SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  Gwen turned, slashed at the first thing she could find, and heard a low hiss. She’d hit her mark.

  “She’s got a damn knife,” a male voice, not Rhein’s, said.

  And then she was gone, her consciousness just slipping away. The last thing she remembered was the feel of the dagger slipping from her hand.

  ***

  When she woke again, she was lying on a bare concrete floor, not so much as a blanket to protect her from the moisture. There was light here, though, and she could see she was in a small room with no furnishings, nothing that told her where she was. Just concrete, floors, ceiling, and walls, with one small window set so high in the wall she could never have reached it even if she’d tried until her will outlasted her strength, and a steel door that she didn’t even have to touch to know it was locked.

  Nothing of nature in this room except the air she breathed. And she suspected they might have means to pump that out if she tried to manifest another weapon.

  She remembered the sensation of Branwen’s sword slicing through her belly and touched the spot. There was definitely a slice in the center of her shirt, and dried blood that flaked away on her fingers. But the flesh underneath was whole.

  Where was the wound?

  She climbed to her feet and tried the door anyway, but as she had suspected, it would not give even a millimeter. She walked the perimeter of the room, ran her fingers along the concrete and felt the rocks and dirt that was impeded in it, could feel it kind of vibrate under her touch.

  She had to get out of here.

  There was something wrong with this situation. Something…why wasn’t she dead? Why hadn’t Branwen killed her on sight? Was it something to do with the way she had healed? Or was there something else going on here?

  And Rhein. Why was Rhein with Branwen?

  He said he still served his master. But he didn’t name him.

  Was it possible Rhein had switched sides at some point in the game?

  A part of Gwen did not want to believe it.

  Her heart simply couldn’t take the idea that another person she trusted—and she did trust Rhein, despite her doubts—had let her down.

  Not now. Not when so much depended on it.

  She stood in the center of the room and closed her eyes. At first…nothing. But she could still feel the dirt, the rocks, the moisture in the concrete responding to her. It was vibrating, like a child who’d eaten too much sugar. It wanted to respond to her.

  Tell me what to do.

  She focused, not on a thought, not on a place, but on a single flower. On the petals of a rose that sat in the middle of a rounded garden.

  The more she focused, the more detail she could see in the rose. And the more she could feel the walls around her vibrating.

  “Help me,” she whispered.

  It began with a single crack that began at the low, right corner at the back of the room. It slowly split, like a zipper coming apart one tooth at a time. It rose slowly, slipping up to the halfway point and then running ragged toward the front of the room. Then another crack appeared, this one in the ceiling just above Gwen’s head. It, too, ran toward the front of the room, as though racing with its bigger cousin.

  She could feel surprise. She could feel fear. She didn’t know where it was coming from, but it gave her a certain sense of satisfaction as another crack broke through in the left, back corner and joined the race to the front of the room.

  Concrete began to fall from the walls in big chunks. A hunk fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing the outside edge of Gwen’s right shoulder. And then it was like rain, concrete falling in small and large pieces, dancing across the floor, flooding the room everywhere but a one foot radius around Gwen.

  Behind the concrete was earth. A basement.

  They didn’t think of that. They didn’t think she could get through the concrete. They didn’t think she could find the earth…the very heart of her powers…through the artificial rock. But she had.

  And she was going to bring the entire building down on their heads.

  Chapter 24

  Gwen waved her arms, and the door just fell from its concrete surroundings, jamb and all. She didn’t have to open her eyes to know that there were people waiting out there for her. Four men, like the two who had accompanied Branwen to the hotel where the homecoming dance was held. They were frightened, not sure what to expect when she stepped outside that door. But she had no intentions of going to them. They could very well come to her if they wanted to stop her.

  She waved her hand, and the concrete stopped falling. Another movement, and there was a long sword in her hands, a bone hilt that fit in her hand like it was made for that purpose.

  Now she was ready for whatever they had planned.

  But she hadn’t expected applause.

  “An amazing performance,” a familiar male voice said.

  Gwen opened her eyes and found Bran—just as beautiful as the first time she saw him in the Texas Tech library—standing before her.

  “You can’t hurt me,” she said.

  “And I have no intention of doing so. I simply wanted to see how far you had come.”

  Gwen tilted her head slightly. “Why?”

  “Know your enemy, Gwenydd,” he said with a little click of his tongue. “Don’t you know anything about warfare?”

  “You brought me here just to see what I would do?”

  “Yes.” He walked around her, pausing here and there to pick up a piece of concrete that had come free form the walls or the ceiling. “Quite impressive,” he said as he tossed the concrete back down. “Much more advanced than anyone was giving you credit for.”

  “What do you care what I can do?”

  “Because you’re planning on breaking the curse. And I can’t have that.”

  “Because you’d lose all your power.”

  “Not all. But enough to make what I will have hardly worth it.” He came back to stand in front of her, using a single finger to push the sword away from the front of her face so that he could see her eyes. “You see, I worked awful hard to perfect that curse. I’m not quite ready to watch it all be for naught.”

  “Then why did you make it breakable?”

  “Because I never imagined that someone like you would come into the world. But, again, I shouldn’t have dismissed Blodeuwedd so readily.”

  The sword was growing heavy in Gwen’s hand, but she continued to hold it up in front of her body, adjusting it each time Bran moved from one side to the other. She was beginning to think he was doing it just to watch her make an attempt to protect herself.

  “You used her. So maybe it’s poetic that it’s her child who will crush you.”

  Bran smiled. “You know about all that? I guess that means Tony finally put all the pieces together.”

  Gwen shrugged. “You aren’t hard to figure out. You’re just hungry for power, and you’ll use anyone you think will help you get it.”

  “True.” His smile widened for a moment. “But, here’s the thing, child. You don’t know everything. You don’t know, for instance, who you can trust to help you find the gate. And, without the gate, you’re pretty much a duck out of water, as they say.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “How? Are you going to fly to Wales and just drive around until you find something that looks good? That could take a while.”

  “I’ll find it,” Gwen said again.

  Bran nodded slowly. “Oh,” he said, as though a thought had just occurred to him, “I wouldn’t bother with the hospital Tony showed you the other night. It’s not there. The country club, either.”

  “How did you—”

  Bran didn’t let her finish. He was too eager to laugh at her pitiful attempts to outsmart him.

  “You may have figured out the magic,” he said, “but you will never find the gate in time.”

  “If we don’t do it this year, we can try again next year.”

  “I don’t think so.” Bran came close to her, as cl
ose as the heavy sword would allow him. He once again touched it with a single finger and pushed it slightly to one side. “I’ve kept my sister off of you this long, but don’t expect me to hold her back anymore. Everyone is free game after this. You won’t last another year.”

  “Don’t underestimate me.”

  “Oh, I don’t.” He stepped back and gestured around the room. “But, don’t forget that I’ve seen what you can do. I know your strengths. But…” He shook his head almost sadly as he walked toward the gaping hole that had been the doorway. “In knowing your strengths, I also know your weaknesses. So, from here on out, the game is officially on.”

  “I’ve defeated her before.”

  “Did you? Or were you just the mouse in a game with a very clever cat?”

  Bran waved a hand, and Gwen was no longer in the basement. She was standing in the middle of the Langleys’ backyard, the sword still clutched in her hand.

  She fell back, her hand dropping out of sheer exhaustion. The sword vanished as it fell toward the earth. She fell to the earth in much the same way, but she didn’t disappear. She landed with a thud that was hard enough to bruise her tailbone.

  Tears again…for the third time in just two days, tears ran down her cheeks.

  “I can’t do this,” she whispered. “It’s not in me. I can’t do this.”

  “You can. You are stronger than you think you are.”

  Gwen turned and found Paul walking toward her, his kind face creased with worry. All the things she knew he saw in his work, all the children whose lives he had to piece back together with the pieces their parents left them in, she had never seen him that grey, never seen his eyes so pale that there was hardly any color left him them at all. Never were there shadows under his eyes, along the edges of his cheeks, quite like there were now.

  She reached for him like a toddler would a trusted parent, held her arms out and asked him without words to take away the pain. And he was there, dropping to his knees so that he could fully enfold her in his embrace.

  “I’m sorry, Gwen,” he said, his words nearly lost in the choking emotion in his voice. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was more than Gwen could offer him. She couldn’t speak…her throat was clogged with all the things she might have wanted to say, all the emotion that was working its way up from her stomach…emotional vomit. She’d heard the phrase before, but never understood it until that moment, until her father held her in his arms for the first time since she was a small child and whispered her name.

  It was a moment she had waited for all her life.

  Funny how she never imagined it would happen quite like this.

  Chapter 25

  “We have to go now,” Cei announced.

  He was pacing the worn carpet in the Langleys’ living room. Theresa was standing beside Tony on the far side of the room, clenching and unclenching her fists as she watched Cei. She glanced at the ceiling, clearly torn between being here—dealing with Gwen’s dire situation—and checking on Melanie, safely tucked in her bed, but refusing to speak to anyone after witnessing Branwen’s attack on Gwen. Tony had that distracted look on his face that he almost always had, as though he had forgotten something quite important that he was trying to remember.

  Gwen and Paul were sitting on the couch, her hand tucked firmly in his.

  “We can’t act out of fear. It’s what they would expect us to do,” Paul said.

  “But we only have two weeks until Samhuinn. Two weeks to find the gate and to figure out how to break the curse.”

  “And two weeks to parade Gwen all over Wales, where Branwen is more likely to find her.”

  Cei shook his head, stopping in the center of the room to confront Paul with his anger. “Over my dead body.”

  “You were supposed to be watching over her,” Paul said, letting go of Gwen’s hand and climbing to his feet, just as eager to confront Cei as Cei had been him. “You weren’t even with her when they grabbed her.”

  “I was with Morgan.”

  “You should have been with her. Morgan is Rhein’s problem.” Paul gestured somewhere behind him, pointing an angry finger behind him that his body language suggested he would rather point somewhere else. “I had her moved here because you promised you could keep her safe. Yet, every time Branwen attacked, you were nowhere to be found.”

  “I can’t be with her 24/7. You know that.”

  “I know that her life is the most important thing you were tasked with protecting, and you’ve let her down every damn time.”

  “Don’t hold back, Paul,” Cei said, stepping toe to toe with him. “Tell me what you really think.”

  “Don’t tempt me, you punk kid.”

  “Hey,” Theresa said, moving between the two men as Gwen stood and began to pace herself, moving to the far side of the room to put space between herself and them. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  Paul and Cei continued to look at each other there in the center of the room. It might have been comical if the situation weren’t so tense. Paul, a middle-aged man who was a little on the thin side, but slightly taller than Cei, and Cei, an immortal who was thousands of years old, but he looked like he was seventeen.

  Not funny.

  “What about Morgan?” Gwen asked.

  Cei glanced at her. “What about him?”

  “If they’re testing me, don’t you think they might go after him? Has anyone bothered to check in on him?”

  “I was with him less than an hour ago,” Cei said dismissively. “Besides, I don’t think they would bother with him.”

  “Why not?”

  Paul stepped away from Cei and turned his attention on Gwen. “Because he’s not the one who can break the curse.”

  “But he must have some purpose,” Gwen said, thinking about what Morgan had said to her earlier at the school. “These people don’t seem to do things without knowing it will be useful at some point. Why would they put Morgan here, in this town, where I happen to be, where three immortals happen to be, where Bran and Branwen have been operating for at least a few months now? Why here? Why now?”

  Paul shook his head as he approached her. “Morgan was just another attempt at breaking the curse. He was simply born the wrong sex.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Gwen waved her hand in the air, and a small dagger appeared in her fingers. “Do you really think that gods who can manipulate nature can’t manipulate the sex of their unborn children?”

  Paul frowned as the point of what Gwen was saying sank in. He turned and looked at Tony. “She does have a point.”

  “I’ve never come across anything that has mentioned the significance of a male demigod,” Tony said, scratching the side of his head, “but the Druids are notoriously secretive.”

  Everyone seemed to turn and look at Cei at the same time. He tossed his hands into the air, his face a mask of incredulity.

  “This has nothing to do with Gwen’s safety,” he said. “Why are we dwelling on this?”

  “Because I think Morgan might be important. We should do what we can to keep him safe.”

  “But Rhein—”

  “Rhein’s working with them.”

  The room fell silent as everyone stared at Gwen. Tony was the first to speak.

  “I might have misled you the other night, Gwen dear, when I told you about the traitor…”

  “What traitor?” Paul asked.

  Gwen shook her head. “He was there,” she said. “He was with Branwen when she grabbed me off the street.”

  “Oh, hell,” Cei muttered under his breath. He turned in a circle before sitting hard on the edge of the couch.

  “What?” Paul asked.

  “Rhein,” he began, pausing as though to gather his thoughts. “He and I have always been in this sort of competition to see who could break the curse first. He blames me for the death of his last charge, a girl in Holland who died just a week after he told her the truth about her destiny. He thinks I alerted Bran to the girl’s loca
tion because I was the only one besides him who knew where she was. I always thought it was just dumb luck on Bran’s part. But, if Rhein…”

  No one really wanted to say it out loud. But it was pretty obvious where Cei’s thoughts were going.

  Rhein was the traitor.

  Rhein was the one who led Gwydion and the others to the gate of Annwn the night they were cursed.

  Rhein was responsible for this entire fiasco.

  And Rhein was likely the reason Gwen had unwittingly just given away the only thing they might have had on their side—the knowledge of what gifts she had and could control and just how powerful they were.

  Pain sliced through Gwen’s chest.

  Would it never end?

  Cei must have seen something in her face because he came to her, touched her face with the gentlest of touches.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “I know he was your friend.”

  “I thought…I thought I could trust him.”

  “I know, babe,” he said as he drew her against his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

  Gwen slid into him, the comforting smell of his scent washing over her like warm water in a relaxing bubble bath. She buried her face against his chest, felt the steady beat of his heart against her cheek. She couldn’t help but think of Rhein—how close they had been in the library and the way his pulse pounded under the flesh of his throat—and it made the ache in her chest that much worse.