Her heart sank. She was sick of being left out, tired of being left behind.
Already she couldn’t leave the island or go beyond the castle walls. Was she going to sit by quietly, passively until her world narrowed to this tower? This room? This bed?
“I could help,” she offered.
Conn dropped the washrag into the bath water. “It is a warden’s job.”
Her brother was a warden.
Lucy remembered the day after Regina’s attack, when Dylan had been desperate to protect her. Lucy had stumbled upon her brother kneeling in the alley behind the restaurant, his hands splayed on the bricks and his face taut with concentration. She recalled the slow seep of power like water gathering underground, collecting in the cool, quiet chambers of her heart, pouring forth in response to his need.
She met Conn’s gaze again. “I could help,” she repeated, and this time she was sure.
Conn’s eyes narrowed. “It could be dangerous. If Gau senses your presence—”
“Yesterday I blasted a bunch of his wolves,” Lucy said as dryly as she could. “I think I already have his attention.”
Conn’s brows rose in surprise.
Lucy sat very still, her pulse beating in her throat.
Please, she thought. She knew he would not go home with her. He could not leave his responsibilities here. Not now. Perhaps not ever. But they had to find equal footing somewhere.
He could not enter into her old life. Would he accept her into his?
He stood naked before her, tall, dark, and formidable as always. A corner of his mouth curved in his slow, rare smile. “Then we will face him,” he said, “together.”
Her heart trembled. “You’re sure?”
“Sure,” he said and raised her by their joined hands and kissed her.
Caleb Hunter curled his fingers over his wife’s smooth, flat belly. She didn’t feel any different. Here or . . . He stroked upward toward her lush, full breasts. “You’re sure.”
Maggie chuckled and stretched like a cat, almost purring under his touch. “Yes.”
“So soon.”
“Yes.”
Joy, concern, fear crowded his chest. He inhaled carefully. “Don’t you need to take a test or something?”
“Darling Caleb.” Her hand cupped his cheek. “I know how much you policemen like proof. But I know this in my heart. We are having a baby.”
“When?”
“I would say a few months after Dylan and Regina’s child.”
So soon. The demons had targeted Regina as soon as she became pregnant.
“Is it . . .” He paused, worry weighting his tongue. Tightening his throat.
Maggie’s eyes glinted in the dark. “Human?”
He didn’t give a damn if their baby was born with flippers and a tail, as long as his wife was happy. And safe.
“Healthy.”
Maggie smiled. “The baby is fine. I am fine. Never better.”
“Good.” He pulled her into his arms, holding her slim, naked body close. “I’m shaking,” he confessed.
“I noticed.” She kissed him. “Do not worry, my love. You will be an excellent father.”
Oh, God. All the blood left his head. Good thing he was already lying down. “You’ll be a wonderful mother.”
“I hope so.” She laughed breathlessly, sounding young and uncertain. “I do not have much of an example to follow.”
Caleb thought of his mother, who had abandoned him, and his father, who had drowned his grief and resentment in the bottle.
“Neither do I,” he said dryly.
But Maggie’s joy left no room for doubts.
“Oh, your family!” she exclaimed. “We must tell them.”
Fear stabbed him. “Not yet.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “Now. I’m so happy. I want them to be excited, too.”
“Maggie . . .”
“Everything will be fine,” she told him. “Everything is wonderful. What could possibly go wrong?”
16
THE TENSION IN THE CAVERNS WAS AS THICK AS the steam or the smell of sulfur. Blue mage light ran over the dank walls and rippled on the surface of the water.
Conn had summoned the lights for Lucy’s sake, to keep her from stumbling in the dark. Her eyes were not attuned like selkie eyes to see below the surface.
She did not belong here, whatever he had told her in the tower.
Conn fought to keep his face carefully blank and his thoughts even more carefully focused. Lucy had earned the right to stand with his wardens. And the full and unfortunate truth was he might yet need her and her power.
The children of the sea did not command this portal to Hell, formed and framed by rival elements, by earth and fire. Conn and his wardens could not close a gap between continental plates. But they could seal it, plugging the rift with their magic like crofters caulking mud between the stones of a house.
If Conn could bind their strengths together. He glanced around the circle. The selkie were solitary by nature. They did not work easily or well together. Even here, even now, their energies pulled against his control, darting in every direction like fish caught in a net.
Deliberately, Conn relaxed his clenched fists, letting his thoughts float below the cloudy surface of the pool, sending his spirit drifting down through the warm, bubbling currents, spiraling into the murky depths, dragging the wardens after him like an anchor chain in the dark.
Sweat poured from his face. Rushing filled his ears, his head, as his spirit self sank down through the silken water, down through the mineral silt.
His eyes stung. His lungs burned. His spirit continued its descent, his body anchored at the side of the pool. The wardens’ presence tugged behind him like so many buoys on a line. Lucy floated above him, sunlight on the water.
He must go deeper still to seal the portal.
Down through the scalding water where the blue-green algae bloomed. Down, until the heat killed all life and nothing grew, breathed, moved but rock and the water trickling through the rock.
Conn’s temples throbbed. He had been too long in his tower, in the clear light, in the cold air. The pressure of the deeps crushed his chest. His doubts churned like sediment, clouding his mind.
And still he pushed, filtering down, down through tiny passages in the stone, seeking the bright molten thread, the rent in the world, the balance between earth and fire.
He could not breathe.
The roaring in his ears was not water, but fire. Smoke and darkness blinded him. Vibrations shook him, like the sound of an approaching army on the road or the shudder of a burning house before it collapsed in flames.
He had been noticed.
Someone was coming.
Gau.
Did he feel, just for a moment, Lucy tremble above him?
“My lord Conn.” The voice was in Conn’s head, Gau’s voice, unformed by lips or tongue but still recognizable. Breathless, if words without air could be so described. The demon lord must have hurried to intercept him. “This is a surprise.”
Conn’s anger flared, a gout of rage that ate the soft tissues of his mouth and scorched his throat. Not a surprise, you sodding son of a bitch. You violated Sanctuary.
But rage was Gau’s weapon, Conn recognized. To distract him, to deflect him from his purpose.
If Conn engaged the demon at this level, he could not win. He might not survive.
He stopped his eyes and ears. He made himself like water, clear and calm, sinking down through layers of stone, disintegrating as he went.
He felt Enya like a flash of quicksilver and Griff, steady and persistent as rain. Morgan cut his own path through the rock, a spear of ice. Lucy . . . Where was Lucy?
Fear flickered, bright, consuming.
Another trap, Conn realized, and focused his thoughts toward the portal.
There. A red, seething gap in the wounded crust of earth, boiling with energy. The gateway to Hell.
Gau was with him, in him, still. The de
mon’s words burned in his mind like holes through paper, scorching, empty.
You cannot do this.
Do not provoke our enmity.
Do not . . . Do not . . .
Your father knew better.
Will you risk the peace for this? For her.
Lucy.
The thought formed, his or Gau’s, their minds so close Conn could no longer separate them. The demon leaped on her name, fed on it, on her image, fueling his energy and Conn’s fears.
She is not worth this.
The daughter of Atargatis, Conn spoke or thought.
But mortal. A human. She will not live. Nothing lasts that is not of the First Creation.
Their thoughts clashed, thrust, parried, their arguments sharp and flexible as steel. Conn had withstood the demon’s assault on his emotions, but Gau’s mental challenge lured him to fight. His intellect had always been his strength and his weakness. His arguments quickly out-paced his wardens. Soon he was alone, locked in furious mental combat with the demon lord.
You broke the peace.
You disturbed the balance.
An act of aggression . . .
Self-defense . . .
The portal blazed. Heat scorched his hair, his flesh, his his hope. His nostrils clogged with the stench of burning.
Give her to us, the fire sang, and we will have peace again.
Conn opened his mouth to defy the flames, and the fire rushed in, eating his tongue, searing his throat and lungs. Give her to us, or we will destroy Sanctuary.
He staggered. Mind and heart were dead and dry as bone. He must . . . What? There was something he wanted. Something he must do.
Close the gap. A whisper like water.
Lucy. Her name sizzled, a drop in his mouth. He gasped, pressed between hundreds of feet of rock above him and the fiery pit below.
Close the gap.
He shook as he laid down lines of magic, emptying himself to form a tissue seal across the door to Hell, spilling himself into the spell.
Too little, Gau whispered. Too late.
A vision scorched Conn’s brain and shriveled his soul. His wardens lost, trapped like sea creatures abandoned by the tide, each in his private pool, his separate Hell. Dying. Drying up.
The flames howled.
Desperately, Conn drew magic like moisture from his flesh and bone, poured it out like blood.
He drained himself out like a cup of water into the burning sand.
And felt his strength, his spirit, evaporate away.
Lucy’s nose itched.
She fought not to scratch. She didn’t want to make a move that might disturb Conn or distract the wardens from whatever they were doing, standing around, staring into the pool.
The surface of the water trembled like a dreamer’s eyelids. The air was hot and close. Lucy measured the time in heartbeats, fighting to stay awake. What was going on?
In the beginning, she’d at least had a sense of the others’ presence. They glowed in the dim cave like gemstones in a mine: Conn, brilliant and hard as diamond, and Griff with his great warm ruby heart. The one Conn called Morgan, dark as onyx; and the woman beside him, round and shining as an opal.
But as the minutes—hours?—passed, Lucy’s awareness of them faded. Maybe if they were holding hands, the way children did in line, for comfort and to keep from getting lost . . . But the selkie did not touch.
“I touch you,” Conn had objected. “I have been inside you.”
The memory made her smile.
The blue lights had dimmed. An effect of the steam? Or was everybody else nodding off, too?
The heat was stunning. Numbing. Lucy’s head drooped. A bead of sweat rolled down her nose and plopped onto her shirt.
With a surreptitious sideways glance, she wiped her nose on her wrist.
No one noticed. Good.
No one moved. At all.
In fact . . .
Lucy frowned, a funny quiver in the pit of her stomach. In fact, they barely appeared to be breathing.
“Conn?” Her voice shivered like the surface of the water.
No answer. The quiver spread. Grew.
“Conn!” Her cry bounced off the cavern walls and ran into the corners. Just like in her nightmares. “Griff? Conn.”
Pain consumed him.
Pain and burning. He stretched across the mouth of Hell like a prisoner on a rack, like melted wax on the seal of a bottle. His bones ran with fire. Flame coursed through his veins, pumped his heart.
Lucy, my heart . . .
He had not thought to love her. The selkie did not love. Or die. He would live forever in agony as long as his body above survived.
As long as his will held out.
He lay and burned.
Lucy seized Conn’s arm, as stiff, as cold, as unresponsive as his face. Terror closed her throat.
“Help me!” she shouted.
But everyone who could help was already here, blind and voiceless as mannequins in a department store window.
She grabbed Griff on her other side. Energy sparked and snapped through her body. Her pulse jumped. Her nerves sizzled. Like jamming a fork in a toaster. As if her touch had completed a connection.
Griff groaned and took a shuddering breath.
Fear and urgency overrode her relief. She tightened her grip on his arm. “Conn?”
Griff blinked bleary eyes at her. “Too deep,” he murmured. “I could not—”
She had no time for explanations. No patience. Love sharpened her brain. Fear pressed like a knife at her throat. She shook him. “Help me,” she said fiercely.
“Lass ...”
“Like this.” She would not release her hold on Conn, so still, so cold beside her. With her free hand, she reached past Griff, fumbling for the woman on his other side. “Hold her. Her arm. We need to . . .”
What?
“Make a circle,” she decided. “All of us.”
Griff shot her a confused look but obeyed.
The woman beside him gasped and stirred.
Lucy danced from foot to foot in an agony of impatience as the wardens woke and grumbled, as Griff prodded them into a circle, linking hands like reluctant fifth graders forced to square dance.
The silver-haired man, Morgan, took the arm of the man beside him. He looked at Lucy, his mouth compressed. “Why?”
She bit her lip. She had no answer. She only knew, with a teacher’s instincts, what to do in an emergency. Hold hands. Stay in line. Stay together. So no one is lost.
The pressure swelled in her chest. Her breath escaped on a sob.
Oh, Conn.
He wept without tears. Screamed without sound, without throat or mouth. Throat and mouth were burned away; being and memory, gone. Only his will remained, a spider thread stretched across the door of Hell.
Oh, Conn.
A name raked from the ashes.
His name, in a voice . . . Her voice. His beloved’s. She was saying his name and crying.
Her tears were sweet balm and precious rain to him. He roused, trying to summon strength to answer, to thank her for her tears, but there was not enough of him left to respond.
He closed his lidless eyes and burned.
But her voice would not let him go.
Her words dripped into his arid soul, trickling along his veins, seeping into the marrow of his bones. Her golden tears opened channels for other streams to follow, springs of strength, rivulets of power. Griff’s. Morgan’s. Enya’s. The streams joined and mingled. The gush became a spring, the spring a torrent that thundered through Conn like a flood. He was battered, blinded, deafened, grateful.
The golden flood rushed along the passage and scorched through his soul, drowning out the roar of the fire, inundating the threshold of Hell. He was taken up, taken over, by a great wave of power that flung him up and cast him on the shore.
When he opened his eyes, he was in the caves under the castle, and Lucy was holding him as if she would never let go.
&nbs
p; She smiled at him with tears in her eyes. “Welcome back.”
“Walk with me?” Conn invited in his cool, uninflected voice.
At the word “walk,” Madadh lurched from the hearth, panting at the prospect of escape.
Lucy knew exactly how the dog felt. “Outside the castle walls?”
Conn nodded.
She eyed the sword at his hip. “Is that safe?”
“The portal is closed,” he reminded her. “Thanks to you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”
“You united us. You enhanced our power.”
“Did I? I just . . . I had to do something, you know?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t need to say more. More than anyone else, this son of Llyr understood that you did what you could with what you had in the face of overwhelming odds.
He looked . . . not his age, exactly. But he looked tired tonight. Human. The strain of the day had etched deeper lines at the corners of his mouth and drawn the skin taut across his cheekbones. Concern tightened her throat.
“I’ll get my cloak,” she said.
He smiled at her, the rare, brilliant smile that transformed his austere face. But the shadows lingered in his eyes.
Warrior’s eyes, she thought with another quick squeeze of concern. She could drag him back from the brink of Hell, but she could not ease the memories of what he’d suffered there any more than she’d been able to help Caleb when her brother returned from Iraq.
As she pulled her cloak from the wardrobe, a memory flashed across her brain: Conn, carved of marble and moonlight, gazing out to sea, so weary, so proud, so alone.
Well, he wasn’t alone anymore.
Dragging the sealskin off their bed, she turned to face him. Her heart hammered in her chest. “Ready,” she said.
He froze.
She stumbled to explain. “I thought . . . After the day you had . . . Here.” She thrust the pelt at him.
He made no move to take it. “You are releasing me.”
Did she imagine the question mark at the end?
“I guess.” He was a child of the sea. The sea could heal him. She had not attached any larger significance to her gesture than that. But . . . “I mean, yes. I don’t want you to feel like my prisoner.”
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