Private Demon

Page 31

"You must have given her to the police."
"It was terribly hard to do that, when they came to collect her. I'd never held a baby, and I felt so possessive of Jema. That night, the police informed me that Jema had been identified as the daughter of my nearest neighbor. Imagine my surprise." He felt a bitter amusement over the memory. "When they called, I had started working out how I might adopt her as my own daughter. I felt as if someone had stolen her from me."
Alexandra sighed. "Oh, shit."
"A good description of how I felt." He rose and walked around the room. "It was much easier when Jema was a child. I know what you are thinking, but I only felt the most distant and paternal-minded of affection for her."
"I get that." She nodded. "Then she grew up on you, and wham."
"Wham indeed. I began to see her not as a child, but as a woman. I don't know why. Jema has a lovely face, but she is no way robust, or anything like the women I prefer."
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, us skinny, dark American chicks can't compete with those zaftig, blond Austrian babes."
"I couldn't see the attraction, and then it was so simple and clear to me. She is not like any woman I have ever known." He gave her an ironic look. "I have known my share."
Alex grinned. "I bet you have, Valentin."
"That was when I began collecting moments I shared with Jema. In the last thirty years, I have spent at least an hour in the simple honesty of her gaze. I have heard perhaps ten minutes of the sweet cascade of her laughter. I have watched the elegance of her hands dance for I know not how long. They always make me forget the time." He made a face. "I make a poor poet."
"What are you talking about?" She rested her hand against her cheek. "I think I'm in love with you now."
It felt ludicrous to laugh, but what else was his situation?
"Once I knew my feelings would not change, I became disgusted with myself for a time and eliminated all possibility of contact between us. I told myself over and over that she was a child, a fragile, often gravely ill child, and I had no right even to think of her in such a way. Then, too, came the time when I had to pretend to die and return to Derabend Hall as my 'son.' The Kyn who stay in one place must do so regularly to prevent suspicions among the locals. Thus Jema will never know that the man who found her in his garden, the man she thought was my father, was in fact me."
"You're breaking my heart here, Val." Alexandra shook her head. "Isn't there some way you two can be together?"
"Jema doesn't know I love her. She's dying. Juvenile diabetes." He came to stand beside her chair. "There is one way, but I never considered it. We have not been able to change humans for the last five hundred years… until you, Alex."
Her expression changed. "You're not talking about… oh, no." She got up from the chair and held up one hand. "I don't even know why I survived being infected, and my mutation isn't the same. Kyn blood kills every living thing that I've exposed to it. Before you ask, no, I am not experimenting on humans."
He felt confused. Cyprien had told him how diligently Alexandra had been working on fathoming the origins of the Kyn. "But Michael said that you're studying us. He said there was a possibility—"
"I'm looking for a cure. A way to turn us back into human beings," she told him flatly.
Despair turned into disbelief. "Why would we wish to be human again?"
"We're still human. We're just really powerful and our diet sucks. Excuse the pun." The humor left her eyes. "Let's be clear on this. If I did discover how to change a human into Kyn without killing them, then I'd never tell anyone. I am not restocking Tremayne's army of darkness."
"Then Jema and I can never be together." He turned away from her and went to the window to look at the gardens.
Alex tried to placate him. "You still have her human lifetime to share. You could make it work."
"Jema's thirtieth birthday is next week." He knew which flowers he would send to Shaw House. "I have spoken with doctors, and thirty years is far beyond what was predicted for her life expectancy. Her decline cannot be reversed. The next time I send her flowers, it will be for her funeral."
Chapter 13
The antique clock Jema kept by her bed told her she had woken up fifteen minutes late for work. The more dependable LED alarm clock behind it confirmed the time.
"Nice going, Shaw." She shoved her face in her pillow so she wouldn't have to see the evidence of her extreme laziness.
It was his fault again. Golden Eyes.
Over the last week she'd woken up each morning remembering a little more of her dreams. The first day it had been only a fragment; she recalled something about a ballroom and dancing with a tall, dark man with golden eyes. The second morning came with a vague recollection of a conversation she'd had with the same man. She'd been in a precolonial muslin gown; he'd been dressed in buckskins. They'd been standing under a waterfall lit from the outside with torches, and she remembered feeling cold and miserably wet. He'd told her that she would have to endure it, as he endured… something. The dream evaporated from there.
Yet as each day passed, less of her dreams vanished when she woke. None of them was recurring, but she became convinced that the men in them were all the same man. His appearance and clothes varied from one night to the next, but at some point in the dream, his pupils would contract into thin, dark lines like a cat's, and the irises would turn to gold.
Jema remembered most of the dream she'd had last night. "I can't believe I picked him up in a bar, or let him do that to me. On a pool table." She wrapped her arms around herself and giggled like a girl. "Too bad it didn't last long enough for me to… oh, I am depraved." She pulled back the covers and laughed again when she realized she was naked. "Completely, thoroughly depraved."
She stopped laughing when she breathed in and smelled fresh gardenias, and saw the faint marks on her breasts and thighs.
Jema walked naked into the bathroom and switched on all the lights to examine herself in the mirror. What appeared to be light pink and lavender smudges circled both of her breasts. There were five on each side. Three more, darker purple marks like bruises marred the inside of her right thigh. She turned and found four more marks just like them on her left buttock.
"I've heard of convincing yourself that you're pregnant, but convincing yourself that you've been manhandled?" Jema had had one brief romance with a boy who had loved to nibble and suck on her neck, and she remembered how her easily bruised skin reacted to that. Daniel had nearly had a heart attack, thinking that she was showing symptoms of a secondary blood disorder, until she'd stuttered out an explanation. To make matters worse, that particular boyfriend had dumped her the very next day.
She touched one of the marks on her breast gently, testing it. They didn't hurt, and there wasn't any abrasion to the skin itself. It was the sort of mark left when someone took hold of a person and squeezed.
The way he squeezed me. Jema's face burned as that portion of the dream suddenly came back to her with vivid, intimate detail. The way he touched her; it had been embarrassing and thrilling and totally outside her fairly dismal experiences in bed with men. Either I have a wonderful imagination, or I miss sex more than I thought.
Jema started to make a hideous face at her reflection and stopped cold when that, too, struck her. She rarely looked at herself in the mirror. Now, because of some silly female version of a wet dream, she was feeling up her own breasts and clowning around in front of one, as if she did it every day.
Mirrors are not my friends.
With wary steps, she retreated back into the bedroom and took one of her work outfits from the closet. One of the maids must have sprayed some sort of concentrated air freshener in her room; the air was thick with the scent of gardenias.
Jema took an appreciative sniff. Good thing I like the smell. It made her feel great, for some reason. She'd have to ask Micki what it was so she could take some in to the museum. Her office could use some serious freshening treatment.
She hated going into work late—everyone took extra pains to ignore her for acting like the boss's daughter—but it was better than sitting around the house listening to her mother describe the depth and breadth of her imaginary chest pains. That she could listen to anytime. Plus she wanted to see Luisa before the weekend. Since she was already late, she could stop by the hospital on the way to work.
If she tried very hard, she could probably forget all about the marks and the fact that her room smelled like a hothouse.
She did hear Daniel and her mother in the library, and stopped there on her way to pick up something to take with her for breakfast. She was tempted to assume her usual listening post, to gauge how things were going inside, but suddenly she was tired of eavesdropping for mood swings. She knocked once and walked in.
"Good morning. I overslept a little." She glanced from Daniel to her mother. "Hey. You two look nice."
Meryl wore what Jema recognized as her favorite outfit, a ruffled skirt and lace blouse in a pearly cream shade that didn't leach all the color from her skin the way her other Snow Queen white outfits did. Daniel was his usual tidy self in his tweed jacket and pressed navy trousers, but he'd put on a good tie with a small gold caduceus tie pin.
"Are you feeling ill?" her mother asked at once. "It's not like you to leave so late. You should stay home today."
"I'm terrific. I can't wait to get to work; I have a mystery to solve. Then again, that's my job." Jema grinned as she noticed a large pile of legal documents sitting on her mother's desk. "Speaking of which—you never told me why you two were out on the town so late the other night. Everything okay with the family fortune?"
Meryl drew back as if Jema had spit in her face, while Daniel avoided her gaze. It was such an unexpected reaction that Jema laughed.