Chasing Shadows(17)

I could tell her attitude was a front—what he’d just told her had frightened her a great deal. I looked up at him. “She’s right, Mark. I know you’re a lot more used to the way you heal than we are, but humor us, okay?”

After looking at me a moment he nodded, then sat in the chair to my left. Juliette finally sat in the chair on my right.

“I want you to explain to me how my dog is really my baby sister,” Mark said after a long moment of silence.

Juliette looked at me. I nodded my encouragement, and then listened as she told again the story of the night her brother was born. His hands balled into fists when she recounted what her mother had told her about the rogue vampire who had attacked his, and I covered them with my own in silent comfort. She explained that it was her mother from whom she had inherited the ability to transform into a dog.

“So that’s what really happened to my birth mother,” he said hoarsely when she had finished. “That’s how I became what I am.” Neither Juliette nor I said anything, we just let him process the information. Mark looked between us, then asked his sister, “Does Dad know about any of this? About you and Mom? How many others like you are there?”

Juliette seemed pleased that he still referred to Monica as “Mom,” so she smiled tentatively, but shook her head negatively. “No, Mark, Daddy doesn’t know anything. Mom said he was destroyed by what happened to Patricia and she just didn’t think he could handle anything more. As for others, there are groups of shapeshifters all over the world, and actually, quite a few of Mom’s relatives are shifters. Uncle Buck was Banjo and Aunt Teresa was Sandy.”

Mark’s eyes grew large. “Our pets were family members?” he asked incredulously.

She chanced a smile again. “Still are, technically. They’re just not Banjo or Sandy anymore. They still shift and all, but they had to stop being our pets when they imprinted.”

“Imprinted?”

“Imprinting is to shapeshifters as pair-bonding is to vampires,” she said. “Although even I didn’t know that until yesterday. Until I met Saphrona, I had no idea any of that drivel Vivian Drake was putting out was true.”

Mark looked at me then, and I shook my head minutely, hoping he understood that I had not told her I was Vivian Drake. He blinked once and then put on a sheepish smile. “I didn’t either, until today. Didn’t even know what I was until Saphrona told me immortal humans were real. And you’ve just told me how it happened to me.”

He reached up and ran a hand through his hair. “Been a hell of a day,” he said.

“You’re a lot calmer than we thought you would be,” Juliette mused.

Her brother spared her a glance. “We?” he queried.

“I’m sure Saphrona’s told you how she knew what I was?” she asked, and he nodded. “Well, I knew she was part vampire because of the way she smells, so I knew from some of the things she was saying yesterday that she wanted to talk to me as soon as I could get away from you. When you let me out for the last time last night, I came here to talk to her. We both concluded that your finding out the truth was inevitable, so I called Mom today after you took off on the horse and arranged a meeting to discuss telling you everything. She and I agreed that because of your relationship with Saphrona, it was time you knew, but we didn’t think you’d be all that rational about it. Of course, neither of us had any clue that you already knew there was something different about you.”

Mark looked between us again. “What does my relationship with Saphrona have to do with my learning the truth?” he asked.

I took up the narrative then. “Last night while we talked, Juliette wasn’t the only one who learned something new,” I began. “What she just told you about your mother sending her pack after that rogue was to protect you.”

“She didn’t think he was going to come back after me, did she?”

Juliette shook her head as I said, “No. She wasn’t exactly protecting you from him, she was protecting you from other vampires. Juliette told me that the real reason there are no known dhunphyr like you is because they were all killed shortly after birth. Apparently the blood of an immortal human is a powerful narcotic to my father’s kind—it works a lot like steroids do in humans. Only worse.”

“Makes the vampire virtually indestructible as long as the blood is in his or her system,” Juliette added.

“Damn,” Mark swore softly. “You’d think they’d want to keep people like me around rather than kill them.”

I nodded, but said to him, “How often does an addict stop after just one dose? The more he has, the more he needs. Eventually the Ancients, the vampires that rule our society, had to outlaw the creation of dhunphyr, because too many young mothers were being killed for their unborn children. Human society was beginning to notice.”

“And you didn’t know any of that?” he asked me.

“I knew that your kind was virtually non-existent, and I knew that creation of them had been outlawed, but I didn’t know the real reason behind the decision. Juliette thinks I might have learned it had I completed my Coming of Age ceremony.”

He frowned again. “And what is that? I remember reading about it in Vivian Drake’s books, but I never really understood how it works.”

“New vampires aren’t considered fully mature until they’re fifty years old,” I explained. “Don’t ask me who decided on that age, or why—it was way before my time. Anyway, when a person’s been a vampire for fifty years, they hold an elaborate ceremony where he or she drinks the blood of their sire, so that they can gain the blood memories of that person.”

“You guys can really share memories through drinking one another’s blood?”

I shook my head. “Not precisely. It only works between a vampire and the vampires he or she has created. Truthfully, Diarmid wasn’t sure it would work with me since he hadn’t created me in the traditional sense. It was speculated that since I shared his DNA, I would either come by the memories automatically, which I did not, or I might not gain them even through drinking his blood. Part of me thinks he was hoping I wouldn’t, because if I didn’t I’d never have learned what he was really like.”

I took a deep breath, and I was very glad to have his hands to hold as I yet again recalled that awful night more than a hundred eighty years ago.

“The memories are delivered in reverse order,” I went on. “They start the day of the ceremony and work backward. I’d always believed my father loved my mother—that’s what he’d always told me. But it was all a lie. He was only using her. He’d have killed her had she not gotten pregnant, and he only stuck with her long enough to get what he really wanted, which was me.”

Instead of tears filling my eyes a third time, I knew it was rage when Mark’s expression shifted, as I told him, “He took me away from her right after I was born and walked away—just walked away. She died screaming, begging for him to come back. I will never forgive him for that.”

Mark rubbed my hands to warm them, as they had gone quite cold. “And you didn’t see anything else?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head. “No. I couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing anymore of his memories, not after the nightmare of my mother’s last moments in this world.

“I gave up almost everything that had to do with being a vampire that night,” I went on. “I stopped speaking to my father, all my friends. I even stopped speaking to my brother for several years, although I did reconcile with him sometime later. He was the one who first introduced me to my sister, who was created twenty years after I left, because I had refused to meet her if Diarmid came along. Lochlan and a small number of vampires who have also chosen to drink the blood of animals instead of humans are the only people from that world I have anything to do with. No one ever told me the truth about dhunphyr blood, and of course I never thought to ask.”

Silence fell again for a minute or two, until suddenly Mark straightened. “You’re worried that our meeting has put me in danger from other vampires,” he said.

Juliette and I both nodded. “It’s a very real possibility, Mark,” I said slowly. “I told you Evangeline is jealous of me because of how much Diarmid loves me, in spite of how much I hate him, and yet she was here yesterday on his behalf. I can’t say she won’t be back. And even though estranged hardly describes our relationship, my father has been known to just show up, making one of his many attempts to reconcile. My brother is also coming over tomorrow night to take me to a movie we’ve been waiting to see for weeks.”

I drew a breath. “There’s also the fact that… Well, I went to a psychic once, about the dreams I used to have about you. I wanted to know when we were going to meet, and she told me that we would meet when we needed each other the most.”