Dark and Stormy Knights

by P. N. Elord

  She shook her head firmly. “I’m not a knight. . . .”

  He moved forward and nuzzled her one last time, breath hot against her cheek. Finish the puzzle . . . and I will finish what Claudius began in me so many years ago.

  She held the saw in her hand, wielding her “sea wave” pattern. As her favorite design, it had seemed most appropriate for her knight’s task. They’d been forced to wait until the evening to begin cutting the pieces, the gold not fully dry on the canvas until then.

  Although Claude paced, growing increasingly impatient, she’d warned against how disastrous rushing might prove, reminding the man of her previous failed attempts. As those last hours ticked off, the gold slowly drying, Claude had nearly lost his impenetrably cool composure.

  As she worked beneath the light now, nearly finished with the design, he hovered much too close beside her. She paused, saw in hand, and glared up at him. “If I make a mistake, the whole thing’ll be botched.”

  He inclined a slight bow, backing away from her table. “As you say, Anna. You are the expert in this matter.” But then he gestured toward the clock that hung over her desk. “Still, allow me to indicate the time. We are fifteen minutes from the solstice.”

  She bent almost eye level with the puzzle, squinting as she moved the saw. “And I’m no more than a minute from being done. That leaves plenty of time.”

  And then what? she wondered, panic seizing her as she recalled her knight’s warnings in that final dream. He would battle Claude for his very soul, apparently. Where would that leave her?

  The tool made a dull, buzzing sound as it reached the edge of the puzzle, and she turned it off, staring down to examine her handiwork. It was a splendid, rare piece, without a doubt. Perhaps her greatest work ever. If she’d wanted, she could have sold it for tens of thousands of dollars, an almost unimaginable sum, really, when you considered the rare Templar gold involved.

  Setting the saw beside her on the table, she stared down at the burnished pieces. They seemed to grow more luminous with every passing second, in fact, and she glanced at the work light, wondering if the reflected light was creating the effect.

  “You are done?” Claude’s words were breathless, excited. “The puzzle is completed?”

  “See for yourself.” She rolled her chair back from the table, allowing him access.

  Claude bent over the table, and she’d have sworn he was panting slightly. “He’s stunning. You are a master of your craft.”

  “He’s still inside the puzzle,” she pointed out, hating how fast her heart had begun beating. A creeping sense of dread fell over her. Definitely not the lion from her dream. “It’s minutes until the solstice. How do we free him?”

  “We must break apart the pieces now, scramble the image.” Claude reached toward the edge of the puzzle, but she stopped his hand.

  “Don’t touch it.”

  Claude stood upright again, studying her through narrowed sea gray eyes. “He was first ensorcelled within a chess set. Did you know that?”

  She shook her head. “I know nothing. You made sure of that.”

  “You knew enough to set about painting him. To realize the Templar gold was necessary.”

  She shrugged, not wanting to tip her hand as to how intimately she and the knight were attached. “Call it a lucky guess.”

  “From the chess set, I nearly freed him, but he moved into an illuminated Bible, of all things.” Claude laughed heavily. “That didn’t last long.”

  Slowly she broke apart the first piece, the lower left corner, and then hesitated. “I’m not sure about this.”

  Claude reached past her, blocking her from the puzzle with his large body. “This task, truly, should be mine. He must not have a way of reentering the image once he emerges.”

  “Would he want to?”

  “Sebastian Fray has a talent for many violent acts, especially moving from one image to the next.”

  A name! Finally. She was certain that Claude had used it intentionally, too. That he was preparing some sort of trap—perhaps for her or more likely for Sebastian himself. But she had her knight’s name; all she’d wanted to know, really, or so she’d believed. Now she knew that her desire ran far deeper, was an unquenchable thirst to free a doomed and captive man.

  “When you put it that way,” she said, “it doesn’t sound like Sebastian cares too much for freedom.”

  Claude didn’t answer, focusing instead on disassembling the puzzle. The pieces formed a shimmering mound beneath his palms as the last bit fell from his grasp. “He is complete.”

  That declaration seemed particularly perverse considering that the puzzle she’d painstakingly created lay in broken bits. She was about to remark on that fact when a humming, electric energy began, emanating from the work itself.

  A swirling, living image began to take shape within the air, an amalgam of puzzle pieces that seemed to be alive. With a gasp, she looked at the table, but the small heap of cut work remained intact. No, whatever multidimensional tableau was emerging, it breathed with a life all its own, imbued with a dark, otherworldly essence that literally burned the air around her.

  She tried to back away but found herself enthralled. Captivated. Even when she heard the lion’s roar, she remained manacled to the floor of her studio as if unseen hands gripped her ankles.

  Sebastian became fully solid before she could gasp. Pure gold rippled across his fur, as shimmering and alive as the Templar bullion that had animated him after long captivity. One word said it all: magnificent.

  With a ravenous sound, her lion tossed back his head, the mane of vibrant fur standing on end; his eyes were no longer the smoky blue of his human self, but rarest green, filled with shifting hues and accents.

  Why didn’t Claude ask me to paint Sebastian just like this? some stupid part of her terrified mind wondered.

  That was before she noticed the collar, barbed about Sebastian’s leonine throat, studded into his fur with sharply faceted diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Claude tightened the rein with a snap, inciting a harsh snarl, one that seemed to come from the heart of the beast.

  “Yes, there you go,” Claude murmured to the cat in his hypnotic, smooth voice. “You were made for this, Sebastian. To kill. To hunt. I know how you’ve missed it.”

  Sebastian’s eyes narrowed on her, his jaws snapping as he rumbled a voracious roar.

  “There now. There,” Claude whispered, walking toward her, leash in hand. “I am here to oblige your basest instincts, knight. Here she is. Your first kill of many.”

  “No. He’s not like that,” Anna said, backing up against her worktable. “He isn’t what you’re saying.”

  Sebastian snapped his jaws in denial, leaping toward her, but Claude snapped hard on his leash. “Not yet,” he murmured. “It’s all in the timing. Midnight, Fray. Midnight.”

  The solstice. What dark magic did Claude plan to work at the stroke of that hour?

  Claude dropped to his knees, raking his hands across Sebastian’s mane and fur. “Calm for now, old friend. Patience. Ah, but that never has come easily for you.”

  “Sebastian, you can still control your own destiny,” she told him in a slow, soothing tone. “He only controls you if you allow it.”

  Claude spun to face her, shadowy, gorgeous features transforming into something terrifying. Scales formed along the sides of his jaws and neck; horrible jaws elongated. “Did he tell you that he sold himself to me? To do my bidding?” he asked, still morphing into something hideous and terrible that was caught between man and dragon.

  “He is not your prisoner,” she insisted, shaking so hard that the words came out in half gasps. “He has free will.”

  “This knight, this once brave Templar, sold his freedom for the very gold you used to bring him back to life. Greed overtook him. Ah, and then it was so easy to wield him by my own hand. To make him mine again, as he always should have been.”

  “You made him a killer.”

  “I turned him to hi
s true nature. Darkness. Made him like me.”

  “You’re a devil.” She jutted out her chin, determined to appear strong. “He told me, earlier. Described exactly what you are.”

  Claude only laughed in reaction, scales changing hue across his features, humanity nearly vanishing. “I merely gave him what he wanted. As I did for you, Anna. You sought to free him, and now he is unleashed. Well”—he gave the long yoke around Sebastian’s neck a jerk—“at least as far as we can trust him until midnight.”

  Anna stared at the clock over her desk. Only two more minutes until the summer solstice, but she was out of ideas, short on strategy. Yet something kept whispering through her mind, a hidden clue that Sebastian had murmured to her in his last desperate bid to hold on to freedom.

  Gold. Something to do with the gold.

  Melt me. That’s what he’d said, and it hadn’t made sense, still didn’t.

  Now, in the rush of the moment, she swore she heard his voice in the hidden reaches of her mind.

  Return me to my metal state!

  “Sebastian,” Claude commanded, his voice that of true ownership, “kill her. Now. I sense the hunger in you. Hundreds of years and you’ve not tasted life. How you must have missed the feeding.”

  “He won’t touch me,” she countered, almost believing what she said. Cautiously she glanced away from the lion, using her peripheral vision to search for the puzzle pieces. They lay scattered on the floor, the gleam of gold sparkling.

  The slap of that long leash bit into the lion’s fur, red forming where the barbs struck his golden hair. “Sebastian. Sebastian Fray. Heed my commandment.”

  The cat’s nostrils flared as his eyes narrowed. The clicking of his claws punctuated the silence between them all, and Claude allowed the leash some slack. The lion padded closer toward her, bloodlust evident in his eyes.

  To own a man’s name was to own his will. He’d said something like that to her in that final dream, she suddenly recalled. That’s why Claude kept using it, over and over. He owned Sebastian’s freedom because he owned the man’s name.

  “Sebastian,” she said with forced calm, “you won’t hurt me. Don’t, Sebastian.”

  “He has no care for you now,” Claude told her with a hollow laugh. “Don’t bother trying to appeal to him.”

  The lion halted midstride, blinking at her and then turning his massive head toward Claude as if awaiting an order. An explanation as to whom he should heed.

  “Take her,” Claude murmured, sounding almost like a lover. “We will be powerful again, the two of us as one. You once let me hand you the world. Kill again and it shall be true forever.”

  The lion turned ravenous eyes upon her, pouncing before she could take a breath. She fell beneath his massive body, going down onto the floor with a hard crack of her skull. Blackness engulfed her, the sinewy threat atop her body wavering with that darkness.

  Burn me . . . melt . . . Anna. You are the one to save me. . . .

  With a shove, she thrust at the massive beast, but he was dead weight; she might as well have sought to push a felled oak tree off her. But then, seemingly remembering his better nature, Sebastian reared away with a guttural cry.

  She seized that moment and began sweeping her palm along the hardwood, scrabbling for even one piece of painted Templar gold. As she scooped up a handful of shimmering pieces, she kicked the table that held the burner, and it went crashing to the floor.

  Events happened with that drawn-out pulse of only one or two heartbeats that lasted a lifetime. Claude was dragging on the leash; Sebastian was snapping his jaws at her, overtaken with the need to kill.

  And she was hurling the few golden pieces she could grab right into the flame.

  I sold my soul for that gold once. Destroy it . . . me. Free me.

  Claude rushed forward, seizing hold of both her wrists. “He is mine!” he snarled, but he moved too late. The gold began bubbling and hissing against the wooden floorboards.

  The clock struck midnight then, ringing its antique chimes. Claude shoved her aside, taking hold of the leash once again.

  But Sebastian vanished from the space between them. Gone, dissolved as effortlessly as he’d seemingly emerged from the puzzle. Claude rounded on her, eyes beady red and scales massing across his enlarging form. Leathery appendages fanned out from his back, scaled like wings but covered in barbs.

  A devil. Truly.

  And now he would kill her, she thought numbly, but she would never let him own her, not the way he’d owned Sebastian.

  “Do you know how many years I’ve sought him?” His words bubbled like the melting Templar gold. The sound was dry and chafing, and she pictured a parched brook filled with dry stones. . . . The voice of hell itself.

  But another voice murmured in her ear. I am free, and for that, I thank you humbly. But your knight’s duty is not finished.

  Sebastian was alive somehow, still. Was he in the remaining bits of her puzzle?

  I am free. But you must vanquish this evil.

  “I . . . I . . .” I’m not a knight!

  This is your destiny; ours together. Look to the gold that bought my soul.

  The dragon beast that she might have called Claude—if she were being generous—advanced upon her with a menacing curl of lips over distending fangs.

  It took every bit of strength inside her soul, but she searched around her for Sebastian’s gold. And there it was, slithering. Snakelike. Enlarging so boldly that she shrieked. The gold that previously had purred beneath her touch began morphing into something as voracious as the beast who stalked toward her. Was the precious metal merely an extension of Claude’s will? Was it not obedient to Sebastian, after all?

  Except the metal wasn’t finished with its fiery transformation. It rose off the floor, as alive as she was; forming into a gleaming sword, it flew into her hand.

  She didn’t bother thinking or hesitating; she grasped its heavy weight and rose upward, plunging the weapon into the center of the beast’s chest. It swiped deathly claws at her, and she ducked backward, shoving the sword deeper into its body. The sword made a vibrating hum, the same pleasured sound the gold had made in her palm, and seemed to assume the task on her behalf.

  She dropped to her knees heavily, watching as the sword forced its own way deeper into the creature’s chest. Until the monster fell, blood gurgling from between its thin, monstrous lips.

  Until, like Sebastian, the devil vanished entirely, protruding golden sword along with it.

  She spent the next week praying for a dream or a sign—any instruction at all as to what she, a strange latter-day female knight, was supposed to do. Surely Sebastian wanted her to mop up the proverbial mess. The studio remained as it had after that last battle moment: a bloodstain on her floor, a scorched mark nearby, the burner overturned. The puzzle pieces sat on her work desk, heaped in an incomplete mound, missing several bits of canvas—and all of the gold she’d applied.

  After the seventh dreamless night, she sat at the table, switched on the light, and began working the pieces back together.

  “Okay, nothing to be scared of,” she reassured herself. Truth be told, she was terrified to assimilate the scene again, unsure of what image the puzzle might now reveal.

  So she worked very slowly, methodically, fitting each swirled line back together. It became apparent early on that the picture was indeed altered, but she forged ahead, refusing to flinch or doubt. When she finished, three pieces were missing—the ones she’d tossed into the flame—but that wasn’t all that had vanished.

  A knight stood in the field, brandishing a sword in his grasp, but the lion was no more. She stared down, wishing she could see Sebastian’s face, praying that he was truly free.

  That was the last time the heavy blanket of sleep overcame her. Laying her head atop the assembled puzzle, she closed her eyes, vaguely aware that the clock on her wall chimed three.

  She felt his touch before she saw him or even heard his voice. A warm, strong hand too
k hold of her shoulder, turning her toward him. Sebastian’s eyes were golden for the first time, his gaze lighter than it had ever been in any dream or painting.

  He smiled, reaching a hand to her cheek. “You wield a sword with the strength I knew you possessed,” he said admiringly.

  She flung herself against his chest, crying for the first time since the odyssey had begun. “Sebastian,” she murmured, relieved simply to speak his name. “You’re free now?”

  “From Claude’s control, yes.” He slid an arm around her back, holding her close.

  “I don’t understand. You’re not . . . what? Not truly free?”

  “So long as he could summon me, I was a killer,” he said, pressing a kiss against her temple. “You’ve saved me, Anna. My very soul.”

  “Then come out of the puzzle!” She pulled back slightly, beseeching him with her eyes. “We can be together now, finally. I have so many questions, so much to tell you.”

  He stroked rough fingertips along her cheek, caressing her, his expression melancholy. “Ah, and so many kisses I would have for you, Anna,” he murmured. “So many. But, alas, it shall never be.”

  She pressed her cheek against his chest, felt the strong, steady beat of his heart. He was real, human. “But you said I freed you.” She wrapped both arms about him. “I feel how alive you are.”

  He tilted her chin upward, forcing her to look into his eyes again. “Anna, you completed your knight’s task with true bravery. But your work is not quite done.”

  She shook her head. “I did everything you asked.”

  He lowered his mouth and kissed her, his lips soft and warm. Then he murmured his final instruction. “Burn the other pieces.”

  Shaking her head, she cried, “But you can’t emerge if I do.”

  He smiled wistfully. “To remain in exile is my freedom, Anna. A freedom you’ve given me.”

  “I’ll paint you again. I’ll find another way—”

  “You won’t remember. When you burn the last piece, you will dream all of this away. Including this kiss.”

  He captured her mouth much more roughly than before, deepening the kiss for long moments. The kiss seemed to span as a bridge between eternity and their two hearts; it lasted that long, became that powerful.