Purpose (18 page)

I sighed, too, and leaned my head against his
shoulder. I traced my fingers around the scars on his chest,
careful not to touch them. “What would you do if I did become evil?
I mean, if the Daemoni blood wins.”

“My allegiance is to the Amadis, so I would
have to save your soul.”

I mulled over this for a few minutes.

“I don’t think it’ll be an issue. I think she
primarily worried because I’d become so
angry
. I was pretty
cruel, especially to her.
I
even thought the Daemoni was
coming out in me. But the anger is
gone
. All I feel now is
love and happiness. I just needed you.” I put my hands around his
face and looked into his eyes again. “And
you
are not evil.
You
are
Amadis, too. We’ll be okay. No, we’ll be more than
okay. We’re going to be
great
now.”

He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes, and
then he folded me into his arms. “I hope you’re right. We have a
lot of challenges ahead of us.”

“We can handle them, as long as we’re
together. Just don’t leave me again, no matter what the
reason.”

“
Never
again.” He sealed the promise
with a kiss and I remembered the last time he’d done the same
thing…when he’d promised to come back. It had taken a while—way too
long—but he’d made good on that one. I knew, however, there were no
guarantees in our bizarre world. I leaned my head back against his
shoulder.

“What happened? When you left, I mean?” I
asked quietly. “Owen thought you were…dead…when he got away. They
never gave me any details and I never asked. I was afraid they’d
tell me something that would confirm what Owen thought and I
couldn’t let myself believe it.”

I didn’t know if he would tell me. He never
spoke of his past life, of the horrors when he was part of the
Daemoni. He refused to dredge up those memories. Though this was a
different situation and he didn’t perform the evil acts, he
probably didn’t want to relive those memories. But, after years of
wondering and imagining my own version of the events, I felt
compelled to ask anyway. And he actually answered.

With me still on his lap, he scooted back on
the bed so he could lean against the headboard.

“The day I left…the day I made my worst
mistake ever…” He shook his head. “I had to pull them away…from
Rina and Sophia…from you. The Amadis had agreed to flash to a park
in the Shenandoah Valley, away from the safe house to protect you,
if needed. So I flashed there and the Daemoni followed my trail,
just as planned.”

“Followed your trail?” I interrupted. “When
you flash?”

He looked down at me through his lashes. “You
really still haven’t learned much, have you?”

I shook my head.

“When we flash, we leave a sort of trail.
It’s like an energy signature. It can’t be seen, but it can be
sensed. It disappears in a second or two, but if someone is close
enough to catch the trail, they can go right where you went.” He
paused to make sure I understood and I nodded. “The Amadis
followed, too, but more Daemoni kept appearing.”

“Were there dog-things?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Dog-things?”

“Like the creature Edmund had at your house.”
It had been just a few days before our wedding…the raging wind of a
tropical storm, the bulky figure of Edmund and his creature that
wasn’t quite dog but definitely not human, either…the whole fight
had firmly impressed itself into my memory. Until the battle at the
safe house, I’d never been more terrified in my life. The dog-thing
had apparently left a lasting impression. I knew it was a stupid
word, but I didn’t know how else to describe the wretched
creature.

“Ah, the nora.”

“The
nora
?” I asked. It took me a
minute to make the connection. I held an unusual amount of
knowledge about mythical creatures—knowing was part of my job,
after all—but the nora, bald men who ran on all fours and sucked
breast milk, were rarely mentioned. I would have never thought the
dog-thing to be a nora. “I didn’t know they were real…I mean, even
less so than vampires or werewolves.”

“That was a real nora. And they don’t just
suck women’s breasts. They like blood more than breast milk, but
they do prefer women.” He paused for a moment. “That’s been your
image of the Daemoni, huh?”

I thought about it for a moment before
answering. Until recently, my experiences with the Daemoni had been
limited to Ian, an Irish idiot who’d once been Amadis and now got
his kicks out of watching the destruction of others’ lives, and
Edmund and his nora.

“I guess the nora scared me the most.
Probably because I could see no humanity in it at all.”

He rested his cheek against my head and was
silent long enough, I almost asked what he was thinking. But then
he continued with his story.

“Well, they are pretty rare, but there were a
hell of a lot of Daemoni, so there may have been a few nora. They
ambushed us. I wasn’t surprised. I knew it would be the only way
they could take me. I just didn’t think it would be so bad. I
should have known better….” Remorse filled his last statement. I
looked up at him when he didn’t continue. He leaned his head back
against the headboard, his eyes closed. “As soon as I realized
their numbers, I went ahead, hoping to keep as many off of the
others as I could. I knew they’d go after me. Most of them did, but
not enough. Even while fighting, I kept aware of the others. They
shouldn’t have even been there. Stefan went down—”

I cringed and he paused. The image came
clearly, very similar to the dream I used to have, the part my
imagination had created of Stefan’s death, followed by Tristan’s
disappearance. I shook my head to clear it and Tristan tightened
his arms around me. His voice came even lower and quieter as he
continued.

“Owen, Solomon and Micah, another soldier,
were the only Amadis left standing. I had to pull the Daemoni away
from them, before we lost them, too. So I flashed again, but this
time they didn’t know where I went. The Daemoni closest to me
followed, and then the rest followed their trails, like a domino
effect. They paralyzed me with their magic long enough to take me
to the Ancients in Afghanistan.”

I sucked my breath loudly and blew it out
with an, “
Oh!
”

He peered down at me. “What?”

“Weird…,” was all I could say at first. Then
my thoughts all came out in a rush. “Every night since you left, up
until last week, I had pretty much the same dream—replays of the
few memories we had together. But it always ended with you in a
field with Stefan and everyone, and then just you and the Daemoni,
in a foreign desert, surrounded by stone mountains. I thought that
part was a figment of my imagination.”

“You didn’t know where I was supposed to meet
Lucas?”

I shook my head. “No one would tell me. You
know how they are.”

“Right. Hmm…that
is
…interesting.” He
paused again, then continued. “At first, I didn’t fight. I knew as
long as they had me, they’d stay away from you. I tried my first
escape the day after Dorian was born and they had their
celebration. Their compounds are shielded, so you can’t flash out
of them, but I thought I knew the location where they held me and
the way out. But I was mistaken. They’d taken me somewhere new that
they’d developed since I’d left them. So they recaptured me before
I could get out, then took me to Siberia.”

“
Siberia
?” I asked, astonished. “I
planned to come find you, but I would’ve never guessed to look for
you in
Siberia
.”

What on earth had I been thinking? How
would I have ever found him? And then, exactly, how would I—little
me—have helped him escape against all those demons?
The idea
sounded ludicrous now. Tristan’s humorless chuckle told me he
thought the same thing.

“Trust me, I will teach you everything you
need to know now. I’m going to prepare you for
every
thing,”
he said. “For now, just picture a large network of tunnels and
caves, under the Taymyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. An
underground city. All of their cities are underground, and this one
is their largest—their capital, in a sense. I’d spent a lot of time
there in my past life, knew it well. But they’d expanded the caves,
dug down deeper. They kept me in a new part…far below the surface
of the earth.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “You really were cut off
from the entire world.”

With the darkest of tones, he answered, “As
far away as possible…and as close to the bowels of Hell as you can
get.”

He fell silent, providing no more details,
but the image of a cold, dark cave blossomed in my mind. I
envisioned him sitting alone on a dirt floor, the stone walls
curving overhead. I could almost hear distant screams of terror and
pain from other caves and tunnels. I felt his dread. The dread of
knowing someone or something would be coming any time to deliver
his own torture. Not knowing when or even
if
there would
ever be an end to it all. My heart squeezed and I fought back a
shudder.

I could only imagine the loneliness he had
felt. I, at least, had had Dorian and Mom and even Rina and Owen.
He’d had no one. I reached my hand up and cradled the side of his
face with it. He leaned his head into my hand as I stroked his
cheekbone with my thumb. It felt like anything I did was so
little…not enough for what he deserved. But he seemed to appreciate
every little gesture. He’d been isolated from even the least bit of
humanity, just when he’d learned the importance and joy of it…what
it felt like to be touched and held by someone who loved him. He
could only hold on to those memories, relive them in his mind.

I wondered if perhaps we had been somehow
connected and that was why I had those same memory-dreams every
night for the entire time he was away…and then they all but
stopped, about the same time he’d escaped. We had both needed those
memories. Perhaps we even shared them at the same time. And that
connection told me I just needed to hold on to him, wait for him,
although everyone else thought of me as pathetic for doing so.

I didn’t know if the idea held any truth,
but, I had learned in the last couple days, anything was possible
in our world. And it was really a nice thought to hold onto in the
midst of all we’d been through. So I shared it with him.

“Huh, it’s an interesting theory,” he said.
We sat in silence as he thought through it. “I can see the
possibility of it, especially since your blood runs through my
veins.”

“Like vampires?” I asked with surprise. “I
mean, the connection vampires have with those whose blood they’ve
sucked?”

“Exactly. But my body wouldn’t burn through
it for energy like they do. So, your theory’s a strong
possibility.”

He just confirmed what I’d once believed to
be fiction—the connection between vamps and their victims—and
something about that gnawed at the back of my mind. I decided it
was just lingering shock because nearly everything I’d been writing
about was
real
.

“So, tell me the ending,” I said, returning
to his story. “How did you escape this time?”

Tristan grinned but not his normal smile.
This one took my breath for a different reason. It actually
looked…
wicked
.

“I’d been planning it for a while, ever since
I first heard they were coming after you. They’re slow to make such
decisions, which they should be, of course, especially when their
reasons aren’t credible. I paid attention, analyzing everything,
learning the new areas as they moved me around. I hid the fact that
I’d become immune to the spells they used and let them believe they
still controlled me completely. So they became relaxed with me,
keeping me around as they discussed their plans, still absorbed
with their own pride and believing I’d change my mind about them. I
learned what I needed to know to escape and when I heard they were
executing their plan for you, I executed my own plan. I surprised
the hell out of them—they created me, yet they still underestimate
me. I took out a few of their strongest on my way. I quite enjoyed
that.”

Now I understood the nefarious grin. Not
actually evil, just vengeful.

I didn’t know what to say. He stayed with
them to keep me safe and then escaped to protect me. Even while
captured, sitting in the closest thing to Hell, he worried about
me. And I only thought about why he hadn’t come back sooner. In
other words, I worried about me, too. Even now, the only thoughts
coming to mind were selfish or, at least, minimal.
I wish you
had come back sooner? I’m glad you’re back? Thank you?

“What are you thinking?” he finally asked
after a few minutes of silence.

“About how much I love you and how miniscule
that sounds compared to what I actually feel.”

He nuzzled his face in my hair and murmured,
“Hearing you say you love me will never be miniscule to me. It’s
the best thing these ears could ever hear. And I’ve been waiting a
very long time to hear it again.”

I turned to him and brushed my lips across
his. “I
love
you, my sweet Tristan.”

It still didn’t sound like enough to me, but
a glorious grin spread across his face as he closed his eyes.
“Mmm…that’s what I’m talking about.”

Every little gesture
was
important to
him. I needed to remember that—to never discount anything. He
pressed me tighter against him and I listened to his heart, strong
and steady and comforting. I slid my hand up his chest and neck,
around the contours of his face and into his hair.

“Your hair is so dark,” I whispered. “It used
to be lighter, the color of sand. Dark sand, anyway. Now it’s like
caramel.”

“It hadn’t seen sun in many years.”