Heart's Price (MxM)

Chapter 30

"How much of that did you already know?" Dane asks Ambrose as we walk down the long, paved pathway to where we'd left our cars.

"The basic facts," Ambrose replies. "Not the details."

"Did you know the baby's name?"

He shakes his head. "No. Didn't even know she had one, actually. The way Aengus told it, I thought she died before she had a chance to be given one."

"Did Jack know?" I ask. The baby would have been Jack's sister, and her murder the cause of his mother's death, after all.

"No," Ambrose sighs, "thankfully he did not. Aengus told me the whole sordid tale the day I gave him the news of Jack's own death. Jack may have been the only person Aengus ever really loved—his precious first-born son—though they'd been estranged ever since Jack rescued me from the hell his father put me through. Aengus probably came the closest he ever did to feeling something like guilt that day, and for whatever reason he unburdened himself on me. It was after that I cut ties with the family for good. Well, until recently, that is."

"On the list you gave me, Aengus is marked as deceased," Dane points out. "How'd he die?"

Ambrose shrugs. "Don't know, for sure. He made a mistake, you see. Like the rest of the family, immortality was part of his goal, but while the others all asked for 'eternal youth,' or 'unfading beauty,' or some such thing, Aengus asked for 'deathlessness.' I suppose he thought he was being clever, but Ainach gave him exactly what he asked for and nothing more, and eventually Aengus learned that not being able to die was less 'gift' than 'curse.'"

We've reached the spot where we'd parked our cars by now, and he pauses, squinting up through the leaves of the old maple tree beneath which we stand.

"After I told him of Jack's fate, he tried to take his own life, and that's when he discovered his mistake. He couldn't die. By that time, too, he'd begun to age—the only one of that lot to show any evidence of his years. It was a horrific thought—that he'd grow older and older, but never meet an end. So he decided he'd summon Ainach again, on his own this time, and give the gift back."

"On his own?" I ask. "I thought he needed the 'Circle of Nine,' and all that?"

"That's to bargain with a dragon. To merely speak with one is a simpler affair, though not something a man who values his life should attempt. Aengus was no longer such a man, so..."

"And is that possible?" Julian asks. "To give back a dragon's gift, I mean?"

Again, Ambrose shrugs. "Must be. Aengus announced his intentions and then he disappeared, and neither hide nor hair of him's been seen since."

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," I point out.

Ambrose turns to me, his mouth curled in a little smile. "Right you are, but Aengus was a meddlesome bastard. Were he alive, I doubt he'd have managed to keep the fact quiet all these years. Besides, he'd be..." He pauses, looking up at the sky as he calculates, "...nearly one hundred and fifty years old by now. He'd be a right monster, for sure."

"What about Rosie?" Dane asks. "Is it possible she or her baby could have survived the fire somehow?"

"I don't know," Ambrose answers, rubbing his fingers across his mouth. "That all happened seventeen years before I was born, remember. It's not as though I witnessed it. But it does seem unlikely: if she was possessed by a dragon, and burned with dragonfire... I don't see how there would be anything left. But then again..."

"Yeah." Dane scratches the back of his head. "The motive's clear—vengeance—and the connection between 'Kitty' and the cat's paw sign makes sense, but the timeline's weird. If Rosie survived somehow, why would she wait so long to get her revenge? And what would she have against you, anyway?"