Blood Legacy Origin of Species (19 page)

“Of course it’s about Drake,” Victor replied. “Aeron may be many things, most inspiring nothing but disgust in me. But he is a surprisingly good father, and an unyielding protector of the boy. In some ways, I’m not sure Ryan could have chosen a better mate.”

Victor really could not believe he was speaking these words. “There will come a time when it will take all of my strength to protect Ryan, and when that happens, it will be Aeron’s job to protect Drake.”

“Well this is going far quicker than our last game.”

Ryan glanced at the ancient timepiece mounted on the wall. Aeron was right; they had been at it a mere six hours.

“You say that as if you sense the end is near.”

Aeron examined the pieces on the board. “You are the most amazing opponent I’ve ever faced. It’s difficult to tell if you play by logic or intuition. There are times when I feel you have calculated out every move, then others when I feel you make the most marvelously absurd move on pure instinct.”

“And what’s your feeling now?” Ryan asked.

“Well,” Aeron said, examining the board, “I have two choices. I can attack your Queen, whose apparent vulnerability is an illusion and will result in my loss of the game. Or I can take a defensive position, which will ultimately result in a draw.”

“I notice that ‘winning’ is not one of your choices.”

Aeron smiled his shark’s smile. “Yes, somehow that option is rarely available with you.”

“And yet I always offer a draw,” Ryan said.

Aeron turned his attention away from the board to the stunning creature across from him. “Yes,” he said, “something I have always found curious but am beginning to understand.”

Ryan moved a piece on the board, one move away from solidifying the “draw” ending. “That’s something I learned from Kusunoki.”

Aeron winced. “I see you are not above low blows.”

Ryan smiled as he moved his piece into the position that ensured the draw. He turned his gaze once again upon her. “So does a draw mean that we both lose?”

“Possibly. Or it could mean that we both keep our part of the bargain.”

Aeron’s gaze returned to the artery in her throat. “I would accept that interpretation of the rules.”

Ryan gazed at him steadily with an unblinking gaze. “Then you will protect our son at all costs.”

“Of course I will,” Aeron said, his blue eyes dark with multiple emotions. His eyes appeared more like his son’s than Ryan had ever seen them.

Ryan glanced around. “So were you just going to take me on the floor, should I bend over the table or what?”

Aeron uncharacteristically caught his breath. “I particularly like the bending over the table option.”

“I don’t think so,” Ryan said, and disappeared.

Aeron caught her, just barely, in the hallway. He lifted her off her feet to keep her from fleeing because she was so much faster than he was. He kissed her as he removed her clothing, and she returned his kiss, laughing.

“I hardly think it’s necessary for you to remove my clothing to bite my neck,” she said, amused.

He began removing his own clothing with urgency, desperate to feel her skin against his. He half-carried her into the bedroom where they collapsed in a pile on the bed.

“Not everything has to be ‘necessary’ to be enjoyable,” Aeron said.

Ryan had to concur because the hardness of his body against the firmness of hers was luxurious. And although that particular sensation was irrelevant to the upcoming act, it was still pleasurable. Aeron’s teeth on her neck, however, wiped that minor pleasure from her perception as the most powerful of pleasures took hold.

Ryan arched upward, feeling the ecstasy of the union. She could feel the blood rush from her system, giving her the familiar light-headed euphoria and the rhythmic pulsing through her veins. She could see Aeron’s life unfold before her, see his Memories, see his disbelief and joy at the first sight of his son. She watched the experience change him, fundamentally alter the immortal, unbending, rigid creature that he had become.

Aeron pulled away from her, almost unable to do so. “Are you able to take my blood?”

The vein in his throat was tantalizingly close but Ryan forced herself to focus, forced herself to remain in control. “I think so,” she said.

She rolled over on top of him and fastened on his neck. Aeron moaned aloud as his blood poured into her. Ryan could feel the dark place beckon, the inner sanctum where she danced with death and brought all her paramours to the edge of time. But she resisted the siren call, knowing that an ancient race beckoned her there, wishing her to wreak destruction on all who would dare accompany her to that blood red world

Ryan did not enter that mental space, knowing what awaited her there. But Aeron was still sated, as was she, at least physically, and the two fell into an exhausted sleep, their bodies entwined.

The bodies were stacked by the hundreds. Rats fed upon the rotten remains, and flies blanketed the corpses in black. The boy stepped carefully, quietly, terrified that he might disturb the rats or the flies. The insects, if rousted, would take to the sky in a smothering angry swarm of stinging hell. The rodents were even worse. If agitated, they would attack him en mass. Only yesterday he had seen a woman stumble upon a cadre of the beasts and within seconds go down in a filthy sea of lashing tails and wriggling bodies. In shame he had fled as the woman’s agonized screams chased him down the alleyway.

His only consolation was that the rats and the flies would be dead before tomorrow. Everything that touched the corpses died. His blue eyes darkened. He had fled even from his own mother when her hands blackened with necrosis as the flesh began dying on the bone. He had stayed with her as long as he could, even when she began coughing the bloody sputum. But when the fingernails turned black and the tissue on her knuckles began to rot, he could not stand it anymore.

His mother had been the last of his family alive. His father had returned from the war, pale and ashen-faced at what he had seen. But the boy knew it was not the horrors of war that had so diminished and debilitated his father. His papa had been a proud soldier, a fierce fighter who had risen in station because of his skills on the battlefield. No, it had been something else that had changed his father into a shadow of his former self, but it was something the boy did not know because not long after his father returned he grew terribly sick and died.

Many other soldiers grew sick and died soon after their homecoming. Then after that, their families began to sicken. The boy watched his two younger sisters and brother die painful but blessedly quick deaths. His mother had been strong and had not sickened right away. And even when she began to display the initial symptoms, some force of will seemed to hold off the disease. But eventually even she crumbled before its hideous onslaught, her fortitude resulting in only prolonging her suffering.

The boy was all that was left, not only of his family but of his entire town. He was going to leave soon, he just didn’t have any idea where to go. He had heard that the army was still conscripting and was so desperate it might even take someone as young as him. The losses had been enormous but many whispered it wasn’t battle that had taken the majority.

He was almost to the shanty he had been staying in. Most of the homes in his town were now vacant; it had just been a matter of finding one that wasn’t filled with death. He rounded the corner, then quickly ducked back into the shadows. He peered around the corner, careful to keep hidden.

Some sort of creature was sitting on its haunches, crouched over a dead body. The thing appeared to be eating the diseased flesh and it took the boy a moment to realize that the creature was a woman. The filthy thing jerked her head upward, sniffing the air like a wild animal, her yellowed eyes flitting about furtively. She had open lesions on her skin and her lips were split and bleeding. The boy pressed backwards into the shadows, his heart beating wildly. The woman was frozen in place, only the eyes moving about, and the boy was certain she would see him.

Suddenly, a beam of light split the air behind her, the woman opened her mouth to scream as she caught fire, then she disappeared into a pile of ash. The boy was so startled at the instant vaporization that he, too, nearly screamed, but instead clambered under a nearby wagon filled with hay. He peered out from beneath his cover.

Three figures walked into the street, two men and a woman. They were dressed strangely in garb the boy had never seen before and could not even describe. One of the men had a scar on his face and held an odd item in his hand, an item that appeared to be the source of fire that had turned the woman to ash. They spoke to one another in a harsh, rasping tongue that the boy could not understand. Their manner, however, was easily translatable, filled with menace and disdain. The man pointed the weapon at a nearby wooden structure and it exploded into a cloud of splinters.

It was all he could do to keep from starting in terror from his position, but he knew he would not get far from these three. Instead he calmed himself, then inched his way over the wagon’s edge and into the pile of hay. With as little movement as possible, he wormed his way down into the deepest part of the grassy stalks, then willed himself to stay completely still.

The three continued to talk in their unknown tongue and there were additional sounds of massive destruction as the weapon was discharged. The smell of smoke was thick and the boy was afraid he would burn to death in the wagon, but he was far more afraid of the strangers. The sound of voices and destruction faded into the distance as the three moved away. Finally, the boy could stand the smoke no longer and burst from his hiding place. He fled the burning town as fast his he could run, his eyes tearing at the fumes and his lungs burning from the smoke. He ran and he ran and he ran, thinking he might never stop running again.

Ryan opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. Although the dream was vivid in her mind, she could not shake the feeling that there was some other dream she was forgetting. For the briefest instance she saw a pair of glittering green eyes, but the vision slipped away.

She looked down at Aeron’s naked form draped around hers, his head next to hers on the pillow. She examined the dark eyelashes resting against his cheekbones, noting how they contrasted with his fair hair. He opened his eyes, and although his pale blue eyes could never be described as warm, they were less like ice at the moment than cool blue water.

“What?” he asked.

Ryan turned to him, slightly adjusting her position in his arms. “Do you remember anything about your childhood?”

“No,” he said. “I remember nothing before my Change. And I don’t believe Victor or Abigail does either.”

“I always wondered why,” Ryan said.

Aeron noticed that she used the past tense. “Do you know something from my past?”

“I’m not certain,” Ryan said, “I’m seeing visions of a young boy during an ancient time. There’s a lot of death and destruction, and some sort of disease, but it’s difficult to tell what’s happening.” She shook her head and rolled over. “The visions come to me like dreams, and right now I don’t trust my mind. I can’t say what might be your Memories and what I’m simply making up.”

Aeron settled in behind her, content just to lie with her. Ryan could be notoriously reserved when she felt like it.

Ryan took comfort in the presence of her lover and enemy, and was not certain which role comforted her more: the lover for obvious reasons, or the enemy because it was so soothingly familiar. Either way, it helped temper the disquiet the dream caused.

She had not been completely honest with Aeron. Although she genuinely was not certain the boy was him, she had a much better idea of what was happening than she described. In fact, she recognized more from the dream than the boy who had lived through it. The odd garb of the three “strangers” was something she instantly recognized; Madelyn’s men had worn something very similar. The strangers themselves felt familiar, as if she had seen them before, but she could not place them. And she was very certain that the “disease” was nothing of the kind, but rather the results of an intentional biological experiment on the people of the time.

Ryan again considered the possibility that the dream had been just that, something her mind had concocted, trying to reconcile and encode the Memories she had received from so many different sources, perhaps even an attempt to reconcile the guilt and grief that were beginning to surface in her. The possibility gave her a brief flare of hope, one that was just as quickly extinguished.

One facet of the dream gave it an overwhelming sense of reality. The boy in the dream understood nothing of what the strangers were saying, but Ryan understood everything. Just as Drake had acquired her language, having assimilated it wholly in content, context, meaning, idiom, and expression, Ryan had assimilated an alien language so richly structured around complex personal and political relationships imbued with violence, it presented itself to her in its entirety. Although fluent in multiple human languages, there were certain things she could not even begin to translate, yet still somehow understood.

The strangers in the dream spoke the language of Ravlen, words that Ryan herself could not yet formulate because she had never heard them before, yet words she could translate because the template resided in her blood.