Until the Sun Falls from the Sky(122)

“What else could it be?” Aunt Nadia replied to my mother.

“There’s no such thing as lifemates. That’s romance novel balderdash,” Aunt Kate proclaimed.

“Sounds fishy to me too,” Aunt Millicent agreed.

“Well, it doesn’t sound fishy to me. She’s marking him and only Lucien can do that. She can talk to him with her mind. That’s never happened, not from a mortal. And she’s dreaming about The Sentence,” Aunt Nadia said.

The Sentence? What on earth was that?

I moved to the wall to better hide myself and decided to full on eavesdrop since they weren’t talking about Katrina, they were talking about me.

Me being lifemates with Lucien.

I read romance novels, loads of them, and lifemates were what some of those books called the union  s between immortals or mortals and immortals.

The concept was, there was one being on all the earth through all of time that belonged to the immortal. She was destined for him (it was usually a him) even so far as created for him.

And of all the millions and billions of beings on the planet through time, he had to find her. Through all his centuries and sometimes millennia of living, he had to search out his one true love, the other half of him and bind himself to her.

Of course, he found her. They usually had lots of hot sex. Though how they got to the sex when all the rest of the time they were bickering or there was some huge misunderstanding or they had to fight against some grave evil or he’d done her some wrong for which she hated him, I’d never know. Still, it worked.

Eventually she soothed his savage soul, he’d find some way to make her immortal if she already wasn’t and they lived happily ever after for eternity.

Aunt Kate was right. Balderdash.

“What do you think, Avery?” my mother asked and my eyes went to the study door which, I noticed belatedly, was open and no one was inside.

Where was Lucien?

“I think I’ll respectfully decline participation in this conversation,” Avery murmured.

“Oh come on Avery. You have to speak up,” Aunt Nadia urged. “Mortals don’t have those powers. Leah didn’t even have those powers until she met Lucien.”

“She’d had the dreams,” Aunt Millicent pointed out.

“Okay, she had the dreams,” Aunt Nadia allowed. “But the rest? It’s crazy! Sounds total lifemate to me.”

“Can you imagine? My Leah, lifemate to the Great Lucien. She’s already famous but she’ll be a legend.” Mom sounded ecstatic.

I was famous?

I didn’t have time to ponder my celebrity, Aunt Kate spoke.

“I hope you jest, Lydia. I hope to God you jest,” Aunt Kate whispered but her whisper was strange.

It was angry and it was afraid.

“Katie –” Aunt Nadia started.

“You’d wish that on your daughter, to build a legend?” Aunt Kate hissed.

There was silence.

Then Mom replied, “Kate, I just want to see Leah happy.”

“Happy for what? A few years? Until they cotton on, they hunt them down, they torture them and they hand down The Sentence?”

“Kate –” Avery said gently.

“No, Avery, no,” Aunt Kate cut him off. “If such a fool thing as lifemates exists and if Leah is Lucien’s lifemate, I hope she doesn’t figure it out. And I especially hope he doesn’t. There is no way the Great Lucien will denounce her. Not ever. And Leah’s so stubborn, she wouldn’t denounce him either. He’d burn and while he did he and the rest of us would watch her swing.”

My breath stuck in my throat, stars exploded in my eyes and I thought I might faint.

My dream, the heat I felt, the noose around my neck, Lucien telling me he was in it. Was that what it was? A premonition of this sentence thing?

Lucien burning. Me swinging!

Oh my God!

“For a month, Lydia,” Aunt Kate went on, “you and Nadia, Lana, Natalie, Kendra, Melissa, you’ve all been after me to let you speak to Leah, to let you disobey the wishes of a vampire to make sure she’s all right. And now you want her life to be at risk?”

They wanted to speak to me? Even Kendra?

My cousin Kendra and I fought before I left because she couldn’t find that kickass belt I loved so much that I wanted to bring with me but I’d lent to her. She was always losing my stuff (like my kickass belt). Why I let her borrow it, I’d never know.

“Do you think Lucien would let anything happen to Leah?” Mom asked, sounding uppity and taking me out of my thoughts about my belt. “You saw them when we walked in. Have you ever, once, seen Lucien laugh?”

More silence. I guess they hadn’t.

Wow.

Mom went on, “We agreed to this because this is bigger than all of us. This is huge.”