by kimberly
Wincing, Morgan drained his glass. The hand he leaned on moved to his temple, where he pressed three fingers hard against his skin. "I was drunk and it was never official," he said tiredly.
Anlese's voice interrupted the sniping, loud and clear.
"I've heard quite enough," she said briskly. "I believe I'll go to bed now." She beckoned Tobias, letting him help with her chair.
"You will excuse an old woman," she said. "I seem to be a little tired now. Forgive me if I retire early, won't you, dear?" she directed at her granddaughter.
Julienne smiled up at her, folding her own napkin and placing it on the table. Her own stomach was doing back flips against her spine. "Of course, I understand."
"I'm sorry you had to see us at our worst, dear," Anlese apologized.
"I'm sorry, too." Julienne watched Tobias escort the old lady out of the dining room. God, I'm glad this is over!
As soon as Anlese was out of earshot, Ashleigh resumed her verbal attack. "That's all you ever are--drunk!!" she hissed nastily.
Morgan raised his glass and drained it. "Not yet, but give me a few more hours and I will be."
He's put away almost the whole thing. Julienne mentally measured the liquid in the bottle with her gaze. Less than two inches. That bottle's nearly empty. Professional drinkers have high tolerance. Too well did she know that the more one used a drug, the longer it took to feel the same effects.
"You asked me to marry you three months ago," Ashleigh sniveled. "Now you break it off without a by-your-leave."
"So keep the damned ring, Ashleigh!" he snarled and filled his glass again.
Ashleigh wrenched the ring off her finger and slammed it down on the table. "I don't want it. I don't even want the money. I just want you, Morgan. Don't you get it? I love you." Her eyes began to mist.
"But I do not love you," he returned simply, with a definiteness that left no room for argument.
Ashleigh's hazel eyes turned to glass. "Of course, you don't. Your heart is a piece of coal--black and evil."
"Give it up, Ashleigh!" he snapped. "I have made my decision and it does not involve you. When I leave Blackthorne, I am leaving alone."
Ashleigh Reynolds fumed with anger. "You should be leaving in a pine box! And I'll be glad to put you in it!"
Morgan centered his attention on his whiskey. "Whatever."
"What's the matter?" Ashleigh screeched, her voice rising two octaves toward hysteria. "You're not the only one who can make threats, you know!"
He raised a slight mocking eyebrow. "I suggest you do not make threats you can not carry out," he replied, dismissing her with a one-sided smirk.
"Or you'll what?" she jeered. "You're nothing but a drunk nowadays, giving yourself to the booze."
"More interesting than you have been lately," he said with a deep and cutting sarcasm. "Having sex with you is like taking a dead woman."
Ashleigh's features froze with embarrassment. "Don't blame me," she retorted. "There's only so much a girl can do with a limp penis!"
Morgan's dark face went rigid with displeasure. Like mercury rising, he stood, his eyes ablaze with fury.
Oh, I can't believe she had the nerve to say that! Julienne put her hand to her mouth to stifle her unbidden giggle. The shit's about to hit the fan!
Quickly rising from her own chair in an attempt to escape his wrath, Ashleigh stumbled, her reflexes slow and clumsy from the effects of the booze and pills in her system. Her hands shot out to break her fall, almost overturning her chair in her efforts to keep from falling. Jarred violently, dishes scattered across the table's smooth surface. Her fluted crystal wine glass tumbled to the floor at her feet, shattering into a thousand pieces.
"Morgan, please," she said, desperate to placate him, beginning to sob, then cringing in fright. "I didn't mean what I said."
"You are drunker than I am," he accused. "When I get my hands on you…"
"Don't!" she pleaded.
Snatching up his empty glass, Morgan drew back his arm and sent it whizzing toward Ashleigh's head. "Go n-ithe an cat thu is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat!" he said through half-clenched teeth. May the cat eat you and may the cat be eaten by the devil.
Ashleigh screamed and ducked. The glass shattered against the wall behind her, dangerously showering her with flying shards. It was sheer luck that he missed his mark. Sobbing, she stumbled out of the dining room and into the foyer toward the staircase, scrambling up the steps on all fours. Losing her strength, she lay still and prostrate in a stupor of numb misery. Her body shook with her sobs and soft moans.
Morgan was on his way after her when Julienne blocked his path.
"Leave her alone!" God, I hope he doesn't hit me!
Morgan sliced a menacing look her way, for the first time breaking his aloof façade to reveal the passions that fought for release from beneath his icy exterior.
"Get out of my way!" His face looked murderous, devoid of all color. His broad shoulders stiffened ominously, his throat corded in a column of muscle. He was a magnificent savage, his forbidding expression grim and ruthlessly bent toward violence.
Julienne retreated a step, stricken by the force of his anger, very much aware of his feral nearness. Her throat worked painfully. Far from being drunk, he seemed perfectly in possession of himself. There was no hesitation about his actions, nor did he stagger. But, peering closely at his face, she saw past his fury, saw the deepening lines etched at the corners of his eyes that betrayed a pain deep inside.
"Enough is enough," she said sternly, reinforcing her words with her deepest frown. "Leave her alone." The best way to tame this savage beast would be in not letting him back her down.
Morgan's jaw knotted momentarily, as if he were surprised she had the courage to challenge him. Clearly, he didn't believe anyone would dare to stand up to him, much less a woman!
"I am going to kill her." His jaw hardened and his eyes blazed like the deepest, darkest pits of hell.
Julienne caught his shoulders and gave him a furious shake. She felt weary and worn out, not at all inclined to soothe his tantrums.
"You've been drinking all evening and you haven't had anything to eat," she said, keeping her voice deliberately calm and level. "You're not in your right mind." Her heart pounding with fear--she could not believe she had the nerve to manhandle him so.
Her bravado seemed to strike him profoundly on some half-conscious level, and she could see incertitude writhing in the depth of his eyes. He scowled and shook off her hands, taking angry steps backward. He signed her impatiently to silence.
"Leave me alone!" he snarled, turning and striding away. Julienne feared for a moment he would go after Ashleigh. She was prepared to use every bit of her hundred and fifteen pounds to stop him from hurting the girl. Instead, he surprised her and detoured toward the library. A moment later, the slamming of the doors underlined his passage through the manor.
Julienne's shoulders sagged with relief. Oh, God, what have I just done? And then it hit her.
She'd gone eye-to-eye with the tiger and backed him down.
Chapter Fifteen
In the library, Morgan lay prostrate on the floor, an unopened bottle of scotch in his right hand, filched from the bar. A fire snapped, burning bright and clear in the depth of the hearth, gently illuminating and warming his chilled skin. The library was very still. Around him, the air was warm, the pungent, earthy scent of burning wood drawing his memory back to a harsher, more primitive time when this world was lit only by fire, and those of his kind walked among mortal men as gods.
Spread-eagled, face up, he stared at the white stucco ceiling. It wasn't the first time he'd hit the floor. It would not be the last time. He was of a forbidding mind. Although he was unwilling, he was steadily withdrawing into a brutal bitter core of self-hatred, descending far out of the reach of both fantasy and reality. It didn't help that he had a splitting headache.
As usual, he was trying to drink his way through it, knowing the pain would soon grow to
o intense for alcohol to affect his system. Too well did he know the trials of existence as an immortal. One of the reasons he had turned away from the occult was because he dreaded the insanity that lurked behind his burnout. For him, eternity was a living hell. His mind, his self, his psyche was steadily doomed to crumble. It was his forever, a very long disintegration. An irregular thing of no prediction, his cycle of burnout was rapidly approaching. The price of who he was, of what he was, was an agony he could not escape. In his exile, his endurance had lessened. The pain often brought him to the brink of instability. When the time came, he would have a single recourse--to seek regeneration within himself if he wished to survive with any sense of his mind intact.
The dark side of the occult demands all and gives nothing in return, was his malignant, hate-filled thought. His brow wrinkled, unpleasant images filling his mind.
It was a part of his price, the sacrifice the occult extracted from him. Other forces directed him, toyed with him like a puppet master pulling the strings. Even as he maneuvered people and events to suit his private designs, the irony was not lost on him that he, too, was merely another puppet, manipulated by an even greater power.
He grimaced, his fine features taking on a brooding scowl. It was not as if he had any choice over his fate. His mother had made her decision--selecting the child she believed would bring her race to peace.
Too bad she chose…unwisely.
The headaches had surfaced in his mortality. Retribution, he believed, for the sins lurking in his past. A mind-twisting force, the pain could send him into a deadly depression that he attempted to ease with alcohol. Pushed to stay one step ahead of insanity, he pursued a life of hard drinking and even harder fighting. Constantly on the move, he was a physical blur, always hunting for a confrontation to goad someone into killing him before he was forced to do it himself. He did not care about his life. This was the factor that made him a formidable enemy to face.
He lived to die.
When no man proved able to kill him, he had turned to the razor that could deliver an end to the agony tearing apart his reason and slit his wrists. There had come a time when the alcohol no longer deadened the headaches costing him his sanity; each year that he aged came forth with a new intensity of pain. So, on a day he could barely recall, except for the pain, he opened his veins for the first time and watched quite calmly as the cursed blood ran from his scored wounds in crimson rivulets. A curious darkness soon followed. He knew little more of the day that became weeks in a pitch-black, barely furnished room, a merciless confinement between four walls. He paced like a caged tiger until the migraine attack passed and his mind was whole again.
No, not really whole. He could think and function from day to day with the help of alcohol, but the scars still marked his wrists, a constant reminder that the life he lived was a lie. No living soul knew that the pain had surfaced on the very night he had taken dagger in hand to practice the art he had been reared from childhood to pursue. He would lead a double life, a normal man on one hand, money for blood on the other. But the dark side of him carried a price he had to pay--guilt that his first victim had been his own father. The lash…the scars… Celeon had abused him one time too many.
Assassin. He wore the brand inside where only he could see it. The pain that racked his body was only in his mind, but there it remained and grew worse with each passing day.
Yet, he played the game well. None who contracted his services knew his name. His victims never saw his face. Quick, quiet, and deadly accurate, Morgan Saint-Evanston was above suspicion, but not above reproach. Village gossips maligned him regularly for his addiction to demon whiskey and the quick temper that would put him in the middle of a fight for no good reason other than that he seemed to be looking for trouble. Local people would have you check the gaoll first if you were looking for Morgan, because he was often in the lockup for his wayward behavior. People warned him he would not live to see thirty. He surprised them.
He was thirty-seven when he walked away from life, his grief plunging him into an occult existence that would have him become a hunter among the entities of the occult dimension.
This destiny was of his very blood, written by an unknown hand many hundreds of years before his birth. Alone in his own mystery and owing no allegiance to any master, he had few allies and many enemies among the practitioners of the occult arts. It disturbed them that death should lurk in the fabric of the centuries they had achieved.
But not even the Reaper's favorite son was himself eternal. One mistake could bring him death.
Or exile.
Exile. The word was bile in his throat. His mistake was anathema. He had wondered when he would himself fall prey to the hand of an assassin. Surely the day would have to come when he would turn around and find he was a victim…of himself? So it would seem.
He knew his days as a multi-dimensional being would be numbered no matter how many centuries he lived. That he could end his supernatural existence as he had begun it would be his final irony. In the end, the blood drying on his hands would be his own.
He stopped then, forcing himself to push away thoughts of old sins. Right now he must focus his waning attention on his present circumstances.
He sighed, exhausted by the night's fruitless exertions with Ashleigh. A deathlike lethargy crept into him, supplanting his pain by degrees. He could feel twinges of tension in his shoulders and back. Fighting with Ashleigh had not helped his state of mind. Why had he even become involved with her? Boredom was the easiest answer. Sex was another. Ashleigh was young, beautiful, vital and alive--everything he could take easy advantage of. And he had. Now, the time had come to cut the ties and encumbering emotional entanglements. Well practiced as he was, it was something he did with ruthless efficiency.
He closed his eyes. Who are you, really? What are you?
To understand himself at this point was to comprehend the enigmatic construction of his splintered personality. Though not absolutely insane in the psychological or medical sense, he was many persons, several Morgans in ceaseless struggle with one another for dominance.
There was the immortal, who longed to be human, a being capable of love, of living, of laughter--of dying. Also working within him was Morgan the cold, ruthless assassin, able to commit murder without conscience, practitioner of the darkest soul-destroying arts. An entity with an existence spanning centuries could not survive without being well-versed in the application of death. Lastly, perhaps most importantly, there was Morgan the small five-year-old boy, hurting from the profound wound of witnessing his mother hang herself.
There's always another wound to discover, he thought, going past the places where he might have turned, continuing deeper into the recesses of his mind.
Like other personalities, there were other Morgans as well: the vicious alcoholic who would accept no one's help, dismantling the people who came into his life; and, conclusively, the warrior who understood even innocent lives must be sacrificed for the greater good.
The danger was not that he would lose his discipline or surrender to a single, assertive personality seething inside, but that the unbending exterior features would become perceptible as parts of a disguise. His own personality was far too fragmented for him to dare to use it as a tool for exploring the endless caverns his astute but lacerated mind forced him to enter.
He tried to recall exactly how many identities he had been forced to assume throughout the centuries. His memory was blurred with great gaps of…nothing. Simply, he had spent too many years not paying attention to time.
He swore at himself in his mind. Time is nothing to one who is immortal.
Yet, he had committed the sin of ignoring it. He had allowed the days to pass unnoticed, mostly because he did not care. He was a prisoner, and like most prisoners, he simply existed.
"Morgan?"
Julienne's voice sounded in the distance, breaking the uneasy silence he had retreated into. A moment later she was cautiously winding her way throug
h the library. He could hear the whisper of her mincing stride on the carpet. He groaned inwardly. He didn't have to open his eyes to follow her path. His acute senses told him all he needed to know as she approached. One, two, three steps down into the sunken area, coming around the end table and finding him in front of the couch. So much for his hiding place being private. He should have retreated into his den and locked the damn door. He was in no mood--or shape--to argue with her.
Without opening his eyes, he broke his silence. "I thought I told you to leave me alone."
"After what you did to Ashleigh, you deserve to be kicked in the balls." She prodded him with the sharp heel of her sandal. "Did you pass out?"
"Hardly." He was quiet for a moment. "How is she?"
"Like you care."
He opened his eyes. Julienne stood staring down at him. By the glow of the fire, he could see her severe frown. Her green eyes were narrow, no hint of sympathy in their depths.
"I know I got out of hand," he admitted. "Where is she?"
"Melissa and I put her to bed. Poor girl's just a wreck." She shook her finger in a scolding gesture. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You could have hurt her."
"I thought I already had."
"Ever the smartass, aren't you?"
"Does not matter. Tomorrow she will be gone."
"Wrapped up with a bow and sent neatly out of your life," she said mockingly. "How convenient."
"With a seven-million-dollar payoff," he reminded her, knowing full well how long and how much she had observed of his argument with Ashleigh.
"The privilege of the stinking rich?"
"Mmmm, I have a lot of privileges in my life."
He couldn't help staring up at her. Julienne Blackthorne was a vibrant, vitally sexual woman. Lips parted, slightly breathless, an object to admire, but not to touch.
Julienne.
He felt himself harden. He had a sudden vision of pulling her down beside him and introducing her lithe body to every sensual pleasure known to man. Despite his resolve to the contrary, it was difficult to wrangle down the surge of carnal desire spreading through him. He was, after all, a flesh-and-blood male when it came to women. It was damned hard not to think of what it might be like to make love to her. She might not welcome him willingly, but he believed she could be persuaded. Her lips would be moist and warm, breasts firm and full to overflowing under his caress. He imagined stroking her slender legs, parting her firm white thighs in anticipation of descending deep inside her womanly warmth.
