Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) (14 page)

“
Agreed.”

She smiled shyly. “I’m going to take my bath now.”

“Okay, Ambra. Do you need help to bathe?”

“
No. But why don’t you give me about ten minutes of privacy and then come in the tub with me?”

A flood of surprised warmth surged through me at her clear invitation.

“All right. I’ll be there soon.”

“
Don’t forget to bring your blade.”

“
It’s kind of attached to me,” I said.

She grinned at the double entendre.

It wasn’t long before we began to peel back the layers of our hearts and open ourselves to the possibilities of love.

Chapter Seventeen

Sometime during the night, I felt her shiver. She was asleep already, worn out from lovemaking, and I moved closer to her to warm her with my body and just hold her. I wrapped my arms around her and she stirred awake.

“Are you chilled?” I asked.

She was still shaking and I worried she was getting sick. It was then that I realized that she was crying. The most lethal vampire hunter that I knew was weeping, so silently that I would not have known it, except for her trembling and sharp intakes of breath.

I turned her over and her eyes shimmered with tears in the half light of the embers in the fireplace.

“
What is it?” I asked, looking at her badly bruised forearm. “Did I hurt you?”

She nodded. “Not physically, though.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

Her lips trembled and I kissed them softly.

“Ambra, tell me.”

“
You didn’t say it yet. In English.”

“
Say what?” And then I realized what she meant. The text I had sent her:
Je t’aime.

“
Don’t
say that you love me. I can hear you thinking it over and over.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. “What’s wrong with saying it out loud?”

“It could weaken you…
us
…in a critical moment and threaten our safety. If the vampires knew, they would steal one of us away and use us for bait for the other one.”

“
Like they did with Gabby, but she turned on them and took our side?”

“
Yes.”

“
You think they killed my wife and stole my daughter to lead me right to them?”

She nodded. “Eventually, when they think they can beat you, I think they will put Kristen out in the open so you will not be able to resist going to rescue her. And then they will strike you down.”

“I am more worried about her than me. Do you think she is safe with them?”

“
I don’t know. Who knows what the vampires will do?”

“
I understand. You’re afraid to fall in love with me because you’re afraid to lose me.”

She nodded. “I’ve already fallen. It’s like sinking into a warm feather bed and it feels like Christmas Eve. You’re my gift under the tree.”

“Sweetheart. We have lost so much, both of us. Are we not on Earth to give comfort and joy to one another?”

“
In a perfect world. Ours is far from it.”

I wiped a tear from her eye. “No one knows that better than us, what has been wrenched from us: happiness, family, lover, spouse, home, and life. As we once knew it.”

“So, what do we do with this?” she asked. “With
us
?”

“
We live, Ambra. We just live. Moment to moment. If we have to.”

“
I don’t know if I can be a good partner in that sort of incremental commitment universe.”

“
You already are a good partner. In every way.” I paused. “If you don’t want me to say I love you, because you are superstitious that somehow the universe will hear and come along and take me away, then what would give you joy with me, Ambra? What would give you…peace?”

“
To know that you would never forsake me.”

“
I wouldn’t. I won’t. Not ever,” I vowed.

“
How do you know, Rand?”

I thought for a moment. “I came to love you slowly and carefully. It is not without great discernment that a vampire hunter, a widower with a kidnapped child, can choose a mate from among our few and lovely available potential mates.”

She smiled. “There are only a handful of women in the world.
Our world
.”

“
Listen to me, my beautiful Sister of the Scythe. Even if you became a vampire, I would not forsake you.”

“
Now that is unconditional love,” she said in her soft Swiss accent.

“
It’s what I do.” I looked outside the window at what seemed like an endless night. “You should sleep.” I stroked her cheekbones and she closed her eyes, the tears slipping from them like diamonds to sink into the Battenburg lace-trimmed pillowcase.

“
I would not forsake you, either,” she said softly, but passionately. She must have wrenched that from down deep, my tough beautiful lover.

I kissed her tears away. And then I made love with Ambra again, very tenderly, and with each stroke of my body in hers, I said, “I will not forsake you.”

She wept so hard, and then she cried out my name when she climaxed.

I held her and held her. It was the longest period I had been awake for quite some time without my weapons on.

It was then that I realized that
Ambra
was my sword, my blade that cut through despair and slashed open the curtain of woe to reveal this shimmering light inside of me, a light that she had now kindled.

Chapter Eighteen

What had made this vampire hunt historic was not just killing one of the vampires who had killed my wife and brother, and getting a lead on the other two who had kidnapped my daughter. The triumph of the vampire hunt was nearly eclipsed by my finding love again and falling in it, blade over heels, with the most courageous woman I had ever seen or kissed.

That made Ambra beautiful to me. Her brave true heart, her sense of right and wrong, her passion for doing goodness in the world, and bestowing her love on me like a mantle of grace had broken through the careful boundaries I had formed for most of my life, even though I had married and had a child. With Ambra, I was genuine and warm, like her.

It was not her long legs, nor her two feet of silky straight blonde hair, nor her gorgeous skier’s body, nor the unforgettable face that Michelangelo would have loved to paint. None of that made me love her as much as I loved Ambra’s courage, her grace under fire, and her relentless and almost fearless fierceness against evil. These qualities made her the most desirable woman I had ever had the privilege, or the opportunity, to love.

Not that I hadn’t loved Megan, the mother of my child and my former wife, but the dynamic was very different with Ambra; we were so connected by our focus on self-preservation that every single moment we lived became this precious drop of time together, encapsulated by the microcosm in which we lived as vampire hunter partners. The times that we had kissed strung together like iridescent pearls in my mind, and they were radiant.

There was once again beauty and truth in my life, and the woman who exuded it was, to my knowledge, the strongest, swiftest vampire hunter on the face of the Earth…Ambra killed vampires without mercy. Without hesitation. She had my back. As well, I had hers.

I not only loved her, I
trusted
her.

It remained to be seen if I would ever again see my daughter. I prayed that I would, but in the meantime, I was no longer alone in the world. More than ever, I had reasons to fight the evil vampires who had taken everything from me, yet inexplicably, had ironically begun to give back what they had seized. If not for being a vampire hunter, I would have never met Ambra.

The more evil the vampires became, the more I triumphed and felt raised up by increasing determination against these dangerous adversaries, due to solidarity with my comrades in arms.

It
was
good not to be a lone vampire hunter. How had I even survived those years?

And then there was Samantha Moon, who was such a paradox. I was reminded of an old movie line: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In my mind, the phrase unexpectedly twisted into: “The friend of my enemy is also my friend.”

I began to see that loyalties with immortals were very complicated as I also began to realize that the annihilation of
all
vampires was certainly not the answer.

Nor werewolves, for that matter.

I didn’t even know if I could lay my eyes on Corbin, the resident werewolf, in his human form and not want to pummel him to death for trying to make Ambra his mate. But then, I tried to put myself in his place. If I was a werewolf or a vampire, would I try to drag Ambra, my love, down into the black hole with me?

I hoped never to have to tackle that dilemma.

When would I be able to articulate this exact concern to the Brotherhood of the Blade, and the Sisterhood of the Scythe:

If Samantha Moon is a good vampire, are there many others? If so, should we let them into our confidence to work for our cause against the most-predatory clans of vampires? Or was Sam the only vampire that we would ever be able to completely trust? And Gabrielle. Dear God, Gabby. What a loss to us! And Lucian. He had helped Ambra and me kill Vlad. And we had, the three of us, barely killed Vlad!

And werewolves. How could we ever trust Corbin again? Certainly, he was never getting another crack at Ambra, not even in human form. It would be over my dead body that he was ever alone with her again. Ever.

Gabrielle Dubois had given her life for our cause, even as a vampire, and I was still stunned at the depth of her personal sacrifice as she acted like a sole proprietor of her own private French Underground, and of her brave intent to take down Vlad the Impaler. Though her initial plan to lure Vlad into the vampire trap had not resulted in his direct death, Gabby’s death had not been in vain. Thanks to her, the world was rid of both Vlad Tepes and Elizabeth Bathory, the vampire who had bathed in the blood of hundreds of people, if not thousands, over centuries.

Do vampires go to Heaven?

The question seemed to be voiced in my head by some other entity, perhaps one of the resident ghosts that I ignored, rather than acknowledged, so as not to give them power, nor credence.

I hoped that Gabby was in Heaven with my brother, Rudolph.

I wanted to believe that she was, that even vampires could enter the pearly gates and get their wings and haloes. It was a travesty that there would be no more music albums for her millions of fans, and that the last one she had recorded when she was a vampire, was a dark tribute to the bloodthirsty, nasty Vlad. The songs of the opera were like a Gothic passion play and it tore up my heart to listen to them. But listen to them I did, many times over the next few years, in order to glean clues to the vampire culture from her lyrics.

I shouldn’t have been thinking of all that just then, with Ambra in my bed, but I felt a sense of accomplishment that one of the three vampires who had killed my brother, Rudolph, had been destroyed. Vlad was gone. Now, I still had Nero and Delilah to kill. One third of my personal vampire quest, to avenge Rudolph’s murder, had been achieved.

Ambra stirred and reached for me yet again.

“Are you lying awake and thinking over there?”

“
Yes.”

“
Quit it.” And then, her hands made me forget about the immortal badminton game in my head.

As she touched me, knowing just how to do so, I steeled myself to be even more tender with her, to make her feel more loved, more cherished, and more connected to me. Obviously, she had gone for a long time without lovemaking and her need was greater than I anticipated.

But I was up for it. Literally.

She was exactly like I imagined she would be as my lover—snow and rain-scented, responsive and reciprocative, and achingly passionate, to the point where I near-wept when she cried out her pleasure under me and kissed me with a moan rising behind her lips. When I released her mouth, her face was wet with tears when she said my name.
Over and over.

Afterward, we rested. Lying next to Ambra with my arm around her, keeping her close, and with the sweet scent of our lovemaking still perfuming our bodies, I listened to her slumber grow deeper. Her body relaxed completely against me. Perhaps the first time that I had not seen Ambra in battle-tense readiness.

It was then that I prayed to God, and for the first time in a very long time, with an honest gratitude and some proper humility.

I thanked Him for Ambra, who had made my life not only tolerable, but filled it with a joyful purpose and incentive to keep living my life to the fullest.