Bannockburn Binding (Beloved Bloody Time) by Cooper-Posey Tracy

Author:Cooper-Posey, Tracy [Cooper-Posey, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780986906497
Publisher: Tracy Cooper-Posey
Published: 2011-12-13T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Stelios emerged from the shed in the small hours of the morning and found Ryan where he sat on a stile over a drywall.

It was so silent Ryan could hear the wind in the tops of the trees. Ezra’s gasping groans had stopped.

Stelios put his foot on the bottom step of the stile. It was a while before he spoke. “I tried basic medicine when he first got sick. But all I know is human stuff. Like I said, I didn’t think you people got sick.”

“We don’t. This isn’t sickness, Mr. Stelios,” Ryan told him. “It’s stasis poisoning. When we come back in time, the symbiot in our blood that makes us vampire goes into stasis. From that moment on, we are human again. But there is a price for that humanity. All the years and decades and centuries we have lived begin to attack our human form. It is entropy at light speed.”

“So when you guys come back in time, you start dying?”

“At a vastly accelerated pace, yes. We pay for the time we have lived. Death from stasis poisoning is the most painful death anyone can imagine. And despite medical research we still don’t know how to stop it, or delay it. We don’t even know how to alleviate the symptoms.”

“Can’t you just take him back? To our time?”

Ryan sighed. “It is too far gone now. His skin—you saw the cracks?”

“Like a dried-out lake bed.”

“His skin is breaking down now. To try the jump back would be just like stepping onto the surface of the lake bed. Jumping on it, in fact.”

“Jesus,” Stelios whispered.

The silence stretched between them while Ryan listened to the wind and held Ezra in his thoughts.

“Why didn’t he just cancel the tour? Take us both back home?” Stelios said at last. “I’m a reasonable man. I would have understood.”

Ryan sighed. This was the point that had troubled him since he had seen Ezra’s extinguishing form in the shed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I looked at Ezra’s tour journal before we came. He had completed too many tours, too close together, but he was one of our best and one of only a few that know this era and the regency era well. And Ezra was a proud man. He would be the last to admit he was tiring. Besides, he would have found it too embarrassing to explain the facts of his vampire existence to a human. Then…” He looked at Stelios’ shadowed form. “There was the pressure you put on the agency to give you the tour. I only know Ezra a little, but I know his twin sister much better and they’re stubborn. If you had insisted on your tour he would have insisted you complete the damn thing, come what may. He’d rather risk a bit of stasis poisoning than admit he couldn’t give you what you wanted. But I think it came on too quick, this time.”

“He did this to spite me?”

“You misunderstand,” Ryan said quickly. “He did it to spite humans, who have hounded him and his sister all their lives.

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