Draycott Everlasting

by Christina Skye

  ADRIAN SCOWLED.

  He’d managed to take on physical form, thanks to Gideon’s help, but using this tangible body was far more difficult than he remembered.

  There was too much weight.

  Too much delay of thought to movement. It was fortunate the American woman hadn’t connected him with the portrait in the library yet. Fortunate, too, that she followed him without question.

  Acutely aware of the moon rising above the dark woods, he stalked to the third floor and pushed open the door to the roof.

  The woman raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure you know where you’re going?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Just for the record, I trust nobody.” She followed reluctantly, her body alert for signs of attack. She was used to danger, Adrian noted. And she would need all the courage she possessed to face what was waiting.

  When he opened the door to the roof, the wind slapped at his face. The hole was exactly as before, black images swirling from its dark heart. The sight filled him with fury.

  The woman walked beside him and scanned the gusting darkness. “Okay, this has been fun, Mr. Adrian. But frankly, I don’t see any problem here. The only things here are stones.” She frowned in distaste. “Stones that are pretty dirty.”

  The wind shrieked. “That is not simple dirt. Nor is the roof empty,” Adrian whispered. He leveled one finger. “Do you not see?”

  When she shook her head impatiently, Adrian sighed. He had forgotten that mortal humans had such a singular lack of vision.

  “Am I missing something or is this some kind of game?”

  “Not a game, Ms. Nightingale,” the abbey ghost said gravely.

  “Special Agent Nightingale.” The woman stood taller, her eyes wary. “And if we’re done here, I need to get back to the library.”

  “Your work can wait for twenty-four hours. I fear you have a far greater duty that will not rest.”

  Her impatience was turning to something harder. “I’ve given you enough time, Mr. Adrian.”

  Intractable woman. How could he make her understand?

  A demonstration was necessary.

  “One moment.” He ignored her frown and pointed to the center of the roof. “Stand by this chimney. Yes, just so. Now raise your hand. Slowly,” he cautioned.

  Looking irritated, she did as he asked. “Well? What am I supposed to see? There is nothing…”

  Her eyes narrowed. Then the words trailed away. Her glare gave way to a look of confusion as a blurred shape drifted over her hand. “What’s going on?” Her breath hissed from her throat. “How did you create that illusion?”

  “What you see is not of my making.” Adrian watched another dark shape writhe free. To his horror, the center of the hole tore wider with every passing minute.

  Navarre’s gift, he thought grimly. Soon that darkness would swallow all of his abbey.

  “I only pray you will believe what I tell you, Agent Nightingale. Even as we talk, time is running out. Within hours this house and all within its walls may be destroyed.”

  She continued to stare at her hand. “Is this some kind of biological weapon? Is it Chinese? Russian?”

  “You speak of things I do not understand.” Adrian took a deep breath. “Listen well, Agent Nightingale. I have need of your help this night, from moonrise to moonrise. Otherwise all will be forfeit.”

  She made an irritated sound, but her eyes kept returning to the strange darkness that covered her arm. “If I believed you, which I don’t, what kind of help would you want?”

  “To oppose the man who did this.”

  “So he’s a scientist?”

  “Hardly. A…warrior. Once Navarre was the greatest of all. But now he is changed, and nothing is safe while he walks the night.” Shadows seemed to gather along the stone parapet.

  Adrian turned to face her, his body rigid. “You are a woman who can match him in wit and courage. There may yet be a way. I sense he may have one weakness.”

  She hunched her shoulders against the biting wind, her expression wary. “Tell me what to do and let’s be done with it. Where is this man? I think it’s time we met this infamous intruder.”

  “I am here.” He walked out of the darkness, broad-shouldered, silent, his features blurred by shadow. His eyes held lifetimes of power, but no warmth lit them. Chiseled cheekbones rose above a hard jaw and his full mouth hinted at an equal mix of arrogance and sensuality.

  He ignored the woman. His focus was all for Draycott. “She doesn’t believe you, old friend. Not much help when you cannot win her trust.” He cut through a wedge of moonlight that left his stark features in sharp silhouette. “Not that anything of mortal creation can help you. Even now your precious minutes dwindle.”

  “Moonrise to moonrise, that was your word. Or have you broken a promise already, Navarre? Just as you did long before.”

  The air seethed with old angers, nearly dense enough to touch.

  “If so, I learned from you,” Navarre snapped. “Or have you forgotten your tryst in the spice market? The way you left me wounded in the sands outside Acre?”

  “How could anyone forget?” Adrian whispered. “There was blood enough for a lifetime of memories. But I did not leave you. We searched all day and most of a night. You were nowhere to be found,” he said fiercely. “And I know not what you mean by a tryst. There was no time for such things with the Saracens at our gates.”

  “Even now you twist the truth.” The tall Crusader flung out a dark cloak, fingers stretched toward the abbey’s ghost. “Enough of your lies. You will stay here, feeling the weight of all to come. You will watch, helpless, until you are swallowed just as I was.”

  Light shimmered, driven before a wave of shadow that wrapped around Adrian Draycott’s neck. Inch by inch his whole body was engulfed. “Moonrise to moonrise. Then you are Taken,” Navarre intoned. “By word and act so do I declare.”

  Adrian tried to answer that cold, imperious face, but no sound came. Navarre’s magick was beyond measure.

  Within an instant, all movement was denied him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NEITHER MAN PAID ANY attention to Sara Nightingale. A relief, given all she had to process.

  The sands outside Acre?

  Something about the words tugged at her mind. Why did they stir her even as she recognized how impossible the scene before her was?

  But the Draycott estate manager looked sick, so sick Sara grew truly worried. “What have you done to him? He can’t seem to breathe.”

  “Nor can any ghost.”

  “Very funny, pal. Now tell me what you did to him.”

  The tall man turned at her flat command. Surprise stirred in eyes as cold as the North Sea. “You champion Draycott’s cause?”

  “That’s right. So back off. Otherwise I’ll have to alert the local authorities.” As bluffs went, Sara had done worse. The situation required dire measures, even though she was way outside her legal jurisdiction. “Trust me, you won’t like being arrested.” Her weapon rose, level with his face. “They’ll eat you up in prison with a costume like that.”

  The man’s black mantle seethed in the wind. “Costume? I have fought the infidels from Acre to Syria. I have held to the Crusade at the will of my liege of Aquitaine and Anjou. But now I fight a different war. This man betrayed me and left me for dead, and he will pay for it now. Make no more feeble challenges, woman.”

  Aquitaine and Anjou?

  Uneasiness filled Sara. Her knowledge of the Crusades was a little thin, but the parts she knew began to settle into a picture. Yet that picture made no sense. How could a living man remember events centuries in the past? Why did he maintain this fiction of having crossed through time?

  Either he was a lunatic or a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. Barring that, she was watching a complicated vendetta carried out by two bright but highly unstable Englishmen, complete with costumes, historical references and theatrical boasts.

  But the huge broadsword at Nava
rre’s side was most certainly real. Moonlight glowed along its patterned length. Damascus steel, she recalled reading, was the finest of its era, forged in layers that gave legendary strength. Well-used, too. Not a theatrical prop at all. The thought made her uneasy. Again.

  She kept her gun level, her hand steady. “Listen carefully, Mr.—Navarre. That is your name, I take it?”

  “Gabriel of Montford and La Varenne, duc de Navarre,” he said, cool arrogance in his voice. “And you may remove your weapon from my chest.”

  “I don’t think so. And I repeat—tell me what you did to him.”

  She frowned at the Draycott estate manager. “He still looks bad. We have to do something.”

  “I have done something.” The man called Navarre crossed his arms. “I have bound him fast just as he is. He cannot move until I will it.”

  Because her confusion was getting worse, Sara buried it with anger. “Oh, sure. I completely believe that. And unless I get some cooperation, you’re headed off to jail.”

  “By all rights, you should be equally bound,” Navarre said slowly. “Yet you snap and growl, unaffected. Most unusual.” His fingers rose, outstretched.

  Sara felt shadows deepen around her. “How about you stop the amateur-hour theatrics?”

  “Are you a witch to block me so completely?” Navarre’s eyes narrowed. “Did Ylaine send you?”

  “No one sent me. Now move out of my way. Do it very slowly.” Sara stepped around him, her weapon still level at his middle of mass.

  But somehow the man moved without sound, and she was pressed to his thigh as an arm in chain mail and rough leather wrapped around her waist. Then her handgun simply…vanished. “How did you do that?”

  “With the power of my intention.” The madman held her still as she tried to dig her fingers into the small nerve at his neck. “Your fighting is useless. Submit.”

  Sara blew out an angry breath. “Sure. Perhaps I should just ignore all my training and bow to you. I’ll crown you King of England, too. With the power of my intention,” she said sarcastically as she twisted in his arms.

  Navarre stared at her in amazement. “You truly are immune. This merits serious study. But perhaps Jehanne sent you. She was always the stronger enchantress and one step closer to the dark.”

  He was serious, Sara realized. This idiotic man actually believed she was some kind of witch. As she looked up, moonlight shifted, tracing gaunt cheeks, a scarred jaw, eyes filled with darkness without end.

  She tried her best aikido move, knuckles to the radial nerve. She felt the lock of his muscles and his momentary surprise. Then she gasped in pain, yanked back against his chest. “You can’t hold me. I’m a special agent of the U.S. government and—”

  “Agent,” he whispered harshly. “So that is your work. Not as a witch but a spy. But this world of yours holds no interest for me. My only task is revenge.”

  When she didn’t move, he seemed to sink into deep thought. Swiftly she drove one elbow into his kidney, an advanced technique that bought a second of distraction, enough for her to slip free.

  Navarre cursed softly and eyed her with new respect. “So your minders teach you the arts of war. I will know in future to be prepared.”

  And in the space of a breath she was caught in the air, flung back against his chest. Chain mail dug at her cheek and she fought a wave of dizziness. This was no amateur theatrical. Something had jerked her through the air and was holding the abbey’s estate manager in a kind of paralysis. She seemed to have no power to stop the man.

  “By my order you will remain here until I choose to release you. Keep your friend, Draycott the betrayer, company in these shadows.”

  “You’re wrong. This man’s name is Adrian. He is Lord Draycott’s estate manager.”

  Navarre’s lips curved in the hint of a smile. “Estate manager. Seneschal to the viscount. How amusing. He was always an excellent liar.” The towering warrior laughed coldly and Sara felt the sound rumble between them. She shivered, unbearably cold. Unbearably aware of the pressure of their joined bodies.

  “Why would he lie, pretending to be an employee?”

  “Because it suits his whim. Because he is arrogant as he ever was, both at court and in all Outremer.”

  Outremer.

  Sara took a sharp breath. That was the Holy Lands.

  In the Middle Ages.

  Again she felt a cold flare of uneasiness. “None of this is my concern. Play at your twisted game of revenge, but I won’t stay to be caught in the crossfire.”

  “Too late to run now. And even if you could—” As Navarre stared down, their bodies locked in struggle, something like surprise flared over his face. “There is a depth to you I did not expect, lady. A flame, well-banked. There is steel in you as well. A worthy opponent, in truth.” His glove cupped her chin. Ignoring her angry struggling, he traced the curve of her lip with the rough leather.

  Gentle, Sara thought. Gentle for so much anger.

  “You’re wrong,” she rasped. “Wrong about all of this. Don’t add to your guilt by doing more harm that you’ll regret one day.”

  “Regret,” he whispered. “Already it haunts every breath, every waking minute. The thought that I might have found her first and stopped her infatuation—” Torment darkened his hard features. “And you who are so different, opposing me as ever she did. Brave without measure.” His fingers opened. The gauntlet twisted and slid free.

  Suddenly warm skin touched Sara’s mouth, and the roof spun dizzily under her feet. Despite the cold wind, her face flared with heat. His fingers were callused, yet infinitely careful, and she felt his warm breath touch her hair. Her body seemed to come alive beneath that careful brush of his fingers.

  Metal and leather separated them.

  Just as it had separated them before.

  Sara dragged in a breath, shaken to her core. His gentleness was her first surprise, but her swift response was the second. And now this deeper thing, a knowing. Almost like memories…

  Fear made her clumsy. She jerked backward in his arms, her palm cracking against his cheek. She saw the imprint of her fingers in a welt on his skin. “Stop it. You have no reason, no right to touch me.”

  Or to make me remember…

  She swayed and felt his strong arms grip her. A moment later she stood alone at the center of the roof.

  Somehow Navarre was now six feet away, pacing restlessly. “Too late for all of us. You have passed into our crossfire, and at the next rising of the moon, you will be destroyed along with every stone of this house. No words or human tricks can change that.”

  She tasted his anger, felt the weight of his torment, heavy in the silence of the night. Then he flung out one arm, his cloak a slash of shadow.

  Sara stared at empty space. Shock and confusion kept her rigid, trying to breathe, shivering in the cold wind. How was any of this possible?

  Swaying, she turned toward the estate manager—or whatever he was. The man watched her but did not move, pale in the moonlight with no sign of response.

  Sara closed her eyes. “I have work to finish. None of this makes sense.”

  She drove away a flash of memories, just out of reach.

  Grim and determined, she strode through the dappled moonlight that now felt cold and threatening. The door was open. Light spilled from the narrow corridor to the floor below.

  Forget the man. Forget his torment.

  Abruptly her hand struck a pillar. Cold stone dug into her shoulder. Blinking, Sara looked into the shadows.

  No stone.

  No pillar within reach.

  She touched nothing but empty space.

  And yet not empty, because something held her where she was, five steps from the stairway down into the house and that invisible barrier was as real as granite beneath her fingers.

  She heard the sharp burst of her cell phone where she had left it back in the library.

  Useless to help her now.

  Over the dark woods the moon cre
pt higher, a cold disk against slate sky.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FBI Headquarters

  Washington, D.C.

  EDWIN HARDING stared down at the number on his phone’s LED screen. Why in the hell wasn’t Sara answering her cell phone?

  He dialed again, feeling a jab of uneasiness. She had had more than her share of stress after her last chaotic field mission. She still hadn’t healed from that night—not mentally, not physically. So when the call from a joint agency task force had come in, he’d sent her to Draycott Abbey on what should have been a relatively soft assignment. And Sara happened to be the best choice for the job.

  But now she didn’t answer her phone, and that wasn’t like Sara. Had something happened?

  He glared out at the lights of the Washington Monument, dim in the distance. It was hardly likely, not in that great stone house built like a fortress. Special Agent Nightingale was probably asleep at her work or she’d left her cell phone in another room. Yet neither of those things sounded like the woman he had observed closely for six years. He had secretly cheered at her steady progress through the forensic document unit, noting her eye for detail, persistence and relentless curiosity. She had excelled from her first day on the job.

  Harding made a mental note to locate their contact in the U.K. and have him check on Sara’s status. Maybe then this odd uneasiness would pass.

  He opened a locked drawer on his desk and removed a single file, code-named Traveler. Inside were six photographs of a set of worn Chinese ingots, each worth a small fortune because of their rarity and historical significance. There had to be hundreds more somewhere, equally rare, equally well-preserved, said to be part of Marco Polo’s treasure conferred by Kublai Khan. Through steady work over the past three years Sara had found documents confirming that the Khan’s treasure existed. Now she was close to finding their location.

  But Harding worried about her state of mind and her safety. She hadn’t yet recovered from the shooting. Though they were tracking the source of the recent bugs, it might take weeks.

  He snapped the file closed and punched two buttons on his secure phone, drumming his fingers on the leather blotter. His Bureau contact in London answered on the second ring and immediately went into action. Harding’s next call was to an old colleague experienced in electronics and surveillance. Izzy Teague was an independent operator who often handled sensitive tasks for Harding’s agency. If anyone could stay beneath the radar, it was Teague.