by Alexa Egan
She blinked up at him, lungs burning to fill. Unable to do anything but nod.
He tossed away the knife but did not move from where he knelt above. His eyes burned as they traveled her from head to foot, and now her lack of oxygen had nothing to do with the blow to her back but with the squeeze of her heart. Her torn shirt offered him more than a passing view of her breasts, though his gaze didn’t linger there for long. Instead he focused back upon her eyes, the blue of his gaze burning like ice and fire both.
His face filled her vision, the sweeping arch of his dark brows, the flop of hair across his forehead, the chiseled angle of his razor cheekbones. She wanted to touch him, to feel his lips upon hers, to curl her legs around his waist and have him bury himself inside her. It was a raw, visceral need that quivered her insides like jelly and made her sex clench in anticipation.
“I was wrong, Meeryn,” he said, his eyes never once leaving her face.
“Were you?” she managed to respond on a sharp panting intake of air. She swallowed a moan as his weight between her legs intensified, the evidence of his arousal nestled against her slit. Sensation spiraled inward until every breath shot a delicious throb from her crotch to her brain. He would take her here . . . now . . . under the wide sky in a field of flowers. What could be better? What could be more right?
An expression passed over his face, so quickly it was gone before she understood its significance. Only when he rolled off her and up onto his knees did she come to her shaky unsettled senses.
“McIlroy did a good job in my stead,” he said, gravel roughing his deep voice, his gaze impenetrable. “Better, actually. I’m a dreadful teacher. I’ve not the patience it takes to explain what I do, only that I do it.”
Her knees shook, her stomach turned in a thousand knotted circles and she’d a desire to take up the knife she’d dropped and plunge it right into his cold, unfeeling heart. “Yet he was a lot like you in many ways.”
He lifted his brows in question.
“He had the same build, the same blue eyes”—she scrambled to her feet, snatching up her blade with now trembling fingers—“and he ran away when it got too hard to stay, just like you.”
* * *
The cottage sat off the main road in a twisting alley running between the back of the tavern stables and a brewery. Nothing to set it apart from its equally nondescript neighbors. Same mossy slate roof, same forbidding granite façade, even the muddy earthen paths leading to battered boot-scarred doors matched in almost every detail. The shapechanger had worked hard to blend into his surroundings until none would suspect that the barman bore a secret. Head down and mouth shut; that was how he’d tried to live his life—until Gray and his group had enlisted him to their cause.
It had cost him his life.
The fly-riddled corpse lay by a door leading to the yard beyond. Blood and offal spattered walls and floor and ceiling, congealed under the mangled limbs and nearly severed head. He hadn’t just been killed. He’d been eviscerated . . . and then—Gray swallowed back the vomit chewing its way up his throat—gnawed on. Were the enforcers feasting on those they killed now? Was this a warning to those who remained loyal to the rightful heir?
“Gray? Over here.”
Meeryn summoned him to a small lean-to opening onto the kitchen. Another body, this one hanging by the neck from a rope knotted round a high beam. The face purple and black, but still recognizable as the young groom Kelan had set free. Greasy gray entrails spilled from his ripped stomach, a splintered end of bone protruded from his left leg.
“Do you think Kelan and Jamie rode straight into the massacre?” she asked, a hand covering her mouth, her expression a shade of pea green.
“I haven’t found any bodies but the two. Let’s assume that means they passed through before this occurred or after the Ossine had left.”
He returned to the front room, where Doule’s battered corpse lay in pieces like an accusation on the floor. Gray closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping to stave off the pounding in his head. Exhaustion dogged him like a shadow. He moved in a fog, faculties dimmed, sickness a mere shaky breath and trembling hand away.
Meeryn’s revelations about Jai Idrish rang in his head, but it was the memory of the longing in her eyes and the tremoring anticipation in her limbs that built the pressure in his chest until he could barely breathe around the immovable boulder lodged against his heart. He could have sated his greedy hunger. Found his climax and rolled away, unmoved by anything more than physical gratification.
But this was Meeryn. And he knew that if he ever surrendered to the staggering demands of his body, there would be no winning his way back. He would be lost to the force of his feelings. She would pay the price for his weakness.
“Who is he?” She stood behind him, chalk white but for two high spots of color on her cheeks. He tried not to flinch away from her proximity.
“His name was Zeb Doule. His brother worked in the stables at Deepings.”
“That must have been Caleb. Sir Dromon said he’d discovered one of the grooms had been sending messages to the rebels. He had him killed,” Meeryn said, her eyes clouded with sorrow.
“You knew him?”
“I tried to know everyone who worked to keep the estate going. As the duke grew less interested in the running of things, I took over many of the day-to-day tasks. That is, until Sir Dromon insinuated himself into the household. He didn’t appreciate my interference.”
Gray searched the room. No letters. No journals or pages that might lead to others in the group. Not even a scrap in the blackened hearth, though a pile of ash was evidence of a recent burning. “Bugger all, I have no idea whether Doule destroyed everything he received or if the Ossine found it when they tore the place apart. We could be riding straight into a trap.”
“Is that what upsets you? Not that these men were killed but that they might have left a few stray pages lying about?”
His skin crawled with unspent tension, his knotted muscles twitched. “What upsets me is that their deaths put others in jeopardy. That we’ll have to find a new informant within Deepings willing to pass information out through the proper channels.” A flash of color caught the corner of his eye. He bent, shoving a hand under an overturned chair. Pulled free a shard of rose-colored glass, a bit of notched edge still intact—Doule’s krythos, dropped and crushed during the brief futile struggle. Gray put it in his pocket, his headache moving into his neck and down his spine into his shoulders.
“Is that all they were to you? Sources of information?” Meeryn asked, shrill anger hardening her words. “Spies for your conspirators?”
“They were soldiers under my command.”
“I think your years in the army have made you forget where soldiers come from. They don’t spring from the ground like dragon’s teeth.” A storm brewed in her expression. Just what he didn’t need right now when his self-control hung by the thinnest of threads. “Here’s some information for you; Caleb was barely seventeen. He wanted to move to London and find work in the city, but he’d an elderly mother and with his brother gone from the holding, there was none to support her but him. Now she’s lost them both. They had lives and people who depended on them and hopes for the future. They weren’t just pieces to be moved about a board at your whim.”
The thread snapped with an audible twang. “Do you think I don’t know that?”
“I think you forget as you’re strategizing your next move and mapping out this great new world of yours. As you lose yourself to the slaughter and the secrets.”
A haze reddened his vision. Aching muscles vibrated painfully as if plucked by an invisible hand. Guilt loosened the boulder until the words came pouring out. “Aren’t you the one who’s been carping at me about my duty to the clans since you arrived unannounced in my bedchamber?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“What do you think that means? That I serve as some pointless figurehead who’ll tell the Imnada that the world is bright
when in fact it’s burning? That may be your job as N’thuil. It’s not mine.”
The storm in her eyes became a full-blown cyclone. Hands on hips, chin up and braced for battle. “At least I took on a responsibility. You fled it. You’re still fleeing it. Did you think I didn’t notice that no one calls you Lord Halvossa, even though it’s your title? It has been since you were fourteen.”
“Fled it? Two years ago I was bloody well stripped of everything, nearly including my mind. My fucking title was the only thing they couldn’t take from me when they ripped away mark and signum. But it was a label I gained by a fluke of chance. The rank of major I earned. If Sir Dromon wants a damned war, he shall have it. But he’d better understand, this isn’t my first back-to-the-wall fight-or-die battle. The Arch Ossine won’t be allowed to hide in the shadows while others do his butchering and his dying for him.”
“You say Sir Dromon hides behind his army of Ossine, Gray.” Meeryn’s gaze settled once more on the corpse already bloating in the summer heat, her expression grim. “I begin to wonder if you’re really any different?”
* * *
Sleep. She’d heard of it. As fleeting and mysterious as the mythical unicorn, it had something to do with closing one’s eyes, relaxing one’s muscles and, if she wasn’t completely mistaken, it happened while one was lying horizontal, preferably not under a leaky ceiling and out of any irritating drafts. It certainly had nothing to do with chop-gaited, swayback horses, hours of dragging dullness punctuated by moments of sheer terror, all conducted under a sky that poured endless buckets of rain down on her head, except for those rare moments when it gusted those same buckets sideways into her face.
As the sun sank toward the horizon and they skirted one more village for the less comfortable track uphill across a high boulder-strewn down, she bit her tongue just before she caught herself whining a petulant “Are we there yet?” to the unyielding, broad-shouldered back ahead of her.
It wouldn’t have helped. He hadn’t spoken to her for the last twenty miles, not since his curt “Get the hell down and don’t move.” Almost warm and cuddly compared to the icy silence of the rest of this hellish journey.
It was probably the silence that saved her—or the exhaustion. The pattering rush of falling rainwater from a bush announced the ambush just as Meeryn slumped forward across her horse’s withers half-asleep and the explosion of a musket shot sent a bullet buzzing past her ear like a hornet. This time she was the one shouting “Get down!” and sliding from her saddle for the cover of a low stone wall.
Gray was there before her; a blur of uncoiling tension. He dragged her deeper behind the wall where the brambles scratched at her draggle-tailed gown and caught in her hair. Another blast rang out, dark smoke and chattering birds rising in a cloud from the wood. The bullet bit into a tree not a foot from Gray’s heart.
Footsteps and a drone of conversation signaled the presence of more than one enforcer. Dear Mother of All, if they were surrounded, they may as well surrender now. Gray was chalky with illness, his body aflame with more than typical Imnada heat, and exhaustion dragged at her like anchor chains.
“Wait.” Gray laid a hand on her arm.
Before she could stop him, he slid away through the brush and the saplings lining the wall, barely making a ripple of sound. He was long and lean and deadly, and she was reminded of a snake moving slowly through the grass toward two unsuspecting mice. Not exactly a description normally associated with Ossine enforcers, but then she’d never seen such focused control, every precise motion as Gray slunk toward the far corner of the wall designed for the surprise kill. It was beautiful and frightening to behold, this transformation from the Gray she knew to a remorseless bloodthirsty stranger. Like two sides of the same coin. Only the face on both was as impassive and grim as death.
Two shots gone wide, the enforcers had obviously chosen to wait them out. With the horses scattered and little cover beyond the wall and the scraggly wood beyond, it was a simple matter of patience on their part.
Meeryn had never been patient. She chewed on a fingernail, her heart thudding like a drum until it felt as if it might explode.
By now Gray was lost from sight, not even a breeze-tossed grass blade to signal his trail. Encroaching dusk threw the landscape into a shifting pattern of light and dark, masking movement and camouflaging intent. The air seemed charged, the tension crackling as the moments dragged on with no sound but the swish of the wind and the rustle of the trees.
Then all erupted into chaos.
Gray rose from his cover in a graceful flow of eye, body, and throwing arm. His dagger sliced the air with a killing sing of steel to strike the enforcer in the space between his ribs and over his heart.
Blood welled around the quivering handle as he fell, the second enforcer up and attacking before his associate hit the ground. The man dashed for Gray, hatchet raised, hair and eyes wild, a blood-curdling yell tearing from his foaming lips.
Her breath caught in her throat. Her feet remained rooted to the ground. Her mind reeled off at a million miles an hour; every reckless thought, every shuttered glance, every beloved face, every wish she’d ever wished . . .
Gray! she pathed in a mental scream of warning.
He turned and threw his arm up just as the man made his final lunging thrust, and they met with a force to rattle the breath from her lungs, going down in a spinning tangle of arms and legs. The enforcer’s hatchet ended lost in the wild overgrown hedge beside the wall. Gray rose from the mud, face streaked black and clothes caked with sticky goo, but his eyes remained glacier cold and sharp as jagged glass as blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Loosed from her paralyzing fear, Meeryn ran for the hedge, kneeling to feel her way past the thorns and needling branches for the hatchet. She was useless without it. No match for the maddened masculine brawn of the Ossine’s deadliest. Fingers stretched, she searched . . . nothing.
“Murdererous whoreson bastard!” the enforcer shrieked, staggering to his feet. He might have been temporarily unarmed, but he bore a thick wrestler’s body and his stance revealed obvious fighting skill. “I’ll cut your damned heart out.”
He closed in a bull rush that sent Gray lurching backward into the wall with bone-crushing force. He grunted as the breath was driven out of his lungs, his face a ghastly white beneath the mud, but his eyes gleaming almost iridescent blue.
Cut out his heart . . . of course, the second Ossine. He remained where he’d fallen, ominously still but for the blood pumping from the wound in his chest. The dagger lay in his limp hand, his strength used up in the fight to yank it loose.
Meeryn snatched it up with a hasty glance at the downed enforcer, just long enough to notice the fuzz browning his upper lip, the dark curls brushing his homespun collar. And his boots, they were . . . old. Cracked. A farmer’s boots, not the soft-footed welloiled soldier’s garb. No knife at his waist, no red-tasseled scabbard, just a rusty musket and a billhook tucked in his belt.
“Avaklos will prove our loyalty once and for all. Do what Dromon’s men could not.”
The shout dragged her from the horrible truth. She spun in time to see Gray drop the man to the turf in a brutal attack that would have snapped a normal human’s spine. His face was a mask of unrelenting concentration, but she could see he tired. His moves came slower, his reactions dulled by fatigue . . . and something else . . .
Shadows lengthened as the sun dropped beneath the horizon, bathing the glen in a blue and silver twilight. A hot wind stung her face. Gray screamed and staggered, his face stark and stretched tight as bone, his eyes burning with an icy fire. Flames seemed to ripple over his body, bathing him in an eerie phantasmal glow.
He dropped to his knees, doubled over, hands to his face as the wind and the flames wrapped him within their shrinking cocoon. Mother of All, he was shifting from man to aspect against his will. She watched as he fought the agony of it, muscles in his neck standing out as he refused the scream ripping its way up his th
roat.
His attacker shrank from the power, eyes wide with horror. “The black curse takes him over.”
It was true. The Fey-blood’s black spell was changing Gray, twisting him, stripping his soul bare for the world to see. Fey-blood magic curdled her insides and needled her brain. She wanted to be sick, her stomach rolling at the convergence of so much corrupted power.
Recovered from his initial shock, the man attacked with redoubled intent, striking with boots and fists, his fear and anger making him oblivious to anything but dealing death, his muttered curses emphasizing every blow. He never noticed Meeryn until the dagger slid through coat, waistcoat, and shirt to the vulnerable flesh just above his kidneys.
The knife made him pause, but whatever he saw in her face must have terrified him. “Don’t make me drive it home,” she said, her tone cold, her body colder. She forced her hand and her voice to steady. “It’s a messy, painful end.”
“You’d not dare,” he muttered harshly through lips drawn back from his yellowed teeth in a grimace of rage.
“I was told once it grew easier every time.”
He bent away from her blade, his hands opening and closing, his shoulders hunched. Then, just as she drew a shaky breath, he lashed out. His fist came up in a swift lunge meant to take her hard in the face. And just like that, she slid the blade deep, blood gushing hot over her hands as he fell in a ragged retching heap.
“You killed me,” he called, tears blubbering down his fat cheeks.
“No, I saved him—again.” She turned to Gray, but he was gone. All that was left was a bundle of clothes, a crush of matted grass and broken branches, and an eagle beating the air with great golden wings, heading east. When she looked back at the man, he lay quiet, eyes staring in his blue-lipped face, hands reaching for her as if he sought her help in his final moments. Not an enforcer. Not an Ossine whose death she could justify as a battle-scarred killer of innocents. This man had been a farmer, a clansman whose only crime had been believing the Arch Ossine’s lies.
“What have I done?” She dropped the knife, seized by a horrible despair, sweat washing cold over her back, up her legs, making her knees buckle until she fell to the earth, tossing the knife away as if it burned her.
