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  “A risk?” she repeated, her voice rising. She stood, incensed, and looked down at Aedan as he sat at her feet. “He’d never hurt me. He loves me. Do you even understand the meaning of that word?”

  He blinked up at her twice, his eyes gleaming with a trace of blue amid the silver, then stood. His voice remained quiet, but his eyes betrayed his anger.

  “What I understand is what Bradan has become. I understand it quite well. Just like I understand his hunger. I’m afraid you don’t. You can’t understand that.”

  Standing at her full height, she crossed her arms and raised her chin.

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  He inclined his head.

  “That’s true. But I can forbid Bradan to seek you on his own. And I will.”

  She was about to accuse him of using Brad’s vampirism as an excuse. From the start, he’d been against her relationship with Brad. But just then, quiet rustling sounds drew her gaze to the woods, and she watched Brad appear at the edge. She smiled instinctively when she first saw him, but as he came closer, something tightened inside her chest.

  It was Brad who was coming to her, the shy, quiet man she’d had a crush on for months before she’d had the chance to truly know who he was and fall in love with him. But for the first time, she could also see that it was… someone else, too. There was a spot of blood at the corner of his lips, but what shook her was the glint in his eyes. It wasn’t the silver gleam she was growing used to, or at least not entirely. Instead, it was how cold that glint was, how… alien.

  He blinked when he reached her, and the glint disappeared when he smiled at her and asked if she was ready to go home. She nodded, not trusting herself to say a word, and took his arm. They walked back to the castle, Aedan following a step behind.

  Vivien didn’t ask to be alone with him again and went to bed on her own, wondering if Aedan’s words were getting to her or if she’d truly seen something in Brad that hadn’t been there before. Wondering if she was afraid of her own boyfriend when he’d done nothing to deserve her fear.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Apologies

  Bradan couldn’t sleep.

  He’d barely done anything today, and his run with Vivien and Aedan had not been enough to tire him. He felt full of energy, ready to take on the world for Vivien, ready to do anything. Anything but sleep as Aedan had suggested.

  Aedan, of course, was not in his own bed, and Bradan had no trouble figuring out where he was: guarding Vivien’s door, and never mind that she was safe, having put Elver through the same lie-detection process she’d used on Doril. With the shields set over the castle, no one could get in unnoticed.

  The thought of the shields struck him like an unexpected blow. He wouldn’t be able to maintain them anymore. He’d have to show Vivien—no, not show, he couldn’t show her anything. He’d have to explain to her how to channel at the shields every so often to renew and reinforce them. Something else to rest on her shoulders; how much more could she take before she cracked? He hoped he never had to find out.

  Giving up on trying to rest, he slipped out of bed and back into his clothes. A few days ago, he’d have channeled a ball of light to guide him through the dark corridors of the palace. Now, he didn’t even notice the darkness.

  “You should be sleeping,” Aedan said as soon as Bradan reached Vivien’s hallway. “Keeping human hours helps.”

  Crossing his arms, Bradan leaned back against the wall next to his brother.

  “How does it help?” he asked. “You barely get any sleep at all.”

  A sliver of annoyance rose through the bond, but Aedan silenced it right away, and there was nothing in his words to suggest he was annoyed. He’d been doing that a lot, Bradan had noticed, silencing whatever he felt rather than giving it voice. Bradan wondered whether the bond was more sensitive now, allowing him to pick up things he’d never noticed before, or if it was a new habit of Aedan’s.

  If it was something new, why had he suddenly decided to try to hide so much of what he felt? Bradan couldn’t fathom a reason for it. And if it was something he’d always done, the question remained the same: why would he want to hide so much from Bradan?

  “I don’t need much sleep anymore,” Aedan said. “The older a vampire gets, the less sleep he needs. But you, you’ve just been turned. You need as much sleep as you did as a human. Sleeping as they do is one way you’ll be less likely to see them as prey.”

  It sounded odd, more like wishful thinking than anything real, and Bradan couldn’t quite suppress a skeptical snort.

  Aedan sighed.

  “Try to think of how many years I’ve had to learn that to be true,” he chided.

  There it was again. After less than two days, Bradan was fast becoming familiar with Aedan’s ‘I was a vampire long before you and I know what I’m talking about’ routine. He couldn’t begrudge it to Aedan; after all, it was true. If anything, he sometimes felt like Aedan should have been more forceful in his demands. “Don’t make me order you,” he’d told Bradan just yesterday, but such an order would have felt more natural than his pointed warnings.

  “I tried to sleep,” Bradan said, ignoring the strange path his thoughts were taking. “I can’t. My mind won’t shut down and—”

  He stopped himself rather than admit he couldn’t stop thinking about blood. About Vivien’s blood, in particular. He wasn’t hungry, not exactly; he’d had quite enough to eat earlier. But the need was there anyway, pulsing through him.

  Had Aedan offered him his wrist right then, Bradan would have declined. Not easily, because for some reason blood taken from his brother felt a hundred times more satisfying than blood from the animals he hunted in the woods, but he would have declined nonetheless, because Aedan needed to remain strong just as much as Bradan did. But if Vivien had done the same… If she’d come to him, bared her throat, drawn him to her…

  He shook off the thought along with the images dancing in his head. Only when he felt Aedan’s sharp gaze on him did he realize that the bond might have carried some of that. Wincing, he braced himself and met Aedan’s eyes, ready to apologize and swear he’d never act on those daydreams; denying they even happened would have been useless. Aedan, however, did not berate him. He didn’t even mention what he might have felt through the bond. If anything, he looked… understanding. After his warnings, it seemed odd.

  “Come on,” he said, pushing away from the wall. “You need to learn to fight with knives. We might as well start now since you won’t sleep. And it might help you focus, too.”

  A question was on Bradan’s lips, but he kept it quiet. No, he wouldn’t ask if it was okay to leave Vivien’s door unguarded. They both knew it was, and teasing Aedan about it would only bring up the question of why he did it. Bradan had his theories, but he didn’t want to go down that path. Either Aedan was guarding her from Bradan or he wasn’t guarding her at all and merely wanted to be close to her; Bradan wasn’t sure which would be harder for him to accept.

  They walked to the first floor in silence, then to the armory. There, they retrieved plain knives rather than the silver ones vampires fought with. Wounds inflicted by a silver blade carried danger for vampires in a way that regular steel didn’t, and practicing with silver knives would have been foolish. Bouncing the two knives into the palms of his hands, Bradan started for the door off the armory that led into the small courtyard where they usually sparred, but Aedan stopped him.

  “Let’s go out onto the grounds,” he said. “We’ll have more room. Besides, if we practice in the courtyard, we might wake our dame, and she needs her sleep.”

  Bradan nodded, annoyed he hadn’t thought of that first. The courtyard was beneath Vivien’s window, and in the past he’d caught glimpses of her watching them while they sparred. He followed Aedan out to the back of the castle, and if the smells and sounds of the night still felt too intense, even overwhelming, he tried not to let it touch him. This, too, was practice.

  “All right,” Aeda
n said, facing him. “Let me see how you hold your knives.”

  Bradan showed him. Aedan was not impressed, and for a good fifteen minutes he made Bradan practice drawing the knives from sheaths fastened to his thigh and belt, ensuring that Bradan’s grip was perfect every time he took a hilt in hand. It was not what Bradan had expected in guise of practice. Neither was what came after.

  “You have to forget everything you know about fighting with a sword,” Aedan said when they finally got to the core of things. “If you try to fight with a knife the same way you fought with a sword, you will lose. It’s as simple as that.”

  What was not simple, however, was to set aside a lifetime of habits.

  They started with basic gestures, practiced side by side, first with one hand, then both. It felt like hours before Aedan decided that Bradan was ready for more than that, and by then Bradan was bored enough to want to show off, or maybe just show his brother that he wasn’t as inept as Aedan seemed to think.

  They started to spar. In fifteen seconds, Aedan disarmed him of both his weapons. Stepping back, he motioned for Bradan to pick up the knives and, in a cool voice, simply said, “Again.”

  As much as he tried to control his emotions, Bradan couldn’t stop mixed anger and embarrassment from filtering through the bond, but Aedan commented on neither. He took position again and waited for Bradan to attack first.

  The disarming, this time, took about twenty seconds, and Bradan ended up with one knee to the ground.

  “And this is why you need to forget sword fighting,” Aedan said, still without inflection. “Again.”

  The next three or four hours were, to Bradan, less than pleasant as he was beaten, time after time, without ever managing to take so much as one of Aedan’s knives. The lesson was humbling, and from anyone other than Aedan it would even have been humiliating. Still, as time passed, Bradan realized that something was different.

  They’d trained together before, and more than once Aedan had been thrust into the position of teacher, but tonight his advice and suggestions all sounded like commands. It should have been irritating, should have grated Bradan’s nerves.

  Bradan had once been proud to be the oldest of the two of them if only by minutes, and he had seen it as his right to lead all games. Watching Aedan grow older faster than he did after Bradan had gone to the Otherworld had been odd to say the least, and little by little he’d started to defer to Aedan because he knew, had seen and experienced more—had lived more. Bradan hadn’t liked it, but he hadn’t allowed his pride to get in the way.

  This was different. It felt normal to heed Aedan’s commands, and sometimes Bradan found himself moving before he was even aware of it. It was as though both his body and mind were expecting, waiting for orders from his brother, and ready to obey.

  Orders from his brother… or from his Maker?

  When Bradan was too tired to go on, he didn’t need to speak; the bond conveyed his exhaustion. Aedan sat down in the grass after sheathing both his knives. Bradan simply dropped his at his side as he lay down on his back, panting. He supposed at some point he’d lose the habit of breathing too hard, but right now his mind insisted he needed air even when his body couldn’t have cared less.

  “I’m sorry,” Aedan said after enough time had passed that Bradan had stopped breathing again. The words rose no louder than a whisper, but Bradan heard them as clearly as a shout.

  “Sorry?” he repeated, propping himself up on his elbows so he’d be able to see Aedan’s face. “Sorry about what?”

  Aedan did not meet his gaze, focusing instead on the blade of grass he was twirling between his fingers.

  “I was scared,” he said, still as quietly. “Terrified. I’ve watched people die, some at my hands and some despite my efforts to save them. It never occurred to me before that I could do something about it, not until it was you dying in front of me. This is not how it’s supposed to work. Humans are supposed to ask, and vampires can agree or refuse, but they can’t suggest it first, let alone do it without consent. All I can say is that I was just too afraid to lose you, and I stopped thinking. Can you forgive me?”

  It took Bradan a long time to understand what this was about, and even then he could barely understand what Aedan was asking from him.

  “You saved me,” he said, shaking his head in incomprehension. “I would have died. You gave me time. More time with Vivien and with you. I can keep helping. I can hold on to the promise we made. Why would you ask forgiveness for that? If anything, I should be thanking you.”

  A pang of bitterness flashed through the bond, echoed by a twisted smile on Aedan’s lips when he looked up.

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “You’ve just awakened. You don’t know yet all the ways your life has changed. You really shouldn’t thank me.”

  Before Bradan could reply, Aedan stood, pulling his knives from their sheaths.

  “Ready for another round?” he asked, his voice strong and steady again.

  Never, in all the years since he had become a vampire, had Aedan even hinted that he was less than satisfied with his existence. What was he implying now? Was it about the hunger? Was it about more than that?

  Bradan felt cold, and it had nothing to do with the cool night air or the coming rain he could taste on the wind.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Staffing Issues

  When Aedan had said he wanted to find more guards to protect her, Vivien somehow imagined it would take days, and that she’d have gone back to Rhuinn’s castle for the duel before they found anyone. By the time she woke up, however, she was proven wrong.

  Very early that morning, Aedan had apparently enlisted Doril’s help in contacting people he knew who might be interested in becoming guards. When Doril came to bring Vivien her breakfast, she told her about it, though she seemed less concerned about the two men who were to come to the castle after lunch than she was about more practical matters.

  “I’ve tried telling Aedan, but he just won’t listen. Maybe he’ll listen to you, my lady. I’m a cook. I was never trained in anything else. I can channel to let people Pass Through, of course, but I’m no majordomo, nor do I want to be one. Maybe after you’ve found more guards, you might want to find a majordomo along with a maid?”

  Deep down, Vivien wanted neither more guards nor a majordomo, let alone a new maid. However, she had resigned herself to the fact that, as far as the staffing of the castle was concerned, her wishes counted for very little, and so she assured Doril that, yes, they would find someone. It only occurred to her after Doril had left her that maybe they already had someone who could serve as majordomo.

  “Elver?” Aedan repeated, nonplussed, when she ran the idea by him. “He could do it, I’m sure, but do you really want your groundskeeper to be the first face visitors see when they come to you?”

  “What’s the alternative?” she asked. “Having Doril open the way instead? Or me? What kind of impression does that make?”

  Aedan’s silence was as good as a concession that she was right. It was nice to get the last word with him, once in a while.

  Elver was already at work outside when Vivien went to talk to him. She could all but feel Aedan’s discomfort when he had to remain inside while she walked out into the sunlight, and she knew he’d watch her from the threshold, as close to being outside as he could manage without risking being burned by the sunlight.

  She remembered all too well that first morning when she’d opened a door carelessly and let the sunlight in. The smell of his burning flesh was one she wouldn’t forget; the guilt was just as difficult to shake off, even if she’d had no idea at the time what would happen if she exposed him to the sun.

  Stopping a couple of steps outside, she looked first to the sky, checking the position of the sun, then toward Aedan. Taking a deep breath, she focused her mind and reached for the Quickening, watching the colors drain from the world as she willed into existence a large beachside parasol.

  It was the first thing that had co
me to her mind, but it looked more than a little odd, standing there. Also, it wasn’t quite good enough for her purpose. She changed the image in her mind and watched the parasol extend and become a large black, opaque, floating screen that cast an extended oblong shadow over the ground. Satisfied that this would work, she looked at Aedan, one eyebrow raised.

  “It’s direct sunlight only that hurts you, correct?”

  He nodded, eyeing the patch of shadow with a wary expression.

  “We both know I’ll be safe going to talk to Elver,” she said. “But if you want to come along…”

  She wouldn’t demand that he come with her. For one thing, she didn’t need a guard, and was only offering because she knew he’d worry if she went alone. For the other, if he stepped into that patch of shade, he’d be dependent on her to keep him safe by moving the sun block and making sure it didn’t simply vanish. Maybe it was too much to ask him to trust her so implicitly with his very life.

  Or maybe not; as he walked out, he gave her one of his customary small bows.

  “Walk next to me,” she demanded, knowing he’d otherwise remain behind her. “So I can see where you are and move the shade along with you.”

  He did as she asked, one hand as always on the hilt of one of his knives. Habit rather than belief he’d need the knife to protect her, she was sure.

  They followed the path of small white stones that circled the castle and quickly found Elver. His new project now that he’d finished restoring the path was to build a gazebo.

  When he’d first mentioned it, she’d imagined a small thing that would be large enough for three or four people to stand together. What she found instead was a large circle, maybe fifty yards across, that had been covered in a Quickening-made layer of dark, shimmering rock almost a foot high. She stopped as the sight gave her pause. It wasn’t what she’d been expecting.

  “Dame Vivien?” Aedan said urgently.