And as much as the coward in him wanted to, Alder could not simply walk away from the inn, leaving the Levenach untouched. The vengeful archangel spoke true—he would hold to Beatrix’s oath, and return did she not succeed in redeeming Alder. Alder had seen Michael’s wrath played out for one hundred years, and he could not allow himself to think of the myriad of torturous ways Beatrix might be punished for her failure. Perhaps the archangel would even do as he had with Alder, and enslave Beatrix as a hunter in his vengeful band. The only certainty was that if Beatrix was either made vampire or left whole, Michael and his Wild Hunt would find her.
There was only one other choice, the single thing that would ensure the salvation of Beatrix’s soul, as well as her safety from the Hunt. And that meant that Alder had only a few short hours remaining to be with the only woman he had ever loved in one hundred and thirty years. A few short hours to make up for several lifetimes. To be worth eternity in hell.
He opened his eyes as her quiet footfalls scraped over the threshold of the doorway, and he turned to face her.
Even after his earlier rebuff, Beatrix came to him without hesitation, and Alder took her fiercely into his arms. “I love you, Beatrix Levenach. I don’t know how that is possible, but I do.”
The Levenach stilled in his embrace and then her arms tightened around his waist. “And I love you. That is why you must trust me, Alder. Trust me.”
Alder said nothing. She turned her face up as if she would kiss his mouth, but Alder averted his head.
“Let not your lips touch mine—I am soiled with Laszlo’s filth.”
“Very well,” she said lightly. “We’ll go below and wash you clean.” She spoke as if Alder had but been toiling in a field under honorable labor, rather than dirtied by the deepest evil under God’s heaven. As if mere water could wash away his sins.
She stepped away then but took his hand, leading him to the corner of the floor where the trapdoor to the cellar lay. Alder followed, every footstep drawing him closer to the moment when he would kill Beatrix Levenach.
Beatrix was atremble with fear and anticipation as she led Alder once again into the inn’s cellar. The candles still stood bright sentinels in the corners, but the glow they emitted seemed different in those last hours of All Hallow’s Eve—brighter, more pure, and sparkling with silver magic and mystery. The smell of stagnant damp was no more, having been replaced with the scent of a clear running stream in a quiet forest glade, a cool breeze chasing over the stones and making the candle flames sway sensuously.
Again she led him to the bed, this time to treat a wound more dire than the one he’d suffered from the falling timber. Alder sat without direction or comment, his long, white hair shielding his face, his shoulders hunched as if his physicality was at last catching up with his old, old age. She laid her hand against the side of his head briefly, her heart paining for the struggle she knew he felt.
“Trust me,” she whispered again.
He said naught.
Beatrix let her hand fall away and then removed herself to the shadows of the cellar to gather her supplies. He had not so much as shifted his weight in the time she’d left his side. She sat on the edge of the bed and dipped a rag in the bowl of blessed water.
“Take off your shirt,” she commanded gently. When he delayed, Beatrix let the rag fall into the bowl and reached both hands for the ties over his chest.
Her action moved him from some trance, for he raised his arms and pushed her hands aside before they could touch him.
“I’d not have you serve me,” he growled. “I am not worthy, Levenach.”
Beatrix could not keep the bittersweet smile from her mouth. “Oh, I think you are.”
He raised his eyes to her for only a moment, and Beatrix glimpsed such pain in those black, bottomless depths that she was forced to swallow before she could speak again.
“Throw the shirt on the floor. We’ll burn it in the morn.”
She was saved from his hopeless gaze as he pulled the blackened and stiff garment over his head and let it fall to the cold stones, his wrists dropping to his knees, defeated.
Beatrix kept her silence as she once more took the rag in hand and reached out to take a tentative swipe down Alder’s right cheek. The sticky black demon’s blood disappeared beneath the blessed water as easily as wind dispersing a pile of dry, dead leaves. Encouraged, Beatrix scooted closer on the mattress.
He did not look at her as she washed him, only continued to stare at the space between his soiled boots, but Beatrix could not help the welling of emotion she felt as she smoothed the rag over the white skin of his face, neck, and chest. How had she come to care so deeply and so quickly for a creature she was sworn to destroy? Did Alder’s coming to the Leamhan forest mean that they were fated to be together?
Or would her ancestors exact a high penalty for her blood betrayal?
Beatrix could not yet know. She would continue to fulfill her obligation—now that the king of the vampires was dead, it was her duty to care for those touched by his evil. To Beatrix’s mind, no one more deserved mercy and reward than Alder the White, who had not only saved her life, but perhaps her soul. She loved, when she had never thought that emotion to be in reach of the Levenach. The fear that ran through her was not because the great well might witness her act of mercy as an abomination, but because once Alder was whole again, he would leave her at the inn as he had found her—alone.
“There,” she said quietly, setting the bowl and rag on the floor and sliding them under the edge of the bed. She waited a moment and then took a deep breath. “Are you ready to have done with this, then? We only have a little time left.”
He turned his head—still bowed—slowly, slowly to look at her. “I cannot do this, Levenach. I have not the strength. The courage.”
“I doona—” understand had hovered on Beatrix’s lips until she once more looked into his eyes. The cellar around her seemed to fade to black night, making a tunnel of clarity from her eyes to Alder’s, and in that narrow corridor, Beatrix saw.
She saw herself in Alder’s embrace, similar to the way Laszlo le Morte had held her captive in the clearing. Alder’s face was buried in her neck as a lover might do, only Beatrix’s own expression was not one of passion, but of horror.
He drank from her, and she watched as her life flooded out of her body, her skin tightening and going gray over her decimated flesh, her limbs falling limp; her eyes widening, blanking. Alder raised his head, his own skin now a healthy pink beneath the tears on his cheeks and her blood on his lips. He laid her dead body gently on the ground, stood aright with a ragged yell…
And burst into flames.
Beatrix started, gasped, on the bed, and the cellar once more came into reality around her.
“You would kill me?” she whispered.
“I would not make you what I now am by only taking enough of your lifeblood to retrieve my own soul. It would damn you, Beatrix. But do you not fulfill your promise to Michael, he will come for you, and his punishments are worse than death, many times over. I care little for my life now, but you—Beatrix, you are yet pure.”
Beatrix’s head spun with the madness of what Alder was telling her, and he continued to speak as she tried to make sense of it all.
“I love you and would suffer the rest of a mortal or unnatural life for you, but we cannot share the same eternity. I must do what I can to save you. Out of my love. Can you understand?”
And then the crazy pieces slid into place and at last, Beatrix did understand. She smiled at him.
“You would spend the rest of your life suffering for me?” she repeated.
His frown deepened. “I would. But it matters not. We—”
“I’m nae certain that’s at all flattering, but I will hold you to your word, Alder the White,” she said, cutting him off and rising from the bed. She walked to the center of the cellar, facing the giant slab of black stone.
“Beatrix, what are you doing?” Alder asked from behind
her, alarm sharpening his tone.
The Levenach stretched out her arms to either side, her palms facing the stone. She could not answer Alder’s question because, in truth, she did not know what she was about to unleash on them both. But she trusted that the power that had brought Alder to her would not forsake them now.
“Fosgail,” she commanded.
Open.
Chapter Twelve
Alder’s body began a queer trembling as Beatrix stood with her back to him, her hands raised, her red hair tossed by an impossible breeze in the close space. At her commanding word, the black floor itself, made in part from shining black stone, began to crack and slide apart.
Was the Levenach summoning hell for Alder? Something about her actions struck a fear in his heart colder than the vampire blood that coursed through his veins, and Alder wanted to flee.
Instead, he stood. He would not leave Beatrix.
As the gaping blackness that was the void beneath the stone widened, the candles in the corners of the cellar winked out, allowing first only night to flow from the crevasse, then shooting rays of silver light. Alder threw up a forearm to shield his eyes from the bright blades, sparkling like stars shooting across a midnight sky.
Beatrix dropped her arms to her sides and stepped back one pace, then a pair, until she stood next to Alder. When she turned her face and looked up at him, he saw that Beatrix, too, was more than a little frightened of what she had done.
“What is happening?” he asked.
She swallowed. “I doona know.”
Alder drew his arm across Beatrix’s shoulders and together they looked to the sparkling hole in the floor once more.
The first phantasm swooped out of the black like a streaking swath of fog, whistling a circuit around the cellar walls, tossing both Alder’s and Beatrix’s hair—white and red, tangled together. She turned into him slightly, and gripped his sides with her fingers.
The swirling apparition was soon joined by another, and another, and then what seemed an endless river of white erupted from the floor and turned the air in the cellar into a storm cloud, nearly deafening in its power. A cyclone of gauzy white, glowing, radiating energy and light, and seeming to push Alder and Beatrix even closer together.
Then, as suddenly as the storm had formed, it ripped into separate sheets and fell to the stone floor like giant raindrops, splashing into hazy, white shapes of…
People.
In the blink of an eye, the cellar of the White Wolf Inn was choked with scores of the spectral images, standing five and six deep against the walls in some spots.
Beatrix gasped beneath Alder’s arms and pushed away.
“Da,” she choked, running to one of the ghostly figures.
Although Alder could clearly see through their forms as if made of little more than smoke, the shimmery image that Beatrix ran to met her in a solid embrace.
“Honey Bea,” Gerald Levenach said with a smile. “How foine it is to hold you once more.”
“Oh, Da,” Beatrix cried, and began to sob against her spectral sire.
Alder let his eyes skim over the crowd of figures openly staring at him, and he felt his fangs erupting behind his lips in instinctive fear.
He recognized several of the faces. Even after one hundred years, he could not forget. These were the Levenachs of a century ago. The victims of the massacre.
Alder’s judgment was at hand.
“Is this him, then?” Gerald Levenach said to his daughter, and Alder forced his eyes away from the damning gazes of the ghosts in time to see Beatrix nod and swipe at her eyes.
“He did it, Da, as was foretold—Laszlo le Morte is dead.”
Gerald nodded and his eyes pinned Alder. “’Tis well. And what will bring the end of this evil, once and for all?”
“He needs us, Da,” Beatrix said. “In order to regain his soul, he must drink of the Levenach’s lifeblood.”
Gerald Levenach’s ghostly eyebrows rose. “Must he now?” He looked pointedly around the cellar at his otherworldly companions. “’Tis nae only up to me, Honey Bea.”
“I’ll not do it,” Alder said. “I love Beatrix. More than anyone I ever have in my mortal life or the unnatural one I have now. Better that you take me back into the depths with you than leave me, a monster, here alone with her. I will not damn her as I have been damned.”
“Damn her? I should hope nae, if you love her as you say you do,” Gerald observed with amusement. “Our clan will decide, as it always has.”
Alder did not understand the cryptic answer, but ignored it, dropping to his knees on the cellar floor. He now addressed the audience of spirits watching him keenly.
“I have done your family a grave and ancient wrong, and for that I am sorry. My greed and my thirst for war when I was still a mortal man led to the massacre. I was turned into what I am by Laszlo le Morte, but he is no more. I have hunted him for a century, a slave, and soon I will be condemned to an eternity of hell. Perhaps only what I deserve. But I will not sacrifice the last Levenach, the most good and noble human I have known in all my many years, to save myself. I love her, and I will not do it. I ask not for your blessing, only for your forgiveness.”
He turned to look at Beatrix; silvery tears ran down her cheeks. “I will say again to you, Beatrix: I love you. And I also ask you to forgive me for not being the man you deserve.”
“There is nae need to ask my forgiveness, Alder,” she choked.
Gerald Levenach turned his head to appraise his companions. “What say you, kin? What is your judgment upon this creature?”
“Guilty,” one phantasm intoned in a grinding voice.
“Guilty,” added another.
“Aye, guilty.”
And so it went, until all the spirits had voiced their damnation of Alder. When they were silent once more, he felt almost relief. He was guilty in their eyes. They would not allow him to take Beatrix.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“We’re all agreed then, White Wolf,” Gerald announced. “You are guilty.”
“I am.”
Gerald looked down at his daughter. “Let him be healed, Honey Bea. Give him the lifeblood.”
“Truly, Da?” Beatrix whispered.
Alder frowned, confused. “No.”
Gerald continued as if Alder had become less substantial than the ghosts populating the cellar. “You have fulfilled your oath. May our family’s lifeblood sustain and protect you both. The highlands need you.”
Beatrix threw her arms about her father’s neck. “I love you, Da.”
The spirits standing along the walls began to howl. Alder did not understand what was happening, but the cellar had started to cant queerly to one side. He blinked, and his vision blurred.
He blinked again and his eyes opened on blackness.
“I love you, Honey Bea,” he heard Gerald Levenach call from the void.
And then the whirlwind started once more, this time invisible in the endless pitch of the cellar, and Alder felt himself falling, falling….
“Drink, Alder,” Beatrix whispered into his ear. It was still so black…but it was warm, and Beatrix was pressing her naked body against his own cold flesh.
“No,” he mumbled, trying to turn his head away.
“Aye, drink. You must. The sun will soon rise.”
He could hear the first tentative calls of the forest birds, rousing from their nests and announcing the day. Alder could smell earth, the moldering leaves. He could feel the hard ground beneath his bare skin. Were they outside? But how had Beatrix…
“Alder, drink,” Beatrix insisted from the blackness again. “We have only moments.”
If the sun rose upon him, touched his skin, Alder was finished. “I will not damn you,” he insisted, feeling with his every sharpened sense the impending sunrise. “Let me be destroyed.”
“Do you love me or nae, Alder?” she asked urgently, her breath feathering his cheek.
“More than my own soul.”
“Then you must trust me. And you must drink now! Now!”
Alder felt the hellacious burn on his skin, and as he opened his mouth in a hiss, his fangs springing free, a warm, thin liquid flooded his mouth.
Beatrix pulled the cup away slowly, watching with frightened tears in her eyes as Alder writhed on the ground before the inn. She hoped she had not been too late.
She stood, her legs feeling like limp ropes, and faced the rising sun, reaching its arms over the treetops as if to seize the man on the ground behind her, who thrashed and gasped.
“Eternal Mother, I thank you for your bounty,” she choked. “The legend is fulfilled. Blood for blood, right for wrong. Let peace come over your land and peoples, and we will guard it well. Bind and banish the evil, as my man pours out his sacrifice on this sacred ground. I, too, make my own sacrifice.”
Beatrix emptied the cup of the remaining water from the Levenach well onto the dirt. It pitted the loose soil and turned it into a siphon, spiraling deep into the earth with a whisper and a shudder.
Behind her, Alder screamed, and his cry echoed one hundred years of pain and remorse.
The sun burst over the Leamhan forest like a fire-ball, tenfold as bright, burning Beatrix’s already watering eyes. The morning wind took up a march through the clearing, moaning with the satisfied voices of her ancestors, the final trumpeting end of a century of evil, come full circle at last.
And then all was very, very still.
She stood for a long moment facing the wood, too frightened of turning and seeing Alder’s body lying in a pool of nothing. Perhaps she had been too late, they had all been too late.
“Beatrix?”
At his weak and pleading whisper, she spun.
Alder lay nude on the ground, staring up at the streaked sky with wide eyes. She rushed to him and dropped to her knees at his side.
“Alder,” she choked, running her fingertips down his cheek. His skin, once so white it nearly glowed, was now pinkening, his black eyes lightening before her disbelieving gaze to a blue that reflected the morning sky above them.
Highland Hunger Bundle with Yours for Eternity & Highland Beast Page 72
