Killian grunt-snickers.
“Nice,” he says, looking at my angry fist.
Roarke goes back to bandaging up his brother. A fresh bandage, I note, because there’s an older one sitting on the low table.
“What happened?” I ask, my gaze tracing over Killian, then Roarke, Seth, and finally landing on Pax.
“The wards on the arena don’t dissolve until the match is finished. Killian tried to get through the door before they were down,” Roarke says.
“And they burned the crap out of him?”
“Yep, that’s the point of them. There’s no running from a tournament,” Seth says.
“Why were you trying to get through the damned door, then?” I demand.
To which Killian just grunts.
“You’re crazy. That was crazy. Don’t do shit like that,” I say, but I don’t push that any further, because I’m really, really, grateful that they got through that door when they did.
“So how did you get through, then? Because I saw, I felt, you blow that door clean off.”
Seth actually chuckles at that.
“They didn’t know what hit them. We’ve never used our combined power in the arena before.”
“You did that explosion thing?”
“Blast,” Killian corrects.
Seth presses a hand to the small of my back and angles my direction toward the cold hearth. Toward where Pax is standing.
“We need to talk,” Pax says.
I sit on the edge of the stone, which is immediately uncomfortable. So, I lower myself to the slightly softer floor. Someone tosses a pillow my way, and I wedge it behind my back, trying not to wince.
A unanimous decision is made, without any consultation, and the two nearest lounges get picked up and moved over. Creating enough space on the floor for everyone to join me, in various positions of stretching out, or leaning back on the low coffee table or the glass of the window.
Killian sits. He’s favoring his arm, and he rests the thing in his lap much like I do with mine in the sling, but the serious expression on his face has nothing to do with his own pain.
“Some triunes that are around long enough have developed specialties,” Roarke begins, because knowledge is his thing. “Powers that they can use as a team. We spent decades together and developed a few specialties before the call drew us to the White Castle. We try to keep them to ourselves and we’ve never needed them in the arena before.”
He’s using his normal-person voice, not a tinge of allure to it, but the way it settles inside me makes me shimmy across the floor. I can’t quite label what’s motivating me. I’m not in terrible pain, but I’m not pain free either. It’s almost desire, but not lust. I stop trying to work it out.
He’s sitting half-cross-legged, his shoulder against the window and one arm behind himself for support.
Everyone stops for a moment, watching me. Seth even has his head cocked to one side, as I slip into Roarke’s arms.
He lets me, moving his arm out of the way and his legs to either side of me. Once I’m nestled with my left side against his chest, he wraps an arm around me. His fingers brush my hair back, and little white spots dance through my vision. Just little ones, not the mind-consuming-make-me-pass-out full effect of his power. Just enough to ease the ache.
Pax is looking over my head, his gaze locked on Roarke. He gives his brother a sharp nod, and I feel Roarke nod back.
“So you used your blast specialty to get through the door?” I ask, and I even sound more relaxed.
“No,” Seth says. “We used the blast to knock everybody on the sand unconscious, which ended the match and dropped the wards instantly. Apparently, our power is strong enough to go through the wards, though.”
“Which you guys didn’t know, because you’ve never tried it before.”
“We know what happened on the sand,” Pax says, waiting for me to look at him before continuing. Eye contact is a good fifty percent of the way these guys communicate. “What happened in that room?”
“They had a key.” I pause there as a wave of aggression rolls around the room. “Courtesy of Logan. They wanted to know why I, and you guys, exist – then they were going to end that existence.”
“What did you tell them?” Pax asked, and it dawns on me that this is the information he was after in the first place.
Not how they got in or what they did or even what they wanted – but what I told them.
A bubble of frustration floats up into my chest.
“What could I tell them?”
With all the punching and the kicking and the pain, I don’t even remember what my sigil-cursed mouth spilled out.
Roarke starts running his hand over my head, stroking my hair – patting me. The soft rhythm actually helps me focus, but I still can’t remember.
“Logan isn’t in the castle anymore. His triune was sent to their first trial straight from the arena. The dignitaries knew we’d come after them, and they didn’t wait to see our reaction,” Roarke says softly.
“But what about the others?”
“Gone,” Pax says.
“Gone?” My voice is a weak echo of his.
“Gone,” they all say, every single one of them, almost in complete unison, and I feel the syllables bounce around inside me with relief.
There’s a moment of silence, some kind of silent conversation unfolding in the room while I take a deep breath and let the fear of a repeat attack subside.
“Does she actually know anything?” Seth finally asks.
“Who knows what she knows? She has a habit of hearing things,” Pax says.
“I don’t think I said much. He hinted that he thought I couldn’t lie, which put all kinds of ideas in my head. I’m pretty sure everything I said was the same kind of crap I’m always saying.”
“But you can’t remember?” Pax asks.
When I shake my head, a very little shake of my slightly numb head, his gaze lifts to Roarke’s.
“She’s pretty beat up still, Pax,” Roarke says.
“But she trusts you now.”
“It’ll probably knock her unconscious again.”
I groan, interrupting their private conversation, because anything that involves trust with these guys also involves pain, or hard work, or hard work that leaves you in pain.
“I knew I shouldn’t trust you.”
I straighten away from Roarke and feel the throbs and aches return as he releases me. Seth reaches across, his hand sitting flat against my shoulder – pushing me back into his brother.
The pain isn’t instantly gone, Roarke clearly has to do something that involves white dots and sparkles filling my vision, and Roarke doesn’t move. Just sits like the backrest on a chair. Seth also doesn’t take his hand away.
“Just listen,” Pax says.
It’s pretty clear that we’re involved in a whole-body version of a staring contest.
And no, I’m not ready to just listen just yet.
“What would you all do right now if I tried to run?” I demand.
“You can’t,” Killian deadpans.
He’s taken a small knife from his boot and he’s twirling it, the blade making a hole in the rug.
“Not the point. What would you do if I tried?” I pose the question at all of them, but Seth’s specifically in my sights because he’s the one currently pressing me back into his brother’s chest.
“Let you?” he asks slowly, a hint of acknowledgment in his tone, because it’s a trick question, and he knows it.
“Then why are you holding me down?”
“Because I can,” he says, but he lets me go all the same, and I push myself up to the balls of my feet.
Half crouched, ready to get up.
“Because you need to listen,” Pax says, and the word need is laced with the bone deep tones of his alpha status.
It makes me pause and swallow hard. Unable to get to my feet. “You need to tell me what’s going on before I really freak-the-chuck out!”
My chest tightens, breathing becoming a little hard, and I start to calculate the ways in which I could get from here, to Pax, and punch him in the face, when the guy also pops from a sitting position into a crouch. The fingertips of one hand on the ground, supporting his weight, as he leans forward like a predator making a point.
Roarke’s arm snakes around my waist, then picks me up and pulls me back to press hard against his chest and practically sit in his lap. I can feel the tension coming off his muscles, but the more overwhelming power in the room is rolling off Pax.
His eyes begin to glow golden right where the color meets the pupil.
“We can’t wait any longer,” he says, the words mixing with the beginnings of a growl deep in his chest.
Roarke lowers his lips to my ear.
“You can trust him,” he says.
He could make me do whatever it is Pax wants. Pax could make me do it for that matter, if he goes complete Alpha on me. They could have in the stables when Seth ended up trying to kiss information out of me, but they didn’t, and since then I’ve managed to practically burn the skin off Killian’s arm because everyone wants to know something. Something to do with me and whether there’s more to us being stuck together than a potion gone bad.
I square my gaze off, looking at Pax with as much intensity as I can muster and then fake a bit more just for good measure.
“Let go of me.”
“If I do, there’s every chance he’s going to pounce on you,” Roarke says, pointing at predator-Pax, eyes glowing, hair darker than usual, and definitely in pouncing range.
But as he speaks, he relaxes his grip, him and Seth both giving me my space.
So I do the only not-sane thing a girl could possibly do.
I pounce on Pax, pushing aside the way the broken parts of my body sear with pain.
My initial thought is that maybe I can knock him over and knee him in the balls, but in mid-air I realize two things. That I bloody trust Pax, which is the absolute only reason I would have the guts to take him on. And that he’s way too agile for me to knock the man over.
His jaw tenses for half a second, then he moves. Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he twists, and pulls me down to the ground. I grunt as I hit, the dull pain in my head turning its volume up. He’s leaning over the top of me, one arm around my shoulders and pinned underneath me, the other supporting his weight.
“What did that achieve?” he asks, his tone heavy with the power still radiating from him.
“Nothing. I just wanted to see how you’d react.” His brow creases a little, but the glow in his eyes doesn’t dim so I add, “How you’d react if I attacked you.”
He growls. This Pax is not amused.
“You’re mortal with no weapons and not an ounce of solid muscle on you.”
Okay, so ‘attacked’ probably isn’t the best way to describe it.
“If I brought the argument into your territory,” I try again.
That sinks in, but his eyes don’t dull, they actually flare brighter.
“You wanted to see if the next thing on my list was to beat the information out of you,” he says, lowering his face.
He presses his forehead into mine like the contact is somehow calming him. I don’t need it to calm me. Yeah, I’m having a bit of trouble breathing, but somewhere in mid-air something shifted inside me.
“Pax,” Killian rumbles the warning, which makes me even more nervous about what’s going to happen next.
“You. Are. Pack,” Pax talks like each word has specific meaning. “You. Are. Mine.”
Suddenly he’s on his feet and he’s taking me with him. His arm moving to my waist. I’m still eye to eye with him – which means my feet are dangling in the air.
He turns and passes me into Roarke’s arms, and Roarke lowers me so I can stand. Which puts my back flush against Roarke’s chest, with his hands on my hips, and Pax so close to me that I might as well have my chest pressed to his too for all the gap he’s left. I have to tilt my head back to rest against Roarke’s shoulder so I can look up at Pax.
Killian and Seth are standing, filling the space we’d created by moving the lounges. I can feel their eyes boring into me, but I’m pretty sure I’m incapable of taking my attention away from Pax right now.
“Pax?” Killian asks.
“We’ll deal with that later,” Pax counters.
“Deal with what?” Seth asks.
“Later,” Pax snaps.
I lift my good arm to rest against his chest. I’m not even sure why because trying to make him move isn’t on my mind, but as he continues to talk, the deep rumble of his words vibrates through my fingers, and that could have something to do with it.
“I can make you answer questions you already know the answers to, but we need to know what you can’t remember. We need to know what happened to you when you were young,” he says.
“I can lure the memories out from deep within your mind.”
“And he can take away the pain of it,” Seth adds.
Killian makes a ‘she can handle it’ grumbling noise.
“What pain?” I demand.
“Pulling memories from someone’s subconscious isn’t comfortable,” Seth says, rubbing the back of his head like he’s speaking from experience.
The room is still, just breathing – which I’m super aware of with Roarke’s chest rising behind me and Pax’s in front of me.
After another breath I realize they’re all waiting. Just watching me and waiting. I guess that’s their form of asking for permission.
Permission to do what? Search through my mind with Roarke’s power to try and hunt down long lost information that I probably don’t have, because nothing of interest ever came through Lord Martin’s estate?
I feel like I need to swallow hard before answering, even though my throat isn’t dry.
“We need to understand your part in the destruction of our realm before we can understand how to save it, and how to protect you,” Pax says, hooking one finger under my chin. “Say yes.”
“Say please.”
“Please,” four voices echo.
“Yes.”
“Just listen to my voice then, Kitten,” Roarke says, each word getting heavier and heavier. Like silky tendrils of wine slipping into my consciousness and reaching back into parts of me I didn’t even know existed. “What is the very first sight you ever remember seeing?”
“The stone hearth in the kitchen when I was about three-years-old.”
“Anything before that?”
“Nothing.”
“Then let’s go right back, remember taking your first breaths,” he says.
I try to keep my eyes open, but there’s too much pressure in my mind. I close them and look for comfort in the darkness.
Pain stabs into me, not in my mind where I’d expected it to, but in my soul. I may have just gasped, or it could have been a whimper, I’m not sure.
My body is gone. My real one. My present day one.
Gone. Instead, I’m inside the tiny form of a newborn baby. No crying, no screaming, just a little wriggling as I look at the moving things in my new world.
A small hand – a baby, but not me. One with black hair, but equally as gray eyes. My own hand reaches out and our fingers touch, then I’m scooped up into one set of arms and she is scooped up into another.
“She needs to recover. I will take baby Ky for a wee walk. You’ll be alright with just one for a moment,” a young woman says.
“Tamma, don’t leave me with the baby,” the man calls.
Tamma, the woman leaving the room with the dark haired baby in her arms, chuckles.
“She’s yours to keep, Haryk. Might as well start now,” the woman says.
I can’t see much, but I think we’re inside, and I think sunshine is flooding the room.
“Remember it all,” Roarke says, and this time I scream.
Which throws me into another memory before I’ve had time to recount the first.
My legs buckle, and the only thing keeping me standing is Roarke. Someone else’s hands grip my waist just above Roarke’s and I feel a new surge of power spread through me. Pax’s power.
There’s moss underneath me, and by the feel of it, I’m pretty sure I’m naked. But where the moss doesn’t reach, the ground is paved in a patchwork of grays and browns. Water sings past my head. A dragonfly darts by, stopping for a second to investigate something near my toes. Tiny toes, and yes, I’m definitely naked.
“Are you sure? Are we trying to kill her?” a woman is asking.
“I’m not sure of anything anymore. Except that Raefiya sent this message. The child must go into the spring,” someone else says, another woman.
“What will it do to her? What do you know?”
“I’ve used this spring in my potions for eleven hundred years. This one is specifically good for separating things, locking things and stopping things and creating things, renewing them, growing them.”
“That’s both ends of the spectrum. It doesn’t sound very reliable. The variables are pretty big. I can’t tell if we’re killing her or saving her from something, and what if we’ve got the wrong baby?”
“She is, was, the only mortal to survive being taken as a Saber mate in thousands of years.” As the woman talks, she picks me up and without any fuss, puts me in the torrent of water. “And Haryk-Larsan was the only Origin left in existence. You, me, and Raefiya are the only ones who even know, plus there is no other baby born to those two. There’s no chance we have this wrong. Haryk brought us this babe, something Raefiya saw, something that happened, scared him to us to fulfill this prophecy. We can’t possibly think we know better than they do.”
The water itself is the perfect temperature, the surface it flows over is smooth and slippery and for a moment I move with it without any comprehension of the danger. Sliding off the edge of a small step before I am spun around. Two women with the straight white hair of the Silvari masters are watching me. Beyond them is a doorway built into the crumpling stone of a mountain side, the water spilling from inside.
I jolt over another step and sink. Air gone. No warning. Light fading as the current pulls me down.
Panic takes over my every instinct, and I inhale lungs full of water until the water is completely black and my body stops moving.
Shadows and Shade Box Set Page 30
