Chapter Two

A Fair Trade

The room was silent, save for the gentle sound of pages turning. The sole occupant, a young girl with long silver hair and violet eyes, lay curled up on her bed with a large stack of comic books resting beside her.

In her hands she held issue twelve of “Gunrunner Kid.” She turned the colorful pages almost reverently, revealing a cyberpunk fantasy story about a young girl who worked as a courier in a futuristic society while wielding a semi-sentient cursed gun. The artwork was fantastic and the storytelling was quite good. She burrowed deeper into her blankets as she read, reaching automatically for the next comic in the series as she finished the one she was currently reading.

Jenna was surrounded by books.

Her room was full of bookshelves, so many in fact that an observer would’ve been hard pressed to find any uncovered wall space between them. The shelves themselves were full to overflowing, books stacked not just lengthwise, but top to bottom as well. Every inch of available space was in use and indeed, several of the stacks were leaning precariously outwards and appeared to be in real danger of falling onto the carpeted floor with the slightest provocation.

In the center of the room sat a large mahogany desk and a comfortable looking office chair, both of which were similarly piled high with books and papers. There was a small clear space on the desk with a clipboard full of yellow notebook paper, the top few pages of which were covered in cramped, excited looking handwriting. Resting on top of it was a pen with one end that appeared to have been severely chewed on.

Jenna was humming a happy little tune to herself as she finished another comic book and started on the next in the series, lost in the adventures of Kine, the protagonist of the story. So involved was she in her reading, that at first she didn’t even hear the quiet, insistent knocking at her door. It persisted however, until she looked up from her comic with a guilty start.

Unbidden, a line from Edger Allen Poe’s “The Raven” came to her lips.

“Who is that knocking, knock knock knocking at my door?”

The knock came again, this time a little bit louder.

“Hold on, I’m coming!” she called out.

Jenna hopped out of bed and looked at her stack of comic books with dismay.

Aww, nuts.

She swept the comic books under her blanket and piled her pillows on top of them.

There, that ought to do the trick.

She looked around the room quickly, to see if there were any other items that might get her in trouble when she was supposed to be studying, but she couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.

Satisfied, Jenna threw the door wide open, but instead of her father, whom she had been expecting, the tall figure of Sloan, Knight-Captain of the Crusader wolves, stood in her doorway with one hand raised to knock again. He was wearing his customary white cloak and uniform, but the sword he usually wore belted at his waist was conspicuously absent. He was probably off duty though.

It wasn’t that he was in the custom of wearing a weapon inside people’s houses, at least she didn’t think so, it was just that he looked a bit odd without it, as if something were missing.

He stared at her for a couple of seconds and then sighed.

“Jenna, it’s good to see you, but could you please put some clothes on?”

Jenna looked down at her body.

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t a little girl anymore.” he explained in a pained voice. “And this habit of wandering around naked is going to get you in trouble one of these days.” He was no longer looking directly at her.

She crossed her arms over her breasts.

“It’s my body and my room and I’ll do what I want to here.” she declared hotly.

Jenna felt herself becoming more than a little irritated with him. There was nothing wrong with her body after all and she had almost reached the age of maturity. So what if she wasn’t fully developed? He had no call to throw it in her face like that.

“It would make me more comfortable.” he said mildly, keeping his gaze averted.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.” she said in a hurt voice. “Since I’m so ugly, I’ll just go put something on.”

She slammed the door in his face with perhaps just a bit more force then was necessary and made a startled exclamation when several stacks of books made the jump for freedom off of her overburdened bookshelves and spilled themselves onto the carpet.

Drat that man!

Jenna stalked over to her closet and pulled out her purple bathrobe from where it was hanging on the door.

It’s my house...well, father’s house. Nobody else is really allowed in here anyway, so who cares if I wander around without clothes?

She pulled the robe on and tied it closed at her waist. It was fluffy and comfortable and she liked lounging around in it when it was cold.

When I move to my OWN house, nobody is going to tell me what to do. I’ll walk around naked all day if I want to and if they don’t like it they can just leave.

“There, Mr. Stuffy.” She yanked the door back open. “Are you satisfied now?”

“You are too kind, milady.” Sloan murmured. “May I enter?”

“Yes.” she said, still feeling rather grumpy about the whole affair. She wasn’t going to allow him to sweet talk his way back into her good graces so easily and besides, she had other reasons to be mad at him, now that she was thinking about it.

 Sloan stepped inside her room and looked around. “Are we redecorating?”

“No.” she said. “We are going to get all of my books off of the floor and back onto the shelves where they belong.”

Jenna’s room was actually fairly large, but it was also very full. Her personal library wasn’t nearly as extensive as she would’ve liked, but she had hundreds of volumes, the collected works from several classic authors and fantasy and science fiction books of every kind. There were murder mysteries and political thrillers and a few westerns and of course there was her treasured comic book collection.

The real problem was that she lacked adequate space to hold everything she wanted to collect.

On her desk she had her study materials, books written in other languages, volumes of history that hadn’t seen the light of day in years and books on information theory, sociology, philosophy, and psychology. There were even a couple of volumes on the arcane arts.

The two of them worked in silence, picking the spilled books up off the carpet and replacing them in their stacks on the shelves. Jenna inspected them meticulously for damage as she worked, but they seemed to be in good condition. Somewhat mollified, she moved the books that were resting on her chair and invited Sloan to sit in it when they were finished.

She sat down cross-legged on her bed.

“So, why did you decide to finally come visit me again?” She looked at him suspiciously. “Not more weapons training, I hope.”

Sloan shook his head with a rueful expression on his face.

“I believe you made it quite clear how you felt about those, the last time.”

Jenna gave him a sharp look.

She’d known Sloan all of her life and his familiar, solid presence was somehow very reassuring to her. Lately though, he’d come to visit her less and less often, despite being one of the very few people allowed within her father’s dwelling. Over the last ten years or so, his behavior had changed. Something subtle and alarming had crept into his interactions with her. She didn’t know what it was or what to do about it, but something was very wrong with the Knight-Captain of the Crusader wolves.

Jenna had never met her mother and the only people she had for family were her father, the Circle’s Knowledge Keeper, and Sloan, her father’s close friend. She had always thought of him as an indulgent uncle and she loved him dearly, even if she had no real desire to learn the various martial forms he took such pains to try and teach her.

Sloan seemed to regard her in much the same manner. He answered her excited questions about the outside world and usually seemed glad to see her...except now. Now he wasn’t.

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” he replied.

“Sloan...tell me.”

He met her gaze evenly.

“No.”

His scent was calm, his posture comfortable and relaxed, but his eyes....

She had no name for what she saw in his eyes.

“Is...is there anything I can do to help?”

Maybe she should mention it to her father, but what could she say? Sloan was a forged weapon of the Circle’s. His sole purpose was to find and eliminate vampires. So long as he did that, it was unlikely that anyone would inquire into the matter on her say so.

He shook his head and smiled tiredly at her.

“Not with this, little one. However....” He hesitated.

“What?”

He scrubbed at his face with both hands in a motion that conveyed to her beyond words a feeling of deep, deep exhaustion. It was more than just what he was saying or how he was saying it, there was something about his body language that just felt wrong. It was as if he were making an effort to act normal and not quite making it.

Is he not sleeping enough?

That might explain what was wrong with him. Wolves were effectively ageless, but time had a way of pressing down on them anyway. The older a wolf was, the more likely they were to develop problems like that. The registers were full of the names of old wolves who needed extensive therapy to deal with issues collected over their long, long lives. And Sloan? Sloan was a very old wolf indeed.

“I need to know what happened to someone.”

“You can’t ask my father?”

He shook his head.

Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, waiting for him to continue.

Finally, he spoke again.

“Her name was Aybaline.”

Jenna froze.

No. Oh, no. I can’t—he can’t—

She must have made some kind of noise, because Sloan looked up at her sharply.

“You know the name.”

“Maybe.” she hedged.

“What can you tell me?”

Sloan seemed more animated now, more there. In fact, he was starting to look better than he had in a long time, as if something inside of him were waking up, ready for the hunt.

Jenna quickly ran through what she knew offhand. She’d read in the secret histories that Sloan had converted to the Circle seven hundred years ago and she knew that he’d brought a little girl named Aybaline with him. They were escaped prisoners of a terrible vampire who called himself the Baron. She also knew what had happened to that little girl.

There was no possible way she could tell him that.

She looked at Sloan helplessly.

Maybe he means someone else?

Who knew how many females named Aybaline a man could meet in seven hundred years?

“Describe everything you can remember about her.” she ventured finally.

He made a motion with his hand to indicate height.

“She was this tall when I knew her and she had reddish hair. The most unusual thing about her were her eyes. In this day and age, a pigment mutation like that isn’t all that remarkable, but I thought it was very unusual back then.”

Oh no, no, no.

Jenna bit her lip and waited for him to confirm her suspicions.

Sloan was studying her face, gauging her reaction.

“She had orange colored eyes.”

Jenna winced.

“You do know of her.” There was something feral about the way he leaned forward in her chair. “Tell me.”

Jenna raised her chin slightly and schooled her features to stillness. She had a duty as the Circle’s next chosen Knowledge Keeper. Her training was incomplete and her duty was different from Sloan’s, but she would not betray it so easily.

“Tell me whatever else you can remember. I need to know when and where you met this girl before I go off on a wild goose chase.”

Sloan did not look happy, but he continued to talk, verifying that this Aybaline was indeed the same one that Jenna knew of.

“Okay.” she said when he was finished. “I do recognize the name and I know what happened to her.”

“And?” he asked, with the first stirrings of real impatience.

“And what?”

“It’s obvious you don’t want to tell me what you know. Why is that?”

He was almost growling now.

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you.” she said, choosing her words carefully. “It’s that I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me why not?”

She fidgeted under his steady gaze.

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

Sloan sighed.

“Don’t whine Jenna...and stop slouching.”

He stood and began to pace around the room, ignoring her indignant glare. He moved with a predatory, fluid grace that made her not at all happy about being in the same room with him.

She straightened her posture and started to say something, but he spun around and interrupted her.

“I’ll do it.” he said through gritted teeth.

Jenna blinked at him.

“You’ll what?”

“If you can get me the information about what happened to her, then I’ll get you out of here for a little while.”

Jenna opened and closed her mouth a few times, but nothing came out. She felt shaken right down to her very core.

“You...would go against the wishes of the Circle for me?”

“I really wouldn’t be doing that.” he said heavily. “It is your father’s wish to keep you here and isolated, not necessarily the Circle’s.”

Jenna didn’t understand that at all.

What difference did it make to her? All her life she had been kept like a prisoner in a tower. She was confined to her father’s house, the private library, and the secret vaults where the histories were kept. She was forbidden to go out without escort and her father had routinely denied her requests to leave the compound and see even the smallest part of the outside world. The only access she had to it were the computers in the library, but she was always supervised, never able to learn anything with them other then what her father decided she should know.

And now this.

She jumped to her feet eagerly.

“You really mean it? Really, really, really?”

 Sloan paused in his pacing and turned to look at her. For the first time a in a long while, she thought he was actually seeing her, really seeing her. He smiled and closed his eyes.

“Of course, little one. Can you get me what I need?”

“Yes!”

For that she would. For a chance to see the outside world firsthand, even for a little while, she would do almost anything.

Jenna flung herself at Sloan and wrapped her arms around him. She felt like laughing and crying at the same time.

Finally! Someone finally listened to me.

She looked up at him and saw that he was looking down at her with an oddly tender expression on his face. He kissed the top of her head, just as he used to do when she was little and for a little while everything was all right with him again. She took comfort in his warm, solid presence, resting her head on his chest and listening to the sound of his heart beating slowly.

After a bit, Sloan eased her back at arm’s length.

“In order to do this, I need to call in a few favors. Get what you need and then have one of your guards send someone for me when you’re ready to leave.”

“Sloan...are you really all right?”

Jenna stared at him and watched as that strange look came back into his eyes. For just a moment, the mask slipped and she saw the man who helped raise her and had always treated her with kindness, but then it came back up and the grim, commanding presence of the Knight-Captain settled over him like an untouchable mantle. His hands dropped back to his sides and he turned away, leaving her feeling cold and alone.

Without another word, Sloan left the room.

Jenna stared after him for a long time after he left, wondering.