Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(154)

Meanwhile he was preparing for the gathering storm as he always did: by traveling as far and fast as he could. Once it had been the seas and then the rails, but now Gallowglass took to the roads, motorcycling around as many hairpin turns and mountainsides as he could. With the wind streaming through his shaggy hair and his leather jacket fastened tight around his neck to hide the fact that his skin never showed any hint of tan, Gallowglass readied himself for the call of duty to fulfill the promise he’d made so long ago to defend the de Clermonts no matter what the cost.

“Gallowglass? Are you still there?” Verin’s voice crackled through the phone, pulling her nephew from his reveries.

“Still here, Auntie.”

“When are you going?” Verin sighed and rested her head in her hand. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Ernst yet. Poor Ernst, who had knowingly married a vampire and, in doing so, had unwittingly involved himself in a tangled tale of blood and desire that looped and swirled through the centuries. But she’d promised her father, and even though Philippe was dead, Verin had no intention of disappointing him now, and for the first time.

“I told Marcus to expect me the day after tomorrow.” Gallowglass would no more admit he was relieved by his aunt’s decision than Verin would admit that she’d had to consider whether to stand by her oath.

“We’ll see you there.” That would give Verin some time to break the news to Ernst that he was going to have to share her stepmother’s roof. He wasn’t going to be pleased.

“Travel safe, Auntie Verin,” Gallowglass managed to get out before she hung up.

Gallowglass put the phone in his pocket and stared out to sea. He’d been shipwrecked once on this stretch of Australia’s coast. He was fond of the sites where he’d been washed ashore, a merman coming aground in a tempest to find he could live on solid ground after all. He reached for his cigarettes. Like riding a motorcycle without a helmet, smoking was a way of thumbing his nose at the universe that had given him immortality with one hand but with the other taken away everyone he loved.

“And you’ll take these from me, too, won’t you?” he asked the wind. It sighed out a reply. Matthew and Marcus had very decided opinions about secondhand smoke. Just because it wouldn’t kill them, they argued, that didn’t mean they should go about exterminating everybody else.

“If we kill them all, what will we eat?” Marcus had pointed out with infallible logic. It was a curious notion for a vampire, but Marcus was known for them, and Matthew wasn’t much better. Gallowglass attributed this tendency to too much education.

He finished his cigarette and reached back into his pocket for a small leather pouch. It contained twenty-four disks an inch across and a quarter of an inch thick. They were cut from a branch he’d pulled from an ash tree that grew near his ancestral home. Each one had a mark burned into the surface, an alphabet for a language that no one spoke anymore.

He had always possessed a healthy respect for magic, even before he met Diana Bishop. There were powers abroad on the earth and the seas that no creature understood, and Gallowglass knew well enough to look the other way when they approached. But he couldn’t resist the runes. They helped him to navigate the treacherous waters of his fate.

He sifted his fingers through the smooth wooden circles, letting them fall through his hand like water. He wanted to know which way the tide was running—with the de Clermonts or against them?

When his fingers stilled, he drew out the rune that would tell him where matters stood now. Nyd, the rune for absence and desire. Gallowglass dipped his hand into the bag again to better understand what he wanted the future to hold. Odal, the glyph for home, family, and inheritance. He drew out the final rune, the one that would show him how to fulfill his gnawing wish to belong.

Rad. It was a confusing rune, one that stood for both an arrival and a departure, a journey’s beginning and its ending, a first meeting as well as a long-awaited reunion. Gallowglass’s hand closed around the bit of wood. This time its meaning was clear.

“You travel safely, too, Auntie Diana. And bring that uncle of mine with you,” Gallowglass said to the sea and the sky before he climbed back onto his bike and headed into a future he could no longer imagine nor postpone.





The Empire: Prague





Chapter Twenty Seven




"Where are my red hose?” Matthew clomped downstairs and scowled at the boxes scattered all over the ground floor. His mood had taken a decided turn for the worse halfway through our four-week journey when we parted ways with Pierre, the children, and our luggage in Hamburg. We’d lost ten additional days by virtue of traveling from England into a Catholic country that reckoned time by a different calendar. In Prague, it was now the eleventh of March and the children and Pierre had yet to arrive.

“I’ll never find them in this mess!” Matthew said, taking out his frustration on one of my petticoats.

After we’d lived out of saddlebags and a single shared trunk for weeks, our belongings had arrived three days after we did at the tall, narrow house perched on the steep avenue leading to Prague Castle known as Sporrengasse. Our German neighbors presumably dubbed it Spur Street because that was the only way you could persuade a horse to make the climb.

“I didn’t know you owned red hose,” I said, straightening up.