Bloodchild (8 page)

Why she needed courage to tell him
what she intended to do, however, was harder to explain.

A small part of her would have
liked to accompany Brad into the woods, if only not to be left alone with
Aedan. However, she still couldn’t look at the woods without a faint sense of
alarm ringing through her, the vague awareness that the woods were dangerous
and someone—her mother?—would be upset if she went in.

Or maybe it was that familiar
dream coloring her thoughts; in that dream, she fled from whatever was pursuing
her through woods just like those. She’d started to wonder if they might be
more than similar woods: if they might actually be those exact woods, and if
the dream might be a memory. If it was, she still had no idea who the man was
that she always ran to for safety.

She ended her channeling with
bursts of miniature fireworks that shimmered over the water. She took a deep
breath, steeling herself, but before she could say a word, Aedan spoke first.

“Dame Vivien? May I talk to you
about something?”

She turned a curious look to him,
and he continued.

“With your permission, I want to
find more guards for you. You were always going to need more bodyguards, but
now that both Bradan and I are vampires, we need to find someone who can
protect you in the sun.”

That was not anything she’d
expected to hear, nor was it anything she wanted, not after what had happened
with the last person who had come to work in the castle. She’d agreed to keep
Loree as her handmaid despite her better judgment, and in the end Loree had
almost killed Brad. Or had she really killed him? He was still there, but he
wasn’t the same anymore, was he?

Something of her thoughts must
have shown on her face because she didn’t have to say a word before Aedan said,
“I know you are reluctant, and I understand why. So am I, if I must tell the
truth. But it’s not about what I want. It’s about keeping you safe. And if you
can channel to make sure the new guard is loyal and truthful, the way you did
earlier, we can both be reassured.”

“My little lie-detector trick
didn’t end well this morning,” she reminded him. “What if I burn myself out?”

“Now that you know it can happen,
you can learn to control the flow better,” he said. “And it’ll be good
practice, too.”

She mulled it over for a few
seconds, but the idea still held no appeal.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “And
anyway, it’ll only be a few days before the first duel. Who would want to join
my cause before that? Not even the High Families want to be associated with me
right now.”

He’d picked up a small rock as she
talked, and now he threw it into the water. A loud plop was followed by wave
after wave of ripples.

“The High Families are one thing,”
Aedan said quietly. “Heads of families need to think of their people, and
Rhuinn keeps a close eye on them. Guards, cooks, gardeners… Rhuinn cares little
for those. Fear of him won’t keep potential guards away, I think. May I have
your permission to look for one?”

She still didn’t like the idea,
but by now she’d learned something about Aedan. In the end, he’d do what he
thought was best, regardless of what she wanted. He’d asked for her permission,
but he didn’t need it to act. Maybe if she granted it, she’d set a good
precedent so that he’d keep asking for her opinion. And maybe it’d make her own
request go down that much easier.

“Very well,” she said, trying to
inject confidence and strength into her voice, the way she had whenever she had
talked to the people she’d hoped to make her allies. “You can try to find
someone, but I want the right to reject them if I don’t like them. Also, I want
to spend some time alone with Brad. And that’s not up for—”

“No. My apologies, Dame Vivien.
You may reject whatever guard I ask you to consider. But I cannot allow Bradan
to be alone with you. It’s too much of a risk.”

“A risk?” she repeated, her voice
rising. She stood, incensed, and looked down at Aedan as he sat at her feet.
“He’d never hurt me. He loves me. Do you even understand the meaning of that
word?”

He blinked up at her twice, his
eyes gleaming with a trace of blue amid the silver, then stood. His voice
remained quiet, but his eyes betrayed his anger.

“What I understand is what Bradan
has become. I understand it quite well. Just like I understand his hunger. I’m
afraid you don’t. You can’t understand that.”

Standing at her full height, she
crossed her arms and raised her chin.

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

He inclined his head.

“That’s true. But I can forbid
Bradan to seek you on his own. And I will.”

She was about to accuse him of
using Brad’s vampirism as an excuse. From the start, he’d been against her
relationship with Brad. But just then, quiet rustling sounds drew her gaze to
the woods, and she watched Brad appear at the edge. She smiled instinctively
when she first saw him, but as he came closer, something tightened inside her
chest.

It was Brad who was coming to her,
the shy, quiet man she’d had a crush on for months before she’d had the chance
to truly know who he was and fall in love with him. But for the first time, she
could also see that it was… someone else, too. There was a spot of blood at the
corner of his lips, but what shook her was the glint in his eyes. It wasn’t the
silver gleam she was growing used to, or at least not entirely. Instead, it was
how cold that glint was, how… alien.

He blinked when he reached her,
and the glint disappeared when he smiled at her and asked if she was ready to
go home. She nodded, not trusting herself to say a word, and took his arm. They
walked back to the castle, Aedan following a step behind.

Vivien didn’t ask to be alone with
him again and went to bed on her own, wondering if Aedan’s words were getting
to her or if she’d truly seen something in Brad that hadn’t been there before.
Wondering if she was afraid of her own boyfriend when he’d done nothing to
deserve her fear.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Apologies

Bradan couldn’t sleep.

He’d barely done anything today,
and his run with Vivien and Aedan had not been enough to tire him. He felt full
of energy, ready to take on the world for Vivien, ready to do anything.
Anything but sleep as Aedan had suggested.

Aedan, of course, was not in his
own bed, and Bradan had no trouble figuring out where he was: guarding Vivien’s
door, and never mind that she was safe, having put Elver through the same
lie-detection process she’d used on Doril. With the shields set over the
castle, no one could get in unnoticed.

The thought of the shields struck
him like an unexpected blow. He wouldn’t be able to maintain them anymore. He’d
have to show Vivien—no, not show, he couldn’t show her anything. He’d have to
explain to her how to channel at the shields every so often to renew and
reinforce them. Something else to rest on her shoulders; how much more could
she take before she cracked? He hoped he never had to find out.

Giving up on trying to rest, he
slipped out of bed and back into his clothes. A few days ago, he’d have
channeled a ball of light to guide him through the dark corridors of the
palace. Now, he didn’t even notice the darkness.

“You should be sleeping,” Aedan
said as soon as Bradan reached Vivien’s hallway. “Keeping human hours helps.”

Crossing his arms, Bradan leaned back
against the wall next to his brother.

“How does it help?” he asked. “You
barely get any sleep at all.”

A sliver of annoyance rose through
the bond, but Aedan silenced it right away, and there was nothing in his words
to suggest he was annoyed. He’d been doing that a lot, Bradan had noticed,
silencing whatever he felt rather than giving it voice. Bradan wondered whether
the bond was more sensitive now, allowing him to pick up things he’d never
noticed before, or if it was a new habit of Aedan’s.

If it was something new, why had
he suddenly decided to try to hide so much of what he felt? Bradan couldn’t
fathom a reason for it. And if it was something he’d always done, the question
remained the same: why would he want to hide so much from Bradan?

“I don’t need much sleep anymore,”
Aedan said. “The older a vampire gets, the less sleep he needs. But you, you’ve
just been turned. You need as much sleep as you did as a human. Sleeping as
they do is one way you’ll be less likely to see them as prey.”

It sounded odd, more like wishful
thinking than anything real, and Bradan couldn’t quite suppress a skeptical
snort.

Aedan sighed.

“Try to think of how many years
I’ve had to learn that to be true,” he chided.

There it was again. After less
than two days, Bradan was fast becoming familiar with Aedan’s ‘I was a vampire
long before you and I know what I’m talking about’ routine. He couldn’t
begrudge it to Aedan; after all, it was true. If anything, he sometimes felt
like Aedan should have been more forceful in his demands. “Don’t make me order
you,” he’d told Bradan just yesterday, but such an order would have felt more
natural than his pointed warnings.

“I tried to sleep,” Bradan said,
ignoring the strange path his thoughts were taking. “I can’t. My mind won’t
shut down and—”

He stopped himself rather than
admit he couldn’t stop thinking about blood. About Vivien’s blood, in
particular. He wasn’t hungry, not exactly; he’d had quite enough to eat
earlier. But the need was there anyway, pulsing through him.

Had Aedan offered him his wrist
right then, Bradan would have declined. Not easily, because for some reason
blood taken from his brother felt a hundred times more satisfying than blood
from the animals he hunted in the woods, but he would have declined
nonetheless, because Aedan needed to remain strong just as much as Bradan did.
But if Vivien had done the same… If she’d come to him, bared her throat, drawn
him to her…

He shook off the thought along
with the images dancing in his head. Only when he felt Aedan’s sharp gaze on
him did he realize that the bond might have carried some of that. Wincing, he
braced himself and met Aedan’s eyes, ready to apologize and swear he’d never
act on those daydreams; denying they even happened would have been useless.
Aedan, however, did not berate him. He didn’t even mention what he might have
felt through the bond. If anything, he looked… understanding. After his
warnings, it seemed odd.

“Come on,” he said, pushing away
from the wall. “You need to learn to fight with knives. We might as well start
now since you won’t sleep. And it might help you focus, too.”

A question was on Bradan’s lips,
but he kept it quiet. No, he wouldn’t ask if it was okay to leave Vivien’s door
unguarded. They both knew it was, and teasing Aedan about it would only bring
up the question of why he did it. Bradan had his theories, but he didn’t want
to go down that path. Either Aedan was guarding her from Bradan or he wasn’t
guarding her at all and merely wanted to be close to her; Bradan wasn’t sure
which would be harder for him to accept.

They walked to the first floor in
silence, then to the armory. There, they retrieved plain knives rather than the
silver ones vampires fought with. Wounds inflicted by a silver blade carried
danger for vampires in a way that regular steel didn’t, and practicing with
silver knives would have been foolish. Bouncing the two knives into the palms
of his hands, Bradan started for the door off the armory that led into the
small courtyard where they usually sparred, but Aedan stopped him.

“Let’s go out onto the grounds,”
he said. “We’ll have more room. Besides, if we practice in the courtyard, we
might wake our dame, and she needs her sleep.”

Bradan nodded, annoyed he hadn’t
thought of that first. The courtyard was beneath Vivien’s window, and in the
past he’d caught glimpses of her watching them while they sparred. He followed
Aedan out to the back of the castle, and if the smells and sounds of the night
still felt too intense, even overwhelming, he tried not to let it touch him.
This, too, was practice.

“All right,” Aedan said, facing
him. “Let me see how you hold your knives.”

Bradan showed him. Aedan was not
impressed, and for a good fifteen minutes he made Bradan practice drawing the
knives from sheaths fastened to his thigh and belt, ensuring that Bradan’s grip
was perfect every time he took a hilt in hand. It was not what Bradan had
expected in guise of practice. Neither was what came after.

“You have to forget everything you
know about fighting with a sword,” Aedan said when they finally got to the core
of things. “If you try to fight with a knife the same way you fought with a
sword, you will lose. It’s as simple as that.”

What was not simple, however, was
to set aside a lifetime of habits.

They started with basic gestures,
practiced side by side, first with one hand, then both. It felt like hours
before Aedan decided that Bradan was ready for more than that, and by then
Bradan was bored enough to want to show off, or maybe just show his brother
that he wasn’t as inept as Aedan seemed to think.

They started to spar. In fifteen
seconds, Aedan disarmed him of both his weapons. Stepping back, he motioned for
Bradan to pick up the knives and, in a cool voice, simply said, “Again.”

As much as he tried to control his
emotions, Bradan couldn’t stop mixed anger and embarrassment from filtering
through the bond, but Aedan commented on neither. He took position again and
waited for Bradan to attack first.

The disarming, this time, took
about twenty seconds, and Bradan ended up with one knee to the ground.

“And this is why you need to
forget sword fighting,” Aedan said, still without inflection. “Again.”

The next three or four hours were,
to Bradan, less than pleasant as he was beaten, time after time, without ever
managing to take so much as one of Aedan’s knives. The lesson was humbling, and
from anyone other than Aedan it would even have been humiliating. Still, as
time passed, Bradan realized that something was different.

They’d trained together before,
and more than once Aedan had been thrust into the position of teacher, but
tonight his advice and suggestions all sounded like commands. It should have
been irritating, should have grated Bradan’s nerves.

Bradan had once been proud to be
the oldest of the two of them if only by minutes, and he had seen it as his
right to lead all games. Watching Aedan grow older faster than he did after
Bradan had gone to the Otherworld had been odd to say the least, and little by
little he’d started to defer to Aedan because he knew, had seen and experienced
more—had lived more. Bradan hadn’t liked it, but he hadn’t allowed his pride to
get in the way.

This was different. It felt normal
to heed Aedan’s commands, and sometimes Bradan found himself moving before he
was even aware of it. It was as though both his body and mind were expecting,
waiting for orders from his brother, and ready to obey.

Orders from his brother… or from his
Maker?

When Bradan was too tired to go
on, he didn’t need to speak; the bond conveyed his exhaustion. Aedan sat down
in the grass after sheathing both his knives. Bradan simply dropped his at his
side as he lay down on his back, panting. He supposed at some point he’d lose
the habit of breathing too hard, but right now his mind insisted he needed air
even when his body couldn’t have cared less.

“I’m sorry,” Aedan said after
enough time had passed that Bradan had stopped breathing again. The words rose
no louder than a whisper, but Bradan heard them as clearly as a shout.

“Sorry?” he repeated, propping
himself up on his elbows so he’d be able to see Aedan’s face. “Sorry about
what?”

Aedan did not meet his gaze,
focusing instead on the blade of grass he was twirling between his fingers.

“I was scared,” he said, still as
quietly. “Terrified. I’ve watched people die, some at my hands and some despite
my efforts to save them. It never occurred to me before that I could do
something about it, not until it was you dying in front of me. This is not how
it’s supposed to work. Humans are supposed to ask, and vampires can agree or
refuse, but they can’t suggest it first, let alone do it without consent. All I
can say is that I was just too afraid to lose you, and I stopped thinking. Can
you forgive me?”

It took Bradan a long time to
understand what this was about, and even then he could barely understand what
Aedan was asking from him.

“You saved me,” he said, shaking
his head in incomprehension. “I would have died. You gave me time. More time
with Vivien and with you. I can keep helping. I can hold on to the promise we
made. Why would you ask forgiveness for that? If anything, I should be thanking
you.”

A pang of bitterness flashed
through the bond, echoed by a twisted smile on Aedan’s lips when he looked up.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “You’ve
just awakened. You don’t know yet all the ways your life has changed. You
really shouldn’t thank me.”

Before Bradan could reply, Aedan
stood, pulling his knives from their sheaths.

“Ready for another round?” he
asked, his voice strong and steady again.

Never, in all the years since he
had become a vampire, had Aedan even hinted that he was less than satisfied
with his existence. What was he implying now? Was it about the hunger? Was it
about more than that?

Bradan felt cold, and it had
nothing to do with the cool night air or the coming rain he could taste on the
wind.