An acutely personal grief took hold of Uta. Ridiculous. She had not lost a family.
But all vampires had lost something in that war. Now they existed in a perpetual exile that she felt in her bones, without Croatia and without Bel.
Why had Rize left this for her? And here, of all places?
Tears blurred her vision, keeping the answer from her. “Can you read Latin, Bel?”
“Only scientific jargon. The empire was a bit before my time, you know.”
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, saline tinted pink ruining yet another fabulous jacket, and finally she was able to make sense of Rize’s words.
If you are here, child, I can only assume the reason.
I too have begun to doubt my instructions to you.
After the massacre, when my mate was killed and I nearly died from our broken bond, my grief for her and our children, my horror at the scale of violence, I wanted to spare every vampire that fate.
I traveled west, and I met you. Do you remember that night I appeared in your tent and fought for the right into your bed?
You were so hard, your edges sharp and rough like a stone arrowhead. Only you fought an enemy with armor and swords. You, a ferocious freedom fighter, clinging to your land against a monstrous empire.
I showed you the power you could have, if you would only become like me, because I knew on first sight that the next generation of vampires must be like you—fearless and unsentimental.
Are you still, daughter?
I am not. In my old age, I have returned to my homeland. I was wasting away for want of it. The Hunters are here. I smell them and glimpse them on the street. I know they will find me eventually, and I no longer care. I must be here. I must remember. And, Uta, child, I want you to remember too. I want you to keep the hope alive for a return to our paradise. For a new era of peace.
You have been a perfect friend and daughter to me. Perhaps not as cold as I first assumed. And if the longing draws you back, trust it. And fight for it. This place is your home as much as Illyria or Solta. It is home to all of us. Go, Uta. Go and feel the power of your true home. Meet Ayal. Recruit her to your cause.
I do not know when you will come. I have left this same message for you in a dozen places—churches, mosques, synagogues. Who knows what monuments will withstand human squabbles?
Uta, dearest, I see now I was wrong. It was not all of the Hunters who betrayed us. My wife was pure and true, as were so many others. It is wrong to hate them all for the actions of some, and so I hold out hope for a reconciliation, in your lifetime, if not in mine.
Your sire, Rize
No. It was too much. She did not want this burden. It was the very opposite of the one he had given her before, and simply too much. Maybe her sharpest edges had been dulled, but she was no idealist. She set the parchment down on the table and splayed all ten of her fingers, inhaling deeply.
“Uta, what does it say?” Bel squatted to look into her face.
“It is a goodbye note. He knew he was wasting and he came back to his homeland to die at the hands of Hunters. The silly bastard went soft in the end.”
Bel’s eyes traced over her face, but his expression was unreadable and she still could not get a hold on his feelings. “There is a map here.”
Go, Uta. Go and feel the power of your true home.
“Let me see.”
Black lines zigzagged across the third and smallest piece of parchment above a placid lake, creating the type of map printed in the cover of a children’s fairy-tale book.
“This is useless. We need GPS coordinates or the name of a town. Something concrete.”
Damla leaned in. “That is Karagöl Lake, in Borçka Province, near the border with Georgia. The peaks are distinctive. My people believe it is a place of great power.”
“Borçka.” Yes. It was not the place she had planned to take them, but she had heard it spoken before, long ago, maybe even whispered to her in a dream—and it had been a very long time since she’d dreamed.
Feel the power of your true home.
Home. Was that what she’d felt in her bones since the plane landed? She shook her head fast, faster. “This is a bad idea. Loki should not have sent us.”
Bel rested his hand on her shoulder and heat radiated through her, calming her a little.
“How far is Borçka from here?” he asked.
Damla’s fingers drummed on the table. “Four hours or so. You may take the SUV, of course.”
“Good. Is it sunproof?”
“No.”
“Hmm. I don’t like that risk. If we got stuck…how are the roads?”
“Decent until the last ascent up to the lake. If you leave at sundown tomorrow, you will have no problems.”
“No. We’ll leave right away.”
An objection echoed in the recesses of Uta’s mind. No. She shouldn’t go. This wasn’t her fight. She didn’t want to fight anymore—not with anyone besides Bel.
“We’re leaving? We just got here,” Leo whined from a bedroom door.
Damn. One look at the kid, and all Uta could think of was that icon of the family.
“Yeah, we did. And now we leave.” Bel rewrapped the brittle sheets of vellum and parchment. “I want to finish this trip, report back to Loki, and resume my research.”
All the reasons for her not to go pressed against her lips, but she couldn’t say them.
Rize’s voice, so long gone, was loud in her ear. Keep the hope alive for a return to our paradise.
Her heart swelled in her chest, racing.
Fuck every sheep in the Turkish countryside, she would try. “Let us go.”
Chapter 34
GWEN LAY ON THE BED in the closet-turned-cell and breathed with practiced patience. Controlling her breath allowed her to tolerate nearly everything.
She’d been a fool not to expect the old fears to return, here among vampires. They raced through her veins, and she began to sweat in the cool room. Any one of the creatures could do anything to her. They could swing open the door, bite her, and torture her—and she would like it, then hate herself for it.
Then her shallow breaths changed, her nipples hardened, and a weight settled on her pelvis. Fear transformed into arousal, as it always did because of the way Mason had crossed all her wires.
Did Marasović have the same sadistic streak as Mason and Ethan? Probably so, if Zoey was his slave now. She didn’t act especially submissive, but then again, neither did Gwen in public. Was Zoey as strong as Gwen, was she as thoroughly addicted to pain? Something told Gwen she was not—a small consolation.
She slipped her hand between her legs—only because Ethan had given her permission to, while they were apart—and pictured him. The open-mouthed wonder on his face when she orgasmed under his cruel ministrations. His enjoyment made the sacrifice of her body worthwhile—eventually, it would simply subsume her, and she would be free.
Without inviting it, another image took shape, of herself pressed between the beautiful Kosjenic and Andre Marasović, fangs and cocks and hands battering her in a whirlwind of sweet torment while the whole household looked on, seeing her for the trash she was. She came with a cry. But as her pleasure unfurled, humming through her fingers and toes, her shame seared over her cheeks. She’d betrayed Ethan with the disgusting fantasy.
Her heart rate steadied, and she wiped her slippery fingers on the sheets. If she stayed in this cell too long, her sick imagination would drive her insane.
She would have to persuade them to trust her and somehow get out. Ethan only needed Gwen to disable the shield, but so far she hadn’t learned a thing about it. Did giant electromagnets somewhere generate the barrier, or was it magic, as some of the Hunters believed? Given what she’d seen since she’d met Mason, anything was possible.
A gentle knock on the door sounded, startling her off the bed. Polite jailers, these. Unfortunately, any vampire would know what she’d been doing—the smell of her fear and sex would hang in the air like catni
p.
Please be Andre.
Seconds later, the smaller vampire appeared, looking just like one of Santa’s elves in street clothes. He carried a tea tray aloft, balanced on the tips of his fingers and thumb. Upstairs, he’d been issuing orders, alongside Marasović. And now he was playing butler? Mason wouldn’t have served her tea even if it would have somehow caused her pain.
“Hello, Ms. Evans. Care for something to drink?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He gave her an appraising glance. “You have many choices, child. More than you can accept, I suspect. And I certainly don’t intend to pour tea down your throat.”
Put that way, her insolence stung. “Thank you. I’d like a cup.”
“With milk, no sugar?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“It’s a useless skill I’ve honed over a very long time, to be able to guess these things.” He tilted his head and looked at her again. “I expect you take coffee with cream and sugar, prefer white wine, and rarely drink spirits, but if you did—” his sharply arched eyebrows lifted “—Scotch?”
A laugh escaped her. “Is there a beverage dossier on me somewhere?” But of course, there couldn’t be. Mason had never known things like that about her. Oddly, Ethan had taken pains to learn her taste in food, but he wouldn’t have shared them with the enemy.
The vampire poured the tea into a small bowl without a handle—an Asian tea set, although the scent and color of the tea revealed it to be a strongly brewed English Breakfast. Her mouth watered.
“I believe, Ms. Evans, that you are a historian by training?”
“Yes. Ancient languages of the British Isles are my specialty.”
“I see, kona, slœgr eða fagr.”
She spelled out the words in her mind letter by letter, finally recognizing them as Old Norse, the language of the Viking raiders of England. He’d called her a clever and beautiful woman.
“Thank you. Are you also a scholar of languages?”
“No, child, just a speaker.”
“You mean—”
“Yes, for a time I spoke Old Norse, and before that the language which preceded it, brought by the first wave of Indo-European migrants. But I am a Laplander and my people have inhabited Norway since the creation of the world, so my mother tongue is Sami.”
He had to be lying. “The Sami languages are nearly extinct.”
“That is true. Only a few of us remember, now.”
Remember? “You want me to believe you are more than a thousand years old?”
He smiled, and his eyes disappeared into slits, giving him a jolly, amused look. “Far more than that, child. I am the oldest one.”
“One of what?”
He sat back. “How little Ethan has told you.”
Was that true? Or was Ethan ignorant too?
“Whereas, I know quite a bit about you. About your abuse at the hands of Mason Kearney and how Uta Ilirije rescued you, brought you to her home, hired skilled therapists to treat your trauma.”
She retreated, scooting backward on the bed. “I didn’t know Uta was a vampire.” That revelation had sent her into the streets of Manhattan barefoot and in her bathrobe at dawn. The police took her to a shelter, and eventually she’d crawled back into her life, numb to everything but her research until Ethan found her.
“I am very sorry for what Mason did to you, child.”
A scream curled up from her stomach, lodging behind her sternum. With a masochist’s self-control, she hid her revulsion. “Thank you.”
“And Ethan Bennett is the same sort?” Loki’s eyes penetrated her, peeling away clothes and skin and boring into her soul.
But she’d master her body’s reaction to fear. She faked a quiver in her lower lip. “He is.”
“You have become an addict and you will crave pain again. Why should we trust you?”
“I don’t care if you do. Just keep me here, locked up and safe from him, and myself.”
“So be it, child. I have asked Trys to visit you. If she has any magic to spare, she can heal your bruises.”
Gwen shifted in her seat. “Magic?”
He blinked and bobbed his head with a single nod.
“How did you know I am bruised?”
“I can smell the clotted blood.” He grimaced. “Extensive. And a cracked rib—white blood cells smell sweet.”
Why should that surprise her? Mason’s heightened senses had given the impression he could read her mind. He knew what she ate and could detect where she was in her menstrual cycle. She squashed down the unwelcome memories and passed a moment with the vampire in almost companionable silence.
“How old are you, really?” she blurted.
He blew out a breath through his nose. “Would you believe me if I said I had lost count?”
Something about his tone caught her attention. “Not for a second.”
“Clever, indeed. I have never known a vampire who did. According to my parents I was born in the third month of summer in the year we now call two thousand one hundred and seventeen.”
She immediately eliminated the possibility that he came from the future, which meant he was four thousand, one hundred and thirty years old—quite literally prehistoric. She cataloged the eons he’d witnessed, a vast portion of human history.
His child-like face remained impassive, as if he sensed her awe, and without thinking, she stroked his cheek, supple like a young man’s. He closed his eyelids, accepting the caress, and whispered, “Child, very few of us are like Mason Kearney. I take responsibility for his crimes; we should have stopped him.”
Tears prickled in her eyes, but she would not permit them to spill. His apology blew over her like a breeze on barbed wire. Nothing could change who she’d become under Mason’s control, and therefore nothing would dissuade her from Ethan’s mission.
“For some humans,” the old vampire continued, “turning vampire is the best remedy for abuse—you would grow powerful, your body would heal, and over time, your heart as well.”
Her stomach clenched, and she must have flinched, because he reached for her hand.
“There is time to decide.”
“Thank you. I am honored by the suggestion.” She barely managed not to spit the lie.
“Ms. Evans. I hope I have the honor of meeting you again under happier circumstances, but I must depart.”
Caught off guard, her knotted gut fell into her pelvis. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes, the entire Justicia leaves at nightfall.”
He kissed her cheeks, and to her surprise, this time she didn’t recoil.
Were Ethan’s offenses in place yet? It would be such a tragedy for the little creature to die—a living, breathing trove of history.
Should she warn him?
“Be careful.”
He flashed his impish smile over his shoulder. “I always am, child. That is how I have survived so long.”
Lucas bent his head closer to Derek so he could get a better view of the screen.
“Do you know him?” The ex-Hunter moved the mouse over a name on the screen.
“Yes, a little,” Lucas replied. “He’s a good choice.”
They had amassed a shortlist of the most moderate, reasonable Hunters in the United States. Amenable connections overseas would be more difficult to find, since the tribe resisted organization as if it were a plague—or at least they had until Ethan appeared and pretended to be the Messiah and Keeper of Hunter Mysteries.
Leo had wheedled his way in with the younger set, who had their own bizarre online Hunter world—Internet dating for burgeoning young sadists. A message from Derek containing the evidence against Ethan had gone out via those networks already. But, as always, the Hunter elders held all the power.
“I’ll start making phone calls.” Derek shut the laptop and pivoted to face Lucas. “But this is real, right? We haven’t been brainwashed?”
“You know the saying about the person who wonders if they are crazy never b
eing the crazy one?”
“I don’t need a saying, Bennett, I need an answer.”
Lucas sat up and put both hands on the table. “I can’t begin to describe what I feel about Pedro, or what it’s like between us, but I’ve never lost my ability to think clearly. I’m not brainwashed.”
Derek leaned forward, his knees on his elbows. “My head feels crystal clear, too.”
“I believe in this with everything I’ve got, Derek. I’d give my life for the smallest hope of ending this war, or hell, just the chance to save a few kids from growing up the way we did. Don’t tell that to Pedro, though.”
A deafening bang sounded, and a moment later, the house shook.
“Davo!” Andre’s roar came from the north wing, the master bedroom.
Lucas walked as fast as the stitch in his side would let him. All the vampires beat him there.
The curtains on the windows had been flung wide, affording a perfect view of the highway, where a single car blazed.
“Who was in that car?” Lucas asked, but from the silence in the room, he already knew.
Chapter 35
BEL DOZED IN THE BACK SEAT next to where Leo slept soundly. Uta and Pedro took turns at the wheel. Insomniac vampires sure came in handy on all-night drives. Since they’d left Ezurum, the SUV had climbed increasingly steep ascents into the mountains that rimmed the Black Sea.
Uta had been uncharacteristically silent since she read that letter from Rize. She was fighting something, and Bel had no clue what it was.
Pedro turned down the volume—of course he’d managed to find trancey Turkish dance music on the radio a thousand miles from any nightclubs. “So tell me, what that hell is this feeling in my veins?”
Bel came fully awake in an instant, but he remained still.
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