“Well, yeah, we can try all we want.” I grinned back with understanding.
“Then we will do everything we can to give Dorian a little sister.” He winked and I fogged over. He chuckled and nibbled my ear. The tickle cleared the fog.
“I need to call Dorian,” I said. “I haven’t talked to him in so long. I wish he could be here.”
Tristan glanced at the clock. “Give them another hour or so. I talked to Sophia before you woke up and they were between flights then.”
“You talked to Mom? Where are they? She knows you’re back? What did she say?”
He held his hand up to stop the barrage of questions. “Your phone wouldn’t stop ringing as soon as Owen saw me with you in my arms, so I finally answered it.”
“Owen,” I groaned. “I bet he’s pissed at me.”
“Hmph. Yeah, you could say that…and at me. He’ll get over it.” He shrugged. “Sophia sounded…hesitantly happy. She knows you’re safe, but she’s concerned.”
“She thinks I might become evil.”
“She thinks I am evil. I don’t think she trusts me entirely again. She knows the Daemoni too well.”
I looked into his beautiful eyes. “I trust you.”
“Good. That’s all that matters to me.” He sighed. “Still, Sophia has every right to be concerned.”
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.”
