Romani Armada (Beloved Bloody Time)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “He’s not coming back,” Justin said, from the window. His voice was remote. Strained.

  She struggled to take it in. “I don’t understand,” she confessed, bewildered.

  Adán pulled her closer to him. Then even closer, forcing her to sit on the bed, her hip next to his. He cupped her face with his hand. “I won’t jump back,” he told her. “Not with Christian and Marley. But that doesn’t mean I won’t return at all.”

  “Unless something in the next two hundred years does manage to get you,” Justin interjected.

  Adán shot him a glance. “I thought you would understand this. I thought you would understand why.”

  Justin turned and propped himself on the window ledge. His hands were thrust into his pockets. “I know why you think you’re doing it. You want to be vampire in this time. You don’t like being vulnerable.”

  “I don’t want this to happen to me again,” Adán said. He patted his stomach lightly, where the dressings covered him from the middle of his chest down to his hips.

  Deonne clutched at Adán as understanding flared inside her. “You’re going to live through the last two hundred years, instead of skipping them.”

  Adán nodded. “I want to be a member of the agency in full, Deonne. I want to be a fully-contributing part of it all, and I can’t do that if I’m human and constantly worrying about my own hide. And…I want to be with you. Both of you. I can’t do that if I’m human, and have to go back to my time over and over.”

  “You’ll be alone,” Justin said, his voice harsh. “You will have to live through two hundred and ten years without us.”

  Adán squeezed Deonne’s hand. “But it will be only a few days for you,” he assured her. He looked at Justin. “I lived alone and without you for much longer than that, before I found you again. This time, I will know you are both waiting for me. That will make it much easier to bear.”

  Justin drew in a breath that shuddered. Deonne could hear it from across the room. “And what if you die?”

  “I will do my best not to die,” Adán told him gravely.

  “That’s no bloody guarantee,” Justin ground out. “You’ll have to live through Constantine’s Curse, the Revelation, Censure, at least six civil wars before that…”

  “There are no guarantees,” Deonne told him gently. “The last few days have taught us that much. No one knows everything that time can do, Justin. Look at us – we were considered the most unlikely couple in the agency and we defied those expectations. I met Adán despite everything we did to try and change that. We all survived the Liping bomb. And despite being the most closed-mouthed, intimacy-phobic man I’ve ever met, you’ve opened up and showed us your life. Truly, nothing is predictable. Nothing is guaranteed.”

  Adán began to laugh, a low sound. He clutched at his stomach as his mirth irritated his wounds, but kept laughing.

  Justin scowled. “It’s not funny,” he said.

  Adán shook his head. “No, it’s not. But it’s true.”

  Justin sighed and stood up, pushing a hand through his hair and ruffling the dirty blond locks. “Okay. It’s true. And you’re an idiot. And I love you both. So much, it hurts when I think about you. So you have to promise you’ll do everything you can to make it through. And then, maybe, I’ll let you go.”

  “You’ll let me go?” Adán asked, raising a brow.

  Justin moved to the side of his bed. “You heard me. I’m still vampire, here and now, don’t forget. You’re not.”

  “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever admitted there might be an upside to being vampire,” Deonne observed.

  “It’s no advantage at all if I can’t stop him leaving.” Justin looked at Adán. “And I can’t.”

  “I’m doing it for you. And Deonne. All of us,” Adán pointed out.

  “Then you’d better make the time worthwhile,” Justin growled.

  Adán grabbed his shirt, gripping the front of it in his fist. “You don’t pout well.”

  “I don’t pout. This is a bad idea.”

  “Shut up. Kiss me. And take care of Deonne while I’m gone. A week, Justin. I’ll be back in a week’s time, when I want both of you to take me to bed and fuck me until all this is a distant memory.”

  Deonne leaned out of the way as Justin was pulled in closer toward Adán by Adán’s grip on his shirt. Adán kissed him and let him go, wincing. He tried to hold back a groan of pain.

  Justin licked his lips, staring down at the blinding white dressings, which contrasted strongly against Adán’s olive flesh. He rested his fingers gently against them. “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I want you well. I want you as you were.”

  “I just want you. Both of you,” Deonne admitted. “I’ll take you any way you come.”

  Adán lifted a brow and Justin choked back a laugh. “Care to rephrase that, Dee?” he asked gently.

  She smiled, seeing the warm merriment in Adán’s eyes. “No,” she assured them as Adán reached for her. “I don’t.”

  Then he kissed her and for a while, no one argued about anything.

  EL FINAL DE LA HISTORIA

  (The End of the Story)

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2264 A.D. —ten days later.: Ryan’s private chamber at the Agency was a grandly-scaled suite, with a main room that featured twenty-foot high ceilings studded with ancient wood molding and frescos. The wood panels on the bottom half of the walls added more warmth and ambience.

  The focus of the main room was an equally grand bed that could easily hold three people, as it was doing now.

  Cáel sprawled on the bed naked, eating pieces of fig from Nia’s belly and occasionally leaning down to lick the juices from her flesh. Nayara’s head lay in Ryan’s lap and occasionally, his hand dropped to her forehead to brush her hair gently away from her face and linger for further caresses. Ryan was the only one dressed, if a silk robe could be considered ‘dressed’. The strong Italian sunshine was blazing through the transom windows that arched over the big French doors, letting in an incandescent light that fell just short of the foot of the big bed.

  Despite their indolent poses, the conversation was serious – the sort of stuff discussed over a boardroom or the President’s desk.

  Cáel found the contrast between their conversation and the idyllic surroundings odd, but delightful. He was mining these moments for their full body of pleasure, for this was only the third time in the last year that the three of them had been together in one place. He was also enjoying the knowledge that the Assembly was in recess and would be so for the next few months at least.

  Ryan had paused for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. Now he spoke once more. “Kieren does seem to be working out, although what do you make of these super powers he says he inherited from Pritti? And why him?”

  “Because he was already like her. He was simpatico,” Nayara said. “It’s easier to connect with someone who has similar talents.”

  “So now he’s a wild talent plus?” Cáel asked. “Someone should take him in hand and train him so he can use them properly.”

  “I think Pritti took care of that in one big gestalt,” Nayara said. She sighed. “I miss Demyan. I had no idea how much he talked. He always seemed so quiet.”

  “In comparison to the ultra-egos everyone else has, Demyan was quiet.” Ryan adjusted his back against the headboard. “He’ll be back,” he added. “He just has to work it out for himself.”

  “I heard Adán left, too,” Cáel said. “I spoke to Justin when I arrived. He looked like hell. Deonne is in the past somewhere—”

  “Don’t ask me where,” Nayara warned.

  “I’m not. I don’t want to know. I don’t want that knowledge in my skull where Gabriel can pluck it out. But to get back to the point: Deonne is gone and so is Adán, and Justin is suffering.”

  “Adán will be back. Well, he’ll be here. He’ll turn up, I mean,” Ryan said.

 
Nayara shifted her head to look at him. “He’s a week overdue. I had to send Deonne back to her hideout when he didn’t turn up. Both of them looked like they wanted to kill me when I insisted.”

  “This is a professional agency,” Ryan groused. “Yet we seem to spend more time worrying about peoples’ feelings and love lives. I’m not Justin’s mother. Adán will turn up…or not. They knew the risks when they decided to do this.”

  Cáel lifted a finger. “Actually, you both are mother and father surrogates to everyone who is a member of the agency.”

  “They’re vampires, for Christ’s sake,” Ryan protested. “They’ve all been around for centuries, most of them, and they did that without us. Why are we anything but their employers?”

  Nayara dropped her chin to look at Cáel. “Because of the war?” she asked.

  “The war is part of it,” Cáel agreed. “Human resistance to accepting vampires fully is another big part of it. By forming the agency, Ryan, you’ve built a place where vampires and anyone who is a little bit different, or is rejected by humans can find a home, work, and a reason to exist. No one is scorned, here, once they become members. Everyone takes their oddities in stride and treats them as equals. They’ve even embraced me and my plain, ordinary humanness. Can you think of a better definition for family?”

  Nayara looked up at Ryan. “He has you there.”

  Ryan pursed his lips. “I suppose.”

  “Kieren found acceptance here,” Cáel added. “Even Pritti, may she rest in peace.”

  The contemplative silence fell once more. Then Ryan spoke again. “Gabriel will come back at us even harder, this time.”

  It seemed like a shift in subject, but Cáel knew Ryan had been thinking about Pritti’s heroic efforts to defeat Gabriel and find Jack.

  “We beat him at his own game,” Ryan continued. “We beat him using psi talents. He’s not going to like that at all.”

  “He’ll sulk, like the child he is,” Cáel said and picked up another succulent piece of fig and bent the skin backwards to expose the flesh.

  Nayara sighed. “Pritti told me something before she died.”

  Cáel looked up at her. “About Gabriel?”

  “I guess she showed me, more than told me. She passed a mental image to me. Something that she had seen in Gabriel’s mind, so the image is distorted by human perception limitations and because it’s third-hand. I’ve been puzzling over it since she gave it to me, and I still can’t make sense of it.”

  “What did you see?” Ryan asked.

  Nayara lifted her chin so she could look at him directly. “I want to try something. I want to try and give the image to Cáel.”

  Ryan glanced at him. “Not me?” he asked Nia lightly.

  Nayara bit her lip. “I’ve tried talking to you before, but it only works when you’re not vampire. With Cáel…it does work.”

  Ryan straightened his back, stretching. “Have you got some psi genes you failed to disclose, mo leannán?” he asked Cáel.

  Cáel shook his head and bit into the fig flesh. “I’m plain old human. Maybe that’s why Nia can reach me. She can’t hear me if I try to talk to her. She can only pick up what I’m saying if she scans me.”

  Ryan studied him for a moment, then grimaced. “I’ve been sleeping way too fucking long. I’m missing half our lives.”

  Cáel caught his shoulder in his hand. “It’s easing off now. You’re improving.”

  Ryan plucked at the cover on the bed. “Yeah,” he said heavily. Then, “So try it, Nia. Give him the image. Then he can tell me. Cáel is better at describing things, anyway.”

  Nayara rolled her eyes. Then she shifted her head and got more comfortable.

  Cáel held himself still and tried to push all thought away and empty his mind, to make himself as receptive as possible. He didn’t know how to make this work. It was something Nia could do to him and he’d never looked into it or discussed it with her. This was the first time either of them had spoken of it aloud. It was fitting that Ryan be part of that discussion.

  Then he realized that his mind was drifting along on random thought trains, and tried to focus on black nothingness.

  He thought, instead, of a large room – larger than this one by at least two times. He was sitting in the middle of the room, in a comfortable automated chair, while all around him, covering the floor like a fleshy, bumpy carpet, they lay comatose. Each and every one of them was connected. Connected to each other, connected to him. He could feel the rush, the heat of their combined—

  Cáel sat up with a jerk. “Jesus wept. That was your thought, not mine. I mean, it was his thought. Gabriel’s.”

  “What did you see?” Ryan asked.

  “A room, full of bodies. I think they were alive, but they looked close to death from what I could see. They weren’t moving at all.”

  “Gabriel sat in the center of them,” Nayara added. “And everyone is touching at least one other person. I got the impression of some sort of feeding.”

  “A battery,” Cáel amended. “He thought of them as his battery.”

  Ryan looked from Nia to him. “Power,” he summarized. “He’s using them for power…but for what? What is Gabriel brewing now?”

  * * * * *

  Waterloo Station, London, United Republic, 2264 A.D.: Even though Justin held her hand for most of the g-train journey, even though she had been called back from her tiny, obscure life in twentieth century Canada, even though the weather was absolutely perfect, Deonne couldn’t seem to banish the misery in her heart and thoughts.

  She knew she was sulking. She knew she was being unfair to everyone at the agency, but Adán’s absence was like a missing tooth that her tongue kept prodding at to explore the shape and size and texture of the hole it had left behind. The fact that two weeks has passed the agreed upon deadline for his return kept blooming in her thoughts whenever she relaxed from concentrating on work.

  As the deadline moved further and further into the past, dread began to gather in her heart and mind. What if Adán wasn’t just late? What if he wasn’t returning at all? What if Justin had been right and Adán had met a grim death somewhere in the past?

  Returning to her own time and snuggling into Justin’s arms underlined the dismal fact. When she was with Justin, she noticed Adán’s absence even more. She guessed Justin felt the same way, for he was withdrawn and moody.

  Kieren, who was acting as her personal security escort while she was in her own time, had finally thrown up his hands, barely six hours after she had arrived back in the twenty-third century. “I’m taking you out. Shopping. Somewhere. Anywhere there are lots of people. I’m sick to death of you looking so sorry for yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” she began. “It’s just—”

  Kieren held up his hand. “I know,” he said. “I’ve heard it more than once. Tomorrow, we’re going on a mission to buy clothes. Lots of clothes. Bring Justin. He can share your misery while you spend his money.”

  “He’ll love that,” Deonne said dryly, wondering over the change in Kieren. He hadn’t given her a single ma’am since she had got back and she had even spotted him smiling once or twice, which had startled her…but she did like his smile. It changed his features enormously and made his grey-blue eyes dance.

  Brenden had volunteered to tag along. “I like Britain,” he said.

  “He likes Britain’s widows and heiresses,” Justin had amended when he heard about the excursion. “I could withstand buying you a pretty dress or two,” he’d conceded, shifting around from the security terminal he was pouring over, looking for any trace of Adán in the history catalogues.

  “I stopped wearing pretty dresses when I graduated from high school. But you can buy me a gown or suit or two…or three.”

  “Very well. London it is,” he said. “I wonder if the bounty on my head is still current?”

  “After five hundred years?” Deonne marveled. “And this is Britain, not Australia.”

  “In my time, Brit
ain considered Australia to be theirs – a colony of the British Empire, although not a very comfortable one. And don’t underestimate the British. They have long memories and ruthless manners.”

  “I’ve always found them to be a very pleasant people. I thought they were very polite until I got to Canada.”

  Although Kieren had made light of the outing, he still took all the same security precautions that she remembered from Sweden and Brenden was more than happy to cooperate. Keiren’s manner reverted to close to the controlled, contained Warden she remembered, as he juggled potentials and possibilities as they sped through the streets of Rome to the g-train station.

  Once aboard the train, in their private and very secure cabin, Kieren relaxed by a fraction of an inch.

  “This isn’t going to be a fun shopping trip if you don’t unwind just a bit,” Deonne pointed out.

  “I’ll be happier once we’re in Britain, where Gabriel wouldn’t think to look for you.”

  The journey to Britain was quick – just over two hours, with a single stop in Paris and Deonne watched the rows and rows of terraced houses that covered most of the British isles zip past her window, while Justin held her hand, and tried very hard not to feel miserable. She could keep up a happy act when there was something to do, but as soon as she came to a halt, or was forced to inactivity like now, her thoughts shifted back to Adán and his absence.

  The g-train’s terminus was the restored and restructured Waterloo Station, just east of the famous Big Eye Memorial on the banks of the Thames, next to the ruins of the Eye itself.

  Kieren made them wait until the very full train was almost completely empty of disembarking passengers, while he looked through the windows of the cabin and did quick spot checks of the carriage corridor.