Regaining her balance, Hallie spun to face Arad. Her lungs ached as she fought for breath and wondered if the fall to the floor had cracked her ribs at last. Adopting a defensive stance, she ignored the pain, the breathlessness, her drifting mental clarity. She wanted Burke to take Lese and flee, leave her to this mess of her creation, leave her, leave her, leave her…
Hallie shook her head to clear it of the echoing voices. She jerked her chin up in time to see Burke raised arm, the weapon in his right hand gleaming dully through the miasma of Skelly’s apparition. Arad saw it, too, the weapon and not the shadow. He lunged for her arm, yanking her in front of him as Burke fired, releasing the pulse of energy. Hallie felt the thump in her chest, oddly dull yet massive, a wave of power that shattered her and sent her flying into darkness.
V.
HOME
Hallie heard a sound, a kind of tuneless, wordless singing. She opened her eyes, realizing she ached all over. The singing stopped. A familiar face bent over hers.
“Calypso?”
“Is me,” said the dancer, her mutable eyes the color of the sky.
“Where am I?”
“Here.”
Hallie rolled her eyes. Typical Calypso response. Oddly enough, she couldn’t recall why she didn’t know where ‘here’ was. And then she did.
Struggling to sit up, fingers on her shoulders eased her back down. Not Calypso’s tiny digits but a more substantial ten. A vaguely familiar voice spoke.
“Rest still. Don’t move yet.”
A face appeared peripherally, Talian, the mark of the Watchers Guild vivid on her brow. Arad’s guard. Hallie sucked in a breath and started to struggle.
“Is all right,” said Calypso. “Stay. Not move.”
“Where’s Burke?” Hallie demanded, collapsing back onto what she began to recognize as a soft mattress. “And Lese?”
“Here,” said a voice that brought tears to her eyes. Calypso moved out of her view to permit Burke to take her place at Hallie’s side. His hand closed over her own. She lifted it to make certain the fingers were really his. She kissed them with cracked, dry lips.
“How long have I been lying here?” she asked.
“Too long.” Burke’s tone were strained. She stared long into his dark gray eyes. He didn’t look to have slept well. Lines of fatigue marked his jaw, the corners of his eyes, darkened the flesh beneath them.
“Well I seem to be back now from wherever I’ve been,” Hallie said.
“That you are, sweetheart.”
At the endearment she did start to cry. Burke leaned toward her, kissing her forehead. He lifted her against his chest and held her close. In the corner of her eye a small face appeared to peer closely at her. Lese, satisfied all was well, slipped away again.
“What happened to Arad?”
“The Revered is dead.” This was the Talian guard, issuing the pronouncement with little emotion. Hallie couldn’t yet figure out why the woman was here with them, but she would ask that later.
“You killed him?” Hallie asked Burke, leaning back a little in order to see his face again. “To be honest, I thought you had killed me.”
His eyes misted and he made a wry face. “I thought I did, too. But I didn’t kill Sterne.”
Hallie uttered a silent prayer of relief. She hadn’t wanted Burke to bear that on his conscience. She’d only wanted them to get safely away. They appeared safe, all of them, but were they away? She frowned in concentration, trying to remember what she had asked first. Oh. Yes. Arad.
“What happened?”
“His heart gave out.” The Watcher again. Hallie turned her head to look at the woman. She had a no-nonsense gaze that was still, somehow, kind. “The coroner has attested to it. I stood witness, to his demise and to all that I heard in the arboretum. His heart gave out. Apparently, there has been an issue for some time that the Revered had chosen to ignore.”
“His heart?”
“Yes.”
“Was it the altercation, then?”
“No,” stated the guard flatly. “It was something he saw.”
Hallie’s pulse leaped. She stared hard at the woman, who met her gaze in silent acknowledgment. Slowly the woman stood up, touching two fingers to Hallie’s brow in a time-honored salutation. The guard spoke, gathering up all present in the room and ushering them out with her. Except for Burke.
“Did you see—”
Easing her back onto the bed, Burke nodded. “I saw.”
Hallie said nothing. She pressed further into the pillow beneath her head. Burke’s fingers on her own were warm, callouses hard and lovingly remembered. She ran her fingertips over them into the center of his palm.
“He warned me,” Burke said.
“Who?”
“Skelly. He told me if I killed him, you would die. That only he could stop me when the time came. I didn’t know what he meant, but I think somehow he knew what was coming. I didn’t kill him, those creatures did, but he made sure he was there at the end.”
“To attone,” Hallie whispered. “It was the only way he could forgive and find peace.”
Burke smoothed her hair back. “When everything was over, I went back and gathered up all the crystals and buried them in the green shadows of the oasis. Hopefully, that will put Shane’s troubled spirit to rest, if that’s what it was.”
Hallie swallowed. “May I have something to drink?”
Leaning away from her, he brought back a cylinder of cool, clear water and held it to her lips. When she’d had her fill, he placed it away again.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“What?”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that while my mouth felt like sand. Kiss me.”
He did, gently, as if he thought he might hurt her. She let him. Later, when she was feeling better, it would be different. For now it was enough. She lay back against the pillow as he straightened on the stool.
“We’re all here together? Emil, too?”
“Emil, too,” he said.
“What do we do now?”
To her surprise, Burke laughed. “Nothing for a little while. Let me take care of you, all right? That’s what I want to do right now. Got it?”
“Got it,” she murmured. “What about…your occupation?”
“Being a Drifter? I don’t think I have it in me anymore. It worked when I didn’t care what the hell happened to me, but I care now. I want to be with you for as long as I can. You and Lese.”
Hallie smiled at him. “Do you mean I’ve made of you an honest man?” she teased.
“Yes,” he said, not smiling at all. “You have.”
She bit her lip hard to keep from crying again. “No I haven’t. It wasn’t me. Don’t ever say I changed you and made you different. I don’t want to be responsible for that.”
“But you are, Hallie. It’s not a bad thing, I swear it to you.”
She said nothing.
“Emil and I have been discussing several business plans. It’ll all work out, I promise.”
Hallie took his hand again, turning it palm up on her stomach and fitting her fingers in between his. “There’s something familiar about this room,” she said, turning her head to gaze about fully for the first time. “Where are we? And don’t you dare say here.”
“Very well, I won’t say here. I’ll say ‘home’.”
“Our home?” Hallie asked, puzzled.
“For now,” Burke answered. “But it’s always been yours.”
“Always been—” Hallie squirmed upright with Burke’s assistance, heart pounding in her breast. Someone else was still in the room with them, sitting beyond Burke, hidden by his broad shoulders. She should have known it, should have sensed it, should have…something.
“Mer,” she whispered.
Across the room, the room of her childhood, her mother rose from the chair where she had been seated. The woman crossed the room, bearing a face so like her own, though older, rounder, gentler, and absent all Talian blood. As she near
ed, that face crumpled and ran with tears. Hallie held out her arm, refusing to release Burke’s hand, and pulled her mother close while they wept, head to head. Burke tried to excuse himself, to pull free, but Hallie wouldn’t let him go.
“Don’t you go anywhere, Burke Conlan,” she whispered fiercely around her mother’s auburn head. “Got it?”
Wordlessly, he nodded, lowering his tall form back onto the stool.
“You’ve given me back everything, Burke. Everything that I am, that I was, that I stood for, that I loved. Do you understand what that means to me?”
Rising up a little from his seat, Burke kissed the crown of her head and then, much to her joy, turned and kissed the top of her mother’s head, too.
“What I guess it means,” he whispered with a wavering grin, “is that we’re even now.”
The End
For more about the author, please stop by her website: www.celiaashley.com
Also available from Celia Ashley: the Dark Tides Series
Book I – Dark Tides – AVAILABLE NOW
Book II – Storm Surge – AVAILABLE NOW
Book III – Comes the Dark (November 2016 – available for
preorder now)
Additional titles from Celia Ashley:
Midnight Hearts – AVAILABLE NOW
The Other Side of Silence – AVAILABLE NOW
Emerald Twilight: Bundled Edition Page 24
