Home > An Immortal Guardians Companion(7)

An Immortal Guardians Companion(7)
Author: Dianne Duvall

Come in, Marcus thought, knowing Seth would hear him even though Marcus wasn’t telepathic.

The door opened and closed behind their leader, who bore a frown. “Another nightmare?” Seth asked.

Marcus nodded. “Does she dream of her torture?”

Seth crossed to the bed and brushed the fingers of one hand across her forehead. “No. Not this time.”

Her frown smoothed away. Her limbs relaxed. When Seth withdrew his hand, she curled onto her side, facing Marcus, and slipped into a more peaceful slumber.

“Why is this happening?” Marcus asked, brushing her hair back from her face.

Seth hesitated. “I don’t think the dreams are hers.”

Marcus met his troubled gaze. “What?”

“I think the dreams are the babe’s, and Ami is picking up on them.”

Dread soured Marcus’s stomach. “Are you saying my baby is dreaming of her mother’s torture?” What the hell kind of start to life was that?

Seth shook his head. “That’s the puzzle. Ami isn’t the one being tortured in the dreams.”

Horror filled him. “The baby is dreaming of her own torture?” Was his daughter precognitive? Was she seeing her future? A future in which he would fail to keep her safe?

“No,” Seth hastened to assure him. “The one being tortured is a man. And before you ask if it’s you, I don’t know. I can’t see his face because the dream seems to be from his perspective.”

“What the hell? Is she seeing someone else’s dream? Someone here in the house?”

Seth tilted his head to one side and looked at the ceiling as though listening for something. Several long minutes passed. “No,” he said at last. “No one here is having such a dream.”

What did it mean? “Can we do anything to stop it?”

“Not until we learn the source. If there even is one. For all we know, the babe could be seeing visions of a past life.”

“Shit.” He hadn’t thought of that. But with extraterrestrial and gifted one DNA combined and the virus thrown in, they didn’t know what gifts or powers the babe might possess.

“Well…” Seth took a step backward. “I shall let you return to sleep.”

Marcus held up a hand to halt him. “Wait. Do you have a minute?”

Seth nodded.

Marcus slipped from the bed and pulled on the pair of sweatpants he had taken to keeping nearby in case Ami needed him to get her something during the night or to fetch Melanie. “Is there another quiet room we can talk in?”

When Roland, Marcus, then Bastien had fallen in love and married, David had begun to renovate and add rooms to his basement that were designated quiet rooms because he outfitted them with thousands of dollars of extra soundproofing materials to give the couples privacy whenever they spent the day there so the other immortals wouldn’t hear them make love.

Seth shook his head. “We’re full to the rafters. Almost every immortal in the area and their Seconds are spending the day.”

To protect Ami and offer their support.

Marcus appreciated it, but…

“We can talk here,” Seth said. “She’s sleeping deeply now and won’t hear us.”

Marcus nodded.

When Seth bypassed the cushy chairs in the room and sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall opposite the bed, Marcus joined him.

“What’s on your mind?” Seth asked as Marcus settled beside him.

Marcus stared at Ami’s cherished form. “Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t delved into your thoughts in months. I thought you could use the privacy.”

He almost wished the elder hadn’t been so considerate. Then he wouldn’t have to ask what he intended to. “Can you still travel through time, Seth?”

A long moment passed. “You wish to discuss time travel?”

“Tell me again how you took Bethany back to the Middle Ages.”

Marcus boasted one of the most unusual pasts in the Immortal Guardian world. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, when he was still the mortal teenaged squire of Lord Robert, Earl of Fosterly (a man Marcus had loved like a brother), Lord Robert had fallen madly in love with a woman they soon learned had traveled back in time from the early twenty-first century, and the two had wed.

Marcus had fallen in love with her, too, but had said nothing, unwilling to disrupt their happiness.

After he was transformed against his will by a vampire a decade or so later, Marcus had continued to love Bethany until the day she’d died a very old woman. Then he’d waited seven centuries for her to be born into the late twentieth century. He had watched her grow up, befriended her and her brother, and loved her until the day she went back in time to meet Lord Robert.

Or, as he had learned to his astonishment, until she had been escorted back in time by Seth.

“It’s complicated,” the Immortal Guardian leader hedged.

“Then explain it to me as if I were a child.”

“Marcus—”

“Seth, please, just do it.” He needed a moment to gather his thoughts.

“It isn’t so much traveling through time as it is opening a doorway to another dimension,” Seth began. “There are three commonly known dimensions in this world: height, width, and depth. A fourth, about which there has been much speculation, is time.” He looked at Marcus. “That moment eight months ago—when we realized in this very room that Ami was pregnant—is taking place right now in another dimension. If I were to open a doorway to it, we could witness it firsthand.”

Marcus frowned. “The past is happening alongside the present?”

“As is the future.”

Marcus had heard theories of such before, but… how would that work?

“Have you ever heard of residual hauntings?” Seth asked.

The change of subject threw him for a moment. “Of course.” Marcus had been born with the ability to see spirits or ghosts, so he had pretty much seen it all in terms of hauntings. “Visitors to a reportedly haunted hotel, castle, or what have you report seeing men and women garbed in the clothing of another era carrying towels to rooms and the like without acknowledging the viewer’s presence.”

“Exactly. Those aren’t hauntings, Marcus. In some places, the dimensional barriers are weaker and allow glimpses into the past or future. Those visitors aren’t witnessing hauntings. They’re actually looking into the past.”

“But I’ve seen residual haunts.”

“Did those ghosts behave the way the other ghosts you see normally do?”

“No. They just seemed to go about their daily life as if they didn’t even know I was there.” Most ghosts noticed him… and made sure he saw them noticing him. As Étienne was so fond of saying, the shit was creepy.

“That’s because they aren’t ghosts.”

Marcus pondered that a moment. In a weird way, it made sense. “And you can open these dimensional doorways?”

“Yes. It isn’t easy, but I can do it.”

“Do you do it often?”

“No. I’ve learned that—no matter the good I think I’m doing—there is always a catch, a detrimental effect of tampering with time. Bethany was a gifted one whose life would have ended tragically had I not intervened. I thought to make her and Lord Robert happy…”

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