No doubt she was. Duncan had seen her a few days before when he helped transport her to the Chapel Island sanctuary. Rachel had just fed the Soldiers Cove group and they had been merciless. She had been pale, gaunt, scarred and passing out periodically.
“I definitely feel better,” she said. “Thanks to Gavin.”
Duncan turned and patted Gavin on the shoulder. “Well, thanks to me and about three donors.”
Rachel said, “I’ve taken a lot of lives over the last year. More than I ever thought possible.”
“Now, now girl,” Duncan said, turning to face her once again. “That can’t be helped if you want to live, and if you want to keep the others alive as well.”
“I do. But they don’t want to keep me alive it seems.”
Duncan raised his eyebrows as he looked back and forth between Gavin and Rachel. “Again?”
“Afraid so,” Rachel said. “But Gavin stopped her. We lost another one.”
Duncan closed his eyes for a moment, making the sign of the cross and then whispering, “God rest her soul. May the lord have mercy on her.”
“Do you think he will?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know, girl. There’s not much reason why he should have mercy on any of us, which is all the more reason to stay alive as long as you can. None of us know what waits for us on the other side.”
This was a question vampires pondered all the time. Gavin had spent many long nights wondering what was on the other side for him as well and if god could forgive him for all the atrocities he’d committed since his turning. There would only be one way to find out, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to find out for quite some time.
Rachel turned to Leiv and was just about to reach out for him when he turned his back sharply and disappeared up the stairs. For the millionth time today it seemed, Rachel’s face filled with hurt. Next to he and the children Leiv was the one person she longed to be with. Her very being screamed to spend time with him and protect him. He knew she worried for him immensely and although Holly and Duncan were very old and experienced, it wasn’t the same as having your own maker be there to teach you. Leiv had just ended his transitional year and Rachel had seen practically none of it.
Like an abandoned child, Leiv sulked quite a bit and was spending more and more time alone. He wanted to move back to Sydney with Alexander, but Holly and Duncan felt he wasn’t ready for that yet, and perhaps not for another year. Gavin couldn’t say he blamed the young man for being upset. In the same situation he would have felt a sense of being trapped as well.
Alex followed Leiv up the stairs in an effort to comfort him, leaving the rest of them alone in the kitchen. “Do you think he’ll ever forgive me?” Rachel said.
Duncan winked and took her by the arm, sitting her down at the table. “In time, of course he will. Trust old Duncan. This will all be an unpleasant memory someday and the two of you will be as close as any maker and progeny ever were. He’s still a baby though. Still adjusting. He’ll come around.”
Rachel nodded and Holly began to rattle pots and pans in the background, getting things ready for supper. Rachel stood to help but Holly put her hands up, stopping her. “Oh no you don’t. I got this. I’ll be done in no time and then you all can get down to the pond before dark so that Ryan can show you his moves. You should rest before the meeting tonight.”
Rachel tilted her head back, her long hair spilling over the chair as she did. “The meeting… Oh my god I forgot all about it. Jesus!”
Council meetings had turned out to be something they all detested as the subject matter never seemed to progress beyond Rachel herself, the situation with the ‘orphans’ as they had become known and why she should allow someone, for the good of the clan, to kill her and take over. Someone stronger, someone like Duncan.
Rachel had taken Ely’s advice and appointed not just her friends, but a representative of those who opposed her. They had formed a group and a vampire named Jacob was their leader on the council, and preferably their leader for good if they could manage to get rid of Rachel. Lately their arguments were becoming more and more aggressive and Gavin feared for Rachel’s life, not just at the hand of the sick, but at the hand of someone in her own clan on the opposing side.
“You’ll feel better about it once you get some food into you,” Duncan insisted. “Things will calm down, you’ll see. We just have to steer them in a different direction tonight.”
“I can’t imagine any other direction they’d want to go in. Has anything new come up?”
“Not really,” Duncan said.
“Well then I know what we’ll be talking about.”
Before Gavin could say anything, Ryan came bustling down the stairs with a hockey bag that looked like it weighed a good fifteen pounds. “I’m ready to go,” he shouted.
“Not just yet,” Holly said, pointing to the table. “You sit yourself down and eat your supper, then Grampie will take you to the pond.”
Gavin had never seen Ryan sit at the table so fast. He chuckled under his breath and took a seat with himself between his wife and son. As the babies played together, throwing toys and babbling with the occasional word thrown in, Holly served them with an elaborate meal. A large turkey dinner with all the trimmings was the fare on this night. It was comfort food and god knows they all needed a little comforting. It was especially good to see Rachel finish every bite.
“Thank you, Holly,” she said, putting down her fork as she finished. “That was wonderful.”
Holly gave her a wink. “I’ll go get the girls in their snowsuits, they like to slip and slide on the ice in their boots.”
“I’ll help,” Rachel offered.
“No. You just sit until it’s time to go.”
Ryan finished up as well and soon all of them were dressed for the winter night and on their way to the pond. The sun was still up but wouldn’t be for long, and as such Duncan had brought all the supplies they would need down to the ice for a bonfire earlier in the day.
As they came to the clearing, Rachel seemed to weaken and stumbled on to an old log someone had slid onto the pond, where she sat, almost missing it, and doubled over for a moment. Gavin sat next to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just got a little woozy all of a sudden.”
Gavin stayed silent but continued to keep watch over her as Ryan and Duncan skated circles around one another. The two little girls walked and slid and fell a dozen times, Holly keeping close to them and laughing as she did. As Gavin watched he, for a moment, became resentful. Why couldn’t they be the ones doing this? Why could they not have been enjoying their family instead of Rachel being deathly sick from having to feed those vultures? Sometimes he became so angry about the whole situation that he was sure he would prefer to let them all die. Let them all starve to death and leave his family in peace. What problem was it of theirs?
He knew that was unreasonable though and the resentment passed as easily as it had crept up on him. Rachel, even if she had not had any physical need to let the orphans feed on her, would have felt a moral obligation to let them do it anyway. That’s who she was.
As the feeling passed and he came back to the reality of the cold winter night he noticed Rachel, staring at something directly below them. Watching the ice closely as if seeing something underneath it. His eyes flitted to the spot where she was keeping watch but he saw nothing. Just as he was about to say something Rachel shouted, “Did you see that?”
Gavin scanned the icy area, his vampire vision more than adequate to notice anything abnormal below the surface. He looked, but saw nothing. “See what? What did you see?”
“A face,” she said, whispering the words as if only talking to herself. “Someone is down there. There’s someone under the ice.”
Gavin looked again but saw only stillness and the calm of a frozen pond. The ice was like glass and even a human could have seen that the area below the surface was empty. “Honey,” he said, gently laying a hand on her knee. �
��There’s nothing there.”
“I swear there is,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “I’m not crazy.”
For someone who had suffered from mental illness for as many years as she had, the idea of having a hallucination was particularly frightening for her. “No, you’re not crazy. Nobody said you were crazy. It was probably just the way the light hit the surface. That’s it.”
Rachel thought for a moment and then nodded and continued to watch Ryan skate around, slamming his hockey stick against the puck every time Duncan passed it to him. Although Gavin had assured her it was just a trick of the light, deep down in the privacy of his own mind he was questioning whether or not it might have been an actual hallucination. After all she was under a lot of strain and it was bound to affect her mind. God knows it affected her in all kinds of physical ways. He wished she could just take a week and rest. Feed and replenish herself, but there wasn’t time. The orphans had to be fed. The children had to be visited and Leiv had to be dealt with. Clan business had to be dealt with too and all too soon the fun on the pond was over.
Duncan gathered up Ryan’s things and Holly took the girls, one by each hand, and began to lead them back toward the house. The meeting was in about three hours and he knew Rachel would insist on putting Ryan to bed tonight. When they arrived back at the house she did just that, and as Holly had told them, he fell sound asleep rather quickly as he was totally exhausted.
Rachel came out of Ryan’s room with a small but warm smile on her face. “He sure was tired,” she said. “I wish I could be here to tuck him in every night.”
“Soon you will be,” Gavin told her as he took her in his arms, gently rocking her back and forth. “Soon he’ll have his mom and his dad back. This is almost at an end and we can get on with our lives.”
“Maybe…”
“Of course we will.”
“Not if I’m killed. Gavin, if I die you must promise me…”
Angrily he let go of her and took her by the shoulders, looking her squarely in the eye. “I’m not promising you anything.” Without knowing it he was shouting. “Nothing is going to happen to you Rachel. If the clan wanted you dead you’d be dead by now. They’re moving past it. You’ll see. Tonight will be different.”
The angrier he felt the more he shouted. He was sure he could convince her and himself that the council would not be a problem. There had been rumblings of stopping Rachel’s reign with a vote of non-confirma. That was impossible for now as it had to be one full year, but as he said, if they’d really wanted her dead she would already be gone. Assassination was always a possibility. Or perhaps it was just that nobody had the balls to cross him, or Duncan for that matter. A one thousand year old vampire having a reason to hate you was never good. Most of them would stand to lose in a confrontation with him. Some in the clan said Duncan’s presence was the only thing keeping her alive.
Rachel spoke once more. “Gavin you have to be prepared to do this alone.”
He turned his back on her now. All he wanted was to forget about the idea. Doing anything on his own had seemed painful since the night he’d come across her in the woods. He had waited for what seemed like forever to have her join him, and he wouldn’t let something like the leadership of this pathetic little clan take her away from him. He’d die himself first. “Let’s go,” he said without looking back.
He felt her presence behind him all the way to the sanctuary, even though she was not directly with him. She was walking side by side with Duncan and so he could afford a little reprieve from being on constant observation. Just then he yawned, exhausted.
“Gavin needs to sleep,” he heard her say from behind him.
“Aye. That he does. When we get back to the house he should do just that.”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled, turning his head in their general direction without actually looking at them. “I just need for this to be over. We all need for this to be over.”
“On that we are agreed,” Duncan said.
Chapter Three
A crowd had gathered outside the council room. Vampires had taken the time to come stand out in the corridor as the meeting was going to take place, something he had never witnessed on a regular basis, and yet something that was becoming all too common in the last few months. There was no denying that tension was building among his people, and Rachel felt it too. He felt her tense up emotionally as she quietly walked passed them, head down, and made her way to the council chamber door.
Inside the rest of the group was already assembled and so Rachel, Gavin and Duncan all took their seats, Rachel being seated at the large throne like chair in the middle of the black wrought iron table. The table itself looked like a piece of gothic art with its various skulls and fanged images carved into it.
Rachel knew better than to let her exhaustion and worry show in this room, and she sat down, confidently, leaning forward and folding her hands on the table in front of her.
“Good evening,” she said, her voice as stern and direct as any leader he had ever heard. “Let us begin by bringing our business forward. Is there anything the council feels I should know or that needs my attention?”
Gavin looked around the room. There were six of them in total. He, Duncan and Rachel made up half, and at the other end of the table were Ellie, a long time council member and mother to Aries, blood grandmother to Ryan. John, Gavin’s father and Jacob, a known supporter of Angus and someone who had been dead set against Rachel taking the position of leader.
Although Gavin was terribly uncomfortable even being in the same room with him let alone having him on the council, he knew that Rachel had to appoint someone who held opposite views to her own and Jacob was it. Everyone shook their heads, ‘no’. All except for Jacob and Gavin came dangerously close to rolling his eyes at him. Of course there would be something he would want to discuss, and Gavin didn’t have to be a mind reader to figure out what it was.
“I want to talk about the possibility of Rachel excusing herself from this position. We all know it isn’t right. This was never supposed to happen. She is the mother of two children and wife to someone. She has too many ties to be an effective leader. It will color the way she rules which is not fair to the clan and certainly not fair to her children.”
Jacob always seemed to find a way to bring Gavin’s children into things and Gavin was getting sick of it. “I think that’s a decision she’s entitled to make for herself.”
“And what of your children? Are they not entitled to a safe home?”
Duncan leaned forward now, slamming his fist on the table and sending a rattle through the darkened room. “They do have a safe home. Unless, Jacob, you are planning on making it unsafe somehow.”
Jacob looked as though he was wounded. Gavin knew better though. Jacob knew how to feign offense like any good politician. “Now, Duncan,” he said. “Your accusations are unfair. We have been coming here for nearly a year and in that time have I ever shown any disdain for our leader’s children? No. I simply worry that they are being unnecessarily being put in harm’s way. They are, after all, members of this clan as well. The boy belongs to two of our secret peoples. I don’t want to see anything happen to him especially.”
Gavin could no longer sit still and listen to Jacob. The sound of his voice grated on him like microphone feedback. “What a bunch of bullshit,” he boomed. “Like you care at all about my son.”
Jacob grinned from ear to ear as if pleased with himself for getting under Gavin’s skin. “Oh. I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware you had a son.”
Suddenly Gavin found himself standing, ready to jump over the table and take out Jacob’s throat. The familiar low guttural sound he made when faced with a threat reverberated in his throat.”
“Sit down!” Rachel stood in front of Gavin so that she was the only thing he could see. When he didn’t obey right away she screamed, “Now!”
A sick feeling came over him. She was his official leader after all and challenging her gave him a visce
ral reaction. One that was most unpleasant to feel to say the least. “My apologies,” he said, gaining control over his emotions and sitting once more.
Rachel sat again as well and after taking a moment to breathe she spoke again. “Jacob, stunts like that waste everyone’s time. I know you’re not in favor of my position, but it is what it is, for now anyway.”
“Yes, for now,” he said, lowering his eyes.
“Well, when the year is up in a few weeks you’ll have your chance to claim non-confirma, but, until such a time we are here to do business, so if you don’t have anything constructive to bring forth I suggest you stay quiet.”
“My apologies, Rachel. To both you, and your mate. I hope that when the time comes you will not be offended.”
Offended? The fact that he disagreed with them on most things was the reason he was here. Gavin suspected he wanted the leadership position for himself, but only time would tell. Rachel would not be offended, they had seen this coming a long way off.
“Of course not,” Rachel said. “Now, does anything need my immediate attention?”
Out of nowhere Ellie’s small but sharp voice spoke up from the other end of the table. “Naiads,” was all she said.
Rachel’s expression gave way to confusion. “Naiads?” she said. “What are naiads?”
Gavin had heard the stories, which he’d always assumed were just that, stories, and leaned forward to hear Ellie speak.
“Naiads,” she said, “are the women who live under the pond. They are a water people and only awaken every couple of hundred years. We think they are awake now.”
“And that’s a problem why? Are they hostile?”
Ellie, Duncan and John all let out small chuckles.
“Quite the opposite,” Ellie said. “In fact, they are overly friendly. Especially to males. They mate with them and then they drown them. They prefer humans, but will drown a Satyr if they can catch one. I think we need to take steps to cleanse ourselves of them once and for all.”
The Vampires of Soldiers Cove: Sacrificial Children Page 2