lush, yet crisp tones of her voice. Never erase the memory of her elegant fingers clasped against his in a shake as decisive and firm as any man’s.
Never feel that grip…elsewhere.
Because by now, she was dead.
“Listening to Puccini by firelight and sipping a fifty-year-old wine that is not a sipping wine?” Nicholas Kingswood strode from the entry to the stone manor’s library, helped himself to a glass, and joined him at the hearth as though the flames could answer his unspoken questions. When they didn’t, he turned his dark head toward Julian. “What is your bereavement this time?”
“This time?”
“Last time you left Le Chateaux Morte and ventured into the world, I found you thus the very next morning. How long ago was that, a hundred years or so?”
Julian took another sip and turned from the fire, preferring the shadows to his comrade’s shrewd, calculating gaze. “Nineteen-eighteen,” he murmured.
“Ah, yes.” Stripping off his charcoal suit coat, Nicholas released the cuffs of his blue silk shirt, and claimed a great deal of the leather couch with his powerful body. “Influenza, a stroke of brilliance on your part.”
“A stroke of genocide.”
“Buck up, Jules. Genocide is what you do best.” Nick raised his glass in salute. “You’re a maestro of the massacre. It was your last work that truly went ‘viral.’” He chuckled around a sip at his own pun.
“This is no time for levity, Nicholas, a woman is dead.”
“As opposed to the seventy-five million casualties in the nineteen-eighteen pandemic?”
Julian grunted his irritation.
“Don’t you think maybe a few of those corpses were women?” Nicholas asked.
“And children, and the elderly! Did you come to salt my wounds, or does your visit have a purpose?”
Contrition wasn’t a display that lay organically on Nicholas Kingswood’s features, but the attempt was appreciated. “I came to check in on you. And to…thank you.”
Julian made an ironic sound in his throat. “And to what accomplishment is your gratitude owed?”
“I don’t know, Julian, saving the fucking world from the Apocalypse, I guess,” Nick spat. “God, a hundred years of solitude makes you a surly dick hole.”
Julian joined Conquest, folding into the throne-style chair next to the table of wine. “My apologies,” he muttered. “I found the task more…distasteful than was expected.” It was an admission he could only make to Nicholas, for the same reason he knew that only Conquest, himself, would venture into the library drawn by good music and better wine.
“Where’s Drustan?” he changed the subject.
Nicholas shrugged. “Lurking in the hedges somewhere, practicing the more physical skills of the art of war. You know nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills…”
Julian did crack a smile at Nicholas’ perfect rendition of Napoleon Dynamite. But when he looked over, Nicholas was studying the fire through his wine glass, as though only just discovering the intriguing color of the vintage.
“Julian, do you ever wonder… Do you ever question our…purpose?”
“The question being, what is the bloody point?” Julian finished. “Constantly.”
He studied Nicholas over another sip from his goblet. Conquest, brilliant as he was, never had been a man prone to brooding. He built empires and toppled civilizations all in a day’s work. He was a man of action. Decisive, confident, and damned effective.
So why the sudden cognitive dissonance?
His swarthy, brutal features darkened. “Why would they create the four of us, the billions of them, the prophecy, the Grimoire, the…de Morays?”
Julian had given it a good deal of thought. Not just ponderance, but study, prayer, meditation, et al. “I suppose, this world—this short life of theirs—is only one chapter in the eternal tome that is existence. Perhaps we are an end to the chapter. A cliffhanger of sorts. Even a transitory vehicle to the next phase of being?” It was the best he could come up with thus far.
“Fuck off. I’m no astrophysical, hypothetical transit authority.”
Julian chuckled. “That’s not precisely what I was alluding to… Though, I often wonder. Why would the gods create creatures of such majesty, power, vitality, beauty and infinite potential only to have us lay in wait for the day we must destroy them?”
Nicholas’ eyebrow went up. “You hold the mortals in higher regard than I realized.”
Julian maintained his silence. He hadn’t been talking about the mortals.
Only one of them.
“I thought you were weak, you know,” Julian admitted. “You and Drustan. I didn’t understand why you hadn’t yet destroyed the de Moray witches while they were still estranged and easily broken. I couldn’t comprehend how three of them had found each other and cast magic before you were forced to call me away