A Visit to the Past

The shifting in the undergrowth became a footstep, and then a voice. "There. By the roots." Five large men crashed through the jungle. They came from three directions at once. This was enough to tell Isabella they were not fishermen who had followed out of curiosity. These men had spread out. These men had been tracking. They were rough-looking, dressed in the worn canvas of dock workers, but two of them carried Naval boarding axes and moved with the confidence of men who had done this many times before. The tallest one, a broad-shouldered bruiser with a shaved head and a scar that pulled his lip into a permanent sneer, looked down at Lucian's prone form, his mouth curling in disgust. "Captain wants a word," he said, looking back to Isabella. "Come quiet and no one gets hurt." "Your captain," she said, "already hurt plenty of people today. We are long past the cordial stage, don't you think?" Isabella moved first, because she had always found waiting for the inevitable to be a particular form of cowardice she had no patience for. Her cutlass took the nearest man across the forearm, not deep enough to disable, but deep enough to sting and slow him down, and she was already pivoting when the second grabbed for her shoulder. She broke his grip with a downward sweep of her elbow, drove her knee up hard and heard his breath leave his body in a satisfying rush. Three and four closed from the flanks simultaneously, which meant someone had drilled them, and that irritated her more than the odds. Professionals were so much less fun to humiliate. Isabella fought the way she sailed, all controlled aggression and no wasted motion. She took a glancing blow to the ribs that would purple up nicely by morning and gave back two cuts that would leave their own memories. For twenty long, grinding seconds she was winning, or at least denying them the easy thing, and then the fifth man, who she had been tracking at the edge of her vision, came in low from behind. He wrapped an arm around her throat and dragged her roughly to the ground. They wrestled her into a nearby clearing, a small opening in the jungle canopy where afternoon light fell in long amber columns, and she made them earn every inch of that ground. One of them would be walking with a limp for a week. Another had deep crescents from her nails in his forearm that he would remember for longer. But they were five, and she was one. Lucian they dragged by his ankles into a patch of sunlight, throwing him down into the dirt without ceremony. Pinned securely to the ground, Isabella watched the man with the permanent sneer stand over her, her cutlass now sheathed in his belt. Isabella, however, paid him no heed, instead looking past him to the columns of light, as they warmed to gold and began to die. She then looked over to Lucian. His face was turned toward the sky, still slack, and where the last of the sun touched the edge of his jaw the skin beneath had an awful waxy quality she had only seen once before, when she had found him near dawn on the deck of the Serpent. He would not burn, not yet, not in this thin remnant of light. But he had fallen unconscious and was not waking up. Come on, she thought, and hated how much depended on it. Her refusal to even acknowledge her captors struck a nerve, and the man's composure snapped. He knelt closer, grabbing her chin and reefing her head around to look him straight in the eyes. "Where's the rest of your crew?" "Dead," she said pleasantly. "Which is what you will be soon." Releasing her chin, he hit her, a backhand that split her lip and rocked her head. As her mouth filled with blood, she smiled up at him, her red-stained teeth showing. This only infuriated him more and he leant in closer, whispering menacingly. "I am going to enjoy having my way-" But he never got to finish his sentence. Driving her head forward, Isabella broke the man's nose with her forehead. He stumbled backwards, momentarily stunned, then, slowly getting back to his feet, he drew Isabella's cutlass from his belt and moved toward her. And that was when the sun went below the tree line and the clearing dropped into sudden violet shadow. Lucian moved. He became upright the way a shadow becomes a figure in a doorway, one moment on the ground and the next standing, his pale eyes open and extraordinarily cold. The men nearest him scrambled back. The bruiser spun around and made a sound that was nearly a word. "Gentlemen," Lucian said, clearly relishing what was about to happen next, "you have made a very grave error." He did not need long. He did not need much. He was still weak, she could see it in the tightness around his eyes, but fear did most of the work. Three of the men ran. The fourth backed into a tree, then kept backing. The broad-shouldered bruiser instinctively swung Isabella's cutlass, and Lucian stepped inside the arc of it with a kind of offended elegance, and that particular fight ended as quickly as it began. Silence settled back over the clearing, and the jungle resumed its evening business of insects and distant birds. Isabella reached over to where her cutlass had fallen next to the bruiser's broken body and used it to help herself to her feet. Her ribs ached. Her lip was bleeding. She looked at Lucian, and he looked at her. "Your lip," he said. "I noticed," she said. He reached out and touched the corner of her mouth with one finger, wiping off some blood. He considered it momentarily and then his eyes moved back to hers, and whatever she saw there wasn't amusement anymore. It looked almost like hunger. Isabella held very still while around them both, the jungle ticked and breathed. "We should move," she said, when the moment had stretched as far as she was willing to let it. "Yes," he agreed, but he did not move immediately. Isabella stepped back and surveyed the clearing. Vance was nowhere to be seen. The men who had run would run to someone, and that someone had sent them. She had no ship, no crew she could count, and a vampire who could not see sunrise. Her options, she reflected, were limited. "There is somewhere," Lucian said. He said it in a particular way, reluctant and certain at once, as if he had known the fact for a long time and had been hoping not to use it. He was already looking south, deeper into the jungle, where the darkness between the trees was oldest. It took them the better part of an hour to find it, following a long overgrown path that Lucian navigated without hesitation. The ground rose slowly, the trees thinned, and there it was. The temple was not large. It had been swallowed by the island over what must have been millennia, roots prying the stones apart, flowering vines mantling the walls, beautiful in spite of the ruin. The carving above the entrance arch had been worn by rain and years but was still legible, if you knew what you were looking at. Isabella was a woman who had read every map she had ever stolen. She looked at the carved frieze and felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Pale figures, taller than men, surrounded by kneeling islanders. Offerings at their feet. Moon-signs overhead. "The ancient ones," she said, mostly to herself. "Yes," Lucian said, still in that careful voice. He stood in the entrance and put his hand against the stone of the arch, and something in his expression changed. He was not a man prone to uncertainty, she had learned that long ago, but this she did not have a word for. Recognition, perhaps, except deeper. The way a man looks at a portrait of his grandfather. "Have you been here before?" she asked. "No," he said. "But something here has been waiting." Inside the main chamber the air was cool and smelled of old stone and the particular earthy sweetness of places undisturbed by time. At the far wall, set into a niche, was a stone figure. It was not an exact likeness, but the chiselled features were unmistakable. The high planes of the face. The lean, composed quality of the body. Lucian stood before it for a long time. Isabella stood beside him and said nothing, knowing full well that some silences were not hers to fill. It was only then that she noticed the fallen slab of rock at her back was carved, deliberately, in a style no shipwright or islander she knew would have chosen. A doorway half swallowed by roots opened into a black passage sinking down into the earth beyond, into what she was only now understanding was far older than the island itself. She went still, one hand dropping instinctively to the handle of the cutlass at her hip. "Lucian?" He didn't startle. He didn't even open his eyes fully. He just slowly turned his head toward the black mouth of the passage, and a calm settled over him that had nothing to do with exhaustion. Not fear. Not surprise. Recognition. "Lucian," Isabella said again, sharper now, "tell me you don't know what that is." He didn't answer. He only smiled, faint, unreadable, entirely too at ease for a man who'd been half-dead in her arms an hour before. He let his eyes drift closed again, as though a buried temple was the least remarkable thing to have happened all day. A sound reached them from the temple entrance. Measured footsteps, slow and deliberate. The Royal Navy captain who appeared in the archway was nothing like the hired hands from the clearing. He was younger, handsome in a sun-darkened, square-jawed way, with gold braid on his coat that caught the moonlight beginning to pool through huge gaps in the stone ceiling. He removed his hat with one hand. He looked at Lucian, and his face did not do the thing faces usually did when confronted with Lucian after dark. There was no fear in it. Only a cold, thorough appraisal. Clinical and unimpressed. "A sun-cursed blood drinker," the captain said, almost conversationally. "I wondered if the reports were true." Then he looked at Isabella, and everything in his expression changed. It went complicated in ways that took years to accumulate. "Bella," he said, and his voice was quiet. "You should not have made me sink your ship." The silence in the temple stretched until it had weight. She had not heard that name in eleven years. She had not looked into those eyes since the morning the horde had ransacked their town, burning it to the ground. Warehouses, fishing boats, the entire waterfront gone to ash. Almost everyone they had known, dead. The paths they'd chosen in the smoke and confusion had sent them in opposite directions, and never once back toward each other again. She had been seventeen. She had thought, for one entire summer before that morning, that she'd known exactly how the rest of her life would go, and that he would be in all of it. Captain Greaves, the Royal Navy's finest, was grinning at her now with the lopsided particular grin she had last seen on a boy of fifteen. He put his hat back on. Behind him, through the entrance arch, she could hear the distant tramp of boots. Many boots. "I have forty men outside," he said, his eyes drifting over to settle on Lucian. "And I have questions about your friend."