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

Chapter Thirty-One

Doni went to her knees in front of Liam. "Can you follow her?" she implored. "Liam, you've got to be able to find her! If he's dead..."

"Shush." Liam reached out to rest one hand on her shoulder. "Let me try, Doni. Let me try. Stephen?" He reached out with his other hand and Stephen, taking his seat again on the other chair, took the older man's blue-veined hand firmly between both of his. "I'll need your strength," Liam said, soberly. "And yours, Doni."

Dinah, standing behind Donalore, watching, her face sick with frustration, said, "Can I help?" She knew she couldn't. Liam's kindly eyes told her that. Only the Awakened could help, and only a channeler like Stephen could take energy from one and give it to another.

Liam said, "Pray for her, young lady." He smiled slightly and closed his eyes. His head sank forward to rest on his chest, and the room became profoundly silent.

Dinah watched the three of them, as if she expected something visible to happen. It didn't. Liam had gone into that "otherness" state again, that emptiness state, and Doni and Stephen were watching him as closely as she was, but with a strange concentration in their eyes, as if they could see something she could not. She saw Stephen's hands tighten around Liam's, and Doni's head dropped forward, her eyes closing now, as did Stephen's. They were still there; but they were in some indefinable way diminished. Something of the vividness of life had gone out of each of them, and she understood that they were lending their strength to Liam, to the search he was making, trying to follow whatever essence Lily had left behind as she transported her body to where her mind had found the man she loved ... and lost him.

Moments ticked away slowly; the old alarm clock on the dresser was as loud in the silence as the clash of cymbals. Dinah wanted to scream. She wanted to grab Doni, or Liam, or Stephen and force them to tell her where they had gone, what they were doing ... and where Lily was and what had happened to her.

She could do nothing at all without dooming Liam's efforts to failure. She knew that what he was doing required a level of concentration that was more than human.

She stepped back and sat down of the bed again. The place beside her was still vaguely warm from where Lily had sat only moments ago.

She tried not to watch the clock, and watched it anyway. Two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes ... fifteen...

"Oh!" Liam's head came up suddenly. He was entirely himself again, and his face was suddenly suffused with blood. His expression was almost comically chagrined.

Doni and Stephen were fully aware now, too, and Doni was frowning at Liam fiercely. "Did you find her?" she demanded.

He just looked at her. His eyes darted to Stephen's, hopelessly. Doni had gripped the hand he tried to take from her shoulder as if she was about to tear it off his wrist. "Liam," she said furiously. "Did you find her? You did, didn't you?"

"Uh ... yes. Donalore..."

"Then take us there." Doni pushed up to her feet, ready to go. "Liam, come on. Lily still isn't strong. She may need us."

Liam didn't move. "Uh ... I don't think so," he said in an oddly strangled voice.

Dinah was on her feet beside Doni, ready to lend her demand. "What the hell does that mean?" she said angrily. She knew how sick Lily had been. If this old fart knew where she was and could take them there...

Liam looked at Stephen, his eyes pleading. "She doesn't need our help ... and she wouldn't welcome our interference right now, Stephen."

"Liam, what are you talking about?" Doni jerked on his hand to get his attention. "You said yourself that there was some kind of battle going on there, that there were guns shooting. We've got to get her out of there!"

"Not now," Liam said. "Believe me, Doni. Not now."

"Why the hell not?"

Liam's face was flaming. He couldn't meet her eyes now. "They just ... they need to be alone now," he said, almost too softly to be understood.

"They?" Doni stared at him with baffled fury and then, suddenly, the unbelieving shock of understanding. "Oh for god's sake," she said. "Are you trying to tell us the damned man has her in bed already?"

Dinah's mouth dropped open. Liam didn't say anything. Stephen, his face turned suddenly away, was clearly fighting a smile.

Donalore was exasperated beyond endurance. She looked from Liam to Stephen and back again. If she had had something close enough at hand, she would have thrown it. If she could have thought of something scathing enough to say, she would have said it.

Instead, because she had to do something, had to say something, she stamped her foot hard enough to crack floorboards and said, very distinctly, "Fuck!"

Stephen couldn't help it. The smile he couldn't control broke free, and with it a loud snorting sound. Wisely, he had turned his back to Doni so that she couldn't see the look on his face.

But she saw his shoulders shaking, and heard the familiar snorting sound he made when he was trying really hard not to laugh out loud.

Doni reached out and swatted him one across the back of his head. "It's not funny, dammit! Stephen ... I swear to god, if I ever get my hands on that man again, I'm going to castrate him ... or tie a knot in it!"

Liam, still a bright strawberry color, smiled behind his hand. "I don't think Liliana would appreciate that, Doni, dear," he said. "She seems quite pleased with the current state of his ... affairs..."

Doni raised her hand again, and stopped. Cripes ... she was going to hit an old man ... and a priest.

No, she wasn't. She let her hand drop to her side.

But, by god, the first time she got a shot at him, she was going to hit Richard Plantagenet.

T'beth's bare feet, running lightly down the stairs from the harem to the basement, made no more noise than swan feathers floating down those same stairs. In a way, it was a pity; doom should have sounded far more portentous.

The guard at the bottom of the stairs, staring nervously up into darkness from whence came the sounds of gunfire, grenades and screams, was half-thinking of deserting and half-thinking of going upstairs and helping his comrades. He never got to finish either thought. T'beth's right foot caught him in the windpipe as she leapt nimbly from the third to last stair down in a move that Bruce Lee would have killed to have been able to execute. T'beth did kill. The guard's body, blood trickling from his ruined throat, fell. She grabbed his rifle before it clattered to the floor beside him.

High time she was allowed to have fun.

Ravan was still baby-sitting the women in the harem. As long as somebody was looking after them, ensuring they weren't all killed, T'beth could play in the basement. She had to clear this area before they could get the women out safely. She felt a brief moment of concern for what would happen to the women after they got them out of the palace--chances were that their families wouldn't want such soiled doves back--but quickly forgot that thought as another guard came by to investigate the sound he'd heard.

He found a fellow guard, dead, and a beautiful woman in skin tight leather pants and a tank top that didn't do much to hide either her breasts or her muscles standing beside the corpse. She had a crossbow, and there was a bolt in the groove. The guard could read his name on it, and knew his future was limited to about ten seconds.

"Spare me," he begged in Farsi. "I have children."

"So did the pregnant women in the harem," T'beth replied, and fired.

The guard screamed and collapsed, staring at the short-feathered, seriously barbed quarrel sticking out from his right knee.

"Go home to your children," T'beth said, kicking him in the other knee to make him shut up. "Treat the girls especially well." She confiscated his rifle and bent it double with her bare hands.

The guard's eyes rolled straight up under his eyelids and he collapsed.

Richard probably wouldn't like her leaving a live guard behind, but he wasn't down here. It wasn't that T'beth was soft and felt that the guard deserved to live. It was that she knew it was very likely his wife and children would be cast out to starve to death by the guard's family if anything happened to him. They might possibly keep the eldest son, if there was one, but any girls or very small boys...

She shook her head, glad that if she'd had to have been born in this benighted country, it was in Sa'idi among the black Baluchi. She hoped it was another half a millennia before she felt the urge to come back to her native soil.

She heard two guards attempting to follow her without being overheard. To her sensitive vampiric hearing, it sounded like a whole regiment behind her. Didn't the fools know that you can't hide breathing from a vampire, let alone the sound of footsteps, especially in military boots? Of course, maybe they didn't know she was a vampire.

She turned, and leapt up into the air. Straight up, with no take-off, no preliminary crouch, no warning at all. The bursts of gunfire from two automatic rifles whistled harmlessly through empty air where T'beth had been standing only a second before. On her way down, she propelled her body forward and took out the guard on the left with a kick to the head that made his neck snap audibly. The still-standing guard on the right dropped his rifle and ran for it.

T'beth let him get nearly to the closest door. She liked toying with her prey.

Another one of those amazing, graceful leaps took her to his side just as he flung the door open. His fingernails left double rows of scratches down the wood as she dragged him down, and his scream quickly became a burble, then nothing at all.

T'beth straightened and "searched" the basement with her heightened senses. A quick snack had sharpened them, not that they needed it. Other than the still-unconscious guard she'd left, the crossbow bolt still in his knee, there was one more guard in the basement. He was hiding.

"Olly, olly, outs-in-free," she called out, in English. There was no Farsi equivalent. There was also no response.

"Oh, goody," she said, and her smile was truly terrible. "I love playing hide and seek. You have to call out 'warmer' and 'colder,' you know; it makes it more fun."

She knew, of course, perfectly well where the guard was hiding. But it wasn't any fun if she went directly there. She started looking around where she was standing, behind the door with its bloodied scratches, under the body of the guard she'd just dined on, behind some boxes and inside one or two of the larger ones. Her ears told her that the hiding guard was frantically moving from his current spot by scooching along on his butt so as to stay low. Her nose told her that he was badly frightened, sweating, and had pissed himself.

Humans are so messy.

She deliberately went the opposite way for several feet, shifting boxes. "I seem to be getting colder," she said. "You're not playing fair!" She turned on her bare heels and went along the far wall of the basement, poking the muzzle of her stolen rifle behind crates. "Am I getting warmer?" she asked.

He was crawling towards the door to the outside.

She could let him go. He wouldn't be crazy enough to go back into the palace by the front doors, which her side controlled. But he was a coward, a bully, and he would have to admit to his friends and family that he had run from a woman. He was too dangerous to be allowed to escape. He hadn't mentioned any children.

Fair game.

T'beth was getting faint mental echoes of what was happening upstairs; Adrian seemed very upset about something and Jake was freaking out. But she couldn't spare an ounce of concentration; she closed her mental channels to them.

She was tired of the hunt. The night was waning and there was still work to do before she could crash for the day. She jumped out from her own concealment of boxes, surprising the guard who'd thought she was much farther away. She wasn't hungry, and she wasn't interested in being cruel any longer. She shot him, at point-blank range.

The basement was secured. She carried the wounded man up the stairs to the back entrance, nodding to the two Sa'idi guards posted there, tossed him out onto the sidewalk, and told him to go home. How exactly he was supposed to do that, crippled and with the bolt still in his leg, she didn't care. On second thought ... she turned and yanked the crossbow bolt back out of his knee. He passed out again.

Tsk. No stamina.

Probably somebody would find him and look after him. Probably. The Sa'idians weren't lining up to do it.

T'beth turned and went back into the palace, removing her mental blocks so that she could contact the others. 'Basement secure,' she sent to Adrian. No reply. 'Talbot?'

It was Jake who answered. 'Richard's hurt, T'beth. Adrian's really upset.'

'I'm on my way,' she sent, and ran like hell for the nearest stairs.

They weren't on the main floor anymore. From up above somewhere, she could hear a brief burst of gunfire, and then silence. Where the hell...? She tried to concentrate on Adrian's thoughts, but he wasn't sending, and whatever he was feeling was a senseless, agitated jumble. But she got a direction, and ran.

Laughter? She skidded to an abrupt stop. Adrian was laughing. A minute ago, he'd been upset to the point of tears; now the little bastard was laughing. Jake was, too. There was an edge of hysteria behind it, but it was mostly relief.

'Talbot!' she sent, furiously. 'What the hell's happening?'

There was no answer. They were laughing like idiots.

'Talbot! Damn you, when I get my hands on you...’

'Where the hell have you been?' Adrian finally sent to her. There was amusement and perfect composure in his thoughts. 'Come join us. Jake and I are going for a beer.'

'What?' she demanded. 'Who's with Richard?'

'Darling Lily … I assume, at least,' Adrian replied.

Lily? Richard's dream girl? How in the hell could she be here? Were they all going crazy?

'I'm on my way,' she sent again. Grimly, T'beth took the stairs up two at a time.

Mac had made something to eat for all of them, and was surprised, when he came looking for them, at the addition of Liam ... and the absence of Lily.

Nobody explained. But they dutifully trooped down to the kitchen and settled around the big butcher's block table where he had laid out five place settings. Shai, the only other occupant of the house these days, had begged off, deep in his studies.

It was a silent meal. Mac's eyes slid from Dinah's stiff, disgruntled face to Liam's warmly appreciative one, from Doni's angrily snapping brown eyes to Stephen's amused blue ones. He didn't pry; he wasn't sure how much he could have, in this world, or if his attempts would be detected.

Mac liked Stephen instinctively. There was a quiet strength in Stephen, and an obvious sense of responsibility, and a leavening humor that lightened both. He liked Liam, too, within moments of meeting him. Liam's generous spirit, his heartfelt warmth for all other beings, glowed around him almost visibly.

Donalore was a different matter altogether, but in spite of Dinah's hostility, Mac found himself liking Doni, too. She didn't have Lily's great beauty, but she had classic, reserved good looks and an almost corrosive intelligence ... sharp and hard and acidic. Stephen adored her; that was easy enough to see. Mac thought that her own feelings were probably as deep ... but not so calmly certain. Donalore did not have an easy spirit. What she had in great measure, though, was an enormous capacity for love and caring, and, Mac thought, a deep-rooted fear and distrust of her own emotions. She could not be an easy woman to live with, but Stephen seemed content with his lot.

Mac understood, too, that these people were like Liliana in the powers of their minds, powers that were not natural to most of the population of this world. He had endured Liliana's fruitless attempts to probe his mind, and he was well aware of their strength ... and the innate differences between his mind and theirs that protected him from them. He found himself wanting to know more about them, and about Dinah's connection to them. Dinah was extraordinary, but she wasn't what they were.

At the moment, Dinah was extremely unhappy. "So," she challenged, as she helped Mac clear away the dinner dishes, drawing every eye at the table to her, "do we just forget about Lily altogether? Do we just let this man of hers take her into any damned situation he wants, no matter who's shooting whom or whatever the hell is going on there?"

Stephen's hand shot out to cover Doni's, cutting off whatever she had been about to say. "We don't forget about her, Dinah," he said reasonably, "but we do stay out of what isn't any of our business. Lily is where she wants to be, and she's with the man she wants to be with."

"The man you want her to be with," Dinah shot back at him. "Didn't you damned near shove her into his arms, right from the start, because you wanted him, not her?"

Stephen wasn't perturbed. "I want both of them. And I gave her a push when she needed it. But I didn't make them fall in love with each other, and I can't make them fall out of it."

Dinah snorted. She wasn't convinced. She carried her load of dishes over to the sink and plopped them down carelessly, saw one of her best plates crack across the middle and hardly noticed. Mac, standing at the sink beside her, put out one hand and touched her wrist lightly. "I think," he said, carefully molding his tone of voice to soothe and relax her, "your friends are just as worried as you are, Miss Dinah."

"Oh, Mac." Dinah looked up at him with irritation ... but now it was for him, not for the others, and it was very mild and almost affectionate. "I thought we'd agreed to knock off that 'Miss Dinah' crap."

He grinned down at her. "You're right. We did."

"Have we got any dessert to give these people?"

"Just ice cream." With so few people in the house, Dinah didn't do much baking anymore.

She sighed. "It'll have to do. Will you make the coffee?"

His head tilted quizzically. "Did you think I planned to drink yours?" They had long since established that Dinah's coffee made excellent drain cleaner and paint remover.

She smiled, and went to get the ice cream.

But she couldn't let it go, and once they had settled down with their coffee, she asked Stephen, "So what do we do? Lily's not strong, even if she is better. You haven't seen her these last few weeks, Stephen. She couldn't keep anything on her stomach, and most of the time she's been bent double with pain."

"I've taken care of that," Doni said.

Dinah looked at her. "How?" she said, challengingly.

"By inhibiting her output of stomach acids, if you must know. I can't leave it like that, but until she can eat regularly, I have established some controls. She won't be in any pain."

"And she just stays in ... wherever the hell it is she's gone? With a war, or whatever it is going on there?" She turned to look at Stephen. "But no ... that's not the idea, is it? She's supposed to bring this Richard back with her ... because you want him to help you."

Stephen nodded serenely and sipped his coffee without saying anything.

"Stephen, this stinks," Dinah said. "Lily's gone through hell for all this time, because you want to make use of some man you couldn't get to work for you without throwing Lily into the bargain. There's a word for that in any red light district in the world."

Stephen didn't look at all upset. He said, "I have responsibilities. I do what I have to do to live up to them. The man is unique, Dinah, and what I want from him is all he is really qualified to do in this world. And there is no one else qualified as well. Also," and his eyes moved from her to Donalore, "they are made for each other, and neither one of them would ever have been content with anyone else."

Liam cleared his throat and spoke over the rim of his coffee cup. "I must say, I have never, in my long experience, seen anything quite like their ... connection to each other. It should not have been possible for Liliana to bond with the man, and yet she has. Doni, that is absolutely unique in all our history. I think Stephen is right. I think they would have found each other, somehow, with no help from anyone ... and regardless of whatever might have stood in their way. I think that when you said that Liliana could not live without him, you were quite simply telling the literal truth, and that it is true, as well, for him. In some ways, in some part of them, they are almost like two halves of the same entity ... or what Liliana did would not have been possible at all."

Doni made a small noise of annoyance. "I meant, Liam, that she couldn't live without him because of what she was doing to herself. She lived without him just fine for quite a long time before they ever met. I didn't mean they were symbiotic."

Liam smiled. "I know you didn't, my dear. And I agree that, before they met, each of them could live adequately ... but at a very different level than what they have achieved together. I think that their meeting, once they existed in the same time plane, was inevitable, and I think it will be fascinating to see what their existence from now on will be, now that they are together. They will never be the same as they were before."

"You make it sound as if they're a different life form," Doni said, her annoyance growing.

Liam looked thoughtful. "Is that so far-fetched? We've posited all along that we are an evolving species, Doni. We are not human any more, and we seem to be changing ... the newly awakened are not what we were, when we first awakened, and we have grown far beyond what we originally were, haven't we? Human beings have been striving for all of their history to find the means of matching up with the ideal life partner, and for them it will always remain a matter of good or bad luck. For us, the chances are better ... because we can share much of ourselves with each other, when we choose. But Liliana is an empath, and in finding the one man to whom she is perfectly matched, she has created a bond that was never before possible. When he is awakened, as well..."

"What?"

Liam stopped, aware that he had said too much. Doni's eyes darted to Stephen. "That's the Plan?" she said caustically. "That's what you've been leading up to all along?"

He smiled softly at her. "Doni, did you think I meant for them to have a few good years together, and then for Lily to tend to him through his doddering senility? Of course I want him awakened."

Doni just stared at him. Grief for Anne almost overwhelmed her, and she couldn't tell anyone. Anne could not be awakened, not with the taint of Gabriel Tallant's blood in hers. Anne was condemned to age and die ... and if Stephen had his way, she would do it while she watched Richard, unchanged, forever young and in love with another woman.

She saw confusion bloom in Stephen's eyes; he had expected her to be angry, but through their bond he was aware of the sudden surge of sadness, and he could not understand. She opened her mouth, not even certain of what she meant to say to him, when suddenly her face went white and she breathed, "Oh, my god..."

Stephen came half out of his chair, reaching for her. "What? What is it?" He and Liam had both felt the intensity of the psychic jolt that had hit Doni, but it was directed at her, and they could not read it.

She looked up at him, trying to control herself. Lily's panicked shriek went on and on inside her head. "Lily ... I've got to go to her. Something's happened."

Liliana's mind, calling to hers, had formed a nexus, and Doni would be able to go to it easily. She took Stephen's hand in hers, and he turned his head to say, "Dinah, as soon as I know, I'll send..."

And they were gone.

Dinah turned on the astonished Liam. "What happened?"

"I don't know." Liam was still feeling the shattering force of that call. "Liliana sent for Doni to come to her. At a guess, I would say that her king is in urgent need of a Healer.

"How can that be?" Dinah was scowling fiercely at him. "You said, just a little while ago, they were making love."

Liam looked innocently perplexed. "Maybe," he said, "he over-exerted himself?"

"You were really there ... in the caves, on the plane..."

"Yes." Liliana released the word on a long sigh. His lips were moving over her throat; his hand over her breast and down to her abdomen, where their child lay.

"I thought so ... and I was afraid to think so ... I needed you so much. I thought I was deceiving myself..."

"I couldn't help it. I tried to stay away." Her breath caught in her throat as his hand moved. The long, slow waves took her again. She was so sensitive now to his slightest touch...

"I tried to keep you away," he whispered as she came down again. "And then I crawled into my bed, praying you would come..."

"You were so angry." She kissed his mouth as he raised his head, puzzled. "At first ... the first time. You hated me. You thought I had lied..."

In Toronto, in his bed at the hotel. She had been there, even then. He had thought he was dreaming, and in the dream he had been cruel ... he had hurt her.

He made a small, hopeless sound and gathered her in tight against him. "Sweetheart, Liliana, forgive me ... forgive me..."

"Richard, I did lie to you." She could hardly breathe against the strength of his arm. "I let you think I was going back to Rafe, and I wasn't. I never intended to. From the very beginning, from that first day on the road, when the car broke down, there has been only you. But I didn't know it until Maine. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. The night you told me about the baby, I thought I had to get away from you right away, or I would never be able to leave ... and it was already far too late..."

"Hush ... sweetheart ... hush..." He shifted a little, moved over her, sank into her again, and for a long while she couldn't think at all, except for the litany that played and replayed through her mind. "I love you, I love you..." But whether she spoke the words, or he did, she didn't know, and didn't care.

Long after, when she was half-dozing, luxuriating in the heaviness of his body lying half over her, she heard his small laugh, a breath in her ear. "You need a bath," he said.

She did. She was as dirty as he was. His blood was drying, matted, in her hair and his. It was smeared all over her and on the bed beneath her. Liliana smiled lazily, remembering. "Or a shower?" she murmured, and he laughed again, and kissed her.

"I don't think I have the strength left to shower with you, my love."

She had kept the bond fully open between them, and their memories of that first shower they had taken together played back and forth, from his mind to hers, and Liliana moaned softly. It had been there, standing in the shower in the house in Maine with the warm water pouring down over both of them, that she had known, finally, that he was everything beautiful in the world to her, and that there would never again be any joy in her world without him. For Richard, it was then that she had taken the sick taint Gabriel Tallant had left in him, all the bottomless shame and self-loathing, and replaced it with her love of him, her total acceptance of him. She had forced him to see himself through her eyes, and to rejoice in everything about himself that made him who and what he was, because she loved it all.

He raised his head again to look down at her. "The stupid words," he said. "Remember? You called them that ... in a dream. The stupid words: I love you, because they don't say enough, they can't say what I feel. Liliana, there are no others ... I love you. I..."

He stopped, and his head tilted forward, his eyes closing.

"Richard?"

He opened his eyes and smiled down at her, shaking his head a little. "I think I'm too tired ... and a little dizzy ... forgive me..."

Fear, sudden and icy, clutched at her. The pupil of his left eye was widely dilated ... but not that of his right eye. His head, around the grazing wound at the right corner of his forehead, was swollen and blue beneath the bloodied skin. Oh, god ... she hadn't realized ... she was so caught up in just being with him again that she hadn't even thought...

"Richard..."

He shook his head again, just a little. A deep line had formed between his eyebrows, and his eyes couldn't seem to focus on her. "It's nothing," he said. "I didn't sleep..." But then his eyes closed again, and he whispered, "Remember ... I love you," and sighed lightly, and let his head fall against her. Just that quickly, every muscle in his body had gone totally slack, and he was a dead weight over her.

"Richard!" He was too heavy; she had to use her Awakened power to roll him over onto his back. His head lolled to the side; his eyes were half-open and utterly sightless. He was so deeply unconscious that her mind could not reach him at all.

Panicked, terrified to the depths of her soul, Liliana sent a mental shriek out to the one person in the world who would always help her.

"DONI!!!"