by Kari Gregg
He wouldn’t.
Dead vampyr were a waste of blood.
“But it’s out of my hands. The weres are in position, waiting to see what you’ll do. So… Will you speak with me? As we once did?”
Garrick stared, his gaze guarded. “And after?”
“If you want my head, you’re welcome to it.”
Garrick’s gut knotted, but he lowered his sword by slow, careful degrees. The master’s piercing green eyes followed his every move, watched as he bent and gently placed his sword on the cold tile.
He smiled. “I knew you’d be reasonable.”
Garrick sat on the floor. He propped his forearms on his raised knees, let his fingers dangle between them. “Why?”
“I told you. I’ve missed you.”
His head shook. “No. Why did you…do what you did to Luc?”
Zechariah steepled his fingers. “I liked him, Garrick. He’s not what I would have chosen for you, but he does love you.”
He choked on the grief tearing at his throat. “Then why did you hurt him?”
The master scowled. “To draw you to us, of course. You’d have hardly come otherwise.”
“Torturing Luc was the fastest, most efficient means of getting to me. I hate it, but I understand that. No, I mean the rest.” He jerked his gaze away. “Why did you force your blood on him? And for God’s sake, why did you let the others give him theirs?”
“As much as that infant loves you, Garrick, I love you more.”
His shoulders slumped in defeat.
“You don’t belong with the slaves. You never have. They are incapable of appreciating you, of understanding and loving you as we do. You were our son. Two masters chose you before you’d reached your maturity. Two!”
He whipped his stare back to Zechariah’s. “Nathaniel was no father.” He glared venomous hatred. “Not to me.”
“You’re right. He wasn’t. Nathaniel was too sick, too twisted to be a father to anyone.” He exhaled a weary breath. “I’m sorry for what he did to you. We all are.”
“Is what why you didn’t hunt me? Why you let me live?” Garrick sneered. “You pitied me?”
“Not pity.” Zechariah’s jade eyes glimmered his shame and sorrow. “Remorse. After Nathaniel, no one could deny we’d failed you, and your weapons could never be as sharp as our regret. How could we condemn the pain that drove you when we had inflicted it? We’d earned your wrath. I’m only grateful you destroyed as few of us as you have.”
Zechariah blew out a hard breath. “Each of us hoped when we sensed you approaching that your fury had reached its end. That you’d forgiven us and had finally come home.” His glance darted away. “Many masters died longing for your return, hoping you’d chosen him as your father. Gladly. I, too, will die gladly.”
“Is that all this was?” Garrick’s stomach clenched. “A twisted scheme to orchestrate a master’s noble death? To die with honor at the hand of a son?”
Zechariah’s eyes narrowed in irritation. “Not just any son. Bad enough that the slaves so underestimate you. Don’t disrespect me by carrying on as though I know no better. As though you know no better. You are far, far more, and have always been more, than any master’s son.” He paused, chuckled. “I know it’s incredibly rude to mention it, but I must know. When Aidan approached you to join their silly council—”
“I will not speak of it,” Garrick snarled, interrupting the master before he said something that provoked him beyond what he could bear.
“No, I suppose you won’t.” When he coughed, blood frothed at the corner of his mouth. “Just tell me this much. A final boon before I die.” He studied the younger vampyr with heartbroken eyes. “How could you do it? Knowing what you were meant for? What you are?”
He averted his eyes, unwilling even now to face the master’s hurt and disappointment. “That’s over. Ended,” he murmured. “As dead as my father.”
“No, it’s not!” Zechariah slammed a weak fist to the tile floor. “Isaac is dead. No one is more sorry for that than I, but you are still very much alive. He wouldn’t have wanted you to die along with him. You can still have the station and the power that Isaac, that everyone, planned for you.”
“Don’t you hear when I speak? Do you ever listen?” Garrick’s head darted up. “I don’t want your bloody title! The position, the power—I don’t want it.”
Zechariah glared. “You did, once. Before Isaac—”
“I loved him. I would have given him anything, done whatever he asked. Even that,” Garrick said, disgusted by the desperate appeal that made his voice husky. “But I never wanted it. Those were my father’s dreams, his desires.”
“Whether you wanted it or not, you would’ve nonetheless taken power when the time came to please Isaac. If only Nathaniel hadn’t killed him.”
“If not Nathaniel, one of the others would’ve. You hated him as fiercely. All of you did.” His eyes burned with an old anguish never forgotten. “I loved him, and you killed him for it.”
“Yes. We did.” His bloodied lips curved to a sad smile when Garrick stared at him, stunned. “Didn’t expect me to admit it, did you, boy?”
Zechariah laughed, harsh wet coughs racking his broken body. Garrick gritted his teeth while he waited for the master to wipe misted blood from his chin. “I’m dying. What harm is the admission to me? Yes, I’ll confess. Every master wanted your father dead. He insisted that we wait until you’d matured. Reasonably so, in retrospect. But jealousy blinded us. We believed Isaac selfishly kept you from us. Not for our benefit and certainly never yours. Some whispered that when you attained your majority, that even then, Isaac would not share you.”
Garrick liked to think so. He nurtured the hope that, if Isaac had lived, he would have been unable to part with him, that he’d have denied the others in the end. But he knew his father’s ambitions for him too well. “Isaac had begun preparing me. Before he died.” He wouldn’t think about that. He couldn’t. “He couldn’t wait for me to be ready.”
Zechariah blew out a ragged breath. “I was as blind as the others, sick with my envy and distrust. Only Nathaniel was twisted enough to act, but we all, in our hearts, rejoiced when he destroyed Isaac. Of course we hated him. Isaac had you.”
He swallowed convulsively, braced himself. If he were to ever find the answer to the one question that had haunted him these long centuries, Zechariah would give it. He had to try. “Why?”
“Why did Isaac have you?” Zechariah’s brows furrowed in confusion. “He bit you. You were his son in every sense. Ours by adoption, his by nature.”
Garrick shook his head. “I know why I was Isaac’s son. I mean… Why did you want me to be yours?”
A perplexed line furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”
“What made me special? So special that you were all willing to father me?”
“After all this time, you still do not grasp how unique you are,” he murmured, voice low with sad affection. “You love, Garrick. What you felt for Isaac was so open, so genuine. But the true miracle is that your love wasn’t selfish. You loved Isaac best. You loved him most, but you loved me as well. I know you did.”
Garrick didn’t try to deny it. “I did.”
“You still do.”
He couldn’t deny that either, but it hurt too much, so he simply glanced away.
Zechariah lifted his bloody hand, reached out for him. “Come here, son.”
Refusing him was surprisingly easy. “No.”
“I love you. As your father loved you.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t!” he said, wetness gathering in his eyes. “I made a mistake. A horrendous mistake that cost you the one you loved and robbed me of you these many years. I’ve paid for that, Garrick. More than you know. I’ve suffered every day for how dear the price my self-absorption exacted on you.”
“But I learned.” A tear slid down Zechariah’s bloodied cheek. “A bitter lesson, but I learned it. I know better
now what it means to love. I understand Isaac’s devotion to you as I never did before, how deep it ran. I can love you like that.”
“How can you still be so blind?” Garrick shook his head in amazement. “You claim to regret the destruction of my father. Yet you stole Luc from me, tortured and ruined him.”
“If you had not felt so alone after Isaac was killed, you would have never attached yourself to an insignificant, inferior slave in Nathaniel’s stable. I should have appreciated how lonely you were. I didn’t then, but I understand it now. I do. You taught me loneliness all these years you rejected us for the slaves and the rebellion. But we need not, either of us, continue suffering this way. You aren’t alone, Garrick. Not anymore.”
“I haven’t been alone. I had Luc,” he said, though the master would never, ever understand. He slowly rose to his feet. “You say you have learned, but I have as well. From Luc, the slave you discarded as insignificant and inferior.”
Instead of reaching for Zechariah’s raised hand, he hefted his sword. “Luc showed me that he could care for me and ask nothing in return. He taught me that others would sacrifice for me. For me! It was he who hauled me from the stables after I’d helped him kill Nathaniel, he who saved me when I begged to die. He kept me alive those first terrible years when it would’ve been safer for him to abandon me. He was the son I failed to be. Because he deserved nothing less, I became the father you should’ve been.” His eyes sparked urgent fury. “And you’ve destroyed him!”
The master jerked as though he’d been physically struck.
Garrick focused past the hilt of his sword, his cold and dispassionate eyes studying him. “You’ve learned nothing, Zechariah. Yours is a destructive love. I want no part of it.”
“Then I have no desire to continue this misery called life. You may consider our bargain fulfilled.” Anguish that death could not ease glittered in the master’s green eyes. “I ask only that you finish me quickly.”
“Can you stand?” he asked, willing at least to offer his old friend that much. To die as a man, as a warrior.
Zechariah’s muscles tightened and coiled with the effort of trying to push himself upright, but with a weak grunt, he slid back against the glass door. “I cannot.”
Garrick’s sword arm raised.
“I owe your Luc,” the dark master said with a body-racking shudder, “for saving your life. I cannot approve of him. But if he spared this cursed world your loss, I want you to know that I do regret ruining him.”
Garrick’s eyes snapped briefly shut. Zechariah was sorry for decimating Luc. Not because he finally realized Luc’s life had value. Never that. To acknowledge that a slave had merit beyond his usefulness to his superiors would invalidate millennia of ugly and brutal prejudice masquerading as noble heritage.
No, Zechariah regretted the blasphemy he had perpetrated on Luc only because Luc had served as a means for sustaining the life the masters credited above all others—Garrick’s. Even at this, his bitter end, Zechariah was too invested in his narrow-minded bigotry to recognize that the slaves were more than tools.
Accepting that was as close to genuinely understanding him as Zechariah had ever been capable, Garrick jerked his head in a stiff nod. “Thank you.”
The ancient vampyr lifted his chin. “Tell me just this once? Before I die. Please.”
Garrick swallowed the tight ball of grief that lodged in his throat. “I love you, Father.”
Yelling out his pain, his anger, he swung the blade.
Epilogue
Howler monkeys shrieked. Something heavy and dense crashed through the tangled underbrush to their right. The jungle at dusk was as alert and alive as the bayou Garrick had left behind in Louisiana. A chorus of buzzing insects, stalking predators and rustling greenery faded to black and silver as the sun dipped and finally fell.
Chest laboring in great pants even after these many months, Luc slowed the hard pace he’d set. He leaned against a vine-wrapped tree, eyes staring dead and blank. He bent over, hands dropping to his knees to rub viciously at the ache there as his lips—bisected by a white ridge of scar tissue that ran from temple to chin—separated to suck oxygen into his lungs.
Garrick, hardly taxed after the run, dropped to a fallen log facing him. “Shall I call the weres?”
Luc cursed him with his eyes.
Garrick rejoiced.
Three months ago, they’d feared, even with the aid of were blood and as much as Garrick himself could spare, that Luc’s vampyr would not be able to heal his blindness.
He didn’t speak. He rarely did now, and he’d ruthlessly closed his mind from both him and Kate as soon as his severed vocal chords had knitted enough to produce a hoarse rasp. But Garrick read his fury and frustration in the cold glitter of his eyes, the stiff set of his shoulders, the white shine of his knuckles fisted against his crippled knees.
Three fingers on each hand.
Not five.
Garrick’s stomach rolled with sick shame at his failure to protect him, at the damage that had been wrought on the young vampyr’s mind and body to draw Garrick out.
So much pain and suffering.
Garrick could almost endure it—almost—if the damage had only been physical. But what they’d done to Luc’s spirit was a constant, throbbing ache. When hopelessness and despair threatened to overwhelm him, Garrick fell back to repeating what Kate never stopped insisting, never stopped believing: “Give it time, Luc.”
“Time?” He laughed, a hoarse, brittle sound that shivered up Garrick’s spine. “Yes, I’ve centuries to endure yet before you’re forced to break your damn vow and take my head.”
Garrick flinched, though pleased that Luc at last seemed ready to speak more than reluctant monosyllables. “Every night, you heal further. Your body may still recover,” he said, but Luc’s silent sneer bespoke the lie.
His recovery had slowed in the past weeks, his body’s ability to repair itself sharply declining. The setting sun no longer brought the hope of another milestone of shattered bone knit together, of torn muscle and sinew mended. Luc worked now to adapt to his body’s new limitations: his limp, the loss of his fingers, the ropey scars that made drawing humans to him for blood a grueling ordeal.
“I am a monster.”
His heart wrenched at even so glancing a link with Luc’s shattered mind, the crushing grief, self-loathing, and pain, but just as quickly, Luc shut him out.
When Garrick could stand to look at him again, bear the horror of the burdens he had placed on the young vampyr, one of Luc’s remaining fingers traced crude white stripes the dark masters had engraved into his chest. They’d sliced deep, devastating his internal organs to carve the mocking word there for all eternity:
SON
“Thank you, Father.”
Garrick hung his head low, took the sharp lash of Luc’s ruined voice as punishment he well deserved. “I love you,” he said. His bitterly strong and healthy voice lowered to a husky rumble in a pain that rivaled Luc’s. “Too much to watch you die.”
“Your love is too costly,” Luc snarled. “Can your love give my fingers back to me? The headhunters won’t have me, not with maimed hands. I can’t defend myself, much less go to war.” He fisted a crippled hand and slammed it into the tree. Wood splintered. “A vampyr who cannot fight is useless. Impotent. Less than a man.”
“You will grow stronger.” Garrick swallowed the boulder that had lodged in his throat. “Every night, you grow stronger.”
“Can your love give me a mate?” he demanded. “No female could love this…thing…I’ve become, and even if a female were willing to look beyond the scars, her vampyr would never accept mine, never accept blood that’s been mutilated and wasted.”
“Your healing is not yet complete. Give it ti—”
“No woman can bear look at me!”
Garrick’s nostrils flared, scenting Kate before he detected the faint rustle of her clothes as she glided from the shadows.
“I look at you.�
�� Kate walked to Luc. “And my vampyr likes you just fine.”
“For God’s sake, don’t touch me.” When Garrick glanced hopefully up, Luc had twisted away from the tree and backed a rejecting step in retreat. He visibly shuddered, both three-fingered hands lifted to ward her away. “Don’t. I am unclean.”
Kate didn’t heed Luc’s warning. Her arms snaked around his torso, wrapped around his damaged body to hold him, her cheek resting on the damning word carved into his chest. “You are what you have always been. My guardian. My friend.”
“Garrick.” He kept his arms raised, the muscles of his neck cording in his effort to resist holding her, gaining comfort from her.
“The masters’ blood taint is long gone from you. Whatever you believe of yourself, of what you fear, you must entertain no doubts of that. They are dead. They can’t hurt you anymore.”
Luc’s eyes rounded in desperate entreaty, his Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallowed. “Father. Please.”
Garrick exhaled a tired breath. “Come to me, Kate.”
She sighed, brushed a chaste kiss across the brand on Luc’s chest, but when Garrick lifted his hand to reach for her, she came into his arms. He tucked her against him, sniffed, enjoyed the fresh feminine scent of her hair. “When do you want to leave?” Kate stiffened against him in mute protest. “No, love. He needs to go.”
Luc’s stare glittered. “Tonight.”
“No,” Kate shouted, her small hand tightening on his bicep. “Garrick, you can’t let him, not this quickly. He’s barely recov—”
“Shh,” he said calmly, smoothly, his gaze never leaving Luc’s. Crushing relief devastated him, made his body far weaker than the maimed vampyr before him. “Thank God.” Garrick fought tears and won. Barely. “Look at him, Kate.”
She opened her mouth to argue.
He stopped her with a subtle stroke of her hip. “He’s challenging me.”
Kate’s eyes studied Luc under her lashes. “He knew you wouldn’t let him go tonight, for my sake if not his.” Garrick felt the first stunning sweep of relief rush through her as intimately as he’d felt his own. “His pride is returning.”