At a gesture from the witch, the grip of the magic forced Reda to drop her to her knees, spread her arms out to the sides and tip her head back, baring her throat in a terrifying position of obeisance.
No, Reda screamed inwardly. Nooo!
Her mouth dried to dust as Moragh advanced on her, continuing to recite strange syllables that didn’t make any sense to Reda, but coiled inside with hard, hurting intensity.
And suddenly, she wasn’t cold and controlled anymore, wasn’t confident, because for the first time since she had broken from her craven shell, it was painfully, elementally clear that being brave wasn’t always enough.
Benz had been brave, and that hadn’t saved him. He’d needed his partner to have his back.
Dayn, hurry! But she didn’t know if the words got through, if anything got through. Panic bubbled in her, leaking weak tears from her eyes.
Moragh’s chant rose in its intensity as the witch stopped directly opposite Reda. Her eyes were burning with power, her face frighteningly beatific as she set the knifepoint at the hollow between Reda’s breasts.
Pain pricked and a drop of blood welled up. The sight made the love bites on her wrist and neck throb with memory, made the rest of her ache with sorrow. I’m sorry, love. I tried to hold on long enough.
The witch ended her chant with a flourish, drew back the knife and—
Bang! Moragh gasped and spun as the double doors flew open with a gunshot crash that reminded Reda of the ettin bursting into Dayn’s cabin. Only this time the creature that filled the night-dark doorway wasn’t a three-headed giant; it was a huge black unicorn with a flowing mane and tail, hugely spiraled horn and murder in its fiery orange eyes.
And astride it rode a fairy-tale prince.
He wore a rebel’s tunic over his shirt and brandished his short sword as the huge unicorn lunged into the hall and flew toward Moragh. The witch screeched and backpedaled, bringing up her own smaller knife.
Dayn! Reda didn’t know if she managed to say it aloud or if the word sounded just in their heads, carried on the love bond that suddenly flared fierce and proud. He heard her either way; his eyes locked on hers for a brief second, with a look that said everything that she was feeling.
The unicorn swerved to miss Moragh, did a sliding stop and bumped Reda, knocking her aside as Dayn performed a flying dismount that sent him right into the witch.
The second Reda’s feet left the powder-drawn symbol, the magic snapped out of existence. And she was free! She scrambled to her feet, backpedaling as the unicorn’s huge head swung toward her and the light glinted off its spiral horn.
Dayn landed swinging, but Moragh ducked and spun away, coming for Reda with the knife outstretched. The unicorn oriented, lowering its massive weapon, but Dayn got there first. He flung himself on Moragh and they went down together, rolling and struggling.
And then not struggling anymore.
Reda surged forward, heart stopping for a second and then pounding back to life when he moved, shifting to extricate himself from the witch, who lay on her back, both hands gripping the handle of her own knife, which had been driven into her heart.
“She’s gone,” he said, voice rough with whatever it had taken him to get to her.
Reda waited until he looked at her. Then she smiled. “I’m not.”
His expression shifted, then cleared. “Ah, Reda.”
And then it was easy to cross to him, reach up and touch his dear face. “You left the others to come find me.” She wouldn’t have asked it of him, but it mattered.
But he shook his head. “I came for you first, dear heart. I don’t want to do this without you. Past, present, future—none of it matters if you’re not at my side.”
Her heart lodged in her throat as everything she had ever desired—even things she hadn’t realized she wanted—suddenly opened up in front of her. And, even better, she didn’t want to look at them yet. She only wanted to look at the man standing in front of her right then and there.
“I love you.” The words weren’t scary and they didn’t hurt, she found. But they mattered.
His face smoothed and his eyes lit. “My sweet Reda.” He drew her into his arms and kissed her, so his lips were against hers when he said, “By the gods, I love you, too. You’re it for me. You’re my life, my love, my one and only. I wasn’t born to be the king and I don’t want to play politics. I just want to be a man who’s in love with his mate.”
She kissed his jaw, nipped his throat and felt him quiver against her. “You’re talking of kings and politics like the battle is already over. Sounds to me like it’s just getting started.”
“Duty calls.” He broke away from her as the unicorn moved up near him, then gathered a handful of the long black mane and swung himself aboard. Leaning down, he reached a hand for her. “And it’s calling for both of us. From now on, we’re a team, no matter what.”
As if that had answered a last lingering question she hadn’t even been aware of having, the last of the tension eased her heart, leaving only the warmth of their bond—and her love for him—behind. She took his hand and settled herself gingerly into position on the unicorn’s broad, powerful back. “Is he yours?”
The creature snorted disgustedly as it started out, moving easily despite the double burden and the slippery stone floor.
“I think it’s closer to say that we’re cautious allies.”
She laughed and moved up to snuggle behind Dayn and slide her arms around his waist. As the big black creature carried them down the training hall, she asked casually. “What’s a Medinian?”
“The royal family of High Reaches.” He shot a curious look back over his shoulder. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
He smiled. “I like the sound of that. ‘Later.’ Yeah. That’s good.”
She pressed a hand to her stomach, where the warmth of their loving bond had concentrated itself in a happy glow. “My gut tells me there’s going to be a later, that it’s all going to work out okay.”
“Mine, too. And it also says that your gut is going to be saying to you something else in the next few weeks.”
“What?”
“Tell you later.”
Laughing, she pressed tight to his back and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Sounds good. Now, let’s help the others take care of ‘now’ so we can get to the later.”
“Deal.”
He covered her hands with his and the two of them moved in unison as the huge black unicorn cantered off, metallic hooves ringing on the stones as they headed for the castle, the coming battle…and the rest of their lives together in the magical kingdom of Elden.
TWIN TARGETS
CHAPTER ONE
SYDNEY WESTLAKE MADE her move a half hour before the shift change, when the armed men who guarded the compound on Rocky Cliff Island would be at their least vigilant.
She hoped.
Tiberius was too smart to have a clockwork-regular schedule for something as important as security, so the armed forces that guarded the mansion and surrounding grounds worked randomly staggered shifts. After eleven months on the island, though—three of them as a prisoner—Sydney had found patterns in the randomness.
Today they were on what she’d dubbed “Schedule C,” which meant the guard post located directly between her quarters and the boat dock would change shifts at 1:40 a.m. God willing.
“You can do this,” she said to herself. “You have to do this. For Celeste.” Her sister’s name had become a mantra, something she held on to when her bravery faltered.
At first Sydney had told herself she was helping her ailing twin by staying on the island off the Massachusetts coast and working for Tiberius. She’d been trying to find a cure for the insidious genetic condition that was slowly killing Celeste. The obscenely large income being funneled into an offshore account was an added draw, allowing Celeste to stay in their wheelchair-friendly, restored Victorian in Maryland with a personal aide, rather than moving to an ass
isted-living facility of some sort. It had all seemed like a godsend when Tiberius first contacted her through his figurehead company, Tiberius Corp.
Now, though, she knew better. Tiberius wasn’t a philanthropist and he wasn’t a visionary. He was a monster, a sociopath, a self-professed businessman who wanted to use her discovery to do terrible things. Or rather, sell it to other criminals, who would use it as a smokescreen, hiding their identities while they did God only knew what.
She had to stop it from happening.
Trying not to betray her nerves, she crossed the high-tech lab Tiberius had ordered built and outfitted to her precise specifications. When she’d first arrived, the huge room, filled with the latest cutting-edge biotech equipment and analytical devices, had seemed like paradise. Now, it was a prison.
Sitting down at the bank of a half dozen networked computers, each of which controlled several of the big machines and analyzed the resulting data, she tried to block awareness of the security cameras blanketing the huge room, tried not to think about the men who were undoubtedly watching her image on-screen.
She’d done her prep work well. They’d gotten used to her returning to the lab around 10:00 p.m. and working until one or so in the morning. If she were lucky, all they would see now was their tame lab rat pulling up the last set of results and then powering down the big machines for the night.
In reality, she was executing two programs she’d managed to sneak onto the island. One was an uncrackable lockdown program that would freeze all of the lab computers and machines until she typed in a password. The other would shut down all of the networked computers on Rocky Cliff Island—including the ones running power and security—for the space of five minutes, and then go back into hiding, supposedly untraceable by all but the original programmer.
Celeste had developed the routines just before she’d gotten sick; she was the techie, Sydney the bio-geek. Together, they’d used to joke, they were a nerd super-hero.
Now, those powers would be put to the test.
“Okay, kids, do your thing.” Sydney powered the lab computer down right after she’d fed the programs into the network. In ten minutes, the lights should go out. Then, the next time someone turned on one of the lab computers, the only thing they’d see on the screen would be a text prompt that read: Password?
If she made it off Rocky Cliff Island, she would use the password as leverage to keep her and Celeste alive long enough to grab the money out of her accounts and disappear. Then and only then, she would contact the authorities and tell them about Tiberius’s plans.
If she died trying to escape, she could only hope Tiberius or his tech experts would try three wrong passwords, whereupon the worm would corrupt every piece of data on the network and fry the computers.
If she lived and was recaptured, though…
She shuddered. She’d seen what happened to people who crossed Tiberius. The image of what he’d done to Jenny Marie, the softhearted cook he’d caught sneaking emails between Sydney and Celeste, would remain burned on Sydney’s retinas until the day she died. Unfortunately that day could be far sooner than she hoped, because crossing Tiberius was her only option right now. She couldn’t allow him to use her scientific discovery for the purpose he intended; she had to stop him. Which meant it was now or never.
Sydney’s fingers trembled as she hung her lab coat on its hook near the airlock-type passageway that was the only way in or out of the windowless lab. After pushing through the first of the pressurized doors, she touched the intercom button beside the second. “Out, please.”
She’d long ago learned not to bother making small talk with the guards—it only made them suspicious. Nowadays, she stuck to her routine and they stuck to theirs, little suspecting that she was studying them and waiting for her chance to escape. Or maybe they’d suspected all along, and she was doomed before she even began.
The door unlocked with a click. Sydney held her breath as it swung open automatically, then exhaled in relief when she saw the hallway was empty. If they’d sent an escort she would’ve had to scrap her plan, but the armed escorts had gotten fewer and further between with every week and month she behaved herself, as she’d pretended to cooperate with Tiberius and his mad plan.
Forcing herself to breathe evenly, she stepped out into the hallway and headed for her quarters, trying to look like all she had on her mind was a few hours of sleep. When she reached the gray, featureless door leading to her two-room suite, she pressed another intercom button. “In, please.”
The door clicked and opened, but instead of entering, she reached around the corner and fumbled for the thin wire she’d installed in the wall panel earlier that day, in the ten minutes she’d bought by “accidentally” blocking the view of the single camera in the main room of her suite by hanging a towel over the lens. By the time one of the guards had buzzed himself in without knocking, removed the offending item and groused at her for her continued sloppiness—which she’d carefully cultivated over the past few months—she’d done what needed to be done with the circuitry.
Concealed alongside the molding, the wire led to a simple gadget she’d Mickey Moused out of parts filched from the lab, using the diagram Celeste had sent via Jenny Marie. A sharp tug would form a bridge between the two main power lines in the wall beside the door, creating an obvious short and giving Tiberius’s engineers no reason to look further for the source of the electrical failure.
At least that was the theory.
“Here goes nothing,” she whispered, heart pounding. She checked her watch. Nine minutes fifty-five since she’d fed the kill program into the network. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. As the door to her room started to close on its soundless mechanism, she yanked on the wire and jumped back.
There was a sizzle and a blinding flash in her room. Two seconds later the lights went out in the hallway, plunging her into utter blackness.
Sydney didn’t think. She ran.
She heard muffled shouts and pounding feet as she bolted along the hallway and slammed through the door at the end, where she’d jimmied the lock earlier that day.
She was out!
The night was cold and rainy, which she hadn’t anticipated. Sucking in a lungful of the wet, cutting air of springtime off the Atlantic coast, she plunged down a short cement staircase and bolted past a tarped-over swimming pool. Taking the direct route she’d mapped out during her daily guard-escorted walks around the compound, she headed for the dock at the bottom of the hill. The boats were little more than a collection of shadows against a misty backdrop of rain, dark against darker in the moonless, drizzly night.
She was halfway there when the backup generators kicked in, circumventing the primary network she’d crashed. Emergency lights flared to life and alarms whooped, the noise seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Heart pounding, legs shaking with fear and adrenaline, Sydney ran for her life.
The drizzle had slicked everything with a thin layer of water, making the cement walkway slippery beneath her sneakers. The sharp wind cut through the jeans and light turtleneck shirt she’d worn in the climate-controlled lab. She hadn’t dared trigger the guards’ suspicions by dressing more heavily than that, and she paid for it as she pounded down a short incline to the water. Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the first boat.
“Stop!” a voice shouted from behind her. Booted footsteps approached from the side at a run as the guards surrounded her. Gunfire chattered, kicking up stinging pellets of concrete directly ahead and to both sides of her.
They weren’t aiming to kill. Not yet, anyway.
Ignoring the warning shots, Sydney took two running steps across the dock and flung herself toward the nearest motorboat, which was one of the small, fast two-seaters the guards used for shoreline patrols. She untied the craft from the dock and clambered aboard, ducking with a terrified scream as bullets smacked into the side of the boat and peppered the interior of the craft.
Her heart rocket
ed in her chest and for a split second she wanted to give up, wanted to put her hands up and say, “You win, I was just kidding. Take me back to the lab.”
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Still, her fingers shook as she punched the ignition button—her complacence had made the guards sloppy enough to leave the console unlocked, thank God—and the engine roared to life.
Coming from the other side of the island, past the cliff-side mansion, she heard the rotor thumps of Tiberius’s helicopter preparing to lift off. She wasn’t sure if he was evacuating or coming after her, but the sound added to the chaos of siren whoops and shouts as a dozen guards hit the dock, running flat out toward the other boats. The gunfire was silent for the moment, though, indicating that the security detail had orders to recapture her, not kill her.
She’d figured Tiberius would consider her far more of an asset than a liability…at least until it looked like she was going to succeed in escaping. Then he’d have his men start shooting for real.
Thank God for the rain. It would give her a layer of covering fog, and hopefully spoil their aim. The idea of being shot at—of being shot—terrified her, but she couldn’t turn back now.
She slapped the throttle forward, blessing the summer she and Celeste had spent with a foster family on Moosehead Lake, where they’d learned the basics of boating. The motorboat leapt forward, spraying the dock with a plume of water that made the guards shout and curse, sounds that were quickly lost beneath the roar of the motorboat engine and the growing thump of the helicopter.
Sydney glanced back to where the mansion rose high on the crest of the island, a dark, hulking shadow that was barely visible in the fog. Then the chopper swung up and over the building. Its searchlights cut through the mist, and the bumps of rockets were clearly visible on either skid.
That gave Sydney her answer: Tiberius wasn’t fleeing. The bastard was coming after her.
Trembling with terror and adrenaline, breath sobbing in her lungs, she sent the little boat west, toward where the shoreline of northern Massachusetts ought to be. She couldn’t see any town lights through the wind-driven rain, which was coming down harder by the moment. The pellets stung her face and throat, quickly soaking through her light clothing and plastering the fabric to her skin.
Lord of the Wolfyn rhos-3 Page 21
