Evermore

  Evermore

  an AROTAS novel

  BY

  Amy Miles

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Miles Books, LLC.

  http://www.AmyMilesBooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1495426773

  For my readers,

  A special thank you to anyone who has picked up one of my books and given me a chance. This novella is my gift to those of you who have fallen in love with Roseline, Gabriel, Sadie, Nicolae and Fane. These characters are more than people on a page. They are my friends. I laugh with them, fight with them and mourn each passing.

  An author is truly only as good as her readers and each of you are very special to me.

  Thank you for your support.

  ONE

  I pledge my heart, my life, my soul to you on this day and all the days to come. My life, bonded to yours, if you will have me.

  Roseline wraps her arms tightly about herself, feeling as if the mists that cling to the castle grounds have seeped through the walls and closed in on her, yet still she does not turn away from the window. There is something soothing about the rain. The dreariness of it calls to her.

  She has avoided the sun since Gabriel’s passing, avoided everyone except Elias, but even he has gone away. She knew it would happen eventually. Surely he has other tasks to attend to than keeping vigil by her side.

  The rain pattering against the pane of glass before her is rhythmic and soothing, barely more than a gentle sprinkle now. It is far better than the torrential downpours that have left the castle grounds sodden for nearly three days. Leaning her forehead against the window, she closes her eyes to the ache in her chest that has become all too familiar.

  Gabriel is gone. Fane is gone. Nothing else matters.

  She knows that she should go to visit their graves, but she can’t bring herself to do it. To do so would be to admit to the horrible finality of it all.

  A single thought plagues her relentlessly: I am alone.

  Roseline stiffens when a knock sounds at the door, knowing without opening it that Sadie has brought her yet another plate of food. They have begun to stack up outside her door. At least the dogs are happy with her lack of interest in eating.

  Roseline sighs, slowly shaking her head. Not completely alone.

  “Go away,” she whispers, knowing her friend will have no trouble hearing her through the thick wooden door.

  Since Sadie’s transformation not long ago, she has done remarkably well with adapting to her new skin. Roseline easily remembers the first few months after she was turned, remembers the confusion, the fear, and the endless questions about the unknown. Thankfully, Sadie will never truly have to experience all of that. Not as long as Roseline is around.

  But I haven’t been around, have I? she thinks, silently chiding herself. She can’t hide up in her tower forever and she knows it.

  She hears Sadie’s feet shuffling in the hallway and closes her eyes to still her growing frustration. Sadie means well, but Roseline has no desire to chat about her feelings or eat anything piled on top of Sadie’s lunch plate. Claudia may be an excellent cook, but the idea of food turns Roseline’s stomach.

  Sadie has taken to wearing hunter garb, finding herself at home in the tightfitting black uniforms and thick-soled combat boots. If Roseline could muster the effort to care, she would complement her friend on the new look. It really does suit her. Far better than most of the wild outfits Sadie has donned in the past. The worst was the cowgirl costume. Roseline still has no clue what she was thinking.

  “I’m worried about you,” Sadie says back, just as softly. “We all are.”

  Roseline pulls away from the window, feeling the damp from the moisture clinging to the pane of foggy glass upon her forehead as she draws her knees up into her chest and balances on the plush seat cushion. Why can’t they just leave me alone?

  The castle is filled with people. Many immortals followed them home from Canada for the funeral. Others came from the continent to pay their respects. Every spare room has been turned into sleeping quarters. Hunters now claim every couch, bed, and rows of makeshift cots set up in the great hall below. You can’t walk a straight line without tripping over someone, and the line to use the bathroom never seems to diminish.

  Her home has been overrun. Not that she minds having the hunters here. In fact, if circumstances had been different, she would have welcomed them, but now she feels trapped. She longs to roam the silent, dreary halls in peace. To wallow in her mourning, but instead, she is confined to her tower, her only tiny slice of privacy.

  Nicolae will have his hands full with training the new immortals, hunters who chose endless life over sure death on the battlefield. She knows he is waiting for her, needing her advice and experience to help him teach his men to deal with the new urges that they are helpless to ignore. A man’s soul and will power can only do so much to combat the need for blood. No, not the need, the longing.

  She will be a crucial part of guiding these new immortals, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Not yet. So Nicolae trains them as if they were still human, placing a crossbow or ax in their hand and setting them to train in the courtyard below to keep their minds busy. It won’t work for long, but at least it is something.

  Not all the fallen hunters chose this fate, and in this moment, staring out over the sodden castle grounds and feeling time stretch infinitely before her, she does not blame them. There is great honor in a good death. She, of all people, knows the burden of bearing immortality. Time never ends. It flows and taunts her until she wants to double over and shriek, tearing strands of hair from her scalp, but she does not. To do so would be to slip down a slope of insanity she fears she might never be able to climb back out of.

  “I just need some time,” she whispers instead.

  “I know.” Sadie sighs and leans against the doorframe. Roseline can hear her trailing her nail idly over the grains of wood in the door. “When you’re ready, you know you can talk to me, right?”

  Roseline clamps her eyes tightly shut. She has known Sadie just as long as Gabriel, and with her friend’s presence comes a flood of memories, of moments stolen from her that she will never have. It’s not Sadie’s fault, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

  She should have had a life with Gabriel, a life beyond the vows they spoke in the snow-covered woods, as binding as a human’s marital pledge. Elias said Gabriel was destined to be a protector, a guardian. He may have been meant for those things for mankind, but he was meant for them even more for her. They were bonded and that is not something someone so easily moves on from.

  She fully intended to spend her remaining years in Gabriel’s arms. No place would have brought her greater joy, but it was not meant to be. Fate has seen to that.

  I had two chances at love and both have been lost to me.

  It is hard to stop the tears that threaten to fall once they begin, but somehow she manages. Roseline has never liked crying, never liked feeling weakness. Living as Vladimir’s prisoner for so many years taught her to never let anyone see her pain or risk it being exploited.

  “Yeah,” she mumbles back to Sadie, realizing her friend is waiting for an answer. She clenches her arms tighter around her knees. “I know.”

  “Good, ‘cause I do actually know how to shut up and listen. It’s happened once… maybe twice in my life, but I can be a g
ood listener when I need to be.”

  Roseline’s lip twitches. “You’re babbling.”

  “I know. Got you talking though, didn’t I?”

  She can hear the pride in her friend’s voice and almost smirks. “Good-bye, Sadie.”

  “Fine. I’m going, but you know I’m coming back.”

  She does. Sadie has come to check on her regularly for the past several days. When she first rises from her slumber at Nicolae’s side, with each meal that passes and before she returns to her bed, long after the moon has taken up its residence in the sky.

  Nicolae has not given up attending to his uncle’s affairs and estate, but he has been spending an awful lot of time here in Sadie’s room. Roseline doesn’t care. They are free to do whatever they want.

  The one thing that does mildly surprise her though is how accepting William has become of their tryst. Perhaps his budding infatuation with the fair-haired Claudia has helped to distract him a bit.

  Roseline breathes a sigh of relief when she hears Sadie’s footsteps retreat down the hall. She can hear William calling out in a hushed tone, inquiring as to whether his sister managed to make any headway. Roseline raises a hand and unlatches the window to drown out their conversation.

  She doesn’t want pity, not even from her friends. She just wants time to come to an end or to rewind entirely so that she can change fate.

  Both of the men that she has loved died in front of her and she was incapable of saving either of them. No one should be forced to bear such a burden, especially with an eternity of mourning stretching out before her.

  The air is crisp against her face as she leans forward and breathes deep. The rain pelts down at her, but she hardly notices. There is a scent on the air that has ensnared her senses.

  Pressing her cheeks between the panes of glass, she breathes deep, closing her eyes to focus. Elias has returned.

  Her eyes fly open wide as a whirlwind of questions besiege her. Why hasn’t he come to see me? Is he afraid of disturbing me? And why does he linger on the castle grounds in such dismal weather? Surely his feathers will grow heavy with moisture.

  She leans back and frowns. Or does water roll off them like the back of a duck.

  Chiding herself for such a random and utterly pointless thought, Roseline rises with hardly a sound as the cushion returns to its former shape behind her. She shakes off the ratty, quilted blanket she has wrapped about her shoulders and lets it fall carelessly to the floor, pooling at her feet.

  It smells of tears, her only source of comfort when no one else was there to hold her.

  I have to see him. She is at the door in two bounds. The door rattles against the wall as she thrusts it open and darts down the hall and descends to the second floor. Her footsteps are silent as she weaves through the corridors. For hundreds of years she has walked these torch-lit halls. She knows this castle’s secrets better than anyone.

  The woven tapestries that hang over the stone walls flap behind her as she runs full out. She startles a hunter as she rounds a corner and leaps over his back while he kneels to tie his shoes. He splutters and flails backward, landing with a pained thump. She doesn’t call out an apology or slow to see if he is hurt.

  She can feel a cold draft winding its way down the hall, curling toward her from just up ahead. She takes an immediate left and leaps through an open archway, the shattered window among the many yet to be replaced from her battle with Vladimir. Her hair whips against her cheek as she plummets from the second floor. Tossing out her hands she lands on a clay tile rooftop in a silent crouch, perfectly balanced along the very edge. Within the span of a heartbeat she leaps and swings from awning to awning, crossing the perimeter of the courtyard with grace and ease.

  Hunters turn and gawk at her as she releases the final awning and spirals to the courtyard below. Water splashes around her boots as she lands.

  “Roseline? What the heck are you doing?”

  She turns at the sound. “Not now, Nicolae.”

  “Wait!” he calls after her, starting forward, but she sprints away, weaving effortlessly through the stunned group of hunters. They scatter in attempt to clear a path for her, but she carves her own, knocking men aside. The sound of clattering bows tumbling from a table and the clanging of swords slipping from their positions as they lean upon the wall echoes behind her, but she doesn’t turn back.

  Guilt needles at her as she hears their cries, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t. Her need to see Elias has risen to obsessive heights.

  Why has he returned? I don’t understand. I thought he was gone for good.

  Pumping her arms, Roseline leans forward into her sprint. She races through the obliterated front gate and leaps down the steps, hardly noticing the char marks along the walls left over from their siege, or the hulking remains of what was once a grand wooden door that kept the outside world from entering Bran Castle.

  Halfway down, she grows impatient and springs off the steps. The soles of her boots sink into the moist ground, leaving a deep imprint as she kicks off. Trees blur around her as she flies over the grounds, leaving the muddy stone paths and heading out over the stunted late-winter grass.

  A wooden building looms off to her right, its roof sunken and misshapen from years of disuse and poor repair. It sits not far from the water’s edge of a small pond, the surface pockmarked from droplets of rain. Mists coil around the water-logged banks, making it difficult to make out where the water ends and the earth begins.

  This place holds a myriad of memories. She has a history with this building, both terrifying and filled with exquisite promise. A place where she learned the meaning of evil and later the true essence of love. She turns away, refusing to let the past encroach back in.

  Atop the crest of a hill, she pauses to listen, breathing deep. Her hair has become damp, plastering to her as water trails down from the crown of her head and into her eyes. Wild strands stick to her cheeks, tangling with her eyelashes. Her nostrils flare out as she searches beyond the fresh scent of the falling rains for Elias.

  He is here, but where?

  Turning her head, she closes her eyes and discovers his location. He has gone to Gabriel’s tomb. She should have known.

  As she heads in that direction, flitting under the willow tree where the seeds of friendship with Fane were first formed, she finds herself suddenly terrified to take another step. His body is out there too, buried beside Gabriel. She had insisted on them being laid to rest side by side, not that there was anyone left to deny her the right to place them within the Enescue tomb. She is sole owner of Bran Castle now. Her word is law.

  Her throat begins to constrict as she slows to a walk. Her hands tremble and she clutches them tightly to her stomach, praying the butterflies swarming there will dissipate.

  Why has Elias come here? To grieve? The great angel has carried the burden of Gabriel’s loss with poise and silent dignity. Roseline has never heard him cry nor show any hint of the anger she knows he feels. His voice has never wavered when he spoke of his fallen companions, neither Seneh nor Gabriel. Not like her voice does when she speaks of her loss.

  As she walks beneath the canopy of trees, she hardly notices the rain or the sound of her feet sloshing along the ground where puddles rise up before her. She is lost in thought, trapped within the torment of memories.

  Elias’s scent is much stronger now. She closes her eyes, breathing deeply. The mausoleum stands before her, appearing diminished in the small valley below. The mists cling to the ground like a carpet, making the entrance of the tomb appear all the more ominous.

  The door is open.

  Roseline’s knees quake as she takes a step and is forced to pause. Her heartbeat thunders in her ears. What is Elias doing? He knows I had that door permanently sealed.

  Morbid curiosity mingles with her growing ire as she shakes off her unease and bounds down the hill. She comes up short before the gaping entry, her chest rising and falling.

  “Elias?” she calls, wincing
at the tremor in her voice. She clears her throat and takes another step, feeling the rigidity of stone beneath her boots now. There is a rustling within the tomb, but it does not sound like angel feathers.

  Her unease turns to concern. Has someone attacked Elias and broken in? If so, for what purpose?

  Roseline braces, ready to spring forward, when a tall shadow emerges from the depths of the mausoleum. A thick dusting of gray covers every inch of the man, matting his hair and eyelashes, coating his lips. His fine black clothes are streaked and filthy.

  She feels faint as she takes a step back, clutching her hand to her chest. Ice-blue eyes, filled with life and love, stare back at her.

  “Gabriel!”

  TWO

  He’s alive! Even as this thought flits through Roseline’s mind, she struggles to grasp it. It’s impossible. I saw him die, felt his heart stop beating.

  “Rose?”

  Oh God! He even has Gabriel’s voice. What sorcery is this? She backs away farther, wary of an imminent attack, although she can sense none. Her time spent in Lucien’s dungeon has taught her not to trust her own eyes, that things are not always as they seem.

  “You’re dead,” she says, shaking her head as he reaches out for her. “You’re not real.”

  His smile nearly makes her weep. It feels so familiar. She thought she would never see it again, that she would spend an eternity branding it into her memory so it would not be lost to the past. Now here he stands before her like a mirage, only to be lost to the winds if she were to reach for him.

  “I am real, Rose.” He stretches out his hand to her, waiting patiently. His gaze flits over her face, steady and calm. Her nostrils flare as she breathes in his scent, listening to the rapid thumps echoing in his chest.

  It’s him!

  Gabriel cries out as she leaps into his arms, crushing him with a ferocity that she didn’t know she possessed. A low chuckle rises from his throat, echoing through his chest against her ear. She clamps her eyes shut against the tears that spill from between her damp lashes. She never wants to let go again. Whatever magic or miracle has brought him to back to her doesn’t matter. Not now.