“You all start working on that. I’ll go talk to Jeremiah, and see what’s to be done there. Tokala, Bidzil, once I get him back in his cell, take Leonidas out to the point so the morning sun can have him.” He paused, glanced back at Elisa, though he hardly needed the visual. He hadn’t let go of her mind, holding it practically in the cupped palm of his soul even in its unconscious state. “Say a prayer over him. He wasn’t always this, and she’d want that honored.”
Tokala nodded, understanding. Kohana spoke then, tersely. “Will she be all right?”
Mal grunted. “Not after I wring her neck.”
It was the right thing to say, obviously, because expressions eased further. As the others began to disperse to do his bidding, he touched Chumani’s arm. “Are you comfortable sitting with Elisa and Miah while I deal with Jeremiah?”
Chumani put her hand over his, squeezed. “Couldn’t keep me away,” she said quietly. Her grip was shaky. It was going to take some time for them all to settle down. A night like this made him regret not allowing alcohol on the island.
Before going to Jeremiah, he returned to Nerida. He stopped three feet away from her, watched the small chin adjust to stare at his boots again. “She’s going to be okay, but she’s going to hurt for a while. We’re going to move her back to her cell and give her blood, tend to her. She’ll need you with her. Are you willing to help?”
Her thin fingers laced and unlaced. She wasn’t brave enough to speak again, but she nodded, a quick jerk.
“Very well, then. Go and get the blankets from Kohana. You can help him spread them on Miah’s bed so she doesn’t get blood on it.”
Nerida got to her feet, slunk over to the Jeep. Mal watched as the child held out sticklike arms. Kohana met his gaze, but then gave Nerida a bundle of blankets, which the girl managed to get back into the enclosure, repeatedly gathering the bundle up so the corners wouldn’t drag the ground, though the blankets bounced against her knees. Thinking of how devoted the two girls were, how often they exchanged touch, he thought he’d let Nerida sleep in Miah’s cell tonight. Along the same line as his thoughts about William and Matthew, and after seeing what had happened here, he knew Nerida would be safe with the bigger girl, even in bloodlust. And tonight particularly, he wasn’t going to make anyone be alone.
Chumani sent him a wan smile where she knelt between the two injured females. Squaring his shoulders, pushing away the pointless yet almost overwhelming urge to take Chumani’s place, Mal turned his attention to the next matter.
He strode across the enclosure, toward Jeremiah. Leonidas was well and truly gone, the boy’s eyes staring glasslike down on Jeremiah’s bent head. Mal went to a squat, studying the two. Jeremiah was coiled inside the spread of Leonidas’s thighs, bracing himself on one with a bloodstained hand. He lifted his head when Mal appeared in the corner of his vision, though Mal was sure he’d heard his approach. Or maybe not. The boy’s expression looked distant, his mind obviously sunk deep into somewhere else.
“She’s going to be fine,” Mal said. “They both are, thanks to you. Thanks to you all.”
Jeremiah’s expression didn’t change, but Mal didn’t think that was because the boy didn’t hear him. Elisa’s words were replaying in his mind, and he was quite certain Jeremiah already knew she was going to be all right. How that was possible, he didn’t know, but he wouldn’t address that now, and not just because the fledgling was in no shape to answer pointed questions. Mal didn’t trust himself to keep a handle on what was simmering in his own mind.
The possessiveness he was feeling was all animal instinct, but he of all people knew the dangers of vampire and human alike denying their animalistic natures. Mal’s vampire nature was seething, wanting to take something apart. He was still young enough, in vampire terms, to have to deal with the ragged edge of his own bloodlust in an environment saturated with this kind of violence. And this young vampire had removed the one justified outlet to deal with that, while inadvertently moving himself into the bull’s-eye range.
“You . . . kill us?” The question was asked in a dull mutter, as if the words had no real meaning or interest to the boy.
“Not today,” Mal said. Reaching out, he closed his hand over the boy’s wrist, attached to the hand that was mired in Leonidas’s chest with the stake. “Let go, boy. It’s all right. He’s gone.”
Jeremiah blinked. In the end, Mal had to loosen his fingers, staining his own with the clotting and cooling blood. “Go back to your cell; shut the gate. The staff are going to come in and treat Miah. We’ll get Elisa back to the house and tend her there. I’ll leave Chumani and Tokala here to watch over you all tonight. In case you need anything.”
Jeremiah stared at his bloodied hand, limp in Mal’s grip. Slowly, he drew it away, cradled it as if it were something fragile, his eyes shifting to the shaft of wood still protruding from the dead fledgling. Rising slowly, he swayed. Mal rose as well, ready to brace him, but Jeremiah stepped back, making it clear touch wasn’t welcome. His legs steadied. Though the boy was quite a bit shorter, when he lifted his gaze to Mal’s, it felt as if the power of the pain he carried had them meeting eye to eye.
“We . . . won’t need anything,” Jeremiah said, slowly enough to make it distinct. “We’ll watch over ourselves.”
23
SHE swam in her dreams, languid, too heavy to surface into the world of the living. If she was dead, this was not too bad, because she floated past things she liked. The wildflowers blooming after the wet. The way the land around the station went on and on, like God’s promise of eternity. Mal’s hair, rippling over his bare shoulders as he squatted in nothing more than jeans, watching his cats with patient eyes. Long, bronze fingers pressed into the grass, connecting him to the earth. When they touched her, they connected her to him, to the earth, to everything.
Willis had her in his arms and they were dancing at one of the picnic races. Turning on a wooden floor covered with sawdust, with the music twirling with them. Then Mal was there and she was between them both, past and present, with no idea of her future. But Willis’s hands slipped away, and there was only Mal’s touch, a mixture of pain and loss, pleasure and hope. They knotted together in her heart, making it hurt.
It was the first sign she was coming back to reality. She wanted to fight it, but she didn’t fight duty. A servant rose at dawn’s first light—or, in a vampire’s household, at three in the afternoon—making sure everything was in order. There were the children . . . fledglings, to check on. But Leonidas was gone. Now there were only five.
Instead of floating, now she appeared to be on murky ground. When her toes curled, it felt like warm sand on the beach, or the grass of a lushly manicured lawn. The Collins family had such a lawn. Once, she’d snuck out at night and run through it barefoot, terrified of getting caught, but unable to resist. She was there now, standing in darkness, her feet in that grass, bugs chirping. Then it faded away and she was looking far down a beach. A distant figure appeared, a boy close to becoming a man, with brown hair and a gangly stride. He wore trousers with suspenders and no shirt, carrying his fishing gear and a healthy brace of fish. When he got close enough to her, he stopped, looked toward her with eyes as green as the grass on which she stood.
“My name was John,” Leonidas told her. “I’d forgotten, till now.” Then, with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile, he turned and kept walking down the beach, until he disappeared into a fog rolling in off the crashing waves, a storm building.
That storm was in her, because she surfaced with tears on her face, sobs making her chest ache with a thousand shards of pain. Wide hands were spread over a bandage that had been wrapped around her rib cage, giving her support. “It’s okay,” Mal murmured in that rumble of calm she needed with all her heart. “It’s all right, Elisa. I’m here. It’s just a dream.”
Oh, I hope not. I hope it’s real. May it be the most real thing ever . . .
She thought he heard her, because his brow lifted. She saw it as she opened her eyes and focused on the world around her, her present world.
She was in her bedroom, and it was perhaps an hour until dawn, because the sky had that dark gray tinge. His hip pressed near hers, he sat on the edge of her bed, his knee crooked up on the mattress. He should be in his room, or at least farther back into the recesses of the house, because the first rays of dawn would stream in through that open window.
“Do you ever stop trying to take care of everyone and everything, Irish flower?”
“No more than you do,” she said with a scratchy-sounding voice.
He looked surprised at that; then his lips twitched. There were other, worrisome things to consider, to ask, but at this second she wasn’t up to it. She would give herself one minute to study the sculpted bones of his native warrior’s face, the serious set of his mouth, the firm line of his jaw. His hair was getting longer, suggesting he hadn’t time to cut it, and he had it back in a short braid. She’d thought about doing that, slipping off the bench one night during those casual meals with the staff to brush and braid it for him. She’d weave in ribbons and feathers so he’d look like a warrior in truth. She’d thought of it when she found a few feathers on one of her outings, probably from a caracal’s kill, and put them in a cup on her dresser.
He cocked his head. “Perhaps I should let you do that. It’s an aggravation to me to do it for myself, but I might like the touch of your hands.” He covered one now, surrounding it with warmth and strength, and that was all it took. The tears overflowed, and the shaking swept through her very bones. She wanted to be held, but she hurt so much that her sobs made her rib cage feel like it was going to shatter and explode.
Bracketing one arm on the outside of her body, he cupped her face. He didn’t try to move her, but he came all the way down until his forehead was pressed to hers, like at the enclosure. She gripped him, held on for dear life as the terror and memory of what had nearly happened, and what had happened, took hold. His hands closed over her rib cage again, and he kissed her tearstained cheeks, her nose, her forehead, then trailed down to brush her mouth, her chin. His kisses fell on her throat, her collarbone, the upper rise of her breasts, the lower curve, just above where his thumbs pressed into the crease. It was a peculiar feeling, her grief wrapped in those featherlike touches of his mouth that seemed to draw away some of the pain.