FOR EIGHT YEARS TAYLOR overlooked the fact that Veris and Brody were not absolutely immortal. A near-perfect human life kept getting in the way. On their daughter Marit’s third birthday, though, death walked through the door. Taylor didn’t recognize because it arrived by limousine.
Alexander was bouncing the copper-headed, smoky-eyed, slender and bubbly Marit on his knee while Brody cut up her barbecued lamb chop. Taylor ate her meal before it went cold. Veris scraped the barbecue down. The swimming pool behind the safety fence lapped peacefully at the brickwork, already glowing eerily blue with the underwater lights.
Around the deck, toys and bikes lay scattered like flotsam.
The sun was setting over the hills in a spectacular range of reds, golds and pinks, promising more heat tomorrow. It was a rare hot day in early December, a warm snap when it was nice enough to sit outside and soak up the sun. At this time of year, the sun didn’t blaze and sizzle, which would have made it too uncomfortable for the non-humans around the table, as it would have in mid-summer.
Domestic sounds and sights. A perfectly normal family if one overlooked the fact that Marit had two fathers and neither of them was human.
Veris put the barbecue tools away, then sat on the bench next to Taylor and pushed her champagne glass toward her. She swallowed her mouthful and took a sip then turned her head toward him for a kiss. He was smiling as he ran the tip of his tongue over her lips before plunging it inside and making her breath hitch. “I love you, Mrs. Gallagher-Gerhardsson,” he murmured against her lips.
“Back at you, Väinämöinen,” she said in Norse.
“Old Norse sounds like such a tongue twister,” Alexander observed clinically, wiping off Marit’s chin with the damp cloth always kept close by for such occasions. “I wouldn’t want to have to learn it without the advantage of acquiring it as you do, Taylor, when you arrive in the appropriate time and location.”
Taylor forced her gaze away from the heat and promise in Veris’ eyes to look at Alexander. “I have to work on keeping the language once I get back. It’s not that easy. I have to let some of them go, unfortunately.”
Brody handed the small fork to Marit. “Here you go. Now try again. They’re smaller pieces this time.”
Alexander stopped his bouncing so that Marit could eat.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Marit said happily in old Gaelic, gripping the fork in her fist. She smiled at Brody, showing a row of small, even teeth, then focused on her plate and eating.
“She’s a replica of you, Veris,” Alex said softly. “For all she has Taylor’s hair and eyes, she looks like you and she has your drive and relentlessness.”
Brody stroked Marit’s head as she bent over her plate with a gentleness that spoke volumes.
Alexander let out a breath. “Perhaps you should take her?” he suggested to Brody.
Brody shook his head. “Unless she is a burden, you’re welcome to keep her for now,” he said.
Alexander stroked Marit’s hair in an eerie echo of Brody’s movement. “You know I never tire of Marit.”
“We know,” Veris said.
Alexander looked up quickly. “I’m sorry. It isn’t resentment. Or envy.”
“We know that, too,” Brody said. “Or you would not be sitting there.”
Alexander breathed out. “You see much,” he agreed.
“As much as you did,” Taylor added. “All those years ago.”
Alexander smiled. “I also see that Veris neatly sidetracked the conversation by putting a lamb chop in front of Marit and creating chaos.”
Veris grinned. “Guilty as charged.” He dipped his finger into Taylor’s champagne glass and licked it. “It’s not a subject we’re used to talking about openly, Alex. And the little one absorbs way too much.”
Alexander looked down at Marit on his knee. “How good is her Arabic?” he said, speaking in Arabic.
“Why are you changing languages again?” Marit asked, looking up at him with her big dark grey eyes, her mouth liberally daubed with barbecue sauce. She had spoken in Arabic.
Brody laughed out loud.
Alexander rolled his eyes, then kissed her forehead, the only part of her he could reach that was clean. “To test my language skills,” he told her in English. “Finish eating. Then we have birthday cake.”
She grinned at him and went back to eating, content.
Alexander gave a weak smile at the others. “Open allusion will have to do. You said the first few times you went back, nothing of consequence happened. It wasn’t until you went back for an extended stay that dire consequences occurred. Why?”
Taylor glanced at Veris. They had explored the facts of their time travelling in depth. Veris had spent hundreds of hours working on the physics theory of what they did and was their resident expert.
Now Alex was asking why the first few times they had travelled back in time there had been no dire consequences to history. It wasn’t until they had travelled back to the first crusade that they had realized that their time travelling was creating ripples that actually changed history.
Veris shook his head. “That wasn’t the first time we changed anything,” he said. “The first time was further back. Four-sixty-two,” he added softly.
Alexander’s eyes widened.
“How do you think the little one was conceived?” Taylor added.
Alexander’s mouth rounded into a silent “oh.” Then he added, “But there were times, you said, when nothing happened. The first few times.”
“We weren’t interacting with anyone from those times,” Brody said. “We were there for a few short moments only, in most cases. We were barely controlling the travelling then. There were a couple of flips that were absolutely in the mind. Personal memory only. The first Taylor and I experienced was one, because that was Camlann.”
Alexander frowned. “I don’t quite follow.”
Brody rubbed the back of his neck, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “In my real timeline I was only thirteen when Camlann took place, yet we both flipped back and experienced it as adults and I was a warrior. But in my real time line I was—” He glanced away. “Well, I wasn’t a warrior.”
Veris straightened up, pushing Taylor’s champagne glass across the wooden table with a damp squeak. “I think that trip was exactly what the queen was talking about. Shared personal memory. Only Brody was sharing something that his father used to talk about all the time. Talk about, sing about, write about. The glory of Arthur’s court. That was what Taylor was at the concert for – to find Arthur’s bard, Inigo Domhnall. They both tapped into the source and that’s what they got, a flip back to Camlann.”
“Finished!” Marit declared, dropping her fork onto the plate and wriggling onto the deck, ready to take off and run.
Veris was faster. He caught her around the middle and snagged her up and onto his lap. “First, let’s clean you up, missy.”
Taylor handed him the damp cloth and he washed her hands and face clean as he continued to talk, even as Marit wriggled and tried to get free. “Then Taylor tried to flip back with me,” Veris continued, not at all distracted by Marit’s squirming. “She’d already been primed on how to flip back from her experience with Brody. So we flipped, but when I thought about Camlann, I was thinking about when I left Norway to join the Saxons to sail to the Hyperborean wastelands and how much I didn’t want to go. So we flipped back to Norway.”
“I want to go ride,” Marit told Veris. She spoke Old Norse.
“Let me see your face,” Veris told her, using Norse, too.
She held up her face for inspection.
“Hands.”
She held up her hands.
“Kiss your mother, then you can go.”
Marit grinned, kissed Veris, then Taylor, then walked over their laps and leaned over to kiss Brody. Then she jumped to the deck and ran over to a plastic molded tricycle, jumped onto it and pedaled off across the deck.
All the adults watched her for a moment.
Alexander stirred and turned back to the table. “I want to learn how you do it,” he said simply.
They stared at him. Brody snorted. “You’ll have to cut Taylor open if you want that secret. We don’t know how she does it. She just does.”
Veris drew a circle on the wood with the dregs of Taylor’s champagne. “After witnessing the horrors of our last flip back in time, you really want to risk it yourself?”
Alexander sat up. “You mean…you’ve not travelled since then? It’s been over three years!”
“Tiny trips,” Taylor told him. “Now we know how to control the flips. Short trips, where we knew we would not meet anyone. A cottage in the Welsh mountains. A villa in Tuscany. But they’re hardly time travel if you can’t mix with the people. So we just...stopped.” She glanced at Marit, who had already moved on to super-sized Lego building blocks. “We didn’t want to be away from Marit for too long.”
Alexander laid his hands flat on the table. “I understand the consequences. I want to learn how.”
“You want children that badly, mo chara?” Brody asked.
Alexander blew out a breath. “It’s not just children,” he said. “If it were, I could find a wife and adopt dozens of children so badly in need of love and care, the matter would be solved inside months.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Yes, I would like my own children. There is a difference, but the difference is infinitesimal and beyond dispute, as you well know, Brody.”
Brody inclined his head.
Alexander sighed. “I want to dip back into the past again. To sample it.”
“You have your memories for that,” Veris said sharply. “They’re virtually perfect.”
“They’re not the same as being there.”
“Being there will change them,” Veris replied. “Einstein’s theory of relativity doesn’t go on a holiday just because you’ve lived through it once already. You go back there, you stand a real chance of fucking up your own future.” He sat up and forward. “We were dumb lucky. Maybe not—Taylor held us together when Brody and I were going to walk away from each other and screw up all our futures, and our child into the bargain, because we were playing out our lives all over again.” He shook his head. “It’s not worth it, Alex.”
“Marit isn’t worth it? Taylor isn’t worth it?” Alexander asked softly. “You got both of them because of it.”
Veris remained silent.
“He has you there,” Brody said. “Personally, I’d do it all again to be sitting right where I am.”
“Fuck,” Veris said, with a sigh. He grimaced. “Me, too.” He picked up Taylor’s hand, the one with the split-and-combined engagement ring with the left and right sweeping half spirals of green and blue gems. Now the ring was nestled on either side by a split wedding band. One side was studded with blue gems, the other with green. Veris kissed the back of her hand and sat back again. He looked at Alexander. “Good luck to you, my friend,” he said. “I don’t know how it works, despite years of study. Taylor is the key. That is all I can tell you. Brody and I provide the direction, she provides the...power. Drive.” He shrugged. “Magic. Whatever. If you can find another Taylor, then you can have your time travel.”
Alexander nodded. He showed no signs of disappointment. “Where there is one, there may be another.”
“The queen certainly seemed to think so,” Taylor said.
“She thought it was a mental quirk,” Veris said, with a sneer.
“She remembered it as a memory sharing,” Taylor reminded him. “But if she had never stepped outside the room she travelled to, she wouldn’t know it was real.”
Alexander held up his hand, a making-peace signal. “This sounds like an old argument.”
“It is,” Brody agreed. “Please help me change the subject and get these two off time travel before they hit Einstein and Newtonian physics and before I reach the point of wanting to shoot my own brains out.”
Alexander laughed.
Marit ran over to Brody’s side and tugged on his arm. “Someone’s coming. Big cars.”
Brody swept Marit up into his arms and stood up. “Did you go all the way up to the side fence again, Marit? We told you not to.”
She nodded. “Lots of cars,” she said urgently, tugging on his arm.
He frowned. “How many?”
She held up her hand with all fingers spread.
Brody exchanged a look with Veris.
“On a Sunday?” Taylor murmured. “Either she miscounted, or something is happening.”
“Band business?” Veris suggested, keeping his tone light.
“There is no business at the moment,” Brody said. “After the tour, we’re all taking a deep breath, perhaps even a permanent one.”
Mia emerged from the sunroom, the white highlights on her black Chucks glowing in the last of the sunlight. She wore black jeans and a tight black tee-shirt and her hip-length hair was tied back in a leather band. She looked so utterly unlike a cook and maid that sometimes Taylor was caught by surprise when she saw Mia around the house. But there was no mistaking Mia’s efficiency, or her loyalty toward Taylor’s family. Taylor had been happy to find out Mia also held a black belt in at least two different forms of martial arts. She was utterly devoted to Marit and the pair of them spoke Spanish nearly all the time.
Mia was frowning as she strode over to the table. “There’s some folk in the library, demanding to speak to the three of you,” she said in her husky, had-too-many-cigarettes voice. “I told them it was a family occasion, but they were insistent. I’m sorry.”
“How many people, Mia?” Veris asked.
“I couldn’t count them all in the time I had in the room. I got up to eleven before I had to turn and leave.” She grimaced and shifted her feet.
Brody tilted his head, studying her. “What is it?”
“They’re vampire,” she said simply.
Taylor was the only one to react. She drew in a sharp breath. “How long have you known?” she asked.
“Since my third month working here,” Mia said. She shrugged. “You can’t live here and not figure it out. Same with figuring out about the three of you, although you came clean on that up front. But you didn’t say anything about the other, so I didn’t. But the folk in the library, they’re scary fuckers. Especially her.”
Taylor drew in another breath. “Tall, skinny, dark skin and black eyes?”
“Yep.”
“Tira,” Brody muttered.
“Who?” Alexander asked.
“The queen is here,” Veris said. “The mountain has come to Mohammad.”
“Yeah and he came in five white stretch limousines,” Mia added dryly.
“Oh, sweet lord,” Alexander breathed. “Now what?”
“You will all come inside. Now,” said a male, flat voice from behind Mia. Six tall men in suits stepped out onto the deck and moved swiftly to stand in a loose circle around them where they sat at the big barbecue table.
Marit nestled tightly into Brody’s side.
“I guess we’re going inside,” Veris said mildly, picking up Taylor’s hand.
Alexander stood aside for Mia and they all moved into the house. Brody stopped at the stairs. “I’m putting Marit down to sleep,” he said, attempting to head off toward her bedroom.
One of the six vampires shepherding them stepped in front of Brody. “All of you,” he said.
Marit, perhaps sensing the menace around them, tucked her head even more tightly into Brody’s chest and tightened her arms around his neck. She said nothing.
Brody simply stared at the strange vampires. Silently, he turned and followed Alexander and Mia into the library, with Veris and Taylor coming last.
Tira had not changed from the last time Taylor saw her. She was still a tall, exceedingly slender, dark olive-skinned woman with black eyes that seemed older than the rest of her put together. She sat in Taylor’s favorite chair, while everyone else stood around her.
But Tira was not watching them as they entered the big two-floor book-lined room. She was studying Marit with a hungry, eager expression on her face.
“Look at me, child,” she said as soon they were brought to a halt in the middle of the room.
Marit gave a little squeak and hid her face against Brody’s neck.
Something passed over Tira’s face. Annoyance. She looked at Brody. “Make her look at me,” she demanded.
“I know what you want to see,” he told her. “It won’t do you any good, my lady. Marit is adopted.”
Tira’s hand on the flat, polished wood of the chair tightened. “That is not what I have heard, Braenden of the Gaels. I will see her face. Either you will show it to me or I will arrange to see it for myself.”
Brody locked gazes with her.
Taylor could feel his temper rising almost like a temperature gauge and wanted to reach out and soothe him. Now was not the time to stir the queen. Not over this. She realized that she was clutching at Veris’ hand compulsively. But Veris’ grip was no lighter.
Finally, Brody sank to one knee and whispered in Marit’s ear. Marit’s arms unlocked around his neck and she let him lower her to the ground. He straightened her jeans and tee-shirt, then she turned around to face the queen, her eyes narrowed. Brody kept his hands on her waist, his hands looking large against her tiny body.
The queen jerked forward, her fingers clenching the arms of the chair.
“It’s true,” she breathed. She snapped her head to look at Veris. “She is a replica of you and the woman.” She pushed herself to her feet, causing everyone else in the room to stir around her. That seemed to make her realize where she was. “Everyone get out,” she snapped. “Gregor, stay here. Peter, too. Everyone else, out. Out!”
The room began to clear as the people shuffled out of the room, out to the limousines ranged outside. The front door opened then closed, leaving Tira and Gregor, a seven foot vampire with a wild black beard and startling grey eyes, and Peter, a perfectly normal looking man in a suit and tie, standing on either side of her. Tira was wearing a collarless and sleeveless white dress that stopped at her knee, and looked effortlessly elegant. Compared to the jeans Taylor and Brody wore and the scuffed and old leather pants Veris wore, Tira look very much like a queen.
But Taylor wasn’t about to let herself feel inferior because of clothing. Not for a moment.
Tira looked them over. “You know the secret of real time travel,” she said. “The proof of it stands right there.” She pointed at Marit, who backed up against Brody. Brody murmured quietly to her.
Taylor’s heart squeezed. There was a note in the queen’s voice as she spoke that was alarming.
Tira shook her head. “You have had the key to time travel for years, yet you have not shared this with me, your queen.” She looked at Veris. “I expected more from you, Northman. You of all people I would have expected to understand the strategic importance of this matter.”
Veris remained silent.
“This should have been reported to the council and you know it!” Tira railed, fury abruptly pouring from her.
Veris cleared his throat. “You can truthfully report ignorance, my lady. They cannot gainsay you on that.”
“They knew of it before me!” she shrieked. “Someone in my own district, someone you confided in before me, went tattling to the Council behind my back! Now they are demanding an explanation from me. From me!”
Taylor could feel her body wanting to shrink back from the queen’s anger. Only Veris’ rock solid presence beside her and Brody’s unmoving body in front of her kept her where she was. She didn’t turn her head to look at either of them because she knew they would be thinking the same thing as her. None of them had confided in anyone until Alexander. Alexander would not speak to anyone about the travelling. He was as cautious about the subject as they.
Who knew about their travelling? Who had found out?
Tira turned to look at Taylor with narrowed eyes. “This all started when you messed up their lives, human. You’re the key.”
Brody stood up, bringing Marit with him. “Her name is Taylor.” He handed Marit to Alexander and turned back to face Tira again. “I suggest you use Taylor’s name, my lady, as she is both bonded and married to us.” His seemingly casual steps had placed him on Taylor’s other flank, opposite Veris.
Tira’s big mouth with the thin lips turned down. “Yes, yes, this polyandrous marriage ceremony you arranged for yourself in Tibet. Gregor filled me in on it. You three have been busy while my back was turned. A human marriage that is very nearly legal and off-spring, too. But you have failed in the one condition we agreed to, eight years ago. She is still human.” Tira pointed at Taylor with a long fingernail.
“We still have some years yet before that condition is to be met,” Brody replied. “And the married is quite legal.”
“In Tibet, perhaps, but not everywhere,” Tira replied, with a small, dry smile. “You will not distract me from the subject with your legal finesse, Braenden. Taylor is the key to your time travelling.” She stepped closer.
Brody stepped smoothly out in front of all of them – Veris, Taylor and Marit in Alexander’s arms – so that he was facing the queen alone.
“Brody…” Veris rumbled warningly.
Tira smiled. “You don’t want to do this. You have no idea the depth and degree of wrath you bring upon your head if you dare oppose my will.”
Brody crossed his arms. “Yeah, I kinda do, actually. But you don’t seem to have any clue about what you’re doing here, either.” He leaned forward a little. “Let me clue you in. Don’t get between me and mine, Tira. Not if you value your skinny black arse.”
She drew herself up to her full height, a thousand years of power squaring her shoulders. “I am your queen,” she said with utter assurance and the flatness of superiority.
“And I’m a father,” Brody shot back. “I outrank you.”
Tira laughed. “How cute.”
“Just try me,” Brody said, his voice more flat and far more sincere than Tira had just managed.
Her smile faded as she studied him. She switched her gaze to Veris. “Explain to him the danger he’s risking, Northman.”
Veris shook his head. “I regret, my lady, that on this occasion I agree with Brody. You’re threatening my family. If Brody wasn’t saying it, I would be. He just happened to say it first and used less syllables than I would. It comes out the same way, though.” His face hardened. “Don’t push me. You’ll regret it.”
Tira glanced from Veris to Brody and back again. Finally, she studied Brody carefully. “Very well, Brody of the Gaels,” she said, stepping back. “When you are ready to give me the key to time travel, you know where to find me.”
She turned and walked out of the room, her head perfectly straight, her shoulders square and still. Tira did indeed walk like a queen.
Her two men, Gregor and Peter, fell in behind her.
Everyone else remained motionless until the front door closed softly behind them.
Veris was the first to move. He turned to Mia. “Mia, go home. Pack. Buy a ticket to any country where you would like a holiday and go there for two weeks. You’re on salary, of course, but go and enjoy yourself until we tell you it’s safe to come back to this house and start work again. Do you understand?”
Mia pursed her lips together. “I could help. With Marit. Taking care of her, I mean.”
“It’s not going to be safe here at all,” Veris told her. “We won’t be here in an hour, ourselves.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mia said. “You’ll need help, anyway.” She shrugged. “I don’t like people who try to tell me what to do any more than you do. Having to go cool my ass off on some beach while you’re in danger...it’d just piss me off, you know?”
Taylor slid her hand under Veris’ elbow. “Let her come.”
Veris shook his head. “I won’t bring another person into danger.”
“It’s my choice,” Mia said, “and I can help.”
Brody put his hand on her shoulder. “Fine, you can help. Veris, pull the stick out of your ass. Mia’s a woman, not a china doll. She can make her own decisions. Mia, pack a bag and if you can pack something for Marit while you’re at it, you’ll have my gratitude. Marit, go with Mia, an bhfuil cuma cad é a deir sí, le do thoil.”
Marit looked at Brody with big, serious eyes. “If I do whatever she says, what if she tells me to jump off a cliff?”
Mia picked her up. “You’re causing mischief, mi un poco inteligente. You know very well I would do no such thing.”
Marit grinned. “But you could,” she said in Spanish, “and then I would have to jump, because Daddy said so.”
Mia rolled her eyes and looked at them over her shoulder as she turned toward the archways. “I’ll be fifteen minutes, max,” she promised. She tapped Marit’s chest as she headed for the foyer and the wrought iron stair case. “Even if I told you to jump off a cliff, missy smarty pants, you know very well that both your daddies have given you a much older rule, a higher order that says you have to preserve your innards first and foremost.”
Marit began to argue in clear and well-constructed Spanish and their voices faded as they climbed the stairs.
Alexander turned to face the three of them: Veris, Taylor and Brody. “Have I been marked by the queen, do you think?”
Brody grimaced. “Do you want to risk her wrath by assuming you are not?”
“Who spoke to the council?” Alexander asked. “If we gave her that name, then perhaps we would draw her sting.”
“No, we wouldn’t,” Taylor told him. “She wants time travel. She wants me. Telling her we don’t know how it works won’t appease her. She wants a secret, something she can give to the council to get them off her back and make herself look powerful and knowledgeable again.”
Alexander nodded. “So I understood. I thought perhaps a consolation prize might work. I clearly do not know the queen well enough. Then my next assumption may be wrong, too. I had assumed I would be better on my own. Safer.” He raised a brow. “Now I begin to wonder how determined Tira will be to restore her reputation.”
“Very,” Brody said flatly.
Veris crossed his arms. “You’d better come with us, Alex. You were never a fighter—“
“I do know which is the sharp end of a sword,” Alexander objected.
“But it wasn’t your life’s trade as it was ours,” Brody added gently. “There’s no reason for you to have to pick up a weapon if we’re around.”
Alexander was frowning. “You think I cannot defend myself?”
Veris shook his head. “We object to you having to defend yourself. This isn’t your fight. We won’t have you break with your faith’s moral code because of us.”
Brody swore and reached under his tee-shirt for his cellphone, clipped to the band of his jeans. He pressed the screen and stared at it. “Bugger!” he muttered and thumbed out a fast text message. He looked up at Veris. “Band trouble,” he said. “A break-in on the bus. Cops want us all there to check it over and see what’s missing.” He put the phone back on his belt. “I’ll be as fast as I can.”
Veris caught his arm. “We all go,” he said. “From now on, we all move together. Everywhere.”
For a moment Brody looked like he wanted to protest. Then the line between his brows smoothed out and he nodded. “I’ll get the limousine organized,” he said quietly and left, moving fast.
Taylor caught Veris’ eye. “Coincidence?” she asked, her heart thudding unhappily. She didn’t like how the business with the band’s coach had suddenly occurred right at this moment.
Veris shook his head, frowning. She could see he was mentally groping, looking for answers where there were few or none yet to grasp. “Let’s hope so.”