by Sara Reinke
“What are you talking about?” Mason shook his head. “The only one we need protection from is him.”
“He didn’t kill Michel.”
Michel stared at her, disbelieving. “Of course he did. Who else would have? Could have?”
“My thoughts exactly,” Phillip said as he came striding briskly down the corridor from the foyer. The front door was open wide behind him, and Naima caught a glimpse of the four-wheeled ATV bike he’s ridden to the house parked at a crazy angle in the drive outside. When Mason glanced over his shoulder at his brother’s approach—and Phillip realized he had a gun shoved against Aaron’s scalp—he raised his brows, visibly impressed. “I guess congratulations are in order, Mason. Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
“Phillip, listen to me…” Naima began.
“I think you’ve said more than enough, Naima,” he cut in with a glare. “Judging from what I just heard, in any case.” To Mason, he added, “I’ve got a dozen more at least right behind me. They’ll be here any minute. Ethan found us at the gate post.” With a pointed glance at Naima, he added, “He said Davenant had just killed his grandmother and Karen Pierce.”
“They’re not dead. They’re just stunned,” Naima said hotly.
“Really? And how would you know that?” Phillip challenged. “Oh, that’s right—Ethan said you were with him. You’ve been helping the son of a bitch all along, haven’t you?”
Mason blinked at her, wounded and stunned, and she shook her head.
“No. No, that’s not true. Mason, listen to me. You know that’s not—”
“Did you help him get onto the compound the night he tried to cut Tristan’s throat?” Phillip snapped.
“No!” Eyes flown wide, she shook her head. “What the hell are you—?”
“Convenient that you’re the one who discovered him there,” Phillip continued. “The one who supposedly stopped his attack…especially to hear you claim now, only a day later, that the two of you are in love.” He sneered at this, his mouth twisting as if he’d tasted something bitter. “Was it all just a ruse, Naima?”
“No,” she snapped back, fists bared. She could feel her gums tingling, her fangs wanted to drop in her sudden, bright outrage. “You son of a bitch, that’s not how it—”
“Has this all been just a set up so he could get to Michel more easily?” Phillip demanded.
“Aaron didn’t kill Michel!” Naima shouted. “I know, because he was with me when it happened. He was in my house when Michel was killed!”
“If he didn’t do it, then who did?” Mason asked. Although he kept the gun pressed to the top of Aaron’s head, some of the ferocity had drained from his face. Meeting her gaze, locking eyes with her, he asked in her mind: Who did you think he could protect me from?
Julien, she said, the name sending a visible shock of recognition through Mason.
From outside, drifting in through the front door, came the sounds of approaching engines, high-pitched and whining.
“Looks like we’re about to have company,” Phillip said.
Aaron had been quiet for most of the exchange, trying to concentrate on keeping calm, on trying to keep his breathing slow and shallow, so that he didn’t hemorrhage further and bleed to death. But when Phillip ratcheted a round into the rifle he carried, Aaron opened his eyes. Straining against Mason’s fist-hold in his hair, he craned his neck to look over at Phillip.
“Nice…gun,” he murmured. “What is that? A…a 98-Bravo…?”
To Naima, he shot a single, imperative thought: It’s him.
She didn’t understand, however, until Phillip hoisted to rifle to his shoulder and swung the length of the barrel toward Mason, standing within point-blank range.
“Mason!” Naima screamed. As Phillip’s finger folded inward on the trigger, Aaron reached up, clasping the wrist of Mason’s gun arm between his hands. Gritting his teeth, he twisted sharply, and gave a furious yank, both diverting the aim of the pistol away from his head, and making Mason pitch sideways in a stumbling, clumsy fall. The sharp clap of gunfire from the Bravo was overlapped by that of the 9-millimeter pistol as, still grasping Mason by the arm, his fingers laced over Mason’s around the gun stock and trigger, Aaron returned fire.
The rifle shot went wide as Mason fell, but Aaron’s shot hit home--the center of Phillip’s forehead. The rifle fell from his hands as he crashed backwards, gracelessly to the floor, a thin trail of blood hovering momentarily in the air to mark his wake.
Naima had instinctively crouched at the gunshots. “Aaron!” she cried, scrambling to her feet. “Mason!”
Heavy footsteps suddenly shuddered through the floorboards as the proverbial cavalry arrived. Elliott burst into the living room, rifle in hands, his cheeks flushed, his eyes wild. At least a dozen other Morin men rushed in behind him. Elliott had about a half-second to take in the scene—Phillip lying dead, sprawled on the floor, and Mason nearby, with Aaron beside him, still holding the gun.
“No!” Naima screamed as, brows furrowed, Elliott raised his rifle, taking aim for Aaron’s face. She threw herself in front of Aaron, crashing onto her knees, her arms spread wide. “No, don’t shoot him! Elliott, don’t shoot!”
Elliott stared at her like she’d gone nuts. “Naima, what the hell are you doing?” he cried.
“If I’m not mistaken…” Mason murmured, pushing himself into a seated position. “She’s trying to protect the man she loves.” With a glance at Aaron, he added, “Not to mention the one who just saved my life.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Come with me.
Aaron remembered Naima whispering this to him, pleading, as he’d unlocked the gate to the underground Indian tunnels in 1815. His hands had been shaking; it had been hard to get the key into the ancient, rusted lock, but somehow he’d managed. He remembered the screech of the hinges as he’d pulled the heavy gate open. Beyond the threshold, for the first twenty yards or so, the tunnels had been paved with creek stones. After than, just beyond the circumference of light cast by a small oil lamp he’d brought with him, there was nothing but blackness, utter and absolute.
He helped her button up the front of her dress, but despite this, she was still shivering. He shrugged off his jacket—something fancy and velveteen because it was his mother’s birthday, her party was still underway upstairs—and gave it to her, tugging the lapels close against the sweet swell of her bosom to keep her warm.
They raped her. He remembered this now; he’d gone downstairs and found Allistair, Vidal and Jean Luc, all drunk, savagely taking turns with Naima. He’d tried to stop them, but in the end, they’d overpowered him. He hurt all over from the abuse they’d heaped on him, his lower back and belly aching in sharp, shuddering spasms that nearly stripped the breath from him.
None of that mattered. All that mattered was Naima, getting her out of the house, keeping her safe. He’d never had another chance like this before; he knew he’d likely never have another again. Lamar was gone. Aaron didn’t know where, and he didn’t know how long he’d be gone, but the important thing was his absence.
“Come with me,” Naima pleaded again, her beautiful brown eyes swimming with tears. “I can’t,” he said.
“But I’ll never see you again,” she whimpered, and her tears began to fall, gleaming droplets rolling slowly down each of her cheeks.
“Yes, you will.” Cradling her face in his hands, he kissed her. “I promise, Naima. No matter what, I will find you again. We’ll be together.”
For some reason, he thought of her grandfather, of Michel Morin’s voice, soft words echoing through his mind: I expect you’re the sort of man who doesn’t give his word lightly, and when he does, it’s binding then, no?
“I promise,” he whispered to her again.
“He'll kill you," she said, weeping openly now. He didn’t even have to ask; he knew she meant his father. "Please, Aaron. If he finds out what you've done, he'll..."
Her voice cut short as he touched her face aga
in, gently wiping her tears. "Hush now," he breathed. “Everything’s going to be alright. I promise.”
She threw her arms around his neck, leaping against him, crushing her lips against his. He could taste the salty sweetness of her tears, feel the warmth of her body against him through the cotton of her dress. He held her fiercely, clutching at her, gasping against his own unbidden tears. Because even though he’d promised her otherwise, he knew the truth.
I’ll never see her again.
And the pain of that realization—the sheer magnitude of that devastating loss—was almost too much for him to bear.
“I love you, Aaron,” she said.
“I love you, too,” he told her, letting his lips steal against hers one last, lingering time. Then he drew back, ashamed of the tears that burned his eyes, strangled his voice. “Hurry,” he whispered. “There…there isn’t much time.”
He’d watched her hurry past the threshold into the tunnels, but once inside, she went no further. She turned and watched him close the gate, clutching a small bundle of foodhe’d given her against her belly, and carrying the lamp by its handle in her other hand. Her entire body had shuddered from the force of sobs she struggled to control, and her breath hitched and hiccupped piteously.
“Aaron…!” she mewled, curling her fingers around one of the bars.
“Go,” he told her. Closing his eyes, he kissed her fingers. “Naima, you have to go.”
He stumbled back from the gate, then began backing up the earthen stairs toward the main floor of the great house again.
“Aaron,” she begged, weeping. “Aaron!”
But when he turned around and didn’t answer, when he continued up the stairs without looking back, he saw the glow against the cellar walls from her lantern fade, heard the soft but rapid patter of her bare feet against the packed dirt floors as she ran away.
She’s safe now, he told himself, even though that didn’t stop that awful, rending ache deep inside of him. She’s safe at last, and he can never hurt her again. None of them can.
He’d just settled his foot on the top of the last riser, when he heard a sharp whistle of wind from his right. He started to turn, startled, but then something heavy smashed into the side of his head. The blow knocked the wits from him; he staggered sideways, then crumpled to the floor, catching himself on his hands and knees, and blinking against a dizzying array of stars. His nose tickled, and then blood spattered down against the oak floorboards between his hands in a steady stream.
With a groan, he looked up. His head was swimming, his vision fading and out of focus. His first thought was that Vidal had survived; that he’d somehow lived through Naima’s attack and had returned to the great house to enact his revenge, or maybe Jean Luc or Allistair. But instead, he saw his father towering above him, still dressed for riding in his heavy great coat and boots. Jean Luc stood behind him on one side, Allistair on the other, both cowering behind his coat tails, both grinning with malicious glee at Aaron.
In his gloved hand, Lamar held his walking cane—the one with the handle that had been carved to look like a snarling dog. Only now the pale ivory of the dog’s snarling snout had been smeared with blood—Aaron’s blood.
“You have betrayed me for the last time, boy,” Lamar said, his voice strangely cold and devoid of any tone, even rage. And when he raised the cane aloft to strike him again, Aaron knew better than to cry out or try to beg for mercy, because there would be none.
There never had been.
***
“Gunnnnnghh!” With a breathless cry, Aaron tried to sit up. For a moment, he nearly expected to find himself back in the nineteenth century, back in Boston again, with Julien reading from the New England Courant and patiently keeping vigil at his bedside.
Instead, he found himself in what appeared to be a hospital room. Outside of having his CT scan performed, he’d actually never been on the patient side of one before. Lamar’s idea of recuperation from injuries involved being left on the floor of the room in which they’d been inflicted, until such time as one could summon the strength to get up and limp to one’s own bed for further healing. At first, the sight of the intravenous tubes running from the inner crooks of his elbows alarmed him, as did the strange rubber tubing he felt bisecting his face just beneath his nose.
“It’s oxygen,” he heard Naima say, as she draped her hand against his to prevent him from yanking the cannula away. “It’s to help you breathe, Aaron. Leave it alone.”
She sat beside his bed, a book in her lap. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a colorful peasant blouse. Her feet were bare, propped up against the side of his bed.
“Where…am I…?” he croaked.
“You’re safe,” she said gently, kicking her feet down and leaning toward him. With a smile, she brushed his hair back from his brow.
“As my younger brother might say, you’re in a highly specialized medical facility—the only one of its kind in the entire world dedicated to the care and treatment of our species,” Mason said, stepping into view.
Unlike their last occasion to meet, this time, Mason was clean shaven, his eyes bright and sober. He walked over to a machine beside the bed from which two bags of clear fluid dangled, connected to Aaron’s arm by those intertwining tubes. As Aaron watched in mounting alarm, Mason lifted a syringe in hand, connecting it to a port in one of the lines.
“What is that?” Aaron asked, stiffening reflexively, trying to sit up as Mason slowly depressed the syringe plunger. “What the fuck did you just stick me with?”
“It’s morphine,” Mason replied, seeming unbothered by Aaron’s hostility. “It will help with your pain.”
“I’m not having any pain,” Aaron said with a frown.
Mason smiled. “You’re welcome.”
He dropped a wink at Naima and then walked away, heading out of the room through a nearby door that he closed behind him.
“What the hell is going on?” Aaron asked Naima.
She stood, leaning over the bedrail to stroke his hair again. “You almost died, Aaron. Mason saved your life.”
Aaron groaned as the sudden rush of morphine in his brain—like a warm blanket drooping over his mind, clouding his senses. “I saved his first,” he muttered, feeling like he stood on a surfboard, riding one hell of a steep wave in toward shore.
“Try to rest,” she said, and when she brushed her lips against his, he lifted his head unconsciously to meet her, responding to her as if to do so was an inherent and undeniable component of his very nature.
“I remember that night,” he said. “The night of the fires…what my brothers did to you…” He looked up at her, even though it was hard for him to see clearly now, and his eyelids kept wanting to droop closed, his mind slipping into shadows. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop them in time…I didn’t…”
“Hush,” she soothed.
“There…was no riding accident,” he said. “I never fell off my horse. It…it was my father. I remember now. He hit me with his cane…over and over. He knew…what I’d done…that I…I had helped you escape…”
“Aaron,” she said gently, caressing his face.
He turned his face into the palm of her hand, closing his eyes. “He wanted me dead,” he whispered helplessly.
“It’s alright,” she told him, her lips lighting against his brow. “He can’t hurt you anymore, Aaron. Never again. You’re safe now…safe here with me.”
I love you, he thought to her as his mind drifted off with a morphine-induced tide.
I love you, too, he heard her say, and then he slept again.
***
Naima left Aaron to rest, and followed Mason across the hall to Tristan’s room. Not everyone in the clan was happy to know that Aaron remained in the clinic for care—or that Naima, who had helped him, was allowed to stay, for that matter—but Mason was their leader now, patriarch of the Morin clan, and his word was their law.
“How is he?” she asked Mason hesitantly in the doorway.
&nb
sp; Mason had been leaning over Tristan’s bed, but straightened now and smiled. “Better. His last set of labs came back nearly normal. His infection is just about clear.”
One of the primary reasons Naima suspected no one in the family had objected too loudly about Aaron’s presence was because everyone still seemed to be collectively reeling over Phillip’s betrayal. True, Phillip had never been close to most of his siblings or kin, but he had still been the first-born son. Tradition had always instilled among the Brethren a sort of respectful deference to him because of that, if nothing else. No one had ever suspected the true depths of his hatred for his fatheror Mason for what Phillip had felt was an usurpation of his rightful place in the clan’s hierarchy.
“By sending first Jean Luc, then Aaron against us, Lamar gave Phillip an opportunity he’d probably waited centuries for,” Mason remarked, as if reading Naima’s mind and sensing the train of her thoughts—which, in all likelihood, he had. “He had someone to blame if we both turned up dead, an explanation for why someone would hate us—Michel and me—so much.”
“But why?” Naima asked. “Why would he want to kill Michel? I know they had their differences, that Michel could be pretty bullheaded when he put his mind to it, but…”
“I think this was the final straw,” Mason said quietly, slipping his hand against his brother’s to clearly indicate Tristan was the this he referred to. “Phillip never had any children, you know, although he took several wives over the years. Father always feared he was sterile. It runs in our family, you know.”
When Naima shook her head, surprised by this, he continued. “It’s called Y-chromosomal microdeletion, a genetic abnormality that leads to significantly decreased—and even completely absent—sperm production. About one in every ten males born in the clan is affected to some degree or another. Michel pressed for years for us all to consent to genetic testing, but Phillip never would. Anyway, Phillip was able to impregnate Lisette, and he always used that as proof that Father was full of shit.”