Once she had recovered from the onslaught, Jessenia began to pack her few things. "We're going to Italy, to the villa, to make sure they are safe."
"Italy?" Robert repeated. "No."
"You are a soldier!" she shouted. "Demetrio is an artist! Would you not protect them?"
He grasped her hand. "I would protect you first."
"Please," she whispered. "Please, Robert. None of us will survive by hiding. We have to fight. This Julian is still a newborn. His luck will not hold."
They began the long journey back to Italy, to the villa, where they found two piles of dust, just inside the terrace.
Jessenia fell to her knees. "It is them," she said. "My maker told me that we turn to dust. They are gone."
This was the first time Jessenia had ever mentioned her maker.
"We have to go," Robert said. "We need to leave this place now." An unfamiliar and unpleasant feeling had begun crawling around inside him. He couldn't quite place it, but he believed it was fear. "Jessenia, come. There is nothing you can do."
She let him lead her through the front doors, into the dense gardens. Cristina had always liked thick, wild gardens. Jessenia stumbled out ahead of him, and he longed to comfort her, but what could he say?
His mind was churning with decisions over the best possible place to take her and hide, when she walked past a mulberry tree, and the darkness beside her seemed to move on its own. A glint arced through the air, and her head flew off her body before his eyes could absorb what was happening. Her body fell forward with a slight thud.
Before he could even scream her name, a wave of memories hit him.
It was nothing like what he had experienced back in England. He was only a few feet away from her, and he buckled from the impact, rolling on the ground. And what he saw… He saw her dressed as an English lady in the fifteenth century in a velvet gown and headpiece with her hair pinned beneath. He saw a vampire with a wizened face lecturing over a small pile of books, hitting her hand with a wooden pointer, and going on with the lecture. But her name was not Jessenia back then. It was Jane.
The memories went on as if Jessenia was speaking to him.
The wizened vampire had wanted a daughter with imagination, and he'd chosen her. He seduced her agreement through promises of travel and learning. But he was coldhearted and cared nothing for her well-being.
Yet only when he allowed her to begin meeting other vampires, such as Cristina and Demetrio, did she understand the loneliness of her existence. She wanted a different life.
She ran away.
She was alone and lost and frightened-even of some mortals, once she learned her gift did not work well on those with little imagination.
While traveling with a group of gypsies, she changed her way of dress, her hair, her name. She learned the power of her gift. She began looking for a companion, and she could see him in her mind. She would never break the laws or make someone too soon, but still… she searched.
And then she found Robert.
He saw image after image of himself, the way she saw him. She thought him handsome, with his lean face and broken nose. She loved the way his presence changed the way brutal mortals treated her. Harsh men would only need glance at Robert and then look away. None of them came near her. Robert was the real thing. A hardened soldier. He protected her, saw to her needs, loved her, and he asked almost nothing in return. All he wanted was for her to plan their next journey, their next delight, their next exploration, and to share in her enjoyment. He washed away the pain of the past and took everything upon himself. Every night, she looked at him and wondered if he was real…
Robert was choking from unbearable physical and emotional pain when his vision cleared enough to see the blade arcing down at him, and on instinct he rolled to one side.
The sword sliced through the front half of his throat, sending a spray of black blood into the air. He finished his roll, bleeding onto the ground, and looked up to see a dark-haired man standing over him, raising the sword again.
Julian.
It had to be.
Robert flashed out telepathically, rage and hatred giving him strength. The sword stopped in midair as Robert held him there. He wanted this creature to suffer for hours! But the blood kept flowing into the dirt beneath him, and he was growing weaker by the second. The world grew hazy before his eyes. He couldn't get up. He couldn't fight. Soon, he was going to lose the mental connection.
Then he would die.
Had he allowed himself to think, he would have chosen death, but the survivor embedded so deeply inside him took over, and he used a simple telepathic glamour, the same kind he might use on a feeding victim, to alter what Julian saw.
Still standing above him, Julian stepped back, looking down.
Robert managed to stay inside his mind, and Julian saw a headless body on the ground, slowly turning to dust. He looked around, seeing Jessenia's body turning to dust as well.
His work was complete.
After a few moments, he turned and walked away.
Robert lay there, bleeding into the dirt, unable to move, realizing that when the sun rose, he would burn anyway.
He didn't care.
Jessenia was dead.
Her memories tortured him. Why had she never told him of her past? He would have comforted her. He writhed in pain just thinking about the way she saw him. She saw herself as the taker and him as the giver, when he saw it the other way around. Why had they never spoken of such things?
He wanted the sun to rise.
Just before dawn, a gardener came up the path and gasped loudly, running to Robert's side.
"Oh," he cried, kneeling down and leaning over. "Can you move?"
Robert couldn't get up, but he could move his arms. Again, the survivor, the soldier of Norfolk, took over, pushing everything else away. Robert grabbed the gardener and jerked him down, driving his teeth into the man's throat and draining him. He drank until the man's heart stopped.
It was the only time he ever killed to feed.
The wound in his throat closed slightly, and he dragged himself into the house.
In the early years after Jessenia's death, Robert sometimes burned with enough hatred to attempt tracking Julian, to take revenge.
But that fire faded after a while. He was sometimes hit by the distant, much weaker onslaught of the memories of dying vampires-he now knew what they were-and in the dullness of his nightly existence, he lost interest in revenge.
It wouldn't change anything.
It wouldn't bring Jessenia back.
As a mortal, he had often been told that time heals all wounds, but this proved untrue. Each night, he woke up reaching for Jessenia, and each night, the absence of her body, her laugh, the way she always turned to lie facing him in the bed, came crashing down as he saw the empty space and felt the same agony.
It never went away…
Chapter 13
"No!" Robert gasped, summoning all his strength to wrench himself away.
He grabbed Eleisha's shoulder and pushed her. She struck the bathroom door and fell. Her expression was wild and confused.
He wanted to kill her.
She had invaded him and seen everything, all his private thoughts and his past. He had relived it all. He could still taste Jessenia in his mouth.
"I'm so sorry…," Eleisha choked out. "Robert, I'm so sorry."
He crawled toward her, wanting to get his sword and take her head.
"If you were sorry, you wouldn't have done it!" he spat.
"Jessenia," she whispered, her eyes still lost. "I'm so sorry."
He stopped.
She covered her face with her hands. "Why did you show me all that? You said one memory."
"Show you? You took it!"
Then he wondered how. How could she make his life pass by to the degree of reliving it?