Immortal: Lucas Cynthia Breeding 1
The Immortals I:
Lucas
By
Cynthia Breeding
( c ) copyright by Cynthia Breeding, September 2009
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks, September 2009
ISBN 978-1-60394-
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Foreword
The Legend of Balor
An early Celtic sun-deity who evolved into a god of death, Balor wore a patch over one eye that, when lifted, could cause destruction with a look. It was prophesized that only his grandson could kill him with a spear through that eye. Consequently, he imprisoned his only daughter so she would bear no children.
But the Fates intervened.
Exiled from heaven, Balor vows to seek revenge by wrecking havoc on Earth. Assuming human form as Adam Baylor has weakened him so he seeks the four Hallows of the lost Templar treasure: a spear, sword, platter and chalice whose powers will restore him to immortal strength…and then, he will destroy the world, one nation at a time.
The Fates intervened again, sending four medieval warriors to the New World to recover the relics before Balor does. Each of them has a special skill that will be needed to defeat the demon.
And that is where this story begins.
Chapter One
One strong hand cradled her head as the Templar’s mouth softly brushed hers, teasing, tantalizing her into wanting to taste more of him. His face was lost in shadows, but his hot breath grazed her cheek as he pulled her lower lip between his, nibbling lightly until she parted her lips and invited him in. His tongue, warm and velvety, leisurely explored her mouth while his other hand deftly undid the buttons to her silk blouse. Calloused fingertips were surprisingly gentle as he kneaded her breast and flicked a thumb across her nipple. It budded immediately.
With a sigh of pleasure, she let him lay her back against the bed, dark hair fanning across the pillow. He tore off the white mantle with its square red cross and she savored the feel of his naked skin and the smooth, hard muscles of his arms and chest as he stretched out beside her.
He parted her shirt and trailed kisses down her throat to where her exposed, rounded mounds waited for him, nipples taut in anticipation. He lolled his tongue over one, causing her to gasp and then took it in his mouth and began to suckle, long and—
DANGER!
With a start, Sara Kincaid sat up in bed, glancing around wildly. She was alone. And she’d dreamt of the Templar again. Had been dreaming of him ever since the devastatingly handsome Lucas Ramsey came to work for her boss a short time ago. Like she needed that kind of man in her life. Loser Number Three’s betrayal still hurt. She shook her head. There was no reason to dream of Templars anyway. The medieval artifacts at the auction she’d attended must still be on her mind. The private research she did for Mr. Smith concerned Celtic history, not warrior monks on Crusade.
So okay. She was attracted to the elusive Lucas and maybe seeing the Celtic cross pendant with its fleur-de-leis ends that he wore on a gold chain had influenced her imagination. The mind was a powerful thing, as she well knew from the meditation and centering that was required before the Circle of the Sisterhood—she refused to call them a coven—performed a ritual. Maybe the dream was a past life regression or something.
DANGER!
Her head snapped up, remnants of sleep gone. Nim, the faerie who resided in her home, hovered anxiously in the air beside her. To most humans, she would have been no more than a slight shimmer in the moonlight that splashed through the window, but Sara could see her delicate features, long pale hair and ivory gown. The faerie’s gossamer wings beat rapidly which meant she was highly agitated. Or scared.
Then Sara heard it. Just a slight swish, as if a curtain fluttered somewhere in the breeze. But her windows were all closed and securely locked.
Silently, she reached for the Smith and Wesson .38 that she kept on the floor below her bed. With all the wackos strung out on drugs these days, a single woman living in the Dallas-Ft.Worth metro-mess couldn’t be too careful.
Another sound. A footfall? Was someone coming down the hall? She knew she’d thrown the deadbolt and if someone had broken in, surely she would have awakened to the noise. It wasn’t like she had been in the throes of a climax…yet.
But there it was again. Closer this time. She slipped out of bed and took the extra two pillows on her king-size bed and lumped them under the sheet. Her eyes spotted a hairpiece she occasionally wore on those occasions when she had to dress up and look somewhat elegant. Quickly, she unpinned it from the mannequin’s head and laid it on the pillow. Then she padded silently to the closet and stepped in, leaving the door slightly ajar so she could see. She covered the hammer of the revolver with one hand and quietly cocked it. She might not have time for the safety of a double-action gun.
The door to her bedroom swung open slowly. The man wore a ski mask, but he was tall and powerfully built, like a bouncer in some club. A gang thug? But what would they want with her? And he was moving too stealthily to be on drugs.
She held her breath as he neared the closet and wondered if the thumping of her heart could actually be heard. The man stopped at the dresser and started rifling the drawers tossing delicate, lacy panties and bras on the floor. Not finding anything, he glanced at the closet. Sara stopped breathing and readied the gun.
But he moved past her to the armoire and opened its drawers. More clothing went flying to the floor and then he gave a grunt. He’d found her leather portfolio at the bottom of the case. Opening it, he shuffled the papers, apparently satisfied that they were all there.
He tucked the bag under his arm and started out. At the door he paused and turned around and Sara saw that he, too, was armed. The gun was an automatic—probably a 9mm that seemed so popular with criminals—and it had a wicked looking silencer on the barrel.
The man lifted the gun and fired at the bed. Bing. Bing. Bing. So soft. So deadly. And then he was gone.
She heard the door click close and sank to the floor of the closet before her trembling legs gave out entirely. Someone had just tried to kill her to get the manuscript.
So it was that important after all. She almost smiled and then felt a bubble of hysteria rising in her throat. Smiling when there were blackened holes in her bed? Where her body might have been?
The manuscript itself was safe, of course, locked in concrete vaults beneath her boss’s mansion. What she had was a copy and she had been careful to put that in her wall safe when she’d come home earlier. The only thing the thief got were some notes she’d been making on the possibility of the Celtic queen, Gwenhwyfar, having been a Pict. A totally different project for her boss.
But her life was still in danger. Would the thief be back once he found out he had basically worthless stuff? Or when whoever had tried to murder her saw her alive?
She walked to the dresser and looked in the mirror. Her blue eyes were so dilated they looked almost black. Her hand shook a little as she picked up the phone. Then, slowly, she put it down.
She couldn’t call the police. Her eccentric boss was funny about stuff like that. Probably because not all of the medieval artifacts he collected were reputably gotten. That’s what the vaults were for, although she had never been inside some of them. Mr. Smith fastidiously avoided the police as Howard Hughes had done germs and the media.
Sometimes she thought she should return to running the Temp agency she owned or ma
ybe go back to being an adjunct for the class in medieval folklore at the local community college. Life had been safe before Mr. Smith had discovered her at a weekend workshop on sacred relics that had never been found.
But then, she wouldn’t have seen the manuscript.
Several weeks earlier…
Sara handed the ivory embossed invitation to the security guard at the entrance to Sotheby’s and pulled the collar of her lightweight jacket closer. As pleasant as it was to get away from an unseasonably warm Texas spring, the damp morning air of London gave her a slight chill. But hey! She was in England! Her first trip and expenses paid. She couldn’t beat that.
She craned her neck to look around. Walking down New Bond Street and seeing all of the world’s great jewelry stores—DeBeers, Cartier, the interesting Folli Follie, Tavenier’s—had left her awestruck and she almost missed her turn on to Conduit Street and the fabled auction house.
But her boss hadn’t paid her to buy jewelry. She was here to bid on an ancient Gaelic manuscript that had come up on Mr. Smith’s database. The teasing lead-in had hinted that the paper might hold a clue about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail and her employer had been hooked.
John Smith—she grinned at the name since he was one of the richest men in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, but insisted on hiding his identity in the art collector’s world—had a penchant for anything that linked itself to the Arthurian legends. His home was a literal museum of swords and shields and chalices and the Goddess only knew what he had hidden in the concrete vaults below his mansion.
She had been working on her own computer in his home when he’d admitted a strange squawk and staggered from his office, a well-manicured hand clenched dramatically to his throat.
“You’ll never believe what I’ve found,” he said breathlessly, his voice pitched even higher than usual. “You’ll just never guess!”
Sara refrained from rolling her eyes. Her boss was given to theatrics, having had a bit part in an off-Broadway play in his younger years. Short, plump and too average looking to tempt any film producers, he contented himself with capturing audiences in his home. And, since the first love of Sara’s life had run off to Hollywood after taking $5000.00 from her, she wasn’t inclined to like actors.
“What?”
“The Grail!” He nearly danced as he minced steps toward her and clapped his hands. “The Holy Grail. There’s a possible map in a manuscript that’s been found. Oh, I must have it!”
And so, here she was.
She showed her passport to register for the auction and received a numbered paddle in return. Then she walked in and looked around. There were several other medieval items on display, including a wooden shield with white lacquer and a square red cross. The gold card beside it simply read “Circa 1300’s: Paris” Quite possibly a Templar shield left behind when the knights were so cruelly rounded up on that unlucky Friday, the thirteenth. Briefly, she considered calling Mr. Smith and asking him if he wanted her to bid on it, but she reconsidered. She had no idea how high the bidding would go for the manuscript; if no one else was insistent, she might have enough funds for both.
She moved on and stopped again when she came to where a copy of the front page of the manuscript lay. It was hard to say how old the yellowed-parchment was, but the script was middle-Gaelic. The page in front of her didn’t contain much more information that a modern title page did, but she made a note that the catalogue number for it was 333.
Her mind clicked on the trivial fact of the Power of Nine. In mathematical terms, if a number were multiplied by nine, the answer would always equate to nine. In the Sisterhood, it meant something quite different. There were nine Muses, nine priestesses of Avalon, nine aspects of the Goddess…and the Goddess was always represented in her triple form which multiplied by itself equaled nine.
Sara returned to her seat. Perhaps the number was just a coincidence.
A thin, young man took a seat a short distance away. He seemed nervous and looked back over his shoulder more than once. Sara turned, too, catching a glimpse of a rather bulky man with a swarthy face far to the back of the room. He wore a patch over one eye and could have been a middle-aged pirate, but she knew with the surveillance and security measures that auction houses used, the man would not be armed. She blinked and realized that he was gone. It must have been an illusion with the doors opening and casting shadows into the corners of the room. Shrugging to herself, she turned back as the auction began.
Unfortunately, the Templar shield came up for bid before the manuscript did. The opening bid was $5000.00 and a couple of bidders drove the price to $6,500.00 before the gavel descended. The item sold to a good-looking man impeccably dressed in an Armani suit and Gucci shoes. But as she studied him, the clothing didn’t seem to fit his character. His face was sharply angled and his body was tense. He had dark hair that curled over his shoulders and the look in his dark eyes was alert, as if he were ready to spring at the first sight of danger. This must be her day for oddities.
She turned her attention back to the auctioneer as number 333 was announced. The document was brought out and carefully displayed for a few moments. Several people walked past it to get a look before it was taken away. Again, the opening bid was $5000.00. To her surprise, the nervous young man beside her cleared his throat and raised his paddle. Sara quickly raised hers and the young man did the same. They repeated the sequence several times until the price topped $10,000.00. Just as the auctioneer began to bring the hammer down, the dark-haired man that had purchased the shield raised his paddle. The auctioneer raised an eyebrow slightly and looked back at her. Sara’s paddle went up.
The young man beside her was sweating now and glancing back more frequently as the price was driven up. Finally, at $25,000.00 he gulped and gave up. The dark-haired man smiled at her and lifted his paddle once more. Sara gritted her teeth, tempted to hurl a curse at the man. Then she remembered it would return three-fold. Harm none. Mr. Smith was not going to be happy with the price, but he would be furious if she let it go. Not that she thought it really contained a message about the Holy Grail. But if her boss thought so and they couldn’t prove otherwise, there would be hell to pay for a long while.
Finally, at $35,000.00 her tormentor acquiesced. The manuscript was hers.
As she moved toward Purchaser Accounts, the young man brushed against her on his hurry to get out. He looked like he needed some fresh air.
“I’m sorry if I drove the price up so high.”
She turned and looked into the eyes of the man in the expensive suit. He was signing for the shield and looked down to smile at her.
“Did you really want it so badly or do you just like to irritate women?”
He looked almost affronted. “The Order would never allow that.”
“The Order?” Good Lord. He couldn’t be a monk or a priest!
He gestured toward the shield. “Some of us still exist.”
A Templar? She knew that a lot of them had gone to ground after that fatal day in 1307, being absorbed by the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights as well as the Portuguese Knights of Christ. And the theory that the Masons had descended from them was still alive and well. But…
“I can see you’re skeptical,” the man said. “Perhaps it’s just as well. When your eyes are ready to see— ”
“And my ears ready to hear?” she answered and received a fleeting look of surprise before he carefully masked his face.
“Something like that,” he said. “But to answer your other question, no, I didn’t jack up the price on purpose. I was bidding for someone else and my money ran out.” He nodded toward the shield again. “This was his. The Grand Master’s.”
Sara wasn’t sure if he was talking about someone living or not, so she decided to let the subject drop. “I was bidding for someone else, too. I’ll just have to tell him a Templar drove up the price.”
He smiled at that and pulled up the collar of his suit. Putting on sunglasses, he picked up the wrapped
shield. “Good luck.”
She watched as he walked away, wondering why he’d shade his eyes on a cloudy day. Whom did he really work for? Mr. Smith would probably like to know.
“Miss?”
She turned back to the man behind the Purchases counter. He was holding a leather portfolio. “The manuscript has been shrink-wrapped to prevent exposure. But if you’d like to examine it before you leave, I can show you to a private room.”
“That won’t be necessary. I saw it earlier.”
He nodded. “Let me call a security guard to escort you to your transportation.”
The guard was young and friendly, more like a college kid than a private bobby. “Let me hail a hack for you,” he said as they went outside to the curb. He took a few steps into the street to signal one just as a small, black car careened around the corner of St. George’s Street with a screech of tires and raced straight toward them. For a moment Sara stood transfixed as the front tire leapt the curb and at the same time she felt a huge tug on her shoulder. Instinctively, she cradled the portfolio, but before she could turn around, someone caught her around the waist, diving to the ground with her as the car whistled past, regaining the road.
The man had cushioned her fall with his body and she was aware of how very muscular that body was even dressed in a suit and tie. He wore a hat over tawny hair and sunglasses—what was it with Londoners anyhow?—but she had a glimpse of a full, sensual mouth inches from hers before he rolled her off him. Before she could thank him, the security guard was back, helping her on her feet with a worried look on his face. Several people had come running out of Sotheby’s and a couple of witnesses were telling anyone who would listen what happened.
“Are you quite all right, Ma’am?” the young guard asked.
Sara brushed dust off her skirt and nodded, trying not to look shaken. Had the car been meant to kill her? Or was it a distraction so the pickpocket could grab her case? With the turmoil of a runaway car and a woman knocked down, no one would have noticed a snatching. Or had he been only an opportunist? No, she knew that answer was wrong. Whoever the attacker had been, he knew what he wanted. He didn’t even attempt to grab her purse. And where was the hottie who had so gallantly rescued her? She wasn’t used to being rescued; she could usually take care of herself. Still, she should thank the man, but he seemed to have disappeared.
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