Savannah’s soft little gasp in his mind betrayed her presence. He found himself smiling that she could slip in and out of him, so much a part of him that he could no longer tell where he started and she left off. She had access to his memories and his knowledge. The more time she spent in his mind, the better she was at acquiring the lessons centuries had taught him. More than you know. Savannah sounded smug.
Beau was much more relaxed, not the happy captain of earlier, but his tension had definitely eased. “There was nothing we could do for any of them. We had entered the monster’s playground, and he was in the mood to play. He didn’t try to drown any of them right away, or kill them outright. He tossed them into the air and ripped parts of them away. Pieces of bodies were floating in the water. A girl’s head bobbed up and down near the bank. I remember the way her hair was spread out like a fan on the surface of the water.”
Gregori touched the man’s shoulder. Enough. There is no need for you to remember the details of this atrocity.
Beau shook his head, the vivid picture in his mind suddenly dimming to a hazy recollection. “We almost didn’t make it out ourselves. It came at us, as big as any of those crocodiles on the Nile. He didn’t want food, he wasn’t protecting his territory, he just liked to kill. We had penetrated into his lair, his domain, while he was amusing himself, and he was angry. My father threw the oil lamp on the water and set the whole thing on fire. We didn’t look back.”
“You were very lucky,” Gregori said softly, his voice like a fresh, cool breeze. It seeped into La Rue’s mind, his pores, and dissipated the sickness gripping him.
You can heal him, Savannah said.
He is mortal.
You can do it, she insisted. Julian protected him, ensured the poison wouldn’t spread, kept the nightmare away, but you can remove it.
The hard edge to Gregori’s mouth softened, almost a smile. She was doing it again. There was no way to convince her he couldn’t do what she wanted. She believed it implicitly. He brought her hand to the warmth of his mouth, pressed a kiss into her palm. Je t’aime, Savannah, he whispered into her mind like a caress.
Savannah leaned into him. I love you, too, lifemate.
Gregori turned his attention to cleansing the mortal’s mind, washing away the memory of the encounter with the loathsome creature, the undead. He didn’t remove it completely because it was firmly entrenched in the captain’s soul; the man had lived with the experience for too many years. But Gregori whitewashed it, toning it down, extracting the remnants of the vampire’s tainted touch, the evil punishment for the intrusion, for the ability to escape the snare. The nightmares would be gone, the vivid horror would fade, and the terrible dread and fear Beau had lived with would be gone from his life for all time.
Gregori sighed softly and rubbed the nape of his neck where it tightened after such a mental excursion. Removing the taint of vampire from a mortal, from anyone, was difficult; it took tremendous energy. But looking down into Savannah’s shining eyes made it all worthwhile. She was looking at him as if he were the only man on earth.
You are the only man as far as I’m concerned, she whispered softly, the words brushing away the weariness in his mind. The sound of the ancient healing chant was soothing, as her voice, beautiful and pure, rinsed away the ugly touch of the vampire’s depravity from his own mind. To walk in Beau’s mind and heal it, he had had to see every memory in vivid detail. Gregori had to enter the ugliness of the vampire’s sick spells to unravel them and heal from the inside out. He found his hand gripping Savannah’s, a kind of humbleness sweeping through him. No one had ever done that before—looked after him, worried about his well-being, helped heal him. It was a unique experience for the master healer of their race.