She stepped off the porch and forced her own emotions away, needing to be there for her friend. Walking toward him, she held out her arms, and he fell into them, his larger frame crumpling and pulling her to the cold ground. She fell into a heap of skirts and rocked him as he cried. No explanations were needed. His mind was open, showing her everything.
She could smell his sister’s young blood on him. He knew what they were. He knew.
I’ve known for a while.
She didn’t acknowledge his thought. It was too difficult to explain. She simply held him, much like a mother holds a boy. Much like she had seen her mother hold her father when he returned home after everyone feared they had lost him forever. For as much as their people waited for callings, if this was what love did, Gracie wanted no part of it.
Dane eventually stopped crying, but made no move to stand. He held onto her, and she would wait with him until he was ready to let go. As surreptitiously as she could manage, she slipped up a wall between their thoughts. She blocked him, she could tell he realized it by the way he tensed in her arms, but he said nothing.
She worried about Cybil. What would they do to her? There had to be a way to bring her back. Perhaps it was simply because she was young. Perhaps…Gracie knew nothing. The men were the only ones with the answers on such matters, and her father wasn’t here to question. Perhaps Adam would know what the council would do. She could ask one of her grandfathers, but as elders they might not be willing to share such information.
The future was suddenly a dark and terrifying guess. If something happened to Cybil, if they sentenced her to death, Dane would absolutely leave. There was nothing holding him here. She clung to him, not ready to let him go. Would she ever be ready?
A while later Dane moved. His motions were empty and perfunctory. His expression was blank and vacant. He stood, and Grace followed.
Destiny and Vito were still on the porch. They were speaking in a different language, and Destiny still appeared shaken. Dane walked into the house.
“Would you like me to clean her up?” Grace offered.
Vito eyed her suspiciously. She twitched under his scrutiny. He no longer trusted her. “Why do I suddenly remember things?”
His memories must have opened with the overload of familiar patterns and ideas. “I’m sorry we had to lie to you.” It was all she could say. She couldn’t understand their thoughts. They were not in any language she spoke. There was no point in lying to him. It would require an elder to erase this much damage.
“Larissa. I knew Larissa. She was my friend.”
Gracie blinked and swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“And your bishop…He’s a fucking dickhead. Why’s she with him?”
“Please don’t say that. It will only anger him, and we need him to be calm right now for Dane’s sake. I know you feel betrayed. All I can say is I’m sorry. For our own safety we simply cannot risk exposure.”
“I figured it out,” he said as Destiny rested her cheek on his shoulder and stared blindly at nothing. “Did you know that? I figured it out when Destiny was missing. I told her it was vampyres, but she didn’t believe me. Are you guys the ones killing people in the woods?”
She needed to find her grandfather to deal with this. “No.”
“Will Destiny become one now?”
“No.”
“Cain is one.”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “She loves him. She’s never loved anyone, but she loves him, and he’s a fucking vampyre.”
“He won’t hurt her.”
He narrowed his eyes at her and pointedly gazed down at his sister’s injuries. “We had better clean her up.”
When they entered the house, Dane was sitting at the table, looking as though he were made of wax. Vito sat Destiny in the chair next to him, and Gracie went to fill a bowl with water. Gathering some linens and towels, she returned to the table.
The scent of blood had her fangs extending. She pressed her lips together so not to alarm the others and focused on cleaning Destiny’s wound. She pinned the other woman’s hair out of the way, using her own pins. Dane’s eyes flickered as Grace removed her bun and loosened her braids. He watched her, and she didn’t mind, being that it seemed to restore some life to his expression.
Once Destiny’s hair was out of the way, she loosened her shirt and looked at the wound. Two tiny puncture marks, like that of a child, delivered sloppily to the shoulder. The flesh was torn, and she imagined someone had ripped the child off of her. Grace dipped the cloth in the water, wrung it out, and gently dabbed the mark. Destiny flinched, but did not make a sound.
Once she had her skin clean, she looked around her neck for any other damage. There was a dark mark at the base of her scalp. “Is this a bruise?”
Vito frowned and came around the chair to see what she was referring to. “I don’t know what that is. It doesn’t look like a bruise. Maybe it’s a birthmark.”
“You’ve never seen it before?”
He shrugged. “I don’t really study the back of my sister’s head. Her hair’s always in the way anyway.” He touched the mark and turned to his sister. “
Esta marca sempre esteve aqui?
”
“
Sim,
” she quietly answered.
Vito shrugged again and returned to his chair. “Must be a birthmark.”
Vito went to find Destiny clean clothes, and Grace moved to the sink to empty the bowl of now-pink water. As she rinsed it out, Dane whispered, “They’re not like us. There’s no place on this farm for mortals like us. If I were you, I’d leave before it’s too late. They don’t want us here anyway.”
Gracie’s eyes rapidly blinked as she stared out the window over the sink, pretending not to have heard Dane’s advice to Destiny. It was one thing for Vito not to trust them anymore. It was something entirely different to hear such words from Dane.
Chapter 26
Cain didn’t leave the bishop’s until almost midnight. He had so many thoughts running through his mind he could barely remember his own name. The one thought in the forefront of his head, the one that he had repeated over and over again since Cybil had been locked in that godforsaken cell was,
Please don’t let Destiny leave before I talk to her.
He walked into the house and found Gracie sitting at the table. She looked at him, and he opened his mind to her, letting her find the answers she sought. Sadness touched her eyes when she understood how hopeless the entire situation was.
Dane, who sat beside her with his face hidden in his arms resting upon the table, looked to be sleeping. Gracie’s hand coasted over his hair, comfortingly. “How is he?”
“How would you be?” she asked right back, and he nodded.
“Are Vito and Destiny still here?”
“She’s in your room. Cain, I haven’t been able to get much from her. I don’t speak Portuguese, but I’m pretty sure I know what
vampiro
means. This isn’t good.”
“I know.”
He walked to his room and stopped outside the closed door. He sighed and knocked.
“Come in.”
He entered. She was wearing the clothes she had arrived in and sat facing the opposite wall. A small bandage showed at the curve of her neck and shoulder where the collar of her top slid off her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I guess this is why you can’t be with me.”
He stayed where he was. He had never been in this situation before and wasn’t sure how a mortal would handle learning that vampyres do exist. “I’m so sorry, Destiny.”
“Is this what all of you are?”
“Dane’s the only one left on the farm who is mortal.”
She shook her head and gave a humorless laugh. “Mortal. I suppose you aren’t really thirty-eight.”
“I am thirty-eight. I never lied to you, Destiny. I just couldn’t tell you about this.”
“That’s a pretty big secret to keep.” She sighed. “So what happens now? Do you erase my memories or scramble my brain or something?”
“I cannot alter your thinking. You think in Portuguese.”
She jerked her head around and gave him a withering look. “You’ve tried though.”
“This isn’t the first time you have been exposed to our kind. In the woods, you were attacked by my uncle. I saved you, and you shot me with an arrow.”
Her eyes moved as she tried to rationalize his words. “If you can’t change my memories, how come I don’t remember that?”
“Bishop King speaks your language. He removed the memories of what happened in the woods.”
“Will I ever have them back?”
“Do you want them back?”
“I’ll never know, will I?”
He hated feeling like he had betrayed her. That had never been his intention. “Destiny—”
“Just tell me what happens now, Cain. Will you call the bishop and have him take my memories again? Of what I saw today? Of you?”
“Is that what you want?”
She scoffed. “Do I have a choice?”
“I’m giving you a choice. I don’t think you would betray me. I can’t promise you that they’ll let Vito leave if he knows, but I’ll be damned if I let Eleazar into your mind against your will.”
“If I were like you, would that change things?”
“That would change everything.”
The silence became suffocating. Finally, she asked, “Isn’t…can’t you…can’t you make me like you?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Destiny, it doesn’t work that way. Only our true mates can be changed. If they’re not chosen by God, then the transition doesn’t work.”
“Well, maybe we are—”
He shook his head. “Every male only has one mate. You’re not mine.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Annalise is my mate.”
Shock showed clear on her face. When she blinked, a tear trailed down her cheek. He moved to sit beside her on the bed and took her hands in his. Reaching up, he gently wiped away the salty trail, but another tear fell in its place.
“I’m so sorry, Destiny. I never expected to fall in love with you or to have you love me back. If it was about leaving the farm, I’d go so that I could be with you. But I need to feed and there are risks, doing that off of the farm. People would wonder, too, as you grew older and I remained the same. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I could never give you children because it would be too complicated if they had my immortal blood. English technology would catch the difference and our child would become a laboratory project. There are just so many reasons that it wouldn’t work. Trust me, for the last several days I’ve thought of little else but ways that we could possibly be together and make this work.”
“Do you love Annalise?”
“Like a sister. She belongs to Adam. No one can tell us why, but we were both called to her. They think it’s because we are twins, but no one’s sure.”
She nodded and pulled her hands out of his. Her withdrawal from him seemed to take a chunk of his soul with it. “So that brings us back to my original question. What happens now?”
“That’s up to you.”
“I fell in love for the first time in my life with a good man who actually understands what it means to love me back, yet he can’t, and nothing will ever change that fact. If I can’t be with you, Cain, then I don’t want to know you exist, because no other man will ever measure up.”
His stomach bottomed out at her words. He didn’t want her to forget him. He wanted to know that she was out there somewhere thinking of him.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. “I’ll go get the bishop.”
A pained gasp left her lips. “This isn’t fair.”
He pulled her into his arms and kissed the top of her head. He didn’t want to let her go. “Let me get the bishop, and he can take away all your pain.”
She nodded and pressed the heel of her palm under her eyes as she quietly sobbed. He waited silently. He didn’t want to torture her by confessing how much she had come to mean to him. He simply held her and kissed her gently as she broke apart. Eleazar would make it all better for her. He would take her memories and with them, her suffering.
The rain pelted the window. He had no doubt the cause was his own heartache. He imagined it would be storming for quite some time.
* * * *
Cain entered his bedroom just before dawn. The dull rays pressed through the dreary rain pelting his window. He collapsed onto his bed and breathed in her scent. He swallowed back his pain and shut his eyes. Images of her laughing, smiling, falling apart in his arms filled his mind.
His hand slid under the pillow and touched on something cold and hard. He grasped the small object and looked at it. It was her phone. He brought it to his nose and breathed in. Jasmine.
He stayed in bed all day, and no one bothered him. The rain never ceased, and he wasn’t sure it ever would. Around seven o’clock that night, Gracie brought a tray of food to him. She said nothing, and he didn’t acknowledge her presence. He also didn’t eat any of the food she brought.
The next morning he awoke to a light scratch on the door. He didn’t turn or invite the visitor in. The rain had stopped while he slept. Of course it did. He couldn’t dream, so he wouldn’t be thinking of her.