On the days that Roman was out of town, Sebastian took over his squad. Sebastian had been an officer in the English army during the Napoleonic wars. While he preferred to hunt under Nial’s command, he was a strong enough leader that Roman’s absence wasn’t felt as badly as it might have been.
Blythe was confident enough of Sebastian’s command that she did not make any special arrangements to support his squad. Sebastian held up his own very nicely.
As the weather grew warmer, the number of Summanus increased. Blythe’s plans to clear out the suburbs were impacted by the more frequent incursions. The squads fell back into purely reactionary mode, spending their nights hunting down as many Summanus as possible, without any real strategy in mind.
Perhaps that’s why it happened. Without direction, a squad could flounder. Afterward, she questioned herself and wondered if her command had been insufficient.
The first hint of trouble came when the radio on her hip crackled and static screeched from the speaker. Then she realized it wasn’t static, but screaming. The sound cut off as the connection was lost.
She waved for everyone to hold, then ducked behind a fence and put her back to it, so that she could wait for a follow-up communication, which was standard protocol.
As she didn’t know who had made the call, waiting was all she could do.
Fifteen seconds later, the radio crackled again. She turned the volume down so the others would not hear what came next. Even then, the fine hairs on the back of her neck were prickling hard.
“Blythe, are you there? Over.”
“I am. Who is this? Identify yourself, please.”
“It’s Kimball. Sebastian is down. Repeat. Sebastian is down. We are cut off and fighting our way out. We need backup.”
Blythe forced herself to keep breathing. She thought quickly. Nial’s squad was on the far side of the hills, cleaning out a nest they had found. For a brief moment she hoped that they were out of range of the radio and that Nial was not listening to this.
Her squad was closer. She lifted the radio to her mouth. “Give me your exact location.”
Kimball shouted out an intersection. His words were interspersed with gun fire. They had been ordered not to use guns unless pushed to the extreme, even though every squad carried a few of them, just in case. Gun fire could kill civilians, too. There were far too many civilians in the suburbs to use them safely.
If Sebastian’s squad had broken out the guns, they were indeed in trouble.
“Hang in there, Kimball. We’ll be there in four minutes.”
She stood, waved everyone over to her and explained what was happening. They raced for their cars, which were only a block away. With a squeal of tires, they headed for Kimball’s location.
The Summanus had them blocked off in an alley and were using sheer numbers to press in toward them. Blythe had everyone line themselves up at the mouth of the alley and lay down a suppressing fire, to disperse them.
It was tricky, because Kimball and the others were also in the line of fire. The Summanus were so thick upon the ground, though, they acted like a shield.
As soon as the Summanus realized there were enemies behind them, they leapt over their fallen brothers and raced for them. Blythe’s squad was under attack, everyone fighting hand-to-hand. However, they’d had a lot of practice at this and the Summanus fell. She had told everyone what was at stake on the way over and now they were all fighting to save the others.
The Summanus dispersed, possibly cowed by their determination. Blythe turned and sprinted down the alley before the last of them had disappeared, sure that the others would see them off. Kimball was crouched behind a dumpster, his gun in his hand. He had Sebastian in his other arm. Sebastian was lying still and there was a lot of blood.
Blythe’s heart fluttered to a stop. “Let’s get him to the big house as fast as we can. Winter can see to him. I’ll let her know we’re coming.”
They carried Sebastian to the nearest car and put him on the back seat. Blythe wasn’t sure it was one of their cars and didn’t ask.
The drive to the house took far too long. On the way, she phoned Winter.
“We are bringing a casualty to you,” Blythe said carefully.
“I’ll be waiting. Who is it?”
“Winter, I’m sorry. It’s Sebastian.”
Silence.
“I understand. I’ll be waiting.” Winter disconnected.
Kimball and Dominic carried Sebastian into the dining room and laid him upon the big table. Winter followed them in and leaned over Sebastian, her hand on his head. There were tears on her face, but she focused upon him in the way she had, reaching inside and assessing. “Everyone go away.” Her voice was hoarse.
“Can we get you anything?” Patrick asked.
Winter glanced up at them. She looked like she had aged ten years. “I don’t need anything except peace and quiet. Someone must deal with Nial. Close the door please.”
She turned her back on them and bent over Sebastian once more.
Patrick led Blythe out of the room and shut the door as requested. They moved into the big lounge room. He looked around at everyone there. “Has anyone called Nial?”
“I told him to come home,” Garrett said. “I didn’t say why.”
“There’s a chance he heard the radio call,” Blythe reminded them. She glanced at Dominic. “Could you recall the squads, please? Hunting is over for the night.”
Dominic was their default communications hub, when he wasn’t sniffing out Summanus nests. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and moved into one of the offices to make his calls.
Patrick picked up her hands, which she had squeezed together. “This isn’t your fault.”
She nodded. He might be right. She wasn’t going to argue with him. Not now.
“You should eat. You’re very pale.”
“It’s just shock.”
“Exactly. Calories will help.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
There was a shout from outside, close to the house. Then a door slammed. Footsteps.
Blythe had been braced for Nial’s arrival, but she had forgotten his vampire-enhanced abilities.
He was moving fast, almost too fast to see properly, and came to a halt in the middle of the room. The mesmerizing blue of his eyes seemed to blaze as he looked around wildly. “Where is he?”
“In the dining room—” Patrick began. That was all he got out. Nial moved with such speed that this time, Blythe could not follow him.
As Patrick was the nearest to the dining room door, he took a step forward, raising his arms. He moved with the same vision-blurring speed. There was a grunt. Blythe had no idea who had made the sound, for suddenly the two of them were standing with their arms locked and their bodies straining.
“Let me in,” Nial said.
“Winter needs to concentrate. Having you in there won’t help her. You can’t go in.”
“If you don’t let me go, so help me….” Nial’s voice was a low growl and the threat made the hairs on the back of Blythe’s neck stand up in a painful prickle. The menace radiating from him was enough to make her want to reach for her knife. It reminded her forcibly that Nial was very old. He had survived countless wars and his moral compass was quite different from a modern man’s.
Someone he loved was in jeopardy and Blythe knew that very little would stop him forcing his way into the room. Except that Patrick stood between Nial and Sebastian.
She inched closer, even though all her instincts were telling her to stay far away.
Patrick gripped the back of Nial’s head. There was nothing intimate about the hold. He was simply forcing Nial to focus on him.
“You can’t do anything in that room to change the course of what is to come,” Patrick said. His voice was low, so that it wouldn’t carry too far across the room and there was an iron core threaded through the words. Patrick knew what he was talking about and it showed.
“I know it seems impossible,” Patrick continued. “You must stay here and wait. All your skills, all your fury, none of it is going to help now. You must trust that Winter will do everything she can to save him.”
Nial was breathing heavily. It was almost like he was panting. Then Blythe realized that he was actually hyperventilating, something she had never seen a vampire do before. Alarm trickled through her. She didn’t know enough about a vampire physiology to understand what was happening to him.
Patrick gave Nial a small shake, to command his attention. “If I let you go now, will you sit down and wait?”
Blythe was close to Patrick’s shoulder now and she could see over it that Nial’s eyes were almost feral. His gaze was skittering everywhere. Her instincts were still telling her to go for her knife.
“Nial!” Patrick didn’t shout. He was using all his skills to project his voice in a way that made everyone else in the room jump. Nial’s gaze returned Patrick’s face.
“You have to breathe,” Patrick told him. “Your human physiology is breaking through.”
Going against every instinct and common sense she had, Blythe laid her hand on Nial’s arm. “They know you love them,” she said gently. “But you are not helping them. You need to pull yourself together, in case they do need you. Then you will be able to help them. You can’t, if you don’t get it together.”
Nial flinched and his gaze turned upon her. She drew in a sharp breath as she saw that his eyes were sparkling. He was on the verge of tears, an impossibility for a vampire.
Nial wrenched himself out of Patrick’s grip and turned away. He kept turning, perhaps looking for a place to go, but there were enough people in the room that there was no private corner for him. He was still breathing raggedly and his hands were flexing.
He dropped onto the big square Ottoman in front of the armchair and covered his face with his hands. He was shaking.
After a moment, he pushed his fingers through his hair in a helpless gesture. His gaze remained on the floor and Blythe knew that he was trying to avoid anyone’s gaze.
“He’s not vampire anymore,” Nial said brokenly. “He doesn’t heal.”
“Winter can heal anyone,” Patrick said softly. “She has bought Sebastian back from the dead once already. She can do it again.” He gripped Nial’s shoulder and squeezed. “You must let go and relax,” he said. “You must let your vampire physiology reassert itself.”
Blythe didn’t know if Nial heard him. He bought his hands back to his face, hiding it. He stayed hunched over and her heart shifted as an echo of the agony he must be feeling touched her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The hours stretched out endlessly, while Patrick continued to talk Nial down and keeping him from tearing his way into the dining room and jogging Winter’s elbow. Patrick seemed to have endless patience and always said exactly the right thing to help Nial breathe away the panic.
Blythe sat on the edge of the armchair opposite the one Nial was sitting in front of and watched Patrick work. Once Dominic had finished his calls, he sat on the arm of the chair behind her, his hand sometimes resting on her shoulder.
It took a while for Blythe to realize what Patrick was doing, because she had never seen it before. Then she noticed the pattern. Nial was a victim of his thoughts, which were circling endlessly around Sebastian’s fate. Then the panic would catch him, flaring up like a volcanic eruption and that was when Patrick would talk him down to calm again.
Slowly, the peaks diminished and the calm between grew longer. In those, moments, Nial sat quietly, talking only to Patrick in a quiet voice.
Patrick did not leave his side. He did not spare attention for anyone else in the room. He concentrated solely upon Nial. He was possibly the only one in the room who could have known what to do, too. Patrick was dealing with Nial as if he was a drug addict in crisis. He was talking him down from reaching for what he needed the most.
It was close to two in the morning when Winter emerged from the dining room, closing the door behind her. Everyone looked up. No one had moved from the room since Winter had sent them from the dining room four hours before. All the squads recalled by Dominic’s phone messages had remained in the room, too.
Winter looked drained, although the haggardness that had made her look so old when they had first bought Sebastian to her was gone. There was peace in her eyes.
“He’s fine now,” she said softly.
There was a collective sigh of relief and Nial got to his feet. She looked at him and gave him another warm smile. “He wants to see you.”
Nial paused at her side and kissed her, then moved into the dining room and shut the door behind him.
Winter sat on the footstool that Nial had vacated, sinking down onto it with the slowness of the truly exhausted.
Blythe got to her feet. “Coffee or food, or both?” she asked Winter.
“If there is something hot to eat, that would be good,” Winter said quietly. “Then I think I’m going to go to bed and sleep for a month.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Blythe said. She headed for the kitchen. There was some turkey stew at the back of the fridge that would warm up well.
She was stirring the stew in a pot on the stove when Patrick and Dominic found her there. She looked up from the pot and waited, because it seemed that both of them were waiting to tell her something.
Her gaze fell to Dominic, who always knew what was coming. This time he shrugged. “He’s blocking me out by quoting Shakespeare in his head. I don’t know what this is about.”
Patrick took the spoon out of her hand and put it back in the pot. Then he turned her to face him and cupped her cheek in his hand. His gaze drilled into her. “I am a fool if I don’t say this now. I love you. I love you both.” He held his hand out toward Dominic.
Dominic took it and moved to stand next to both of them. He closed his eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “You’re no longer afraid.”
Patrick gave a soft laugh. “I’m still terrified I’ll screw this up in some way, only that doesn’t seem very important anymore. Any of us, all of us, we could all be dead tomorrow. There are no guarantees and that’s what I’ve been looking for all this time—some sort of guarantee that this miracle that fell into my life wasn’t going to disappear if I made a wrong move. I think that’s a mistake I’ve made over and over…and I think I finally have learned my lesson. I’ve wanted warranties and locked-in certainties. Love doesn’t work that way.”
He stroked Dominic’s cheek with his thumb. “I don’t have to wait for you to say it. I don’t care if I’m the first to put myself out there. I love you both so much it makes me shake if I think about it too hard or too long.” He drew in a heavy breath and let it out.
Blythe wasn’t sure she could speak. Something was crimping her throat and clamping her chest, making it hard to breathe.
Dominic spoke for her. “Of course we’re not going to leave you up there waiting. Blythe has loved you forever. It was almost love at first sight and nothing to do with seeing you in the movies.”
Patrick closed his eyes slowly, in relief. Then he kissed her and suddenly she could breathe again. She clung to him, letting her body speak the words that she had not been able to say. She felt as though she would never be able to get close enough to him. She forced herself to step away, thought, because not everything had been said yet.
She looked at Dominic. He was watching her with his dark eyes and there was an expression on his face that told her he already knew.
“Of course I knew,” he said gently. “That first time we made love, I knew then. I had to wait for you to figure it out for yourself. Then Patrick came along and that locked everything into place. For me, too.” He glanced at Patrick and gave one of his endearing smiles. “I had to feel you two falling in love and realize that I didn’t resent it in the slightest, to know that I was already there. Mind-reading is very inconvenient at times, but it stops me from denying what I don’t want to face.”
Dominic shrugged. “This,” he said, lifting up his hands to encompass the kitchen and beyond, to include the entire house. “Domesticity. No more wandering. Responsibility. I got pulled into it one step at a time, but because I love you both as much as I do, I don’t care. And if anyone threatens Jake and the girls, I’ll take their heads off.”
“I’ll beat you to it,” Patrick said.
Dominic smiled. “You wanna bet? Blythe would mow both of us down and get there first.”
Blythe realized she was wearing a silly smile and didn’t care. “Who gets to tell the kids that this is going to be a permanent arrangement?”
Dominic laughed. “They already have figured it out for themselves. They’re smart and they all like the idea, too.”
Blythe rested her hand against Patrick’s chest. “Brownie points at school,” she said. “They live with the great Patrick Sauvage.”
Patrick smiled. “I can’t think of a better use for my fame than to help them.”
Behind Blythe, the stovetop hissed and she whirled and fished the spoon out of the stew just as it boiled up to the top edge of the pot. She stirred quickly and turned the heat down. “Damn,” she said. “I think this is ruined. I’ll have to do another batch for Winter.” She fumbled for the oven mitt to pick the saucepan up and dump the contents.
“And that right there is a metaphor for us,” Dominic said softly.
“Burning soup?” Patrick asked.
“You know exactly what I mean,” Dominic chided him. “You’re just doing your macho I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-icky-feelings thing.”
Blythe laughed and it came easily. She skirted around both of them, carrying the saucepan over to the sink and dumped it. “Winter told me that Sebastian proposed to her when he was tied up in a chair and she had just rescued him. While we spend our lives being ordinary. I get to find out you both love me while stew burns on the stove behind me.”
Blood Revealed Page 29