by Lisa Shearin
"Ma’am,” Vegard warned.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be good if he will. But if he’s looking for trouble, I will give it to him.”
“I’ve been ordered to sit on you, ma’am,” the Guardian told me. He didn’t sound very enthused about trying.
“I know.” I gave him my best evil grin, then turned back to watching Carnades and his merry minions.
They sat at one of the tables closest to the stage. Piaras had just finished his warm-up.
I tensed, but kept my seat. Me going to Piaras would just get him the wrong kind of attention. He would be performing a sleepsong, but this version wasn’t for a battlefield; it was for a nursery. If Taltek Balmorlan or anyone else in the theatre came to hear a weapon, they were going to be really disappointed. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t let everyone know that messing with Piaras would be a very bad idea.
“Vegard?”
“Ma’am?”
“I know all these Guardians are for me, but could you spare a few to discreetly, but obviously, arrange themselves at the base of the stage when Piaras is singing?”
The big Guardian was instantly beside me. “The boy’s in danger?”
“Not immediately, but someone here might be spellsinger shopping.”
Vegard knew exactly what I meant and growled something that summed up my thoughts perfectly. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you, Vegard.”
“Always my pleasure, ma’am.”
He went to Riston and they spoke quickly in lowered voices. Even I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I didn’t need to. Within half a minute, five fully armed and really good-sized Guardians had arranged themselves around the base of the stage, their broad backs to Piaras, their stony expressions toward the audience. Piaras looked out at me; his eyes widened briefly. I smiled and gave him an encouraging nod. Piaras didn’t know what was wrong, if anything, but he knew that me and the boys had it under control.
Piaras walked to the middle of the stage. He looked out and saw who was in the audience. He didn’t know any of them, but he couldn’t have liked that every eye was on him, anticipating his first note. Piaras closed his eyes and took a breath and let it out. It was shaky. Then he raised his head and resolutely fixed his gaze on the back of the theatre where there was no one staring at him.
Piaras sang without accompaniment. No instrument marred his voice’s pure, unadorned perfection. The words and tune were a soothing lullaby, but flowing beneath them was a depth of power most spellsingers could only dream of. The sleepsong was for a baby, not a battalion, but that didn’t matter. Piaras couldn’t hide his strength. And he had the rapt attention of everyone in the theatre. There had been talking during the other spellsingers’ practices. No one spoke now or even moved. Entirely too many people in that audience had just had their suspicions confirmed. Damn. I couldn’t see the faces of anyone at Carnades Silvanus’s table. But I could see some of the goblins, and I didn’t like the looks Piaras was getting. To them the Guardians were just furniture to be pushed aside or ignored, and Piaras a treat to be taken and enjoyed. In that moment, I understood why Carnades hated goblins.
I didn’t hate goblins, but I could have a momentary change of heart for that bunch.
Piaras finished his song to thunderous applause. One of the goblins gave him a standing ovation. He had the high cheekbones and handsome, angled features of a pure, old-blood goblin. His black eyes were bright as he shouted, “Bravo!”
The bastard.
Piaras left the stage and stopped to confer with Ronan. Two of the Guardians moved closer to him, blocking anyone from access. No one tried. I had to hand it to Mychael’s men—they had the bodyguard thing down pat.
I felt a presence brush my skin like fingertips. I sat perfectly still.
It was Tam.
I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t need to. I could feel him just fine.
“Raine, you shouldn’t be here.”
I gasped at the sudden intimate contact. Tam’s voice brushed against my mind like dark silk.
Vegard looked at me, and I quickly coughed.
“Dry throat,” I rasped at his concerned expression.
Tam and I had spoken mind-to-mind before. Many times.
“Mychael didn’t want me here, either,” I said. “You know I never do as told. Especially when I haven’t been given a good reason. Now what the hell is going on?”
I slouched in my chair. Keep it casual, Raine. I wanted answers from Tam; I didn’t want to tip off Vegard. I turned my head toward the stage as if the human kid up there now running through scales was simply fascinating. My eyes flicked up to the right of the stage, then up to the first dining suite.
There he was. The dining suites were dark and Tam blended in perfectly. My elven eyes could just see him, his beautiful, silvery face silhouetted against the shadows. Vegard was human and if he looked at the suite, he would only see the shadows.
I had promised Mychael I wasn’t going anywhere near Tam. I could keep my promise and talk to Tam at the same time. And I could stay safe while doing it.
“Trust your instincts, Raine. You are not safe here. You’re being watched.”
I kept my face neutral. “By who?”
Tam met my question with silence.
“What have the Khrynsani got on you?”
No response.
“You can’t tell me—or won’t?”
I saw Mychael on the opposite side of the theatre conferring with some newly arrived blue-robed mages. He stopped and looked at me. I gave him a little smile and a wave—and held my breath. He shouldn’t be able to sense me mindspeaking to Tam. If he could, he’d have been over here in an instant. Mychael held my gaze a moment longer, then turned back to the mages.
“The men in blue robes are Conclave shield weavers,” Tam told me. “They’re reinforcing the stage’s shields. Since these are Ronan’s best students, I can’t risk anyone being hurt.”
“Some risks are worth taking, Tam. I want to help you.”
“Sometimes you can risk hurting someone just standing close to them.”
“What happened in that alley won’t happen again. I won’t let it.”
Tam’s low laugh brushed against me like the softest fur. I shivered and gripped the chair’s armrests. Tam had never been able to do that before.
“Stop it.”
His laughter stopped. “Just a demonstration, Raine. What happened between us is still there. We’re not entirely separate anymore. Mychael knows this. Some things are beyondmortal control—and some things are impossible to resist.Like you. Please stay away from me.”
Don’t think about Tam. Don’t think about what we did, or what I’d like to be doing again right now. Eternal damnation versus amazing sex. Close, but no contest. Amazing sex didn’t last nearly long enough—damnation lasted an eternity. That tossed a bucket of ice water on my lust.
“What have the Khrynsani got on you?”
Silence. “It’s complicated,” he finally said.
“With you it always is,” I muttered. “I’m a bright girl, Tam. I can handle complicated. You’d be surprised at the knots I can untangle. You made a bargain, but you didn’t keep it. Then you killed the person you made the bargain with. In my family that makes any and all deals null and void. How does it work in your family?”
“You saw last night how it works in my family.” His voice in my head was tight with repressed rage.
“The Khrynsani aren’t your family.” I stopped, thought, and concluded in the span of two seconds.
Oh hell.
The Khrynsani worked for Tam’s family. The Mal’-Salins.
I just sat there. A Khrynsani shaman could have popped out of the floor right next to me and I don’t think I would have batted an eye.
Things fell into place for me and it wasn’t pretty.
The Khrynsani wanted me, which meant the Mal’Salins wanted me. Their lawyers were taking the legal road. Their shamans were going for dark a
lleys—and Tam. You didn’t get to pick either your enemies or your family, and both were just as likely to stick a dagger in your back.
Tam’s presence in my mind vanished. My glance flicked back to the dining suite. He was gone.
Piaras appeared at my side and I damned near jumped out of my skin.
“You looked like you were concentrating on something. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“You didn’t disturb me, kid. You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s my fault; I wasn’t paying attention.” I was too busy realizing that Tam’s family had somehow roped him back into service, and had come close to lassoing me along with him.
I felt someone watching us. I had a feeling who the voyeur was, but I turned and looked to the front table anyway. Yep, it was Carnades. I was half tempted to stick my tongue out at him.
Piaras grinned sheepishly. “Well, how did I do?”
“Absolutely beautiful.” I didn’t mention the people in the audience who thought the same thing but wanted more. “If it hadn’t been for those stage shields, everybody out here would’ve been—”
I sucked in my breath and froze. Something was lightly brushing the skin between my breasts. I looked down. Nothing there except me and mine.
I stood as calmly as I could considering I was being groped by invisible fingers. I stepped back and the touching didn’t stop. I blew out my breath in short puffs and looked at Carnades’s table. He was turned away from me, talking to someone. It wasn’t him.
And it wasn’t Tam.
Piaras’s hand gripped my arm. “Raine, what is it?”
“Someone’s touching me.”
“I’m touching you.”
“It’s… not you.” My breath came in gasps. I couldn’t get any air.
Vegard was beside me. “Ma’am, what’s wrong?”
The fingers suddenly splayed, the tips pressing into my breasts, the palm pushing hard against the center of my chest. Power radiated inward from that invisible hand. Searching. Summoning.
The Saghred surged against the hand from inside of me. The pressure from both inside and out held my rib cage like a vise. I couldn’t breathe at all. Piaras’s face blurred and faded. I was going to pass out.
“Raine!” It was Vegard. I could see his face, but his voice sounded like he was yelling down a well. I dimly heard him call for Mychael.
With the pressure came a presence. Not just old. Ancient. Its weight crushed me, thickened the air that I couldn’t breathe. Filled my gasping mouth and nose with the sharp, coppery scent of blood. More blood than one body could hold, the blood of hundreds, thousands of screaming victims.
It was magic. Ancient and malignant. And evil. Gleefully evil.
Black flowers bloomed on the edge of my vision. The hand on my chest suddenly blazed into a white-hot brand, searing my flesh, burning through bone. My silent scream became one of the thousands as I fell into darkness.
Chapter 13
“It wasn’t Tam,” I said for the umpteenth time.
I could almost sit up in bed now. I was perfectly fine. Well, at least better.
Mychael wasn’t listening to me.
It didn’t help my case any that when I came around, I didn’t have the strength to get my head off the pillow. Hard to be defiant and have a decent argument when you couldn’t lift your own head. I was surprised to find that I didn’t have any burns. It felt like someone had hauled off and punched me in the center of the chest with a branding iron.
Apparently I was out cold all the way back from Sirens to the citadel. And judging from the cramp in my neck and the dark outside my window, I’d added a couple of hours of sleep on top of that. I felt better, still crappy, but better.
Once he determined that I could speak, Mychael had started in with the questioning. You’d think that air-deprived impressions and images wouldn’t stick around in your head all that long, but you’d be wrong. Like the phantom hand in the center of my chest, those images were seared into my mind. There was going to be no forgetting those anytime soon. By the next time I went to sleep, they’d probably have taken a place of honor in the parade of night-mares that made me go scream in the night.
I wondered how long I could go without sleep.
“All I know is that the Saghred responded to him,” I told Mychael wearily. “Big-time.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “Like Tam?”
“Nothing like Tam.”
Tam had been amazing; this had been amazingly painful and nearly deadly.
My tone must have implied my enjoyment of the former, because Mychael’s scowl deepened. Great. Jealousy was rearing its ugly head. Normally I’d feel flattered; now I knew it was only adding unwanted trouble to an already-too-long list.
“The Saghred just said hello to Tam,” I explained. “It greeted Mr. Fiery Fingers like a long-lost friend.”
I knew who it had to be. He was an ancient, powerful, bullying slaughterer who enjoyed his work way too much. I’d read all about him and his antics—in his own words and his own handwriting. All the blood, the thousands of screaming victims had been Saghred sacrifices.
“You’ve got a seriously unwanted guest on your island,” I told Mychael.
“I’ve got a lot of those right now.”
“This one makes Banan Ryce look like a choirboy.”
Mychael didn’t move. “Do you have a name?”
“Rudra Muralin.”
Mychael sat back in the chair he’d pulled beside my bed. He didn’t say anything for a while. “Are you certain?”
“I can’t imagine the Saghred reacting that way to anyone else. He kept it fed and happy. The rock was trying to rip me apart to get to him.”
Mychael knew what Rudra Muralin being here meant. I could see it in his eyes. The Khrynsani and the Nightshades had just been downgraded from dangerous to a mere nuisance.
Mychael had himself a big problem. Mine was catastrophic.
A thousand-year-old psychotic goblin teenage spellsinger wanted his rock back.
“Rudra Muralin was in Sirens,” I said. “It doesn’t tell us what the Khrynsani have on Tam, but it might go a long way toward explaining why he had to act like he was going along. And it would also explain why he didn’t want me there.”
Mychael’s lips quirked in a sardonic grin. “Tam can be a wise man sometimes.”
I pressed my lips into a thin line. “So what did the fount of wisdom have to say for himself?”
“Probably nothing more than what he told you.”
I blinked. “You were eavesdropping.”
“I was doing my job.”
“I thought your job was to keep us apart.”
“My job is to keep what happened in that alley from happening again. Tam was less than forthcoming with me. I thought he might tell you things that he’d kept hidden from me.”
“So you struck out?”
“What he told me, I already knew. When he discovered that the Khrynsani were going to kidnap one of his employees, he and some of his men went to retrieve the boy.”
I nodded. “That matches the story the kid told me. Either it’s the truth, or Tam told the kid what he was supposed to say if anyone asked. That adds another question. What do the Khrynsani want with a nightclub spellsinger? And then it just so happened that I was there while Tam was there, and Darshan the shaman was tickled to see us both. I take it Tam didn’t say why.”
“He refused to give details. I could have arrested him, but I know Tam and that wouldn’t have made him talk. Though if the Mal’Salins are threatening or coercing him, a containment room might be the safest place for him right now. And if the Khrynsani discover Tam killed one of their own with a death curse, he may wish that I had arrested him.”
I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You threatened to lock him up?”
“I never threaten; I merely told him what my duty as paladin required of me.”
“Sounds like a threat
to me.”
“I would have been entirely within my rights as paladin to take Tam into custody. I can’t trust him, but I can’t deny that he saved your life. I’m having him closely watched. No doubt, his reaction to the Saghred was as much a surprise to him as it was to you. I don’t think it was premeditated. The last time he saw you in Mermeia before we set sail, the Saghred was secure in its casket and wrapped in containment spells. At that time, those containments actually worked. There was no reaction then between the two of you and the Saghred.”
No, but there’d been plenty of reaction between Tam and me. Now there was a good-bye a girl could remember. I think I can safely say that I’d never been slammed against a mainmast and kissed quite like that before. Tam wanted to make sure I wouldn’t forget him. No chance of that.
Mychael hadn’t seen that farewell, and I wasn’t about to tell him. Especially now.
“The containments aren’t working so great anymore,” was what I said. Piaras’s song put the Saghred down for a light nap. It was snoozing just fine until it got a whiff of Tam’s magic. “I’m not surprised you couldn’t get Tam to admit to anything. Goblins are notorious for talking in circles. Tam’s elevated it to an art form. If he doesn’t want you to know something, trying to pry it out of him will just make you dizzy.” Tam’s answer to a question was very often another question. Not one of his more endearing qualities.
One thought kept popping into my head with annoying frequency.
“Mychael, has anyone actually tried to steal the Saghred?”
“No one.”
Mychael’s stony expression told me that fact confused and concerned him even more than it did me. He didn’t want anyone to steal the Saghred, but he expected someone to at least try. Apparently there were no takers—at least not yet.
“Maybe Piaras putting most of the Guardians to sleep actually was a trial run for a Khrynsani robbery attempt,” I ventured.
“Perhaps. But Piaras didn’t knock out all of my men. With the wards, spells, and guards I have down on the containment levels, no one can stroll in, pick up the Saghred, and walk out.” He paused. “The only treasure anyone has tried to take is you,” he said softly.
