Veris got to his feet and let Brody painfully roll over onto his hands and knees, trying to figure out how to breathe through what was left of his face. It would take a few minutes for the healing to kick in to the point where he could see straight. He stayed, swaying, on all fours.
“There was a point you were trying to make, I presume?” Veris said.
Brody nodded.
“Do you feel you’ve made it?”
Brody nodded again.
“Really?” Surprise tinged Veris’ voice. Brody heard him squat down next to him. “Keep your chin up so the blood runs back down your throat. It’ll feed the tissues there and help them heal faster. Then you’ll be able to speak.” The tone was neutral. The words helpful.
Brody lifted his chin. In a few seconds he was able to clear his throat with a cough. Vocal chords again. Well, well. How many of these types of beatings had Veris gone through?
Veris was sitting on the sand now, his arms on his knees. “Can you speak yet?”
“I think so,” Brody said. His voice sounded strained. “Make that yes.”
“You were planning on explaining this, weren’t you?”
Brody nodded. He rolled over so he was sitting on his butt facing Veris.
“You don’t look pretty anymore,” Veris said.
“You never did.”
Veris’ mouth lifted at the corner. “At least I fight better than you. A product of a long life, that apparently you are more familiar with than I thought. Speak, Brody, or I will take great delight in taking apart what is left of your face again. You are trying my patience.”
Brody nodded. “I know. Thing is, I can’t explain it. Most of the time, when I hit a quandary like this, I used to talk it over with you. You’re the clear thinker. You could cut through a problem faster than anyone I know, except maybe for Taylor, but this is so much about her I’m not going to lay it out for her to fix.”
Veris stared at him. “In your future, you mean?”
“Yeah.” Brody squeezed the bridge of his nose and felt bones creak. His nose was healing nicely, but still felt swollen. “But it’s also about you, asshole. Your future self. Not you sitting there. Although it’s also about you sitting there.” Brody sighed. “I know you can’t follow this. We’re not giving you nearly enough information and that’s not fair for you and you can’t cope with the idiom or the cultural references either. But you’re all I’ve got.”
Veris was silent for a long moment. “I believe you may be underestimating my usefulness. I may lack knowledge, but I can reason as well as my future self.”
Brody pushed at his cheekbones. One was still broken. The pain of bones moving made him hiss. “And fight.”
Veris shrugged. “I learned early, apparently.” He shifted and settled himself in the sand. “A quandary, you said. There are very few true quandaries in the world.”
“I think I’ve got a real one on my hands.” Brody let his hands drop from exploring the damage of his face. “You rejected Taylor today.”
Veris drew a slow breath. Brody could hear it. In the stillness of the dell and with his senses all on hyper alert while he healed, he could hear the inhalation as clearly as his own breath.
“
That’s
what this is about?” Veris asked.
“No, but that’s what made me start thinking. Mostly, Taylor has been doing it up until now and I’ve let her because she’s good at it. But that kicked me into gear and made me start this discussion with a sucker punch. She didn’t say a word, but I know she didn’t like the fact that you walked away.”
“Most ladies would take that as a form of politeness, not an insult,” Veris growled.
“I keep trying to explain that Taylor isn’t like anyone you’ve ever met.” Brody scrubbed at his hair, which was full of sand now. He stretched his shoulders and heard them creak, then realized he was putting this off. “Okay, here it is. You’re not like the Veris I remember. You’re not like the Veris I love.”
“Understandable.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Brody said, thumping his fist into the ground. “There’s been changes. There’s differences. You’re not…right.”
Veris stared hard. Then: “You’ve been here before. To this…time. We’ve met. Here.”
Brody took a breath. “In Jerusalem.”
Veris rubbed his thumb over his bottom lip thoughtfully. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes.” Brody found his hands curling into fists. “I love Taylor. I know you have the hardest time with that idea, but there it is. I love Taylor in a way you don’t understand. I love her as much as I love you.” Brody clenched his hands together. It was so important that Veris grasp this. “The other Veris—
he
would never ask me to choose between you. He would know I couldn’t do that.”
“I am demanding that of you?” Veris sounded curious.
“You’re going to. By rejecting Taylor today, you outlined the shape of things to come. There will come a time when you ask that of me.”
“You don’t know that,” Veris said softly.
“Yes, I do,” Brody insisted. “You are denying her. Denying yourself. You want her. Tell me you don’t want her. Tell me that and I will call you a liar.”
Veris drew in a breath to speak. But he didn’t speak.
Brody nodded. “There is something stopping you. It’s not just Davina, or you would have dealt with her already. Taylor and I don’t know how to fix it, because we don’t know what it is and you won’t tell us. You don’t trust us enough for that. We’re running out of time. All sorts of time, that you have no idea about. That’s why I must speak tonight, because you will ask me to choose between you and Taylor. It will come to that and when it does, I think…I really think Taylor will be my priority.”
“Your wife comes first, of course.”
Brody groan and clenched his fists to his temples. “Fuck, Veris, stop being reasonable! I love you. I love Taylor, but if you make me choose, I’m going to choose her! It’s nothing to do with being married to her! I’m not married to her at all! I’m bonded. She won’t marry me. She won’t marry you, even though you asked her.”
Veris sat forward. “I did?” he said sharply. “When?”
Brody winced. “Sorry, too much information. Forget I mentioned it.”
Veris held out his hand. “When did I ask her? It’s important.”
“Far, far into your future, as you currently reckon it,” Brody said flatly. He slapped the sand by his hip. “Are you even listening to me, Veris? Do you grasp the quandary now? I want Taylor, but to keep her, I have to keep you and I’m not even sure I
want
you anymore.”
Veris recoiled. “I’ve changed that much?”
Brody sighed. “Physically, you’re exactly the same, which makes it confusing. You sound the same, speak the same, walk the same. There’s so much about you that is the same that when I first saw you I was fooled. It took a while for me to notice the differences. They only show up when you’re put under emotional pressure. I’m guessing that’s not something that happens to you a lot these days. You’ve learned dozens of tricks in the last few centuries so you can avoid emotions, until Taylor and I came along and messed things up for you.”
“This other Veris of yours…he is a master at emotional pressure?” Veris asked, his brow lifted.
Brody shook his head. “No! Not even close! But he would never have walked away from us this afternoon. He would never make me choose as you are going to.”
“You are going to risk everything—the woman you love, even me, my future self—based on the assumption that I will absolutely force you to that choice,” Veris said softly.
Brody closed his eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he begged.
Veris was silent for so long that Brody thought he would not answer at all. Then he stirred and sighed. “You already know how Davina entered my life, do you not? You have hinted as much.”
“She force-bonded you to her,” Brody said.
“The first night she met me,” Veris added.
“After she had chained you to the wall in her dungeon,” Brody finished. “Then came a night of sexual pain and torture. And every other night she chooses to call you to her. Sometimes she loans you out to other “masters”‘ too. All of them enjoy pain, all of them like blood along with their sex.”
“It’s been seventy-eight years next month,” Veris said. He sounded almost wistful. “You asked a curious question yesterday. You wondered why I didn’t deal with her in Normandy. How did you know I had been thinking about killing her? Is that what the other one did?”
Brody grimaced. But there was no ducking it now. “Yes,” he admitted.
Veris nodded. “You wanted to know why I didn’t. Would you like me to tell you now?”
Brody jumped. “Yes,” he admitted. This could unravel the mystery of Veris.
Veris took a deep breath. “In the country that would become Norway, around 460 A.D. I had a wife who I took into the woods one night for a tryst after a feast at the king’s hall. She disappeared that night. The village mourned the loss of my beautiful wife and said I murdered her in a jealous rage because the king favored her.
“They couldn’t prove anything. There was no body. So I was beaten, hung, whipped and smeared with excrement. I was thrown out of the village naked and with no weapons. The kingdom next to mine would have nothing to do with me, because that was the kingdom my wife came from, according to my sister. I had to travel under an assumed name and find work far abroad, with no references. I never saw my sister again. I lived off the land for months until I could start earning money enough to buy lodgings.” Veris patted the scars on his stomach. “Not all of these are from humans.”
“Bears?”
“Some. This all happened before I was turned, so the scars are a permanent reminder.” Veris grimaced. “Just in case I ever manage to forget.”
“What did happen to your wife?” Brody whispered.
Veris lifted his shoulders a tiny fraction. “I couldn’t explain to them what happened because I don’t remember a single thing about the day, my wife, or the feast. I remember nothing except for waking up beside a cold fire the next morning, naked, next to a pile of women’s clothes that Marit said she had given my wife—the woman I can’t remember.”
Brody felt a chill settled around his guts. Surely, if Veris and Taylor had gone back to that time, they would have told him? But, a whole day and night? Then he realized that this time jump had lasted that long already. So it was possible.
His sense of fear enlarged.
Why would they not have told him?
The truth hit him in a rush.
Veris would have been human
. He wouldn’t have wanted to tell Brody, to tease him with a long-gone state that Veris had just enjoyed for a whole twenty-four hours.
Brody shuffled forward, closer to Veris. He cupped his jaw, looking into his eyes. “Did they describe your wife to you?” he asked. “Did you ask them?”
Veris snorted with derision, then his laughter faded as he really saw Brody’s expression. “I didn’t ask,” he said slowly. “They simply extolled her virtue and her beauty. Her ethereal qualities. Her glowing…” He licked his lips. “Her glowing skin and…” He drew a shaky breath. “Dark hair,” he finished. “Dear God, it was Taylor,” he concluded.
Brody nodded.
Veris put his face in his hands. He stayed that way for many long moments. When he looked up again, his eyes were dull. “Is it going to happen again, here? You will just disappear?”
“I won’t,” Brody said. “But Taylor will. You should be prepared for that. Even I will be…my old self. I won’t have my future memories anymore. You will go on knowing the little we have told you about the future, but I won’t know anything about it.” He tried to smile. “You can tell me about it. I promise to be stupefied.”
“And I will never see Tyra again,” Veris concluded.
“Oh, you will,” Brody assured him. “In time.”
“
If
I commit to you now.”
Brody drew a breath. “Yes.”
“But if I make you choose between me and Taylor, you’ll pick her.”
Brody held up his hand. “It’s not that black and white, Veris. You’re trying to dramatize, like you always do—”
“Yes or no,” Veris growled.
“I won’t pick one.”
“I’ll presume that your inability to directly answer means you are afraid to say yes, you’ll pick my wife over me.”