by H. D. Gordon
She watched as he went over to the old stove in the corner and reached behind it, pulling out a very old and very dusty guitar. He smiled as his eyes fell on it, and then frowned as he held it by the neck and brought it to eye level. He looked over at her with a puzzled expression.
Her brow furrowed. “What?”
He looked back to the guitar and shook his head. “Nothin’. It’s just that I only come out to this place like once every fifty or sixty years, and no matter how I leave it, when I return, it’s always as dusty and dirty as you first saw it.” He held out the instrument, smiling again as his eyes ran over it. “And when I take this out, it’s always covered in cobwebs and spiders, but your spell must have done a seriously thorough job, because you even got behind the stove. That’s kinda amazin’.”
Surah wanted to scoff at this, but stopped herself because she didn’t want to offend him. Sometimes she forgot how little commoners used Magic in their daily lives. Also, she didn’t miss his not-so-subtle veer off the main subject. She decided to let it drop… for now. Maybe rest would do her some good.
“It’s a simple spell, really,” she said. “I directed it to clean and set to rights everything within these four walls.” She hesitated now, unsure how he would take what she was going to say next. “I could… teach it to you, if you want. It would make cleaning your bar for the night much easier.”
He shifted the guitar to one hand and went over to the small bench they’d been sitting on. Surah was conscious not to let her shoulders drop at his choice in seating. He settled the guitar over his lap and began to tune it, waving his free hand at her suggestion, that calmness falling over him once more. At least she knew it could be cracked.
“Nah,” he said. “I don’t mind cleanin’ things with my hands. In fact, cleanin’ the bar soothes me most of the time. It’s so silent in there after all the folks are gone. It’s a good place to think. Low lights, thick walls, warm colors, the smell of peanuts and liquor… But thanks for the offer, anyway. I ‘preciate it.”
Surah had learned rather quickly that it was rare to hear Charlie give such a speech, and now she found herself riding on the country rhythm of his words. He usually only spoke in broken sentences or single words or not at all, and she thought now that this was a shame. His voice was deep and rich and low and lovely. It was a voice she could listen to for the rest of her days. She also sort of hoped he was rambling because he was still worked up over what had almost just happened between them.
Dear Gods, when had she turned into such a hopeless romantic? She shook the sappy thoughts away, snuggling into the pillow, though she still was sure that sleep would not come. “What are you doing?” she asked.
Charlie finished tuning the guitar and looked up at her, that lazy half smile back on his lips. “Gonna sing you a lullaby. Help set your mind at ease.”
Surah couldn’t hide her own smile now, even though her mind was too far away to be set at ease. “How are you so sure it’ll work?”
She watched as Charlie’s fingers began strumming the strings expertly, a slow, pretty rhythm floating out of the instrument and filling the little cabin with sweet music. She looked up to see him staring at her, his fingers moving seemingly without a thought, no need to look down at them. That indifference toward the world was gone again, and the pain and troubled soul were just visible to her once more.
“Because this is the only song I remember my mother singing to me,” he said, and there was such veiled sadness in his voice that Surah felt an actual ache in her chest for him. She knew well how it felt to lose a mother and to slowly forget the memories of her. “It’s the one she used to sing to put me to sleep at night, when I was still young enough to be afraid of the shadows in my room… If you can stay awake all the way to the end of it,” he paused, fingers still stroking the strings, head tilting to the side, “I’ll give you all my marbles.”
Surah laughed, but it was cut short by a yawn she tried to suppress and couldn’t. Her body seemed to have relaxed in just the time it took him to deliver those few sentences and those few repeated cords from the guitar. He chuckled a little and then began to sing, and then his lovely deep voice was all she could think about. It didn’t just fill the cabin, it filled the world.
“Sleep, baby, sleep… pretty sunshine of my heart. Nothing in this sad old lonely world, will ever keep us apart… Sleep, baby, sleep… close your pretty eyes tonight. Everything so wrong will turn out to be so right…”
And those were last words she heard as the exhaustion caused by the last couple days took over her, and her body fell down into a deep, peaceful sleep. Her last thought had been an answer to the question she’d asked herself, and she didn’t know it, but she passed out with a small smile on her lips.
Since when had she become such a hopeless romantic?
Since Charlie Redmine walked back into her life.
The question that burned her was different, and she thought she should make it a point to learn the answer before this thing got on any further. The question was, what had happened to Charlie since that day at the lake that made him the way he was now? Just who was this man she was falling in love with?
And what was he keeping from her?
CHAPTER 6
CHARLIE
Charlie sat on the bench and watched her as she slept, lost in his thoughts. He was concerned about the situation they had found themselves in, but looking back over his long life, he supposed he’d found himself in much worse. After a while, when the shit just kept falling on your head, you learned to pop open an umbrella and breathe through your mouth. You learned to take things in stride. He’d been fool enough to think the hard times were in the past, that he had finally moved on and built himself a stable, peaceful life. A new existence. This was the whole reason he’d stopped communicating with Michael over a hundred years ago, but he should have known his brother would suck him in again, attract trouble and expect Charlie to face it with him.
To Michael, he would always be Charlie-Boy, a thrill-seeking young man with no regard for the law and big ideas about how to come up in the world. But Charlie was no longer that person. Three centuries in the prison of the Northlands could do that to you. You walked into that place as one thing, and walked out another, if you managed to walk out at all. Gods knew Charlie had had enough close calls in that hell-hole to consider it a miracle he had lived through it. Now look at what he was facing; death, or a return to Contrain Prison for the remainder of his life. He was sure he preferred death. It was one of the only things he was sure of right about now.
The princess shifted in her sleep, and Charlie rubbed his hand over his jaw, wondering what she would think of him if she knew about all the things he’d done, things he’d tried and tried to forget but had never really lost sight of. He considered the Charlie who’d been a thief, a liar, and yes, even a murderer, dead now. That Charlie had died in prison, had literally been beaten and cut and knocked out of him in blood and screams. The Charlie he’d been since being released from Contrain was someone who avoided trouble, who laid low and tried to do what was right. This was the only Charlie the princess knew, and he didn’t necessarily consider this a dishonesty, really. He had not in a million years imagined things would go this far with her. And, he’d always figured when you lived as long as his kind did, you could be afforded one or two do-overs, reinventions of the soul. But the past always caught up with you eventually. It was something that had taken him surprisingly long to learn.
And now things were even more complicated. She would have to know about his past eventually, because someone couldn’t really know someone else without seeing their past. She was the first person in a long time that he wanted to really know him, and this made him instinctively uneasy. She would see the scars hidden under his shirt and want to know the stories behind them. She would see what happened when he was pushed to the edge, would slowly see that his perpetually calm demeanor was built over a lifetime of shitty situations and a controlled addiction to ad
renaline. Eventually, she would know the truth about that day when her sister and mother died in the attack on her father’s castle… And what would she think then? She would hate him, but she would hate him more if he allowed her to give herself over to him without knowing the truth.
He would hate himself even more if he allowed that.
Sitting in that dungeon back at the castle, before she had come and helped him escape, he had been thinking about the way life seemed to come full circle. He thought about his first week at Contrain, about how he’d had his nose and jaw broken in the yard by four other Sorcerers because he’d refused to get up from the workout bench one of them wanted. He’d thought about how his first cellmate had tried to stab him to death with a shank while Charlie pretended to be asleep, about how that cellmate would make the seventh person whose death he was responsible for, all because Charlie had spoken to one of the guy’s enemies earlier in the day. Sitting in that dungeon, he’d thought about all kinds of things he hadn’t allowed himself to think of in a hundred years, things he swore he would leave between those cold stone walls.
He thought about how he had ended up there in the first place. These thoughts inevitably led to thoughts of his brother. On the long nights he had lain awake in his cell, he’d never once blamed Michael for being in there. He’d paid the price for both of them and left the bitterness that tried to build in him behind, but when he’d gotten out, being the new Charlie that he was, he had decided to cut off communication with Michael—for both their sakes. Obviously, Michael still had a taste for trouble, but for Charlie, any taste he’d had for that was long gone.
Still, trouble was here, and this time Michael’s hand in the matter could not be denied. As he sat watching the princess sleep, for the first time in his life he was truly angry with his brother. For the first time in his life, he questioned what choice he would make if it came down to a decision between her and Michael. Hers had been the face in his dreams when he’d finally find sleep in his cell, a beautiful reminder of why he deserved to be punished, but Michael’s had been the one on his mind when he’d had to remind himself of the sacrifice he’d made and why it was worth it. Both of which, he’d had to do often, just to keep his mind.
He’d tell her everything, he decided, but first he would watch her a while longer and see what kind of skeletons she had hiding in her own closet. He could see so much in the violet of her eyes, so much of the past visible only there. Maybe this was why they were so attracted to each other, why their souls seemed to speak with no words. They both wore masks that hid ugly truths and broken pieces. And if they were going to continue down this path, the old Charlie would have to make himself known. Anything else would be unfair to her.
If things kept unraveling the way they were, he was certain she would meet Charlie-Boy soon enough. And then… Who knew?
There was a possibility she would hate him for it, and this made an ache in his heart where he had thought only stone resided. On top of that, there were enough people in high places who hated him as it was.
CHAPTER 7
THEODINE GRAY
A terrible storm of emotions raged inside him as he stood at the bedside of his comatose king. King Syrian looked better today than he had yesterday, but the Shaman had said it could take him a couple weeks to fully recover. That didn’t mean that he couldn’t wake any day now. He could. The princess had used the Black Stone to reverse the demon poison just in time, and the effects of it were still just working themselves out of his system.
In that storm of emotions, love was part of what filled Theo as he stared down at his king, a grimace on his handsome face that he was not aware of. King Syrian had always been good to him, had practically raised him as his own after Theo’s entire family had been lost in the Great War. Theo was the last of his name, and the king could have very well turned his back on him, or simply brushed him aside, but he had not. King Syrian was a good man.
Theo would never forget the words the king had told him after his family’s funeral, as he’d stood beside him and accepted condolences with Theo, who’d been just a boy, and could not help the tears from streaming down his face, though they shamed him.
King Syrian had placed his large hand on Theo’s shoulder and regarded him with gentle violet eyes; eyes the same color as his daughter’s. He’d said, “You must be strong now, son. You have my word that this does not mark the end of the Gray line. You will carry on your father’s name someday, and someday after that, your children will carry it on. This is not the end of things for you. It’s just the beginning.”
Theo’s heart swelled with pain and hurt and love, as it always did when he recalled this particular memory. King Syrian had been good to his word, practically raising Theo as his own, making sure he received the best of Magical instruction and education and even giving him his own permanent quarters in the castle. When Theo had come of age, the king had knighted him quickly, and given him a position with the Hunters. It hadn’t taken long before Syrian had promoted him to Head Hunter. Just before he’d succumbed to the poison and fallen into a coma, he’d promised Theo his daughter’s hand if he could manage to rescue Surah from Black Heart. But that hadn’t worked out, and it was all because of that common piece of trash Redmine. And now…
Now he was thinking terrible things. Things that, if carried out unsuccessfully, could strip him of his position and standing with the king, whom he loved very much. But today, as he stood looking down at the king’s pale face, at his closed eyes and shallow breaths, the love he’d once had was underscored with a deep feeling of betrayal and hurt, like a knife in his heart that just kept twisting and twisting, tearing him up from the inside out.
His head tilted, and his cold gray eyes went to the piece of White Stone hanging around the king’s neck, resting like a diamond on his wide chest. The king’s piece of White Stone was the largest, save for the piece it’d been chipped from, which even Theo did not know the location of. The second largest had belonged to the queen, who was long passed, and her stone was likely in some secret place only the king knew about. Next were the three stones that belonged to King Syrian’s children; Syra, Syris, and Surah. Syra’s stone had been lost for centuries now, and Theo assumed Syrian’s was hidden away with the Queen’s.
As Head Hunter, Theo had his own piece, but it was hardly bigger than a pearl, and allowed him to teleport and use other more complicated Magic that was not accessible without one. Magic was in the blood of every Sorcerer and Sorceress—some more so than others—so simple spells were practiced by all. But the stone resting on King Syrian’s chest was a source of power greater than Theo could ever imagine yielding, and even now he knew it was working to speed the healing process of its owner. It never left its place around the king’s neck. But, perhaps…
He touched the thing he’d slipped into his pocket before coming to the king’s chambers, indecision falling over him. It was such a rare thing for him that he felt his heartbeat pick up and his palms become sweaty. Reaching into his pocket, he removed the diamond he’d brought and stared down at it, his eyes flipping to the king’s stone and back again, comparing their likeness. They were about the same size and shape… almost identical save for the fact that one held Magic, and the other did not.
His thoughts turned dark again as he stood indecisive, like a switch being flipped inside his soul. If he were being honest, he wasn’t entirely sure Charlie Redmine was responsible for the murders of two Highborn women, or the capture of the princess. Somehow, that didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that everyone was guilty of something, and he was going to make sure Redmine paid in full for his indiscretions. And the princess… Well, he would decide how to deal with her when the time came.
But, to do that, he needed to make sure he was in the position to be making those kind of decisions. With the king out of commission, and his daughter missing—Theo refused to think of her absence in terms of her assisted escape of Redmine—the throne was left open and weak. As Head Hunter, he was
technically in charge. He smiled at this thought. No, it was his duty to be in charge. For the good of the kingdom. For the princess’s own good, even if she couldn’t see it yet.
Before he could second-guess himself, he reached down and removed the stone from its holding place on the chain around the king’s neck and replaced it with the diamond. His heart was racing faster than a prize horse now. He stared down at the royal stone in his hand and closed his fingers over it, feeling its power flood through him. It felt wonderful, a sensation that filled him from head to toe, like being gently massaged on the inside of his skin.
Then his eyes flicked back to the king, and he couldn’t help the bit of guilt that flooded through him. The difference in the king wasn’t very obvious, it was just a small change that represented his loss of the stone. Theo doubted anyone would notice. After all, so few were even allowed in the king’s chambers while he was in such a condition.
Theo leaned down and kissed the king on his clammy forehead, the look in his gray eyes somehow colder than it had been yesterday. Resolved. “For you, my king,” he whispered. “I will set things to rights in the kingdom. I will capture and kill Black Heart and his worthless brother. I will save Surah from her own mistakes. You just rest a while longer. When you wake, it will be a whole new world for us.”
He left then, a smile on his face that stole whatever beauty had been left there.
CHAPTER 8
SURAH
Surah awoke to the smell of cooking meat, her stomach growling even as she swam up to consciousness. She sat up and suffered a moment of panic as she couldn’t remember where she was. Then she turned her head and saw Charlie standing over the stove, his back to her, a pan and spatula in his hand, sizzling and cracking. He didn’t turn to face her, but his head tilted slightly and he said, “Hungry?”
