chapter Seventeen
We drove for another five hours with little conversation, both of us reveling in our reestablished whatever-it-was and, equally, contemplating Hellion’s promise of help now and threat later. Bahlin held my hand as he drove, not even releasing it to shift gears but working our hands together on the shifter. I smiled.
He couldn’t, no he wouldn’t, stop touching me, albeit very appropriately at all times. He held my hand and when we stopped for fuel he knelt by my open door and caressed my face, leaning in to kiss me gently. He was so profoundly affectionate, murmuring to me in Gaelic, that I wondered how I had doubted his sincerity despite the continued weight of the prophecy hanging in the back of my mind. Words, once spoken, were impossible to take back, including if not especially the three most important words between us. So while I believed he loved me, I was scared. But there would be time for that later.
We pulled into Edinburgh and drove about until we found a hotel. Again Bahlin got a single room, despite Hellion’s assurances. We made our way to the seventh floor and Bahlin laid down on the bed while I freshened up and hooked up his laptop to the room’s Wi-Fi. When I came out of the bathroom, the computer’s screensaver drew random lines across the black screen on the bedside table and Bahlin’s eyes were closed, his body relaxed. I tiptoed to the edge of the bed and looked down at him, his hair splayed over the pillow and his hands relaxed across his hard stomach. His eyelashes brushed his cheeks and his lips curved the slightest bit, smiling as if he were already having good dreams.
He spoke and I jumped, not anticipating the deep rumble of his voice in the silence. “Won’t you lie with me, mo chrid?”
“Bay, we have to get going. I checked and the moon has three nights before it’s truly full. That only gives us tonight, tomorrow and the following night until the moon crests to find Tarrek, save him and solve the murders”
“And Imeena?” Bahlin asked, opening his eyes.
Holy crap, I’d forgotten Imeena. “I want to save her as well, Bay. Where should we start do you think? What do we have to work with?”
“Tyr is a great resource and will be more helpful since you’re new. But he’s still a god, and they’re fickle creatures.” I snorted, and Bahlin grinned. “I see you agree.”
“Understatement made and duly noted. He said I could meditate and reach him.” I wandered to the balcony to look out at the new night.
“You’ve not the natural temperament or training for meditation, so sleep is your best option if you can think of him long enough before dozing off to establish the connection. It’s tricky, but you can do it.”
“Why does everyone think I’m so angry?” I asked, turning to face him.
Bahlin just arched his brow at me yet again, the physical silence which stretched between us heavily littered with conversations past.
“Okay, okay. I’m not Mother Theresa when it comes to temperament…or anything else. Fine. I’m a raging bitch, but I need help.” I stomped back across the room and threw myself on the bed, bouncing Bahlin. He used the momentum to flip over on top of me.
“Calm down, Maddy, and set your pride aside.”
“My pride?” I asked, incredulous. He thought this was about pride?
“Yes, your pride. You are an incredibly angry young woman, and within the boundaries of your own life you’ve a right to be…to a point. But you’ve got to learn to harness the anger and stop letting it control you. Otherwise you’ll spend your time as Niteclif looking over your shoulder for all the people you’ve pissed off who now have the means, and the desire, to kill you.” His somber eyes were empathetic, and he smiled just a little trying to soften the kill shot. “Your anger at the universe won’t bring your parents back.”
I closed my eyes, unshed tears burning brutally. I remembered my dad. He’d taught me to shoot a gun. But I got angry and frustrated at not being as good as he was. He’d admonished me to control my temper and harness my frustration to make me more effective because if I didn’t, he’d warned, I’d just end up a victim of my own making. “Dictate the terms of your anger and the actions you’ll allow on its behalf. Don’t let it dictate to you what it will and won’t do, Madeleine.” Sometimes it felt like he’d only been gone a day, other times it seemed he’d been gone a lifetime.
I rolled into Bahlin’s chest, trying to control my breathing lest I burst into tears.
Bahlin rubbed my back, murmuring softly into my hair. I relaxed and gained control of my emotions, slowly drifting to sleep. I tried to steer my thoughts toward Tyr before I ended up a marionette to my emotions. It worked.
“Hello, Maddy,” Tyr said. He was dressed in modern jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, his hair tied back with a leather thong. He sat on the sofa as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Though probably irreverent, it crossed my mind that with his size and the clothes he looked more like a modern day professional wrestler than a deity.
I sat up and looked at Bahlin who had crashed beside me, hogging the bed as usual.
“When I see you like this, am I dreaming or am I having an out-of-body experience? Because everything seems the same except you’re here.”
Tyr smiled and said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Divine avoidance. Fabulous. “So I’ve made it to Edinburgh and I’m only about an hour from where I suspect Tarrek’s being held. I need some help, Tyr.”
“Ask your questions.”
“Imeena is missing. Is she with Tarrek?” I asked, unsure he’d answer such a direct question, but he surprised me.
“Yes.”
“Huh. Is she there voluntarily?” I pressed, wrapping my arms around my knees. I was getting a bad feeling.
“I won’t answer that. You must use logic to take this last step, Madeleine…Maddy,” he said with a snort. “You butcher such a beautiful name with a nickname.”
I didn’t comment, thinking about what he said. The sick feeling was back in the pit of my stomach, and I wasn’t sure what to do.
“Is there anything you can tell me?” I reached out and touched Bahlin. He didn’t move though I saw him breathing, and the feel of his skin didn’t register to my fingertips. It was as if I was nothing more than a dream, and then it dawned on me. I didn’t exist. Not in this plane.
Tyr saw the understanding on my face and said, “This is what it is like to have never existed, Maddy. To see and touch and feel, and to be of another dimension. Don’t fret,” he said as I began to hyperventilate. Apparently breathing was still a necessary function. He stood and walked toward the bed, confidence in motion, reaching me and stroking a hand down my hair and across my cheek and cupping my chin. “Is there anything I can tell you?” he repeated. “There are eons of information at my fingertips.” He snapped, and we were standing on the shore of a crystal-clear lake with mountains in the background and a hawk crying out overhead. He snapped again and we stood in the middle of a desert, the night sky filled with an infinite number of stars. He snapped once more, and I was back in my hotel room. “But what you want the most I cannot give you.”
“And what is it I want?” I whispered, reeling from the reality of Tyr.
“Reassurance that what you know to be true will not kill you.” He bent and kissed my forehead and was gone.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding out a staccato rhythm. I gripped Bahlin’s arm, and he rolled toward me in his sleep. I laid down next to him and pulled his trunk of an arm around me and he snugged me up close to his body. I was chilled, and even his body heat didn’t feel like it was enough. What did Tyr mean I wanted reassurance? What was it that I was afraid would kill me? Hellion, whispered through my mind and I gave an involuntary jerk.
Bahlin grunted and opened his eyes to small slits of midnight blue. “What’s the matter, my love?” His sleep-roughened voice was seductive, and my nipples tightened.
I knew he wasn’t really awake, but I needed him to be. I twisted around in his arms and tugged his hair, looking up at him. “Bay?” I stage whispered. “Are you awake?”
“No,” he muttered, “I’m not awake. Are you?” He arched his neck to look down at me, pulling back slightly so he could see me.
I sighed. “Sorry to wake you.”
He propped himself on his free arm and continued to look down at me. “Did you reach Tyr then?”
“Yeah.” Skipping the conversation about the alternate realities, I told Bahlin about the statement Tyr had made regarding reassurance.
Bahlin’s brow creased in concentration, and he tapped his fingers against my hip. This went on for several minutes before Bahlin finally said, “Let’s get a piece of paper and work this out.”
He grabbed the notepad the hotel had provided on the telephone desk and we sat at the small table. Putting my name in the middle, he said, “We know you’re worried about Hellion.” He wrote Hellion’s name above mine and drew a short line connecting the two. He did the same for Tarrek and Imeena. “Who else are you worried about?”
I thought about all the monsters I’d met in my short time here. I glanced at Bahlin and immediately looked away. Without a word he wrote his name on the pad of paper.
“It’s only fair,” he said softly.
“Honesty?” I asked.
“Remember? Always.”
“Brylanna.”
Bahlin’s head snapped up like I’d slapped him, and he looked at me closely. “My sister has nothing to do with the disappearances.”
“True, but she’s done nothing to help either. Shouldn’t a Seer—or would that be Seeress?—be more involved with solving a series of crimes that affect her brother?”
Bahlin dropped the pen and shoved away from the table, nearly sending it over on its side. He stalked to the balcony window and threw it open making the glass vibrate heavily in its frame. “Sodding hell,” he yelled to the sunless sky. He spun to face me, his eyes wild. “No,” he whispered. But the seed of doubt was cast.
His body shivered and muscles moved beneath his skin as he fought not to shift. He turned away from me and the fabric of the shirt stretched, seeming to strain to contain the twin mounds his wings made as they tried to push through his skin. He was as close to losing it as I’d ever seen him, and it frightened me.
I picked the pen up off the floor where it had landed when Bahlin had shoved away from the table. I wrote Brylanna’s name at the bottom of the page and drew a connecting line to me. Bahlin stood there, chest heaving, pleading with his whole being for me to say it wasn’t a possibility. But we’d promised each other honesty.
“Come back to the table,” I said gently. “We have to discuss this, Bay.”
He walked back to the table with jerky movements, nothing like the graceful predator in motion he normally projected. “Give me another name,” he said, his voice gravelly.
“There’s no one else,” I said, reaching over to lay my hand over his clenched fist. He relaxed incrementally, and I squeezed his hand. “The other Seer is dead, the Council all but disbanded in the wake of Imeena’s disappearance. Whoever has planned this has done a very thorough job of dismantling the only semblance of organization in the paranormals’ society.”
We sat staring at the names on the paper. The killer’s name was on that sheet. I was sure of it.
“According to Tyr, one of my skills is determining truth when it’s in front of me. Let’s see if he’s right,” I said. I tore off the top sheet of paper, setting in the center of the table. Then I wrote each individual’s name on a separate sheet of paper and each sheet in a corresponding circle on the table. I picked up Bahlin’s sheet first.
“You’re serious,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless.
“I have to rule you out officially.” I reached for his hand again, but he withdrew it before we touched. “Bay, I am about to sentence someone to death. I have to be able to defend my position without prejudice. You taught me that first rule. Tell me why you didn’t do it.”
“Because I love you,” he roared in that gravelly voice. I crossed my arms under my breasts and met his heated gaze with my own cool one. He slapped his hands on the table and the little eddies of air he created sent the paperwork fluttering about. He stood and towered over me. “I love you, and that should be enough.”
I held my ground despite my fear that this would create a new, irrepairable fissure in our relationship. “It is—for me. But explain it to me as if you were on trial before the High Council.” It was too early in our relationship for such slippery conversational ground and I resented it on some level.
Bahlin fell back into his seat, and it groaned at the onslaught of his frame. “You’re right. I know you’re right.” He pushed his hands through is hair, pulling it back from his face harshly and fisting it at the nape of his neck. “The first two murders were committed before you arrived, so you’ve no point of reference or proof that anything I tell you is other than hearsay. After you arrived, the murder of Meyla occurred while we were together. However I could have tipped the room while you were downstairs with Sarenia. You never did see it, anyway. You just took my word for it. Tarrek disappeared in the sithen. I’ve no explanation for that beyond Gretta. And Imeena disappeared while we were separated.” He paused, sighing and releasing his hair. It fell back around his shoulders and he relaxed slightly. “It looks poorly for me, I know.”
I picked up where he left off, not giving him a chance to continue. “You weren’t at the sithen when I was shot, but I suppose you could have hired Maddox. Though had you been inclined to shoot me, you could have, and like would have, done it when you first came to my rooms to disclose my evolution. You’d no need for a proxy killer when the opportunity to kill me presented itself so simply.”
Bahlin’s shoulders relaxed even more as he realized I didn’t think he was guilty.
I crossed his name off the list and removed his individual sheet of paper, letting it float to the floor.
“That’s it?” he asked, shocked.
“You didn’t do it, Bay. I know that as deeply as I know that this isn’t just a dream.”
“Thank you.” He reached out to touch the back of my hand, and I flipped it over so our fingers touched, front to front. “I’m sorry, Maddy,” Bahlin said quietly. “I don’t normally lose it like that. I just saw myself losing you again so soon, and it made me a bit—”
“Crazed? Maniacal? Enraged?” I suggested with a smile.
Bahlin smiled back. “Point made. Who’s next?”
Might as well get the hardest one out of the way. “Brylanna.”
As expected, Bahlin stiffened again, but he didn’t rage at me. Instead, he took a deep calming breath and seemed to collect himself, forcing his eyes back to midnight blue. “Let’s trade this one off, because I can’t be totally objective about her,” he suggested.
“Fair enough. Brylanna hates me. She sees me as interfering between the two of you, which, I might add, is just a little creepy. She knew I was coming and made sure that the prophecy was fulfilled just as she’d predicted. As you’ve stated, I have no point of reference for the first murders, so let’s just say she could have done it.”
Bahlin’s jaw clenched, his neck muscles cording, but he nodded and gestured for me to go on.
“You got to me so quickly that she didn’t have a chance, so she could have hired Maddox to kill me. But it just doesn’t ring true. Why would she hire a fae when she has access to the wyvern? And she’s already a Seer, so there’s no reason for her to kill Meyla. She’s not strong enough in her human form to fight Imeena, and there’s been no report from Imeena’s kiss of a dragon interfering with her. The only claim was that she was behaving strangely. No, Brylanna probably regrets not trying to off me before we got together, but she didn’t do it. There are too many negatives in even the column of possibility.”
Bahlin got up and walked to the sliding glass doors of the balcony and slid them shut gently. Yet he stood there, looking out over the rooflines and saying nothing.
“Bay?” I got up and walked to him and slid my arms around his waist. “Are you okay?” I rubbed my hands up and down the ridges of his stomach, and they tightened involuntarily. He put his hands over mine to still them, and I laid my cheek against is back.
“A part of me would have died if she’d been sentenced to death.” He was so still, so quiet, the rapid beating of his heart the only indicator of strong emotion.
A thought dawned on me. Why I’d never thought of it before was beyond me. “Bahlin, who carries out the death sentences of the Niteclif?”
He looked at me and I could tell he knew I’d finally put it all together. “The High Council member of the offending group.”
“So if Brylanna had been guilty…” I couldn’t finish the thought.
“Then I’d have had to kill my own sister.”
Shakespeare couldn’t have done better than this, I thought. I kissed his back through his T-shirt and I squeezed him tight. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. I would have sorted her out on my own.”
“No, don’t hold back with me, Maddy. If I have any chance of breaking the prophecy I’m going to need all of you, my love: your trust, your heart, your faith, your confidences and more.”
That he would put so much of his blind faith in me was terrifying, but he was asking nothing more of me than he was willing to give himself. I nodded against his back, too choked up to answer him, though what strong emotion was most responsible for my mute condition was open for debate.
I hated myself for asking, but a morbid part of my mind demanded an answer. “Do you think we’d survive your having to kill your own sister if I handed down a death sentence for her?”
Bahlin didn’t answer. Instead he twisted out of my grasp and walked to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Water ran for several moments before it shut off and, eventually, he came out. He’d rinsed his face and a few of the shorter hairs at his temples curled where they’d been splashed. He stopped ten feet from me and shook his head.
My stomach plummeted, and I involuntarily grabbed it.
Standing straighter and setting his shoulders, Bahlin finally answered the lingering question. “I don’t know how I could kill her. She’s my baby sister. If you handed down a death sentence for her…if the crime was heinous…” He drew a hand across his lips. “I’d do it, but I don’t know how we’d survive it, Maddy. It would be there, between us, forever.”
I nodded, swallowed hard and tried to come up with something to say that would offer reassurance to us both. Unfortunately, my mind was nothing but a great, big, cavernous void of white noise.
Bahlin closed the distance between us and reached for my hand. “Back to our temporary drawing board?”
“Who should we do next?” I asked, releasing him and turning for the table. Before I was fully faced away from Bahlin, he grabbed my arm and spun me back to him so hard that I lost my balance and stumbled into him. His arms crushed me to him, and I grunted at the force of his embrace. He dipped his head to mine, whispering against my lips, “I’ll no’ take yeh to bed, Maddy, because yeh asked me not to, but I’ll make yeh wish I had.” And then he closed the distance.
He devoured my mouth with a combination of nibbling kisses that left me straining against him and rough, tongue-delving assaults that left me almost struggling to break free. He was relentless. I pulled my arms free and he let me, snaking them up his chest and grabbing fistfuls of hair and yanking him closer to me. He grunted with pain but continued his onslaught, and I groaned into him mouth. He breathed into me and his breath was searing, lighting me up from the inside and seeming to set my soul ablaze. I wrapped a leg around his and ground my pelvis into his thigh, panting and begging and whimpering all at once. I wanted him flat on his back. I wanted him stretching me to breaking. I wanted… I just wanted.
He broke the kiss and disentangled us despite my best efforts to crawl up his front. “Maddy?” he asked and I opened my eyes to look at him, lust glazing my vision. “You’re sending mixed messages, love. I’m about ten seconds from throwing you to the floor and ravaging you, despite your earlier wishes, and I don’t think you’d be complaining. Come on now, pet. Tell me what you want with a clear head.”
I looked at him, and my mind’s haze lingered. I wanted him. I wanted him, wanted him. But this wasn’t slow. Hell, I’d nearly been screaming, “Warp speed ahead,” just seconds ago while looking for Bahlin’s thruster with my whole body. It wasn’t fair. I stepped back and had to clear my throat, twice, before I could put together an apology.
“I’m sorry, Bahlin. I truly am. I know it’s not fair to you, but I’ve got to ask you to stop. If I don’t then we end up right where we left off. Like I said before, my morals, or what’s left of them, need to regroup.”
“Do you believe I love you?”
I looked at him warily. If he gave me the screw-me-because-I-love-you speech, I was going to break his damned nose. I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Then you must believe I respect you, yes?”
My fists formed, and my shoulders straightened.
“And if you believe I love and respect you, then you must believe I’ll accept your wishes on this matter.” He smiled at me, his lips reddened from our kisses, his pants bulging dangerously in the front.
I relaxed my hands and noticed that he noticed, then he laughed, rubbing his jaw.
“Besides,” he said, “I’ve no intent of giving you any more reason to punch me, whether I stand before you as a dragon or a man.” He tilted his head to the side and chuckled at my blushing cheeks.
“Sorry for that last time.” I stumbled through the apology, unsure how sincere it really was.
Bahlin and I gathered up the scattered remnants of our remaining suspects and laid everything back out on the table. We were left with Hellion, Tarrek and Imeena.
“I suggest we start with Imeena since she’s the most recent to disappear,” I said, running my fingers over her name. I could imagine her with her blue-black hair and Caribbean blue eyes staring at me across the High Council’s meeting table. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, thinking through the events of the last week and a half.
“Maddy, I think it’s important to rule out Hellion first,” Bahlin said, his voice insistent.
“No. Because I don’t believe Imeena did it and if I’m right, she’s the most recent disappearance.”
He looked at me, his eyebrows shooting precariously close to his hairline. “But she’s a vampire,” he exclaimed.
“And you’re a dragon. It doesn’t make either of you guilty.” My tone rang sharp. “Harboring a little prejudice?”
Bahlin blushed like mad and I suddenly knew, with alarming clarity and vivid imagination, that he and Imeena were once lovers.
“Bay, you had better come clean about this right now before I pick your damn name up off the floor and reconsider your place in all this,” I growled at him. Jealousy made me want to stand on the table and beat my fists on my chest, then throw him to the ground and love him until he begged me for release. Which, of course, I’d deny. Okay, not really, but it sounded good and made me squirm in my seat a little.
“It was about seventy years ago,” he said, and my head snapped up as I realized I still didn’t know how old Bahlin was. “She’d lost her mate and we, well, I’d come out of a bad relationship and the Council had just met and we ended up getting together for a few years, but it wasn’t significant. It was a passing entertainment for both of us.”
A few years? “How old are you, Bahlin?”
He closed his eyes and let his head drop back.
“Tell me,” I said, standing up to loom over his seated form by inches. Pathetic, but it was the best I could do with such a huge man. “Tell me, damn it.”
“How about we compromise and I tell you how long dragons live?” he asked, never opening his eyes or picking up his head.
“Both,” I said through gritted teeth.
He cracked a single eye.
“Tell me both.” I had no idea why it was so important to know his age, but he’d been so sketchy about it that now I needed to know…desperately.
“Dragons live to be about ten thousand years old,” he said softly. Then he lifted his head up to look at me, slowly pushing himself to standing and never taking his eyes off me as he did it. “And I’m two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven years old. Are you happy? Does this make you feel any better, Maddy?”
I sat and missed the chair completely, catching my hip as I went by it so that it tipped me over. I threw out an arm to keep from face-planting it on the carpet.
“No,” I said. “It really doesn’t help me much at all.”
“Do you understand now why I didn’t want to disclose this?” he asked, staring down at me with his dragon’s eyes.
“Makes perfect sense,” I whispered.
“Should I get the door for you now, or will you wait to run until I’ve got my back turned?”
“That’s pretty low, Bahlin.”
“I call it like I see it, love.”
We stared at each other, neither willing to give ground. My mind whirred faster than an accountant’s adding machine as I worked through a variety of issues but one, one, stopped me, tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“How many women have you loved in your lifetime?” Morbid, but I needed to know how I stacked up against the millennia and the thousands of women he’d likely bedded.
“One,” he answered, stepping close to me. “I’ve waited for you since I was just a lad, Maddy. I’ve waited since before I was a High Council member. I’ve waited since Brylanna announced over dinner one night that the first female Niteclif would be mine, and I would break her heart. I’ve lived with this damnable prophecy hanging over my head for more than nineteen hundred years, Madeleine. It’s a long time to wait and know you’ll never have what you want, and you’ll never love another. I’ve never been a monk, and I’ll always be mythology to most, but I was born to love you. Never forget that.”
Bahlin held out his hand to me and I took it, trembling as he helped me to my feet. He stepped toward me very slowly and I looked at him with large eyes, sure that the whites were showing all around the irises. I didn’t run. I wouldn’t run. I’d loved him without knowing and knew there was no valid reason I shouldn’t love him now that I did.
He embraced me gently, laying kisses along my temples and down my nose before resting his forehead against mine. “I love you, a stór. Not even the ages can change that.”
“I love you too.”