Night's Templar: A Vampire Queen Novel (Vampire Queen Series Book 13) (20 page)

Blood throbbed in his temples, his pulse beating strongly in his throat. Damnation, he’d left this behind. That this damn disease would bring all of it back so clearly, so painfully… Truth, there was a cruelty in the design of the world that could stir hopelessness about what lay beyond its making. He understood Cai’s feelings on that all too well.

“It sounds as if you will not run out of stories to tell me on our trek. But why don’t you take your ease before we proceed to the sorceress’s home?” Keldwyn slid down to the ground so his back was against the rock. He stretched his legs out in front of him. “Put your head in my lap. There are no eyes watching us here, and now that we know for sure those eyes are our foes, I could give a fuck about their opinion on man-love.”

It was unexpected, Kel offering his lap for a pillow while he slept. When Uthe hesitated, Keldwyn lifted a brow. “Do I need to make it a condition of our agreement?”

Uthe snorted. “If I say yes, you will make everything part of it.” What had him hesitating wasn’t that, but how appealing it seemed. When Kel extended an imperious hand, his gaze fastening on Uthe’s, he decided not to argue further. He lay down, stretching out so his head was propped on Kel’s thigh. He emitted an uncertain sigh as Keldwyn’s hand fell on his brow and began to soothe. Uthe inhaled the smells of the desert and the earth scent of the Fae Lord: a hint of cool stone, spring flowers waiting below the winter ground, and snow clinging to mountain tops.

“That’s new,” he observed. “I smell winter on you, my lord.”

“The Fae have an affinity for a particular season, but there is some overlap, especially as one ages. I have a far greater connection to winter now than I did earlier in my life.”

“Does that mean a miracle might eventually happen and your ice queen will discover the lighter touch of spring flowers?”

“Do not be disrespectful of her, vampire. She would say that is my job.”

Uthe smiled as Keldwyn flicked his ear. “Yes, she would.” Then the humor died away as he thought of the sorceress once more. “God be with you, Fatima,” he muttered. Closing his eyes, he began to say the paternosters that took the place of compline. He could say them on her behalf, and the rhythm of it would soothe him into a short sleep to replenish him. Keldwyn’s fingers wrapped around his shoulder, a light hold. It occurred to Uthe that Keldwyn had stood as his protector before Cai, staying watchful of both strange vampire and wolf as Uthe questioned them and learned their mettle.

“You know, I can take care of myself,” he said tiredly.
At least for now.

“You are more than capable of it,” Keldwyn agreed. “I never said you weren’t, my lord. I simply have a vested interested in contributing to that intention.”

“Hmm.”

“Your father was a Trad, wasn’t he?”

Uthe’s fingers dug into Kel’s leg, a jerk of reaction. “Don’t.”

Kel’s hand paused on his shoulder. He’d been tracing the roundness of it, fingers slipping over the bunched curve of Uthe’s biceps, testing their resilience with firm, caressing pressure. “You do not wish to speak of it.”

“No. Not before sleep. It brings nightmares.”

“Then we will speak no more of it. Will you tell me a story of your sorceress, though? It may help you sleep, and celebrate her life.”

“You owe me a story before I give you another. I want more of your life, Keldwyn.”

“Information is power. You intend to keep the playing field level between us.”

A statement laden with meaning. The warning beneath it was a drawn sword, the slip of steel out of supple leather, an erotic threat. Keldwyn’s touch had moved from his shoulder to the side of Uthe’s throat. His fingers slid up Uthe’s carotid to the hinge of his jaw, and then back down, tracing the pulsing arteries and veins, moving around to the jugular. He slowly wrapped his hand over it, then released Uthe to start over. It wasn’t an idle touch. Keldwyn was even now gathering knowledge, absorbing Uthe’s reaction to the contact. Uthe put his hand up over Keldwyn’s, curving his fingers into the spaces between the Fae’s. It stilled the movement, holding pressure on his throat so he felt the beating of the blood beneath their combined touch. “And if I said yes to that?”

“When a chessboard is tipped over, all the pieces scattered, the game is over. All that is left are the two players, facing one another with nothing between them.” Keldwyn bent so his breath slid along Uthe’s temple. He didn’t look up, but he knew if he did, the Fae’s dark gaze would be close and large as a full moon at early twilight, tempting the viewer to think it could be touched. “I relish showing you how pleasurable a tipped playing field can be, my lord. I will give you a story eventually, on my own terms. But tonight let us honor the dead. Tell me of your sorceress.”

Uthe suppressed a sigh. “To do that, I go back to the beginning. To Haris, Fatima’s ancestor.”

Haris had been built strong, with masculine features. She was quick, lissome as an eel with a blade. In hand to hand, she was almost a match for Uthe’s vampire powers. He’d discovered that on their initial meeting, an ambush where Haris and her companions had been sent to assassinate King Louis III. It was during the Second Crusade, when the Templars had been charged with guarding the king and his army as they headed for Damascus. Louis’s commanders had little knowledge of how best to navigate the Holy Land terrain or the dangers there.

It was one of their earliest encounters with the Saracen version of the Templars—the Assassins, a sect who served Allah and the Old Man of the Mountain. They would have succeeded, except for Uthe’s vampire senses. He’d detected their infiltration into the camp, around the king’s tent. He remembered the shadows against the fabric, the clash of steel as they’d engaged in that small area, the king’s personal guard getting the monarch out of harm’s way. Two of his brethren slew two of the assassins, and then the third had ducked free of the tent, cutting the cords as he rolled free.

Uthe was quick enough to slip out of the potential net. He’d pursued the assassin outside the camp, on foot, which meant he should have gained on him, but the short male stayed an impressive length ahead of him, until Uthe boxed him in among the more rocky terrain. Then the assassin turned, drew his curved blade, and waited for him.

That was when Uthe caught her full scent and knew he faced a woman. Then she was on him, her blade flashing like a serpent’s tooth. When he finally made full contact with her weapon, the power that sang up through his arm, practically dislocating it from the shoulder, told him her already considerable abilities had been augmented by magic. He backed off and stared at her. She was doing the same, as if she’d expected the magic to end him.

“Vampire,” she breathed, startling him.

He tipped his head to her, his sword still raised and ready. “Sorceress.”

“Not a sorceress, no. Protected by one. As well as by my skill with a blade. Almost enough to take you out, vampire.” She had a rough, masculine voice. She sheathed the blade, surprising him. “We will meet again. This is not our day to die.”

She bolted, running lithely through the rocks like a wild cat. He could have continued to chase her, should have. But he had not.

“You recognized her as something more like yourself,” Keldwyn mused.

“Yes. That was part of it. In war, strange bonds can form. You remain enemies on the battlefield, but sometimes a respect is born between those who fight.” Uthe paused. “I told you why I went to Jerusalem. When I joined Hugh’s company, I discovered hope and purpose in faith. Protecting pilgrims from raiders, protecting those who sought that same hope and purpose, was what drove us. We had no fight with Muslims or Jews. For a short time, despite what had happened in the First Crusade, we were able to find that balance with them that had existed before it, no matter how uneasy at times. It was only later, when the Templars began to be tangled up in the ambitions of kings and popes, that purpose was lost.”

He closed his eyes, seeing printed script. ‘Each should remain in the vocation to which he was called.’ There was an anonymous letter written to the Order early in its life, as if the author knew what would happen to us. They discounted the idea that Hugh wrote it, but I think he may have done so. He was the type of man who realized an anonymous letter might be considered more for its content than the author, if they had no author whose motives they could dissect. It spoke with the voice of someone within our ranks, someone who had more foresight and divine guidance than those who eventually led us. He said the devil tries to persuade men to desert their true role to chase the ‘phantom of the higher good’. ‘This is a delusion, for God desires a patient acceptance of the gifts which one has received.’ In hindsight, I think that letter may have also been Hugh’s penance, for he started the Order on the road to material success and power, though with the best of intentions.”

Uthe opened his eyes, though in his mind he still saw the complicated tapestry of battles, decisions and multiple paths that could have been, against those that had been chosen. “Bernard saw the same possibility: ‘The temporal glory of the earthly city does not demolish its heavenly rewards, but demonstrates them—so long as we remember that the one is the figure of the other, and that it is the heavenly which is our mother.’”

While he kept worn copies of the Rule and Bernard's
De Laude
, lately it was as if he was hearing them in his head as they’d first been spoken to him, rather than as an echo of what he'd read repeatedly and recently from his bedside. Since most Templars weren’t able to read then, he’d sat in on oral readings of them often enough.

He brought himself back to the story at hand. “At the time I met Haris, we were starting to lose that vocation and our understanding of the gifts and the charge we were given. So I didn’t kill her.”

Collecting his thoughts, he returned the story back to the original point. “Haris was a male name. I never could get her to tell me what her birth circumstances were. Perhaps she’d been born to a family who’d wanted a boy or who’d had to conceal her gender and raise her as a male. Or she’d assumed the disguise herself because she wanted more freedom in a male-dominated society. Or, though she’d been born a woman, she felt more comfortable embracing a man’s identity.”

“We have those among the Fae. So you saw her again?”

“Yes. I often had separate tasks to handle alone, related to the quest we are on now. It was during one of those that she and I met again. We startled one another at an isolated oasis. Purely for form, we did our best to each kill the other. Then we sat down and spoke through most of the night. Her beliefs were strong and pure and, though she saw me as an infidel, she also had a touch of the Sight and the mystic influences of her aunt. Her aunt was the sorceress who’d given her the magical shield. When I met Shahnaz, she was quick to tell me that Haris’s fighting skills were her own. The magic she’d bound to her simply kept her safe and augmented her strength when facing a preternatural threat like myself.”

Uthe paused. “Shahnaz was as beautiful as Haris was plain, but a male relative had cut up her face when she refused to marry whom he demanded. She escaped to France with enough funds to set herself up as a reclusive widow of noble birth. She told me the lack of spouse suited her just fine, since it freed her up to pursue the study of magic. When I visited her there, a tanned skin was stretched over one wall, a beautiful piece of artwork, painted with magical symbols and elements of nature intertwined. To those who can detect such magics, like yourself, it formed a protection shield upon her and her home that was never challenged. Though her visitors assumed it was an heirloom of animal skin, it was human. From the way she touched the scars on her face when she was contemplating it, I knew it belonged to the man who’d injured her.”

“One of the first complicated magics I learned was how to skin a man alive with one incantation,”
she’d mused.
“Takes them a while to die that way. Horrible noise and quite messy. I wouldn’t recommend doing it more than once and only when absolutely necessary.”

“Not a woman to cross, obviously,” Keldwyn said.

“Most of them aren’t, my lord. At least the ones we know.”

“So she was Fatima’s ancestor.”

“She was. The magic was passed on to the next female relative born with the gift, and so on and so forth. They compiled quite a body of arcane knowledge. Lines of dark and light magic can cross until they become so confusing…” Uthe trailed off.

When Keldwyn slid his hand over Uthe’s short hair, Uthe sighed. “You are unexpected at times, my lord. I didn’t expect you to be gentle.”

“I am not.” Keldwyn brushed his knuckles along Uthe’s jaw. “Sleep. Think of things that bring pleasant dreams. Your Mariela’s sweet lips, the comfort of your prayers, the things worth remembering.”

Silken black hair sliding along his bare skin, Kel’s serious profile as he contemplated one of Uthe’s chess moves, the taste of a firm, heated mouth. Uthe turned over onto his back and lifted his hand, trailing his fingertips over that mouth, the fair brow. Keldwyn’s arm circled him, bringing him up so their lips met. Uthe closed his eyes, muscles coiling like a snake writhing in the sun as Keldwyn found his way beneath the tunic, clasping Uthe’s cock through the thin cotton pants. It was a leisurely exploration of what the Fae had claimed as part of the binding. It banished any shadows and replaced them with tight longing for a variety of things, the least of which was sex. Though that alone was a throbbing, constant undercurrent around the male.

With a vague embarrassment, Uthe realized Keldwyn had shifted him so Uthe’s ass was planted between Keldwyn’s spread thighs. The Fae was holding him in his lap. Uthe was of a similar length and breadth to Kel, so only by sitting on the ground like this would the position work, but there it was a secure embrace. Keldwyn’s hand curved over his hip and buttock, the other arm wrapped around Uthe’s back. His palm cupped Uthe’s skull to deepen the kiss. Uthe curled his fingers in the front of Keldwyn’s laced tunic, finding the lightly furred skin beneath. He savored the long columns of his thighs, one beneath Uthe’s bent knees and the other against his lower back.