Nora Roberts's Circle Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  “There are more openings, pockets in the wall. Were,” Hoyt corrected. “This is a powerful spell.”

  “And nobody’s curious—people who come here, live here—about what happened to them.” Blair nodded. “That’s powerful, too. She wants her privacy. We’re going to have to disappoint her.”

  Hands on hips, she turned around, searching. “Hey, Hoyt, can you and Glenna carve a message into that big rock over there?”

  “It can be done.”

  “What’s the message?” Glenna asked her.

  “Gotta think of one, since Up Yours, Bitch seems a little too ordinary.”

  “Tremble,” Moira murmured, and Blair gave her a nod of approval.

  “Excellent. Short, to the point, and just a little cocky. Take care of that, will you? Then we’ll get started on the rest.”

  “What is the rest?” Larkin wanted to know. He gave the wall a frustrated kick. “A stronger message would be to break this spell.”

  “Yeah, it would, but right now I’m thinking she doesn’t know we’re out here. That could be an advantage.” She heard something like a small blast of gunpowder, and turned to see the word Tremble deeply carved into the rock. Below it was another carving, of what she assumed was Lilith. With a stake through her heart.

  “Hey, nice job. I really like the artwork.”

  “A little flourish.” Glenna dusted off her hands. “I paint, and I couldn’t resist the dig.”

  “What do you need to try the transportation spell?”

  Glenna blew out a breath. “Time, space, focus, and a hell of a lot of luck.”

  “Not from here.” Hoyt shook his head. “The cliffs are mine. The caves are hers. However much time has passed, the cliffs are still mine. We’ll work the spell from above.” He turned to Glenna. “We have to see first. We can’t transport what we can’t see. It’s likely she’ll sense us, and do whatever she can to stop us.”

  “Maybe not right away. We won’t be looking for her this time, but for people. She may not realize what we’re doing, and give us the time we need. Hoyt’s right, it’s better done on the cliffs,” Glenna told Blair. “If we can get anyone out, we wouldn’t want to bring them out here in any case.”

  “Good point.” Maybe they wouldn’t get any solid intel out of this trip, Blair mused, but they might not walk away empty-handed. “So, what do we do with them if it works?”

  “Get them to safety.” Glenna lifted her hands. “One step at a time.”

  “I can try to help you. I haven’t much magic,” Moira added, “but I could try to help.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Glenna said.

  “Okay, the three of you go up. Larkin and I will stay here, incase…well, in case. Anything that comes out this way to give us trouble has to be human. We’ll handle it.”

  “It could take a while,” Glenna warned her.

  Blair studied the sky. “Plenty of daylight left.”

  She waited until they’d started up before she spoke to Larkin. “We can’t go in. If this magic deal opens up the caves, we can’t go in. I mean it.” She punched his arm. “I can see what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, can you now?”

  “Rush in, grab a maiden in distress or two, run out the hero.”

  “You’re wrong about the hero end of it. That wouldn’t be what I’m looking for. But now a pretty maiden in distress is hard for a man to resist.”

  “Resist it. You don’t know the caves, you don’t know where she’s holding the prisoners, and you don’t know their numbers or how they’re equipped. Listen, I’m not saying a part of me wouldn’t like to go charging in there if it opens up, do some damage, maybe save some lives. But we’d never make it out alive, and neither would anyone else.”

  “We have the swords Hoyt and Glenna charmed. The fire swords.”

  She struggled with frustration. It was so damn irritating to have to explain basic strategy. “And we’d take some vamps with us, no question. Then they’d have us and the swords.”

  “I know the sense of what you’re saying, but it’s hard to stand by and do nothing.”

  “If the magic team pulls this off, it won’t be nothing. You’re too good in a fight for us to lose you trying something that can’t work.”

  “Oh, a compliment. Not many of those spill out of your lips.” He grinned at her while drops of sea spray glinted in his hair. “I won’t go in. I give you my word on it.” He held out a hand for hers. When she took it, he gave it an easy squeeze. “But there wouldn’t be anything stopping us from slapping some fire in the hole should this bloody rock open. It would be what you call making a statement, wouldn’t it?”

  “Guess it would. Just don’t get cocky, Larkin.”

  “Sure I was born that way, I’m afraid. What’s a man to do, after all?”

  He turned to face the wall, and leaned back on one of the wet rocks as the spume sprayed. And looked relaxed enough, Blair noted, that he might have been sitting in the parlor by the fire.

  “Well, likely we’ve got some time on our hands just now. So, tell me, how did you first know you’d be a demon hunter?”

  “You want the story of my life? Now?”

  He moved his shoulders. “Might as well pass the time. And I’ll admit to some curiosity about it. Before I left Geall, I wouldn’t have believed any of this, not at the heart of it. And now, well…” He stared thoughtfully at the wall of rock and sod. “What’s a man to do?” he repeated.

  He had a point she decided. She moved over to join him, angling her body so that she could scan one sweep of the cliff face while he took the other. “I was four.”

  “Young. Young to have any understanding of matters that dark. That they’re real, I’m saying, and not just the shadows a child imagines are monsters.”

  “Things are a little different in my family. I thought it would be my brother. I was jealous. I guess that’s natural enough, the sibling rivalry.” She slid her hands into the pockets of her coat, idly toying with the plastic bottle of holy water she’d shoved in there before they’d left. “He’d have been six—six and a half. My father’d been working with him. Simple tumbling, basic martial arts and weaponry. Lots of tension in the house back then. My parents’ marriage was falling apart.”

  “How?”

  “It happens.” Maybe in his world the sky was rosy pink and love was forever. “People get dissatisfied, feelings change. Added to it my mother was sick of the life, the things that took my father away. She wanted normal, and it was her mistake she’d married someone who’d never give it to her. So she was busy picking fights with my father, and he was busy ignoring her and working with my brother.”

  Which would mean, Larkin thought, that no one was paying attention to her. Poor little lamb.

  “So I was always after my father to train me, too, or trying to do some of the stuff my brother was doing.”

  “My younger brother trailed after me like a shadow when we were children. This is the same in all worlds, I suppose.”

  “Bug you? Bother you?” she amended.

  “Oh, drove me mad some of the time. Others, I didn’t mind so much. If he was close by, it was easier to devil him. And others yet, well, it wasn’t so bad as company.”

  “So pretty much the same as with me and my brother. Then this one day they were down in the training area—a space most people would have a family room.” But you had to have a family to rate a family room. “We had equipment—weights, a pommel horse, uneven bars, rings. One whole wall was mirrored.”

  She could still see it, perfectly, and the way they’d reflected her father and her brother, so close together, while she’d been off to the side. And alone.

  “I watched them in the mirrors; they didn’t know I was there. My father was giving Mick—my brother—a rash of grief because Mick just couldn’t get this move. Back flip,” she murmured, “dive, shoulder roll, throw the stake into the target. Mick just couldn’t get it, and my father was dead set he would. Finally, Mick got pissy
himself, and he threw the stake across the room.”

  It had almost brushed her fingers, she remembered. As if it had been meant for her hand.

  “It rolled right to me. I knew I could do it. I just wanted to show my father I could do it. I just wanted him to look at me. So I did. I called his name: ‘Watch me, Daddy,’ and I did it, the way I’d watched him do it over and over trying to get Mick to understand the rhythm.”

  She closed her eyes a moment because she could still see herself, still feel it in her. As if the world had stopped, and only she was in motion for those few seconds.

  “Hit the heart. Mostly luck, but I hit the heart. I was so happy. Look what I did! Mick’s eyes just about fell out of his head, then…there was this little smile in them—just a little. I didn’t know what it meant then, I thought he’d just gotten a kick out what I did, because we mostly got along pretty well. My father didn’t say anything, not for a few seconds—seemed like an hour—and I thought he was going to yell at me.”

  “For doing something well?”

  “Getting in the way. And, not yell, really. He never raised his voice; that’s all about control. I figured he was going to tell me to go back up with my mother. You know, dismiss me. But he didn’t. He told Mick to go upstairs, and it was just him and me. Just me and my father, and he was finally looking at me.”

  “He must have been very proud, very pleased.”

  “Hell no.” Her laugh was short and without any humor. “He was disappointed. That’s what I saw when he finally looked at me. He was disappointed that it was me and not Mick. Now he was stuck with me.”

  “Surely he…” Larkin trailed off when she turned her head, met his eyes. “I’m sorry. Sorry his lack of vision hurt you.”

  “Can’t change what you are.” Another lesson she’d learned hard. “So he trained me, and Mick got to play baseball. That was the smile. Relief, joy. Mick, he’d never wanted what my father wanted for him. He’s got more of my mother in him. When she left, filed for divorce, I mean, she took Mick, and I stayed with my father. I got what I wanted, more or less.”

  She stiffened when Larkin put an arm around her shoulders, but when she would have shifted away he tightened his grip in the comfort of a one-armed hug. “I don’t know your father or your brother, but I do know I’d rather be here with you than either of them. You fight like an avenging angel. And you smell good.”

  He surprised a laugh out of her, a genuine laugh, and with it, she relaxed against the wet rock, with his arm around her shoulders.

  Chapter 3

  On the cliffs, the circle was cast. Now and again, there was the sound of a car passing on the road below. But no one walked here, or snapped their pictures, or stood on his headland.

  Perhaps, Hoyt thought, the gods did what they could.

  “It’s so clear today.” Moira looked skyward. “Barely a cloud.”

  “So clear, you can see across the water all the way to Gaillimh.”

  “Galway.” Glenna stood, gathering strength and courage. “I’ve always wanted to go there, to see the bay. To wander along Shop Street.”

  “And so we will.” Hoyt took her hand now. “After Samhain. Now we look, and we find. You’re sure of the location where we’ll send any if we can transport?”

  Glenna nodded. “I’d better be.” She took Moira’s hand in turn. “Focus,” she told her. “And say the words.”

  She felt it from Hoyt, that first low rumble of power, the reaching out. Glenna pushed toward it, pulling Moira with her.

  “On this day and in this hour, I call upon the sacred power of Morrigan the goddess and pray she grant to us her grace and prowess. In your name, Mother, we seek the sight, ask you to guide us into the light.”

  “Lady,” Hoyt spoke. “Show us those held beneath this ground, against their will. Help us find what is lost.”

  “Blind the beasts that seek to kill.” Moira struggled to focus as the air began to swirl around her. “That no innocents will pay the cost.”

  “Goddess and Mother,” they said together, “our power unite, to bring into day what is trapped in the night. Now we seek, and now we see. As we will, so mote it be.”

  Darkness and shadows and dank air, fetid with the foulness of death and decay. Now a shimmer of light, glimmers of shapes in the shadows. There was the sound of weeping, so harsh, so human, and the moans and gibbering of those who had no tears left to shed.

  They floated through the maze of tunnels, felt the cold as if their bodies walked there. And even the mind shuddered at what they saw.

  Cages, stacked three deep, four high, jammed into a cave washed in a sickly green light. But their minds saw through the gloom of it, to the blood pooled on the floor, to the faces of the terrified and the mad. Even as they watched, a vampire unlocked one of the cages, dragged the woman inside it out. The sound she made was a kind of keening, and her eyes seemed already dead.

  “Lora’s bored,” it said as it pulled her across the filthy floor by the hair. “She wants something to play with.”

  In one of the cages, a man began to beat the bars and scream. “You bastards! You bastards!”

  The tear that spilled down Glenna’s cheek was cold.

  “Hoyt.”

  “We’ll try. Him, the one who’s shouting. He’s strong, and it may help. See him. See nothing else.”

  Because she needed the words as well as the sight, Glenna began to chant. Moira’s voice joined her.

  And the ground trembled.

  Larkin was singing. Something about a black-haired maid from Dara. Blair didn’t mind listening; he had a clear, easy voice. The sort, she thought, of a man used to raising it in a pub, or while he walked the fields. And it was calming to have the tune, the steady roar of the sea, and the warm beam of the sun.

  Added to it, the simple companionship was a change for her. Usually when she waited, she waited alone.

  “You wouldn’t have the little thing? The little thing with the music in it with you?”

  “No. Sorry. Next time I get a chance, I’m buying myself a pair of those Oakley Thumps, got the MP3 player built in. Sunglasses.” She mimed the shape of them over her face—and it occurred to her Larkin would look damn hot wearing a pair himself. “With the little thing with the music inside them.”

  “You can wear the music?” His whole face lit up. “What a world of miracles this is.”

  “I don’t know about miracles, but it’s jammed with technology. Wish I’d thought to bring the player along.” Music would be easier than all this conversation. She was used to waiting alone, damn it. Not hanging around with a companion, exchanging small talk and life stories.

  It was making her itchy.

  “Well, that’s all right. Be nice if I had my pipe.”

  “Pipe.” She turned her head. Couldn’t quite fit the idea of a pipe with that gilded Irish god face. “You smoke a pipe?”

  “Smoke? No, no.” He laughed, shifted his weight as he lifted his hands in front of his mouth, wiggled his fingers. “Play. The pipe. Now and again.”

  “Oh, okay.” His eyes were the color of good, dark honey. Might look hot in a pair of Oakleys, she mused, but it would be a shame to put lenses over those eyes. “That works.”

  “Do you play anything? Musically?”

  “Me? No. Never had time to learn. Unless you count beating out a tattoo on vampires.” She mimed again—it seemed they did a lot of charades between them—punching her fists in the air.

  “Well now, your sword sings, that’s for certain.” He gave her a friendly little shoulder bump. “Don’t know as I’ve heard the like of it. And this would be a fine place for a battle, I’m thinking.” He tapped fingers rhythmically on the hilt of his sword. “The sea, the rocks, the bright sun. Aye, a fine spot.”

  “Sure, if you like not having an escape route, or losing your footing on slick rocks. Drowning.”

  He gave her a pitying look and a sigh. “You’re not considering the atmosphere, the dramatic tone of it all. Can
vampires drown?” he wondered.

  “Not so much. They…Did you feel that?” She pushed off the rock as the ground under her vibrated.

  “I did. Maybe the spell’s breaking down.” He drew his sword, scanned the cliff wall. “Maybe the caves behind it will appear now.”

  “If they do, you’re not going in. You gave your word.”

  “I keep my word.” Irritation flickered over his face. This was the soldier now, she noted, and not the pipe-playing farmer. “But if one of them sticks its head out, just a bit…Do you see anything? I’m not seeing anything different than it was.”

  “No, nothing. Maybe it’s the magic trio on the cliffs. Seems like they’ve had enough time to do something.” She kept her hand on the stake in her belt as she worked her way as far toward the crashing surf as she dared. “Can’t see from here. Can you, like, be a bird? Like a hawk or something? Take a look up there?”

  “I can, of course. I don’t like to leave you alone down here.”

  Irritation rippled down her spine. Here she was explaining herself again. “I’m in the sun, vamps can’t come out. Besides, I’ve worked alone for a long time. Let’s get a status report on magic time. I don’t like not knowing where we stand.”

  He could do it quickly, he thought. He could be up and back in a matter of minutes. And from the sky, he could see her, and anything that came at her, as well as the group on the cliffs.

  So he passed Blair his sword and thought of the hawk. Of its shape, of its vision, and of its heart. The light shimmered into him, over him. In that change, as arms became wings, as lips formed a beak, as talons sprang and curled, there was a sudden and breathless pain.

  Then freedom.

  He soared up, a gold hawk that took the air, and circled once over Blair with a cry like triumph.

  “Wow.” She stared up, watching his flight, the sheer power and majesty of it. She’d seen him change before, had ridden on his back when he’d taken the shape of a horse into battle. And still, she was dumbstruck.

  “That is so sexy.”