by BETH KERY
“I have…I have used my ascendancy to make her forget. I have never done it before to someone for nights…weeks. It must be having a negative effect on her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” This time, Isabel clearly heard the anxiety in his voice and longed to comfort him. “I will leave for Delraven,” he said after a pause, his voice as barren and bleak as a desert at midnight.
“You must,” Margaret said. “This cannot go on.”
Don’t go. Don’t go. She was too weak to shape the words with her mouth. The plea reverberated around her skull, the message trapped.
It was she who was helpless, she who was trapped. She pried her eyes open, the effort costing her more energy than she ever recalled expending.
He glanced up and met her stare, his eyes wells of pain. He had heard her silent, desperate pleas.
“I’m harming you, lovely. I’m killing you. My need is too great. I must leave Sanctuary.”
“No!”
She screamed it through a rising sea of hurt and confusion. Everything swirled and struck, her desires and fears and fragments of memories pummeling her spirit like hurled projectiles. She couldn’t grasp what was happening to her. She was so alone. Only one thought possessed her, the sole plea that she clung onto like a raft tossed in a stormy ocean.
“Don’t go. Don’t go, Blaise. You are my other half now.”
“No, lovely. You will die if I stay with you.”
“I will die without you.”
“No. Never. You must sleep now. You have to rest.”
She fell into unconsciousness with his hand on her cheek and her heart clenching in pain.
Blaise glanced around quickly at the sound of Margaret Turrow gasping in shock.
“My word…how in the world did you get there?” she asked the man who stood next to Isabel’s bed.
Blaise dropped his hand from Isabel’s cheek and stood, his shock at seeing Usan for the first time in fifteen years nearly as great as Margaret’s. He watched, stunned, as the formidable Magian stepped forward and touched Isabel’s neck with long fingers.
“She is a strong one,” he told Blaise before he withdrew his hand. As always, the Magian’s sunny smile struck Blaise as bizarre, contrasting as it did with a handsome, austere face. Two lethal-looking incisors extending longer than the rest of his straight, white teeth. Other than the fangs, Usan possessed human-like features, but his crystalline blue eyes conveyed an intelligence that immediately struck even Blaise as otherworldly.
“She is resting easy,” Usan said, seeming satisfied.
“What are you doing here?” Blaise asked, still numb from the realization he’d just made about Isabel. He’d been harming her by forcing her to forget their moments together—first their matings, and recently, their rapturous lovemaking. Now he must leave her—
“I thought it was time,” Usan said simply as he gestured toward Isabel. His hand lingered over her belly. He touched her.
Blaise reached with lightning speed, grabbing Usan’s hand.
“What does that mean?” he asked roughly, his incisors now extended in anger. “Do you know something about Isabel that I don’t? Do you sense an illness in her? Is she going to be all right?”
“She’s going to be fine,” Usan assured. Blaise released him when he jerked on his hand. Usan glanced over at Margaret, who was still staring at him in open-mouthed amazement, and gave a small bow, his unusual burnt orange robes billowing around his legs.
“Greetings. I’m Usan, and you must be Margaret Turrow. Blaise values your loyal service, honesty and even your occasional insubordination.”
Margaret’s gaze flickered over to Blaise, her eyes even wider with wonder. “Lord Delraven told you that?”
“No, but his mind is an open book to me,” Usan said, smiling.
“Then you’re singular in all existence. He’s a puzzle in the dark to most of us,” Margaret muttered. Usan chuckled.
“What do you want?” Blaise growled, Usan’s demonstration of omniscience in front of Margaret scraping his already raw nerves.
He could not say that he loved Usan, for the soulless did not love, but he’d grown accustomed to the Magian’s enigmatic character. Usan regularly withheld information from him, and then inexplicably spilled a precious kernel of knowledge out of nowhere. He might want to throttle Usan at times, but he also valued him as a link to his origins and his past. Usan was the closest thing Blaise had to an ancestor.
“I came to speak with you about Isabel,” Usan said mildly.
“What do you know of her?” Blaise demanded, his tone so sharp that Margaret started.
“I know many things.” The Magian’s eyes sent a chill through him when he met his gaze. Usan stepped back and held out his hand toward the door. “Shall we adjourn to your quarters?”
Blaise swallowed and glanced back at Isabel sleeping on the bed.
“I have told you Isabel would be fine. Have I ever lied to you?” Usan asked quietly.
Blaise leveled a cold stare.
“Isn’t silence the biggest lie of all, Old Man?” he grated out bitterly, before he headed for the door.
“You cannot leave Sanctuary, Blaise,” Usan said a half an hour later.
Blaise paused in the process of wearing a hole in the carpet before the fireplace with his pacing feet. He felt as if an animal were in him, rearing and clawing, demanding release. He kept picturing Isabel’s malaise, her piercing hurt when her confused mind understood they were about to be separated. How could he have known he was harming her by making her forget their nights spent pressed together, skin to skin?
“Are you forbidding me?” he challenged Usan, his frothing anguish and bewilderment requiring a target for release.
“No. I have never forbidden you anything. You possess free will, Blaise. If you did not, my research would mean nothing.”
“Damn your bloody research,” he bellowed. “You say you don’t lie to me, but look what you do now? The mandate you have set in my blood to control Morshiel prevents me from any sort of free will, and you know it!”
Usan’s nonchalant shrug infuriated him farther.
“Come on,” Blaise said.
“What? Where are we going?” Usan asked.
“To fight,” Blaise bit out. “Right here. Right now. I don’t know why I haven’t ever wanted to knock your head straight to the earth’s soul before.”
“Oh, but you have,” Usan said, seeming unaffected by his surge of aggression. “After Elysse died you wanted to fight me, don’t you recall?” His tone gentled when Blaise continued to glare at him. “Besides, Isabel is not dead. She’s not Elysse, either, but something much more powerful, as we both know.”
He settled back on the couch and smoothed his robes contentedly, the fringe on his odd hat brushing his classically sculpted cheek. Blaise often referred to him as “Old Man” although Usan possessed no features of advanced age. His skin was vibrant and smooth, and not a single strand of gray ran through the jet black of his hair. A human might have guessed he and Usan were the same age, but Blaise instinctively understood the truth.
The male who sat before him was more ancient than he could fathom.
Blaise unclenched his fists and began to pace again. Pounding in Usan’s face would accomplish nothing, and it might even prevent him from attaining one of the meager little morsels of truth Usan occasionally tossed his way like a human threw scraps from the table at a dog. He hungered for facts—some guideposts in this new confusing territory he’d entered with Isabel. He wasn’t too proud to refuse Usan’s leavings.
“If you understand about Isabel, then you know why I must go,” Blaise said gruffly.
“Because you have mated with her, you must leave?” Usan asked, bewildered.
“The Sevliss aren’t meant to take mates. You have told me this yourself. We are sterile. We cannot…love.”
Usan gave a little apologetic smile. “I wasn’t lying. The truth changes over time, Blaise. Nature is not a fixed process. Thank the Empre
ss for that.”
“I am harming her.”
Usan sighed. “The harm you cause her is from your habit of making her forget the moments of mating, not the mating itself. The body, spirit and mind suffer when they are forced not to recognize one another. You cut off a portion of her very soul by making her forget your mating, by forcing her to forget her intimate knowledge of you. It is depleting her vibrancy, but not to the point of harm. Not yet, anyway. But her soul longs to be with you so much, that she forces herself into unconsciousness, where she knows she will find both you and her buried memories of you.”
Blaise blanched at the news. How could he have known? He noticed Usan studying him and resisted another urge to lash out.
These were not the particular truths he wanted to hear at the moment.
“I can’t seem to stay away from her, as much as I know I should,” he mumbled.
“She has a brilliant soul…breathtaking,” Usan said.
“If I can’t stay away from her, then I must leave Sanctuary, mustn’t I?”
“What if I told you that I will remove the wards of magic that protect Sanctuary if you go to Delraven? Isabel and the Literati will have no protection against Morshiel and the Scourge.”
Blaise froze, stunned. “You would do that, just to spite me?”
“I have no use or time for spite,” Usan said, his voice suddenly ringing with power, his countenance that of a different creature. “If it came to protection between you and Isabel, I might choose her. Do you mock me for that?”
“No,” Blaise replied quickly. He was still angry, but his curiosity was mounting. Usan was behaving strangely, even for him. “I would choose the same. But because I would have you protect her before me does not equate to you automatically agreeing. You have never granted my wishes in the past so readily. Why would you now? Why do you care what happens to Isabel?”
“You know what she is. Does it surprise you?”
“No,” Blaise growled before he began pacing again. He suddenly knew for a fact that whatever secret Saint held involved the mystery of what was happening between Isabel and him.
“Is Saint being prevented from speaking to the rest of the princes about how he conquered Teslar?”
“Yes.”
Blaise blinked, surprised by Usan’s quick, forthright answer. “Why?” he demanded.
“Kavya has forbidden him to speak openly to the rest of you, upon the request of the rest of the Magian council.”
“You make it your sole duty to vex me, Old Man.”
Usan looked politely interested. “You know, I’ve never heard it put quite so succinctly. To vex, to agitate, to prod—”
Blaise made a sound of profound frustration, causing Usan to blink and rise from his intellectual musings.
“You will thank me someday for it, Blaise.”
Blaise bared his teeth.
Usan sat forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He pinned Blaise with his eerily focused stare.
“Perhaps today is the day,” he said thoughtfully. He seemed to come to a decision and smiled. “All right. You crave a truth? I will give you one. Isabel is pregnant. She is going to have a child.”
His ears rang in the silence that followed. For a moment, he thought Usan had used his magic to conjure an invisible hand to wrap around his throat.
“Isabel is pregnant?” he said after he’d managed to suck in a thin stream of air.
“That’s right.”
“You…you are certain of it?”
“One hundred percent certain, yes. She’s only a few weeks along, but trust me. We alchemists know two things very, very well—genes and vitessence. Isabel is going to have a baby,” Usan said with a satisfied smile as he arranged his robes in his lap.
Blaise turned toward the fire, seeing nothing, impervious to the heat on his skin. A few weeks along? Had she taken a lover while she was in London? A thought struck him and he made a choking sound of rising horror. He reached for the mantel to steady himself. The Literati, the Scourge, Morshiel and himself were all sterile. If Isabel was pregnant, then—
“One of Morshiel’s drudges,” he said in a choked voice. “Those fucking humans who follow him in exchange for drugs and Morshiel’s leavings. One of them must have raped Isabel on the night Morshiel kidnapped her—”
Usan made an exasperated sound behind him. “Today is not the day, then,” he said under his breath, sounding a little weary.
“Today is not the day for what?” Blaise roared, spinning around. “Stop speaking in riddles. If you know the details of Isabel’s pregnancy, tell me. I won’t tell her if the truth would upset her, but I want to know.”
“You want the truth?” Usan asked, his tone suddenly just as commanding as Blaise’s. He stood. “You are the father, Blaise. You are.”
He blinked and flinched back as though Usan had just struck him. “I am? Don’t be ridiculous. You said—”
“That you were sterile, yes I know. But haven’t I also taught you that one of the glories of nature is that it never stays the same? Change is the only constant in the universe.”
“But…the soulless cannot procreate,” he muttered.
Usan’s only response was to quirk his eyebrows in a query.
Blaise just stared. His brain seemed to have become disabled, as if the information was so powerful it caused a circuit overload. Suddenly, one clear thought streamed through his consciousness.
Isi. Maybe it was easier to accept the truth—whatever that truth was—from a peer versus Usan.
Isi was the link to Saint, and to valuable information. Isi had showed some improvement in the last few days, and even had spoken a few words in a thin, raspy voice. Aubrey advised against using any type of telepathy on him in order to gain information, saying Isi was too vulnerable at the present time. But in time, Isi would heal. He’d be able to tell Blaise some of the secrets Saint wanted him to understand. Somehow, Blaise had come to believe Saint possessed the answers he needed for this conundrum with Isabel. Isi held the key—
“Isi?” Usan asked, sitting up straighter. Too late, Blaise realized he’d been so thunderstruck by Usan’s news, he hadn’t taken care to guard his thoughts from the Magian. “Are you referring to Isi, who is one of Saint’s Iniskium warriors?”
Blaise did a double-take when he noticed the shock on the Magian’s face. He had never seen Usan look surprised at anything. Never.
“Isi is here…in London?” Usan demanded.
Blaise knew it was too late to deny it. Usan had already claimed the truth from his mind. “I’m shocked you didn’t know before,” he said. “I forbid you to see him. Morshiel and the revenants nearly murdered him. He’s been recovering, but slowly. Usan,” Blaise bellowed when Usan turned and headed toward the door.
“It should have been impossible for Isi to come to London,” Usan said, pausing. “The change in Saint’s nature has made the impossible possible, it seems. The princes’ followers have never before been able to leave their sire’s territory. Nature has taken yet another unforeseen path. I will not place an obstacle in this particular alteration.”
“What do you mean?” Blaise shouted.
He was destined to continue to be frustrated, however. The Magian strode swiftly toward the exit, his strange robes billowing out behind him. As he grew closer to the door, he faded from view. Blaise was left standing there alone.
The Old Man really did make it his mission to bewilder and infuriate him at every turn.
In the midst of his chaotic thoughts, he sensed Isabel awaken in her bed. He paused, his face turned toward her even though walls and a great distance separated them.
Isabel is pregnant. You are the father, Blaise.
A sweat broke out on his brow.
Do not believe it, he warned himself. Humans would have said miracles abounded in Blaise’s world, but for him, life was an endless, gray duty. Isabel had lit up his world with her presence, showed him a whole new spectrum of color, infusing his world with life.
>
Her presence was all the miracle a being like him could ever hope for. The fact that she wanted to touch him, that she curled into his arms like a contented kitten when he went to her, still remained a matter of pure amazement to him.
He sat down on the couch, and placed his forehead in his hand. His body seemed to strain toward Isabel while his mind kept recalling in vivid detail the malaise that consumed her, the illness he had caused. Usan was right about one thing—he could not leave her now. He would continue to try and comprehend these inexplicable events, but he must endeavor to stay away from Isabel until he was more certain of what was happening. He would go to her only as Royal, for she still had not made the heinous realization that he and the animal were one.
As for Usan’s claim in regard to her pregnancy, the news tore at his consciousness.
Miracles didn’t exist, and certainly not for creatures such as he. Recalling the stunned look on Usan’s face caused a worm of sick anxiety to squirm in his gut.
If Usan was worried, Blaise had a thousandfold reason to be.
Chapter Fourteen
Aubrey had recommended to Blaise that the crystal be stored in the apex of Sanctuary—at the very tip of the pyramid, where the power from the earth was the strongest. The apex room had always been a comfortable retreat where the Literati liked to go to relax and meditate. He often went near dawn, when the rest of the Literati slept. That, and the magical ward he placed on the door, assured his privacy while he performed his rituals.
It wasn’t a church, of course, but considering how aware the Literati were of the earth’s sublime soul, it made sense that this room, which burrowed down farther than any other, would be held in special regard. Now that the crystal was housed in the apex room, it made the location a hundred times more powerful.
Aubrey chanted the ancient words and inhaled the pungent scent of incense into his nose. Summoning a demon was always tricky magic, but tonight the challenge was exponentially greater. It was the first time he’d attempted the spell within Sanctuary’s magical protection.
He opened his eyes, breaking his deep trance when he finally felt her presence beside him.