Lionheart

by Thea Harrison

  Wordlessly he took the lighter pack. He had born her weight plus both packs through the night, so she wasn’t about to complain. Straightening, she shouldered the other one. Then she followed him into the palace.

  The interior was grand and abandoned. Normally she would have pored over every detail with intense fascination. Now she had neither the time or the energy. Spacious hallways, wide stairwells, and corridors all went by in a blur.

  The sense of being watched by the dark Power intensified until the tiny hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Every Wyr sense she owned was screaming: Danger. Run.

  But she did no such thing. She followed Robin down a wide, richly appointed corridor to a set of double doors made of a glossy, very dark wood. She almost expected Robin to pull out a key. Instead, he merely turned the knob and pushed the door open to a deeply shadowed room.

  Oberon was in there. She knew it. She could feel it in the goose bumps raising on her arms and legs. This was the culmination of her long journey.

  Here, the presence of the dark Power was almost unbearably intense. It felt like a thunderclap about to break against her skin. She half expected lightning to shear across the dark interior space.

  Robin was looking at her as if he expected her to do something.

  Setting down her pack, she sat down carefully on the floor at the edge of the doorway. Then, because she was who she was, she multitasked and pulled out a bag of the high-calorie, high-fat trail mix.

  Shaking some into her hand, she popped it in her mouth. After chewing and swallowing, she said, “Your majesty, my name is Dr. Shaw, and I’ve traveled a very long way to meet you. I’m here to help you if I can, but I won’t attempt to do anything against your will. If you understand what I’m saying, please give me a sign that you consent to an examination.”

  Then she paused. Nothing happened. Her wary gaze shifted sideways to Robin, who had squatted by her side. The puck stared at her intently. She tilted the bag toward him.

  Slowly, his feral gaze never leaving her face, he reached into the bag and took a handful of the trail mix.

  She turned her attention back to the shadowed room. “Sir, I have to ask you again, do I have your consent to examine you? Give me a sign, Oberon, or I’m going to go away. I was led to believe you were unconscious, but you’ve got too much raised Power to be completely unaware, and I’m not going to risk my life just to examine you. I’ll make this simple—do you want to live, or do you want to die? Because you’re headed for death just fine on your own, and you don’t need me to be here for that.”

  She ate some more trail mix while she waited. Mmm, chocolate.

  Nothing happened.

  Disappointment made her shoulders sag. Okay then. Pushing to her feet, she said, “I’m going… Going…”

  Just as she was about to say gone, the unbearable intensity in the Power shifted. It didn’t go away, but as she carefully assessed the change, it no longer felt like it was going to ram like a spike down her throat.

  Suddenly magic arced like lightning, and light flared in round witchlights positioned around a richly appointed bedroom. The figure of a large man lay on the bed. His shape was a dark, heavy shadow against the crimson-and-gold bedcover.

  She was going to ignore the fact that she had almost jumped out of her skin. She and Robin stared at each other, eyes wide.

  “All right,” she whispered. “I’m going to take that as a consent to enter.” Even as she spoke, an unusual case of anxiety attacked her. Stepping inside that room felt like walking into the open mouth of a giant.

  “I will enter with you,” Robin replied softly.

  “Sure, okay,” she muttered, unimpressed. Oberon liked Robin.

  Pushing to her feet, she left her pack in the doorway and slowly walked inside.

  Then lightning bolts hit her after all as several realizations struck at once.

  He was a big, hard behemoth of a man. It was difficult to tell with him lying down, but she thought he might easily be the size of one of the gryphon sentinels, if not larger. He sprawled in a casual pose on the massive bed, as if he had just laid down for a nap.

  She glanced at the rich but plain masculine furniture and the luxuriously thick rug underneath as her mind flashed through rapid calculations.

  A fortnight in Lyonesse roughly equaled six months on Earth, and on Earth Oberon had been in a comatose state for two hundred years. So that would be four Lyonesse weeks for each Earth year, and four times two hundred meant he had been unconscious in Lyonesse for eight hundred weeks.

  It was silly to think Lyonesse might have fifty-two weeks in a year just because Earth did, she thought, but for the sake of compiling a completely useless statistic, let’s say there were. That meant Oberon had been in a vegetative state for almost fifteen and a half years.

  The entire room, even Oberon, should be coated with a layer of dust, but everything was pristine. His muscles should have wasted, but they hadn’t. He looked fit, vital, and his skin was deeply burnished as if he spent a lot of time out in the sun. He had a strong, mature face with a short-clipped beard, and thick, packed muscles wrapped around a long, masculine frame.

  It was a hard face, a dangerous face, with an outrageously sensual mouth. The severe cold invaded even this room, but he wore nothing except a pair of black pants and boots. A sprinkle of dark hair dusted the broad muscles of his chest and arrowed down to disappear into the waistband of his pants.

  Studying him outside the sterility of a hospital examination room felt inappropriately intimate. Every detail struck her like bullets and burrowed underneath her skin. She felt invaded just by looking at him.

  But none of that delivered the sucker punch.

  That blow came when she took in her first breath after stepping into the room. For the first time, she breathed in his scent and reeled.

  Oberon was Wyr.

  Chapter Five

  He dreamed of killing the bitch over and over again, caught in an endless loop.

  Isabeau, Queen of the Light Court. Satan personified. She had a beauty like a rotten peach whose perfect, blush skin invited you to partake, but when you bit into the flesh, poisonous worms spilled into your mouth.

  He didn’t want her merely dead. He wanted her utterly crushed, completely destroyed, and then violently executed. He wanted her aware of her own destruction so when she sank into that final darkness, she would know she had lost everything she had ever cared about and everything she had ever wanted.

  Just as he had.

  His hands squeezing around her neck. His thumbs gouging out her eyes. His sword sliding into her body.

  Somehow in his dreams, it was never really satisfying, never really enough. Never really finished. Somehow she always slipped away to come at him in another fashion.

  And so he had to kill her again while kingdoms fell and life devolved into a single sick feeling in the gut, because everything was always in a crisis, and all that remained was rage.

  Until a woman started speaking to him.

  At first it was meaningless background noise to his death-filled dreams. But then it intruded, and life gained a definition that went beyond the sick sense of crisis in his gut.

  Now there was a second thing.

  There was the sound of her voice. Her, the woman. He had never met her before, but suddenly she came to be present, and when she spoke to him, the words were calm, bright, and crisp.

  Sometimes there was silence and the killing dreams returned, but then the woman came back. If he had been awake, it would have driven him crazy.

  Because she talked and talked and talked.

  And talked.

  Then he no longer dreamed about killing Isabeau. Sometimes he dreamed about figuring out ways to shut that talkative woman up.

  Chapter Six

  It was day four in this frozen hellhole. Day four. And it was freaking freezing everywhere.

  Nothing stayed warm. Since their arrival, she had tried a new bedroom every night and had stocked it
beforehand with plenty of firewood. Each night she had built a blazing fire, but they all burned without warmth. She could run her fingers through the flames without getting her skin singed.

  The only way she survived was by wrapping herself up in coat, cloak, and blankets and then tucking the Mylar emergency blanket around the entire bundle so that it captured ninety percent of the heat she managed to generate. She felt like a giant foil-wrapped burrito.

  Water didn’t boil. Food never warmed. There was plenty of food in the cavernous palace kitchen and pantries, but it was all frozen hard as rocks. For every swallow of water, she needed to suck on a piece of ice until it melted.

  In order to eat, she either had to do the same thing, or carry frozen bits of food around in her pocket so her body heat would eventually help it to thaw. She had a hardy constitution, but all the challenges were frankly wearing.

  The hand and body warmers were lifesavers. She used one a day and got ten glorious hours of help with combating the cold in the form of a single miraculous little packet. But she had only two left. Soon she was going to have to rely solely on her own body’s resources.

  And Robin was no help. First, there was no way in hell she would suggest sharing blankets and body heat when she barely trusted him enough to turn her back while they were together in the same room.

  Second, she couldn’t suggest sharing body heat anyway, because after shadowing her obsessively for two days and listening to her constantly explain every little thing to him—which meant she frequently had to offer background medical lectures so he understood what she was saying, including drawing sketches in lieu of PowerPoint slideshows—he disappeared without warning or explanation.

  She had no idea if he was off running some errand that he considered vitally important or if something had happened and he had gotten himself into real trouble. He had simply vanished.

  Kathryn wrote “4” on a piece of parchment paper and propped it in one corner of Oberon’s room within easy sight.

  Day four meant Annwyn and her troops would be arriving in about ten days. Then, according to Robin, Kathryn would need to shelter in place as they entered the city.

  Unless Robin had changed his mind and had gone to fetch them? But that didn’t sound likely, so she had to plan for other contingencies. Probably the best place to shelter would be with Oberon in his bedroom, because presumably his Power wouldn’t have any self-destructive tendencies when it rampaged the city.

  After she had finished her morning ritual of straightening her possessions that had gotten strewn all over Oberon’s furniture, she braced herself and turned to face the man lying on the bed. Every time she looked at him, she felt the same gut punch as the first time she had laid eyes on him. At least now she knew to prepare for it.

  Yes, he was Wyr. According to his scent, he was some kind of feline. He was a big damn cat.

  On the night of their arrival, when she discovered what Oberon was, she had exclaimed, “How come nobody told me he was Wyr? I thought the Daoine Sidhe was a community of mixed breeds from the Elder Races!”

  She had always liked the idea. It sounded warm and inclusive, with none of the walls that people erect to keep out their perceived “other,” so she felt a little shock of betrayal to discover the truth.

  Robin had given her a thoughtful look. “He was mixed Dark Fae and Wyr for a very long time. It was only after Morgan’s attack that he threw everything he had into trying to shapeshift. He thought it might help dislodge the magic. After he finally changed into his Wyr form, it did seem to work—for a while. He appeared to be healed for another two years, until the spell awoke again.”

  Robin described the reality of what every half-Wyr faced. They couldn’t completely access many of the health and physical attributes of the full Wyr until they were able to successfully shapeshift into their animal forms. Most who were part-Wyr never managed to achieve that transition.

  She couldn’t imagine how Oberon had managed to shapeshift on his own without the assistance of an older Wyr. It spoke of a towering will and determination to survive. When she had met with Morgan, the sorcerer had confessed he was astonished Oberon had survived so long. As scary as Oberon’s Power felt, she had tremendous respect for his will to live.

  But this situation was maddening. Even though he appeared to be perfectly warm, the cold was so bitter she had draped blankets over his lax form before leaving that first time.

  The next morning, when she had walked into the bedroom, everything she had done to him had been reversed. He lay back in his original position, and the blankets were tucked back in the closet.

  The room lay in deep shadow, only flaring with light when she and Robin stepped back inside. Her possessions were the only things left alone… possibly because they were new to Oberon’s unconscious mind and he didn’t know what to do with them?

  Who the hell knew? She could say only one thing for certain. In all her many years as a doctor, this was the most unique situation she had ever been in. And she hated to admit that it wasn’t going well.

  Because she didn’t just have Morgan’s sophisticated assassination spell to fight. That would have been difficult enough on its own. She had to fight Oberon himself.

  And she wasn’t winning.

  She had run out of the jerky and trail mix. In an effort to keep her caloric intake high, she had taken to eating butter and other fats from the kitchen pantries because they melted easily after being in contact with her body heat.

  Still, she had grown tired all the time, and while the Wyr didn’t suffer from colds like humans did, her lungs felt raw from constantly breathing in the dangerously frigid air.

  Also, her throat was sore. She was suffering from voice strain from all the damn talking she’d done over the past several days. She could cast a pain-relieving spell on herself, but she didn’t want to do permanent damage to her vocal cords, and the only thing that would help them was to rest her voice.

  She had started out with explaining every little thing to Robin, but then she found that if she didn’t keep talking to Oberon every damn moment while she scanned him or did anything else, his Power would gather in the room like a black, malevolent thundercloud. And black, malevolent thunderclouds never boded well for anybody.

  The only way she made headway was when she talked nonstop while she tried the various spells and techniques she had worked out with Morgan. Oberon didn’t fight her when she was talking to him. When he lay acquiescent, she could sense the icy needle pressing against his heart. It was so close to taking him, so close.

  But after long, careful work, she had only managed to wiggle that needle back a millimeter, then another… just as long as she kept talking. As soon as she paused to take a breath, or her voice faltered, his Power snapped around him like a clenched fist and she couldn’t get back inside his body without doing damage, either to him or to herself.

  What she wouldn’t give for a warm, cooked meal and something hot to drink. Broth, coffee, tea. Anything. A whiskey toddy with lemon and honey sounded like heaven.

  In the meantime, the bastard just lay there on his bed and looked like he could sit up at any minute. Even though he was shirtless in the wretched, unnatural cold, he was warm to the touch. Other than the few precious remaining packets of body warmers that remained, he was the only heat source in the entire city.

  He was warm to the touch.

  When the idea hit, it was filled with such simple brilliance her shoulders sagged—partly from relief at the thought and partly for how far and quickly she had fallen away from any semblance of keeping appropriate boundaries between her and her patient.

  But he was warm to the touch, and her stiff muscles and tired mind needed some real rest before she expended more energy on trying to wrestle another round of healing spells into him. So she did the practical thing. She went down the hall to her latest bedroom and retrieved her Mylar blanket.

  She was already wearing her fur-lined cloak over her coat. With two people under the Mylar bla
nket, she thought the cloak would be more than enough covering. And she had already gone to the kitchen for provisions. She’d hacked some ice chips into a tankard, and gathered frozen nuts, dried fruit, a small tub of butter, and a wheel of cheese, both as solid as blocks of ice.

  Back in Oberon’s room, she set the tankard on the mattress next to his hip and carefully propped it up with the food. Then she lay down on his other side, shook her cloak over them both, food and all, and then over that she spread the Mylar blanket, talking hoarsely the whole time.

  “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do—or any more than you would if you were really cognizant of what a monumental pain in the ass you’ve been. But until I break through to you or…” Or conclude I can’t do anything for you. Something in her chest tightened at the thought. “…or you stop creating such terrible winter conditions, we’ve got to do whatever it takes to make this work. Understood?”

  He said nothing, did nothing. Most importantly, his Power did not coalesce menacingly, so she eased down beside his long, hard form and eased her head down on the pillow next to his.

  Soon she was more than warm. She quickly grew too hot. Eureka. Unzipping her coat, she shrugged out of it and let it fall by the bed. Deep exhaustion followed the wonderful warmth as her tense muscles finally unknotted for the first time since crossing over.

  As she lay back down beside him, she murmured drowsily, “That’s all that’s coming off, buddy, so relax, you’re safe.”

  She was even halfway convinced she was safe, at least for the moment, but she wasn’t comfortable with the situation, not by a long shot, and she tried her damnedest to keep from coming into direct contact with his bare skin.

  Yet she couldn’t help but notice he smelled pretty good for a guy who hadn’t bathed in fifteen and a half years. All clean and über-male, even if he was some kind of damn cat.