Fairytale (38 page)

Adam hoped, for Brigit’s sake, that the
pewter pendant had helped her sister. She hadn’t heard from Bridin
since she’d left her in Rush, and Adam knew she worried about her.
But there was a certainty nestled deep in Brigit’s heart, that no
matter what might happen to Bridin, she’d be all right in the end.
She talked about that feeling often. She’d told him that she clung
to that certainty, believed in it with all her heart.

She turned her attention again to the
storybook. Within the book’s pages was a tale of adventure every
child would cherish. All fiction, of course. Or...pretty much so.
Unlike her sister, Brigit had assured Adam as she’d offered advice
on the plot he’d constructed with great care for his son, she had
not inherited the ability to predict the future.

“My kids are going to love it,” the nurse
said softly. “I can’t wait for the next book in the series.”

Fairytale,
the cover said, in elegant
golden calligraphy lettering that glittered magically in the
overhead lights.
Book I. Written by Adam Reid. Illustrations by
Brigit Malone Reid.

“I especially love that opening page.”

The baby in Brigit’s arms made a startled
sound, and Adam could have sworn he reached for the book.

“Darling,” Brigit whispered. “He wants you to
read him his story.”

The nurse chuckled and handed the book to
Adam. Then she discreetly slipped away. Adam sat on the edge of
Brigit’s bed, and she held little Jonathon up as if he needed a
better view of the pictures.

“Once upon a time,” Adam began, and if his
voice was choked, it was because of his tears, and because of the
swelling in his heart, and because he was wondering again, as he
often did these days, how the hell he had gotten so lucky. “There
was a little boy. His name was Jonathon Adam Reid, and he was the
most precious thing in his parents’ lives.” Adam reached out one
hand to stroke his son’s glistening black hair. “They gave him all
the love in their hearts, because they knew how very much every
child in the world deserves to be loved.”

Adam paused, leaned down to kiss his wife,
and then his son, and then he turned the page. “One day, Jonathon
went on a great adventure, and this is the story of that adventure.
It happened on
the other side,
in the enchanted land of the
fairy folk, the land known as Rush...

The End...or is it?

***

Exclusive Excerpt From:

By Maggie Shayne

Available in print Sept. 20, 2011

Available in E-format, Oct. 1, 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Benson. Permission to
reproduce text granted by Harlequin Books S.A.

Coastal Maine

It was the blackest, rainiest night the
forgotten and overgrown cemetery had seen in centuries. Ancient
tombstones leaned drunkenly beneath the bones of dead-looking
trees, while gnarled limbs shivered in the cold. Arthritic
twig-fingers scratched the tallest of the old stone monuments like
old, yellow fingernails on slate. And the surviving vampires
huddled together around an open, muddy grave.

Brigit Poe, part vampire, part human, and one
of the only two of her kind, was dressed for battle, not for a
funeral. It was only coincidence that she wore entirely black. That
breathable second-skin fabric favored by runners covered her body
from ankles to waist like a surgical glove. Over the leggings, she
wore tall black boots, with buckles all the way up to her knees.
The chunky four-inch heels provided extra height, an advantage in
battle. And the weight of them would add more potency to a kick.
Her black slicker looked as if she’d lifted it straight from the
back of a cowboy actor in an old spaghetti western. It was long and
heavy, with a caped back, but it did more than keep the rain away.
Its dense fabric would help deflect a blade.

She could have wished for a hood. She could
have wished for a lot of things, topmost among them: for the task
she faced to fall to anyone other than her. But that wasn’t going
to happen.

As she stood there, watching each vampire
move forward to pour ashes into the muddy hole, her twin brother
walked up to her and plunked a black cowboy hat onto her
dripping-wet blond curls. She had, she’d been told, hair like
Goldilocks, the face of an angel, the heart of a demon—and the
power of Satan himself.

Black hat, she thought. It figured. In that
spaghetti Western she’d been envisioning, she definitely would have
worn a black hat. Her brother would have worn a white one. He was
the good guy. The hero.

Not her.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he told her.
“Hunting him down. Killing him.”

“No shit. He’s five thousand years old and
more powerful than any of us.”

“Not exactly what I meant, sis.” James—known
to her as J.W. despite his constant protests—looked her dead in the
eyes. She pretended not to know what he was looking for, even
though she did. Decency. Morality. Some sign that she was
struggling with the ethics of the decision that had been made— that
she must find and execute the ancient one who had started the
vampire race.

Only days earlier, her brother had located
and resurrected the first immortal, the ancient Sumerian king known
as “the Flood Survivor.” He was the original Noah, from a tale far
older than the Biblical version. His name was Ziasudra in Sumerian,
Utanapishtim in Babylonian.

A prophecy, the same prophecy that had
foretold the war now raging between vampires and the humans who had
finally learned of their existence, had also said that the Ancient
One, the first immortal, the man from whom the entire vampire race
had descended, was their only hope of survival.

Or at least, that was what they had thought
it said. Turned out, their ancestor was actually the means of their
destruction. Still believing the Ancient One was their salvation,
J.W. had used his healing power to raise Utana from the ashes. And
the man had returned to life with his mind corrupted by thousands
of years spent trapped, conscious, his soul bound to his ashes.

Believing he’d been cursed by the gods for
sharing his gift of immortality and inadvertently creating the
vampire race, he’d set out to destroy them all. One look beaming
from his eyes, and they were annihilated. He’d killed many vampires
already.

Human vigilantes had killed even more.

The end of their kind, it seemed, was at
hand.

Unless she could stop Utana from his
self-appointed mission.

“What I meant,” her brother went on, “was
that killing someone who can’t truly die, knowing that all you’re
really doing is sentencing him to spend eternity, virtually buried
alive—”

“Are you trying to tweak my conscience,
J.W.?” she asked, irritated. “It won’t work. I don’t have one.
Never have. That bastard’s killed hundreds of my kind. Our kind.
I’ve got no problem taking him out before he can eliminate the rest
of us. No problem whatsoever.”

Someone cleared his throat, and she looked
toward the open grave again. Thirteen survivors of the recent
annihilation had scooped up the dust of their beloved dead and
brought the remains here, to this abandoned and long-forgotten
cemetery in the wilds of Maine.

Those gathered included ten vampires: Eric
and Tamara, Rhiannon and Roland, Jameson and Angelica, Edge and
Amber Lily, Sarafina and the newly turned Lucy. In addition, there
was Sarafina’s mortal mate, Willem Stone, and the mongrel
twins,

Brigit herself and her brother, J.W. The
supposed only hope for the dark half of their family.

Rhiannon, their unofficial aunt, her long,
slitto-the-thigh gown dragging in the mud at her
uncharacteristically bare feet, poured the final jar of ashes into
the hole, threw the jar in after them, then tipped her head back
and opened her arms to the skies. The rain poured down on the pale
skin of her breasts, almost completely exposed by the plunging
neckline of her bloodred gown. Her long black hair hung in wet
straggles, and her eyeliner was running down her cheeks, mixed with
rainwater and tears. She was not herself.

“I know you can hear me, my friends. My
family.” Her voice broke, but Roland moved up behind her and placed
his strong hands on her bare shoulders. Then slowly, he slid them
outward, following the length of her arms upward, his black cloak
opening with the motion, sheltering her from the rain. He clasped
her hands in his, his arms open to the skies just as hers were.

It was a beautiful image. And heartbreaking
at the same time.

“I know you can hear me,” Rhiannon said
again. “And I trust you’ve found that we, too, enter paradise when
we leave this life. We, too, are worthy of heaven. We have
souls—souls that feel, that love, that live, a thousand times more
powerfully than those of the mortals who call us soulless
monsters.” She closed her eyes, drew a breath. “Be well, there in
the light, my beloved ones. Be well, and fear not. For those you’ve
left behind will survive.” She opened her eyes, and they were cold
and dark, more frightening than ever, ringed as they were in black.
“And I swear by Isis Herself, you will be avenged.”

She lowered her arms slowly, but Roland still
held them, and he wrapped them around her waist, enfolding her in
his cloak and in his arms as if they were one.

“It is done, my love. Come, we need to brief
our little warrior before we send her off into battle.”

Rhiannon turned, meeting Brigit’s eyes,
holding them. There was so much there, Brigit thought, staring at
her mentor, the woman she most admired, most wanted to be like and
whose approval she most craved. And truly, had never been without.
There was love in those dark-ringed eyes. Love and grief and fear.
A lot of fear.

Fear in Rhiannon’s eyes was something so
unusual that it shook Brigit right to the core.

J.W. tightened his hand on her shoulder.
“It’s going to be all right, little sister.” “Easy for you to say.
Your job was to raise our living dead forebear. I’m the one who has
to deal with him now that he’s up and rampaging.”

“Come,” Eric said. “Let’s return to the
mansion. It’s unsafe to be out in the open for long, even
here.”

One by one, and two by two, they filed out of
the cemetery together, taking a soggy path that wound from the old
graveyard along a narrow and twisting course to the towering
structure that sat alone on the rocky, seaside cliff. The ocean was
as restless tonight as the skies, as the vampires and their kin
made their way higher. Winds buffeted them, howling and crying as
if they, too, mourned the loss of so many.

Brigit walked alone. Normally she and J.W.
would have been a pair, side by side, the only two of their kind
and yet opposites in every way. But now he had his mate, the
beautiful, brilliant Lucy, a vampire now. And Brigit was…she was
alone, and facing the biggest challenge of her entire existence. A
challenge she didn’t want and wasn’t sure she could handle.

And yet, she was all but on her way. Her bag
was packed and waiting at the mansion. She’d been waiting only for
the funeral rites to conclude.

Up ahead, Rhiannon, in the lead—where else?—
reached the mansion’s door and stood, holding it open while the
others entered the crumbling ruin.

Brigit was last in line, and as she passed,
Rhiannon put a hand on her forearm. “We’ll have a talk before you
leave,” she said softly. “Wait in the library.”

Great, Brigit thought. One more delay, and it
was as inevitable as it would be unpleasant. The elders must want
to brief her before she left on what was undoubtedly a suicide
mission. Just what she needed. A lecture before dying.

Downtown Bangor, Maine

The oldest being on the planet, the first
immortal, the original Noah, stood trembling on a village sidewalk
in the pouring rain. He wore a dripping wet bed sheet, wrapped in
the old style around his body, covering one shoulder. He’d
arrogantly refused to don the clothing that had been offered him
when he’d first been resurrected. The type of clothing that he now
realized was necessary if he hoped to become invisible among
mankind in this strange new age. People looked askance at him,
ordinary humans, mortals, dashing past him from their speeding
mechanical conveyances to the small and poorly designed buildings
that lined the streets. In and out they ran, as if the rain would
melt them. Up and down the streets they rolled in those machines.
Automobiles. Cars,
he’d heard them called.

He wanted to know how they worked. But later.
First he wanted to become invisible. He would prefer dead, but
death wasn’t an option for him right now.

Right now he had very few options, in fact.
But he did have needs, and the immediate ones were urgent enough to
distract him from the problem of attracting too much attention.
That would come after his initial needs were met. He needed warmth,
shelter from the ice-cold, unforgiving rain. So much rain.

It would have been a blessing in his
time—unless it went on too long. He wondered briefly whether this
rain was normal in today’s civilization, or whether the gods, the
Anunaki, had yet again decreed that mankind must be brought to its
knees.

Utana shook off the shiver of apprehension
that thought induced and tried once again to keep his focus on his
immediate requirements. He needed food, lots of it. His belly was
rumbling, twisting and gnawing at him, demanding sustenance. And
water—he needed sweet water to drink. Those things were first. The
rest could wait. The garments to help him blend in with the mundane
commoners as thick on this land as fleas upon a desert dog, the
knowledge he so craved and must acquire in order to make his way in
this world, the mission he must accomplish in order to extract
forgiveness from the gods—all of those things could come later.