The Rhiannon Chronicles

by Maggie Shayne

  I scrambled to my feet, dizzy as hell, and pushed myself around the corner to the other side of the building. Several armed men converged near the explosion, helping the truck’s driver to the ground, their rifles aiming around them as they herded him inside. I had mere seconds before they would discover me. Zipping up the side of the building toward the front, I paused at the corner with my back to the wall, and peered around.

  When I saw them, I swore my blood turned to ice. There, standing in the middle of the front lawn were three small children—Nikki, flanked by Ramses and Gareth. They stood there in the dead of night, calm and still and completely defenseless while bullets rained all around them from the rooftop. Fear such as I’d never felt before wrapped around me like a deadly constrictor.

  Little tufts of grass exploded around the children, shocking me out of my stillness. I shot toward them as fast as I could run, opened my mouth to shout at them to get down, but my voice seemed frozen in my throat. I saw little Nikki clasp her brother’s hands, close her eyes. And then they vanished. Just rippled and disappeared. Muzzle flashes from the roof were like strobes in the darkness and the deafening shots were fired in such close succession that they sounded like machine gun fire. I veered to the nearest cover I saw, the sign on the front lawn, and I crowded my body against it.

  Nikki! Ramses and Gareth! What in the name of Isis are you doing here?

  Don’t be mad, Nikki returned, speaking to me mentally, and just as proficiently as we vampires did with one another. I did the Glamourie, she told me, using the name I called my invisibility spell. She’d seen me do it twice. Apparently that was enough. They can’t even see us, she went on, sounding very pleased with herself.

  We came to help you save Roland. That was the voice of Gareth, the gentle one.

  Bullets peppered the ground between me and the place where I’d last seen the three children. I clung to my only scrap of cover, calling upon the old gods to protect them. Do not move. Being invisible will not stop bullets. Stay perfectly….

  I heard glass shattering, and dared to peer around the sign just in time to see several vampires hurling themselves through a broken window. One was dear and familiar, and landed unevenly on the ground. He lifted his head. I saw his face and my heart contracted in my chest. “Roland!”

  "Rhiannon!" He hopped rapidly toward me as the others scattered, propelling himself wildly on his one leg. His prosthetic was nowhere in sight, and one of his eyes seemed oddly swollen.

  In the mere seconds it took for him to reach me, I was certain that I was about to see my only love shot down before my eyes. But he kept coming, somehow dodging the bullets that hit the earth all around him, and then he was stumbling into me, holding me, his arms crushing me to him, my face buried against his chest. “My love, my love, my love,” he said, one hand in my hair.

  Tipping my head up, I kissed his face, chin, jaw, neck. “Thank the gods I’ve got you back. I was so afraid—but Roland, the children are—”

  Before I finished, they were there beside us, crowding in and wriggling their way between my beloved and me. Nikki had lost her grip on the spell, so they were once again visible. She was telling Roland excitedly how she and her brothers had managed to stow away in the belly of Roxanne’s small yellow airplane to get here, and how she’d blocked their energy from me the whole time.

  So very proud of herself, the willful little thing.

  I adored her.

  A cessation of gunfire, followed by wild clattering sounds drew my attention, and I looked around the sign to see rifles flying from the rooftop, landing in the grass, flipping and bouncing, one after another.

  “It’s Sheena!” Ramses cried, pointing the opposite direction, toward the perimeter fence.

  Turning, I saw the seventeen-year-old Offspring we’d named Sheena standing just outside the fence and moving her hands as if she was grabbing each rifle and flinging it herself. And she was, I realized. But not by actually touching them. Her brother Wolf was beside her.

  Relief washed over me so powerfully that my knees weakened with it. The two had jumped overboard to try to follow Devlin when he’d left The Anemone and until that very moment, I’d had no idea whether they’d even survived. Devlin was here, so apparently, the twins were with him. And I would let him know, very soon, what I thought of him dragging the teens into harm's way. But that would have to wait until we were all safe again.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, whispering harshly. “This is our chance. Everyone join hands.”

  The children obeyed. Roland smiled, his right eye barely open and watering as he slung one arm around me, and reached out with his other hand to clasp Ramses’. Gareth held my other hand, and Nikki climbed up onto my back, wrapping her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck to ride along.

  “By the power of three times three, I now evoke the Glamourie,” I said in a tone that I used only for magic. It was deeper and more resonant, my magical voice. And powerful, incredibly powerful.

  I felt it when we vanished, although because we were together within the spell, we could still see each other. It wasn't so much a spell of invisibility, but one of camouflage. We simply blended into our surroundings, chameleon-like.

  “Run, and when we reach the fence jump it and keep on running,” I said. “Now!”

  We burst out of the shelter of the sign, running as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast, since Roland could only hop on one leg. Still, we made it to the fence. A few shots were fired as we ran, presumably by men who still had hold of their rifles, but none were aimed at us, since they couldn’t even see us, and soon we were sailing over the barrier and dashing into the nearby woods.

  I released the spell as we moved deeper and deeper into the forest, and soon Lucas and Pandora came crashing out of the trees and straight into our path. Pandora lunged at Roland, hitting his chest with her paws so hard she knocked him flat on his back on the ground, then stood there upon his chest, touching his face repeatedly with her nose as if kissing him.

  “I will never get used to that,” Lucas said with a shake of his head. “Is everyone all ri—What the hell are you kids doing here?”

  Nikki shrugged innocently. The boys ignored him to fall into the pile of vampire and black leopard currently tussling on the ground. It was as close to an emotional hug as I had seen them come, though disguised as playful wrestling.

  “They stowed away in the cargo hold,” I told Lucas. “Have you heard from Maxine and Lou?”

  He nodded. "There’s a barn ten miles north on Highgrave Road. It’s safe, they said.”

  I nodded, then relayed the information mentally to Devlin. We have the Sevens and we’re clear. Get yourselves and the twins out of there. There’s a barn ten miles north on Highgrave Road. Meet us there. Do not be followed.

  Then I turned and reached out a hand for my love, who was lying on his back, accepting a welcome from an overly enthused big cat and two little boys.

  He reached through them all to let me help him up. “We have to go, children. It’s not safe here.” He glanced over his shoulder. “And yet, I sense no pursuit.”

  “Roland,” Lucas said, and when I looked his way, he was holding a long straight limb that had been stripped of its bark. It had a natural rounded knot on the top. Lucas held it out and said, "I had time to kill while waiting for you all, and I thought you could use a staff."

  Roland took it, thumping it on the ground to test its strength. “This is going to make my ten-mile trek much easier. Thank you, Lucas.”

  For the first time, I started to believe in the young man in a way I hadn’t before. Maybe he truly was sorry for his misguided choices in the past. Maybe he was genuinely on our side.

  Time, I supposed, would tell.

  “What’s up with your eye?” Lucas asked, then.

  “No idea. Let’s get out of here,” Roland said. He used the staff, walked up beside me, and put his free arm around my shoulders. My side pressed to his, I relished the feel of h
im, his nearness, and more than anything, the life force still burning within him. He was alive. And besides the painful looking eye, he seemed well, I thought, as I examined him both with my vision, and with my inner knowing. He seemed well. Almost. There was something...a shadow over his essence that gave me pause, but I refused to entertain the notion that anything was seriously wrong.

  Thank the gods.

  We walked away with our little troop, leaving DPI behind.

  I wished I could believe it would be forever.

  Chapter Seven

  Slowly, due to Roland’s impediment, we made our way to the abandoned barn Maxine and Lou Malone had located for us. It was lopsided and its boards were gray with age. Great patches of bare roof were exposed to the elements, where shingles had been blown away by storms or simply rotted with time. The door was made of wood planks, suspended by rollers from a track nailed to the barn itself. When I tugged it open it squealed in protest, and my hands came away with a few slivers.

  “Inside, children. We’ll be safe here for a little while. Hurry up now.”

  My three darlings ran past me into the barn, Lucas right behind them. My poor dear Roland brought up the rear, struggling a bit now, with his one leg and makeshift crutch. It had been a long walk.

  Only, it shouldn’t have been. Not for a vampire.

  Pandora was beside him. She’d been staying close to him, watching his every move. I wasn’t certain if she was worried for him or perhaps could smell the evil of DPI clinging to him in some way. She acted almost as if she didn’t trust him anymore.

  He met my eyes, and I could see his shame, his humiliation at being so weak, so slow. I pressed my hand to his cheek and said, “Don’t despair, my love. You’re free and we’re together again. Everything will come around as it should. Including your leg.”

  He nodded, but didn’t reply, and hobbled past me into the barn. Pandora looked up at me.

  “What is it, girl?” I would give a great deal if only my cat could talk to me, or if I could read her thoughts. I couldn’t. But we’d been together long enough that I could make a very good guess most of the time. I knew she was uneasy. Troubled.

  “Everything’s all right, my girl,” I told her, stroking her head.

  She sighed heavily, turned and went into the barn, her paws making no sound on the earth nor on the aging floorboards within.

  I gave a last look around with all of my senses, but I still felt no sign of pursuit. And that concerned me quite gravely. DPI should be chasing us, flattening the forest with their jack booted thugs and automatic weapons and tranquilizer darts.

  I looked to the sky as if it would send me an answer. But there was nothing. With one last sweep of the dark forest and winding dirt road, I went into the barn and closed the door.

  Max and Lou were standing on either side of Roland, clapping his shoulders and talking to him eagerly and too loudly, and then Maxine met my eyes over his shoulder, and came to me. “You did it!” The perky redhead had a gift for stating the obvious.

  “Did you truly doubt I would?”

  “Nope, not a bit.” Then she sent a worried look Roland’s way. “Is he all right?” she whispered, as if that might stop a vampire thirty feet away from hearing.

  “As all right as anyone could be after spending time in the hands of those beasts,” I told her. “And his hearing is as good as ever,” I added.

  “But his eye looks like hell.” She gave a sheepish grin. “We heard from Roxy. Those kids of yours are a handful.”

  “I haven’t addressed that particular offense yet,” I said. “I suppose they should be punished in some way....”

  “You think?”

  I shrugged. “If someone had tried to keep me from helping Roland, I’d have done the same. Or worse.”

  She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. “Are you sure they’re not genetically yours?”

  “Quite sure. Spiritually, though, I believe they were always meant to come to us.”

  She seemed touched by that, gazing at the children, who had discovered a mountain of hay in the rear of the barn and were climbing all over it like mountain goats. “So,” Max said, shifting her focus back to me, “if we’re going to get home before sunrise, we’ll need transportation back to the plane. It will take too long on foot.”

  “And do you have a suggestion for that?”

  “Wouldn’t’ve brought it up if I didn’t,” she said. “Lou and I are going to hike into town and rent a van. Won’t take us more than a couple of hours, which is a lot faster than we can all walk back to the plane.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you insist on doing so, you must use false names. I don’t want you and Lou implicated in any of this. DPI can make your lives hell.”

  “They tried to hire us, you know,” she said, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “To help track down vampires. Even suggested we inform them of any clients we suspected were in cahoots with you.”

  In cahoots? She was entirely too cute. “And what did you tell them?”

  “That we had too much private work to accept any government contracts. But we were flattered by their offer. The dirty bastards.” Then she turned away, our conversation over. “Lou, we’ve gotta make tracks.”

  Lou clapped Roland on the shoulder and said he’d see him later, and then the two of them headed out of the barn together, and to my surprise, Lucas got up to go with them. As he passed me, he said, “I know you trust them, and I know they’re good, but I just want to make sure no one spots them, follows them, nothing like that.”

  “I appreciate your vigilance,” I told him.

  With a nod, he left as well. I went to Roland, led him deeper into the barn, and urged him to sit on a bale of hay at the bottom of the mountain. “You need to rest,” I said. “You’re in pain. Is it your leg?”

  “My head, actually.” He gazed lovingly into my eyes. “It’s been throbbing incessantly. And I can’t see a thing from my right eye.”

  “The gods only know what they did to you while you rested. Your eye should’ve healed with the day sleep. Here, let me try to help with the headache, at least.” I worked myself around behind him and sat down on a bale a bit higher than his. My legs were on either side of him, my feet on the bale on which he sat. Sliding closer, so that my front pressed to his back, I began to massage his temples, calling up the healing magic I’d learned as a child.

  He sighed, leaning back against me. “I’m sorry my mood isn’t better. There were others there, captive vampires. I’m afraid I wasn’t as much help as I would’ve liked to have been in freeing them. Devlin did most of it, including rescuing a barely alive, possibly mad vampiress from the furthest cell.” He gazed toward the door. “I hope we hear from them soon. We shouldn’t have left them.”

  “Please. You were arrested without cause, held prisoner, torn from your family. Besides, we had to get the children out of there. Devlin can handle himself.”

  He nodded in agreement. “I should be elated, not short-tempered. I’m free. It’s over.” He sighed deeply, and I felt the tension easing from him beneath my gentle massage. “It’s finally sinking in, I think.”

  “Good. We’ll be out of here within a couple of hours and Lucas will fly us all back to Maine.” He groaned at the word “fly” but I only kissed the top of his head and kept on speaking. “We can stay with Maxine and Lou for a few days while we search for our new home. The place where we will raise Ramses and Gareth and Nikki.” I smiled at the thought. “I’m actually excited about the prospect of motherhood.”

  He nodded. “We’ll raise them to be good people, strong people, people who do not judge others based on their differences, but rather search for common ground.”

  “Hmm.”

  He twisted his neck to look up at me. “Go on. Say it.”

  “I’m hardly going to argue with you on our first night together again,” I told him.

  “But...?”

  I shrugged, turned his head forward again, then moved my thumbs just abo
ve his ears and spread my fingers over the top of his skull to rub small circles there. “I was rather thinking we would raise them to be strong. To know their own worth. To never allow themselves to be mistreated or wronged, and to be warriors in their own defense when necessary.”

  “I suppose we’ll find a compromise,” he said.

  I moved my hands to the back of his neck and the upper parts of his shoulders, driving a sigh of appreciation from his chest. “No compromise. You teach them diplomacy and tolerance, and I’ll teach them pride and empowerment. They’ll be very well-balanced children.”

  “I love the way your mind works,” he said softly.

  Then he sat up a little, and looking the children’s way, called them to him. The three had been tumbling from the top of the hay to the bottom like circus monkeys, but they came quickly when he called and stood before him, curious and attentive.

  Roland said, “I want you to know how grateful I am for your devotion, little ones. It means the world to me that you would risk your lives to come here and try to help free me.”

  “We didn’t risk anything,” Ramses said. “We’re stronger than they are.”

  “And we’re not little,” Nikki added.

  Gareth said, “We were afraid of what would happen if Rhiannon couldn’t save you by herself.”

  “I did have other help,” I reminded them.

  “Humans.” Ramses said it as if the very notion that they could help us had been ludicrous.

  “Nonetheless,” Roland went on. “You made some very bad decisions. If you’re going to have good lives for yourselves, you’re going to need to understand the difference between good decisions and bad ones. So I want to talk to you about that.”

  Gareth lowered his head and said, “I told you we shouldn’t have stuck those needles into Roxy and Christian.”

  “They wouldn’t have let us go if we hadn’t!” Nikki countered.

  Roland studied them one by one. “That doesn’t make it right, Nikki. Those tranquilizers you used on them could have killed them. The doses were intended for vampires, not humans. How would you have felt if they’d died?”