Part 25 (2/2)

”Is it a nice memory?”

Kate shook her head. She didn't want to remember this. She knew she didn't. But the smell of lavender was everywhere, and the woman's face. And she knew who the woman was and why she looked like that. She began to shake. ”No. No... I don't want to do this.”

But she couldn't help it. The memories were rus.h.i.+ng over her now. ”My G.o.d, she's shocked. I think she was shocked at... at me.” But there was more, much more. ”I remember... her arguing with a man. They were shouting.” And then some floodgates within her burst, or perhaps it was the wind bursting through the tent walls and into her soul. ”They were arguing about... me.”

Memories whirled in her head like sand. ”And he said I was unnatural and he wouldn't have me around, and she... she said she had no one to whom she could give me. She promised him I wouldn't say anything about what I'd seen anymore. And he said she'd promised that before, and I always blurted out something and frightened everyone. And he said he was tired of being put out of their lodgings because of me. And I was just a girl, and who would they marry me off to, with what I was?” The scene replayed itself, and Kate couldn't stop it. ”And then she cried and said she loved him. And that... she'd get rid of me...” Kate's voice had sunk to a whisper. Surely Gian couldn't hear her.

but it was all she could manage. She felt scoured out inside. She couldn't even cry, perhaps because in those first days after the trash heap, she'd cried so much. Maybe that was why she never cried when Matthew beat her, or when Sir shut her out in the cold because she hadn't come back with anything to sell.

Gian squeezed her shoulders and leaned his cheek against the top of her head.

”They abandoned me because I was having visions even then, didn't they?”

”Yes. And you suppressed your visions because they made people you loved, and who were supposed to love and care for you, abandon you.”

The roar of the storm was far away. There was enough roaring inside her. She had to master that before she could think about the storm. She realized she'd stopped breathing when her lungs heaved a breath of their own accord. ”You're so lucky your mother loved you. She still loves you.” She felt wrung out, exhausted.

”Yes, I am. Vampires often abandon their children. It's a perversion of the Rule that says we live one to a city. I was lucky. My mother kept me by her. When my powers came on me at sixteen, she taught me how to manage everything raging inside me.

You know how sixteen-year-old males can be.” He took a breath. ”Young male vampires are worse. Then she sent me to Siena, only fifty miles away. She came to see me often.”

”And what of your father? Did he and your mother not stay together?”

”They couldn't. Not for more than fifty years. He was human.” Gian's voice was rough.

So many questions dodged about her head. ”Is that why your mother could have you? I mean, you said having a child was rare... for your kind.”

”Probably.”

”So, you never knew your father at all.”

”Quite the contrary. I watched him grow old and die like any human child. He taught me how to grow grapes on our estates at Montalcino. I loved him. But I've never forgiven him for breaking my mother's heart.” His voice got far away now, following his thoughts back in time. ”He was taken as a slave from a Barbarian army in the first century before Christ. She bought him, freed him, and married him. Sometimes I thought I'd give my canine teeth to have known them when they were courting-what it was about him that made her crazy for him. I can never imagine him being her slave. But that would have been interesting to say the least. It almost killed her to watch him age. She's never found another love to match that one with him.”

In almost a thousand years. The enormity of his mother's love for his father, for him, the length of his own life, dwarfed her own pale experience. She found herself depressed. What could someone who lived but a single lifetime offer to someone who had experienced everything? And yet, his mother fell in love with a man who lived and died in a single life span. ”Why didn't she just infect him with the parasite?”

”It is forbidden. If every one of us made vampires every time we fell in love, just think what would happen. People separate, then think themselves in love again. Then ones made would make others, and soon our world would be unsustainable.”

Interesting problem. ”Can... your kind drink other vampires' blood?”

”No. Very old ones can drink the blood of the newly made. But Companions of the same strength war with each other.”

That was it then. No wonder it was forbidden. She felt very inconsequential. Then her usual rebellious spirit rose inside her. ”Mr.

Rufford is made, and he made Beth.”

”And they'd be dead today at a born vampire's hands if he hadn't saved us all by killing Asharti. They are the exception that proves the Rule. And the Rules are all that stands between us and chaos.” He made his voice hard. The rebellion she felt growing inside her might crash in waves against the stone behind that tone and never crack it.

Realization washed over her. ”So... is the pain you saw your mother experience why you never keep a lover for long?” Of course it was. It didn't matter what he said. He never let himself get attached to avoid the pain he'd seen all around him growing up.

She felt him stiffen. He said nothing.

After a moment she just went on. ”So why don't you find one of your own kind?”

”One to a city, remember?”

More rules.

”Sometimes we get together briefly, but it doesn't last.”

”That's why Elyta hates you, isn't it?” He had abandoned Elyta, in fact, but she didn't say that. Still, it sent a chill through her.

Maybe she could understand Elyta's wrath.

”Yes. But she also hates the fact that Mother cares for me. Her mother cast her off.”

”Oh, that's rare.” Kate snorted. ”Now I have something in common with Elyta.”

”No.” He pulled her close. ”You are strong. You didn't let it twist you. She did.”

”But I am twisted, I think.” Her voice was small in her own ears. Maybe the fact that she was abandoned as a child was why she was so afraid of Matthew abandoning her. She had never let herself care for him, even though he said he was her father. Could one care for Matthew? Perhaps not, but she had never tried, and that seemed right now to be because she didn't want his inevitable abandonment to hurt more than it must.

Maybe her history was why she despised those poor weak people who were her marks too, because despising them was easier than sympathizing with them. When you sympathized with someone, it was almost like caring about them. And she held herself aloof from ever committing her emotions to anyone. That, too, might be because she was afraid they would abandon her, reject her somehow. It was all of a piece, cut from the same cloth of her past.

The realization horrified her. It meant that all the time she thought she had been in perfect control of herself and her life, above those around her, aloof-all that time her past controlled her. That one action of her mother and her father (if the man she remembered even was her father-she didn't really know that) casting her on a trash heap because she had visions and couldn't keep them to herself... that one act ruled her whole life.

In the same way Gian's mother's grief had ruined his life, when she thought about it.

She could hear the smile in his voice as he said, ”You are the most straightforward person I know. And your reaction to your past has saved your life more than once, I should think.”

”You mean suppressing the visions kept me from being burned at the stake as a witch.” Her voice was hoa.r.s.e. Even breathing seemed an effort.

”I mean that your habit of s.h.i.+elding your mind is why our kind can't compel you and why you can look at the stones without going mad.”

”Oh.”

”You see? You are quite a remarkable person. One might say... supernatural.”

”I don't feel supernatural.” She listened to the howl of the wind, and the sand shus.h.i.+ng against the tent. ”And nature feels quite overwhelming all by itself.”

He chuckled again. ”My dear, dear Kate.” He smacked a kiss on the crown of her head. ”Now, have some cheese and some dates to keep your strength up.” He reached for the pack.

Suddenly, dates and goat cheese and warm water had never sounded so good.

Chapter Twenty.

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