Midnight Rose

by Shelby Reed

  Kate parked behind Martha’s white sedan. Her hands trembled when she retrieved Ferdinand from the floorboard, and she clutched his little body to her for warmth and comfort as she climbed from the car.

  Wind swayed the bare, gnarled branches of the trees while she rang the doorbell and waited, her breath puffing out clouds into the night. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since the evening she stood in this exact spot and stared at those huge, daunting doors, waiting for them to open and wondering what fate held for her inside. She could never have guessed what a tangled web her reality would become when Gideon’s truth spun its threads around her.

  God, it was cold. Much colder than Richmond. She shivered, tried to fit Ferdinand inside her coat, but the twenty-pound beagle was getting too big to be carried around like a baby.

  She only had to wait a moment before the knob turned and Jude stood in the doorway, tall and handsome, a man.

  “Jude.” She gave a disbelieving laugh and after a hesitation, reached up to hug him. “My Lord. I wouldn’t have recognized you.” It was a lie; he looked so much like Gideon her knees quaked. His dark hair was longer, brushed carelessly back from his face. He looked at her with his father’s gaze, and for a shuddering instant, Kate wondered if Jude’s eyes would hold the same glimpse of hell as Gideon’s had when he transformed into…whatever it was. A vampire. Once again, the idea seemed too ridiculous to be entertained. The teenager before her seemed utterly human. Diffident. Traumatized by the changes in his world.

  A smile shattered the solemn lines of his angular face as he stepped back and warm air rushed to greet her. “Come in. I see you brought a friend.”

  “This is Ferdinand.” Stepping inside, she held the dog out to him, and Jude hesitated, eyeing the passive puppy.

  “Animals usually act all crazy and ferocious around me.”

  Kate turned the puppy and looked at his placid face. “Are you crazy and ferocious, Ferdinand?” She laughed at the wet drag of the puppy’s tongue on her chin. “He says no way.”

  Holding out his hands, Jude drew the beagle against his chest. Ferdinand slurped his face and snuggled against him, still sleepy from the long drive.

  The teenager stood in quiet pleasure for a moment, stroking the puppy’s silky ears. Then he glanced at her, and tears sparkled in his dark eyes. “Kate, I think this might be all my fault.”

  “Oh, no, Jude.” She caught his hand, found his fingers icy. “This isn’t your fault.”

  “But you don’t know. Right after you left, I did something…I…” He couldn’t finish, and she tugged his hand, drew him closer. He towered over her, but she sensed the child inside the man’s body, and reached up to wrap an arm around his neck.

  “It’s okay, Jude.”

  His shoulders shook with silent weeping, his face buried in the curve of her neck. It took a while, but finally he spoke in a choked, hoarse voice. “One night, I went looking for that girl, Melissa. We…she and I…I didn’t know so much about the blood cravings and how out of control they could get. I didn’t hurt her, but I could have. I scared her really badly, but she was drunk, so she didn’t know if what she saw was real or not. I guess she never told the cops or her parents. But she could have. The authorities could have come out here. We could have been discovered. When Dad found out, he just broke. That’s when he drank the vial.”

  Kate hugged him in silence, weathered the storm of ignoble tears that shook him, until his shoulders stopped trembling. Then she drew back to look at him and said, “You know what tells me you’re your father’s child, Jude?”

  “What?”

  “You could’ve hurt Melissa, but you didn’t. You didn’t. And now, with all that’s happened, I don’t think you’d hurt anyone, ever. You’re good at heart. Just like your dad, and all the people who’ve helped raise you. They all love you. Even Martha. Especially Martha.” She paused. “I saw her car out front. Is she here?”

  Jude brushed a hand over his eyes and nodded at the stairs. “She’s asleep in the west wing. I didn’t tell her you were coming. I didn’t know if you’d stay.”

  “Is your dad asleep?”

  “He comes and goes. The lights are on in his room if you want to go up.”

  Gladness and grief battled for position in her heart as she started up the stairs. The hunt scene caught her gaze. It appeared as it did the first time she saw it; the hound in the corner looked a lot like Ferdinand in a bad mood. She glanced back at Jude.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “No.” He rested his cheek against the puppy’s head, a lone, dark shadow in the center of Sister Oak’s grand foyer. “I’ll wait for you down here.”

  “Does Gideon know I’m coming?”

  “He knew, even before I told him,” Jude said with a tearful, hopeful smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Gideon opened his eyes, blinked, and closed them again, caught in the filmy place just beneath the surface of sleep. He’d thought Kate sat at the edge of his bed, but when he looked again, it was a figure in white, face veiled, surrounded by an ethereal glow. Her cool hand pressed to his forehead, a relief to his feverish skin. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this phantom; she was different than the shadows of his old days, and he knew she was a harbinger of death. She waited with quiet patience for him to tie up the ends of his life. When he was done, she would take him.

  He wasn’t ready.

  The figure emitted a shaky sigh, and Gideon’s lashes fluttered open again. It had sounded too real. The gentle touch pushing his hair back from his forehead was too tangible to be phantom.

  His vision swam and he squinted to clear it. Kate’s features came into focus, gave his heart a joyful jolt.

  “I woke you,” she whispered, reaching beneath the covers to grope for his hand. “I only meant to sit here and watch you sleep. I’m so sorry.”

  “You came home.” He drew a breath; his aching lungs expanded and he grimaced with pain. It was so hard to breathe. The poison seeping through his system had attacked him, his senses, taking him piece by piece. He’d known he would pay this price, but it hardly eased the agony of a mortal’s death, or the regret that battered him, now that he had the sweetest reason to stay.

  “Jude told me about the vial,” she said, her brown eyes liquid with unshed tears. “He says you drank some of it.”

  He managed a sleepy smile. “Good thing I didn’t drink it all, huh?”

  A half-laugh, half-sob escaped her and she clutched his hand more tightly. “Oh, Gideon. Please tell me you didn’t take this risk because of me.”

  “I didn’t take this risk because of you.”

  Two tears raced down her cheeks. “You’re lying.”

  Beneath the sheet his fingers laced with hers, and he slowly withdrew her hand, lifted it to his lips. “You were the catalyst. I’ve missed you so much. When you left, I lost the love of my life. And then Jude…my God.”

  “He told me everything that happened,” she said gently, squeezing his hand. “He feels responsible for your illness.”

  “No. It’s all my doing. Even Jude’s mistakes. I had to change it, Kate. What kind of fool would continue such an existence when he could fix it, make it right? It was time. Long past.”

  “But you’re so sick.” Her shoulders shook, and his heart ached with sorrow. She was fragile. More than before. More vulnerable than he, lying broken in this bed.

  She swallowed another sob. “You’re suffering, and for what? Is death such a precious commodity that you would throw away your life with Jude? He needs you, Gideon. He’s still a child. Don’t abandon him.”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t argue that he’d abandoned Jude the moment Delilah sank her fangs into his son’s flesh, and that his failure to save his own child made his endless life all the more unbearable. How could he walk alongside Jude’s eternal path to hell, a duplicitous model for the boy to follow? Everything decent in him cried out in protest. The blood of the saint hadn’t killed him. Hatred for the
creature within him was a far more potent poison.

  But Gideon said nothing. He just watched her, eyelids heavy with fatigue.

  “I should have listened to you the first time you told me to leave Sister Oaks,” she said with a tearful sigh. “It would have saved you.”

  Mustering strength, Gideon moved over and beckoned her. “Lie down with me.”

  She stretched out beside him, filling his senses with the sweet, familiar scent of her hair, her skin, her tears. He cupped her face with a weak hand and kissed her, lips clinging, his throat knotted with poignant emotion.

  “It feels so good to touch you,” he whispered. “Sleep with me tonight.”

  “I’ll sleep with you every night. I won’t leave you again.” She reached to carefully arrange the intravenous line that carried fluids into his ailing body, and slipped a pillow beneath his left arm to keep the line steady. Then she laid her head on his shoulder, her palm caressing his cheek, and pressed a soft, shuddering kiss against his ear. “Don’t leave me either, Gideon. I need you.”

  He tried to answer, but sleep pulled at him with insistent fingers, and finally he let it drag him under, with Kate’s scent and warmth surrounding him at last.

  * * * * *

  Voices filled his head. Voices from the past. Jakome’s, low and gentle. Martha’s clipped, careful enunciation. Kate’s soft replies.

  Gideon opened his eyes and studied the faces looking back at him.

  “He wakes.” Jakome’s proclamation rumbled through the room as he laid a hand on Gideon’s shoulder. “We were beginning to think you’d left us.”

  “Not yet,” he tried to say, but something plastic and cumbersome covered his nose and mouth. An oxygen mask. He breathed in, exhaled, heard the hiss it made. The blood moved sluggishly in his veins. He felt the labored pump of his own heartbeat and knew death hovered near.

  Jakome pulled his chair closer to the edge of the bed, his dark eyes steady on Gideon’s face, full of concern. “Kate found my number and called me. My psychic ties to you are frayed, my friend. I had no idea you were sick. I flew in last night from Montana, barely got here before the sun popped up and could roast me to a nice medium rare.”

  Gideon wanted to laugh. Death…the perfect hostess. It had introduced him to Jakome when they were novice nightwalkers, and now it drew them back together, banishing the injurious past as though time had never fallen away from them. It filled Gideon with a strange peace to have his long-estranged friend at his bedside, seeing him off on a final passage he’d never thought would come. Death was a much-maligned blessing. Didn’t all men broach that moment of realization as they stood at the threshold of its embrace?

  Jakome grasped his hand, his expression suddenly fierce, as though he read Gideon’s musings. “Listen to me, brother. I haven’t loved many people in my endless life, but you, Gideon Renaud…I have loved you. And you know what they say. Love is the great redeemer. Through love, all things are possible.”

  Words of the Franciscan. Did the Basque, this iniquitous creature of the dark, know whom he quoted?

  Tears glistened on Jakome’s lashes, and he was unashamed. He’d never been afraid to show his emotions. His propensity for affection and honesty was one of the threads that bound him and Gideon at the heart. “Once I was told that nightwalkers couldn’t experience such a phenomenon. So what is this warmth and comfort I feel when I think of you, Gid? The many times we traveled the world together, talked and laughed and shared…the memories heal me time and again. We shared myriad lifetimes, my friend. Impossible or not, I have loved you. And now I sit here and ask your forgiveness for my stubborn silence these past years. For invading your home and shaking the balance of your life. For threatening the careful joy you’d cultivated. Out of misguided good intentions, I became your enemy in that window of time, and now I want to take it back. Forgive me, Gideon. And stay.”

  Gideon swallowed, his lashes sliding closed to staunch the burning threat of emotion. When he opened his eyes, Jakome pressed his lips reverently to Gideon’s hand, then released it, and Martha’s dainty fingers quickly claimed it. She perched on the edge of his bed and busied herself straightening his covers.

  “You desperately need a shave,” she said flatly. “A beard doesn’t become you.”

  Gideon wanted to smile, but a spasm of agony fisted around his chest, stole his humor, swallowed his breath. For a second he drowned. Then he gasped in, and oxygen invaded his lungs, sweet relief. No pain in death, he mused. Only in the arduous trek to its door.

  Martha’s trembling voice brought his gaze back to her dear, familiar face. “I’ve been with you for nearly forty years, Mr. Renaud. It didn’t take me long to figure out there was something very strange about you. And even when you tried to explain your secrets to me, I didn’t want to hear them. The truth is, I loved you madly. I was frightened by the duality of your life. But the one blessing that’s come out of it is knowing you would never die and leave me.”

  Her voice cracked; she removed her glasses, wiped them on the hem of her sensible skirt. He wanted to comfort her; he wondered if she read it in his eyes. “You’re supposed to live forever, Gideon. I’ve counted on you to see me out of this world when my time came, and here I sit, and all I can do…” She stopped, her throat working as she regained composure. “All I can do is tell you to your beautiful face how much I love you. How I’ve always loved you.” Leaning closer, she whispered against his ear, “Love is the great redeemer, dear man. Through love, all things are possible.”

  Gideon’s gaze darted from her face to the others. The edict. The words of the Franciscan. They understood.

  Along with Jakome and Martha, Kate was there, standing by Jude on the opposite side of the bed. Jude towered over her, and his arm encircled her shoulder. They wouldn’t abandon each other now, Gideon thought driftingly. Their bond was true. He would leave his son in loving hands. His fine, honorable boy, who’d surprised him a million times in the last weeks with his integrity and maturity in the face of the mess Gideon had made of their lives.

  Jude sat at the foot of the bed, his dark gaze piercing as he studied his father’s face. “Dad, you’ve always had a stockpile of the right things to say at times like this. Now that you can’t talk, I wish I’d listened. I don’t have your talent with words. But I’m asking you to listen to me.” He scooted closer and grasped Gideon’s left hand, careful of the IV line. “Kate and I read the priest’s book backward and forward last night. Nothing in it said that you would last this long after drinking from the vial. Something’s keeping you here with us, Dad. And if you try, if you know how much we want you to stay, and you fight…I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll live like you have. I’ll forget what Delilah showed me and do whatever it takes to be the man you are. I’m already trying, but I can’t do it without you.”

  His chin trembled and he bowed his head. “I’ve been a real pill, and I’ve done things to hurt you. But please, Dad. I need you. I need you to show me how to do this the right way, because it’s so easy to go wrong. Don’t leave me here alone. I’m not ready.” He sat in silence filled with the hiss of the oxygen mask, tears dripping on his hand as it clutched Gideon’s. Then, getting to his feet, he leaned and pressed his lips against his father’s forehead. “Love’s the great redeemer, Dad,” he said, voice quaking. “Through love, all things are possible.”

  Emotion swelled in Gideon’s chest, pushing the words he wanted to speak to his throat, but they wouldn’t come. All he could do was watch his family as they quietly left the room. The man in him wanted to follow. But his soul seemed to have other plans, as though sensing this ailing body was a precarious place to stay.

  Soon only Kate remained. Gingerly, she stretched out beside him on the bed and propped herself on her elbow to look at him. “Did you know, Gideon, that one of your rosebushes is still alive? We potted it for you and brought it here so you could watch it.”

  His eyelids shot open and his gaze darted to the bedside table. A small, strag
gly rosebush sat in a plastic pot by the lamp. It held no blossoms, no scent, just thorny, brittle branches…and a single sprig of sweet new growth, a tiny crimson-black stirring of promise.

  He looked back at Kate, found her watching him. “Now that I have a captive audience, I have a story to tell you.” Her cool palm rested on his cheek, her gaze holding his. “Once there was a woman, a man, a boy, and a castle. And secrets,” she said, stroking his hair. “And ghosts. But the strongest presence among them was love. The woman loved the man and the boy and their castle, even with its secrets and ghosts. But unlike your typical gutsy heroine, she got freaked out a few too many times by the spooky stuff. Eventually—and stupidly—she ran away.”

  Tears filled her eyes, but she brushed them away and offered him a watery smile. “While she was gone, the man did something very foolish, but also very brave. He drank a magic potion to save his soul, and it made him terribly ill. But it brought the woman back, and she arrived just in the nick of time. She had nothing to offer but love to heal him, but it was enough. They all lived happily ever after. And do you know why?”

  The oxygen mask hissed as he drew in a choked breath, and he blinked away the salty moisture that clung to his lashes. She broke his heart like no one else.

  “Because…” She cleared the huskiness from her throat. “Because love is the great redeemer, my darling. Through love, all things are possible. In every good story. In our story.”

  Leaning over him, she pressed trembling lips to his forehead, and Gideon heard the thunder of her pulse, the desperate surge of blood pushed by hope.

  He lifted a hand to remove the oxygen mask, but his strength failed him. Kate seemed to understand, and gently moved it above his head. “What is it?”

  “Marry me,” he mouthed.

  A laughing sob slipped from her lips. “I’ll marry you and drown you in love and joy and…and…oh, Gideon. Jude and I…we think you can heal. We’ve prayed. We’ve bargained with God and each other and you, even while you were unconscious. What more can we do? The rest is up to you. Get well, my love. Come back to me.”