by Julie Leto
Damon held his hand against Aiden’s weapon, which glittered white when another bolt of lightning streaked across the sky. “Remember, we must find Sarina before we kill Rogan. He cannot die until we know where she is.”
The brothers said nothing, but their faces darkened, their jaws tightened and their eyes burned with hatred.
“We must ride!” Damon declared.
Once again, their band took off toward the cliffs. Between the rocky jags they narrowed their line, entering through the pass one rider at a time. By the time all six of them emerged in the valley, a cold weight dropped with a thud in Damon’s stomach.
The village of Umgeben appeared untouched. Still. Had the Gypsies not received the warning sent a few hours before? Fires flickered in the windows, smoke curled from the hearths of the common houses and music echoed from a faraway vardo, an elaborately decorated wagon the Gypsies had been forbidden by English law to move. But John Forsyth, their governor, had rescinded the order hours ago to help the Romani escape the incoming hoard. Why weren’t they uprooted? Hitched to mules in advance of the exodus that could possibly spare their lives?
Colin, the third brother, rode up silently, his voice only slightly louder than his usual whisper. “Where is everyone?”
Damon urged his mount through the town’s open gates and from his saddle tore open the curtains of the nearest cottage with his blade. He smelled meat stewing on the hearth, yet no one tended the fire. He rode around to the back and saw the animal pens unlocked and empty. He heard his brothers behind him as their horses’ hooves sucked in and out of the slick clay, each one riding to nearby houses and announcing the same results.
The Romani had disappeared. The entire population of Umgeben was gone.
“What sort of magic spirits away an entire town?” the elder twin, Logan, shouted to Rafe, who’d dismounted. “They had but an hour’s warning. They could not have abandoned their homes without our meeting them on the road.”
Rafe, the only brother with Gypsy blood, looked as confused as the others and shook his head wildly. Damon’s anger surged. If his youngest brother, so adept at maneuvering through the Gypsy world, was shocked by these events, what chance did they have at saving Sarina?
Aiden raised his sword, pointing east. “Colin, search the chapel in case the citizens have simply taken refuge. Rafe, find the Chovihano,” he ordered, directing their youngest brother to the Gypsy elder. “See if he’s remained, and if so, what he knows. You two,” he barked, indicating the twins, Logan and Paxton, “check the storerooms. See if the tinker is about. He alone is allowed to travel from this place. He might have known of this attack long before we heard the news, and warned the others away before our message arrived.”
The brothers dispersed, leaving only Damon and Aiden behind. Aiden had just returned home from fighting with the king’s army, scarred but alive. Now betrayal hardened his features. Damon reached out and placed a calming hand on his shoulder.
“We shall find her,” he said.
“I’ll seek out Rogan,” Aiden replied.
Damon shook his head. “I brought that viper into our midst. It is my right to slay him. But only after Sarina is back in our care.” Damon sat straighter on his mount. He’d allowed his brother to take the reins a moment ago, but now he had to act. He was the eldest. He bore the responsibility of justice.
“Check the armory,” he ordered. “See if the Gypsies armed themselves to fight before they left.”
Aiden opened his mouth to protest, but then quickly deferred. He sheathed his weapon and rode west.
Alone, Damon cantered through the village, his destination looming just beyond the ramshackle cottages and immobile vardos squatting along the main path. Lightning ignited the flecks of glass embedded in the stone of Rogan’s castle and shimmered up the tall spires that rose into the sky like snakes about to strike. The large stone structure was intimidating, just as the architect had intended. But Damon wouldn’t hesitate to enter. Not when he guessed that this castle would be the most likely place for Rogan to hide Sarina, if they’d stayed behind.
Which Damon suspected they had. He could smell the stench of Rogan’s power even through the falling rain. On missions of their own, his brothers would be safe from the battle to come. And when his combat with Rogan ended, they would reunite in victory.
At the entrance to the castle, Damon dismounted, unsheathed his sword and smacked his horse on its rump so it shot into the darkness, out of the storm. Out of danger. He climbed the steps boldly and kicked open the heavy door. Pain shot up his thigh. He cared not. He removed his cloak and balanced his blade in his hands. Rogan would die tonight.
Something crunched beneath Damon’s boot as he stepped toward, the grand staircase. He bent down and his heart clenched. Sarina’s necklace. The chain broken. The charm damaged beyond repair. Who had ripped the ever-present amulet from her throat? Damon’s footfalls reverberated on the stone floors until the sound of his steps was muffled by one of the many rich carpets. The only light came from two torches at the top of the stairs.
From there, Rogan smiled down on him.
Damon smirked. Not the man, but the portrait, hung with conceit as the centerpiece of the staircase. The oil on the canvas portrayed the villain with perfect accuracy.
“Rogan!” he shouted.
Damon stomped up the stairs.
“Rogan! Release my sister and face me.”
His voice shook the atmosphere, but there was no response.
Only silence. Deadly silence.
The absence of sound was ripe with magic. Damon could taste the metallic flavor on his tongue.
At the portrait, he stopped and stared into the eyes of the traitor, fighting off a chill spiking from the black irises. In the dancing light from the flickering torch flame, Damon spied the makings of a sneer on the man’s slim lips, even while he petted the beloved cat curled in his lap. Cursed beast. Black. Long-haired. Amber-eyed. Mean as a devil. The perfect personification of dark and dangerous magic.
Why hadn’t Damon seen the evil in his so-called friend before? Damon had once prided himself on his ability to judge people. What kind of charm had Rogan employed to make Damon believe him to be a noble companion? To convince all the Romani exiled to Valoren that Rogan had their best interests at heart?
Pushed by a surge of wind, the manor door behind him banged closed. The torches faltered, then flamed, but in the seconds between light and dark, Damon glimpsed a figure move within the painting.
Not Rogan. In a doorway curved over Rogan’s left shoulder.
A woman?
Damon’s stomach dropped.
“Sarina?” he whispered.
He stepped closer, sheathed his sword and yanked the heavy portrait off the wall. Startled at the weight of the carved and gilded frame, he took care not to damage the canvas. Even the Gypsy Chovihano, the shaman Damon’s father had consulted when Rogan’s dark intentions had started to manifest, feared that Rogan had mastered the blackest of magical arts. Could the sorcerer have tucked his sister away in a place from which no mortal man could release her—even someplace as inconceivable as inside a painting?
Damon dragged the portrait closer to the torch and stared hard into the shadowy doorway painted in the corner. Again he caught sight of a woman. But her hair wasn’t dark like his sister’s. This woman’s tresses caught and reflected the light from the flames.
In a flash of thought, he remembered his wife back in England. Flame-haired and filled with ice. If he died in the battle with Rogan tonight or with the king’s mercenaries at dawn, she’d care not. But his mistress...at least she’d weep for his loss, even if only for the absence of his generous purse. For his part, he’d miss her bold lovemaking, her insatiable, curvaceous body and the sound of her pleasured cries bursting in his eardrum. Suddenly he could hear her laughter, raucous and loud, burbling from the painting. His body instantly responded with needs that had no place here, needs that made him forget—momentarily—his missing
sister.
He shook his head until his brain cleared.
“Damn you, Rogan!”
Damon lifted his sword high, and then plunged the blade down into the canvas, precisely at Rogan’s black heart. He heard the rip and then pain shot through him. He screamed as a thousand shards of light stripped his body bare to the bone.
And then...
Nothing.
1
St. Augustine, Florida
April 2008
“What are you doing?”
From behind her, manicured hands coiled around Alexa Chandler’s face and pressed gently against her temples. Even without turning around, she knew who’d come up behind her. Catalina Reyes’s scent always gave her away. Spicy. Rich. Exotic. Alexa had tried wearing the same fragrance and had come off smelling like the proverbial French whore. On Cat, however, the scent reminded Alexa of pure freedom—of the wild life she could be living if she used her money for evil rather than good.
If simply making more money qualified as “good,” of course.
“What do you think I’m doing?” Cat replied.
Alexa sighed. They’d played this game before. “Trying to read my mind.”
Cat chuckled softly.
“Only trouble is,” Alexa continued, “you don’t read minds.”
“Says you,” Cat countered.
“Oh yeah?” Alexa said, sounding much more confident than her previous experiences with Cat warranted. “What am I thinking?”
Alexa clutched the railing of the hotel suite’s balcony tighter and focused on the horizon, on the tiny sliver of land far in the distance, where, with any luck, she’d be exploring sometime in the next few hours.
“You’re thinking about how much money you’re going to make if that abandoned old castle on that barren little island your father left you is the cash cow in disguise that you think it is,” Cat replied.
Alexa turned abruptly, breaking Cat’s contact with her skin.
“How’d you know that?”
Cat laughed, the otherworldly tone in her voice completely gone. “Because I’ve watched you go after properties for six years now. What else would you be thinking?”
Alexa rolled her eyes. “See? Not psychic.”
Cat gave her a sly smile. “You’re also entertaining some fairly naughty fantasies about finding a mysterious dark knight in that castle and letting him have his way with you.”
Alexa’s breath caught in her throat. She was fairly sure that she’d never shared that particular fantasy with anyone—not even her favorite drinking buddy. Of course, with all the tequila they’d shared over the years, she supposed she might have gotten a little too tipsy once or twice and spilled her most secret desire to her friend.
As a young girl, castles, headstrong maidens and handsome princes had been her easy, innocent daydream. Her mother had spared no expense in transforming Alexa’s bedroom into a perfect princess palace, right down to the step-up four-poster bed with shimmery sheers flowing from the canopy. After her mother had died, Alexa had forbidden anyone, least of all any of her stream of stepmothers, from changing the decor.
In her teen years, the setting had become more private. More sensual. Ripe for a young girl’s fantasies. Only she’d never wanted a knight or prince to rescue her. From what? A life of wealth and privilege? No, she’d simply wanted a sweet-voiced young man who could satisfy the torturous, mysterious aches that haunted her in the middle of the night. A man who could steal her away with pleasure and, perhaps, a forever love.
Luckily for her, college had pretty much knocked those delusions right out of her head. Sex, while enjoyable, was no longer a mystifying secret. And as far as Alexa had experienced, men who could weave prince-worthy magic with their bodies were few and far between. No, Alexa had now turned her princess fantasy into something much more practical.
Profit.
“I’m not talking about my sexual fantasies,” Alexa said, “until you’re ready to spill a few of your own.”
“You want the ones I’ve actually lived out or the ones I’m still working on?” Cat replied quickly, a sculpted eyebrow arched over a sparkling eye.
Alexa steeled herself against a shudder. “Forget I said anything. I don’t play games I can’t win, and God knows your love life has always been more exciting than mine. Let’s talk about something important, like how you’ll help me with this project.”
Cat stepped back. “God, that hungry look is scary.”
Alexa chuckled. “So I’ve been told.”
“You do realize that you already have more money than God, right? I mean, in case you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, I’d say from the nearest five-star restaurant that delivers. Hell, who cares if they deliver? You can buy the place and have the chef come over to make you a peanut butter sandwich. With truffle sauce.”
Alexa blanched at the combination of flavors, imaginary or not. “It’s not about the money.”
Cat laughed out loud. “Come on, Alexa. With you, it’s always about the money.”
Alexa turned back to the sliver of land on the horizon, shaking her head as she gazed. She couldn’t blame Cat for making that assumption. She presented that picture to everyone, even to her best friend. Her father had left her millions—millions he’d made with his own ingenuity and backbreaking determination.
He’d worked his way up from a doorman to become a competitor to the likes of Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott. Crown Chandler hotels exemplified excellent service, meticulous decor and premium prices. Since Richard’s death six years before, Alexa had kept the business running with keen precision, as she hadn’t been raised to whittle away her legacy without first adding to the pot. She’d worked twenty-four/seven to ensure that everyone from the maintenance man to the top executives knew that Alexa Chandler put the solvency and growth of her business above all else.
When she discovered that in addition to his all-consuming work ethic, her father had also left her this perplexing piece of land off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida, uncharacteristic whimsy had shot through her. What could be more perfect for her than an abandoned island and a castle? Though Richard Chandler had died in the same car accident that had also nearly killed Alexa, no mention of the property had been made in his will, and the deed had only recently been discovered by her stepbrother, who found the paperwork among his mother’s belongings—along with a note that had “For Alexa” jotted on the corner. None of his attorneys knew a thing about it, though they’d verified the authenticity of the document and Richard’s signature.
The discovery had spawned a series of events that had led her here, to St. Augustine, with her best friend, the occult expert, opening her briefcase in preparation for a meeting Alexa had been anticipating for hours. Initial research revealed that the island—and the castle—were reportedly haunted, which put them right up Cat’s alley. A well-known paranormal researcher with a list of degrees as long as her waist-length hair, Cat was the perfect person to delve into the history of the land Alexa had inherited. And if the rumors of ectoplasmic activity were true, Alexa knew she had a real discovery on her hands.
In more ways than one.
“The only reference I could find to Valoren was in a database run by a Gypsy genealogy site,” Cat informed her after placing pointy-cornered glasses on her regal nose.
At the news, a thrill shot into Alexa’s veins, and she spun, excited and terrified at the same time. The word “Valoren” had been scribbled on the bottom of the deed, with no explanation.
Alexa had tried to research the island—called Isla de Fantasmas by the locals—on her own and had come up with little more than rumors and speculation. She’d learned that the island’s reputation as a gathering place for ghosts had been recorded as far back as the Spanish occupation of Florida in the fifteen hundreds. Tales of hostile spirits, coupled with the inhospitable terrain made up mostly of prickly palmettos and thick walls of bamboo, had kept anyone from inhabiting the land. Even sea birds and turtle
s stayed away. Locals speculated that the tales of spectral activity had been planted by pirates protecting their stronghold, but the tales had remained long after the privateers vanished from the Florida coast.
Then, sixty years ago, according to a local historian, a mysterious speculator had bought an abandoned castle in Germany and began moving it to Florida to rebuild on Isla de Fantasmas.
Piece by piece.
Quietly, almost secretly, the medieval-style stronghold had been rebuilt by a foreign architect and workers housed exclusively on a ship anchored off the island. Armed men in fast boats had kept curious onlookers away. Even the press had been thwarted in their quest to find out more about the project.
And then, in 1950, two years after the work began, the project stopped.
The architect, the workers, the ships, disappeared. The castle remained, but the local fishermen claimed that even if a visitor did find a place to go ashore on the craggy island, the castle was surrounded by a completely impenetrable twenty-foot stone wall. If anyone had made it over the wall, he or she hadn’t returned to tell about it. The sheriff had reported that thrill seekers often claimed to have breeched the island’s natural defenses, but no one cared enough about an empty scrap of land to provide proof.
Interestingly, the county courthouse contained no record of the land being bought by Alexa’s father, though the quitclaim deed had been declared genuine by a local judge. Yet when she’d asked for a guide to take her to her property, the local sailors had scattered faster than a school of grouper startled by a hungry shark.
That’s when she’d called Cat.
“So, the rumors...are they true?”
Cat shook her head, her ironed-straight hair brushing along bared shoulders. “That the island is haunted? I’ll need to see that for myself,” Cat said, her tone, as usual, brimming with skepticism. Though Cat’s genetic makeup included a potent mix of New Orleans Creole and Santería-worshipping Caribbean stock, her friend didn’t believe in any magic she couldn’t prove. So far, Cat had built a reputation for proving more paranormal phenomena than any other researcher in her field—and disproving even more.