Twilight Fulfilled (17 page)

“Are you going to say hello or just stand there staring all night?”

Brigit nodded, unable to hold Rhiannon's steady, probing stare. “Hello, Rhiannon. It's good to see you.” And then another vampiress descended more slowly, stopped halfway and held out her arms.

Moving past her aunt, Brigit rushed up the stairs and straight into the arms of her mother.

She was vaguely aware of Lucy moving past the two of them, welcoming J.W. back into her passionate embrace, and of others gathering in the living room below. Roland. Eric and Tamara. Her own father, Edge. And more. She wondered if all the surviving vampires were gathered here, in this place.

Sniffling, Brigit lifted her head from her mother's shoulder at length.
Those
eyes she could hold. “I'm so sorry, Mom. I've messed up everything. I didn't kill him when I had the chance, and now he's taken my power from me, and I—”

“Shhhh. Let's take it one step at a time, shall we?” her mother asked softly. Turning her, keeping one arm around her shoulders, Amber Lily walked
beside her down the stairs. “You're here and you're safe, that's the most important thing.”

“And you're wrong. So woefully wrong,” Rhiannon added. She'd poured thick red liquid into a wineglass, and now she swirled it thoughtfully.

Sniffling, Brigit turned to face her. “About what?”

“About being without power. You still have it.” She wrinkled her nose. “I can smell it on you.” She crossed the room, her long dress skimming just above the floor so it almost appeared that she floated when she moved. She made her way to a Victorian-style love seat and sank onto its burgundy brocade. Pandora, Rhiannon's black panther, trotted down from upstairs and settled at her feet, lifting her head briefly in greeting, only to close her eyes again as soon as her mistress's hand stroked her jet-black fur.

“He took my ability away, Aunt Rhi. The power you're sensing in me now is…” Lifting her eyes to meet her brother's she said, “It's yours, J.W. He gave me the power he took from you.”

“Why would he do that?” J.W. asked, looking puzzled.

Brigit sighed, moving farther into the room, greeting the others with her eyes, accepting a hug from her father before settling into a comfortable chair near the darkened, cold fireplace. She rubbed her arms, shivering.

Rhiannon flung a hand toward the hearth, and
the logs stacked there burst into flames. “I can tell you why,” she said. “He must have needed healing. He's only concerned with his own well-being, after all. Isn't that the entire reason he wishes to annihilate us? To avoid what he thinks is the gods' punishment?”

“That's unfair, Aunt Rhi,” J.W. said. He turned, keeping one arm around his beautiful Lucy's waist, and they walked to the sofa to sit together, every possible part of them touching. “Given what that punishment entailed…”

“Either he suffers or we die,” Rhiannon snapped. “His choice to make, or so he believes. And the suffering was his to endure. No fault of ours.”

“But, Rhiannon—” Lucy began.

“No, she's right.” All eyes were on Brigit as she interrupted. “He gave me J.W.'s power because he was injured. Grabbed hold of an electrified fence at the DPI mansion where they were keeping him. Making him think he was an honored guest, when he was, in fact, a prisoner. And all the time reinforcing what he believed about having to destroy the race he created or return to a living death.”

Rhiannon averted her eyes. “Hell.”

“I thought I could convince him that it was a mistake. That the gods would never want him to wipe out an innocent race. I believed that his mind was damaged by all those years of living death.”

“Well, that is likely true,” Rhiannon said, staring thoughtfully into her wineglass.

“So I tried to heal it.”

Every eye turned her way, and Brigit went on. “When he asked me to heal him from the electrocution, I also placed my hands on his head, and tried to direct that healing light into his mind. And I thought it had worked. He was beginning to believe me—to change his mind about hurting any of you, ever. I know he was. Or…I thought he was. Until…”

“Until?” Rhiannon asked.

Brigit closed her eyes, but the tears burning beneath her lids seeped out anyway.

“Until he ditched her,” J.W. explained. “And we went after him and saw him with the scar-faced bastard we now know is DPI.”

“Where?” Rhiannon demanded.

“At St. Dymphna—the former mental hospital where they're holding the Chosen,” Brigit said, able to speak again at last. “But Aunt Rhi, it's a trap. The DPI has been rounding up the Chosen and taking them there for only one reason. To use them as bait to lure all of you there so they can wipe you all from existence in one final blow—an ambush attack.”

Lifting her brows, Rhiannon said, “A blow to be dealt us by Utanapishtim, no doubt.”

Brigit looked at the floor. “That was the plan.” Blinking her eyes dry, squaring her shoulders, she
lifted her head again. “But we were coming here to warn you. Utana wanted to help us rescue the Chosen. He gave me his word that he would not harm any of you.”

“And then he ran back to report to his friends at the DPI,” Rhiannon said. She drew a deep breath, then blew it out again. “Nonetheless, all is not lost. Not yet, at least.”

“How the hell is all not lost?” Brigit looked around the room at the rest of them. “They're going to do some bad-ass shit to those innocent people they've got locked up in that loony bin. Soon. Anytime now, maybe even tonight. They're gonna make them suffer enough so you'll hear their cries and go charging to the rescue. And they'll be waiting to wipe you out when you get there. How the hell is all not lost?”

Rhiannon met Brigit's eyes. “There is something you do not yet know. We have someone inside the hospital.”

Brigit frowned, looking from one face to the next, and seeing surprise in most of them. “Who?” she asked, returning her gaze to Rhiannon.

“The oldest living member of the Chosen caste. Her name is Roxanne—Roxy. She was to have been rounded up with the rest, but unlike the others, she knows what she is, what we are. She's a trusted friend and confidante of Reaper, who is one of us. And smart—for a mortal. So she eluded them,
forged some documents and managed to place herself on staff as a nurse there. She's been in touch with Reaper, but only twice. It's risky for her to try to communicate. She's being watched—they all are—her phones tapped. But we know more than we would have without her. So far, the Chosen are safe and well.”

Blinking slowly as she digested that information, Brigit felt the first glimmer of hope in her chest. “Can we ask her if she knows where Utana is?”

“If we can safely contact her, yes. Though I do not know why you still doubt that he is our enemy.”

“I know how much you want to believe in him, sis,” J.W. said. “But come on, you can't keep denying the truth.”

“Why do you want to believe in him?” Rhiannon asked. She looked at Brigit, narrowing her eyes.

At the same time Amber Lily came around the chair in which her daughter sat, crouched in front of her, looked into her eyes and searched her very soul. “Oh, no,” she whispered at length. “Oh, my poor baby.”

“It's fine. Mom, I'm fine. I just—”

“You love him,” her mother whispered.

“You love him?” Rhiannon gasped.

Brigit lowered her head, her face burning. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to happen.”

Rhiannon threw her hands in the air, then
dropped her head back against the settee. “By the wings of Isis, child, haven't I taught you better?”

Then her head came up again, and she frowned, pressing her fingers to her temples. She seemed for a long moment, as if she were listening to something only she could hear. And when her eyes refocused on the here and now, she pursed her lips.

“Reaper has heard again from his mortal pet, Roxy. Very briefly. She reports seeing a very large, foreign-looking man, who was first being shown around the hospital as if he were some VIP by Gravenham-Bail, your friend Scarface. And later, being pushed through the lower floors on a gurney, unconscious.”

Brigit shot to her feet. “I knew he wasn't on their side.”

“Don't jump to conclusions, Brigit,” J.W. warned, getting up as well, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It might be another trick.”

“How?” Brigit demanded. “Unless Scarface knew somehow about our informant and expected her to pass this information to us?”

“If that's the case, Roxy's in danger,” Lucy said softly.

“And if it's not, then Utana is,” Brigit replied. She looked at her mother, her father. “I have to go back. I have to get him out of there.”

“Brigit, I cannot allow it,” Rhiannon decreed.

Brigit looked at her beloved aunt and found it dif
ficult to believe the words she heard coming from her own lips. “You can't stop me, Aunt Rhi. I'm going. Believe me, I'm going.”

There was a long, drawn-out silence as the two women stared each other down. Finally Rhiannon nodded. “You're far too much like me for your own good, Brigit. Fine. Do what you feel you must. But before you do, you need to restore your brother's power to him. We'll need you both armed with the healing power for the battle that lies ahead. I only wish you could have your destructive power back, as well.”

Brigit blinked hard. “I…didn't even know that was possible. I can restore J.W.'s power to him? And not lose it myself?”

“I'm a high priestess of Isis, a daughter of Pharaoh,” Rhiannon, formerly Rianikki, reminded her. “There is nothing that is not possible for me.”

A
n hour later, even though she was itching to be on her way to find Utana, to discover for herself whose side he was truly on, Brigit lay upon a bed of pillows on the floor. J.W. was stretched out beside her, and there was a ring of glowing candles surrounding them, flames dancing so close she could feel their heat on her face.

Rhiannon knelt just above their heads. Her face always changed during these rites of hers. Whenever she performed magic, her expressive features turned placid, utterly tranquil. Even her eyes beamed with nothing but pure love, the kind the mystics called Namaste. Rhiannon called this expression “the eyes of spirit.” It was, she had taught Brigit, the state of being in which the very essence of God or Goddess, or both, flowed through the priestess. That gaze sought, found and drew forth the deity within any other individual participating
in the ritual. Brigit felt it, and not for the first time. J.W., though, might not have experienced this rush before. It was something too otherworldly to be described through words. It wasn't experienced through the five known senses. It was something else altogether, something that had to be lived in order to be known.

The room seemed to fade and her vision to become unfocused. Thoughts ceased their zipping in and out of her brain, and it, too, became quiet. Her breathing deepened, slowed, becoming such a rhythmic flow that she could no longer completely distinguish between inhale and exhale. It was all just like ocean waves, washing in, washing out, overlapping. Gentle, cleansing, calming.

Brigit felt herself expand to fill the entire room and then move beyond it, as her spiritual self floated free of her physical shell. Rhiannon was speaking softly, but her words were only a distant song, which made sense somehow, though the words themselves were lost. It was just a pretty noise now.

Gosh, Brigit felt so big. She wondered, as she always did, how she was ever going to squeeze all of herself back into that tiny little body. But she knew the self she was experiencing now was her true self. That part of her that was also part of…well, of
every thing
. There was no separation between her body and the pillows. Or the floor beneath them. Or the ground beneath that. Or the planet. Or
the stars. Or the entire universe. That was how big she was.

There was no separation between her and her twin brother. Or between her and Rhiannon, who always seemed so much more than Brigit felt herself to be. But not really.

Rhiannon was telling her to look for her power. She was telling J.W. to look for it, too. Brigit couldn't make out the words, just felt the energy of the instructions. So she felt around until she found her power, and she gasped when she did. It seemed bright, pulsing, a ball of energy that was not unlike a star. She imagined herself cupping it in her hands, even though part of her was sure it would burn, which was silly. She was pure spirit. She couldn't burn.

She felt as if her brother's hands were cupping the star, too, even though neither she nor J.W. had hands anymore. And then J.W. stepped away from her—at least, that was what it felt like, and she sensed, rather than saw, that he now held a beaming, pulsing star cradled within his own palms, even while she still held one in hers. The star had divided, becoming two, neither one less than the original had been.

Rhiannon's voice was calling them back into their bodies now. Guiding them.

But Brigit wasn't ready. She wanted to see Utana. And the moment she thought of him, she
did
see
him. She saw him first as a spirit as big as she felt right then, but all crammed into a tiny container—the statue where his ashes had been held, she realized. Smaller than a body. Far more constricting, because a body was able to experience life on the physical plane. To hone the focus down to this one, vivid, beautiful lifetime in order to relish every instant, every breath, every sensation, every morsel. And yet he'd been unable to experience life in that way. To exist in that way. Or in any way, besides in darkness.

She saw, then, the explosion of force when he'd been released by her own brother's extraordinary power. J.W. had revivified Utana in order to save the vampire race. But the prophecy he'd believed was telling him to do so had been misinterpreted. Utana was instead the means of their destruction.

And he'd exploded forth from oblivion in a flash that seemed as if it must have been second only to the Big Bang itself. The moment of creation.

Sensation had bombarded Utana like needles shot from a cannon and embedding themselves in every inch of his skin. Every touch had stabbed his nerve endings. Every pinprick of light had been blinding. The most subtle of smells had been overwhelming, and the slightest sound deafening, almost too painful to bear. He'd wanted only release.

“He was out of his mind,” Brigit whispered. Or
she tried to. What came out sounded like babble to her. “He didn't even know how to be human anymore.”

Rhiannon's voice called to her, the words still unintelligible but their meaning clear: come back.

Brigit tried to say “not yet,” but again only a slurred, meaningless noise emerged. But she ignored that, seeking Utana again, searching, trying to experience him as he was now.

Peaceful. Silent. Asleep, resting, dreaming…of her. She saw a vision, of the two of them entwined, not entirely in physical form. The top halves of them seemed normal—torsos, arms, heads and faces, eyes locked on one another. Lips melded in an endless kiss. But the bottom halves of their bodies were smoke and glitter, green and gold, or those were the closest colors she could name. In truth, they were colors that didn't exist in this world. Colors humans could not perceive. The colors of pure spirit.

“Come back to me, little one,” Rhiannon called. “You're floating too far away. Come back.”

Brigit felt the most incredible sensation in her heart. It seemed to be expanding, so big it might burst, as her spirit settled at last into its temporal home. She felt tiny again, but reassured that the larger part of her was still there, and that she was still a part of it. A very small part of it, but still… She opened her eyes, and the room slowly came back into focus.

“I really do love him,” she whispered. “And what's more, he loves me back.” Blinking, she whispered, “I felt it. I saw it. It's real.”

 

Utana came awake to pain, hot, searing pain, and the stench of his own burning flesh. An anguished scream was driven from the depths of his soul as his eyes flew open wide. Through a red haze of agony and wisps of smoke rising up from his own skin, his vision swam, cleared, swam again. Men were around him. Nashmun, his so-called vizier, stood only an arm's length away, holding a red-hot poker in his fist. And smiling. The scar on his face made the grin look demonic.

Utana lunged toward him, but his arms were brought up short, wrenching his shoulders as iron rang against iron. Chains. He was in chains. Upright, with shackles at his wrists and ankles, and a foot of iron chain from each embedded in the stonelike wall at his back.

“What meaning is this, Nashmun!” he demanded, his mastery of the language faltering under duress.

His vizier's smile died, and his eyes went as cold as twin granite stones. “It means you should have done what you were told to do to begin with, Utana. You were resurrected for a reason, after all. We brought you back to do a job.”

Utana's eyes narrowed. He called on his inner power, intending to send its deadly beam to this
man and end his reign of terror once and for all time. Nashmun was not worthy to live. Nothing happened.

“It's the drug. The liquid we injected into you,” Nashmun told him, gloating and pleased. “It will inhibit your powers for as long as I need them inhibited. You can't hurt me, Utana. You're helpless.”

“I am never helpless.”

“You are now. And we are not going to give you a choice. You're going to do the job we brought you back to do,” Nashmun told him again.

“Why you say you raised me?” Utana licked his lips and tried to clear his mind of the fog that kept overwhelming him. “You did not. James of the Vahmpeers, he is the one. He awakened me.” He thought of James—Brigit's beloved brother—who had raised him from ash. He had insisted Utana must save his people. Instead, Utana had tried to annihilate them. How James must hate him for that.

“James Poe, the male half of the mongrel twins, did exactly what we wanted him to do,” Nashmun said. “Don't you see, Utana? We've been planning all of this for years. Every single detail. We found the prophecy, the real one, not the bits and pieces you and your demon offspring have been playing at deciphering. We found it first. We translated it. All of it. And we saw our opportunity to rid the world of this unnatural, demonic plague once and for all. All it took was a little editing, a little chip
ping away of those clay tablets. A character here, a sentence there. The vampires read that prophecy exactly the way we wanted them to. James brought you back because we made him think that's what he was supposed to do.”

Brigit had suspected as much, hadn't she? And James's beautiful mate, the genius Lucy. Truly the women had been far wiser about all of this than the men had been. The men should have left it all to them to begin with.

As the thought of Brigit came into Utana's mind, she filled it. Her image, her face, her eyes, all swam there in his inner sight, rippling before him like a blissful mirage in the desert. Beautiful, alluring, and he wanted to reach for her, to touch her. He thought he could smell her skin, taste her kiss, but only for a moment. And then she vanished, like the vision she was.

Had she been right about all of it? Had the gods ever truly decreed that he must wipe out the vahmpeers? Had his long sentence of living death truly been a punishment for creating the Undead race? Or was all of that yet another tentacle of this DPI beast's many-armed plot?

“What sayed the tablet—the true one?” he asked, even though he had little hope the betrayer would tell him.

“Nothing much. And certainly nothing I'm going to share with you. Not yet, anyway. Maybe just
before I kill you. But not yet. First, I need you to do your job.”

“You wish me to murder the vahmpeers.”

“That's right.”

“What sayed the tablet? Did the gods truly decree that I must do this? Or did you only make it seem so?”

“It doesn't matter. You're going to do it. You're not going to have a choice.”

Utana strained at his chains, but it was useless. Someone approached, a small, nervous man in white. He jabbed Utana in the thigh with another needle, and immediately he felt his head beginning to fill with mists, his eyes to grow heavy.

“Why…you wake me to burn me, to taunt me, then make me sleep more?”

“I only needed you to scream in pain, Utana. And you did. I don't need you anymore right now. You just rest. Oh, and just so you know, if you get your strength back and try to break those chains, I'll know. We've installed sensors to detect if you break free.” He moved closer as Utana's head fell to one side, his neck suddenly too weak to hold it upright. “That's a good king. You just sleep now. I imagine your favorite mongrel belly dancer will be here within the hour.”

Alarm and sudden understanding brought Utana's head up again, but only briefly. He imagined Brigit in his mind, knew she would have heard
his anguished shout, felt his pain. And he knew, too, that she would come to him. Just as Nashmun wanted her to do. He tried to shout a mental warning at her, but he had no idea if the message was received. His own mind went dark even as he tried to call out to her. And then he knew no more.

 

“Did you feel that?”

Brigit gasped the question as her arm snapped around her own middle, hand clasping her waist.

The vampires were gathered around a circular table, studying two sets of blueprints of the same building. One set, dated 1911, was labeled
St. Dymphna Asylum
. The other, dated 1986, was for St. Dymphna Psychiatric Hospital. There had been modifications, expansions, made in between. The place was currently serving as a prison for the Chosen. Though that was certainly not what the DPI were calling it.

They all looked up, though, at Brigit's exclamation. J.W. hurried around the table to her side. “What is it, sis?”

Her brows bunched together, eyes closed, she said, “It burns!”

Her brother tugged her hand away, examining the flesh between her midriff-baring T-shirt and her low-riding jeans. Then he went still, raising his eyes to her face. “There's nothing there.”

“It's not my pain.” The heat began to ease. Brigit relaxed, opened her eyes, met her brother's gaze. “It's Utana. He's hurt.”

“He has my power. If he's hurt, he'll heal himself.”

“He's with those people, James. The DPI. Gravenham-Bail.”

“He works for them, remember?”

She shook her head. “Then why did he just scream in pain as if something—or someone—was burning his flesh? God, it felt like a branding iron.”

From beyond her brother, Damien—the vampire once known as Gilgamesh, king of ancient Sumer—whispered, “I did not feel the pain. But I heard him cry out.” And then he looked past J.W. to Brigit. “I was made by him. I was the first. For me to hear his cry is natural, inevitable. For you to feel his pain—that's something else entirely, Brigit.”

“By the gods, have you shared blood with him?” Rhiannon gasped.

Brigit met her aunt's critical eyes and did not flinch. “I drank from him. I drank in his power, and it made me stronger. That strength will benefit us all.”

“Not if you use it to help our enemy, it won't.”

“Rhiannon, they're going to try to force him to kill us. All of us,” Brigit insisted. “Do you understand that?”

“I didn't see anyone
forcing him
to raze Haven Island with his eyes, burning alive every vampire in his path.”