Chapter 10 #2
After a moment for revelry, Saint Germain swung his coat off his shoulders and placed it gently on the largest chair at the Council table, left empty for him.
“We have serious business this evening,” he said, his showmanship on extra wattage tonight as he swept around the ring, claws extended, grinning at the packs.
Stopping in front of the Portes de l’Enfer bleachers, he looked up at Jack, sitting alone with his family, and raised an eyebrow.
“Lela Beauloup, you’ve been bound?” he asked, flicking his glance to Lela’s growing belly. Lela stood up with Julien beside her, and Saint Germain clapped his hands together with glee, his claws clacking together. “To the other brother!”
The crowd howled its approval as Saint Germain toyed with them, pointing back and forth at them and then at Lela’s belly. “And it seems Julien Beauloup wasted no time with his new mate!”
Lela’s face flushed, and she cast her eyes down, but Julien’s lips tilted up just slightly. “Were she yours, Premiere Loup, would you have wasted any?”
“Ah, ha ha!” Saint Germain chortled, and the crowd went wild, demanding that the newly bound couple kiss by pounding their feet on the floor faster and faster, louder and louder.
Lela looked up at Julien, and Jack’s own heart clenched to see the love in her eyes.
As their lips touched, Jack, like every other bound Roug in the room, felt the tremor of intimacy pass through him.
Short gasps and small sighs could be heard around the room as other bound couples reaffirmed their bond with a touch or kiss.
Saint Germain narrowed his eyes at Jack. He’d noticed the shudder of Jack’s shoulders, a telltale sign of a bound man. He whispered, just loud enough for Jack to hear. “And your mate, Jacques Beauloup? Where is she?”
“Not here yet,” he answered quietly, standing up.
“So you will push this to an Inquisition.”
“No, sir. I could try to explain.”
“Explain what? You had one simple instruction: to bring your mate here to be re-bound. And here you are. Alone,” he spat. “You disrespect our—”
“No, sir. I have nothing but respect for our ways.”
Saint Germain looked annoyed for a moment, then grinned with delight, raising his voice. “Felicitations, Julien et Lela! But you will all notice, Jacques Beauloup sits alone. I do believe it’s time—”
“Saint Germain!”
All eyes turned from Saint Germain to look at Tombeur Lesauvage, who stood beside Tallis Beauloup at the Council table. Hand in hand, they stared at Saint Germain, and he had no choice but to turn away from Jack and direct his attention to his mother instead.
“Tombeur and Tallis. Do you have something to say?”
“Yes. We wish to be bound,” said Tombeur.
A gasp could be heard around the entire hall, and Jack clenched his eyes shut in relief, sitting back down, grateful for the extra minutes. A new binding, especially between two such well-known and respected Rougs, was certainly cause for celebration. Jack’s re-binding would wait.
“A new binding!” exclaimed Saint Germain, moving away from Jack to face Tombeur and Tallis. He turned to the crowd, waggling his bushy gray eyebrows. “What do you say?”
The roar of approval was deafening as Saint Germain urged Tombeur and Tallis away from their seats and into the center of the Council Ring. Saint Germain placed a hand on each of their shoulders, standing before them, and the crowd quieted down immediately.
He waited until the room was silent before reciting the ancient words, “If she be for me, let my heart stop beating. If I be for her, let it be born again.”
For years, Jack had witnessed the bond of love between his mother and Tombeur, so he knew what they risked tonight.
If their kiss didn’t bind them, it meant that they weren’t supposed to be together.
It meant that they’d never achieve ultimate physical pleasure, eyespeak, Dansmatête.
They’d be destined to friendship, and all romantic flirtation between them would die swiftly.
Tombeur reached for his mother’s face, cupping her cheeks gently, and Tallis covered his hands with hers, looking deep into his eyes. Tombeur’s eyes burned golden and green, and Tallis’s answered with a fierce, burning copper.
From where Jack sat, he could see Tombeur hesitate for a moment, perhaps realizing that this was the ultimate moment of fate. Would his soul be bound to Tallis for life, or would he lose the woman he’d loved for so many years?
Tombeur’s voice shook as he whispered, “Je t’aime, femme.” I love you, woman.
But Tallis’s voice was strong and certain as she whispered, “Je t’aime aussi,” back.
Almost unable to bear the tension, Jack watched as Tombeur’s head lowered, coming closer and closer to his mother’s lips until they touched for the first time, then parted.
And Jack felt it. It ripped through his heart, through his newly formed soul, like a bullet, like a drug, like a song.
As Tombeur lowered his lips again, binding himself to Tallis and she to him, every bound Roug in the hall felt the earthquake of emotion, and amid sighs and gasps of pleasure, Jack’s mother was bound for the second time in her life, to the man she’d loved for what seemed like forever.
“What is bound cannot be broken!” declared Saint Germain as the crowd exploded in approval. Tombeur and Tallis, who’d waited half their lives to feel their lips pressed against each other, kissed long and hard, arms holding, fingers grasping, entwined around each other, barely under control.
They may have kissed forever, but for the loud, single, earth-shattering howl that rent the dark of night outside of the Gathering Hall.
Chatter abated in waves, and a strange silence descended on the hall as every Roug in attendance recognized the call of an unbound female, newly turned, coming closer with every passing second.
Jack’s eyes widened, and he bolted out of his chair, flicking a quick glance to Tombeur, who ripped himself away from Tallis in recognition of his progeny’s call.
Taking a deep breath, he tilted his face to the open sky and released his own howl, guiding her, telling her where to find him.
The Gathering Hall, waiting with bated breath to see the curiosity of a newly turned Roug, shifted their eyes to the far side of the Gathering Hall, where the large entrance lay still.
Darcy howled again, this time much closer, and Tombeur’s answering cry was more mellow, more assuring, less directive.
And suddenly, she appeared.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, red hair tumbling over her shoulders in defiant waves, and eyes burning silver-green, she strode into the Gathering Hall, beelining for Tombeur.
The crowd watched in fascination as she approached, only to stop short in her tracks and inhale sharply, jerking her neck to look at Tallis.
Darcy had ridden with Willow as far as the weigh station on the boundary of Portes de l’Enfer before tucking her clothes under her arm, shifting, and running the fifty miles back north to try to make the Gathering in time.
She howled to Tombeur to let him know that she was coming, praying, with every footfall on the hard earth, that she wouldn’t be too late.
The change in Tallis’s scent was unmistakable. Darcy shifted her eyes to her maker. “You’re bound.”
Tombeur nodded. “I told you.”
Darcy leaned forward and kissed his cheek, then drew back, offering him a small, contrite smile. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
“Such excitement!” declared Saint Germain, who still stood in front of Tombeur and Tallis. Extending one yellowed claw toward Darcy, he asked, “Who. Are. You?”
Tombeur stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Darcy, and raised his voice to introduce his progeny to the waiting packs.
“She is Darcy Turner Lesauvage, lately of the Southern Bloodlands, turned not blooded.”
“Of the…Southern Bloodlands,” mused Saint Germain, grinning at her. “A turned human? From Carlisle or Colebrook?”
“Carlisle,” she said, her voice even and strong.
She looked up at Tombeur, a clear question in her eyes, and he flicked his chin to the right, where she found Jack Beauloup standing in the first row of bleachers, watching her with rapt attention.
His face—familiar, yet strange, beloved, yet unknown—was unreadable, and yet she may have seen hope beneath the burning of his eyes.
“How fascinating,” murmured Saint Germain. “Why do I feel like there’s more to your story, Darcy Lesauvage?”
“Because there is,” she said softly, her eyes welling as she stared back at Jack, unable to look away.
It wasn’t that the memories she’d seen were suddenly a firm part of her history.
It wasn’t that simple. Although she’d been touched on a visceral level as she’d watched hers and Jack’s love story unfold in her mind, she’d still felt a certain detachment from it, almost as though she were watching someone else’s story and was deeply affected.
So affected, in fact, she hadn’t noticed when her heart, overloaded with sensations, had sped up so fast that it finally stopped.
For all intents and purposes, Willow told her, she’d died in that rocking chair by the fire.
And when she did, the only face Darcy saw, the only touch she felt, the only voice that she heard, was Jack’s.
And as her heart started beating anew, her lungs sucked in a huge breath, and the only person she wanted to see was Jack Beauloup.
Memories or not, he was her past and her future, and she wasn’t frightened anymore. She knew it was true.
Her feet moved noiselessly but surely toward him, and he ducked under the railing, stretching his body, then straightening to stand before her.
Tall and impossibly handsome, his eyes seemed to reach out to her, trying to speak to her, and she suddenly knew that’s exactly what he was doing, and it made her lips tilt up just slightly as she closed the distance between them.
When she was about a foot away from him, she stopped, her heart thundering in her chest.
“Jack.”