Dark Vision (36 page)

I sighed, realising that I was getting a bit fed up of playing the human buffer zone between the various psychopaths that now inhabited my life. Give me a bar-room brawl in Liverpool any day – at least there were always bouncers to break things up. Here, I was the bouncer, and I hadn’t even shaved my head that week.

I stood up, trying to keep the bearskin wrapped around me, and quickly realised that unless I wanted to hobble towards them and fall in an undignified heap at their feet, it wasn’t going to work. So I dropped it down, and strode tall and naked in their direction. Naked, I thought, would probably score higher on the distraction scale anyway. And I’d definitely look better than the average bouncer.

I will confess to feeling a very ungracious rush of empowerment as I placed myself between them, and looked on as their collective jaw dropped to the floor. The flickers faded from Gabriel’s fingers, and Luca stood up straight, eyeing me appreciatively as I flaunted myself. Yep. That had definitely worked.

I placed my hands on my hips, and stuck out my boobies. If you’re going to do something, might as well do it right.

‘Luca,’ I said, when I’d got their extremely undivided attention, ‘leave us. Go take Isabella a ferret, or something.’

‘I do not wish to leave you,’ he said, his voice dripping with a strange blend of anguished need and good old-fashioned lust.

‘You have no choice, right? If I tell you to do it, you do it? So jog on, kitty – leave us alone.’

Gabriel was sneering, grinning at Luca in a way that clearly said ‘my dick’s bigger than yours’. He obviously thought he’d won some kind of big battle, the dumbskull. Honestly, hundreds of years on the planet, and at heart he was still a teenage boy fighting behind the bike sheds.

‘Yes,’ said Gabriel, ‘leave us. And be cautious, Luca, of how you behave around the Goddess – her blood is sacred, and her body is mine. She has no use for you or your kind, with your parasitical ways and your concept of love and death – I will not let you use her, or drain her for your sex. She is not your plaything.’

Ooh. There was so much wrong with that little speech I didn’t know quite where to start. My body was very much my own, thank you very much – apart from those brief interludes where I seemed to be possessed by the spirit of a Playboy Bunny. And as for Luca killing during sex? I could
so
see how that would happen, and it sent a little chill all the way down my spine. I’d have to remind myself of that next time I was leching over his boy bits.

Luca looked at me again, and I made a ‘take a hike’ gesture with my head, nodding towards the door.

‘If it is what you wish, Lily, then I will leave you,’ he said, ‘but only because you ask it of me – not because Cormac Mor tells me to. And remember this – yes, there are aspects of my nature that might be repellent to you as a mortal woman, but at least I never speak untrue to you, Goddess. I don’t expect you to live your life as a child, forever doing my bidding, wrapped in a web of lies that I have spun all around you.’

With a final glower at Gabriel, he stalked towards the door, making us, and the dogs, all jump with the ferocity of his exiting slam. I waited for a moment, half expecting a rockfall.

Right. One down, one to go. I glared at the one in question, then started to patrol around the room, looking for clothes. I finally found a T-shirt and some leggings neatly folded on top of a chair, and climbed into them as elegantly as I could, given the fact that he was staring at me so hard I could almost feel boreholes singeing into my skin. I felt so much better once I was covered – that whole ‘knock ’em dead naked’ power trip had a very limited shelf life, before I just started feeling mortified and wanting to join a nunnery.

‘Is everyone safe?’ I asked, sitting down on the bed and popping out a couple of those paracetamol. Strangely enough, I could now feel a headache coming on.

‘Are you well?’ he asked, ignoring my question and frowning as he pulled a chair up to sit opposite me, looking on as I fumbled with the tabs.

‘Yes,’ I shot back, gulping in a couple of mouthfuls of Diet Coke to swill them down. ‘I think I’m just suffering from testosterone poisoning after that little scene. Now, answer me – did everyone make it back OK?’

‘We did,’ he replied, staring at my chest. I suspected his gaze was less about being a perv than recalling the events of the night before. I waited for the thank yous, although I knew they’d never come.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said, fixing him with a pretty angry stare. ‘No need to thank me.’

‘Thank you?’ he snapped. ‘You are expecting gratitude, for jeopardising everything I have ever worked for? For not trusting me to triumph in a battle that has been centuries in the making? For leaving me there, not knowing if you were alive or dead? I will not thank you for that, Lily. Your last actions were foolish, ill-conceived and stupid beyond even my usual expectations of you.’

As he ranted, he grabbed hold of my wrist, and held it so tightly it hurt. I looked down at his fingers, and tried to breathe through the usual rush of panic at someone – anyone – touching me.

I pulled together that mental barrier I’d been working so hard on, trying to block him out, and found it was easy. Maybe it had been last night’s events; maybe I was just getting better at this shit – but I knew that unless I deliberately lowered my guard, he wouldn’t be able to get into my mind, and I wouldn’t get an inappropriate fit of visions. I didn’t have time to celebrate that fact right now, but I knew at some point it would feel pretty good – finally being liberated from a burden I’d carried my whole life.

As I was having so much fun, I decided to step up my game and try something new – conjuring up an image, and throwing it at him, as fast and as hard as I could. The image I chose was of a gun firing out a stream of liquid manure, and I aimed it right at his face.

He dropped my hand suddenly, rubbing his own fingers like they’d been burned, and looked at me with a tinge of his own panic clouding the deep-shaded navy of his eyes. I’d obviously hurt him somehow, and I have to confess it felt good.

‘Don’t call me names,’ I said, sharply. ‘I’m getting pretty fed up of it. Now, why are you here, and what do you want?’

I saw a rush of emotions play over his face – he wasn’t a man used to being challenged, especially not by little old me. In the end, he just sighed, and smiled, and stroked the white streak of hair back from my face in a way that made my tummy do a little flip. Damn. I might be able to control the supernatural mind patrol, but I was still a sucker for the gentle touch of his fingers against my skin. I suspected that was a far more difficult condition to control. It was called being female.

‘I shouldn’t be here at all,’ he finally said, letting his hand drop and rest tentatively on my shoulder. Probably scared I was going to start slinging cow shit at him again. ‘But I needed to see you, to see for myself that you were as well as the Morrigan insisted – her standards of “well” are not the same as most people’s. Technically, I am forbidden to see you until the ceremony. Until the … choosing.’

I noted the careful way he used the word, savouring it on his tongue as though it was a new delicacy he was sampling, and he wasn’t at all sure if he liked the taste or not. The choosing. Yes. That would be a whole new concept to him, and I acknowledged the effort he was making in using it.

‘Why forbidden?’ I asked, shrugging his hand from my shoulder. I didn’t mean to be rude; I just didn’t want to start feeling all naughty down below.

‘I suppose,’ he said, moving his hand safely back to his lap, ‘that they fear I’ll make some kind of final pitch. That I’ll try to charm you into submission, or win you over through sex.’

I laughed – very long and very loud. Charm. Yeah, right. Storming into my room, having a slanging match with Luca, calling me his property, then ranting on about how stupid I was. He had a way to go till he could pass his Swiss Finishing School exams. The sex, though, I thought – that was a risk. Because despite his battered face and his scarred skin, he was still quite the work of art to look at.

He was a super-hot hunk in a super-tight T-shirt, and I knew – despite the fact he’d not covered himself in glory so far today – that he loved me. He really did, as much as he was capable of. He just did a damned fine job of hiding it beneath multiple layers of knobdom. Knowing that was one thing; figuring out what I felt was a different matter entirely. Could I love Gabriel? I’d have to revisit that one when life was a little calmer. Like in a decade or so.

‘Sorry,’ I said when I’d finally stopped laughing and he’d started to look amazingly peed off, ‘but if we have a few illicit minutes together, there are more important things on my mind than getting laid. Yeah, really, there are – don’t look at me like that! I have questions, and until they’re answered, I won’t feel ready for this … choosing.’

His body tensed, and even without a brain plunge I could tell he was nervous about what was coming next. Quite rightly, too. He nodded, once, sudden and sharp, and gestured for me to go on. I felt tense myself: this man had me on an emotional carousel. One minute he could do a pretty good impression of the man of every girl’s dreams (presuming she’d been eating a lot of cheese the night before), and the next I was slapped around the face with a revelatory wet kipper. It would be easy to stay quiet, to give in to the urge to hide from truths I knew would hurt me – from truths that would make the tricky issue of Gabriel and me even more tricky. But I couldn’t. I had to know. I had to poke, to prod, to ruffle the undergrowth and see what came out. No wonder I’m single.

‘Coleen,’ I said simply. ‘The wedding photo. Her. Tell me.’

He ran his hands through his hair in a way I recognised as something he did when he was anxious. When he was playing for time. When he was entirely possibly thinking up a big fat lie to tell the kids.

‘The truth,’ I said, ‘or I’ll know.’

‘The truth is a complicated—’

‘Oh, spare me the bullshit. I’ve heard that speech before from Fionnula. What it usually means is I’m about to hear something I won’t like. Well, I’m a big girl now, Gabriel, and I need to know. So tell me, or I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be running straight into Fintan’s arms and doing a conga with the Faidh come nightfall.’

He closed his eyes, and started to crack his knuckles, and stared first at the dogs and then at the fire and then, finally, at me.

‘Coleen’s husband, Philip, was one of ours,’ he said, his voice low and quiet and reluctant. ‘He was human – but he’d been raised here in Meath, and his family was tied to ours. He was, I suppose, a servant. He helped us on the mortal side, one of many allies we had here.’

Hmm. Like Miss McDonough and Roisin, I supposed – not one of them, but working for them. OK. I got it so far. I raised my eyebrows, asking what was next.

‘Then he developed cancer. He was young – in his thirties. Leukaemia, just at the time when he and Coleen were starting to talk about having children of their own. She was … well, she was different then. She was happy. They were happy. When Philip found out he was dying, he told her about us, and she made contact. She asked us for help. She asked us to save him.’

Jeez. I could only imagine what a head fuck that had been. One minute you’re a happily married Scousewife planning the rest of your life, the next you have a dying husband and a whole new world to come to terms with.

‘I’m guessing,’ I said when he paused, ‘that you didn’t – because I certainly never met a Philip, and Coleen wasn’t exactly what you’d call a blushing young bride, was she? What did you do?’

‘We … I … did help her. In a way. There was nothing we could do for Philip on that side – he was too far gone down the path of the disease. So she begged us to … take him. To the Otherworld. To keep him there, keep him safe. Make him forget all about her and their life together, give him a fresh start, unencumbered by memories or sadness or regret. In exchange, she took on his duties for us. For me.’

‘So … Philip is in the Otherworld, living a carefree life. And Coleen was left … alone. With a new job,’ I said, frowning as I struggled to wrap my meagre brain around the whole idea.

The woman I’d known – the cold, hard-faced battleaxe who’d raised me – had seemed completely devoid of warmth, or love, or any human emotions other than anger and bitterness. Yet at that time, at that crossroads, she’d made the most amazing choice. She’d sacrificed the rest of her own life to save his. It was beautiful, and brave, and so completely fucked up. No wonder she’d been scared of them. No wonder she’d seemed so resentful of me: I was a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in her world. A constant reminder of everything she’d lost.

‘Why couldn’t you take her as well?’ I asked. ‘Let them both go to the Otherworld, and stay together? Is that … not allowed?’

He met my eyes, and I knew there was a nasty coming.

‘It is. And I could have. I chose not to. I needed her on the outside. I needed her for you, as my backup plan. So I refused her when she asked, and told her she must live her life the way I wanted her to, or—’

‘Or what?’ I said, leaning forward so our knees were touching. ‘Or you’d … hurt him?’

‘Or we’d make him leave the Otherworld, and the safety he knew there. Return him to the mortal plane, where he would most certainly die.’

He was silent after that. We both were, listening to the hiss of the fire and the gentle snoring of the dogs and the quiet clunk of a whole new reality sinking into place. They – he – had taken advantage of the love a young woman had for her husband, and then threatened to torment him if she didn’t do as she was told. I’d known he was ruthless, but this … this really was taking the whole packet of Hobnobs.

‘I think you’d better leave,’ I said, finally. I felt suddenly cold and alone and overwhelmingly sad. Coleen was gone, my parents and sisters were on the other side, Carmel was a blood-crazed lunatic, and the Morrigan had a hairdo made up of slaughter. The man who sat beside me, the man who loved me above all others, was so single-minded in his ambitions that he was borderline evil. That left me with only Luca – my vampire slave – and possibly a shiny dog. In the whole wide world.