Spartan Resistance (30 page)

But now was not the time to ask Brenden about it. He was annoyed because she hadn’t just fallen in with his plans to spy on Laszlo. But that was okay with her. She was just as pissed with him. Clearly, it had been his idea even though Billy had been the one to ask her.

She wanted to get back to her suite and shut the door, so she could think about everything. Except that she didn’t have the spare time to think. By the time she got back, she would have to contact Laszlo to either cancel dinner or make arrangements to meet. That was why they had brought her back in time in the first place. To gain the time to talk her into it.

The knot in her belly crimped tighter. It was never a good idea to make a decision like this under pressure but that was exactly what she was going to have to do. She certainly wasn’t going to stay here in the past, with Brenden and Billy trying to convince her to go along with their grand scheme.

Brenden pushed the door open and glanced around the street below and the buildings across the way casually, but Mariana recognized the indifferent sweep of his gaze. It meant he was looking for observers, quartering the area to see if anyone was taking undue interest in them.

“Is trouble likely?” she asked him.

He looked at her, startled. “When I’m back in time, I tend to stay on alert. Just in case. Especially with two novices with me.” He shut the door and turned the bolt. “I’ll take Mariana back,” he told Billy. “I won’t be a minute.”

Billy looked at Mariana. “He means that literally. I had barely sat down last time and he was back again.”

Mariana gave him a small smile in return. “Brenden is one of the best travelers out there. His timing is immaculate.”

Brenden held out his arm. “Which probably means I’m climbing the stairs right now. Someone might notice I’ve come into the room twice and not left. Let’s go,” he told her, with a touch of impatience.

That
was why he had looked around as they entered the room, she realized. It wasn’t just habit or having two newbies with him. Anyone paying close attention to them would notice the oddities in their behavior.

She stepped hurriedly up against his arm and his hand curled around her waist, taking a firm grip, pulling her up tight against him. Mariana disguised her gasp, controlling the indrawn breath and letting it out.

Brenden glanced at Billy. “Don’t go anywhere.” His voice was low.

Billy gave him a small smile and his green eyes grew warmer. “Hell, no.”

Shock clamped Mariana’s chest and locked down her breathing. She could feel her eyes widening, then the sensation-dead black of the jump dropped around her and the arrival chamber at the villa formed, taking the place of the black.

Mariana completed her gasp.

Brenden looked down at her as he let her go and stepped back away from her. “Sorry, was your landing too heavy?”

Mariana shook her head. “I’m just not used to it, like you are,” she lied. Tendrils of anger were curling through her, gathering energy. Growing. So she gave Brenden a huge smile. “Thank you for the tea and the travel. I always enjoy going back in time.”

Then she got herself out of the arrival chamber as quickly as possible and hurried through the villa to her room and shut the door on the world, just as she had wanted to.

Only then did she let herself vent any of her fury. She walked her sitting room in tight circles, her hands in hard fists.

Brenden had made it as plain as day that he and Billy were together. The timber of his voice, his expression, the words themselves all said the two of them were intimate. Billy’s pleased response was mere confirmation.

Vampires, particularly agency members, were sexually promiscuous—it was a facet of their nature. There were not many true emotions and feelings that remained when a human was turned vampire. Sexual pleasure was one of them and vampires tended to compensate for the loss of sensitivity with their other emotions by taking multiple sexual partners. Mariana had always known that about vampires and she had always secretly admired them for their lack of inhibitions.

But the flip side of that was that vampires were the most discreet partners on the planet. They
never
spoke about their partners, about sex, or even about the ones they loved. Secrecy had been bred into them by millennia spent trying to look as human as possible. Mariana hadn’t been aware of Deonne’s long relationship with Justin until Adán, Justin and Deonne had announced her pregnancy and their threesome in one public declaration. She had only grown aware of just how in love Ryan, Cáel and Nayara were through observation of details—and there were very few details to spot, for those three were more furtive than thieves.

And now Brenden almost openly declares he and Billy were…what, exactly? They could be anything, including all the way to the far end of the spectrum of deep love. With Brenden keeping Billy in the past and jumping back there himself, they could have spent months or even years back there and no one at the agency would know. That was plenty of time to fall in love.

But why had he let her see it? Was she so unimportant in Brenden’s estimation that he simply didn’t care if she knew or not?

Mariana dropped onto the loveseat and gripped her hands together. “He did it because
you
care,” she told herself.

Brenden had made no secret of how he had felt about Laszlo when he had first appeared and his disgust had been even less subtle when he found out Laszlo was dating her.

Was this Brenden’s way of…what? Getting even?

Why would he want to get even with her? It was Laszlo he had disliked and he’d never had any trouble communicating exactly how he felt about Mariana, so why the passive-aggressive pay-back?

Mariana was tempted to contact Laszlo and finalize the dinner date she had agreed to. Tit for tat.

She stood up and looked out at the roses through the tall, narrow window, blowing out her breath and deliberately reaching for the sort of serenity that Nayara always seemed to exude.

What was she
thinking
? Using Laszlo to get back at Brenden for a slight she had only inferred? She could have imagined the entire sub-text of their short exchange, along with the way they had kept deferring to each other at the café.

This was crazy-thinking. Human knee-jerk emotions were driving her and the emotions were all wrong and mixed up. She needed to think.

“So
think
,” she commanded herself, dropping her gaze to her toes.

What was the right thing to do?

Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2265 A.D.

After Gawaine shut the door on their latest visitor, Marley pulled out the battered kitchen chair and sat with a tired sigh. The table was holding up a staggering array of things. There were half-a-dozen instant lottery cards, all of them medium-to-major prize winners. There were a dozen eggs, a freshly cooked pecan pie that was filling the apartment with the smell of spices and making her mouth water. Lying over the back of the other chair was a denim and fleece-lined coat that fit her perfectly and would replace her torn and worn coat when the weather turned.

Behind her, two men, both of them vampires, were washing dishes and scrubbing the backsplashes. She had tended both of their minor scrapes and bruises, the result of street lynchings by angry humans who had spotted them as vampires. The DRS was a city full of prejudices even though everyone in it was a refugee of one kind or another and should know better.

In the two days since Karoline had told Gawaine to buy a lottery ticket with the coin he had discovered in his pocket, there had been a steady stream of visitors. Most of them were unobtrusive, tapping softly and not drawing attention to themselves as they came and went from the apartment building, but as the foyer didn’t have any sort of security, strangers could let themselves into the building unremarked.

All of the visitors had needed medical attention of some sort. The vampires behind her were not the first to find their auto-healing abilities hampered by whatever malevolent control Gabriel was putting out there. But she had also tended to psi-filers and humans.

“The psi-filers are scary,” Gawaine told Rhydder, who was sitting on the chair at Gawaine’s desk, giving off steam clouds of fury. “They just
know
what we most need. And it’s not something we’re even consciously in need of. I didn’t know Marley’s coat had been torn.”

Rhydder had appeared in the corner of the apartment reserved for jumpers as Marley had been finishing up with the teenager that had just left. The teenager was a psi and already feeling the effects of psi-dementia.

Rhydder had a small melt down when he realized that the teenager was not the first patient Marley had dealt with and that there was a psi-filer in her bedroom, recovering from child-birth. He had waited out her treatment of the teenager while Gawaine gave him a rundown of the cottage industry that had sprung up overnight.

“The vampires pay cash—hard currency and credits,” Gawaine added. “The humans…well, they’re as poor as the psi-filers, but they don’t have their skills. But we’ve got groceries for a month in the cold cupboard that they’ve brought here in dribs and drabs, including some of the best home-cooking I’ve ever tasted.”

Rhydder shook his head. “You can’t keep treating them.”

“Psi-filers, vampires or humans?” Marley asked coldly.

“Any of them,” he said flatly. “Word will pass. Gabriel will find out.”

“These people need someone like me,” Marley pointed out. “There’s probably not a single legitimate doctor in the city and any real doctor would turn them away—especially the vampires and the psi.”

“You’ve already got a practice,” Rhydder countered.

“And now it has expanded.”

“We can’t protect you here,” he growled. “In fact it might be better if we moved you to the villa permanently.”

Marley got to her feet. “If you’d asked a week ago I might have considered it. But not now. I am
helping
these people.”

“You help the agency.”

“Do I?” she asked dryly. “I doubt any member of the agency even knows when I’m there. But that reminds me. I’m out of a number of items, including a whole pharmacy of antibiotics and nano-steriodals. I’ll have to raid the agency supplies.”

Rhydder’s jaw rippled. “That’s something you need to take up with Nayara.”

“You don’t think she will agree to this sort of direct charity?” Marley asked softly.

His expression grew stony and Gawaine grinned. She had Rhydder cornered and everyone knew it.

“Gabriel!” Gawaine uttered and leapt to turn up the volume on the screen that faced the kitchen table.

Marley turned to look at the screen. It
was
Gabriel and he looked worse than before. “What now?” she wondered aloud.

* * * * *

Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2265 A.D.

When Brenden arrived in Nayara’s office, summoned by her direct implant-to-implant communication, the first person he saw was Mariana, sitting on one of the visitor chairs in front of Nayara’s desk, her legs crossed and her feet tucked neatly underneath her. That told him exactly what was going on.

He stopped three long paces away from Nayara’s desk and the other chair that was waiting for him and hissed. “She fucking
told
you?”

Nayara got to her feet. “Mariana told me what you should have told me the moment this happened.”

“I don’t tell you about every little thing that happens around here,” Brenden growled, “because you’d never get anything done. Besides, you have enough on your plate right now.”

“It is not your role to choose for me what I should or should not be privvy to,” Nayara replied evenly. “This could affect the Agency at the highest level. It should have been brought to me immediately.”

Mariana had not turned in her chair to look at him and that bothered Brenden more than anything else, including the fact that she had gone behind his back to Nayara. “Sorry,” he told Nayara shortly. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree over the scale of this. It’s a blip. And I’m working on it.”

“I want to talk to Wolffe,” Nayara replied.

“Which one?” he asked.

“Both of them,” she said, her tone grim. “We’ll get to the bottom of this in five minutes with both of them in the room.”

The door to the rose garden opened. Stelios moved into the room. “Gabriel is on the nets again,” he said and picked up the remote for Nayara’s screen.

Brenden studied the Assemblyman curiously. He had come from the direction of Ryan’s office, which was next to Nayara’s with doors connecting it to the rose garden, too. It wasn’t unusual for Stelios to be in either office, but the tone he had used just now was odd. Authoritative, whereas normally Stelios was hyper-sensitive about appearing to use any sort of authority at all, here at the agency. It was a delicacy that Brenden had appreciated.

Had something changed?

Then he saw Gabriel on the screen and forgot about everything else, including Mariana. He sent out an all-hail alert to everyone on his team. They’d be assembled in the command center by the time he got back there.

“…have failed to meet my simple request last month,” Gabriel said. One side of his mouth didn’t look like it was working properly.

“
What
request?” Mariana asked the room in generally, getting to her feet. “He didn’t demand anything!”

“Every human has the right to vote,” Gabriel continued. “Even vampires have representation in the Worlds Assembly.”

Brenden frowned. “Since when?” he demanded. He caught Nayara’s quick glanced at Stelios where he stood with his arms folded, watching the screen with a heavy frown marring his forehead.
Ah
…Brenden said to himself, silently.
That’s
our unofficial representative. But how had Gabriel known that?

“Psi-filers only ask for simple equality. The right to vote. The right to be represented in the governing bodies of the nine worlds. And now we will demonstrate a little of the inequality and injustice we currently suffer. We will continue with such demonstrations until there is no longer any need.”