by Joy Demorra
“But how does this help us?”
“Do not worry about that now, Uladzimir,” the Count said, bracing his hands on either side of Vlad’s arms in the closest approximation to a kindly touch Vlad could remember in decades. “Do not even think about it. Put it out of your head for now and speak of it no more. I will deal with it.”
“As you wish,” Vlad replied, wincing as the headache manifested fully, like a hot poker being driven through his eye socket.
“Good.” The Count let go of him and moved toward the door. “Now, make haste. We must hurry if we wish to return on the afternoon tide.”
“I…” Vlad opened his mouth, and the Count turned back to look at him. “I was going to spend a few days here.”
“But Parliament dismissed you. What possible reason could you have to stay?”
“I’m meeting someone,” Vlad replied, clearing his throat awkwardly when his father arched a curious brow at him. “It’s a private matter.”
The Count stared at him for several long, heart-stopping moments, and then his expression split into a lecherous grin that made Vlad feel grimy all over. “Well, well. You didn’t waste any time, did you? Is it the peasant girl after all?”
“No.” Vlad ground his teeth together again. The pain behind his eyeball sparked.
The very image of the indulgent patriarch, the Count chuckled and shook his head. “Very well, enjoy your dalliance. But take care. And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Too late, Vlad thought, bowing stiffly and holding the position until the Count vacated the room. Only once he was certain his father was gone did he allow himself a brief bout of silent hysterics, wondering what would happen if he’d admitted to bedding a werewolf.
They’d probably be able to see the sparks across the ocean in Obëria.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
“How did it go?” Nathan asked when Vlad finally traipsed into the hotel suite, bringing the chill of the winter wind with him. The werewolf was spread out along the length of the plush velvet couch in front of the fire, reading from a book that was almost as thick as he was broad. He looked so comfortable; Vlad wanted to curl up on top of him.
“Ghastly,” he complained, stripping out of his heavy winter layers and pressing the heels of his palms to both eyes. At least the sickening kaleidoscope display of colors had vanished, but he still felt drained like he’d rowed through a hurricane with a pair of toothpicks. He shook his head, valiantly trying to clear it. His gaze fell inevitably on the drinks cabinet in the corner and the promise of relief held within.
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked, catching Vlad by his fingertips, the gentle touch hauling him back from the brink of oblivion like an anchor. “Hey, come here…” He tugged gently to emphasize his request.
Sitting down heavily, Vlad leaned into the solid warmth of Nathan’s torso. “Headache.” Nathan’s hands slipped up to rub soothing circles along his back; Vlad listed forward uselessly, his head braced in his hands.
“No wonder. I could bend steel round your shoulders,” Nathan grumbled.
Vlad huffed softly.
“Want to talk about it?”
Vlad shook his head.
“Want a hug?”
Vlad hesitated, then nodded.
The couch was barely large enough for Nathan to lounge comfortably, let alone both of them, but Vlad made it work. Burrowing into Nathan’s warmth, Vlad melded against him as Nathan turned onto his side and wrapped solidly reassuring arms around him. Somehow, he doubted this was how Nathan had envisioned spending their first night in Ingleton together, but he needed this after today.
He hated being needy.
“Sorry,” Vlad mumbled against Nathan’s chest.
Nathan shushed him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “It’s okay. We all need a bit of a cuddle now and then.”
Vlad forced himself to look up, nudging his nose against Nathan’s in the process. “I’ve been dismissed from Parliament for the rest of the season.”
“Really? Who did you set on fire?”
Vlad let his head drop back down and rubbed his cheek against the soft fabric of Nathan’s shirt. “No one. Yet. But the Count showed up… caused quite a stir.”
“Oh?”
Vlad hummed. “He wanted me to go back with him. But I told him I had a prior engagement.”
“Is that what we’re calling this?” Nathan asked. “Bit sudden, but all right.”
Thumping his hand lightly against Nathan’s chest, Vlad snorted outright. He knew Nathan was teasing, his tone more flippant than amorous, but it still made a spark of something warm ignite in Vlad’s chest, pushing back the looming darkness of his thoughts.
It was a nice thought. Even if it would never happen.
*
After a hazy amount of time in which Vlad may or may not have fallen asleep, he became aware of Nathan humming a low, tuneless melody as his fingers scratched idly against Vlad’s scalp. He also became aware that he was being used as a bookrest.
“What are you reading?” he asked, the words slurring together as he unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
“The Very Nearly Complete History of the Northern Wereclans.” Sighing wearily, Nathan adjusted his hold on the massive tome as Vlad wriggled round in the confined space until he was facing the right way up. “Did you know, the Wolf Lord has the right to conscript anyone they like into a wereclan? The law’s still active. The Empire never wrote it out.”
“Happens,” Vlad replied around a jaw-cracking yawn. He thought about all the laws and rights that passed into memory through sheer bad bookkeeping; it wasn’t a surprise that this was one of them. “Bit heavy for bedtime reading, though, isn’t it?”
Nathan grunted sourly. “It’s not by choice, trust me. My father wants me to learn it all. But it’s rather difficult when I don’t know what it says half the time.”
He held the book up, and Vlad squinted obligingly at the pages. He recognized the archaic print. “S’Octish,” he mumbled, wondering what he’d done with his glasses. “Says something about ‘law of inheritance.’”
“You speak Octish?” Nathan shifted behind him, and Vlad could feel Nathan staring at him through the top of his head. “How in the nine hells do you know Octish? No, don’t tell me, you got bored one decade and decided to learn a dead language.”
Vlad shrugged mildly. That was pretty much the gist of it.
He was just about to ask why Nathan needed to learn these things, when the werewolf snapped the book shut, throwing it onto the coffee table with a heavy thud that was probably felt two rooms down. “Anyway, enough of that. I’ll have plenty of time to read it on the carriage ride north.”
Vlad felt him shudder and smiled softly to himself. The werewolf had been antsy the whole carriage ride here; he couldn’t imagine how he’d fare the full two days it would take him to reach Lorehaven.
“You should take the new train line,” Vlad mumbled, pressing into Nathan’s side again and snuggling close to his chest. “It’d cut your travel time in half.”
“Maybe,” Nathan said, scratching idle fingers against the nape of Vlad’s neck and making him shiver. “Might try it on my way home, see how it compares.”
Vlad frowned; sleep tugged hazily at his thoughts again, but he was still aware enough to know that Nathan had misspoken. “You mean on your way back to Eyrie…”
“That’s what I said,” Nathan replied, wrapping Vlad up in his arms and holding him close as the vampire slipped back into unconsciousness. “On my way back home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Slightly Later Winter, 1888
Nathan paused under the limbs of a thick fir tree near Lorehaven, resting his pack on the ground and yawning widely to relax his jaw. Panting as he turned his head up, he sat for a while on his haunches, scenting the air.
The world looked different through the eyes of a wolf. For one thing, it was less colorful; the vivid greens and reds of the forest muted to varying shades
of gray and brown. But what it lacked in trichromatic vision, it more than made up for in smells. Pine was the overwhelming scent here—pine and the smell of the deer who liked to nibble on the prickly needles when food was scarce. But he wasn’t in the Ironwoods, not yet.
He’d planned to undertake most of the journey home by carriage, but it had snowed during the first night: thick, wet flakes that turned the already muddy roads to treacherous slush. The coachman had halted at the closest inn, proclaiming the way ahead too dangerous for humans. No one had said anything about a wolf.
Adequately rested, he picked the pack up again and trotted off, his paws crunching through fresh snow. He knew the moment he stepped foot in the Ironwoods—a shiver of tension rippled down his spine as he crossed over the boundary lines. He’d never noticed it before, but he felt it now, the spark of dormant magic in the earth rising to meet him. Welcome home, it seemed to say. Nathan huffed to himself for being so fanciful.
He smelled the castle before he saw it, the scent of smoldering peat and the promise of a warm hearth luring him on until he arrived at the gates. Limping his way across the lowered drawbridge, he entered a scene of utter pandemonium.
Festive pandemonium.
Garlands of greenery lay strewn everywhere while an alarming number of small children ran around unattended. Even with his listening aids safely secured in his kitbag, it was deafening.
But there was one voice that carried clear and resonated over the chaos: his mother’s. “No, hang those over there. Boys, no. Randa? Can you take the twins inside, please? Thank you. Connor, this way with the boughs, mind the holly. Kai, be careful with that ladder. Honestly, where is Tam? Nathan?!” The tray in Moira Northland’s hands clattered to the ground.
With all eyes in the courtyard turned to him, Nathan dropped his kitbag and limped toward her. He didn’t get very far before she was in front of him, sinking to her knees in the mud as she tried to gather him into her lap like a puppy. “You awful child!” she scolded, laughing through tears as he licked her face. “All those letters, and not once did you mention you could change! Not once!”
Surprise, Nathan whined, wagging his tail hopefully.
“Oh, but look at the state of you!” She tutted as she tried and failed to brush the muddy paw prints from the front of her apron. “Honestly, Nathan. One of these days you’re going to come home looking respectable, and that’ll be the biggest surprise of all.”
Nathan huffed. There was just no pleasing some people.
*
“And that’s what the brace does,” Nathan explained, rubbing at the back of his neck self-consciously. “It helps the muscles heal.”
Her hand clamped firmly over her mouth, Nathan’s mother shook her head. “Oh Nathan. I’m so sorry, love.” She reached across the kitchen table to take his hand.
He gave his mother’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’m just glad the doctor on Eyrie found it. They said it might take up to a year to fully heal. Maybe longer.”
“And what about your hearing?” his father asked, eyeing the loops of gold around Nathan’s ears. “Will that eventually be fixed as well?”
Nathan hesitated. “I don’t know. The right side got a little better, but not the left. These help, though.” He pulled the right listening aid free and handed it over to his father for inspection.
Warily, his father turned it over in his hands. “It looks like frippery,” he said at last.
Snorting at the pronouncement, Nathan stated, “They’re made from northern crystal.” His father looked up with sudden interest. “I asked the doctor who made them. He said it was mined here. Apparently, we provide the best quartz crystal for audio resonance. Whatever that means.”
“Well now, isn’t that a thing,” his father murmured, regarding the listening aid in his hand a little more kindly. He handed it back, and Nathan looped it around his ear. “I always say you can’t go wrong listening to the land.”
“No, I always say that,” his wife corrected as she stood to take their empty mugs over to the hearth and refilled them. “You called it fanciful guff. Are you sure you don’t want something else other than tea, Nathan-love? I could make cocoa?”
“No, Mum, thank you.” Nathan smiled tightly. “It doesn’t agree with me anymore. Apparently metal poisoning can do that.”
“I still can’t believe you had silver in you this whole time,” his mother said, her voice wavering. She paused on her way back to the table to foist more mince pies onto the side of his saucer before handing it back to him. “How do they even miss something like that?”
“By not looking,” another voice said. Nathan turned to see his Uncle Ivar walk into the kitchen. Technically, he was Nathan’s great uncle, but no one ever bothered to make the distinction, least of all Ivar. The man strode into the room and greeted Nathan with the merest of head bumps. “You’re looking good, lad. From what your father wrote me, I was half-expecting a cadaver to show up.”
“Ivar,” Nathan’s mother said warningly.
The old wolf cracked a toothy grin, ruffling Nathan’s hair affectionately. “What? I said he looks good, didn’t I? Must be all that sea air. Does the lungs powerful good, sea air does.”
“You’d know,” Nathan replied, flattening his hair. “How are the Black Isles? Still two sticks away from being blown away in a gale?”
“Aye, just about.” Ivar sat down heavily in one of the vacant chairs around the kitchen table and stretched his legs out. In his prime, he’d been a tall, rangy man, and despite a little thickening about his middle, Ivar cut an imposing figure even though he was in his twilight years. Most werewolves could hope to live into their mid-two-hundreds, if they were careful. Three, if they were lucky. Ivar—who was lucky, careful, and craftier than a fox in a chicken coop—was close to pushing three hundred and seventy, making him the oldest living werewolf since the days of legend. He’d served as Counsel to both Nathan’s father and grandfather: the only Counsel to have ever served two consecutive Wolf Lords. It was a point of pride that didn’t so much put a feather in his cap as the whole damn rooster. But despite his advanced age, there was something undeniably lively about him—a glint in his one remaining eye that belied the crevices time had carved into his craggy features and the shock of white hair he still somehow kept while younger men around him went bald.
Men like Nathan’s father.
“Bloody stuff and nonsense,” his father grumbled, carding fingers through thinning hair in a familiar gesture of frustration. He appeared profoundly weary next to Ivar. “You ought to come home, spend your time with us instead of communing with trees. Or whatever the hell you’re doing up there.”
“You can learn a lot from trees,” Ivar replied levelly, pilfering one of Nathan’s mince pies with a wink. It was gone in two bites. “And rocks. Rocks are fascinating. Do you know, there’s a standing stone up there, right in the center of the island? If you hold a needle on some thread, the needle swings toward it. I think there’s magic in it.”
Taking a swig from his mug of tea, Nathan said, “Eyrie’s like that. The entire island’s a dead zone for compasses. Vl—the Viscount says it’s science. Minerals like basalt and something else. Magnetite, I think he said.”
“Did he now?” Ivar asked, his tone carefully light as he rubbed his eyes, careful not to dislodge the eyepatch fitted over his right side. “I’m surprised he said anything to you at all. His father wouldn’t give a werewolf the time of day. Ignorant prick.”
Nathan blinked, surprised. “You’ve met him?” He recalled the look of dread that passed over Vlad’s face whenever they talked about the Count. The vampire always tried to hide it, masking it behind vague smiles and derisive remarks, but there was something haunted behind his eyes that Nathan didn’t like.
“Once or twice. Last time would have been… Gods, forty-odd years ago?” He turned to Nathan’s father, who grunted in agreement. “Last time we were at Parliament. He wouldn’t even look at us. Just stared straight ahead. Stuck
up bloodsucker.”
His mother paused stirring something which smelled vaguely medicinal on the stove to ask, “Which one was he again? Was he the one that went around putting people on spikes?”
“No,” Ivar replied, “That was the old Count, the one this one did away with. Nasty business.”
“They eat their own, vampires.” Nathan’s father grumbled; his voice cracked apart on a wet cough deep in his chest. Nathan frowned, concerned, as Ivar thumped his father on the back. “Turn on each other like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.
“So do we,” Nathan countered, frowning even more when his father continued to cough. “How long have you had that?”
His father waved him off. “Ach, it’s nothing. Caught a cold, and the damn thing’s lingering. And what do you mean ‘so do we’? We’d do nothing like that.”
Nathan arched an eyebrow at him. “Really? Because that’s not what that book you gave me says.”
“He’s got you there, Tam,” Ivar interjected with a crooked smirk. “It’s true, lad. We’ve got our own bloody history. But we came out of the darkness and unified. It was the only way to survive. Strength through unity. No pack left behind. And all that.”
“Well, I haven’t met the Count yet,” Nathan said. “I probably won’t have to. The Viscount runs the island. And he’s…” Wonderful, amazing, adorable, I miss him already… “Perfectly nice. We play chess together.”
“Really?” Ivar asked, arching a bushy eyebrow at him. “Who wins?”
“Me, usually. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing.” Ivar barked with laughter. “I just wanted to make sure I didn’t waste my time teaching you. And the Viscount’s all right, I suppose.”