Nora Roberts's Circle Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  Hoyt said nothing for a moment, thinking of King, and the loss of him.

  “Nor, for you or me, the time before that,” Cian added. “You ended up barely able to walk away, and I took a fucking header off a cliff. Not one of my happiest memories.”

  “Those times were different altogether, and you know it. It’s daylight now, and this time she won’t know we’re coming. And being it’s daylight, you’ll have to stay behind.”

  “If you think I’ll sulk about that, you’d be wrong. I’ve plenty to keep me busy. Calls and e-mails, which I’ve largely neglected these past weeks. I still have businesses that need my attention, which might as well be tended to since you’ve pulled me out of bed in the middle of the damn day. Let me add it’ll be a pure pleasure to have five noisy humans out of the house a few hours, that I can promise you.”

  He rose, walked to his desk and wrote something on a notepad. “Since you’ll be out and about, I’ll need you to go here. There’s a butcher in Ennis. He’ll sell you blood. Pigs’ blood,” Cian said with a bland smile as he handed his brother the address. “I’ll ring him up, so he knows someone’s coming. Payment’s not a problem as I have an account.”

  His brother’s writing hand had changed over all this time, Hoyt noted. So much had changed. “Doesn’t he wonder why…”

  “If he does, he’s wise enough not to ask. And he’s no doubt pleased to pocket the extra euros. That’s the coin here now.”

  “Aye, Glenna explained it to me. We’ll be back before sunset.”

  “Better hope you are,” Cian warned when Hoyt left him.

  Outside, Blair tossed a dozen stakes in a plastic bucket. Swords, axes, scythes were already on board. All of the fiery variety. It was going to be interesting explaining things if they got stopped, but she didn’t scout out a vampire nest without going fully loaded.

  “Who wants the wheel?” she asked Glenna.

  “I know the way.”

  Blair checked the need to take control, climbed in the back, took the seat behind Glenna as the others joined her. “So, Hoyt, have you ever been in the caves? I don’t figure that kind of thing changes much in a few hundred years.”

  “Many times. But they’re different now.”

  “We’ve been in them,” Glenna explained. “Magically. Hoyt and I did a spell before we left New York. It was intense.”

  “Fill me in.”

  Blair listened, one part of her brain marking the route, landmarks, traffic patterns.

  In any part, she saw what Glenna described. A labyrinth of tunnels, chambers blocked with thick doors, bodies stacked like so much garbage. People in cages like penned cattle. And the sounds of it—Blair could hear that in the back of her mind—the weeping, the screaming, the praying.

  “Luxury vamp condo,” she murmured. “How many ways in?”

  “I couldn’t say. In my time the cliffs were riddled with caves. Some small, barely big enough for a child to crawl through, others big enough for a man to stand. There were more tunnels, wider, taller than I remember.”

  “So, she excavated. She’s had plenty of time to make it all homey.”

  “If we could block them off,” Larkin began, and Moira turned to him in horror.

  “There are people inside. People held in cages like animals. Bodies tossed aside without even the decency of burial.”

  He covered her hand with his and said nothing.

  “We can’t get them out. That’s what he’s not saying to you.” But it had to be said, Blair thought. “Even if a couple of us wanted to try a suicide run, that’s just what it would be. We’d die, they’d die. A rescue isn’t an option. I’m sorry.”

  “A spell,” Moira insisted. “Something to blind or bind, just until we free those who’ve been captured.”

  “We tried to blind her.” Glenna flicked a glance in the rearview to meet Moira’s eyes. “We failed. Maybe a transportation spell.” She looked at Hoyt now. “Would it be possible for us to transport humans?”

  “I’ve never done it. The risks…”

  “They’ll die in there. Many have already.” Moira scooted up in her seat to grip Hoyt’s shoulder. “What greater risk is there than death?”

  “We could harm them. To use magicks that may harm—”

  “You could save them. What choice do you think they would take? What choice would you?”

  “She’s got a point.” If they could do it, Blair thought, if they could save even one, it would be worth it. And it would be a good hard kick in Lilith’s ass. “Is there a chance?”

  “You need to see what you move from one place to another,” Hoyt explained. “And it’s more successful if you’re close to the object. This would be through rock, and we’d be all but blinded.”

  “Not necessarily,” Glenna countered. “Let’s think about this, let’s talk it through.”

  While they talked—argued, discussed—Blair let it all stew around in the back of her mind. Pretty day, she thought absently. The sun shining on all that green. The lovely, long roll of land with cows grazing lazily. Tourists would be out, taking advantage of the weather after yesterday’s storm. Shopping in the towns, or driving out to gawk at the Cliffs of Mohr, getting their snapshots and videos of the dolmen in The Burren.

  She’d done the same thing herself, once upon a time.

  “So, does Geall look anything like this?”

  “Quite a bit really,” Larkin told her. “It’s very like home, except, well, the roads, the cars, most of the buildings. But the land itself, aye, it is. It’s very like home.”

  “What do you do back there?”

  “About what, exactly?”

  “Well, a guy’s got to make a living, right?”

  “Oh. We work the land, of course. And we’ve horses, for breeding, selling. Fine horses. I’ve left my father shorthanded. He may not be too pleased with me right at the moment.”

  “Odds are he’ll understand if you end up saving the world.” She should have known he worked with his hands, Blair realized. They were strong and hard, and he had the look, she supposed, of a man who spent the bulk of his time outdoors. All those sun-streaks in his hair, the light golden haze on his skin.

  Whoa, settle down, hormones. He was just another member of the team she’d been pulled into. It was smart to learn all you could about who was fighting beside you. And stupid to let yourself get little tingles of lust over them.

  “So you’re a farmer.”

  “At the bottom of it.”

  “How does a farmer know how to use a sword the way you do?”

  “Ah.” He swiveled around to face her more directly. For a moment, just a short moment, he lost his trend. Her eyes were so deep and blue. “Sure we have tournaments. Games? I like to play in them. I like to win.”

  She could see that as well, though it was probably more Hollywood than Geallian. “Yeah, me, too. I like to win.”

  “So then, do you play games?”

  There was a teasing, playfully sexy undercurrent in the question. She’d have had to have been brain-dead to miss it. Brain-dead for a month, she decided, not to feel the little buzz.

  “Not so much, but I win when I do.”

  He draped an arm over the back of her seat in a casual move. “In some games, both sides are the winner.”

  “Maybe. Mostly when I fight, I’m not playing around.”

  “Play balances out the fighting, don’t you think? And our tournaments, well, they’ll have served as a kind of preparation for what’s to come. There are many men in Geall, and some women besides, who have a good hand with a sword or a lance. If the war goes there, as we’re told it will, we’ll have an army to meet these things.”

  “We’ll need it.”

  “What do you do? Glenna says that women must work for a living here. Or that most do. Are you paid in coin to hunt demons?”

  “No.” He wasn’t touching her, and she couldn’t say he was putting moves on her. But she felt as if he were. “It’s not the way it works. There
’s some family money. I mean we’re not rolling in it or anything, but there’s a cushion. We own pubs. Chicago, New York, Boston. Like that.”

  “Pubs, is it? I like a good pub.”

  “Who doesn’t? Anyway, I do some waitressing. And some personal training.”

  His brows knit. “Training? For battle?”

  “Not really. It’s more for health and vanity. Ah, helping people get in shape, lose weight, tone up. I don’t need a lot of money, so it works out okay. Gives me some room, too, to take off when I need to.”

  She glanced over. Moira was staring out the side window like a woman in a dream. In the front, Hoyt and Glenna continued to talk magic. Blair leaned closer to Larkin, lowered her voice.

  “Look, maybe our magical lovebirds can pull this transportation bit off, maybe not. If they can’t, you’re going to have to handle your cousin.”

  “I don’t handle Moira.”

  “Sure you do. If we’ve got a shot at executing a little cave-in, or firing up those caves, we have to take it.”

  Their faces were close now, their voices down to whispers. “And the people inside? We burn them alive, or bury them the same way? She won’t accept it. Neither can I.”

  “Do you know what torment they’re in now?”

  “It’s not of our doing.”

  “Caged and tortured.” She kept her eyes on his, and her voice was low and empty. “Forced to watch when one of them’s dragged out of the cage, and fed on. Terrified, or well beyond that while they wonder if they’ll be next. Maybe hoping they will just so it ends.”

  There was no playfulness now, in his face, in his tone. “I know what they do.”

  “You think you know. Maybe they don’t drain them, not the first time. Maybe not the second. They just toss them back in the cage. It burns, the bite. If you live through it, it burns. Flesh, blood, bone, a reminder of the impossible pain when those fangs sank into you.”

  “How do you know?”

  She turned her wrist over, so he could see the faint scar. “I was eighteen, pissed off about something and careless. In a cemetery up in Boston, waiting for one to rise. I went to school with the guy. Went to his funeral, and heard enough to know he’d been bitten. I had to find out if he’d been turned, so I went, and I waited.”

  “He did this?” Larkin traced a finger over the scar.

  “He had help. No way a fresh one would’ve managed it. But the one who sired him came back. Older, smarter, stronger. I made some mistakes, and he didn’t.”

  “Why were you alone?”

  “Hunting alone is what I do,” she reminded him. “But in this case, I was out to prove something to someone. Doesn’t matter, except that it made me careless. He didn’t bite me, the older one. He held me down while the other one crawled over toward me.”

  “Wait. Can you tell me, is that the way of it with a sire? To provide…”

  “Food?”

  “Aye, that would be the word for it, wouldn’t it?”

  It was a good question, she decided, good that he wanted to understand the phychology and pathology of the enemy. “Sometimes. Not always. Depends, I’d say, on why the sire chose to change instead of just drink. They can form attachments, or want a hunting partner. Even just want a younger one around to do the grunt work. You know, sort of work for them.”

  “I see that. So the sire held you down so the younger could feed first.” And how terrifying, he thought, would that have been? To be restrained, probably injured. To be eighteen and alone, while something with a face you’d once known came for you.

  “I could smell the grave on him, he was that fresh. He was too hungry to go for the throat, so he got me here. That was the mistake, for both of them. The pain woke me up. It’s unspeakable.”

  She said nothing for a moment. It threw her off her stride, the way he laid his fingers on that scar now, as if to ease an old wound. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched her to comfort.

  “Anyway. I got a hand on my cross, and I jabbed it right into that bastard’s eye, the one holding me down. Christ, did he scream. The other one’s so busy trying to eat, he doesn’t worry about anything else. He was an easy kill. They were both easy after that.”

  “You were just a girl.”

  “No. I was a demon hunter, and I was stupid.” She looked Larkin in the eye now, so he would see that comfort, sympathy couldn’t stand in front of sense and strategy. “If he’d gone for the throat, I’d be dead. Yeah, probably, I’d be dead and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I know what I felt when I saw that thing coming for me. In the good black suit his mother had picked out for him to be buried in. I know what those people inside those caves feel, at least I know a part of it. If they can’t be saved, death’s kinder than what’s waiting for them.”

  He closed his hand over her wrist, completely covering the scar, surprising her with the gentleness of the touch. “Did you love the boy?”

  “Yeah. Well, the way you do when you’re that age.” She’d almost forgotten that, nearly forgotten how sad she’d been, even through the pain. “All I could do for him was take him out, and take out the one who’d killed him.”

  “It cost you more than this.” Larkin lifted her hand, brushed his lips over the scar. “More than the pain and the burn.”

  She’d nearly forgotten, too, she realized, what it was like to have someone understand. “Maybe it did, but it taught me something important. You can’t save everyone.”

  “That’s a sad lesson. Don’t you think, even when you know you can’t, you should try anyway?”

  “That’s amateur talk. This isn’t a game or a contest. Somebody beats you in this, you die.”

  “Well, Cian’s not here to dispute the matter, but would you want to live forever?”

  She let out a short laugh. “Hell, no.”

  There were others along that lonely stretch of cliff and sea. But not as many as Blair had expected. The views were amazing, but she supposed there were others, equally dramatic, and more easily accessible.

  They parked, and took what weapons and tools they could most easily conceal. Someone might spot her sword in its back sheath under the long leather coat, Blair decided. But they’d have to be looking. And then, what were they going to do about it?

  She studied the lay of the land, the road, the other cars parked along it. A middle-aged couple had climbed to some of the tabletop rocks at the base of the cliff, where it now met the road. Looking out to sea—and completely oblivious to the nightmare that lived below.

  “Okay, so it’s over the seawall and down. Gonna get wet,” she concluded, looking down at the narrow strip of shale, then the teeth of the rocks where the water swirled and plumed. She glanced back at the others. “Can you handle this?”

  As an answer, Larkin rolled over the wall. She started to shout at him to wait, to wait one damn minute, but he was already heading down the jagged drop that faced the sea.

  He didn’t change into a lizard, she observed, but he could sure as hell climb like one. She had to give him A’s for balls and agility.

  “Okay, Moira. Take it slow. If you slip, your cousin should break your fall.” As Moira went over, Blair looked at Glenna.

  “Never did any rock climbing,” Glenna muttered. “Never could figure out the damn point until now. So, I guess there’s always a first time.”

  “You’ll be fine.” But Blair watched Moira’s progress, and was relieved she was proving nearly as agile as her cousin. “The drop’s not that bad from here. It won’t kill you.”

  She didn’t add that bones would be broken. She didn’t have to. Hoyt and Glenna went over together, and Blair followed.

  There were some reasonably good handholds, she discovered—as long as you weren’t worried about your manicure. She concentrated on getting the job done, ignored the cold spray as she worked her way down.

  Hands gripped her waist, lifted her down the last couple of feet. “Thanks,” she told Larkin, “but I’ve got it.”
>
  “A bit awkward with the sword.” He glanced up to the road, grinned. “Fun though.”

  “Let’s keep the party moving. They probably have guards. Maybe some human servants—though it has to be tough keeping humans on tap if there’s as many vampires in there as you said.”

  “I didn’t see anyone alive outside of cages,” Glenna told her, “not when we looked before.”

  “This time it’s live and in person, so if they’ve got any, that’s who they’ll send out. Hoyt you’d better take point, since you know the area.”

  “It’s different, you see it’s different than it was.” Some of what he was feeling leaked into his voice, the emotion and the sorrow. “Nature and man have done it. That road above us, and the wall, the tower with the light.”

  Looking up, over, he saw his cliffs, the ledge that had saved his life when he’d fought with what Cian had become. Once, he thought, he’d stood up there and called the lightning as easily as a man calls his hound.

  It had changed, he couldn’t deny it. But still, in the heart of it, it was his place. He made his way through the rocks, over them, through the spray. “There should be a cave here. And there’s nothing but…”

  He laid his hands on the earth and rock. “This is not real. This is false.”

  “Maybe you’re a little turned around,” Blair began.

  “Wait.” Glenna made her way over to him, put her hands next to his. “A barrier.”

  “Conjured,” Hoyt agreed, “to look and feel like the land, but it isn’t the land. This isn’t earth and rock. It’s illusion.”

  “Can you break it down?” Larkin thumped a fist against the rock, testing.

  “Hold on.” Frowning, Blair slicked back her damp hair. “She’s got enough mojo for this, or has someone in there with enough, we don’t know what else she has. This is smart.” Blair tested the wall herself. “Really smart. Nobody gets in unless she wants them in. Nobody gets out unless she wants them out.”

  “So we just walk away?” Larkin demanded.

  “I didn’t say that.”