by Sarah Hegger
He could sense them, eyes on him and Bronwyn, slithering in the dark shadows cloaking the sides of the pub.
Bronwyn put her hand in his, and he wanted to throw back his head and roar to the world that she was his. For the sake of those hungry eyes he kept hold of her hand. For the sake of the burning need in him, he kept hold of her hand.
She stopped in the light of the portico over the pub door, adorably shy and uncertain all of a sudden. “Thank you for dinner. It was lovely.”
Hundreds of years—hundreds of women—spent waiting for this woman. The one woman destined to be his, and the one woman he could never have.
“My pleasure.” Out there with watching eyes, he was safe to give in to the demand to touch her. He stroked the peachy smoothness of her cheek as he cupped it. “May I see you again?”
“Yes,” she whispered. The wanting reflected in her eyes appeased the gnawing ache in him.
“Tomorrow.” He brushed her full, beautiful lips with his. Meaning to pull back on that brief contact, his miscalculation thundered lava hot through his blood. With their lips perilously close he froze.
And then she sighed, and her eyelids fluttered shut.
Alexander lost the battle and slanted his mouth over hers. The need to taste her raged through him, and he took her mouth, his tongue claiming the hallowed space beyond her lips.
Her hands fluttered, and then she wound her arms around his neck.
He deepened the kiss, taking what was his. Desire thrummed his nerve endings and his cock hardened. Like a randy teenager, he pressed against her.
Bronwyn’s body cleaved to his, and she moaned in the back of her throat.
He cupped her round, delicious arse and pulled her tighter against him. He could take her upstairs right now. Take her.
And that was precisely the problem and why, hate it as he may, he needed to stop before it raged beyond his control.
Gentling his kiss, Alexander eased them both down before breaking away.
The sight of her, mouth kiss swollen, cheeks flushed, almost undid him, but he reminded himself of the stakes to the game they played. “Good night, little—Bronwyn.”
She hesitated at the door, the same desire still haunting him playing across her face. Then she turned, opened the door and let herself in. She tossed him a sweet, shy smile over her shoulder. “Good night.”
The door closed, and he was alone in the quiet night. Or not. He spoke to the shadows to the left of the door. “You can go home now; there’s nothing more to see.”
“Very good, my lord.” Clyde slithered out of the gloom. “I wasn’t being a voyeur.”
“I know that.” Despite himself, he pitied Clyde. Rhiannon kept her minions on a short leash.
Cool night air helped clear his head, so he left his car at the Hag’s Head and walked toward the green. He was playing a dangerous and complicated game. One misstep, and he could lose everything. But he wouldn’t be the only one who paid the price.
He should have known the prophecy would come with its own insurance policy. His and Bronwyn’s mutual fascination made sense in light of what the prophecy expected of them. In the few meager hours he’d known her, Bronwyn had already burrowed beneath his skin.
Failure had become even more terrifying.
All these sodding years, that bloody prophesy had been hanging around, mainly irritating him, and now it looked alarmingly like it might roll right along and drag him with it. Fucking hell! He’d always found the idea of being a cosmic stud service, an arcane sperm donor, distasteful and demeaning. Even now though, his cock was ready to remind him of what a splendid idea it was after all.
The night stayed fine, with a light onshore breeze dispelling any lingering heat.
As though Roderick called to him, he wandered over to the statue on the village green.
At the base of the statue, a pair of teenagers were trying to eat each other’s braces off. They paid him no mind as he stopped right in front of it.
The Lovers.
Alexander laughed aloud. If Roderick would give him ten seconds before he tried to remove his head with a broadsword, they might have had a good laugh over that one.
The teenagers were still at it, so Alexander nudged the boy’s foot with his toe. “Go home.”
The boy tore his mouth off his girlfriend. “Fuck you, old man.”
Ah, the youth. So charming. “I’m older than I look.” By approximately seven hundred years. “But why don’t you fuck off instead?”
The boy managed to hold his stare for an impressive two seconds before sloughing to his feet and tugging the girl up with him. “You don’t know me. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Alexander gave him the look. The one he’d learned at dear old Mum’s knee.
The teens scuttled away like hell was after them.
“Well.” He took a seat at the base of the statue. The stone pressed cool against his back. “It’s starting to look rather alarmingly like you and I are going to have another go at each other.” Alexander couldn’t remember when he’d started his nocturnal chats with Roderick. It amused him to know the other man had no choice. If Roderick had a choice, Alexander would be fighting, not chatting. “I would wish you luck, but as that will probably result in my demise, I’m sure you’ll understand why I resist.”
With the idea of fucking firmly off the table, fighting sounded like a grand idea. It had been a long time since Alexander had enjoyed a competent opponent. Roderick had been the last, and that had been nearly four hundred years ago. Alexander had won their last bout, which was the only reason he was still breathing, and Roderick was…well, he didn’t rightly know what or where Roderick was.
It was a pity they were sworn enemies because they were probably the only two men capable of understanding each other.
“She feels you.” He liked to think Roderick understood him. Sad sod that he was, talking to a stone person for company. “She feels you waking, and it’s driving her batty.” Not that Rhiannon and sanity had ever had more than a glancing acquaintance. “You’re the only thing stopping her from getting into that castle, and if she could, she would have done away with you already.”
Rhiannon’s power grew almost daily, and Alexander could sense it in her, pulsing like a huge gray malevolent slug beneath her skin. “She’s getting closer to breaking the ward spell.”
He sat there until the chill brought him to his feet. A wonderful cognac he’d been saving since 1815 was calling his name.
“I’ll be seeing you, old man.” He tapped the plinth. “Sooner rather than later, if you know how to do what you were created to do.”
Halfway down the lane toward his home, Alexander felt her. Dear old Mummy. The foul miasma surrounding her crept over his skin and made him want to dermabrade it off. He didn’t hurry his pace. She would sense him and know he was on his way.
He let himself in through his front door, not bothering to lock it. The only person he wanted to lock out was already sprawled across a Victorian velvet chaise drinking his cognac from a pint glass.
Tonight Rhiannon had dressed old school in a wine-red velvet evening gown that clung to her body. Gems gleamed about the neckline and down the long sleeves. She smiled and held one slim, white hand out to him. “My son.”
“My lady.” Suppressing his recoil, Alexander took her hand, kissed the back and bowed to her. And the royals thought they had familial formality in their homes. “You honor me with your presence.”
She watched him with those pitch-dark eyes. “Do I really, Alexander?”
“Of course.” Not at all, but he was careful to keep all such thoughts off his face. Fucking hell! She’d already quaffed half his bottle of cognac. He poured himself a measure and stood in front of the armchair opposite her.
She motioned him to sit, and he did.
“You had her here.” She breathed deep. “I can still smell her.”
“Yes.” Alexander didn’t dissemble, like he didn’t sit without her permission.
“Yes.” More than even she knew.
“Do you want her?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She was a vicious bitch, and just because she needed him enough not to kill him, it didn’t mean she couldn’t make him hurt. “It won’t be long before I have her.”
“You haven’t yet?” Exposing the delicate column of her neck, she rested her head against the back of the sofa. It wouldn’t take much to slit her throat. A quick lean forward and the dagger he always kept tucked away.
“This is a different time, as you know.” It would do him no good to slit her throat, however. She would heal long before she could bleed to death. He still wasn’t sure how old she was, but she predated the original druids and went back to a time before time was measured. “It would go better for us if she wasn’t crying rape afterwards.”
“Ugh.” She grimaced. “It matters not to me.”
“Nor I, really.” He sickened himself with his lies and half-truths. “But I judged circumspection the best course. She’ll succumb to me, and I’ll get the job done without anyone being any the wiser.”
Her belief in him doing what she’d created him for was all that kept Rhiannon at bay. She took another long pull on her pint glass. Alcohol didn’t affect her like it did humans. She was long past that point. “Does she know what she is?”
“Not at all.” Alexander wished for his little witch’s sake she could stay ignorant, but her life depended on him destroying her bubble.
Rhiannon stood and put her pint glass on the table. “I had not planned on some of them getting away. There might be others.”
Not many and not nearly enough. The screams and sobs of that night still trod his nightmares. Being the son of Rhiannon, he’d always believed he understood and accepted evil. That heinous night, he’d found out how wrong he was. “Did you do it?” Her mood augured well for asking questions. “Did you kill her family?”
“Not me, darling,” And she smiled. It was all the more disturbing for its flawless beauty, her smile. It hid a being so impenetrably dark she defied description. “But I cannot allow cré-witches to run around all over the world. That bitch is still alive, and if they start using their magic again, it will awaken her.”
That bitch, better known as Goddess, the source of all life and truth in the world, and the only thing that could stop Rhiannon. Although Goddess had been asleep since her dying witches had cast a spell so powerful it had almost ripped the veil between good and evil. They had done the unthinkable and used blood magic. It was against everything Goddess was, her very essence, and it had driven her into a sleep so deep, only Rhiannon caught dim flashes of her from time to time.
The same spell had left Roderick and Maeve on the village green.
“She’s the one,” he said, because she would already know who Bronwyn was. “And I’ll take care of it.”
“Hmm?” She studied him, her lids lowering over her dark, glittering eyes. “Be careful, darling. You’re a clever one, but not that clever.”
Chapter Six
Time passed as she floated, and time was lost. More time vanished and the loss coupled itself to emotion. Time became the enemy, and she was no longer alone in the void because time carried with it a panicked sense of how she needed to escape.
Perception crept into the vacuum and forced itself into her awareness. Sensory input pierced the void. First sight and then touch. It was cold and dark in the abyss. So dark and cold and silent that if she screamed it would ring endlessly. Then she smelled something. This time when the bubble floated up through the endless dark, it carried a distinct smell and the smell brought memories with it.
She remembered things lost and things no more.
This never-ending emptiness filled her with fear. She feared she would never find her way out, and she had to get out of this place that robbed her life in the relentless press of time. But this place had no ending and no beginning, and she did not know how.
It seemed to take forever to put a name to the scent. It might have taken eons, or just a heartbeat; she had no way of knowing. She veered away from those thoughts. They terrified her. Time terrified her.
She concentrated instead on the smell and broke it into two parts, both of which had a name, lily and orange. Like pins stacked in a row, one thought, idea, concept, crashed into another and blossomed in her mind as certainty.
Not a disembodied smell at all, the lily and orange belonged to magic. It was the scent of unique magic wielded by a witch. A witch such as herself. A cré-witch. Suddenly starved of the magic, she lunged for it. It danced maddeningly out of her reach, and now she no longer floated, she waited. She waited at the place the magic had appeared for it to appear again. When it did, she would grab on to it and force it to take her home.
Home, a concept so painful it hurt to breathe.
Saturday morning made it a week since she’d come to England, and Bronwyn bore the heavy sense of a momentous night before. Outside her bedroom window, the sea was topped with white caps and swirled green and sapphire around the rocks.
“I think I’ve met someone, Dee.” Even with death separating them, she never felt as if her grandmother had left her completely.
Outside the open window, gulls screeched, and a sprightly onshore breeze ruffled the curtains.
“He’s so beautiful, Dee. Like he stepped out of one of those books we used to read.” She and Deidre had spent hours drinking red wine and reading novels. In those novels, women met men who struck them dumb, men who made their blood heat and their pulses pound. “But there’s something else there too. He’s so…” She couldn’t find the right word, so she used the one that came closest. “Mysterious.”
Trust your instinct. Deidre had lived her life by that as well. Except her instinct hadn’t helped her that morning a year ago when she’d gotten into her car and driven to the store.
After a shower, Bronwyn got dressed and made it down to the dining room. The German couple sat eating their breakfast by the window. The man smiled and waggled his phone at her.
She smiled back and took a free table. Even on such a bright day, the interior of the Hag’s Head was dark and smelled faintly of stale cigarettes and beer. A massive inglenook fireplace, mantel stained black by countless fires, dominated the wall to the right of the bar. Dark wainscoting and heavy, low wood timbers added to the general gloom.
“Madam.” The same waiter from last night appeared at her table. “English or continental breakfast?”
“Continental.” She didn’t have a good feeling about the pub’s kitchen and eggs. If she ordered the eggs, maybe Alexander would appear and whisk her to his manor and whip up eggs benedict. Or not.
The waiter grinned at her, his eyes glinting with odd intensity. “Very good, madam. Right away.”
“Thank you.” There was something off about the waiter, and he creeped her out. He smelled odd as well, kind of sickly and putrid, like rotting vegetation.
Still grinning and twinkling, he leaned into her personal space. “Coffee?”
“Sure.” The hair on her nape rose and she moved back as discreetly as she could.
To her relief, he scuttled off with her order.
She waited for her breakfast with half an eye on the door. Alexander has said he wanted to see her today but hadn’t taken her number.
The waiter appeared with her breakfast: a croissant, a pat of butter shaped like a witch’s hat, one of those mini pots of strawberry jam and a bowl of anemic cantaloupe. Given her insipid meal, the coffee was surprisingly good.
Too restless to stay indoors and wait for Alexander to maybe appear, Bronwyn wandered out of the pub and took a walk down the main street. Planning for this trip had not progressed much beyond getting to Greater Littleton. She’d come with a purpose and she needed to push distractions aside.
According to her DNA, her family came from this village. The closest connection she’d felt had b
een at Baile, and when she’d met Mags. The same Mags who had promised Bronwyn the answers she was looking for. She could grab a cab and take Mags up on the offer of tea, but that seemed intrusive. This morning, Baile gleamed pale gray above the village, beautiful and serene. It would be wonderful to find proof her people had come from there.
A bay window with mullioned glass panes drew her to the Speckled Grimoire Book Shoppe. The window displayed a Harry Potter Collector’s Edition set, and a coffee table book on British castles. Toward the back, beside a handmade cardboard sign saying Local Author was a book called, The Secrets of Baile; Fact or Fiction...or Worse.
A book shop—excuse her, shoppe—might be a good place to look for information. The local section was disappointingly small, and she settled for a map of Greater Littleton and The Secrets of Baile.
Back on the street again, she headed for the green with some half-baked notion of seeing if the statue had the same effect on her today. Alexander had known a lot about Roderick and Maeve, but he hadn’t told her how he knew. If the information Alexander had given her was readily available, Hermione might have had it. His offhand reference to his family being old and going way back didn’t really make sense. Sure they might have all sorts of information on the town and the castle. A house as big as Alexander’s was bound to have a library, right? So, if he knew the statue was definitely Roderick, why not tell the world?
Being around Alexander had befuddled her, made her thinking mist. The knowing muttered inside her. She should have asked more questions. For a woman with a mission to find her roots, she’d let prime opportunities to press him for answers pass her by.
In the clarity of morning, last night seemed unreal. Other than that kiss, and that, she remembered like a million-pixel image with her other senses built in.
Irritated with herself, she leaped on the distraction of a sign promising a local farmer’s market that afternoon. Still early, barely ten, she arrived at the parking lot as the vendors were setting up. A sound like a gunshot cracked through the still morning.