Draycott Everlasting: Christmas KnightMoonrise

by Christina Skye

  And how she had emerged, flushed and disheveled, two hours later. Navarre’s servant had heard her words of love with his own ears, then waited to see the Lord of Draycott emerge only five minutes later.

  The pain of Navarre’s shattered hand was nothing next to the torture of betrayal.

  He struggled to his feet, cursing his friends, his life and all that he had ever loved. In his rage he had swept through the enemy ranks like an evil storm, cutting down dozens until a Mamluk sword had knocked him from his horse. Then had come the blows, the agony.

  In the wild rush for the city walls, he had been forgotten, left for dead. And though he would have preferred death, Navarre found himself alive.

  Doubled with pain.

  Crippled with the loss of his beloved and his friend.

  “Take me, if you dare.” He raised one shattered hand in defiance. “And if you dare not, I swear to hunt Draycott down and make him taste my steel. A curse on him and a curse on the stones of the abbey he loves so well. May they all fall to darkness.” His voice broke. “And may I fall also.”

  The sands did not answer as Navarre took a clumsy step, nearly swept unconscious from the pain. In the far distance he saw the hot orange fires where the city burned. How many had gotten away, he wondered, safe aboard ships bound for Cyprus or Tyre?

  He cursed them all, along with this desert where he staggered. Pain walked beside him. Revenge burrowed into his heart.

  And somehow Navarre sensed he was no longer alone. Something else stirred in the desert night, barely visible. He heard a low chattering and the click of sharp claws.

  “You ask to be taken,” the desert whispered. “You dare us. Puny human fool.”

  And then Navarre saw the darkness open, billowing wide. As a vast hole formed, it reached for him, greedy and relentless, swallowing his growl of surprise….

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sussex, England

  Present day

  One hour past solstice

  A BIRD CRIED IN THE high wood.

  The night seemed to press down, fearfully cold.

  Curled up in a wing chair beside a long oak table, Sara Nightingale twisted, her body shaking in the clutches of a dream. Branches tapped at the window. Loneliness was a taste that clotted on the tongue.

  She shot up, fully awake, shivering in the sudden silence. Something too dark to be a dream tugged at her memory, daring her to remember.

  To remember what? she thought, rubbing grainy eyes. She had had enough restless nights since her arrival in this ancient house to make her swear off caffeine forever. Everything about Draycott Abbey seemed to stir memories, history beckoning from every room. And Sara could never say no to history.

  Pulling on her sweater, she stared at the papers neatly spread over the polished mahogany table. Draycott’s library was richer than any she had visited, and she had worked in all the great libraries of Europe and the U.S. during her professional career. On the shelves around her hundreds of fragile volumes and manuscripts held the wealth of Europe’s history.

  The pages before her were direct from the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, one small part of the abbey’s priceless collection. But she hadn’t come to savor the Italian masters. A decorated FBI forensics expert, Sara Nightingale had come to locate a priceless vellum map and a captain’s scribbled logbook. The discovery would help her government pinpoint a missing treasure before it fell into the hands of those with hostile intent.

  In a turbulent world, money would always be used to fund weapons of destruction and the forces of hate.

  Sara stifled a yawn, trying to remember when she had last eaten. Six hours? Ten?

  The great English house creaked, settling around her in that living way of all old places. Right now she was the abbey’s only guest, while the viscount and his family traveled in the Far East.

  But in reality, she was no guest. Her weapons were the rare documents arranged over the table. But the right document eluded her.

  Her hand opened on the polished wood, worn beneath centuries of hands. Sometimes at night Sara sensed old secrets in shadowed corners, restless images always at the corner of her eye.

  The history of this house touched something inside her, reaching through time in a way that felt odd.

  Familiar, almost.

  The very idea made the Washington law enforcement agent inside her scoff. This was her first trip to southern England and her first encounter with Draycott Abbey. Until two weeks earlier, she’d never heard of this great English estate.

  But another part of Sara’s mind reached out to sift the shadows, searching for the reason the walls felt familiar, and why she seemed able to find her way without once consulting any floor plan.

  Closing her eyes, she leaned back, a hand pressed to the paneled wall. Her fingers curved, tracing the outline of what she knew—knew without opening her eyes—was the soft wing of a smiling cherub worked in gilt and Italian plaster.

  She opened her eyes. The cherub smiled back at her.

  Her hand clenched. A dozen times in the past week the same thing had happened. There was no possible explanation except that stress and jet lag had fueled her imagination.

  Nothing else was logical.

  Sara Nightingale didn’t believe in coincidence or prescience. She was a seasoned professional with a focused, analytical mind. She did not believe in haunted houses or any other sort of hocus-pocus. There was a practical explanation for her sense of familiarity with Draycott Abbey, and eventually she would find it.

  But right now her government assignment came first.

  During a mission to Hong Kong three years earlier, Sara had located a thirteenth-century manuscript describing the route of a family of Europeans returning from the court of Kublai Khan.

  The family had been called Polo.

  Sara knew well that scholars had begun to question whether Marco Polo had really existed and whether he had truly visited the Mongol court. But she had found a set of captain’s logs in a private maritime archive in Madrid. The journals provided ironclad evidence that Marco Polo had duly been escorted back to the West as a passenger, reaching Venice in the winter of 1295. The baggage of the travelers was said to hold a fortune in jewels, the gift of the great Khan for the Venetian family’s work over two decades in China.

  The captain’s logbook, documenting the last segment of the journey, indicated that the Polos had vanished for three days while the ship made repairs somewhere along the thousand islands of the Dalmation Coast.

  Sara’s job was to discover where the travelers had vanished. She had her suspicions that they had gone ashore to hide part of their wealth, probably carried as jewels and gold. The most logical spot would have been an island in the north of the Dalmation Sea where the family had holdings.

  Her search had focused there.

  Sara had been awed by the meticulous maps in Lord Draycott’s family collection. An avid historian and art collector, the viscount had given her free rein with the collection, as well as his own research on a set of rare thirteenth-century maps overwritten by drawings and notes.

  Fighting the distraction of the beautiful view from the abbey’s leaded windows. Sara rubbed her cramped shoulders. Before her was a bill of lading and a faded map. As sleep dug at her eyes, she stood up and stretched awkwardly.

  Pain shot through her neck. She had a sudden, agonizing impression of being locked in a small space, feeling her muscles knot as she tried vainly to escape. Darkness. Stifling heat.

  Sara dragged in a breath, forcing down her panic.

  Just another bad dream. She had had too many of them in the past few months.

  Squaring her shoulders, she poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, stretched her legs and went to stand at the window. She knew this assignment was meant as a gift, recovery time after a difficult field assignment had blown up in her face. But how did you forget difficult choices and a partner’s mistake?

  Sara worked at the knot of muscles in her neck. Going over the details of
that night wouldn’t help her forget.

  No doubt the residual trauma was the source of her strange dreams here in the abbey. The Bureau therapist had told her not to fight the process, but keep a record and look for recurrent themes or symbols.

  A dream diary. How wacky could you get?

  Sara blew out an irritated breath. She’d had enough counseling and questions after the shooting. It was time to move on. She rubbed her shoulder carefully, feeling the burn of muscles that had still not completely healed.

  Outside in the darkness a branch scraped at the window.

  Uneasiness whispered along her neck.

  More imagination. More pointless fantasies, she thought. Cradling her coffee, she went back to work.

  HE WATCHED HER from the shadows near the doorway, unmoving amid the silence.

  He knew the name of the explorer Polo. A contentious man given to excess and exaggeration, from all that Adrian Draycott had heard. Their paths had crossed once near Constantinople in the sweep of times past, and the Venetian trader had been flush with pride even then. If half the man’s stories were true, he had led a life beyond imagining. Most certainly there had been a treasure, lost through foul weather and the cunning of fellow travelers. The whispers had begun immediately after the Polo family’s return to Venice.

  But the abbey’s guardian ghost had no interest in gossip. If a threat did not focus on the Draycott family or their holdings, Adrian was unmoved. Yet now, because of Navarre’s appearance, this woman was involved in the danger. Adrian believed there was more at work here, something hidden in her past.

  He sensed that she was a warrior in her own way, betrayed and wounded. Doubting her own courage. And beyond that something deeper…

  But he could see no more.

  Meanwhile, time was short. Already he felt Navarre’s anger move on the wind, seething like smoke. There was magic to be made.

  In the space of a heartbeat Adrian was back on the roof.

  He flung back the lace at his cuffs. It had been years since he had attempted to make the change that twisted every molecule into physical form. But now it was time.

  Adrian focused, stilled his mind, began to will the change. He pulled light from shadow. Sparks spun from his arched fingers, still not enough to draw in the density of human form.

  He tried again. Failed again.

  “Damn and blast. What torment a human body can be.”

  At his booted feet a low purr spilled through the night, followed by the press of warm paws.

  “I know well that I must concentrate, Gideon. I managed it before, but I’ve forgotten how to—”

  The cat’s body moved. Tail flicking, he made a calm circle around his oldest companion. Light touched the tip of the gray tail, swirled slowly. As the circle climbed, Adrian felt the thickening, the density, the too-solid force of a physical body pulled up around him.

  And then the change was done.

  He drew breath, physical breath, as he had not done for a scattering of years. A mortal body now stood where ghostly light had played.

  “Well cast,” he murmured, feeling the sudden weight of muscle and human bone. “You’ve done it, Gideon.” Adrian stumbled, awkward in the flesh after so many years. “Strange to feel my stones underfoot. Indeed, strange to feel the outline of my own feet.” He pressed a hand to the parapet for balance, then made his way clumsily to the steps. “She’ll not believe anything I say, you know. She wants nothing to do with anyone.”

  The cat meowed.

  “Of course I mean she. The woman in the library. The one who’s done nothing but pore over our books and maps since her arrival. And I’ll need your help to make her leave in case we fail, Gideon. I do not want her shattered soul on my conscience.”

  The wind stirred with sudden violence. The abbey seemed caught in darkness. Slowly the cat circled the black dome. Across the fragile barrier shapes swirled with angry faces.

  Their voices cried out for revenge.

  “We must hold against it, Gideon.” Adrian raised one hand and sent a bright spiral of energy by his will into the leaking wound of the Other Place, from where Navarre had emerged. But the light was swallowed up instantly. The hole seemed to seethe and grow larger.

  The cat moved closer. When he raised a paw, smoky waves flowed down. Clean gray fur vanished beneath oily ripples.

  “Stay, Gideon. No good to try. Not the two of us alone. We’ll need more to help us this night.” Adrian drew a harsh breath. “With three together we may hope to succeed. There is power in the woman. I can sense it clearly. But first, I’ll need to convince her.”

  The cat meowed.

  “Yes, she is still awake, hunched over a pile of dusty books, looking for more of her secrets. Something to do with travelers and maps.”

  Comparative document research. Forensic map analysis.

  Adrian shook his head. She had it wrong. She rifled through old documents when she should have been searching for a deeper truth, something beyond words or paper.

  Something locked inside her own heart, though she knew it not.

  Adrian sensed her strong magic, buried in the past where it could not be reached. Her silent resolve came from the difficult work she did. A strong woman but also a stubborn one, used to making her own rules.

  A modern woman, he thought irritably. Just his luck to be cursed with such on this darkest night of the year. Was she strong enough to face what waited?

  He was at the door, about to knock, when he saw her stare up at the aristocratic portrait of the eighth Viscount Draycott.

  His portrait.

  Before he could do more, her small communication unit chimed on the desk.

  SARA SCANNED THE SCREEN of her cell phone, surprised to see the number of her superior back in Virginia. Given the time difference, her boss was working very long hours.

  She took a calming breath, then answered. “Nightingale here.”

  “Harding. Everything okay? We agreed you were to check in every day.”

  “My mistake. I planned to call you in two hours, sir. What time is it there in D.C., anyway?”

  “Never mind the time.” Edwin Harding, Special Agent in Charge of the Forensic Analysis Section, cleared his throat. “Something’s come up here, Sara. Today we ran our usual security sweep of the unit offices and found a tap on two phones. One of them was yours.”

  Sara stiffened, working through all the things he hadn’t said. “So someone knows what I’m working on.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “And that same person knows…I’m here. Someone outside the Agency?”

  “We have to assume that’s the case.”

  Sara shoved down uneasiness. She’d faced killers with hollow-point bullets. This was nothing to spike her pulse. “I see.”

  “I want you to take extra precautions. If anything seems wrong, alert me immediately.”

  “Understood.”

  “Any developments to report?”

  “I’ve found another log entry and some early port documents. So far nothing pinpoints a location.”

  “You are going to have some extra help. I’ve just had a call from Viscount Draycott, and he has asked his estate manager to see you. Draycott says the man is extremely knowledgeable about the abbey’s document collection, and he will have information you’ll find useful. Ask for any help you require. Lord Draycott regrets that his business will keep him out of contact for several days.”

  “Understood, sir. Did he give you the estate manager’s name?”

  “Mr. Adrian, I believe. The connection was terrible, but I think that’s it.”

  Sara noted the information and waited. She had been out of her office for almost two weeks, between research and travel time, and the peace of the abbey was becoming dangerously seductive after the stress of her usual assignments.

  Especially the last one.

  “I want daily reports, Nightingale. And keep alert. If someone puts the pieces together based on your research, he could end up
on your doorstep with no warning. A treasure of this importance would be a magnet to any of our country’s enemies. Stay sharp.”

  Then the line went dead.

  THE WIND HISSED in soft warning, full of images from the Other Place, where Navarre had been captive for almost eight centuries.

  Not dead. Nothing so bearable. Simple death would have been a better fate than the torment he’d known in that place some called purgatory and others called Bardo.

  He had been bound in torment, held captive until a solstice like this gave him the means to escape.

  Now it had come.

  Death was far better than what Draycott and its inhabitants faced now, Navarre swore.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BARELY TWENTY MINUTES had passed when a knock at the library door tore Sara away from a map of the medieval Venetian coast. She checked her watch, frowning, expecting to see the abbey’s meticulous butler, Marston, with more coffee and excellent pastries. Though the hour was late, the man was attentive to a fault. The stories she had heard about English butlers appeared to be true.

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry to intrude so late, Ms. Nightingale.” The man in the doorway was half hidden in shadows. He looked determined but just a little uncomfortable. “My name is Mr. Adrian. I was told that you worked late and that I could find you here.”

  He wore a perfectly cut black jacket over a black sweater that looked like alpaca or cashmere. Discreet but expensive. Almost too expensive for some kind of estate manager, not that she knew what kind of salary an estate manager made.

  He wore no watch. No ornament of any sort. Only black. As he moved through the shadows of the room, Sara had a glimpse of high cheekbones and cool eyes that flashed with intelligence. He glanced at the maps and old documents spread on the long table. “Excuse my coming so late, but Lord Draycott told me to help you in any way possible with your research.”

  “So you have a particular document to show me?”

  The estate manager turned, trailing one hand reverently over a shelf of leather-bound volumes. His face seemed almost familiar, Sara thought. But where could she have seen him before?