by J. J. McAvoy
“Fine, keep your secrets; I have plenty of work to do,” I muttered and pulled out my chair in front of the desk, sitting down to put on a new pair of gloves. Slowly, I set up all my tools once more and pretended he wasn’t only inches from me.
“Why do you do this sort of work?”
“Why are you still here instead of figuring out why you painted portraits of me?” I questioned back, leaning over the painting before picking up a roll of cotton towels and cutting them into smaller squares.
“Why do you continue to question why I am here when I have told you so?”
I glanced up, gripping the scissors. “Why do you continue to stay when I told you I’m not your mate?”
He leaned on the desk beside me, but I didn’t look up. “Because you have not told me to leave you.”
I didn’t respond.
“So, you answer my questions with questions and my statements with silence.”
Still, I didn’t reply.
Instead, placing my scissors down and picking up the solvent—it was blended with potassium oleate and worked best for oil paintings.
“You do not use CL-84?”
“CL-84? That’s a bit dated and could ruin the underline integrity of the art, especially on works like these. Which you would already know because you created the art, and of course, would know how to clean them.” I drifted off, seeing the corner of his mouth lift. I didn’t even last two minutes before I began to answer his questions. Now I really couldn’t look at him, even though I could feel his eyes on me. It didn’t help that he turned more toward me and leaned in.
“I do not know,” he said. “I have never cared to clean my art myself.”
I wanted to ask why and lecture him on how horrible it was that he just left them to rot. But now, I was sure he was baiting me. Saying nothing, I tried to focus on the job in front of me, picking up the varnish as well as my paintbrush.
“I painted this about two hundred years after my rebirth.” He leaned closer, and I felt his breath tickle the side of my face. “I call it My First Rebellion.”
“What?” At that, my eyes jerked toward him, and he grinned, knowing I’d lost this game. Damn my art-history heart. Sucking up my pride, I ignored his smugness. “Why your first rebellion? And two hundred years after your rebirth would make this five-hundred-years older than the Mona Lisa…and six-hundred-years older than the Renaissance period it comes from.”
“You are so young, you may as well be human.” He laughed at me as he pulled up a chair.
“You really must be enjoying starting fights with me.” I glared at him as he sat beside me to touch the painting. But I grabbed a new pair of gloves to make him wear.
His eyebrow rose, but he took them. “I am. But I doubt you can stop yourself, either.”
“About the art…how?”
“What does renaissance mean, Druella,” he questioned as he placed the black gloves over his hands.
“Rebirth or revival.”
He nodded. “Exactly. For there to be a rebirth or revival then it must have existed before, or else it would have been considered new. People were painting long before the mortals classified the Renaissance period in 1400.”
“Of course, they were, but the Renaissance was of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that had been abandoned during the dark ages and replayed to the world around them instead of being left to clergy and the church.” I felt like I was speaking to my Introduction to Art History 101 professor. “The work of the medieval times is much bleaker.”
I saw a lot of tough times through art, and the Romanesque period was not my favorite. Paintings had continued as illustrated manuscripts and extended to murals within in churches. Everything was focused on holy figures portrayed in stiff and formal postures, with thick halo-crowns and this expression of serenity, which I always felt looked forced. Most of all, the paintings lacked background, and the figures were all flat with no sense of depth or dimension.
“For the mortals,” he corrected, amused. “I know a great many vampires who thought the 15th century was the closest thing to heaven they had ever encountered.”
Now that I thought about it more, no one that I was aware of knew anyone who’d live through it. The paintings I had thought of as all history automatically turned to human history. “For the mortals,” I spoke my thought aloud, so he could correct me if I were wrong. “All of the world was either at war, or dying of plague or hunger, there wasn’t anything scenic to paint into the background, and the faces of people were probably gaunt. Which is why the figures were either stickily thin or overly round. Either the human artist was depicting the reality, their holy figures suffering in serenity like them, or they were imagining those figures above the world of suffering they were in. But witches weren’t sick.”
“And because of that, they were exposed, leaving them the victims of witch hunts and the blame for the human illness. Some, like you did as a child, would pretend to be ill to survive. They lived in the same horrid world and could not use their magic to save themselves.”
“But for the vampires?”
He smirked a bit. “We enjoyed roaming the earth freely for the first time, no more hiding in the shadows. The mortals were trying to survive while many of us were feasting and living like gods; at least the Noble bloods were, anyway.”
“Dr. Lovell always called me a snob for not really caring for art before the Renaissance, but you were all living like Marie Antoinette.” I shouldn’t have found it funny who knew how many died of the plague or at the amusement of vampires.
“Not all of us,” he repeated, nodding to his work. “As I said, at this point, I was rebelling.”
“From?”
“Everything.” He frowned, looking over to himself in the painting. “I had lived for over two hundred years, and I had grown tired of the humans’ constant wars, the witches’ constant trouble, and the vampires’ constant need for power. I wanted it to end.”
“You… you wanted to die?”
“Yes, and Noble bloods do not die easily. It is not only witch fire that can kill us instantly. But bewitched beasts, poisoned blood, or to be ripped to pieces and set aflame, but normal flames would work all the same. I had already been ripped to pieces, and I doubted I could stay still enough to be burned,” he said as if it were nothing and pointed to a man in the distance at the very top of the Colosseum-type structure. “I went to the now-lost city of Hylluspolis, north of Cairo. It was said a great wizard lived there with his bewitched beast, who had never been defeated.”
“So logically you went down to the lost city to see if it was true.”
“Logically.” He winked at me, and I ignored him, nodding to the person he’d mentioned.
“Is this the great wizard?”
“He was King Hyllus.”
“King Hyllus of Hylluspolis? Really?” I gasped, staring at him. “Is this story real?”
He pointed to the stones in the chair of the King, and my Latin was good enough that I could read, King Hyllus I. “He was just as ridiculous as the name of his city.”
“What happened to Hylluspolis?” Just saying that name made me want to giggle.
“It was destroyed.” His lips twitched.
I leaned closer, staring at the line of his lips. “You didn’t. You sacked the whole city? After you picked a fight with him?”
“Me?” He pretended to be offended—I could tell by the grin he was suppressing. “I won, and he tried to cheat me out of my reward. In fact, the whole city was a den of cheats, thieves, and liars. I thought the witches had learned their lesson with Atlantis. How was I supposed to know he had made the city with magic and his death would destroy it?”
“Wait.” I held out my hand. “Atlantis was real?”
Instead of just helping to get me another cotton swab, he took my hand, first kissing my wrist right above the glo
ve before giving me the cotton. “Though it was before my time, my grandfather, lived to see it fall, and some of his drawings from his visit still exist. It existed mostly as Plato described it—in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just southwest of the country now known as Morocco. Is it still known as Morocco? Last I remembered, they were at the beginning of Rif War.”
He spoke and asked all of that with such ease that I couldn’t speak. It hit me again just how old he was that his grandfather was living through an event no other historian remembered. He had lived during the invention of gunpowder, the First Crusade—no all of the crusades, Genghis Khan, the Declaration of Magna Carta, The Great Famine, Dante’s writing and finishing the Divine Comedy, The Hundred Years War, The Black Death, The Great Schism, the Fall of Constantinople, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and that was just the middle ages.
“Druella?” he asked softly.
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “It just hit me how old you are. How much you must know that the rest of us don’t. Oh, and Morocco still exists. They gained independence in 1956.”
He made a face of disappointment.
“What?”
“I’ve lost a wager. I didn’t think the Spanish or French would be able to hold on to them for so long.”
“With who?”
“One of my brothers.”
“You have brothers? Still living?”
“I am sure they are still alive.” He replied. “I pity the person who tries to take their lives.”
I wanted to ask more about his family, but I steered us back to the original topic—the painting. Looking back at the king who was quite short and had his hand on a… “Is he holding a skull?”
He looked and nodded. “His first wife. He loved her a great deal, he refused to bury her, and had her carried wherever he went.”
“And that was normal?” I shuddered.
His eyebrow raised. “It was a city of Wiccans. What would be normal?”
Good question. “So, what was the reward that you just had to have enough to destroy this city?”
“I didn’t mean to destroy it,” he muttered and then leaned back in his chair. “The reward for defeating the bewitched beast of King Hyllus was to become the new king. Obviously, King Hyllus never planned to allow that to happen. If the Wiccans can’t have it, then they destroy it. It is their way.”
I laughed. Oh, I couldn’t stop laughing. “You came for death and instead trigged it on everyone else? Oh, that’s horrible to laugh at, but it’s like a Monty Python skit. For some reason, I see a city exploding in the background as you hobble onto your next destination alive and well.”
“I’m pleased you find it so amusing, but I do not know what a Monty Python skit is.” He stared at me. “Also, I did not hobble anywhere on anything.”
“King Theseus of Hylluspolis…haha…sorry.” I put my hand over my mouth and took a deep breath.
“I enjoy your laughter.” He smiled at me. “It is beautiful.”
“I haven’t laughed like this in a long time,” I confessed but didn’t want to get sappy. “I’m shocked it’s not too loud or rude for your delicate ears.”
“I have already adjusted to it,” he teased back and spoke a bit more seriously. “I want to adjust more to you because I enjoy this. Talking to you.”
Me too.
“Not about everything apparently.” My smile fell as I thought about what had happened earlier.
“I want us to be simple before we are complicated,” he replied. “I wish to simply know you, know what it is you like, what you like to do, where you like to go. I wish to know who is this woman that fate has bound me to.”
“Didn’t I tell you I make my own destiny? Fate can’t tell me who my mate is.”
“Maybe you do, but I do not think the gods have left me with that sort of power.”
“The gods?” Now he really sounded like an ancient Greek, making me remember his name. “Which of the gods are you speaking of, Theseus Christian Apollo de Thorbørn.”
“You find my name humorous.” He beamed and stared me, his grey eyes on me as if I were the only thing in the world worth watching.
I nodded, picking up my paintbrush again and spreading the varnish over the art slowly. “You are legitimately named after a Greek hero, the Christian god, Apollo the Greek god of the Sun, logic and reason, among many other things as well as Thor the old Norse god of thunder, among other things. How does a Greek man end up with a last name like Thorbørn?”
“By being turned into a vampire by a Viking, of course.”
My hand slipped, and I ended up getting varnish on his gloved hand and wrist. “Sorry,” I said, quickly picking up some tissue to wipe it off.
He chuckled, not saying anything as he pulled off the glove, allowing me to clean his wrist. It was then that I noticed how long and smooth his hands were. They looked nothing like what I commonly knew as artist hands and more like the model of the hands all artist wanted to paint. Glancing up, I met his eyes. His eyelashes were long and dark, and I realized I was not just holding his wrist.
“Sorry…” I tried to let go, but when I did, he took hold of my hand, taking off one of my gloves and held it in his, my slender fingers intertwining with his. “What…”
“A moment longer,” he demanded. “As penance for painting on me.”
“I need penance for that?” I murmured, my hand feeling truly warm for the first time in a long time.
He kissed the back of my hand before he brought his face closer to mine, his grip tightening gently. “When you say sorry, are you not saying, forgive me?”
“It’s not meant to be so serious,” I replied, my eyes dropping to his lips for only a second. Why was I reacting like this? “You’re supposed to say no problem, and let it go.”
“That is not in my nature,” he replied, reaching up and touching the birthmarks on my face with his free hand. “Thorbørns do not let offenses against us go, least of all me.”
There was a flash of something in his eyes, and those words obviously held much more weight than he was willing to share with me right now. He was more interested in my face, his fingertips trailing down from my cheekbones to my neck.
“Do you go by Theseus Thorbørn or Christian de Apollo?” I asked, trying to break the through the rising tension.
“Only those close to me are permitted to call me Theseus as that is my true name, even before my rebirth. Christian is one I was given that was better suited for the changing world. Christianity being the rising faith, my family thought it was proper.”
“And de Apollo, for the gods?”
He shook his head. “Apollo was a god of Athens; it was more a homage to the place I was originally born than to the god.”
“And Thorbørn is the name of your maker?”
“My father’s surname, yes. But he has been given many names,” he stated very clearly before his eyes dropped to my lips. “Are you going to explain your name to me now, Ms. Druella Zirie Monroe?”
“I wish I had some story to tell.” This conversation was supposed to be his hint to put distance between us, and yet now, I felt like I was getting wrapped up further into him. “But sadly, I wasn’t close to my father before he passed, and my mother was the one who named me. So, I never found out why she picked a name which pretty much gave others a free hall pass to have me bullied growing up.”
“Ahh…now I see.” He was amused.
“See what?”
“Why you are so stubborn. I wonder what you did for revenge.”
“Nothing,” I lied, and he noticed, grinning. “At least I didn’t destroy a whole city!”
At that, he grinned, and so did I before I realized it, his lips were not even an inch away from me.
“You are persistent, Mr. Thorbørn.” And we were only on day two.
“Have you seen you? It would b
e disgraceful not to be.”
I could clearly see him leaning into me, and he was doing so slowly on purpose, so I could see him, so I could stop him. But I didn’t, and he noticed.
Closing my eyes, I waited….and waited. But I didn’t feel his lips on mine. Instead, his hands dropped from my face. Opening my eyes quickly to see what was wrong, I found him glaring toward the elevator. His jaw was set and his grip on my hand tightening. A dangerous sound radiated out of him.
Tensing, I tried to pull away my hand, but he held on tighter. “What’s wrong?”
“Witches.”
Chapter 9
“Witches?” I repeated, sure I heard him correctly but unsure why that had made him snarl. I listened, but I couldn’t hear anything. In fact, I couldn’t hear anything but us.
“Strange, is it not?” he asked, noticing my expression, rising to his feet and slowly dropping my hand but staying close to me. “Our kind often becomes accustomed to tuning out the rest of the world. We ignore the sounds of everything we do not need to hear, especially in public spaces. The witches know this and magically enhance it because most would not even notice until it was too late.”
“Too late for what?” I asked, rising out of my chair just as slowly.
However, he didn’t answer when his eyes shifted to the air vents above us.
I listened again, watching him. All I heard sounded like… “Hissing?”
“Move!” he hollered, and he grabbed my shoulders, as a large, double-headed, white-scaled python burst out of the air vent. Its eyes were pure red, their pairs of fangs dipping with what smelled like black acid, and it lunged toward me—no him—as he threw me behind him, sending me flying into the glass cabinets. They shattered against my back as I slid down off Dr. Lovell’s black desktop and landed on the ground.
I stayed there for a second, a bit too shocked to understand what the hell had just happened…why the hell this was happening. Theseus?
I stared as he fought the creature on his arm, blood and poison soaking through his black shirt.
“Theseus!”
“Do not get up!” he hollered at me, yanking the python from him, ripping off its head, and throwing it across the lab, grabbing the scissors I’d just used to cut cotton. In the same second, he threw them perfectly and with so much force into the opening throat of the second snake that came from the vent. The head sliced right off with black blood coming from it.