Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (31 page)

“Aaron…!” she mewled, curling her fingers around one of the bars.

“Go,” he told her
. Closing his eyes, he kissed her fingers. “Naima, you have to go.”

He stumbled back from the gate, then began backing up the earthen stairs toward the main floor of the great house again.

“Aaron,” she begged, weeping. “Aaron!”

But when he turned around and didn’t answer, when he continued up the stairs without looking back, he saw the glow against the cellar walls from her lantern fade, heard the soft but rapid patter of her bare feet against the packed dirt floors as she ran away.

She’s safe now,
he told himself, even though that didn’t stop that awful, rending ache deep inside of him.
She’s safe at last, and he can never hurt her again. None of them can.

He’d just settled his foot on the top of the last riser, when he heard a sharp whistle of wind from his right.
He started to turn, startled, but then something heavy smashed into the side of his head. The blow knocked the wits from him; he staggered sideways, then crumpled to the floor, catching himself on his hands and knees, and blinking against a dizzying array of stars. His nose tickled, and then blood spattered down against the oak floorboards between his hands in a steady stream.

With a groan, he looked up. His head was swimming, his vision fading and out of focus. His first thought was that Vidal had survived; that he’d somehow lived through Naima’s attack and had returned to the great house to enact his revenge, or maybe Jean Luc or Allistair. But instead, he saw his father towering above him, still dressed for riding in his heavy great coat and boots.
Jean Luc stood behind him on one side, Allistair on the other, both cowering behind his coat tails, both grinning with malicious glee at Aaron.

In his gloved hand, Lamar held his walking cane—the one with the handle that had been carved to look like a snarling dog. Only now the pale ivory of the dog’s snarling snout had been smeared with blood—Aaron’s blood.

“You have betrayed me for the last time, boy,” Lamar said, his voice strangely cold and devoid of any tone, even rage. And when he raised the cane aloft to strike him again, Aaron knew better than to cry out or try to beg for mercy, because there would be none.

There never had been.

***

“Gunnnnnghh!”
With a breathless cry, Aaron tried to sit up. For a moment, he nearly expected to find himself back in the nineteenth century, back in Boston again, with Julien reading from the
New England Courant
and patiently keeping vigil at his bedside.

Instead, he found himself in what appeared to be a hospital room. Outside of having his CT scan performed, he’d actually never been on the patient side of one before. Lamar’s idea of recuperation from injuries involved being left on the floor of the room in which they’d been inflicted, until such time as one could summon the strength to get up and limp to one’s own bed for further healing. At first, the sight of the intravenous tubes running from the inner crooks of his elbows alarmed him, as did the strange rubber tubing he felt bisecting his face just beneath his nose.

“It’s oxygen,” he heard Naima say, as she draped her hand against his to prevent him from yanking the cannula away. “It’s to help you breathe, Aaron. Leave it alone.”

She sat beside his bed, a book in her lap. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a colorful peasant blouse. Her feet were bare, propped up against the side of his bed.

“Where…am I…?” he croaked.

“You’re safe,” she said gently, kicking her feet down and leaning toward him. With a smile, she brushed his hair back from his brow.

“As my younger brother might say, you’re in a highly specialized medical facility—the only one of its kind in the entire world dedicated to the care and treatment of our species,” Mason said, stepping into view.

Unlike their last occasion to meet, this time, Mason was clean shaven, his eyes bright and sober. He
walked over to a machine beside the bed from which two bags of clear fluid dangled, connected to Aaron’s arm by those intertwining tubes. As Aaron watched in mounting alarm, Mason lifted a syringe in hand, connecting it to a port in one of the lines.

“What is that?” Aaron asked, stiffening reflexively, trying to sit up
as Mason slowly depressed the syringe plunger. “What the fuck did you just stick me with?”

“It’s morphine,” Mason replied, seeming unbothered by Aaron’s hostility. “It will help with your pain.”

“I’m not having any pain,” Aaron said with a frown.

Mason smiled. “
You’re welcome.”

He dropped a wink at Naima and then walked away, heading out of the room through a nearby door that he closed behind him.

“What the hell is going on?” Aaron asked Naima.

She stood, leaning over the bedrail to stroke his hair again. “You almost died, Aaron. Mason saved your life.”

Aaron groaned as the sudden rush of morphine in his brain—like a warm blanket drooping over his mind, clouding his senses. “I saved his first,” he muttered, feeling like he stood on a surfboard, riding one hell of a steep wave in toward shore.

“Try to rest,” she said, and when she brushed her lips against his, he lifted his head unconsciously to meet her, responding to her as if to do so was an inherent and undeniable component of his very nature.

“I remember that night,” he said. “The night of the fires…what my brothers did to you…” He looked up at her, even though it was hard for him to see clearly now, and his eyelids kept wanting to droop closed, his mind slipping into shadows. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop them in time…I didn’t…”

“Hush,” she soothed.

“There…was no riding accident,” he said. “I never fell off my horse. It…it was my father. I remember now. He hit me with his cane…over and over. He knew…what I’d done…that I…I had helped you escape…”

“Aaron,” she said gently, caressing his face.

He turned his face into the palm of her hand, closing his eyes. “He wanted me dead,” he whispered helplessly.

“It’s alright,” she told him, her lips lighting against his brow.
“He can’t hurt you anymore, Aaron. Never again. You’re safe now…safe here with me.”

I love you,
he thought to her as his mind drifted off with a morphine-induced tide.

I love you, too,
he heard her say, and then he slept again.

***

Naima left Aaron to rest, and followed Mason across the hall to Tristan’s room. Not everyone in the clan was happy to know that Aaron remained in the clinic for care—or that Naima, who had helped him, was allowed to stay, for that matter—but Mason was their leader now, patriarch of the Morin clan, and his word was their law.

“How is he?” she asked Mason hesitantly in the doorway.

Mason had been leaning over Tristan’s bed, but straightened now and smiled. “Better. His last set of labs came back nearly normal. His infection is just about clear.”

One of the primary reasons Naima suspected no one in the family had objected too loudly about Aaron’s presence was because everyone still seemed to be collectively reeling over Phillip’s betrayal. True, Phillip had never been close to
most of his siblings or kin, but he had still been the first-born son. Tradition had always instilled among the Brethren a sort of respectful deference to him because of that, if nothing else. No one had ever suspected the true depths of his hatred for his fatheror Mason for what Phillip had felt was an usurpation of his rightful place in the clan’s hierarchy.

“By sending
first Jean Luc, then Aaron against us, Lamar gave Phillip an opportunity he’d probably waited centuries for,” Mason remarked, as if reading Naima’s mind and sensing the train of her thoughts—which, in all likelihood, he had. “He had someone to blame if we both turned up dead, an explanation for why someone would hate us—Michel and me—so much.”

“But why?” Naima asked. “Why would he want to kill Michel? I know they had their differences, that Michel could be pretty bullheaded when he put his mind to it, but…”

“I think this was the final straw,” Mason said quietly, slipping his hand against his brother’s to clearly indicate Tristan was the
this
he referred to. “Phillip never had any children, you know, although he took several wives over the years. Father always feared he was sterile. It runs in our family, you know.”

When Naima shook her head, surprised by this, he continued. “It’s called Y-chromosomal microdeletion, a genetic abnormality that leads to significantly decreased—and even completely absent—sperm production. About one in every ten males born in the clan is affected to some degree or another. Michel pressed for years for us all to consent to
genetic testing, but Phillip never would. Anyway, Phillip was able to impregnate Lisette, and he always used that as proof that Father was full of shit.”

Mason’s glanced at Naima, sadly. “The pregnancy wasn’t viable, though. She lost the baby within the first term. Phillip pretty much pushed her aside after that. He wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Here she was, shunned from her birth family because of her marriage to a Morin—because God knows Lamar wouldn’t have any more to do with her after that—plus no real friends in the clan she’s wed into because of the ongoing feud with the Davenants. And now her husband won’t as much as look at her. She was devastated.”

He managed a soft smile as he gazed down at Tristan. “They were good together, Lisette and Father. I, for one, was pleased to realize they’d fallen in love, but you know Father…he wanted to spare Phillip’s feelings, so they kept it as much of a secret as they could. When Tristan came into the picture, that became more difficult to manage.”

Mason laughed. “Can you believe some of our clan actually believed
I
was Tristan’s father? I used to bring him with me when he was a boy, and I’d go on one of my whirlwind traveling adventures—do you remember? Lisette would come, too. My God, she was a dear friend to me. And everyone thought we were sleeping together. I don’t know who Phillip hated more—me, when he caught wind of
that
rumor, or Michel, when he finally figured out the truth.”

He sighed unhappily. “Either way, he hated us both enough to want us dead, it seems. That he’d come to realize Father had left me his primary beneficiary—not
him—probably only made things worse. And like I said—your boy gave him the perfect scapegoat to pin our untimely demises upon. Not to mention the rifle.”

Naima laughed. “I wouldn’t call Aaron
my boy.
”

“He looks like Lisette,” Mason said. “I told him that at the cemetery.” He slipped his hand away from Tristan’s, then adjusted the blankets as if he’d imagined a crease in their otherwise pristine, faultless drape. “But my God, he favors his brother, too. It’s been ages since I’ve seen Julien. But they could pass for twins, the last I knew of him.
The Davenants and those heartbreaking blue eyes.”

She opened her mouth to ask him about Julien, because at his house on the afternoon when Phillip had died, he’d seemed startled—no,
stunned
—when she’d told him she thought that was who was trying to murder him. And just now, even with this fleeting mention, the same kind of softness came over Mason’s face that she’d seen when he’d talked about the young baseball player, Andrew Taylor, and had gazed with obvious fondness at his photograph.

How exactly do you know Julien Davenant?
she wanted to ask, but she bit back the question and watched him walk out of the room. Mason had known that Tristan was Michel’s son long before any of the rest of the clan—including her. He’d known about his father’s love affair with Lisette, and had kept quiet about it for decades. The man obviously had a knack for keeping secrets close to the vest.

And maybe sometimes it’s better that way,
she thought.

***

When she returned to Aaron’s room, to her surprise—and alarm—he was gone. The IV lines that had been connected to his arm had been pulled out, catheters and all; they lay in a little pile, with a small bloodstain on the sheets beneath them. He’d yanked off his telemetry monitoring pads and wires, his oxygen cannula and his pulse oximetry gauge. He’d left all of these in a tangle among his bedclothes, then apparently changed out of his hospital gown, back into his street clothes and—judging by the opened window on the far side of the room—jumped out.

Goddamn it,
she fumed, brows furrowing as she climbed up onto the window ledge and swept her gaze, and her telepathy, through the yard below. She couldn’t sense him but that was no big surprise. Aaron was another one who was good at keeping secrets—namely, his present whereabouts and frame of mind.

Goddamn it,
Naima thought again, leaping down the two-story drop. She grunted softly as she landed on her feet, then paused, again looking all around for any hint of where he might have gone. He’d metabolized the morphine fast; clearly whatever sedating effect it had had on him had been too short-lived for anyone’s good—including his own.

She heard the sudden revving of a car engine, and bit back another swear as she sprinted for
the parking lot in front of the clinic. She raced up onto the asphalt in time to see his rented gold Infiniti G35 sport coupe squawling its tires as it pealed out of the lot.