Lover Mine

he felt like he was crying sand. Usually, he alternated between clicking on the bulb and turning it off.

From out in the hall of statues, he heard Zsadist and Bella and Nalla walk down to their room. As the couple talked about the dinner, Nalla cooed and squeaked in the way babies did when their bellies were full and their parents were right with them.

Blay came down the way next. Aside from V, he was the only other person who smoked in the house, so that was how John knew it was him. And Qhuinn was with the guy. Had to be. Otherwise Blay wouldn’t have lit up outside of his own room.

It was payback for that receptionist at the tat shop and who could blame him?

There was a long silence out there. And then a final pair of boots.

Tohr was heading to bed.

It was obvious who it was by the quiet more than the sound—the footfalls were slow and relatively light for a Brother: Tohr was working on getting his body back into shape, but he hadn’t been cleared for fieldwork, which made sense. He needed to put on another fifty pounds of muscle before he had any business going toe-to-toe with the enemy.

There wouldn’t be anyone else coming down. Lassiter, a.k.a. Tohr’s golden shadow, didn’t sleep, so the angel usually stayed down in the billiard room and watched highbrow television. Like paternity tests on Maury and The People’s Court with Judge Milian and Real Housewives marathons.

Silence... silence... silence...

When the sound of his heartbeat started to annoy him, John cursed and stretched up, turning on the light. As he settled back against the pillows, he let his arms flop down. He didn’t share Lassiter’s fascination with the boob tube, but anything was better than the quiet. Fishing around the empty bottles, he found the remote, and when he hit the on button, there was a pause like the thing had forgotten what it was used for— but then the picture flared.

Linda Hamilton was running down a hallway, her body bouncing with power. Down at the far end, an elevator was opening... revealing a short dark-haired kid and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

John hit the power button and killed the image.

Last time he’d seen that movie had been when he and Tohr had watched it together... back when the Brother had taken him out of his sad pitiful exisitence and shown him who he really was... back before all the seams in both their lives had gotten yanked apart.

At the orphanage, in the human world, John had always been aware he was different... and the Brother had given him the “why” that evening. The flash of fangs had explained it all.

Now, naturally, there had been a shitload of anxiety that came with finding out you weren’t who or what you’d always assumed you were. But Tohr had stuck by his side, just chilling and watching TV, even though he’d been on rotation to fight and also had a pregnant shellan to look after.

Kindest thing anyone had ever done for him.

Coming back to reality, John pitched the remote onto the side table and it bounced around, knocking over one of the empties. As the last half inch of bourbon splashed out, he reached across and picked up a shirt to mop up the mess. Which, considering what a shambles the rest of the room was in, was like backing up a Big Mac and fries with a Diet Coke.

But whatever.

He wiped off the tabletop, lifting the bottles one by one, and then opened the little drawer to swipe across the—

Tossing his T-shirt onto the floor, he reached in and picked up an ancient leather-bound book.

The diary had been in his possession for about six months now, but he hadn’t read it.

It was the one thing he had of his father’s.

With nothing else to do and nowhere to go, he opened the front cover. The pages were made of vellum and they smelled old, but the ink was still totally legible.

John thought of those notes he’d written to Trez and iAm back at Sal’s and wondered if his and his father’s handwriting were at all similar. As the entries in the diary were done in the Old Language, there was no way of knowing.

Focusing his tired eyes, he started out just examining how the characters were formed, how the ink strokes whipped about to form the symbols, how there were no mistakes or cross-outs, how even though the pages were not lined, his father had nonetheless made neat, even rows. He imagined how Darius might have bent over the pages and written by candlelight, dipping a quill pen...

An odd shimmer went through John, the kind that made him wonder whether he was going to have to be sick... but the nausea passed as an image came to him.

A huge stone house not unlike the one they were living in now. A room kitted out with beautiful things. A hurried entry made on these pages at a desk before a grand ball.

The light of candle, warm and soft.

John shook himself and kept turning the pages. Sometime along the way he started not just measuring the lines of characters, but reading them...

The color of the ink changed from black to brown when his father wrote about his first night in the warrior camp. How cold it was. How scared he was. How much he missed home.

How alone he felt.

John empathized with the male to the point where it seemed as though there was no separation between the father and the son: In spite of the many, many years and an entire continent of distance, it was as though he were in his father’s shoes.

Well, duh. He was in the exact same situation: a hostile reality with a lot of dark corners... and no parents to back him up now that Wellsie was dead and Tohr was a living, breathing ghost.

Hard to know when his eyelids went down and stayed there.

But at some point he fell asleep with what little he had of his father held reverently in his hands.

EIGHT

1671, SPRINGTIME, THE OLD COUNTRY

Darius materialized in a stretch of thick forest, taking form beside the entrance of a cave. As he scanned the night, he listened for any sounds worthy of notice... There were deer tiptoeing around down by the quietly running stream, and the breeze whistled through the pine needles, and he could hear his own breathing. But there were no humans or lessers about.

A moment longer... and then he slipped beneath the overhang of rock and walked into a natural room created aeons ago. Deeper and deeper he went, the air thickening with a smell he despised: The musty dirt and cold humidity reminded him of the war camp—and even though he’d been out of that hellish place for twenty- seven years, the memories of his time with the Bloodletter were enough to make him recoil even now.

At the far wall, he ran his hand over the wet, uneven rock until he found the iron pull that released the hidden door’s locking mechanism. There was a muffled squeal as hinges turned and then a portion of the cave slid to the right. He didn’t wait for the panel to fully retract, but stepped through as soon as he could wedge his thick chest in laterally. On the other side, he hit a second lever and waited until the section was secured back in place.

The long pathway to the Brotherhood’s sanctum sanctorum was lit with torches that burned ferociously and cast hard-lined shadows that jerked and spasmed on the rough floor and ceiling. He was about halfway down when the voices of his brothers reached his ears.

Clearly, there were a lot of them at the meeting, given the symphony of bass, male tones that overlapped and competed for airspace.

He was probably the last to arrive.