Legacy: The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 1

by Denise Tompkins

  “That’s it?” he asked, shocked.

  “You didn’t do it, Bay. I know that as deeply as I know that this isn’t just a dream.”

  “Thank you.” He reached out to touch the back of my hand, and I flipped it over so our fingers touched, front to front. “I’m sorry, Maddy,” Bahlin said quietly. “I don’t normally lose it like that. I just saw myself losing you again so soon, and it made me a bit—”

  “Crazed? Maniacal? Enraged?” I suggested with a smile.

  Bahlin smiled back. “Point made. Who’s next?”

  Might as well get the hardest one out of the way. “Brylanna.”

  As expected, Bahlin stiffened again, but he didn’t rage at me. Instead, he took a deep calming breath and seemed to collect himself, forcing his eyes back to midnight blue. “Let’s trade this one off, because I can’t be totally objective about her,” he suggested.

  “Fair enough. Brylanna hates me. She sees me as interfering between the two of you, which, I might add, is just a little creepy. She knew I was coming and made sure that the prophecy was fulfilled just as she’d predicted. As you’ve stated, I have no point of reference for the first murders, so let’s just say she could have done it.”

  Bahlin’s jaw clenched, his neck muscles cording, but he nodded and gestured for me to go on.

  “You got to me so quickly that she didn’t have a chance, so she could have hired Maddox to kill me. But it just doesn’t ring true. Why would she hire a fae when she has access to the wyvern? And she’s already a Seer, so there’s no reason for her to kill Meyla. She’s not strong enough in her human form to fight Imeena, and there’s been no report from Imeena’s kiss of a dragon interfering with her. The only claim was that she was behaving strangely. No, Brylanna probably regrets not trying to off me before we got together, but she didn’t do it. There are too many negatives in even the column of possibility.”

  Bahlin got up and walked to the sliding glass doors of the balcony and slid them shut gently. Yet he stood there, looking out over the rooflines and saying nothing.

  “Bay?” I got up and walked to him and slid my arms around his waist. “Are you okay?” I rubbed my hands up and down the ridges of his stomach, and they tightened involuntarily. He put his hands over mine to still them, and I laid my cheek against is back.

  “A part of me would have died if she’d been sentenced to death.” He was so still, so quiet, the rapid beating of his heart the only indicator of strong emotion.

  A thought dawned on me. Why I’d never thought of it before was beyond me. “Bahlin, who carries out the death sentences of the Niteclif?”

  He looked at me and I could tell he knew I’d finally put it all together. “The High Council member of the offending group.”

  “So if Brylanna had been guilty…” I couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Then I’d have had to kill my own sister.”

  Shakespeare couldn’t have done better than this, I thought. I kissed his back through his T-shirt and I squeezed him tight. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. I would have sorted her out on my own.”

  “No, don’t hold back with me, Maddy. If I have any chance of breaking the prophecy I’m going to need all of you, my love: your trust, your heart, your faith, your confidences and more.”

  That he would put so much of his blind faith in me was terrifying, but he was asking nothing more of me than he was willing to give himself. I nodded against his back, too choked up to answer him, though what strong emotion was most responsible for my mute condition was open for debate.

  I hated myself for asking, but a morbid part of my mind demanded an answer. “Do you think we’d survive your having to kill your own sister if I handed down a death sentence for her?”

  Bahlin didn’t answer. Instead he twisted out of my grasp and walked to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Water ran for several moments before it shut off and, eventually, he came out. He’d rinsed his face and a few of the shorter hairs at his temples curled where they’d been splashed. He stopped ten feet from me and shook his head.

  My stomach plummeted, and I involuntarily grabbed it.

  Standing straighter and setting his shoulders, Bahlin finally answered the lingering question. “I don’t know how I could kill her. She’s my baby sister. If you handed down a death sentence for her…if the crime was heinous…” He drew a hand across his lips. “I’d do it, but I don’t know how we’d survive it, Maddy. It would be there, between us, forever.”

  I nodded, swallowed hard and tried to come up with something to say that would offer reassurance to us both. Unfortunately, my mind was nothing but a great, big, cavernous void of white noise.

  Bahlin closed the distance between us and reached for my hand. “Back to our temporary drawing board?”

  “Who should we do next?” I asked, releasing him and turning for the table. Before I was fully faced away from Bahlin, he grabbed my arm and spun me back to him so hard that I lost my balance and stumbled into him. His arms crushed me to him, and I grunted at the force of his embrace. He dipped his head to mine, whispering against my lips, “I’ll no’ take yeh to bed, Maddy, because yeh asked me not to, but I’ll make yeh wish I had.” And then he closed the distance.

  He devoured my mouth with a combination of nibbling kisses that left me straining against him and rough, tongue-delving assaults that left me almost struggling to break free. He was relentless. I pulled my arms free and he let me, snaking them up his chest and grabbing fistfuls of hair and yanking him closer to me. He grunted with pain but continued his onslaught, and I groaned into him mouth. He breathed into me and his breath was searing, lighting me up from the inside and seeming to set my soul ablaze. I wrapped a leg around his and ground my pelvis into his thigh, panting and begging and whimpering all at once. I wanted him flat on his back. I wanted him stretching me to breaking. I wanted… I just wanted.

  He broke the kiss and disentangled us despite my best efforts to crawl up his front. “Maddy?” he asked and I opened my eyes to look at him, lust glazing my vision. “You’re sending mixed messages, love. I’m about ten seconds from throwing you to the floor and ravaging you, despite your earlier wishes, and I don’t think you’d be complaining. Come on now, pet. Tell me what you want with a clear head.”

  I looked at him, and my mind’s haze lingered. I wanted him. I wanted him, wanted him. But this wasn’t slow. Hell, I’d nearly been screaming, “Warp speed ahead,” just seconds ago while looking for Bahlin’s thruster with my whole body. It wasn’t fair. I stepped back and had to clear my throat, twice, before I could put together an apology.

  “I’m sorry, Bahlin. I truly am. I know it’s not fair to you, but I’ve got to ask you to stop. If I don’t then we end up right where we left off. Like I said before, my morals, or what’s left of them, need to regroup.”

  “Do you believe I love you?”

  I looked at him warily. If he gave me the screw-me-because-I-love-you speech, I was going to break his damned nose. I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  “Then you must believe I respect you, yes?”

  My fists formed, and my shoulders straightened.

  “And if you believe I love and respect you, then you must believe I’ll accept your wishes on this matter.” He smiled at me, his lips reddened from our kisses, his pants bulging dangerously in the front.

  I relaxed my hands and noticed that he noticed, then he laughed, rubbing his jaw.

  “Besides,” he said, “I’ve no intent of giving you any more reason to punch me, whether I stand before you as a dragon or a man.” He tilted his head to the side and chuckled at my blushing cheeks.

  “Sorry for that last time.” I stumbled through the apology, unsure how sincere it really was.

  Bahlin and I gathered up the scattered remnants of our remaining suspects and laid everything back out on the table. We were left with Hellion, Tarrek and Imeena.

  “I suggest we start with Imeena since she’s the most recent to disappear,” I sai
d, running my fingers over her name. I could imagine her with her blue-black hair and Caribbean blue eyes staring at me across the High Council’s meeting table. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, thinking through the events of the last week and a half.

  “Maddy, I think it’s important to rule out Hellion first,” Bahlin said, his voice insistent.

  “No. Because I don’t believe Imeena did it and if I’m right, she’s the most recent disappearance.”

  He looked at me, his eyebrows shooting precariously close to his hairline. “But she’s a vampire,” he exclaimed.

  “And you’re a dragon. It doesn’t make either of you guilty.” My tone rang sharp. “Harboring a little prejudice?”

  Bahlin blushed like mad and I suddenly knew, with alarming clarity and vivid imagination, that he and Imeena were once lovers.

  “Bay, you had better come clean about this right now before I pick your damn name up off the floor and reconsider your place in all this,” I growled at him. Jealousy made me want to stand on the table and beat my fists on my chest, then throw him to the ground and love him until he begged me for release. Which, of course, I’d deny. Okay, not really, but it sounded good and made me squirm in my seat a little.

  “It was about seventy years ago,” he said, and my head snapped up as I realized I still didn’t know how old Bahlin was. “She’d lost her mate and we, well, I’d come out of a bad relationship and the Council had just met and we ended up getting together for a few years, but it wasn’t significant. It was a passing entertainment for both of us.”

  A few years? “How old are you, Bahlin?”

  He closed his eyes and let his head drop back.

  “Tell me,” I said, standing up to loom over his seated form by inches. Pathetic, but it was the best I could do with such a huge man. “Tell me, damn it.”

  “How about we compromise and I tell you how long dragons live?” he asked, never opening his eyes or picking up his head.

  “Both,” I said through gritted teeth.

  He cracked a single eye.

  “Tell me both.” I had no idea why it was so important to know his age, but he’d been so sketchy about it that now I needed to know…desperately.

  “Dragons live to be about ten thousand years old,” he said softly. Then he lifted his head up to look at me, slowly pushing himself to standing and never taking his eyes off me as he did it. “And I’m two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven years old. Are you happy? Does this make you feel any better, Maddy?”

  I sat and missed the chair completely, catching my hip as I went by it so that it tipped me over. I threw out an arm to keep from face-planting it on the carpet.

  “No,” I said. “It really doesn’t help me much at all.”

  “Do you understand now why I didn’t want to disclose this?” he asked, staring down at me with his dragon’s eyes.

  “Makes perfect sense,” I whispered.

  “Should I get the door for you now, or will you wait to run until I’ve got my back turned?”

  “That’s pretty low, Bahlin.”

  “I call it like I see it, love.”

  We stared at each other, neither willing to give ground. My mind whirred faster than an accountant’s adding machine as I worked through a variety of issues but one, one, stopped me, tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  “How many women have you loved in your lifetime?” Morbid, but I needed to know how I stacked up against the millennia and the thousands of women he’d likely bedded.

  “One,” he answered, stepping close to me. “I’ve waited for you since I was just a lad, Maddy. I’ve waited since before I was a High Council member. I’ve waited since Brylanna announced over dinner one night that the first female Niteclif would be mine, and I would break her heart. I’ve lived with this damnable prophecy hanging over my head for more than nineteen hundred years, Madeleine. It’s a long time to wait and know you’ll never have what you want, and you’ll never love another. I’ve never been a monk, and I’ll always be mythology to most, but I was born to love you. Never forget that.”

  Bahlin held out his hand to me and I took it, trembling as he helped me to my feet. He stepped toward me very slowly and I looked at him with large eyes, sure that the whites were showing all around the irises. I didn’t run. I wouldn’t run. I’d loved him without knowing and knew there was no valid reason I shouldn’t love him now that I did.

  He embraced me gently, laying kisses along my temples and down my nose before resting his forehead against mine. “I love you, a stór. Not even the ages can change that.”

  “I love you too.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bahlin and I set everything to rights yet again. I kept glancing at him, and he finally sighed. “Is there something else you’d like to know about me, pet?”

  It was humiliating, but I wouldn’t rest until I knew. “Hwmnywmn?” I muttered, turning away from him.

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh don’t go being all polite. You heard me!”

  “What I heard, Maddy, sounded like you need a decongestant and a day in bed, if not a priest to read your Last Rights. Now come clean before I fetch the priest.”

  “Fine. How many women, Bahlin?”

  “Ah. To be fair, that’s not fair.” He smiled. I didn’t. “Okay. I honestly don’t know. I spent years trying to prove that I wouldn’t be the fool the prophecy foretold.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay? You berate me, chastise me, dump me and then love me over a prophecy beyond my control, but you just accept the women I’ve known?”

  “Look, you did more than know them, buddy. But it’s irrelevant.”

  “Goddess knows I’m afraid to ask, but why in the world is it irrelevant?”

  I looked down, but he grabbed my chin and lifted my face, moving close enough that I could see only him. “Because you’ve loved only me,” I whispered.

  “Too true.” He moved behind me, took me by the arms and backed me into the chair. Once he had me sitting, he began rubbing my shoulders.

  I leaned my head against him, and he sighed before I realized I’d laid the back of my head against his groin. I left it there, as much to torment him as me. Thoughts were swirling all around in my head, and I was getting that sickening feeling in my gut again. I’d been over Hellion’s reasons a hundred times, and I’d even spoken to him. But he’d appeared shocked this morning when I spoke to him about Imeena’s disappearance. He had displayed none of the physical signs of lying—quickened breathing, dilated pupils, shifty eyes, fidgeting—and had, in fact, done everything to make me think he was sincere, right down to offering to scry for us.

  “Bahlin?”

  “Hmm?”

  “If Hellion were to scry for the killer, and it was him, would he identify himself?” I asked.

  “Bloody brilliant,” Bahlin yelled, yanking me up and spinning me around in his arms to lay a loud, smacking kiss on my lips. He dropped me to my feet and I stumbled, but I managed to recover and save a little face, sitting back down to watch him. He strode over to his laptop bag and pulled out a cell phone. Dialing a few numbers, he spoke tersely when the recipient answered.

  “Meet me at the Glendale on St. George Street. Agreed. How soon can you be here?” Bahlin paced, biting the thumbnail of his left hand. I idly wondered if his dragon claw would be shorter on that hand when he changed. “Fine. Room 1810. Come alone and don’t send one of your coven for this.” He clicked the phone shut and turned to face me.

  “Hellion will be here before the end of the day. We’ll have our answer by tonight and, if need be, I’ll kill him myself.”

  I blanched, and Bahlin rushed to my side. “Gads. I’m sorry, Maddy. That was bloody inconsiderate of me. He’s going to bring his scrying tools, and we’ll ask very specific questions to determine his innocence. But if he’s our killer, we won’t have the opportunity to issue a death warrant and wait for his coven to carry it out.”

  “How are dragons kil
led, Bahlin?” I asked in a small, pained voice. “Because I won’t risk losing you over this. Not if we can wait on his coven to carry out the sentence.”

  “Let’s wait and see if he’s guilty first, okay?” He smoothed my hair and shifted me out of the chair before pulling me into his lap. The poor piece of furniture groaned, and Bahlin chuckled. He stood and carried me to the bed, laying me down and crawling on top of me, trapping my thighs between his. He leaned in and kissed me tenderly, but I recognized his diversion strategies at this point.

  “Bahlin?” I asked into his mouth, refusing to succumb to temptation. “Bay.”

  “Bloody hell, woman. You make it inconceivably difficult to seduce you.”

  “Stuff a sock in it. How are dragons killed? And don’t kiss me again until you’ve answered me.” I struggled to regain my arms from where he’d pinned them over my head, and I crossed them over my chest in an image of pure defiance.

  He sighed, and I knew I’d won.

  “Dragons in human form can be killed like any other human. With the exception of our strength, speed and unnatural ability to heal, we’re human for all intents and purposes. Of course, you’d never want an autopsy performed on one of us because underneath it we’re very different, but you get the point.”

  “And in dragon form?” I pressed.

  “That’s a different story. Our bodies are incredibly difficult to kill. There is one small scale missing over our heart that can be pierced by arrow or blade or magic that will kill us. Otherwise our scales are relatively impervious to attack. Our eyes are our weakest point, though in battle we rely on all of our senses to, ah, take down our enemies. To answer your question, we’re very hard to kill.”

  “Do you breathe fire?”

  “I do. Not all dragons do, but my weyr is one that is so gifted. Why?” he asked.

  “Can you do it now?” I asked, curious. Truth was turning out to be better than fiction.

  He smiled and a small stream of smoke snuck out of one nostril and rose through the air. “I could, but we’d not get our deposit back on this fine room.”