Bodyguards (8 page)

For a second or two, she was sure
Brad would say yes. He shifted his hold on the sword and nodded ever so
slightly. His eyes flicked behind her to his brother, however, and his
expression changed at once, becoming contrite.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,”
he said slowly. “And I have to go down to the village anyway and get some
food.”

“All right. I’ll come with you.
See what this place is like.”

“That is not possible either,”
Aedan said behind her. “We can’t let anyone know you’re here.”

Annoyed, Vivien turned on her heel
and stabbed the ground beside her feet. Aedan was still standing by the door,
his expression unreadable. She strode past him and back inside.

She had come to this place to help
free Anabel, but it wouldn’t take much more for her to start feeling like a
prisoner herself.

CHAPTER NINE

Histories

Before Brad left, he made Vivien
promise not to go out on her own.

“We’ll go outside together later
if you want,” he told her. “I’ll show you the lake or we’ll go running. But I
don’t want you to go alone and wander beyond the shields by accident.”

She agreed because he insisted,
but after he had left, she looked out through the kitchen window and had to
roll her eyes. Last night she had seen nothing but darkness outside; now all
she could see were those ‘shields’ a small distance away, maybe a hundred
yards, like a blurry curtain. How could Vivien have walked beyond them by
accident?

Shaking her head, she turned away
from the window, and tried not to frown at Aedan, who was standing against the
wall.

Now dressed in a black shirt and
pants like the previous day, he had watched her finish her breakfast, answering
only with a cool “I do not know what that is, Dame Vivien” when she had
inquired about coffee. The same question to Brad moments later had produced no
more than an apology. Apparently this place did not know coffee, or caffeine.
One more reason for Vivien to go back home as soon as possible.

“Shouldn’t you be doing
something?” she snapped at Aedan when he followed her out of the kitchen, two
steps behind her and not a sound to mark his passage.

He gave her a puzzled look. “I am
doing something. I am guarding you, Dame Vivien.”

She let out a grunt of annoyance.
“Stop calling me that. And stop following me around. We came back here to free
Anabel, so why don’t you do something about her?”

“Bradan went to find information
as well as food,” he said in an even voice. “It is my duty to follow you and
keep you safe. And it would not be proper for me to call you anything other
than Dame Vivien.”

“Proper?” Her voice rose, and her
eyes widened. What was it with these two and being ‘proper’? She straightened
her back to stand at her full height and glared at Aedan. “And was it proper
for you to kill people in the middle of the woods with no warning, without giving
them a chance to bow out of the fight? Was it proper for you to practically
kidnap me and take me to this place? Is it proper for you to stalk me when Brad
said no one but us can even enter this house?”

His nostrils flared, and a muscle
twitched in his jaw. By a trick of the light, his pale eyes seemed to gleam
like metal catching sunlight. Some instinct deep inside Vivien clamored for her
to pull back and retreat, but she refused to back down. Brad had intervened
last night, but she didn’t need help to put Aedan in his place. Let him dare to
raise his voice against her, and she’d show him a thing or two about being
proper.

Except... Aedan didn’t raise his
voice. He even took half a step back, standing there with his feet slightly
apart and his hands behind his back. He looked at something behind her shoulder
as he answered her questions in a completely toneless voice.

“They would not have bowed out.
They had sworn their lives to Rhuinn, like I have sworn mine to you. The
alternative to bringing you here was letting Rhuinn have you, and I trust you
would not have found his hospitality very pleasant. And as no shield is
entirely safe, it is my duty to guard you even here.”

“Duty!” She all but spat the word.
“You keep saying that, but I didn’t ask anything from you. I don’t need your
help. I don’t
want
your help.”

She turned on her heel before he
could answer and stalked down the hallway. Without thinking, she went to the
only other room she knew on this floor: the library. She started to shut the
door behind her, but Aedan’s hand closed around the edge and blocked it.

“Let go!” she demanded, imperious.

Aedan’s fingers flexed on the wood
as though hesitant, but he didn’t release the door. “The last time you hid
behind a closed door, you ran out on me through a window. I will not let that
happen again.”

Gritting her teeth, Vivien pushed
the door, but it didn’t budge.

“I already promised Brad I
wouldn’t go outside,” she said, biting out each word. “What do you want me to
do? Promise again?”

She had not expected him to
incline his head or say, “If you promise me not to leave this room through a
window, I will let you close the door.”

It felt a lot like blackmail, and
she’d still be technically under his watch, but at least she wouldn’t have to
see him.

“Deal. I promise.”

He inclined his head again and
finally let go of the door. Vivien pushed it shut, and the latch gave a
satisfyingly loud clank when it closed. She wished she could have locked it,
too.

The fire had long since died, as
had the candles. Vivien went to the windows on either side of the fireplace and
pulled the drapes to the side, even opening the windows so that sunlight and
fresh air poured in. In the full light of day, the room seemed different;
larger, maybe, or more welcoming. The portrait over the fireplace, on the other
hand, was still the same.

Vivien’s mother looked down upon
the room with a cool gaze, the lightest of smiles touching her mouth. She had
elegant features, with high cheekbones and sensuous lips. Dark hair cascaded
freely over her shoulders except for one thin braid woven across her forehead
like a tiara. She wore a dark-blue, floor-length dress, fitted to accentuate
her figure, with full sleeves that widened at the wrists; her attire wouldn’t
have been out of place in some medieval castle, Vivien thought. The dress was
cut modestly to show a little cleavage, and over the blue of the dress, the
metallic tones of the spiral pendant seemed even more striking. Vivien wondered
what Brad had done with the pendant. Had he left it back in her house, or had
he taken it to this place?

She watched the portrait for a
long moment, observing every detail and trying to jog her memory. Eleoren’s
eyes were brown, like her own. Her fingers, linked in front of her, were long
and elegant; many times as she was growing up Vivien had been told she had
pianist’s fingers and should learn to play. On Eleoren’s right thumb, a ring
was painted carefully, the designs engraved around it rendered in painstaking
detail.

Vivien looked down at her own
hand, absently turning the plain ring on her thumb with her fingers. She had
started wearing a ring on that finger some time in middle school and had never
stopped. Her friends had found it odd that she was wearing a ring on her thumb,
and Anabel had asked what had given her the idea. All Vivien had been able to
say was that she thought it looked nice. Had it been a memory of her mother
slipping through?

As much as she wished she could
remember more, looking at that portrait didn’t help. Instead, it replaced those
fugitive images from her dream—in which Eleoren had breathed, moved, and
talked—with this beautiful but still and silent image.

She turned away and looked around
the room again. The library, Brad had called it, and it was easy to see why.
The wall around the door and the back wall on the left were covered in books,
the built-in shelves so full that she’d have been hard pressed to find room for
even a handful more books.

She approached the wall and ran
her fingers along the spines of a few volumes. The covers felt smooth under her
fingers, the heavy leathers dyed in different colors, some faded with age. Her
eyes trailed over the titles, and several seconds passed before she realized
something.

She understood the titles; she
could read them as clearly as any of her textbooks back home—and a lot of
books, at least on this shelf, seemed to be history textbooks with names such
as ‘Treatise on the Quickening Wars’ or ‘A Genealogy of the High Families.’ But
if Vivien focused on the letters rather than the words, if she tried to see the
text rather than the meaning behind it, she could see quite clearly that the
words were not in English. They used the same alphabet as far as she could see
except for a few accents and symbols, but she would have had no idea on how to
pronounce the words. And yet, she could understand everything.

Sliding a random book from the
shelf, she let it fall open in her hands. She read a full paragraph about
conflicts between vampires and channelers, and every word made sense. But when
she tried to read aloud, she couldn’t even get past the first word.

Was it more magic at play? Were
these books charmed somehow, so that anyone opening one could read it? After
all, there was a ‘magic fridge’ in the kitchen, so why not a magic library? She
couldn’t come up with any other explanation.

She supposed it would have been
easy to ask Aedan about it. All she had to do was open the door; she wouldn’t
even need to ask him to come inside. She didn’t want to talk to him, however.
She didn’t need another one of those pitying looks like when he’d complained
she didn’t remember, or even for him to be angry that she didn’t show enough
respect for the Quickening—and she’d keep calling it magic if she felt like it,
and he could bite her, for all she cared!

After putting the book back on the
shelf, she started to look at the titles again, searching for something
interesting to read to help pass the time. She didn’t find any fiction—unless
all the books about vampires were fiction, and as disquieting as the thought
was, she suspected they were just as factual as the rest.

Maybe the people in this place
called ‘vampires’ something entirely different from the vampires she knew from
television and movies. It was another question she could have asked Aedan, but
she’d wait for Brad’s return instead.

In the end, she picked a book
titled ‘A History of Lahien the Great’ in equal parts because she was bored and
because the name tickled her memory. After she’d sat in the armchair and read
the first couple of pages, she suddenly remembered where she had heard the name
before: Aedan had mentioned it when he had told her about her family’s lineage.
So this person was—supposedly—her ancestor. As she continued to read, she
became less than thrilled with the connection. As with the Earth history she
was more familiar with, ‘the Great’ seemed to signify that the man had been on
the winning side of quite a few wars.

She read a few chapters before
getting tired of the writer’s ornate style; apparently, historians in this
world shared a few stylistic choices with historians on Earth. She chose
another tome, and while the names were different, the events were similar:
political maneuvering, duels to the death, feats of magic she had a hard time
believing even after what she had seen Brad accomplish. The style was more
tolerable and she started losing herself in the book, fascinated to note the
similarities between events in this world and what she had been studying in
college. Some patterns matched exactly. She’d have loved to pick one of her
professor’s brains about all this.

Absorbed in what she was reading,
she forgot where she was until two knocks on the door startled her.

“What?” she called out, her
annoyance thick in her voice.

The door swung open and Aedan
appeared—except it wasn’t Aedan, she quickly realized.

“Vivien? May I come in?”

She closed the book and rested it
on her knees. “Sure.” She waited until Brad had entered the room before she
asked, “Did you hear anything about Anabel?”

He made as though to look back,
but seemed to think better of it and kept his eyes on her as he approached. “I
did. She’s at the palace, like we thought. I couldn’t find out more
unfortunately.”

Vivien looked down at the book on
her lap; it had hinted at unpleasant things happening to whoever had the
misfortune of being considered an enemy of the king. She swallowed hard before
looking up at Brad again.

“Do you think they’re hurting
her?”

His expression answered clearly
enough, even when all he said was, “I don’t know.”

“How are we going to help her?”
Vivien insisted.

“I don’t know,” Brad repeated, his
voice dropping to a whisper.

“Then why did you bring me here?”
She stood abruptly, and the book tumbled to the floor. “You said if I came
here, we’d be able to get her back.”

“And we will.” He crouched down to
pick up the book, smoothing out a page that had been creased. “We’ll figure
something out.”

She didn’t at all like the way he
avoided her gaze on those last words, like he didn’t want her to see his
doubts. And of course he doubted. There were three of them. Anabel was held by
a king, with all his forces at his back. After reading those books, Vivien was
beginning to have a better idea of why Brad and Aedan thought she was in such
danger—and that meant Anabel was, too. Unless Brad wasn’t telling her
everything...

She watched him set the book back
on a shelf, approaching slowly so that when he turned, she was right in front
of him.

“Is she dead?” she asked, holding
his gaze.

Brad sighed softly. “I wish I
could tell you for sure that she isn’t. But the truth is, I don’t know.”

Tears prickled Vivien’s eyes. She
turned away. She didn’t want him to see her cry. She left the room, ignoring
Aedan when she passed by him. If she had thought it would make a difference,
she would have told him not to follow her, but by now she knew it was useless.
She hurried up the staircase to her room and closed the door behind her. This
one, at least, she could lock. Too bad she couldn’t lock her fears out the same
way.