Gawain (Knights of Excalibur Book 1)

by Hanley, Donald

  “Is that what you wish?”

  “Don’t do it,” Hawk growled. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Why not?” asked Trisha, genuinely puzzled. “Why wouldn’t anyone want to live forever?”

  “Because other people die,” Nim said softly. “Friends and family all pass in time, leaving us behind to mourn them.”

  “Oh my God.” That never occurred to her. It was bad enough when patients died, people she scarcely knew, but she couldn’t imagine watching everyone she ever met pass away while she lived on.

  She drew a shaky breath. “Okay, so let me see if I have all this straight. Your boss is the real King Arthur and you’re the actual Knights of the Round Table. Your sister kidnapped Merlin, probably, which led to the collapse of Camelot, and you’re trying to bring it back somehow. The Chevaliers don’t want you to, so you’ve been fighting them for the last thousand years. Oh my God!” she exclaimed as a realization just struck her. “Does that mean Lionel works for Guinevere?”

  “Guinevere?” The three of them exchanged a puzzled look.

  “Guinevere. The queen. Arthur’s wife or ex-wife or whatever she is now.”

  “Guinevere was just a pawn in all of this, Trisha,” Nim explained, shaking her head. “She had no ambitions, no interest in ruling. Viviane is our enemy, not Guinevere.”

  “So your sister is the one pulling all the strings?”

  “Yes,” said Nim sadly. “And Lionel, once Sir Lionel of Gaul, is one of her Chevaliers.”

  “Oh my God.” She wanted to bury her face in her hands and scream in frustration but she took another deep breath instead. “Okay, so even though Merlin is trapped somewhere, he’s still sending you on Quests to – to make sure you’re still worthy or whatever. But why? Why wouldn’t he just tell you where he is so you can rescue him?”

  The three of them exchanged a gloomy look. “We think he’s trying to do exactly that,” Hawk said finally, “but whatever Viviane did to him is preventing the message from coming through clearly. It’s like he’s locked in a room and we can just barely hear him shouting.”

  “The Quests we’ve received since he disappeared have been ... puzzling,” Nim admitted. “The objects we find seem to be of no value, the people we seek are ordinary. No offense,” she added. Trisha just shrugged. She knew she was nobody special. “If they’re clues to Merlin’s location, they’re too obscure to interpret. All we can do is keep trying.”

  “Why don’t you just kill Viviane, then?”

  “Easier said than done,” Butler observed dryly.

  “And potentially dangerous,” Nim added. “I may not be strong enough to break her spells on my own. We might actually need her to release Merlin from his prison.”

  “Like she’d ever do that,” Hawk scoffed. “He’s probably really pissed with her right now. Letting him out would be suicide for her.”

  “As may be, Gavin, but we can’t take the risk, not until we know more.”

  “So the Quest you’re on now is just another scavenger hunt?” Trisha asked in dismay. “I’m just an old license plate or a – a postcard from Australia?”

  “No,” Butler told her firmly. “You’re not. Look,” he told the others, “part of the reason we tried to keep this a secret is that it’s been years since the last Quest, right?”

  “Eight years,” Nim affirmed. “What’s your point, Lucas?”

  “What if Merlin stopped sending us Quests to rest, to build up his strength so he could shout louder this time? What if this Quest is really him telling us to find Patricia Macmillan?”

  They all turned to look at her and she shrank back in her seat. “Why would he do that?” she asked nervously. “What good can I do?”

  “That’s what Hawk needs to find out.”

  Hawk looked surprised. “Me? It’s your Quest.”

  “Not anymore. Here, we didn’t have a chance to go through the whole thing.” Butler turned on his tablet and flipped it around to show them the first image. “We all agree this is Trisha, right?” Hawk and Nim nodded and Trisha joined in reluctantly, touching the nick on her ear. “And this is the Macmillan tartan, which gave us her last name. This,” he flipped to the third image, “is a cairngorm.” Hawk leaned closer with a scowl but after a moment he nodded thoughtfully. “At first I thought it was just another hint about Trisha’s identity, but this is actually important on its own. We need to find this brooch and Trisha’s going to help us do it.”

  “Do you know what the significance of this is, Lucas?” Nim asked. She took her seat again and held out her hand for the tablet, inspecting the drawing closely. “How can this help us find Merlin?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas told her cheerfully. “Like I said, that’s Hawk’s job now.”

  “Care to explain that?” Hawk growled. “What’s stopping you from finishing this up?”

  “Because of the vision I got the night before I ended up in the hospital.” He took the tablet back from Nim and switched to the fourth image. Trisha recoiled from the snarling savagery on the screen. Hawk just looked grim. “I sensed someone following me while I was wandering around Boston looking for a woman named Macmillan, but I didn’t know who it was. That night, I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to confront him. I left the apartment around midnight, drove down to that park, and jumped Savard when he followed me in.”

  “You knew it was Savard beforehand and you still did it?” Nim looked shocked.

  “Yeah, but you know how these Quests are. It’s all or nothing.” Butler tried to pass it off casually, but there was a strained look in his eyes.

  “But why would Merlin or whoever tell you to do that?” Trisha asked, angry despite herself. “You were nearly killed!”

  “But I found you,” he pointed out with a grin. “Remember what I told you about moving the pieces around the chess board? I had to fight Savard so he would put me in the hospital where you worked so that Hawk would find you there.”

  “Me again,” Hawk grumbled. “Why do you think I have anything to do with this?”

  “Because of this.” He turned to the fifth picture. He’d added to it while they were talking and another green-tinted shape now lay beside the first one. Trisha twisted her head around, trying to make sense of it, and she finally realized what it was.

  “That’s a broken chess piece,” she said doubtfully.

  “More accurately, it’s a green knight that’s been beheaded,” said Nim, casting an amused smile at Hawk.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. “God damn it.”

  Butler laughed. “Sorry I didn’t have time to finish it earlier. I had to run out and get eaten by a wild animal. It’s your turn now.”

  “But this doesn’t make any sense,” Hawk argued. “Why wasn’t I given the Quest from the beginning? Why go through all these gyrations?”

  “It had to be this way, Gavin,” Nim told him. At his skeptical look, she went on, “Think about it. The only reason we’re all sitting here together is because Lucas lost his battle with Savard. That brought you to Boston and put you in contact with Trisha almost immediately. It also allowed us to expose Lionel’s involvement and put Savard out of commission for a while. None of this would have happened if you received the Quest yourself.”

  “You’re welcome,” Butler said wryly. Hawk shook his head, as if he wanted to deny Nim’s reasoning but couldn’t come up with a good counter-argument. “By the way, Nim, in case you were wondering how I knew where you were today.” He showed them a brand new picture, a sketch of a one-story house in a large empty lot surrounded by trees. “I got this one last night.”

  “These are very specific images,” Nim mused thoughtfully, “and they’re incredibly prescient. They’re not normal Quest visions.”

  “Told you,” Butler said with a smirk.

  “But what’s changed? It’s almost as if Merlin has been asleep all this time and just recently woke up to give us precise instructions.”

  “But we still don’t know what he wants us to d
o,” Hawk pointed out harshly. “Find Trisha and hope she’ll lead us to an old piece of jewelry? What are we supposed to do with it afterwards, assuming we do somehow get our hands on it?”

  None of them had any suggestions and they all looked at Trisha speculatively, as if she would somehow come up with the answer all by herself.

  Oh my God, she thought miserably. What have I gotten myself into?

  37

  Butler sat at the kitchen table with his right arm resting on a hand towel taken from the master bathroom. Trisha hunched over his arm, carefully snipping the next suture with a tiny pair of scissors Butler had in his toiletry bag and then slowly extracting the thread with his tweezers. The process wasn’t painful as long as she was careful, but the sensation was obviously unpleasant, judging from his expression. She dropped the suture into the bowl by her elbow and started on the next.

  “You’re kind of handy to have around,” Butler noted. “I wasn’t looking forward to pulling these out myself.”

  “You should go back to the ER,” she told him, concentrating on her task. “They can make sure there’s no infection or other complications.”

  “It’s probably best to avoid the hospital for now,” Nim said absently. She sat across from Butler, frowning at something on her phone. “They’d have too many questions that we can’t answer.”

  “Like why your arm isn’t still torn to shreds.” Trisha grimaced as she wiggled the tip of the scissors under the next suture. The knots were very tight. “Dr. Adams had a note in your file for the neurologist to check you out after you woke up. He wasn’t sure you’d be able to use your hand again.”

  “No worries there.” Butler waggled his fingers and Trisha pulled back quickly to keep from accidentally stabbing him with the scissors. “Sorry,” he said contritely. She shook her head with a frown and resumed her work.

  “Would anyone care to explain who Savard and Chantal are?” she asked, not entirely certain she wanted to know the answer. “How can they do ... this to people?” She indicated Butler’s arm with a vague wave of the tweezers.

  “By that, I assume you mean you want to know what they are.” Nim set her phone down, looking pensive. “In a word, they’re an abomination.”

  Trisha paused, shooting Nim an uncertain look. “What do you mean?”

  Nim looked her over for a moment, as if assessing her likely reaction to what she was about to tell her. “Among his many other talents,” she said finally, “Merlin was a very skilled therianthropist. A shape-shifter,” she explained at Trisha’s puzzled expression. “He could transform himself into an animal and back again at will. He usually took the form of an owl when he needed to keep an eye on things in secret.”

  Trisha wanted to heave a frustrated sigh at being subjected to another one of Nim’s nonsensical tales but she managed to restrain herself. “Go on,” she said tersely.

  “Viviane persuaded Merlin to teach her the art of shape-shifting, although she isn’t quite as skilled at it as he was. She’s used it many times over the years to trick and harass us.”

  “Are you saying she’s Savard in disguise?” Trisha asked skeptically. “Or Chantal?”

  “No, not at all, although you’re not too far off the mark. Somewhere along the way, she discovered how to change other people into animals, if they were both willing and strong enough to survive the process. A couple of hundred years ago, she found a small community of hunters living in the French Alps. They were being persecuted by the French nobility in the area, probably for poaching in the royal forests. Viviane recruited them to join her cause, in return for granting them the power to change back and forth into animal form. Savard and Chantal are their descendants.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Trisha looked up in exasperation. “They’re werewolves?”

  “Werecats,” said Hawk grimly, leaning back against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed.

  “Werepanthers,” Nim corrected him. “We killed off the last of the werewolf packs in the mid-1800s. The werepanthers proved to be more elusive, but their line is fading. To the best of our knowledge, there are fewer than fifty left now.”

  “That’s fifty too many,” Hawk grumbled.

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Nim told him. “Viviane wanted to use them to assist Napoleon in his rise to power, but they were too difficult to control. They were as likely to slaughter their allies as their enemies and Viviane eventually banished them back into the mountains to live or die as fate dictated. We thought they all died out back in the fifties, frankly, until Hawk stumbled across them during an assignment about twenty years ago. He barely made it out alive.”

  “You fought off fifty of – of – those things?” Trisha asked him, aghast, but Hawk shook his head with a scowl.

  “Just five,” he said, “and one of them was just a young girl. They were out hunting, I guess, and just happened to pick up my trail in the woods. They jumped me and I had to kill two of them before I could get away.” He chewed his lower lip grimly. “Savard’s hated me ever since.”

  “Why? They attacked you first, didn’t they?”

  Hawk shrugged noncommittally but Nim looked concerned. “Savard said he’d been removed as the leader because he couldn’t keep his own family safe. Could he have been related to one of the therions you killed?”

  “They didn’t introduce themselves before they came after me, Nim,” Hawk snapped.

  “No, of course not.” Nim drummed her fingers on the tabletop as she thought. “Chantal was the only one to join Savard in exile, so they must be close. Trisha, how old would you say she is?”

  Trisha wasn’t expecting the question and she blinked for a moment to come up with an answer. “Twenty,” she guessed hesitantly, “maybe twenty-five.”

  “Which would make her the right age to be Savard’s daughter,” Nim mused. “As I recall, you killed a male and a female, is that right?” Hawk nodded with a scowl.

  “That woman had to be Chantal’s mother,” Butler pointed out somberly. “That would explain why she attacked you when you found Trisha.”

  “Fuck,” Hawk muttered. “Now I have two of these damned things after me and they’re both in Boston.”

  “Not an ideal situation,” Nim agreed, “but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Just stay alert, Gavin. We know Savard was told not to kill Lucas but we have no idea what orders Lionel gave concerning you.”

  Hawk nodded silently but Trisha bent her head over Butler’s arm to keep her emotions hidden from the others. She didn’t believe in werewolves or werecats or whatever they were and even if they were real, she couldn’t imagine Lionel consorting with anything so incredibly dangerous.

  What about Chantel at the mansion? a tiny voice asked her. What about all that damage to Hawk’s car and the scars on his arm? Explain that! She couldn’t, so she concentrated on removing the rest of Butler’s sutures.

  When she was done, he rubbed the rows of tiny pinholes in his skin while she carefully disposed of the knotted threads in the trash and scrubbed the bowl and the tools with plenty of hot water and soap. She set them on the counter to dry and washed her hands twice.

  “So what happens now?” she asked, shaking off the water. Hawk surprised her by silently handing her a towel and she took it with a stammered thanks. They all looked at Nim.

  “We should return to New York,” she said, although she sounded uncertain. “We have more resources there and it will be quite a bit safer for everyone.”

  “But what about the cairngorm?” Butler asked in dismay. “Shouldn’t we be looking for it?”

  “Do we have any reason to believe it’s actually in Boston?”

  “Well –” He looked at Trisha with a helpless expression. “She’s here.”

  “But she doesn’t know where to find it. Isn’t that right, Trisha?” Trisha nodded worriedly. “The research team can assemble a list of stones and jewelry that match Lucas’s sketch and Trisha can check them out for us. One of them is bound to resonate with
her.”

  “That’ll take weeks,” Hawk argued, “and that’s assuming the right one is even on the list.”

  “I can’t spend weeks on this!” Trisha blurted out in dismay. “I have a job and a house and – and a cat! I can’t just go to New York. This is insane!” She eyed the apartment door nervously but Hawk was in her way.

  “No, you’re right, Trisha,” Nim sighed. “We can’t ask you to disrupt your life for us. It’s not fair to you.” Trisha blinked at her in surprise. That was the last thing she expected her to say. Nim glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was just after six. “When are you expected back at work?”

  “Monday,” Trisha told her, wondering why she needed to know that. “The morning shift.”

  “Can I ask a favor of you, then?” Against her better judgment, Trisha nodded slowly. “Stay with us tonight and tomorrow. Help us search for the cairngorm. If we find it, wonderful. If not, you’re free to go back to your life. We won’t trouble you again.”

  “What?” Butler looked like he couldn’t believe his ears. “What about the Quest?”

  “We can hardly claim to be the good guys if we’re willing to ruin a young woman’s life for our gain,” Nim told him firmly. “The end does not justify the means.” She shook her head sadly. “We’ve waited a thousand years already. We can wait another eight years if we have to.”

  “But –”

  “Let it go, Lucas,” said Hawk. He looked old and worn out. “Trisha doesn’t owe us anything. I’ll take you home now if you want,” he told her somberly.

  Trisha stared at him in shock. Of all of them, he was the last one she expected to show her any sympathy. She looked at all their faces, seeing only hope and resignation in their eyes.

  “No,” she said finally, “I’ll stay. But only until tomorrow night.”

  Nim nodded in quiet appreciation, while Butler just seemed doubtful. Hawk, though, looked worried, as if he thought she was making a terrible mistake.

  38

  She stood beside him at the edge of the lake, the hem of her white gown floating on the still surface of the water. Her hair flowed down her back like a waterfall of milk chocolate, held in place by a silver circlet. The boat lay tilted upon the pebbled shore a short distance away. It was still without a sail or oars, but that hardly mattered. The fog hid everything from view, shrouding the world in a veil of glowing gray mist.