundred years, lovingly packed away for every trip. He’d been in the process of unbraiding his hair, Val realized, noting the way the unbound braid above his right ear slow unwound itself as he walked to the nightstand. A knife waited there, sharp and clean, glinting under the lamplight.