“Then I would let Pengorren live,” he said.
“Nathaniel,” she breathed. She came forward and dropped to her knees beside him, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“I love you,” he said. “If I have to, then I will have to live without you, but I’ll know you’re alive in another time. I could never live if I thought my actions had ended your life.”
“Are you sure it’s not just the glamour?” mocked Pengorren, his face twisted with spite. “You’ll never know, will you?”
Melanie looked up at the queen and held out her hand. The silver locket caught the light. “Your Majesty, you said if I brought the key back to you, then you would give me what I most want. Please, I ask you, will you let me live with Nathaniel at Ravenswood. I want to go home with him and be with him. I don’t want glamour, I never did. I want to be an ordinary woman.”
The queen nodded thoughtfully. Reaching out, she plucked the locket from Melanie’s hand, the touch of her flesh as cold as death.
“If you go into the past, Melanie Jones, there can be no returning. You know that, don’t you? You will live and die in the nineteenth century.”
Melanie glanced at Nathaniel. “I think I can cope with that,” she said.
“Then you can’t exterminate me from history!” Pengorren shouted gleefully. “I will live on.”
The queen narrowed her eyes. “Not necessarily. I will take some of your essence from you, just enough to give your offspring a little glamour, nothing dangerous, and I’ll channel it into someone else.”
“Channel it into someone else?” he repeated, as if he couldn’t believe she meant it.
“Yes. Your essence will ensure that Melanie and her sister do not change in the future, but the being who takes your place as their ancestor will not be as troublesome as you. He will obey my instructions.”
“Who could take my place?” he roared. “There is no one like me!”
“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Your stand-in will be a protégé of mine who has been loyal and obedient and deserves the chance to step up to a higher level. Teth!”
Pengorren looked around wildly.
Teth came running up, tongue lolling.
“God, no.” Pengorren was pleading.
“Don’t you think Teth will make a fine sire, Pengorren? He couldn’t do a worse job than you, and he will be you for all intents and purposes.”
“She can’t be serious,” Melanie groaned.
The queen was bending over the hound, speaking some words in a low, harsh voice. The black hound began to shimmer. In the blink of an eye a tall, dark-haired man stood in his place. He was wearing the costume of a Regency gentleman, and he looked extremely elegant, with his black hair and lean, saturnine features.
“Did you see that?” Melanie gasped.
“I did.”
Teth bowed low before his queen and spoke in a gravelly voice. “Thank you, Your Majesty, I am very grateful.”
“And so you should be,” the queen retorted. “Be good, Teth, or I’ll turn you back. Now, do you know what you have to do?”
Teth grinned, his coal black eyes gleaming. “I think I have a fair idea, Your Majesty.”
The queen gave an earthy chuckle. “Off you go then!”
Teth bowed again and strolled past her down the tunnel. He glanced at Nathaniel and Melanie as he passed, and winked.
“Your ancestor is still Pengorren,” the queen assured her, “but I have just saved you from the nasty side effects.”
“How boring a place the world will be without me,” Pengorren muttered.
The queen turned to him, her eyes so brilliant that Pengorren covered his own. “Now for you,” she said in a booming voice.
He screamed, but he was already gone. Vanquished to whatever prison had been prepared for him.
Nathaniel slid his arm around Melanie and drew her close. There was still a zing between them, a shimmer of sexual attraction and an ache of love, but not the painful experience it had lately become.
“I still love you with all my heart and soul,” he said. “It wasn’t the glamour.”
“My Raven!” The queen demanded their attention. “I will miss you, despite your disobedience, but you have completed your task. Will you be satisfied, do you think, with a mundane life as squire of Ravenswood?”
“I will.” He smiled. “If anything could be mundane with Melanie by my side.”
“Then go. You know the way.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” It was heartfelt.
The tunnel opening lay before them. Nathaniel pushed through the lacework of branches, helping Melanie to climb out through the shrubs near the summerhouse. She lifted her head, blinking in the sunlight.
“I’ve come home,” Nathaniel said, grinning like a boy as he surveyed the neat garden and the gleaming façade of Ravenswood.
Melanie looked at him and smiled back. “We’ve come home.”
“Wait until you meet my parents, and Sophie.” He paused, fixing her with a questioning look. “Do you really expect to be an ordinary wife, Melanie?”
“Of course,” she teased. “If you will be a mundane husband.”
“I will make you a promise then. During the day we will be both ordinary and mundane, but at night…well, that will be an entirely different matter!”
Melanie laughed as he took her hand in his, and they began their journey into their future.
Epilogue
The Sorceress strode through the great cathedral, enjoying the sense of space around her. Incense burned, flowers bloomed, and there was a deep ancient silence.
She smiled, congratulating herself. Everything had gone very well with her past two attempts at adjusting history, and she hoped for more success again.
She entered a white marble chapel, bleached by the light of many beeswax candles. The man in repose upon his tomb had once been called a giant among men—and his powerful arms and chest proclaimed him a warrior.
But Reynald de Mortimer had been far more than that.
With his white-blond hair and grey, almost colorless eyes, he was well named the Ghost. He was a brutal and powerful lord in the thirteenth century, and he’d had to be strong in mind and body to hold on to his lands despite all those who tried to take them from him. Yes, he was feared in his day, but even his enemies said of him that when the Ghost gave his word he kept it.
That was why it was so strange that he hadn’t kept his word the day he died. Afterward his lands had fallen into chaos, with people dying in the slaughter that seemed to go on endlessly up and down the Welsh borders. The Ghost could have prevented that if he had lived.
But this was his chance now to make amends, and the Sorceress had found a particularly interesting mortal to help him out. She smiled. Yes, there’d be some fireworks between them, but that was all part of their journey.
She held her hand over his face, not touching him, but close enough to feel the stir of his breath. There was an ugly scar on one side of his throat where someone had tried to kill him, though the rest of his face was unmarked. Handsome, but it did not look as if he smiled very much.
“Your chance has come, Ghost,” she murmured, and her voice caused the walls of the chapel to vibrate. She raised her arms and the heavy wolfskin cloak rose about her, the strands of her long red hair writhing like serpents around her face. She looked frightening, like a Welsh witch from the days of old.
She began to chant and the man on the tomb moved restlessly, as if he were fighting against some imaginary foe, and then his eyes sprang open. They were of the clearest, palest grey—almost the color of water. And he spoke one word.
“Run!”
About the Author
SARA MACKENZIE has long had an interest in the paranormal, and it seems appropriate that she should live in an old house with a resident ghost. When she’s not writing she spends time reading or watching movies and trying to keep up with the housework. She also pens historical romance for Avon Books as Sara Benne
tt. You can find her at her website, www.saramackenzie.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
By Sara Mackenzie
SECRETS OF THE HIGHWAYMAN
RETURN OF THE HIGHLANDER
Coming in December 2006
PASSIONS OF THE GHOST
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SECRETS OF THE HIGHWAYMAN. Copyright © 2006 by Kaye Dobbie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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