Adam (3 page)

“Please. Please!” Leah reached out for Jasmine, grasping the Vampire’s face between her hands and meeting her gaze with a chilling sort of wisdom radiating from her young eyes. “I was mean to her tonight. I don’t want Mama to leave me thinking I’m a bad girl.”

“Puss, you and I both know your mama would never think that of you. She loves you more than anything,” Jasmine reassured her as she pulled her into her lap and hugged her close.

“I know she loves me more than anything, but I don’t think she knows that I love her. I was mean to her.”

“Oh, sweetheart. She knows. Mamas always know.”

“Please. I need to tell her. Please ...”

The little girl pressed her lips to Jasmine’s, right over the spot where her upper left fang was hidden and retracted. Jasmine was well aware that this clever child was manipulating her, pulling out all the stops, doing whatever it took to save her sole surviving parent.

“Damn.”

Leah didn’t understand what saving Bella for the moment could cost Jasmine for the rest of her life. Jasmine had never drunk the blood of anyone who wasn’t human or Vampire before. The idea offended her every last sensibility. All her life it had been drilled into her that she shouldn’t ever drink the blood of a Nightwalker. Until recently it had been deeply forbidden. But then Prince Damien had drunk from a Lycanthrope, who later had become his bride, and it was discovered that the reason the cold and loveless Vampires lived lives of such bland emotion was because they were destined to find their mates in the other Nightwalker breeds ... in the blood of other Nightwalkers.

But there was no love to be found here. The thing Jasmine was considering was to drink in order to trigger the autonomic systems attached to her second bite, her finishing bite, which would inject coagulants into her victim’s body, thus stopping Bella’s bleeding. But to drink from Bella would mean to take on an aspect of her power, and Jasmine wasn’t interested in altering herself on a molecular level for all time. She liked herself just the way she was.

But it wasn’t herself she was forced to consider. It was a pair of pleading violet eyes, a child on the brink of becoming an orphan, and it was that child’s mother who would suffer painfully if Jasmine saved her long enough to say good-bye to her daughter.

“I’m sorry,” the female Vampire whispered to the babe. “She’s gone.”

She picked the little girl up and walked out of the cavern that held Leah’s dead and dying parents.

One Week Later

Noah, the Demon King, raged with grief, the temper of his volatile element getting the best of him. He hid himself in the very same caverns that had seen Jacob’s death and, using the power of his flame and Fire, he burned everything in sight until the rock was charred as black as the wounded places in his heart.

Kestra, his Queen, grieved with love. Leah glued herself to Noah’s wife, scrawny legs around her waist and clutching arms around her neck beneath Kestra’s sugar-white braid of hair. While her husband burned in anguish, Kes rocked and comforted the orphaned child. They clung to each other, the parentless child and the barren Queen, each fulfilling places of desperate need in the other.

Leah’s blood uncle, Kane, brother to her father, couldn’t bear to be in the child’s presence. Neither, it seemed, could his mate, Corrine, who was Isabella’s blood sister. They each saw too much of Bella and Jacob in Leah’s features and her coloring, and their avoidance would set a trend far into the future. Leah would feel it most keenly, and she would age knowing very little about them, except to realize just setting eyes on her caused them inconsolable pain.

And they were not the only ones who would behave in such a manner.

She learned not to mention anything about her parents to anyone who didn’t talk about them first. Within days she understood that she had no family anymore. That she was alone.

And through the years to follow, a certain female Vampire would watch as the once close-knit Demons began to fall apart over the deaths of two of their finest and most beloved members, anguish and suffocating guilt stealing away what nothing else could have done. She quickly came to realize there was nothing at all she could do about it.

Chapter 1

Ten Years Later

“Adam?”

Leah’s dark head jolted up and around in her shock, her violet eyes going wide as she stared at her
Siddah
Elijah. Elijah looked at his foster daughter with amusement. He was well aware the fifteen-year-old had been tuning out most of her lessons up until that point.

“Yes. Adam. Your father’s eldest brother was Enforcer before your father inherited the mantle from him.”

“But ... Daddy’s only brother is Uncle Kane.”

“Trust me, angel, I was very good friends with Adam. You were perhaps just too young to recall your father ever mentioning him.”

“But Uncle Kane never speaks of him,” she argued.

No doubt
, Elijah thought. Kane had not known Adam, having been born after Adam’s loss. Then again, the present Enforcer also avoided his niece whenever he could, so the opportunity for discussions about anything was nonexistent. The look flitting over Leah’s features told him that she was recalling that very same fact.

Kane and Corrine had never recovered from the tragic loss of their siblings. They had become very insular, taking solace only in one another and avoiding anything that could possibly remind them of Jacob or Bella. At first, Kane had even refused to take on the position of Enforcer, this in spite of the fact that he knew he was the last of his line, the last of a very special legacy of Demon power that allowed him to sense when other Demons were on the brink of insanity.

Eventually, Kane had very little choice. Then again, it wasn’t as though any of them had a choice. Life plodded forward, but they were all aware of the pall that had hung over their society this past decade. There were many who believed Jacob and Bella would have destroyed Ruth eventually, or at the very least the plague of rogue Vampires that now threatened to overwhelm the Nightwalker world.

Kane always tried his best and he meant well, but his youth was against him as he struggled to fill his brother’s formidable shoes.

Others, like Elijah, simply believed that the blow of the Enforcers’ deaths had taken the spirit out of the entire Demon community.

“Adam was gone long before Kane was even born,” Elijah pointed out to his charge. “He didn’t even know him.”

“Gone? You mean he died?” she pressed. As a rule, her
Siddah
was very careful with the words he chose, so the distinction caught the clever girl’s attention.

“Actually, I can only assume so. Adam disappeared without explanation some four centuries ago on a Beltane night. We found no clues to his disappearance; however, since we were at war with the Vampires at the time, it was not unusual for even our best warriors to disappear.”

“Oh! How terrible!” Leah’s violet eyes filled with empathetic tears. She often did this. Leah hungered for stories of her parents and felt a constant need to apply emotions to them. Elijah supposed it helped her to feel closer to them. The tragedy was that Kane and Corrine, the two people on earth who could best fill her hunger for information about Jacob and Bella, were as remote a resource to her as Pluto was to Earth, and it had very little to do with the fact that Leah was being raised in a distant Russian province in the court of the Lycanthrope Queen, Elijah’s mate, Siena. Being a Mind Demon, Kane was capable of teleporting at will. He could have brought himself and his mate to Russia whenever he wanted to.

“You know, Noah was Adam’s best friend, as I recall. Perhaps you ought to ask him about your other uncle,” Elijah suggested.

“Really? I can go to England?”

“Of course.” He chuckled. “Kestra and Noah would be thrilled to see you.”

“Yeah, I guess,” the young girl sighed. “But it stresses Kes out when she sees me. It stresses all of you out.”

Leah knew that was exactly the truth of the matter. After her parents had died, there had been something of a terrible war over her custody. Demon tradition stated that upon the death of both parents, a Demon child’s
Siddah
would take immediate custody of the child, instead of waiting until the child’s power began to show itself in the child’s late teens. But Noah and Kestra had fought with Elijah and Legna for the right to raise her themselves until the proper time for her Fostering to begin. They wanted to raise her in the Demon court and in the hub of Demon life. Leah’s
Siddah
, Elijah and Magdelegna, both lived with their mates in the Lycanthrope court. A foreign court with foreign traditions.

Of course Kestra’s motivations had been strongly oriented to her husband’s desires. She was unable to have children of her own and knew how deeply Noah felt for Leah. She had seen it as a perfect opportunity to provide him with the family he deserved. And Leah didn’t doubt that the barren Queen had been strongly in favor of the idea for other reasons as well. The fight had, she came to understand, caused some rifts between Elijah and his King ... and even between Magdelegna and her brother. Legna and Noah had once been very loving and very close, but now the relationship was strained.

All because of Leah.

Eventually it had come down to the Great Council’s vote on the matter. The Council had strongly sided with Leah’s
Siddah
and Demon tradition, and so she had been raised by Elijah and Legna and Legna’s Demon mate Gideon. Siena, the Lycanthrope Queen, and Siena’s entourage of Lycanthropes had had their influence on Leah, too.

Leah didn’t know if any of them were good or bad influences, or if Noah and Kestra might have been better ones, but frankly she was glad she had been raised outside of the Demon world. There was always so much weight in the eyes of the Demons who saw her mother and father in her looks or her bearing or perhaps even her smallest habits. That weight invariably led to sadness and an overwhelming guilt. Leah’s guilt. She felt bad for making them sorrowful, and the older she was, the worse it seemed to get. Apparently her face and eyes made her a dead ringer for her mother, while her build and hair reminded everyone of her father.

“I think I’ll just stay here,” she said as she almost invariably did whenever she thought of visiting the Demon court. Actually, her thoughts were far more engaged with the fascinating concept of learning about an uncle she had never heard of before. “So what can you tell me about Adam?”

“Adam? Sweet Destiny.” Elijah paused to thrust the blade he was forging deep into the hot coals before him. “Why are you so fascinated with him?” he asked his fosterling. He took a moment to look over her willowy frame, smiling as he saw how much she had grown these past few months. She also looked healthy and, considering her history, reasonably happy. But there would always be an element of sadness in this child, Elijah thought. The tragedy of her parents’ death was worn deep in her young spirit, and anyone who sat and talked to her for any length of time could see it sitting on her soul.

“Well, you were good friends, yes?”

Elijah didn’t see what possible use there was in bringing up stories of other great men who were also long gone, but she was animated and curious and it was infectious to see her that way.

“Honestly?” the big blond Demon said with a crooked grin. “Your father was Adam’s best friend even above Noah. When they weren’t bickering, that is. Your dad loved to get under Adam’s skin and would poke and prod until he got his ass kicked for it.”

Leah laughed, and Elijah relished the sound. It was a rare commodity in her. It was rare in just about everyone these days.

“Then again,” he continued, “those sparring matches and their playful rivalry is probably how your father learned all the tricks of the Enforcer’s trade. From diplomacy to cunning to battle, Adam was the ultimate instructor, and your father a clever sort of student. Did you know that Adam was the one who devised most of the current punishments we use to deter Demons from straying during the Hallowed moons? There have been others throughout the centuries, but Adam’s were by far the most wickedly effective and have stuck the longest.”

“Really?” she asked breathlessly, her expression rapt as she leaned in.

“Yeah. Apparently, Adam thought the original forms of castigation and humiliation were a bit too warm and fuzzy for his tastes. What he devised has proved far more diabolical. Adam was ...” Elijah grinned at her, his green eyes alight with distant memory. “Adam was the definition of a hard-ass. Believe me when I tell you it paid off. Whatever you hear people say about your father being militant, it was nothing compared to Adam. He was the all-time deadliest fighter on the block when he wanted to be. Not to disparage your father, but if Adam were still around, Ruth would have been dealt with long before she could ever have got this far.”

Leah frowned as he turned to shift the blade under the coals. “You mean he was better than Daddy?” she asked as she licked the sweat from her upper lip. The forge was hot and close, but she wouldn’t have budged for anything.

“Well ... let’s say he was different. Adam wasn’t known for being touchy-feely. Your father was the opposite in many ways.” Elijah hesitated. “If I took Adam at the time he died and set him up against your dad at the time
he
died, it’d be a real hard call. But you see, your mother made Jacob more powerful than Adam could ever be alone. However, she also ... well ...” Elijah stopped with a wince, realizing he had forgotten whom he was talking to.

Leah wasn’t left behind.

“You mean to say Mama was Daddy’s worst weakness as well, don’t you? It’s okay, Elijah. I was there. I know my father wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t turned his back on his enemies.”

“Actually, no one knows that,” he corrected her sharply. “Do you blame your mother for what happened? Or your father?”

“I blame everybody!” Leah bit out sharply. “I blame everyone who ever let Ruth slip through their fingers! I blame the Vampires! I blame you and Noah and even Adam for not being there when my parents needed them the most!” Leah’s small hands balled into fists as she railed. She tried to hold back, to rein in her temper, especially when she saw the guilt and pain in Elijah’s eyes. “I just ... I wish it had been different. I bet if my father and my uncle Adam had been there together that day, Ruth would be dead and that Vampire bastard would be burned to ashes instead of my father and mother!”