“Yeah, we agree on that.”
She stood near the foot of the bed unable to move and her brain had stopped functioning because she really couldn’t think of anything else to say.
He seemed to understand. He looked away from her and cleared his throat. “Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. I think all I need right now is some sleep.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He moved past her, heading to the door. He gestured to a long bank of floor-to-ceiling drapes patterned in a soft gray swirl. “The conservatory is right there. Feel free to open the sliding door if you want.” He smiled again, softer this time. “Maybe the ‘singing’ will sweeten your dreams.”
“Thanks, I might just do that.”
He nodded. “Anything, Samantha. Really. Just ask.” Through the open doorway, he glanced down the hall. “My rooms are the double door at the end of the hall. Shout. I’ll hear you.”
She dipped her chin a few times.
“Okay,” he murmured, slapping the doorframe twice. He then closed the door and she heard his muffled footsteps as he headed back the way they’d come. No doubt he had more realm business to tend to.
She put a hand to her chest, however, aware of her laboring heart. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I know. But try to calm down. He’s just a man. I mean a vampire.” Then she laughed, because it was all so strange, and horrible, yet wonderful at the same time.
She hadn’t expected an adventure when she left for the prave earlier that evening, but it looked like she’d gotten one.
*** *** ***
Ethan rubbed his forehead as he moved back down the first set of stairs then headed into his office. He glanced at some notes he’d made that afternoon about realm details he needed to deal with, especially issues with some of the towns and cities. But now was not the time.
Instead, he called Finn.
“How we doin’ out there?”
“Quiet. Very quiet.”
Ethan could hear the concern in Finn’s voice. Invictus activity made the night hard, but the lack of it wore on all the Guardsmen’s nerves. A lull never meant good things, usually a serious gearing up for something big.
“Well, shit.”
“Ethan, you don’t think Ry would join forces with those bastards, do you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really known him, just his rage because the Sidhe Council voted him out and me in.”
“You’re the better man and don’t you forget it. There isn’t a vampire on the force who won’t cheer that’s he’s gone. You can count on that. Should have been done a couple of decades ago.”
“I never felt right about stepping in. This was his realm.”
“I’m not going to waste time arguing with you on that score again. You’re the vampire for this job.”
Ethan sat in his leather chair and released a heavy sigh. “Yet I can’t seem to get the better of the enemy that we’ve battled all these years, these decades. We dispatch hundreds of wraith-pairs every year and bury twice as many realm-folk. Does that make me the better leader?”
“It was worse under Ry. And he’d been running three illegal gambling joints as well.”
“Small comfort.”
“So how’s your woman?”
“Not my woman, Finn, and if you want to keep your front teeth and a pair of fangs, you’ll keep your trap shut.”
Finn chuckled. “Just giving you grief.”
“Hey, thanks for showing up tonight.”
“Within a half hour of leaving you, I’d gotten word that Ry had abandoned his northern patrol.”
“Well, I was glad to have witnesses for giving Ry the boot.”
“It was a pretty sight, but how are those precious knuckles of yours?”
Ethan looked at his hands. He was already healed up, despite his blood-starvation. “Content.”
Finn cleared his throat. “Just one suggestion, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Call a donor. You were looking pale when I left.”
“You my mama now?”
“You know I’m right.”
Ethan did know, but the thought of bringing in one of his doneuses with Samantha in his house felt like a kind of betrayal he couldn’t easily explain. “Call me if you need me.”
“Yes, mastyr.”
After ending the call, Ethan sat for a good long while in his office. He took stock of his condition and he didn’t like what he saw, what he felt.
Earlier, Samantha had said he was trembling. At the time, he thought her presence had brought on the strange sensation. But the truth bit deeper. His blood-starvation, always at a difficult level, had sunk to critical and the earlier donor had barely scratched the surface of his need. Sure, his mastyr status kept him in this chronic, undernourished state, but usually a feed would keep him stable for twelve, sometimes eighteen hours.
He lifted his hand off the arm of the chair.
His fingers shook.
This was new and not good.
He swiveled, angling back up the hall in the direction of Samantha’s door. What he needed lay just beyond a few inches of carved, fine wood.
But he couldn’t go there. He couldn’t do that to her and he knew once he got started, he wouldn’t be able to control himself, not with her, not with a blood rose.
And sex would follow.
Because the trembling increased, he finally understood that her presence made his symptoms worse, so he had no other choice, but to call for help. He arranged for a later feed, just before his patrols for the following evening.
For now, rest would help, so he headed back the way he’d come.
Maybe facing off with Ry had taken a toll, and clearly meeting his blood rose had hit his reserves hard, but he needed sleep. He had his cell with him and in an emergency, he had a support call service hooked up to an intercom system in his house.
He paused only once, just outside Samantha’s door. He heard a soft humming sound, a single pitch, somewhat high. He suspected she was matching the sound the crystal ceiling made for her.
He shook his head, as disbelief, maybe even shock, still worked within his mind.
Once inside his rooms, he stripped and showered, then lay down on his bed. He’d fully intended to have a hard think about his current situation, but like the proverbial head-hitting-the-pillow, he was asleep and slept until his alarm sounded at four the next afternoon.
He woke up not feeling rested at all, but rather like horses had stomped on him all night. He sat up dizzy and put his head in his hands. He needed blood. Now.
Naturally, his thoughts turned to Samantha, which cramped up his stomach into a fierce knot of pain. He swore he could smell her blood even though at least forty feet of house separated them. He slid from bed and found it was easier to tolerate his condition so long as he kept moving.
All that held him together was the knowledge that his doneuse, Angela, would arrive soon.
He showered quickly then placed a phone call to the Merhaine Realm. He said a quick prayer that communications between Realms would be open because he needed help with Samantha, help he couldn’t give her, not even a little. He was a vampire. Her faeness could only be interpreted by another fae and his choice for serving up all that information landed on the most powerful in the Nine Realms.
The phone rang and rang and just as he’d begun cursing fate, Davido answered. “Hello and good eventide to you. Vojalie the Wise’s residence, your handsome troll here. With whom do I have the great pleasure of speaking?”
Ethan smiled and shook his head. Warmth spread through his chest. He had great affection for both Vojalie and Davido and often forgot that, unlike he and his Guard, most realm-folk led relatively normal lives.
Davido was old, as in no one really knew how ancient he was. He’d never, therefore, fully taken on modern speech patterns. “Ethan here. How’s it hangin’, my friend?”
“Ah, Ethan. How uplifting to hear your voice!
What nonsense we have these days with the realm-to-realm access points coming and going like fog rolling through then disappearing only to come back. Have you Andrea’s daughter there with you?”
“Wait, what? How the hell did you know that? Has someone called you tonight?”
“Nay. Tis my beautiful one. The ceiling dome of her living room has been cloudy and at times black. Imagine, black! Visions and headaches have settled on her and she’s been weeping for Andrea again. She said Andrea’s precious daughter would be in Bergisson soon. So, you have her?”
“Yes.”
“And did you say anything to her, about Vojalie I mean and Andrea?”
“No, of course not. I thought Vojalie should be the one to tell Samantha about her mother and all things fae. But we need your wife here, Davido. Is there any chance--”
“She’s been packed and waiting for your call these five days.”
Five days. Sometimes he forgot how different the fae were from vampires. “Well, good, that’s good. Can you bring her now and the baby, of course. She’ll want the baby with her.”
Vojalie had given birth not long ago and the fae were she-bears when it came to offspring. He wondered if Samantha would be the same, a thought that led to a sequence of images that ended with her belly full of his child and how he’d gotten her that way.
He gripped his stomach and bent over at the waist. Could a vampire perish from lust? He began to think it possible. Sweet Goddess, he needed to get fed and laid, the sooner the better.
“Of course Bernice will be with her and I shall accompany them both.”
“I was hoping that would be the case. I’ll have Vojalie’s favorite guest suite prepared for the three of you.”
When he hung up, he spent the next five minutes just breathing through the pain. He couldn’t put this off. He placed a second call to hurry up the appointment and within a few minutes, his doneuse, Angela, walked into his bedroom, a frown between her brows.
“Ethan, why did you wait so long? You look like you haven’t fed in weeks. Is it true your blood rose has come? It’s been all over the Bergisson blogs.”
He nodded and waved her forward. “You’d better just give me the inside of your elbow. I don’t trust myself at your neck.”
“Whatever you need, mastyr, you know that.” Angela had a husband and three children, all in elementary school. She’d been serving him for decades and at one time had been one of his lovers, but that was years ago.
He respected her choices and never, never, crossed the line with any of his doneuses once they took a husband, regardless of species. She was a wife to a powerful shifter, a wolf named Smack, a descriptive name for exactly what would happen to Ethan if he ever strayed from his principles.
He bit quickly and struggled to keep from collapsing the vein by sucking too hard. She spoke quietly to him about her children, which helped a lot to keep him on an even keel, especially to prevent him from thinking about what existed off the conservatory, in one of his guest suites, so close, so close.
Ah, Samantha.
“Hey, easy does it, mastyr. Smack won’t want to see a bruise.”
He gentled his suckling and focused hard on the home run her second son had made in T-ball.
When he finished, he fell back against the bed. At least his stomach had settled down. “Thank you.”
“Sweet Goddess, Ethan, you don’t look much better than when I came in. I take it your blood rose hasn’t given it up for you?”
She smiled when she spoke, teasing him, but the imagery made him sit up again way too fast. His head swam and he barely kept from throwing up what she’d just given him. “Don’t talk like that about her.” Now he was defensive. Great.
“I can see I’d better go.”
“Thanks again, Angela.”
“Anytime.”
He waved a hand and heard her leave, the door snapping shut behind her.
How the hell was he supposed to get through the night’s patrols in this condition? And what would he do if Ry chose to challenge him?
*** *** ***
At four-thirty in the afternoon, Samantha sat in Ethan’s conservatory and dined on some of the finest food she’d ever eaten, made savory by the herbs grown in the mastyr’s kitchen garden.
Marta, the housekeeper and a lovely troll, had set up a table in the conservatory, then brought her a perfect spinach omelet and a shallow bowl full of succulent mixed berries.
She enjoyed the black tea, in particular, sweetened as it was with raw sugar and cream.
She felt really spoiled except for the fact that she was no longer in Shreveport and that her life had been turned upside down.
Staring up at the crystal apex, the music had never been prettier. She’d awakened to it throughout her sleeping hours, aware that the sounds resonated with a part of her deep inside, the part that was fae.
Just as she set her mug on the wrought iron table in front of her, she felt a strange vibration deep in her chest, not a warning exactly, more like an announcement or a revelation.
She stood up, and hand between her breasts. Her heart still thudded around in her chest, of course. That was a given because of her proximity to Ethan.
But this felt different.
Again, this felt very fae.
She pivoted toward the arched doorway and there, cast in a glow from the sun still lighting up the crystal roof, stood the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen, and she was fae.
Vojalie.
Samantha felt the woman’s identity in her bones, as if she’d always known her.
She was tall, like Samantha, probably close to the same height, though Samantha might have been a little taller. She had fae features, a thin nose and a chin that came to a strong fae point, though not so severe as most. She wore a narrow headband to hold back her dark brown hair, which hung past her waist ending in a series of soft curls. Her dark eyes, which twinkled, matched her hair.
“You must be Samantha even though I confess you don’t look a great deal like your mother.”
“I was always told I resembled my daddy. I could see it in the mirror, as well. Now that I see you, I realize how fae she really was.” She began walking toward Vojalie as though pulled by an ancient connection. She almost thought ‘family’, which she supposed came from their shared heritage as fae.
Vojalie, standing beneath a large ficus tree, held out both her hands and smiled. “I’m so glad to meet Andrea’s daughter.”
When Samantha reached the powerful fae, she didn’t hesitate, not even for a second, to put her hands in Vojalie’s.
She gasped as a sensation like a balloon flying into the air took hold of her. She felt light, buoyant, free, a strange, euphoric experience. “I feel like I’m coming home after a long absence, but how is that possible?”
Vojalie’s warm brown eyes filled with tears. “I missed your mother so much. I took her death hard. We barely spoke after she moved to Shreveport so that I never even knew about you. She wanted a different life, you see, and nothing more to do with me or Bergisson or any of the Nine Realms. I had to respect her wishes so I hope you’ll understand that.”
“Well, of course.” Samantha withdrew her hands from Vojalie’s soft grasp. “But you must have been really good friends at one time. I mean you speak like you were sisters or something.” Vojalie didn’t look older than Samantha, but the world of the Nine Realms was a long-lived world, something she had to keep remembering.
A slight frown appeared between Vojalie’s strong, arched brows as though she was trying to figure something out.
Finally, she said, “We were both those things, friends and fae-sisters, if you will. I was grief-stricken when she left our world. But she had a terrible time when her fae husband died, Patrick. He’d been a rock in her life and that year following his death, nearly forty-one-years ago now, sent her spiraling into a dark place. I know that’s when she started thinking about leaving Bergisson.”
Samantha stared at Vojalie as she processed t
his new revelation, one of so many. At some point, when she was ready to read Andrea’s journals, the five red leather tomes would undoubtedly be able to fill in a lot of the missing blanks. She’d even packed the journals in her suitcase, but didn’t feel the time was right to dig in.
Now Vojalie was here, a different kind of source of information.
“So, my mother had another husband. I never knew, but she never told me much about her life, and now I can see why since she’d had to lie about most of it. She said she’d come from New Mexico but had lived in Louisiana for the past thirty years before she died.”
“I see.” Vojalie seemed very distressed, her brow puckered, her expression grim. “When I spoke with Ethan earlier, I guess I forgot to ask how much you knew. All that he told me was that last night was the first you’d learned about being part-fae. I suppose I should have guessed that Andrea would have kept silent about her former life.”
Marta appeared in the doorway with a fresh pot of tea and a second mug. Samantha turned and led Vojalie back to the small wrought iron table.
The lovely troll housekeeper arranged things quickly, setting out the teapot and the second mug. She brought forward an additional chair as well.
Samantha gestured for Vojalie to sit down, then resumed her seat.
Vojalie sipped her tea, the frown showing again. “So you know nothing about the realm-world.”
“Only what I learned from school-ground gossip growing up, then later through university and the Internet, and last night, of course, I met Ethan at the prave.”
“Do you often go to praves?”
Samantha held her mug cradled in her hands. “Never. I wanted nothing to do with your realm-world. Or I suppose I should say ‘our’ realm-world now, but it still feels so wrong.” She glanced around the conservatory. The soft music of the crystals eased her and she almost asked Vojalie if she could hear them as well, but decided against it. “I just wanted a quiet life in my grandmother’s home, making my jewelry, studying for my masters.”
“And is that your dream then? Living in your grandmother’s house, making jewelry, exploring your education?”
“Yes and no. I’m content with my life in Shreveport, but I guess you could say my real dream was to have a cottage by a lake, surrounded by weeping willows and more lawn than I could manage by myself. And the cottage would be made of river-rock, you know tumbled boulders.”