Awaken the Curse (6 page)

“The thing’s alive?”

James opened his eyes as he pocketed the disk. “I’ve no idea, but I’d wager Cade can tell us when he comes to. It’ll be one of a very long list of questions.”

*   *   *

James glanced at the stunted elm with something approaching loathing; its crooked branches heavy with snow, a bird’s abandoned nest in an upper bough. He hated every bloody inch of it.

“We passed that tree three times already. We’re lost,” Katherine said, giving voice to James’s worry. “And the snow is getting heavier.”

An understatement. Already it billowed and swirled in an icy wind that covered their tracks almost as soon as they made them. If they didn’t find the road for the Hall, they’d lose what little light remained. And if they thought wandering the mountain now was bad, doing it in the dark during a blizzard would be damned impossible.

“We’ll backtrack to the last trail,” he encouraged. “It’s sure to head east toward the ford.”

But even as they guided the weary pony back the way they’d come, a silver-laced mist rose up to mingle with the flying snow until he had to squint to see even a few measly paces ahead. The wind sliced through his heavy coat, chilling the sweat dampening his shirt to his back. It moaned over the crags to merge with the rush of a nearby river on its way downstream. The pony sidled and tossed its head on the narrow track. Stones clattered into the ravine on their right, while the mountainside on their left rose in a sheer granite wall. One wrong step and they’d plunge over the edge.

Katherine looked back, her face white against the black night, eyes hollowed with fatigue and loss.

“A little farther,” James called. “We’re almost to the bottom.”
I hope,
he added silently.

She nodded and continued the infuriatingly slow shuffle that had served them this far. After what seemed an eternity, they rounded a bend leading into a deep ravine. The wind dropped in the shelter of the high surrounding hills, the river emerging in a frothy torrent from a cleft in the rock face. They paused to draw a breath, say a prayer, and draw their coats tighter about their shoulders.

That’s when the howl cut through the silence like a knife.

The pony reared at the end of its lead, its eyes rolling white in terror.

“Easy, boy,” James soothed.

The howl came again. A low, mournful sound lifting the hairs at the back of James’s neck and freezing the blood in his veins. In a blind panic, the pony tore free of James’s grasp, wheeling in a circle to disappear into the storm.

“Damn,” James cursed as he scanned the dark, every sense on alert.

“What was that?” Katherine shuddered, hugging her arms to her chest.

“Probably an owl,” he lied.

It was absolutely
not
a nightwalker. They didn’t exist. The Imnada had died out over a thousand years ago. They were dry text on a page and weatherworn runes on a stone, not living, breathing monsters that would rip your heart out and gnaw on your brain. And if he repeated this enough, he just might convince himself.

“It didn’t sound like any owl I’ve ever heard,” Katherine said, glancing around her.

“You’re an ornithologist now?” James blustered, attempting to sound confident. “Let’s keep moving. We’ll look for a place to rest and wait for morning.”

They continued on, the impenetrable mist thinning in some places, collecting in others, so that James had the eerie sensation of being shepherded by invisible hands. He strained to hear the ghostly cry again over the roar of the wind, but there was nothing beyond his heavy breathing, the rapid beating of his heart, and the deafening clack of his teeth.

Just when he thought they’d have to settle for a frozen huddle beneath a heavy stand of trees, the mist parted like a curtain, revealing a blackened tumble of stones. “Up ahead. It’s a ruin of some sort. We’ll make camp there.”

And pray that whatever had made that unholy howl wasn’t what he feared it was.

*   *   *

“Fageth a-dhesh aysk. Golest a-dhesh tewath. Enowot,”
James whispered over the pile of kindling, conjured flames dancing higher as the spell took hold to cast wild shadows over the walls of the dilapidated stone chamber. The air slowly warmed. Heat melted the snow on Katherine’s hair and thawed her muscles, but it never reached the frozen emptiness within her. She remained numb as the reality of her father’s death sank in.

A hand touched her shoulder, her cheek. Father’s face became James’s, a worried frown creasing his forehead as he knelt beside her. “Katherine? Are you well? I’ve warded the perimeter. That should offer us protection.”

Hot tears slid down her cheeks to slip salty between her lips. “He’s dead.” Her voice cracked, her breath coming in great jagged gasps. “Cade killed him.”

James pushed her hair behind her ears and threaded his fingers through her long locks. “We’ll get through it, Katie love. You’re not alone. You have me. You’ll always have me.”

If only it were true. If only he meant it. Still, his voice soothed the tempest churning her insides, his keen-edged stare heating the cold, empty place in her heart. She wanted to outrun the desperation nipping at her heels, crushing loss a step behind. If she stopped—if she thought—the horrible truth would consume her.

She reached for James, caressing the hard angle of his jaw, the combination of stubble and bruising that darkened his chin, the ugly cut on his left cheek. Her heart turned over in her chest as she stared deep into eyes that had always seen straight to her every fear and hope. Leaning forward, she brushed her lips against his. “Please. Hold me close. Keep me warm.”

*   *   *

This was wrong. Very wrong. Wrong for more reasons than he could count. Katherine came to him out of grief and pain and fear. He was supposed to be a gentleman, or so his title implied, though with Katherine’s body pressed enticingly against his, all gallantry and honor had dissolved into bone-throbbing lust.

She pushed a hand inside his coat, laying it upon his chest where his breathing quickened and his heart thundered under her palm. Gods, help him, he wanted her. To hell with noble intentions and morning-after regrets.

The plain, unvarnished truth smacked him between the eyes; it had never been the lure of the Imnada drawing him to this remote part of Wales. It had been all Katherine. The shape of her face and the sweetness of her mouth. The smell of her skin and the curve of her back. Her sense of humor, quiet loyalty, and irritating mother-hen tendencies. He’d spent five years getting over her. Thought he’d managed to finally lock those memories away—yet, like a drunkard when offered a taste, he’d been unable to help himself.

As he wrestled with his swill-pot conscience, the kiss spun deeper and longer, every inch of him on fire, nerves scraped raw with longing. With his last ounce of integrity, he pulled away, gasping like a half-drowned swimmer. “We can’t, Katherine. You’re in shock. You don’t mean it. You’re not thinking straight.”

And he wasn’t thinking at all.

Her eyes burned dark and hot. For a woman not thinking straight, she looked awfully intense. “You’re wrong. I’m not scared. Not of you.”

“By the gods, you
should
be scared.
Especially
of me.”

“We can pretend it’s just as we once dreamed it would be. You and me and nothing between us. Or do you no longer want me?”

Was she mad? Every screaming cell in his body wanted her. Repeatedly.

She pulled his head down to hers, giving him no time to question her further. No time for him to come to his senses. Not that he fought that hard. He was lost to those honey-sweet lips that could turn a man’s innards to jelly. Dizzy with the southward rush of blood to his already rock-hard groin as her pliant body curved against him.

Even so, if he really tried, he could come to his senses and stop now. It would be damn painful and probably leave permanent scars, but a brisk walk in the snowstorm outside might cool his overheated libido. It would be best. It would be right.

Then she dragged his coat from his shoulders and pulled his shirt from his breeches, and the last noble intention was ground to dust beneath an avalanche of baser emotions. With a groan, he surrendered, his tongue plunging within to take all she offered, his hands full of her long red hair.

Katherine Lacey had been his once upon a time. She would be his again. There was nothing to stop him.

*   *   *

She felt the moment James gave in, the second he reached his point of no return, hesitation changing to hunger. It should have frightened her, this single-minded power stringing his muscles and hardening his gaze. Instead delicious heat seared its way through her body, chasing away the shadows that lurked, the endless days that lay like a wasteland ahead of her.

Closing her eyes, she ignored the future, concentrating on the present. On James’s hands as they caressed the slopes of her shoulders, the curves of her breasts. On the shivery trembling in her limbs as he lay a trail of kisses behind her ear, down her throat, inside her elbow, the center of her palm.

Behind her, the fire blazed up in a shower of sparks, the air growing warm and fragrant with flowers. She opened her eyes to discover walls of rough-hewn stone shimmering into flawless white marble that rose into the arch of a domed and frescoed ceiling, thick carpets where once she stood upon cold, damp earth, an enormous bed hung with damask curtains, a silken coverlet drawn aside to reveal linen sheets.

“How can this be?” she gasped.

A sheepish smile broke over his rugged face. “Fires are not all I can conjure. And I told you I spent much of our years apart in study. I just didn’t happen to say what sort of study.”

“Is it real?”

“Like the jewel I offered you, for tonight, it’s as real as you or I. But come the dawn, the magic will burn away like dew before the sun.” The flecks of gold within his unyielding gaze gleamed brighter and brighter until she saw nothing beyond the brilliance within his eyes. When he finally blinked, she caught back a breath. Gone were their heavy winter coats, mufflers, and boots. Vanished were layers of damp woolens and cold stockings. James wore a velvet embroidered banyan sashed at the waist, while she felt the slide of perfumed silk against her bare skin.

“Tell me, Katherine,” he asked quietly. “Is this truly what you want?”

She reached up to cup his cheek, half expecting him to disappear in a flash of Fey-born magic. “It is.”

“Then who am I to deny you?” He gathered her into his arms and took her to bed. The mattress sank beneath her weight, the scents of lavender rising around her like springtime. And James above her, his face etched in stark, chiseled angles by the light of the fire.

Tapes pulled loose, buttons undone, he guided her free of her gown, his hands and then his mouth sweeping away her embarrassment. She wanted his touch, yearned for it. Would die without the feel of his fingers gliding across her skin, his tongue dancing over her heated flesh.

He rolled away long enough to shuck off his heavy robe and then he was back, the ripple of his muscles and the strength in his arms knotting her insides all over again. But there was also deep purple bruising across his ribs and horrible discoloration down over his left shoulder, which was still bandaged. “You look horrible. Does it hurt a lot?”

“Not as much as my c—”

“James!” she exclaimed, an unladylike giggle bursting out of her.

“As much as my head . . . right here.” He pointed to a spot above his left eyebrow.

She took his face in both her hands and kissed the nasty bump there. “Better?”

He smiled. “Much.” He curved her against him, his skin blazing, his kisses seductive. “I never stopped dreaming of this, Katie love.”

“I refused to dream. It was easier.”

“Until tonight.”

Tonight. Cade’s attack . . . Father’s murder . . . Anguish threatened to smash through the fragile shell she’d placed around her heart, but she fought back as she skimmed her hands across the broad plane of his chest, the expanse of wide, muscular shoulders. Drowned out worries of tomorrow by memorizing the way his dark hair curled behind his ears and the laugh lines crinkled the edges of his eyes. She would pick up the broken pieces of her life tomorrow. But tonight was for her.

He caressed her behind her knees, along her inner thighs, at the junction of her legs, before sliding his fingers into her tight, wet center. She gasped but didn’t pull away. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. It was all too wonderful. Too amazing. A delicious coiling need moved up from her center until her blood burned and every second spun into an infinity of wanting. She moaned, the friction setting off fireworks inside her, desire tightening her belly, excitement trembling her limbs.

He withdrew his fingers and nudged her legs wider, a single question burning stark in his eyes as he lay poised above her. She answered with a lifting of her hips and a teasing smile as she guided him inside her. Inch by delicious inch he claimed her, filling her, completing her. Light danced across her vision. She dug her nails into his arms, rocked to meet his thrusts. Harder and faster he drove, an irresistible force building, pushing her toward a far horizon. Closer, quicker, until the pleasure crested over her like a wave and she would gladly drown in the sweet wild pleasure jolting through her like lightning.

His body strung taut as a bowstring, jaw clenched in his chiseled face, James locked his gaze with hers. Flames leapt in his eyes as he shuddered, a groan rising hoarse and furious from his throat as together they found release.

Chapter 4

“I didn’t want Father to invite you to Wales. I was afraid of seeing you again.” Katherine curled into James’s shoulder, her head nestled under his chin, her hair tickling his nose.

“That’s funny,” he replied. “I went as far as throwing his letter in the ash bin to be burned for the very same reason.”

“You were afraid too?” she asked, surprise in her voice.

“Terrified.” He stared deep into the fire, watching the ripple and curl of mage energy within the heart of each flame. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened had we not been caught that night? Or if you’d agreed to come with me when I left for London?”

She tilted her head up so she was facing him, forehead crinkled in confusion. “What do you mean, ‘agreed to come’ with you? You never asked me.”

“Are you mad? Of course I asked you.” A horrible suspicion snaked its way into his sleep-satisfied brain. He didn’t want to believe it, but the monstrous pieces fit. Shoving himself up onto his elbows, he met her curious gaze with drawn brows. “I wrote you the very night your father caught us kissing. When I didn’t hear back, I wrote you twice more.”

By now she was sitting up beside him, running hand over worried hand through her hair, lip caught between her teeth, anger swiftly replacing confusion.

“I finally risked both life and reputation and showed up at your door. I’d pumped so much whisky into myself, I didn’t care what threats your father hurled. I needed to see you. Hear you say the words to my face.”

“What words?” The color had drained from Katherine’s cheeks. Even her lips were bloodless. Only her eyes burned hot as coals.

“That it was over between us. That a penniless younger son and a precarious future were never in your plans. That it had all been a lie.”

She pulled away, dragging the coverlet with her, shoulders hunched as if she were in pain. “I don’t want to hear any more, James.”

But as if something cracked open inside of him, he couldn’t stop. She needed to hear. Needed to know what her father had done. “He told me that you’d left for Bath to stay with your aunt. That you didn’t want to see me again. Then he handed me my letters back. All unopened.”

“I didn’t . . . James, I never . . .” Her voice caught on a sob. She paused to draw a calming breath and began again. “How could you believe him? How could you think I would do that? I never knew about the letters. I never received them.
Any
of them. After a week with no word, I assumed . . . I thought . . . When Father packed me off to my aunt, I went. I didn’t care. I felt so stupid and humiliated, I just wanted to be away from Oxford and pretend none of it had happened.” She drew her knees up, hugging them to her chest, her hair falling around her face, shudders running the length of her body. “Father lied to me, James. Why would he do that? Why would he be so cruel?”

James rose, pulling on his banyan, to pace the floor. It was that or pound his fists against the wall. Five fucking years. They’d lost five long fucking years. He laughed to keep from hurling curses at the sky, the sound jarring and discordant, but at least it eased him back from white-hot murderous rage.

“James?” Katherine stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, and perhaps he had.

“I assume your father kept us apart for the simplest of reasons, Katie love—he didn’t know. He saw me kissing you and assumed the worst—that a confirmed scoundrel was dallying with his daughter. He didn’t know how far it had gone between us or that I’d fallen head over heels. He thought he was protecting you.”

Her hands stopped worrying at her hair. She tossed it over her shoulder, squaring her shoulders. “If he’d known the truth, he would have forced you to marry me. All this time we might have been together . . . like this.”

“Or we’d have fallen apart,” he conceded. “You were barely seventeen. I was flat broke. The Duncallan coffers have never been flush enough to support a second son. I barely scraped by after I left Oxford, hustling my keep at gaming tables and race meetings. A few years of that life and you may have cursed the day you laid eyes on me. There’s no way of knowing, is there?”

She shook her head, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. “Is it too late, James? Has our chance passed us by?” Her eyes met his, shimmering like ancient coins in the light, a rosy glow to her honey skin.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

She sniffed, a crooked smile curving a corner of her mouth. “Yes, but I practically forced myself on you. And you are a man, after all. As Enid would say, no right thinking male would hesitate to take advantage of a situation.”

“I do have
some
principles, ragged as they are.”

“Is there hope, then? Can we start again?”

“As you said a few days ago, there’s no starting again, Katie love. But we can take up where we left off.”

She threaded her fingers with his, gaze fearful and expectant but bright as stars all at once. He lost himself in those eyes, and when the icy wind blasted through the chamber, smashing his magic like a fist through a mirror, his gaze held those eyes as if gripping a last tenuous lifeline.

A second wave of magic burned its way along every nerve ending, leaving him screaming as the pain lanced his skull, the shock wave sizzling down his spine until he curled, retching and gasping for air. Oblivion reaching with tentacles to claim him.

“James!” Katherine’s shout followed him down into a great tunnel, her hands holding him together lest he break into a million pieces. Her beautiful golden eyes shimmering against the encroaching dark.

A voice spoke to him from the spinning blackness.
You should have listened, Fey-blood. He has come for the disk.

*   *   *

Dream fast became nightmare.

Katherine struggled into her dress and boots. Gathered her coat back onto her shoulders. Blinked back tears at the destruction of James’s mage-spun chamber. It was as if the past few hours had not occurred. Their confessions erased as if they’d never been. A tenuous future unraveling like thread from a spool. She swallowed the panic swamping her limbs and curdling her insides. Fear would only kill her faster.

James lay on his side, one arm stretched toward the dying fire. She checked his pulse as she dragged a coat over him against the cold of the barren stone and icy puddles. He wasn’t dead. She had not lost the two men she loved the most on the same day.

“I know you are within, mademoiselle. Bring me Lord Duncallan’s disk.”

Monsieur d’Espe? The chevalier was behind this vicious attack? Were he and Cade working together? Or was there more going on than she and James had surmised? “Come and get it!” she shouted back, every ounce of false bravado strengthening her shaky voice.

“His Lordship is a stronger mage than I gave him credit for, though still weak in many ways. He has made it impossible for my physical form to cross the warded threshold, though even he could not keep out my magic.”

“Then unless your magic can take this disk from me, you’ll just have to leave empty-handed, because I’m not bringing you anything.”

A chuckle scraped knifelike along her bones. “I have your father. If you do not want to see him in pieces, you will do as you are told. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

Another familiar voice called over the wind. “Do as he says, Katherine. It’s not worth your life.”

“Father? Is that you?”

Hope arrowed through her and a great weight seemed to lift from her chest. Father still lived. Cade had lied about his murder. She caught back a swift breath, her relief tempered by fear. Father lived, but for how long unless she turned over the disk to d’Espe?

“Mademoiselle Lacey? Are you prepared to let your father die over a little piece of metal? I had not thought you so coldhearted.” D’Espe’s question oozed against her skin, making her shiver, and she knew what she must do.

“Don’t believe him. It’s a trick.” From behind her, James’s voice came threaded with weakness, his face blanched white as bone.

Her eyes darted from the darkness beyond the flickering light of the dying fire to James and back. “I can’t let my father die. I can’t turn my back on him when he needs me.”

James fought to stand, his back braced against the wall of the chamber as he pushed his legs into his breeches, every movement painful to watch, his jaw clamped, his teeth drawn back in a grimace of agony. “You can’t give him the disk. You can’t let him open the tomb. Not if he’s right. Not if it’s a source of Imnada power.”

“My patience wanes, mademoiselle,” d’Espe called, a steel edge to his velvet voice. “I know Duncallan carries the disk on him. Bring it to me. Now.”

She shook her head in anger and confusion. “I have to do as he says. I have to save my father if I can.”

James straightened, eyes grim. “And if d’Espe succeeds in harnessing that power for himself?”

“Give me the disk, James. Please.” She reached for the amulet, but he grabbed her wrists to hold her off. “He has my father.”

“You don’t know that for certain. He could be bluffing.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You might be willing to take that chance with my father’s life, but I’m not.”

He released her as if she’d burned him, his face painfully devoid of expression. Before he recovered, she grabbed for the disk at his neck, ducking under his guard to shove him hard against the wall. He stumbled, his skull smashing against the rough stone blocks with a sickening
thunk
. His knees buckled, and he slid unconscious to the floor.

Stomach rolling, hands shaking, Katherine yanked the chain free, her fingers closing around the smooth edges of the disk. Anger simmered just below her skin. Did James’s resentment run so deep, he could allow her father to be killed without a second thought? Could this be the real reason he’d come to Wales—not to assist her father, but to punish him? A tightness in her chest and an ache in her throat brought on a fit of quick gasping sobs. Had she completely misjudged James? Had desire blinded her to his bitterness and his selfish cowardice? Had she just made the third biggest mistake of her life?

Forcing her mind and her gaze from James’s slumped body, Katherine walked out into the snow with head held high and shoulders squared.

Ten paces away stood two shadowy figures, unmoving but for the flapping of a coat and the flicker of a shuttered lamp in the steady wind.

“Father?” she called.

“I’m here, Katherine. It’s all right.”

“Bring me the disk, mademoiselle.” Malice infused the chevalier’s deep voice, chilling her already frozen body. “Once I have it in my possession, you may have your father. We’ll all gain what we most desire.”

Do not give it to him.

A new voice pounded against her skull. Insistent. Angry. A shadow moved at the corners of her eyes. Black on black. She turned her head but saw nothing beyond the trailing mist, the dense trees, and the cliffs rising above.

The
Gylferion
are not yours to bestow nor his to accept. They belong to the Imnada.

There it was again. Pain cramped her neck, burrowed into her shoulders as the voice beat against her brain like a hammer upon an anvil. It became an effort to put one foot in front of the other. From dim shapes, the tall, lanky frame of the chevalier d’Espe and the more rotund form of her father materialized like spirits out of the gloom.

“Where is Duncallan?” d’Espe barked.

She clenched her jaw, allowing no hint of her lie to penetrate her expression. “Your magic weakened him. When he tried to stop me, I killed him.”

If the chevalier’s words grated against her ears, his smile froze her blood. “The little bee has a sting on her. I would not have thought it.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it.” Her heart lodged in her throat, and she felt her father’s questioning stare drill into her. Hating herself, she extended her arm, the disk lying flat upon her palm. “Is this what you wanted?”

As d’Espe reached for the silver disk, darkness took form, sliding through the trees, gliding like a phantom over the snow. Yellow eyes burning in the night.

We want what is ours.

An enormous shape crashed from the trees, jaws gaping on an unearthly snarl.

The nightwalkers. The Imnada. They were real. They had come.

*   *   *

James came to with a groan and a pain in his skull that radiated all the way down his spine. The room above him spun like a top, and the slightest movement churned his guts. “Katherine?” His shout ricocheted against his fried brain until he wanted to retch.

No answer.

He fumbled for the amulet, but he knew already the disk would be gone. She had stolen it.

Bracing himself against the wall, he ignored the pain in his head and the cramping of his bowels and staggered out of the ruin after her.

The snow had stopped falling and the wind had died. Broken clouds drifted across a midnight sky, and an enormous full moon shed light over the blanket of white with the brightness of a million candles. No sign of Katherine or d’Espe, but ten paces away a man in an enormous coat and muffler bent over a body in the snow.
Fucking hell! Katherine!

Mage energy flowed from the man’s hands into the body, a river of twining, flowing color and light. Blue to indigo to scarlet to citrine.

An agonized scream ripped the night, the body convulsing as the magic penetrated.

“You’re killing her!” James shouted.

The man tore his hands from the body, the magic winking out, leaving the night darker, the stench of charred flesh hovering like smoke in the air.

James’s bowels turned to water, fear closing like a fist around his heart as his faltering steps propelled him through the deep snow. “Katie love!”

The man turned, revealing a shock of white hair, moonlight glinting off his spectacles. “Duncallan!” the man called. “You’re alive, boy.”

James plowed to a stop, his lungs on fire. “What’s happened? Is Katherine all right?”

“Katherine’s with d’Espe. He took her with him to the obelisk as insurance.”

“Then who—”

The moon chose this moment to slide free of a wispy cloud, picking out the waxen features and bloodied body of Cade.