Cara Mia - Book One of the Immortyl Revolution (29 page)

The smell of fish from Fulton Street masked just about everything but then I heard it, a heartbeat, getting faster and far too close. I couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from. Too many sounds bounced off the pillars supporting the roadway. I assumed a fighting stance and pulled my knife. “Show yourself!”

Ethan stepped from behind a pillar. “Very good, if you find yourself in an uncertain position, show no fear.” The hellish heat couldn’t thaw his beautiful coolness. He looked as if he never sweated— skin sculpted of snow, midnight hair perfect except for the one unruly lock, white shirt crisp and dark suit smooth. The diamond on his finger matched his icy eyes. “
Cara mia
, my soul.”

How could he put all those syllables into that one syllable word? For a second I was dumbfounded. Then thirty-six rotten years flooded back into my memory.

“You bastard!”

He leaned against one of the pillars casually folding his arms. “Miss me?”

“I’ve kept myself busy.”

Distaste flooded over him. “So, I’ve been told.” He offered his arm. “Come with me?”

I held my knife toward him. “Get any ideas and I swear I’ll cut your throat. You showed me how, remember?”

“You were a bright pupil, yet you succumbed to the charms of a
boy
.”

“He’s not a boy.”

“It’s Brovik’s way of punishing me.”

“Kurt and I don’t feel that way.”

A knowing smile danced on his face. “Just how do you feel,
cara mia
? Tell me you love him and I will trouble you no longer.”

He did exactly as I knew he would, and I still couldn’t say it. I was at a loss for words and as you know Joe, that’s something.

“I don’t answer to you anymore!”

I passed him without taking his arm. He gestured to a parked car. I refused to speak to him as we drove. We ended up at Gramercy Park, a quaint old neighborhood surrounding a charming gated park. He pulled over to the curb to let us out and led me to the door of an apartment building. Alarm bells started going off as he ushered me inside.

“What’s this place?”

He laughed, hitting the button for the elevator. We rode to the very top floor. He unlocked the door to an apartment, switching on the lights.

It was all there. Paintings and drawings I’d collected hung on the cream papered walls. All my books, including those from Kurt reposed in shelves built into the wall flanking the fireplace and little art objects I’d picked up in our travels arranged tastefully around the room. Deep blue Chinese rugs and simple light furnishings completed the decor. Every vase was crammed full of creamy roses. Ethan’s hand was in the details.

I gasped, turning to him. “I’m not coming back to you.”

“These trappings are meaningless.”

“Lots of memories attached.”

“Not all good, I’m afraid.”

“Not good
at all
.”

He stood in the doorway, dejected and weary. “My life ended when I cast you out.”

I looked away because I didn’t trust myself. Was it always so? Would I always feel this for my maker? Was it the blood that bound us together? All the nights I’d spent rehearsing the things I’d say to him, my grand vindication scene. It was no fucking good. He still got to me. I turned, trying desperately to hold him off. “I’m not giving Kurt up.”

For a moment he was silent. “I did you a great wrong, Mia.”

“You did me a great
many
wrongs! You owe me Ethan but this has nothing to do with money. Why
really
did you make me a vampire? Don’t give me the usual line about seeing me in that play.”

“I loved you.”

“Bullshit! You made me to get back at Brovik for Kurt. Don’t you know how much I’ve suffered because of it?”

“You were the dawn of a new day!”

“Don’t quote that fucking play to me!”

“It’s true! It is just as I say. Brovik promised a new world, Mia, but it was an evil place, without love, without honor. You were proud and strong. Nothing could stand in your way.”

“You saw a character in a
play
, Hilde…
the Bird of Prey
. Mia was just a girl, wanting to be loved! I aborted the only child I’ll ever carry to be with you. You had children. I never will. I’m a
woman,
but I no longer can give life, only take it!”

“I’m truly sorry for that.”

“And you threw me away like garbage when you finally figured out I wasn’t what you thought!”

“Don’t.”

“You abandoned your mortal children and you abandoned me!”

“Stop!” He raised his hand to me, but then slowly lowered it, his face stricken. “I
am
a monster, but I will always love you.”

He looked so much older than I remembered, his face lined with pain. I bent down and kissed his lips, and somehow the spell was broken. I knew for sure I’d never return to him.

“I’ll always love you too, Ethan, but I can’t stay with you.”

“You choose Kurt?”

It wasn’t the wild, terrible longing I had for Ethan. It was much deeper, down in the marrow of my bones. Kurt and I shared one skin. Tears rolled down my cheeks as the realization finally hit me. “After all you did to me, I thought I couldn’t love
anyone,
but I do.”

Ethan didn’t acknowledge my words. He just got up, gathering his composure about him. “You’ll find papers in the drawer of the desk. It’s all yours.”

“Not yet. All those years you hid so much from me.” My fingers ran over the face I knew so well. “So many things I don’t understand. Open yourself just once.”

His face clenched. “All right— you should know. This I owe you more than anything.”

I led him to a white silk-covered chaise. I loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. I brushed my lips down to the pulse. His still felt like satin on my skin as he kissed my wrist.

Light and sound filled my consciousness, hundreds of voices speaking at once all around us, the voices of his long memory. I saw glimpses of his past, his dysfunctional childhood, the tutor he’d fallen in love with, the baby girl he fathered with a slave, his unhappy marriage to Sally Anne and his joy in his two sons. All these demons he’d held close for so long.

Then inside me, wind howled and rain began to fall, bolts of lightning cut a ragged gash across the sky over a city with cobblestone streets. I knew it was long ago, New York, seeing it through Ethan’s eyes. There in the gaslight stood Brovik, dressed all in black like a vampire in a movie, with a long cape, and his flaxen hair blowing long and free. He held out a gloved hand and smiled serenely, so that Ethan let go of the weapon he held.

Brovik took him to a nearby house where inside stood a table piled with delicacies and bottles of wine. Ethan was thinner and pale as if he’d not had decent food in a long time. Brovik told him to sit and eat. Ethan fell on the food ravenously, with not one shred of the fine manners he took such pride in. Brovik sat beside him, speaking low and pouring wine. Ethan looked on in wonder as Brovik told of sea voyages and exotic places.

Brovik held out his hand. Ethan hesitated then clasped it in his. Brovik led him up the stairs to a bedroom and took Ethan into his arms. Now snow began to fall, blizzards of ice and cold filled me. Ethan and Brovik stood under the pines on Brovik’s island, but no Bauhaus concrete and glass palace stood there yet, only a dark wood structure like a large cabin. Ethan turned away from his master and trudged off through the snow, leaving Brovik, enigmatic and cold as the northern lights blazing overhead.

Many years passed in his mind, I saw Ethan returning to his ruined house and tearing vines away from the brick. He wandered far and wide, searching in many different places for something he couldn’t define, frightened and lost in a world that was rapidly changing.

Then I saw Philip and Ethan on a boat approaching Brovik’s island where his sparkling house now stood on the hill. Great longing filled me as Ethan’s memory drew closer to his master’s dwelling, exactly like the same magnetic force binding us.

Brovik met them on the shore, holding his arms and embracing them both. As they went into the house, Brovik gestured to the long stairway where Kurt was descending. A searing pain rocked me as I took in my lover’s shining youthful face looking adoringly at his master. The pain was Ethan’s more than mine. Brovik bid him to sit at the piano and play. As Kurt wove his angel’s song, jealousy consumed Ethan. Angry words passed between Ethan and Brovik. Kurt trembled with rage and launched himself, a small, deadly missile. Ethan caught him by the throat and squeezed. Brovik’s voice thundered and all the glass in the house shattered, raining down as Ethan dropped Kurt on the floor. The glass cut their faces and hands. Brovik took Kurt into his arms to protect him. Ethan turned away and left them together bleeding among the shards.

Snow blew into Ethan’s face and eyes, stinging his open wounds as he boarded the boat and departed. A plan formulated itself in his mind, of the only thing he could do that would wound Brovik as deeply as he had been wounded. The snow fell and fell and when it cleared I saw the neon glitter of New York, as I knew it in the fifties, where rainbows of light and spilled petroleum sparkled on the wet pavement and a cacophony of car horns, human voices and rumbling subways filled my ears. Ethan sat in a hard chair in the small theatre where we met. I entered like in the dreams I had before he found me, in my Hilde costume, but not looking as I saw myself but rather in an idealized light where my eyes burned like a
Valkyrie
.

It hurt too much, I tried to pull away but he held me fast to him to allow the vision to conclude where he willed. This was the place I feared to go, the demon I kept tightly locked within me. I lay cowering, drenched in my child’s blood and my own as he took me up in his arms and his love filled my veins.

A falcon was loosed. She soared higher and higher above the city and over the seas to the frozen wastes of Brovik’s dominion until she finally stooped toward the old one, to tear out and devour his living heart.

Ethan pulled away in pain, falling limp and panting on the chaise. I collapsed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. An idea suddenly took flight, terrifying me. A face swirled into my brain, female, her dark eyes lined in kohl. Her deep red mouth spoke a soundless command. My voice fell to a shocked whisper. “
I’m going to kill Brovik
.”

“Are you mad? Don’t even speak such nonsense.”

“It was all in my vision. I saw myself as a falcon devouring him.”

“Visions in the blood are but phantoms of memory and emotion. Events are not exactly as they happened or will for that matter. It is fantasy, nothing more!”

“You don’t see as I do. It’s Sanjivani— she’s working through me somehow— like I’m her reincarnation.”

Ethan sat up and buttoned his shirt. “That is complete and utter nonsense. Haven’t I taught you better?”

“Ethan, I saw it
inside you
.”

“It is ridiculous, a hallucination.”

He was right. It was completely crazy. “You’re right. I’m just overcome by all this.”

He straightened his tie, rising to his feet. “There is some scientific explanation for these memories in the blood. They are not precognition.”

“Wishful thinking, I guess.

“We never had this conversation.” For some reason this entire conversation had upset him deeply. Or maybe it was just the fact that I’d essentially dumped him for good. He broke away, heading for the door, but just as he put his hand on the knob he hesitated. “Goodbye, Mia. You know where to find me. I am
always
at your service.”

I couldn’t shake the vision. It
was
ridiculous I tried to tell myself. I was just worked up from being with Ethan and seeing all the things I did confused me. My imagination had intruded on what I saw or wanted to see. Brovik also told me you can’t really gauge the total truth from such visions— or was that just because he didn’t understand? Only Sanjivani and I shared this gift.

Kurt showed up unexpectedly two weeks after Ethan, wearing a dark suit to match the expression on his face. He’d learned from Philip about my new digs, and looked them over with a scowl. “This place reeks of Ethan.” He brushed past me into the bedroom, setting down his laptop and small bag down on the bed. “So. Has she been here?”

“Who?”

“Leisha! She’s gone, cleared out! Things are missing Mia, files, data, money. Brovik thinks she’ll search you out.”

That threw me for a loop. “Why me?”

Kurt looked very worried suddenly. “Because I have access to everything, and you have access to me. She was working on the acquisition of a new company for us, but she doesn’t have the kind of money to buy it herself.”

Threads insinuated themselves as intricately as the pattern of embroidered Indian shawl covering the table, as if Sanjivani’s fingers were weaving them.

“Brovik’s dogs are searching for her. They’ll be watching you closely now. If she approaches you, they’ll contact him immediately.” He took a good look around the bedroom, running his fingers over the silk draperies. “Didn’t spare any expense, did he?”

“What will Brovik do?”

“She’s tried to cozy up to me, but I’ve never trusted her overtures of friendship. Asking about you and whether I’m happy in my work— just to gauge the depth of my loyalties.”

Another strand insinuated itself into the pattern. “You still didn’t answer my question.”

He winced. “He’ll execute her.”

“I won’t be party to that.”

Kurt took me by the shoulders. “If you don’t cooperate, he’ll do the same to you!”

“Not if he never knows. If I see her, I’ll warn her, and you won’t tell.”

“Mia, you put me into an impossible position!”

“Brovik puts you in this position. You’d be better off far away from him. But you’re still in thrall to him, aren’t you?”

His anguished expression didn’t make me feel better.

I scowled. “He’s using me to keep you in line and I don’t like it.”

“What choice do we have?”

“You never heard me say this. Promise me, Kurt.”

“It could be very bad for us.” He pulled the drape aside, looking out over the park. “That park looks like a cage in the zoo.”