by Julie Leto
“Like hell,” Damon shot back. “This old coot is Paxton Forsyth, my devious younger brother.”
Twenty Nine
The collective gasps in the vast entryway nearly sucked the air from Alexa’s lungs. She searched her memory for information about Paxton, recalling only that he was one of the twins, the youngest of the sons borne to John Forsyth and his first wife. But what were the chances that her Gypsy expert and Damon’s assumed dead brother were one and the same?
“Your brother?” she asked. “How is that possible?”
“It’s not,” Ben insisted.
Paschal leveled his steely gaze at his son. “It’s more than possible, son. It’s true.” He then spun on his brother, his arms akimbo in a jaunty pose that shaved twenty years off his reputed age. “I’d wondered if after all these centuries, my arrogant, self-centered git of a brother would recognize me.”
Alexa searched Paschal’s expression for signs of real resentment but found nothing but twinkling eyes and a devilish grin. After a tense moment, a similar smile lit Damon’s face and he laughed heartily. With a push, he removed his grown nephew from his path and enveloped his long lost brother in a massive hug.
Cat grabbed the back of Ben’s jacket to ensure he didn’t interfere.
“This isn’t possible,” Ben muttered.
Cat patted him lovingly on the shoulder. “Just four hours ago, I contacted your father using a catalog of swords as my psychic telephone line. Just four days ago, Alexa walked into this monstrosity of a castle and freed a cursed phantom from a painting. The fact that your father is just under three centuries old seems par for the course.” She turned to Alexa. “Small world, huh?”
Alexa exhaled a whoosh of air. “So he’s an expert on Valoren because he lived there.”
Cat bounced on the balls of her feet. She always loved a good cosmic connection. “Who better? Still planning on turning this magic magnet,” she said, gesturing to the castle, “into your flagship hotel?”
Alexa’s smile nearly hurt her face. Suddenly, the banners flapping on the walls looked brighter, the tapestries richer, the carpets more lush. Even the sparkling stone and its incessant chill seemed warmer when filled with the people she cared about—Cat, of course. Damon, particularly. Even Ben and Paschal—er, Paxton—as they were Damon’s family. She suddenly felt a connection to her castle that went beyond business, beyond ambition, beyond pride. This was where she’d found him. And this was where, with Paschal’s help, she would set him free.
“Absolutely,” she replied.
“He was supposed to be your resident ghost,” Cat reminded her.
“The guests can get their own ghost,” Alexa quipped.
“I don’t know…he was your big draw.” The doubt on Cat’s face and her singsong voice were clearly for comic effect.
Alexa watched Damon and Paschal part, then after a moment of checking each other out from head to toe, they fell into another fraternal embrace.
“He’ll always be my big draw,” Alexa mused, her hopes helplessly pinned on Paschal Rousseau—or Paxton Forsyth, as the case may be—to reveal the secret that would set Damon completely free. “As for my previous plans, I believe I’ll look into the possibility of special effects.”
Cutting their banter short when Paschal and Damon finally released each other, Alexa sent Ben into the dining hall to retrieve a chair for his father, who seemed wiped out from the explosion of emotion, not to mention the aftereffects of a kidnapping and rescue, all of which Cat recounted. Ben wordlessly placed the high-backed oak chair near his father. Paschal sneered at the seat, but took it nonetheless.
“What happened?” Damon asked, a hint of a frown tilting his mouth as he knelt beside Paschal, his hand protectively atop his brother’s knee.
“You mean, why am I so old?”
Damon’s brow creased his face severely.
Paschal clapped his brother heartily on the shoulder. “Think this is what awaits you, do you? Immediate aging once you are free of the curse? If I’d aged to where I should be chronologically, I’d be nothing more than a pile of dust. No I was freed of the curse over sixty years ago at the height of the Second World War, thanks to a lovely French girl who had an eye for beauty even amid the ravages of war.”
Damon glanced at Alexa, a grin teasing his lips. Her own eye for stunning lines and magnificent symmetry, along with her penchant for fantasy and an insatiable hunger for a secret lover, had drawn her to the castle and into Damon’s world with just as much romanticism as the lilt in Paschal’s voice.
“White blond hair,” Paschal mused. “The shapeliest legs I’ve ever seen. Since women in our time were scandalized by the exhibition of a well-turned ankle, you can imagine how the shortage of fabric in Europe worked to my advantage.”
He waggled his eyebrows. and Alexa had to admit that Paschal’s impression of history was much more passionate than hers. In her catch-up session with Damon two days before, Alexa had barely touched on the world wars, not to mention the radical changes in women’s fashion since the Georgian era, but over the next fifteen minutes, Paschal regaled them with adventurous recollections of the French Resistance against the Nazis and of the brave and trusting twenty-year-old girl who’d found a mirror in an abandoned shop in Provence that had, because of Rogan’s magic, contained Paxton’s soul.
His voice adopted an increasingly dreamy quality as he slipped farther back into his memory and described the night Damon and his brothers had stormed into Umgeben to free their kidnapped sister.
“As you ordered, Logan and I went in search of the tinker,” he said. “His shop had been abandoned, just like the village square. We searched for any sign of evacuation, but everything seemed to be exactly where it belonged. Except for two stunning mirrors in a velvet-lined case, sitting in plain view. Logan couldn’t believe anyone would leave such wonders of workmanship behind. Or out in the open. They were, admittedly, brilliant pieces of silverwork, with jeweled handles. And since Logan was always in search of a new gift to offer his latest conquest, he grabbed them. Handed one to me. For a split second, we looked at each other. Then, a bright white light. And that was that.”
He finished his story with a nonchalant shrug.
“That was that?” Ben repeated incredulously. “That was what?”
Positioned behind his father, Ben’s arms were so tightly crossed over his chest that Alexa thought the constricting pressure was the only thing keeping the vein on his neck from bursting. She glanced at Cat, who sidled over and placed a hand quietly on his back.
Quietly and…intimately.
What exactly had her best friend been doing with this guy during his father’s rescue, hm?
Paschal threw an exasperated glare over his shoulder. “Loosen up, Benjamin. You weren’t born yesterday. This is your uncle. This is your history. You should be very interested.”
“If this fairy tale is so important,” Ben challenged, “why haven’t I heard any of this before now?”
Paschal’s snow-white brows rose high over clear gray eyes. “You would have thought I’d lost my mind and had me committed—and don’t say you wouldn’t have, because that’s precisely what I would have done had the roles been reversed. Your mother and I considered telling you years ago—”
“Mother knew?”
“Good God, boy, of course she knew! She’s the one who freed me from the curse, just as I suspect Miss Chandler here did for your uncle.” He turned back to Damon and spoke directly to him, though behind his hand, as if everyone couldn’t overhear. “He’s a handsome boy, and bright, too, but has a nasty stubborn streak. It’s in the genes.”
“The what?” Damon questioned.
Paschal waved a hand dismissively. “You can learn about genetic studies later. Of the lot of us, you always were the book learner. Funny. Now I’m the one with the knowledge you need. The one who used to put toads in your bed.”
Damon and Paschal laughed, but Ben remained in stunned silence. The merriment didn’t die
down until Paschal turned his gaze to Alexa’s throat. Instinctively, she drew her hand to the charm Jacob had given her. Paschal’s stare narrowed, then he waved her forward.
She bent low so he could examine the necklace. “Ah, yes. The Queen’s Charm. I highly suspected, after Miss Reyes explained your circumstances, that you’d somehow gotten ahold of it.”
“My brother gave it to me,” she explained. “For protection.”
He nodded knowingly. “The primary purpose of the Queen’s Charm is protection, but I gather you’ve already learned as much.”
Damon scooted closer. “The Queen’s Charm, you say? I thought this was but a trinket Father gave to Sarina.”
“So did I,” Paschal reported, “until circumstances forced me to find out where Father got it in the first place. Apparently, the old King George’s queen, Sophia, before her banishment, received the charm from a Gypsy artisan she’d done an accidental kindness to.
The Gypsy claimed it was a key to unlock a woman’s greatest desires. The queen must have passed the trinket to our father before he left to oversee the colony at Valoren. Rumor has it, she was fond of our father. But the poor woman likely didn’t believe in the magic. Nevertheless, Father gave the charm to Sarina years later as a gift.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Sarina wrote about it in her diary,” he answered. “I take it you haven’t read it.” Paschal nodded knowingly. “Delving into our sister’s secret passions was not easy for me, either, not when we don’t even know what became of her. But I can tell you—after Rogan fell in love with her, he further enchanted the charm to protect Sarina from his magic.”
“Fell in love?” Damon spat, shoving to his feet. “The mere thought is as revolting as it is insane. Rogan lacked the heart to love anyone.”
Paschal shrugged. Clearly, his spite and anger toward Rogan had lessened with time. Or else he’d never experienced the same all-encompassing rage Damon struggled so hard against, since Rogan had been his friend.
“Why did this sorcerer need to protect your sister from his magic?” Cat asked. “If he cared for her—even if he only meant to seduce her,” she amended, witnessing the affronted look on Damon’s face at the implication that Rogan might have genuinely loved Sarina, “why would she be in danger from him?”
Damon, Alexa and Paschal all sighed knowingly.
“The magic,” Alexa piped up, laying her hand softly against Damon’s arm, “comes with a price. It corrupts the sorcerer who wields it. Makes him very dangerous.”
“Very good, Miss Chandler,” Paschal said, ignoring the flash of regret that streaked across Damon’s face. “You figured out in a matter of days what took me years to learn. Once I got my hands on the necklace again sixty years ago, I was able to breach the castle’s defenses and move the structure here. Seem to remember I procured this island during a rather dicey poker game.”
“You gamble, too?” Ben asked incredulously.
“Life’s a gamble, my boy,” Paschal said with a dismissive snort. “I brought the castle out of Valoren because a nasty group of cultists had been trying to take the castle for their own nefarious intentions. I anticipated I’d need years to sort out Rogan’s magic. I’d hoped my brothers had been trapped as I was, and I, of course, intended to free them. I took the castle as far away from Germany as I could, knowing it might be the key—the source of the curse.”
“Cultists?” Alexa asked, confused.
“They’re called the K’vr,” Cat told her. “They’re followers of this Lord Rogan and they’ve been searching for the source of his magic for centuries. They kidnapped Paschal.”
Alexa stared at Damon. They’d spoken at length about Rogan, but he’d never claimed his enemy to be any sort of religious leader. “Rogan had followers?”
Damon shook his head, clearly as amazed as she. “Not in his lifetime. The Gypsies adored him, but—”
“The cult was actually started by his brother,” Paschal explained. “Lukyan Roganov was a greedy landowner in Hungary who used his brother’s reputed magic to scare his tenants into paying inflated tithes. The power of influence was something he couldn’t give up even after his brother disappeared, so he played upon the fears of the illiterate peasants and started a secret society that lasts until this day.”
Paschal eyed the charm again. “The group that kidnapped me wants that,” he warned, pointing a gnarled finger at her chest.
Alexa flattened her palm over the gold triangle. “Sarina’s necklace?”
“The K’vr believe that Rogan bequeathed his magic to the Gypsies, and on the night of their mass disappearance from Valoren, he somehow left the magic inside the castle to be reclaimed by his devoted followers. They believe the magic was encased in an item Rogan owned, one he’d found during his extensive travels. They believed, at first, that the Queen’s Charm was the source. After they possessed it, which they did a century ago, they realized that wasn’t the case—although I’ve recently learned that that knowledge had been lost. Only a select few realize that the source of the magic lies elsewhere.”
Alexa tried to process centuries’ worth of subterfuge and treachery and magic and came up woefully confused. She combed her hand through her hair and for the first time since the castle was invaded by visitors, wondered what she must look like in wrinkled clothes, sans makeup and lacking sleep.
Damon shot a glance at Ben, who, with a groan, disappeared into the dining hall and returned with a chair for Alexa. She sat and leaned on her elbows to be nearer to Paschal. “You mean some of the K’vr still want my necklace?”
Paschal stretched and rubbed his back. She couldn’t imagine that a terrifying kidnapping, a harrowing escape via helicopter and private plane from Texas and brief, but frantic ocean travel added up to comfort for a man Paschal’s age. She wondered if they could delay the rest of this conversation, but one glance at the stained-glass window in the room behind them told her they could not. Daylight was coming. And since Cat and Ben had stolen Paschal back from his captors, there was a good chance those goons were headed this way, too.
“The K’vr has since split into factions,” Paschal explained. “One is quite aware that the necklace is only a key. The other took me captive.”
“And they let you go once you could not produce the charm?” Damon asked.
“One of the faction leaders—or at the very least, someone who aspires to the job—aided in my escape and stayed behind to waylay the others. But l doubt I’ve seen the last of her—or them. They are led by a power-hungry parvenu named Farrow Pryce. The second group has the bloodlines. The leader, Keith Von Roan, is barely a man, but he’s descended from Lukyan Roganov. His father, grandfather and beyond led the K’vr for years. That gives him extreme sway. His is the group that knows the charm’s true purpose, and I suspect they will move against us soon. They must have orchestrated you getting the necklace so you could bypass the castle’s protective spell for them. That’s why you need to take Rogan’s power now, before anyone else.”
Damon scowled. “You think I have not been trying? Finding the source will release me fully, will it not?”
Cat blew out a frustrated breath, and Alexa could see dark circles beneath her friend’s eyes. Paschal wore a matched set. Ben didn’t exactly look ready to run a marathon. They’d been through so much, but sunrise loomed. The time to solve this mystery was now.
“Why wasn’t Damon released the way you were?” she asked. “Why is he trapped in the castle?”
Paschal’s expression turned pensive. I believe, though I am not certain, that Damon has suffered from a second magical curse because the portrait was more important than the mirror that entrapped me. I don’t believe the painting was intended to capture my brother or any of the other raiders heading toward Valoren that night. I believe the painting was meant as a hiding place for Rogan himself.”
Damon stood and, in his usual, thoughtful manner, began to pace a tight circle around his brother.
“Because
Rogan was in the portrait originally?”
“Yes,” Paschal replied. “He kept that painting at the precise center of the house. The best place to hide something of value is in plain sight, agreed? Rogan manipulated the magic most skillfully so that anyone who stumbled upon his cursed items, perhaps the raiding horde on their way to massacre the Gypsies, would suffer centuries of loneliness trapped inside the valuable items he’d enchanted, but they would not control his power. That, he’d keep for himself.”
Damon sat back on his haunches. “So you knew I was trapped in the painting when you found it?”
“I suspected,” Paschal said, rubbing his stubbled chin. “But nothing I did released you. Even my dear Collette tried, to no avail. That’s when I decided to use the money Collette’s family had amassed before the war to bring the painting back to its home. Here, in the castle, but out of reach. I’d hoped the surroundings would trigger the magic.” His tone dipped low as his failure hit him hard. “Nothing worked. Then the charm was stolen from me and I could no longer enter the castle. I had to abandon your portrait. I decided then to work toward retrieving every item I could associate with Valoren, in hopes I’d free one of our brothers, and together, we’d find a way to free you.”
“So you left?”
Alexa wished she could erase the pain from Damon’s voice, but Paschal stood and put his hand on, his brother’s shoulder. “I had to keep searching for the answers. I believed Rogan had created the ultimate catch-22. He could hide in the painting, in a sleeplike state, for as long as he needed. He would not age. He would not waste away from hunger or thirst. But to break free of the painting, someone, most likely Sarina, had to unlock the magic with the key—the Queen’s Charm. When he was out, he would destroy the protection spells and go about his life. Apparently, things did not go as he planned.”
“But how does this help us find the source of Rogan’s power?” Alexa asked, her eyes darting to the window.
