Nyanther got to his feet. “I’ll see you to the door,” he said. His gaze flickered toward me, then moved deliberately toward Tally.
He took Donna out to the front door.
I moved to sit next to Tally and picked up her hand. “Hey.”
She shook her head. She was sitting quite still, staring straight ahead.
Nick dropped down into a crouch in front of her, looking up at her. “We always thought it was Oscar,” he said gently.
“That’s not it,” Tally said. Her voice wobbled.
“It will be a year in just under a week,” I said as gently as I could. I wanted to draw the thorn that was hurting.
At last, she began to cry. “She looked wr…r…retched! Is that what I look like? Is that all that is left for me?”
“You’re a hunter, born and bred,” Nick said firmly. “No one can take that away from you.”
Tally began to cry harder and for the first time I realized that it wasn’t just the anniversary of Carson’s death that was prodding her. “What do I do once Lirgon is dead?” she asked, through her tears. “Keep hunting?”
“If you want,” I said as calmly as I could, although my heart was already hurting from beating too hard.
“I don’t want Riley growing up in this world!” she cried. “Yet if I don’t hunt, I must face becoming human, normal, again. I can’t do it! I just can’t! That’s why I don’t want Riley to grow up like me!”
It was a nasty dilemma. I didn’t know what to say. So I drew her against me and let her cry on my shoulder. I think that was the first time and also the last time that Tally truly cried in that entire horrible year.
Nick’s gaze met mine. He was deeply troubled, too.
Movement caught my eye and I looked behind him. Riley was on her feet, wobbling, clutching the corner of the armchair. Her play blanket was three feet behind her.
As I watched, as Nick spun to see what I was looking at, as I pushed Tally up and pointed, Riley took two more hesitant, tottering steps, then sat down suddenly on her rear and giggled.
Tally surged out of her chair and swept Riley up in her arms and covered her in kisses. “Oh, you sweet, darling girl! You’re walking!”
It was the only light, happy moment in a month, a year, that had grown to be almost unendurable.
January 1, 1984
Nyanther was the one who saw the late night look-how-strange news report on a bear eating people in Florida and coupled it up with Lirgon’s return.
Even if I had seen the original smarmy, tongue-in-cheek report, I might still not have made any connection because one didn’t generally think of caves, ancient creatures and the supernatural as anything related to swampy, flat and above all, hot Florida.
Only, for Nyanther, everything was still odd and strange. So connecting the two was natural. “There are caves in Florida,” he insisted as we sat around the table, Tally eating breakfast I had cooked for her while Nick fed Riley. “The center of the state is riddled with them. I looked it up. They’re limestone and most of them are underwater, except where the ridges emerge, the caves are dry. It might not be a gargoyle nest the way you and I think of them, but it still fits their criteria.” He lifted his hand and touched the tip of his fingers as he counted off the criteria—a modern habit he had picked up from somewhere. “Caves. Forests—well, swampland. Which means wild animals to tide them over when they can’t find humans. Humans who are missing and remains that have been eaten, especially the legs.” He lowered his hand and shrugged. “It’s Lirgon.”
“Or a bear, or a crocodile.” Nick wiped Riley’s chin.
“Who do you know in Florida?” Nyanther insisted.
Tally picked up her coffee cup. “There’s Miguel,” she said.
Nick frowned. “Do you have contacts for him?” he asked.
“A phone number for a bar that he uses as a message drop.”
“It’s New Year’s Day,” I pointed out. “You’re not going to raise anyone until late afternoon.”
Nick sighed. “Why don’t you leave a message for him tonight?” he told Tally. “It won’t hurt for him to look into it. We could drive down while he checks it out. It would take three or four days but if we drive, we can take all our gear. We could leave on Tuesday and be there by the weekend.”
I wondered if Nick was agreeing to this as a way of getting Tally out of the house and out of New York at this time of year. I didn’t like the pallor of her face, either.
“Why leave on Tuesday?” Nyanther asked. “Why not tomorrow?”
“No,” I said at the same time as Nick.
Tally put her coffee cup down, staring at the brown liquid.
Nyanther sighed. “Forgive me,” he said. “I forgot.”
January 2, 1984
I don’t think I spoke to anyone on January 2nd. None of us in the house did.
We all pretended to get on with the day, however, by mid-afternoon we all gravitated toward the living room. There was a storm building, the sky was heavy with snow and a dark, iron gray color that sucked all the light out of the day.
Nick got the fire going and we simply sat. Even Riley was subdued, perhaps picking up the mood of the house. She was teething. Baby Tylenol soothed her into early sleep. Then Tally crept into the room where we were, curled up on the sofa between us and dropped her head onto Nick’s shoulder, reached back and picked up my hand.
That was where we stayed until the day moved on to January 3rd.
January 3, 1984
We drove down to Florida, taking four days to make the trip, because no one wanted to stay behind with Riley. So Riley came with us, happy in her baby seat on the backseat of the big Cadillac DeVille, with Tally and I on either side to keep her occupied when she wasn’t sleeping.
We took four days to keep the time in the car at a minimum per day, with lots of stops on the way.
I don’t think anyone except Nyanther truly thought we were going to find Lirgon in Florida. It just seemed so unlikely. I know Nick didn’t believe so because he told me on the second night on the road, in a roadside motel just south of the Virginia state border. Tally was the only one who really needed to sleep, so we took rooms on either side of her to give her time alone.
I did a lot of walking on those nights, out under the stars, my thoughts freewheeling. For the first time in my life, being in the same room with Nick had become uncomfortable.
When I got back to the motel room around two in the morning, Nick was lying on the bed, his hands behind his head. The TV wasn’t on. Neither was the bedside lamp, but neither of us needed the light, anyway.
He sat up as I closed the door very softly, so no one else in the motel was woken by it.
“You’ve been a while,” he said evenly.
“It’s nice out there. Warm, even.” Compared to Albany in January, it was very nice, with just a touch of crispness in the air to make it refreshing. There were no predators, neither man nor beast, who could make it dangerous for me to walk alone in the night, either.
Nick looked down at his hands.
I sat on the other double bed, facing him. “We need to talk,” I said as gently as I could.
He still didn’t look at me. I heard his heart stir and sluggishly beat. “Is this when you tell me it’s not about me. You’re the one with the issues?” Finally, he lifted his head. There was dull fury there. Fear, too.
I sighed. “It’s all about you, Nick. You know that as well as I do. Since Connors died, you’ve been…obsessed. You don’t talk. Well, you were never one for talking. I’ve lost track of the last time we made love.”
“Last week,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
“That was just sex,” I said flatly. “You could have used your hand and gotten the same result.”
He flinched. “You sound like every lonely housewife ever born,” he said harshly.
“That’s all I am now,” I agreed. “Riley’s caretaker…and that’s the only reason I’m still here. Riley. Tally, too, although she do
esn’t really need me either. You and she are existing on the same fumes. This useless hunt for Lirgon and the closure you think you’re going to get from it.”
“I stopped caring about Lirgon a long time ago,” Nick said stiffly. “Right after we buried Connors. You might remember. You were there, begging me to let go. So I did.”
“You haven’t let go of the need to earn Tally’s forgiveness. That’s what’s driving you, while all she wants is revenge.”
Nick looked down at his hands again. It made my chest ache to see him so low. This was the vulnerable man who hid from everyone but me. I know Tally never saw this side of him. Nick would rather have cut out his heart than let Tally see any weakness in him.
“Is Nyanther part of this?” he said, very quietly.
“Nyanther?” I repeated, for a moment genuinely confused. Then it clicked into place. The look Nick had given us on the plane back from Scotland. His distance lately.
I let out a gusty breath as I saw it all. “Gods, Nick…please don’t tell me you’ve been this way for months because of some latent, pathetic jealousy?”
His head jerked up, as if I had slapped him. Perhaps I had. “As if I would indulge in such a petty past time,” he said stiffly.
The mental weight that had been bearing down on me lifted and floated away. I looked at him fondly. “No, of course you wouldn’t,” I said. “Nyanther is still finding his sea legs, here in the twentieth century and I know something of what that is like, especially when I remember what my early life was like in comparison. It can make you dizzy and snatch your breath away. So we have that in common.”
“I know,” Nick growled. “I, on the other hand, have only existed for a few measly centuries.”
“Eight of them, last I checked,” I said lightly. I moved to sit next to him on the bigger bed. “Four of them we have in common, which outweighs by several hundred years any commonality Nyanther and I share.”
Nick let out an unsteady breath, watching me.
“You’re an old fool,” I told him softly.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Forgive me.”
“Already forgiven.”
He moved very quickly, even for a vampire. I still could have countered the move if I’d been of a mind to. Instead, I let him pull me down onto the bed properly and settle over the top of me. My heart hurried along, this time with happy contentedness.
“I am going to leave you limp and utterly drained,” he growled, pulling at my sweater.
“Do your worst,” I breathed back.
January 4, 1984
We had arranged to meet Miguel on the Friday, which was the fifth. The night before, we stopped just outside Jacksonville at another franchise hotel, this one with a suite we could use.
Tally settled Riley for the night, then sat cross-legged on the floor between Nick’s armchair and where I sprawled on the sofa, hogging the cushions. She put her hands together, studying us both. “Nyanther is out?”
“Swimming.” I grinned. So did Nick and Tally.
The idea of recreational swimming was another one Nyanther had adopted with enthusiasm. An entire indoor pond filled with filtered water had floored him and left him shaking his head for days. “Our human tribe drank wine because the water made them sick,” he said.
“I wouldn’t drink the water in the pool,” Nick advised. “That will likely make you sick, too, but not for the same reasons.”
At home, Nyanther used the pool at the YMCA. The pool in the hotel had a waterslide, which he had wanted to see for himself.
Tally recomposed herself. “I was thinking, this afternoon…I don’t know where it came from. Well, perhaps I do.” Her face shadowed. “I don’t have a will.”
I sat up, giving myself time to think of a reply. There were very dark, unhappy thoughts behind that statement.
“You really don’t need one while Damian and I are here, you realize?” Nick said quietly.
“I would give you everything I have,” Tally said with a shrug of her shoulders. “That’s about six hundred dollars and my mother’s best china set, that Damian doesn’t like, anyway. Riley makes a difference, though.”
“You know that this trip to find Lirgon is a fool’s errand, don’t you?” Nick said sharply.
She gave him another stiff smile. For the first time I consciously noticed how much weight she had lost lately. There were the faintest signs of dark marks under her eyes. She wasn’t sleeping, either. “I think everyone but Nyanther thinks this is a complete waste of time. It was good to get out of New York, though. Nyanther is seeing the countryside and sitting in the car all day is giving me time to think. Forcing me to think, actually. I haven’t done a lot of thinking for a long time and that’s why I haven’t thought of this until now.”
I made myself say it. “If anything happened to you, you know perfectly well that we would take care of Riley.” I hesitated. “We’ll even keep her out of the business. Have her grow up a normal human.”
“Of course you would. That’s not what I’m talking about,” Tally said with a touch of impatience. “Nick, you killed the last of the Stonebrood Clan in 1873, just over a hundred years ago. Gargoyles were taken off the official hunter list after that. Everyone thought they had gone. Then they came back.”
“They came back because Azazel resurrected them. It’s completely different,” Nick pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” she said with the same touch of asperity. “What’s to stop him doing it again?”
“You,” Nick said with icy calm. “Seven years ago. You drove an iron curtain rod into his gullet. Or so Carson told me. I wasn’t in a state to witness it, although I wish I had.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as being—I don’t know—too easy? It was Azazel, one of the most powerful demons known to hunters and humans, both. He’s been around since history began. And little Natalia Grey is the one who rids the world of him with a curtain rod and a sachet of salt?” She shook her head. “I might have wounded him. Badly wounded him, even. Only, what if he comes back?”
“What if he does?” I asked. “As you said, he’s lived through all of recorded time and he was doing something in all those centuries. If he does come back, he’ll go on doing whatever it is he does, which could be a long way from here.”
“I don’t have enough ego to think that he’ll come gunning for me to avenge himself,” she replied. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m a passing blip, a temporal human life that means less than nothing to him. Yet I keep reminding myself that he’s a demon. They don’t think like we do. They’re essentially immortal, just like you two. You’re closer to human than demons are and even I have trouble understanding the way you think, sometimes.”
“You think he’ll come back for you, anyway?” Nick asked.
“I think that if he has all of time to play with, he might find it amusing to spend a few years toying with me and mine, just because we inconvenienced him once.”
I didn’t have anything to say in response, because she was right. Demons were chancy and unpredictable. They didn’t think in human terms and because they were demons, they lacked the empathy and compassion that drove most other creatures.
Tally rethreaded her fingers together. “That’s what I was thinking about today,” she said. “About how Azazel might come back. About how, if he really wanted to mess with me, he could simply regenerate the gargoyles and make us go through this all over again.”
Even Nick had no response. We both sat there, trying to find something reassuring to say and failing.
“And then, I thought about how this whole business started,” Tally added. “It had nothing to do with me, in the beginning. It was all my father’s project, to investigate the demonic activity that later turned out to be Azazel himself reanimating gargoyles. Azazel killed my father…well, his gargoyles did, but I’m sure it was under his direction. Azazel didn’t stop there, though. He came after my father’s family. Me.”
Nick cleared his throat. “Riley,” he said simply.
“Riley,” Tally confirmed. “My offspring.”
I made myself breathe. My head was thick. I needed oxygen.
“I might live to be a hundred and two,” Tally said. “And I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. I don’t know how to be anything other than a hunter, so the chances are the bus will hit me before I start going gray. Besides, this isn’t something I can put in a will, even if I had one.”
“You want us to protect Riley,” Nick said. “If Azazel ever comes back.”
“I know you will do that anyway,” Tally said. “I still want you to promise me, here and now. I want you to swear that no matter what happens, if Azazel comes back, if the clan is raised again, you will make sure that Riley survives. No matter what,” she added fiercely.
“No matter what happens,” I said. “We will.”
“Nick?”
“Of course I will. With my life, if I have to.”
Tally relaxed. This time, her smile was more natural. “Thank you.”
“You should sleep,” Nick added. “It could be a long, useless day tomorrow.”
January 5, 1984
Florida, even in January, was warm enough that we could forego our coats and parkas and not look ridiculously out of place. Even Tally stripped off her outer layer and looked up at the blue, sunny sky before dropping sunglasses into place.
Nyanther looked around curiously while unconsciously plucking at his sweater. It was the first time he had experienced southern climates and land that looked considerably different from Scotland’s misty moors and glens. He sniffed, sampling the air, which was rich with the smell of green, growing things. His old instincts were making him wary.
We had found the road-side diner that Miguel had directed us to and Miguel arrived only a few minutes later, his dilapidated Buick belching blue smoke into the air.
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