Curse Breaker (Phoenix Throne Book 7): A Scottish Highlander Time Travel Romance

by Heather Walker

  Grace took two fistfuls of Alexis’s shirt and wrestled her back from the door. “We have to get out of here. The whole castle’s coming down.”

  Alexis staggered away, but when they got out of the passage, she realized Grace was right. Beams and stone lay all over the place, with more flying through the air in all directions. Screams and panic filled the halls. No one knew where to go or what to do.

  Grace ducked, and a brick zoomed over her head. It smashed into Alexis’s face, and she dropped. She lost consciousness, and the world went black.

  Chapter 11

  Christie went down on his knees on a windswept hill overlooking a beautiful cream-gray castle. He closed his eyes and thanked Heaven he finally found this place, but he already knew it was too late. His Clan and his people were all gone. Duart would never rise again.

  He had no reason to ask the Urlus for help now, but maybe his message would help them stop this terrible curse. He could only hope one of the men he knew was still alive after forty years, but his own time was just about up.

  He hugged his arms over his stomach. The pains and the bleeding got worse on the journey here, but at least he survived to get here. He passed out on the road several times a day, but he kept going. Even now, he wasn’t sure he could summon the strength to walk down this hill.

  The castle gleamed in the sunshine. Colored flags flapped on its turrets. Other than that, he didn’t see any people around.

  He coughed until a chunk of bloody pulp dislodged from his lungs and came up into his mouth. He spat it into the grass. He rested his forehead against the Earth until he gathered the energy to sit up.

  These Urlus couldn’t help his people any longer, but at least Christie would die behind walls. At least he would see some familiar faces, even if they had aged. He used his hands to get his feet on the ground. He reeled when he stood up, and his breath came in short gasps.

  He stumbled down the hill and across the river. He found the drawbridge down and no one guarding it. He leaned against the stone wall. The place stood empty. No boys played in the courtyard. No horses stood tied to the posts. No maids came out to draw water from the pump. What was going on?

  While he stood there, a lone woman in a long dress emerged from a side door. She carried a basket on one arm, and a white apron covered her dress. She crossed the courtyard right in front of him, but she didn’t look right or left.

  Christie narrowed his eyes at her. He could never forget that face as long as he lived. He summoned his last ounce of strength to call out. “Sadie!”

  She jumped and spun around to face him. Her hand flew to her heart, and her jaw dropped. “Christie!”

  Christie almost burst into tears to hear her say his name. She ran across the courtyard and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed his cheeks and forehead. She petted his hair out of his face. Merciful Heavens, it was good to see her!

  He swallowed his emotion. “How are ye, Sadie lass?”

  “Oh, Christie!” Tears streaked down her face. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I’m here, lassie,” he murmured. “I’m here.”

  He tried to push himself off the wall. His knee buckled, and he toppled forward. She ducked under his arm and caught him just in time. “What’s wrong?” she cried.

  “It’s naught,” he muttered. “Just a wee pain I have in my belly. It’ll pass in time, now that I have seen your lovely face again.”

  She lowered him onto the water trough by the well and stood back to study him. He started coughing again, and a trail of blood stained his shirt cuff when he wiped his mouth.

  “You’ve got it, too,” she breathed. “What’s going on? Have your people all got it?”

  Christie couldn’t look at her. “They’re all gone, lassie. They’re all…”

  His head shot up, and he stared at her. She gazed down at him, as fresh-faced and beautiful and as caring as the first day he ever met her.

  “All dead!” she cried. “Lachlan, and all the others—dead! It can’t be!”

  Christie frowned. “Lassie.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, poor Lachlan!”

  “Lassie,” he repeated, “how auld are ye?”

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  “How auld are ye?” he asked. “How long has it been since I have seen ye?”

  “How long?” she repeated. “I don’t know. Maybe seven months. I can’t really remember.”

  “So it’s…” He struggled to find the words. “It’s no’ forty years?”

  Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Sadie was no wrinkled hag. She was young. She couldn’t be more than a few months older than when she left Duart to marry Callum Cameron.

  She laid her hand on his shoulder. “You’re sick, just like the others. I don’t know what it is, but I’m doing my best to figure it out. Once I crack the diagnosis, I’ll start working on a cure.”

  “The others!” he echoed. “Are the others sick, too?”

  “Everybody’s got it,” she replied. “We thought it might be some sort of epidemic, but we sent word, and the surrounding country is untouched. It’s only us.”

  “And us,” Christie added.

  “Come inside. I’ll find a place for you to stay.” She took his arm and helped him up.

  Now that he had her to lean on, his last remaining will to struggle on drained out of him. He leaned on her shoulder and let her support him inside. She steered him toward the Throne Room.

  He’d never seen the Phoenix Throne before, and he certainly never expected to see it like this. The giant black dragon sat on a platform at the far end of the hall. It curved its wings around the King’s seat. It stared out through piercing black eyes that seemed to penetrate the soul of anyone who saw it.

  No King sat on that Throne now. No admirers or dignitaries came to pay their fealty and respect. Blankets and pallets covered the whole marble floor from one wall to the other. Groans and screams and sobs echoed off the walls. People in every attitude of disease and death packed that hall with only inches to spare between their bodies.

  Sadie lowered Christie to the floor by the door. “Wait here. I’ll go tell Angus you’re here.”

  She vanished before he could say anything. She picked her way across the hall. She paused along the way to bend down and touch a hand here, to offer a few murmured words of encouragement there. That woman never changed. He of all people understood her comforting presence from those awful days when she saved his life at the Tower House.

  She made her way across the Throne Room and disappeared through a side door. The wooden dragon still glared at Christie from the far end of the hall. He found it hard to tear his eyes away from the thing.

  A husky voice caught his attention nearby. “Christie! Christie McLean!”

  A frail skeletal figure lay under a few tattered blankets on a pallet at his side. Christie crawled over to it. He would never have recognized the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes, and the thin, lifeless lips. Sweat stuck the stringy hair to the wraith’s forehead. “Jamie! What ails ye, mon?”

  “It’s naught, mon,” Jamie wheezed. “Just a bit of a cold, like. That Sadie, she’ll have us all fixed up in a few days. How fares ye, mon? How’s your family and your brothers?”

  Christie couldn’t answer those questions, not here and not now. “Are ye down here with the rest of them, mon? Do ye no’ belong in your own room upstairs?”

  “They’re all full, mon,” Jamie replied. “Every room in the castle’s full to bursting with the sick and the dying. It’s a low time ye have come to see us. What brings ye so far?”

  Christie couldn’t cope with this anymore. He came all this way for help, only to find the Urlus stricken with the same catastrophic illness that destroyed his family. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Sadie or Jamie or anybody else he cared about how this sickness ended.

  He just couldn’t bear the reality of it anymore. He stretched himself out on the floor at Jamie’s side and closed his eye
s. If he died right here, it would be more than he hoped for or deserved. He lost everything, and now the Urlus would die out, too. Nothing would remain of this magnificent people. They couldn’t help him or the McLeans. No one could help any of them ever again.

  Sadie shook him awake. “Christie! Are you all right?”

  He jolted upright and looked around with wild eyes. “What’s amiss?”

  She helped him sit up. “It’s all right. I brought you something to eat.” She placed a bowl of soup in his hands. “Eat that, and I’ll find you a bed. You can’t sleep on the bare floor.”

  He bent over the bowl and took a sip. It burned his broken insides, but he drank it anyway. What difference did a few more days of life make in this asylum for the dead?

  “I brought Angus to see you,” she told him.

  Christie’s head shot up. He hadn’t noticed the tall, muscular man standing behind Sadie. His sandy hair hung to his shoulders, and his kilt and his white linen shirt only enhanced the sense of power radiating off him. He looked every inch a King in his plain clothes. “I’ll no’ ask ye how ye are, lad. I can see that myself.”

  Christie bowed his head over his bowl. “I’m sorry to burden ye with another patient. I wouldnae come if I had kenned this was going on.”

  “Another patient’s no burden to us, is it, Sadie lass? You’re right welcome, lad. Only tell me how your people are. How’re ye faring since my brothers left ye?”

  Christie glanced around. “I dinnae ken how to answer that. There’s magic afoot. That’s all I can say. I left my brother Lachlan with a message to ye and yours to come and help us fight the curse, but a sight of business has happened between now and then, and I dinnae think the message is valid any longer. I’d no’ ask ye for help in your condition anyways.”

  Angus cocked his head. “Do ye want to tell me what’s afoot? It may help ye, even if I can’t.”

  “I’d like to,” Christie replied. “I’d like to more than anything in the world. I need to tell somebody, but I dinnae think I can. It hurts…”

  His voice cracked, and his emotion threatened to break out if he tried to speak of it. He turned away, and Sadie rested her hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. You don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I dinnae want to talk about it,” Christie snarled. “I want to die. I came here dying, and I mean to die here. I’m sorry, mon. I cannae live with the pain any longer, and I see I have come to the right place where everyone I ken is dying, too. I want to go where my brothers and my kin are, and that’s beyond this business here. Just leave me be in a quiet place, and I’ll die with ye. That’s all I can do.”

  Angus bent down and took Christie’s hand. He pressed it between both of his. “If that’s all ye want, then you’re welcome to it. We cannae do much more, but you’re one of us, lad. You’ll go where we go, and when we get there, you’ll see your kin again alive and well. Ye rest now where Sadie takes ye, and I’ll come and visit ye for supper.”

  Angus walked away somewhere, and Sadie helped Christie to his feet. She took him to another room lined with more sick and dying people. She found a bed for him in the corner and eased him down on it. She laid a blanket over him and tucked him in.

  She stroked his cheeks and forehead, but he couldn’t look into her deep caring eyes. He turned his head away, and after her footsteps receded to nothing, he buried his face in his pillow and sobbed.

  Chapter 12

  Alexis climbed the hill to the standing stones. She walked right up to the first one she came to and laid her hand against the cold grainy surface. Nothing happened. She waited, but the ground beneath her feet remained as solid as ever.

  Alexis frowned. Why didn’t it work? She concentrated her power on the stone, but it still didn’t activate. She took a step back and examined the stone. It looked the same as the last time she saw it. The lichen still grew on its rough face. The sun shone through the trees overhead. The fields spread out all around her.

  She took a step forward and laid her hand on the stone one more time. Nothing. It was dead. No power came through it. The ground didn’t open up to take her down. The vibrant energy that once shimmered out of the place no longer sizzled up her arm when she touched that stone.

  She started to walk away, but she stopped in the center of the ring. What was going on here? Why didn’t the mound work anymore? She had to get underground. She had to get into Faery and ask the King about this curse. He was her only hope.

  She faced the stones again, but she didn’t try to touch them. She closed her eyes and transported herself into the Faery palace the same way she transported herself home to her parents’ house and back to Urlu and everywhere else she wanted to go. She bent her mind on it, and she went.

  The ground didn’t soften. She blinked through the hard crust to the entrance hall beneath the mound. She opened her eyes and looked around.

  Dirt and rock and moss littered the checkerboard floor. Tree trunks lay at odd angles in the corners, and dirt showed between the cracked tiles.

  From where she stood, she gazed into the throne room where she once sat next to James Stewart in state. A tangle of broken beams piled in one corner. Bare earth lay exposed behind the shattered walls and ceiling. Mold stained the carpet leading to the throne, and one chandelier sat in broken pieces in the middle of the floor.

  Suits of armor that once stood at attention along the walls lay toppled on their faces. Sections of stone were missing from the walls, with roots and soil exposed to view in the holes.

  Alexis turned the other way. A staircase that rising to the bedrooms and sitting rooms upstairs hung in mid-air. It ended above Alexis’s head, and the lower half lay in a pile of twisted wood and jagged splinters across the hall.

  Alexis couldn’t look anymore. She didn’t have to ask what happened here. She’d already seen it enough times. No Faery lived in that place. No Faery would ever live in it again. Where they went, she didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.

  She closed her eyes and sent herself far away, as far away as she could get. She opened them in a dark forest. She let out a shaky sigh. At least she was alone here. She would stay here alone where she belonged. At least no one would get hurt as long as she stayed here.

  She set off walking through the forest in no particular hurry. The peaceful stillness calmed her nerves after everything she saw and experienced. She admired the beauty of this place. The devastating destruction wouldn’t come for her here. She sensed that in her deepest being. The horrors she saw started to slip off into the realm of nightmare. She was safe.

  She saw no sign of human habitation. They would have caused her distress if she had seen them. She paused to watch birds hopping from bough to bough. Insects crawled over rotten logs. Those things gave her comfort. The world still worked the way it should, in spite of everything that happened to her.

  She sat down to rest after a few hours. She would start to get hungry and thirsty pretty soon. She called up everything she knew about wilderness survival, which wasn’t much at all. She needed to find herself a place to stay, and the only available place she saw right now was a space under a log. That wouldn’t get her very far, and it wasn’t anything to eat.

  While she sat there, she heard a thrashing noise in the undergrowth. It sounded like it was coming closer. She strained her ears to listen. Yes, it was definitely coming closer. She got to her feet, but she still didn’t sense any danger. It was probably just an animal of some kind.

  Something dark moved out there in the shadows. Alexis stiffened and looked around, but she didn’t see anything that would work as a weapon. Could she use her power to defend herself?

  The moment that thought crossed her mind, the shape emerged from the dense foliage and came straight at her. A large wolf with jet black fur staggered on unsteady legs into the space in front of Alexis. It curled back its lips and snarled at her, but still she felt no fear from this thing.

  The animal took a stumbling step and lost its balance. It
crashed shoulder first into the nearest tree and leaned there. Its ribs heaved with the strain of breathing. The animal glared at Alexis with burning golden eyes, but it lacked the strength to stand on its own feet.

  Alexis studied the creature. Whatever was wrong with it, it couldn’t go any further. That’s when she noticed dark wet patches on its sides. They dampened the animal’s fur. In front of her eyes, one spot on its side dripped onto the moss at its feet and colored it blood red.

  Alexis’s heart pounded. Pity filled her heart, but she had no way to help the dying creature. She gathered all her resolve and took one tentative step forward. The wolf snarled louder than ever, and blood dribbled from its lips.

  She took one more step. She had no idea what she would do if she got near it, but she would do her best to help it. It couldn’t live much longer like this. One chunk of flesh hung ragged and bleeding off its lower leg. The fur dangled by a torn flap of skin and muscle. The animal’s back legs shivered from the effort of standing up.

  Alexis extended her hand to it and whispered. “It’s all right. It’s gonna be all right. I won’t hurt you. Let me help you.”

  The creature didn’t move. It leaned its weight against the tree trunk and eyed her. She inched closer. Her brain screamed to do something, anything, to ease the poor thing’s suffering.

  It tried one more time to growl at her, but it only wound up panting instead. Its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth, and the tongue looked very pale against the blood moistening its teeth and gums. Every detail about the animal tortured Alexis’s heart strings. Maybe the best thing she could do for it would be to put it out of its misery.

  What was wrong with it? Was it rabid? She might wind up dying herself if it bit her. She came up to its side. Her fingers hovered over its coarse coat. She hesitated to touch it, but it clearly couldn’t harm her. It could barely keep its legs braced upright.

  She let her hand fall on its back. The instant she made contact with it, it lunged off the tree trunk. It took two steps and plowed face first into the soft ground. It struggled in desperate confusion to get its legs to work. It scratched up the moss and dragged itself a few inches forward before it lay still. Its sides heaved, and blood gurgled from its mouth.