Kiss Across Kingdoms Read online

  “I don’t look that far ahead,” Taylor said honestly. “I think I would go crazy if I did. I just keep my gaze on the next few years that include raising the children.”

  Sydney let out a small sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” Taylor said softly. “I try not to rub it in.”

  Sydney shook her head. “It’s okay. I don’t think about it anymore. Life is busy enough without adding children into the mix.” She ran her own private security company, now, that she had built from the ground up. The company specialized in industrial and high technology corporate security and this would be her fifth year in business. It was a demanding and absorbing occupation and what little spare time she had was more than adequately filled by the two men in her life.

  Alex and Sydney had moved into Rafe’s big house not long after Taylor had been made. It had been a temporary way of staying together, that had turned into a permanent home. Even Bruce, Sydney’s aging St. Bernard, had settled down and been comfortable in his house under the stairs, up until his death a year ago.

  Sydney’s attention was caught as Rafe walked around the backs bowed over Alex’s shoulders. “Here,” he said firmly and pulled one of the sheets out from under Alex’s hand. He pointed to the top of the page. “That doesn’t make sense in old English or Welsh, or even Latin.” He pushed his fingers through his hair, brushing over the silvered locks at his temples. Careful applications of bleach left him looking older with each passing year, yet his face remained unlined. Sydney wasn’t sure how long Rafe would be able to continue in this human life without stirring speculation.

  “The seal?” Alex asked, lifting the page up.

  “The writing around the edge of the seal,” Rafe said. “See the letters?”

  “They’re Latin script,” Alex pointed out.

  “This isn’t Latin.”

  “No, it’s not,” Veris said. He was the Latin expert in the room, although Sydney knew that both Brody and Taylor spoke regionalized versions of Latin, too.

  Alex looked up at Rafe. “My laptop is in the office. Would you mind?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Why not?” He left the room.

  “Something has tripped your thoughts, Alex,” Veris said.

  Alex nodded. “I think it might be a cypher.”

  Veris stood up. “A cypher….” He sounded intrigued.

  Taylor got up and moved over to a chair closer to the group. “Cyphers weren’t common in western Europe in the tenth century.”

  “They were in the East,” Alex assured her, “and much earlier than that.”

  Rafe came back with the laptop, already open and booted up. He put it in front of Alex.

  Alex pulled it closer, then bent over the seal and began to tap out the letters on the file he had open.

  “Here, let me read them out,” Rafe said. He picked up the sheet and called out the letters one at a time, as Alex typed them.

  Then everyone stood back and looked at the screen. Sydney got to her feet and moved around to where she could see it, too. Rafe gave her a smile and pulled her in front of him so her view was unobstructed. His hand settled around her waist.

  The letters glowed in the middle of the screen.

  IZUVHBWMVBXLNVZGLMXVZOVCNFHGIVNARM

  “Marit,” Veris said. “Do you recognize this as a language of any sort?”

  Marit, who was a natural polyglot and could soak up a new language almost overnight, stepped between Veris and Brody and looked down at the screen. “It’s gobbledygook,” she said.

  Alex was counting silently, his lips moving, as he stared at the screen.

  “What are you doing?” Sydney asked softly.

  “The most common letter is V,” he said. He typed quickly, beneath the meaningless words.

  IZUVHBWMVBXLNVZGLMXVZOVCNFHGIVNARM

  E E E E E E

  They stared at the two lines of text.

  “That doesn’t get us anywhere,” Brody said.

  “You know cyphers, Alex?” Veris asked.

  “I came across my first cypher when I still human,” Alex said. “It was one the Jews used….” His mouth opened and his eyes widened as his gaze returned to the screen. “Surely not.” He lifted up his left hand and lowered each finger as if he was counting, but said, “A…b…c…d…e. Five.” Then he lifted his right hand. “Z…y…x…w…v. V,” he repeated, staring at the screen.

  “A substitution cypher?” Veris asked.

  “A simple one,” Alex said. He wiped out the second line of Es and typed quickly:

  A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M,

  Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T, S, R, Q, P, O, N

  N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

  M, L, K, J, I, H, G, F, E, D, C, B, A

  “It’s called the Atbash Cypher. The Jews of Jordan used it for decades,” Alex said. “You switch out the letters in the top line for the letters in the second line.”

  “E is V,” Rafe said. “So the first letter would be…R.”

  “Call them out for me,” Alex said.

  Slowly, Rafe called out each letter on the seal and Brody provided the uncoded pair, as Alex wrote them down.

  RAFESYDNEYCOMEATONCEALEXMUSTREMAIN

  Alex inserted spaces and the room became very still and silent as they all stared at the screen.

  RAFE SYDNEY COME AT ONCE ALEX MUST REMAIN

  “This isn’t possible,” Taylor breathed. “Someone put the seal into the copy, just to pull my leg.”

  Veris moved over to the door and shut it firmly and softly. He turned to face them. “The message implies time travel,” he said. “The only people who know Sydney and Rafe and Alex can travel through time as we can are standing in this room.” He looked at Rafe sharply. “Unless the council has been informed?”

  Rafe shook his head. “I meet with Thorsby every year and fail to mention it every time.”

  “Thorsby is your contact?” Veris said.

  “He’s the chair,” Rafe said.

  “I didn’t realize you were that high up in the hierarchy,” Veris murmured.

  “I’m a flunky to the chairman. It’s not high at all,” Rafe pointed out dryly.

  “Screw the politics,” Brody said loudly. He pointed at the laptop. “One of us put that message in the seal specifically for us to find it now.”

  “Yes,” Veris agreed. “It was either Sydney or Rafe who did.”

  Sydney stepped backward and rammed into Rafe’s shoulder. “I didn’t do it,” she said, her heart squeezing.

  Veris’ gaze was steady and his eyes very blue in the glow from the laptop screen. “No. But you will.”

  Chapter Two

  “It has to be from us,” Brody said, his voice strident. “It mentions three specific names, one of them common only to this century. ‘Come back’ clearly means they must go back to when the manuscript was copied. It uses a cypher that just happens to be the first one Alex ever learned. That puts the odds far too high for simple coincidence.” He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, as far away from the table and the laptop as the room would allow.

  Sydney wondered what it was that Brody felt threatened by.

  “When was the manuscript dated to, Taylor?” Veris asked. He was standing at the head of the table, right behind where Marit was seated. His arms were crossed, too.

  “Radiocarbon dating says the ninth or tenth century. The Anglo-Saxon experts at Oxford suggested early tenth.” Taylor got to her feet. “This is a discussion that could go on a while, so I’m going to take Marit home to bed.”

  “But, Mom!” Marit cried in protest. “I could help!”

  Veris rested his hand on her head. She lifted her chin and rolled her eyes up to look at him.

  “You may very well be of help,” he said, “However, this is vampire business now. Remember the distinction?”

  “I have to stay human as much as possible,” Marit said in monotone.

  “As you are human,” Taylor said, holding out her hand. “And you need your sleep.” She pulle
d Marit to her feet and headed for the door.

  “It’s not fair,” Marit grumbled.

  “No, it’s not,” Brody agreed, coming over to them and giving Marit a kiss on the cheek. “Life isn’t fair, most of the time. It’s just life. Goodnight, darling daughter.”

  “Night, Athair. Night, Far.”

  She held her arms up and Veris picked her up off her feet and hugged her tightly, then kissed her cheek and put her back down.

  Taylor gave both men a quick smile. “I’ll come back, after.”

  Veris shut the door behind them and moved back to the head of the table and frowned down at the two offending pages. “Rafe, you said you were in Powys when the Vikings invaded. When was that? I don’t know Gronoyan history at all.”

  “Nine hundred and seventeen,” Rafe said.

  “Early tenth century,” Alex added. “Right when Taylor’s buddies at Oxford think this was written.” He was still sitting in front of the laptop, only now he was transcribing the old English narrative into a Word file.

  “You’re not really thinking that we should jump back there, are you?” Sydney asked Veris.

  Veris looked at her, his gaze sharp. “Someone went back there and planted this seal for us to find tonight. The seal says that you and Rafe must go there at once.”

  “This is a joke or something! No one leaves messages in ancient manuscripts for people of the future to trip over. That’s just in the movies,” Sydney protested.

  “It speaks your names, all three of you,” Brody said. He was back in his corner. “The original page was carbon dated and this copy is certified. The seal is as old as the rest of the manuscript. It’s not a joke.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a joke or not,” Rafe said, his voice low. “I’m not saying I agree to this at all, but even if I were to consider doing what this seal says and jump back to Powys, there’s no way I’m leaving Alex behind.”

  “You have to,” Alex said.

  Rafe looked hurt. “You’re not buying into this, are you?”

  Alex shrugged. “Nothing else fits the facts. If you accept that this is a viable, urgent message—”

  “No, I don’t accept it at all!” Sydney interjected.

  Alex reached out and grasped her hand, his cool fingers firmly around hers. “If we accept that this is a real message sent by one of us, then we must accept what the message says. One of you two went to a lot of trouble to find the monk and give him the lettering for the seal. Whatever those reasons, they drove you to this and you are insisting I stay here. I trust both of you, so I will stay.”

  “There is a reason why you told him to remain behind,” Veris added. “We just don’t know what it is, yet.”

  “You’re speaking as if this is locked in, that we’re really going to jump back!” Sydney cried. She jumped to her feet. There was no way she could remain sitting.

  “Because you already have gone back,” Brody said. He didn’t speak very loudly, although he didn’t need to. “You can’t get around it, Sydney. The seal is on that page because you did go back. So you must go back.”

  “Maybe we go back there somewhere in our future. We don’t have to go this very instant,” she pointed out.

  “The seal says at once,” Veris pointed out. “There’s not a lot of space around the seal, just room for eight words and you used two of them to emphasize urgency. You can’t ignore that.”

  Alex got to his feet and pulled her into his arms and she let him comfort her. His arms around her were strong, as always. “I know you’re afraid,” he said and she could hear his voice rumbling in his chest, against her ear. “I am, too. Yet this must be done.”

  “That makes three of us who are afraid,” Rafe said. He was sitting on one of the dining chairs, pulled out from the table. He was leaning his elbows on his knees and his hands were gripped together tightly. “There’s a reason I’ve never talked about Gronoya before.”

  Veris cocked his head. “It was very bad?”

  Rafe nodded. “Powys had the strongest army in all the British kingdoms and they had rebuffed three separate Viking attacks, working with the other kingdoms. Brycheiniog, Deheubarth and Gwynedd were all strong allies, although they didn’t match Powys for military strength. Then Powys marched on Mercia in retaliation for the Lady Aethelfreda taking the wife of the king of Brycheiniog. Llewelyn sent every able-bodied man, because Mercia was so strong. He even took me and I was just a scribe. That’s when the Vikings attacked, when there was no one left behind to defend Mathrafel.”

  The bitterness in his voice was deep.

  Sydney stared at him. The emotion in his face and the way he was speaking, the old names from times in history…it was startling to consider that Rafe really had been there and seen it all.

  “Did someone tip them off?” Brody asked from his corner.

  Rafe jerked, as if he had been touched by a live wire. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “The timing was remarkable.”

  “Invasions are always brutal and bloody,” Veris said. He glanced at Brody, who grimaced.

  It reminded Sydney that both Brody and Veris had lived through an invasion of their own and that Veris had been the invader.

  “We’ll protect your bodies here while you’re back there,” Veris added. “You are going to have to go back.”

  Alex’s arms tightened around her even more and Sydney turned her face into his shoulder and closed her eyes.

  * * * * *

  “I don’t know how I can do this,” Sydney whispered into the dark.

  Alex settled himself more firmly against her back and Rafe stroked her temple. They were all resting on Sydney’s big bed. None of them had been able to do more than that. For once, sex had not ended her evening and she barely noticed the absence.

  “You’re the most courageous person I’ve ever met,” Alex said softly.

  “I don’t mean I’m scared I’ll get hurt. I mean, I don’t know how I can do this to you, Rafe.”

  Rafe’s hand stopped touching her. He lifted himself up and in the low light creeping in from the partially closed door, she could see that he was propping his head on his hand, studying her. “Are you worried that I won’t be able to take care of myself?” he asked. He sounded amused.

  “If you put it like that,” she said, “then it sounds condescending and that’s not what I meant at all. I saw your face, earlier, Rafe. You have bad memories of that time.”

  “You’ve been listening to Veris and Brody too closely,” Alex said gently. “They both jumped back to times in their past that were hard for them to deal with because they hadn’t dealt with the personal issues those times had thrown up. That’s why they went back there—they were pulled there by their unresolved feelings. So the jump back was stress-filled and difficult for them. That doesn’t apply here.”

  “Really.” She didn’t make it a question. “How much do you know about Rafe’s life in that time? How much has he told you?”

  Alex hesitated. “I suppose he just hasn’t got around to telling us about Gronoya.”

  “Because he doesn’t want to,” Sydney said gently.

  “Hello? Right here, remember?” Rafe said. He sat up. “I don’t talk about Gronoya because I don’t talk about any of my previous lives. Neither does Alex. It’s the way of it.”

  “Bullshit.” Sydney sat up, too. That made Alex also lift himself into his favorite cross-legged sitting position. At the same time he turned on the lamp, so the room was filled with the soft orange glow and now she could see them.

  Alex was looking troubled, although it was Rafe she was watching more closely. There was a pinched look around his eyes that she recognized. He was stressed and hiding it.

  “You don’t deliberately sit down and tell stories about your past lives, yet you talk about them all the time,” she assured them. “Alex always talks about patients he’s tended and how different modern medicine is from what he first learned and when he does that he doesn’t talk about Jordan. He talks about countries and
cities that don’t exist anymore. Or he’s talking about events that I only know as history. The siege of Acre. The rebuilding of the library in Toledo when he spent fifteen years translating texts. Every time he makes one of those comments, it tells me a little bit more about him. And you, Rafe, you like to laugh about things that happened so long ago I can’t even find those places on a map anymore. Such as that man who used you to run a crooked dice game, for instance, and how Veris came along and cheated him out of his slave.”

  “Baradaeus,” Alex murmured.

  “Exactly,” Sydney said. “Alex remembers him, because you’ve spoken of him before. I know that you were a slave in the Byzantine Empire, then you travelled to Britain. You’ve never said so directly, but I’m pretty sure you travelled there with Brody, because he’s mentioned before that he returned to England when he left Constantinople. And I know you went back to Iberia for a while, too. Only, that was later, because you spoke about the Caliphate, so that was when the Muslims were controlling the peninsula.”

  “It was,” Rafe said quietly.

  “You’ve told me about the wars you’ve been in and taverns and inns across Europe. How you were asked to come to America by more senior vampires and you didn’t say so, yet I know the vampires who asked you to do that were on the Council.”

  Rafe’s gaze flicked away from her.

  “I’m not prying. I’ve never pried,” Sydney said quickly. “I don’t have to. You tell me about your lives all the time. Both of you.”

  Rafe and Alex exchanged glances.

  “She was an expert interrogator,” Alex said, the corner of his mouth lifting.

  Rafe looked at her, his black eyes steady. “I don’t mind you knowing this about me. Not you.”

  Sydney rested her hand on his knee and looked at Alex. “Did you know that Rafe was in Gronoya in the tenth century?”

  “I didn’t. Although, to be reasonable, I also don’t know where he was in many other centuries, either.”

  Sydney sighed. “You’re both as slippery as fish on a dock. This is why I don’t ask you direct questions about your history. You’re right, Alex. None of us knows each of our personal pasts in great detail. We haven’t been together for a thousand years the way Veris and Brody have been—”