by BETH KERY
“Morshiel and I came from the same mother cell,” Blaise said flatly as he shoved the poker into the flames.
Aubrey made a predictable scoffing sound. “Perhaps, but you are as different as a human is to a raptor.”
Blaise glanced over his shoulder. “Which one am I supposed to be in your analogy. Both are deadly beasts, aren’t they?”
Aubrey rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You miss my point entirely. I’m just saying that you might not always perfectly intuit Morshiel’s plans just because you’re clones. You’ve had centuries to differentiate yourselves, after all, and have done so markedly. Consider this,” Aubrey said, holding up his hand in a bid for reason when Blaise tossed the poker into its holder with a loud clang and turned to his friend. “What if Morshiel suspects that you might leave the crystal in the tunnel in order to lure him? And he sacrifices a scouting party of revenants because he desires knowledge of the crystal’s whereabouts so greatly?”
“No,” Blaise repeated as he paced like a caged lion in front of the fire. “Morshiel knows I would never take even the tiniest risk in the matter. He knows I wouldn’t play games with that crystal. Have you been excavating in the vicinity where the crystal was found, like I asked?”
“Yes, the crystal definitely came from that location. It wasn’t relocated there by Morshiel.”
Blaise paused. “And is there any indication there could be more of them?”
Aubrey shook his head. “It is a single anomaly…a rare miracle. Have you spoken to Saint? Did he tell you how he knew the crystal would be there?”
Blaise shook his head. “He somehow sensed the unusual electromagnetic pulse. Or someone did.”
“What is it, Blaise?” Aubrey asked, his eyes narrowed.
Blaise shrugged. “Something is amiss with Saint. He’s not being honest.”
“You don’t trust Saint?” Aubrey asked, obviously stunned. Blaise understood why. All of the Sevliss princes were as close as brothers, despite the fact that they were scattered across the globe. Blaise trusted the five other princes more than any other creatures on the planet, for they were more than brothers. In a sense, the six of them were their own unique race. None of them were certain of their origins on this planet. All of them had come to consciousness as they were at present, recalling no childhood. Each of them possessed a Magian overlord, a super-powerful being who had created each prince—to what purpose, none of them understood.
One thing was a certainty—the biological mandate set into the princes’ very blood to control their bloodthirsty clones. They could not vanquish their clones, although their clones could murder them at any time. Every time Blaise fought Morshiel, it was a mortal battle.
Or at least it used to be a given for them that they could not conquer their clones. It had been a universal reality until Saint eradicated Teslar in some fashion that remained an utter mystery to the remaining princes.
“I do trust Saint. I just can’t understand why he’s being so secretive ever since he vanquished Teslar,” he said, frustration tingeing his tone. “We have always shared information on the best ways to control our clones. Now Saint has done the impossible and destroyed Teslar, but he won’t tell us how. It’s incomprehensible, not to mention frustrating as hell,” he muttered roughly under his breath.
“Perhaps he’s keeping other secrets as well. Like why you can touch the woman when none of us can?”
The logs in the fireplace crackled in the silence that followed.
“Perhaps Saint is being prevented from speaking on the matter. Perhaps the Magian are prohibiting it somehow,” Aubrey said thoughtfully.
“I’m starting to suspect the same thing,” Blaise replied bitterly. Like the rest of his Sevliss brethren, he didn’t appreciate being treated like nothing more than a lab rat for the Magian Council’s incomprehensible aims. He resumed pacing, his thoughts once again on the miraculous discovery of the crystal. “I can’t explain it. Ever since Saint vanquished Teslar, it’s as if…everything is changing among us.”
Aubrey leaned back on the couch, his expression thoughtful. “Morphic resonance.”
“Excuse me?”
Aubrey’s gaze sharpened on him. “Morphic resonance. It’s a theory put forth by a man named Rupert Sheldrake, concerning what he calls a morphic field, which each member of a given species can tap into for knowledge. A monkey learns to wash sand from a yam before she eats it on one island. The race knowledge is translated by means of the morphic field not just to the monkey’s brethren on her island, but to monkeys on a separate island. All of the monkeys begin using the same skill, even though they’ve never had direct physical contact. Most scientists think it’s a bunch of supernatural crock, but as I possess the major advantage of knowledge in regard to energy and the life force in regard to nature,” Aubrey gave a little flourish with his hand, “I happen to differ on the matter. You yourself have said the Sevliss princes are a singular species. Perhaps whatever happened to Saint and Teslar in Chicago can change the other princes, even if Saint is being prohibited from telling exactly what that ‘something’ is.”
Blaise thought this over as he paced, but was still left frustrated with his lack of knowledge. “I’m in Saint’s debt for tipping me off about the crystal, even if he isn’t being completely honest with me. Imagine the havoc Morshiel could have created with it. I will never let him have it.”
“Or the woman?”
Blaise glanced sharply at his friend. Aubrey sprawled on the couch, a knowing look in his light gray eyes, comfortable within the bounds of their friendship.
Too comfortable.
“Don’t speak of her.”
Aubrey straightened into a sitting position slowly. “She’s not Elysse, Blaise.”
“The crystal gives off enough vitessence that we need not feed off humans anymore,” Blaise said, determined to ignore what Aubrey had just said.
“You have never fed to the point of harm. None of the Literati do. Surely you’re not planning to play the martyr and never taste human flesh again.”
Blaise put his hand on the mantel and studied his friend. “You’ve grown callous, Aubrey. You’ve become too comfortable with your parasitic nature.”
“I am what I am,” Aubrey said, shrugging. “And I am so because you made me that way some three hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Perhaps it would have been better for the plague to take you instead of this complacency.”
“You don’t believe that. You salvaged nearly three dozen of the brightest intellectual stars of the age by turning the Literati. You wouldn’t allow this mind to grow dim under the influence of such a dirty, meaningless disease. You would regret letting this brain molder in some mass grave beneath Aldgate station. I was meant for much larger things than that.”
“Titurino is right. You are a strutting cock.”
Aubrey grinned dashingly. “I am what I am,” he repeated. He laughed when he saw Blaise’s expression. His gaze turned speculative. “Have you fed, my friend? I can’t help but notice that your mood is a bit…dark.”
“I told you, the crystal can sustain us,” he snapped. “Did you think it’s always just been words when I’ve said I despise living as a parasite off human beings for all these centuries?”
“We aren’t as yet entirely certain that the crystal can provide sufficient vitessence for long-term survival. I’m running experiments even as we speak, but I would prefer that you weren’t a subject. We need your strength, Blaise.”
“Sometimes you are as insufferable as Usan and the Magian Council. My preference is a private matter, not data for one of your bloody experiments,” Blaise said, half exasperated, half amused. When he saw Aubrey open his mouth to argue, he added more firmly. “You have seen well to my needs over the years, Aubrey, and I thank you. I know you’ve done it because you believed it was best, and because you care. If it weren’t for you, I would have found a way long ago to overcome the mandate set into my blood by the Magian to control Morshiel.”
“By ending your own life by refusing to feed?”
Blaise heard the hint of incredulity in Aubrey’s tone. It was a long-standing disagreement between the two of them. As brilliant as Aubrey was, his friend never could quite comprehend Blaise’s longing to end this never-ending, gray torment called life. Elysse had lit his monochrome world, however briefly. Then she was gone. His need had killed her. No…he was being dishonest. His need hadn’t done it.
The truth of what he was had been what destroyed Elysse.
Now his world was ablaze again, more brilliant than ever before, and he didn’t know what do…didn’t know how to act.
He shrugged off Aubrey’s question. His friend had never seen the expression of horror on Elysse’s face when she understood fully what he was. That vision had been burned into Blaise’s mind’s eye. It would never be banished. Her shame—her disgust—had become Blaise’s own.
Aubrey sighed when he saw that Blaise would converse on the topic no further. “You say you don’t want me to speak of the woman. Aren’t you going to ask me what Michael discovered about her in his reconnaissance mission?
Blaise straightened. “Why didn’t you tell me Michael had reported in?”
“I was about to when you forbade me to speak of her.”
“Go on,” Blaise grated out.
“Her name is Isabel Lanscourt. She’s an American actress.”
He stepped toward Aubrey. “And?”
“She’s only played minor roles as of yet, but brilliantly. She’s managed to get into some major productions on Broadway. According to critics and general sentiment, she’ll eventually go far. Not too surprising.”
Blaise didn’t respond. He knew what Aubrey meant. Talented actors and actresses frequently had a forceful vitessence, although they weren’t typically aware of it. Humans couldn’t see the energy that surrounded all living things, but they reacted to it. For many actors, their powerful vitessences were made evident by their charismatic presences and instinctive ability to read and influence an audience’s energy.
Isabel Lanscourt was destined to become a magnificent star.
She would have been, anyway. If she hadn’t made the vital mistake of coming to London and having Morshiel take notice of her.
She would be destined for greatness if she wasn’t now Blaise’s prisoner.
He stifled his regret with the ability of long practice. That the trajectory of such a beautiful creature—the very essence of life—should be cut off in midpath pained him, but there was nothing he could do.
Nothing.
“Was she about to do a play in London?” he asked Aubrey.
“No. She was in London for something far more fascinating. Apparently, she was severely injured in a car wreck a year and a half ago. That’s part of the reason she hasn’t yet reached the apex of fame the theatre critics had predicted for her. She spent almost half a year in a coma. Apparently, after she left the hospital, she lived as a recluse in Brooklyn in a rundown boarding house.”
“Hasn’t she got any family?”
“No. She hasn’t. She was an only child. Her parents were a sort of oddment. A Stanley Kowalski and Mary Cassatt romance, if you take my meaning. Her mother, who apparently was a rather gifted painter, died when she was only two. Her father aspired only to work in the coal mines, and died of lung cancer at age thirty-eight. From all indications, her father’s death was a defining point in Isabel’s life.”
“Who will be looking for her?”
“A man named Lester Dee arranged her tour here of universities and colleges in the United Kingdom. Isabel gives demonstrations of her power and Dee lectures on the research he’s done on her. He’s already contacted the authorities about Isabel’s disappearance.”
“Her power?”
Aubrey sat forward, his gray eyes alight with intellectual interest. “Yes—let me get to the meat of things. Isabel Lanscourt is a psychometrist—apparently an incredibly gifted one.”
Blaise’s incisors were not extended, but he snarled at Aubrey nonetheless. Unfortunately, Aubrey was every bit as brilliant as he bragged. He had a nasty habit of getting swept up in that brilliance and talking to himself, since only he could comprehend his own meaning. He immediately interpreted Blaise’s familiar annoyance and hastened to explain.
“Psychometry is a type of psychic ability where an individual can telepathically receive information about an object or person through touch. Ms. Lanscourt can pick up a discarded newspaper and tell you where the trees grew that make up the paper, where it was printed and details about the man who just touched it that would likely make the gent blush. She can touch a weapon and tell you details of how it was manufactured, the people who used it and the violence it wrought. She’s a walking miracle. There was a very talented Russian psychometrist I studied along with the Society for Psychical Research back in the 1890’s, but Ms. Lanscourt’s abilities blow that case away. What’s wrong?” Aubrey interrupted his own enthusiastic explanation when he noticed Blaise’s expression.
“She must exist in a living hell.”
Aubrey’s expression sobered. “Well, yes…I suppose it must be difficult at times, having all those images and perceptions invade the brain. Rather like a madness, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps that explains her isolation and depression after she left the hospital. Good thing Dee happened upon her, poor girl.”
“That’s why she wears the gloves,” Blaise said. Too late, he realized he’d been staring at the painting mounted over the fireplace of a woman wearing a topaz, ermine-bordered gown, a slender diadem resting on her dark brown hair.
“Isabel Lanscourt looks nothing like Elysse,” Aubrey observed.
“Why do you keep bringing up Elysse?” Blaise blurted out in rising anger.
“Because I know you. You’re comparing the two women in your mind. Who wouldn’t?”
Blaise stood frozen, both shocked and infuriated at his friend’s audacity. “Are you saying that you’re comparing the two?” he asked in an ominous tone as he stepped toward Aubrey.
Aubrey stood with the alacrity conferred by his paranormal nature. “I am. All the Literati are, Blaise. It’s not only you who sees Isabel Lanscourt’s grandeur. She’s like a blazing comet in all of our eyes. The fact that we see her for what she is, that we feel her pull, isn’t what’s got you upset right now.”
Blaise approached him so that they stood eye to eye. Fury boiled in his veins. Aubrey was an inch away from being beaten to a bloody pulp, and damn his tendency to go easy on him in a brotherly sparring match. He was so mad that Aubrey had the nerve to compare the woman to Elysse out loud that he actually hoped his friend would dig himself a deeper hole.
“Go on. Enlighten me,” he prodded.
“You’re upset because she’s more powerful than Elysse. You’re pissed at finding yourself a thousand times more attracted to Isabel Lanscourt than you ever were Elysse de Gennere.”
For a moment, Blaise experienced a very satisfying fantasy about planting his fist in Aubrey’s face. He conquered the lure of it, but with extreme difficulty.
“Get out of here.”
“Don’t be such a son of a bitch about this, Blaise.”
“I am no one’s son. Now get out of here.”
Regret sliced through him when Aubrey moved hastily, obviously taking the ominous threat in his tone seriously. He stumbled and caught hold of himself on the arm of the couch.
“I don’t know why I put up with you half the time,” Aubrey said, eyes blazing and his fangs fully extended. Blaise stepped toward him. Aubrey retreated. They were like brothers, but there could only be one alpha in a pack of wolves.
“I don’t know either. You’re the genius. Let me know when you figure it out,” Blaise said before he walked toward his private quarters, shutting the door behind him with a click of finality.
After Aubrey left, Blaise once again wandered out of his bedroom. He felt edgy and restless. After five seconds in his study he was all too eag
er to avoid Elysse’s portrait, all too desperate to prevent recalling what Aubrey had said.
You’re pissed at finding yourself a thousand times more attracted to Isabel Lanscourt than you ever were Elysse.
He winced at the memory.
He sought out David Kwan in the gym. An hour and a half workout with David didn’t ease his anguish as it should have. Smashing his fists, knees and feet into David hadn’t calmed him, and having David return the favor hadn’t worked either. The image of Isabel Lanscourt’s luminescent face would not be dislodged from his mind even by David’s brutal blows to his skull.
After he got out of the shower in his private quarters, he felt weak. He should have visited the apex room where they’d housed the crystal. He needed to feed. His flesh was not nourished moment to moment by a soul. He required vitessence to survive, and he had not tasted blood or a woman’s sweet juices for forty-eight hours now…since before they stormed that unused Tube platform and found the crystal and the female.
Isabel Lanscourt.
He felt too fatigued to dress completely. Instead, he fastened the brown leather harness that fit snugly around his hips and below his testicles and buttocks. He sheathed his heartluster next to his outer left thigh. Even if he were at death’s door, he would strap on his heartluster. It was as integral to him as his arms or eyes…as much a part of him as his clone.
Morshiel was a cancer he couldn’t completely cut off his body. They were two parts of the same whole. Aubrey didn’t understand that. No one understood that fact, save for Blaise, Morshiel and Usan, their Magian creator. Blaise fought desperately against his clone just as he battled with his own savage, parasitic nature.
He lay on his bed and stared at the frescoed ceiling, seeing nothing but a pair of large, animated, black eyes. One second, the expression in those eyes was dazed, bewildered…soft. The next moment, they might have belonged to a spitting tomcat backed into a corner.
After she’d fainted and he’d laid her in her bed earlier, he’d allowed himself five full seconds just to stare at her before he’d resolutely turned and walked out of her suite.