by Nora Roberts
“It would have been a problem if there’d been more of them.” Hoyt spoke quietly, but it didn’t disguise the steel beneath the words. “It would have been a problem if they’d killed or captured you.”
“Didn’t happen. We have to be ready to take opportunities. Not only the six of us, but the people we’re going to be sending into battle. They have to be trained, how to kill, when to kill. Not just with sword and stake, but with their bare hands, or whatever comes to hand. Because everything’s a weapon. And if they’re not trained, if they’re not ready, they’re just going to stand there and die.”
“Like Jeremy Hilton.”
“Yeah.” She nodded at Larkin, absorbed his anger along with the weight in her heart. “Like Jeremy. Cian, were you able to find anything out?”
“He’s dead.”
She closed off the part of her that wanted to moan. “Could he have been changed?”
“No. There was too much trauma to the body for that.”
“It’s still possible he—”
“No.” Cian bit off the word to cut her off. “She ripped him to pieces. It’s one of her signatures. He’s just dead.”
She let herself sit. Better to sit, she decided, than to fall over.
“There was nothing you could do, Blair,” Moira told her gently. “Nothing you could have done to stop it.”
“No, there was nothing. That was her point—look what I can do, right in front of you, and you’re helpless. We were engaged, Jeremy and I, a couple years ago. So I had to tell him—in the end I had to show him—what I am, what I do. He walked out, because he wasn’t going to believe it, wasn’t going to be part of it. Now it’s killed him.”
“She killed him,” Larkin corrected. “Who you are didn’t kill him.” He waited until she shifted her gaze, met his eyes. “She wants, very much wants, you to blame yourself. Will you give her that victory?”
“She won’t win anything from me.” Tears stung her eyes again, but she willed them back. “I’m sorry, all around. This messes me up, and I have to live with it awhile on my own before I can put it away.”
“We’ll put off the meeting.” Glenna glanced around at the others for agreement. “You can take some time.”
“Appreciate it, but work’s better. Thinking’s better.” If she went upstairs now, were alone now, Blair knew she’d just fall apart again. “So okay. If we’re going to set traps on the other side, we’ll need to calculate the best locations, and determine how many we’ll need on those details.”
“We have more immediate concerns,” Hoyt interrupted. “The transportation to Geall itself. If Cian’s barred from the Dance, he can’t reach the portal.”
“There must be an exception.” Moira laid a hand on Blair’s shoulder, gave it one hard squeeze before moving aside. “Morrigan chose us, all of us.”
“Maybe she’s finished with me.” Cian shrugged. “Gods are fickle creatures.”
“You’re one of the six,” Moira insisted. “Without you in Geall, the circle’s broken.”
“I could go back to the caves. From the air.” Larkin paced in front of the windows. How could he sit at such a time? “Scout. I might be able to find where they’re going through.”
“We can’t separate. Not this close to deadline. We stick together now.” Glenna scanned faces, lingering on Blair’s. “We stay whole.”
“There’s another thing, I think I should mention.” Moira glanced toward Cian. “When Larkin and I went to the Dance in Geall, it was barely midday. It seemed to happen so quickly, the way we were swept up and away. But when we came out here, it was night. I don’t think we can know how long it takes, or if time’s the same. Or…or if we leave at night as we planned, if it would still be night when we come to Geall.”
“Or high bloody noon.” Cian cast his eyes up. “Isn’t that just perfect?”
“There has to be a way to protect him if there’s sunlight.”
“Easy for you to say, Red.” Cian rose to get a glass of whiskey. “Your delicate skin may burn a bit in strong sunlight, but you don’t go to ash, do you?”
“Some sort of block, Hoyt,” Glenna began.
“I don’t think SPF-forty will do the trick,” Cian countered.
“We’ll figure it out,” she snapped back. “We’ll find a way. We haven’t come this far to give up, to leave you behind.”
Blair let them talk, argue, debate. The voices just buzzed around her. She didn’t comment, didn’t contribute. When Hoyt finally harangued Cian into giving him a sample of blood, she left them to their magic.
He didn’t try to sleep. A half dozen times he started to go to her room. To offer what? he wondered. Comfort she didn’t want, anger she didn’t need?
She had suffered a terrible loss, and a hard, hard shock to her heart. She hadn’t, perhaps couldn’t turn to him. Not even, he thought now, as a fellow warrior.
He couldn’t soothe hurts she refused to let him see, or reach wounds she closed in to herself.
She had loved the man, that much was clear. And there was a small part of himself, an ugliness he could despise, that was jealous of the brutalized dead.
So he stood at the window, watching the sun rise on his last day in Ireland.
When someone knocked, he assumed it was Moira. “Bi istigh.”
He didn’t turn when the door opened, not until Blair spoke. “My Gaelic’s pretty crappy, so if that was go to hell, too bad.” She hefted the bottle of whiskey she held in one hand. “I raided Cian’s supply. Going to get a little drunk, have a wake for an old friend. Want to join me?”
Without waiting for an answer, she walked over to sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, resting her back against it. She opened the bottle, poured a generous two fingers into each of the glasses she’d brought in.
“Here’s to just being dead.” She lifted the glass, tossed back the contents. “Come on, have a drink, Larkin. You can be pissed at me and still have a drink.”
He walked over, lowered to the floor to sit across from her. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”
“I’ll get over it.” She handed him the second glass, poured more whiskey in her own. “Sláinte.” She tapped the glasses together, but this time she sipped instead of gulped. “Attachments, my father taught me, were weapons the enemy could use against you.”
“That’s a hard and cold way to live.”
“Oh, he’s good at hard and cold. He walked out on me on my eighteenth birthday. Done.” She leaned her head back and drank. “You know, he’d hurt me so many times before, cut my heart out, I thought, just by not loving me. But it was nothing, nothing that happened—didn’t happen—before came close to what it did to me when he walked away. That’s how I got this.”
She turned her wrist over, examined the scar. “Going out while I was still reeling, trying to prove I didn’t need him. I did need him. Too bad for me.”
“He didn’t deserve you.”
She smiled a little. “He’d completely agree with that, but not the way you mean. I wasn’t what he wanted, and even if I had been, he wouldn’t have loved me. Took me a long time to come around to that. Maybe he’d have been proud. Maybe he’d have been satisfied. But he never would’ve loved me.”
“And still you loved him.”
“Worshiped him.” For a moment, Blair closed her eyes as she let that part of her go. That part was over. “I just couldn’t rip that out and turn it to dust. So I worked, really hard, until I was better than he’d ever been. But I still had that need inside me. To love somebody, to have them love me back. Then there was Jeremy.”
She poured more whiskey for both of them. “I was working at my uncle’s pub. My aunt, my cousins and I took shifts. Hunting, or working the bar, waiting tables, just taking the night off. My aunt called it having a life. Work as a family, share the burden, have some normal.”
“Sounds like a sensible woman.”
“She is. And a good one. So I’m riding the stick—working the bar—when Jeremy comes i
n with a couple of friends. He’s just copped this big account, and they’re going to hoist a few. He’s a stockbroker.” She waved that away. “Hard to explain. Anyway, he’s good looking. Great looking, actually. So, he hits on me—”
“He struck you?”
“No, no.” Finding that wonderfully funny, she snorted out a laugh. “It’s parlance, slang. He flirted with me. I flirted back because he gave me the buzz. You know what I mean? That little zzzz you get inside?”
“I do.” Larkin brushed a hand over hers. “I know that buzz.”
“He hung around till closing, and I ended up giving him my number. Well, we don’t need every detail. We started seeing each other—going out together. He was fun, sweet. Normal. The kind of guy who sends you flowers the day after your first date.”
Her eyes misted over, but she shook her head, downed more whiskey. “I wanted normal. I wanted a chance at it. When things got serious between us, I thought yeah, yeah, this is the way it’s supposed to be. The job doesn’t mean I can’t have somebody, be part of somebody. But I didn’t tell him what I did on those nights we weren’t together, or what I did some nights after he was asleep. I didn’t tell him.”
“Did you love him?”
“I did. And I told him that. I told him I loved him, but I didn’t tell him what I was.” She drew a deep breath. “Honestly? I don’t know if that was sheer cowardice or ingrained training, but I didn’t tell him. We were together eight months, and he never knew. There had to be signs, there had to be clues. Hey, Jeremy, don’t you wonder how I got these bruises? Why my clothes are trashed? Where the hell this blood came from? But he never asked, and I never let myself wonder why.”
“People, you said, have blinders. Love, I think, can thicken them.”
“Bet your ass. He asked me to marry him. Oh God, he pulled out all the stops. The wine, the candles, the music, all the right words. I just rode on it, the big, shiny fantasy of it. Still, I didn’t say anything, not for days. Until my aunt sat me down.”
She pressed the thumb and finger of one hand to her eyes. “You have to tell him, she said to me. You have to make him believe it. You can’t have a life, can never build one with him, not with lies or half-truths or without trust. Dragged my feet another couple of weeks, but it ate at me. I knew she was right. But he loved me, so it would be all right. It would all work out fine. Because he loved me, and he’d see I was doing not just what I had to do, but what was right.”
Holding her glass in both hands, she closed her eyes. “I explained it to him as carefully as I knew how, taking him through the family history. He thought I was joking.” She opened her eyes now, met Larkin’s. “When he realized I wasn’t, he got hostile. Figured it was my sick way of breaking the engagement. We went round and round about it. I badgered him into going to the cemetery with me. I knew one was supposed to rise that night, and hey, a picture’s worth a thousand. So I showed him what they were, what I was.”
She drank again, one long sip. “He couldn’t wait to get away from me. Couldn’t wait to pack his things and get away. To walk out on me. I was a freak, and he never wanted to see me again.”
“He was weak.”
“He was just a guy. Now he’s a dead guy.”
“So it’s your fault, is it? Your fault that you cared enough to share what you are with him. To show him not only that there are monsters in the world, but that you’re strong enough, courageous enough to fight them? Your fault that he wasn’t man enough to see the wonder of you?”
“What wonder? I do what I’m trained to do, follow the family business.”
“That’s bollocks, and worse, it’s self-pity.”
“I didn’t kill him—you were right about that. But he’s dead because of me.”
“He’s dead because a vicious, soulless demon killed him. He’d dead because he didn’t believe in what was in front of his eyes, and didn’t hold on to you. And none of that is your doing.”
“He left me, like my father left me. I thought that was the worst. But this…I don’t know what to do with the pain.”
He took her glass, set it aside. Reaching out he pulled her into his arms, pressed her head onto his shoulder. “Put a bit of it here for now. Shed your tears, a stór. You’ll feel better having given them to him.”
He held her, stroking her hair and soothing, while she wept for another man.
She woke tucked into his bed, still dressed, and grateful she was alone. The hangover wasn’t the clanging bell of a night of foolish indulgence, but the dull gong that came from using whiskey as a cushion.
He’d drawn the drapes so the sun wouldn’t wake her, she noted, and checked her watch for the time. The fact that it was already noon made her groan as she threw back the covers to sit on the side of the bed.
Too much to do, she told herself, to coddle a half-assed hangover and a raging case of sorrow. Before she could gather the fortitude to stand, Larkin walked in. He carried a glass that held something murky and brown.
“I’d say good morning, but it likely doesn’t feel as such to you.”
“It’s not too bad,” she told him. “I’ve had worse.”
“Regardless, it isn’t the day for having a head. Glenna says this will help it.”
She looked dubiously at the glass. “Because drinking it will make me throw up everything in my system?”
“She didn’t say. But you’ll be a brave girl now and take your medicine.”
“I guess.” She took the glass, sniffed at the contents. “Doesn’t smell as bad as it looks.” She took a deep breath, downed all of it. Then shuddered right down to her toes. “Tastes a lot worse. Not just eye of newt, but the whole damn newt.”
“Give it a minute or two to settle.”
She nodded, then stared down at her hands. “I wasn’t at my best last night, to put it extremely mildly.”
“No one expects you should be at your best at all times. Certainly not me.”
“I want to thank you for the ear, and the shoulder.”
“Those seemed to be the parts of me you needed most.” He sat beside her. “Were you clear-headed enough to understand what I said to you?”
“Yeah. It’s not my fault. In my head I know it’s not my fault. There are other parts of me, Larkin, that have to catch up with my head on this.”
“They wasted you, these men. I won’t.” He pushed to his feet again when she stared at him. “Something else for you to catch up with. Come down when you’re ready. We’ve a lot of work.”
She kept staring even after he’d gone out and closed the door behind him.
It helped to have the work. They would carry—the old-fashioned way—as much of the supplies and weapons as possible to the circle. Hoyt and Glenna would continue to work on a shield of some kind for Cian.
With Larkin in the form of a horse, Blair loaded him while Moira loaded Cian’s stallion.
“Sure you can ride that thing?” Blair asked her.
“I can ride anything.” Moira glanced toward the tower window. “It’s the only way to get this done. They need to concentrate on what they’re doing. We can’t risk trying to carry everything we’re taking the full distance after sunset.”
“Nope.” Blair swung onto Larkin’s back. “Keep your eyes open. We may have company in the woods.”
They started out, single file. “Can you really smell them?” Moira called out.
“It’s more that I sense them. I’ll know if one gets close.” She scanned the trees, the shadows. Nothing stirred but birds and rabbits.
Sunlight, she thought, and birdsong. It would be a different matter taking this route at night. She and Moira, she decided, on Larkin, with Hoyt and Glenna on the stallion. Cian, she thought, could move nearly as fast as a horse at a gallop if necessary.
It was a twisting and at times a barely trod path. And at times the shadows over it were deep enough to have her fingers twitch toward the crossbow.
She felt the ripple of Larkin’s muscles between her thighs, n
odded. So he could sense them, too, she thought. Or the horse he was inside could sense them. “They’re watching. Keeping their distance, but watching.”
“They’ll understand what we’re about.” Moira glanced back. “Or get word to Lilith, and she will.”
“Yeah. Pick up the pace a little. Let’s get this done.”
They came out of the woods, crossed a short fallow field. On the rise of it stood the stone Dance.
“It is big,” Blair murmured. Not Stonehenge big, she thought, but impressive. And like Stonehenge, even before she moved into the shadow of the stones, she felt them. Almost heard them.
“Strong stuff.” She dismounted.
“In this world, and in mine.”
Moira slid off the stallion, then laid her head against Larkin’s. “It’s our way home.”
“Let’s hope so.” Within the Dance, Blair began to offload weapons. “You’re sure vamps can’t come inside the circle?”
“No demon can pass between the stones and step on the sacred ground. It’s that way in Geall, and from everything I’ve read on it, that way in this world as well.”
Moira looked as Blair did, toward the woods. But she thought of Cian and what would become of him if they were forced to leave him behind.
“We’ll figure it out.”
Moira glanced over. “You’re worried, too.”
“It’s a concern. We’ve got to get him there, keep him from frying—so make that two really major concerns. Handy this is a safety zone, and we’re not going to come back in a few hours and find they’ve raided our weapons stash, but Cian’s the downside.”
Without thinking, she rubbed Larkin’s flank. When he turned his head, eyed her, she dropped her hand. “Hoyt and Glenna are on it. We all go, that’s the deal. So we’ll figure it out.”
The swish of Larkin’s tail slapped her in the butt. “Hey.”
“He’s a playful sort,” Moira commented. “In almost any form.”
“Yeah, he’s a real jokester. Ought to be careful, one of these days he might stick in one of the four-legged varieties.” She came around to his head. “Then where will you be?”