Trinity stumbled onto a soft, yet far more substantial surface.
“Whoa!” Feminine hands reached out to catch her. “Easy.”
Lexi. And Eryx stood behind her.
“That’s a trickier exit than it looks,” Trinity said.
Ramsay cupped her elbow to steady her and a perfunctory thank you queued up on her tongue.
A fat silver streak shot across the sky and wiped the polite comment away along with the rest of her thoughts. Velvet night skies stretched as far as she could see with more of the sparkling streams streaking in random patterns. Even the grass—at least she thought it was grass—sparkled with a kind of metallic sheen.
“You made her walk her first time out?” Lexi asked and aimed a nasty glare at Ramsay.
“I offered to carry her.”
“You said I could walk or you’d sling me over your shoulder,” Trinity said. “You’ll forgive me if I opted for the upright option.”
“Christ, Ramsay what the hell’s wrong with you?” Lexi said.
Eryx tugged Lexi against his chest. “Let it be, hellcat.” He nodded toward a building in the distance, but kept his gaze locked on Ramsay. “Ludan and Jag are securing the box at the castle. Lexi can get Trinity settled in and give her a tour. Why don’t we head to the training grounds?”
Trinity spun in the direction he’d indicated. Her heart leapt a good two inches and she choked on a girlish squeal. A castle. A real, live castle made with soft gray stone and fanciful turrets glowing in the moonshine.
Ramsay barked, “I’ve got plans with Ludan.”
“Not anymore, you don’t.” Eryx kissed Lexi’s temple and nudged her toward Trinity. “I need a full rundown and you’re going to give it to me. You want to throw a few swings in the process to pull your ass out of the funk you’re in, then you’re welcome to try to land them.”
Trinity barely stifled a snort. Neanderthals. Every damned one of them. Dizziness rushed in behind the thought, and the spot on her arm throbbed angrily. She must have moved or swayed, because every head snapped in her direction.
Ramsay’s eyes narrowed and he stepped toward her. “You okay?”
She waved him off, and opened and closed her fist to stave off the sensation. “I’m fine.” More like a little buzzed, but who could blame her under the circumstances? “Go spew your anger somewhere else. Trust me, your prophecy pawn isn’t going anywhere soon.”
His gaze shot sideways, and his lips mashed together in a way that made her regret her words.
Eryx steered Ramsay away with a hand at his shoulder. The two men were identical in stature, the only difference between them Eryx’s nearly barbaric-looking braids, and Ramsay’s stiff, angry stride.
In the distance, a wide stone structure spanned about two football fields with flaming torches mounted in regular intervals along the walls.
Trinity rubbed her arm and rolled her shoulder to ease the building tension. She should’ve trusted her instincts and leveled with him from the start. Yes, he’d screwed up too, but what was the old adage? Two wrongs don’t make a right?
“You wanna talk about it?” Lexi said.
Hardly. And even if she wanted to, what would she say? “Hey, I kept a really big deal under wraps with your family and I shouldn’t have? Oh, and I might have messed up something special with a kick ass guy in the process. Oopsie.”
“I’d rather have a bucket of Ben and Jerry’s,” she said. “But something tells me you don’t have grocery stores here.”
“Nope, but we have Orla, which is even better.” Lexi guided her toward the castle, thankfully choosing the arm that wasn’t burning a blue streak up her shoulder and neck. “Now, come on. You can tell me what my idiot briyo did and we’ll plot some sort of nasty revenge.”
Chapter 20
Ramsay dodged left, barely missing Eryx’s roundhouse kick to the head.
Before he could re-center, Eryx jabbed and clipped his jaw.
“Fuck!” Ramsay jumped back and shook his head to clear the lingering rattle. His muscles had bypassed any kind of healthy burn an hour ago and throbbed with a bone deep ache.
“You’re distracted,” Eryx said between heavy breaths. “Either focus or give it up.”
He probably should give it up. They were both drenched in sweat, shirts tossed aside less than thirty minutes into their match, but his mind wouldn’t shut the hell up. He staggered back into the game, chin down and hands up. “More.”
“Bullshit.” Eryx feigned another kick, levitated into a spinning barrel roll over Ramsay’s head, and smacked him on the temple before landing in a crouch. “You’re too damned stubborn to own what’s going on.”
The verbal barb pierced deep, stinging worse than the bitch-slap his brother landed. He lashed out, one kick after another interspersed with ruthless punches. It wasn’t Eryx in front of him anymore. It was everything else. A black blur of frustration. The prophecy. Trinity’s heartless mother. The Spiritu.
His fist connected with bone, and his vision cleared in time to see his brother’s head snap to one side. “Shit.”
Eryx leaned over and braced himself with his hands on his knees, and a drop of blood splattered to the sand.
“Eryx—man, I didn’t mean—”
Eryx waved him off and straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, but he was grinning. Lopsided, but grinning, his teeth streaked with more blood. “Thought you’d never get around to that.”
Ramsay’s thoughts, his breath, even his body shook with a dangerous mix of fatigue and adrenaline scrambling for stability. “I shouldn’t have let that out.”
“Actually, it’s exactly what you should have done, but about an hour earlier.” The words were garbled, hindered by what Ramsay suspected was a broken jaw, but there was no missing the message in his tone. “You keep that stuff locked up and it’ll ruin you from the inside out.” He pressed his palm to his cheek and concentrated on healing the injury Ramsay had caused.
Ramsay spun away, a whole new flavor to his already manic emotions jumping into play. He’d sparred with his brother in one way or another since before they’d been born, but he’d never attacked him like this. His outburst was a complete lack of control. The purest kind of rage, indiscriminate of anything in its path.
The tall stadium wall with its ivory stone spectator benches stretched out on either side of them, an impressive five hundred feet total. Only a handful of torches burned in the center where they’d fought, making the arena seem even older than it really was. How long had it been since they’d had warrior competition just for fun? Bright sunshine pinging off the gold flecks in the sand and stone while spectators cheered on their favorites? Certainly not in the last year. At this rate, he wasn’t sure they ever would again.
“Let’s go.”
Ramsay turned at his brother’s sharp and much clearer words.
Eryx shuttled his jaw back and forth, prodded the bone near his chin as though checking his work, and took off for the tunnel leading to the locker rooms. “We need a drink.”
“I need to get back to Trinity.”
Eryx kept going and snatched his drast from the dirt. “According to Lexi, Trinity went to her room nearly dead on her feet an hour ago, so she doesn’t need you.” At the entrance, he pegged Ramsay with a warning look. “What you need is to spill whatever crazy thoughts are spinning in your head.”
“I’m fine.”
“Really? Tell that to the jawbone I just mended. Which, by the way, Galena’s gonna be pissed if I screwed up and she has to reset it.”
Pissed was putting it mildly. The last time she’d had to do it had been when Ramsay broke his arm and mended it himself. She might not usually show the pain she took on when she healed a person, but experiencing the re-break process with him had been too much to hide.
Ramsay sighed and ambled behind Eryx to the private locker room they shared. His sweat-soaked jeans abraded his skin almost as badly as his jumbled emotions scraped his insides. He’d hav
e hell peeling out of them later. Eryx was damned lucky he’d only have to wrestle off leathers.
Dropping into an oversized leather chair, Ramsay glared at the ceiling. A crystal tumbler floated into his line of sight filled nearly to the top with strasse. He grabbed the glass and knocked back a dangerous-sized slug.
“So?” Eryx kicked back behind his desk and propped one foot on the gleaming black surface.
Ramsay shook his head and tried to stifle the burning cough that bubbled up in the strasse’s wake. A heck of a lot easier task than wrangling words to make sense of what was in his head. “What do you want me to say?”
“How about owning up to whatever it is that’s got you scared shitless?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Said the little boy whistling past the graveyard.” Eryx took a much more reasonable-sized drink, his eyes narrowed daringly over the rim. He exhaled loud through his mouth, a kind of fire-breathing necessity brought on by the liquor. “Now be a fucking man and spill it.”
Son of a bitch. The end-all taunt between men. Ramsay squeezed the tumbler tighter and the indentations of the crystal pressed into his fingers. Sweat broke out on his neck and forehead. The strasse in his belly lurched toward his throat. “I started to believe in her.”
“Yeah, she seems like a pretty straightforward, honest girl.”
Ramsay clunked his glass down on the marble table top beside him. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
Eryx grinned back in a way that said, “I know that’s not what you meant, but I’m not making this easier and sayin’ it for you.”
Ramsay gripped the leather armrest hard enough the wood frame creaked. “I thought she might be someone permanent.”
Silence.
He didn’t dare face his brother. Histus, he could barely look at his own thoughts, let alone try to process anyone else’s. “I thought she might be mine.”
“What makes you think she’s not?”
She couldn’t be. It hadn’t been anything more than a ruse. At least that’s what part of him insisted. The rest of him clutched his brother’s challenge as permission to move forward. He surged from his chair and paced the spacious room. The cool gray stone beneath his bare feet was a welcome relief against his heat-stifled skin. “She’s a damned Spiritu, that’s what. They push all kinds of thoughts that aren’t your own in your head. How am I supposed to know which thoughts are mine and which are hers?”
“You’re shittin’ me, right?”
Ramsay halted in front of Eryx. “What? Don’t tell me you haven’t wondered the same thing since the Spiritu showed up.”
“Actually, I haven’t. If anything, I kind of liked knowing who to thank for leading me to Lexi.” He sipped his drink. “Then again, I can see where you’d be hesitant of anyone who leads you toward an actual relationship with someone outside of me, Galena or Ludan.”
“What in histus is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’ve lumped everyone except the three of us in the too-dangerous-to-care bucket ever since we were kids. The closest you ever came to stepping beyond that zone was building a friendship with Reese, and you used his deception to refortify those walls.”
Ramsay fought to keep his feet still. To keep from flinching or hightailing it somewhere he could lick the deeply covered wounds his brother had ripped open. What he felt didn’t have a thing to do with relationships. It was the Spiritu and the way they muddled with people’s heads. Wasn’t it?
At one end of the room, the circular stone map of Eden perched on a marble pillar. The thing was at least two thousand years old. His dad had spent hours reviewing the detailed topography with his sons, one of the few times Ramsay actually remembered their father finding time for them.
“Our parents were distant,” Eryx said, low and free of judgment. “I felt it the same as you. But not every relationship has to be that way. Not everyone is going to meet you at the same level you want or expect, but that doesn’t mean they’ll all let you down.”
The sentiment ricocheted in his chest, and the hooks and levers that held his carefully structured, carefree life in place snapped free, leaving him flailing without an anchor. He didn’t want this. Didn’t want to feel this exposed and vulnerable.
The scrape of wood on stone reverberated off the walls, followed by the clink of crystal on the sidebar. He felt more than heard his brother moving closer.
“The Spiritu aren’t puppet masters. They’re inspiration. Ideas. It’s what you do with them that matters.” Eryx gripped his shoulder. “If Trinity makes you feel a tenth of the way Lexi makes me feel, then I’d say you could do worse.” He let go and left Ramsay alone with the silence and his thoughts.
So much introspection and not one damned scrap of tactic to go on. Between the fighting and the strasse, his body idled in neutral, and his mind did little more than pace in a non-ending loop. The aloneness of the empty training grounds pressurized his body until it hurt to even breathe.
He snuffed the candles with a thought and strode down the long corridor to the outside, desperate for air. For sound or touch.
The moon shone bright above him, the well-worn path to the castle easy to follow. Silver streaks of energy darted bold against velvet night skies. How many times had he walked this same path growing up? Running home, eager to tell or show his mom and dad something, only to find them unavailable? It was always Eryx who’d stepped in to fill the void and cover the loss, putting on a brave face for Ramsay.
A slow breeze buffeted his face and chest, the fresh, clean scent that went with it not unlike waking up next to Trinity. He quickened his pace and took the steps to the terrace two at a time. He could deny the connection he felt with her all he wanted, but it was there. A demanding pulse that thrilled and comforted. Possessive and needy.
And she accepts you just like you are.
The vacant rooms between the castle entrance and his suite blurred past him. Despite every caution and protective barrier he’d built, right now all he wanted was to see her. To know she was safe. Protected.
Still twenty feet away, he opened the door with his mind and a soft pool of candlelight spilled out into the hallway. As he entered, sheer black panels lining the open windows stirred and the twin flames at his bedside fluttered. Trinity’s tousled blond hair barely peeked above the covers, the rest of her huddled deep beneath the blankets.
If Trinity makes you feel a tenth of the way Lexi makes me feel, then I’d say you could do worse.
Him. In a relationship like Eryx and Lexi. The idea knocked around in his head, clumsy, but determined. Had he been using the Spiritu as an excuse to hide behind his feelings?
Only silence answered. That and the need to feel Trinity next to him. He could hold her tonight and face his questions in the morning.
He peeled off his still damp jeans and doused the candles. He owed her an apology too. A big one. Somewhere in the vicinity of groveling might be enough. He pulled back the covers and stopped, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows.
She was still in the clothes she’d worn to Eden and her body was curled into a tight, trembling ball.
He cupped her neck. It was drenched in sweat, as was her back and hair. He rolled her to her back and shook her shoulders. “Trinity, wake up.” He re-ignited the candles and lifted each eyelid.
Unresponsive.
He straddled her shaking body and tossed the covers completely off the bed, sending out an urgent call to Eryx and Galena. Damned if he’d wait for them though. He speared his spirit into her body, checking her vitals and organs with an almost instinctive desperation. She’d been fine when they got here. She should be safe with him. Healthy. Able to hand him his ass on a platter.
The door slammed against the stone wall, Eryx’s voice ramming home right behind it. “What’s wrong with her?”
Galena shoved his shoulder. “Ramsay, move and let me check her.”
Ramsay held his ground. Didn’t dare move. His spirit too
focused on the riotous energy swirling through her torso. The same pattern every other Myren suffered at some point in their life.
“Ramsay!” Galena shouted and slapped his cheek.
He sat back on his heels, hands fisted on his thighs. In the tunnel. The bruises. He’d healed her and not thought a damned thing about it.
“Ramsay, you need to move if you want me to help her.”
He shifted to the side of the bed and sucked in a much needed lungful of air. “You need to anchor her.”
Galena slid in and pressed her hand against Trinity’s forehead. “What?”
“You need to anchor her.” He looked back at his brother, comprehension settling into Eryx’s face even as shame and terror stomped around in Ramsay’s chest. She might not have thought she was Myren, but there was no denying what he’d seen. “I triggered her awakening.”
Chapter 21
Muted, rumbling voices and sharp commands sounded around Trinity. Not at all a fit to the soft white light in he mind’s eye and the weightless sensation in her limbs. Kind of like she was dreaming, but still registering the real world all around her. Last she remembered, she’d crawled into Ramsay’s bed.
Her body seemed to be situated at a slight incline. Whatever held her upright wasn’t a bed. It was too warm for that. Too…powerful.
A body. Strong arms wrapped around her.
Ramsay.
“You’ve really got him in a tizzy.” Kazan’s voice jolted loud and clear through her head, though no body accompanied it in her dreamscape.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.”
She angled her dream self in all directions, the endless white nothingness almost the same as groping blindly in pitch black. “Where?”
“Doesn’t matter.” His voice reverberated all around her, somewhat like a thought, but more concrete. “Just know I’m here and you’ll be fine.”
“Fine from what?” Where was she, anyway? “Did something happen?”
Kazan’s ironic laugh echoed out in all directions. “You could say that.”
Waking Eden (The Eden Series Book 3) Page 17
