“You’re right,” she said softly. “It probably is a waste of time.”
As usual, the minute he had spoken the vicious words, Seth regretted them. Leah was his best friend. She was always nice to him. They liked so many of the same things. They thought so many of the same ways. And they were both born out of some stupid prophecy that neither of them felt they could live up to. Leah would give anything to be a normal Demon from a normal element, something simple like Water or Body. And Seth would give anything to have been born to normal, run-of-the-mill parents instead of the most powerful and Ancient one and the King’s dynamic sister.
But Seth caught himself in that thought and just as quickly rejected it. He loved his mother. She was the only thing that made living with his father bearable.
“Well ... what’s his name?” Seth asked awkwardly.
“Who?”
“This uncle you had.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Adam. He was supposedly this real kick-ass Demon. He was—”
“Enforcer before your father,” Seth finished for her. He nodded and sat back down next to her, but on the edge of the bench only, in case she didn’t welcome him after he’d been so mean.
“How did you know that?” she asked.
“History lessons. You know my dad. He’s always on me about history. It’s easy for him, though. He can remember it all because he was there.”
“Oh yeah.” Then Leah’s whole face brightened and she slid closer to Seth, grabbing hold of his arm eagerly. “Oh yeah! Your dad lived through all of that! I bet he knew Adam, too.”
“Well sure. Until he just disappeared ... hey, I know that look. You’ve got something going on in your brain,” Seth accused her. “Some kind of plot.”
“No plot. Just curiosity. Elijah tends to exaggerate about warrior prowess and all of that when it comes to his friends who are ... you know, dead. But your dad doesn’t ever exaggerate about anything.”
“No.” Seth gave a beleaguered sigh. He screwed himself up into a proper imitation of his father. “‘It makes no logical sense to decorate a story with colorful and emotional flotsam.’”
Leah giggled. “You do that very well.”
“Yeah well, I have the benefit of an up-close study.”
“Do you think he would talk to me about it?”
“It’s hard to say.” Seth thought about it a minute, the generous lips he’d inherited from his mother quirking into half a frown. “We’d have to make him think it was his idea or something.”
“Or make it seem like a history lesson.”
“Why do you want to know about some dead uncle anyway?” Seth nudged his shoulder into hers. “Don’t you hear enough about the dead people you missed out on?”
She gave him a grim nod. “True. But ... I have my reasons. Let’s leave it at that.”
Chapter 2
“There were yellow flowers in the children’s hair last week,” Syreena said softly. Her expression turned sad and wistful. “But now they’ve all died and faded. And I can’t find the children.” Then she smiled brightly at Jasmine, the multicolored streaks in her charcoal eyes actually growing light. “But we shall find fresh flowers in the gardens. I think bluebells will look lovely. Have you seen the children?”
Jasmine had been on her way out of the citadel when she was waylaid by the Lycanthrope Princess, who was married to Damien, the Vampire Prince, and Jasmine’s closest friend. Now she sighed and tried not to roll her eyes. Syreena didn’t respond well to negative emotions and hostility, so it was best to talk softly and play along.
“Um ... I think they’re in the courtyard.”
Yeah. Right. Just like there were no flowers in the gardens at this time of year, yellow or blue.
“Oh, but I looked there earlier,” Syreena said as she absently studied her fingertips.
“You must have just missed them,” Jasmine said, trying to hold on to her patience.
“Do you think so?” Syreena asked eagerly. “I will look again.” She leaned forward and kissed Jasmine on her cheek. “I am so glad we are friends now.”
Syreena drifted off toward the courtyard, the train of her dress trailing behind her, the silken fabric falling crookedly off one of her bony shoulders and showing just how thin she had grown over the past two years. The truth was she often forgot to eat or bathe. Not unless Damien reminded her and held her hand through the entire meal or stepped into the bath with her to keep her focused.
No. Syreena spent most of her time looking for the children.
Children that did not exist.
They had never existed. Would never exist. And therein lay the trouble. When Ruth and Nico had attacked Syreena two years ago, Ruth had plunged into Syreena’s psyche and perverted her very worst fears and weaknesses into ...
. . . into this.
Jasmine let her hand fall away from the door handle and looked around the room. She could feel him, knew he was close. He was always close by when Syreena was near.
Damien broke away from the shadows down at the opposite end of the great room. He moved with his usual dark grace as he crossed the room, but all of the strength and power he had once had was now faded. He neglected himself too often, choosing instead to attend to Syreena’s needs over his own. He would often go days without hunting, and he didn’t dare feed from Jasmine or anyone else to sustain himself, because then Syreena’s gentle madness would turn into something else, something vicious and violent.
Jasmine sighed as he spared her only the briefest of looks.
Unsatisfied, she followed him as he tracked his bride’s tragic wanderings through his fortress.
“Damien,” she called to him as gently as she could. She tried to imbue the address with everything she was feeling, with all the support she could muster. She tried to remind him that she was there for him. She would always be there for him.
Usually he would ignore her or merely nod and continue on his way, but this was one of the rare instances when he stopped and turned back to her.
He looked so sad and tired. His handsome face should have shown nothing of his age, Vampires being utterly ageless, but these past years had altered his looks. He looked older. Weary. Lost. And Jasmine knew she wasn’t the only one noticing it. When a Prince grew weak, he could not defend his holdings or his monarchy. There were vipers, young, powerful, strong vipers, waiting in the darkness for the chance to sever Damien’s head from his body and thereby lay claim to the Vampire monarchy.
Jasmine was the only one standing in their way. Her strength and her loyalty were protecting Damien’s life and his rule.
“Damien ...” she said again as she reached to put her arms around him. He resisted her hug, casting a worried glance after Syreena, but in the end he was starving for the strength and support of his best friend and adviser. In the end he let her hold him, let her hug him tight and close. He took a deep, cleansing breath, drawing in Jasmine’s personal aura, her vigor. Jasmine bit her tongue so she didn’t give in to the urge to spew words he would refuse to hear in any event. “Have you hunted recently?” she asked instead.
“Not very recently,” he admitted to her. “But I cannot leave her alone. If she wandered into the wrong place unprotected ...”
Mad or not, Syreena was still an exotic genetic anomaly. She was a one-of-a-kind Lycanthrope, a changeling who could take on two animal forms instead of just one because a childhood illness had split her abilities in two directions. But what had made her special had also left her barren. At first her barrenness had been attributed to the fact that Vampires and Lycans were not compatible, but as other Vampires began to take Lycanthrope mates and proceeded to have buckets of children together, it became all too clear that the fault was with Syreena’s very specifically altered biology. This was Syreena’s opinion anyway. An opinion Jasmine had shared. But after Ruth’s perversion of her deepest held fears, Syreena began wandering the halls of the citadel like some kind of screwed-up Ophelia, singing to herself and chasing hallucination
s in circles. Jas had let go of her enmity toward Damien’s wife, feeling too sorry for her in the long run to keep hating her scrawny little guts.
Damien was right. There were lawless Vampires everywhere who coveted Syreena’s powerful Lycanthrope blood, and she was now helpless to protect herself. Syreena had once been a magnificent fighter. Jasmine had to confess to that. But now she was an easy meal for any Vampire who bumped into her.
“Damien, you can’t do this for the rest of your life,” Jasmine said softly, knowing the grim reality of her words would anger him.
“What would you have me do?” he said, but this time there was no anger, and there was no fire in the question. It was as though he was honestly asking for her help. Jasmine’s solution had always been to kill the silly bitch and be done with it. But the truth was, for all of Damien’s present unhappiness, to lose Syreena would be the end of him. He fancied himself hopelessly heartbound to the Lycanthrope, connected to her in some mystical, spiritual way. Damien had already proven to her that if Syreena died, he would quickly follow.
Jasmine cared too deeply for him to lose him.
And Jasmine needed her anchors, like her friendship with Damien and her appointment as leader of the Nightwalker Sensor Network. It was too easy for her to lose touch with the world around her. Too easy to grow bored and melancholy. It had been that way for as long as she could remember. Perhaps all of her life ... but more so since ...
Jasmine shook the thought off. It did no good to wallow in what might have been, what once had been ... what no longer was. Nor was she going to allow herself to get so depressed that she could no longer bear living aboveground. Damien needed her. Desperately. If she went to ground, some bastard Vampire would take advantage of Damien’s present preoccupation, see it for the weakness that it was, and behead the Prince, taking his throne from him in one sweep of violence. Then who knew what would happen to the era of peace the Nightwalkers were trying so hard to enjoy.
She laughed at herself. Her appointment to the Nightwalker Sensor Network was supposed to have been a temporary one. She was supposed to get it on its feet and then turn over the reins to someone else, preferably Stephan, the former leader of the Vanguard, the Vampires’ version of an army. But Stephan had been killed, and it turned out there was no one else to take over. Not anyone that all the leaders of the Nightwalker clans were comfortable with, at any rate.
“You need to hunt. You need to keep strong,” she counseled her Prince. “You cannot protect her in this weakened state.”
“What is this?”
The shrill demand made Jasmine and Damien jump apart, with a guilt there was no reason to feel. They had done nothing wrong.
But the madness in Syreena’s eyes blazed and she was pointing an accusatory finger at Jasmine and her husband. “I see! I see it now! You don’t love me! You are going to throw me aside because I cannot give you the children you desire!”
“Syreena, that is not true,” Damien said soothingly as he tried to gather his rigid, hysterical wife into his embrace, turning his back on Jasmine and the brief moment of opportunity where Jasmine might have made him see sense.
“You’ve always loved her more than me,” Syreena accused him with heavy sadness washing over her and tears filling her eyes. “She’s always been better for you than I have. You ought to have married Jasmine. Everyone says it. Everyone thinks it!”
“No one says that,” he denied softly, although it was very much a supposition in Vampire circles. “And even if they did, it would not matter to me. It never has. You are everything to me. You are my only love. I need nothing else so long as I have you. I wish you would believe that.”
But Jasmine knew Syreena didn’t believe him. If she had, then maybe Ruth would not have been able to weaken her mind, tormenting her over children she simply could not create.
Although if Jasmine was going to be fair, Syreena and Damien had once been very happy, strong and content in spite of the Princess’s infertility. They had seemed to love each other powerfully enough to overcome this obstacle and learn to be happy with just each other.
Jasmine walked away from the couple. It was just too painful to watch them now. Needing to escape, for just a little while, she flew away from the Romanian fortress and traveled the miles to the Russian provinces of the Lycanthropes. She was drawn to these caverns again and again for one reason. She asked herself for the thousandth time why she was there, why she was so obsessed with checking in on the little Demon orphan she’d rescued that day long ago in similar caverns.
She had no more answers now than she ever had.
Jasmine went in search of Leah.
“Mama, have you seen Father?”
Legna looked up at her son and tried to hide her surprise. It wasn’t like her son to seek out his father voluntarily, and it certainly wasn’t time for lessons.
“He is in the south wing. Just beyond the baths. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I had a question for him.” Seth shrugged it off, but Legna was a Mind Demon, and that made her a powerful empath. She could sense her son’s emotions very easily. She was grateful for that because it was the only way she would ever know what was going on in his head most of the time. Ever since he had reached puberty, he had become like a stranger to her—and a hostile stranger to his father.
She had to give Gideon credit for his patience with the boy. Gideon was a very direct creature and didn’t see much value in indulging in wasteful emotions. Not that he wasn’t a devoted and loving father. He was, and he tried to show it as best he could. As Gideon’s Imprinted mate she was very well aware of how deeply loving and passionate a man Gideon truly was. And, with her, he was quite demonstrative.
But since Seth had reached ten years of age, they had lost touch with each other. Seth had started to reject his father’s attentions and affections ... now the only way they connected was in their daily lessons. It baffled Gideon no end. He was Ancient and wise, had lived so many ages and experienced so many things, but he had never been a father before and found himself at a loss. He wanted to be direct, address the problem head-on, but luckily Legna had been able to convince him that wouldn’t be a very good idea. Seth was very sensitive, even a little brooding. He tended to come around to things in his own way and in his own time. It was best to let him do so without forcing him or challenging him before he was ready.
“I am certain he would love to answer your questions,” she said, turning from her baking and dusting off her hands.
“Yeah. I know. He’d never miss a chance at a lecture,” Seth said, coming just shy of sounding snide.
“Seth, your father loves to teach you. He wants to prepare you for the world and for the future. He does it to protect you. There are so many dangers out there.”
“He should just leave me to my own devices. Seems to me he’d be happier if I got bounced off the earth,” Seth said with a shrug.
“Seth! Why would you think such a thing?”
Seth drew back at her powerful response, looking a little trapped for a moment, almost as if he hadn’t meant to speak his feelings aloud.
“Never mind,” he said hastily, pulling back as his mother reached for him. “I was just talking trash.”
“First,” she said as she grabbed hold of his arm, “lying to your mother is unacceptable. Second, lying to an empath is futile. Surely you have learned that as my son.”
She took the sting out of the rebuke by drawing a line of flour down the side of his cheek.
“Mama!” he protested, swiping at his face. But he stopped trying to escape her. With his head hung, he shrugged one of his narrow shoulders. “It’s just ... I know I am nothing but a big disappointment to both of you. To everyone. I’m a powerless nothing when I ought to have been something special. He hates that I’m not all magnificent and special like he is.”
“Sweet Destiny, Seth, nothing could be further from the truth! What is it that you think we are expecting from you? You are only fourteen years old! You have
a good four to six years yet before we expect to be on the lookout for your power!”
“That’s bull. You all look at Leah and wonder why I’m not as strong and special as she is.” The boy’s eyes teared up as he withdrew physically from her, wrapping his arms protectively around himself. “She did massive things when she was just two years old. Noah was really young when his power first showed. Jacob was what? Nine? Eight? All of the most powerful Demons on the planet had so much power in them it couldn’t wait to be born. And then there’s me. A big, fat ... nothing.”
“The biggest mistake you can ever make is to compare yourself to others.”
Seth started at the sound of his father’s voice behind him. Shame rushed over him. How could he have forgotten? Speaking to his mother was like speaking to his father at the same time, their connection was so strong, their thoughts so intermingled. But he had seen his mother distance herself from his father psychically before. Stupid of him to think she would have done so now to give him a private moment with her. He turned quickly to face the astral projection of his father, his whole body bristling defensively as he tried to erect some kind of mental protection.
“Whatever,” Seth said with a shrug. His eyes were cast downward, studying the rug on the floor.
“Seth,” his father said, the tone of his voice far gentler than he was used to hearing from his sire. It was enough to encourage him to lift his eyes. “I have great faith that you will be an extraordinary Demon one day, I do not deny that. But if you were healthy and happy, that would be more than enough for me. Your happiness is everything to me.”
Seth had never heard his father speak to him like that before. He looked at him with doubt, wondering if he was using some kind of reverse psychology on him.
“Or,” his mother interrupted his thoughts gently, “maybe he loves you just the way you are.”
Seth had so convinced himself otherwise that he really found the thought hard to believe. Legna could sense that, and she could sense her husband’s dismay as well. It was an idea that would have to be addressed slowly and over a long period of time. But now that they were aware of what was at the root of their son’s troubles, they could perhaps go about rectifying the problem.
Adam Page 4