hoverbike lifted into the air. “And I think I shall keep my words for my beloved’s ears alone. Please lead the way. I want to get this over with so we can properly begin our lives.”
“Says the two-thousand-year-old male,” Adam joked. “I think your life already began.”
“You would be wrong,” Marcus replied in a serious tone.
I held on as the garage door came open and Taggart began moving through the thick fog that covered the surface.
“You begin to make me feel better about my plane,” Marcus remarked as we moved into the dense pollution.
The helmets immediately went to work, filtering out all the toxic particles.
“No one lives below the tenth floor,” Taggart explained over the headsets. The bikes moved carefully through the fog. “And it’s only like this in the cities. There are still some places where you can walk the surface. Of course, no one tends to go there. We’re not real big on traveling that doesn’t involve business.”
“Speak for yourself,” Kaja said. “I prefer the time we spend in Tír na nÓg. The forests are beautiful and I can run.”
How I missed Tír na nÓg. As we moved along the surface, toward the gate, I held on to Marcus and couldn’t help but think about my home.
Thinking about where I spent my childhood inevitably led me to thinking about how I’d been born.
I remembered the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. Her face staring down at me, and I felt a wave of sadness come from her. Not sadness at me, but at the situation. She’d had plans, and my existence changed them. Like many mothers, my own had to rethink everything, had to sacrifice for her child.
My mother had put her soul on the line so that I could live.
It’s an odd comfort to see her face in the mirror, to think of the life I could have had if I’d been a real baby. I think about it a lot. I think about what would have happened if I’d simply been an accident in human form.
Not that it would have been possible. Daniel Donovan couldn’t have fathered a child. He’d been a vampire. I was unique in all the worlds.
And that is a burden to bear.
I heard Taggart tell our caravan that we were approaching the gate and to be prepared, but my mind was on my parents. My father had been asleep when Momma had found me in the box, but I’d felt him. Even though he’d been in the sleep that most earthbound vampires had to endure during the day, I knew he’d felt me, too. He’d been panicked at the thought of what would happen, then resigned, then excited. I’d felt his excitement at the potential of me.
I’d heard some of his thoughts because I wasn’t good at staying out of people’s heads then. He hadn’t understood what I was, but he’d known I was different.
He hadn’t wanted to leave me either.
Up ahead, a brilliant light split the gloom.
“That is a sight, bella.” Marcus’s head was up.
It was the door opening at its appointed time, a crack in the veil that separated our planes. Daylight flooded my sight as the fog from the Vampire plane attempted to invade the Refugee plane.
“Tír na nÓg is even more beautiful,” I said with a sigh. I wished I could take him to the shining seas and show him why they called me Summer of the Gentle Winds. When I stood on the cliffs, the winds always came for me. At first they’d thought it was coincidence, but soon they realized the winds gathered and gentled at my approach.
“Then you will be my guide,” Marcus said.
“Hold on.” Taggart’s voice came over loud and clear. “We’re moving now. We’re going into haul-your-ass mode.”
I felt the bike rev beneath me as it prepared to go super fast.
“How safe are these things?” For the first time Marcus sounded slightly unnerved.
“Very safe,” I assured him. “Though I prefer to walk. They’ve got a guidance system so we won’t hit anything.”
My breath caught as the bike took off and we were through the door in seconds. One minute we were on the cloudy, desolate streets of Vampire and the next we were racing through a faery forest with massive trees reaching to the blue sky above.
There was a path that led from one door to another. It had become overgrown through years of disuse. There was evidence that once it had been a maintained path, but now I could