Chapter One

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Blood Origins by T.Isilwath


Two

            Tobias walked down the streets of Seattle. It was raining. It was usually raining in Seattle. The city averaged three months of sunshine a year; perfect for someone who was fatally allergic to sunlight. Now if it were only warmer. He turned up the collar of his coat and hunched down into its downy softness, pointedly ignoring the water dripping off his brown curls. What did he care if his hair got wet? It wasn’t like he was going to catch pneumonia. The thought made him laugh. There had been a kindly old woman who had admonished him as he left the airport.

            “You’ll catch your death out there, young man,” she scolded, no doubt seeing his pale skin, flushed cheeks and lack of hat and gloves.

            He’d only smiled and dipped his head. He hadn’t the heart to feed on her, even though he was hungry from the long flight. His sentimentality had always been his greatest weakness. At least his younger brother, Dorian thought so. Etienne hadn’t, though. Etienne loved the fact that he wouldn’t feed on just anybody. He sighed. He didn’t want to think about Etienne. He knew he was obsessing about his estranged lover, but the young man he had brought into this life to be his companion in eternity was never far from his thoughts. And it was Etienne who brought him to Dorian’s door on this cold September night.

For the first time since his lover left him, Tobias knew where to find him, but Etienne had been seen with another vampire, a powerful vampire named Barias. Dorian knew Barias, and Tobias hoped his brother would accompany him to see Etienne in order to ease tensions and prevent hostility. At least that is how he wished it to happen. Dream and reality were often two very different things when dealing with vampires, but if Dorian were with him he would not be alone, and that would make him feel more secure.

The streets were empty, an unfortunate side effect of traveling after dark. Still, lack of prey was a small price to pay for not smoldering in an airplane. Planes, after all, did fly above the clouds; they gave new meaning to the words ‘spontaneous combustion.’  He giggled at his own wit and realized that he was getting punchy. He needed to find a victim before he saw Dorian. It would put him in a better mood in which to face the younger vampire.

Extending his sharp hearing, he honed in on a lone heartbeat somewhere just north of him. Following the sound as he would a Siren’s song, he tracked it to a dark house at the end of a cul de sac. Inside he could hear five distinct heartbeats, all slow in sleep, but three slightly faster than the others: children. His quarry was outside the house, navigating the shrubbery beneath a rear window. He smiled ferally: a burglar. How convenient. Silently, as only his kind could do, he approached the man skulking in the shadows until he was nearly upon him. Then he allowed his feet to make a sound. The would-be robber jerked and peered owlishly into the darkness.

“Pete? Is that you?” the man hissed.

He stepped out of the shadows, letting the diffused beam from a motion sensor light activated on a house two lots down illuminate him. He knew what the burglar would see: a slender but robust young man with long curly brown hair that fell over his shoulders, dressed casually in corduroy trousers and a heavy, down coat. He watched the man take him in, shamelessly reading his mind, sifting through his thoughts like so much garbage. Too short to be considered a threat, his youthful, round face and big blue eyes fooling his prey into a false sense of security.

“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded.

He shrugged. “No one,” he answered in a sibilant whisper, letting his nostrils flare at the scent of the blood thrumming just under the man’s skin.

“What are you doing out here?”

“I’ve come to see my brother.”

The burglar gave a short laugh. “He live here?”

“No.”

He saw the confusion cross the man’s face as he closed the distance between them. Under ordinary circumstances he would have prolonged the game, playing with his victim as a cat would a mouse, but he was hungry and it was late. Within heartbeats he had the man pressed firmly up against the side of the house.

“What the hell do you want?” his prey choked.

“You,” he replied simply, just before he sank his small fangs into the hot flesh beneath his lips.

He drank swiftly, with little finesse, easily holding his quarry both silent and immobile. When savored, the act of feeding could be the ultimate pleasure for his kind. Tonight, however, he swallowed the pulse of blood greedily, sucking his victim dry until the heart stopped. He pulled away, taking in gulps of air and shaking off the feeling of euphoric vertigo he always experienced after making a kill. Oftentimes he wondered if this was what doing whiskey shots felt like to mortals; that sweet burning, followed by a sense of weightlessness, then the heavy fall back to earth. Carefully, he used his sharp nails to slit the dead man’s throat, effectively obliterating the puncture wounds from his fangs, then dropped the body into a dumpster at a nearby construction site.

Less than an hour later he was standing outside Dorian’s house. Dorian did not live in Seattle proper, but some distance northwest of it on a large tract of undeveloped land. His high, wooded property had spectacular views of the Sound. He had a double prow home with huge windows facing the Sound and the view to the east as well. The home was built on a slope, with the lower level set into the hillside. A large wrap-around deck on the main level encircled three quarters of the house. The landscaped property gave way to a row of pine trees and redwoods about fifty yards from the house, then progressed into heavy forest another twenty yards beyond that. He had a painstakingly cared for garden on terraces carved into the hill, and a rock garden centerpiece set with large slabs of blue slate and a cherub fountain at the center. To get to the house one had to go up a long, wooded driveway and pass through a security gate. Tobias had taken a cab to the beginning of the drive and walked up the roadway in the rain. Getting through the security gate had never been a problem. The gate was meant to keep out mortals, not vampires, and it was easily jumped over.

The lights were on so he knew the younger vampire was home, but he wasn’t certain how well he would be received. Although he and Dorian had come to a reluctant truce, and perhaps even a tenuous friendship in the last fifty years, there were still unhealed wounds left behind from decades of fighting and sibling rivalry. Many of the fresh scars came from Tobias’ knowledge that Dorian had been created because he failed to live up to their maker Ian’s expectations of him. Even though he was some two centuries older than Dorian, he still felt like a recalcitrant child in his presence.

Living in Dorian’s shadow had never been easy; resentment and jealousy ran high between them. It seemed Tobias could never forgive Dorian for being everything he wasn’t, and for some reason Dorian could never forgive Tobias for being Ian’s firstborn. It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair, but after nearly six human lifetimes’ worth of existence, he knew that life wasn’t fair. In fact, life often... how did they put it in this day and age? Royally sucked. Which, considering that was exactly what he did in order to survive those six human lifetimes, was a stroke of irony that nearly threw him into hysterics.

As he stood staring at the entrance to the house, the wind caught his wet and now riotous brown curls. He swept them back with one hand and secured them in a club at the base of his neck. With a bitter smile he remembered that Dorian had always accused him of looking rather like a poodle when he had his hair pulled back. Scowling at the memory, he pulled the club free and let his hair fall loose once again, the ever-strengthening wind lashing the tendrils against his face and neck. Steeling himself, he quieted the butterfly tremors in his stomach and approached the closed door, comforting himself with the fact that, regardless of whatever arguments were between them, Dorian had never refused him help.

The door opened before he could ring the bell, and Dorian stood there in the entry looking rather unkempt, or so he thought.

“Oh, it’s you. What do you want?” his brother demanded.

After a heavy pause he replied in his softest voice, “May I come in?”

Dorian regarded him for a moment then shrugged, opening the door wide to admit him and walking away, his back to his brother. As Tobias stepped into the house, he took a moment to wipe his feet and look at Ian’s second son.

Dorian’s hair was still long, still jet-black except for a single shock of silver that came from the right side of his forehead all the way down to his chin. He always suspected that Dorian was intensely proud of that single band of gray, it made him look older and somewhat more distinguished. Considering that Dorian was almost three hundred years old, the thought of anything making his brother look older seemed preposterous to him. He was tall, thin, but well muscled, and he dressed in clothing that flattered his svelte body. Tonight he was wearing a pair of snugly fitting black trousers and a loose white shirt with wide sleeves.

Dorian led him down a flight of stairs to the lower level of the house and into the to the den. Tastefully appointed with bookshelves and comfortable furniture, and warmly lit from a fire in the large hearth, it seemed that Dorian had been there for quite some time. Briefly he wondered where Aaron, Dorian’s on-again/off-again lover was, but he didn’t ask. Aaron came and went in Dorian’s life; it was a simple reality and probably the only thing that kept the two of them from killing each other. Tobias knew first-hand how difficult Dorian could be to live with.

“I’d offer you a drink, but I killed the last one this morning,” Dorian told him, a telltale smirk on his face, his green eyes flashing.

            Tobias always thought the slightly slanted green eyes spoke of an Asian influence somewhere in Dorian’s bloodline, but he doubted that Dorian’s English aristocrat father would ever have admitted to it. While Dorian wasn’t finely made like a China doll- he was robust and had a strong English jaw, his eyes and delicate hands bespoke of Asian genes. Tobias had no doubt that the blood of the Orient once ran in Dorian’s veins, but he politely resolved to keep his mouth shut on the subject.

            “Good,” Dorian snapped, proving once again that Tobias’ mental shields were no more effective in protecting his thoughts as tissues were against plague. “Now if you’d only keep your brain shut on it, and tell me why you’re here.”

            With a flourish, his younger sibling turned and lowered himself into a plush wingback chair set close to the fire. His long legs crossed while the rest of his body flowed over the arms of the chair as if it belonged there. No one could sprawl like Dorian. The very fact that the English vampire could make his thin body take up so much room seemed to defy the laws of physics. He had no time to dwell on the science of his brother’s body, however, because said sibling was glaring at him in irritation. He sighed and lowered his gaze, suddenly feeling very sad and small. It always began this way, the old rivalry and anger creating walls between them.

            “Please,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “Can we not...”

He sighed again and took a deep breath air, clenching and unclenching his fists. As always, Dorian waited patiently for him to calm down. He knew Dorian had learned from experience that if Tobias did not rise to take his bait, it meant his elder brother had come to him on some matter of importance. Dorian remained silent as he let the wave of anger crest then die, allowing the red haze and all the old pain it brought with it to fade.

            When he spoke again, it was with the voice of reason, or so he hoped. “Please... Ian is thousands of miles away. We are not in his house any longer. I am not the Firstborn and you are not the Prodigal Son. Can’t we simply be brothers?”

            His request was met with a silence that went on too long, and his hopes fell flat on the carpet. Defeated, he turned for the door.

            “I am sorry. I should not have come.”

            *No. Wait. There is no need to go,* came the mental plea, followed by Dorian’s soft voice. “I’m sorry. You’re right. We are a long way from the castle, both in time and distance.” He shrugged, a sheepish smile on his thin lips. “Old habits die hard.”

            Tobias agreed with a nod of his head, water dripping from his damp curls onto the Oriental rug. Dorian snorted in disgust.

            “Oh Hell. You’re getting my rugs all wet. For Crissakes go get a towel from the bathroom and dry your hair. You never did have any sense Toby. It’s pouring out there. You could have at least carried an umbrella.”

            He smiled at the false anger. “Umbrellas are for English wimps like yourself, Ri-Ri. And don’t call me Toby,” he jibed.

A book that had been sitting on a table next to Dorian’s chair thumped loudly against the doorjamb as he skittered out of the room.

            Ten minutes later he sat in a second wingback chair next to the hearth sans his coat and sodden shoes with a towel wrapped around his neck. The fire warmed his damp feet while a ceramic mug of hot water pleasantly warmed his hands. Warmth was comfort to a vampire. It was one of the reasons mortal lovers were so pleasant. Snuggling up to a hot, human body was wonderful even if certain types of mortal sex were not an option. Tobias had always attempted to avoid certain situations by favoring male lovers. Most of them had been more than pleased at his performance. In fact, only Etienne ever seemed to mind his impotence. A flash of memory struck him, of Etienne while still a mortal man, flushed and sweaty from sex, the scent of his blood and arousal heavy in the dark room, his dark blond hair stuck to his wet skin...

            “So what brings you to my doorstep on this dark and stormy night?” Dorian asked slowly, breaking him out of his erotic memory.

            Dorian’s voice was oddly calm and Tobias suddenly realized that he must have broadcast the image to his brother. Flushing as much as his kind could, he placed his cooled mug on a table next to the chair and looked at his hands.

            “I met Khristopher last week,” he began, dropping the name of their vampire cousin.

            “Ah. Is he still riding around Miami on the back of a ‘57 Harley?” Dorian quipped with a wry smile. “Y’know, there is something fundamentally wrong with a vampire who voluntarily chooses to live in a place called the Sunshine State.”

            The last comment made Tobias laugh, and it felt good. It warmed him from the inside out like wine did when he was mortal and young. He heard Dorian laughing with him.

            “So, what did Khristopher have to say about Etienne?” the younger vampire finally asked.

            The mention of his lover’s name stilled his laughing. “How did you...?” he began, then stopped. Of course Dorian could read his mind.

            “No. Not this time. I didn’t have to. I know that lost look on your face usually means something has happened with Etienne.”

            “He left me.”

            “He’s left you before.”

            “Four years ago.” ‘Four years since he walked out of my life and took my heart and soul with him.’

            “He’ll be back. What’s four years when you have forever? Look at Aaron and I. He’s left me for decades at a time.”

            “Khristopher said he saw him in Ecuador.”

            “Nice country. A little too remote for my tastes, though.”

            Tobias cast a glance at his brother. “He was with Barias.”

            The name made Dorian straighten up a little. “Barias? Was Khristi sure?”

            Tobias nodded. “He said he was certain. Etienne and Barias were together in Ecuador.”

            Dorian sat back again, his face thoughtful. “Hmm. That is interesting.”

            Tobias waited to see if Dorian would be more forthcoming with his thoughts, but the younger vampire kept his counsel to himself. After a few moments of silence, he unveiled his meager plan.

            “I am going to Ecuador. I mean to go and find them. There were so many things left unsaid...”

            Dorian’s pale hand covered his own. “No, Toby. Leave him be. When he is ready, he’ll come back to you.”

            “But...”

            Dorian cut him off. “No. I know what you are trying to do Toby and it’s not right. Etienne needs to grow on his own. He needs to breathe and feel the vampire blood you gave him pound in his veins. You know it is not unusual for a fledgling to leave its maker. You love him enough to give him his freedom. Don’t make the same mistakes with him as Ian did with us, like I did with Elizabeth.”

            He saw a shadow fall across Dorian’s face as he remembered his first and only fledgling: a spirited Commoner the younger vampire had made at the turn of the twentieth century. She had lasted barely a decade before going mad. Ian had killed her out of necessity, but in doing so had destroyed the close bond he shared with his younger son. Dorian knew there was nothing else that could have been done, but he truly had never forgiven his maker for killing her. He and Ian did not speak to each other for eighty years, and in those eighty years Ian’s two sons found reconciliation with each other. It was one of many good things that had come from the disaster that was Elizabeth.

            “But I miss him so much...”

            “You miss the familiarity of him,” Dorian corrected. “You hate to be alone. You need someone to tell you what to do and who to be. Do you forget the reasons why you put up with all the rivalry and fighting after Ian brought me? You stayed because you didn’t want to leave home, because you had no idea how to live on your own. And when you tried to go out your own, you just found someone else to cling to until Ian dragged you back. I blame Ian for that. He kept you needy, dependent.”

            “He was my savior,” he argued, bristling. “Without him I would have died on the streets or been caught and executed for stealing.”

            “All you did was trade one master for another,” Dorian shot back. “I swear Toby, if you wanted to be a mindless minion, you should have entered the clergy! Tell me, do you still believe in all of that? That crap about God and Satan and the sanctity of the Holy Catholic Church? You used to. You ate it up like blood.”

            Anger simmered just under the surface of Tobias’ skin. It was an old argument that would see no end. Dorian, born in 1682 and made in 1703, had been raised in the Anglican Church while his older sibling had been brought up in the shadow of Rome.

It was 1490, people believed that midwives were Satan-spawn and that the Church was the only source of Truth in the civilized world. Pope Innocent VIII ruled the Vatican, sending his Inquisition out to bring down the heretics and roust the witches that plagued Europe. Priests taught that the devil had come back to earth in the form of an old hag, and only the Inquisitor stood between you and the minions of Hell. To break ties with Rome was the ultimate sin, and Excommunication was a fate worse than death. God and Satan were real, and the agents of both walked the earth, vying for human souls. That had been his world for the twenty years of his mortal life and the first two hundred of his immortal one. God was wrathful and those who murdered belonged to the devil. It was a good thing vampires lived forever because if he ever died, he knew he was going straight to Hell.

“Thou shalt not kill. Those are the words. That is the law. I am damned, as we all are, and always have been,” he replied tightly.

Dorian laughed. “Oh, Toby, you always did make me laugh. Those laws, those tenants, we lost them when we lost our mortal flesh. We aren’t part of them any longer. Why do you still cling to the old faith when you know it’s only a bunch of fairy tales and forged documents?”

“Sometimes faith is all we have. If I don’t have faith how can I justify our existence? I find evil mortals and send them to Hell. It’s what I do. It’s what I have done for five centuries,” he answered, gripping the arms of the chair tightly.

Dorian gave him a small smile, one that struck at the very heart of his anger. Dorian was the scholar, the one who always knew everything, who could out-think, out-talk and out-class his elder sibling who was, for all intents and purposes still stuck in the Renaissance. Dorian’s smile turned bitter.

“Yes. I was smarter, and stronger, and more independent. I fought every day to be perfect, to be exactly Ian’s image of me. Every day I had to earn his love, but he gave it to you freely. I would consider that a fair trade.”

Now it was his turn to smile bitterly. “Nothing in life is fair. We should not have had to earn his love. He was our maker, our father; he should have loved us in spite of our weaknesses.”

“But you see Toby, that’s the whole thing. Ian did love us. He loved us the only way he knew how. There are many things I would accuse the old man of doing, but not loving us isn’t one of them. It took me almost seventy years to realize that, but once I did, it helped me... be at peace with some things.”

Tobias nodded. He knew what Dorian meant. After Ian killed Elizabeth, both of his children left him. Dorian had disappeared into the wilds of the New World while he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. The time away from his maker had allowed him the necessary distance needed to look more kindly and objectively upon Ian’s motivations.

It had been his first successful foray into the world of his own independence; the first time he had run away and Ian had not tracked him down to drag him back home. While he had not liked it, and often found others to be with because he hated being on his own, he never became lonely or desperate enough to return to his maker. But he did come to realize that Ian had done many things out of love for his children, including kill Elizabeth. In retrospect, with ninety years gone by, he could even sympathize with Ian’s hopeless situation. He had no choice but to kill the mad vampire woman. It was that or risk the lives of his sons. He often wondered if Ian knew killing her would break up his family, and surmised that was why Ian did not hunt his two errant sons down after they left. Whatever his reasoning, he had never told either Tobias or Dorian why he waited for his sons to come back rather than chasing after them. Maybe Ian had realized it was time to let his fledglings fly. He doubted he would ever really know the answer. Ian was notoriously closed lipped on many issues, especially ones regarding the heart. There were times when Tobias had not been certain that Ian loved him, and he did not want Etienne to ever have those same doubts, and he told Dorian as much.

“That is why I want to find Etienne and talk with him. I do not want him to question my love for him.”

“In his heart he knows you love him, just as we know Ian loves us. What you need to do is find out why he left you,” Dorian corrected.

“He told me he could get more attention from a doll than he could from me,” he admitted softly.

Dorian regarded him calmly. “From what I saw of the two of you eight years ago, I would agree. You were distant and cool towards him. He desperately wanted your attention Toby. He needed you. He was newly made and still reeling from the change. I was surprised that you were so cavalier towards him. I always expected any child of yours would be smothered with affection.”

He fought back tears, remembering his confusion and desperation. “I wanted to. Every time he came to me, I wanted to wrap him in my arms and comfort him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know if it was what he wanted. Things... changed after I brought him to me. We changed. We could no longer enjoy some pleasures. It was very awkward.”

Dorian smiled knowingly. “He wanted you to be the leader and you lost the vampire-mortal lover dynamic which allowed you to feel comfortable dominating him.”

“Perhaps,” he hedgingly agreed, looking at his hands. “But you know how it is with maker and fledgling. The child usually leaves the parent after a while. Ian held us with him through our weaknesses: my fear of abandonment and your need for love, but I refused to do that with Etienne. I fully expected him to leave me. He no longer had a reason to stay.”

           The slap that struck him was fast even for his vampire reflexes. He barely had time to tense before the blow knocked him out of the chair, and he found himself sprawled on the floor, looking up at a furious Dorian.

“Fatalistic idiot! No reason to stay? He loved you! Isn’t that a decent enough reason to stay? If this is how you treated him, it’s no wonder he left!” Dorian spat, his eyes blazing.

Tobias bared his teeth, his cheek still feeling the sting of the blow.

“What do I know of love, Dorian? All those I have loved abandoned me,” he countered, not bothering to get up. “My mortal family sold me to the duke as a bed servant. My vampire father gave me love only when I was dependent upon him, and he took the only true vampire lover I ever had away from me. My brother in immortality was my hated enemy. My mortal lovers used me until I learned to use them.”

He paused, looking away, his anger fading to be replaced with despair. “Only Etienne was different. I had hoped he could teach me how to love.”

He heard Dorian sigh heavily then saw him offer a hand to pull him up off the floor. He took the peace offering and allowed Dorian to yank him to his feet. No one was more surprised than he when the younger vampire did not halt the pull once he was upright, but continued until he was crushed into a tight embrace.

*Ri-Ri?* he ventured mentally.

*No one can teach you how to love. It’s either something you intrinsically know, or something you learn on your own- usually the hard way.*

The iron grip eased and he found himself looking into Dorian’s tear-rimmed eyes. The sight was shocking to him. Dorian rarely cried. It was something that just wasn’t done. To see him so close to weeping unnerved him greatly.

“Don’t be so surprised. I can cry, you know, and I do. Just ask Aaron. I cry over him all the time. Love hurts, Toby. It’s all the best and worst things about mortality brought into this vampire life. It means doing things that go against your very nature, things you hate doing, but you do them anyway out of love. Sometimes it means letting go when the only thing you want to do is hold on tight.”

Dorian stopped, a strange, almost mortified look upon his face, as if he realized that he had just revealed something intensely personal to a potential enemy. Tobias hurried to reassure him.

“It’s all right. All past now.”

The younger vampire shook off the look and let his arms drop to his sides. Then he turned to stare at the fire.

“I’m sorry. I’m rather maudlin tonight.”

Tobias raised a hand and gently placed it on his brother’s shoulder. “I am the one who is sorry. I came here bemoaning my absent lover and gave no thought to your pain.”

He felt Dorian stiffen and raise his chin. “I’m fine. Never better. You know me, stiff upper lip and all that. My father was very big on how boys should behave. I’m used to it.”

He ignored the statement. He had not known Dorian’s father personally, hearing only secondhand stories from his son and Ian. What he had heard of the Earl had left a bitter taste in his mouth. The man had been a tyrant by English standards and by German ones. He doubted any love was lost between father and son when the Earl, an officer in the Royal Navy, was killed in one of England’s many Naval battles.

“Will you come with me to find Etienne?” he asked gently, changing the subject. “You know Barias. You could speak to him for me...”

Dorian shook his head, still focusing on the fire. “I can’t. I have a painting arriving this week. I thought it would look nice in Aaron’s room. It’s a Monet, one of his more cheerful ones. It will brighten up the walls a bit I think,” he answered, then looked at Tobias with a wry smile on his face. “But if you need money... there’s always plenty of that, you know.”

“No. I don’t need money. I think finance was the one thing you and I both excelled in,” Tobias replied warmly.

“Well, one must have money. Money buys tolerance for one’s eccentricities, and fixes damn near everything. It’s amazing what one can buy when one has enough money.”

“Or who,” Tobias added without humor. They both knew too well what he was talking about.

Dorian looked away again. “Or who.”

He let his hand slide from his brother’s shoulder. “I have to go.”

“Will you not stay until tomorrow?”

“No. I can’t. I must strike while the iron is hot, so to speak.”

“Then I wish you safe travels.”

He smiled. “But not luck?” he asked fondly.

Green eyes met blue ones. “Always that.”

Dorian turned to face him and he offered a tentative embrace that was accepted. The hug lasted barely a moment, but they parted smiling.

“I’ll see you soon,” he promised.

“I’ll be here.”

With a final smile and a pat on the arm, he retrieved his now dry shoes and coat, and donned them, preparing to once again face the storm outside.

“I took the liberty of calling you a cab since I know you won’t take my car. It will meet you at the end of the drive,” Dorian informed a few minutes later.

“Thank you.”

“Here,” he said, offering him a wide-brimmed hat.

Tobias grinned and took the gift, fitting it over his curls. “Now all I need is a trench coat and I could be Humphrey Bogart. Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

Dorian rolled his eyes as he opened the door. “Don’t quit your day job. Oh wait, you don’t have a day job.”

“No, I just lounge around all day feeding on Playmates and critiquing art films, like someone else I know.”

“Out! I shall not have my honor insulted in my own house!” the younger vampire ordered with mock anger.

“Too late for that, Ri-Ri,” he teased and slipped out the door before Dorian could swat him.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” he heard his brother yell over the wind and he smiled.

He was still smiling as he walked towards the road where the cab would meet him. Although he had not secured Dorian’s company on the trip, their meeting had gone a long way to raise his spirits. His step was lighter and his mood more optimistic. Even the storm seemed to have eased some of its fury. Happy, he raised his face to the falling water, and listened to the steady patter on the drive and treetops as he quickened his pace. He’d always loved the sound of rain.

Chapter One

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