By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Ten

Damn Mac!

Lily knew damned well there should be dozens of dirty glasses along with the dirty ashtrays Dinah brought into the kitchen. There were none at all, and she didn't have to wonder what had happened to them. Between the peculiar priest who kept accosting her with his desperate eyes and Mac's kindly intentioned efforts to spare her further work, Lily was fast running out of options. Dinah was already trying to shoo her out of the kitchen. And for that matter, Lily herself was just about dead on her feet. She was going to have to lie down soon.

She knew exactly what was going to happen if she fell asleep ... and she didn't know if she could stand to wake up, when it did.

Stephen had said she must exercise her will, so that it contained her mind even when she slept. Stephen was full of shit. Lily didn't normally approve of that expression, but she couldn't think of another that fit the situation quite so well. She already knew that, where Richard was concerned, she had no will. She loved this one man with an aching desperation she would not have believed possible before it happened to her, and she wanted him so much that, even awake, he was in her thoughts at virtually every moment. Asleep, she was helpless against the pull of him. Her mind, lying in wait for her to succumb, finally, to exhaustion, would seek him out the minute her eyes had closed.

She delayed as long as she could. Banished at last from the kitchen, she forced herself to relax in a hot bath, washed her hair vigorously, sat in front of her dressing table and dried it the conventional way ... with an electric dryer. That done, she touched the scent she loved so much, "Toujours Moi," to the pulse points on her arms, to the base of her throat and behind her ears, to the valley between her breasts ... and sat there, staring at herself in the mirror, perfectly aware of what she was doing. She was preparing herself as if he would actually be with her, as if she was going to his bed in fact and not in pitiful dreams, and the pathetic reality of the emptiness of her life without him came home to her with sickening finality.

This was all she would ever have of him. And it was not enough.

She set the perfume bottle down carefully and let her head fall forward into her hands. She would not cry. She had done so much of that, and it hadn't eased anything at all. Dear God, how was she going to live without him?

In the end, it didn't matter. Even if it wasn't enough, if it left her more bereft each time she woke, yet she would still rather have this much than nothing at all. She rose and went to her bed, turned off the bedside lamp and lay back, waiting. She didn't have to wait for very long.

He was asleep, again. The place in which he lay was puzzling ... rock walls, lit with an eerie reflected greenish glow from the emptiness that seemed to be the opening of a cave. She could not imagine what he might be doing in a cave, or lying not on a bed but on a sort of pallet made of what appeared to be an open sleeping bag. He was lying face down, naked, as he always slept, and his pale skin was utterly colorless in the strange half-light.

In her dream, she knelt on the pallet beside him, studying what she could see of his face. He was so tired; he had looked just like this when she first went to him in the infirmary, his face drawn, with the dark bruise-like hollows under his eyes. His hair was damp, and a loose strand had caught in the corner of his mouth. She reached out to smooth it back, and felt the coolness of his skin against her hand.

He was cold, but too deeply asleep to care. Lily smiled and stretched out beside him, carefully moving his arm to fit herself under it. He stirred then, his arm tightening, drawing her closer, half-under him as his body twisted to fit itself to hers. His leg slid over hers and his face turned in, burying itself in her hair. He sighed, a lovely, long, contented sound, and relaxed again, sinking even more deeply into sleep.

Lily's lips brushed against his hair, his ear; her hand came up to stroke, gently, over his back. He had held her in just this way after making love to her during those long nights in Maine, and she had never been so totally happy in her life as she had been then, with all the world driven safely away from them for that little time.

She drove it away again now. With a thought, she covered their bodies with a lightweight thermal blanket and twisted her hips a little, finding a more comfortable hollow in the shifting sand beneath the pallet. That done, she sighed, as he had, and let her eyes drift closed, content to join him in sleep. To hell with tomorrow. Tomorrow didn't matter. She was with him tonight.

It was Adrian's turn at the water. Even though he didn't sweat or otherwise exhibit signs of uncleanness, he wanted a bath. Even a cold bath. He'd finally have a chance to get rid of the damn make-up. So he undressed and carefully immersed himself into the freezing water, hoping like hell that all the activity around this pool had frightened away any wild animals.

There were bears in Iran. Bears lived in caves. There was no sign of bear in this particular cave, granted, but Adrian wouldn't have put anything past a bear. Like horses, they had a kind of low cunning and lived to plot his particular destruction.

Doing his best to forget the possibility of ursine attack, Adrian washed away the make-up and some of the weariness of the long journey. Even he felt the cold of the water, this wasn't a warm tub to wallow in. He pulled himself out, rubbing his arms and legs to warm himself again even though his blood didn't precisely circulate ... blood.

His head came up, nostrils flaring, as he realized he could smell blood. And the person the blood was flowing in. Someone was in the cave with him, even though Ed Perry and Shahid had both declared that Adrian's bathing was to be strictly private.

Why did these things always have to happen to him when he was naked? He reached for his trousers and heard a sigh.

"Show yourself," he commanded, adding a mental probe that would root out the intruder.

Mansour emerged from behind some rocks. "You are so very beautiful, Ah-drian," the Baluchi declared. "Will you not share with me?"

The sheer persistence of these Baluchi was wearing Adrian down. He pulled on his pants without answering. But Mansour, unaccepting of no answer, followed him out when he left.

Adrian was hungry, and the pre-packaged blood they'd brought along held little appeal. Here was young, hot blood and an amenable donor. He could make Mansour think they'd had sex.

"Yes," Adrian said when Mansour asked him again. "Yes, I will share with you. Come to the cave where I will sleep."

Delighted, the bearded young man slapped Adrian on the backside and cheerfully followed him to the mentioned cave. He could not believe his luck, that he, Mansour, had been the one to win a chance at bedding this beautiful boy. How the others would envy him!

Adrian did a quick check of his sleeping cave. No bears. He relaxed, and allowed Mansour to kiss him and slide a hand inside his pants. A minute or so later, there were no pants in the way. Expediency or no, this young Baluchi knew precisely what he was doing. Adrian found himself responding nearly against his will to Mansour's explorations.

Time to take control of the situation before things went too far! He stopped Mansour's hand mid-journey and enticed his victim down onto the bedroll. His tongue lapped across the desert dweller's wrist while Mansour's eyes widened. A quick, hot flash of pain for Mansour as the fangs sank in and as quickly retracted, then the warm, welcome blood met Adrian's questing tongue.

When he'd had his fill, he sealed the fang wounds and looked into Mansour's eyes, ready to make the other young man forget, ready to imprint a memory of sex. But the other was looking at him longingly, hands already reaching for Adrian, his own interest rampant.

"Let me be the one who tames this wild one," Mansour whispered. "Let me ride you."

Adrian sighed and let Mansour take him in his arms. "Yippee kai yay," he replied.

(You didn't really think he was going to keep that resolution, did you?)

Richard Plantagenet, unable to have his longed-for privacy, has kept himself rigidly awake for more than 36 hours on the bare three hours of sleep he was able to steal on the plane between Paris and Bahrain. But now he is entirely alone, secure in a small cave that branches off the huge cavern where the Baluchi tribesmen have led his party in the arid mountains of western Pakistan. Outside the cavern, it is fiercely hot and dry. Inside, where there is a large spring-fed pool of icy water, eerily lit by the phosphorescent rock containing it, it is contrastingly cool and damp. Will Scrope, determined to prevent any disturbance from waking his exhausted king, has taken station just outside the entrance to this small side cave, making up his own bed where no one can approach Richard without waking Will first.

Richard is concerned about a number of problems that are simmering beneath the surface of this journey ... not least of which is the fascination of the younger Baluchi tribesmen with a certain beautiful teal-eyed actor whose dietary requirements give a certain expediency to encouraging that fascination.

Is it possible to dream of dreaming? In these last months, Richard had come to accept as possible many things that, in his former life, he would have seen as vilest witchcraft. And dreams don't care about what's possible anyway. He dreamed of dreaming...

He had slept for hours. He knew it even as his mind surfaced slowly through thinning layers of sleep. Exhausted, dreamless, he had slept as profoundly as if he had been drugged.

And she was there, as he had known she would be. She lay on her back, half under him, her hair spread out beneath his head, her scent surrounding him, her small body fitted to his as if each of them had been constructed to precisely fit all the curves and hollows of the other. In his dream, he raised his head to look down at her and marveled at the pale glow of her skin in the strange, green-tinted half light that stole all the pastel colors of her but only accentuated the purity of line ... the straight, narrow nose, the soft indentations at the corners of her lips, the lovely, flowing curve from her ear and down along her neck to her shoulder. He pushed himself up on one elbow and drew the thin blanket back away from her body, and let his eyes drift down over all the vividly remembered perfection of her. He smiled to see the subtle signs of her pregnancy becoming more evident with time ... the nipples that would feed his child were larger, fuller now ... and the child did not need them yet...

With his free hand, he cupped one breast and moved his thumb in slow circles over the aureole, watching as it stiffened. She made a small noise, deep in her throat, but did not wake. His smile widened. She had made that same little moaning sound the first time he had made love to her, under the breeze-shivered trees, in the hills above the Refuge. When he entered her, that first time, almost mad with need, and so grateful, so relieved, just to have sunk at last into the lush female heat of her, she had made that same small breathless sound ... of purest pleasure, and of welcome.

He lowered his head and took the nipple in his mouth, but gently, not teasing, savoring the taste and texture of her. His hand slid down over her, over the hollow of her stomach to her lower abdomen, where his imagination only created a soft swell that was not really there yet, where his child grew inside her. He felt her mind touch his, and a question ... "Would you like to meet him?"

He lifted his head, startled. Her eyes were open, fathomlessly black in the strange light. A small, infinitely tender smile lifted just the corners of her lips. "Him?" he said, in awe of her now.

He felt the touch of her mind on his strengthen, and she took him with her, questing within her own body ... to the small, greedy life there. He felt its ... his ... comfort, his contentment. There were no thoughts yet, but only feelings, and they were all of warmth and satisfaction. But even without conscious thought, there was no mistaking that this was life, an individual being, and his son.

He felt as if he couldn't breathe. His son. After so very long, he was afraid to believe this tiny life was real, that it would grow and emerge into the world, strong and healthy, that his own son would grow to manhood before his eyes, as those others had not ... little Ned, whose gallant heart could not overcome the small body that was sick from birth, and Johnny, whom he could not bear to think about, even now...

But he would have a son again ... already had a son, here within the body of this tiny woman he loved with such soul-shattering yearning ... this beautiful woman who was not his, and would never be his...

Liliana's mind drew back from the child, but she did not draw away from Richard. Into his mind, with sudden, silent misery, she poured all of her longing for him, her desperate loneliness, her regret and hopeless sorrow. "My love, my love," she whispered in his mind, "I can't bear this. I'm dying without you." Tears welled up in the eyes she had locked on his and spilled, unheeded, from their corners. "Richard," she said, aloud, "I don't know how to live without you."

He knew it was only a dream, only what he wanted her to feel. But even knowing it, he felt exultation swell inside him. At least, in his dreams, she felt what he did, needed him as much as he needed her, and the words he wanted desperately to say to her, and could not, his dreams allowed her to say to him.

Her small hands pulled at his shoulders and he moved over her, settled into her, their bodies joining as easily, as naturally, as if they were meant to be this way, and never separate. Her long sigh breathed against his ear, her lips moved on his neck, her hands tightened on his back. Her whispering voice pleaded with him, "Richard, love, please..."

In his mind, her own need drove against his as she opened fully the bond between them, letting him feel all that she did. He moved, inside her, and felt the first violent wave of sensation from her, as she felt his. He was as gentle as he could be, as careful to avoid hurting her, because the child had become so vividly real in his mind, but she was pulling him on, begging for him to increase the power of his body in hers, and finally he could not hold back anymore. With his face tightly buried in the mass of her fragrant hair, he gave himself over entirely to his own fierce longing for her, and she rose to it, eager for it, until at last he found release for them both as her body arched against his and the intense waves of orgasm beat back and forth between them through the bond.

"Richard, my love..." her whispering voice was a caress, as was the touch of her lips against his throat, his face. Her hands came up to lift his head, cradling his face. Her eyes glowed, green shimmering over the black depths. "I love you," she said, and then made a small sound of despair. "Those stupid words," she said, shaking her head against his bedding. "They never say enough. They can't say what I feel, and I want to say it, I want to tell you..."

He kissed her. He couldn't say it, either, except in the way he always had, with the worship of her body with his. He felt no weariness now, but only deep, quiet joy ... and he would say it, in every way he knew, using all the knowledge of her body he had so carefully sought out during those long days and nights in Maine, as often as her body and his would allow it, and as long as their stamina would last.

But dreams end, even when the mind fights to keep them. Richard woke, how much later he had no way of knowing. He had dreamed of dozing off, satiated at last, his head resting on her breast, her hands finally quiet and content on his back, and his traitorous mind left her and brought him fully awake.

She was not there, of course. He lay alone, under the light blanket he didn't remember, and tried foolishly to sleep again, to find his way back into the dream. At last, cursing his own pitiful cowardice, he opened his eyes and stared up into the dark roof of the cave. She was not there, and all the dreams could not change at all the emptiness of his life without her.

He sat up and pushed the blanket back, annoyed with this evidence that Will, at some time during these last hours while he slept, had come in here, fussing again, to cover him against the cave's chill. But he checked the thought. His annoyance wasn't with Will, but with himself. He had to get up, to resume the responsibilities of this mad journey.

And somewhere, in his suddenly busily occupied mind, the small thought lingered: when you can sleep again, she will be there, waiting for you.

(Jake's been having a rough trip. Brought to the Middle East essentially against his will, unable to turn around for having an arrogant, self-centered, commandeering man boss him around, suffering from jet lag, homesickness, sunburn, and saddle sores, and now dumped into icy cold cave water by his so-called friend Adrian for a simple practical joke about cave sharks ... poor Jake.)

Since Jake was already soaked and freezing, he didn't cavil too much when it came his time to bathe in the pool. He washed quickly, not wanting to get any colder, and wondered if there were any further dunkings in freezing cold water in store for him. So far, Lake Ontario and a cavern pool had both done their best to give him pneumonia.

He put on the silk burnoose that the Baluchi had provided, and took his wet clothes outside. Though it was still early morning, the desert sun beat down mercilessly and temperatures were already in the high thirties -- Jake, as a good Canadian, thought in terms of Celsius. The wind dried him instantly. He hung his clothes on a tent rope to dry, and looked around the Baluchi encampment. The young men were tending the horses, paying no attention to the forlorn foreigner in their midst. Adrian was asleep ... or, as Jake noticed the absence of Mansour, otherwise occupied. Richard, too, was asleep and Will was guarding him. Jake had found friendly conversation with Ed Perry impossible. He had no idea where Alexis was, and she didn't have much time for him, either.

He sighed. He was thousands of miles away from home. Back in Toronto, the leaves would just be turning, the football season had started, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on TV tonight. Or last night ... he hadn't quite figured out the time change. He had been dragged into a foreign country more or less against his will by two extremely arrogant men. His constant teasing of Adrian had only been to get a little of his own back, satisfy his need to bitch about this whole situation. He hadn't deserved to be dunked into a freezing cold pool ... well, maybe not fully deserved it.

He had pushed too far with the cave sharks, but even as he thought that, he grinned to himself. Cave sharks. Adrian had bought it, too, at first.

He looked at his reddening skin and wondered, once more, what the hell he was doing in the desert. This was no place for a bloodling, or for a full-fledged vampire if you came to think of it. He was along to make sure that Adrian and T'Beth were kept safe. He had to look after himself, too ... and he was going to get badly sunburned if he kept standing here like an idiot. He ducked back inside the huge cavern and found his pack. Still lots of sunblock left, thank goodness, and some Solarcain. He treated his flaming skin and decided to find a place to sleep ... nothing else to do, and he would be unable to sleep at night.

Jake found a clear spot away from where either Adrian or Richard were sleeping, and set up his bedroll. He lay down and was quickly asleep, but had troubling dreams. For Jake, enhanced by the vampiric blood that bubbled in his veins and that had wrought so many changes, was psychic. Even in his sleep, he picked up vibes from Adrian ... and from Richard. But with no Mansour or Liliana to accompany him, Jake dreamt of Grace, of Evelyn, of Melantha ... of the women he had known in every sense, and of the emptiness now in his life.

As night stretched over the Pakistani mountains, the occupants of the caverns began to stir. The Baluchis were the first ones moving, along with Ed Perry. Will rose and stretched, wincing as his muscles ached and complained. At least he had gotten Richard to sleep during the day. Alexis appeared, mysteriously, at the cooking fire as the tribesmen prepared dinner. She merely smiled when Ed asked her where she had been.

The smell of food reached into the nook where Jake was sleeping. He snorted and sniffed, waking up immediately. Nightfall, time for all good vampires and even half-vampires to get a move on. He shook his head to rid of last ni ... er, day's dreams. Talk about your daydreams. Damn that Adrian ... and Richard, too, Jake thought, a bit disturbed at having picked up on the king's dream. But what a dream!

Shaking that thought off, Jake ambled over and claimed his share of food, only raising an eyebrow when Adrian deigned to join him on a nearby rock.

"Enjoy yourself?" Jake asked, well aware of what the vampire had been doing until sleep had claimed him.

Adrian just smiled lazily. "Middle Eastern food is quite delightful to the jaded palette," he said, making Alexis laugh.

Ed Perry looked disgusted, but said nothing. Richard finally appeared, joining their group after taking a bit of the communal supper and insisting that Will do the same. The Baluchis did not find it odd that Alexis did not eat with the men, except that it was unusual for a Western woman to show such Middle Eastern traditional manners; and if they thought it was odd that Adrian didn't eat, either, they said nothing about it. Ed had learned to keep quiet about the odd habits of his fellow travelers.

Adrian, sitting right beside Richard, noticed the scent of perfume on the king's skin. He thought it was a bit odd, especially since it seemed a very feminine scent ... and where would Richard get perfume in the wilds of Pakistan, anyway? Alexis? No ... she had passed him, and she wasn't wearing perfume. Adrian didn't think it politic to mention it, especially in such a crowd, though.

Soon after they ate, Richard urged them to get on the trail again. The king's restlessness infected them all, and they complied with no complaint. Adrian found his reluctant horse already saddled and bridled, being held by a widely grinning Mansour. Someone had prepared Alexis' horse for her, as well, since that was not a proper activity for a mere female.

Jake, however, was determined to make himself useful and redeem himself somewhat in Richard's eyes -- cursing his wish to do so at the same time, of course. He was going to saddle his own damned horse if he had any say. So he took the tack from one of the Baluchi and watched as one of them saddled a different mount. Okay, that didn't look too hard, and at least the beast was already bridled, which was the really difficult part. You put on a pad first, then the saddle ... easy. Buckle it underneath ... really, there was nothing to this...

"You had best tighten that cinch, Jake," Richard had been watching the young man's efforts and came over to help.

"It looks pretty tight to me," said Jake dubiously, eyeing the thingy that fastened the saddle around the horse -- what was it called? A cinch. He'd pulled it tight, he was sure.

Richard walked up to the side of the horse and kicked it, swiftly and fairly brutally, in the guts with his knee. The horse expelled noisy and noisome gas from both ends, making Jake wave his hand in front of his nose. Richard then pulled the cinch several inches tighter than Jake had had it and fastened it.

"Horses will always do that when they sense that the person saddling them is inexperienced," Richard explained. "So you have to kick them to make them let the air out. Had you attempted to ride with the saddle fastened as you had it, you'd have fallen off."

"Oh," said Jake, feeling like an idiot.

"You couldn't have known, Jake," Richard assured him, and went over to his own horse. It, of course, had been saddled for him. Nobody expected Effendi Richard to prepare his own mount.

They were on their way shortly thereafter. Jake found himself riding beside Adrian again, only this time he was much too stiff to be singing cowboy songs. His speeded-up healing process wasn't much good for out of shape muscles. He eyed Adrian, noting that the vampire sat far too easily in the saddle for someone who had ridden all night and then ... er...

"Had sex?" Adrian finished the thought for him. "With another man?"

"I wasn’t..."

"I know, Jake. But I do have healing powers, which of course are augmented by fresh blood."

"A bedtime snack and a roll in the cave? What happened to your resolution?"

Adrian shrugged. "I broke it."

"And how."

A frown met this remark. "What do you mean? It wasn't a wild orgy, Jake. I did confine myself to just Mansour, and there really wasn't much time."

"You made me dream about sex."

"Oh, I am sorry..."

"Shut up. But I was ... I picked up on Richard's dreams, too, Adrian. And he was..."

"Jake, you are positively Puritanical. Neither of us are naive children, to be shocked by human coupling. Spit it out, or I'll read your mind."

"Okay, okay. He was making out hot and heavy with a woman, in his sleep. Between you and him, you both made me dream about it, too. Shit, Adrian, if you think you're horny..."

Adrian reined in his horse, a little wobblingly. The horse stopped, having learned to obey this predatory dead thing on its back because not obeying was so much worse.

"You picked up on Richard's dreams?" he asked, this just having sunk in.

"Yeah. I guess it's the proximity or something, and he was dreaming very loudly."

"This is very strange, Jake. You say you know he dreamt of being with a woman. When he joined us tonight, I could smell her perfume on him."

The two of them looked at each other.

"What the hell does this mean, Adrian?" Jake asked after a minute.

"I don't know, Jake. But I don't think it's something we can ask Richard about."

At that moment, Alexis turned her own horse back to join them. "Hey, you two," she called out, "we're leaving you behind. Better catch up."

Two grinning Baluchis also turned back to round up the stragglers, herding them back into the midst of the group. By tacit consent, neither Jake nor Adrian mentioned Jake's dreams or his ability to pick up on Richard's dream.

The second night, they once more halted at some caves an hour or so before dawn. These were smaller, and did not boast a pool of water, but would offer at least token protection from the rays of the sun to the most vulnerable member of the rescue party.

Adrian looked unhappy. Jake had discussed the possibility of bears with him, pointing out that there were indeed bears in Iran and Pakistan* and that they lived in caves, sheltering in them by daylight and roaming in the cooler nights. It was going to be daylight soon. That was when bears would come to the caves.

"We have tents," Adrian declared, rebellion written on every feature. "We brought tents especially for me. Why go to all that trouble if we're not going to use them?"

"These are perfectly good caves," Jake said. "You didn't have any problem with the caves last night."

"Well..." Adrian tried not to look at Mansour. The young man would have been quite happy to share his cave with him again, but so would all the others. Mansour had been pretty unlivable most of the day, and Adrian was starting to worry that one of the two older Baluchi was going to do violence to the boy. So no Middle Eastern on the menu tonight ... unless he could manage to be very discreet. "Those were different caves. These look like the type of caves a bear would use."

Jake shook his head. The others were dismounting, setting up camp, and beginning to stare at them.

"Do you need help, Ah-drian?" Mansour was at his stirrups.

"Your help is needed over here," said Zabour, pointedly, to Mansour. The young man turned to go, but threw a look at Adrian that made the actor twitch uncomfortably on the saddle.

"I think he likes you," Jake grinned.

Adrian's reply was a quickly raised finger. He swung off his horse and allowed one of the other young men to come and take it away. Jake was forced to look after his own mount; none of the Baluchi were interested in assisting him. Come to think of it, that wasn't a bad thing ...

Richard was waiting at the entrance to the small caves. "You know best what suits your requirements, Adrian," he said. "You select your chamber first. We will divide what is left between us."

Adrian hung back from the entrance. "A tent will suit me just fine," he said.

"Is there some problem?" Richard's eyebrows went up.

"No, of course not," Adrian lied. "I'm just tired of caves. We have the tents; why not use them?"

One of the omnipresent Baluchi came out from the caves, a large flashlight in his hand. "I have found one for you, Ah-drian," he said. This one's name was Naajy. "It is very sheltered. You will like."

The young men who could speak a little English had found this a great advantage in getting closer to the beautiful object of their desire.

With Richard and Jake staring at him on one side, and Naajy looking at him imploringly on the other, Adrian sighed and followed his eager guide into the caves. His nose wrinkled ... these were definitely not the spacious, airy caves of last night.

They smelled of bear.

Adrian mentally commanded himself to pull himself together. He could not exhibit fear in front of Naajy; he would lose face. So he braced his shoulders and went into the cave that the grinning young man was pointing to.

He stepped in. It was small, really just big enough for one person to lie down in. It was essentially a coffin, Adrian thought wryly, practically sealed out of the way of all sunlight; any light would have to pierce through several other caves to get here. If he were claustrophobic, this would be a nightmare. But his actual phobia was making him downright paranoid enough. There was a suspicious-looking mound in one corner, dimly seen in the glow of Naajy’s flashlight. Adrian poked at it gingerly with a booted foot, and it parted into less-than-fragrant clumps.

Naajy stood staring, dismayed, at the tracks the pretty boy made out of the cave.

Adrian hit vampire warp speed about the second cave towards the entrance. He was really moving by the time he plowed into Richard, Jake, Shahid Khan and assorted Baluchi. Alexis had the good sense not to be standing in the path of a panicked vampire.

"BEAR!" was all Adrian could manage to babble before collapsing.

(*Really true. The Asiatic Brown Bear has a range that includes Pakistan and Iran. It's a smallish bear, compared to a grizzly or a Kodiak, and mainly vegetarian, but let's not tell Adrian that. :)

Adrian was unconscious. As the various Baluchi tribesmen picked themselves up off the ground, Richard Plantagenet bent down over his peculiar friend with grave concern on his face. Jake Fowler, who had also found himself flung to the ground by Adrian's passage, came on his hands and knees to try to figure out what in the hell had happened. "What did he say?" he asked Richard.

"I'm not certain," Richard said. "Is he all right?"

Jake had turned Adrian's limp body over, but saw no signs of physical trauma. To Richard, he said, "I think so. Richard, there's hardly anything that can really hurt him."

The young Baluchi tribesman, Naajy, had followed Adrian out of the caves at a more human pace, and stood now, looking down at him, with deeply sorrowful eyes. "It was the..." his English failed him, "the bears, the..." Unable to find the right word, he made an embarrassed gesture toward his own backside.

"Bear droppings?" Richard asked.

"Yes, that," Naajy agreed, nodding eagerly. "But very old, Effendi Richard. Perhaps many weeks."

Richard turned questioning eyes on Jake, who looked as if the dawn had come. "Adrian," Jake said, keeping his voice low enough that only Richard could hear, "has a phobia about bears. He can't help it, Richard. Something that happened when he was a kid."

Richard sighed. Wars without people, he thought wistfully. But this had to be dealt with, and quickly. The Baluchis' respect for Adrian, which was vital, had just taken a nosedive, and it had to be restored. If, in the process, Adrian could also be supplied with something else that he needed, all to the good.

Richard stood and walked over to Shahid Khan. "My friend has suffered an indisposition," he said calmly. "His condition makes him prone to such spells, and it is only his great heart which makes him attempt this journey in light of that debilitating condition."

Shahid looked blank, and Ed Perry translated this into Baluchi, quickly, since the problem seemed to be that Richard's vocabulary exceeded Shahid's to some considerable extent. Shahid's eyebrows lifted as he understood. "Ah," he said, "I do not know, Effendi, that this was so. It is ... misfortune for one so young."

Richard's face was very stern. "He does not spare himself any hardship, my lord Khan. His courage, in the face of this sickness, is humbling to us all."

Shahid got this part, and nodded sagely. "It is a great heart that risks so much for a friend," he agreed.

"In view of this," Richard persisted, "it would be helpful if your young man ... Naajy? ... could be set to watch over Effendi Adrian during the day, if you would allow it. I think he would be willing to perform this small service, and he could thus inform us if my friend suffers any further ... spells of this sort."

Shahid Khan agreed to this plan, and went over to inform Naajy of his additional duties, which Naajy seemed suspiciously eager to comply with. By this time, Adrian was stirring, and Richard went back to him quickly. "Adrian," he said, his voice fiercely low as Adrian's eyes fluttered open, "control yourself at once." As awareness, returning, brought panic back into Adrian's eyes, Richard's hand on his shoulder closed in bone-bruising determination. "There are no bears in the caves. The Baluchi will be camping at the entrance, and no bears will pass them to enter during the day. I myself will sleep just within the entrance of this cave, and will provide further assurance." He watched the panic recede ... but not vanish altogether. Very firmly, he said, "I have told these people that your behavior is a symptom of your 'illness,' which they accept, and they must continue to believe that. Adrian, you cannot show fear, or you will not be able to command obedience from them when it is critical that you do so."

"I'm not going back in there," Adrian said shakily.

"Yes, you are. And Naajy is going with you. He will stay with you throughout the day."

Adrian's eyes lifted to where the young Baluchi tribesman stood over him, his great dark eyes filled with eager longing. Oh, well ... in that case...

"Can you get up?" Richard asked.

Adrian, who could have stood with Richard on his shoulders, looked wan and helpless. He raised one languid hand. "Maybe with Naajy's help...?" he said weakly.

Naajy was only too happy to help. He bent and lifted Adrian and, supporting him with a strong young arm around the waist, guided him back into the cave.

Richard stood up and, offering his hand, pulled Jake to his feet. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Oh, hell, yes," Jake said. "I'm getting used to being tossed around by him. At least, this time, I didn't freeze my balls off."

Richard didn't answer, but spun on his heel and walked quickly away. He left the group, as if seeking privacy, and curious, Jake followed behind. There was a strange, closed expression on Richard's face he hadn't seen before, and he had a suspicion...

He was right. Around a protecting bend in the rock wall, Richard Plantagenet, too endlessly polite to do so in Adrian's presence, was leaning against the face of the mountain, pounding with one fist against the rock, and with the other jammed tightly into his mouth. And he was laughing his ass off.