Turning it upon myself helped me see my own flaws and insufficiencies. It fed me images of its own past and it fed me its own weaknesses.
What if weaknesses could be turned to strength. My fear of failure might yet serve me.
"It's not enough," I said aloud and everyone turned their eyes to me, sharp and disappointed. "It's good. We'll do all those things, but we need more."
Marlin shuffled back and forth as though he was listening to one of his infernal songs on that player. I noted he avoided my eye.
"Use me as bait," I said.
-11-
I could see on Lance's face that he wasn't happy.
"You said damsels were too much work," I said. "Don't turn me into one."
His throat convulsed but he nodded slowly.
"What are you planning?"
"I need a Judas. Someone to take a message to Hunter that I'm leading the town to destruction, that my need for vengeance has blinded me. That someone needs to betray me and bring me out into the open where Hunter can finish me off."
No one looked pleased. No one volunteered to be that person.
"I won't be alone," I pressed. "I'll never be alone again and I know that and I'm grateful for it, but Hunter needs to think that I am."
I expected an argument, but all voices were silent. The only sound was the hum of the electricity in the chandelier above me. They were thinking, mulling over the possibilities. They wanted to believe I could fix this with Excalibur and a one-to-one battle.
"You won't be doing nothing. We still need the town protected. You'll still be facing his army, but I know him. He will want to finish things with me. All I need is one brave soul to betray me."
"Me," Lance said. "Betrayal carries a terrible weight. Best it's someone with broad shoulders."
I shook my head. "The town needs you here."
Chas cleared his throat and I noted he had lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. My throat ached as I took in the slightness of his form.
"I'll do it," he said.
"I promise to keep this between us," I said. "No one needs to think of you as a traitor. No one here will speak of it. Lance. Make sure everyone knows after this, how brave this act is."
"Tell them yourself," he said. "When it's over."
I smiled half-heartedly at him and waved Chas from the room. Best this thing get done immediately.
"Hunter won't come by himself," Marlin finally said, breaking the silence. "It won't be just Hunter you face. He'll have his sorcerer, all that dark blood magic."
I lifted my chin. "I'm counting on it."
We spent the next hour going over the details. Myste left to work on the node to get it back on line in the hopes of minimizing the electrical damage. and people were dispatched all over the town to spread the word to shut off the power were ever it had come to life.
They were instructed to pull out wires and sever them everywhere they found them. Dallas volunteered to marshal anyone who didn't want to remain in town to his caves like we'd planned. Townsfolk could stay in their cellars if they wanted or follow Dallas and his street rats into the caves outside of town to minimize the damage.
Only the fighters and the most visible of the townsfolk would remain so that Hunter and his spies wouldn't know anything was different. They would think they still had the upper hand when they came to town in force.
When they entered New Denver with the plan to attack as the power blew through the town, the nymphs and the fighters would remain in the town to defend it.
I would make my stand outside the town, close to the hills, just outside my grandmother's house.
It seemed fitting, actually. It was where I'd had to battle the first man who thought he could own me and pass judgment on how he thought my life should unfold. That man had taken something precious from me, but he'd paid for it in blood.
And so would Hunter Wolfe.
When the army came, it was in force. First the power surge came and then the men. And both of those were my cue to head out of town. I had to ignore the fighting around me. The screams and cries of those who got too close to a surge of electricity and magic as they blew. Balls of fire spread through the town as each spelled item turned back on its power given to it by the nymphs and slammed into buildings.
Probably the hardest thing I'd ever had to do was to walk away from that town with people I had come to care about would be fighting for their lives behind me. While all around them fires and magic and electricity surged and burst and burned them, knowing that next would come a horde of warriors that Hunter had amassed.
I had to trust I was doing the right thing. I had to trust that Lance and Gal and Dallas and Sadie and Myste could do their part. It was hard, yes, but that thing that was my greatest weakness, that made me feel inhuman, the ability to shut down all feelings in order to accomplish a task, I pulled that quality close to my breast. I saddled Gentry, and I plodded up the trail toward my grandmother's home, knowing Chas would have found a way to make his defection known. As instructed, he would tell Hunter I'd been told he was ambushed out at my grandmother's house as he'd gone to retrieve something for me. I'd race to his aid, only to be met by Hunter in an ambush I'd not expected.
The sound of fighting and crashing and noise behind me, of the chaos that wrapped this town in a shroud of energy, dissipated little by little as I raced along the trail toward home.
The back of my neck prickled the entire way. Excalibur stayed in my grasp, feeling weightless but filled with energy.
When I reached the yard, I jumped off Gentry's back and slapped his rump. If Hunter wasn't already there, he would soon arrive and I didn't want to risk Gentry's life should the sorcerer require his blood as well to fuel his magic.
I stood in front of the house, surveying the front. There were no man traps anywhere on the property anymore. Somewhere to my right about a hundred yards lay the feral pig that I'd buried. The compost heap out back would already be breaking down the gofer. The bear had been dragged off by dire wolves or coyotes, no doubt. It no longer hunkered down on my stone stoop. All that was left of it as evidence was a dark stain that flies flitted over and landed upon.
I had my own theories about the dead animals, one that I'd worked up in the late hours over the last night or so when I couldn't sleep. My grandmother had a cat once that would leave mice it had caught on her pillow. More than one morning, I'd woke to the sound of her shrieking as she found the vermin lying next to her face. It had been the cat's way, Gran explained, of showing her its prowess and of indicating exactly how much Gran needed the cat. In a way, Gran said, the cat was demonstrating just how badly a weak human needed the help.
If the hell hound was a primal, beastly predator, it no doubt shared some of the same urges.
At least, that's what I told myself as I approached the house.
From the edge of the property, my grandmother's homestead looked sedate and inviting. The whitewashed stone had grown gray with creeping moss and the sod roof had grown leggy with tall weeds. A breeze moved the tips of the fronds. They looked as though they were dancing in the air. The breeze smelled of wild roses.
All in all, a perfect place to die.
I sucked in a deep breath and headed across the lawn toward the front door. I had no intentions of going inside, I had told myself the last time I was here that I would not return and I meant it.
I'd said goodbye to everything in there that meant anything to me. I'd closed the door on the larder of the memory of that man who had assaulted me and taken the innocence of a child and turned it into something warped and hateful.
The threats he'd made as he pulled butcher items from the closet and laid them on the table in front of me that day, had been sufficiently frightening enough to make me shut down every small piece of feeling and emotion that crept into my awareness. I'd spent a lifetime smothering down the memories. I'd used my rage and sense of powerlessness to do unholy things later. But that day, he'd paid for his deeds with his life, and I'd pa
id for mine with a lifetime of solitude and distrust.
He was gone. Those memories were over. I'd used them already back in the mineshaft as Excalibur had fed them to me so that I could feel enough rage and hatred to dispatch half a dozen or more men who wanted to hurt me and the people I loved.
I had none of that within me now. All I had was the desire to finish this once and for all.
I strode to the middle of the yard and spun in a circle, surveying the woods around me. I remembered sitting at a table with Hunter, the first time I'd ever met him. He'd caught me executing my own sort of justice on the man I'd found beating his child.
I impressed him he'd said. He bade me come home with him, fed me. We sat across from each other at that table, drinking wine and breaking bread together. He told me of all the things he wanted to do. His dreams and hopes. He told me how he thought the world could be. And he'd said I could be part of it.
He'd been as much of a cult leader to me as Cliff Arnold had been to the Order of the Shadows. The difference was that the Shadows and Cliff had got it right.
We humans were hateful with technology. We used it to hurt one another and even when we used it for good, it robbed us of our character. It made us lazy and antisocial. Shadows were right to bring the EMP's back on-line to obliterate the power the world had fought to have returned. It had been a bloody war, then. And when Hunter Wolfe moved into that vacuum of power left and began to spread his message through the nation, I wanted to be part of it.
But it was true, absolute power corrupted absolutely.
I looked down at my hand still holding Excalibur. And I thought how magnificent the power was within it. I understood why the Lady of the Lake wanted it returned. She didn't give it to just anyone. It had its own guardian. I'd seen that vicious beast myself and stared down into its soulless eyes.
Such power couldn't be put in the hands of anyone who would be corrupted by it.
The biggest question now, was whether or not I could be corrupted?
Even Marlin had hinted that he'd been made to suffer for his abuses of power. That his powers were only returning gradually as he lived and died and re-animated. I wasn't sure what he'd done to endure this atonement, but it told me he wasn't above reproach.
The sword needed to return to its owner and Hunter needed to be stopped.
The sound of the door creaking open behind me was the signal that I wasn't alone. He'd been inside. Watching me.
I spun around to face him, clenching Excalibur in my fist.
"You're alone," Hunter said.
"I am," I said.
"You don't look surprised to see me."
I shrugged. "You put too much trust in people's willingness to betray each other."
He smirked. "So you knew about the betrayal? Instigated it, even. Clever Skye." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter."
I could see over his shoulder in the shadows of my ancestral home, the sorcerer awaited. He was a tall, thin man.
"So much for fighting with honor," I said, jerking my chin toward where the man stood in the shadows.
Hunter looked over his shoulder briefly and then back at me. "It's not as though you're fighting without enhancement," he said.
I pulled Excalibur to my chest, twisting it back and forth in the sunlight so that he could see it clearly.
"You know what this is?" I said.
He nodded. "I wasn't sure when we met before," he said. "But my man here tells me he knows what it is."
The sorcerer stepped into the light. His face was twisted and gnarled. Warts peppered his brow, and broken capillaries spotted his nose and cheeks. He had a swollen and bulbous look to his nose. His mouth drooped on one side.
But Hunter looked fresh as a daisy.
"He's mustering your life force, isn't he?" I said to the sorcerer.
The man said nothing but the look on his face told me I was right.
"You're willing to die for this man?"
Hunter took a step toward me. "Finding a sorcerer is a rarity these days," Hunter said. "Finding someone who's willing to sacrifice themselves to save someone they love is even more rare."
I didn't need for him to explain to me who the sorcerer was protecting. It might be a child, a son or daughter, it might be a mother or sister. It could even be a wife. Maybe even a lover. It didn't matter. Hunter was doing what he did best. He used people's weaknesses, things that might have been strengths in an ordinary lifetime, to his own ends.
"He doesn't look like he has much left in him," I said.
Hunter shrugged. "I don't need him much longer anyway."
He pulled his blade from behind his back and spread his legs wide in a fighter's stance.
I backed up into the grass. I wasn't going to soil my grandmother's floor with blood. He'd have to come at me in the grass.
Of course, he did. He advanced slowly, matching me step for step. The sorcerer followed him, chanting beneath his breath. I knew my sword would meet Hunter's strike for strike. It would know where to meet his blade and be where it needed to be to protect me.
It would feed me visions. I was prepared for it. I'd already endured Hunter's worst thoughts and memories.
I only lifted the sword in defense as he struck out. I used its protection to find my way onto the middle of the lawn, far enough from the house that not a single drop of blood would spray onto the lintel of the door, the stoop, or into the open door frame.
Hunter thrust. I met it. He swung in a circle, pivoting in the grass, gaining momentum and energy with the movement and using it to swing hard at me. The blades of grass laid down beneath his boots and dug into the earth.
Excalibur moved where it needed to be, spinning me with it. It was like dancing at the end of marionette strings. I let it move me without thinking, to meet each of Hunter's strikes.
And all along, Excalibur sang to me of memories, it fed me with possibilities. It showed me laughing children. And yet behind it all was the swirling shadow, soft furious and dark, shifting shapes now and then into a man, then again into a hound. I knew I was right. I knew that my one final thing I had to do was to smother down my fear. My own sense of self-preservation.
I sucked in a breath. I knew that with one swing Hunter's blade would cut into my torso. I swallowed down my fear. Shoving it all into a cupboard and closing the door.
I halted. Going perfectly still.
I'd not been honest with my knights. They thought I meant to fight Hunter.
I'd really come to die.
-12-
His blade entered my body with the feeling of pressure and no more, but it was enough pressure that it loosened my grip on Excalibur. I felt it drop from my grasp. Heard it thud to the earth. I watched it impale the ground and bury itself several inches. I thought I heard it strike rock.
The sorcerer stopped chanting.
Hunter's face went deadly white.
At first I thought I had hurt him somehow, but he rushed me when I collapsed.
He caught me before I fell.
"I'm so sorry, Skye," he said as he crouched over me.
He cradled my head in his hand as I slouched onto the grass. I flicked my gaze from where it was pinned to Excalibur's hilt to his face.
There was something compelling in his gaze. I could see him struggling with his own emotions. I couldn't sense them anymore for myself; Excalibur had fallen from my hand and I had lost the connection. Even so, I didn't need its magics to see he was conflicted. His eyes were bloodshot and his eyelids were red and swollen.
"It's your fault," he said. "You should never have left me. You could have been something. Now look what you've done. You're dead."
The fragrance of smoke wafted over his shoulder as he leaned closer. He laid my head on the ground, cupping the back of my neck in his beefy hand.
I tried to speak, but my tongue felt as though it had lost connection to my brain the way my hand had left Excalibur's grip. I tried to move my fingers, testing if I still had any path between brain and body or
if my spirit, such as it was, had already begun to wrestle its way out of its shell.
"I wanted more for you," he said.
"I know," I managed, but it came out as more of a sigh than any sort of articulate words.
He looked at me strangely. He might even have inspected the wound he'd delivered to my stomach. I thought I felt my clothes being peeled back, the soft pressure of fingers playing over skin, a bright, blistering pain that came and receded.
I winced at first, but then my skin went cold and the pain disappeared. To be honest, everything just sort of felt numb.
"It's an awful mess, Skye," he said with a furrowed brow as he heeled his free hand across his cheek. The movement left a smear of grime that trailed into his salt and pepper hairline.
I had the vague feeling I'd done something that would infuriate him, that he would not forgive me for. A chuckle escaped my lips, although I wasn't sure I could remember what was funny.
At the sound, his expression hardened and he laid his finger against my lips in pique not comfort.
He wasn't finished, apparently, and he wanted his say before I died and took that away from him.
"We'll raze the town," he said without emotion. "To show the others that no matter what, we won't suffer insurrection. We will have justice. We will have order. I will mourn you today for the sake of the daughter you were to me, but I will not think of you again."
He drilled into my gaze with his red-rimmed eyes.
"You understand?"
I nodded but had the feeling I didn't move a single muscle as my head lay cradled in his hand. Of course he wouldn't think of me again. It would hurt him too much. He'd feel pain and shame and he wouldn't risk that. No one understood it better than I did.
Not that it mattered.
He lifted his nose to the air, sniffing once, then dropping his gaze again to mine. He searched my face, no doubt looking for signs of my final breath. My breathing had grown ragged. I knew the signs. He did too.
His gaze trailed away, surveying the grass around us. When his head canted to the side, I knew a thought had occurred to him, one he hadn't given space to before.
Queen of Skye and Shadow complete box set : Queen of Skye and Shadow Omnibus books 1-3 Page 31
