by Lisa Shearin
Like the souls in the Saghred.
I dimly heard Mychael and Vidor Kalta shouting orders.
The Reaper in front of me wasn’t getting any closer; it just hovered there. This many Reapers weren’t here to collect just one wayward specter. A few weeks ago when I’d escaped the Reaper in the tunnels under the island, I knew that it would be back, and when it came it would bring reinforcements.
Dad stood at the top of the stairs, not even twenty feet away.
“Run!” I screamed at him.
Dad knew the danger. From the expression on his face, he wasn’t running from anything.
Dammit.
Anyone who had died and been brought back to life was fair game for a Reaper. If you had only been dead a few minutes, you were still theirs. The young Guardian whose body my dad’s soul inhabited had died. As far as the Reapers were concerned, coming back to life was my dad’s problem, not theirs.
He ran toward me, darting around the Reaper. A tendril snapped out, lashing Dad across the back. His breath hissed out in pain, but he kept coming until he was at my side.
I couldn’t believe him. “Are you insane?”
He flashed a crooked smile. “I’ve heard that question a lot.”
To everyone watching, he was a twenty-year-old Guardian either brave or stupid enough to tangle with a Reaper. To me, he was a dad trying to protect his newly found daughter.
“I’ve dealt with them before.” His words came quickly and in near silence.
I caught a flash of another face under the young Guardian’s skin, that of Eamaliel Anguis, my dad. I knew it was an illusion—at least I thought it was. Dad’s elegantly pointed ears marked him as an elf, a beautiful pure-blooded high elf. His hair was silver, and his eyes were the gray of gathering storm clouds. Eyes identical to my own.
Eyes that could see the Reapers just as clearly as I could.
Sudden movement caught my attention. Vidor Kalta. I didn’t think he could see the Reapers, but he knew exactly where they were, surrounding us. Then he saw my dad and his black eyes widened in realization and disbelief.
Oh no. He knew.
The body that housed my dad’s soul had been murdered, dead for only a few minutes, but dead was dead and Kalta knew it.
The Reapers were coming out of the walls. I felt two of them rise from the floor behind us. Dad went back to back with me, his entire body suddenly aglow with the same incandescent white power that had covered Mychael’s hands.
He was going to fight.
“Tell me what to do,” I asked as my eyes tried to look everywhere at once. The Reapers were too damned fast.
“Tamp down that rock!” he growled. “They can’t eat what they can’t find.”
“I’m standing right here,” I snapped. “It’s not like I can—”
“Just do it. Leave the rest to me.”
“How are—”
Dad took my hand and his thoughts instantly passed to me.
My mouth fell open. “You’re kidding?”
“It’s worked before. Take care of the rock and leave the beasties to me.”
No doubt my dad had plenty of experience keeping Reapers away from the Saghred, nine hundred years’ worth. But as far as these Reapers were concerned, I was the Saghred.
And his idea of fighting them was to sing them a children’s song.
It was a nursery rhyme sung by children at bedtime to chase away things that hid in closets and under beds. Those were imaginary monsters; these were real.
These were hungry.
My dad, Eamaliel Anguis, was a master spellsinger. Arlyn Ravide, the young Guardian whose body his soul occupied, was not.
His first note confirmed that with sickening certainty.
Arlyn Ravide couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. The Reapers were getting closer but Arlyn’s off- key tenor kept right on singing. It wasn’t just awful to hear; it was going to get us killed.
Then magic spun from that note-cracking voice. He was doing more than singing the words; he was believing them, and that belief gave them life and substance, but most of all it gave them power, pitch be damned. I could feel it and so could the Reapers. This actually might work. Arlyn repeated the verse again, and then again, and each time the words took on a new certainty, a defiance. The Reapers didn’t back off, but they didn’t come any closer. At this point, I considered that a victory.
Until the souls inside the Saghred began to struggle.
“Stop them!”
Dad’s urgent plea came inside my head. I wanted to answer him, I wanted to stop the souls that were surging up inside of me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t breathe. The Saghred was in a guarded and warded chamber five floors below, yet I felt it as if I were holding it in my hands, feeling the souls writhe inside. Their terror was mine and so was their desperation.
One soul broke away, then another, and yet another, trembling with eagerness. They weren’t inside the Saghred.
They were inside of me.
Inside of me and struggling to get out, to go to the Reapers, to embrace and be embraced by Death. They wanted it with an intensity that stole my breath and froze my body. They were coming out; the Reapers were drawing them out.
Through me.
I gasped with shallow breaths, the shouts and screams of the men around me dying away until my own panting breath was all I heard. I looked down in horror as a twisting, curling ribbon of light as thick as my arm emerged from my chest, the cold vapor of a wraith, a captive soul that was captive no longer. In a flash of light it was gone, snatched by the nearest Reaper. Another wraith followed the first, then a third, and a fourth.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream, and I desperately needed to do both. I was blacking out. Pain dug with white- hot claws into the center of my chest. It felt like my insides were being ripped out, and I was helpless to stop it.
I raggedly dragged air into my lungs and screamed, an agonized wail of unbearable pain.
The wraiths inside of me stopped.
And the Reapers rushed us.
Vidor Kalta shouted something and ran forward, a spell spreading a black nimbus over his long- fingered hands like a shield. He used it like a battering ram between two Reapers. The things jerked away from him as if burned and he closed the distance to us. The nachtmagus turned his back to me, putting himself squarely between us and any Reaper who tried to get past him.
Vidor Kalta was defending us.
Three Reapers darted back and forth mere inches from the nachtmagus’s extended hands, looking for a weakness, determined to find a way to get past him. Kalta’s already pale face blanched further under the invisible onslaught, beads of sweat forming at his temples and running down his face, his breath harsh and ragged. He couldn’t hold on for much longer.
What felt like a whip made of ice lashed itself around my wrist, jerking my hand from Dad’s grasp. He disappeared into a knot of Reapers.
“No!” I screamed.
A roar tore its way out of my throat as I shielded myself and charged into the Reapers. Tendrils that a moment before had looked thin and filmy lashed at me like the stings of hundreds of jellyfish. My legs went numb with cold; coils whipped my throat, face, arms. One wrapped like a weighted chain around my waist and dragged me down. Coils of soul-numbing, burning cold grabbed at me, stabbing, slashing, looking for a weakness.
Finding a way in.
I screamed in terror and pain. I struggled to think, to fight back. I was covered in Reapers, panicking, their coils weaving their way around me like a shroud. I’d denied Death before; I would win again. My scream turned into a snarl, channeling my rage into a white- hot fury. I had to fight them; I had to get up. They would take me, and then they would take Dad.
A flash of impossibly bright light pierced the cold. An avenging angel, blazing with rage and savage strength, beautiful and deadly.
Mychael.
The coils and tendrils loosened, retracted. I could feel my legs and arms burning as
if lashed with fiery whips.
A pair of arms wrapped around me, warm and strong. I blinked slowly, trying to focus. My vision cleared and I looked up into eyes younger than my own, but haunted with nine centuries of life.
I dimly felt my lips twitch in a smile. “Found you,” I croaked. My throat was raw from screaming.
Dad’s hands were cool on either side of my face. “Raine!” His shout came to me as if from the top of a deep well.
I dimly heard Mychael shouting commands, then he was by my side. He spoke quickly to someone I couldn’t see; his voice was forced calm, but his words had an urgency that scared me.
I looked down at myself.
My hands and arms were covered with red lashes. My shirt was in tatters; the raw welts slashed my chest, back, and legs. I tried to move and pain blazed from every burn as I fell into darkness.
Chapter 4
I drifted.
And dreamed.
Impossibly soft, sun-kissed sand, heated and firm against my back. Gentle waves and ripples flowed over me, caressing my bare skin with tropical warmth as I lay in the shallows, my long hair flowing loose around me. Soothing, calming.
Healing.
The waves receded and the dream slowly shifted. Large, warm hands roamed over my body, caressing, lightly brushing, barely touching. Strong, skilled fingers soothed painful aches, aches that were determined to drag me awake.
I wanted to stay right where I was, warm, cradled, held.
Held?
My mind’s brief flutter of concern was outvoted by eyelids too heavy to open, too content to move. I sighed and shifted, rolling over on my side, snuggling back against the source of that warmth.
Warmth whose breath tickled my ear, followed by a low, masculine snore.
Huh?
I forced my sleep-sticky eyelids open. Disoriented and confused, my groggy mind tried to remember where I was. I didn’t recognize anything.
I was in a bed, a big bed with a canopy and curtains. A lightglobe glowed on a bedside table, and I could just make out a desk piled with papers. I dimly heard the crackle of a fireplace, but seeing it would mean moving or at least turning my head. Neither one was going to happen. My head felt like it weighed a ton; I couldn’t lift it off the pillow, and I didn’t want to.
My eyelids closed and I drifted some more, deliciously lethargic. I knew I should move; something about moving was important, really important. Not just moving—running. I needed to run from . . . from what? Why would I . . .
Reapers.
Shit! I gasped and my eyes flew open. No Reapers, just a strange bed. And a warm, hard . . . whoa . . . very male body pressed firmly against me. A muscular arm slid lazily around my waist, his hand stopping just below my breasts, pulling me even closer, lips nuzzling the back of my neck.
My mind screamed fight; my body muttered sleep.
“Raine?”
Mychael’s voice was deep and rusty with sleep.
I tried to speak, even one word would do, but my throat was dry; nothing would come out. I looked down where Mychael’s hand was and the word I was trying to say came out as a squeak.
My breasts were bare and so was the rest of me.
I was buck naked, wearing nothing but a sheet—and Mychael.
I swallowed and managed to get some words out. “Uh . . . uh, Mychael?”
“Mmmm?” He nuzzled closer.
“What are you doing?” Better yet, what had we done? The last I remembered, I was covered in Reapers. Now I was covered in Mychael. This went beyond not making sense.
Mychael sighed and shifted, and it was all too obvious that he wasn’t wearing much, if anything.
“Healing you,” he rumbled drowsily.
“Naked?”
“Bare skin works best.”
“For who?”
It took a few seconds, but Mychael propped himself up on one elbow and gazed down at me. His auburn hair was tousled with sleep and his face was darkened with his morning beard. His hand slid from the base of my breasts to the flat of my stomach. The sensation of heated tropical waters swirled and spiraled down from his hand into me, soothing burned skin, aching muscles.
Healing what the Reapers had done to me.
“Better for both of us,” he said.
Through his hand, the ebb and flow of magic spread from Mychael into me and back again, like the tide, like the waves in my dream. Soothing, healing.
Connecting us. Bonding.
I tried to sit up, but Mychael’s hand on my stomach held me still, gently, but firmly enough that I wasn’t going anywhere. Damn, I was still weak as a kitten. I did manage to pull the sheet up to restore some semblance of modesty, though he’d already seen—and probably touched—everything I had, so I didn’t know why I bothered. Maybe I was still delirious.
I took enough of a breath to get the words out. “Your bedroom?”
“It is. I brought you here because it’s better warded than almost any other room in the citadel.”
“You carried me here?”
“I did.”
“And undressed me.”
A corner of his lips quirked upward. “I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone else do it. Now, lie still.” His voice lowered. “I’m not finished healing you yet.”
Firelight gleamed on his smoothly sculpted chest and taut stomach—and on several dark, angry stripes running from his shoulder to his ribs. I instinctively reached out, but Mychael’s hand around my wrist stopped me.
“Try not to move,” he told me.
“Reapers did that to you?” My voice was barely a whisper.
Mychael nodded once.
I frowned at him. “Because of me.”
“No, because I wasn’t going to let them take you.”
“Still my fault.”
“You didn’t do it; they did.”
“You know what I mean.”
Mychael smiled, very slightly. “I do and I’m ignoring it. I’ll heal you, but if you want to argue, you’ll have to do that by yourself.”
My hand reached his chest before he could stop me. My fingers tentatively touching, gently tracing the burn across his chest. My hand tingled at the contact, and Mychael went utterly still.
“Who’s going to heal you?” I asked quietly.
“I can heal myself now that you’re out of danger.”
My fingers stopped. “How much danger?”
Something flickered in his eyes that I’d never seen in them before. Fear. “More than I ever want you to be in again.”
Fear of losing me.
If I’d been close to death, I really didn’t want to know how close. Regardless, Mychael had obviously drained himself to bring me back.
“Thank you,” I said simply. My voice was raspy and raw. I dimly recalled screaming while covered in Reapers. Mere thanks wasn’t nearly enough, didn’t even begin to be enough for all the sacrifices Mychael had made for me since we’d met.
He sat up and leaned over to the bedside table where there was a pitcher and two glasses. He poured me a glass of water. I winced and eased myself up on the pillows, pulling the sheet up with me.
“Careful,” Mychael cautioned, gently holding the glass to my lips. “Drink slowly.”
I took a sip. The water was cold, nectar- of-the-gods cold; I resisted the urge to gulp.
When I’d finished, Mychael took the glass and turned to put it back on the table.
That was when I saw the lash on his neck. It was worse than the ones on his chest, much worse. Dammit. He could claim otherwise, but if it hadn’t been for me, none of those burns would have been there, and his very life wouldn’t be in danger from mages who not only wanted him removed as paladin; they wanted his head removed from his shoulders.
And every last bit of it was my fault.
Mychael had stood steadfastly by my side from the very moment the Saghred had sunk its figurative claws into me. While nearly everyone else wanted to kill me or lock me up, Mychael had fought to save and protect me.
He knew who and what I was—the Saghred’s bond servant and a Benares, a name synonymous with criminal. He was the top lawman in the seven kingdoms. I was trouble of the worst kind for him in more ways than one. He knew it, and he didn’t give a damn.
He was willing to take that risk, take it and not look back. Saving my life more than proved it.
Mychael and I had a link, a magical bond of the most intimate kind. Just over a week ago, with a single touch of his hand, Mychael’s magic had merged with mine. My magic had surged forward to meet his, matching him, and for a few intensely intimate, breath- stopping moments I had been keenly aware of his every pulse, every muscle, the surging of blood through his veins. Two people with one body, and magic pulsing like a single heart that we shared.
He had been just as aware of me—all of me. We didn’t know what had caused it, and right now it didn’t matter.
Not with what I was about to do.
“Mychael, healing me . . . like this. What did it do to our link?”
“Probably made it stronger.”
That was what I thought. “Is that a good idea?”
“I think it’s the best idea.”
“I don’t see how that could possibly be good—especially for you.”
“The Saghred has nothing to do with our bond,” he told me. “I think that the closer you are to me—and the closer we are to each other—the better you’ll be protected from the Saghred.”
“Or the better the Saghred can get its hooks into you.” I hesitated. “Mychael, right now I am the Saghred. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And you won’t.”
Mychael regarded me with calm, confident eyes. He had no doubts, no fears. He didn’t need any; I had enough for both of us.
“Raine, I’ve only felt myself being drawn closer to you. I haven’t sensed the Saghred at all.”
“Nothing?”