Bitter Night

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  “Why does Giselle object?” Alexander countered, and was surprised when she answered.

  “She apparently had a vision a while back. She decided she is going to save what she can. Horngate will be a sanctuary.”

  He stared, even more certain he had made the right choice to stay with Giselle and Max. Then another thought struck him. “Perhaps that is why they are threatening Horngate. If she does not join the war for the Guardians, then she sets a bad example for other witches. She is very strong. She could cause problems.”

  “Against the Guardians? They’ll swat us like a fly.”

  But something in her expression told Alexander she did not entirely believe it. There was something she was not telling him.

  She blew out a breath. “We need to get home.”

  “How much farther?”

  “It’s another thousand miles. That’s another night and a half. I don’t know if they can hold off that long’if they are even under attack. With Sunspears and Shadowblades trading off the driving, Giselle should have made it back to Horngate yesterday, and she’ll have strengthened the shield wards. I just don’t know how long the Guardians were going to give her to answer before they attack. And what the fuck is Alton up to?” She shook her head. “I need a shower and sleep. Try to eat. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need all the strength we can muster.”

  She strode into the bathroom, leaving Alexander to stew over the new information. He knew why Selange was resisting the call of the Guardians. She was a flesh mage. No matter how much power the Guardians gave her, once humanity was destroyed, she would be entirely dependent on them. She’d fight tooth and claw to avoid that.

  He was still staring at the ceiling when Max returned and lay on top of her bed. Soon she was asleep. But it was not peaceful. She shook and her body knotted against the pain of her compulsion spells. He watched her for hours, unable to help her. Sweat gleamed on her skin and she tore at her face and arms with her nails. Then finally, in midafternoon, she seemed to conquer the pain. Her breathing steadied and she stopped struggling, her body going still. It was almost like she fell into a coma. He scowled at her. At this rate, she might be dead before they got to Horngate.

  He lay down at last. His last thought before fading away was that Max had said we, like she had accepted him into her Shadowblades. He hoped it was true.

  16

  THE NEXT NIGHT ALEXANDER BEGAN A CAMPAIGN of asking Max questions as they drove north through Utah and Idaho. He wanted to pull her out of herself. That inward-looking habit could only agitate her compulsion spells, and he did not know how much more she could take. She looked haggard, and her body had been through so much in such a short time that he feared the straw that might break her. He had to be careful, though. At any moment she might shut him down. He had to avoid walking out onto any of her personal minefields. The trouble was, he had no idea where they might lie.

  “Tell me about Montana,” he asked after they had eaten their drive-through meal.

  He shifted in his seat to watch the play of emotions across her face. She gave him a sidelong glance. Not entirely friendly, but not unfriendly either.

  “What do you want to know?”

  He shrugged. “Do you like living there?”

  “I do. It matches who I am.”

  “How so?”

  “It can be a harsh, unforgiving place. The Rockies are full of sly, secretive valleys and canyons, the peaks thrusting out like knives. What grows there has to be tough. The forests aren’t easy things. They aren’t lush and green. The trees root into the bones of the mountains, and they don’t invite intrusion. The things that live there are hardy and dangerous’mountain lions, wolves, bears, moose, and elk. Each one knows how to kill to survive. The valleys aren’t much more inviting, though they’ve been tamed by ranchers.” She paused thoughtfully. “I never thought I’d be happy there. Now I can’t imagine being happy anywhere else.”

  “Where did you come from before that?” Alexander asked tentatively.

  “Nosy today, aren’t you? All right, if we’re going to play the question game, how old are you?”

  He let out a silent sigh of relief. She was not shutting him down. “Selange made me in 1904. At that time I was twenty-three years old.”

  “You look pretty good for an old geezer,” Max said. “So how did you end up with her?”

  Alexander looked down at his hands. He did not often talk about his past. But if he wanted to know more about Max, he would have to give as much as he got. “I was born in Canada in 1881. My parents were Bohemian. They had emigrated to Kolin in the district of Assiniboia, which today is part of Saskatchewan. They were poor, hardscrabble ranchers. It was a difficult life. My father drank and was sometimes violent. My mother ...she was tough. She left him when I was ten years old. She never came back. I never saw her again. It made my father bitter. He died five years later in a saloon brawl. There was a smallpox epidemic a few years after that, and both my brothers died. I left soon after. I worked herding cattle mostly, then trapping up in Washington and BC. Even did a little searching for gold in California.

  “I met Selange in San Francisco. Even then she was a powerful witch. She had come from France ten years or so before. She was hungry to establish a coven in America. There was a lot of free territory’it was all just a matter of staking it out. I had just come in off a tramper down from Seattle. I was footloose’I was not sure what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. Then I saw her.”

  He smiled at the memory with bittersweet emotion. He had been so damned young.

  “And?” Max prompted.

  “And I was lost. I followed her carriage. I could not help myself. I did not know it then, but she had glamoured me. She had need of Shadowblades in this new land.

  “One day she invited me into her carriage and into her bedroom. Then she asked me if I wanted her gifts. I said yes to everything. Anything. A man like me could not hope to touch a woman like that, and there I was in her bed. The bedsheets alone cost more than I was worth. Everything smelled’like a garden. Within a month I was a Shadowblade.”

  “Well, at least you got laid. Giselle just got me drunk,” Max said sourly. “All right. Fair is fair. I grew up in Iowa. Went to college, and my roommate turned out to be a witch. One night we went to a bar and she started asking me all these questions. You know, what if I could never get sick, never grow old ...I said that would be great. Next thing you know, I woke up on her altar.”

  “When was that?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  Alexander sat up. “But’”

  “But what?”

  “It is just that you are so strong. I thought you surely must be older than that.”

  “I’m a fifty-year-old child wonder. If my family could only see me now.”

  That did it. Her expression went cold and once again she started withdrawing inside herself. Alexander could feel the stillness settling around her like armor. He scrambled for something’anything’to keep her from going away. The only guaranteed route he could think of was to go running straight out into the obvious minefield.

  “Where is your family?” he asked. “You are so young’surely they must still be alive.”

  She twitched and jerked her head to look at him. Her eyes had turned nearly black. They looked like black holes. Alexander stiffened, more than a little expecting her to reach out and try to rip his head off. Her hand on the steering wheel tightened and the other flexed in her lap. His gaze slid to the knives strapped to her forearms beneath her pushed-up sleeves, and he wondered if he should be reaching for his.

  “They live near Sacramento.”

  He was so shocked that she had actually replied that for long moments he had nothing to say. Finally: “Do you see them? Do they know?”

  She shook her head. “I just disappeared one night and they never saw me again. Papers said I’d been taken by a drifter, and a big manhunt ensued, but of course they didn’t find me. Couple of years after that I
made sure the cops found evidence of my death. I didn’t want them to keep hoping. It was killing them. They left Iowa and went to the Sacramento Valley and grew cherries and peaches. They’ve retired and moved to a place called Del Webb’it’s a retirement community. My brother still runs the orchard. My sister owns a bakery.”

  Her voice was expressionless, as if the words had nothing to do with her. Alexander did not know what to say. He had never known what to say to new Shadowblades who had to give up their families and friends’their entire lives. Selange made the choice easier. She promised that she would kill the families and friends of any Spears or Blades who came into contact with someone from their past’even accidentally. No one doubted that she would follow through.

  He was scrabbling for something to keep her talking when she shocked him again.

  “So what about you? Did you leave someone special behind in San Diego?”

  Alexander thought of Thor. “One. A friend.”

  “Not saying much for a man of your advanced years. You must be a real ass. Or maybe you just have really bad breath. Which is it?”

  He was pleased to hear the humor. She was climbing out of her own personal abyss by sheer strength of will. He had no right, but Alexander was proud of her. “Perhaps I just have discriminating taste,” he said drily.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Tell me about this friend of yours.”

  Now it was Alexander’s turn to be swallowed by shadows, guilt, and sorrow. He felt himself tensing. He wanted to brush away the question, but if he did, he knew that the deadly silence would return and the delicate bridge building between them would collapse in rubble. If he wanted trust from her, he was going to have to give it. That meant sharing his painful secrets, as she had inexplicably shared hers.

  “It is not a pretty story. I did not really know he was my friend until it was too late. Like you, he defied his witch for me.” He told her how Thor had helped him escape, how Alexander had shot him, then cut through his spine and left him bound with the others in the van.

  “I hope it’s worth it,” she said when he was done. Blunting the tartness of her words, she reached out and clasped his hand before pulling back.

  “It was,” he said quietly. He shook off the dark mood that felt a little too much like self-pity. “Besides, it is really only self-preservation. Imagine what Niko, Akemi, and Tyler would do if I let anything happen to you. Not to mention Giselle.”

  She grimaced. “It isn’t your job to look after me.”

  “I do not see it that way. And neither do the others.” He paused. “You risk yourself too much.”

  “Do I? How much is too much?”

  He shook his head. “I do not know. But I worry about you,” he added, speaking more honestly than he wanted.

  “You and me both,” she muttered, then shook her head. “Get over it. I can handle myself just fine, and pain is just pain. It goes away eventually.”

  “Unless you die first,” he pointed out.

  She shrugged. “Still goes away.” She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. “I haven’t adjusted well to being a Shadowblade. I have some anger issues.”

  “Really? I am shocked.”

  She grinned unrepentantly at his sarcasm. “For a long time my goal was to see Giselle dead. I didn’t really care what happened to me as long as I got to kill her first.”

  “And now?”

  She sobered. “There’s going to be a war, and like it or not, we’re in the middle of it. It’s time to give up the revenge fantasy and get on with doing my job.”

  “Somehow I doubt that will make you behave any more carefully,” Alexander observed. “Not after you nearly died getting me out of the Conclave. I was a stranger and an enemy. What would you do for your covenstead?”

  Max tapped a finger against her lips, then glanced at him. Her eyes were hot and hard. “The real question is what wouldn’t I do. But you’re in luck. There’s a really good chance you might find out soon.”

  17

  MAX DROVE LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL THROUGH Idaho and up into Montana. She got a ticket just north of Pocatello, accepting it from the cop without argument and driving sedately away. Ten minutes later she was doing a hundred miles an hour again.

  Alexander’s persistent conversation had eased her compulsion spells slightly. She knew what he was up to and forced herself to let him help her. All she could think of was the silence at Horngate and Magpie’s cryptic warning before the Conclave. The words ran over and over through her mind, prodding at her to hurry faster. No safety there, not for anyone. Not until you return. Only you can make it safe.

  They spent the day in Dillon, less than two hundred miles from Horngate. There wasn’t much open that early but for a local dive that served as both a bar and restaurant for railroad workers. They managed to get a greasy breakfast before they had to hunker down in a hotel, but Max was too wound up to sleep. She paced the room as Alexander watched. At last he stood and guided her to the edge of the bed and pushed her down. Then he knelt behind her and rubbed the tense muscles in her shoulders. It was all Max could do not to flinch away from him.

  His hands were warm and soothing. But she didn’t want soothing. She needed to hit something, to yell and swear. Her stomach knotted with helplessness. The pain of her compulsion spells throbbed and chewed, and Max was grateful for them. The moment they faded was the moment Giselle died, and probably Horngate, too. Her body seized with fear. She wasn’t thinking about revenge anymore; Max was praying to whatever gods were listening that Giselle had made her a strong enough weapon to save Horngate. Because if Magpie was right, then Max was their only hope.

  At last Alexander gave up on the shoulder rub and straddled her from behind, pulling her back against his chest and holding her loosely.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, starting to lever away.

  “You are not alone in this. I am here and I am worth five Shadowblades’I was Prime, after all. You can use me however you need me.”

  “I don’t want to use you,” Max spat, leaping to her feet and spinning around. “I don’t fucking want to use anyone.”

  “But you have to. That is what you are now. You are Shadowblade Prime of Horngate, and you protect your witch and your covenstead. You use the weapons you have at hand, and I am one of them. Or is it that you still do not trust me?”

  Max went still. Trust was a leap of faith. She’d made it once with him when she let him choose to serve Giselle or leave. And then he’d betrayed her. Or not’she still wasn’t entirely sure. But if he was acting, he deserved an Oscar. The problem wasn’t with him. The last time she’d really trusted anyone had been thirty years ago, and Giselle had shattered that trust. Max wasn’t sure she was really capable of it anymore.

  And yet she wanted to trust Alexander. Whenever she looked at him, she saw his bone-deep understanding of what it meant to risk her people, to want to guard them, to need to keep their pain to a minimum. And though she’d only known him a few days, he already knew more about her than anyone else except Giselle. Plus she enjoyed his company. Those hours outside the Conclave before the challenge had been so ...normal. Like real people living lives where they didn’t go around getting tortured and cutting throats.

  He was waiting for her answer, his gaze heavy, his expression growing harder with each passing second. She opened her mouth but words failed her. Even the smartass ones. “I need a shower.”

  She fled to the bathroom and stayed there until the water ran cold. It was not until she stepped out that she realized she hadn’t brought a change of clothes inside with her. “Terrific,” she muttered. Being naked that close to Alexander was like waving red meat in front of a starving pit bill’where she was the pit bull. “Down, girl,” she told herself, then resolutely opened the door.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed flipping through the channels on the television. He looked at her, his expression remote, but his eyes were like coals. His anger filled the room and made it hard to breathe. Shi
t. Max hesitated, holding the towel tight. His gaze slid downward to her feet and back up slowly until he met her eyes again. She swallowed. The anger had changed into something else. Something far more dangerous and just as hot.

  “I need my clothes,” she said pointlessly in a strangled voice, grabbing her gym bag and disappearing back into the bathroom. For a moment she contemplated a cold shower. Not that it would work. She yanked on her clothes and scrubbed her hair dry with a towel, combing it with stiff fingers. When she returned, Alexander had not moved.