Were-Devils' Revenge [Were-Devils of Tasmania 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (7 page)

“No,” said Edmund. “I love her.”

Alice Mortimer didn’t waver. “I know. But there is more at stake here than…how you feel.”

Edmund took the cup of tea from Elisabeth and sat down, looking into the dark liquid as if for an answer.

“You can’t stop me marrying her,” said Edmund, unable to bear the silence that sliced between them with the coldness of a knife blade.

“No, we can’t,” Alice said. “But I trust you to behave honorably, as we brought you up to.”

They had raised him up to be true to himself. To have integrity. Not marrying Larissa would throw this to the wind. But Alice read his mind, and she slammed down her hand onto the table. “No,” she said. “You have other responsibilities.”

Zelda until now hadn’t looked at him. A large woman, she had a deep-red-and-purple scarf wrapped around her head and heavy jewelry shimmering around her neck and both wrists. She now raised her head.

“I have dreamed of you,” she said, her voice rich and deep. “Each night for seven nights.”

Edmund, who would rather have left, was compelled to look at her, as strongly as if she had grabbed him by the chin and turned his head by force.

Zelda looked at him and then at Alice, shaking her head. “I do not know the meaning. That is for you to decide.”

“It’s clear to me,” said Alice. “My sons are about to go to war, and you see deaths.” She went to her son, hand clasping his shoulder so tightly Edmund winced. “You are no use to her or me if you die on some battlefield in some country that isn’t ours.”

“Sit, Alice,” said Zelda, the only person there who would have dared to order Alice to do anything. Even then she obeyed reluctantly.

“There will be deaths and many of them,” said Zelda, “with the traces of your blood on each one.”

Edmund looked at her and felt his soul start to freeze.

“The deaths will go on for more than fifty years and two generations before there is a chance of redemption.”

“And you say this will be on my conscience if I marry the woman I love?” Edmund’s voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper.

Alice went to interrupt, and Zelda put her hand up to stop her.

“This will happen if you do not heed the prophecy.”

“Which is?”

“In my dreams you are strong and virile,” said Zelda. “Often you have transformed, a fine, large, black beast, the strongest of them all. You have less of the white streaks that my people gave your kind after you stole their babies.”

This they all knew was an Indigenous legend, one that the town of Tarrabah had been named for.

“You have a choice, and it is the choice you make that leads to a curse or the final end to the feud between you and the ghosts.”

They called the Karlssens and their kind ghosts because of how pale they were, but they were also known as the false vampires, a nod to their distant cousins in the Northern Hemisphere.

Zelda took her tea cup and swished around the dregs before turning it over on the saucer. She did the same with Edmund’s cup. Turning hers back over, she looked thoughtfully at the tea leaves that remained and those on the saucer. “Here I see the bared teeth of your kind,” she said. Next she looked at Edmund’s and frowned. “Here,” she said slowly, “I see a rose.”

Edmund stiffened. His thoughts went immediately to Larissa and where they had made love, the scent of the roses still mixed with her scent in his memory. He blocked the thoughts but not fast enough.

“It’s her,” said Alice. “Don’t you see?”

“The prophecy gives you a choice,” said Zelda, ignoring the interruption. “Between your own kind and the rose. But the choice that brings bloodshed is the one where you do not heed your instinct.”

“You’re a were-devil whether you like it or not,” said Alice. “To go against that is to destroy yourself and us with you.”

Edmund buried his head in his hands. Every pore of him wanted to be with Larissa. But was this lust rather than instinct? Certainly his mother thought so. Certainly every instinct he had had before falling for Larissa had been for his own kind.

“You have always been destined to marry Kaitlin,” Alice continued, referring to a girl he had met and liked well enough from the south. “Do it now and put an end to this. Marrying into the ghosts will only inflame the situation.”

Edmund thought of Larissa’s brothers and her cold father. He had always known they would never accept him, but it had not seemed to matter. He thought of Romeo and Juliet and how disastrous their love had been. He loved Larissa too much to ever condemn her to that. He would make his choice and be true to his kind, but he knew he would never forgive himself and that, as far as he was concerned, his life was now over.

Queensland, Present Day

As soon as Gabriella heard that the Richards boys wanted to go to Cairns on Friday she offered them a ride. Her father was taking her to the family funeral, and there was room in the plane.

Gabriella introduced them to her father, Vince, who grinned and shook their hands, winking at his daughter. She winked back. Her father could always read her without having to be able to read minds.

The light plane was a five-seater, and she ended up next to Mitch with Mac behind.

“So what are you doing in Cairns?” Vince asked.

“Just looking around,” said Mac evenly. “We haven’t spent much time in this part of the world, so we want to take advantage of our time here.”

“You should go up to Palm Beach and Port Douglas,” Vince replied. “Great beaches.”

The brothers nodded, but Gabriella didn’t get the impression they were intent on checking out beaches. She didn’t see them as souvenir hunters either and, for the first time, wondered what it was they were going to do.

“Were you close to your…aunt, was it?” Mac was polite but distant.

Gabriella had the feeling he knew about her and Mitch, and it made her feel uncomfortable, though there was nothing about the night she regretted. She stole a glance at Mitch who winked at her. If Mac saw it, he didn’t react.

“Great-aunt,” said Gabriella. “And no, but all my family will be here, so it’s kind of a ‘can’t get out of’ occasion.” She looked at her father who rolled his eyes. He had been remarkably tolerant of his wife and her weird relatives.

They landed smoothly and took a cab, dropping the boys off in the center of town. Gabriella braced herself for the rest of the day.

* * * *

As soon as Mac got out of the plane he had a bad feeling. This time it didn’t have anything to do with Gabriella. He looked at Mitch who had felt it, too. When they were dropped off in town, they headed toward the marina, but they already knew that Lena and Zachary weren’t going to be there.

“I feel the aura to the west,” said Mac. He looked to the sky as if expecting to see ghost bats swarming, but there was only blue sky and wisps of white.

“It means more than one or two then?”

Mac nodded. “We had better spray ourselves again.” Auntie Kate had provided them with a concoction she guaranteed would block the bats from identifying them at a distance. Up close it might be less reliable. It had a slightly sweet, musty rose smell. It seemed they were going to need it.

The marina, as predicted, though busy, was devoid of the ghost owners of Tropical Tours.
The brothers headed west toward the sensations that were coming strongly, a mix of olfactory sensations and a vibration that seemed to be movement but was hard to pinpoint. They got to the edge of the city and instantly knew they were nearly at the source. In front of them was a sprawling cemetery. They looked at each with the same thought.
Gabriella would be here.

To the side of the cemetery the road was lined with pine trees and they took this approach. The gathering was just inside the hedged wall.

Two hundred, Mac estimated. Maybe more. The heads were mostly blonde and white which made finding the redheaded Gabriella all the easier. She was standing on the edge of the crowd with her father, a blonde woman who was presumably her mother, and an older, white-haired woman who, for all of Mac’s instinct, was stunning in an ethereal way. She held herself with great poise, though he could tell she was troubled.

“Look,” whispered Mitch, pointing to the right of Gabriella. Mac stiffened. Approaching Gabriella was a striking woman of about her own age with exceptionally pale skin and hair.
Lena.
The woman joined Gabriella, hugging her.

“What do you think?”

Mac was thinking a lot and trying to not only make sense of this but also make some common sense, immediate decisions. They obviously weren’t going to be able to take Lena and Zachary out here. They would need to get them together or ideally alone. But now there was this added complication. Gabriella was clearly not ghost because he would have sensed it. Her father was human. But her mother? Her grandmother? Lena was definitely ghost so not a sister. A cousin maybe.

His attention was drawn to a man standing by the graveside, an older, white-haired man with a large nose. Next to him was another man who looked like a brother. The first was distressed. Clearly it was his wife they were lowering into the grave. But Mac also sensed anger, a seething wave of rage that felt like it had been awakened. He had no doubt where the rage was directed.

“Let’s get out of here.”

* * * *

Gabriella hugged her cousin. They were close friends but hadn’t seen each other in over a month. She had heard via Wilson about her recent trip south and grabbed her cousin’s arm.

“Oh, Lena,” Gabriella cried out when she saw the ugly, red scar down her cousin’s arm. “You could have been killed.”

“Would have been,” said Zachary joining them. “If the deadbeat, little rats had had their way.”

“Zachary saved me,” Lena added.

Gabriella hugged her again. “Promise you won’t go down there again.”

“Don’t have to,” said Zachary. “They’re up here somewhere.”

“Are you sure, Zachary?” Gabriella’s grandmother asked, her voice low and deep and commanding immediate respect.

“We smelt it months ago,” Zachary replied. “We thought it might have been Tremain up here with a virus he’d developed.”

Gabriella, like everyone else, knew that Tilman Tremain, a were-devil academic, had been working on a vaccine to combat the contagious cancer that had been ravaging the species for the last thirty years.

“But it wasn’t,” said Lena. “He’s still working on saving his world, though we managed to put a damper on that.”

Gabriella saw her grandmother wince.

“Wilson thought he smelled them here, farther south,” added Zachary. “Speaking of whom, has anyone seen him?”

Gabriella was still annoyed at Wilson for being jealous, so she hadn’t been looking for him. But no one else had seen him either. She shrugged. “He’s in a bad mood with me, but I thought he was bigger than letting that interfere with him coming today.”

“I wouldn’t have thought he’d miss this,” said Zachary.

Gabriella watched Zachary’s bereaved grandfather starting to round up the family. Though Wilson was a Magnussen he would have turned up. She saw Zachary frown. He was thinking the same.

Wilson was soon forgotten as his grandfather started to speak. “I tell you,” he said. “Marianne didn’t die of anything natural. The revenge has started, and we are all at risk.”

Gabriella’s grandmother started to walk toward her brother, the crowd splitting to let her through. Gabriella didn’t think she’d ever seen so many of her family and the Magnussens together. Even her Great-Uncle Charles’s grandsons, Damon and Kadar, who had somewhat legendary reputations for aloofness and never being around, were there. As the elegant, older woman walked between them, her back stiff, her long, off-white gown swished around her ankles. She looked far younger than her years.

“Adam,” she said. “You have been talking this way for the last seventy years. If you are right, it is because you and Charles brought it upon us.”

“And all because
your
sister was a traitor.”

Gabriella held her breath. The “traitor” had of course been Adam’s sister, too, but she had never been forgiven.

“No, Adam,” said Gabriella’s grandmother. “It was because she wasn’t allowed to follow her heart. And any fallout now is because of the pact
you
made with our cursed Northern cousins.”

Silence ate into the space like an evil memory, weaving in between each of them. Gabriella had never heard what had really happened and didn’t even think her mother knew. But, seeing her grandmother staring down her two brothers, she knew that these three did. Were they all about to find out?

“Do you know why Grandma wanted us here?” Gabriella whispered to Lena.

Lena shook her head slowly. “I think…” She bit her lip and Gabriella realized to her surprise that Lena was blocking her thoughts. Whatever was she hiding? Finally Lena said, “We’re the second generation. And the only girls.”

A wind picked up from nowhere, and Gabriella’s grandmother’s dress billowed behind her, wisps of her white hair in the breeze. She looked, Gabriella thought, just like an angel.