by Zoë Archer
He nipped at her bottom lip and growled. “I’ll terrorize whole packs to be alone with you.” They drew closer, body to body, and it was a wonderful torment.
Hearing Catullus and Max finish with their horses, Astrid drew reluctantly away. She missed the heat and solid strength of Nathan immediately, but turned to face the other Blades, standing and holding the reins of the animals. Catullus’s expression remained carefully neutral.
“I spotted a dry site in the meadow,” she said. “It’s high enough to keep us out of the damp, but not so high that we’ll catch the wind.”
“Glad somebody knows what to do out here,” Quinn replied. “Our guide hightailed it.”
Astrid started. “Your guide abandoned you?”
“He tried to have us turn around.” Catullus’s voice was also deliberately toneless.
“But what if you didn’t find me?”
“Have I ever turned back or abandoned a colleague?” Catullus answered.
“No,” she said after a long pause. “You may have new whiskers, but you are still Catullus Graves, tireless and obstinate.”
Hard to know whether it was the lowering sun glinting off his spectacles or a flare of old, shared humor that she saw in Catullus’s eyes. She hoped it was the latter. Having glimpsed what she and her erstwhile friend once shared, she found herself with a powerful yearning. Nathan’s presence showed her what she had so ruthlessly denied.
Wordlessly, the four travelers made their way through the foothills to the site Astrid had identified. While waxed canvas tarps were laid down atop gathered tree branches, Astrid built a fire pit and set up a line on which everyone could dry their soggy clothing. One at a time, they slipped away to change into dry clothes. The moment of utter disrobing in the frigid air stole Astrid’s breath, but she hastily pulled on fresh garments, grateful that at least some of her belongings had been spared a tumble into an icy crevasse.
Everyone gathered close to the fire, warming their hands and watching their rain-drenched clothes steam. It had not escaped Catullus’s notice that Astrid and Nathan would share a pallet that night, but he said nothing. A tight silence spread like a sail, buffeted by winds of tension. Several times, Quinn attempted conversation, but his efforts were met with awkward, monosyllabic answers.
“Say, Lesperance,” he said, rising to his feet, “I bet we’ll need more kindling. I’ll need your wolf eyes to help me find some. There’s a pal.”
A more naked attempt to put Astrid and Catullus alone together could not have been fashioned. Nathan sent Astrid a hard, questioning look. If she wanted shelter, he would provide it.
She gave a miniscule nod. This was something that she must do. He understood and rose sinuously to standing. After a narrowed glance at Catullus—promising retribution should anything happen—he strode from the camp with Quinn loping beside him, one fair and gangly, the other dark and sleek.
Another weighted silence pressed down. Astrid resisted the impulse to fidget, as she’d done when about to receive a scolding from her parents—usually with good reason. She had been rather a handful as a child, so willful and apt to get into scrapes of both the metaphoric and literal kind. But Catullus wasn’t her parent. He was her equal.
“How is working with Quinn?” she asked, because she needed some way in.
The firm line of Catullus’s mouth bent in one of his restrained smiles. “He’s a good man. Eager, but able.”
“I remember hearing about him. He and Tony Morris were in the Yucatan, keeping the Heirs away from some feathered serpents.”
“Tony’s dead. The Heirs killed him almost a year ago.”
Astrid’s heart seized. Tony Morris had been the most genial man she’d ever known, always making a fuss whenever she and Michael were at headquarters, and running out in the dark of night to get the kind of boiled sweets Michael craved when on a mission.
She croaked, “Anyone…anyone else?”
Catullus listed names, grief hardening his voice. “Pritchard. The German cabal, facing him in the South Pacific. Sarah Halpin came back from St. Petersburg with a limp. She’s been retired from fieldwork.”
“Oh, God.” Astrid scrubbed her face with her hands as if to pull away a mask of anguish. So many names, faces, people she had known and fought beside, to have them lost or wounded. It was the price of being a Blade, a high price that had cost Michael his life and Astrid her heart. But Michael and Tony and Jim Pritchard knew the risk, as every Blade did, including herself, and they all took it willingly.
“But there are good tidings, too,” Catullus continued, his words growing lighter. “Thalia Burgess is married now, and she and her husband, Gabriel Huntley, are both Blades.” Astrid remembered dark-haired, emerald-eyed Thalia, tall and dynamic, and imagined that any man she might have selected for herself would be just as tall, just as forceful.
“She always wanted to become a Blade,” Astrid murmured.
“She earned it, too. I was with her and her husband in Mongolia—an assault on a Buddhist temple in the Gobi. They both fought well, and a Source was saved.”
Surely a larger story lay behind those simple words, one she longed to hear, but another time. Her desire for news must have shown in her face, because Catullus said, “And here’s a sign of Armageddon: Bennett Day is also married.”
Astrid could not have been more astonished if Catullus suddenly ripped off his perfectly tailored coat and sprouted a pair of butterfly wings. Her mouth truly did hang open.
“Was he smoking opium at the time?”
Catullus chuckled. “He was entirely and ashamedly sober. And loves his wife as he does everything: immodestly and joyously.”
“I cannot imagine the paragon that ensnared him,” Astrid breathed. She was quite convinced that the word “rake” would forever have to be retired and struck from the vocabulary, since no man could ever embody the term more perfectly than Bennett.
“His bride is London Edgeworth.”
Fortunately, Astrid had not been taking a drink from the canteen, or surely water would have gushed out of her nose. “Joseph Edgeworth’s daughter? The man who is one of the most powerful Heirs? That London Edgeworth?”
“The same. And Edgeworth is dead. His son has assumed his role. London is now a Blade. I was at her initiation in Southampton.”
Yet more stories. Her head spun with them. She wanted tea. And whiskey. “I feel as if lifetimes have passed me by.”
“That was your choice.”
Ah, the preliminaries were over. Anger edged Catullus’s voice, though he kept himself as restrained as always. She did notice, however, that his hands were busy, methodically stripping away the damp bark from a stick.
“It was,” she said evenly. “And, at the time, it was what I needed.” She thought about Nathan, about the family he never had, never having a place or people of his own, and his wrath that she should have all of these things, yet deliberately abandon them. “It was also,” she continued, “bloody selfish.”
His surprised eyes met hers, but he kept mute.
“He was everything to me,” Astrid said simply. “No one, not even you, can know what it’s like to have the person you love more than anyone else die in your arms. And I had to bury him, too. Alone. So, until you have experienced that, I daresay you cannot judge my actions.” There was no heat in her words, only simple statement of fact. That old pain no longer haunted her, and she knew that Nathan’s presence allowed this.
Catullus bowed his head before looking up again. “You are right. We were all of us hurting after Michael’s death, and I remember…,” he said, growing slightly fond, “I remember such times the three of us had.” He smiled at some memory, doubtless one of the moonless nights where she and Michael had helped test some of Catullus’s more daredevil inventions. Shingles were likely still missing off of headquarters’ roof. “I had hoped that you and I might find a way to negotiate grief together, support each other through it, but you just…” He spread his articulate hands, encompassing
her absence.
“I did not think of anyone but myself,” Astrid acknowledged. A renewed pain to think of hurting Catullus, that he might need help, too. Her dear friend became much more real in that moment, as brittle as any human, with his own needs. She reached over and took one of his hands with her own. Those inventor’s fingers, more precise than the finest instruments. They both contemplated the sight, her roughened hand grasping his after years apart.
“We have all learned the secrets of magic,” she murmured. “Yet there is no way to undo time. The only incantation I can say is that,” she paused, allowing herself to feel the gravity of her words, “I am sorry.”
Catullus stared at her.
She let air into her suddenly tight chest. “I know that does not make everything right, but I hope in time you and I should be friends again. For I have missed you, Catullus. Very much.”
He was silent for so long, Astrid felt a chill creep into her. She began to pull back, but his hand stopped her.
“You damned woman,” he grumbled. “Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“I will always be your friend. Always.”
Oh, damn it. Her throat and eyes burned. “Always?”
His grin, dazzlingly white, transformed the scholar into an imp. “If I can forgive you for nearly burning my workshop down that one time, I can forgive you a little lapse in correspondence.” And, bless him, he respected her enough to leave it at that.
Their hands came apart, but now with the ease of old friends.
“And you,” Catullus said. He looked her over, from her boots to her heavy coat. “You have evolved into a mountain woman. I hope you haven’t taken up chewing tobacco.”
She chuckled. “This place has a tough glory. It’s a hard and beautiful land, and there’s something of the wild Viking in me that responds to that.”
“And Lesperance?”
Her face heated. Just to hear Nathan’s name spoken sent her pulse quickening. She both did and did not want to speak of him. To distract herself, she picked up a twig at her feet and began toying with it. “We have grown…close. He saved my life. In many ways.”
“He loves you.”
The twig snapped. She lost the ability to draw breath as her heart shied like a startled horse. “He hasn’t said so.”
Catullus made a wry face. “Men and words. A contentious relationship.”
“Not with him. He says what he means.” Stupidly, Astrid thought, We must be near the ocean. Because she heard a loud roaring, a whoosh and crash, yet Catullus did not seem to hear it. And then she realized, No, it is within me. It is my blood.
“But those words are the hardest to speak.”
She tried to align herself with ordinary life, which meant talking. “Have you ever said them?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you wanted to?”
Catullus looked away, taking himself from the light of the fire, and now that the sun was almost completely down, she could barely see his face, obscured as it was in shadow. “No.”
“Don’t worry, Lesperance,” Quinn said with easy camaraderie. “She’ll be fine.”
Nathan and Quinn drifted in arcs just past the boundary of the firelight. The pretense of collecting kindling had been abandoned almost at once, which left Nathan enough time to pace and brood. There was history there, between Astrid and Graves, a history in which Nathan played no part. He couldn’t lay claim to her past, had no wish to, but not too long ago, she’d been so mired in her history she couldn’t move forward. Graves might spirit her back, the changeling returned and the woman restored to her rightful place. Leaving Nathan without her, bereft, howling in pain and fury. His life without her held nothing but chill emptiness.
The realization slammed into him like a fist. This was the danger, he saw, of giving someone your heart. If they left, you had nothing within but a chasm. He’d been on his own his whole life. Yet that was nothing, nothing compared to how alone he’d be without Astrid.
He couldn’t answer Quinn, but continued to pace. Night sounds of insects and rousing animals drifted up from the meadow and nearby. If he wanted, he could attune his hearing to the low murmur of conversation around the fire. Yet he had to give Astrid her privacy, much as he burned to know what she and Graves said to each other after years apart.
Many minutes stretched.
“He’s not a rival,” Quinn added.
Nathan stopped in his pacing, frowning. He glanced at Quinn, who was busy weaving long pine needles into something.
“He talked about her a little,” Quinn continued. “Not a lot, because I learned that Graves, he’s a reserved kind of fellow. But he doesn’t think of her like a lover.”
“I trust her,” Nathan said at once.
“But do you trust Graves?” asked Quinn, wry.
“Not yet.”
Quinn chuckled. “Don’t trust me, either, I bet.”
“No.”
Quinn didn’t take this as an insult. He shrugged affably. “Makes sense. You just met me and Graves, and I bet you don’t have a lot of reason to trust people. Especially ones you don’t know.” He held up the needles, which, Nathan could tell now, had been fashioned into a doll. “What do you think? I was going to give it to my niece.”
“She’ll like it.” Though Nathan had no experience with children. Still, he could imagine a small girl might like a doll made from needles found in the Northwest Territory. They would still carry the sharp, clean smell of the wilderness.
Quinn contemplated the toy he’d fashioned and smiled. He tucked it into his pocket.
“Tell me about being a Blade.”
Nathan’s demand didn’t seem to surprise Quinn. “We’re all a bunch of harebrained fools,” he said affectionately. “Running all over the damned place and putting our lives in danger as regularly as some folks drink coffee. Our numbers are small, and our enemies just keep getting bigger and stronger. And we just keep trying to fight them, even though we can’t ever truly stay ahead.”
“Then why do it if you can’t win?”
Now Quinn looked puzzled, as though Nathan’s question was patently obvious. “Whether we defeat the Heirs,” Quinn said, “or any of the others, that doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that someone has to stand up and do what’s right, regardless of the outcome. It’s the fight.”
Nathan nodded, understanding this. He’d done the same his whole life. It would be strange, though, to continue his own rebellion with someone beside him. To have comrades in arms, sharing his struggle. Dusting him off when he fell. He’d taken so much upon himself, he never thought to have anyone help. There were many advantages. Still, he would be accountable to others. To ask their opinion. To act, but consider someone besides himself.
The sound of soft laughter drew his attention. Graves and Astrid, chuckling. Then their voices again, low and familiar. Nathan wouldn’t allow himself to hear the specific words. But he could tell the tension between the friends was gone.
“We can go back,” he said to Quinn.
After they both gathered armfuls of kindling to help everyone maintain the pretense, he and the tall Blade returned to the camp. Nathan’s gaze immediately went to Astrid. The fire shaped her in clean planes of gold as she smiled up at him. Something in his chest broke free into flight to see the unfettered soul gleaming in her eyes. A burden had been lifted from her, and though he wanted to shoulder all her burdens, he couldn’t resent their lack.
He sat beside her, taking her hand, absorbing what he’d learned about his feelings for her. She threaded her fingers with his, pressing their palms together and, in full view of Graves and Quinn, kissed him. Deeply. He barely kept himself from groaning at her taste, her openness. And when she and Nathan did reluctantly pull apart, he saw more than relief from old weight in her eyes. As she gazed at him, those storm silver depths shone with such tenderness that he forgot the rudiments of breathing. Everything coalesced into a single moment of heart and breath.
I
love her.
She knows. And she isn’t afraid.
A meal was shared, talk exchanged about the next day’s trek up the mountains, and Nathan began to appreciate Graves’s dry humor, his incisive mind. Quinn, too, was a good-humored sort whose cheerfulness, even in the face of damp ground and future entanglements with the Heirs, couldn’t be dimmed.
But, honestly, Nathan cared for only one thing, one person. He burned with need for the woman beside him. Not simply her body, but all of her. There was a pleasure of sitting with her by the fire, sharing conversation, knowing they were bound together in a way that couldn’t be undone. His body wanted hers, but his heart wanted her heart more. And had it, if her kiss and sweet gaze spoke true.
Tomorrow would be another long, perilous day. Soon after they finished their meal, everyone crawled off to their respective pallets to sleep. When Astrid stretched out beside him, fitting her body to his and sighing as she relaxed into slumber, his noble impulses to chastely savor their connection disappeared like birds flushed from the briers. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. His beast clamored for her, needing to mark her as his. He couldn’t give in, not now. Yet it was a small price, to suffer this want, knowing that she gave herself the strength to accept his love.
He debated between changing into a wolf and staying human. As Nathan and the Blades started their ascent of the mountains, he decided it was best to have the ability to speak. The horses had been released, since the animals could never scale a mountain. Which meant everyone shouldered their gear and weapons. All the Blades had revolvers and rifles.
Nathan pulled himself over a tumble of rocks forming the scree slope at the base of the peaks. Graves was just behind him. At their rear was Quinn. Astrid took the lead—far more familiar with mountaineering than any of them.
“Use the foot and handholds that I do,” she called back to them. “We don’t know what’s stable and what’s likely to fall.”
The men all grunted their acknowledgment as they sweated their way up the angled slope. Cold sunlight beat down on them. “Day’s just getting started,” Graves muttered, “and I’m already quite bored by these rocks.”
