Queen of Skye and Shadow complete box set : Queen of Skye and Shadow Omnibus books 1-3

by Thea Atkinson

  I could have sworn my voice would tremble when I spoke, but it was clear and strong.

  "Your men have been arrested for their crimes. You've already been judged."

  I lifted Excalibur above his chest, much as he'd done to me. I expected the magics to send me pain and fear and I was ready for that. A woman should ache for the thing she puts down. She should wear that pain forever so she didn't take life lightly.

  But I felt no pain. The magics of Excalibur sent me something else. Something far worse.

  I felt his mental anguish. The catalyst emotions he'd buried for too long and that Excalibur dredged up from his past and fed to me.

  He ached for the death of the man. He ached for the loss of his mother.

  He grieved my betrayal.

  But those emotions he had smothered and buried and refused to exhume. They became an unknown driver for the deeds he perpetrated now, thinking he was doing them all in the name of some greater good.

  And that made me pause.

  Was I doing the same thing he was? Was I executing what I believed to be right without allowing compassion to lift its gaze at what I was doing?

  That was the magic of the blade, I realized. The cost the Lady of the Lake had mentioned. It could overtake me if I let it, or I could allow it to temper me and cushion the punishment.

  It had nearly undone me moments earlier. I knew I couldn't take his life. I was prepared for the guilt, I'd lived with it for years and found a way to bury it the way Hunter had.

  But I wasn't prepared for becoming everything about him that I loathed.

  I might have released him, spoken a few words of solace, but his jaw seesawed back and forth as he watched me. He knew my hesitation meant more to him than a few spare seconds before the blade plunged downward.

  He grabbed for his sword and rolled away. I watched him push up into a runner's lunge and head for the door with a heavy sadness weighing my shoulders. Through the empty doorframe, I saw Lance and Gal and Myste and Sadie holding his men corralled with ropes in a group. Lance might have taken a run at Hunter, but his prisoner started to fight and he needed to be subdued.

  Hunter took the opportunity and was gone in moments.

  It didn't matter. He was gone. I was alive. The kids were alive.

  For the first time, I felt Excalibur's weight in my hand.

  I had to put it down.

  And only when it was safely out of my grip did I collapse.

  -16-

  -16-

  I was alone in the schoolhouse and I wouldn't blame anyone if they left me there. In my mind, I'd risked everything that mattered to them in order to win. I'd taken a chance with the children of the town, with only the merest of beliefs that I could beat Hunter, and then I'd failed to do what needed to be done.

  I was on my knees when Lance reached me. Excalibur lay on the floor at my side. I thought I could hear it humming but that couldn't be right. I swung my head in its direction, numbly scanning the surface of its metal. Was that a glint of sunlight winking at me or the pull of magic inward to its molecules?

  I felt bereft without it in my grip, but I also felt relieved. It had shown me things I would never want to see again. I didn't want to feel the things it sent coursing through me.

  I understood things about Hunter Wolfe that even he wouldn't let surface. His life had been one of passion and obsession, driven by wounds he cauterized with denial. I'd seen most of it through the magic of the blade and it laid bare a vulnerable spirit that cracked under its burden. I'd seen him kill and rape and steal as he tried to plug the dam. I'd seen him murder the sorcerer who had spelled his blade because he didn't want to risk him undoing the magic.

  Something told me that the energetic blood coating the blade had used the worst of Hunter's qualities to attack me even as Hunter assaulted me with his skills.

  The magic man had been powerful, but his power had come from a sense of purity. He'd not expected the man he helped in the hopes of doing good to turn on him. I'd felt betrayal acutely in the blood that coated the grip of Excalibur.

  The Blood Blade carried all his residual magics and they were terrifying because there was no longer compassion to temper the power. Excalibur had met its magic, drawn some of it from the blade; yes, but hadn't overcome it.

  I didn't think Excalibur couldn't overcome the Blood Blade. Rather, I thought that final choice had been left to me. Had I decided to ignore the pity I felt, had it sensed a lack of mercy within, I was sure Excalibur would have done its work.

  But what might I have ended up as, had I taken Hunter's life out of vengeance when he was helpless.

  It was only when Lance spoke that I realized he had lain his hand on my shoulder. I had to blink a few times to clear the muted film that seemed to gum up my vision. My brain was still squirreling over itself as it tried to work out everything that had happened.

  "Skye," he said, stooping to catch my eye. "What happened?"

  "Are the children OK?" I said, thinking for a second that someone hadn't got out. Was it the small one who couldn't hold her water, who made my survival possible?

  I aimed a quick check at the puddle on the floor. "The girl. Is she alright? Tell me she got out."

  "Everyone is fine," he said, taking a step toward me. "At least as fine as they can be. It's you I'm worried about."

  I lifted my gaze to his face and my heart lurched at the concern in his features. I fell sideways onto my palm.

  "Me?"

  A short chuckle escaped him. "Of course you," he said.

  I found myself shaking my head, trying to position this strange new information into the miasma of data swirling around in my mind. This was the most puzzling of them all.

  "Why?"

  He swallowed as though he was trying to decide upon something and was sorting through the words on his tongue to find the right one.

  "Why was I worried about you?" he finally said. "The better question is why wouldn't I be? Skye. Why wouldn't someone care about you?"

  His voice was entirely too soft. It sounded far too intimate. His expression clouded with what I thought might be pity as he reached for me. I panicked, thinking he planned to pull me into an embrace.

  I didn't deserve comfort and I didn't want his pity.

  I scrambled backward before he could touch me.

  "You are one amazing woman," he said but it didn't sound like a compliment. Instead he sighed heavily as he let his arms drop to his side.

  My knees were up to my chin and I had to roll over onto them to get to my feet. I left my back to him as I stooped to retrieve Excalibur. It was no longer humming. The metal was cold-looking and lifeless.

  I expected to feel the cold and viscous energy that had coated it earlier, but the handle was just leathery. A bit frayed. Cold. I imagined it sinking beneath the waters again in the mega mall, the Lady of the Lake croaking a farewell.

  I shook the image free and squared my shoulders, bracing for what he might say when I spun around.

  I held my breath as I faced him.

  His eyes searched my face. They lingered on my mouth for several seconds, so long that I expected he wanted me to say something so I answered.

  "If by amazing you mean stupid, then yeah. I guess so," I said.

  "Amazing," he said again, this time with a shake of his head. "Amazing as in frustrating, brave, brilliant."

  "Don't say that," I said, backing away.

  The sword felt light. It rasped against a desk because I needed to put my fingers down on something for balance, and I'd forgotten it was there in my grip.

  "What are you scowling for?" he said. "It's true. All of it. You did it," he said. "It worked brilliantly. Exactly like you said it would."

  He lay one palm against the other and rubbed them, tangling fingers in and around each other as he massaged the surface.

  "I don't think my skin will feel the same for days after Marlin juiced me, though, but it worked. We touched them, each weapon one by one, and they couldn't be h
eld. The Skulls had to drop them."

  He took another step toward me, advancing the way Hunter had, except this time with excitement. The look on his face was bald and clear. Happiness. Elation. Something else that I'd never seen before but it had the faint echo of the men who murdered my mother.

  I held up my hand to ward him off.

  "Skye," he pleaded. "Enjoy it. It's wonderful."

  "It's disconcerting," I said.

  I'd made sure Marlin gave as much energy as he could to each of the ones I trusted. They in turn had been instructed by the street rats to find a way to touch the Ruby Skulls weapons. I knew they'd not be able to hold them, not with all that muster ringing through the metal and leather. It would burn the tanned hide to cinder and leave the metal white hot in their hands.

  "Dropped like hot stones," Lance said with a grin. "Dallas and his street rats took great pleasure helping us rope them up."

  Yes, that too, had been part of the plan. It was a hollow victory, knowing it had been for nothing in the end.

  I strode closer to the door, keeping my eye on Lance as I went.

  I peered through the doorway. Several of the Skulls glared at me. One lifted his tied hands and gave me the finger. His wrists were chafed red.

  "Where's Colton Musk?" I said.

  "Held," he said, striding to the other side of the door and leaning against the door jam. "Myste caught him trying to leave town. She made him resign his post. She even got his signature, although it's done in blood and written on the back page of an old book."

  He canted his head at me. "That's alright, isn't it? That she ordered that from him without your consent."

  I searched the crowds for Musk and found him sitting hog-tied on the dirt. He lay on his side, facing the school. He had a slash across his cheek that was dripping blood onto the dust.

  "You don't need my permission. It's your town."

  I felt his hand grapple for mine and he tugged on it gently when I tried to pull away. I thought at first he would kiss my fingers like an old world gentleman, but instead he pressed the back of my fingers against his forehead.

  My throat ached at his touch.

  "It's your town," he said. "We all agreed. We took a vote right in the street."

  He pulled my hands down to our waists. He held my fingers tightly as though he expected me to yank them away again. I found I couldn't. All I could do was fight the urge to step into an embrace or pull him into one. I so needed it in that moment and I so wanted it to be him.

  "You want me to stay?" I said, hating the sound of uncertainty in my voice.

  "We want you to lead us," he said.

  I laughed out loud and braced my back against the doorframe. It was a nice thing to say, one that made me feel warm inside. The feeling of acceptance was painful because I knew it was an illusion at best. A dream.

  "I'm not capable of leading. I'm a mercenary. A guard. A lackey. I let Hunter go. "

  He tucked my hand onto the one holding Excalibur and met my gaze with his.

  "That's exactly what a leader would do," he said.

  "Let someone escape?" I scoffed. "You've been breathing in too much smoke from your forge."

  He let go my hands and I took that as a signal that he was done being near me. The knowledge that I couldn't be what they needed, what he needed, was no doubt dawning on him.

  I started to move away, but he held me back, capturing my chin in his fingers. He lifted my face to his gaze. His eyes were black, I realized, just like the coal he fueled his forge with.

  "Skye," he said. "A real leader would question things. Their decisions, their power, their skills. In the wild, alphas don't lead the pack, they follow it to keep it safe, to spot the dangers. You did what was right. No one will question that. What they will question is if you execute your decisions alone and without mercy. That you let Hunter go, proves you can see all sides of a life, not just the bad."

  "But he'll be back," I said.

  "And we'll be ready."

  "Will we? Hunter Wolfe does not concede and he has the power of his Ruby Skulls to back him."

  He pulled me gently into an embrace, testing my resistance first, and when I found I had none in me, he enveloped me with his arms. They were thick and powerful and they made me feel safe. I hadn't felt safe because of another human being in a decade or more.

  "Who said you were alone?" he murmured over my head. "You've got all of us. You've got me."

  I relaxed finally. I'd heard the words from The Lady of the Lake, and while I'd trusted her, I hadn't truly believed it till right then. It sounded divine, the thought that I could be welcomed and accepted, but more than that, it was heavenly to be part of something. A family.

  And that felt more powerful than any spelled sword, real or legendary.

  <<>>

  Sword of Truth

  -1-

  It was official; I had picked the absolute the worst place to bury a body. The ground was rocky and hard pan down to at least the two feet I'd already dug. The rocks were the size of my fist and as numerous as a clutch of spider's eggs. Several of them, actually. I was getting nowhere pretty damn fast.

  I'd stooped to pick up and toss aside so many rocks already that my back had begun to ache. The clay that enshrouded them made for tough work for the little garden spade I'd brought along for the task.

  Of course, I didn't know that when I'd begun to dig. The topsoil looked rich and fertile, sporting a crew cut of thick grass. Easy pickings, I'd thought. A few hours' work at best.

  But twenty minutes and a mere scraping of the top couple of inches revealed the truth, and now it was too late to stop. At least, too late to reclaim the time I'd invested, and since it was already past noon, I wasn't about to give up or risk the time it would take to abandon the site and find another.

  Call me stubborn like that.

  Besides, the victim wasn't too big anyway: a feral pig that I might have decided to roast with savory herbs over an open pit if it hadn't been torn into by something that didn't seem the least bit interested in its meat.

  Instead, it had dropped the shredded carcass on my doorstep sometime during the night. The stink of its rot woke me up just after dawn.

  To be honest, it took me a few hours to realize the pig had been dragged and left a few feet from my door at all. I'd assumed something had gone off in my larder and spent way too much time trying to hunt it down inside the house.

  Frustrated, I finally made a cup of wild mint tea and pushed open my door to take a breather on my step and suck in a draft of fresh air.

  That's when the stink really hit me. But I didn't need a sense of smell to locate the carcass because it confronted me as soon as I opened the door. It lay stretched across the flat stones of my ground level patio, gathering flies. Several rats scuttled from beneath its stomach into the bushes when they heard me curse and gag loud enough to make the last of them squeal in terror.

  I might not have bothered with burying the beast and left it to the rats and flies off somewhere in the woods if I hadn't heard a pack of wolves howling the night before. Dire wolves, no doubt, angry or lonely at the death of what must have been its alpha a few nights earlier.

  I'd given one second's thought to the beast that had attacked me those nights ago, and made the decision.

  I'd bury the damn pig far enough away that even if it got dug up, my own property wouldn't be at risk of invasion.

  I had no interest in attracting any more beasts.

  I leaned on my spade now with a heavy sigh and recalled the awful journey to this spot a couple hundred yards off from my property line, a place of deceptively spongy earth and moss and a grazing field of crab grass and buttercups.

  I'd been tired. I wanted done with it. The thing stank to high heaven.

  So I'd given in and dug, thinking it was as good a spot as any. Easy pickings, to be honest and I was feeling lazy after that hike with nothing in my stomach but mint tea.

  Now I wished I'd had just a few feet
more fortitude in me. A couple hundred yards didn't seem nearly far enough and the ground was stubborn.

  "Looks like cremation's the ticket for you, Mr. Porker," I said to the carcass that lay on the other side of the hole.

  It had drawn a second, moving skim of black wings and blue bodies. The hum of them made me nauseous.

  I kicked a rock toward the pig, lifting the swarm of flies to the air.

  I couldn't help grimacing in disgust.

  "Seriously," I said. "It would have been easier if you had any bacon worth saving."

  I stretched backward, arching the ache out of my spine before I stooped to grab a hoof, tugging it as I held my breath so that it would tumble into the hole I'd managed without too much of the oily and rancid smell coating my palate.

  The hole wouldn't be deep enough to fully bury and cover the body. It wasn't but two feet deep even if I'd spent a bucket of sweat and put what I figured was a week's worth of crimp in my back.

  I looked askance at the pile of earth and groaned. Since the hole wasn't big enough, there also wasn't nearly enough dirt to cover the creature when I dumped it in.

  "Too many damned rocks," I said, eyeing the inadequate amount of soil sitting next to the ridiculously large pile of stones.

  Maybe burial was a foolish idea. Maybe there was something smarter. Something less back-breaking.

  "What do you say to a warrior's funeral, Mr. Porker?"

  I huffed as I realized I'd have to hike back to my house to retrieve something to start a good, roaring fire with while it was still light enough to cremate it and have the fire burn back down again without the aromatic fats seducing every feral beast within a mile.

  I could make a cairn of the rocks, I supposed. It worked for the Celts, didn't it?

  Sure it did. I had books that said so.

  Maybe I just wanted to talk myself into it, but it took me far less time to cover the carcass over with the excavated stones than it did to dig everything up. It wasn't perfect by any stretch; I could see the hair on its snout through gaps in the rocks, but I figured it would work.