Vampire Most Wanted

Page 32

“The reason there were so few immortal women in the camp was because they usually killed themselves rather than suffer Leonius’s raping and impregnating them. I saw two of them do it during the year I was there. One got free and when the guard pulled his sword, she just threw her head over it, decapitating herself. Another threw herself in the fire and burned to death. Abaddon said they had honor and their families would have been shamed had they not done it. That their families probably would have cut them down themselves had they found them in Leo’s camp alive and well, never having tried to escape or kill themselves. He said Uncle Lucian was the same, arrogant, cold, hard . . .”
“Abaddon again,” Marcus interrupted angrily. “Divine, he was lying to you. He lied to you about what happened to the women in the camp, and he lied to you about this. How long did he pound those tales into your head?”
“I don’t know. Ten years, I guess,” Divine said, staring at him wide-eyed. It was the first time she’d seen him really angry.
“You were with him for ten years after he smuggled you out of camp?”
She nodded. “At first I needed him. I had Damian, I was breast-feeding, I—”
“You were a child,” he added grimly. “You needed someone to find you hosts to feed on while you breast-fed, and you needed someone who could provide a roof over both your heads.”
“Yes,” she said, bowing her head.
“There is no shame in that,” Marcus said, his tone less angry. “Besides, as I said, I suspect he was using mind control on you. You seem to see Lucian as some kind of bogeyman, and for him to go from a substitute father to bogeyman like that, mind control must definitely have been involved.”
Divine rubbed her eyes wearily. She suspected Marcus was right and wondered how she hadn’t seen that for herself centuries ago.
“How did you eventually get away from him?”
“He was away looking for hosts to bring back one night and I . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “I just packed up Damian and ran with him.”
“Just like that?” Marcus asked with a frown.
Divine nodded.
“What happened to bring it about?” he asked after a pause.
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” she said slowly.
“You thought you needed him to survive. Why suddenly did it seem better to be away from him?”
Divine bit her lip and then reluctantly admitted, “I caught him calling Damian by the name Leonius.”
Twenty-one
Marcus dropped his head back against the headboard and closed his eyes. Divine might have named her son Damian and taught him the rules about not harming mortals, but Abaddon had busily been undoing all her good work from the boy’s birth. It was obvious to him that Damian and Leonius were one and the same son of Leonius Livius I.
“It infuriated me,” Divine admitted, drawing his attention again. “And scared me. I was suddenly desperate to get Damian away from him.”
“He called him Leonius,” Marcus murmured, and then lifted his head to peer at her and simply asked, “Did you take Leonius from that hotel in Toronto two years ago?”
“No,” Divine said firmly, and he felt a moment’s relief, until she added, “I took my son, Damian, from it.”
“Ah crap,” Marcus muttered, closing his eyes again.
“He is not like his father,” Divine said quickly. “My uncle has been hounding and hunting him ever since the immortal/no-fanger war just because he carries his father’s blood, but Damian’s not like Leonius. I brought him up with the same rules my grandfather taught me. He knows not to harm or kill mortals. Yet Uncle Lucian has hunted him, killing Damian’s sons in the process, innocent little boys, most of them under ten.”
“What?” Marcus asked, shocked at the very suggestion. When Divine nodded her head, he stared at her blankly for a minute and then said, “Divine, I don’t know what happened to your grandsons, but I guarantee you that Lucian would not kill little boys. At least not unless they were no-fanger and killing mortals willy-nilly.”
“They weren’t no-fangers. Most of them hadn’t turned yet and were mortal still,” she responded.
“Mortal still?” he queried blankly.
Divine shrugged. “Some of the boys seemed to be mortal and then turned when they were somewhere between five or ten.”
“That’s not possible,” Marcus said at once. “What’s more, if Damian is no-fanger, he is not your son.”
She blinked in surprise at that comment, and gave a short laugh. “I’m sorry, Marcus, but you’re the one mistaken this time. Damian is no-fanger and he is definitely my son. I gave birth to him.”
“You couldn’t have,” Marcus said firmly. “Divine, I explained about nanos. They are carried in the blood. A mother passes them down to her child.”
“Or the father does,” she said with certainty.
“No,” Marcus said stoutly. “He doesn’t. He can’t. It’s in the blood, not in the sperm.”
“Well, that still doesn’t mean an immortal mother can’t have a no-fang— edentate child,” she corrected herself. “No-fangers and edentates are immortal too, aren’t they? We all have the same nanos.”
“Ah, damn,” he whispered suddenly with realization. “I didn’t explain that part to you in the RV.”
“What part?” Divine asked uncertainly.
Marcus breathed out a sigh and then explained, “No-fangers and edentates don’t carry the same nanos as immortals. The first no-fangers and their prodigy carry the nanos from the first batch the scientists came up with. But those nanos turned out to be somehow flawed. A third of the subjects died when given them, and a third went crazy. The other third were fine. And then when Atlantis fell, none of them produced fangs and they had to cut to feed. The crazy immortals without fangs were called no-fangers. The noncrazy immortals without fangs were called edentates to differentiate them.
“Immortals,” he continued, “are the result of the scientists going back and tweaking the nanos. I don’t know what they did, or how they changed the programming, but the second batch of nanos produced the immortals that simply go by the name immortal. None of them died or went crazy when the nanos were introduced to their bodies. And when Atlantis fell, it was only in the immortals with the second batch of nanos that the fangs developed.”
“Oh,” Divine said with a frown.
Marcus sighed and then continued, “Because the nanos are carried in the blood, the child becomes what his mother is. A mortal mother will have a mortal child every time no matter what the father is, and the same is true of an immortal. An immortal mother with the second batch of nanos can only produce an immortal child. But both a no-fanger and edentate mother with the first batch of nanos will pass those on to her child and produce an edentate who has a thirty-three percent chance of remaining edentate, a thirty-three percent chance of turning no-fanger, and a thirty-three percent chance of dying.
“You carry the second batch of nanos, Divine. The child you gave birth to in that camp, and any children you produce in the future, can only be immortal. If Damian isn’t an Immortal, with fangs, then he is not your birth child.”
“But . . .” She shook her head, confusion rife on her face. “I gave birth to him.”
“Is it possible your child was switched for Damian?” he asked gently. That seemed the only explanation. “Was the baby you gave birth to ever out of your sight?”
“No, I . . .” Divine paused and frowned. “Well, Abaddon did take him out of the room briefly to clean him up, but . . . he was only gone moments before returning with him bundled up in swaddling.”
“This Abaddon must have switched Damian for your child then. Damian must have been the child of Leonius and a no-fanger woman.” He raised his eyebrows in question. “Were there any no-fanger women who gave birth around that time too?”
“Yes,” Divine murmured, looking defeated. “One of them had a child the day before.”
Marcus nodded. “Damian is probably her child.”
“Yes,” Divine agreed, and then she suddenly straightened. “But he is still my son, Marcus. I raised him, I breast-fed him, I cared for him, taught him, kissed his scraped knees and boo-boos. I raised Damian. He is my son.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said sadly, and she glanced to him with surprise.
“Why?”
“Because if Damian is the man who was shot several times, including an arrow through the heart, and was picked up outside the hotel room in Toronto, then he’s a stone-cold killer, and a no-fanger, not edentate.”
Divine was shaking her head before he’d even finished. “No. He’s not a killer. I taught him—”
“If the man you whisked away from the hotel is Damian, then Damian is a killer,” Marcus said firmly. “He and a handful of his sons killed several women in northern Ontario, and then kidnapped a doctor and her sister. The doctor was rescued right away, but one of the sons, Twenty-one I believe he was called, got away with the sister. The man you whisked away was captured at the site where the dead women were found, but he too got away.”
He saw Divine close her eyes at this news, but continued, “The sister, who was a teenage girl by the way, was rescued, along with a couple of other victims, from the hotel room you whisked your son away from as well as from the room next door to it. And he was going by the name Leonius.”
“You said that earlier,” she muttered unhappily, and then said, “But Damian said he was only there because a couple of the boys got up to some risky business and he had to go get them out of trouble.”
“Risky business?” he interrupted with amazement. “They cut those women up like kindling . . . and he bragged about at least one of his kills to the doctor they took. And,” he added heavily, “one of their victims, a young woman named Dee, told us how Leonius and his boys slaughtered her family. He wasn’t there to get them out of trouble. He was leading them into it.”
Marcus gave her a moment to digest that, and then said, “Everything I’ve said is true, Divine. I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re my life mate . . . and believe me I wish this wasn’t true. Because this does mean you’re rogue and we are going to spend the rest of our lives running and hiding.”
Divine stared at him blankly for a minute, and then suddenly turned and headed for the door.
“Wait! Where are you going?” he called, struggling with the ties on his wrists.
Divine didn’t answer, simply slipped out of the room and let the door close behind her. Cursing, Marcus gave up trying to tug his hands free of the ties at his wrists and began to jerk at them, trying to snap the cloth. Instead, on the fourth pull, he snapped the bed headboard clean off the bed. That was good enough. Marcus tugged the ties off of the snapped wood, and quickly removed the cloth from his wrists as he slid off the bed. He then rushed for the door, but when he hurried out into the hall and looked both ways, it was empty.
Marcus cursed and turned back to the room, intending to dress and go after her, only to find that the door had closed behind him . . . and locked.
“Brilliant,” he muttered, slamming one fist on the wooden panel with fury.
Divine kept expecting Marcus to rush up behind her and stop her as she made her way out to the hotel parking lot where the SUV was parked. She didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed when that didn’t happen. A little of both, Divine supposed as she slipped into the driver’s seat and started the vehicle. However, it was probably for the best. She knew it was. That didn’t make it any easier. But then there was very little in her life that had seemed to be easy.
While Marcus had wanted to learn more about her from their talk, in the end she’d learned more from him than he had from her. All he’d learned was that she was indeed the rogue he’d been sent to find. She’d learned that her son wasn’t her son, that he was a killer, and that Abaddon had probably been using mind control on her from the get-go to get his way.
Divine really couldn’t believe that she hadn’t picked up on it before this. Now that Marcus had said it, it seemed so obvious. Her fear of her uncle had been so solid and deep with little in the way of doubt . . . and so constant. Abaddon must have been feeding that into her thoughts day in and day out for those first ten years and then reinforcing it every time she’d encountered him.
Of course, the fact that he’d played on her own fears had probably helped. She’d admired and envied those two immortal women who had chosen death over Leonius’s abuse. She’d even wondered if that wasn’t the more honorable choice. They had escaped, after all, if only into death. They needn’t suffer the pain and humiliation he’d visited on her and the others. They were free. Their family honor safe . . . While she had quavered and wept and screamed in pain and terror, begging him not to hurt her, groveling at his feet like a pathetic—
Divine gave her head an angry shake as she started the SUV engine. She might have done all of that for nearly four months, but then she’d become pregnant and life had been more bearable . . . and she had survived. She had lived more than two thousand years since then. She’d met millions of people over the years, some shining stars of brilliance, others individuals in need of a little guidance to find that brilliance.
Divine had spent her life helping others. Surely that made up for any shame her family might have suffered? And surely that made what she’d suffered, if not worthwhile, at least bearable?