Lost Paradise (2 page)

I teleported us home to find the house
stinking of burned meat.

I ran into the kitchen, and moved the burned
sausage off the stove. It was little more than a black mess in the
bottom of the pan. I put it in the sink with detergent and water to
soak, then looked for the bacon. I found only the chewed remains of
the empty wrapper on the floor. While we’d been gone, the cats had
knocked it off the counter, and the dogs Ghost and Darkness had
eaten it.

“I hope you guys are proud of yourselves,” I
said sarcastically to them. “There will be no more treats for
either of you today.”

Looking at the stove, it all seemed too much
suddenly. Resigned, I got out some more bacon and sausage, and then
eggs and bread for toast. “What and how many?” I asked Theo
tiredly.

Theo finished letting the dogs outside, then
turned to me. “You don’t have to cook, Sar. We just had a traumatic
event.”

“Good,” I said gladly, grabbing some cereal
bowls. “Cheerios or Raisin Bran?”

* * * *

“I haven’t ever seen you eat so much,” Theo
said as he watched me finish my cereal. “That’s your second
bowl.”

I laughed. “Pregnancy tends to do that.”

He reached out to take my hand in his. “You
did good,” Theo said softly. “You saved me, Sar.”

“Titus saved you,” I corrected gently. “I
just got you to him.”

“He wouldn’t have saved me if you hadn’t
asked him to,” Theo said roughly. “Not for any price. He dislikes
me as much as Lash does.”

Theo’s bitter words sunk in as I finished my
cold but filling breakfast.

Robert, the third Ranked—a hierarchy of those
who made their living from jobs of everything from bodyguards to
assassins, would likely be trying again, once he found out his
attempt on Theo’s life had failed. Rumor was—à la Danial—that
Robert was eager to take Theo’s number two spot in the Ranking.
Usually that occurred after a challenge of some kind, and a fight
to the death. But it seemed like Robert meant to take his prize by
any means necessary…no matter how many other lives were collateral
damage.

If I didn’t know Titus, or he wasn’t my
friend, Theo would have died. I’d initially balked at Titus,
worried at his reputation as a poisoner, his association with
Leri—an evil witch who’d threatened me—and his somewhat scary
admission that he thought of me as kin now because I’d been exposed
to some demon blood from his son, Terian. But after this morning, I
no longer cared what Titus was, or what he was into. He’d saved
Theo. From now on, I was going to be nice to him and turn a blind
eye to what he had to do to live. He couldn’t help what he was. And
I needed him now more than ever.

* * * *

Despite Titus’s grave words, there were no
more problems with poison or attempts at harming Theo in the next
four weeks. What did quickly become a problem was Theo’s
over-protectiveness of me in my condition. I didn’t lose my temper
until he told me I wasn’t to walk the dogs anymore.

“I’m pregnant, not an invalid!” I yelled in
frustration. “I want to try to keep in shape. Already I can’t fit
into my jeans—”

“I’ll buy you a treadmill,” Theo said
smoothly. “You are not walking outside, not until the ice is
gone.”

“Fine,” I said reluctantly.

True to his word, Theo came home with a
treadmill the next night, and set it up for me. I got used to using
it in time, and it was easier than walking outside on ice, though I
missed my walks with the dogs.

In all other ways, my current pregnancy was
the same as my previous one. The Lust presented itself regularly,
though it was Devlin who now raised it and sated it without fail.
He got great pleasure out of the latter. Though I still found that
disquieting, I was grateful for his help, as it allowed me to
control my otherwise out of control desires. Better yet, The Lust
did not present itself with either Theo or Danial again.

Some of that may have been the chaste way
with which Danial acted toward me now, or the restraint that Theo
showed in the few times we were intimate. I didn’t call attention
to either behavior, content to cross my fingers and hope that my
luck held. Lash still shadowed me whenever I visited Hayden, unless
I was with Devlin. I wanted whatever miracle had allowed me to
elude a repeat encounter with him to continue for the remainder of
my pregnancy.

Not that I hadn’t grown used to Lash in all
the hours we’d spent in each other’s company. I was accustomed to
his silence and stillness by now. His reptilian snake eyes still
made me uneasy, but he was never rude or coarse, as he had been to
Danial that one morning in Letchworth. He never mentioned to me
that we had been intimate at all, or acted as if I was anything
other than a friend’s girlfriend he was watching over. As time had
passed, I had relaxed sufficiently to feel easy in his presence,
enough so I began to talk to him when he was in the mood to talk,
which wasn’t often.

One afternoon, I noticed he’d finally neared
the end of his book about the Tibetan Dead. “What’s it about?” I
asked, filing another birth certificate in the correct drawer.

“It’s about life after death,” Lash hissed,
not looking up from the page. “About what the Tibetans
believe.”

Why don’t you vague that up for me some
more, Lash?
“What do they believe?” I asked, holding back my
retort.

“Why do you want to know?” Lash inquired,
looking up finally.

I turned to him, leaning on the filing
cabinet. “I believe in God, but sometimes I wonder about good and
evil. I know Devlin can be bad, but I love him, despite what I know
he’s done. I like Titus, even though he told me what he has to do
in order to live.”

Lash flicked his tongue out at me, tasting
the air.
Perhaps he was tasting for truthfulness?

“I think I’m a pretty good person,” I
continued. “But I wonder what will happen when I die. Will Dev be
where I end up? Will Danial? Will I meet Theo in another life, now
that we’re bound?”

Lash nodded. “The Tibetans believe that you
are reborn when you die,” he hissed. “But not immediately. Your
spirit wanders around for a while to various couples creating life,
and you have to choose your parents, and hope you learn something
by living life as that child. You only stop being reborn when you
reach the level of perfect harmony with the universe, and then you
aren’t reborn anymore.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“No,” he hissed. “I like to believe I’m going
to end up in a bar run by loose weresnake women for eternity, so I
can drink heavily and enjoy myself forever.”

I burst out laughing. After a moment, he
laughed, too. “I’m kidding,” he hissed. “I’d be happy to end up
somewhere warm and sunny, someplace where it wasn’t ever cold. That
would be enough. That would be a kind of Heaven.”

There was yearning in his words, enough to
make me feel self-conscious. He’d accused me months ago about not
seeing him as a person, and he’d been right. Sure, he was a badass,
but he had the same fears I did, and probably some of the same
hopes, too.

I turned back to my work. “I think I would
want to go on living, go on being reborn. I like living. There’s
always something new to see and do. But I’d be happy to be in the
sun, too. I hate being cold, not to mention the ice and snow of
winter.”

“You are going to live a long time,” Lash
stated, regarding me intently. “You’re part vampire now, or so Dev
says. You probably won’t age.”

“That’s what Danial told me,” I said quickly.
I still hadn’t come to terms with that. Every time I thought about
it, I worried. And that wasn’t even counting whatever impact my
exposure to demon blood would have on my longevity, much less my
soul.

“Why are you working so hard?” Lash hissed
angrily. “Devlin didn’t bring you here to work, Sarelle.”

What was this about? Why was he angry?
“I like to work,” I said stiffly, not turning around. “I like to do
things. Theo lets me do nothing now. And I can only lie in bed for
so long.”

There was no reply. I looked over my shoulder
to find Lash gone.

Had he left in anger? That was odd. He’d
never acted angry since that time he’d thrown the glass in the
kitchen, when he’d been pissed off at a previous lovers’
unfaithfulness to him. Putting down my work, I went after him.

I walked to basement stairs and bumped into
Leri coming down the steps.

Chapter
Two

She dropped her eyes immediately. “Hello,
Sarelle.”

“What are you doing here?” I accused. “You
were forbidden from entering the grounds of Hayden, or so Dev told
me.”

“What I did was wrong, I know that—”

Like Hell
. “Don’t,” I said, holding up
one of my hands. “I’ll never forgive you, even if Titus has.”

She sighed. “I can’t forgive myself.”

“Why didn’t you just kill Terian when he was
born?” I said bluntly. “You would have spared him a lot of
pain.”

“He was Titus’s son,” Leri replied. “I
couldn’t kill him. I panicked. I wasn’t ready to be a mother,
especially to a half-demon child. I thought it would be easier,
just giving him a life away from me—”

“Leri,” I interrupted. “If you really want
Terian to forgive you, tell him the truth about Keriam.”

Leri stared at me, shocked.

God, I hoped I was doing the right thing
by telling her this
. “You’ve got to know Terian wants to find
his family. He tried that vampire Danial knew out west, but they
can’t find anything about Keriam’s real family. You have to know
the answer.”

Terian had been to Dallas, Texas, the first
place he had remembered living when he was a child. Though he had
scoured the local files, even expanding his search to include
surrounding towns, there was no record of a college kid who had
disappeared fitting Keriam’s description. Having no way to discover
the true identity of the mortal man that Leri had bespelled into
caring for her supernatural child more than seventy years previous,
Terian had returned to New York State, dejected and hopeless.
Sundown’s presence in his life was helping ease his depression, but
not much.

“He won’t talk to me.”

Terian had refused to see his faerie mother
Leri after an ill-fated attempted reconciliation by his demon
father, Titus. He had cut himself off from the one person who could
give him the answers he was looking for.
But then if my mom had
tried to kill me, I’d probably have done the same.
“Then write
him a letter,” I retorted glaring at Leri. “Telling Terian Keriam’s
real name would go a long way toward healing some of the damage you
did. I’ll take it to him.”

“Why?” she said suspiciously. “You don’t like
me, so why help me?”

“I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for
him,” I said disgustedly. I longed to really light into her
verbally, but was afraid of her magical power. “That’s all you need
to know.” I walked past her and up to the kitchen, before my anger
got the better of me.

Lash was waiting for me outside the cellar
door, leaning nonchalantly against the wall.

“Did you already eat?” I asked, moving past
him. There was no point in asking if he wanted any of what I’d make
for myself; he always refused.

“Yes, earlier,” he replied, following me into
the kitchen. “I was listening to you talk to Leri.”

Another fellow listener at doors.
Something to remember.
“Then it’s okay if I eat?”

His head inclined, puzzled. “Why wouldn’t it
be?” he hissed.

“You left all of a sudden, without saying
anything,” I said, irritated. “I thought there might be a
problem.”

“Someone was in Titus’s workshop,” Lash said.
“I knew it wasn’t him by the movements. I expected to find someone
who needed reminding the basement is off limits. It was only Leri,
getting some things for Titus.”

His tone hadn’t been apologetic, but it also
wasn’t sarcastic. I nodded in reply, then went about making
lunch.

I was pleased at my progress at Hayden. I’d
painted half the guest rooms and gotten through ten of the boxes to
be filed. I still had at least thirty boxes to go, but progress had
slowed a lot today. I had entered older records from the 1940’s and
before. Inside those stacks of cardboard boxes weren’t just
receipts and documents, but also older photos and memorabilia.

In retrospect, I should have expected that.
Danial, keeper of secrets, had never showed me the contents of his
gray memory boxes. I’d never asked, worried about how I might feel
to see his other lives, the loves he must have had over the years.
Yet Devlin had never balked at telling me about the past, or
anything else I asked him. It made sense his memories weren’t
locked away, but jumbled together with everything else where anyone
could see them.

While I had been eager to see some of the
history of Devlin’s long life, I’d been ill prepared for how it had
made me feel. There were photos of Danial and Devlin together,
sometimes with one woman, sometimes with two. The women were not of
one type, and so far, none of them had looked like me. I was both
happy and worried about that.

There were also photos of Devlin alone with
several women, and other men, sometimes couples, and one of him
alone with a younger man. It didn’t look like anyone I knew,
although something seemed familiar about the face. In all the
photos, Devlin looked almost the same, though most of the clothes
he wore in the photos were old fashioned and dated.

That upset me more, irrationally. I didn’t
know who any of these people were, and most of them were likely
dead. But they must have meant something to Devlin to have their
pictures stored down here.
How many had he loved? How many did
he still remember? One day, would I have a file that was the same?
Looking at Cia’s face a century from now, would I remember her
name, or how much fun we’d had last week with the weight of a
hundred years dimming the memory? Or was I doomed to stare at the
faded picture, struggling in vain to recall not only her name, but
ever being there with her at all?