Nightwind (37 page)

“This was the last time he put just the symbol on the agreement. My great grandmother insisted he take a

human name because up until then, the women of our family had only summoned him as the NightWind.”

She touched the symbol on the page. “What does it look like, Lauren?”

It looked like a lightning bolt with a straight line drawn through it, Lauren thought. She had no chance to

say that for her mother was already turning the page and even before the parchment sheet settled, Lauren

knew what would be at the foot of the page.

“My great grandmother gave him the name he used from that day forward when he made bargains with

our family.” Maxine studied her daughter’s white face, searching the eyes that had glazed. “She said he

had been born and bred of the greatest of transgressions, that he had been brought forth from that very

first day to do the wickedness our ancestors could not do on their own.” Maxine noticed the tremor that

had started in Lauren’s hands. “So she named him after that greatest of transgressions. She named him

Sin.”

Scrawled in the unmistakable, bold stroke that she had seen many times, Lauren stared at the name

penned in blood across the document before her and wanted to scream with the horror of it. She reached

out, mindless of tearing the aging paper and turned the page. Again, that familiar signature glared up at

her from the yellow-tinted page that held her great grandmother’s name. Once more she turned the page

and there, at the opposite end of the page from her own mother’s delicate, convent school penmanship,

Lauren read her husband’s name: Syntian Cree.

“He changed the spelling of sin and altered the name himself,” Maxine said softly. “Cree is his real name.

The name his mother gave him many thousands of years ago.”

Slowly Lauren sat down, her gaze riveted on the book, on that one name. Her mother was speaking,

saying something to her, but she didn’t hear. Her blood was pounding in her temples, blotting out all other

sounds, and she was trembling so hard her teeth were clicking together.

“There’s more,” Maxine said loudly, gaining her daughter’s attention. She bent over and turned several

pages at once then straightened up to allow her daughter to see what was on the page. “Seeing this, I

don’t see how you can doubt what I have told you.”

On the page, drawn in an expert hand, was Syntian. He was staring at her as he had been seen by the

eyes of Nicolette Du Mer on the fourteenth of May in the year 1568.

“I guess somewhere along about the turn of this century, the women of our family stopped drawing him

and started taking pictures,” Maxine said gently. She flipped through different poses of the same man,

drawn in different centuries, clothed in the fashions of the times, his likeness caught forever by many

different women, until she came to a section near the back where first yellowing lithographs, then grainy

black and white photographs of Syntian Cree had been taped to the newer pages.

There he was in 1871, standing beside a lovely little woman with pale, pale hair. He looked stiff and

formal in his cutaway and he held his top hat in the crook of his arm like it was an afterthought, and

probably had been.

In 1913, he was seated in front of a woman with long dark hair. Her hand was protectively caressing his

shoulder and he was glaring at the camera as though it were his enemy.

1930, the year Maxine had been born, found him lying on the grass at the feet of Lauren’s

great-grandmother. His white shirt was open to the waist and there was a high sheen on his knee-high

boots.

And in 1949, her mother’s freshman year in college, Lauren saw him holding the hand of a pretty young

woman in a prom dress. The pretty young woman could be none other than her mother.

“That was the year Angeline took him away from me,” Maxine said, walking away from the photograph.

“I had broken the pact between us and she had offered him a way to avoid going back to the Abyss.”

Lauren stared at the smiling face in the photo.
How handsome you look, Syntian,
she thought as her

gaze went lovingly over him. The tuxedo was without doubt very expensive and the corsage on her

mother’s wrist was almost certainly made up of orchids.

“He really had no choice,” her mother was saying. “I see that now, but at the time, I was furious with

him.” She snorted. “And beyond furious with that whoring Angeline!”

Lauren flipped through the pages, looking at the drawings, renderings done with loving hands and eyes

that had no doubt looked upon him with the same measure of love she, herself, had bestowed upon

Syntian Cree.

“Given the choice of signing a pact with her or being forced back into the darkness and stench of the Pit,

I would have chosen the pact, myself,” Maxine mumbled as she paced about the kitchen.

Lauren traced the charcoal jaw line in a drawing made on the Twentieth of June in 1777. Of all the

drawings she had seen, this one seemed to capture the true essence of the man.

“Right after he left with Angeline, I married your father. The biggest mistake of my life, but after Syntian,

what man would have lived up to a woman’s dreams?”

The girl who had drawn that portrait in 1777 was named Gezelle Gilbert. Lauren wondered what great,

great appellation fitted that name. That she had been an expert with her art was in the shading of

Syntian’s eyes and the mobility of his mouth, the almost life-like angle of his chin. Gezelle had caught the

essence of his sexuality in that drawing.

“When he showed up here, I knew exactly what had happened.” Lauren’s mother sat down at the table

again. “I knew you had called him and he had come to you.”

Lauren looked up, caught by the words. “What?”

“He has been indentured to our family for thousands of years, Lauren. He belongs to us. He owes

allegiance to us for it was our ancestor, that very first sorceress who freed him from his imprisonment in

the Abyss and brought him out into the light once more.” She reached out and took her daughter’s hand.

“He heard you calling him, Lauren. He was drawn to you because there is still a connection despite the

fact I broke the pact between him and our family. Out of all the voices in the universe, all the

heartbroken, lonely, desperate women, it was to you he came. Don’t you see?”

“No,” Lauren shaking her head. “I don’t see at all.”

“You had to have called him, Lauren,” Maxine stressed. “Yes, you had to have! He couldn’t have just

come on his own.” She tightened her hold on Lauren’s hand. “Think, girl. Think! Was there a time when

your life was so miserable, so lonely, that you wished for some gallant knight in shining armor to come to

rescue you? Did you not have some fantasy of being swept away from the drudgery of your life to some

distant place where everything would be the way you wanted it to be? Didn’t you cry out for help? For a

ceasing of all the misery in your life?”

There was a grain of truth in what her mother was saying. Many times Lauren had lain awake at night

and thought of just such things happening. She had cried herself to sleep wanting that highwayman to

swoop down on her coach and carry her away with him to his keep where he was lord and master.

She had imagined the lusty pirate who would board her ship, lift her high in his powerful arms, claiming

her before his band of ruthless cutthroats as his own before sailing away with her to some tropical shore.

She had longed for the brawny, sun-darkened arms of the Cheyenne warrior to snatch her up on his

horse and ride away, escaping the cavalry’s noose to hide her in his encampment deep in the Texas hills.

She had dreamt of the highland rebel who had defied king and country to win her hand, who fought with

flashing blade and bare knuckles to keep her forever at his side.

She had created the star traveler whose fast-as-the-speed-of-light war cruiser could whisk her away to

his home in the heavens where he would make her his queen and his mate.

And she had put herself in every romance novel she had ever read and every romantic movie she had

ever seen. She had pictured herself in the arms of movie stars and rock stars and every handsome man

she saw. She had pretended love songs were written just for her ears and that those mysterious

dedications on the pages of her favorite novels had been penned for her.

Yes, she thought with guilt, she had fashioned a world for herself where she was the center of attention.

“He heard you, Lauren,” Maxine whispered. “He heard you calling and he came for you. Just as he

came when I called him.”

“I don’t...I can’t...” Lauren slammed the book shut and buried her face in her hands. “Nothing makes

any sense!” She pushed the book away. “Nothing at all!”

“Doesn’t it?” her mother asked kindly. “You needed him and he came.” She stroked Lauren’s shoulder.

“I doubt even he knew how much you would come to mean to him.”

“Then why did he leave?” Lauren sobbed. She looked through the obstruction of her fingers. “To

answer some other woman’s cry for help?”

Maxine shook her head. “No. As sure as I am sitting here, he did not want to leave you, Lauren.” She

glanced down at the mound of her daughter’s belly. “Especially after he impregnated you.”

Lauren winced at the crude way her mother put it, but then a thought, jarring and horrible, flitted through

her mind; a gist of a long ago conversation coming back to taunt her. She gaped at her mother, her face

going as chalky as death. “Oh, God!” she croaked. “Please tell me it is possible for him to produce

children.”

Maxine looked away.

“Mama?” Lauren’s voice was like a child’s asking for comfort.

Her mother’s shoulders sagged. “If you cut him, he will bleed, although that blood is as black as his sinful

heart. If you feed him what he has to have to stay powerful, he will piss and shit like any normal man,

but...” she looked back at her daughter. “Those are the only bodily fluids that are normal within him,

Lauren. He cannot father children on his own.”

A tiny whimper came from deep within Lauren’s chest. “Then whose child is it?” She shivered, suddenly

more afraid than she could ever remember being.

“Someone he would have approved of,” Maxine was quick to say. “A healthy, vital male whose

offspring Syntian would not have minded raising as his own. Someone who would have had to have had

the same coloring, the same build.” At Lauren’s harsh intake of breath, she nodded. “My guess would be

Ben Hurlbert.”

“No!” Lauren shouted, flinging herself out of the chair and against the wall. “It can’t be! I won’t let it

be!”

“If you read through the history in the book, you’ll see that he has only done this once before. In Ireland,

back in the 1600s. Bridget Mulroney, the woman who asked it of him, made a note on the reverse side

of the pact that he had been furious with her for having to lower himself to gather the seed to impregnate

her and she advised no one else try it for she feared his wrath.” Her eyes softened. “For him to have

willingly done this for you, shows how much he loves you, Lauren.”

“Love?” Lauren shouted, nearly mad with the thought of carrying an unknown man’s child in her body.

Even given the fact that it might be Benny’s, the mere notion of it was akin to the vilest kind of defilement.

“Can you imagine how degraded he must have felt to be handled by another male? The shame he must

have endured just to provide you with what you wanted?” She studied her daughter’s face carefully.

“And it was you that wanted the child, not him, wasn’t it?”

“Why are you defending him?”

“Syntian was my lover,” her mother answered, feeling as much as seeing the flinch that shook her

daughter. A perverse imp inside her made her reckless. “Even after he met you, one final time, he came

to my bed, Lauren.” At Lauren’s look of shock, she shrugged. “Why do you think I left Milton? I had to

get away from him before it happened again. I have no protection from that man’s lust any more than you

do.”

Lauren glared at her mother. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

“I won’t deny it,” Maxine defended. “I will always love him, just as I suspect you will always love him.”

She lifted her chin. “Just as Angeline Hellstrom loves him, else she would not be holding him against his

will and away from you!”

“What are you talking about?” Lauren yelled. She was on the verge of losing her sanity and her mother

was back to vilifying Angeline.

“For pity’s sake, girl, think! Somewhere along the line he had to have told you he was bound to her. I

know Syntian. He would have tried to break the vow he made between her and him and she might even

have allowed him to put aside a portion of it in exchange for the sexual favors he was never all that willing

to give any of us! If she realized how much he wanted you, she’d have given him enough rope to hang

himself then reeled him in when she thought he had gone too far. Willingly getting you with child would

have been way over the limit with her. Don’t you see that?”

What her mother said made sense even though the whole thing was beyond the surreal and had ventured

into the realm of the improbable. Such a fantasy as her mother was spinning was hard to believe and yet

the proof was there before her: in the so-called pacts made with the Demon NightWind; in the drawings

that were aged too well to be anything but genuine; in the photographs which appeared just as authentic;