Eternal Blood - Books 1-3 Wolf Shield, Sword of the Blood, Vampire Bride

by Maria Isabel Pita

  Seating himself cross-legged across from her, Jonathan picked up a shrimp and slipped it between her lips. “I love putting things in your mouth.”

  They tucked into the food but her mind kept chewing on recent events and doing its best to make her feel guilty about how relaxed and happy she was despite the fact that her best friend was missing. There was no rational evidence to indicate Falkon had anything to do with it but in her heart she was sure he was, indeed, responsible for Aapti’s disappearance.

  “Jonathan?”

  He refilled her wine glass. “Yes?”

  “Does the military secretly send psychics off to war with the troops? I mean, was helping people… realize they were dead, then helping them move on… were these your actual official duties?”

  He tore himself another piece of bread. “What do you think?”

  “You never know what the government might be up to…”

  He smiled grimly. “I served as a physician.”

  She almost felt sick with relief and had to stop eating for a minute. He hadn’t killed anyone! He had helped save lives! And souls.

  “Wars are wrong no matter their cause,” he added, wiping his hands clean with an intensity that seemed more related to the conversation than the little bit of olive oil glistening on his fingertips, “yet they’ll remain inevitable until humanity has evolved to the point where no one will be forced to defend himself against anyone else's aggression. You should know, Audrey, that ‘we have reached a point in our evolution where we must evolve spiritually if we are to survive. Our individual spiritual elevation is not the central issue. What’s important now is our collective spiritual evolution.”(8)

  She met his eyes and dared to say exactly what she was thinking even though it was completely over the top, “I feel like you’re my guardian angel.”

  “That’s sweet,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Let’s take a shower.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Walking in the garden, she came upon the terrible sight of a bird caught in a large spider’s web. Helplessly, she watched its desperate struggle. When it finally broke free, the intensity of her relief and joy were so great, she woke up.

  Jonathan was gone.

  Sitting up, she looked around her and saw no evidence he had ever been there. She flung off the covers and ran to the door. The tray he had set back out in the hall was no longer there. Consuelo must have returned for it; she would be able to confirm Jonathan had been here. Her own naked body was proof she hadn’t imagined last night; when she was alone she invariably wore a t-shirt to bed. She was having a panic attack, and that was no way to start a day during which anything could happen, literally. It was imperative she get a hold of herself. First things first—get dressed and head downstairs. Darlene would tell her where Jonathan was. After all, they communicated telepathically, didn’t they?

  As she washed up, Audrey struggled not to feel hurt and abandoned. It wasn’t reasonable to expect normal rules of behavior to apply to a man who could transform himself into a wolf or a falcon and God knew what else. She spit out her mouthwash as she giggled (just a tad hysterically) wondering if he’d flown away.

  On a misty day and by firelight it was much easier to believe in angels and vampires than on a beautiful sunny morning like the one confronting her now. The cheerful weather belied the dark fact that Aapti was still missing; when she checked her cell phone there were no calls, much less a message from her friend assuring her she was all right and safely at home with her husband. Nevertheless, she tried Aapti’s mobile first and then her home number. Only answering services picked up. She left a message on her cell:

  “Aapti, it’s Audrey. Please call me the second you get this message! I’m worried sick about you!”

  Wearing black yoga pants, her black leather walking shoes and a black turtleneck sweater (serving the double purpose of keeping her warm and protecting her neck from attractive predators) she hurried downstairs.

  Darlene wasn’t in her office.

  Consuelo wasn’t in the kitchen.

  Something felt seriously wrong but she struggled not to panic. “Consuelo?!”

  There was no answer.

  Forcing herself not to run, she retraced her steps and left the house through the same door by which she and Jonathan had entered it yesterday. She headed straight for the hen houses hoping to run into Don collecting the day's eggs.

  She turned a corner on the path and stopped dead. She had to be dreaming. Where the coops were supposed to be all she saw were trees.

  Stubbornly, she kept walking, dread speeding up her pulse and burning twice as many calories as her cautious pace required. The cold-frame she had helped Don design was also missing even though last night she and Jonathan had eaten some of the spinach harvested from it. As far as she could tell, the grounds looked very much as they had before her mother disappeared.

  “Oh God.” Her voice failed to ring with deafening power around her but she had to be in the Dragon’s Breath, where Wilona was responsible for this three-dimensional painting of her former home as she remembered it.

  It was comforting to realize there was a mysterious logic even to magical events the intelligence of her heart could sort out. She glanced down at her chest. She was clutching her scarab amulet. She had still been wearing it when she woke up, otherwise completely naked. Darlene and Consuelo weren’t in the house because they hadn’t started working there until after Wilona disappeared… ran off with a vampire, to be precise.

  She stopped walking because there was no point moving any deeper into an illusion. Between the bare branches of trees, no animals were audible or visible. She longed for the site of a large black wolf but the forest was silent; lifeless. Her mother’s imaginative powers left a lot to be desired, or perhaps (and it was a truly chilling thought) they had faded over the years; become as stiff and cold as the corpse she would never be.

  “You can’t fool me, Wilona!” she yelled. “I’m stronger, much stronger, than you are!”

  It came as a slight blow to her confidence when nothing happened. But what had she expected, for the trees, sky and ground to begin fraying at the edges into colorful blocks, like a bad satellite connection or a damaged DVD? She had no idea what she was dealing with whereas Wilona had twenty-two years experience in this realm, for lack of a better term. The luminous crystal of her mother’s DNA was more skilled at interfacing with the Zero Point Field…

  She tried to stop thinking; she was confusing herself. Definitions weren’t what she needed; they couldn’t help her here. Her thoughts were akin to a pack of puppies, tugging her in all sorts of directions desperately seeking to define the limits of reality.

  Paradoxically, she braced herself on Falkon’s words. They actually proved helpful in silencing her mind and encouraging her to simply listen…

  She stared at the dark bare branches of an old oak tree framing patches of vivid blue sky… and she heard them… the colors spoke to her… the distinct way they vibrated against her visual cortex communicated to her that she was like that leafless tree waiting for Spring, when it would begin sprouting leaves to capture sunlight and produce the sugar which would flow down through the trunk as water flowed up from the earth…

  It was imperative she find the sun inside herself. If she kept behaving as though she was standing alone in objective space waiting for something to happen, she might conceivably be there for centuries. She had to make something happen. Her heart was beating magnetized light through her body and creating the corporeal senses currently defining her perceptions… but not her consciousness… her consciousness was the environment itself, the space where time came into existence and everything happened…

  These flashes of insight came to her distinctly out of the silence as though by “listening” to it she had opened a mysterious doorway. More than once she had tried to get into the habit of meditating but had given up every time because she found it impossible to turn off her inner monologue. But that wasn’t the point,
she now realized. The point was to consciously filter the synaptic small-talk and concentrate on the real voice inside her—like tuning out the myriad random conversations of a restless audience and focusing on the speaker, on the Presence playing on the mental stage of her incarnation yet addressing her from the dark wings of the universe…

  I have to find my own sun, she thought, the sun inside me…

  She saw Merlin running toward her along the path.

  “My boy!” She crouched down and he flung himself into her arms, panting and joyfully licking her face and lips.

  Wake up!

  She moaned and opened her eyes as Jonathan kissed her, pressing his mouth hard against hers. His naked body had been pinning hers down against the mattress, but now he pushed himself up on his elbows and stared down at her. “When there are vampires in your life,” he said sternly, “it’s dangerous to oversleep. You drank some of Falkon’s blood, didn’t you?”

  “I thought it was wine…”

  “That’s the first time you’ve lied to me, Audrey. I hope.”

  “I was dreaming? I was sure I was awake and in the Dragon’s Breath again.”

  “That’s why we’ll be sleeping together from now on.”

  “That’s why?” She frowned. “Really?”

  He rolled off her.

  “I’m sorry!” She turned and snuggled up against his chest. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  “But you did.” He bent his arms against the pillow and rested his head in his hands, not looking at her. “She did.”

  “I’m Audrey Goodrich,” her tone was imperious, “no one else!”

  “If you insist on believing that, we’ve already lost the battle. I might as well deliver you into Falkon’s hands and have done with it.”

  “What?” She sat up and stared at him aghast, scarcely able to believe what he had said. “Would you really do that?”

  “Memories are going to begin surfacing, Audrey.” He continued staring up at the ceiling. “You have to be ready to feel things and react in ways you normally wouldn’t. Think of it as fighting an illness accompanied by a high fever. When you’re sick, you’re weak, not as strong as you normally are, and a fever makes you even more vulnerable. You have to stay cool but also warm and protected. It’s important you control your emotions by separating yourself from them so they don’t burn you up. It’s also vital you surround yourself with people you love and who love you.”

  “I love you, Jonathan.”

  Still not looking at her, he said, “Come here.”

  Gratefully she lay down beside him again and rested one of her cheeks against his chest. “I’m afraid!” she whispered.

  “I know you are.”

  “You make it sound as though I’m going to be possessed by this other woman… this other me.”

  “You have to face her.”

  “But she lived centuries ago. Haven’t I been reborn at least a few times since then and paid most of my Karmic debt?”

  “Maybe, and that’s why we’re together again, but the point is to consciously grasp how all your actions through the centuries still resonate in the present. Only by doing so will you be able to rise above your emotions and-”

  “But I don’t want to stop feeling things.”

  “Did you stop feeling for Merlin when you trained him not do certain things and reprimanded him when he disobeyed you?”

  “No…”

  “Do you deliberately run outside when its pouring rain and lightning is flashing?”

  “No…”

  “Think of your emotions as weather fronts and your feelings as the atmosphere in which they manifest and your awareness of this process—your consciousness—as the infinite space beyond it.”

  “I like that…”

  “It’s not just a metaphor. The point of this exercise is simple: you need to forgive yourself. I know what you’re going to say, but you’re wrong. There are many things you feel guilty about and every stab of guilt you suffer, no matter how superficial, drains your heart’s blood and makes you love yourself, and therefore everyone else, just a little bit less, and right now we desperately need to love ourselves. Humanity has to believe it deserves to survive or it won’t find the strength or the willpower necessary to fight for its soul—planet earth, which is both a living organism and the seed of our divinity.”

  She sighed. “Whenever I hear about oil spewing into the ocean and destroying entire ecosystems forever, I feel dirty inside. I feel something similar whenever I think about that evil woman I once was. It seems to me evil is blind, heartless selfishness. Corporations are like vampires bleeding the world dry of all its resources while caring only for their own eternal life even though it’s completely divorced from life.”

  “It’s people who create and run corporations, there’s no reason they can’t have souls, but it’s true, most of them don’t.”

  “Consciously, I don’t feel guilty about my lifestyle, I refuse to, but deep down I think I feel guilty because I refuse to feel guilty and have no intention of giving up all the comforts and pleasures made possible by the oil-based, environmentally destructive society I live in.”

  “Guilt is a waste of time. What you need to do is make an effort to ensure your pleasures become sustainable, an attitude which will also serve to deepen and expand what you consider pleasurable.”

  “Oh I know! If you’ve never grown your own food, you have no idea how pleasurable it can be, not to mention how much better it tastes because you pick it when it’s ripe and not green since you don’t have to worry about it staying fresh in trucks and warehouses for weeks!”

  “You would make a terrible vampire.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But seriously, my love, when you nurture hope in your heart, you encourage your ego to take positive actions. Emotions of guilt and hopelessness provide us with excuses to continue behaving in a lazy fashion, both personally and socially.”

  She had a hard time hearing anything after “my love” but she knew what he said was true. He fell silent and she lay contentedly listening to his heart beating loudly in her ear, steadily and tirelessly pumping blood through his body. A single drop of his blood contained his complete and unique DNA. Blood was a mysterious transmission of information, of light, flowing through the magical engine of his heart… the engine of a Divine force becoming incarnate…

  Information is patterns of energy, to which we give meaning. A curiously androgynous voice spoke clearly somewhere in her head. Intelligence is the ability to receive, manage and use information.

  “Jonathan,” her open eyes widened as she realized, or thought she realized, what had just happened, “did you just communicate something to me telepathically?”

  “Yes, Audrey.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘information is patterns of energy, to which we give meaning. Intelligence is-”

  “I don’t believe it!” She sat up again, astonished. “I actually heard you!”

  He smiled but looked at her almost sadly.

  “I shouldn’t be so surprised, should I? You must feel like a parent with a child.”

  He glanced down at her breasts. “Hardly.”

  When he met her eyes again she stared straight into them, focusing on the black holes of his pupils. Am I contaminated now because I drank Falkon’s blood? It was only a drop!

  His receptors will attempt to influence yours, just don’t let them.

  “But I still don’t know what receptors are.”

  It isn’t our cells’ protein receptors but what actives them that’s responsible for our individual identity. ‘Each cell’s unique set of Identity receptors are located on the membrane’s outer surface, where they act as “antennas” downloading complementary environmental signals. These Identity receptors read a signal of self, which does not exist within the cell but comes to it from the external environment… Your identity is an environmental broadcast’.(6) The cells composing your
body can be likened to a broadcast network downloading the same show—you. The cell’s receptors are like millions of satellite dishes receiving, processing and manifesting your “self”. ‘Your identity is a complex signature contained within the vast Information that collectively comprises the environment’.(7)

  “Oh my God. Are you saying that by drinking a mere a drop of Falkon’s blood, I’ve given him the power to change my channels, to alter how I feel and perceive things?”

  He sat up and put his arms around her. “You’ll be all right, trust me.”

  “I handed him my remote control!” She laughed, bitterly. “How could I have been so weak? So stupid?”

  “Even if he does threaten to drive you crazy with his channel surfing,” he tilted her face up to his so she could see he was smiling, “just remember it’s you he’s playing with. He can make things look darker and plague you with seductive ads, but you don’t have to buy into what he’s selling—re-runs of your past life together in a modern setting.”

  She felt profoundly reassured by his smile, which made light of the whole sinister situation. His smile warmed her heart and told her that taking the matter seriously in hand wasn’t synonymous with being afraid, on the contrary.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was difficult to believe the sun had risen, and impossible to imagine a drearier day. At least it wasn’t raining when they set out, properly fortified by Consuelo, who had prepared a breakfast fit for a royal couple. Audrey was glad of the calories; the damp cold gnawed at her bones even through her coat. She was getting old. Centuries ago—when she had been that other person and girls had married almost as soon as they began bleeding—a thirty-year-old woman had been considered ancient.

  “Jonathan, how old was I when… you killed me?”

  They were walking side-by-side and hand-in-hand but he didn’t look at her as he said, “You already know that.”

  She considered his response for a grim moment before asking, “Is that why Falkon waited until my mother was thirty before he approached her, or appeared to her, or whatever?”