by Bast, Anya
“Ye leave this building, take one step toward that man, ye can never come back, lass.” Thorgest’s voice boomed behind her, accented with magick to make it seem bigger, deeper, more commanding.
Jessa stopped in her tracks and turned slowly. “Are you threatening me?” She shivered and her anger eased. Realization bloomed.
Oh, hell. There was magick affecting her. The thread of it wrapped her will like a piano wire, choking off certain thoughts and emotions … the ones Thorgest deemed dangerous.
“It’s for yer own good, lass. The man’s no good for ye.”
She took a step toward her great-grandfather, trying to summon the flash of rage she’d had a moment earlier. She needed that anger now, needed that intense emotion to burn away the enchantment that had been set on her, to cut the thread that was slowly killing her will.
“Just like the spell you’ve put me under to keep me compliant and easygoing is for my own good, right, Thorgest?”
Thorgest took a step back, the blood draining from his face.
“I just figured it out.”
Her great-grandfather shot a look filled with daggers at Roan.
“He didn’t tell me.” Well, not directly. “I figured it out on my own. How long has it been on me? Who placed it?” She took another step toward him, her rage trickling through her veins a little harder, a little faster. A shiver started and she stopped it dead in its track with a vicious force of her will.
They would never break her.
“Ye leave here to go after that man and ye leave this all behind. Ye’ll never be a real witch, Jessa. All you’ll be able to manage are tricks fit for a toddler’s amusement.”
“Don’t tell me what I’ll be capable of.” Another step toward him.
Now her rage was a running river, pushing away every last vestige of the spellwork that had been woven over her. She summoned her strength of will—which had always been a formidable force—and severed that choking thread. She sensed the tatters of the ruined spellwork fluttering harmlessly to the floor all around her.
Thorgest threw an arm wide in an encompassing gesture. “All this can be yers. We need ye to lead the enclave, lass. This can be yer home. This is yer family.”
“I had a family. Her name was Margaret, the woman my mother chose to raise me in the event of her death.” She paused, realization dawning. “It was Carolyn, wasn’t it? She placed the magick the night she called me. I understand now. That’s why I left the keep, why I left Broder.”
Thorgest said nothing and she knew her guess was right. A light of fear had entered his eyes and she wondered why they were so desperate to keep her here. “We’re yer blood, lass. We only did what was best for ye.”
Jessa looked Thorgest up and down. “I decide what’s best for me, Thorgest. Right now I’ve decided that leaving is best. I’m out of here.” Nodding once at Roan, she turned on her heel and walked out the door.
TWENTY-SIX
It was still raining.
Jessa burst through the front door of the mansion and into a steady downpour. She launched herself down the steps and ran flat out for the main gates. Please, please, let me not be too late.
Broder stood on the trash-strewn path just past the gates, beside his motorcycle, with his back to her.
Her fingers curled around the bars of the gates and pulled. They didn’t budge. They were locked. “Broder!”
He turned and looked at her as if just waking from a daze. He blinked and the dullness in his eyes cleared. “You should go back in, Jessa. It’s over,” he yelled over the pounding of the rain. He turned back to his bike.
She pulled on the gates again, but they wouldn’t budge. “Broder, wait, I need to talk to you.”
He hesitated, then turned and walked toward the gates on the opposite side. Stopping short, he frowned. “This is as close as the wards will allow. They’ve changed something. I can’t take another step.”
“Broder,” she yelled across the short distance. The rain was really coming down now. “Why did you do it? Why did you go berserker on that enclave?”
“Does it matter?” His voice sounded emotionless. “I did it.” He paused.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Just tell me.”
Broder looked up into the heavy, dark clouds, letting the rain hit his face. “My wife went to the witches, asked for a charm to help her conceive, but whatever they did to her, it killed her. Or, at least, I thought so.”
“What do you mean?”
He lowered his gaze to hers. “She got pregnant, died in childbirth. The child died, too.” He paused. “Some things are better left to nature; sometimes magick shouldn’t interfere. It wasn’t rational, but I held the seidhr responsible. Before my wife and child had even been buried, I went to the enclave, demanding answers. I yelled, insulted them. I threatened them. They didn’t like that, didn’t enjoy having accusations of murder flung at them, no matter how unfounded and grief addled they were.”
“Is that when you killed them?”
He gave a harsh, stony laugh. “No. They trapped me, kept me for ten years in a cell. Used me like a guinea pig in a lab for magick. They tortured me, drove me insane.” He stopped and pushed a hand through his hair. “Then, one day, I escaped.”
“And there was hell to pay.”
He nodded. “I delivered hell to the seidhr enclave, then—”
“Loki delivered it to you.”
“Yeah.” He pressed his lips together for a moment. “But I still did it. I slaughtered everyone I saw that day, showed no mercy. I killed innocents.”
“You were insane. They’d made you that way.”
“Doesn’t matter. I did it.”
“It’s been a thousand years.”
He looked up into the clouds again. “And I’m still not worthy of you.”
“Says who?”
He lowered his head slowly and caught her gaze. A spark of hope burned in the dark depths of his eyes. “Loki says.”
“Fuck him. I love you anyway.” Her voice broke on the words. She reached out a hand toward him. He reached out to her, too, but their fingertips could barely brush.
Her gaze held his, her eyes welling with tears.
“I slaughtered your people.” His voice sounded dead.
“There were extenuating circumstances. Anyway, turns out some of them really suck.” Jessa rattled the gates again, then went for the lock … it was open. “Damn it.” She took a step back and stared at the high iron bars. More magick. It wasn’t letting her pass.
“It’s warded,” came Thorgest’s smug voice from behind them. “Ye’ll ne’er get out an’ he’ll ne’er get back in.”
Broder made an angry, snarling sound.
Jessa rounded on the old man. “You can’t keep me prisoner in here!”
Thorgest smiled. “It was done the moment ye came here of yer own free will. Powerful magick can be weaved from acts born of free will. Ye gave me all the clay I needed to work with when ye crossed this threshold. Dinna ye ever wonder why ye needed to hitch rides all the way here?”
“I didn’t cross it of my own free will! I had a spell on me. Compulsion. It’s been choking off certain thoughts and emotions.”
“You dared put magick on her?” Broder shouted, his fists clenched. He strained against the warding, but it was impenetrable to him.
Thorgest’s smiled widened. He cast a poisonous look at Broder. “Some part of ye wanted to come here. Some part of ye wanted to leave him and come to us. That’s all I needed, a sliver of yer will. Now ye’re here and he’s there. Story done. Ye’ll forget this. Train. Become the leader of this enclave one day.” He paused, looking satisfied. “Have Sam’s babies.”
“I’m not staying here, Thorgest. I’m not going to be groomed to be some slave to this place. Now I understand why my mother ran.”
“Ye’ll get over this, Jessamine, see the logic in it. Eventually, ye’ll come around.”
“Yeah, to killing you in your sleep,” Broder interjected.
Thorgest turned his cold eyes to him. “Aye. Ye’d know more than a little about that then, wouldn’t ye?”
“About murdering people in their sleep? No.” Broder narrowed his eyes and looked so brutal for a moment that Jessa took a step back. “I kill them when they’re awake.” No one should ever put Broder on their bad side, Jessa decided.
“Let me out of here, Thorgest.” Jessa went back to the gates and yanked on them.
“I told ye: If ye leave here, ye’ll never be welcome past those wards again.”
“Great!” she hurled over her shoulder at him, while still trying to open them. “That’s just fine with me!”
“Ye’ll never become a true witch.”
“Oh, whatever! If to be a witch is to be like you or Carolyn, then good riddance.”
“Ye’ll be prey to the Blight.”
“I’ll have Broder to protect me.”
“You’re forgetting Loki.”
Jessa went still. Her gaze went to Broder’s on the other side of the iron bars, rain dripping down her face, soaking her clothes and hair. Of course she was forgetting Loki. Broder would never be hers. She turned her attention back to the gate. “I still want out of here. I’ll let the Blight kill me before I stay.”
“So go.” It came from Roan.
She turned and found Roan standing a little behind Thorgest, who had turned to give the shaman the iciest of glares.
“Can I?” she asked him.
Roan shrugged a shoulder loosely. “You broke the magick laid on you by Carolyn; why not break this magick, too?” He paused. “You possess the power to kill Blight, as well. Work on it, maybe you can get it to bloom.”
Thorgest said nothing to Roan, but his intentions were clear in his eyes and on his face. Roan was risking a lot in helping her.
So the man had a conscience after all.
She turned back to the gates and studied them. How could she break the warding with absolutely no training? Reaching out, she touched one of the smooth bars, then focused her gaze past it to Broder.
The gates were only a physical—psychological—barrier. They had no lock and would swing free without magick to bind them shut. She wanted to get past them, to the man she loved, and every moment they didn’t open was a moment she lost with him. The clock was ticking and her asshole of a great-grandfather was wasting her time. Sorrow welled.
“No,” she whispered to herself. “No despair.” Sorrow or despair hadn’t helped her break Carolyn’s magick—anger had.
She closed her eyes and tapped into the source of power she’d used when she’d layered the talisman around her neck with Carolyn’s help. Carolyn, how much she wished she could see her one last time before she got out of here. That woman was in serious need of a piece of her mind … of a good right hook to the jaw.
And she was getting out of here.
Reaching up, she closed her fist around the dragonfly pendant. It didn’t have the magick she needed, but it was the closest she could get to Broder right now—a link, a symbol.
Focusing on her magick—and her rage—she pulled all of it she could up from the depths of her and threw it at the gates. It was messy and clumsy. She fisted her power like a toddler with a fat crayon, making slashes and nonsensical swirls on a blank page. She opened her eyes when it hit and watched in awe as the bars bowed outward in the rain, as though made of rubber, then sprang back into place.
Huh.
She did it again, then again … and something binding the gates broke.
“No,” snarled Thorgest, “I forbid this.” He grabbed for her, but Roan was there, yanking her great-grandfather away from her. They tussled as Jessa lunged for the gates.
Jessa had just grabbed on to the iron bars when magick exploded above her head. Roan wrestled Thorgest to the ground as she pulled on the gates, muttering to herself, “Please, please, please.”
The gates swung open and Jessa ran to Broder without a glance backward. He mounted his bike and she jumped on behind him. As he started the motorcycle, she glanced behind her and saw Thorgest shoot a massive amount of magick at Roan, so much that it made her hair stand on end even at a distance. He reminded her of some wizard from a fairy tale—Merlin, perhaps. Fire and smoke exploded.
When it cleared, Roan was gone and only scorch marks showed where he’d been standing in the rain.
A swell of grief swamped Jessa for a moment. Then Thorgest turned his attention to her and Broder. Her throat caught painfully with fear, the memory of all those exploding demons fresh in her mind. She knew she’d been lucky with the gates, but no way could she go toe-to-toe with Thorgest in a magickal battle. “Broder, go faster!”
Broder’s bike shot forward, causing her to nearly tumble off the back. She gripped Broder’s coat as they sped down the road, away from the enclave. Behind them, magick blew a crater in the pavement. Then one blew closer, and another even closer. Stone exploded, bits of shrapnel flying, raining down on their heads. A crater opened up just under Broder’s back tire, nearly making him lose control of the cycle.
The bike flew down the road until the gates were only a speck behind them and Thorgest was gone forever. They shot out of the mouth of the creepy garbage-strewn road and into the sweet, fresh air of the Scottish Highlands.
Freedom. Safety.
Jessa relaxed against Broder’s back, a tear squeezing out of her eye. So, that was that. Done. The rain was finally beginning to stop. How fitting.
Broder pulled over to the side of the road and cut the engine. They were both drenched and she was shivering. At least this time the shivering wasn’t from manipulative magick, but a result of good, honest chilly air.
Broder pulled her off the back of the bike and dragged her up against his chest, nestling his nose in her hair. He said nothing, but that was okay. Everything that needed to be said was in the warmth of his body and the way he held her.
He loved her more than anything in this world, would do anything for her, risk anything.
She laid her head against his chest and listened to the thrum of his strong heartbeat. For one thousand years that heart had beat. It was the heart of a warrior, of a man who’d been damned, of a Viking—of the man she loved. In his arms, she wasn’t chilly any longer.
He pulled her away from him and stared into her eyes. “You heard everything I did to that enclave.”
“Yes.” She paused. “When you were doing it, did you know? I mean, were you aware? You were described as a—”
“Berserker. I was in a berserker rage. I didn’t know what I was doing but, Jessa, when it was done I didn’t regret it.”
She nodded and swallowed hard, looking away from him. “Okay.” She couldn’t get the images out of her head—what the carnage must have looked like. It was hard to imagine Broder as a stone-cold killer, mowing down everyone in his path indiscriminately.
He tipped her chin up, forcing her to look at him. “I regret it now, and not because I’ve spent a thousand years paying for it, but because I’ve had a thousand years to think about it. I am sick of death, sick of killing, even the killing of the Blight. If I could take back what I did that day, even after what they did to me—I would.”
Her body relaxed a little.
“I thought I’d lost you, Jessa.”
“Never.”
“Stay with me.” It was an order, issued in a low, gruff voice.
“Forever, if they let me.”
But they wouldn’t. They both knew that.
Something dark moved in his eyes, then he lowered his head and kissed her. His tongue eased into her mouth and brushed up against hers. She shuddered against him, her body responding instantly. Molding her body to his, she told him without words how much she needed him right now. They both knew they had a limited time together and they had no idea when it would end.
He scooped her into his arms and carried her over the rise of a nearby hill. Setting her on her feet, he swept off his worn leather duster and laid it on the wet grass, then eased
her down on top of it. They were both soaked; the coat was saturated; everything was wet. She should have been cold, but not with Broder hovering over her body, covering her, protecting her.
Her fingers fumbled desperately with the button and zipper on his jeans, even as he also attempted to get her jeans off her. Slowly, inch by inch, they managed to drag fabric over damp skin. Somehow they managed to get most of their clothes off—the important pieces, anyway.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The rain. The wet duster. The hard earth beneath them. None of that mattered now. Her entire reality had narrowed to the feel of his body rubbing against the bare skin of her thighs, the pressure of his chest against hers.
