Spartan Resistance (22 page)

“I heard one, too,” Nayara said and tapped the screen in front of her.

“But that’s the least of your concerns. Humans are staggering now, trying to encompass how powerful Gabriel really is. They’re starting to wonder what else he might do. He made it sound like he was doing it as revenge against the vampire attack on his base, so it won’t take long for humans to get pissed at vampires for bringing this down upon them. Vampires not being affected by his ‘spell’ is just going to rub salt into the wound.”

“He
did
do it to pay us back,” Nayara pointed out. “But anything else he does will be overkill. If he makes another move, he’ll look spiteful.”

“If he even has the power for another attack,” Kieran added softly from his place at the back of the room.

“I don’t think you can afford to wait for another possible attack,” Deonne said. “Human perception of vampires has always been shaky, but on the whole they held no animosity. They didn’t know vampires and didn’t understand you, so their ignorance made them wary. Now, though, hundreds of thousands of humans have personal reasons to resent you. Their friends and family will, too.”

“They won’t blame Gabriel at all?” Ryan sounded calm.

“He looked sick. Weak and vulnerable.” Deonne shook her head. “They’re going to demand you fix this and the longer you take to do it, the hotter their fury will burn.”

Cáel kept his mouth shut, his heart thudding unhappily. He knew better than anyone in this room that Nayara and Ryan weren’t ready to take on Gabriel. They had been reluctant to prepare for war and had deliberately withheld from attacking, in the interests of better human-vampire relations.

Gabriel’s strategy had flipped that equation on its head.

He caught Ryan’s quick glance at Nayara. Then he shifted on his feet to face Deonne properly…and staggered.

Kieran took a half step forward and even Cáel flexed upwards, until he squashed the instinctive surge.

Ryan thrust his foot out and gripped the edge of the table. He kept his head down, concentrating on regaining his balance.

No one spoke. Deonne’s eyes were wide and her lips had parted. She looked at Nayara, then at Cáel.

Cáel shook his head.

Ryan lifted his head and turned to face Deonne, as if the moment had not happened. “Thank you, Deonne. We’ll need a high-level briefing outlining PR strategies. For now, we will not include you in any discussions about possible retaliation. You understand why?”

Deonne nodded. “Knowing what you plan will affect my own decision making processes and it might tip Gabriel off. You still don’t know if he can read my mind.”

“While you’re in the villa, he can’t,” Kieran said.

“You’re shielding the villa, Kieran?” Nayara asked.

Kieran crossed his arm. “I figured out how. But it takes concentration, so for now, I don’t want to stretch too far.”

Ryan smiled at him. “This is good news.”

Cáel agreed. It was the only good news that had come out of the meeting. As everyone stirred and went back to their assignments, or left for other places, Cáel watched Ryan carefully.

Ryan stayed at the table, swiping at screens, watching footage unroll. It looked like he was busy, but his hips were propped against the edge of the table, holding him steady.

Cáel made himself stand up and reach for Ryan’s cane, which was propped up against the desk where Ryan had been working before the general meeting had begun. He moved over to Ryan’s side and leaned the cane against the table, so that it bumped against Ryan’s thigh. Then he looked down at the stream Ryan was studying so hard.

Ryan’s hand rested against Cáel’s for a moment. Then it lifted away.

Cáel turned and left. He just barely made it through the door before his stinging eyes betrayed him.

* * * * *

Nia found him, forty minutes later.

Cáel sat up from the slump he had fallen in to, as she settled on the stone bench under the arbor next to him. She looked ahead, at the white roses that were glowing in the moonlight.

“He won’t talk to me.” Her voice was full of pain.

“Or me,” Cáel said and sighed. He took her in his arms and her head dropped to his shoulder.

“What do we do, Cáel?”

“Trust him, for now. Trust that he’ll tell us what he needs to, when he needs to.” He kissed her cheek. “We just have to wait.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Nia whispered.

I don’t know if I can do it, either
. But Cáel kept the doubt to himself and held her instead.

* * * * *

Christian looked up as Brenden’s dark shadow moved silently through the perfumed night air, toward the villa steps.

“Are you waiting for me?” Brenden asked. “Or hiding from someone else?”

Christian grinned. “I could give you grief and tell you that you’ve been working Rob so hard that now he’s got a moment to spare, I was forced to shove off and give him some alone time with Tally.”

Brenden climbed the broad steps up to where Christian was sitting on the topmost step. He stopped two steps down and put his foot on the step above and leaned on his knee. “Is that how you three work it?”

“It might be,” Christian said. “But Jack tends to take care of any illusions we have that time is ours to do with as we wish.”

Brenden grinned, then said, “So, you were waiting for me.”

“Kieran said you were down at the gate, seeing to something.”

“Making sure the last of the contractors were well off the property for the day.” Brenden lifted a brow, silently encouraging Christian to speak his mind.

“I wanted to talk to you about Laszlo Wolffe.”

Brenden stiffened. Then he tried to cover it up by shifting his weight. He stopped leaning on his knee. The big hands dropped to his sides.

That’s interesting
, Christian thought to himself.

“What about him?” Brenden asked, his tone even.

“There are some things about him that don’t…seem right,” Christian said carefully. Rob had warned him in his salty way that Brenden didn’t like the agency’s newest customer, although it was hard to think of him as a client now that Mariana had nominated Wolffe as her lover.

“He was scanned and checked every conceivable way possible, then twice for good measure,” Brenden said. “I checked the results myself. He’s the genuine thing.” He sounded pissed about it. “Unless the psi have come up with a way to mask DNA traces, but Wolffe would be the last person they’d want to use for something like that.”

“Too notorious,” Christian said in agreement. “It’s not that. I don’t think he’s a mole. I’m not sure
what
I’m thinking. There are a couple of things he’s said and done and normally I would dismiss it, but…” He blew out his breath. “Okay, you’re free to tell me I’m making way too much of this. But he uses Spanish sword fighting footwork.”

Brenden was silent.

“I trained in Seville in the nineteenth century,” Christian explained hurriedly. “So I know what it looks like. If you train long and hard enough, if you go at it for years, the way I did, then the footwork gets ingrained. You end up using it for everyday things, like standing and stepping around objects. That’s what Wolffe does.”

“Walks like a sword fighter?” Brenden clarified.

“A
Spanish trained
swordfighter, except the Spanish schools shut down centuries ago and no one these days even thinks of sword fighting as a sport. There’s not enough spectacle in it for the nets.”

Brenden put his foot back on the step and leaned on his knee again. “Anything else?” he asked.

“He’s not left handed, but he uses his left hand to catch.” Christian recalled the way Wolffe had snatched the silver spike out of mid-air. “He’s practiced at it.”

“Because he’s used to having a weapon in his right.” Brenden leaned closer. “Justin said Wolffe told him he had military in his background and he stands like a soldier. But there’s nothing in his public records.”

They looked at each other. Christian could see that Brenden believed him. So he got to his feet. “Well, I’ve told you. It could be nothing. But I say he’s keeping secrets.”

“Sounds like it,” Brenden agreed gruffly. “But there’s no law says you can’t keep secrets. The man can’t take a pee without someone wanting to report on it. He’s entitled to keep what secrets he can locked up.”

“Are you saying that to convince me, or yourself?” Christian asked.

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Brenden shot back. “He clears our checks and our checks are more thorough than most. His DNA matches public records, he’s who he says he is and he has the money to pay for his time trip. That’s all we care about.”

But his scowl had deepened.

Christian slapped his arm in farewell and strode back through the courtyard to the south cavedium. The rooms Mariana had arranged for them were at the far end of the villa, giving them as much privacy as could be arranged while still living in the agency. Christian didn’t mind the close quarters. He had grown up with a large family in a small house. Rob had grown up even poorer.

But they had each other and even though it sounded like such a cliché when spoken aloud, deep in his heart, Christian held a happiness that seemed to grow with each day that passed with Rob and Tally in his life and baby Jack to punctuate it.

Jack was asleep by the time he got back to the suite. Christian could tell before he got inside the door, because silence lay beyond. Perhaps Tally and Rob were already in bed, which meant he could interrupt and include himself. His body grew taut at the idea and he pushed the door open as silently as he could.

They weren’t in bed. Tally sat on the sofa, her feet tucked up underneath her, her glowing hair swinging around her shoulders and her sharply pointed chin up. She was upset and every line of her body spoke of it. Christian’s heart stirred and he closed the door just as softly as he had opened it.

Rob looked around at him. He was standing barefoot, his legs spread and his kilt half-unravelled. Tally must have been half-way through pulling Rob’s clothes off when something had interrupted them. Rob’s bare chest gleamed in the soft light, but his arms were crossed. He was a tense as Tally.

“What’s wrong?” Christian asked, alarmed.

“‘tis nothing wrong, exactly,” Rob said. His gaze caught Christian’s and there was a warning there that Christian didn’t understand.

He looked at Tally, hoping she would explain.

Tally’s chin lifted a little bit higher. Defiance. She was expecting him to take Rob’s side. But even as she stiffened, bracing herself for argument, her big brown eyes seemed to fill with sorrow. Christian’s gut tightened. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, or perhaps would have already been crying, if she was capable of tears.

“What is it?” he murmured, sitting next to her.

“Tally wants another bairn,” Rob said, his accent thicker than usual. “She wants yers, to be exact. And she wants my blessin’.”

Christian drew in a sharp breath as fear stabbed him. “After last time, when you came so close to dying, Tally? You would risk that again?”

Tally dropped her gaze. “I would,” she said softly, “if it meant having your child.”

“But the risks!” He picked up her hand. “It’s not just the stasis poisoning. Even if we mitigated that risk as much as possible, there’s all the dangers of living in the past—wars and revolutions and disease.”

Rob hadn’t moved from his taut posture. “Tally proposes she live three minutes in the past, like Rhydder does. Did. Then she could have the best of both worlds. A babe and modern medicine.” His mouth turned down.

Tally was looking at Christian, hope in her eyes. “Don’t you want a child of your own?” she asked softly.

“I have one. He’s called Jack.”

She flinched.

“He’s not my blood, but it doesn’t matter. He will grow up knowing me as one of his fathers.”

Her hand pulled away from his. “But
I
want another child,” she whispered.

Rob picked up the trailing end of his kilt and flung it over his shoulder, then crouched down in front of them. He rested his hand on their knees, one each. “This is too fraught a matter to deal with it in one sitting,” he said, his voice low. “I propose we all think about it for a wee bit. Later, perhaps when this thing with Gabriel is over, we can figure out a way so that everyone gets what they want.”

Tally shook her head. “No. If we wait until Gabriel is contained, then something else will come along that threatens our peace. There’s
always
something. There’s always a reason why raising a child right now is a bad idea.”

Christian picked up her hand again and this time, he gripped it when she tried to tug it away. “Tally, you’re upset. Neither of us understood how badly you wanted this.”

“Aye,” Rob agreed softly.

“Can you give me a few days at least, to think about this?” Christian asked her.

Tally remained stiff. Unresponsive.

Christian smoothed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I promise we
will
talk about this again. And in the meantime, I’ll do some research. And I’ll go over the risks with Marley and Fahmido.”

“I can have a chat with Rhydder,” Rob asked. “Find out how he lasted all that time living back in the past, without keeling over from stasis poisoning.”

Tally threw her arms around them both, drawing them to her and Christian gladly held them. But no matter how hard he held them and even later, as they gradually moved from the sofa to the bed, their bodies warming and their lips touching, Christian couldn’t rid himself of the kernel of fear Tally had planted.

The fear of losing her.

The fear of losing all this, which he loved.

Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2265 A.D.

Kieran found him in the kitchen around four the next morning. Brenden dropped the board he was reading onto the pile on the table in front of him and sat back. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he demanded.

“Because Rob’s busy and you couldn’t be found,” Kieran said. His tone was mild. “The Englishman. The new one, Devon. He came to my room. He didn’t know what to do.”