“So use the best of both, Mal. The man you could have been and the vampire you are, and help her. Just because you can’t remember what your mother looked like doesn’t mean you don’t have her heart, the power to love another the way she did.”

Mal pressed his lips together. “Get out now, Kohana. I mean it.”

The man nodded. “You know where I’ll be.”

When he stumped back to the kitchen, Mal looked out into the night a few minutes more. Then, sighing, he returned to his desk. Picking up the phone, he braced himself to make the call he’d been avoiding. As he went through the necessary operators to connect to the number at Danny’s remote location, he knew it was daylight in Australia, but he couldn’t put it off any longer. After Dev received the call, Mal was glad he didn’t have to do more than say, “I need to talk to Danny.” Apparently, Dev heard it in his voice. He went to wake his Mistress immediately.

As expected, Danny didn’t waste time on preliminaries. “Tell me.”

He relayed all the facts to her. How the other four fledglings were doing, Jeremiah’s decision, how he’d chosen to execute it, how Elisa had helped him. Then he found he didn’t know what else to say.

“Bloody hell. I never thought to have Janus give me when they turned the three boys. We just knew Ruskin’s four monsters were fledglings, and fledgling turnings are horribly unstable. Only in Oz would Council have ignored violations of that magnitude for that long. It’s like we’re not on the bloody same planet with those European bastards.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” Mal said quietly. “Don’t worry about that. I didn’t think about it, for the same reason. We’d already assumed he was a few years older. We just didn’t know how much older.”

“How is she doing?” Danny asked, her voice weighted with tension, concern.

“It’s like she’s fallen down a well. And she has no desire to come out of it.”

The oath on the other side echoed his own sentiments. “She’s been part of the serving class all her life. They don’t have the luxury to entertain depression, let alone have it. If she’s doing that, then she’s gone far beyond where she should go.”

“I know that.” He set his jaw. “But she’s still . . . dusting. Cleaning every damn thing. Mending clothes. I tried to stop her. Kohana tried to stop her. But we have nothing else to offer her.”

“Really.” The one word was heavy with speculation. “Do you want to send her home to us? Do you think that will help?”

“What do you think will help? That’s why I’m calling.” He wasn’t in the mood for damn games.

“My first instinct is to bring her home, to watch over her.” Danny paused. “But can I do that better than her Master?”

He sat on his desk, heedless of the paperwork that crumpled beneath him. Knees splayed, elbows planted on them, he resisted the urge to splinter the receiver. “Danny, would you please stop being a goddamn woman and speak plain?”

“I’m speaking plainly enough,” she responded in that cool tone of hers. “A servant isn’t about having someone to fetch for you and give you physical release when you need it, though all that comes with it. It’s something deeper, something that keeps us connected to the pulse of our soul, Malachi, whatever that is.”

“You held off getting a servant twice as long as I have, way longer than most vamps wait, but now you’re lecturing me on what it means to have one?”

“Mal, can you stop being an emotionally constipated male and admit that if I told you to put her on the next plane, you’d tell me to bugger off in twelve different ways?”

He remembered Nadia, standing before Lord Marshall, begging him to be ruthless with her, to be the Master she needed him to be. He closed his eyes.

“As an emotionally constipated male, I’d only need one way to tell you. Fuck off. Less words, less syllables.”

A wry chuckle at last. It squeezed something around his heart. He sighed. “Help me, Danny. I don’t want to send her back, but I don’t know how to reach her. Except, something Kohana said . . .” He hesitated. Even among close vampire relationships, there was very little as taboo as what he was thinking about saying. “He said I do have the key, but it’s something vampires . . . We don’t offer it to humans. Can’t offer. Right?”

At the sudden, weighted silence, he realized he was right. It was ridiculous, dangerous to even bring it up. As a relatively young made vampire, he was far more likely to be accused of dangerous sentiment, the remains of his human background, which would merely heighten his inferiority in the eyes of other vampires. Even Marshall, after that emotional outburst to his servant, had made an attempt—albeit a poor one—to pass his fierce words off the next day as merely helping his servant, not a true reflection of his devotion.

Total horseshit.

Though Mal didn’t give a damn about vampire opinion, he’d quickly learned, as all vampires did, that a perceived weakness could be a terrible danger for that vampire, quickly exploited by others. He had too much at stake here, too many depending on him appearing strong in all ways. A more powerful vampire with an issue against him could take it all away. Danny had had Dev for only a couple years. As Elisa so eloquently put it, the female vamp would think he’d gone wobbly. He shouldn’t say anymore.

Then he thought of those empty, wounded blue eyes. Damn it. “You know what Elisa said to me, a while ago? She said no one, even vampires, can do without love. And she thought maybe that was why vampires had servants. Because of the way we are, humans are God’s gift to us, to let us love. If you don’t say something soon, I’m going to hang up and pretend we never had this conversation.”

“Well, her logic makes sense, doesn’t it? We’d need that from our servants, because we sure as hell aren’t good at loving our fellow vampires.” His gut loosened anew as he heard the warmth return to Danny’s voice. “She’s quite something, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, in more ways than one.” Mal shifted, scowling at the sound of Kohana rattling his pots. “Since she’s been here, a couple things have happened that made me wonder if there’s more to her than we know. I can’t go into one of them”—he thought of her ability to see the fault lines that only he and Kohana were able to see—“but the other was Jeremy’s second mark. She had a physically empathic connection to him, when he was in distress. Kohana has done some of his medicineman hocus-pocus, meditating or some nonsense, but he says there may be some Celtic magic in her ancestry. Just a residual, nothing too fancy. Maybe a great-grandmother wisewoman type of thing.”

“I’m sure Kohana appreciates your great reverence for his skills,” Danny said dryly. “And while I wouldn’t be surprised, because people are often more than they themselves know, I think she’d be every bit of what she is, even without that. My mother saw something special in Elisa, Mal. In the short time she was in my service, I saw it, over and over again. That day she hit Ruskin with a teapot . . . Hell, it was like watching a field mouse attack a lion.

“It reminded me of the night I walked into a pub and met a man who thought he had nothing to offer, but he was the biggest damn hero I’ve ever met. It’s what makes them special to us, Mal. They can’t overpower us; they aren’t superior to us in any way . . . yet it’s funny how all of a sudden we find we can’t do without them, right? And,” she added, “If you ever tell anyone we had this conversation, I’ll deny it, and then rip your throat out to appease my offended sense of honor. Got it?”

He blinked, not entirely sure she was kidding. “Got it. I think.”

She huffed a snort, then continued. “Mal . . . I know where you’re going here. We don’t have to speak of it directly, but I’ll tell you this. You and I both know when a problem confronts us, we usually already know the solution, however unlikely it seems. So the only thing I’ll say is this, and take it for what it’s worth. Vampires and servants are what they need to be in front of other vampires. What they are behind closed doors . . . that’s between the two of them. Understand? For most, it’s no different from what the vampire world sees. But for some of them—maybe more than we realize, since no one will admit it—it’s something different. Nothing gives a woman a reason to live like knowing someone needs and wants her, more than he wants or needs anyone or anything else.” Her voice softened. “You convince her of that, Mal, and you’ll get her back.”

“So what gives a man reason to live? What keeps Dev going?”

“A cold beer and a soft arse. Men are much easier to recall from the dead.” She laughed, then sobered. “Call me if nothing changes for the better, Mal. If you need us, we’ll come. She’s very special, to all of us.”

41

TWO nights later, when Mal told Elisa he needed her help at the cat habitats, she went along dutifully enough. As he drove the Jeep, she didn’t turn her face up to the night. Instead, she simply stared into space through the windshield. Between gear shifts, he reached over and touched her leg to draw those vacant blue eyes to him.

“Elisa, do you want to go home?” he asked.

“If you no longer need me here, I can go if you want me to,” she responded automatically. “They always need an extra pair of hands at the station.”

“Do you want to go, Elisa?”

Her hands tightened in the folds of her plain work dress. Mal saw it clearly in her mind. She didn’t want to be asked what she wanted. She didn’t want to wade into the jungle of her feelings, wanted to be on the fringes of her consciousness only. She didn’t want to think.

“Will this take long? I told Kohana I’d help him bake apple pies for the day-shift hands, for their breakfast.”

“It will take as long as I require.”