Nightbred(61)

A parade of mortals and immortals began flashing through Jamys’s thoughts: a slave-collared thrall, the leader of a slave rebellion, a haughty courtier, a devout Templar, a brooding monk, a defiant sailor. Each of the males had the same brutally handsome and eerily familiar face, one that grew gaunt or sleek by turns but never aged. Each carried the hammer of a smith, and in their cold gray eyes an eternal fire burned.

Jamys saw the sailor become an avenging angel, and the angel a secretive explorer, and the explorer a reclusive farmer. As the man changed, so did his garments, becoming more fitted and modern as he changed lives again to work as a train conductor, a wealthy businessman, a laughing showman, a dreadlocked common laborer, a bald-headed janitor.

Jamys finally recognized the man as he shifted into the casual garb of the sailboat owner, and reached deeper.

The immortal had lived hundreds of different lives, changing himself to suit the demands of each new era, but he had never been happy. He carried a terrible burden, one he shared with his human kin, who had slowly dwindled away over the centuries. Something else had happened to the immortal, was yet happening, something wondrous and terrible that had sent him back out into the world. He had to bring together the last of his mortal bloodline with the sons he had sired so long ago, the three medieval knights made immortal like him—

Jamys staggered as he was forced out of the professor’s mind by a surge of power unlike any Kyn ability he had ever encountered.

Gifford’s eyes grew unfocused. “You are clever, boy,” he said, his voice dropping to a resonant baritone. “But I have wiped clean from the mortal’s mind everything he knew of Hollander and the Horde. You will learn nothing from him.”

Christian stepped back. “I know you.” Her voice shook as she added, “You were in the tomb with me.”

Gifford’s eyes glowed as he turned his head toward her, but the voice Jamys heard speak next came from inside his own mind. “Live, and you kill a hundred, a thousand, a million.” He looked at Jamys, and the voice inside his head grew icy. “Kill her, and you shall save them.”

Jamys stepped closer, and gazed into the historian’s eyes. “Touch her,” he said clearly, “and you will never again live another life on this earth.”

Gifford began to laugh and shake as his eyes rolled back into his head. A moment later he sank to the floor.

Christian grabbed him in time to keep him from hitting his head. “Okay, I think the professor’s had enough.”

Jamys crouched down beside her and checked the mortal. Gifford appeared unconscious, but his breathing was regular and his heart beat steadily. “He is asleep.”

Christian picked up the journal Gifford had dropped along with a page that had fallen out of it, handing the journal to Jamys before she unfolded the page. “This is a map. Looks pretty old, too. No X marking the spot, but there’s a ship’s course marked on it from what looks like Jamaica to Florida.” She showed it to him.

He eyed the date and some words scribbled at the bottom of the map. “This had to be the final course of the Golden Horde. The pirate must have drawn it for the priest before he died.”

“If we follow the ship’s course, maybe we won’t need an X. Let me see that journal again.” When Jamys handed it to her, she turned to the front leaf before she went still.

Jamys inspected the rectangle of red-bordered black paper in the front of the journal. In the center were two inverted, overlapping scarlet triangles with the letters LHS stamped in gold across them. “What is that?”

“It’s a bookplate. Collectors use them to tag their personal libraries.” She closed the journal and stood, her shoulders rigid. “I know the guy who sold this to Gifford.”

“How could you know this man?”

“Easy.” She gave him a bleak look. “I used to work for him.”

* * *

Once the nightclub had been cleared and closed, armed guards emerged from the tunnels to take their assigned positions throughout the stronghold. In the largest of the conference rooms Burke met with the mortal household staff to brief them, while Aldan assembled the garrison in the lists to do the same.

Lucan remained in his office to review the last week of video recordings from the security cameras, in hopes of finding some clue as to the identity of the Kyn who had tampered with his mind and taken control of his body. He saw no one and nothing unusual, save for the most recently arrived group of refugees, who were now being kept under guard at a nearby resort hotel.

He looked up as his captain and his tresora entered. “What have you learned from your people?”