Perhaps they understood because they both moved closer together and pulled her in to them, holding her against them. Offering the comfort she craved.
“You came,” she told them. “I thought I was on my own, but you came.”
Neither of them said a word, but their arms tightened around her.
It was a perfect moment. Winter realized that she didn’t want it to end. And she knew why. Sebastian was there. Nial was there. No choice was necessary. She was bathed in perfect peace and harmony. A moment out of time and reality.
Then Shakeel snored and grunted and reality came crashing back and the moment was gone.
Chapter Nineteen
SEBASTIAN LOWERED WINTER to the floor as Nial picked up the remote and switched on the two big floor lamps bracketing the sofa. Soft amber light filled the middle of the main floor.
“I should hit the pillow. I didn’t get much sleep last night,” Sebastian said, stepping away from Winter. His chest in the light was a soft matt brown and for the first time she realized that he was more tanned than she had ever seen him. Well, he had been in Ningaloo to soak up the sun, something he could do with comfort now. A tan looked good on him.
“A night cap, Sebastian?” Nial asked, heading for the mobile bar standing next to the fireplace.
“I don’t think—”
“Irish whiskey. Ten years old,” Nial added.
“I suppose…”
“I’m going to go and get changed,” Winter said.
“Stay and have a drink,” Nial suggested.
“I’d really rather get changed,” Winter replied. “Sebastian doesn’t need to see me half-naked and he should have his shirt back.”
“I need to talk to you,” Nial said flatly.
Winter drew in a breath and let it out, looking for calm and barely finding it. She turned back into the room and walked over to the sofa and sat on it. She curled her legs up under her and made sure the shirt was properly tucked in around her.
“Just me?” she asked, trying for a steady voice.
“Both of you,” Nial replied. He handed Sebastian the whiskey and sat on the stool, stretching out his legs. “Tell me what you think of the whiskey. I’m curious to know.”
“I’m sure it’s good. You always buy the best,” Sebastian replied and sipped. “And I’m right,” he added. “It’s one of the finest I’ve tasted.” He stood at the other end of the small bar from where Nial was sitting and rested the glass on the granite top. The heavy base made a soft thud in the quiet room.
Nial crossed his arms. “So, Sebastian, you got your wish. You got the impossible dream, thanks to Winter. You’re human once more.”
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “And?”
“That’s what you always told me, wasn’t it?” Nial said. “You wanted to be human, so that you could live and love like a human?”
Winter jumped a little. But Sebastian didn’t even glance at her. He was simply staring suspiciously at Nial.
Nial shrugged again. “You’re so human, in fact, that you’re locked into a human relationship so tight that to break it will bring both your deaths. That’s about as frail as anyone could wish for, wouldn’t you say?”
Sebastian’s gaze finally flickered toward Winter.
“Nial, what are you doing?” Winter demanded, fear touching her. “What game is this?”
“It’s just a question,” Nial said, looking steadily at Sebastian. “I’m curious.”
Sebastian shook his head. “You’re playing one of your games again. Damn, I thought you’d given up on them, Nial. I thought—” He glanced at Winter. “I thought wrong,” he finished heavily.
Winter uncurled her legs and sat up. “Why are you trying to manipulate him again, Nial?”
Nial looked at them both. “You’re both so afraid of being manipulated. Of being used. Yet neither of you have a clue how power over another works. You’ve been watching me for signs of abuse when you have no idea what to look for in the first place. You’re the blind leading the blind.”
Sebastian held his hand out toward Nial. “See, that’s what I mean,” he told Winter. “Try wearing that attitude for two hundred and fifty years.”
Winter studied Nial. “He has a point. We’re not stupid, Nial.”
“But you fail to see the truth when it’s staring you in the face,” Nial replied. “You’ve been looking at it for five days, Winter, and you haven’t seen it. And some of the truth you’ve been looking at all your adult life and you haven’t seen it. You ask for honesty but you’re not equipped to deal with it.”
Winter scrambled to her feet. “You’ve been hiding behind a shield of lies for fifteen hundred years, Nial! How dare you!”
“Hiding, yes. But I can differentiate truth from lies and I know its power and understand how it works,” Nial said. He still hadn’t moved from the stool.
“He can keep this up until you fall asleep,” Sebastian said bitterly. “That’s how he always wins. He just talks you into defeat.”
Nial shook his head. “You’re both so close!” he said, his voice low and strong. “Stop fighting me on this.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Sebastian replied. “We both just roll over for you.”
Nial gave an exasperated sound. “You really fear my manipulation that much?” he demanded. He stood and in one long lunge reached for Sebastian, his hand curling around Sebastian’s neck. He drew the younger man to him, pulling his body up hard against him, his other hand around Sebastian’s hips. Nial kissed him, taking his time, his lips hard against Sebastian’s. His fingers buried themselves in Sebastian’s thick blond locks of hair and the other hand stroked the flesh over his back before sliding down and cupping his ass and pressing him harder against Nial.
The pressure made Sebastian groan and finally snag a fistful of Nial’s shirt, pulling the taller man closer.
Winter stood frozen five paces away, her heart in overdrive, her body an overworked steam engine about to explode as she watched Nial and Sebastian kissing. Sebastian’s groan was echoed by her own soundless moan. She could barely draw breath.
Winter lost track of her sense of self. Her entire consciousness was focused on the two men in front of her and their passion. Their arousal. She could almost feel it, for it radiated from every tight, hard line of their bodies, the way they were locked together.
Pure wanting.
Nial broke the kiss, with a great gasp, his eyes closed. He stood still for several seconds while Sebastian laid a trembling hand on his shoulder.
“God…Nial.”
Nial looked at Winter. His eyes were stormy. “Who manipulates whom here, Winter, hmmm?”
Shock touched her. “You did that just to prove a point to me?”
Nial lowered Sebastian onto the stool he had been sitting on and moved toward her. “You still don’t understand.” He reached for her.
Winter let him curl his hands around her upper arms and that was when she wrapped her arms around his waist and locked her fingers behind him, her palms resting against the small of his back. “I understand plenty, Nial. I’ve spent days looking inside you and there’s something you don’t understand or that you’ve forgotten about vampires and humans. You feel emotions, yes, but you don’t feel them the way humans do. Every time a human feels an emotion, there’s a chemical reaction in the body. We actually feel an emotion. But you don’t because your human systems are all dormant. For you, emotions are an intellectual exercise, a holdover from when you were human. They’ve probably got all warped and out of kilter over the fifteen hundred years since you last felt real emotions, Nial.”
She had been steadily kicking his human system into gear as she spoke, placing his vampirism on temporary hold so he didn’t go into freeze like he had last time. It was going to take a lot of energy to pull this off, but if she could do it, it would be worth it just to prove her point.
“Like fear, Nial. You must be feeling a bit afraid right now about what I might do to you in th
e next couple of minutes, right?”
Nial licked his lips and glanced at Sebastian, who was sitting up on the stool, watching. “You’re missing the point, Winter,” he replied.
She adjusted his chemistry delicately, upping his fear level and he began to breathe faster.
“There’s terror, too,” she murmured, and poured in some adrenaline and increased his heart rate.
Nial gasped, his fingers digging into her arms.
“Anger is so much blacker when your body is pushing you around, too,” Winter added. She made the adjustments and watched as Nial’s expression changed. White lines of fury drew themselves beside his mouth. His eyes narrowed as he stared at her.
“Happiness,” she announced.
Nial took a breath of relief as his expression cleared and he smiled. He began to laugh.
Sebastian moved closer. “I’ve never heard him laugh like that.”
Winter was concentrating too heavily to spare the attention to answer Sebastian.
Nial’s head rolled back and he laughed up at the ceiling.
“Sadness,” she announced.
His laughter withered and he drew in a shaky breath.
Winter took him on a roller-coaster ride of emotions, switching his body chemistry each time. She had spent a lifetime watching how humans feel emotions. Now she gave that back to Nial.
Sebastian crept closer, a silent witness.
Winter saw that Nial’s heart was galloping wildly. She soothed it, but it wouldn’t calm as much as she wanted it to. This was taxing Nial as much as her.
“Despair,” she called, intending this to be the last call.
“No,” Sebastian said, touching her shoulder. “That’s enough.”
Nial slithered to the floor, onto his hands and knees, forcing Winter to follow so that she could keep her hands on him. She sat in front of him and lifted his head and gasped at the tears in his eyes. But she had activated his human system. Tears were possible for Nial.
“Don’t stop,” he breathed. “Let me feel.”
“I must,” she said. “It’s hurting you.”
“Show me love before you stop, then,” he whispered.
Winter felt tears building in her own eyes. “I can’t,” she told him. “Love isn’t a chemical reaction, Nial. It’s a whole body, whole brain, whole heart feeling.”
“Then I still really do love,” he murmured. And his tears did fall. “Hurry,” he told her.
Winter looked at Sebastian, who nodded.
She wiped her cheeks quickly and set about restoring Nial’s body back to his normal. The human systems she put back into dormancy and wiped out all the chemical reactions she had put into play in his body. As she worked, Nial sank to the floor. Sebastian caught his head before it hit the rug and lowered it the rest of the way.
Winter allowed the vampirism to take Nial’s body back over and withdrew. She felt very tired.
“Is he doing that sleeping thing again?” Sebastian asked, sitting next to Nial’s still form.
She nodded. “He’ll come around in a minute or so and be perfectly normal again.” She stretched out on the rug herself, her forehead on her arms. She wanted to weep, but had no idea why.
Deep silence gripped the room.
“You’re both still here,” Nial said. There was a touch of wonder in his voice. “If you are so afraid of my ability to maneuver you like pawns, why did you not take advantage of my moment of supreme weakness and run like hell?” He pushed himself up with his hands and sat up.
Winter rolled over onto her side. “And leave you lying on the rug?”
Sebastian bent one knee and rested his elbow on it. He pushed that hand through his hair with a frustrated motion. “Nial, please, please, don’t start this again. Five minutes ago I was feeling sorry for you for the first time in ten years. Hell, I even wanted you. Don’t ruin that for me—no offense, Winter. Anything other than resenting you is a complete change of pace.”
Nial took a breath and let it out. “You don’t resent me, Bastian.”
Sebastian groaned and hammered at the floor. “Fuck!”
Nial grabbed his wrist in a vice-like grip. “You don’t resent me,” he said evenly. “You resent the fact that you love me still, even though you think you want your freedom.” He dropped Sebastian’s wrist. “I don’t have power over you, Sebastian. You just think I do because you want me to be important in your life.”
Sebastian shook his head. “No.”
Winter could almost hear Sebastian’s thoughts. She wanted to cry out a warning, but there was no way to stop what he would say next. She sat up, making the third point in their rough triangle on the rug.
Nial crossed his legs, making it look comfortable and natural, even with his long limbs. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Sebastian. That’s something you’ve always discounted and you shouldn’t.”
Sebastian shook his head again. “I love Winter,” he said flatly. “I’d die for her.”
Winter held her breath.
Nial laughed softly. “Bastian, you say that like you think I don’t know, like I should be angry or hurt.”
Winter let out her breath with a gasp. “You know?”
Nial looked at her. “Of course I know, Winter. As I know how much you love Sebastian—quite desperately, in fact. I’ve admired and been astonished that you two haven’t succumbed to temptation some time since this honesty gambit started cracking things open, as I haven’t done anything to keep you apart. Only your sense of honor and loyalty to me has stopped you so far.”
Winter stared at him, astonishment clogging her mind and mouth.
Nial threaded his fingers together and looked at Sebastian. “Now do you begin to understand a little about true power, Sebastian?”
“You use love to push people about?” Sebastian asked, his hand over his eyes.
Nial pulled Sebastian’s hand away. Sebastian blinked and looked at him.
“When have I ever pushed you into doing something you didn’t want?” Nial asked. “Leaving me was your idea.”
“Thank god, or I would never have met Winter,” Sebastian shot back.
“It’s as the gods have written it,” Nial agreed. “We both met Winter because you wanted an impossible fairytale, although given that we all move in the same general circles, it’s likely we would have met sooner or later anyway.”
“I got my fairytale, though,” Sebastian pointed out.
Nial shook his head. He leaned forward and kissed Sebastian, a light touch of his mouth to the other man’s cheek. Then he got to his feet and walked back to the bar. Winter glanced at Sebastian, who shrugged with a tiny lift of his broad shoulders.
Across the air, a bodiless whisper came, like a vagrant shift of the currents. “Watch out Winter!”
Nile turned and threw Sebastian’s empty, heavy whiskey glass at her. It streaked across the ten feet of space like a bullet and Winter rocked back on her hips, throwing her arms up to protect her head from the deadly missile.
Sebastian got there first. The glass smacked into his hand and his fingers closed around it, a bare six inches from her face.
Sebastian pulled the glass into his chest and looked at Nial. “What the fuck?”
Nial’s gaze, though, was on Winter. “Did you see the speed of his reactions, Winter?”
Winter doused her system with endorphins, trying to counter the adrenaline. She was shaking badly. Biting her lip, she nodded.
Sebastian quickly turned his head to look at her. “What?”
“You were moving too fast for a human, Sebastian,” she said gently.
Sebastian took a moment to absorb her words and build the implications behind them. “No.” He shook his head. “No, I’m perfectly human!”
“Not quite,” Nial said simply.
“One hundred percent!” Sebastian replied hotly.
“You eat and sleep, yes. But for energy renewal,” Nial told him. “That’s all. You don’t have a metabolism. You’re not aging, Seba
stian. I spotted it the moment I saw you in Ireland, when after a year’s absence you hadn’t changed at all. Winter had told me you’d become human again so I had been looking for human signs of aging and there weren’t any.”
Sebastian licked his lips. “Bullshit,” he whispered.
“Winter can confirm it for you in thirty seconds,” Nial said. “Now she knows what to look for. But there’s one easy question that will prove it for you.”
Sebastian shook his head. “No, no more questions.”
Nial moved back onto the rug and knelt next to Sebastian where he sat like a steel trap, ready to go off as soon as anyone touched him.
“Have you ever had to get your hair cut since you were made human, Sebastian?” Nial asked softly.
Sebastian covered his face with his hands. It was answer enough.
Nial drew Sebastian into his arms and held him. He lifted his gaze to Winter. “Have you seen your part in all this, Winter?”
“That I failed to make Sebastian human enough? Thank you, my guilt is sufficient, Nial.”
He shook his head. “You could never have made him fully human. You aren’t one yourself.”
Sebastian sat back and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “That’s ridiculous. She was born of human parents.”
“So were you and I,” Nial replied evenly. “And neither of us are human anymore. Winter never was human and now she is even less human than she was when she was born.”
“Because of the symbiosis.” Winter grimaced.
“Yes, but the changes were more far-reaching than you are aware of,” Nial told her.
Winter swallowed. “My eyes…”
“You have vampire vision,” Nial said flatly. “And vampire hearing.”
“Jesus,” Sebastian murmured.
“Then on the plane…” Winter began.
“There was no acoustic anomaly,” Nial replied. “But when I hear sounds very low on the human auditory scale, they do sound like you described, like something riding on air currents. So I knew you were hearing something no ordinary human should have been able to hear. And you’ve heard more like that since, including five minutes ago, just before I threw the glass at you.”
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