by Nora Roberts
He draped an arm over the back of her seat in a casual move. “In some games, both sides are the winner.”
“Maybe. Mostly when I fight, I’m not playing around.”
“Play balances out the fighting, don’t you think? And our tournaments, well, they’ll have served as a kind of preparation for what’s to come. There are many men in Geall, and some women besides, who have a good hand with a sword or a lance. If the war goes there, as we’re told it will, we’ll have an army to meet these things.”
“We’ll need it.”
“What do you do? Glenna says that women must work for a living here. Or that most do. Are you paid in coin to hunt demons?”
“No.” He wasn’t touching her, and she couldn’t say he was putting moves on her. But she felt as if he were. “It’s not the way it works. There’s some family money. I mean we’re not rolling in it or anything, but there’s a cushion. We own pubs. Chicago, New York, Boston. Like that.”
“Pubs, is it? I like a good pub.”
“Who doesn’t? Anyway, I do some waitressing. And some personal training.”
His brows knit. “Training? For battle?”
“Not really. It’s more for health and vanity. Ah, helping people get in shape, lose weight, tone up. I don’t need a lot of money, so it works out okay. Gives me some room, too, to take off when I need to.”
She glanced over. Moira was staring out the side window like a woman in a dream. In the front, Hoyt and Glenna continued to talk magic. Blair leaned closer to Larkin, lowered her voice.
“Look, maybe our magical lovebirds can pull this transportation bit off, maybe not. If they can’t, you’re going to have to handle your cousin.”
“I don’t handle Moira.”
“Sure you do. If we’ve got a shot at executing a little cave-in, or firing up those caves, we have to take it.”
Their faces were close now, their voices down to whispers. “And the people inside? We burn them alive, or bury them the same way? She won’t accept it. Neither can I.”
“Do you know what torment they’re in now?”
“It’s not of our doing.”
“Caged and tortured.” She kept her eyes on his, and her voice was low and empty. “Forced to watch when one of them’s dragged out of the cage, and fed on. Terrified, or well beyond that while they wonder if they’ll be next. Maybe hoping they will just so it ends.”
There was no playfulness now, in his face, in his tone. “I know what they do.”
“You think you know. Maybe they don’t drain them, not the first time. Maybe not the second. They just toss them back in the cage. It burns, the bite. If you live through it, it burns. Flesh, blood, bone, a reminder of the impossible pain when those fangs sank into you.”
“How do you know?”
She turned her wrist over, so he could see the faint scar. “I was eighteen, pissed off about something and careless. In a cemetery up in Boston, waiting for one to rise. I went to school with the guy. Went to his funeral, and heard enough to know he’d been bitten. I had to find out if he’d been turned, so I went, and I waited.”
“He did this?” Larkin traced a finger over the scar.
“He had help. No way a fresh one would’ve managed it. But the one who sired him came back. Older, smarter, stronger. I made some mistakes, and he didn’t.”
“Why were you alone?”
“Hunting alone is what I do,” she reminded him. “But in this case, I was out to prove something to someone. Doesn’t matter, except that it made me careless. He didn’t bite me, the older one. He held me down while the other one crawled over toward me.”
“Wait. Can you tell me, is that the way of it with a sire? To provide…”
“Food?”
“Aye, that would be the word for it, wouldn’t it?”
It was a good question, she decided, good that he wanted to understand the phychology and pathology of the enemy. “Sometimes. Not always. Depends, I’d say, on why the sire chose to change instead of just drink. They can form attachments, or want a hunting partner. Even just want a younger one around to do the grunt work. You know, sort of work for them.”
“I see that. So the sire held you down so the younger could feed first.” And how terrifying, he thought, would that have been? To be restrained, probably injured. To be eighteen and alone, while something with a face you’d once known came for you.
“I could smell the grave on him, he was that fresh. He was too hungry to go for the throat, so he got me here. That was the mistake, for both of them. The pain woke me up. It’s unspeakable.”
She said nothing for a moment. It threw her off her stride, the way he laid his fingers on that scar now, as if to ease an old wound. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched her to comfort.
“Anyway. I got a hand on my cross, and I jabbed it right into that bastard’s eye, the one holding me down. Christ, did he scream. The other one’s so busy trying to eat, he doesn’t worry about anything else. He was an easy kill. They were both easy after that.”
“You were just a girl.”
“No. I was a demon hunter, and I was stupid.” She looked Larkin in the eye now, so he would see that comfort, sympathy couldn’t stand in front of sense and strategy. “If he’d gone for the throat, I’d be dead. Yeah, probably, I’d be dead and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I know what I felt when I saw that thing coming for me. In the good black suit his mother had picked out for him to be buried in. I know what those people inside those caves feel, at least I know a part of it. If they can’t be saved, death’s kinder than what’s waiting for them.”
He closed his hand over her wrist, completely covering the scar, surprising her with the gentleness of the touch. “Did you love the boy?”
“Yeah. Well, the way you do when you’re that age.” She’d almost forgotten that, nearly forgotten how sad she’d been, even through the pain. “All I could do for him was take him out, and take out the one who’d killed him.”
“It cost you more than this.” Larkin lifted her hand, brushed his lips over the scar. “More than the pain and the burn.”
She’d nearly forgotten, too, she realized, what it was like to have someone understand. “Maybe it did, but it taught me something important. You can’t save everyone.”
“That’s a sad lesson. Don’t you think, even when you know you can’t, you should try anyway?”
“That’s amateur talk. This isn’t a game or a contest. Somebody beats you in this, you die.”
“Well, Cian’s not here to dispute the matter, but would you want to live forever?”
She let out a short laugh. “Hell, no.”
There were others along that lonely stretch of cliff and sea. But not as many as Blair had expected. The views were amazing, but she supposed there were others, equally dramatic, and more easily accessible.
They parked, and took what weapons and tools they could most easily conceal. Someone might spot her sword in its back sheath under the long leather coat, Blair decided. But they’d have to be looking. And then, what were they going to do about it?
She studied the lay of the land, the road, the other cars parked along it. A middle-aged couple had climbed to some of the tabletop rocks at the base of the cliff, where it now met the road. Looking out to sea—and completely oblivious to the nightmare that lived below.
“Okay, so it’s over the seawall and down. Gonna get wet,” she concluded, looking down at the narrow strip of shale, then the teeth of the rocks where the water swirled and plumed. She glanced back at the others. “Can you handle this?”
As an answer, Larkin rolled over the wall. She started to shout at him to wait, to wait one damn minute, but he was already heading down the jagged drop that faced the sea.
He didn’t change into a lizard, she observed, but he could sure as hell climb like one. She had to give him A’s for balls and agility.
“Okay, Moira. Take it slow. If you slip, your cousin should break your fall.” As M
oira went over, Blair looked at Glenna.
“Never did any rock climbing,” Glenna muttered. “Never could figure out the damn point until now. So, I guess there’s always a first time.”
“You’ll be fine.” But Blair watched Moira’s progress, and was relieved she was proving nearly as agile as her cousin. “The drop’s not that bad from here. It won’t kill you.”
She didn’t add that bones would be broken. She didn’t have to. Hoyt and Glenna went over together, and Blair followed.
There were some reasonably good handholds, she discovered—as long as you weren’t worried about your manicure. She concentrated on getting the job done, ignored the cold spray as she worked her way down.
Hands gripped her waist, lifted her down the last couple of feet. “Thanks,” she told Larkin, “but I’ve got it.”
“A bit awkward with the sword.” He glanced up to the road, grinned. “Fun though.”
“Let’s keep the party moving. They probably have guards. Maybe some human servants—though it has to be tough keeping humans on tap if there’s as many vampires in there as you said.”
“I didn’t see anyone alive outside of cages,” Glenna told her, “not when we looked before.”
“This time it’s live and in person, so if they’ve got any, that’s who they’ll send out. Hoyt you’d better take point, since you know the area.”
“It’s different, you see it’s different than it was.” Some of what he was feeling leaked into his voice, the emotion and the sorrow. “Nature and man have done it. That road above us, and the wall, the tower with the light.”
Looking up, over, he saw his cliffs, the ledge that had saved his life when he’d fought with what Cian had become. Once, he thought, he’d stood up there and called the lightning as easily as a man calls his hound.
It had changed, he couldn’t deny it. But still, in the heart of it, it was his place. He made his way through the rocks, over them, through the spray. “There should be a cave here. And there’s nothing but…”
He laid his hands on the earth and rock. “This is not real. This is false.”
“Maybe you’re a little turned around,” Blair began.
“Wait.” Glenna made her way over to him, put her hands next to his. “A barrier.”
“Conjured,” Hoyt agreed, “to look and feel like the land, but it isn’t the land. This isn’t earth and rock. It’s illusion.”
“Can you break it down?” Larkin thumped a fist against the rock, testing.
“Hold on.” Frowning, Blair slicked back her damp hair. “She’s got enough mojo for this, or has someone in there with enough, we don’t know what else she has. This is smart.” Blair tested the wall herself. “Really smart. Nobody gets in unless she wants them in. Nobody gets out unless she wants them out.”
“So we just walk away?” Larkin demanded.
“I didn’t say that.”
“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
