by Nora Roberts
“All right then, if that’s the way it has to be.” He reached past her, picked up an ax, the bucket of stakes. “But I’m just going to be thinking about another one. And so are you.”
“Maybe.” She started toward the house, arms loaded with weapons. “A little frustration will give me a nice edge.”
He shook his head as he looked after her. She was, he thought, the most fascinating of women.
Chapter 4
Blair went straight up to put the weapons in the training area, then went down the back stairs to the kitchen. Larkin could clean the swords, she decided. Work off some of that sexual energy.
She found Glenna there, and the kettle on.
“I’m making some tea, a blend that should take the edge off the day.”
“I’ve heard alcohol does that.” And considering it, Blair opened the refrigerator for a beer.
“That’s for later—for me. My system’s a little twisted up yet. Hoyt went up to see Cian, fill him in.”
“Good. We need to talk, Glenna.”
“Could I take you through the steps and stages of the spells later, if you need them? It’s all a little too hard and bright just now.”
“No, I don’t need them—that’s your territory.” Blair boosted herself onto the table, watched Glenna keep her hands busy. “I mean that. When it comes to this area, I’m a civilian. There are some magically inclined, and fairly skilled people, in my family. But nowhere near what you guys have.”
“I have more than I did before. Maybe I’m more open to it now.” Taking a few pins out of her pocket, Glenna efficiently bundled her hair up. “Maybe it’s the connection with Hoyt, the connection we all have to each other. But whatever it is, I’m finding power inside me I never imagined.”
“Looks good on you, too. You need to know, to accept, to understand, what the three of you did today was amazing, and it was powerful, and it saved lives. And regardless of that, you have to know, accept and understand it isn’t something you can do again. At least not anytime soon.”
“We could get more, I think,” Glenna said without turning around. “Maybe only one or two at a time. We were greedy, we wanted to get all we could, and we burned it all too long.”
“Glenna, it’s your territory, like I said. But I’m the one who was looking at the three of you after the serious whammy went down. The fact is, both Larkin and I thought, for a minute there, you were dead. What you were was all but emptied out.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right. Exactly the right term for it.”
“You may not come back from it the next time.”
“Isn’t that why we’re here?” Glenna’s hands were steady now as she measured the tea leaves. “To risk it all? Isn’t it true that any one of us might not come back each time we walk out the door, each time we pick up a weapon? How many times have you picked up a weapon and the gift you have and risked it all?”
“I couldn’t count the times. This is different. You know it. Larkin and I…we need you. We need the rest of you strong and healthy.”
“You nearly died today, didn’t you?”
“Thanks to dragon-boy—”
“Blair.” Glenna turned, took the steps over and closed her hand tight over Blair’s.
Connections, Glenna had said, and Blair felt it now. You didn’t evade the truth, Blair decided, with someone you were so closely connected to.
“Okay, yeah, it was bad—bad enough I wasn’t sure we’d get out of it. But it could’ve been worse. We all did our jobs, and now I’m having a beer and you’re making tea. Good for us.”
“You’re better at this than I am,” Glenna murmured.
“No, I’m not. Just more used to it. Being used to it, I can have a beer because I know we not only beat her today, Glenna. We insulted her, and that feels tingly right down to my toes. And you know what I’d like?”
“I think I do. I think you’d like to go back there and do it all again.”
“Bet your ass I would. Nothing better, that’s the pure truth. But it would be stupid, self-indulgent, and it would probably get us all killed. Take the victory, Glenna, ’cause you sure as hell earned it. And accept you may not be able to do it just that way again.”
“I know it.” Glenna walked back to the stove when the water began to boil. “I know you’re right. It’s hard to accept you’re right. In the past few weeks, I’ve held magicks stronger than anything I ever dreamed existed. It thrills—and it costs. I know we’ll need more time, more preparation if we try to do what we did today again.”
She poured the water into the pot. “I thought we’d lost Moira,” she said quietly. “I felt her falling away, slipping. She’s not as strong magically as I am, certainly not as strong as Hoyt.” As the tea steeped, she turned back to face Blair. “We let her go. We let her go, only an instant before it exploded. I don’t know what would have happened to her if we’d held her in with us.”
“Would you have gotten so many out without her?”
“No, no we needed her.”
“Take the victory. It was a good day. One question though. How did you know where to send them? Not the magic stuff, just the logistics.”
“Oh, I had a map.” Glenna smiled a little. “I’d already calculated the quickest routes to hospitals, in case any of us needed one. So it was just a matter of, well, of following the map.”
“A map.” After a laugh, Blair took a deep drink. “You’re something, Glenna. You are something else. Vampire bitch had you on her team, I think we’d be sunk. Hell of a day,” she said with a sigh. “I rode on a freaking dragon.”
“It was cute, wasn’t it, how surprised he was we didn’t have any.” Chuckling now, easier now, Glenna got down cups and saucers. “What did he look like? I paint them sometimes.”
“Like you’d expect, I guess. He was gold. Long, wicked tail—took a couple of them out with it. And the body’s more sinuous than snakelike. Yeah, long and sinuous, the body, the tail, the head. Gold eyes. God, he was beautiful. And the wings, wide, peaked, translucent. Scales big as my hand, that went from pale gold to dark, and all the shades between. And fast? Holy God, he’s fast. It’s like riding the sun. I was just…”
She trailed off when she saw Glenna leaning back against the counter, smiling.
“What?”
“I was just wondering if you have that look in your eye over the dragon or over the man.”
“We’re talking dragon. But the man’s not half bad.”
“Gorgeous, fairly adorable, and with the heart of a champion.”
Blair raised her eyebrows. “Hey, didn’t you recently get married—to somebody else?”
“It didn’t strike me blind. Just FYI? Larkin gets that look in his eye, now and again, when he turns in your direction.”
“Maybe he does, and maybe I’ll think about taking him up on it one of these days. But right now…” She slid off the table. “I’m going to go upstairs and take a really long, really hot shower.”
“Blair? Sometimes the heart of a champion is tender.”
“I’m not looking to bruise hearts.”
“I was thinking of yours, too,” Glenna replied when she was alone.
Blair heard voices from the library as she passed, and veered just close enough to identify them. Satisfied that Larkin was speaking with Moira, she rerouted for the steps to head upstairs. She wanted nothing more than to wash away the sea salt, the blood and the death.
She paused at the top of the steps when she saw Cian in the shadows of the hallway. She knew her fingers had reached down to skim over the stake in her belt, and didn’t bother to pretend she hadn’t. It was knee-jerk. Hunter, vampire. They’d both have to accept it, and move on.
“A little early for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”
“My brother has no respect for my sleep cycle.”
There was something preternaturally sexual, she thought, about a vampire staring out from the cloaked light. Or there was with this one. “Hoyt had a rough one.”
“So I could see for myself. He looked ill. But then…” The smile was slow and deliberate. “He’s human.”
“Do you work on that kind of thing? The silky voice, the dangerous smile?”
“Born with it. Died with it, too. Are we going to come to terms, you and me?”
“I think we have.” She saw his gaze slide down to her hand, and the stake under it. “Can’t help it.” But she lifted the hand away, hooked her thumb in her belt. “It’s ingrained.”
“Do you enjoy your work?”
“I guess I do, on some level. I’m good at it, and you have to like doing what you’re good at. It’s what I do. It’s what I am.”
“Yes, we are what we are.” He stepped closer. “You look as she must have when she was your age. Younger, I suppose, she’d have been younger, our Nola, when she looked as you did. Women wore down faster then.”
“A lot of times vampires look to family for their first kills.”
“Home’s the place you go where they have to take you in. Do you think any of the others in this house would be alive if I wanted them otherwise?”
“No.” So it was time for honesty. “I think you’d have played along with them for a few days, maybe a week. Get some jollies out of it. And wait until they trusted you, let their guards down. Then you’d have slaughtered them.”
“You think like a vampire,” he acknowledged. “It’s part of your skill. So, why haven’t I slaughtered the lot of them?”
She kept her eyes on his, struck suddenly by the fact it was nearly like looking into her own. Same color, same shape. “We are what we are. I guess that’s not what you are, or not anymore.”
“I killed my share in my day. But excepting that I once tried to kill my brother, I never touched my family. I can’t say why except I didn’t want their lives. You’re family, whether either of us is comfortable with that. You come from my sister. You have her eyes. And once I loved her, quite a lot.”
She felt something—not pity, it wasn’t something he asked for. But she felt a kind of understanding. Following the feeling, she drew the stake out of her belt, keeping the point toward her, and handed it to him. A look of bemusement passed over his face as he studied it.
“I’m not going to have to start calling you Uncle Cian, am I?”
He managed to grin and looked pained at the same time. “Please don’t.”
They parted ways, with Cian going downstairs, then into the kitchen. He found Glenna fussing with tea trays. She looked a little hollowed out, he thought, and shadowed around the eyes.
“Have you ever considered having someone else play mother?”
She jerked at his voice, clattering the cup she was holding onto the tray. “Guess I’m jumpy.” She reset the cup carefully in its saucer. “What did you say?”
“I wonder why one of the others can’t deal with food now and then.”
“They do. Well, Larkin’s slippery, but the others do. Anyway, it keeps me busy.”
“From what I’m told you’ve been busy with things nondomestic.”
“Hoyt spoke to you.”
“He seems to enjoy waking me in the middle of the day. Which is why I want coffee,” he added as he moved to the counter to make it. When he saw her frowning at the stake he set beside the pot, he shrugged. “A sort of peace offering, you could say, from Blair.”
“Oh, well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
He shifted, caught her chin in his hand. “Go lie down, Red, before you fall down.”
“That’s what the tea’s about. It’s a restorative. We need it. Batteries dead low here.” She managed a smile, but it faded quickly. “She brought a storm, Cian. She has someone with her who has enough power to call a storm, to block the sun, so we need to recharge those batteries. Hoyt and I have to work, and we need to work with Moira. We need to pull out what she has, help her hone it.”
She turned back, began to arrange cookies on pretty little plates, anything to keep her hands moving. “We were separated today, the three of us on the high cliffs, Blair and Larkin below. They could’ve been killed, and we couldn’t have helped them, couldn’t have stopped it. We didn’t see it coming because we were so focused on the transportation spell. And when it came, when the power whipped around and slapped us down, we were already tapped out.”
Suffering for it now, he thought. Humans always would suffer for what they’d done, and for what they hadn’t. “Now you have a better idea of your limits.”
“We’re not allowed to have limits.”
“Oh, bugger that, Glenna.” He snatched up a cookie. “Of course you have limits. You’ve expanded them, and likely you’ll push the box a bit wider before you’re done. She has limits as well, and that’s what you’re forgetting. Lilith has weaknesses, and is neither invulnerable nor omnipotent. Which you proved today by slipping five of her trophies out from under her.”
He bit into the cookie as he got down a mug.
“I know I should think of the five we saved. Blair said to take the victory.”
“And she’d be right.”
“I know. I know. But oh God, I wish I didn’t see the ones we left behind. I wish their faces, their screams weren’t in my head. We can’t save them all, and I said as much to Hoyt when we were in New York. It was easy to say it then.”
She shook her head. “And you’re right, I need some rest. I have to take this tray up, see that the others get some of it inside them. You could do me a favor.”
“I probably could.”
“You could take this one into the library. Moira’s in there.”
“She’ll likely think it’s poisoned if I take it into her.”
“Oh stop.”
“All right, all right. But don’t blame me if she pours it down some drain.” He hefted the tray, muttering to himself as he left the kitchen. “I’m a vampire, for God’s sake. Creature of the damn night, drinker of blood. And here I am playing butler to some erstwhile Geallian queen. Mortifying is what it is.”
And he’d wanted to pass some time in the library, with a book and the fire.
He stepped in, leading with his irritation, and a scathing comment rolling up to the tip of his tongue.
Which would have been wasted, he decided, as she was curled up on one of the sofas, sleeping.
Now what the hell was he supposed to do? Leave her be, wake her and pour the damn tea into her?
Undecided, he stood where he was, studying her.
Pretty enough, he thought, with a potential for true beauty if she put any effort into it. At least when she slept it didn’t seem as though her eyes would swallow her face, and whoever she aimed those long, large gray beacons toward with it.
There was a time he’d have found it entertaining to corrupt and defile her kind of innocence. To peel it away slowly, layer by layer, until there was nothing left of it.
These days he preferred the simplicity of the more experienced, women who were in it for no more than he was. A few hours of heat in the dark.
Creatures like this took a great deal of effort. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been stirred enough to play with one.
In the end he decided to leave the tray on the table. If she woke, she’d drink it. If she didn’t, well, sleep itself would go a long way to restoring her.
Either way, he’d have done the chore.
He moved to the table, laid the tray down with barely a click of china on wood. But she stirred, nonetheless. A low moan, a little tremor. He backed away, his eyes on her face—and was careless enough to step into a thin slant of sunlight.
The quick, searing pain in his shoulder had him cursing under his breath even as he moved quickly out of the beam. Annoyed with Glenna, with himself, with the sleeping queen, he turned to go.
She began to twitch in her sleep, small sounds of fear gurgling in her throat. Her body rolled up into a tight ball as she shuddered. And in sleep, she began to speak breathlessly.
“No, no, no.” Again and again, until s
he fell into unintelligible Gaelic.
She thrashed, rolling to her back, going stiff as she bowed up, exposing the line of her throat.
He moved quickly, stepping between the couch and the table, and leaning down, gave her a hard shake.
“Wake up,” he ordered. “Snap out of it now, I haven’t the patience for this.”
She moved fast—and he faster—slapping the stake she stabbed out with from her hand. It clattered on the floor ten feet away.
“Don’t do that.” He gripped her wrist, felt her pulse striking like an anvil against his fingers. “Next time you do, I’ll snap this like a twig, I promise you.”
“I—I—I—”
“Very succinct. Are you understanding me?”
Her eyes, huge and glassy with fear darted around the room. “She was here, she was here. No, no, not here.” Moira came up to her knees, gripping his arm with her free hand. “Where is she? Where? I can still smell her. Too sweet, too heavy.”
“Stop.” He released her wrist to take hold of her shoulders. Another shake had her teeth chattering. “You were asleep, you were dreaming.”
“No. I was…Was I? I don’t know. It’s not dark. It’s not dark yet, but it was…” She put her hands on his chest, but instead of pushing him away as he expected, she simply dropped her head there. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I need a moment.”
He caught himself reaching back to stroke her hair—that long thick braid the color of dark oak. He dropped his hand to the side.
“You fell asleep here on the couch,” he said in a flat, almost businesslike voice. “You had a dream. Now you’re awake.”
“I thought Lilith…” She reared back. “I nearly staked you.”
“No. Not even close.”
“I didn’t mean—I wouldn’t have meant.” She closed her eyes in an obvious effort to find some composure. When she opened them, her eyes were clearer, and very direct. “I’m very sorry, but why are you here?”