The Guardian Mist (3 page)

Gaius shook his head. “My father always wanted a grandchild. He will like having her about.”

Theodosia didn’t know what to say; she was coming to think that, indeed, the gods knew of her plight and had brought Gaius into her life at precisely the correct time. Was it even possible that all of this could be true? She would soon find out.

Gaius and his father, Agrippus, lived like two bachelors on a very large farm. There was plenty of work to be done and Theodosia wasn’t afraid to learn. In fact, she rather liked it. Gaius taught her to cook and to milk goats, to press wine and make flour. Theodosia learned quickly. She soon came to love her new life and, in time, love for Gaius bloomed as well. A truly good-hearted man who readily accepted Lucia, Theodosia knew that the decision to leave her parents’ home had been the best decision she had ever made. She knew that Lucius would have approved.

With the introduction of Gaius, the ring that Lucius had given her those years ago once again turned a deep, rich crimson and would remain so until the day Theodosia passed it on to Lucia on the day of her eighteenth birthday. Fortunately for Lucia, the ring would turn crimson two years later at the introduction of a certain young soldier who happened to cross her path.

The ring of Lucius’ family, the ring of true love or of lost love, continued to live on through the ages, passed down from Lucia to her daughter, and from her daughter onward. The story of the ring was also passed along with it, an oral tradition for the female members of the family, and through the centuries, the eldest daughter of each generation would hold great hope that the ring would turn crimson for her. Somewhere along the line, it was said that if one spoke the words inscribed upon the ring,
with dreams only of you
, that a lover would appear within a fortnight. Many a young woman believed in those words. Many a young woman was rewarded for that belief.

But a few were not. No one could be sure why those spellbound words sometimes worked or sometimes didn’t, or why love would turn the stone to crimson and heartache would turn it to black, but it didn’t really matter. It was a glorious tradition within the females of the family and the mystery of the crimson-stoned ring continued to brand Theodosia’s descendants with its particular kind of magic.

The lore of the Lucius Ring lived on.

T
wenty-Four Years Ago

“
P
ush
, Cassia, push. These babies aren’t going to be born by themselves.”

Cassia Velt bit back a curse and clenched her teeth. If her mom didn’t shut up, she was gonna kill her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t given birth before. She had…five years ago. But unfortunately, it seemed that the curse that hung over their family wasn’t broken. She had one more shot at getting rid of it once and for all.

The curse of the family ring that had been handed down from mother to daughter for as long as anyone could remember was on Cassia’s mind almost every day of her life. The poesy ring was nothing special to look at. Dark gold with a gray-colored stone that legend says might be some sort of really dark ruby. But her mom had tried to polish it more than once and it never looked anything but gray. A dark, disturbing color that made it hard to look at.

The legend of the ring maintained it should be passed down from mother to eldest daughter. The stone would turn a brilliant crimson when each woman found her true love, but it had to happen before she turned a quarter of a century old. If she didn’t, the ring would turn dark and stay that way, making it impossible for the owner to ever find true love in her lifetime.

Cassia grunted as the nurse encouraged her to push just one more time and looked up to her mother.

Juno Velt was an unhappy woman. As was her mother and also
her
mother. Unhappiness ran rampant in their family, as if each generation made it a goal to make the next as miserable as possible.

Cassia had done all she could to find her true love, as the legend foretold, but in the end, had found nothing but bitterness and misery.

She hadn’t ever wanted to get pregnant, wanting to end the curse once and for all. Not having a daughter to pass the ring to would certainly do that—but the Roman gods had taken that decision out of her hands.

Despite being religious about birth control with Bobby and making him wear a condom every time they had sex, she’d ended up pregnant anyway, a year after they’d moved in together.

Of course it had been a daughter.

Of course Bobby hadn’t wanted anything to do with a baby and had split.

Of course her mom had been pissed.

It was Juno who’d had the not-so-great idea that maybe if they sent the baby away with the ring, it might end the curse for all of them.

That didn’t work.

Theodosia’s damned ring haunted Cassia’s dreams and wouldn’t let her rest, even after she’d given away her firstborn. She knew Theodosia and Lucius’ story; of course she did. Juno had told her the fairytale so many times when she was little, Cassia could recite it by memory by the time she was four.

Still, for a time, Cassia had managed to push the fact that she’d given away her baby to the back of her head, ignoring the dreams she had each night of swords, Roman soldiers and castles, and going on with her life.

But apparently ancient curses didn’t care about rules…because she’d been knocked up again. This time by a one-night stand. With twins. Twin
girls
.

Karma was a bitch.

Cassia wasn’t the smartest woman in the world, but when the dreams increased in intensity and she saw the ring in every single one, even
she
knew she was getting a second chance, whether she wanted it or not.

A second chance to help her new eldest daughter find love and free them all from the curse.

“One more push and your first daughter will be here!” the nurse enthused.

Easy for her to say. She wasn’t lying on an uncomfortable bed with her legs strapped into stirrups and her cooter on display to any doctor, intern, and orderly who happened to walk into the room.

Cassia pushed thoughts of the ring and the curse out of her mind, and concentrated on the nurse’s directions to push.

Ten minutes later, Cassia watched as the nurses wiped, dried, soothed, and sucked icky fluids from the mouths and bodies of her two healthy daughters.

“Make sure you mark the oldest,” she told one of the nurses.

“What?”

“Mark the oldest. I have to make sure I know which came first.”

“Of course,” the nurse said as she weighed one of the newborns. “We’d do that anyway. We’ll note it on her bracelet.”

Cassia didn’t know why, but she felt the need to explain herself to the nurses. “I need to make sure the oldest is differentiable from the younger one. It’s a long story, but there’s a lot of family history, involving inheritances, and they’ll both lose out if we don’t know which was first.”

“You don’t have to explain. It’s hospital policy to make note of birth order,” the nurse at her feet explained in a brusque tone.

Cassia sighed in relief. It might be hospital policy, but the nurses had no idea how important it was. They were free to find love in their own time and in their own way. This new baby, the oldest, had only twenty-five years, otherwise she was doomed to be alone and miserable forever.

The other nurse smiled at Cassia. “Congratulations, they’re both healthy and happy and look amazingly alike, even down to their red hair. You’re a very blessed woman.”

Cassia heard her mom snort but ignored it, exhausted. Tired of her life, tired of being unhappy, tired of the curse hanging over her head. She wasn’t sure exactly how curses worked, but there was obviously an ancient god out there somewhere who was displeased with the trick she’d tried to pull by giving up her firstborn, and was getting back at her.

How did she know?

She’d dreamed it.

A beautiful woman had come to Cassia in a dream.

She’d had weird dreams all her life, but this one was different. It had seemed so
real
. The woman had been wearing a damn toga and sat on some uncomfortable-looking stone bench thing. A man was standing next to her. He was good looking, even if he looked funny in his matching toga with leaves in his dark hair, which was too long and curling around his neck. His hazel eyes were piercing and Cassia somehow knew he could kill a man without a second thought. But when he’d looked down at the woman at his side, his eyes lost that lethal glow and softened.

The woman was tall and slender and had beautiful dark auburn hair, unlike Cassia’s own pale red frizzy mop that she’d loathed her entire life. In the dream, the woman had reached up and taken the man’s hand, and Cassia saw the reason her life was miserable on the woman’s finger. The ring. It shone crimson, so bright that it made Cassia’s heart hurt at the sight she’d never gotten a glimpse of in her entire life. Nor had any of the women in the three generations before her.

The woman’s voice was soft and melodic and made Cassia want to weep, it was so sad and beautiful at the same time. “You have been given another opportunity to make things right. Your firstborn will find her true love. She will live a long and happy life, as will
her
daughters—but that happiness will not trickle down to you. The ring must be returned to your family and you will be granted another eldest daughter.”

Cassia had always been defiant and even in her dreams was no different. “How can I have
another
oldest daughter? That doesn’t make sense.”

“You are pregnant with a girl. This is another man’s child and she is the oldest of
that
man’s loins. You have another chance to make this right. For your future, for her future, and the future of your granddaughters twenty times over. It’s up to you. This is your absolute last opportunity. The ring has been dark for too long. This is the last chance for you, for the ring, and for your ancestors.”

“Damn it all to hell!” Cassia had spat in her dream. “It’s not that easy to find true love in this century! Not like it was for you.”

“Lucius and I have discussed this. You’re right. Times were already very different even one hundred years before you were born. Your ancestors all had difficulties finding their loves, but not like Marcellina, Maxima, and Juno.”

Cassia had thought the woman in her dream might be Theodosia, the woman who had started the legend, but referring to the man by her side as Lucius confirmed it. How she knew the names of her great-grandma, grandma, and mother was beyond Cassia, but it was a dream, so she guessed anything was possible.

“Your daughter will experience signs throughout her life, hinting at her soulmate, so when they cross paths, she’ll recognize him immediately. The man meant to be hers will also have some unusual experiences and there will be no doubt in
his
mind that she belongs to him. They’ll have an instant connection, which will be tested in the worst way. But, heed my words, Cassia, no more trickery. The legend will not be denied.”

Cassia had sighed in the dream and said in a sad voice, “I can’t go through the rest of my life as miserable as I’ve been since I turned twenty-five. And I’m afraid to tell my daughter that if
she
doesn’t find her true love by the time she’s twenty-five, she’ll be an old, unhappy spinster like her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.”

Lucius had nodded at her then and said in a deep, soothing voice that seemed to surround her in the large dream chamber she was standing in, “That’s the same thing Theodosia said to
my
mother when she gave her the ring.”

“And what did your mom say?” Cassia asked, hopefully.

“Any daughter you will have will surely be beautiful and know love.”

Cassia had woken up abruptly after that, his words ringing in her ears, and put a hand to her slightly rounded belly. She had another chance to be happy. A daughter who would be beautiful? Sounded good to her.

It was not even a month later Cassia found out she was having twins.

Twin girls.

Damn the gods for having a wicked sense of humor.

Hands at her thighs brought her back to the present with a jolt. Cassia closed her eyes, ignoring the antiseptic smell of the air around her in the hospital, the low murmur of the nurses, even her afterbirth being delivered and her nether region being cleaned up, and, instead, dreamed of a day in the future when her daughter would find a man to love and thus break the curse of her family.

Maybe, just maybe, she herself would finally have a chance to find a man who wouldn’t cheat, hit, or otherwise treat her like crap. It wouldn’t matter if she was in her sixties when it happened, Cassia would take happiness any way she could get it.

She’d done the obligatory “hold your new daughters and look happy” thing when the nurses had shoved the babies into her arms, but had handed them over to Juno as quickly as she could. She just wasn’t cut out to be a mother, but it looked like she had no choice. It wasn’t that she didn’t want her daughters to be healthy, but her mind was whirling with all that needed to happen in only twenty-five years. It might seem like a lifetime to some, but Cassia knew better. The years would go by way too fast, and along with them, her own chance at happiness and love.

“We’ll just take these precious girls to the nursery and get them settled in,” the blonde nurse told Cassia and Juno. “The doctor will be in to check you over soon and we’ll bring your daughters back later so you can nurse.”

“Thank you,” Cassia said tiredly.

The blonde nurse nodded and gathered one of the babies into her arms. The dark-haired nurse next to her did the same with the other child.

“She did a good job; she deserves a rest. She can get to know her daughters and fill out the birth certificates afterward,” the first nurse said to Cassia’s mom.

Juno grunted in response.

The nurses headed out of the room and down the hall to the nursery.

“God, that is one stone-cold bitch,” Roberta, the blonde nurse, exclaimed as she soothed a hand over the head of the precious baby in her arms.

“I feel bad for these two. It’s obvious there isn’t a lot of love in that family. Any sign of the father?” the dark-haired nurse, Susie, asked.

“Nope. I heard the mom harping on her daughter, something about a
curse
and she should’ve known he wouldn’t want more than one night with her, or something.”

“God, I hate people sometimes.” Susie sighed then looked over at Roberta. “Do you know which of these two angels was first?”

The other nurse laughed uncomfortably. “Crap, no. I was hoping you did. I wasn’t watching when mom was holding them and they look exactly alike, so I wasn’t sure which was which when they were handed back.”

“If anyone finds out we weren’t doing our job, we could get fired. But I’m sure it doesn’t really matter. Just pick one and I’ll mark it on her armband. No one will ever know the difference,” Susie stated decisively. “There’s no way I’m going back and telling them I have no idea which was the firstborn. They’d lose it.”

“Good idea.”

The nurses disappeared into the nursery and got the two newest babies settled in a single crib. They snuggled together, as if they were still in their mother’s womb, their arms intertwining and their foreheads resting against each other. They looked exactly the same, weighed exactly the same, and had identical cute pert noses and tufts of red hair on their small heads. The only difference at the moment was a notation on one of the armbands, indicating who was born first.

As the twins took their first nap outside of the warm womb they’d spent the last nine months in, one daughter slept the sleep of the dead, dreamless and devoid of any kind of feeling, good or bad.

The other daughter, the one who had been designated as the younger twin, dreamed of being held close in someone’s arms…the smell of something the baby had no intellectual capacity to understand, much less name in her hours-old brain, but something comforting. It came in the form of a mist that covered her and her sister as they slept. She snuggled into the body at her side, feeling safe and wanted.