Lorna Tedder

by Dark Revelations (lit)

  I dipped to kiss the deep-cut muscle that ran parallel to his pelvic bone as I tugged downward on the belt. Why was he being so stubborn? “There may not be another time. There may not be a tomorrow.”

  He caught my hands in his. “I have a little more faith than you do.”

  He pulled me up to him, dodged my lips and buried his mouth in the hollow under my chin. I squeezed my eyes shut and let the sensations claim me. He rolled over on top of me, one hand trapped under my back while the other yanked the buckle open. He kissed my neck and then licked at my nipple. I heard his zipper give way, and he pushed his trousers off with one hand.

  God, I couldn’t wait! This could very well be the last time a man ever touched me in passion, the last time I’d ever let my own fervor play out. I let my want tear through me and push every other worry aside so that there was nothing but this moment in time. I plunged my hand low on his back and grabbed his ass, pulling him to me.

  “I want you inside me,” I whispered raggedly into his ear. I opened my eyes long enough to see he was watching me, then shut them tightly again.

  “Aubrey…”

  He went stock-still. By the time I opened my eyes, he was sitting on the side of the bed, shaking his head and looking at me as if I’d just broken his heart.

  “Eric?” I extended a hand to his thigh, but he pushed away from my touch.

  “It doesn’t matter how naked you are, Aubrey. All I see is armor.”

  “Wh…?” I gripped his shoulder, but he shook me off.

  “It doesn’t matter how wide you’d spread your legs for me. I’d never get inside you. You’re the most emotionally isolated person I’ve ever met, and that includes stone-cold killers.”

  “What?” I sat up. He was rejecting me? But I needed him, needed his fire, needed to feel alive again. “You think I’m closed off?”

  “I’m saying your armor is too thick for any man to get through. And you like it that way.” He stared straight ahead as I cursed him.

  “You used to be so alive, Aubrey.”

  “How would you know what I used to be? Oh, that’s right. You work for the Adrianos. You know everything.”

  “I also work for Myrddin.” He turned just his face to me. “I know everything about you that he knows and I know how you once were, how alive you used to be, what kind of destiny you had before you. But you’ve spent it all on the past. You might as well be dead already. You’re already a ghost. You haven’t let yourself feel anything in years.”

  Was that what was happening to me now? The tiles, the ringing ears? I was starting to feel? After all these years? Was that this strange electricity in my skin—the letting go of long-lost lovers and the acceptance that my future was something that would never work out as planned? I shook it away and snapped back to Eric instead.

  “What would you know about feeling anything? You don’t even have a life, Eric Cabordes. You say Benny’s your life. Well, he’s cute, but he’s not yours. Why don’t you go get yourself a real wife and kid?”

  He flinched as if I’d slapped him, then rose and stalked to the bathroom. He slammed the door behind him, and a few seconds later I heard the shower running.

  I sat there, seething. I glanced from the door of his room to the window. I should leave, I decided. Then and there. Not even wait for his return. Except that it was still storming outside, my clothes were in the bathroom with Eric, my key was inside my clothes in the bathroom with Eric and the artifacts were hidden under Benny’s bed in the next room—and I absolutely would not sneak naked into a little boy’s room.

  Damn. What have I done? I ached all over, and in ways I didn’t understand.

  Twenty minutes later, the shower quieted and the door to the bathroom opened. Eric stepped out, damp and naked. He quickly wrapped a thin towel around his waist to cover up. Resolute and angry, I was still lying naked on his bed. He seemed genuinely surprised to see me there.

  “I…I thought you might have gone.”

  “I considered it.” I didn’t move except to deepen my glare.

  “Aubrey…” He crossed the small room to the bed and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched as he stared at the floor. “I’ve read every report that’s ever been written about you. At least ten years’ worth. I know everything there is to know. What you were like as a girl. As a young woman. Later, when Max lured you back to Europe and you gradually turned into one of them. But I like you.”

  “Yeah. I can tell.”

  “No.” He frowned up at me. A droplet of water traced a path down his temple and fell to the mattress. “I mean it. I like you. I just don’t like what you’ve become.”

  I flung myself upright and started to slip off the bed and leave him for certain this time, but his next words stopped me cold.

  “I had a wife and child.”

  I settled back onto the bed. Had. Had a wife and child. Meaning no more.

  “A wife and children, actually. One little girl and another on the way.”

  Girls. Eric had girls. He would understand the specialness of a daughter.

  “What happened?” I finally asked.

  “You’re not the only one who lost everything in your life that was important to you.” His breathing slowed. I could see the heaviness on his shoulders. “My wife…she was so full of life. Literally. She was pregnant with our second child. Eight months.” His eyes misted over. “I had the most fantastic little girl. She would have been two years older than her sister.”

  “Eric—” I started to touch his shoulder, but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “You think you have all these plans, Aubrey. My wife had plans, too. She had plans and she lived every moment. We both had plans. Plans for our daughters. Plans for growing old together. But life is what happens when you’re making plans. And sometimes…sometimes the best things in life are the things you don’t plan.” He swallowed. “Like when I fell in love with my wife. And our daughters. Neither one of them was planned. Birth control failed every time. We used to say they were fated. Meant to be. But I guess they weren’t meant to grow up.”

  “Eric.” This time I managed to touch his shoulder before he shook me off. I felt the resistance in his muscles, but then he relaxed and permitted my fingers on his skin.

  “It happened several years ago, right after I started working for Adriano Security. Josh had been my roommate in college, and we’d run into each other and he’d offered me a better job than the one I had heading up corporate surveillance for an American company in Paris. Overnight, we were best friends all over again. And then it happened.”

  I listened to every word. I had the feeling he didn’t divulge his inner world very often.

  “I was working a security detail for Josh. He and Pauline had had a big argument and she told him not to come home. He spent the night at my house to cool off. The Adrianos are routinely targets for kidnapping and assassinations. An assassin—he’s dead now—went after Josh and thought my home…my family’s home…was one of Josh’s getaways. Caleb’s usually the one with getaways, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that my home—and everyone in it—was blown to nothingness in an explosion. Josh and I weren’t even there.”

  “Oh, Eric.” I tried to hug him, but he pushed me aside. “Eric, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry won’t bring them back. Nothing will. For a long time, I didn’t care if I lived or died. I had nothing left. Myrddin was the one who got through to me. That’s when I started working for him. And my life started to mean something again. I can’t change the way Simon is. Or Caleb. Josh, I don’t know. Maybe there’s hope for him. But maybe with the next generation. I decided I couldn’t change the past but I could change the future. I could have a positive impact on that child. I’m hoping for something better with Benny, that maybe I can have an influence on him.”

  My throat ached. I could watch my daughter from afar. Eric couldn’t. I’d spent all my years mourning a life that had been promised to me but never happened. My lover was gone. My daughte
r was lost to me. But at least she was still alive. As long as she was alive…as long as I was alive…

  “As long as I’m alive, there’s hope,” I murmured.

  “Aubrey? I don’t want you just to be alive. I want you to live.”

  Chapter 12

  I woke with a start, and it took a few seconds for me to realize where I was. I lifted my cheek from Eric’s bare chest. The hair on my temple was damp from the heat. I blinked up at him. He was still asleep.

  Somehow I must have fallen asleep, too. That in itself was unusual. The last time I’d awakened in the arms of a lover, I’d been eighteen and that man had been Matthew.

  But Eric wasn’t my lover.

  No, waking with Matthew was not the last time I’d awakened in the arms of a lover but the last time I’d awakened in the arms of a man. Any man. I’d never let anyone get that close to me again.

  Until now. Since Matthew, I’d never allowed a physical surrender to become an emotional one. My bond with Eric had never made it over the threshold of the sexual. This was different. Somewhere in the night, I’d been lulled into an emotional surrender. Or maybe I was so weary that I didn’t care anymore. I’d been battling for much too long, not just the Adrianos and the rest of the world but my own heart, as well.

  Eric slept. His face was peaceful, and I found myself jealous. He’d dealt with his losses far better than I had, turned them into something positive and honorable, into a reason to live. He’d found a way to transcend the Adriano madness, both by helping the women they were trying to destroy and by protecting and nurturing their future leader. One day, Benedict Adriano might become the good man the rest of the planet thought the Adrianos were.

  Nothing could have shocked Eric Cabordes out of his complacency or changed the path of his life except for a drastic plunge into tragedy. Had his wife and daughters lived, he would never have gotten so close to the throne of the Adrianos. Myrddin most likely would have died in the vault. Benny would have fallen to his death from the towers in a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with his uncle Caleb. The Adrianos would have tracked me and recaptured me already. Simon would have had the incunable, a ready-made directory to the families of others of “my kind” who had for centuries been his sworn enemies.

  Yet, in spite of Eric’s resignation to destiny and all he’d done to change the world, I was certain that, given a choice between his heroics and a normal, ordinary life as a husband and father, he would not have embraced this future but would instead have embraced those he loved. How could anyone human willingly give up everything they loved for this kind of life?

  I gently lifted off Eric. My skin was still damp in the valley between my breasts and down between my legs where our heat had merged, if not our bodies. I was careful not to wake him. The storm still raged outside.

  I retraced my steps to the bathroom, freshened myself, then tugged on yesterday’s clothes with the exception of the boots. Then I checked on Benny. He was still asleep. He hadn’t moved. The kitten, however, had shifted from under his chin to the nape of his neck.

  Next to Benny’s bed, I lowered myself to the floor, taking great care to keep my right leg as straight as possible. After all the activity and pressure on my knee the day before, it was sorer than usual and disproportionately swollen. I cringed at the crackling sound it made every time I bent it. I rubbed a slow circle around it with my palm. Whether it was the warmth of my skin or the pressure of my touch that made it feel better, I wasn’t sure.

  The tiles under Benny’s bed rang louder than before in my ears. I could barely hear anything for the sound of them, even the wind and rain outside. I shook my head, but nothing stopped it. The ringing was overpowering. I felt a little sick to my stomach.

  What exactly were those stones made of? Kryptonite?

  Their presence was overwhelming. They felt the way I imagined an anxiety attack might feel. Heart palpitations. Edginess. Nervousness. An overwhelming sense of doom. The strong sense that I was about to jump out of my skin. I couldn’t stand being so close. The only time I’d ever felt this way before was the last week of that six-week workshop that had ended in me being smack-dab in the middle of a museum heist without meaning to be.

  I retrieved the briefcase containing the manuscript from next to the tiles and then ambled back to Eric’s room so I wouldn’t have to listen to the constant drone. I situated myself on the floor in the corner of the room by a table lamp, my back against the wall so I could see all the entrances around me. I opened the stereolithographic case exactly as Simon had shown me.

  With trembling fingers, I extracted the incunable. No doubt, it had touched many lives since the 1430s, mine among them. I turned the pages gingerly and began to translate the tiny script, vaguely aware of the passing hours.

  Jeanne has worn a ring, according to the manuscript. A special ring. One passed down to her from her mother. One of two rings, each resembling a blue eye on a pink face. Isabelle, the twin, had put hers away and had never worn it because she’d become ill on every occasion she’d held the ring.

  Jeanne had worn hers, though. Throughout her trial and tribulations, she’d worn her ring, up until near the end of her life. While away in battle, she’d looked at it often because it reminded her of her parents, particularly of her mother, with whom she must have been close. An Adriano who had been part of her inquisition had take the ring from her, leaving her with a bloody knuckle. After that, the voices and visions—the ones she’d heard and seen since she’d first worn the ring on her twelfth birthday, those voices and visions of the Archangel Micha-El—had vanished, and she’d thought she’d been forsaken.

  Two eyes, I thought. Two blue eyes.

  Leaving the manuscript wrapped and carefully set aside, I scrambled back into Benny’s room. My knee clicked as I crouched on the floor by his bed and pulled back the tapestry. I fumbled through the tiles, hands trembling, until I located two of the tiniest tiles, each one a small blue eye against a background of pink rock. They were square and no bigger than my thumbnail. The perfect fit for a ring.

  I pulled out several other tiles, ones I remembered from my own childhood…the baby’s face…and pressed the tiny blue eyes into a perfect fit. My breath came out in ragged gasps. The missing bits of my heritage were falling together now, faster than I could absorb them.

  Joan of Arc and her sister had been two of my kind. The sister must’ve been my ancestor. My grandmother had said we were descended from the womb of Joan of Arc, but now I understood. Not the womb inside Jeanne but the womb that had held her and her twin sister.

  Isabelle had never worn her ring because it had made her ill, just as these tiles made me ill. And if old Max Adriano had read this manuscript and known that, then he would have known how to pick me out of a crowd of other Joan of Arc scholars. All he had to do was narrow down the number of potential candidates for Aubergine de Lune through our interests and expertise in medieval literature and then lure us to Europe. From there, all he had to do was get close enough to each candidate—or have someone else do his dirty work—with the tiles in his pocket and watch for a reaction.

  I’d had the same reaction to the blue-eyed tiles as Isabelle had. They’d affected Jeanne differently. Not just visions, but visions and sound that she’d interpreted as St. Catherine, St. Margaret and Archangel Micha-El telling her to go forth and crown a king and save her people. They’d hidden the remainder of the tiles, the child’s face and body, burying them at the church along with a sword that Jeanne would later carry into battle.

  According to the incunable, generations of priestesses of the Great Mother had preceded the twins. Jeanne had interpreted the Great Mother as Mother Mary when she’d been told of her legacy on her twelfth birthday. She must have found the stories of warrior priestesses inspiring. Perhaps that’s why she was so quick to go into battle for God when such a mission was usually reserved for grown men, not feisty teen girls.

  Such priestesses and warrior women had existed from the very beginning of oral
history, according to Isabelle’s scribbling. Many had come from other races, other cultures, with even one mention of the priestess Dageniam and the Nolalaln priestesses of a country beyond the wide sea, a land Plato had referenced in his writings, a place Isabelle knew only as Atlantis. There had always been—and maybe there always would be—women dedicated to mothering the entire human race.

  I placed the two small tiles in my left palm and stared at them. My ears rang fiercely, and my eyes, so close to the created stone ones, twitched and blurred. My stomach flip-flopped. I closed my palm over the tiles, but it did nothing to lessen the effect. My skin seemed to crawl with electricity, energy, some of which felt sexual but only in that life-force sort of way that perpetuates our species. Whatever this radiological electromagnetic energy was all about, the way it affected me and apparently some of my ancestors was through the auditory nerve and, to some degree, visually. Not to the extent of seeing archangels, fortunately.

  The blue of the stone seemed both ice-cold and burning in my hand, yet I could not put it down. I pressed it hard against my chest and held it there. It didn’t hurt exactly. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t pleasure, either. But it was intense…so intense…I could barely breathe!

  I held it over my heart. I couldn’t move my hand. I knew a lot about stones, about their reputed physical and metaphysical properties. Characteristics of stones in the breastplates of ancient priestesses were recorded in many languages. Fascinating lore, but I was more of the scientific sort myself. What New Agers like Scarlet felt as “vibes” were really more likely to be geological frequencies or geopathic stress, similar to the upsetting pitch of elemental energies Eric had told me about earlier in the day when he had explained radiological electromagnetic energy fields. Even the woo-woo factor could be explained by science, just as refracted sunlight on atmospheric particles made the moon appear to have turned to blood in ancient times.

  The blue stone with its waves of light and dark blue, almost like swells of the ocean or waves of clouds, was larimar, what some called the Dolphin Stone or the Atlantean Stone. Geologists and jewelers who aren’t familiar with the legends refer to it as blue pectolite. Some texts say it comes from Atlantis, but the one place it’s been found naturally in modern times is the Dominican Republic, where it’s formed by an unusual combination of hot gases, crystallized minerals, volcanic heat and the sea. All four elements merged in one stone. Was that why it was supposedly so powerful? It was revered as a healing stone, one that, when touched, would sear like ice. And upon feeling that strange sensation, the recipient would know that the stone was actually healing rather than harming.