by Denise Agnew
“You know I’d never hurt you.”
She did understand that, but his energy influenced her, creating havoc in her otherwise calm personality. “You do something to me I can’t explain. Whenever I’m with you it feels like everything is clearer. As if my life’s purpose came when I walked back into Pine Forest. Yet my nerves are on fire when I’m with you.”
“Are you saying being with me causes you pain?” The rasp in his voice spelled deep concern.
She touched his forearm and squeezed briefly. “No. No. I don’t know if the attraction I feel for you is real or some weird chemical reaction caused by the fact you’re a vampire.”
“We talked about this before.”
She smiled. “Forgive me for being a little skeptical.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“Good. Then you can answer some more questions.”
“Then we’d better start at the beginning.”
“The very beginning of time?” Clarissa asked.
Ronan propped up on one elbow and looked down on her. “Back so far the only evidence that the civilization ever existed lay buried beneath sand for eons. So you’ll understand how vampires came to be.”
Even with his eyes calm deep pools, she sensed his internal heat, his vampire core filled with energy and potential. Lightning fueled him and centuries of stored memories and actions.
He passed his index finger over her cheek in a gentle caress. “The vampire legend is clouded with mystery and who knows if all of it is true. Like any history things are distorted with the passage of time.” His eyes darkened, as if recalling the details caused him to enter a state of meditation. “This story starts around three thousand years B. C., even before Egypt was a great civilization.” His words sounded ancient, like they touched the dusty past and they’d both stepped into another world. “Close your eyes and you’ll see the story unfold.”
Chapter Twelve
Clarissa closed her eyes as he requested. Then, as time seemed to slide backward with feathery fingers, she realized his words became images. Night became day, and sun-baked terrain, hilly and unforgiving came to her vision as unmistakably as if she’d stepped into the past.
His voice went deeper. “The story concerns the Sumerians.”
Visions unfolded in front of her and she wondered if he planted them in her mind. She saw a growing city made up of flat-topped huts with walls of reed matting stretched between wooden uprights and waterproofed with plaster made of thick mud. The huts had wooden doors and the hearths were holes in the beaten mud floor. Newer buildings arose on the outer reaches of the city, this time of mud-brick and several rooms each. As she gazed out at the spreading city, she noticed this place was a gleaming production of temples and a royal palace.
“Erech,” Ronan said. “It was resurrected by Utuhegal after hordes of Gutians rushed down from the mountains and destroyed it. After a hundred years of oppression, they are free. Their new ruler is Ur-Nammu.”
“You’re seeing what I’m seeing,” she said.
“Yes. But I wouldn’t be able to visualize it if it wasn’t for your ability to see and feel the past. You have a power more formidable than mine.”
Cows, oxen, pigs and other animals populated the village. People ground barley in rough querns to make porridge. A man flint napped arrowheads from obsidian. She saw painted pots and vessels with incised decorations. Villagers moved in the narrow marshes in canoe-type boats.
Then Clarissa saw a beautiful, very young woman of perhaps sixteen who wore a homespun cloth dress. Bone studs pierced her ears, and a heavy necklace of beads made from carnelian, shell, and crystal hung around her neck.
“Her name is Shub-ad,” Ronan said.
“What time frame is it?”
“Around two thousand one hundred years B.C., about one hundred years before the Elamites will destroy Ur. The histories have perished, but some information survives from excerpts in Babylonian chronicles.” He went on, “The woman was the daughter of an influential merchant and he wished great things for her. She wanted to marry a wealthy man, a retainer of the king. But her father wanted her to be a bride of the deity at Ur-Nammu’s temple, a wonderful ziggurat dedicated to the moon-god Nanna. So her father didn’t allow her to marry her love.”
Clarissa gazed into the distance, entranced by Ronan’s words and pictured what the young woman could see. The ziggurat rose high in the distance, a massive structure with three terraced stages rising at least seventy feet above the city. The vision slowly dissolved and Clarissa opened her eyes.
“Attached to every temple there were women who formed the god’s household,” he said.
“Let me guess,” Clarissa said. “She had to take a vow of chastity.”
“No. In fact, the temple women were all prostitutes. As it happened she didn’t become the entu, a first wife of the god. Instead she was a Sal-Me, a priestess of the second caste. During this time she fell in love with a man who visited the priestesses for services.”
“She couldn’t marry him?”
“She could but she wasn’t allowed to have children by him. Because of that he was allowed to take a concubine and the concubine had six children. Shub-ad was jealous of the concubine and concocted a plot to murder the concubine and blame it on the bride of the deity, a far more powerful woman.”
Rubbing her forehead as an ache centered in her temples, Clarissa said, “This is complicated.”
“So it seems. When Shub-ad murdered the concubine, she discovered her husband had fallen out of love with her and in love with the concubine. The law required that Shub-ad be drowned. Shub-ad’s husband couldn’t bear her being put to death, even though she had murdered his beloved concubine. So to help Shub-ad he framed another one of the concubines. The attempt backfired and they were found out. Before Shub-ad and her husband were put to death, she cursed any descendents of the concubine’s children. Many years later each of those children had one child of their own and those offspring were born with a deformity no one had witnessed before. Everyone knew it was because of the curse and because Shub-ad and the children’s father were evil. The defect was in the blood. Each child could become invisible at will and teleport. They could move faster than any other human. They craved human blood and could feast on mortals daily.”
“Vampires.”
Ronan nodded.
“What happened then?” she asked, caught up in his story.
His concentration pinpointed an area above her head, as if he could see more of the story unfolding, but this time wouldn’t share it with her in a vision. “Whenever their anger was aroused, the children would roam the streets and kill and maim those people no one would miss. But as they grew to adulthood, they fanned out over the region and spawned a wider veil of death and destruction.”
“Did they create vampires with their bite?”
“They did. This made the plague, as the people called it, a far worse thing. Now there were hundreds of vampires where there’d once been only six.”
“Did these villagers fight back?”
Ronan eased up and sat cross-legged. “A team of assassins was sent out to kill the original six vampires. One was set on fire. Another was strangled. Yet another was shot in the heart with an arrow. They resurrected and left Sumer. No one knows exactly where they went.”
A question hit her. “Wait a minute. These were the first vampires?”
“Supposedly.”
She pondered for a couple of minutes. “This story was probably concocted because it was an easy way to explain how vampires came into existence.”
He leaned his arms on his knees. “That’s my guess. But it also explains why so few vampires are actually made over time. Once a vampire bites you, it’s very difficult for him stop taking your blood. Most of the time you’d be drained dry. As you saw with Lachlan, Micky, and Jared, it takes only one bite to make a half-vampire.”
She tried thinking of her newfound friends as something almost vampire and couldn’t.
“You acknowledge me as entirely vampire,” he said.
She gave him a rueful grin. “Because I’ve seen you in action, that’s why. I’ve seen you lift a punk off his feet using only one arm. I’ve seen your startling eyes.”
He returned her smile. “Wait until you catch Lachlan, Micky, or Jared angry. That’s a sight to behold.”
She reached up and almost without forethought traced her fingers along his bearded jaw. As a teen she’d never imagined being attracted to a man with a beard. Ronan had changed all that. He trapped her hand in his and touched her fingers to his lips for a quick kiss.
“The story doesn’t end there,” he said. “It’s said not all six of the children were evil. Some were good and they tried to help others where they could. They also vowed to hunt down the destructive vampires and rid the world of them.”
Heavy silence covered the room as she absorbed what Ronan had told her. She waited for him to continue.
When he didn’t speak, she allowed the question to form. “Do you believe evil created the first vampires?”
For a long time he stared at the wall, as if uncertain how to answer. “I know nature creates aberrations. It doesn’t take a curse to cause oddities on earth.”
“So there isn’t anything, in theory, that will kill the ancient one. Except for this sexual union between you and a woman.”
“Right again.”
“Why you?”
“Yusuf didn’t know, but the seer just said she foresaw it.”
She didn’t want to admit to herself that maybe Yusuf and the seer really didn’t know what they were talking about.
Ronan took her arm and leaned in close to her. His warm scent swept her up. Trust me, they have accumulated enough knowledge and experience over the years to know.
That’s an incredible story, Ronan.
Incredible, but does it ease your mind?
She considered his mental question and knew she had to understand more. Renewed apprehension made her speak again. “How did you get to be this…this way?”
“You mean charming, devilish, and—”
She gently smacked his arm. “No, you turkey. I mean a vampire. How did you become a vampire?”
His grin said he knew what she wanted all along but liked teasing her. “I was born in Limerick, Ireland around 1300 to a poor peasant mother and a father who left her shortly thereafter. I was a bastard.”
Though being a bastard didn’t have the same stigma today as it did in his birth time, she felt his pain like a hot poker in the gut.
“I grew up in the most rat-infested area of the city filled with crime and prostitution and hate.”
She cupped his face for a second to give comfort. “That must have been horrible.”
“It was all I knew. Sometimes I didn’t realize how bad it was because I never left my part of the city until I was twelve.” His accent thickened, like he’d gone back in time and brought history with him. “My mother was a whore.”
Dishonor tinted his voice, and she felt a deep ache inside. “What your mother did wasn’t your fault. That was her choice.”
He snorted softly. “You think she had a choice?”
“Come on, Ronan. You’ve been around seven hundred years. You know she did.”
His eyes hardened, a glint of the vampire she’d first met in the graveyard returning. “Her mother was a whore, and probably her mother before that. What else did she know? What opportunities do you think she had?”
She sighed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t judge her. I’m sure she did what she thought had to do to survive.”
For a long time he said nothing, and silence made the room somehow gloomier, as if the comfort turned to solemnity.
He continued his tale. “I don’t know to this day if my siblings were actually full brothers and sisters. I doubt it. I was the eldest, then came Elspeth a year later. We were best friends and I loved her, but—”
When he cut himself off again, she dared look into his eyes and saw a sorrow so deep and agonizing she wanted to cry. “What happened to her?”
“A john stabbed her when she was only seventeen. He took what little money she had and left her dead in an alley.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Your sister was a prostitute, too?”
He closed his eyes and she mourned the way animation left his face. Reminded of how lifeless he’d seemed not so long ago, she squeezed his arm in sympathy.
He opened his eyes. “Yes.” After taking another sustaining breath he returned to his story. “My brother Balcor took it even harder than I did. He was four years younger than me. He lived to be eighty but had no children.”
“And you never really knew your father?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
Clarissa swallowed hard. “How did you transform into a vampire?”
“After my sister was murdered my mother went into a decline. She blamed herself for Elspeth’s death, but I blamed myself even more.”
Moisture touched his eyes and she wanted to cry with him. Touched by the agony she saw building behind his memories, she said, “It’s all right. If you don’t want to talk about it—”
“No, I have to. You have to know it all before you’ll trust me.”
He was right. She needed to know the man before her more than she needed to breathe.
“Balcor said he’d take care of our mother, and I couldn’t take living in the stinking city any more. I also realized I couldn’t do anything to help her. She was a vile and hateful woman with spite in her soul. I left Limerick with a little money I’d gathered from working in a blacksmith’s shop. I headed into the country and traveled.”
“Did you see your mother and brother again?”
His sarcastic smile said it all. “I did. But not until after I was made a vampire. They rejected me when I told them what I’d become.” He shook his head as if to dislodge the thought. “But that happened later. I stayed in Ireland, and eventually found work as a blacksmith at Allegheny Castle near the Shannon River. I made swords and shod horses for knights in Lord Allegheny’s employ.”
She swallowed hard. “In one of my visions about you I saw a fortress.”
“That was Allegheny. The head blacksmith, O’Hennessy, took me under his wing. He was an expert swordsman and taught me how to fight.”
She closed her eyes and remembered her vision of him attired as a knight.
He smiled slightly. “You know a lot about history?”
“Enough to understand the time period.”
“Then you know that going to war with your neighbors wasn’t exactly an unheard of thing in that century.”
“You went to war?”
He nodded. “More than once I helped make the swords, the horseshoes, and the armor that protected those that went to war. Finally one day I couldn’t stand to be left on the outside anymore. I put together my own suit of armor and fought for the castle.”
He sat up, and she didn’t see a wince or hear a groan out of him. He looked as if he’d never been mortally wounded twenty-four hours ago. Instead he slid off the bed, stood, and stretched his arms high above his head. His muscles rippled, and she felt renewed desire spike inside her womb. Heaven help her, he was the most exciting, gorgeous, incredible male she’d ever seen, and she itched to taste him again. Instead of acting on her impulse to go to him, she waited for him to finish the story.
“O’Hennessy had a sister that lived nearby outside the castle. She had a daughter…”
Clarissa felt a surge of jealousy. “The young blonde I saw in my vision?”
“No. Darina was like my sister. She was pretty, a brunette only sixteen years old. Far too young for me.” His sigh filled with hurt, a sound she never expected a tough vampire to make. “Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, one of the men in the village raped and murdered her.”
“It happened to you again. You lost someone you loved.”
He paced to the fan-shaped window and peered outside. “Two innocent
little sisters. I started to wonder what I’d done to deserve this kind of pain in my life.”
“What happened then?”
He turned back to her. “I left the castle in pursuit of whoever murdered her. I chased the bastard across Ireland into Wales but there he faded into the countryside. I was never able to find him.”
“I’m so sorry, Ronan.”
Silence covered the room while she pondered the horrendous agony he must have suffered over the years as he lost women important to him. Then something more intense came to mind. “What about the blonde woman I saw in my vision? She was lying on a path with her throat bleeding. You were…you looked as if you suffered her loss.”
Agony spread fresh across his countenance, and for a moment she wished she hadn’t mentioned it. He licked his lips, and a sardonic smile touched one corner of his mouth as if he wanted to say something sarcastic. Instead he apparently swallowed the impulse.
“That event was still to come,” he said. “When I was twenty-eight I decided Ireland didn’t have anything more for me. After learning to read and write under the help of a monk, I thirsted for knowledge and information. I traveled to several other countries including Wales, Scotland, Italy and Spain. I traveled back to Ireland when I was thirty.”
More curiosity washed over her and she couldn’t help asking, “And during all this time I suppose you lived like a monk?”
This time, when he smiled, the grin seemed genuine. “Over the years I’d courted a few women, made love to them. But I never fell in love. I returned to Allegheny’s Castle and there I finally met someone who changed my idea of love.”
“The blonde in my vision.”
“Fenella. She was the daughter of a friend of mine. After courting her in secret for a few months, I offered for her hand in marriage. She said yes and her mother and father agreed to the match.”
“That’s wonderful.”
She imagined how it might feel for this man to care for her with all his heart and knew his adoration would be a glorious, unspeakably beautiful love. How lucky Fenella had been.