Adam (36 page)

Adam came up beside her, reached out to cup the side of her face in his big hand. Despite her resistance, he made her look at him.

“I will not hide or lie. I do not wish to,” he said softly to her. “There can be nothing but truth between us, even when we wish to lie to ourselves.”

Her breath caught.

“I don’t love you,” she burst out, the statement a bit more painful than he had anticipated it would be.

“Love will come when you are ready to let it come, Jasmine.”

But I know it is already here
.

“Stop it! I do not love you!” She picked up the ball with one hand and threw it into him as hard as she could. He caught it against his sternum with a grunt of pain. She used the action to push past him, to leap right through the blackened glass and out the window.

“Jasmine!”

He bellowed her name, racing after her, diving after her even before he heard her scream.

Sunlight.

Everywhere, all at once. Desperation and emotional pain had overwhelmed her instincts, making her forget that the sun was high in the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, but they came as he plummeted after her, falling at breakneck speed down the massive height of the citadel walls. The clouds came with more speed than he had ever managed before, but not fast enough to keep her skin and hair from bursting into flames. He reached out with both hands, knowing he couldn’t grab her, but willing himself to do something. Anything.

And then suddenly he felt a source of water appearing before him. Jasmine, yet more than Jasmine. The fire along her body doused itself as her skin turned liquid, flinging droplets back at him.

They hit the ground, Jasmine first, in a violent splash of water, and Adam second as the same. But Adam knew how to draw himself back into a cohesive shape and Jasmine did not, so he had to gather up all of the water molecules that she had become, and slowly, with his arms around her, he reformed her into what she should be.

Her hair was burned, her skin, too, but she was Jasmine again. Jasmine his mate. Jasmine the beautiful. Jasmine the Vampire.

Jasmine who could become Water.

The clouds sealed away the sun, rain falling to keep her cool and protected as he took her to the nearest entrance of the citadel and finally was able to close her behind a sheltering door. She was groaning in pain, too weak to hold herself upright, staggering as he tried to avoid touching her at first. But he gave up on that, turning to Water and wrapping himself around her in a cooling, protective sheath. He buoyed her, helped strengthen and guide her steps. He didn’t want to change her form while she was so injured and damaged, not knowing what further harm it might do. When Demons were wounded, changing their molecular cohesion could cause a great deal of harm.

He found a bath nearby, herded her in, and, filling the tub, he lowered her into the water. The tub was wide and deep, allowing her the opportunity to float free of the hard, cold sides.

“I will heal,” she croaked, her voice scorched by the flames that had been swallowed down her throat as she screamed.

“I know you will. I know it takes far more time than a pair of minutes in the sun to kill a Vampire. It is ... it is one of the best ways to torture a Vampire. Stake them out in the sun and let them immolate for hours.”

“And you know the technique well,” she rasped. “How can you love something you hated for so many years?” she wanted to know.

Adam realized it wasn’t that she doubted his feelings. She wanted to know how he had managed to change himself in so short a time. She wanted to know if she was ever going to be able to change.

“To me it is not about Vampire or Demon. Not when it comes to you. It never was. I tried to hold you up to my ingrained hatred of your kind and failed time and time again. It was not the Vampire I was coming to love. It was Jasmine,” he said softly to her, brushing his fingertips, turned into water, against her temple. “It was always Jasmine. And once I realized you could never fit my preconceived prejudices, those prejudices had to melt away. They were designed to fit all Vampires. All Vampires were this. All Vampires were that. But you were none of it, so I learned I could not continue to make such encompassing assumptions about your kind. It made me realize how hard I had been working for some time to hold on to those assumptions.

“So tell me, little Vamp, what are you trying so hard to hold on to that I am not fitting into properly?”

Jasmine turned her face away, let herself soak quietly in the water for a long minute. He felt thoughts ghosting wildly back and forth in her mind.

“Emotions have always disappointed me,” she said at last, her voice already sounding smoother. She had lost her brows and eyelashes, and her hair was breaking off into the water. “For five hundred years I have longed to feel more than I do, but it never changed. No matter what I sought out, how I tried. So I gave up. I just ... gave up. Then Damien told me he had found the answer. But how could he?” she demanded angrily. “I had already written it off. It was over. And I couldn’t take the chance that he might be wrong. Clearly love was working for him, but what guarantees did I have it would work the same for me?

“You said I was jealous of Syreena? I wasn’t,” she said softly.

“You were jealous of Damien,” Adam realized gently.

Jasmine burst into sobs, her hand trying to cover her face, but her face was too tender to touch. She was left raw and exposed in more ways than one. Adam climbed into the bath and surrounded her softly, combining with the water around her to tenderly wash up against her. But he left his shoulders, chest, and neck whole, giving her a point of strength to hold on to. He touched watery fingers to her face, absorbing every salty tear as quickly as it fell so it wouldn’t have the opportunity to sting her.

“Jasmine,” he whispered hushed into her ear. “I am not going to leave and I am not going to take my love, your love, and all those brilliant emotions you are finally feeling away from you. We are all here to stay. You need to give yourself permission to enjoy them. You have waited so long for them.” He took a breath. “I know. I know I left you once. But had I known ...”

“You still would have gone to save your brother,” she said. “And neither you nor I will ever know how many lives you changed by doing so, Adam. Ruth is gone. Defeated at last. I think I am glad I suffered a drab life for a few centuries rather than consider the possibilities. Can you imagine what it would have been like, ten years from now, had Jacob died at Ruth’s hands? Twenty years? Can you imagine the power Ruth would have gained with Nico still alive at her side? The people she would have hurt?

“I saw that girl’s eyes, Adam,” Jasmine said softly. “She was dead inside. She was ... she looked like she had waited four hundred years just to feel that one moment of life the way it was meant to be felt.”

She turned in his watery embrace to look up at him.

“I should take that lesson to my heart,” she said. “The present is so precious. Not to be wasted. Oh my God, look what I almost did!” She lifted her scorched hand to his face, touching the roughness of a cheek in need of grooming. The detail, the dimension of it, the reality of it, made her chest expand with emotion.

“You never meant to hurt yourself,” he said, covering her hand where it lay against him. “Only to run away.”

“Never in my long lifetime have I lost track of the sun. How is that even possible?”

“Fear can blind us to a great many things. Just as prejudice can. I might well have killed you the moment we met. I would have destroyed my own heart without realizing it.”

“It makes me wonder how many of us have done just that? All these years of various wars with each other. How many Nightwalkers have destroyed their own happiness in the name of something as foolish as wars, or boredom, or laws, or the dozens of other types of nonsense we have put in our way?”

“Ten? A hundred? Thousands? We can never know about the past. Only move on into the future.”

“Yes,” she breathed, pulling him to the reach of her mouth, “let’s do that. Let’s move on into the future, Adam.”

Adam smiled, touched his lips gently to hers, and gave her a steady nod.

Epilogue

Windsong stood in the meadow, letting the wind blow over her body, through her hair and against her ears, the sound its own special sort of music. Harrier sat on a rock a short distance away, keeping an eye on her. He had barely let her out of his sight since Damien had returned her to
Brise Lumineuse
. Her kidnapping had wildly reinforced the village’s fears about strangers and letting others come into their sphere. They foolishly thought that if they kept their heads down, all would be well.

But Windsong believed the Mistrals were only destroying themselves with their paranoia and fear. Their isolation kept them from socializing even with other Mistrals. Their birthrates were nearly at a standstill. Windsong couldn’t even recall the last time a Mistral couple exchanged vows. Became a family.

Harrier leapt down off his rock and came over to her, the breeze ruffling his beautiful hair, making her understand how handsome he was and what a shame it would be if he never ventured forth and found himself a bride, never found himself someone to make equally beautiful babies with. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration the extraordinary gift of his voice. The world would suffer a tremendous loss if that gift were never passed to later generations.

But like her, she knew, Harrier believed the insular Mistrals were headed for eradication in the future. At least, that was how he had felt before her capture. She wondered if fear had been revived inside him. If his view had changed.

“Harri, we are the oldest of our kind. We are responsible for the future of our people. You know that, right?”

“I have always known that,” he agreed, sitting beside her and circling an arm around her shoulders. “I have also always known you see the future more clearly than anyone else I know. I believe ... part of me believes you let yourself be captured, Windsong, in order to bring certain things to pass. I find it hard to believe you did not have vision of that encounter.”

“Not entirely,” she hedged. “Nothing is ever that clear for me. But I have seen many other things. I see other ways in which my interference is needed.” She smiled softly at him. “My personal happiness ... there will be some years to pass before we reach that point. But you and some others, Lyric and her little friend Thrush—you will never find your futures if you all continue to hide from the world. None of us will.”

“The villagers will not believe that. They are set in their ways. They are afraid.”

Windsong met his eyes firmly.

“Then I must find a way to break their fear.”

Harrier nodded.

“If anyone can, it will be you, love.”

Jacob was wandering the caverns a short distance away from where Bella lay resting and recovering. Only she wasn’t quite all his Bella yet. She was conscious, and she was improving every day, but it was as though she had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her speech was slow and difficult, her thoughts were disjointed. She had horrible nightmares caused by the infusion of raw evil and tainted magical power she had taken into herself. The mental telepathic connection they had created together when they had Imprinted was silent.

Gideon said she would heal in time, and that all would return to normal one day. She would sleep in peace, she would scold him in his head, the unity and harmony that flowed between them would slowly come back to them. She just needed to heal. Heal in a way that Gideon’s impressive medical skills and powers of the Body simply could not accomplish.

“The Mind and the human brain are very complex,” Legna had said when he had tried turning to her for help as well. “I can work with her to help bring her along, but this trauma will only heal itself in its own time. It will not adhere to our impatient schedules, it will not bend to our desperate wishes to see her back to normal. It has its own methods, and often those are the best methods. If we rushed her back, it could cause more harm than good. Isabella is the most complex and most powerful Druid of her time. Her power knows no equal and, so far, knows no real boundaries. Everything she experiences seems to make her grow in strength almost at an exponential rate. I can only believe that when she comes back from this trauma she will be herself and even more than she was before. Do not worry, Jacob. I feel very strongly she is on her way back to you.”

Jacob felt it, too. Not at first. It had taken almost a week of watching her stammer and stutter her way through the simplest of sentences, having difficulty remembering who he was, who her daughter was, before he had finally seen the small glimmer of hope he had been looking for.

“D-did t-the g-girl co-ome tuh-tuh se-ee me?”

“Her name is Leah,” Jacob reminded her gently for what had to be the twentieth time that evening. “And yes, she came to see you. But you were sleeping. She is off playing with the Lycanthrope children. Do you want me to bring her to you?”

“N-no. L-let her ha-have fun.”