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AJAX
The thing about controlling something that’s supposed to be finite—like time—when already damn-near immortal, is that the longer I lived, the less it meant. Seconds blended into hours, into weeks, months, years, and those became decades that morphed into centuries.
Living over a thousand years could make even the most appreciative vampire a little bored, but having a power like mine—being able to stop and start time at will—was turning me…apathetic.
Had it really been a thousand years if I’d spent five hundred of them in stasis with my brothers? Adding in all the time I’d passed in my little bubble of solitude while pausing it for others, it was probably well over a thousand, actually.
I felt fuckingancient.
I stretched my legs out before me, crossed my booted feet, and leaned back against the wood slats of the too-small bench under the lamppost outside Edgemont Memorial, which had become my habit these last months. There was so much emotion on the faces of the humans coming and going through the glass doors of the hospital that I couldn't help but feel whatever they were manifesting.
If I were my brother Saint, I’d be able to project a little calm into the new father walking by with his partner, pushing their new baby toward a waiting car in a wheelchair that looked like it might fly away at any second with the amount of balloons tied to the handles. Not sure he was capable of projecting much more than pain right now, though.
A smile curved my lips at the careful way the father put the infant into the back of the sedan, handling the giant plastic case—shit, they saidcar seatnow—with the utmost reverence. I could see the thrumming of his elevated pulse at his neck from the twenty feet that separated us, and smell the complicated mix of his fear and elation on the night breeze.
How did it feel to create life? To be responsible for something so helpless and yet so meaningful? Not that my life wasn’t meaningful. It was. I existed not only in service to my king, but also my chosen brothers, fighting the battles that kept our kind—vampires—alive.
A steady, familiar heartbeat approached from my left, and I didn’t bother turning to look, or reaching for a weapon. It was Talon, the youngest of my brothers, and at least he was in human form.
He took the seat next to me and crossed his ankle over his knee, resting his elbows back on the highest rung on the bench. “Figured I’d find you here.”
“So you have.” I scratched my chin through my dark beard. Talon was the only one out of the six of us—fuck, make that five after Samuel’s betrayal—that I didn’t have to fake a smile for or force a quippy remark. “You could have called, you know.”
“The convenience of modern technology still…annoys me. Everyone is in such a damned hurry. It’s all about instant gratification.” He glanced my way, arching a dark blond brow over a Nordic-blue eye. “Should I be worried that you’re hanging with the terminals again?”
“Look at you, mastering modern slang.” I grinned.
“You holding the world at bay while we caught up definitely helped.” He turned back toward the hospital with a smile. Out of all of us—Zachariah, Dagon, myself, and especially Saint—he fit into this modern era the easiest, but since his gift was shapeshifting, Talon had always been the quickest to adapt to new situations.
I envied him for that.
“Was it the Marvel marathon that helped the most?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest, the leather of my jacket tugging slightly over the Sigs holstered along the sides of my ribs. May nights were a touch too warm for outerwear, but I’d learned that humans tended to freak the fuck out when they saw me strapped. Turned out that at some point in the last few centuries, everyone had stopped walking around with swords. “Or maybe the hours and hours of historical documentaries we watched to catch up on the five centuries we spent in stasis?”
“It was the National Geographic specials.” He shrugged. “So many new animal forms to try out.” He could only turn into animals he’d seen, and since the first part of our lives had been spent in Europe and what was now Russia, he now had a wealth of new species to study and scare the shit out of us with.
“The Komodo dragon you pulled off yesterday evening at repast made Zachariah jump.” I studied the new father as he finished packing items into the trunk of the car, then led his partner to her seat with a look I recognized as pure love.
“Dagon didn’t laugh.” Talon’s brow furrowed.
“What, is my laughter not good enough for you now?” I teased, glancing his way and noting the tense set of his angular, aristocratic features.
“He’s worrying me.”
“Samuel has been his best friend for two hundred years. He’s bound to be more than a little fucked up.” My stomach twisted at what ourbrotherhad put us through.
Samuel had convinced us all that his twin, Saint, had been dangerously close to losing himself to bloodmadness, so we’d put ourselves into stasis, hoping that a few centuries of rest could help us save him from becoming the very thing we’d been brought together to hunt.
“Aren’t we all.” Talon sighed.
We’d spent centuries at rest before our new king—Alek—had ordered our rising to fight against the Sons of Honor, an organization of humans whose only mission was to slay supernaturals. Then Samuel had kidnapped our princess, Avianna, nearly forced her into marrying him and even torturing her, all while blaming it on Saint.
And when we’d discovered his treachery, and Hawke, one of our king’s Onyx Assassins, rescued his mate, Samuel disappeared into the damned night, leaving us all mindfucked and Saint…
Who the hell even knew what Saint was thinking?
Even Alek, who had the power of mind control, was giving Saint the respect of some space for the time being.
