"You know, if I couldn't see for myself that it wasn't true, I'd say I was cursed."
Adrian shook his head at the flight attendant's offer of a beverage and cocked an eyebrow at me when she moved off.
"That whole nothing-turning-out-as-planned thing," I answered his silently questioning eyebrow. "First there was you - well, OK, I'm willing to admit that turned out better than I imagined."
The grin that never failed to make my heart do back-flips curled his lips for a moment before he resumed his scan of the passengers on the British Air plane en route to London.
"But then there was the cursing in Cologne." At Adrian's look of warning, I pushed up the armrest between us and slid my hand onto the hard muscle of his thigh. Two could play at the possessive game. Not that I'm blaming you, of course. You did your part perfectly, and I'm strangely pleased to know that, should the need ever arise to curse someone again, we're set, but that whole experience of Herr Baxton growing a third eye has given me the willies. You're sure it will go away?
Adrian's hand covered mine, almost as warm and reassuring as his voice in my mind. I am certain that both the extra eye and the tail that were the result of your curse will disappear with time. The curse you cast was not a strong one, Hasi. It will dissipate in a few weeks.
Good. I'd hate to think Hen Baxton would have to get a whole new wardrobe just because my cursing skills aren't terribly accurate.
His laughter rumbled in my head as I snuggled into his side. The flight itself was uneventful despite a storm that followed us as we flew toward England. Adrian didn't seem to be much in the mood for conversation, his attention focused on making sure that no one had slipped past his guard. I understood he was worried about Sebastian and Christian finding us, but I wasn't overly concerned. Gigli had sent one of her henchmen along with us to the airport, and both he and Adrian had kept their eyes peeled for any vampires, but neither one spotted anyone suspicious. None of the travelers had paid any attention to us as we collected our tickets and waited to board the plane. The passports Seal had given us had been works of forged art, so perfect that not even the overly conscientious Cologne security had given them a second glance. I had to admit being a bit disappointed that we had no need for the hastily conceived cover story I prepared about who we were and why we were going to London, a story that involved a coffee pot left plugged in, a litter of newly born kittens, and a priceless Picasso, but the realization that we were, at long last, on our way soothed that minor irritation.
"So, what now?" I whispered to Adrian less than an hour later when a tired flight attendant asked us to make sure our trays and seat backs were upright. Beyond the tiny airplane window, the lights of the London suburbs flashed beneath us. "We find Asmodeus, and we'll find Saer, right? Since you're working for him, you must know where Asmodeus is."
Adrian's eyes went cold. "Yes. I know where he is."
"Good. This is going to sound kind of odd, but where exactly does a demon lord stay when he's in London?"
The plane dropped into its final descent, bouncing slightly when the wheels hit the tarmac. A few minutes later, everyone leaped to their feet and began tugging luggage from under seats and out of the overhead bins. Adrian leaned toward me to avoid being beaned by a woman with a large stuffed panda.
"Since losing his source of power, Asmodeus has been bound to an ivory figure currently in storage at the British Museum."
My mouth dropped open. "He's what?"
Adrian's fingers closed around mine. You must be quiet, Hasi. For anyone to realize we are in England is a danger to us both.
I scooted out of my seat as Adrian stood, his satchel slung over one shoulder as he waited for me to precede him. I hurried off the plane, smiling at the flight attendant as we left, pausing in the disembarkment area until Adrian caught up with me. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to shout, but, Adrian, the British Museum?"
He shushed me and nodded, hurrying us up the long corridor to the customs area.
I grabbed his arm. There is a demon lord in the British Museum?
Yes.
Doesn't anyone notice ?
He slid an irritated glance my way. He is bound to a figurine, powerless until the ring is returned to him. No, no one has noticed he is there.
Oh. I showed my passport, chatted briefly with the passport control lady, and waited until Adrian did the same and joined me again before I asked, "What sort of figurine? One of those china shepherdesses with all the pink frou-frou and stuff?"
"Hardly," he answered, his voice dry as we followed the signs to the train station beneath Heathrow. "This figure is ivory, from Toprakkale, in Urartu."
"Urartu," I said, frowning as I dug around in my historian's memory.
"Ancient Rusahinili. Eastern Anatolia." Adrian plopped a couple of coins in a machine and grabbed the two train tickets that emerged.
"Oh, that's Turkey! Gotcha."
"The statue is of a griffin-headed demon, one of the figures used in an altar devoted to Asmodeus. Because of its nearness and the fact it had been consecrated in his name, he was bound to it when his ring was lost."
"Huh. So he's stuck in the British Museum, powerless. Where's Saer, then?"
"I suspect with his Beloved," Adrian answered as he shoved me toward a train that had just arrived.
I was getting a little tired of being astonished by what he said, so I didn't stop and demand an immediate explanation. No, I held my tongue until we were settled in the back of the last car, then I asked in a casual, barely interested voice, "Your brother has a Beloved?"
"He's found her, but they haven't yet Joined. At least they hadn't when I last heard of Saer." Adrian sat stiffly next to me, his eyes constantly moving around at the people filling the car. It was just before dawn, a fact that seemed to worry me more than Adrian, but he was focused on the occupants of the car. Most of the people were commuters clutching travel cups of coffee, blinking with bleary eyes at the morning paper.
I put my hand on Adrian's and gave it a squeeze. "Angelpants, I know you're just doing the protection thing, but I really don't think you have anything to worry about here. No one knows we're in England, and quite frankly, I don't think anyone on this train gives a hoot about us."
An eyebrow cocked as he slowly turned to look at me, his lips thinned. "Angel... pants?"
I sighed and raised my hands in surrender. "I'm trying to find an endearment for you, but nothing seems to fit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a love name for a vampire? You guys thrive on names like Betrayer and Spike and Vlad the Decapitator, none of which lend themselves to cute, adorable cuddle names."
Adrian's eyebrow arched even higher. "I believe you are referring to Vlad the Impaler, the man later known as Dracula."
"Whatever. My problem is that honey is too bland, and I don't like darling, and sweetie really is not you, so that leaves me with babycakes, angelpants, and love."
"I choose love," he answered, trying to look stern and unbending, like a man feared for centuries as the Betrayer, but I saw the corners of his mouth quirk.
"You know, the more you do that, the easier it'll get," I teased, leaning over to kiss the curved corners of his mouth.
"I have not had much in my life to smile about," he admitted, his eyes starting to go dark with desire. Mindful of the passengers around us I moved my kisses to the safer region of his stubbly cheek.
"I know you haven't, but that's going to change. You've got me now, and all my friends say I'm a wacky girl. I'm just what you need."
He looked for a moment like he was going to argue that point, but stopped before he said anything. I leaned into his side, content to be there with him, the feel of him warm and solid next to me bringing me a sense of fulfillment and completeness I'd had no idea was missing from my life.
So, was Vlad one of you guys?
A Dark One? No.
What was he, then? And why did Bram Stoker think he was a vamp?
Dracula was a strigoi, a member of a rare blood clan. Strigoi ingest blood as sustenance by choice.
Whereas you guys have to have it?
Adrian's thumb brushed along my jaw in a tender gesture that melted my heart. Dark Ones cannot manufacture blood. We must absorb it from other sources, but we do not ingest it. The blood I take from you joins with my own to give me life.
A little erotic shiver ran down my spine, but whether it was from the soft touch of his mind or the remembrance of just how exciting I found it to feed him, I didn't know. I did know that I had to stop thinking about it, or the early-morning commuters on the train to Oxford were going to get the show of a lifetime.
"Let's back up a minute to your brother. Why would he not Join with his Beloved?"
An interesting mixture of regret, pain, and something that looked very much like embarrassment passed over his face before he turned his head to look out the window. "Saer has always been determined to wield great power. I have done what I could to deny him the power he seeks, but I fear my reign of influence is at an end."
I looked at him, for a minute confused. His jaw was tight, and his hands fisted, both indicators that he was revealing another facet of his character that he felt would show him in a bad light. I knew better - I'd seen into his heart, and I knew he was not a vindictive man.
"You've done bad things in your time, Adrian," I said softly, just loud enough for him to hear. His body tensed as he slowly turned to look at me. I smiled, allowing him to see the love in my eyes. "But you are not responsible for them. You did not ask to be cursed by a demon lord. You do not take pleasure in the acts he's forced you to do in his name. You are not an evil man, so I know that you must have had a good reason for putting the stymie on your brother."
He stared at me in disbelief for a moment, his eyes bright with astounded wonder that darkened into sadness. "You are the only person who has ever believed in me, Hasi. You are the only one who has not feared me. I swear by all the saints, if I could change the inevitable outcome of what must happen, I would. I would give the soul you have all but reclaimed for me in order to change my future, but it is not to be."
I leaned forward to kiss him, changed my angle of attack, and flicked my tongue across the tip of his nose instead. He looked startled by the gesture, just as I intended. "You know, I've never been one to buy into that whole fate thing. I've always believed that life is what you make it, and as I fully intend to spend the rest of mine with you, I'd appreciate it if you weren't quite so doom-and-gloom and 'I am the Betrayer, I must perish!' and start thinking about ways to beat your brother, because I'm not giving up on you. On us. So let's talk about Saer and what his weak spots are. I understand that he wants power, and heaven knows he certainly has that with Asmodeus's ring, but what does his Beloved have to do with it? And why wouldn't he Join with her if it would give him back his soul?"
Adrian sighed a long, put-upon sigh, one that had me smiling to myself. I knew how hard he struggled to maintain his bad-boy image, but I also knew that his Betrayer days were over. It was time he realized that he'd been dealt a bad hand, but now the deck had been reshuffled and I was dealing. "For a Dark One to Join with a Beloved means his life is bound with hers. Their souls are entwined and cannot be separated."
I ignored the pointed look he gave me and nodded.
"Thus any decisions he made would affect her, and vice versa. The type of power Saer seeks would require him to forfeit not only his soul, but that of his Beloved as well."
"And he doesn't want to damn an innocent woman that way," I said, nodding again.
Adrian shook his head. "I would like to believe that Saer could not hand over his Beloved, even without having Joined with her, but the truth is simply that only she can make the decision to submit to a demon lord. Saer, on his own, cannot force her."
"Oh." I thought about that for a few minutes as the train stopped at a station, a couple of people leaving, but more getting on. Adrian peered at each person intently, relaxing only when everyone settled into their seats. "So he hasn't Joined with her because she won't give herself up to a demon lord, and Saer needs to be able to do that to get the power he wants. Got that. But why is he trotting off to see her now?"
"He has the ring," Adrian answered grimly, glancing out the window. There wasn't any sun to be seen, it being a typical rainy English day, but the gray outside was lightening significantly. "He will Join with Belinda, then use the ring against her to force her into compliance with his plans. It is the only way he can do so."
My heart sank. Not only had I screwed up royally in failing to rescue Adrian's nephew, now my stupidity had damned an innocent woman to an eternity as a demon lord's slave? "Crap!"
"Exactly," he agreed, watching as the next station's advance warning signs flashed by. "We will get off here. I cannot risk being caught out in the full light of day."
"Do you know Saer's Beloved?" I asked, more to distract myself from wallowing in guilt than because I really wanted to know. I followed Adrian off the train and through the small suburban station.
He shot me an odd look as he pulled up the collar of his coat.
"You called her Belinda," I pointed out. "I wondered if that meant you know her."
"Yes, I know her. She is... she was... I mated with her. You will please go ask that taxi if he is free. If he is, I will join you and we will go to Belinda's pub. If we hurry, the light should not harm me."
I grabbed his arm and shoved him into a corner of the room, out of earshot of the few people trickling in and out of the station. "You mated with her?"
He frowned, just as I knew he would, but at that moment I wasn't overly concerned about his emotions. "Yes. Did you think I was a virgin?"
"No, of course not, but you don't just blurt out something like that. And especially you don't use the word mated. It sounds so... so... animalistic."
"It was animalistic," he answered, still frowning. "I thought at first she was my Beloved, but as soon as I merged with her" - I ground my teeth, pushing down hard on the need to rail at his cavalier manner of flaunting his ex-lovers at me - "I realized she was not. We engaged in sex for a few months. That's all there was to it."
"New rule," I said, releasing his arm to shake my finger at him. "No introducing lovers without warning. No using the word 'mating' in a sentence mentioning said lover. And absolutely, positively no warm remembrances of your fun time in the sack with her!"
"You are overreacting," Adrian said. "You were not a virgin, and yet I did not demand to know everything about the two men you were with before you gave yourself to me."
"How do you know it was just two men?" I asked, momentarily distracted from my diatribe.
His eyebrows rose.
"Dammit, you poked around in my brain without asking if you could look in my former-boyfriend folder!" I took a deep breath and reminded myself that wasn't the issue at hand. There were much more important things to do right now than harry him over a few poorly chosen words. "Right. Your relationships before we met are no more my business than my past relationships are to you, but I would appreciate it if we could exclude mentions of sex when referring to Belinda."
Adrian tipped his head toward the door.
"Fine. I'll go see if a taxi is free. But no more sex-with-Belinda talk! I'm serious, Adrian! There's only so much a girl can take before she goes totally and completely insane."
"You are jealous," he said, satisfaction rife in his voice.
"You bet your boots I'm jealous! And green isn't a good color on me, so stop looking so smug."
Three minutes later we were zipping through the streets of High Wycombe. It had been raining, but it looked as if the clouds were clearing as the sun started to rise. Adrian had pulled a soft wool fedora from his bag, and with that on his head and the collar of his duster turned up, he didn't seem to be suffering any undue effects.
He slid his hand along my arm until his fingers encountered the bare flesh of my wrist. Why are you staring at me so avidly, Hasi?
I'm just watching for smoke, I answered, sliding a quick assessing glance out the window. It's almost fully daylight. I don't want you to start burning up.
A warm blanket of gratitude fell softly over me. No one has ever worried about me. No one has ever cared if I suffered, but I will not have you concerned unduly, Hasi. Although I cannot help but wish you had not done it, our Joining has given me a slight tolerance of weakened sunlight. As long as I remain covered and out of the direct light, I will not be damaged.
"Good," I said as he removed his hand from my wrist. He answered the taxi driver's question about which pub we were going to, ignoring the driver's comment that the pub wouldn't be open at this time of the morning.
My curiosity got the better of me. "So... um... this Belinda. You said you thought for a little bit that she was" - I glanced in the driver's rearview mirror - "right for you, but she wasn't, she was meant for Saer. Does he know that you and she were an item at one time?"
"Yes," he answered, his face and voice grim. "We were never close, but my history with Belinda drove him into a fury of hatred that left him swearing vengeance on me. For the last ten years, he has attempted by all means possible to destroy me, hiding his true reason for wishing me dead behind the fact that I am the Betrayer."
"What a bastard," I growled, thinking of a couple of particularly juicy curses mentioned in the charm book. "Just let me have five minutes alone with him, and I'll take care of him."
Adrian didn't bother to tell me the obvious - that as long as Saer had the ring, there was nothing either of us could do that would seriously harm him. "I will admit that at the time I thought he was overreacting to the situation with Belinda, but now..." He brushed a strand of hair off my face. "Now I understand the feelings that I must have stirred in him when he found me with his Beloved."
"Wait a minute," I said softly, ignoring the spurt of jealousy that rose every time I thought of Adrian with another woman. "You said you two were never close. I know you're the B-man and all, but Saer's your twin! How can you not have ever been close to him?"
Adrian's eyes were the color of underwater icebergs. "I was bound into service to Asmodeus when I was less than two years old. My father bartered me in exchange for the power to mesmerize women."
I stared at him in horror, fully aware but uncaring that my mouth hung open for a few seconds while I tried to get my stunned brain to function again. "Your father gave you to a demon lord? When you were just a baby? That's how you were cursed?"
He laid a finger across my lips, shushing me.
Your own father, the man whose loins you sprang from gave you to a demon lord? He just said, "Here, take my baby and give me the power to get laid?" Your father did that?
It is a long time in the past, Hasi. I appreciate the anger and outrage you feel on my behalf, but I assure you that I have long since accepted my fate.
Well, I haven't! I lunged across him, framing his face between my hands as I looked deep into his being, mourning for what had been ripped from him. You're not the Betrayer, Adrian, you're the betrayed. Is your father still alive?
A smile curved his lips as he moved my hands so he could kiss my palms before releasing them. "No. He ended his life many years ago when he tired of the shallow nature of his existence."
Impossible as it seemed considering the fury I felt on his behalf, that just made me angrier. "He sold you for sex, then killed himself when he wasn't getting his jollies anymore?"
"I doubt it was quite that simple."
"What about Saer? Did your father give him up, too?"
"No." Adrian's eyes would not meet mine, but I didn't need to touch him to feel the swift stab of pain that lanced through him. "Saer is the oldest son. My father did not feel he was expendable as I was."
"Like father, like son," I muttered to myself, but Adrian heard me. "Saer is a chip off the old block."
"Here you are," the cabby called back to us, pulling up before an old building done in faux half-timbering, a sign next to the door depicting a churchman in full regalia presenting his hindquarters as he looked over his shoulder at a saucy-looking woman who held a switch. "The Flogged Bishop. That'll be six pounds ten."
I stared long and hard at the sign as Adrian tossed some money at the driver, following slowly as he entered a small unmarked door at the side of the pub. "I have just one question - this is a real pub, isn't it? It's not another place like Gigli's?"
His dimples deepened as a grin flashed briefly while he knocked on a door at the top of a short flight of stairs. "You didn't mind me knowing Gigli, so why would you mind Belinda running a brothel?"
"Because Gigli said the only non-mortal beings she serves are poltergeists, which means I didn't have to worry about you having tasted forbidden pleasures there. This" - I waved at the blank wall that stood between us and the pub - "is an entirely different situation!"
The door opened before he had time to respond, the woman standing in the doorway clearly having just gotten up. I eyed her carefully, this woman who Adrian had once briefly thought was his salvation. She was pretty, much prettier than what I expected a pub owner to be, standing a few inches shorter than me, with short curly brown hair and soft brown eyes. "Adrian!" she said in blatant surprise. Her expression quickly changed to one of mingled hope and sorrow. "Have you heard anything? Have you found Damian? Saer said a demon lord has him. Is it true? Is he lost forever?"
"Damian?" I asked, at first a little surprised by her primary concern, then reminding myself that if she was Saer's Beloved, she would no doubt be worried about his son.
"Belinda is Damian's mother," Adrian explained before turning back to the woman. "Is Saer here?"
"No," she answered, stepping back and gesturing us through the door into a small apartment above the pub.
The nervous energy surrounding Adrian lessened a smidgen at her words. I heaved a mental sigh of relief as well. "Thank God he hasn't been here. We've been worried sick that you Joined with him."
The door closed with a hushed click as she turned to face us. "I'm sorry, you don't understand. Saer isn't here now, but he was earlier, and we are Joined. Saer insisted we take the final steps last night, before he left to call up his army."
"Army?" I asked weakly, groping blindly behind me for a chair. My legs gave out as the implications of Saer's actions became very clear in my mind.
"Yes," she nodded, bustling past us to a tiny kitchen. "He's gone to raise an army to defeat his enemy and rescue Damian. He's quite confident that no one will be able to withstand his force now. He's got a special ring, you see, and evidently with it, he's quite invincible. He told me that no one, not even the demon lord himself, can stand against him now." She paused, glancing from Adrian's still form to me, a cheery smile lighting her face as if she hadn't just spelled out the doom of everyone in the room. "Would you like tea or coffee?"
