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wise to simply guard the door. You two were blind and deaf to this world.”
    She felt something fall around her shoulders. Terry cloth. A robe. With jerky movements, she thrust her arms into it and tied it shut.
    Veris brushed past her again.   He was wearing his pants once more.   He sat on the sofa. Like Brody, he seemed completely unembarrassed. Well, these two were lovers, after all.
    Somehow, their complete lack of shame helped to stabilize her. She took a breath and looked at Brody. “We were…acting it out in front of you?”
    “Language and all. It’s been a long, long time since I heard the language of my enemies. I had a hard time just sitting here.” Brody cleared his throat and glanced at Veris. “I knew you’d have it down, but her? It was like she was born to it.”
    Veris shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on. But for the time I was in it, I was home. Except for that one word.” He looked at her. “You said ‘fuck’.”
    Taylor nodded. “I knew it was the wrong word even as I said it but I couldn’t think of the right one. It’s like having a dual personality. A modern one and an ancient one.” She sat on the edge of the coffee table and swiveled so she was looking at them. “I’m right, aren’t I? That was Anglo-Saxon we were speaking? We were somewhere in Scandinavia, preparing to invade Britain?”
    “Norway,” Veris said flatly. “Or what was to become Norway. It was where I was born…in the year four hundred and thirty-nine.”
    Taylor nodded, absorbing that.
    Right.
    She leapt for the door but Veris was there before her, even though she was closer by a dozen feet. She had known he would be that fast, even before she made the move. Only something more than human could have ripped a leather skirt and bustier from her body.
    “You have nothing to fear from us, Taylor Yates,” he said softly, his back against the door. “Especially now I have tasted your flesh.”
    She moaned a little as her fear tried to take over. “Of course…it’s both of you, isn’t it?” She backed up until she could see both of them at once and that put her into the corner of the room.
    Brody still sat on the chair in the silk robe, unmoved, but she knew that he could react as fast as Veris if he needed to. “I suppose you really don’t need those wires they used tonight, huh?” she said.
    “I’m a vampire, not a ghost.” He seemed offended.
    “Why didn’t what happened just now happen out there?”
    “Aren’t you glad it didn’t?” he responded, with a grin.
    She wasn’t sure where the giggle came from but suddenly she was laughing. It didn’t sound like healthy laughter either. It was torn from her body, straining her vocal chords and making her head ache and her temples throb.
    Veris picked her up. “That was one piece of information too much for you, I’m thinking.” His accent was suddenly thicker than she had ever heard it, as if he was relaxing, letting her hear the real Veris. She was lowered onto warmth and heat. “Rub her. Keep her warm. She’s hysterical.”
    “Yes, doctor.” Brody’s voice. Rumbling next to her. His hands were rubbing her arms, her thighs. Veris had dumped her in Brody’s lap.
    “I am not hysterical!” she screamed and burst into tears, proving that Veris was at least partially right.
* * * * *
     
    When her tears had dried, Taylor realized that Brody was still rubbing, still stroking and that she liked it.
    The two men— vampires , her tired mind corrected but she slid over that one with queasy self-denial—were conversing softly in a language she didn’t understand and wasn’t even sure she could name. But if they had lived for centuries, wouldn’t they know a few dozen languages and dialects that the world had all but forgotten? Hell, she had been speaking to Veris in Old English and there were less than a thousand people who could speak that language fluently any more.
    “If you two were born as enemies, how did you become