Shades of Gray: A Jude Magdalyn Novel (15 page)

“You don’t think I didn’t want to be here? That I wouldn’t have given my soul, what’s left of it, to have been the one to stay by your side while they worked to save your life?” His voice sounded as raw as his eyes, almost like the words scratched his throat as he forced them out. “Hart taunted me with images of your broken body. Broken because you stood by your word, refused to give over the Covenant, refused to give over me.”

“I gave my word. I don’t give it often or lightly, so when I do I stick by it.” His pain hurt me but at the same time I felt detached, almost like someone else hearing his confession. Warmth spread up my arm and I knew despite appearances Theo wasn’t asleep. Something told me he kept me from feeling as much as I should.

“And your heart? Do you hold onto it with the same fierceness or does it only require a few flirtatious remarks and hand holding to win you over?”

“You said you owe me no explanations. If you think that, believe it, then you have no more right to question my actions than I have to question yours. You’re upset, for a number of reasons, some of which I guess I’m never going to know.”

I took a deep breath, surprised when the throbbing eased back down to dull. A fine sheen of sweat broke out over my skin, but what was a little sweat compared to not having a massive headache? As I saw it, the payoff outweighed the price.

“But you don’t get to imply I’m a whore or a slut or anything remotely like that. We’ve made no promises, we have no obligations to each other, so you don’t get to be angry if someone wants to take an interest in me and maybe I want to take an interest in them.”

“Do you? Want to take an interest in Theo?” Those eyes almost did me in. Those tortured, burnt chocolate eyes, like I could see straight into his soul. He had one. He just needed to believe it, which would never happen.

I had enough baggage of my own. I didn’t need another two hundred years’ worth.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ll leave you then.” He straightened suddenly, the movement a blur, and then he stood at the door. He wrapped calm around him again, closing everything off. I don’t know what frustrated me more, the calm or the outpour of feeling.

I closed my eyes as he slipped from the room and shut the door gently behind him. A few deep breaths were needed now and maybe a shot of whiskey.

“Should I apologize for eavesdropping, even though I really wouldn’t mean it?”

Chapter Fifteen

“Apologizing when you
don’t mean it is kind of like lying.”

I felt Theo lift his head from the bed and sit up straight, my lips twitching at his muffled groan and curse. “In that case, I won’t apologize. I’m trying to stay away from lying for the sake of lying. Keep some part of my life simple.” He lifted my hand and brushed my knuckles over his rough cheek. “I like simple, all things considered.”

“This thing we have, it’s simple?” I opened my eyes, alarmed when I found myself staring straight into Theo’s. The pillow-top mattress and his chair gave us one of those little moments when you were able to look eye to eye with a person without it being uncomfortable.

“It could be. It should be.”

“I’ve never heard someone say something should be simple,” I replied.

“You just haven’t been in the South long enough, sugar. Give it time, and you’ll understand that simple is pretty much the way we like things down here.”

“I’ve been in New Orleans so long, I’m practically a native.”

“Well, then you’re just out of practice.” His full blown smile did wonders for his face, changed handsome into something extraordinary. It made him glow, from the sheer joy of the moment.

What would it be like to spend a lifetime with someone who glowed just from teasing?

I scratched the thought. There would be no talk of spending lifetimes with people, at least not until we took care of the whole ‘a group of vampires wants you dead’ thing. That’s how my agenda was going to work.

Theo seemed to have a different plan. He held tight to my hand and where something like that would have freaked me out before, now it comforted me to know someone would be there when I woke up. The smile toned down slightly, but the glow held. “I was thinking about kissing you just now.”

“Generally speaking, you don’t announce such things. You just, you know, do them.”

“Well, like I said, I was thinking about it. Then I had the other thought that since you are still, technically, on your death bed - although there’s no way you’re dying at the moment - it would be a little morbid and easy.” The smile grew again, just a hair below the full sunshine of before. “And when I kiss you, I’m kind of hoping you’ll be an active participant.”

“How egalitarian of you.”

“Well, I try.” Theo stood, dropping my hand back to the sheet. I was disappointed, and more than a little shocked that I was. A good near death experience and unspoken proclamations of intentions made me as emotionally gooey as the next girl.

“Gillian’s been waiting rather impatiently for you to wake up. If she isn’t on her way now, she will be shortly and if she finds me still here….” He ran his hand through his hair, mussing it further in the process. “Well, she may tell my Great-grandmother, and I’ll be in quite a bit of trouble. So I’ll make my exit, and leave you to Gillian’s tender care.”

“Gillian? Tender care? I thought you gave up lying.” My voice rose as he drew closer to the door, but he turned to flash one more smile, and I warmth pulse through me.

“I said I was trying. Didn’t say how well it was going.”

I laughed until Gillian opened the door two minutes later. Her scowl took the smile right off my face.

Thirty minutes later,
I had yet to get a word in. It looked like it was going to take me at least another thirty, if I didn’t fall asleep first. I wouldn’t really be asleep, but it would handily end the tirade.

“Don’t even think about trying to fall asleep, Jude Magdalyn. There’s no way you could possibly be tired, seeing as how you’ve been asleep for the better part of four days.”

“Would you let me say something, anything? You’ve been ranting the entire time, without once allowing me to explain.” I kicked the covers off before checking to make sure I was clothed. Whoever dressed me had chosen the rattiest pajamas I owned to do the job. They were going to get a severe dressing down when I found them out.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, toes curling up when they met the cold wood. Pressing them down, I pushed to a standing position, for a moment. Then the muscles in my legs screamed in protest at their sudden usage and I sat back down on the bed.

“If nothing else, you’re still as stubborn as you were before your swim in the river.” Gillian, suddenly beside me, made me wonder how long the moment had actually been. “Part of the healing process involves getting your muscles to work again. As I’ve said numerous times, you’ve been asleep for nearly four days, meaning your muscles aren’t working as well as they normally would.”

“I would have figured that out.” Eventually. “I’m not a complete idiot, Gillian. Only a partial one.”

“I needed no confirmation on that, Jude. Your little stroll through the Quarter proved it beyond any shadow of a doubt.” The hand soothing me a moment before now pressed almost painfully on my shoulder. “What on earth could you have been thinking, wandering around the streets alone?”

“I thought we already established that I wasn’t thinking.” I really didn’t want to have this conversation right now. Actually, I didn’t want to ever have it.

“Why weren’t you thinking? There are hundreds of people relying on you now, not just within the Covenant, but amongst Williams and his followers.” Her painful grip on my chin dragged my face around until we were almost nose to nose. “You must think of all the others before you make any decision, any decision at all.”

“Maybe sometimes it gets to be too much, Gillian. It’s not like this is something I’ve known about all my life and I’ve just been ignoring. This is so beyond new as to have a completely different meaning.” Wrenching my chin away, I made another attempt to stand, pushing Gillian’s hands away when they would have pulled me back to the bed. The muscle spasms were down to twitches and if I concentrated, I could manage to semi-pace around the edges of the bed.

“I’m doing everything you ask me to do, all of you. Doing more, just because it’s the right thing to do. Could you try for a little understanding? A little, I don’t know, sympathy, or something?”

“If you want sympathy, it’s in the dictionary under the letter S.” A hint of amusement colored her tone. “Jude, I’m not entirely unsympathetic, but if you’re having uncertainties, we need to address them sooner rather than later.”

I leaned against the window sill, looking down onto the street below. A faint glimmer of sunlight against the window panes across the way confirmed the early hour. Williams would no doubt be waiting impatiently for the sun to finish sinking below the horizon, eager to continue his quest to find Hart. Theo was somewhere in the house, no doubt showering off the feeling of four days of death watch, just waiting for my word to do whatever needed to be done.

Everyone was doing what they were supposed to, exactly as everything was supposed to be done. Everybody except for me.

“It’s like being hit by a freight train, Gillian. You don’t just get hit, you get dragged. And about the time you get used to the surface, some bump throws you off again. You… there’s just a point where you get tired of it all, but you don’t know what to do to stop it.”

“A poor analogy, but I think I understand what you’re driving at.” Gillian’s voice sounded like she sat in the same position I left her, perched on the edge of the bed. “You just needed some room to breathe.”

“Yes, exactly. And I went to see Suzanne.”

“Ahh. Perhaps that had something to do with your absent-mindedness.” I turned around, careful to stay braced against the window sill. Being stubborn didn’t mean being stupid and I knew if I tried to stand on my own for too long I’d hit the floor. Gillian turned on the bed until she could face me, and we stared at each other across the span of half of the room.

“What did Suzanne have to say?”

“Oh, you know the usual. I’ll be loved, but I’ll also have my heart and soul smashed to smithereens.” Another thought, completely un-man related popped into my head. “And that the Covenant only takes members based on bloodlines, or ancestry, or something.”

“Since you’re obviously not ready or willing to talk about her main message, we’ll focus on the second, shall we?” Just like that, we neatly skirted conversation I’d been trying to avoid. Maybe Gillian was as skittish about discussing my love life as me.

“Your Suzanne is correct. During the whole of its existence the Covenant’s members have descended from the original twelve founding families.”

I waited, but the one sentence seemed to be all I’d get without any pushing. “What, you guys aren’t scared of inbreeding, producing children who breathe fire or something?”

“Don’t be silly, Jude.”

“I’m serious. Why would you want to limit yourselves, your, what do you call it, skill set, or whatever, by not letting outsiders in?” Even leaning against the window taxed my little bit of strength and I walked slowly back to the bed. Gillian watched as I eased myself down and I made a conscious effort to not let any of the pain show on my face.

“It’s not a matter of limiting ourselves so much as protecting ourselves.” Gillian rose to pace in front of me, she kept it slow enough that watching her didn’t make my brain hurt. “Secrecy is paramount to the survival of our kind, even in such enlightened times as we live in now.”

“So all the members of the Covenant are the descendants of twelve families who just all happened to get together a hundred years or so ago and make up their own religion?” I stared. “Seriously, Gillian? What, the kids were forbidden to look outside the ranks for love? If that’s true, what about my parents, how’d that happen?”

“There are times, Jude when I could cheerfully smack you upside the head.” Gillian stopped in her pacing to scowl at me. “For quite a while, close to one hundred fifty years, it was highly discouraged to seek a mate outside the membership of the Covenant. The last half century saw a loosening of those restrictions, although more than a few still chose to marry magic to magic.”

In story-telling mode, I let Gillian talk. Better her talking than yelling at me. I wouldn’t entirely discount the possibility of a tirade later though. “Some, not wanting to live like their parents and their parents before them married non-magic, and how I hate that word, hoping their gifts would simply pass their own children by. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it came back in a stronger form, much to the chagrin of those former Covenant members.”

“So how did my family line end up being the leaders of the Covenant? I mean, no one even really questioned that I was the leader, despite the fact I clearly don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Your many-great grandmother came to the group unmarried and pregnant. No one ever knew the father of her daughter, he was never mentioned and she wasn’t the type of woman to encourage such questions.” Gillian paused, some memory making her chuckle. “She foretold that many, many years in the future, a daughter of her line would bind the group together for all time, making them more powerful than any could imagine. The first mention of the Prophecy.”

“And people just believed her?”

“Sometimes, Jude, all you can do is believe.”

I laughed, the bitter sound echoing. “I don’t know what to believe in anymore.”

Her left hand cupped my cheek, and I realized then the tears I’d thought kept at bay were sliding down my face. “You will, Jude Magdalyn. My promise to you.”

A brief pat of her hand and then she stood, gliding in the direction of the door. I stared out the window, night pressing against the glass.

“You’ll need to change quickly, Jude. The Covenant, what remains of it, will be here shortly.”