Dinner was a strangely comfortable affair at a nice restaurant less than a block from La Sagrada Familia. They spoke little other than for Fionn to ask how Rose was doing after the conversation with her parents.
He’d slept on the train the rest of the way to Dijon, and then Rose had fallen asleep on the train to Montpellier. A little more rested, they’d chatted on the train to Barcelona about her life in Maryland and she’d made a game out of how Fionn ably deflected personal questions.
Apparently, his sharing time was over.
It was frustrating and challenging trying to get him to divulge anything else about himself.
Now it was midevening in Barcelona and she followed Fionn for two blocks before she realized he was walking them in circles back toward La Sagrada Familia.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she shrugged into her jacket against the evening breeze.
“Losing any possible tails.”
“If we were being followed, wouldn’t we sense it?”
“I’m just taking precautions.”
“Well, while you’re at it, tell me about Bran.”
Fionn frowned down at her. “What about Bran?”
“How do you know him?”
He shrugged. “We met at an underground fight back in 1946. Bran was turned overseas. Ireland may have remained neutral in the war but thousands of Irish soldiers fought with the Allied forces against the Nazis. The war was ending, Bran was readying to return home. A vampire attacked him upon his arrival in France. He’d been out drinking, celebrating. She seduced him and then she turned him. Her name was Marielle.
“He was only twenty-one.”
“Bran had a difficult time coming to terms with what he was. He couldn’t return to his family or the girl he’d left behind, and it didn’t help that Marielle, bored with her new vampire lover, abandoned him in London. That’s where Bran and I met. He was angry and wanted an outlet, so he heard of the fights and came to take a beating. Which he did.”
“Underground fights?”
“Places for vamps and werewolves to take that natural aggression they don’t want pouring out around humans. They beat the living daylights out of each other with it instead.”
Rose shook her head in disbelief. “I’ll never understand men.”
“Men?” He smirked. “You’ll find all genders at an underground fight. It’s nothing to do with gender. It’s about a place to vent frustrations without hurting humans.”
“You do this too?” She wondered if fighting helped Fionn vent the anger he must still carry toward the Faerie Queen and the people who’d betrayed him.
“I do. I pose as a vampire.”
“How? You don’t have fangs.”
“I have magic.” He shot her a dry look. “And the ability to make people think I have fangs. It doesn’t always work. Vampires can sense each other, as can werewolves. The ones who looked closely enough at me could sense something was off. And then there are your more intuitive supes who can tell the difference between each kind of magic. The former and the latter have assumed in the past I’m a cheating warlock.”
“Is that how Bran found out the truth?”
“Bran was in over his head at the fights. Too young. Too inexperienced and truthfully, not aggressive enough, even for a vampire.” Rose thought she detected affection in his voice. “Bran’s a lover, not a fighter. Despite being forced into war as a boy.”
“He’s your friend.”
Fionn scowled, hesitated, and nodded. “He’s my only friend.”
Empathy ached through Rose. “I’m not very good at friendship.”
He drew to a halt outside the closed entrance to La Sagrada Familia. “For friendship to grow, trust must develop. With Bran, I didn’t tell him the truth until thirty years after we first met. The vampire is a genius, a curious one, a born researcher, and he’d developed an impressive network of contacts over the years. We met for lunch in Moscow in 1979 and he told me he knew what I was. It occurred to me that instead of killing him, perhaps I should trust him since it would have benefited him more to keep this knowledge to himself.
“Trust is hard for me. It didn’t come naturally. However, Bran was determined to be an asset to me, to have purpose, and he was interested in my mission: waiting for the fae children to be born. It took years of loyalty, but he’s now the only being in the world I fully trust.
“You can trust him too, Rose.” Fionn’s expression was deadly serious. “If anything should happen to me, go to Bran.”
Her stomach flipped unpleasantly at the thought of anything happening