ALEX TORE THROUGH THE barriers to the timescape. The beckoning thought, the forgotten memory, barely raised its head. Briefly, he considered if the dose had been too much. He could barely draw breath.
But he was in the timescape. Now that he knew it was time itself he was perceiving, it didn’t seem like such an alien place. It was understandable, but he didn’t have the capacity to understand it. The dimensions of time couldn’t be grasped by human or vampire perceptions, so he saw it as this clumsy landscape. Like Rafe, he could sense the depth to it. The layers…so many layers! People, millions of them, going about their lives. Dying, being born. All at once.
Alex let his senses stretch out before him and all around him. Rafe had said that the places he had found had beckoned to him, meaning they had some sort of personal significance. That had been the case when Alex found himself in Marit’s long hall.
Beware, Uncle Alex, she had said. Was this what he must be wary of?
He let himself float above the landscape and thought of Taylor. He thought of her laugh, her warm brown eyes, her beautiful hair. Her temper, when it was roused, as Veris sometimes liked to do, just to kiss her into a better mood. Taylor as Alex had known her in the desert, the lady wife of a lord, who said all the wrong things and did all the right things, like taking a spear in the shoulder that was meant for another.
Somewhere ahead, Alex could feel…it was almost like heat, or pulsing sound. Something. He moved toward it. It was a long way off and it felt like he was motionless, but he sensed the landscape beneath him was moving very fast, even though he could see no details that would tell him if his sense was correct.
Taylor, hold on, he thought, as the place ahead started to pull him in, like a fish on a line, faster and faster.
* * * * *
Brody and Veris held Alex down as he thrashed on the bed.
“What’s wrong with him?” Sydney cried. It was terrible watching Alex writhe like that. It looked like he was in abject pain. She reached for Rafe’s hand. “Why is this happening?”
Rafe shook his head. His eyes were wide. “I don’t know,” he said and sounded like he hated that confession. “I think it’s normal.”
“Normal?” Brody asked, horrified. He looked at Veris, who was grimly bearing down on Alex’s shoulders. “He did this for a whole year? What the hell was he looking for?”
“Answers,” Veris said shortly. “Just like he is now. All we can do is stop him from hurting himself.”
Sydney looked at the clock readout on the computer sitting on the desk. There was still a whole hour to go before Veris’ declared deadline. “You can’t let him do that for another hour,” she said flatly. “He’ll tear himself to pieces.”
“I was out for thirteen hours,” Rafe said softly. “We have to give him time to find Taylor.”
Veris looked at him. “Come and help Brody hold him down. I want to take his vitals and see what is happening in there.”
Rafe kissed Sydney’s hand, then stepped over to the side of the bed and took over Veris’ part in holding Alex steady and keeping him on the bed. “No wonder I needed to feed straight after,” he said, looking down at him. “This would drain anyone.”
“We don’t have anything on standby,” Brody said. “That could be a problem.”
“There’s me,” Sydney said, and was as surprised as everyone else. “I mean, he can feed from me, can’t he?” There was so much about vampire culture she didn’t know yet.
Veris looked at her as he untangled a stethoscope and moved back to the table. “It can be problematic,” he said. “Especially between partners.”
The look Brody gave him told Sydney there was another long story behind Veris’ simple statement.
Veris tore open Alex’s shirt and placed the stethoscope against his chest and listened. He frowned. “Runaway heartbeat, slightly arrhythmic. Not a large surprise, but it’s very high.” He pressed his hand against Alex’s brow. “Temperature on the rise. He’s near to human normal already.”
“I thought you could hear heartbeats without a stethoscope?” Sydney asked.
Veris glanced at her. “Not when there are so many loud and elevated heartbeats in the room already.” He kept testing, tapping, and listening. “What I would give for an EEG monitor,” he murmured.
“Later,” Brody snapped. He sounded breathless from his exertions keeping Alex on the bed.
Sydney bit her lip and glanced at the clock once more. Fifty-five minutes to go.
* * * * *
There. There! Alex could see the place just ahead. It was an ordinary room, forming in front of him. He absorbed the details. Tira was there, small and slender, sitting at a table. Taylor stood at the other end of the table. Her arms were not tied, but she was watching Tira closely.
Uncle Alex!
He looked around. Marit was there, with him in the timescape. It was the older Marit, from the long hall. She turned her head to look at the room where her mother was being held.
“You must tell the others,” she said. “Bring them here. The queen is not—”
“Alex!” The call came from behind him. The voice was strong. Male. He knew the voice, but he shook off the imperative call and looked back at Marit. “The queen isn’t what?”
Marit shook her head. “Tell them. Tell them all,” she insisted, and drifted away.
* * * * *
“Alex!” Veris yelled, and slapped his face again.
Sydney moved backward, away from the men bent over Alex’s body. He had stopped thrashing. He had stopped moving at all.
Brody finished injecting the other syringe, the one Veris had warned he would use if he had to, and dropped the empty syringe into a bowl on the sideboard behind him.
Rafe stood out of Veris’ way as Veris pressed his hand against Alex’s chest and listened. “Minimal response,” he said quietly, and dropped his head. “I think we’re losing him.”
Rafe squeezed Veris’ shoulder. “Let me try,” he said quietly.
Veris stepped out of the way and Rafe moved up to Alex’s shoulder and bent over to speak in his ear. “Alex! Can you hear me? It’s time to come home.” He shook him, not gently. “Alex!”
Sydney saw that Veris was watching her. She swallowed, trying to shovel her fear into a tiny corner and bury it.
“Talk to him,” Veris told her.
Brody moved out from the back of table, letting her in. She picked up Alex’s hand and spoke to him, just as Rafe was doing. “Alex! Please, please, you have to come back. Are you listening, Alex? Come back to us!”
They kept it up for long minutes, and still there was no sign of response in Alex. Sydney’s vision blurred with tears that dropped onto Alex’s shoulder, but she continued talking, whispering, begging him to return.
Until Brody rested his hand on her shoulder.
Sydney straightened up. “No! He could still come out of it! Leave me alone.”
“It’s been eighteen minutes,” Veris said softly.
“He’s a vampire. He doesn’t need to breath. He doesn’t need a beating heart,” Rafe said. “We give him time.” He glanced at her and they both bent back to whisper in his ears.
More minutes past, and Sydney began to shake, for Alex’s hand in hers was growing colder. Finally, she couldn’t speak anymore. Sorrow clogged her throat. She looked at Rafe, who straightened up slowly. There was an awful agony in his eyes.
Sydney threw her arm around him and hid her face against his shoulder, and he held her to him, with Alex’s body between them. She couldn’t bear the pain. It was stabbing her in the heart, making each breath painful.
Why, oh why, did she only now realize how much she loved Alex? Why now, when it was too late?
Veris pushed them aside, gently. “He’s breathing,” he said, hustling them out of the way. “Let me get at him.”
Rafe pulled her out of the way, but he kept her arm around her, as they watched Alex revive.
* * * * *
Alex felt cold. He was shivering with it. Veris assured him it was because his systems were slowing down from the frenetic activity they had been put through. Eventually, his core temperature would stabilize, but for now, Alex felt like an old, arthritic human who would never feel warm again. He hugged the blanket around his shoulders, and stayed in the chair where Brody and Veris had helped him, back in the library.
Everyone else was standing, because tempers were high.
“We don’t even know if this will work!” Brody said. “You can’t go, Rafe. Alex has to go because he knows where we’re jumping to, and Sydney must go, because she supplies the power for the jump. That leaves one place left, and even that’s a risk because Sydney has only done this twice and both times were accidental. If you think I’m going to give up that place to you, and let you get Taylor back, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
Sydney was the only one who looked calm, but her arms were crossed and her feet spread…a typical male stance of aggression that Alex just knew she had adopted when facing down male colleagues that disagreed with her. “I know what I’m doing,” she said quietly. “Taylor coached me, and the last time, with Rafe, I made a deliberate choice to jump back. I know how to do it, now. And I can take two.”
“Then I should be the other,” Veris said.
Brody exploded. “No! I’m not staying out of this! I’m damned if I’m going to sit here and wait it out!”
Alex cleared his throat. “Brody.”
Brody didn’t hear him. He lifted a finger toward Veris. “Don’t even think about it, Veris. I warn you.”
“Only one of us can go,” Veris pointed out. “Alex is barely able to stand. If the Queen fights it out, and I have no doubt she will, then it should be a fighter who goes with Alex and Sydney.”
“I’m just as good a fighter as you, you muscle-bound Northman!”
Veris caught Brody’s face in his hands. “But I’m a doctor. You’re not.”
Brody closed his eyes, the fight draining out of him. He swallowed. “Okay. All right.” He sounded tired.
“Brody,” Alex said again.
This time, Brody turned to look at him.
Alex tried to sit up. “Marit can take you.”
* * * * *
Marit gravitated toward Alex, as soon as Mia bought her into the room. She squeezed her slight body in between the arm of the chair and Alex’s knee, and looked at the five adults watching her.
Brody sat on the coffee table, making himself smaller and less intimidating. “Marit, do you know what happened to Mommy?”
She nodded.
Veris sighed. “The things we do to kids,” he muttered.
Brody squeezed his wrist, silently demanding he shut up. He kept his eyes on Marit. “Marit, honey, you’ve known for a long time about how we move around time, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “But it’s a secret.”
“Yes, it is.” Brody licked his lips. “Is that why you’ve never told anyone that you can do it all by yourself?”
The other four were silent and strained, waiting for Marit’s answer.
“Uncle Alex knows,” Marit said.
Brody glanced at him, then back at Marit. “But no one else knows, do they?”
Marit gave an oddly adult-sounding sigh. “I didn’t want to scare you and Far.”
Veris gave a hollow laugh.
Brody held his hand out to Marit, and she took it. “Marit, do you know where Mommy is?”
She nodded.
“Can you take me there?”
It seemed like a very long time before she answered. “I can take both you and Far, Daddy. The queen lady should take Uncle Alex and Uncle Rafe.”
“The queen lady?”
She pointed to Sydney. “Sydney Morrigan.”
Sydney dropped her arms from the defensive pose. “That is my second name,” she said. “My real second name. But how did you know it, Marit?”
Brody frowned. “Mór Ríoghain,” he said. “It’s Irish, for a great queen.”
“You told me,” Marit replied.
* * * * *
The argument this time was even more bitter.
“We can’t just jump into the unknown, with Marit,” Veris declared. “She’s untried, we don’t even know if she’s just saying she can to please us.”
“She’s not lying,” Alex said, and this time his voice was stronger. Also, he could feel the start of blood fever building in him. He would have to feed very soon. If he could get on his feet.
“I don’t care if she’s lying or not,” Brody said. “We can’t take a child into a place we just know is going to become a battlefield. Veris if you want to go with Sydney, be my guest. I’ll gladly give up my place if it means Marit stays here and safe.”
Marit walked over to Brody and picked up his hand and looked up at him. “I’ll be fine, Daddy. Let me take you. Let me help bring Mommy home.”
Brody scrubbed at his hair in frustration. “You don’t know that, Marit. You know how nasty the queen is. She won’t spare you just because you’re little.”
“She does know that,” Alex insisted. He sat up all the way. “Marit sees across the timescape whenever she wants to. She knows she’ll be safe, because she has seen it already. That’s why she found me when I was there. She is everywhere, all the time.”
Marit looked up at Veris. “Listen to him, Daddy. He knows.”
Veris was frowning. “You needed Alex to explain it because you don’t have the vocabulary—the words—to explain it. Not here and now.”
She nodded. “But I’m learning as fast as I can.” Her gray eyes, identical to Taylor’s, were solemn.
Veris sighed one last time, and looked at Brody. “You don’t want to stay back here while we bring Taylor home. Neither does Marit. I can’t gainsay either of you.”
* * * * *
Rafe acquired a blood bag from God knows where. Alex didn’t care at that point. He fell upon it hungrily and didn’t give a damn that Sydney and Marit were still in the room. The stale taste of stored blood didn’t bother him either. Not this time.
Veris wouldn’t let him feed from Sydney even though she had volunteered. “I don’t want her weakened from blood loss,” he said shortly. “And we’re going to wait until you have your full strength back, too, Alex. It doesn’t matter how long we take to jump, at this end. We could take three hours or three weeks and still arrive at the right time and place. It’s what happens at the other end that will need careful timing.”
It took another two days to be ready. In that time, Sydney went back to work for the day, at Veris’ insistence. “You have to maintain your current life for now,” he said. “Later, you may want to start making decisions about changes, but not now. You have to keep up the human façade.”
Rafe also went off to his chambers for the day, and that seemed to convince Sydney more than anything else that the human front to their lives had to be maintained.
While Sydney and Rafe worked, Alex lay in the chair with his feet up, feeling his strength return with each passing hour. Later that night, when Marit and Sydney were both asleep upstairs, he found he could walk around the room. He no longer felt arthritic. Instead, it felt like it had when he was human and had gone through a tough battle. The soreness told him he had abused muscles while mentally wandering, and his vampire healing wasn’t kicking in as fast as it would normally.
Rafe came downstairs and slipped into the library, a dark shadow in the low light.
“She’s asleep?” Alex asked.
“Finally.” He looked at him directly. “She’s scared, but she won’t show it. Not even to me.”
The ache was back in Alex’s chest. “Everything, all of this, it’s new to her. Give her time.”
“I suppose that is one thing I can give her in abundance,” Rafe said. He was still looking at Alex.
“What?” Alex asked, dropping back into the chair with a tired sigh.
“That first time you and Sydney time travelled back to the desert….”
Alex worked his shoulders and neck, trying to massage out the stiffness. “What about it?”
“Brody, Taylor and Veris figure they don’t need to kiss to make the jump, because the intimate connection between them is so strong, now. But they did the first few times. So how did you and Sydney get to the desert?”
Alex couldn’t find an answer that would satisfy Rafe. In truth, he hadn’t considered this at all. So he just looked Rafe in the eye. “It didn’t mean anything,” he said. “I think she may have forgotten that I kissed her, in all that followed.”
Rafe shook his head. “It meant something,” he said softly. “But you’re too honorable to do anything about it.”
Alex’s pulse leapt. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying nothing. Forget I spoke.” Rafe left Alex alone with his swirling thoughts and speculations.
* * * * *
They all met in the library and this time Mia was on hand.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Veris said. “If it’s like we usually experience, then we’re all going to look like we’re asleep. It’s alarming, but all you have to do is make sure nothing disturbs us. We won’t be long. This is in and get the hell out as fast as we can. Nothing fancy.”
Mia nodded.
No one picked up any weapons, for they would not arrive with them at the other end. Instead, they sorted themselves into the two groups; Alex with Sydney and Rafe, and Marit, looking small and vulnerable, with Veris and Brody. Veris picked Marit up, so that she was at the same height as the two of them. “You’re sure about this?” he asked.
She nodded and wrapped her small arms around their necks.
Alex tore his gaze away from the three of them. It was one thing to say he had seen her within the timescape and therefore knew she could navigate time. It was quite another thing to see a small child taken into battle.
Rafe and Sydney were standing with their arms linked, their hands around each other’s waists, waiting for him.
Alex hesitated.
Rafe held out his arm. “Come here, idiot.”
Alex stepped into his arm, and Sydney slid hers around his back. Alex found Rafe’s hand behind Sydney, and picked up Sydney’s at Rafe’s back. Sydney looked up at them. “Who gets to kiss me?” she asked, with a small smile.
“Athair, Far, kiss me,” Marit demanded, behind Alex.
Rafe leaned forward and his lips met Sydney’s and Alex closed his eyes. The tidal surge took him.