He could not argue with the self-preservation--just as he could not vow to disengage from his business. He had worked too long and hard to fade into a lifestyle of sedentary nights ... even if they were spent with her. Besides, he had the worry that things were not done with the Benloise family yet. Only time would tell if there was another brother out there, or mayhap some cousin with a greedy eye and a heart of vengeance for what had been served unto his blood.
She would be safer without him.
As Marisol put her luggage in the boot of the car, her grandmother was accommodated to the front of the vehicle. And there was another pause. Indeed, as she glanced around, he felt she must have seen him--but no. Her eyes passed o'er him in his shadowed hiding spot.
Into the car. Shutting the door. Starting the engine. Turning about.
Then all there was ... were brake lights disappearing down his drive.
The cousins loitered only for a moment. Unlike his female, they knew exactly where he was, but they did not approach. They retreated into the house, leaving the door open for him to use when he could stand the rising sun no longer.
His heart was howling in his chest when he finally stepped free of where he had tucked himself.
Walking across the snow, his body was loose-jointed to the point where he wondered if he would collapse. And his head was spinning 'round and 'round--his intestines as well. The only thing that was solid were his male instincts, which were bloody incessant that he needed to go out to the road in front of her, brace himself before that cheap-ass car, and demand that she turn around and come back home.
Assail forced himself into his house instead.
In the kitchen, the cousins were helping themselves to leftovers specifically cooked for them and left in foil-wrapped servings in the freezer. Their affects were as if someone had died.
"Where are the cell phones?" Assail asked.
"In the office." Ehric frowned as he peeled a Post-it note off the package. "'Preheat to three seventy-five.'"
His brother went to the wall ovens and began pushing buttons. "Convection?"
"Doesn't say."
"Damn it."
Under any other circumstances, Assail would have found it impossible to believe that Evale was wasting his meager urge to speak on cooking. But Marisol and her grandmother had changed everything ... for the short time they had been here.
Leaving his cousins be, he was not at all surprised they didn't offer to include him in the repast. After centuries of transient existence, he had a feeling they were going to become hoarders of those foodstuffs.
In the office, he sat behind the desk and regarded the two identical phones before him. Naturally, his brain went to how he'd procured them--and he saw Eduardo first upon the ground and then Ricardo strung up against that torture wall.
Ordering his hands to clasp them, he--
His arms refused to obey the command, and in fact, his body fell back into the chair. As he stared straight ahead at absolutely nothing, it was clear that his motivation had deserted him.
Opening the desk's center drawer, he took out one of his vials and fired up one nostril and then the other with cocaine.
The tingling rush at least got him sitting up, and a moment later, he did in fact take the phones ... and hook them up to his computer.
His focus was artificial, the attention forced, but he knew he was going to have to get used to that.
His heart, black though it was, had left him.
And was on its way to Miami.
FORTY-EIGHT
It was in fact possible, if you ran long enough and hard enough, to make the body feel as if you had been in a fist fight.
As Wrath continued to pound his Nikes into the treadmill, he thought about his last sparring session with Payne.
He had lied to her. Back when he'd finally assumed the throne in a serious way, the brothers and Beth had confronted him with a set of "guidelines" intended to chill him out on the ol' physical-risk profile. Not exactly a happy convo, and he'd broken the rules at least once that everyone knew about, and a number of times that nobody had caught him at. And after he'd been discovered fighting downtown, he'd agreed anew to put up the daggers but for ceremonial work--and since then, the scent of his shellan's disappointment had been enough to keep him in line.
Well, that and the fact that he'd lost his remaining eyesight entirely at about that time.
The bunch of them hadn't been wrong. The King needed to be breathing most of all; taking down slayers in the back of an alley in Caldwell could not be the primary directive anymore.
And no sparring with the brothers, either.
None of them wanted to roll the dice with possibly hurting him.
Except then Payne had presented herself, and though he'd first assumed she was a male, when her true identity had been discovered, he'd been given a pass ... precisely because she was a female.
He thought of her sneaking into the males' locker room and putting that knife to his throat.
He supposed now ... he could fight with anyone he liked. And that he owed her an apology.
Reaching down, he increased the treadmill's speed. This one machine had been retrofitted with hooks on the console and a padded belt that had been made for him. With bungee cords strung between the two, he could go hands off and still keep on the machine, the subtle pulls on his waist telling him where he was in relation to the running surface.
Handy on a night like tonight. Oh, wait ... it was daytime, now.
Falling into a faster rhythm, he found that as always, his head had a way of floating above the exertion, as if with his body engaged and working, it was free to drift. Unfortunately, like a helicopter with faulty gauges, it kept ramming into rocky cliffs: his parents, his shellan, the possibility of a future young, all the empty years stretching out before him.
If he only had his eyesight. At least then he could credibly go out and engage with the enemy. But now he was trapped--by his blindness, by his Beth, by the chance that she was with young.
Of course, if she hadn't been in his life? He would have gone on a killing bender until he died honorably in the field. Although, hell, without her, he probably wouldn't have bothered doing anything about ascending in the first place.
He knew he should never have tried that fucking crown on his head.
After everything his father had done in such a tragically short time, he should have followed his first instincts and walked the fuck away. The race had been fine going rudderless for a couple of centuries; probably could have kept that shit up indefinitely.
He thought of Ichan. Maybe that SOB was going to discover that modern populations didn't need kings.
Or more to the point, maybe Xcor and the Bastards were going to learn that lesson.
Whatever.
Wrath went to increase the speed again--and found that he'd tapped the machine out on velocity. Cursing, he resettled into his already breakneck pace, and thought of his father, sitting behind the very desk that he himself could no longer see or use, parchment rolls and ink pots, quill pens and leather-bound volumes covering the carved surface.
He could just picture that male behind it all, sporting a half smile of contentment as he melted wax himself and pressed the royal crested ring into it--
"Wrath!"
"Wha--" Cue the squealing of rubber as he yanked out the safety key and jumped to the side rails. "Beth--?"
"Wrath, oh, my God--"
"Are you okay--"
"Wrath, I've got the solution--"
He could not fucking breathe. "About ... what?"
"I know what we have to do!"
Wrath frowned as he panted and braced his hands on the rails in the event his jelly legs gave up the ghost and he torpedoed. And yet even through the hypoxia, his female's scent was strong with purpose and conviction, her natural undertones sharpened so they got through to him clearly.
Grabbing the towel he'd slung over the console, he mopped his face. "Beth, for the love of Christ.
Will you please stop--"
"Divorce me."
In spite of all the exercise-induced suffocation, he stopped breathing. "I'm sorry," he said roughly. "But I did not hear that."
"Dissolve our mating. Effective yesterday--when for all intents and purposes you were still King."
Wrath started shaking his head, all kinds of thoughts jamming up his brain. "I'm not hearing you say that--"
"If you get rid of me, you get rid of the grounds they used. No grounds, no removal. You have the throne and--"
"Are you out of your fucking mind!" he bellowed. "What the fuck are you talking about!"
There was a slight pause. Like she was surprised he wasn't all into her bright idea.
"Wrath, seriously. This is the way to get the throne back."
As the bonded male in him started screaming at the top of its lungs, he was an inch from exploding--but he'd already trashed one whole room in the compound. And the brothers would kill him if he smashed up their weight room.
Attempting to keep his voice level, he failed miserably: "No fucking way!"
"It's just a piece of paper!" she hollered back. "What the hell does it matter?"
"You're my shellan!"
"It's all about carrots!"
Annnnnnnnnnd that stopped him dead. Shaking his head to clear it some, he said, "I'm sorry--what?"
Little hard to transition from ending their relationship to root frickin' vegetables.
"Look, you and I are together because we love each other. A piece of paper one way or another is not going to change us--"
"No, absolutely not--I'm not going to give those assholes the satisfaction of fucking you over--"
"Listen to me." She grabbed onto his forearm and squeezed. "I want you to calm down and listen to me."
It was the weirdest thing. As wound up as he was, when she gave him a direct order like that? He followed like a foot soldier.
"Predate the dissolution of marriage--mating--whatever. Don't give them any rationale, you don't want to look like it's reactionary. Then decide whether or not you want to stay King. But that way? It's not my fault. Right now, like it or not, I'm the reason you're losing the throne, and I can't go through the rest of our lives feeling responsible for something like that. It'll kill me."
"Sacrificing you is not the way--"
"We're not sacrificing me in the slightest. I don't care about being queen. I care about being by your side--and no crown or edict or whatever is going to change that."
"You could be carrying our offspring right now. Are you saying you want to bring that young into the world a bastard?"
"They wouldn't be to me. They wouldn't be to you."
"But to others..."
"Like who? You telling me Vishous would think the kid's something less? Tohr? Rhage? Any of the Brothers--their shellans? What about Qhuinn and Blay--Qhuinn's not mated to Layla. Does that mean you'd look down on that child?"
"This household's not the 'others' I was talking about."
"So who is, precisely? We never see the glymera--thank God--and I don't believe I've ever met what you guys call a commoner. Well, except for Ehlena and Xhex, I guess. I mean, all these citizens of the race--they never come here, and is that going to change? I don't think so." She squeezed his arm again. "Besides, you were worried about putting our kid on the throne? This takes care of that problem, too."
Wrath broke off from her hold on him and wanted to pace--except he didn't know the weight room layout well enough not to land on his ass.
He settled for wiping his face again. "I don't want the throne enough to divorce you. I just don't. It's the principle, Beth."
"Well, if it makes you feel better, I'll divorce you."
He blinked behind his wraparounds. "Not going to happen. I'm sorry, but I will not do this."
His leelan's voice cracked. "I can't spend the rest of my life thinking it's my fault. I just can't."
"But it isn't. It honestly isn't. Look, I just ... I gotta let the past go, you know? I can't hold on to my parents this way. That shit isn't healthy." He let his head fall back. "Goddamn, I mean, you'd figure I'd be over it by now. Losing them, that is."
"I don't think people ever get past that kind of thing--especially the way it happened to you."
Flashes came back of his scrawny pretrans self locked in that crawl space, watching through a knothole in the wood as his parents were cut into pieces. It was always the same film reel, the same glints of sword blades and screams of pain and terror ... and it always ended the same, with the two most important people in his life up to that point gone, gone, gone.
He wasn't going to lose Beth. Not even in a figurative way.
"No," he said with utter finality.
Reaching over, he put his hand on her womb. "I've lost my past and there's nothing I can do to change that. I will not lose my future--even for the throne."
FORTY-NINE
One of the problems with marriages, matings, whatever ... was that when the person you loved laid down a veto? Not much you could do about it.
As Beth stepped out of the weight room with her hellren, she was popped-balloon deflated. Out of arguments, out of plans, she hated where they were, but all the avenues to a better place were obstructed by a "no" she couldn't get past.
Instead of following him into the showers, she went to the office and sat at the desk, staring at the laptop's screen saver of bubbles floating around the image of Outlook--
The hot flash came out of nowhere, blasting up through her pelvis and spreading like a brushfire to the tips of her fingers, the soles of her feet, the crown of her head.
"Christ," she muttered. "I could fry an egg on my chest over here."
Billowing the collar of the nightgown helped a little, but then the internal oven blast was over as quick as it came, nothing but the cooling sweat on her skin left behind.
Swiping the screen saver off, she watched as Outlook updated itself with a send/receive. The account that was configured on this computer was the general mailbox for the King, and she braced herself for a long lineup of unread e-mails to start appearing at the top of the list.
There was only one.
A tangible representation of the switch in power, she supposed ...
Frowning, she sat forward. The subject line read: Heavy Heart. And it was from a male whose name she recognized only because it had been on the list of signatures on that fucking parchment.
Opening the thing, she read it once. Twice. And a third time.
To: Wrath, son of Wrath
From: Abalone, son of Abalone
Date: 04430 12:59:56
Subject: Heavy Heart
* * *
My lord, it is with a heavy heart that I greet the future. I was at the meeting of the Council and I executed the Vote of No Confidence, with its antiquated, prejudicial grounds. I am sick for myself and the race over the glymera's actions of late, but more so over my lack of courage.
A long, long while ago, my father Abalone served your father. Family lore has passed down the story, although its details are not widely known anymore: When a cabal went against your parents, my father took a stance with his King and queen and honored this bloodline of mine for e'ermore in doing so. In return, your father provided the generations of my family with financial freedom and social elevation.
I did not live up to that legacy this night. And I find that I cannot stomach my cowardice.
I do not agree with the actions taken against you--and I believe that others feel the same. I work with a group of commoners to help field their concerns and approach the glymera for appropriate redress. In my dealings with such citizens, it is clear that there are many at the root of the race who remember all the things your father did for them and their families. Although they have never met you, that goodwill extends to you and your family. I know they shall share my sadness--and my worry--as to where we are headed the now.
In recognition of my failure, I have resigned from the Council. I will continue work
ing with the commoners, as they need a champion--and although I am sorely remiss in that role, I must try to do some good in this world or I shan't be able to e'er sleep again.
I wish I had done more for you. You and your shellan shall be in my thoughts and prayers.
This is all so wrong.
Sincerely, Abalone, son of Abalone
What a lovely guy, Beth thought as she got out of Outlook. And he probably needed to ditch the guilt. Given the aristocracy's steamroller approach to everything, he hadn't stood a damn chance.
The glymera had ways of ruining lives that had nothing to do with coffins.
Checking the clock on the wall, she figured Wrath would be along any minute. And then they would ... well, she had no clue. Usually at this time, they were heading up to bed, but that didn't hold any appeal.
Maybe they could switch bedrooms today. She didn't think she could handle even seeing that bejeweled suite of rooms.
Idly heading over to Internet Explorer, she stared at the Google screen, shaking her head at the I'm feeling lucky line.
Yeah. Right.
God, if only V didn't hate everything about the Apple company, she could have had an iPhone in her hand and asked Siri what to do.
She so appreciated Wrath standing by their marriage, but jeez ...
For absolutely no reason, that scene from The Princess Bride flashed through her mind--the one where they were getting married at the altar in front of that priest.
Meeeewidge, a dweam wifin a dweam--
Beth froze.
Then typed fast and hit that frickin' lucky button.
What came up was--
"Hey, you ready to head up?"
Beth slowly lifted her eyes to her husband. "I know what we have to do."
Wrath recoiled like someone had dropped a piano on his foot. And then promptly looked like his head was pounding. "Beth. For the love of fucking God--"
"Do you love me, all of me?"
He let his huge body fall back against the office's glass door as George curled in for a lie-down--like he expected this to be another long one. "Beth--"
"Well, do you?"
"Yes," her hellren groaned.
"All of me, human and vampire."
"Yes."