Incarnation (24 page)

“Your son—?” I was surprised and yet as I looked more closely, I could see him in the shape of her mouth and the set of her chin. “You are Marco’s mother.” The discovery at once alarmed and fascinated me. Of course, he had a mother. I just hadn’t expected to come face-to-face with her.

Pain lent a poignant edge to her pride as glared at me. “I am Cornelia di Orsini. Marco is my firstborn son, as Nicolas
is my second. I should be able to protect them both but instead—”

My hands clenched at my sides. Fear for myself fell away as I considered what might have befallen others. “Where is Marco? What has happened to him?” When hunger drove me from Nicolas’ office, I had not thought that either brother might be at immediate risk. Had I been terribly wrong?

“Do you pretend to care? You are using him—”

“Of course, I care. Marco is—” What was he? The man I had loved with a heart at once innocent and unaware. The man my body still recognized and yearned for more than I wanted to admit. The ally I was counting on to help me find Mordred.

“Marco is a Protector,” his mother said over my stumbling silence. “That is what he was born to be and what he is. Our clan has stood between your kind and humans for centuries. That he should be associated with you in any way is a betrayal of all that we hold sacred.”

I was no stranger to a mother’s worry for her wayward child, nor did I mistake the love that inspired it. That gave me the confidence to say, “You don’t really believe that he has betrayed anyone, do you?”

She drew herself up to her full height, shorter than me in my new incarnation but tall nonetheless for a woman. The light from the lantern cast shadows across her face and form, but I could see the fierce will that sprang from deep within her.

“Who are you to say what I believe?”

I hesitated. For all that she was Marco’s mother, I had no particular reason to trust her. True, she had let me into the inn, but was her intention to protect me or to hold me captive?
Determined to discover which it might be, I made to step out of the salt circle.

Cornelia stared at my foot, hovering in space just above the floor. She shrugged. “Do as you like but know this. If you leave the circle, any vampire hunting you will be better able to detect your presence.” She waved a hand toward the stones that lined the passage on all side.

“The salt combined with the dolomite in these stones throws off the senses of vampires and confuses them.” Looking at me closely, she frowned. “But you appear to be unaffected.”

Slowly, I lowered my foot back inside the circle. Far off in the distance, muted by the walls of the inn, I heard the baying of wolves. No doubt Felix had tried to conceal my absence or at least pretend that there was an innocent explanation for it. But Lady Blanche was far too old and wily to be fooled for long. After her blood-drenched display of power, the others would be eager to do her bidding, whether that meant bringing me back to her or destroying me, as she willed. Either would doom Mordred and all of us.

But it seemed that I had unexpected allies, including the four-legged variety.

Cornelia stared at me, her expression guarded. “Marco thinks that you may be . . .” She could not bring herself to speak of a possibility that would challenge everything she thought she knew about me and the struggle threatening us all. “But that cannot be true. There has never been such a being. No vampire would take the risk of creating a . . . halfling.”

“Mordred did.” Best she know that she was not the only female of proud ancestry and a long tradition of service to humankind. Indeed, when it came to such measures, I outranked her. Best she know that, too.

“I am of Morgaine’s blood, the blood of the Slayer. Mordred must have understood the risk when he incarnated me but he needed the connection that could exist only between us.”

Her shock was unmistakable but so was her skepticism. “Needed it why? Surely he would have understood the danger to his own kind from one such as you claim to be.”

“I agree, he must have, which tells us how desperate the situation is. Only the greatest duress could have driven the vampire king to bring into being the very creature that legend says can destroy the entire vampire species.”

Although she still appeared reluctant to believe me, neither could she dismiss what I was saying. Instead, she probed more deeply. I was beginning to understand the source of her sons’ intelligence and their tenacity. If their father was as formidable as their mother, the di Orsini brothers would be a force to be reckoned with under any circumstances.

“How can you help Mordred?” she demanded.

“I can find him, but time is running out. If I do not discover his whereabouts quickly, it will be too late.”

“For whom, Miss Weston?” Before I could respond, she said, “There are those who say that humans have grown too powerful to have to share the world any longer with those who prey on us.”

“And there are those who say that humans and vampires cannot survive without each other,” I countered. “Our need is the more obvious but yours may be the greater. Without us, you would have destroyed yourselves in wars and conquests long ago.”

“Are you seriously claiming that vampires protect humans?”

“On occasion. Mordred has certainly done so, and every British government for centuries has had the sense to
appreciate it.”

“The privileged few have appreciated it,” she corrected. “But what of the common people who are too often sacrificed? Only the Protectors have stood for them, and at great cost.” Her face tightened. She looked away. “And now my own son has been called by our ruling Council of Protectors to account for his failure to abide by our ways. Because of you, he could be cast out, left alone without the support of the other Protectors, to survive as best he can in a war with your kind. How long do you think he will live under those circumstances? Hours, days?” Tears shone in her eyes. She blinked them away furiously. “I have lost one son already, but at least that was to the cruel vagaries of nature itself. How am I to bear losing another?”

What son had she lost? To what cruel vagaries? Reluctant though I was to admit it, I truly did not understand. Nor was I about to be enlightened. Without another word, Cornelia turned on her heel and left me alone in the stone corridor, held fast within the circle of salt. A prisoner of my own thoughts and fears.

CHAPTER 18

A
s my eyes adjusted to the absence of light, the darkness that had seized my soul eased, if only a little. Slowly, a measure of calm returned. I could not blame Cornelia di Orsini for holding me responsible for putting her son in danger. Indeed, I was none too happy with myself just then. But nothing could be allowed to distract from the urgent necessity of finding Mordred. To that end, I was torn between the urge to set out in search of him at once and the certain knowledge that to do so while a hunting pack of vampires was nearby would be the height of folly.

Even so, waiting was very hard. Moment to moment, time did not so much pass as stretch like taffy being pulled, folded in on itself, and pulled again, a process that, I recalled just then, had fascinated me as a child. During our family jaunts to the seaside, I was content to watch apple-cheeked women in crisp white aprons maneuvering the wooden frames on which the taffy was made. But Amanda always had to have a paper cone of the gooey stuff, which she would savor with such patience that much of it made its way back home to lie dried out and lint covered in a drawer until finally being disposed of by a conscientious maid.

I, on the other hand, preferred rock candy and would devour every scrap of it with greedy haste that left me wanting more. The little chunks of crystal were sharp on my tongue and hard on my teeth but that made them all the sweeter. I could almost taste them now.

Marvelous though they were, the candy crystals did not glow, not like the shards of dolomite in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the basement. Had they been that bright all along or had I become more sensitive to them? Belatedly, a third possibility occurred to me. Could they be reacting to my presence?

As I watched, the stones began to shine even more brightly. Warmth spread through me, made all the more disconcerting because coldness had come to seem my natural state. But this was not the heat of life as I had known it, the product of the processes needed to sustain a human existence. This was something else entirely, a power that long predated the appearance of mere mortals on this planet.

From ancient stone melted in the fires of the first volcanoes that took their substance from the living sun, the heat spread through me. I felt its tingling in my hands and feet, along the column of my spine, until finally in a piercing lance it penetrated up through the stem of my brain and into every aspect of my consciousness.

The world exploded. Stone, light, air, and earth all flew apart as though they had been held together only by a feeble web spun by the limitations of my own mind. I gasped and the sound reverberated through endless chambers of eternity. I reached out and found . . . nothing.

Everything.

“Lucy, is that you?”

A voice in the void . . . a hint of hope but also of desperation.

“Mordred?”

“Thank God!”

Let us leave aside for the moment the inappropriateness of that remark. Let us ignore those credos that claim vampires are the spawns and servants of the Devil, barred forever from the deity’s loving presence. Let us take it as a conversational convention.

“Where are you?” he demanded. Kings, even or especially those in duress, are not noted for their patience.

“Rather more to the point,” I replied. “Where are you?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Forgive me, but that isn’t very helpful.”

“Yet you are here.” He sounded weak but doing his best to conceal it and equally determined to find the silver lining in our unexpected encounter. “After the foundry, I thought any hope of reaching you was finished.”

“What happened there?” I asked. “People are saying it was anarchists.”

“People are idiots. Where are you?”

I hesitated to tell him lest I sound craven but deception would help neither of us. “In the basement of the Serjeant’s Inn, standing in a circle of salt.”

“Is Marco there?” Of course, he would not be surprised by my circumstances.

“He’s been called away, something about answering to his clan for allying with me. But his mother was here.”

“Cornelia?” I thought I heard a faint chuckle but surely I
was mistaken. “What of Blanche . . . up to no good, I assume?”

“Worse. She has killed an unwilling human, made a sacrifice of him.”

“Bloody hell . . .” The curse was little more than an exhausted wheeze, yet beneath it I heard an echo of the power he had possessed for so long and was looking forward to claiming as his own once again. With full vengeance against those who had betrayed him to follow promptly.

“River.” He said, his voice fading. “Bridge but not close. Screaming. Humans. Come quickly.”

“I will try.” That was all I could do, but there was a very real possibility that it would not be enough.

“Lucy . . .”

He was gone. I drifted again in the formless darkness, content for a moment of folded time to do nothing other than consider my dual identities and the contradiction to which they had brought me. The truth is that I would not have gone back to being naïve innocent Lucy for all the warm, coppery blood in London or anywhere else. Granted, I had a lingering affection for her but she was not . . . me, not anymore. I had outgrown her.

Yet neither could I imagine myself moving beyond what I had become, whatever that might be. Half one thing, half the other, precariously balanced with each foot on either side of what felt like an ever-widening chasm. Such is life in all its foolish glory.

Christmas around the family table. The goose picked almost clean. Amanda and I holding between us the gleaming wishbone, that fragile stirrup upon which hopes and dreams so improbably ride.

“Close your eyes, dears,” Mother said. “And listen to your heart’s desire.”

“Lucy!”

Stones pressed against my back. Mordred and the glowing stones were gone. Only their memory lingered. I was fiercely cold, robbed of all warmth, but filled with a shattering clarity. My heart did not beat, my lungs did not move and yet . . . I was alive. Utterly, stubbornly, and it must be said, triumphantly alive, and never mind whoever thought me anything less.