by Billi Jean
Isobel brought me here, an outsider, to her most sacred place.
He surveyed her again and couldn’t believe he’d ever thought her evil. Isobel had unwittingly opened a window to her mind when she had taken his blood or perhaps when she’d shoved Christian’s mind at him. She was not evil. She did not kill for revenge or madness, she killed for something else.
He dared to reach down and run his hand along her silky hair. He’d kissed her, tasted the flavor of her mouth and nearly drowned in her. Sharing his blood had been the most satisfying thing he’d ever done in his life. He’d given to her, the necessary blood for her to survive. Along the way, he’d gotten a glimpse of how blazing hot claiming her would be. She’d turned soft and needy in his arms. It had startled him so badly he’d been unable to comprehend the speed of her—and his—reversal from suspicion and distrust to an absolute staggering level of arousal.
Swallowing painfully, he rose and walked away. Just thinking of how right she’d felt in his arms—awake—still blindsided him. He found a desk, spying money in several currencies, an iMac notebook, and a dozen scrolls held down by whatever she could find, on the large smooth surface.
Not willing to wake her to ask what he needed to know, nor to sit and wait, he wrote a quick note to her that he would return soon, and left it, propped up on her notebook so she would see it upon waking.
Without another glance, he sent himself far afield, seeking Rowan, where he knew once there had been a place, high in the mountains, that the Vampire had sought solace.
Chapter Sixteen
It was nearly dawn by the time Bryson experienced a shock and realized that, below him, he felt the presence of another Vampire. He ventured closer, letting his being become clear as he materialized near the side of the mountain’s highest peak. He settled on an icy ledge. He breathed deeply, sensing awareness, but no barrier to his entering the other Vampire’s home.
“Rowan. I come in time of great need. It is important I speak with you.”
Silence, then, when he considered saying more, the wall in front of him cracked. A slit grew wider as the cliff slid backward to reveal an entrance.
“Come unharmed into my home, Captain MacAfee.”
A man stepped partially out of the gloom. If Bryson hadn’t known Aidan was nowhere near this place, he would have assumed his king had beaten him here. The man walked closer and revealed a jaw covered with a short beard shot through with gray. His hair was tied back at his nape away from a classical Roman face.
Bryson went to one knee and crossed his arm over his chest in the formal greeting to his king’s uncle. “Rowan, I have need of your wisdom.”
“Wisdom.” Rowan laughed softly but reached out and gripped Bryson’s hand, helping him to his feet. “There is no bowing to me, Bryson. I am no better, nor, I hope, worse than you. Come, though, it is not often I receive guests, and I am curious after all this time, why two have come to seek my council.”
Bryson followed him as he spoke, only pausing when his words registered. The entrance led to a spacious room that was cut with light from the high slits in the mountain above them. The room was much like his own study in all of his homes. Bookcases lined the walls past twenty feet and higher in places. Between the books were items tucked away from centuries past. There was no evidence of anything from this century, no computer, no wires, no electricity at all, just a giant hearth and candles, oddly enough of purple wax, spaced throughout the room.
“May I ask who your other visitor was, Rowan?”
Rowan smiled and poured two glasses of dark red wine. After handing him one goblet, he then lifted his own glass. “A young boy. Remarkable lad, really. He brought me this.” Rowan picked up a cell phone, an Apple iPhone 6. “Not much use, since I don’t have the means to run it. He advised me that I would be helping a friend if I had it.”
“A boy?” Bryson sat down, heavily unaware he’d done so until it registered he was looking up at Rowan. “A boy named Faolan.”
“Aye, Faolan.” Rowan sat and rested his arms on the back of the well-worn velvet couch. “He is an unusual boy. You are this friend, I assume, he spoke of?”
“I am a friend. He has quite a few, so I could be the one, but…”
“Ah, I can see that about him. He makes friends easily. He promised he would come back to see me. Said I needed to return to this century. Can you imagine that?” He laughed. “What does my cousin think of him?”
“Aidan thinks him unusual. But he believes the boy can walk on water.”
“We all can. It’s the lightness of our bodies if we were to lose the connection with this form and simply allow the earthly confinement to go… Oh, I see, you are merely saying he can do no wrong.”
Bryson sipped his wine. It was good, an aged vintage that spoke of oak barrels and fields ripe with grapes drenched in the scents of wild rosemary and subtle bursts of mint. Rowan had been someone he’d rarely seen, let alone spoken to back before the troubles. Sitting with him now, he was reminded of a festival where he’d once shared a table with an elder. He had been the same as he was now, slightly long-winded and lost in thought, or else his own thoughts far more than he was present in the conversation. He’d chalked it up to being ancient, now he wondered if it wasn’t part of Rowan’s personality.
“It’s good, is it not?”
“It is.”
“Ah, but you have weighty matters on your mind. Much I sense is troubling you.”
“Why did you come here and leave our world, our people behind?”
Rowan lifted his brow again but studied his wine glass pensively. “It is difficult to accept the animals too many of our kind have become. Worse than animals, rather, for animals seek only to kill to survive, while our kind often kill for nothing more than the pleasure. We were worse than the Romans with their bloodthirsty masses watching the gladiators. At least those brave warriors were granted their freedom after they had survived many battles. We, too, often piled on our kills, one upon the other.”
Bryson sighed and closed his eyes. He agreed. Too many times he agreed. “Aidan is stopping that now.”
“Now. But he will struggle and struggle, for what? The world is becoming increasingly smaller. Vampires are mixing with other species now and not just in children, but in pacts. Such children are glorious, are they not? The pacts between one evil creature and another are not. But such alliances exist. Such children exist. There is nothing I can do, nor Aidan, to stop it.”
“Children of mixed heritage are not evil.”
Rowan waved his hand in the air dismissively. “I never said they were, Bryson. But at one time they were forbidden, as were alliances with other species.”
“Aidan makes alliances, and they are not evil. They are strengthening us.”
Rowan exhaled heavily. “He sees it this way. You see it this way, but not all will. Have you studied the split in the wolf pack?”
“Yes.” Bryson knew where this was going. He had heard the rumors of how the Houses would be better off without Aidan. How Aidan was dragging them into battles they had no business fighting. The whispers that no alliances should be allowed, good or evil, was louder than a whisper now. If he scratched the surface he would find the men and women who Isobel had killed at the heart of it all. “Alrick is having a difficult time. Aidan is as well. Change is not always welcome, nor is it wanted. But change has to come otherwise our kind will become so blackened by evil there will be no more of us left who understand we are not.”
Rowan set the goblet down next to him and picked up a tome, at least five inches thick made of ancient parchment with a burgundy leather cover scrolled in gold. “Are you familiar with the Book of Ages, Bryson?”
He was about to laugh and respond such a thing was merely myth, but Rowan studied him carefully, as if expecting such a response.
“The Book of Ages was given to our forefathers to guide us through the changes that would occur in us as the centuries past. It is said to hold the key to our existence, as wel
l as the truth of why we were created.”
“Ah, you are a scholar. I thought you were, what with your manners and intelligent eye, but one never knows what can hide behind etiquette. Yes,” he went on crisply. “This is that book. And some of what you have learned is true… Unfortunately most is merely myth. The book does foretell some of the changes that will occur within our people. That is what I find curious. While I might have sought solitude, I did not forsake our people. On the contrary, I have watched and witnessed recent events, and measured them to the foretelling in this book. I fear that now, this age, our existence is swinging on a pendulum, Bryson. And that pendulum will either slice our line across the throat or it will cut from us those cancerous growths that would rot us from the inside out.”
Bryson didn’t know what to say.
“She. She will do this.” He opened the book and flipped through the pages, stopping at one and turned the book to face Bryson.
In front of him was Isobel, her hair blowing in an unseen wind, her face frozen in beauty, while behind her a cape flowed outward, and at her back a man stood, his shoulders bunched as if prepared to attack.
“Isobel?”
“Yes. Study it. What do you see?”
He turned back to the page, running a hand over the parchment. Above Isobel’s head hung a moon, bright white, with dark clouds masking its beauty. In her left hand she held a bloody heart. In her right hand, on a beaded chain, she held a key. At her feet the artist had drawn a body of a man, his arms crossed in death, but holding a sword and knife. Alongside the warrior a woman, also dead, clung to him as if she had crawled to him in her time of need. A small, barely noticeable babe’s hand reached out from where she cradled it, and touched the fingertips of some spiritual being.
“What do you see, Bryson?”
“I have no idea, Rowan.” He shook his head, unsure what to say. “Have you shown this to Aidan?”
“Aidan has forgotten me.” Rowan tapped the top of the page. “This is Isobel. This is her bonded, you. You are at the center. Her brother is at her feet, his bride at his side with his child in her arms. Above her left shoulder is my uncle, held down by a group of six, and on her right shoulder—”
“I stand.”
“Yes. You stand.”
“Why is Aaron held down by these others? Did they hold him down while she tortured him? Then killed him?” It made sense. She had been too young and much too weak to have killed an ancient.
“Have you asked her this question?”
He lifted his gaze to Rowan’s. There was no anger there, no horror that Bryson had hidden her from his cousin, the woman responsible for killing a member of their family.
“I do not judge you, Bryson. Above all, you loved my uncle. And for his part, I believed you taught him much, but even you realize that Aaron was set in his ways. His thinking was that any muddying of the blood line had to be stopped. You know that he sentenced Jorge to death for bonding and fathering a child with a witch.”
Bryson sat away from him. “That is not why Jorge died. He killed humans. He murdered an entire village!”
Rowan shook his head. “That is not true, Bryson. You were away. A campaign against the Wolves, I believe. You were not there when he passed judgment, but you must have heard the truth from Aaron.”
“I did hear the truth from him.” He had gone to Aaron straight away. Isobel, he had waited to go to, unsure of his welcome after such a thing had been done by her brother and by his king. But then it was too late. She had killed Aaron and set into motion the events he was even now living through.
“No, Bryson.” Rowan sighed and sat back, searching the room for something, Bryson didn’t know what. Eyes back on him, Rowan shook his head. “No, that was not what occurred.”
“I went to that village. I saw—”
“Oh, that village was burned. That was true. But it was not Jorge that went mad and killed those helpless people. That was rumor only, made up by members of the royal family to hide their guilt.”
Bryson’s mind blanked. “What? What are you saying?”
“It has been so long, but it is fitting that she has been found, that she has risen. It was not her brother that murdered every man, woman and child in that village, it was my brother. It was Gideon.”
Chapter Seventeen
Bryson felt as if he’d taken a mortal hit to his heart. She is innocent. Innocent.
Goosebumps shivered along his arms. She should hate me. Instead…his heart sped up. She came back for me. She kissed me. She… I thought the worst of her. I did not break her free and demand to know if she did this thing, instead I judged her guilty without hearing her side. We all did.
As they wanted. She wouldn’t have killed Aaron. She couldn’t have. She was strong but she could not have killed Aaron. She judged him correctly. It was right there in front of me, and I did not see it. “This means…” Bryson caught his breath, scenting the sweetness of Isobel. He turned and there she was.
“Rowan…” Isobel stood in an arched doorway, face white as a sheet, staring at Rowan. Her eyes were too big in her small face, the dark color catching and reflecting the candlelight. “You are…alive?”
Bryson could clearly hear what else she had not said ‘You did not save me? Come to my aid? Protect me?’
At Isobel’s question, Bryson watched Rowan grimace and rise to his feet. Bowing his head slowly, he pressed his arm over his chest, hand over his heart. “I was…delayed. If I had but been there, I might have stopped him. If I could have truly read the future, I would have stopped him, and the events that followed. This I swear.”
“I trusted you! I went to you, but you were not there. You were gone. As was everyone that could have saved Jorge! Gone! And then…” She gasped and clutched her stomach, as if hurt. “Then it was done. So quickly, done.” Tears, large, wet paths of pain etched down her face. The outward display of such pain hurt him to watch. “They were so happy, then just like that, it was ripped from them.”
Rowan moved before Bryson could think what to do. At Isobel’s side, Rowan touched her shoulder and she leaned into him. The elder embraced her as a father would his daughter. “I know. I was…” He ducked his head, pressing it to her hair. “Detained.”
She pulled away from him and clutched the front of his shirt to stare up at him. Desperation reflected on her face, slowly it eased and more tears fell. “You were taken?” She reached up and touched a thicker white streak of hair by his left temple. “Where?”
Rowan exhaled. “It was long ago. I found my way out and discovered I was in Jerusalem, of all places.”
A laugh from her, then more tears. “He did this to you. Gideon.”
“Yes. He did this. He beckoned to me, calling me in on a false need. I fell in his trap as nicely as he could want. But it is not I that suffered, is it? Not alone. But now, now you must heal. Did I rise from my desolation and seek out death from Gideon?”
“Did you?” Bryson asked.
Isobel glanced at him then Rowan.
“I tried,” Rowan admitted with a laugh. “I couldn’t find him. I had no idea of the loss of Jorge, not until it had passed into ancient history. I came here, unsure where to go in a world that had left me behind.”
“But Aidan, he would have welcomed you,” Bryson argued.
“Would he? He was gone himself, hidden away, not far, but still, alone but for a few. I was old, alone, and had lost all those that mattered to me. I was a Dragon Master, Bryson, and had lost everyone one of my order when Isobel was taken.”
“They killed them,” she whispered. “They came during the day and staked them down and drained them, much like they did to Jorge.”
Bryson sat again, feeling like his whole world had been ripped to shreds. “I knew you were not evil. I knew you had not killed Aaron for no reason.”
“You did not. You thought I was evil, a monster,” she argued.
“I was told you were, but here, where such things matter little, I knew,” he shouted
and jabbed at his chest. He’d jumped to his feet without realizing it. “Why else did I go to the chamber, if not take you from that death?”
“You sent me to that death!” She fisted her hands on her hips, apparently ready to tear his head off otherwise with the tiny things.
“Children, should we—”
“Quiet, Rowan,” he snarled, moving until he was right in front of her. “This time you will listen to me!”
“I have always listened to you,” she whispered in an angry tone. “Yours was the first voice I heard upon waking. It was you that sent me to my death, Bryson. You.”
“Now, now, Isobel, if I could lend some advice here, perhaps he was struck by—”
“No, Rowan!” She snapped her attention immediately back to Bryson once the elder held his hands up, much as Faolan had, and moved to the other side of the room, only then murmuring about getting more wine.
Suddenly alone, nearly, with her, Bryson didn’t know what to say. She was right.
I sent her to her death.
But I also went to her, to take her away from that painful death.
He had planned it out, several times, what he would say to her if he could, but each time everything he came up with was useless in the face of what he’d done—what she had done.
Only she hadn’t done half of what he thought.
“I went to you, forsaking my king, my oaths, to save you, not to have you argue with me and split hairs over my deeds. I am not perfect. I am far from it, but I am not your enemy, Isobel!” He dared to reach out and grip her arms and hold her in place, even though she hadn’t moved. “I have never been your enemy. If anything I have made mistakes, but I have not done those thinking you were anything other than a woman who did something terrible in reaction to something equally terrible.”
