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when I attempt to heal them. It is as if most of their bodies are encased in mineral, hardened and impassable, while I have access only to a single part each night. Some nights it is the same part. I can enter an arm or leg and concentrate there, but the rest of their systems are blocked off to me."

"I don't understand."

Gregori frowned and rubbed at his chin. "Usually when I heal, I can enter an entire body and flow through it with ease, moving through every part, but when I enter Razvan or Ivory, only a small part of their bodies are accessible. It changes with each night."

"What could cause that?" Mikhail wondered.

"I don't know, but I'd like to find out. The soil has always aided healing. And when we're wounded and tired it rejuvenates us, but we've always used a healing spirit to go inside our bodies and repair from the inside out. Something is repairing their bodies, something other than me. It seems to be a slow process, but it is keeping them both alive. I think Ivory could have been saved, but she chose to bind her fate with Razvan's. She is fully merged with him and wherever he is encased, so is she."

"A type of magic? Something Xavier might have come up with?" Mikhail ventured.

Gregori shook his head. "There is no taint of evil. Rather it smells ancient to me, as if they have awoken something from long ago, before our time, and it works to save them. And you know me, I don't trust things we've never encountered. We are a people who have seen much over time."

"True," Mikhail said, "but not all."

"I need to understand how things work. I would like to speak with Syndil. She has been cleansing the earth of toxins for us and is very connected to the soil. I have never seen this, and I don't understand how they are surviving, let alone healing. Nor do I have an explanation for how their bodies are segmented. Perhaps she can explain it to me."

Mikhail frowned. "I don't want her to feel the agony they suffer. It is difficult enough for the two of us."

"She might speak to the earth and hear the answer. Perhaps if I understood, I could aid them, reduce the pain in some way."

"I'll talk to her," Mikhail agreed reluctantly. "Both Natalya and Lara are anxious to help, but I've asked them to stay away until we are certain Ivory and Razvan will live."

"I have no doubt they will live, Mikhail," Gregori said. "I just do not know how."

"You realize Ivory did this once before on her own, centuries ago. There was no one there to hold her spirit, to keep her safe as she keeps Razvan to her."

"She must have been in the soil hundreds of years," Gregori said. "Her body didn't knit back together perfectly. I tried to ease the scars internally as well as externally." He ran both hands through his hair in a gesture of weariness. "She took great care, or perhaps it was Mother Earth, to make certain she could have children. It is the one area where she has no scarring of any kind, and yet there was evidence that even across the womb, they had hacked her in half."

For one moment the air around them crackled with energy and then Mikhail took a breath, bringing himself under control. "I can't see how her brothers could ever have chosen to give up their souls knowing the vampires and Xavier conspired to kill her."

"They blamed Draven."

"It was an excuse and you know it. All of us have lived with betrayal and loss, with grief. They were not near the end; they made a deliberate choice. They have painstakingly pulled together vampires into a league to fight against us, and you know that has taken centuries of planning and even more time to implement. They have also allied themselves with our greatest enemy, the very mage who gave Ivory to the vampires."

"We will know what really happened when Ivory chooses to tell us." Gregori stretched and tried to stand. Dizzy from lack of blood he sank back down. "In the meantime, we can only hold to this course we are on and work to help the pair survive."

"They may be the key to destroying Xavier."

"I think you may be right, Mikhail."

The prince offered his wrist to his son-in-law. "Take what I freely offer. And Gregori, this time you heed what I tell you.