She began to scatter the ashes in earnest, taking up handfuls and flinging them out over the plain, letting them go where they would, anywhere Jeremy wanted to go. Tokala bent and helped her, reading her intent, until all that was left was a dark imprint in the ground. She knew wind, rain and grass growth would eradicate that soon. Nature kept going, no matter what.

She wanted to get up, and she did, but the world was so very bright. Oddly, it felt like she was floating. She passed her knuckles over her cheeks, taking away the tears, and knew they had made their trails through an ash coating, because Tokala’s face was marked with it as well. The ashes had swirled around them on a capricious wind, as if Jeremy had decided to play one last boyish trick on them.

Turning, she made it several steps to the Jeep before her knees went out from under her.

Despite the sunlight that could flood the front room, Mal was as close to it as he could be, standing at the top of the stairs that led to the lower bedroom level. From here he could see the porch, and it was like watching a relay. Kohana got her out of the Jeep, and Bidzil carried her up the stairs. Chumani took her then, carried her through the door, which Chayton held open. When the woman brought her to Mal, he saw his Irish flower was shivering, and coated with ash. He should have said no. He should have been the cruelest bastard in the history of the world, and told her no.

He took her immediately. She felt too light, too insubstantial, and it worried him, badly, because she should be no different from when she’d left. It was as if her spirit, the part of her that kept her weighted to the earth, real and alive, so touchable, had left her. That alarmed him even more.

“It’s done,” she whispered. “Oh, Mal. It’s all done.”

He didn’t want to see how many layers of meaning she attached to that. Kohana had come in, was speaking to him, something about a bath.

“Have it brought below. I’ll bathe her and put her to bed. She’ll sleep with me.”

He hated so many things at the moment. He hated he couldn’t be there with her. He hated that Jeremiah had asked her to do this and yet even he, as much as he cared about the girl, couldn’t deny the boy’s last request. To die alone was a terrible thing, and Jeremiah’s life had been filled with too many terrible things. But as strong as she’d proven herself, he wasn’t sure she was strong enough for this.

Kohana’s impotent anger simmered in his eyes, a reflection of Mal’s. The other hands had worried, too, coming out to see her off like that, helpless to do anything else.

Now, seeing nothing in her mind but that hazy, numb fog, he was sure he’d made the wrong call, that he should have denied Jeremiah. But the boy would still be gone, and his mind would have called out to her at the last, tearing her to pieces.

His angry phone call to Danny, shortly after Elisa’s arrival, haunted him now. You didn’t tell me the girl’s life depends on theirs.

The other four fledglings had a future. They were well on their way to not needing her any longer, and in a handful of weeks they’d be gone. In her mind, he saw she already believed herself to be completely alone, and he saw no sure way to convince her otherwise. It was the first time in a long time he’d felt the kind of fear that was overwhelming her now.

The fear of losing something that could never be replaced. A wound that could never be healed, such that whether mortal, vampire or servant, life was no longer a blessing, but an agony of memory.

40

MIAH and Nerida had left last night, a week after William and Matthew. Mal spent the first part of his evening overseeing the dismantling of the fledglings’ enclosure. The materials wouldn’t be wasted. They’d be put to use for the other cats. He wished everything had such a practical solution.

Despite the mildness of Florida and South American winters, Elisa had knitted all the fledglings sweaters, caps and mittens to remember her by. All four young vampires had worn the full ensemble when they got on the plane. She’d given each one a tight, long hug before they boarded, even blinked out a few tears. Then she’d gone back to being a ghost. A ghost maid, haunting and cleaning others’ messes for eternity.

A few days after Jeremiah’s death, she’d emerged in her apron and work dress, and resumed her duties with quiet efficiency, no matter how he or anybody else tried to bully her into doing otherwise. Until their departure, she’d continued her schedule with the fledglings, including their nightly visits to the house. By the time they left, they were all successfully sleeping in the subterranean guest bedrooms during the daylight hours, though Mal and the staff had temporarily added padlocks to those doors, a measure that would have to be employed by Lord Marshall and Lord Mason to protect servants until it was certain the violent transition seizures had passed, or the fledglings had learned enough control to manage the episodes themselves.

Elisa helped him and them in whatever way needed in preparations for their new lives. When Nadia and Marshall visited, as well as Lord Brian, Enrique and Amara, she conducted herself appropriately, such that only Nadia detected a difference. Once Mal pulled her aside, explained the situation, the woman was even more kind and concerned, but unfortunately she didn’t have Elisa’s unique ability to penetrate the thicket around a broken heart. Apparently, neither did he, damn it all.

He was her Master. He could be in her mind, but now he understood Lord Marshall’s frustration. In her grief for a child, a woman could go somewhere that not even a vampire seemed to be able to reach. And Elisa’s grief was more than Jeremiah’s—Jeremy’s—death. Throughout the events with Victor, Willis, Leonidas, the stress of being thrown into a new environment and of enduring her first vampire gathering as a third-mark, she’d held herself together. Now they were gone, that was all done, and in her mind there was nothing. She was nothing.

Right after Jeremiah’s death, during the bath he’d given her, she’d been little more than a doll, responding with short answers to his questions, begging for sleep when he wanted her to say more. He hadn’t had the heart to push her, and so she’d slept. And slept. It had been that way ever since. The couple times he’d tried a physical approach, she would arouse under his touch because he knew her body, enough to bring her to climax, but he wasn’t touching her heart or soul. Afterward, she curled into a ball and tears trickled down her face because of that emptiness. He’d pull her close anyway, coil his strength around her, try to get her to talk, to feel. But she just retreated into automatic responses and domestic efficiency until he wanted to tear the house down, create a complete wreck of it to see if it would elicit a different, enduring response.

Elisa’s vague smiles and frustratingly helpful behavior were like a branch cut from a tree. For a few weeks, if watered, it remained green and vibrant, deceiving the viewer into thinking it was still alive, still attached to the tree. But now that the fledglings had gone, he knew what was going to happen. She was going to begin to wither, rapidly.

Unless he could figure out how to reach her.

“Damn it.” He swore hard enough the tomcats scattered off his desk. Going to the French doors, he stared into the night. She was asleep now, of course. When she wasn’t doing her chores, that was what she did. She didn’t want to eat with the hands or do anything else. Even the promise that they would visit both sets of fledglings in a month or two elicited little more than a distant smile out of her. He didn’t know what to do with her.

“Are you going to send her home?”

Kohana stood in the hallway, in the shadows. Mal remembered the night she’d come there in her nightgown, daring him to chase her.

“So she can be Danny’s problem?”

“Well, I guess from your perspective, that would be tit for tat, right? Seeing as that’s how you felt when Danny sent her here.”

He narrowed his gaze. “Trying to start a fight, old man?”

“You’re older,” Kohana said automatically, but he pinched the bridge of his nose, an uncharacteristic sign of frustration. “She dusted today, Mal. Dusted. I told her not to, not to do anything, and she looks at me with those wide eyes and says in this quiet, even voice, ‘What should I do, then?’ How the hell can you answer a question like that?”

“She’ll work through it, Kohana,” Mal said with an assurance he didn’t feel. “We’re just frustrated because we don’t yet know how best to help. Sometimes all we can do is wait and be here. Be around her.”

“You can do more.”

Mal frowned at the entirely unsubtle accusation. “Really? Enlighten me. What can I do? Turn back time, change all of it for her? Refuse to let Jeremiah take his life, force him to suffer, just to make her feel better?” Which, in hindsight, he damn well would have done, if he thought it would. It proved his own mind wasn’t in the right place right now.

“She fell in love with you, Mal. I’m not saying it’s the deep kind of love that two people need to get through something this hard, but it was a start toward it. And it’s all she’s got. Use that. It’s the thing you have that none of us do. Bring her back with that. Give her hope. Tell her you love her.”

“I’m a vampire, Kohana.”

Mal lifted a brow as Kohana slammed his fist into the wall hard enough to make the pictures jump. One fell to the floor with a clatter of broken glass.

“I don’t give a damn about vampire rules, and I have eyes, just like every damn person on this island does. You love her. You fell in love with her the first time she wouldn’t back down from you, no matter how much the odds were stacked against her. This isn’t the vampire world. It’s just us. Whatever we have to pretend to be to the whole damned world, fine, but we don’t lie to ourselves here. Not ever. You told me that, long ago.

“As far as being a vampire, and what that means to the two of you, that can help, too. That’s part of what makes her tick, right? The thing that made Danny’s mother pick her, and all that.” He took another hop forward. Even with the limp, when he drew himself up, Kohana showed the blood he carried from his shaman father. As well as the blood of his great-grandfather, the chief from that long-ago Wild West show. The voice that came from him now drew from them both, and every ancestor in between.