Aurora's Triangle Read online

  Tabor whirled at her name, as did Endre. They both flanked her, their eyes blazing with anger and genuine shock.

  “Aurora.” Tabor’s lips thinned. He crossed his arms over his massive chest. His gorgeous eyes narrowed, and even in the volatile moment, Aurora felt as if she’d been punched in the heart. Something behind her breastbone tumbled out of control. “How in the hell…?” he muttered.

  “Hmm,” Endre replied, hands on hips. He made a face and a lock of sandy hair fell over his brow. She longed to swipe it away, to kiss that mouth that twisted in disbelief, but it was hardly the time to express tender sentiments. “It appears we failed to realize our Aurora is just as clever as we are.”

  Tabor swore under his breath. He shot a look at Endre. “What now?”

  “Nothing now,” Aurora tossed back. “I’m here, and you can’t change it. Did you really think I’d just huddle in your damned cage and let you come here and kill him?”

  “Kill him?” Theo swallowed audibly, his thin body trembling as he continued to back away. “Kill who?”

  Aurora let her attention shift to him, though she kept a wary eye on her mates.

  “Hello, Professor.” She sauntered toward him, seeing a vague reflection of herself in him, the violet eyes ringed by emerald, the thick hair. “It’s good to see you back and looking healthy. I was very worried about you.”

  He fidgeted, retreated another step. “They…they ruled out heart failure. It was nothing more than stress coupled with severe indigestion.” His gaze flicked over her shoulder to where Endre and Tabor stood. Theo rubbed the heel of his hand over his sternum and sidestepped to place a laboratory bench between them. His eyes fell to her neck, shifted from one side to the other. She knew he saw the bite-mark scars, more solid evidence of what she had become.

  “Oh, God…just as I suspected, y-you did revive them. And you…you’re a…a vampire?” He gulped again. His face went pale and his body trembled uncontrollably. He steadied himself by planting his palms on the surface of the lab table. “God help me, you’ve become one of them.”

  “Yes, one of them by choice. But I’m also partly…partly you.”

  His silver eyebrows arched. Sweat trickled down his temples and into his sideburns. “Partly me?”

  Although it seemed for now, Endre and Tabor held onto control, Aurora kept her gaze on Theo in the event she had to make a sudden move to protect him.

  Tabor sneered, moving to stand at the professor’s left. “Aurora came here to meet her real father, the man who blindly gave her up for adoption over twenty-five years ago.”

  Endre perched himself on the table at Theodore’s right. “That man being you, the one responsible for attempting to extinguish our race.”

  “No…” He shook his head, backed into the next lab table. “It can’t be.”

  “Yes, it can.” Aurora rounded the first counter. “I’d been searching for you for years, and finally I found you here. I applied for this job and accepted it in hopes of getting to know my real father.”

  His eyes filled with tears. He hung his head and let out a gusty sigh. “I-I knew who you were all this time—I did. I’d been searching for you, too. It’s why I hired you, why I had the job notification sent to you. But I could never admit to you what I’d done.”

  Theo’s nostrils flared. His glassy stare reflected mixed emotions, those of fear, sadness, guilt. She longed to take his tall, thin form in her arms and comfort him, but there were other things to iron out first.

  “I had you here with me. That was all that mattered. I was proud of you, and wanted to make things up to you. Your mother and I…we made a mistake. We…we—she decided she couldn’t live with an eccentric, obsessed man of science such as myself. She left me shortly after you were born, and too late I learned she’d put you up for adoption without my consent. I was such a fool. At the time, I’d been so buried in my research, I didn’t even realize or…or care to fight it until it was too late. I-I’m sorry, Aurora, so sorry. I’ve searched for you over the years, and wanted you in my life.” His gaze fell, his shoulders slumped. “I’ve felt so very guilty.”

  The brief explanation did serve to soothe her pain somewhat, but there were other matters at hand now—life or death of a species, and the safety of her father.

  “Theo, it’s okay. I led a good life, and was loved and provided well for by my adoptive parents. It no longer matters to me. I searched for you, accepted the job because I’d needed to appease my curiosity about who my real parents were. What’s over is over. What does matter, though, is what you’ve done here.”

  “What I’ve done?”

  “Baiting our people here in order to extinguish us,” Endre growled, leaping from the table.

  Theo shrunk away only to bump into Tabor. His voice shook as he spoke. “I-I’m s-sorry. B-but I feared what you would do. Kill us all, take over the world. I—oh, please don’t kill me! Aurora, you’re my daughter. You can’t allow them to kill your own father.”

  Aurora’s heart stirred with pity. “We only want to free them.” She reached for his arm, shook him gently. “Tabor and Endre have vowed not to hurt you in any way—haven’t you?” she asked firmly, raising her brows at them.

  They cursed in unison. Tabor huffed out a breath. Endre kicked the table.

  “Haven’t you?” She repeated the question, and in her passionate anger, her fangs began to tingle and lengthen…as did Tabor and Endre’s.

  Theo gasped. “Oh, God, help me,” he mumbled, burying his face in his hands. Aurora kept him in place, her hand remaining curled around his upper arm.

  “Aurora, damn it,” Tabor swore, “he froze us all. He intended to thaw us without allowing us the opportunity to feed first and be resuscitated. He tried to kill our whole race—your race now.”

  Theo let out a sob and collapsed at Aurora’s feet. “Oh, God, my daughter’s become a murderous vampire.”

  “Murderous? I haven’t murdered so much as a roach. I’m sorry my becoming a vampire is so hard for you. It happened, and it can’t be reversed. Just…just cooperate and I’ll see to it that your life is spared.” She shot a hard look at Endre and Tabor then swung her stare back to Theo. “But, you have to free them all.”

  At his frantic nod, she went on. “We expect you to assist us and to never do such a cruel thing again. Do you understand?”

  Theo sighed, the gleam of apprehension in his eyes finally dimming. “It seems I have no choice.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tabor put in, starting for the door.

  Endre followed. “And there’s another thing you’ll have no choice in. You’ll offer up your blood to them, Kendall,” he threw over his wide shoulder. “You owe it to them all. Now come with us so we can get this done and over.”

  Theodore gasped, hitching in a staccato of high-pitched breaths. “M-my blood? No, please, no.”

  “It’s all right, Theo. You won’t become one of us. All they each need is one minute drop of your blood through their talons for rejuvenation. Our talons’ penetrations are no more toxic than a mosquito bite. It’s our venomous fangs you better steer clear of.”

  She bared hers to demonstrate what he should avoid. He stared at her for a long moment, as if he pondered her trustworthiness.

  “Aurora,” Endre barked from his place at the door. “If you want him to live, we must move now.”

  She set a firm hand on her father’s arm. “Dad…”

  His gaze snapped up to hers. Tears flooded the brilliant orbs set in his worn leathery face. “Oh…” He pressed a hand to his chest. “You called me ‘Dad’.”

  “Yes, because you are my dad. Look, I won’t hurt you—and I won’t let them hurt you, either. But you must show us where the rest of the Vencelzes are. There are a lot more, aren’t there?”

  One lone droplet slid down his pale cheek. “Yes, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands. And your real mother…she is one of them.”

  Chapter Four

  Aurora stood in the massive warehouse-
like cooler and shivered uncontrollably. A jumble of scientific awe, sadness, and nausea roiled in her gut at the sight that met her eyes. Hundreds of upright, glass-encased cylinders glistened in the florescent lighting. Inside them, bodies were frozen immobile and wax-like, held prisoner by a cold, hard frost. She could see by the chutes above them that Theo’s scientific concoction must have lured them in from aboveground and sucked them down to be captured in vats of water. Some containers were large enough to hold several Vencelzes in a single container, while others were small and enclosed only one vampire. Sealed lids over the top of each cylinder had trapped them inside until the temperatures plummeted to below freezing.

  Her heart ached for these people—her people. A vague sense of guilt assailed her at being related to the man who did this to them.

  Endre and Tabor paced from one end to the other naming each and every Vencelze. They’d been frozen in various stages. Some had shifted after being drawn through the chutes, while others remained in full or partial falcon form. She stumbled forward on rubbery legs and pressed her palms to one of the icy containers. How had she been so blinded to this massive undertaking? The entire month she’d been here at the station, these people had been here, vulnerable and in need as she’d gone about her clinical business. And one of them was her biological mother.

  She heard sobs and glanced over her shoulder. Across the space, Theodore knelt before one body, that of a woman. Aurora turned and approached him from behind. Her gaze rose to study the woman Theo appeared to worship. She had hair the shade of honey and a body much like Aurora’s. It was as if Aurora looked upon herself in death, eyes closed, body limp and lifeless.

  “I loved her—I still do,” Theo choked out. “I’d planned to rid the world of this vampire breed I’d discovered…until I walked in here one day and found her among the captured. I didn’t know what to do.” He held his head in his hands and wept uncontrollably as he struggled to explain.

  “I suddenly understood why she’d given you up and hidden you away from me, from her. I believe she’d been bitten after you were born, and loved you enough to see that you were safe. In her eyes, I’m sure she’d assumed I wasn’t fit to care for you, mad, irrational scientist that I was. Oh, Aurora, my heart has been broken for more than twenty years now. I’ve worked diligently to discover a way to save her, which is why I had your two men in the freezer lab. Experimenting with thawing, hoping to revive them somehow, to undo this whole damn mess.”

  He flung a hand up and gestured across the room. “God help me, she’d become a vampire. What was I to do? Yet my love for her only grew stronger. I-I miss her so damn much,” he sobbed.

  Aurora bit back her own tears, and sent pained looks at Tabor and Endre. She saw the hesitation, then slow acceptance, and finally understanding in their eyes. She relaxed a bit, knowing they might not be a threat to her father after all.

  She set a firm hand on Theo’s shuddering shoulder. “Please don’t cry. It’s okay now. You see, they can all be revived. I know this, because when you were at the hospital, I disobeyed your orders. I went into the freezer unit where I discovered Tabor and Endre in a state of thaw. All they’d needed was a drop of my blood through their talons before completely thawing. You—we—can save them. The process can be repeated for them all. You can offer Mother your blood at the right stage and she’ll live, I promise.”

  “Yes, but she’ll still be a vampire feeding on humans…and I’m old now while she’s obviously been given the gift of youth and immortality.”

  Tabor stepped up and studied the chute next to Aurora’s mother, his thick arms folded over his chest. “You have it wrong, Professor. We feed, yes, but mostly on those we hope to have as mates. We are part human, too, not simply carnivores as you perceive us to be. We need very little blood over eternity’s time to sustain us. Sex is our immortal souls’ main fuel. To an extent, your youth will be restored once bitten—that is, if you choose to be fed on by your wife’s fangs in addition to offering your blood via her talons.” He glanced down and winked at Theodore. “If your wife can forgive you, so can we, and we’ll rejoice with you in your newfound sexual stamina.”

  Endre crossed to a cylinder at the end of the row. He stared at a frozen woman with billowing pale hair, her falcon’s wings spread behind her. She looked, Aurora thought, like an ethereal angel.

  “Yes,” Endre said on a sigh. “We love and we live very much like you and your human counterparts, Theodore. See this beautiful woman here? She’s my little sister, Aurelia. And she’s also Prince Viktor’s priestess bride-to-be.”

  Endre continued, gesturing to a cylinder at his left. It encapsulated a strikingly handsome, bronze-skinned man with wings as black as midnight. “She’d been about to offer her blood, the common way our breed binds Vencelze to Vencelze in marriage. They were looking forward to forming their own triangle, to searching for a human to join them in eternity. That is, until you tore her from Prince Viktor’s arms and broke hearts with your damned ‘experiment’. But, you can most certainly make amends. You have it within your power to restore all the lives frozen here, as well as your own.”

  Prince Viktor’s fiancée was Endre’s sister—and therefore, Aurora’s future sister-in-law? This was serious business. Aurora had suspected Tabor and Endre had withheld crucial knowledge from her. They’d warned her of the prince’s coming wrath, and now she understood why Prince Viktor could be vengeful. Her own father had prevented their marriage and their love from living on, a love she’d underestimated and foolishly discounted. Holy shit, Theo had done this to the ruler of the Vencelzes, of all people, and to Aurora’s mate’s sister! And here she’d campaigned to save Theo’s life. She could only hope the prince and Aurelia would pardon her for her role in this tragedy.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Theodore got to his feet, his thin form trembling like a shaky tree branch in the wind. “Yes, yes. I will make it my life’s mission to undo all the damage I’ve done. I can only pray that all of your people—most especially my beloved Clara, Aurora, and your prince and his bride—can find it in their hearts to forgive me.”

  Aurora knew her father had suffered a broken heart, as well. He’d once been a tall, attractive man, she could see that now somewhere within the neglect. But he’d become fixated on his plot to kill all of the Vencelze race. Once he’d found his wife among them, he’d become obsessed with experimentation and finding ways to free her. In the process, he’d let himself go to the point of poor health and near starvation.

  Love swelled in her heart for him. She took him in her arms and allowed him to express his remorseful emotions. Aurora patted his bony back. “It’s okay, Dad, I forgive you. And I’m almost certain Mom will live. We’ll bring her to the state of half-thaw, along with everyone else here, and try to mimic the process Endre and Tabor underwent when the freezer unit failed. You can make it up to her by offering up your blood to her through her talons, a transmission that won’t harm or infect you in any way. The rest is up to the both of you.”

  “No, it’s up to her,” he murmured, pulling free of the embrace. He took a moment to swipe his trembling hand over his face and through his graying hair. “Well, let’s get to it, daughter.”

  “We have to begin with Prince Viktor,” Endre announced, searching around the prince’s chute. “Professor, how do these damn tubes work?”

  Theo shuffled over to Viktor’s chamber. “Here, behind each unit, there’s a panel of switches. The second from the top—flip it down,” he demonstrated, “and it will move the cylinder from a vertical to a horizontal position. Then follow with the third switch to remove the outer shell. After that, we can de-ice the entire body with a portable thawing device I have.”

  The hum of the unit’s engine sounded in the large room as Prince Victor’s body shifted from an upright to a flat position. The outer covering retracted into the device leaving him exposed in a tube of ice upon a slab, precisely the way she’d discovered Tabor and Endre.

  “It’ll have to
be just a hand,” Tabor put in, crossing to stand above Viktor. “De-icing the entire body before providing the blood source will kill them all.”

  Theodore nodded his understanding and located the apparatus, rolling it back to where Viktor lay in waiting. Fear of the unknown smothered Aurora as she assisted Theo. Her hands shook while she engaged the machine and adjusted dials. As she worked, she studied Viktor out of the corner of her eye, her stomach in painful knots. He was a ruggedly handsome man, tall and lean with long locks of sleek black hair. His skin was the color of caramel, his features sharp and hawk-like. He wore clothing much like a warrior of centuries ago, and it molded perfectly to his powerful body. This was a man who would make enemies pay with their lives, she thought, trembling so hard now, she could barely complete the tasks at hand.

  What would Viktor do once he awakened? Would he punish Aurora and her father for their part in this catastrophe that nearly caused the extinction of Vencelze vampires from the planet?

  “You’re doing fine, my love,” Endre whispered in her right ear.

  “Take it easy, babe, calm and steady,” Tabor rasped in her left.

  She nodded and directed the heat source, much like a giant blow dryer, up and down Viktor’s arm. Gradually, water dripped over the slab’s edge and his limp hand was bared.

  “Theodore,” Endre said ominously. “Offer up your wrist to him now.”

  Sweat beaded over Theo’s brow. He gulped and shifted his stare from Aurora to the corpse-like hand.

  “It’s okay, I promise,” she said to him as gently as she could. Aurora took his clammy hand in hers and set it on the table. Next, she took Viktor’s hand and wrapped it around Theodore’s wrist. “Prince Viktor, we offer you life. Arise.”

  Theodore groaned, his entire body twitching. The prince’s claws emerged and penetrated his flesh. “Oh, God. Oh, God…”

  “You’ll be fine,” Aurora assured him, rubbing his shoulder. “It’s almost over.”

  Just as it had with her lovers, the ice cracked and Viktor sat upright. He withdrew his talons and rolled his shoulders. His neck cracked and he leaped from the table, his long damp hair streaming down his back. Aurora gasped at the look in his penetrating green eyes. The claws of panic choked her. Her feet seemed frozen to the floor yet her mind tried to flee from his damning gaze.