Morrigan's Cross - Circle Trilogy 1 Part 4

Cian's gaze drifted over them, then back to Hoyt's face. "They'll heal soon enough."

"I've come with a charge from Morrigan."

"Morrigan, is it?" This time the amus.e.m.e.nt burst out in laughter. "There are no G.o.ds here. No G.o.d. No faerie queens. Your magic has no place in this time, and neither do you."

"But you do."

"Adjustment is survival. Money is G.o.d here, and power its partner. I have both. I've shed the likes of you a long time ago."

"This world will end, they will all end, by Samhain, unless you help me stop her."

"Stop who?" "The one who made you. The one called Lilith."

Chapter 3

Lilith. The name brought Cian flashes of memories, a hundred lifetimes past. He could still see her, smell her, still feel that sudden, horrified thrill in the instant she'd taken his life.

He could still taste her blood, and what had come into him with it. The dark, dark gift.

His world had changed. And he'd been given the privilege-or the curse-of watching worlds change over countless decades.

Hadn't he known something was coming?

Why else had he been sitting alone in the middle of the night, waiting?

What nasty little twist of fate had sent his brother-or the brother of the man he'd once been-across time to speak her name?

"Well, now you have my attention."

"You must come back with me, prepare for the battle."

"Back? To the twelfth century?" Cian let out a short laugh as he leaned back in his chair.

"Nothing, I promise you, could tempt me. I like the conveniences of this time. The water runs hot here, Hoyt, and so do the women. I'm not interested in your politics and wars, and certainly not in your G.o.ds."

"The battle will be fought, with or without you, Cian."

"Without sounds perfectly fine."

"You've never turned from battle, never hidden from a fight."

"Hiding wouldn't be the term I'd use,"

Cian said easily. "And times change. Believe me."

"If Lilith defeats us, all you know will be lost in this time, for all time. Humankind will cease to be."

Cian angled his head. "I'm not human."

"Is that your answer?" Hoyt strode forward. "You'll sit and do nothing while she destroys? You'll stand by while she does to others what she did to you? While she kills your mother, your sisters? Will you sit there while she turns Nola into what you are?"

"They're dead. Long dead. They're dust."

Hadn't he seen their graves? He hadn't been able to stop himself from going back and standing over their stones, and the stones of those who'd come after them.

"Have you forgotten all you were taught?

Times change, you say. It's more than change. Could I be here now if time was solid? Their fate is not set, nor is yours. Even now our father is dying, yet I left him. I will never see him alive again."

Slowly Cian got to his feet. "You have no conception of what she is, what she is capable of. She was old, centuries old, when she took me. You think to stop her with swords and lightning bolts? You're more fool than I remember."

"I think to stop her with you. Help me. If not for humanity, then for yourself. Or would you join her? If there's nothing left of my brother in you, we'll end this between us now."

Hoyt drew his sword.

For a long moment, Cian studied the blade, considered the gun in his hand. Then he slipped the weapon back in his pocket. "Put your sword away. Christ, Hoyt, you couldn't take me one-on-one when I was alive."

Challenge, and simple irritation, rushed into Hoyt's eyes. "You didn't fare very well the last time we fought."

"True enough. It took me weeks to recover. Hiding around in caves by day, half starving. I looked for her then, you know. Lilith, who sired me. By night, while I struggled to hunt enough food to survive. She abandoned me.

So I've a point to square with her. Put the d.a.m.n sword away." When Hoyt hesitated, Cian simply leaped.

In the blink of an eye he was up, gliding over Hoyt's head and landing lightly at his back. He disarmed his brother with one careless twist of the wrist.

Hoyt turned slowly. The point of the sword was at his throat. "Well done," he managed.

"We're faster, and we're stronger. We have no conscience to bind us. We are driven to kill, to feed. To survive."

"Then why aren't I dead?"

Cian lifted a shoulder. "We'll put it down to curiosity, and a bit of old time's sake." He tossed the sword across the room. "Well then, let's have a drink."

He walked to a cabinet, opened it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the sword fly across the room and into Hoyt's hand. "Well done on you," he said mildly and took out a bottle of wine. "You can't kill me with steel, but you could-if you were lucky enough-hack some part of me off that I'd rather keep. We don't regenerate limbs."

"I'll put my weapons aside, and you do the same."

"Fair enough." Cian took the gun out of his pocket, set it on a table. "Though a vampire always has his weapon." He offered a brief glimpse of fangs. "Nothing to be done about that." He poured two gla.s.ses while Hoyt laid down his sword and dagger. "Have a seat then, and you can tell me why I should get involved in saving the world. I'm a busy man these days. I have enterprises."

Hoyt took the gla.s.s offered, studied it, sniffed at it. "What is this?"

"A very nice Italian red. I've no need to poison you." To prove it, he sipped from his own gla.s.s. "I could snap your neck like a twig."

Cian sat himself, stretched out his legs. Then he waved a hand at Hoyt. "In today's worlds, what we're having here could be called a meeting, and you're about to make your pitch. So...

enlighten me."

"We must gather forces, beginning with a handful. There is a scholar and a witch, one of many forms and a warrior. That must be you."

"No. I'm no warrior. I'm a businessman."

He continued to sit, at his ease, giving Hoyt a lazy smile. "So the G.o.ds, as usual, have given you pitifully little to work with, and an all but impossible task. With your handful, and whoever else is fool enough to join you, you're expected to defeat an army led by a powerful vampire, most likely with troops of her kind, and other manner of demon if she deigns to bother with them. Otherwise, the world is destroyed."

"Worlds," Hoyt corrected. "There are more than one." "You're right about that anyway." Cian sipped, contemplated. He'd nearly run out of challenges in his current persona. This, at least, was interesting.

"And what do your G.o.ds tell you is my part in this?"

"You must come with me, teach me all that you can about her kind, and how to defeat them. What are their weaknesses? What are their powers? What weaponry and magic will work against them? We have until Samhain to master these and gather the first circle."

"That long?" Sarcasm dripped. "What would I gain from all this? I'm a wealthy man, with many interests to protect here and now."

"And would she allow you to keep that wealth, those interests, should she rule?"

Cian pursed his lips. Now there was a thought. "Possibly not. But it's more than possible if I help you I'll risk all that and my own existence. When you're young, as you are-"

"I'm the eldest."

"Not for the last nine hundred years and counting. In any case, when you're young you think you'll live forever, so you take all manner of foolish risks. But when you've lived as long as I, you're more careful. Because existence is imperative. I'm driven to survive, Hoyt. Humans and vampires have that in common."

"You survive sitting alone in the dark in this little house?"

"It's not a house," Cian said absently.

"It's an office. A place of business. I have many houses, as it happens. That, too, is survival.

There are taxes and records and all manner of things to be gotten around. Like most of my kind I rarely stay in one place for long. We're nomadic from nature and necessity."

He leaned forward now, resting his elbows on his knees. There were so few he could speak to about what he was. That was his choice, that was the life he'd made. "Hoyt, I've seen wars, countless wars, such as you could never imagine. No one wins them. If you do this thing, you'll die. Or become. It would be a feather in Lilith's cap to turn a sorcerer of your power."

"Do you think there is a choice here?"

"Oh yes." He sat back again. "There always is. I've made many in my lifetimes." He closed his eyes now, lazily swirling his wine.

"Something's coming. There have been rumblings in the world under this one. In the dark places. If it's what you say, it's bigger than I a.s.sumed. I should've paid more attention. I don't socialize with vampires as a rule." Baffled, as Cian had always been sociable, Hoyt frowned. "Why not?"

"Because as a rule they're liars and killers and bring too much attention to themselves. And those humans who socialize with them are usually mad or doomed. I pay my taxes, file my reports and keep a low profile. And every decade or so, I move, change my name and keep off the radar."

"I don't understand half of what you say."

"Imagine not," Cian replied. "She'll f.u.c.k this up for everyone. Bloodbaths always do, and those demons who go about thinking they want to destroy the world are ridiculously shortsighted. We have to live in it, don't we?"

He sat in silence. He could focus and hear each beat of his brother's heart, hear the faint electrical hum of the room's climate controls, the buzz of the lamp on his desk across the room. Or he could block them out, as he most often did with background noises.

He'd learned to do, and not do, a great deal over time.

A choice, he thought again. Well, why not?

"It comes down to blood," Cian said, and his eyes stayed closed. "First and last, it comes to blood. We both need it to live, your kind and mine. It's what we sacrifice, for the G.o.ds you wors.h.i.+p, for countries, for women. And what we spill for the same reasons. My kind doesn't quibble about reasons."

He opened his eyes now, and showed Hoyt how they could burn red. "We just take it.

We hunger for it, crave it. Without it, we cease to be. It's our nature to hunt, kill, feed. Some of us enjoy it more than others, just as humans do.

Some of us enjoy causing pain, inciting fear, tormenting and torturing our prey. Just as humans do. We're not all of the same cloth, Hoyt."

"You murder."

"When you hunt the buck in the forest and take its life, is it murder? You're no more than that, less, often less, to us."

"I saw your death."

"The tumble off the cliffs wasn't-"

"No. I saw her kill you. I thought it a dream at first. I watched you come out of the tavern, go with her in her carriage. And couple with her as it drove out of the village. And I saw her eyes change, and how the fangs glinted in the dark before she sank them into your throat. I saw your face. The pain, the shock and... "

"Arousal," Cian finished. "Ecstasy. It's a moment of some intensity." "You tried to fight, but she was an animal on you, and I thought you were dead, but you weren't. Not quite."

"No, to feed you simply take, drain the prey dry if you choose. But to change a human, he must drink from the blood of his maker."

"She sliced her own breast, and pressed your mouth to her, and still you tried to fight until you began to suckle on her like a babe."

"The allure is powerful, as is the drive to survive. It was drink or die."

"When she was done, she threw you out into the road, left you there. It was there I found you." Hoyt drank deeply as his belly quivered.

"There I found you, covered with blood and mud. And this is what you do to survive? The buck is given more respect."

"Do you want to lecture me?" Cian began as he rose to get the bottle again. "Or do you want to know?"

"I need to know."

"Some hunt in packs, some alone. At wakening we're most vulnerable-from the first when we wake in the grave, to every evening if we've slept through the day. We are night creatures. The sun is death."

"You burn in it." "I see you know some things."

"I saw. They hunted me when I journeyed home. In the form of wolves."

"Only vampires of some age and power, or those under the protection of another powerful sire can shape s.h.i.+ft. Most have to content themselves with the form in which they died. Still, we don't age, physically. A nice bonus feature."