Byzantine Heartbreak (16 page)

Mariana gave Dionne another friendly smile. “You really need to visit the nets more often, sweetheart. You’re just not keeping up on the gossip, are you?”

Dionne’s mouth worked as she searched for a suitable response. She cleared her throat.

“If you did,” Mariana replied, “You’d know that there’s a right ol’ fuss going on over that velvet and chiffon number that Nayara wore to the Vienna ball. No one can figure out who the designer is and no designer is stepping up and taking credit. Everyone’s trying to copy the dress and no one can figure out how to make it. Not with all that silk chiffon floating off it the way it did.” She shrugged. “I just think Nayara should go with her strengths. Everyone loved that dress. She should do another one, same designer. If she can.” Mariana smiled at Nayara.

Nayara smiled back, her heart sinking.

Dionne bit her lip, studying Nayara. “Who was it?” she asked. “If it was Alberto Cuéllar, or House Pontecorvo, or even Berg & Carlsen, I can pull in a few favours with them.”

Nayara rubbed her temple. “In truth...” She winced. “I had the head of the wardrobe department just run me up something.”

Dionne’s mouth opened again.

Nayara rushed to explain. “I was so busy, you see and Cáel sprung the event on us with so little warning. I asked Cybelia to put together a dress like the other women would wear so I wouldn’t look completely out of place. She probably looked at footage from other years’ balls and figured something out.”

“You mean,” Dionne said slowly, looking even more horrified, “You didn’t even have any fittings?”

“Cybelia has my measurements,” Nayara said. “And we don’t change shape.” She wished that Dionne’s look of dismay would go away. It was such a simple matter after all. Well, she had thought it was. It was just a dress.

“No...this is perfect!” Mariana said, her voice dreamy and distant. “High fashion, vampire style.” She started to smile. “Vampire fashion, by Cybelia. Of course Nayara shouldn’t wear human styles. She
should
wear her own! And it should be different, too.”

Dionne put her hands on her hips. “Really?” she said, with a tone of exasperation.

“I like that idea,” Nayara said. “Cybelia has spent centuries studying fashion and clothing. She’s really very good and she has a whole team of designers that turn out clothing for our travellers. They would probably enjoy more creative projects.” She realized that all the men in the room had slightly glazed looks on their faces. “But this is definitely a discussion for another time,” she added.

“Then the music awards are go?” Dionne pressed.

“Oh, do say yes!” Mariana coaxed. “I want to see your dress!”

Nayara couldn’t help smiling. Mariana’s enthusiasm was simply infectious. “Of course,” she said. “I want to see my dress, too.”

Chapter Fifteen

Justin was taller than Dionne Rinaldi, even with her high heels, but her legs were as long as his, so he had trouble keeping up with her temper-fuelled stride toward the visitor’s lounge.

He caught at her elbow. “Slow down.”

“Like hell!” she fumed. “I want off this station as fast as I can.”

“It hasn’t occurred to you we can jump from anywhere?” he asked reasonably. “You just have...to...stop.”

She halted abruptly and he nearly ran her over. They were in the section that linked the security area with the arrival chambers and the wall here was all glass, from top to bottom, giving a stunning view of Earth. Dionne turned to face the glass, her arm up, shielding her face. Justin suspected she wasn’t watching the view.

“Hey,” he said. “I tried to warn you we think differently. I said their reactions wouldn’t be what you could normally count on.”

“I know,” she replied. Her voice was muffled and suspiciously thick.

“You’re not...y’know...crying, are you?” He was faintly alarmed. He hadn’t had to deal with a woman’s tears for a couple of centuries and the last time he clearly remembered a woman crying had been a distinctly uncomfortable one.

Dionne turned her head further away from his sight. “No,” she said flatly. “The last thing I’d do in front of you is cry, Kelly. You’re likely to melt if I do.”

True.

But he tugged on her shoulder, turning her around to face him. Something kicked at his lower belly when he saw her eyes were filled with tears. They just hadn’t dropped yet.

“Hey, I know it was rough on you in there,” he said. “But getting upset about it—”

“I’m not upset! I’m fucking angry!” she spat back.

Justin nodded. “Because that Mariana woman made you look like a fool?”

“Because she was right and I was wrong, Justin! For heaven’s sake!” Dionne thumped the glass next to her hip. “I was one hundred percent, one hundred and eighty degrees wrong and I let a grey haired woman with no make-up and no clue about personal presentation get under my skin and make me behave like a banshee teenager in the middle of a hormonal storm!”

“Well, you have a lot riding on this. A few missteps are likely to happen,” Justin pointed out.

Dionne drew in a breath and let it out. “And
that’s
what you meant by not understanding you people, isn’t it? Because that’s so
not
what I expected you to say. I’ve been fired for showing more decorum than I showed in there, Justin. Are you saying those three—Ryan, Nayara and Cáel—they’re just going to shrug and say ‘nerves’ and let it pass?”

Justin laughed. “I’m not only saying it, I’ll bet you good money on it.”

The corners of her generous mouth tilted upwards just a little. “I don’t have my pay cheque yet. Besides, you’re all filthy rich. I’m not betting you.”

Justin straightened up. There was no need to shield her from the view of passers-by now. “One thing you haven’t learned that you should and quickly, Dionne, is that living as long as we have changes our perspective. A lot. You think you know us because you’ve unearthed some cool factoids, but you really don’t know us at all. Not where it counts.”

Dionne nodded. “I’m starting to appreciate that.”

“That makes you smarter than I gave you credit for, when I first met you.”

“I’m glad someone thinks so, because right now I’m not so impressed with myself. Would you mind taking me home, Justin? I really need to sulk in private where no one will see me pouting like a five year old.”

“Can I watch?” Justin asked.

“Not on your nelly, Kelly.”

“Damn, I thought my day was about to get interesting.”

* * * * *

Ryan placed a bottle and glass in front of Cáel. “Here.
Salute
.” He threw himself into the armchair sitting at the end of the coffee table.

“Ouzo. You’re spoiling me.” Cáel broke the seal and poured, then put his feet up on the other visitor’s chair in front of Ryan’s desk and took a long swallow. “Think the Rinaldi woman will work out?”

Ryan nodded. “She’s good. Very good. She’s just young. Mariana caught her by surprise. She’ll come back next time with a different attitude. She’s flexible and smart. You’ll see.”

“That’s sort of what I was thinking, too. She’s got too much of a reputation for today to mean anything significant.” Cáel watched Ryan stretch in his chair for a moment. “Ryan.”

He looked up.

“I’ve been doing the math. Salathiel was made in fourteen fifty-three. He created the time-wave in twenty sixty-one. You three were together up until that time. That’s six hundred and eight years.”

“I never counted them up before,” Ryan said. Something shifted in his expression, like a dark shadow passing over a sunlit sea. “And especially not after,” he added.

Cáel put his glass down on the front of Ryan’s desk. “Were you truly together all that time? I confess, my mind has trouble with the idea. Humans marvel over marriages that last sixty years. Six hundred is...beyond imagination.”

Ryan stood and moved over to the other chair. He patted Cáel’s ankles, asking him silently to move his feet. Cáel sat up, clearing the other chair for Ryan. Ryan sat in the chair and swivelled it to face Cáel. “You’re only on your first regeneration, Cáel. You haven’t begun to appreciate the long term perspective of time yet, but you’ll get there.” He leaned his elbows on his knees and Cáel saw his gaze turn inwards, casting through memories. “A long term relationship is a different thing for vampires. Even for Nayara and I, who you keep pointing out are so insular.”

Cáel grinned. “How is it different? How was it different for you and Salathiel?”

“We were together for six hundred years, yes, but it wasn’t constant. Not like you see some humans mated together and joined at the hip for the length of their marriage and adult lives. Sometimes Salathiel would get the urge to travel to some far off place he had heard or read about. Sometimes it would be me who wanted to return to Ireland, or spend a few years in the Russian Steppes. And sometimes Nayara would go off, too. We would all follow a dream or a whim, or fight a war, or live out some life that beckoned.” Ryan shrugged. “We could do that, knowing that we weren’t leaving anyone behind, lonely and alone and that we would be returning home to welcoming arms.”

“Ah,” Cáel murmured, as he spotted the key.

“Ah, what?” Ryan asked curiously. “You make that sound like I’ve just revealed the keys to the kingdom.”

“In a way, you did.” Cáel stood up. “I’ve been trying to understand why, after hundreds of years of wandering, you reached Constantinople and just...stopped. I asked you once, but I didn’t believe your answer.”

Ryan lifted his brow. “Really.”

“Not all of it. I don’t think you really knew the answer, either.”

Ryan didn’t respond. He looked thoughtful, instead.

“It wasn’t simply the power of love that halted you,” Cáel added.

Ryan looked up at him. “What was it?”

“In the beginning, Salathiel made you feel human again. He made you laugh. Nayara taught you to love and she accepted you for what you were.”

Ryan took a deep breath. “And after?” he asked, his voice rough.

“Acceptance, still,” Cáel said. “And a sense of home.” He leaned down, his mouth inches from Ryan’s. “That’s why you’ve spent your time since Salathiel died and took it all away from you fighting to get it back. Struggling to find acceptance and a place to call home.” And he kissed him.

Ryan held Cáel’s head steady, extending the kiss, his tongue thrusting into his mouth.

Cáel pulled him from the chair and up onto his feet, his hand fisted in Ryan’s shirt. “Come.” He was very aware of the door between Ryan and Nayara’s office and how it opened to either of their signals, without warning. He pulled Ryan toward the door to his private quarters. “Come here.”

The door opened as they approached and they slipped into the semi darkness lit only by Earth. Cáel pulled Ryan to him once more. “
I
want you, Ryan. Always have.” He started unfastening and removing Ryan’s clothes.

“For some unfathomable reason beyond my comprehension,” Ryan murmured. “I’m a flawed, old vampire, Cáel. The burden and scars I carry...”

“Acceptance means accepting everything. I don’t pick and choose,” Cáel told him.

Ryan closed his eyes, swallowing.

Cáel caught Ryan’s face in his hand and shook it gently. “If you don’t stop being morose and poetic, I won’t fuck you and you’ll have real reason to look so down in the dumps.”

Ryan’s laugh seemed to catch him by surprise. He reached for Cáel’s shirt, tearing it from him with a casual twist of his wrist. “We can’t have that, now, can we?” he asked, his lilt pure Irish.

Cáel stripped Ryan of the last of his clothing and lowered him to the floor.

Neither of them screamed aloud this time. Cáel found himself holding back because he simply didn’t know how good Nayara’s hearing was. Vampire hearing was phenomenal and the last thing he wanted was to assault Nayara’s ears with their lovemaking.

He had thought that afterwards, Ryan would return to work, replete and satisfied. But neither of them moved from the bed. Cáel was in no hurry to leave. He could feel the need for more sitting like a coiled, sleeping serpent in his body. It would waken, all too soon.

In the meanwhile, Ryan talked softly into the darkness. Cáel lay quietly listening, until Ryan reached for him and drew his arms around him and Cáel understood Ryan was seeking the comfort of touch. He was talking about his past, never an easy thing. And he was talking about Salathiel, a subject he had never spoken about at all.

So while Ryan sat on the edge of the bed, Cáel pressed up behind him, one arm around his chest, the other around his waist. He rested his chin on Ryan’s shoulder and listened and prompted with questions as Ryan’s words petered out.

“After Salathiel had been made, he was overjoyed to have us back,” Ryan said. “And for a while, it was as if nothing had changed. We moved to northern Italy for a few decades, until Constantinople had settled down and we could adopt new identities. Then we moved back again. Constantinople was home for us and we all wanted to be there, even with the Turks in control. So back we went.”

“Is that when he changed?” Cáel asked.

“That was about ninety years after the fall of the city. Yes, it would have been around then we started to notice it. It was such a gradual change, of course. Salathiel, who had always been so in love with life, started to hate it. He grew bitter as the long empty years of a vampire’s life set in. He became morbid and angry. He blamed us, he blamed his maker. He blamed everyone but himself.” Ryan sighed.

“We consulted with other vampires in the city. They had experience dealing with this decline in others. But nothing we did could shift Salathiel out of his constant anger. Over the centuries it waxed and waned, but neither Nayara nor I, or any of the more senior vampires in the city, or the country, could lift Salathiel’s anger. And it changed him. He sought power, more money, the secret to shifting the world in the hope that he could change it. Change himself. Change his situation.”

“It never occurred to him to simply end things?” Cáel asked.

Ryan shook his head. “He’d always been such a vital man, as a human. Suicide was unthinkable for him, then. As a vampire, it is virtually impossible. The only way to manage it is to have another vampire’s assistance and neither of us would do it. I think, right up until the end, we still hoped he could change.”

Cáel stroked Ryan’s hip. “You’re not such a pessimist as I thought you were.”

He felt Ryan’s laugh, but didn’t hear it.

“Salathiel dabbled in human politics when he could get away with it,” Ryan continued, “But it was a game of chess to him. It was meaningless. More than once, Nayara and I had to pull him out of situations where he’d played with live stakes and pushed them too far.” He took a breath and let it out. Another deep sigh. “When it was clear that the first phase of the World War was going to hit Europe in the early twentieth century, we left Constantinople and moved to North America. Salathiel
hated
it. He didn’t adjust well, even though we lived in Astoria in New York, where there was a large Greek community and an even larger vampire one, passing as human.” Ryan gripped Cáel’s arm where it lay across his chest. “The vampires there...I don’t know how Nayara and I would have coped without them. I would tell you that Salathiel developed psychopathic symptoms, except it’s impossible for a vampire to do that. Our brains simply do not change.”

“He went mad?”

“He seemed to.” Ryan’s grip tightened. “They tried to contain him in situations where his actions would have no consequences, while they considered what they could do with him. Eventually, when we had run out of options, the only form of confinement left for him was at a mental institution...and that brought Salathiel into contact with his first psi-filer, which started the whole ugly mess rolling toward the end—”

“Ryan? Are you in here?” Nayara asked, opening the door. “I can hear your voice.”

The opening door spilled light from Ryan’s office onto the pair of them. Ryan looked up as Nayara moved into the room and halted.