Terra's Victory (Destiny's Trinities Book 7) (26 page)

Baralathor considered. “It can be discussed later. It is clear, though, that your place among us no longer exists.”

“It hasn’t been there for a long time, father,” Lindal said gently. He rested his hand on Sera’s shoulder. “For either of us.”

“I can see that now.” Baralathor gave a sour smile. “Finally.” He stirred. “I must return.”

“What will you do now?” Sera asked.

He sighed. “I must put off my reunion with your mother. A new candidate must be found to replace your brother. I fear that finding someone with Lindal’s talents will be difficult.”

Lindal pushed away the guilt that tried to settle around him. “Training will make up for any lack. You would be surprised what our kind can adapt to, when it is needed.”

Sera smiled. She had gone through more than her share of change in the last few months.

“I suspect we will all have to do some adapting, now,” Baralathor said. “I will bid you farewell.”

“For now,” Lindal amended.

Baralathor nodded. “Yes. For now.” He cupped Sera’s cheek for a moment. “Take care.”

Then he was gone.

Sera looked up at Lindal. “Let’s go home.”

“Where is that?” Lindal asked seriously.

“Where the others are, Dumbo.” She nudged him in the ribs.

Yes
.

They jumped.

* * * * *

When Beth returned to the clearing, she realized that Aria and her people at been at work again. The ambient temperature in the clearing was that of a warm, sunny day. So was the light.

The trinities were scattered across the clearing, moving among the bodies, hugging each other and talking in loud voices. Their jubilation was raw and overwhelming.

Zack came over to her and hugged her, making Beth’s ribs creak. She didn’t mind at all.

He peppered her face with kisses, holding her steady while he did it.

“My turn, son of night.” Zack was pulled away from her.

Beth drew in a sharp breath as Lindal swept her up into his arms, lifting her off her feet. “You came back!”

“I was tossed out. I’m tainted goods.” He kissed her, taking his time with it.

Zack plucked her out of his arms. “Stop hogging him,” he told her, then turned and kissed Lindal himself.

Beth drew in a breath, tears forming and making her vision blur.

“Beer for the foodies!” someone shouted and a cheer went up. Rhys was standing on one of the higher stumps, a crate of beer in each hand.

“Where is the whiskey? Have you no taste?” Remmy shouted back, stirring laughter.

“Anything you want, we’ll get it,” Beth called.

“Yeah, even if it makes him sick to the stomach,” Diego added.

“As only you would know,” Blake said, slapping Diego’s shoulder.

The party started as simply as that. The jumpers in each trinity took carriers with them and brought back food and booze for those who could eat, along with blood for the vampires, which the elementals warmed to human hot for them.

Someone set up a DJ center and speakers were strung. Even when it began to rain outside the edges of the clearing, the bright sun continued to shine on everyone.

A champagne glass was thrust into Beth’s hand and she drank a little of it each time someone suggested a toast. There were lots of toasts. Lots of cheering and clapping.

Morning came and went and the forest grew brighter around them. The overcast day couldn’t compete with the sunlight inside the clearing and no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave.

There was a lot of kissing and hugging and more intimate cuddling going on around the edges of the clearing, too.

It was shortly after dawn when Beth noticed Declan and Zoe and Sera moving through the party, stopping to check the bodies of the vampeen. Declan rested his fingers against the neck of one as Beth approached him, feeling for a pulse.

“So, now you have pulled off the victory of the century, how do you feel?” The question came from her left. Beth looked up. Aithan was sitting on the edge of the stump, there. Cora was lying on her back next to him, her eyes closed. She looked as if she was sun-tanning, although she was fully clothed.

Aithan raised his brow at her.

Beth answered honestly. “I thought I would feel…different. It was such a massive goal, I thought that achieving it would change things. Change me.”

“Yet you feel just the same,” he said. “Sore feet, scratches, in need of a shower and a month of sleep. No magical transformation.”

Beth grinned. He had nailed it exactly. “I think I could eat for a month, too.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing, feeling the same?” He asked it as if he was genuinely interested in the answer.

“I didn’t want things to change at all,” she confessed. “So it’s a very good thing indeed.”

Aithan grimaced.

“Why do you look like that?”

“Big, momentous events…most people don’t notice how it changes their lives. Not at first. The changes can be so radical they only realize in hindsight, sometimes years later, just how much different they are now.”

“Is that what is going to happen to all of us now?” Beth asked, her heart thumping hard. “We’ll all go on as we were yesterday for a while, then…what? We drift apart, away from each other?”

Aithan pushed himself off the stump and landed just in front of her. “I think that’s going to be up to each of us to decide. I’ve been sitting up there, watching everyone. And you know what? I think a lot of us will fight to stay just as we are, no matter how the lack of a war and a common enemy makes things change around us.”

“We could lose our powers, our strength.”

Aithan smiled. “I don’t think that’s what anyone cares about, in the end.” He winked and walked over to where Rhys was arguing over something with Remmy and Blake and put his arm around Rhys’ waist. Rhys reached up and dropped his arm over Aithan’s shoulders, all while talking.

Declan had moved on to another vampeen and Beth went over to him and crouched down next to him. “Checking for life, doctor?”

“Yes.” He dropped the wrist he was holding with a grimace. “Some of them didn’t come through. The tranquilizer was too powerful. The others, we’ll take back to the barn and put through the anti-toxin cycle.”

“Do you have enough of the cure to go around?” Beth asked.

“Not for everyone here. The good news is, the more vampeen we cure, the more anti-toxin we can produce, using their blood to make it.” He stood up. “The war is over. Now the reconstruction starts.”

Beth rose to her feet, too. She looked around the clearing. There were a lot of vampeen.

“Whatever you need, Declan,” she told him. “Warm bodies, or even lukewarm ones. Resources. Equipment. Just let me know. We’ll figure it out.”

Movement at the corner of her eye drew her attention. At the edge of the clearing, just inside the border of light, dryads had gathered. Some of them were bashful, hiding behind trees and peering out. Kaleh, though, was standing clear of all the trees, in full sunlight.

He pointed.

Beth looked to where he was pointing.

There was a fern emerging from the soil, sheltered in the crook of a big tree root. The fern was curled up on itself in a tight whorl. Yet Beth could see that it was responding to the sunlight and the spiral was already loosening and unfurling. Soon it would spread the delicate fronds out.

There were more of the tiny new plants, dotting what had been once barren soil. Little green sprouts were developing, everywhere she looked, all across the clearing.

“I guess they figure it’s time to move on,” Remmy said. He had come up beside her without her noticing.

“For all of us,” Beth replied.

Blake unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside. There were murmurs of sound inside the apartment that said everyone was still here. He hadn’t been gone long. It only takes a couple of hours to quit a job, after all.

His captain had been almost incapable of speech, when Blake laid the resignation letter on his blotter. Harris turned red in the face, making his pale orange lashes and brows stand out. “After nearly twenty years, you’re quitting? I don’t believe it! This is a bluff, right? You want a promotion, or more pay or something. I know it’s been tough around here for a while, but it’s been quiet for more than a week. Sit down, Harvey, let’s talk it out. No one turns their back on a decent pension without thinking it through.”

It had taken thirty hard minutes to convince Harris he was sincere and that he didn’t care about the pension.

Harris had grown churlish after that, walking Blake through the red tape, tossing the right forms at him, taking his service revolver and his badge, shoving them in his top drawer and slamming it shut.

All the way home, Blake kept reminding himself that he wasn’t walking
away
from a career. He was heading into a completely different life.

Eve bounced into the room, her gray eyes bright. She had all the energy of any eight year old and far, far more wisdom.

“Hiya kidlet,” Blake said and hugged her. “How was school?” This was only her second day of formal education.

“Momma Mia says I am brainy.” Eve grinned. “I did math today and geography.”

The six of them—Diego, Sera, Alex, Mia, Wyatt and he—had decided that putting Eve into the standard education system might be too stressful. She had adjusted to normal life extraordinarily well. Only, the challenges of dealing with other kids, who could be thoughtless and rough, might pressure her into behaviors and responses that would draw attention to her odd background. Home schooling was the only answer and Mia had offered to provide that.

“I’m going to be home with this spud, anyway,” she had said, rubbing her distended belly. “Sera can go study medicine with Declan and have the career for both of us.”

Blake crouched down to look at Eve at her level. “How are the dreams now?” he asked.

Eve’s face drained of happiness. She shook her head.

Blake sighed. “You’re going to keep having them for a while, honey. They might even pop into your head while you’re awake. It will feel like you’re right back there.”

“Even though I can’t remember,” Eve finished, “only I have to tell myself they’re just memories and they can’t hurt me.”

“That’s right. Then you can come and find me and I’ll help you make them go away.”

“Because you know what they’re like.”

“I do,” he agreed gravely and stood up and picked up her hand. “Where’s everyone?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Let’s go and see them.”

They went into the little separate kitchen. Everyone
was
there. With the table in the corner, it was a squeeze for six adults and a skinny eight year old.

Diego squeezed Blake’s shoulder. “All done?”

“I am no longer a cop,” Blake announced to the room. “I didn’t think I would have to talk so hard to convince them I was serious.”

“Any regrets?” Wyatt asked, looking up from the map he was studying.

“None,” Blake said flatly. “That cop, that guy, was a different person.”

Sera bounced up and hugged him. “We found a house!”

“Really?” Blake was surprised. “Something that can take all six of us and kids, that doesn’t cost over a million?”

“It’s in Walden,” Alex said.

“That’s a long way from Manhattan,” Blake pointed out.

“It’s only ninety minutes.”

“It’s a big old Victorian, with four floors, two master suites and a yard,” Sera said. “It’s just perfect!”

“What are the good people of Walden going to think when a commune sets up next door to them?” Blake asked.

“Guess we’ll find out,” Diego said.

Blake sighed. “I guess, if Sera and Mia can still teleport, it doesn’t matter a damn where we are, does it? Walden sounds like somewhere the kids can run wild.”

Mia smiled. “Not
that
wild.”

“Walden is a good base for us to work from, too,” Wyatt said, tapping the map he was studying. “We can keep an eye on the cavern in Saratoga and work the entire eastern seaboard.”

“Hunters, Incorporated,” Diego declared.

“Watch out, Mia really will incorporate us if you’re not careful.”

“I was thinking it might be a smart move, actually,” Mia said. “We’ll have to think up some sort of bland, non-descriptive name for it and be really vague about what we do, but it will offset taxes…”

Wyatt groaned and Diego rolled his eyes.

Alex held up a hand. “She has a point. The tax brackets we could find ourselves in would be crippling and now we have a big house to run….”

Blake let the conversation roll over him, not quite listening to the laughter and chatter. Instead, he tapped into himself, taking a quick stock of his feelings. For the last week, nothing had changed. The little well of happiness showed no signs of drying up. He still loved Diego. He still loved Sera. Miraculously, they still loved him.

Diego tapped his shoulder. “Where did you go?” he demanded. “Your eyes glazed over.”

“Nowhere,” Blake said. “I was right here, telling myself it’s still all true.”

Diego’s expression softened. “Damn right,” he said. He shifted his lean against the sink, until his shoulder pressed against Blake’s. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“Except to Walden,” Blake added.

* * * * *

Rhys put the phone down and stared at it, expecting that at any second it would explode, or someone would shout, “Fooled ya!”

Aithan, sitting in the one easy chair in the room, had been watching him carefully throughout the call. Now he leaned forward, his hands clamped together. “You turned white,” he said.

“That was Mayor Williams,” Rhys said slowly. “Michael Dobson had a heart attack. He resigned yesterday.”

The lock on the door gave the heavy thud hotel rooms the world over made when being unlocked by a card key.

Cora came in, carrying grocery bags that she put on the counter of the little kitchenette. “I heard that last bit,” she said. “Chief Dobson resigned.” She crouched down next to Rhys and took his hand. “Did Williams ask you to come back?”

Rhys nodded.

Aithan smiled. “I guess your behavior doesn’t look all that unreasonable when you stack up all the events happening around the country the last couple of weeks.”