by Kristie Cook
Tears spilled over the rims of my eyes.
“I failed them,” I whispered.
“No, not you. I’m the one who failed them.”
I looked up at him in surprise. “How can you say that?”
“The father’s genes determine the sex.”
“Normally, yes, but we’re not normal, remember? According to Mom and Rina, our eggs can only accept sperm with an X-chromosome. Once there’s a forming embryo, we might drop another egg that would take a sperm with a Y-chromosome. Otherwise, males are rejected. Except for me, of course. Something happened to the female . . . or there just never was one and my egg took the male seed. I have to be abnormal in everything.”
He held me in silence for a while. “Is there any hope?”
My breath caught as my mood suddenly brightened. The words gushed out. “There is! Oh my god. Tristan, there is hope. I’d dismissed the idea because you weren’t here, but now you are, and it could still happen.”
“Whoa . . . slow down.” He took my face in his hands and looked into my eyes. “Tell me.”
I told him about Mom and Rina’s feelings that I may still be able to have a daughter. “I suppressed that hope because you were gone and you are my only love. I couldn’t—”
“You would have forsaken an Amadis daughter to wait for me?” He didn’t sound happy.
I frowned and dropped my head. “Maybe not forever,” I admitted. “But I thought if it ever became necessary, in vitro fertilization would have been the answer. It just wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The council has been growing restless about it lately, I guess, and were forcing me to think about it. Thank God you’re here now.”
He lifted my chin with his thumb and looked into my eyes again. “And there’s still hope? Even with the Ang’dora?”
Right. The Ang’dora.
My bubble burst. A whimpering sound escaped my throat as I dropped my shoulders with defeat. For the first time in years, I wished the Ang’dora wouldn’t happen yet. And what would the council do now, if it was impossible for me to have a baby? With the Ang’dora, there were too many odds against us.
“I don’t know. I’m not even supposed to change over yet—I’m supposed to be too young. Another anomaly to chalk under my name. Of course, Mom’s the only one who had a baby after the change, but I guess it does mean there’s precedence.”
“So we can try.” His lips twitched in a playful smile.
“Well, yeah, we can try all we want.” I grinned back with understanding.
“Then we will do everything we can to give Dorian a little sister.” He winked, and I fogged over. He chuckled and nibbled on my ear. The tickle cleared the fog.
“I need to call Dorian,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him in so long. I wish he could be here. We need to get home so you can meet him.”
Tristan glanced at the clock. “Give them another hour or so. I talked to Sophia before you woke up, and they were between flights then.”
“Between flights? Where are they? Wait. You talked to Mom? She knows you’re back? What did she say?”
He held his hand up to stop the barrage of questions. “Your phone wouldn’t stop ringing as soon as Owen saw me with you in my arms, so I finally answered it.”
“Owen,” I groaned. “I bet he’s pissed at me.”
“Hmph. Yeah, you could say that . . . and at me. He’ll get over it.” He shrugged. “Sophia sounded . . . hesitantly happy. She knows you’re safe, but she’s concerned.”
“She thinks I might become evil.”
“She thinks I am evil. I don’t think she trusts me entirely again. She knows the Daemoni too well.”
I looked into his eyes. “I trust you.”
“That’s all that matters to me.” He sighed. “Still, Sophia has every right to be concerned.”
I sighed, too, and leaned my head against his shoulder. I traced my fingers around the scars on his chest, careful not to touch them. “What would you do if I did become evil? I mean, if the Daemoni blood wins.”
“My allegiance is to the Amadis, so I would have to save your soul.”
I mulled over this for a few minutes.
“I don’t think it’ll be an issue. I think she worried because I’d become so angry. I was a hot mess and cruel to her. I even thought the Daemoni was coming out in me. But the anger is gone now. All I feel is love and hope. I just needed you.” I put my hands around his face and looked into his eyes again. “And you are not evil. You are Amadis, too. We’ll be okay. No, we’ll be more than okay. We’re going to be amazing now.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and then he folded me into his arms. “I hope you’re right. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us.”
“We can handle them, as long as we’re together. Just don’t leave me again, no matter what the reason.”
“Never again.” He sealed the promise with a kiss, and I remembered the last time he’d done the same thing . . . when he’d promised to come back. It had taken way too long, but he’d made good on that one. There were no guarantees in our bizarre world, though. I leaned my head back against his shoulder.
“What happened? When you left, I mean?” I asked quietly. “Owen thought you were . . . dead . . . when he got away. They never gave me any details, and I never asked. I was afraid they’d tell me something that would confirm what Owen thought, and I couldn’t let myself believe it.”
I knew there was a good chance he wouldn’t tell me. He never spoke of his past life, of the horrors when he was part of the Daemoni. He refused to dredge up those memories. Though this was a different situation and he didn’t perform the evil acts, he probably didn’t want to relive those memories, either. But, after years of wondering and imagining my own version of the events, I felt compelled to ask anyway.
With me still on his lap, he scooted back on the bed so he could lean against the headboard.
“The day I left . . . the day I made my worst mistake ever . . .” He shook his head. “I had to pull them away from Rina and Sophia . . . from you. The Amadis had agreed to flash to a park in the Shenandoah Valley, away from the safe house to protect you, if needed. So I flashed there first, and the Daemoni followed my trail, just as planned.”
“Followed your trail?” I interrupted. “When you flash?”
He looked down at me, annoyance flickering in his eyes. “You still haven’t learned much, have you?”
I shook my head.
“We’ll have to fix that,” he muttered. “When we flash, we leave a trail of energy. It can’t be seen, but it can be sensed. It disappears in a second or two, but if someone is close enough to catch the trail, they can follow you.” He paused to make sure I understood, and I shook my head. “They can go to the same place where you appear.”
I nodded now. “Got it. I think.” He groaned with frustration, so I quickly added, “But it doesn’t matter. I’ll learn soon enough. Go on.”
“Okay, so I flashed to the park, and both Daemoni and Amadis followed, but even more Daemoni kept appearing. More than there had been at the safe house.”
“Were there those dog-things?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Dog-things?”
“Like the creature Edmund had at your house.” It had been a few days before our wedding . . . the raging wind of a tropical storm, the bulky figure of Edmund and his creature that wasn’t quite dog but definitely not human, either . . . the whole fight had firmly impressed itself into my memory. Until the battle at the safe house, I’d never been more terrified in my life. The dog-thing had apparently left a lasting impression. It was a stupid word to call them, but I didn’t know how else to describe the wretched creature.
“Ah, the nora.”
“The nora?” I echoed.
It took me a few seconds to make the connection. I held an unusual amount of knowledge about mythical creatures—knowing was part of my job, after all—but the nora, bald men who ran on all fours and sucked breast milk, were rarely mentioned, a myth
from Hungary, if I remembered right. Likened to incubi, who were supposed to be sexual creatures, a nora was the last label I would have given Edmund’s disgusting beast.
“I didn’t know they were real.” I snorted. “I mean, even less so than vampires or werewolves.”
“That was a real nora. And they don’t just suck women’s breasts. They like blood more than breast milk, but they do prefer women.” He paused for a moment. “That’s been your image of the Daemoni, huh?”
I thought about it for a moment before answering. Until recently, my experiences with the Daemoni had been limited to Ian, an Irish idiot who’d once been Amadis and now got his kicks out of watching the destruction of others’ lives, Edmund and his nora, and the fight at the safe house.
“I guess the nora scared me the most. Probably because I could see no humanity in it at all.”
He rested his cheek against my head and was silent long enough, I almost asked what he was thinking. But then he continued with his story.
“Well, they are pretty rare, but there were a hell of a lot of Daemoni, so there may have been a few nora. They ambushed us. I wasn’t surprised. I knew it would be the only way they could take me. I just didn’t think it would be so bad. I should have known better . . .” Remorse filled his last statement. I looked up at him when he didn’t continue. He leaned his head back against the headboard, his eyes closed. “As soon as I realized their numbers, I went ahead, hoping to keep as many off of the others as I could. I knew they’d go after me. Most of them did, but not enough. While fighting, I kept aware of the other Amadis. They shouldn’t have even been there. Stefan went down—”
I cringed, and he paused. The image came clearly, very similar to the dream I used to have, the part my imagination had created, of Stefan’s death followed by Tristan’s disappearance. I shook my head to clear it, and Tristan tightened his arms around me. His voice came even lower and quieter as he continued.
“Owen, Solomon, and Micah, another soldier, were the only Amadis left standing. I had to pull the Daemoni away from them, before we lost them, too. So I flashed again, but this time they didn’t know where I went. I didn’t want them to know. The Daemoni closest to me followed, and then the rest followed their trails, like a domino effect. They paralyzed me with their magic long enough to take me to the Ancients in Afghanistan.”
I sucked my breath loudly and blew it out with an, “Oh!”
He peered down at me. “What?”
“Weird . . . ” was all I could say at first before my thoughts came out in a rush. “Every night since you left, up until last week, I had pretty much the same dream—replays of the few memories we had together. But it always ended with you in a field with Stefan and everyone, and then just you and the Daemoni, in a foreign desert, surrounded by stone mountains. I thought that part was a figment of my imagination.”
“You didn’t know where I was supposed to meet Lucas?”
I shook my head. “No one would tell me. You know how they are.”
“Right. Hmm . . . that is . . . interesting.” He paused again, as if considering something, but then continued. “At first, I didn’t fight. I knew as long as they had me, they’d stay away from you. I tried my first escape the day after Dorian was born and they had their celebration. Their compounds are shielded, so you can’t flash out of them, but I thought I knew the location where they held me and the way out. But I was mistaken. They’d taken me somewhere new that they’d developed since I’d left them. So they were able to recapture me before I could get out, then they took me to Siberia.”
“Siberia?” I asked, astonished. “I planned to come find you, but I would’ve never guessed to look for you in Siberia.”
What on earth had I been thinking? How would I have ever found him? And then, exactly, how would I—little me—have helped him escape against all those demons? The idea sounded ludicrous now. Tristan’s humorless chuckle told me he thought the same thing.
“Trust me, I will teach you everything you need to know now. I’m going to prepare you for every possibility,” he said. “For now, just picture a large network of tunnels and caves, under the Taymyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. An underground city. All of their cities are below ground, and this one is their largest—their capital, in a sense. I’d spent a lot of time there in my past life, knew it well. But they’d expanded the caves, dug down deeper. They kept me in a new part . . . far below the surface of the earth.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “You really were cut off from the entire world.”
With the darkest of tones, he answered, “As far away as possible . . . and as close to the bowels of Hell as you can get.”
He fell silent, providing no more details, but the image of a cold, dark cave unfolded before my mind’s eye. I envisioned him sitting alone on a dirt floor, the stone walls curving overhead. Distant screams of terror and pain echoed from other caves and tunnels, and his dread filled me. The dread of knowing someone or something would be coming any time to deliver his own torture. Not knowing when or even if there would ever be an end to it all. My heart grew heavy, as though filled with lead.
I could only imagine the loneliness he had felt. I, at least, had had Dorian and Mom and sometimes Rina and Owen. He’d had no one. I reached my hand up and cradled the side of his face with it. He leaned his head into my palm as I stroked his cheekbone with my thumb. It felt like anything I did was so little . . . not enough for what he deserved. But he seemed to appreciate every little gesture. He’d been isolated from even the least bit of humanity, just when he’d learned the importance and joy of it . . . what it felt like to be touched and held by someone who loved him. He could only hold on to those memories, relive them in his mind.
I wondered if the connection of our souls went further than we realized, and that was why I had those same memory-dreams every night for the entire time he was away . . . and then they all but stopped, about the same time he’d escaped. We had both needed those memories. Perhaps we even shared them at the same time. It was that connection that told me I needed to hold on to him, wait for him, although everyone else thought of me as pathetic or disillusioned for doing so.
I didn’t know if the idea held much truth, but as I had learned in the last couple days, anything was possible in our world. And it was really a pleasant thought to embrace in the midst of all we’d been through. So I shared it with him.
“Huh, it is possible,” he said. We sat in silence as he thought through it. “The connection might be strengthened, too, with your blood running through my veins.”
“Like vampires?” I asked with surprise. “I mean, the connection vampires have with those whose blood they’ve sucked?”
“Exactly. But my body wouldn’t burn through it for energy like they do. You could be on to something here.”
I cared less about being right about our connection, and more about the fact that he’d just confirmed what I’d once believed to be fiction—the connection between vamps and their victims. Something about that gnawed at the back of my mind. I blamed lingering shock because nearly everything I’d been writing about was real.
I glanced at the clock. We still had thirty minutes before I could call Mom and Dorian.
“So, tell me the ending,” I said, returning to his story. “How did you escape this time?”
Chapter 10
Tristan grinned but not his normal smile. This one took my breath for a different reason. It actually looked . . . wicked.
“I’d been planning it for a while, ever since I first heard they were coming after you. They’re slow to make such decisions, which they should be, of course, especially when their reasons aren’t credible. I paid attention, analyzing everything, learning the new areas as they moved me around. I hid the fact that I’d become immune to the spells they used and let them believe they still controlled me. So they became relaxed with me, keeping me around as they discussed their plans, still absorbed with their own pride and believing I’d change my mind about them. I lea
rned what I needed to know to escape, and when I heard they were executing their plan for you, I executed my own plan. I surprised the hell out of them—they created me, yet they still underestimate me. I took out a few of their strongest on my way. I quite enjoyed that.”
Now I understood the nefarious grin. Not actually evil, but vengeful.
I didn’t know what to say. He stayed with them to keep me safe and then escaped to protect me. Even while captured, sitting in the closest thing to Hell, he worried about me. And I mostly thought about why he hadn’t returned sooner. In other words, I worried about me, too. Of course, a lot of those gray hairs I used to have had come from fretting over his safety, but I’d always been able to convince myself that he’d stay strong. For me. Even now, the only thoughts coming to mind were selfish or, at least, minimal. I wish you had come back sooner? I’m glad you’re back? Thank you?
“What are you thinking?” he finally asked after a few minutes of silence.
“About how much I love you and how minuscule that sounds compared to what I actually feel.”
He nuzzled his face in my hair and murmured, “Hearing you say you love me will never be minuscule to me. It’s the best thing these ears could ever hear. And I’ve been waiting a very long time to hear it again.”
I turned to him and brushed my lips across his. “I love you, Tristan.”
It still didn’t sound like enough to me, but a glorious grin spread across his face as he closed his eyes. “Mmm . . . that’s what I’m talking about.”
Every little gesture was important to him. I needed to remember that—to never discount anything. He pressed me tighter against him, and I listened to his heart, strong and steady and comforting. I slid my hand up his chest and neck, around the contours of his face and into his hair.
“Your hair is so dark. It used to be lighter, the color of sand. Now it’s more like caramel.”
“It hadn’t seen sun in many years.”
I blinked back the tears at the reminder as I let the silky strands fall through my fingers. “And it’s so long.”