"Like asking about your brother."
"How do you know I have a brother?"
His voice was distracted as he ran his fingers along the edge of the wood. After a moment, there was a faint click. He opened the door, revealing the darkness of a tunnel. Red dust flew as he let the door to drop to the ground.
She twitched her nose, fighting the urge to sneeze as she stared into the foul smelling darkness. There was no sound, no hint of life coming from the mine. Not that she really expected there to be. “I know you have a brother the same way I know you turned him."
"I wasn't the one responsible for turning him. I merely nursed him through it." Surprise rippled through her. “Really?"
"Really."
"Then where is he now?"
"On a boat, on his way here from England."
So he hadn't been in America long when Jasper killed him. But how had Jasper killed him when Jasper had to have been little more than a fledgling at the time? “Why is he coming here?" He glanced at her. “Because he misses his baby brother."
"Really?"
A smile touched his lips. “Really."
"Are you supposed to be meeting him, then?"
"Yes, in San Francisco, once I take care of this mess.” He frowned and shadows crossed his eyes. He didn't say anything, yet she felt the surge of anger and sorrow. Deep down, he knew Patrick was long dead, and all these years later, he still quietly grieved that fact. Was Patrick dead because Michael hadn't been there to meet him? Was that the reason for the anger she'd sensed in him when they'd first met? Had his need for revenge been fueled just as much by guilt as anger?
"Was Patrick much older than you when he was turned?" Michael scrubbed a hand across his jaw and, for a moment, looked as if he wouldn't answer. Then he glanced down at the hole and said softly, “No. He took the ceremony earlier than I. But he wasn't in such a hurry to die, and he didn't turn until his heart gave out when he was in his forties."
"He had a heart attack?"
"No. Living was tough back then, and forty was a fairly old age."
"And you were by his side?"
He nodded. “By then, I'd had reasonable control of my blood lust, and I had left Elizabeth. Patrick had caught sight of me a few years earlier, and he told me he knew what I was. He made me promise to be by his deathbed, because the man who had turned him was dead, and he didn't want to hurt or kill anyone while in the fledgling stage."
She raised her eyebrows. Was he implying Patrick was gay? Was that why he'd been headed for San Francisco? Was the city so liberal in its thinking way back then? She didn't know, but even if it wasn't, it surely wouldn't have bothered a vampire all that much.
"So who turned him?"
"I don't know. He never told me."
"But it was a man?"
He looked at her again, answering what she hadn't asked rather than what she had. “Patrick's bisexual. He's the reason the Kelly line still lives on in Ireland."
"Then you never had kids?"
"No.” He raised an eyebrow. “A fact I suspect you already knew." She grinned. “Just confirming these things while you're under the influence."
"Of what?"
"A spell that has apparently frayed your natural reticence when in comes to speaking about your past."
"Woman, you speak in riddles."
"Yeah, makes a nice change, doesn't it?"
He shook his head. “Enough of this ridiculousness. Wait here while I check to see what waits below." She didn't argue, just watched him disappear down the hole. “It's not a very wide tunnel,” he said, after a few minutes.