Twilight Fall

The truth. That was the key.

"We have to go back to Chicago." He hesitated. "There's a vampire living there, the one named Jaus. He can touch people and make them tell the truth. I know, he did it to me in Florida. If anyone knows how the order recruits new members, it's Archbishop Hightower."

Alex looked startled. "You want Val to work on Hightower? I don't know, John. We try to avoid contact with the Brethren. They do unfriendly things like torture and kill us."

"If I brought the archbishop to Jaus, would he do it?" he countered.

"He probably would for me." She looked past him as Cyprien came back into the room. "I have a favor to ask."

Alter she related what John said to Cyprien, he agreed to make the trip to Chicago. "After the problems we encountered with the order while tracking Thierry Durand in Chicago. I am not inclined to risk exposing Suzerain Jaus or his jardin again. Still, there are ways it can be done safely, and as Alexandra says, Valentin is a friend. It is almost dawn; we should go now."

* * *

Chapter 8

The figure of a man on horseback drew Liling from the red camellias she had been arranging to the window. He had stopped at their whitewashed gate and gazed up at the cottage. Surely it was one of the priests, come to take her back to the facility, and that dread expectation made her feel ill. But it was not a priest—he carried neither cage nor scissors.

Was it possible? Was it him? She looked a second time, as he dismounted, and saw the sunlight find itself in golden hair and fine blue eyes.

She had not been mistaken. It was Valentin.

Liling retreated from the window and sat down, holding a bouquet of camellias in her tight fingers, watching the petals change from red to white. His color, like the snow in his voice and the ice in his eyes. "He comes from the Lighthouse purposely to take me," she told the flowers. But why? And where? "I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself."

She had been mistress of herself for so long, though. She was so tired.

You sure, Lili?

The ghost of Chen Ping bustled around the room, trying in vain to wipe the dust-coated furniture and chase the cobwebs in the corners with her broom. She disturbed the blue cygnet that had taken up residence on the pianoforte, sending him skidding along the keys. The angry swan hissed and spread enormous wings, pecking at her spirit until Chen Ping changed substance, becoming a thing made of shadows instead of memories, and gave Liling one last smile.

Wish him joy.

As Valentin entered the room, his expression seemed bewildered, as if he had never been to such a place. But Liling had entertained him so often he should know every room, every wall, every brick of the place. How could he look upon her now as if he expected no welcome—he, the only one to whom she had ever extended an invitation?

"This is not real." Disbelief made soft his mellow tenor. "You are mortal. You cannot summon me."

"I am as surprised by your visit as I am delighted, sir." Liling went to him, commanding her countenance to remain smooth and untroubled, and offered him her hand to shake. "I wish you only great happiness. Mr. Jaus."

"Happiness." He gripped her hand and held it much longer than could be considered polite. "What do you know about my happiness?"

The blue swan uttered a wild call and flew across the room. It smashed through the window, showering both Jaus and Liling with shards before it escaped through the jagged hole. Blue feathers, stained with red blood, slowly drifted to the floor.

From the horizon, inky night streaked toward the cottage, bring with it fiery clouds pregnant with blue lightning.

Now that the swan had fled, a terrible silence fell over the room. Liling looked at the storm closing over her little home, and tugged at his grip. "I was to rejoice in the dryness of the season. It cannot rain now. Please let me go."

"No." He put his hand to her throat. "How did you bring me here, Liling? You are not my kind. You cannot be here."

Behind her, the fire began to smoke.

Not his kind. That was his opinion of her. She had never been allowed to feel angry, had never allowed herself to feel so. It had always been too dangerous, especially after she had discovered what she could do.

You must not give, Chen Ping whispered. Only take.

"Your behavior insults me, sir," she said as harshly as she could. "I gave myself to you. I believe that there can be no danger in my being with you. Do not convince me otherwise."

"The danger is my own," he told her, his voice growing tight with regret. "I am doing no injury to anybody but myself."

The smoke from the hearth dwindled. Camellias began to sprout from the cracks and knots in the planking on the floor. They curled around Jaus's boots and Liling's bare feet, cool and white, soft and fragrant.

Liling covered his hand with hers. "Then cease this unseemly behavior, and be with me this night. Only be with me."

Jaus tucked her head under his chin, his arms going around her, and as Liling accepted the embrace, the cottage faded all around them.

She opened her eyes and found herself in Valentin's arms, on the bed at the back of his plane. There was nowhere to go, no place for her to retreat. They had been together. They were sleeping together.

For a time she lay watching him. He should have looked different, more vulnerable. When they slept men seemed to lose that animal vitality that animated them; they all went slack-jawed and limp as they snored or grumbled and talked in their sleep as they tossed and turned.

Not Valentin. He didn't move or make a sound, his stillness and silence absolute. The set of his features appeared as compelling and obdurate as when he was awake.

Liling's gaze moved down to the terrible scar around his arm, made silver by the moonlight. It hurt her to look at the permanent reminder of his disability. Everything about him was so alive, except for his arm. No doubt his pride forced him to accept the limitation it imposed on him, but it would always be a burden he suffered.

Unless she could do something about it.

Something so difficult as this she had never before attempted; she feared it might overwhelm her. She also sensed that Jaus's pain merely began with his paralyzed arm. There was much more damage, and it lay in places she could not see or touch.

Still, she had to try. Not as repayment for what he had done for her, or as a gesture of sympathy. She had made a promise to Mrs. Chen to help as many as she could in secret. And after they parted, she wanted to know that Jaus was somewhere in the world, whole and happy.

Liling had seen television programs and movies, fictional surmises of what it was to take pain from another. She had read a hundred books on the subject. Most had been wrapped in the misconception that the pain was somehow deserved by the one taking it; that the transfer involved suffering, or some other nonsense.

If she had believed that, what she did would have killed her long ago.

Liling imagined a red swan spreading its wings. It was how Mrs. Chen had taught her to focus her thoughts when she prepared to take from another. She saw her fingertips glow faintly red as she made the space inside herself, and then placed her hand over his scar.

With great care she opened herself to him. Tiny charges of the curious energy contained by the body tingled against her palm, assuring that the connection between their pathways had been made.

The doctors had always wanted her to explain how she was able to do the things she had done as a child, but they could not feel the energy as she did. To them the charges were beeps on a machine or squiggly lines on a graph. To Liling, the body's energy was a flowing liquid river of color and sound, scent and taste. Sickness, disease and pain disrupted the flow, diverted it, or blocked it altogether.

Liling took a deep breath and began to draw on that part of his flow she knew to be blocked by his pain.

Luring pain from his flesh to hers required patience and endurance. It did not come placidly, but sizzled hot and angry along her own pathways before emptying into the space she had made for it.

It was not the pain she expected, either. This pain was something quite different, a variety she rarely encountered. At first it came in an unwilling trickle, for the arm had been lifeless for some years. But the connection spread, waking long-dormant cells with the energy flowing through it, until Liling had increased his flow to a stream, and then a channel, and then a torrent.

More came, and her hand glowed bright red as she took it, enduring the heat funneling through her body, patiently directing it where it belonged, until the torrent became a flood, and the scarlet glow turned orange and spread up to her forearm, her elbow, her shoulder.

Taking didn't hurt, but his pain filled her until she thought it might overwhelm her, in the same way water closed over the head of a drowning swimmer. At last the pain began to slow and taper off. She kept drawing it to her, determined to have the last of it, until the glow from her skin darkened and disappeared, and the connection ended.

Jaus's pain roiled inside her like a living thing, looking for a new place to tester. She reached inside herself and closed the space. It shrank, as it always did, collapsing in on itself until it felt no larger than a single spark. She took her hand away from his body, and the spark inside her winked out.

Liling rolled onto her back, exhausted. In his sleep, Jaus murmured something and reached for her, pulling her close.

She looked down at the arm holding her and smiled before she drifted off to sleep.

Kyan didn't attempt to intercept Valentin Jaus's plane at O'Hare, but arranged with his teacher a flight on a private jet. Thanks to a minor upheaval in the weather, Kyan's plane landed in Atlanta a full thirty minutes before the girl and Jaus would.

"Jaus is a billionaire entrepreneur who owns a great deal of property in the city," his teacher had warned him before Kyan had left Chicago. "Under no circumstances is he to be approached or involved."

"He pity her," Kyan told him. "She fool him, use him, escape me. Read dark girl tears."

"Someday, my boy, you are going to have to learn to speak proper English." His teacher sighed. "When you arrive in Atlanta, go with the attendant. He will take you where you need to be in order to capture her."