Embrace the Power: A Paranormal Romance (The Blood Rose Series Book 9) (30 page)

Delia had booked a room for him at the Sterling Arms. After Rosamunde had returned to Ferrenden Peace, he’d flown to Sandismare with his tuxedo and shoes in a bag over his arm. A shower had followed.

The Sterling Arms was the swankiest hotel in Tannisford’s main city and the rooms had been fully booked in the skyscraper within hours of the gala announcement.

Fortunately, Sandismare had several conference level hotels so that the prominent officials from most of the towns and cities of the Nine Reams had been able to get accommodations.

The local merchants were over the moon.

Several smaller events were being held around the downtown area, but the main gala was in the premier ballroom of the Sterling Arms.

After a good hour had passed since he’d last seen Rosamunde and with his long hair secured in a silver facsimile of the Guardsman clasp, he contacted her and learned she’d made special plans of her own.

He was pleased that she wanted to have drinks with Vojalie and Davido. The latter was already at the castle and happily teleported Stone straight to Rosamunde’s private parlor.

Davido, as ugly as he was, beamed with his usual charisma and seemed like the most striking person in the room. And that was saying a lot since Vojalie’s beauty outshone most of the women of their world and Rosamunde tonight gave her some serious competition.

Her unruly red hair had been tamed into a soft fall of curls over her bare shoulders. Her olive green strapless gown showed off her beautiful creamy skin as well as a line of cleavage that had him wishing they were alone. Her violet eyes held him entranced for a long moment broken only when she turned and reached for a martini for him.

“Davido made them for us.”

He took a sip. “Gin and vodka and nicely chilled. Perfect.”

Davido smiled. “Thank you, Mastyr.”

But as the drink eased down his throat and sent the usual warmth flowing through his veins, he was struck by an undercurrent in the room.

He saw that Rosamunde’s lips were in an odd tight line and that Vojalie kept taking deep breaths. Even Davido cleared his throat a couple of times.

Stone set his martini down on the nearest table. “What’s going on?”

He watched Rosamunde grab for some air as well, which set up a racket inside his chest. He wasn’t fae, so he didn’t get hints about the future. But the tension in the room was enough to set his jaw-muscles to flexing.

Rosamunde lifted her chin. “Davido has something to tell you, something I’ve known for a long time. It’s about your birth parents. I was sworn to secrecy, but given the events of the past few nights, I felt it was time that you knew the truth.”

He stared at her for a long moment, digesting each word. He didn’t know which aspect of her statement to address first, but finally decided on her complicity. “So this is something you’ve known for how long?”

“Decades.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” He had a hollowed out feeling that she’d betrayed him yet again.

She straightened her spine a little more. “This wasn’t my secret to tell, Stone. But given our growing level of intimacy, I’ve forced the telling. As to the details, they belong to Davido.” She gestured with her hand in the old troll’s direction.

He glanced at Davido. “Am I to deduce that you’ve known who my birth parents were all this time?”

Vojalie tilted her head. “I’ve known as well, Stone. But let Davido tell you everything, then you’ll understand. And we both hope you won’t blame Rosamunde for keeping the secret. It was no small thing that we’d asked her to do so.”

He’d weigh in on that subject later, after he knew what this was all about.

For now, he shifted to face Davido, “So, tell me, old man, did you know my birth parents? If so, I’d sure as hell like to know why you kept the information from me all these centuries.” He wished his damn heart would settle down since he felt like it was about to jump from his chest.

Davido also set his martini glass on a nearby table. He then turned and sat down on a leather ottoman in front of a chair by the fireplace. Like most short trolls, his feet didn’t touch the floor.

He was half bent over, his lips turned down. Stone had the worst feeling about what he was going to hear. Davido rarely lost his confident composure.

Davido spread his hands wide. “It’s odd, after all this time, that I find it hard to begin. But, I knew your mother well. Her name was Inez and she was an elegant, black-haired, green-eyed woman, the most beautiful vampire I’d ever beheld and you are very much in her mold. She was loving and had the sweetest temperament.

“When she became pregnant, I’d never seen a woman so devoted to a child before it was ever born. She talked to you all the time and rarely had her hands away from her swollen belly. But, for reasons I’ll never understand, she didn’t survive your birth. She had a rare, untreatable condition in our world.” He lifted shimmering blue eyes. “These things you need to know, how much you were loved.”

The ridges of Davido’s forehead were in tense tight rolls. Tears trickled down his cheeks. “And there’s no other way to tell you the rest, except that I’m your father.”

Stone had heard about the phenomenon of ‘spinning rooms’, but until this moment he’d never experienced one before. He felt Rosamunde slam into him and grab him around the waist. He fell backwards with her onto her sofa. He tried to right himself, but couldn’t. The room shifted about like it was moving on heavy seas.

He covered his face with his hands and wondered who was firing a gun in the room then realized it was his heart beating against his eardrums.

Davido the Wise was his father?

What. The. Fuck.

He’d always wanted to know where he’d come from, who his birth parents were, why they’d given him up. These were natural questions. But knowing that Davido was his father, whom he’d always considered to be an excellent friend and mentor, made no sense.

When he could open his eyes and all the objects in the room finally remained in place, he realized he was leaning hard against Rosamunde’s arm, keeping her pinned to the back of the couch.

“I’m sorry. I must be hurting you.” He moved so that she could slide out from under him. Her dress was slightly askew and she had to tug the bodice back in place.

He shifted to sit forward on the couch which put him directly opposite Davido and a little more eye-to-eye. “So I’m vampire and troll, then?”

“Yes. But you’re something else as well. You’re part elf.”

“Elf?”

“Yes. It’s not generally known that I’m both elf and troll.”

Rosamunde interjected. “I didn’t know that. I always thought you were pure troll.”

He shifted his gaze toward her, his lips curving slightly. “Mostly, I am.”

Stone knew something else was in play here and he wanted the whole picture. “Then all your children are elven.”

“Yes. But not an elf like you, Stone. And that’s the rub, that’s why after Inez died, and I saw what you were, I gave you to a wonderful troll family to be raised.”

Vojalie took a step forward, drawing Stone’s attention to her. “You were the reason Davido and I met and the reason I persuaded him to find adoptive parents for you.”

“You talked him into giving me up?”

“Let me explain. Please. Will you permit me to do that?”

He knew and trusted Vojalie, but she’d all but stated she was the reason he hadn’t grown up knowing his birth father. Anger swelled as it always did. He was too quick-tempered, so for once he worked at tamping it all down. “Yes. Please go on.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Stone, I’d had a horrific vision of you and of Davido, that if you’d stayed with him when you were born, you would both have been slain early in your life. You wouldn’t have made it through your childhood.”

“Why?” But even as he asked the question, the pieces began fitting together. Kaden came sharply to mind and how familiar he’d been with Vojalie to the point Stone had told him to back off. Kaden. The elf-lord. Davido. Part elf. “Holy fuck.”

Davido inclined his head. “You never lacked for intelligence.”

A long string of invectives left Stone’s mouth. “Sweet Goddess, this can’t be happening.”

Rosamunde shook her head. “What am I missing?”

But Davido didn’t answer her. Instead, he kept staring at Stone.

Stone grimaced. “Prove to me right now that everything I’m thinking is true. Show me. Now, old man. Or by the Goddess, I’ll pick you up and throw you against the wall.” He wanted no mistakes in understanding, not tonight. And he needed ‘his father’ to know how serious he was.

He wanted the whole truth.

Davido slid off the chair and stood upright. As he’d seen Rosamunde transform into Aralynn, a vibration ran through the room and Davido emerged as Kaden. He even wore a tuxedo that fit his large frame.

More invectives followed coupled with a kind of pacing across Rosamunde’s fairly small parlor that did not give him enough space. He shoved his hands through his hair which dislodged the silver clasp.

An elf-lord.

Davido, his birth father, was an elf-lord, or as near to it as he could be. Stone wasn’t sure of the difference. Maybe it was about capacity.

He moved to stand in front of Rosamunde again, his anger surging. She needed to know he didn’t approve of her part in this at all.

But she rose to her feet as well, pressed her lips together for a moment then narrowed her eyes. She shoved a finger into his chest. “I swear to the Goddess that if you blame me for this, I’ll belt you one, Stone. I swear it! This was your father’s secret. Not mine! And I really didn’t know about Kaden or the whole elf-lord thing. That’s all new to me as well.”

Her cheeks were bright red and for a moment her anger sidetracked him. He kind of liked this side of the very controlled Queen of Ferrenden Peace.

But the other reality, all the elf-lord shit, grabbed him by the nuts again. He whirled on Davido or Kaden or whoever the hell he was. He even saw some resemblance though not much.

Kaden continued. “Yes, you take after Inez. I loved your mother so much and you were all that I had left of her. It’s so rare for any of our kind to perish that I couldn’t believe she’d died giving birth to you.”

Stone watched tears form in Kaden’s eyes. “I didn’t want to give you up and if Vojalie’s vision hadn’t been so grave, I wouldn’t have. But Vojalie talked me through it. She even helped me choose the family.”

Stone glanced at Vojalie. He wanted to hate her for separating him from his birth father, but he knew the woman’s power and he knew her heart. “So this vision was bad?”

“I wept for days, it was so bad. I’d never met Davido before and though I knew of him, I’d had no idea until this vision that he was an elf-lord.”

Stone shifted his gaze back to Kaden abruptly. “Why are you still alive? I thought they killed off the last of the elf-lords thousands of years ago.”

Kaden’s expression grew solemn. “I assassinated the very last one myself.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I’m not a true elf-lord. I never gave myself fully to the power as the others did, though I managed to sustain the ruse. Becoming an elf-lord, in other words embracing the power fully, is always a decision and I chose against it.”

Vojalie moved close to Kaden and took his hand. It was so hard to think that this ugly troll was probably one of the handsomest elves Stone had ever seen. Kaden swallowed hard and Vojalie covered their joined hands with her free one.

Vojalie met Stone’s gaze once more. “Davido led the resistance movement against the elf-lords, even though as Kaden he was part of their number. He was basically a spy and helped isolate each of the elf-lords one at a time until there were only two left.”

“I had to kill the last one,” Kaden said. “By then, he knew what I’d done. After that, I disappeared for a long time, hundreds of years until the elf-lords fell into historical renderings and eventually mythology.

“Even then, I only transformed into Kaden when I knew I was alone and safe.”

Stone felt as though he’d just been beaten into the ground. He returned to sit on the sofa. He was oddly numb. Rosamunde sat down next to him, more on the edge of the cushion, though she angled her body toward him. She settled her hand on his shoulder and nothing had felt so comforting in a long time. He felt her faeness flowing into him, a warmth and love that stunned him.

He covered her hand, much in the same way Vojalie had covered Kaden’s.

He glanced once more in Kaden’s direction, who now sat on the ottoman as he had before in his troll form. “Does the Sidhe Council know about you?”

Kaden nodded. “Vojalie insisted that I come clean. It took five years of the council’s deliberation, of interview after interview, of reading the historical documents before I was allowed to live.”

“It was that bad?” Rosamunde asked.

Vojalie had never appeared more serious. “I almost lost him. I’d found the right man for me then the Council almost took him away. It was the hardest time in my life.”

“Do you mind if I transform back?” Kaden asked.

Stone shook his head. “I guess you don’t want to be seen in your elf-lord form.”

“No. I don’t.”

In the same way he’d watched Rosamunde become Aralynn, Kaden blurred through the movement, his power changing his clothes as well, until he was once more an ancient, charismatic troll. Vojalie drew a ladder-back chair close to Davido and sat down next to him.

“You know one thing that bothered me all this time?” Vojalie asked.

Stone shrugged. “I can imagine there were a lot of things.”

“There were. But what troubled me the most was that
you
never got to know your half-brothers and sisters.”

“But you brought them round.” His gaze moved back to Davido. “That’s why you were always there, from the time I could remember.”

“Yes, my son. Exactly. But it was paramount that you never learn of my true identity.” He paused, his lips turning down. “Or of yours.”

“You mean as the son of the last living elf-lord.”

But Davido’s eyes once more filled up. “No. As an elf-lord yourself. That’s what Vojalie saw in her vision. If we’d remained in the same house, you would have one day chosen to become an elf-lord and I would have been forced to slay you.”