by Zoë Archer
Bram took Livia’s hand, careful to keep from pressing against her burns. Zora took Livia’s other hand, and Anne pressed the very tips of her fingers to Livia’s forehead.
There were more hands on his shoulders. Bram glanced up and saw Whit and Leo standing close. They wore similar looks of empathy, and he saw in their eyes, their faces, that they too had seen their women imperiled, and knew what Bram suffered.
Of all the deeds the Hellraisers had ever done together, all their revelry, the dissolution, even their moments of camaraderie—this was their truest moment. It bound them together in a way simple friendship never could.
His throat, already raw and tight, closed even further. He could manage only a nod, then turned back to Livia, lying too still upon the grass.
As Zora had suggested, he let instinct guide him. He closed his eyes. The magic remaining in him hadn’t the same potency as it possessed when Livia had been a spirit. But it had to be enough. And he wasn’t alone.
As he drew upon the glow of power within him, he felt it—the fresh surges of strength from Zora and Anne. For a moment, he rebelled. It was wrong to join his power with anyone other than Livia. Yet he knew this remained his one hope, and so he permitted their magic to unite with his. It formed a gold and silver radiance. He channeled this light into her, into all the recesses of her damaged, broken body. He sensed the raw pain of her wounds from within as the energy moved through her. This was a kind of intimacy he’d never known—and prayed to never experience again.
Faintly, faintly, the damaged tissues began to repair themselves, healing minutely.
It wasn’t enough. She could not survive, not at this sluggish rate of mending.
Magic alone couldn’t heal her. But he had nothing more.
No—that wasn’t true. He had love.
Once, they had shared thoughts, the ability to communicate without voicing a single word aloud. Even if he spoke now, he doubted she could hear him, sunk too deeply into the twilight between life and death. So he poured his thoughts into her.
You think I’ll allow you to slip away from me? That I won’t go chasing after you?
He snarled. If anyone thought him a madman for growling beside the terribly still form of his lover, he did not care.
I rose high in the army, and quickly. Know why? Because I never let anything go. I ran my prey into the ground. A fort that needed capturing? I took it. A supply chain to be cut off? I severed it.
It’ll be the same with you, love. I went to the realm of the dead for you. I shall do it again. And again. As many times as I must. I won’t let you go.
Stubborn witch, understand this—before you tore into my life, I was . . . I was more of a ghost than you. A shade of a man. Haunting this world but without sense enough to realize I wasn’t truly alive.
Then . . . you.
He searched through her body, the broken parts of her, feeling her suffering as though it was his own. No wounds he’d ever received ever pained him as much.
You gave me more life than I’d ever possessed. Domineering, imperious, proud. Foolish ghost that I was, I believed you were my punishment for a life of sin.
No man had such sweet punishment. No man was less deserving of redemption. And yet, you fought for me. When I had abandoned hope, you continued to believe.
I cannot . . . He struggled, for merely thinking these thoughts was an agony. I cannot live without you. I won’t. I love you. And to have you with me, I will tear this world and the next apart.
“Please.” He did not know he spoke aloud until he opened his eyes to see Anne and Zora watching him with pity. His voice was a broken whisper as he bent low, laying his head lightly upon her breast. The fabric of her gown grew damp, and he knew he was the cause. “As you fought for me, fight for yourself. For us.”
Beneath his cheek, her heart slowed. Stopped.
His own stopped with it. Pain the likes of which he’d never known tore through him. An animal sound ripped from his chest. Hazily, he felt the hands of his friends on his shoulders, trying to offer comfort. He shook them off, and clutched handfuls of her gown as he kept his head buried against her breast.
A faint beat under his cheek. It came again, stronger this time. Then once more. With each successive throb, her heartbeat strengthened. Until, at last, it came steadily.
Lifting his head, he stared down at her, but her eyes remained closed. The rattling in her lungs disappeared, and her breathing cleared.
“You’ve never yielded,” he rasped. “Not once. And you won’t tonight.”
Livia continued to lie motionless. Yet he peered closely at her exposed skin. The burns were mending, the skin fresh and undamaged.
“Light,” he demanded of Zora.
Flames appeared around the Romani woman’s hands, and she held them up to provide illumination. Bram allowed himself a shuddering exhale. Livia was healing.
He cradled her hand in both of his, watching, waiting.
The first streaks of pink and crimson appeared in the sky as she opened her eyes.
Her gaze immediately searched for, and found, Bram. “Is it . . .” Her voice was barely a whisper. “The door has closed?”
“Trapping the Devil and John together.” He brushed his mouth against hers, savoring the feel of her breath on his lips. “It’s done.”
She said in a thready voice, “Help me up.”
With infinite care, he curved an arm around her shoulders and eased her up to sitting, resting her back against his chest. The feel of her . . . he’d never tire of it.
She looked at the other Hellraisers, each in turn, and gave them a soft, exhausted smile. “All of you. No better allies.”
Whit said, “None of us had a better champion.”
Leo, Anne, and Zora nodded their agreement.
“The threat is gone, then?” Anne asked.
“Hell is John’s home now,” Livia said.
Frowning, Zora lifted her hands. “My magic . . . it’s gone.”
Anne’s gaze turned inward, then she looked at Leo. “Mine, as well.”
“The price of healing me,” Livia said.
Yet Anne and Zora appeared untroubled by this loss. “Seems a fair exchange,” Zora said. “You gave us our power, and we returned it when you needed it.”
“And we’ve fought and defeated the Devil,” Anne said. “That is why you gave us our powers in the first place.”
Zora murmured, “With Wafodu guero imprisoned again, there’s no need for our magic.”
“We’re ordinary women, now.” Anne smiled, rueful.
“Not ordinary,” Leo said.
At the same time, Whit said, “Never.”
Bram gazed at his friends. They formed dark shapes against the paling sky, a fragile, deep blue. The sun was rising higher. Soon, morning would arrive.
“We wore the name of Hellraiser once,” he said. “And it was a shameful thing. But we can bear that name again—with pride.”
Both Leo and Whit grinned, and though they bore passing resemblance to the pleasure-seeking scoundrels they once were, all of them had transformed. Honed by purpose into something sharper, better than they had been. And as Anne rose to stand beside Leo, and Zora with Whit, Bram understood that their true metamorphosis had come with the arrival of three extraordinary women.
Bram’s gaze moved back down to the woman he held. She looked bruised, weary, yet never more beautiful. She returned his look, her own dark and replete. Her fingers trailed along his jaw, down the length of his scar, and he minded her touch not at all. He soaked up the sensation.
She moved her hand lower and began to pluck at the buttons of his waistcoat. At his curious look, she murmured, “Let me see you. Whole and unmarked.”
It took some careful wrangling, with her still resting against him, but he managed to undo the top of his waistcoat and pull at the laces of his shirt. The first gilding rays of sunlight touched him, revealing the flesh across his chest to be free of any markings. Only a few old scars, and tho
se had been honestly earned.
Her smile created a new sunrise within him. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his chest.
He was vaguely aware that Whit, Zora, Leo, and Anne had all drifted away, leaving him and Livia some small measure of privacy.
Cradling Livia close, he brought his mouth to hers in a kiss that pierced him with its tenderness.
“A punishment?” she murmured against his lips. “That is what I am?”
“A sweet punishment,” he corrected.
“One you justly deserve.”
“Two inveterate sinners. We deserve each other.” They held each other, and he felt the sunlight warming them.
A small frown appeared between her brows. “I hope this doesn’t mean that from this moment on, we must be good.”
“If anyone can find a way to make being good wicked,” he said before taking her mouth once more, “it’s you and I.”
Epilogue
Sussex, 1765
The morning rain had burned off, leaving the ground glimmering in the afternoon sunlight as though someone had scattered handfuls of diamonds. After the initial downpour, the day itself had turned fair, a crisp spring sky arching overhead, dazzling in its clarity.
Six riders cantered across the fields. Three men, three women. With the weather so fine, they wanted to take advantage, and so an outing had been proposed. By tacit agreement, they knew precisely where they wanted to go. They had been to that particular spot before, and surely there were better, more picturesque views on the ancestral property, but this location held significance for everyone in the party, and so there they headed.
Their destination appeared no different from the rolling green fields surrounding them. Save for a small stand of elms, nothing distinguished this place. Anyone else would have passed it without further thought.
Yet the riders dismounted here. After hobbling their horses, they drifted around, picking their way through overgrown grasses and studying the ground as if it held long-kept secrets. Indeed, the ground did hold secrets.
“I still cannot fathom,” Leo said, “how a whole Roman temple and the hill it stood upon, vanished.”
Bram shrugged, looking out across the field. “Its purpose had been served.”
“The place is empty, yet we keep coming here,” noted Whit.
“We keep our memories close even as the land changes,” Zora said.
A shared, silent concurrence. This was where their transformation had begun. It was an ongoing process, every day revealing new truths, new discoveries.
One of Bram’s discoveries: love was not a finite thing. It could grow with each hour.
He watched Livia as she paced what had once been the perimeter of the temple. She had never grown acclimated to wearing stays, and in her gown of spice-hued sateen, her dark curls wind-tumbled, and golden light upon her skin, she looked both sensuously pagan and indisputably regal. No one moved like her, or carried herself as she did—confident, aware of her power, yet continually intrigued by her surroundings. Hers was an insatiable greed for knowledge, for experience, and he was at all times eager to gratify her.
As if feeling his gaze upon her, she turned and gave him one of her slow, heated smiles. They had been to this place on their own, many times. It was on his property after all. What the other Hellraisers did not know was that Bram and Livia had ridden out in the middle of the night and made love here, beneath the canopy of stars. A re-consecration of the site. Great evil had been done here. They reclaimed it, changed from a place of wickedness to a place of love.
He strode to her and took her hand. At all times he liked to touch her. A quick glance revealed that Leo and Anne walked together with their arms around each other’s waists. Whit and Zora strolled shoulder-to-shoulder, their fingers brushing in quick, eloquent meetings.
The marriage between a nobleman and a Gypsy had caused a scandal, but Whit cared naught for society’s opinion—after all that had been seen and done, the battles waged against true evil, gossip meant nothing. The temperate months were spent with Zora’s band, and when frost lay upon the ground, he and his wife found warmth at his estates. An unusual arrangement, but one that seemed to suit them.
He’d heard that Rosalind had been traveling the Continent, and that she was writing a philosophical discourse about the complex nature of love. Since being made a widow a second time, she’d taken lovers but refused all offers of marriage. Bram supposed that if any woman deserved her freedom, it would be she.
Now all of the remaining Hellraisers lingered at what had once been the site of the ruin, until the sun dipped and shadows lengthened. A chill threaded through the air and the new green leaves upon the tree branches shivered.
“Come, let us for home.” Livia’s voice was husky and low as she wrapped her arm around his.
He thought of the warmth of the fire, surrounded by friends, and the heat of the bed he and Livia shared. That he, who had sinned so grievously, could receive such gifts never ceased to astonish him. More proof that the world held mysteries he could never understand.
“Your humble servant, madam,” he murmured with a kiss.
“Never humble.” She cupped his face with her hands and returned the kiss. “Not my warrior.”
Once, Zora had spoken a Romani adage, and the words had embroidered themselves upon his mind. As he and Livia walked back to their horses, with the other Hellraisers trailing behind them, he recalled the proverb.
We are all wanderers on this earth. Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.
Two years ago, he would have scoffed at such sentiment. Now, he held the words close, a man transformed.
With Livia beside him, he rode for home, and the brilliance of the sun upon the horizon could not match the light within his heart.
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