Both Khamsin and Christina gasped in unison and they looked at one another with horror.
“Once he slays Stavros and finds you aren’t at Constantine’s keep, he will turn to me to help find you. I will, naturally, tell him he can have you both back but for a price.”
“Him in your bed,” Christina growled.
“For only the one night,” Sibylline allowed. “I have no need of him but for the sowing of his seed.”
“And you know for a fact it will take only the once?” Christina scoffed.
“I will make sure of it.”
Khamsin felt sick to her stomach. The thought of Lucien with the striking red-haired queen hurt her very soul.
“Why would you want to be burdened with a brat, Lucien’s or not?” Christina demanded. “Have you no conception of the problem babies bring?”
Sibylline leaned back in her chair and cocked her head to one side. “What trouble when it is safely ensconced in the mother’s womb—where it will stay.”
“You can’t keep a baby from being born!” Khamsin pointed out.
“Oh, but I can,” Sibylline said sweetly.
“That is ridiculous! You…”
“She can do it,” Christina said softly and there was pain in her words.
“How?” Khamsin demanded.
“She’s going To The Ground,” Christina said.
“Well, to the soil of Croì Cloiche, anyway,” Sibylline corrected. “The soil on Earth stinks.”
“I don’t understand,” Khamsin said. “What does that mean?”
Christina was about to answer but Sibylline interrupted.
“What it means is I am tired,” the Revenant queen said. “I have lived thousands of years—even outliving that bastard mate of mine and his last strutting trollop, I suspect. I wish to go beneath the soil and rest.” She sighed. “But I do not want to go alone. I want my child to go with me.”
“That’s sick!” Khamsin shouted. “How could you be so cruel?”
“Cruel?” Sibylline countered. “Why is it cruel? I will speak to my daughter, carrying on long conversations with her. I will teach her all she needs to know. We will spend eternity together as the best of friends. I will love her and reassure her and make certain her every moment is pleasant and comfortable.”
“And that no man will ever lay hands to her,” Christina put in. “That’s important, isn’t it, Sibylline.”
Sibylline’s jaw tightened. “You should know, Tina.”
“Do you think Lucien will agree to this?” Khamsin asked. Her hands were clutched into fists on the table edge. “After losing one daughter, do you think he will stand by while you take another from him?”
“If he wants you back, he will,” Sibylline stated. “Else he’ll spend eternity alone!”
Chapter Eleven
Lucien woke from the drugged sleep that had kept him immobile for two nights. The first thing he felt was the wicked headache that throbbed over his right eye and the first thing he saw was Petros’ concerned face looking down at him. He knew before asking that Khamsin was gone.
“Christina?” he asked, trying to sit up although the room spun around him like a top.
Petros reached out to assist him. “She’s nowhere to be found.”
“Have you gathered the troops?”
“They’ve been ready since I found you’d been incapacitated. Marc swears he knows nothing of what Christina planned and I believe him. He found the vial of tenerse she must have used on you and brought it to me.”
“If Stavros has hurt my woman,” Lucien stopped, plowing a trembling hand through his hair. He felt weak, disoriented, but managed to toss the covers aside and sit up with Petros’ help. The moment his feet hit the floor, he fumbled for Petros’ arm.
“Easy,” Petros advised. “I’d be willing to bet you have enough tenerse in you to keep ten men out for a week or more.”
“Get my weapons,” Lucien ordered, ignoring Petros’ concern. “The sharpest and most lethal among them.” He looked up at his friend. “There won’t be a Constantine coven member left alive when I’m through if that bastard has harmed one hair on my woman’s head!”
Petros nodded. “Your command will be obeyed, my Prince.”
In less than an hour, a troop of Korvina clansmen was trampling over the drawbridge, their faces set and hard, their hearts filled with fury and revenge. Each trooper was battle-hardened and each was a Revenant in his own right. Not a single one was in thrall to the Korvina coven. That was important to Lucien for he wanted no man to look to another for direction. He wanted his men to know their purpose and to be able to take the necessary measures to see the conflict through.
“We’ll get her back,” Petros had vowed and the men accompanying him shouted in unison that would, indeed, be the case.
“For Korvina!” Lord Nikos Carrus shouted, stabbing his sword into the air.
“For Korvina!” the other twenty-nine Revenant lords echoed.
Twenty-two clansmen rode out of Modartha Keep that night with blood and vengeance gleaming in their eyes. The remaining guards cursed not being able to join the party—as they saw it—but were needed to guard the keep. With swords and daggers honed to razor sharpness, pikes and morning stars and battle-axes at the ready, Lucien’s men took the road south to Duaric, where the keep of Stavros Constantine squatted in ruin. Overhead, the moon was bright, leading the way with a steady beam that turned the surrounding dark mountains pale gray.
“Stavros is mine,” Lucien had told his troopers.
“Keep watch for Giles Kolovis,” Petros reminded them. “You all know him.”
Sitting hunched in his saddle, his teeth grinding, Lucien paid no attention to his surroundings. His mind was a jumble of fear and try as hard as he could, he could not sense Khamsin’s presence.
“Christina would have seen to that, Luc,” Petros said over the jingle of harnesses.
“I pray that it is all it means,” Lucien replied.
“Stavros has been wanting this battle,” Nikos Carrus, the man Lucien called the Dog Lord said. “He’ll not harm your lady until he knows for sure the fight has gone against him.”
Petros shot Carrus a nasty look, no doubt warning him to keep his mouth shut.
“I don’t want one wall at Duaric left standing,” Lucien commanded. “Not one fucking wall left standing!”
“What of the women?” Carrus asked and blushed deeply when Petros hissed at him.
“What herd is left in his pens are to be taken back with us.” He snagged Carrus with a brutal look. “Any man who hurts a woman, rapes any woman at Duaric—thrall or slave—will have me to answer to. Thralls are to be dispatched along with their masters if they resist. I want no treacherous bastard left alive to avenge his owner,” Petros asserted.
“And Lady Christina?” another Revenant inquired.
“Leave her to me,” Lucien said, his eyes as hard as flint.
Silence fell over the clansmen as they started their mounts down the twisting road that led to the valley far below. Loose rocks skittered into the deep ravine below as each trooper skillfully controlled his beast to keep it from descending the steep ribbon of road too fast.
Lucien tried once more to glean some knowledge of his lady but all he sensed was a dark miasma. Hateful thoughts, sorrowful thoughts prickled his mind and made him exceedingly uncomfortable. The evil of the mist that surrounded Khamsin pressed on him like a wet, cloying wool cape. He shifted his shoulders against the feel of it and felt a shiver of cold wriggle down his spine.
He knew he had to get his mind off the wicked notion that Khamsin was suffering at Stavros’ hands. By dwelling on the brutal nature of Constantine, remembering reports of how horrendously he abused women, Lucien was making himself sick. He could taste the hot bile in his throat and the stench of death was ripe in his nostrils.
“If she was suffering,” Petros said quietly, “you would know, Luc. There would be no way for Constantine to hide that from you.”
“He’ll have drugged her,” Petros said.
“Aye, and only the devil knows what he’s doing to her in that state,” Lucien reminded him.
“If she’s asleep, she won’t know, my Prince.”
Lucien looked away from the concern on Petros’ face, but not before he glimpsed the pity in his friend’s eyes. His fingernails dug into his palms until bloody punctures made the reins slippery. He wiped one palm then the other down his britches. Grief ate at him and his heart was like granite in his chest.
“Have you tried to communicate with Stavros?” Petros asked.
“No.”
“He will know we are coming.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lucien snapped.
Petros tried for the third time to mentally contact Giles Kolovis, their spy at Duaric, but there was only an undulating black shadow where once a bright spark had resided in their mind-link. In itself that could mean that either Giles had been discovered and was unable to answer Petros’ call or he was deliberating ignoring the attempt to communicate. If Giles had been discovered and was incapacitated in some way—had been tortured until there was no brain activity or lay dying—that was one thing. But if Kolovis was ignoring Petros’ attempt to contact him that could mean he had gone over to the Constantine side or for some reason thought opening a channel of communication between them was too dangerous. Either way, the situation bothered Petros.
“Still no contact with Kolovis?” Lucien asked, sensing Petros’ worry.
“Not a peep since I learned Christina and your lady were gone from Modartha. I’m getting worried, Luc.”
“It may not be safe for him to converse with you.”
“I’m hoping that’s all it is. Giles is a good man.”
A falling star flashed across the night sky and Lucien looked up to follow its path. The ancient superstition of wishing on a star flitted through his mind and he closed his eyes, feeling foolish for doing so but making a fervent wish nevertheless—“Keep her safe for me.”
The ride to Duaric would take until nearly dawn and not for the first time did Lucien wish he and his men could simply have shape shifted into ravens and winged their way to the Constantine stronghold, but every ounce of their strengths, their powers, was needed in the oncoming fight. Nothing could take away from their ability to crush the enemy. Power and strength needed to be conserved. There would be a minor sapping of their strength when they were required to change into tiny woodland creatures that could bore their way deep into the earth before the rise of the sun. At least such a shifting would not sap that much-needed power. The only concern was that Stavros’ thralls not find their hidey-holes and try to eliminate Lucien’s troops before nightfall.
“Look for mounds of leaves, rocks or fallen logs to burrow beneath,” Petros mentally alerted his fellow warriors in such a way that no escaping thought could be plucked from the ether by any Revenant other than a member of the Korvina clan. “Send your mounts back to Modartha and cover their tracks before you go to ground. Leave no trace of your descent into the earth. Your unlives depend on it.”
As dawn approached, the troop became lethargic, their movements slow. They began looking for hidey-holes into which they could spend the coming day. Only two miles from Duaric, the troops took to the ground, taking care to cover their passing. The last two left above ground—Lucien and Petros—inspected the area where their men had hidden themselves, where they had brushed over the imprint of horse hooves when they had sent their horses back to the keep, and were satisfied no telltale trails had been left for Constantine thralls to find.
“I hate the thought of her in that vile place even one more hour, less an entire day,” Lucien swore as he dismounted. He kicked a few leaves over one hidey-hole then bent down to add a few twigs to further mask the entry point where the Dog Lord had taken himself.
“Stavros can do nothing until nightfall, Luc,” Petros reminded his friend. “He isn’t powerful enough to keep the day at bay as are you. He will have already gone to bed.”
“Aye,” Lucien said through clenched, “with my woman at his side!”
Petros made no comment to Lucien’s words. Instead, he had found a good place to go to ground and was already in the process of shifting his body into a small rabbit.
“See you at sunset,” Petros whispered as whiskers sprouted and his body shrank.
Waiting until he was sure Petros’ hiding place was well concealed, Lucien wandered around the clearing, too distraught to think of his own concealment. He tunneled his fingers through his hair as he stood staring off into the distance. Somewhere beyond the ridgeline, Duaric Keep sat like a warty toad upon a small escarpment.
“Are you awake, cousin?” Lucien snarled, his hands doubled into fists at his side.
He listened carefully but could not hear Stavros’ mental mumblings. Not even sure the bastard could hear him, Lucien cursed the Constantine line and even included Stavros’ dam—Lucien’s father’s sister—for bringing such a contemptible offspring into the world.
Still there was no communication from Duaric.
“But you know I’m coming, don’t you, cousin?” Lucien sneered.
The first faint glow of dawn’s light reached up from the eastern horizon and Lucien felt the pull of the soil calling to him. He would need all his strength for he knew the brutal anger that was driving him took too much of his energy. Striving to calm the rage building inside him, he looked for a place to secrete himself and spied a stony outcropping that had not been chosen by one of his men. Proceeding carefully so no footprint would mar the surrounding sparse vegetation, he walked to the pile of stones and stood there a moment, staring down, preparing himself to shape shift.
It was not a mole or a rabbit, mouse or ground squirrel that morphed there beside the stony concealment but a one-meter-long nose-horned viper, light slate brown in color with chocolate brown zigzag markings framed within white blotches down its back. With a fleshy horn on the tip of its snout, a long, accurate striking ability, hollow fangs that could easily dispense a copious payload of poison, the viper was considered to be the most dangerous and venomous snakes in all of Europe. Any thrall ventured near the place where Lucien had gone to ground would never live to hunt again.
Slithering between the sand-colored stones, Lucien ventured into a deep darkness that hid him from the day’s bright light. Flicking his tongue to taste the space around him, his amber eyes open, he coiled in upon himself and let sleep overtake him.
* * * * *
Stavros was acutely uncomfortable but he didn’t know why. Something was troubling his slumber, keeping him for slipping down into the rest he so enjoyed each day. Opening his mind to the Rift in the Veil around him, he could detect no danger but he felt it, nevertheless. From time to time, a cold shiver rippled down his spine and that was generally a sign to him that something was amiss. He turned over in the bed and dragged the covers of his head. Though there were no windows in his sleeping chamber and the door was heavy mahogany under which no shimmer of light could be detected, the weight of the sunlight disturbed his ability to sleep.
“You are up to something, Korvina,” Stavros mumbled. “Are you raiding my herds again, you bastard?”
Though they had grown up in neighboring villages and had known one another since they were toddlers, the two men had never been on friendly terms. Constantly fighting as youngsters, actively trying to hurt each other as young boys, and consigning one another to hell as they reached manhood, the cousins hated the other with a passion none of their relatives understood. Both were handsome young men—having the same mesmerizing eyes and dark complexion with thick black hair and strong features—so perhaps, it was their very resemblance that had caused the original antipathy between them. Whatever the cause, their dislike as boys had grown into full-fledged hatred as men.
Shudder
ing once more as the spectral talons of destiny scraped down his backbone, Stavros ground his teeth and pulled the pillow tightly over his face. His unease had grown to astronomical proportions yet he could not fathom why he should feel such dread, such nervousness.
“You won’t attack during the day, you coward,” Stavros hissed. “That much I know.”
But sunset was many hours away and sleep was just out of Stavros’ reach. Try as hard as he could, he was unable to sink into the arms of Morpheus, and spent the day trying to glean a measure of understanding from the savage vibrations that were disturbing him. Restless, his powers waning from the constant worry of a threat hanging over his head, he tossed and turned, feeling his energy slipping away. By the time he had fretted himself into a light doze, the sun was dipping toward the western horizon.
* * * * *
Khamsin sat beside the blazing fire Sibylline had lit for her and Christina. The storm still raged around them and Khamsin began to think this was the way the weather ran at Croì Cloiche.
“Why would she implicate me like this?” Christina asked for perhaps the fifth time.
“To hurt him,” Khamsin replied once again.
“It hurts me to think he believes me capable of such treachery,” Christina said and her voice broke. “We’ve been friends since childhood. He and Petros were my only friends. They were the only ones who accepted me as I am!”
“Once we are back at Modartha and we can sit down and talk to him, he’ll no doubt apologize for what he thought, Tina.”
Christina paced in front of the roaring hearth, her arms wrapped around her as though no fire could ever warm her. “I thought I recognized the term Bilitis’ daughter when Petros spoke of it but never could I have imagined Luc thought me a spy for that prick Stavros!”
Sighing heavily for they had gone over this same argument time and time again, Khamsin drew her knees up into the chair and laid her chin in the valley between them. She, too, was cold, but it was not coldness of flesh but rather of heart that caused her anxiety.
“It will torment him if Sibylline steals a child from him and takes it To The Ground,” Christina said. She stopped her pacing and turned to face Khamsin. “It will cause him great misery.”
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