Awaken the Curse (8 page)

Chapter 5

“. . . Katie . . . need to see her . . .”

“. . . your legs . . . do you feel . . .”

“. . . crawl if I fucking have to . . .”

Words faded in and out. Light, fuzzy and dim, seeped round her eyelids. A heavy weight pressed the breath from her lungs. She tasted the tang of iron in her mouth, a strange buzz tickling her throat to spread outward from the center of her chest, simmering beneath her skin. She coughed, sucked in a few great lungfuls of cold air, and opened her eyes to a stranger bent over her, an odd mixture of sorrow and elation in his weary gaze. She tried sitting up, but he pressed her back onto the turf with a slight shake of his head.

“You are weak, mistress. Rest now.”

Did she know this man? He was strong. Built like a behemoth, he had the size and formidability of a wrestler—or a small castle. The hand he used to prop her up bore calluses across the palm and scars across the back, though his touch was surprisingly gentle. He was striking to look at, with overlong dark hair, high-slanted cheekbones, and deep-set piercing eyes black as sloe. And she hadn’t the foggiest who he was or how he’d come to be here.

“Did we win?” she asked, surprised at how gravely and feeble her voice sounded. She wiped a sleeve across her face and was surprised to see blood left smeared upon the cloth. She ran her tongue over her lips. Had she bit down on it as she fell? Had she split her lip?

“Katherine? You’re alive. Thank the gods.” Spectacles foggy and tears muddying the dirt on his face, Father knelt beside her, replacing the mystery man, who withdrew with a silent nod.

“Where’s James? Did he stop d’Espe?”

Father wiped at his eyes with a dirty shirtsleeve. “The chevalier managed to slither off like the snake he is. We can only hope wherever he turns up, he’ll gain his just deserts, the villainous reprobate.”

“And James? You haven’t answered my question. Father, he isn’t . . .” She struggled up onto her knees, the world swaying, black swimming at the edges of her vision. “He’s all right, isn’t he? He’s not . . .” She couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even think it.

“We were worried about you. The shot . . . it . . . I don’t know how he did it, but he kept you alive. He saved your life.”

“James?”

“No. Lucan. He’s with James now. He is doing what he can, but there are some injuries even . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What’s that supposed to mean? And who’s Lucan?” A niggling uneasy thought teased her sloshy brain as she scanned the clearing.

Something wasn’t right. The obelisk should have been just to her right. But now there was nothing beyond a blackened patch of scorched earth and a few tumbled stones. The man who’d spoken to her—Lucan—knelt as Father did, sleeve rolled back, blood sliding down over his wrist. James sat propped up beside him. Face pale as death. Dark hair flopped boyishly over his forehead. Lips pursed to sip at the blood pooled in the man’s open palm.

“What are you doing?” She wrenched away from her father, stumbling like a drunkard across the clearing, but the man speared her to a halt with a mere lift of one brow as he rolled his sleeve back down over his wrist. “The blood of the Imnada is potent medicine. I offer it in gratitude for my release.”

“I don’t care. Get out of my way,” she said, adding when he hesitated, “Please.”

The man dipped his head in a proud courtier’s bow, though she had the distinct impression subservience was not normal to his character. “As you wish.”

“Will he die?” she whispered.

“The blood will hold him to this body. He will live. And where there’s life, there’s hope.” He rose, offering James a last look before turning his attention back to Katherine. A stark animal brutality within his gaze froze her in place. This was the blood she’d tasted on her tongue and saw upon her sleeve. His blood. This man . . . this creature . . . had saved her. “I have kept three of the disks, mistress. But this one I return to you—and to him.” He placed the silver disk in Katherine’s open palm, closing her fingers around it. “Hold it in trust as a gift. Use it if you have need.”

She felt herself nodding dumbly. After he departed, she turned to James, brushing the hair back from his brow. Stone dust floated over his shoulders, coated his hair and face.

She studied his face as if trying to see the truth behind the drawn gray features, tight with pain. Why had he really come to Wales? Had he intended her seduction all along? Had he sought to punish her as much as her father for what he saw as a grave betrayal? Was everything said in the cave nothing but lies? She blinked back tears. Not on her part. She’d meant every word.

So could one love and hate the same person in equal measures?

“Katie, the pistol . . . I saw you fall. I saw . . .” Drops of life-giving blood stained James’s lips scarlet, his gaze clouded with pain.

“The Laceys are harder to kill than you thought.”

He blinked, his eyes seeming to focus for a moment, bright and hard. “It would seem. Yet, something’s died within you.”

Even as weak as he was, he seemed to look straight into her soul, and she looked away lest he read her doubts. “We’ll discuss it when you’re better. I can’t . . .” Her throat closed around the words.

He didn’t answer, but his expression was one of understanding and regret.

She blinked clear her vision, which shimmered with unshed tears. “Perhaps you were right about fate. About destinies that can’t be changed no matter how we try.”

“A believer now?” His eyes closed on an inrush of breath.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “Believe in him.” His gaze cut to the stranger. A man who stood within the shattered debris of the obelisk. A man who wore his loneliness like a shroud, his strength like a shield. A man who’d offered life in exchange for freedom. But freedom from what? The answer that sprang to mind was unimaginable and yet it made perfect horrible sense when she recalled the enormous convergence of Fey magic in those final moments.

Her unease returned a hundredfold—chest tight, ribs aching, and throat raw with the pressure of grief pushing its way up through her.

“Katie love,” he murmured, eyes closed, “we were right . . . Just one tiny error in our theory . . .” His body stilled but for the even beat of his heart.

Shoulders shaking, tears burned her cheeks. “Let me guess,” she whispered to the silence, “Lucan wasn’t dead?”

*   *   *

The weeks passed in a blur. The magic within the few proffered drops of Imnada blood had been enough to knit the deepest wounds, fill and empty lungs, keep an uncertain heart beating. The rest lay in luck and James’s own ferocious determination. Katherine nursed him through long days and brief nights, watching with both admiration at the battle he waged and alarm at the toll it took on his spirit, which seemed more guarded, new shadows entering his once clear gaze.

After he’d passed out of danger, she would confront him. She told herself this over and over. But each day she sat beside him and said nothing. Each night she found her bed, still with the words unsaid. The longer she put it off, the more her anger at James grew to become anger at herself. For weakness. For cowardice. For continuing to love him despite her mistrust and her misgivings.

Outside the sickroom, the world spun on. Enid still grumbled, but James continued to improve, if only to prove her gloomy predictions wrong. News came that Monsieur d’Espe had taken a ship from Holyhead back to France. Katherine knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t help wishing for a wicked squall to wash the villain to a watery grave.

Despite her father’s unceasing interrogation of their unexpected guest, Lucan spoke little. Nothing at all of Arthur or the Imnada or his time imprisoned within the obelisk, but Katherine watched him when he wasn’t looking, noting his dark inward gaze, his face harsh as the granite that had shackled him for a millennium. She wasn’t surprised when he disappeared, though she worried over him after he left. Silly, she knew, for no man looked more capable of taking care of himself than Lucan. Still, in the afternoons while James slept she would pull out the silver disk the Imnada warlord had given her, tracing the symbols there. Protection, he had called it. But from who or what she did not know.

At one point during her vigil, a hand squeezed her shoulder, the familiar, comforting scents of tobacco, peppermint, and old books surrounding her. She and her father had not spoken of that one fateful kiss from which all else had spun. She’d not brought it up and he’d not broached the subject. Instead it had risen like an impenetrable wall between them, adding tension to an already anxious situation—until tonight.

“You were so young, child. So trusting,” Father said quietly, as if answering an unspoken question. She sat pinned to her seat, the words beating on her heart like waves on a rock. “I was afraid he would treat your innocence as a challenge and tire of you once the chase ended. I’d seen it happen so often among the wealthy, brainless good-for-nothings I taught over the years. Maidens ruined. Lives destroyed.”

“I don’t want to speak of it.” She closed her eyes, trying to re-create her initial fury over the deception, but she achieved nothing beyond exhaustion and a dull ache that might once have been regret.

“We must, Katherine. I want you to understand what drove me to make such a decision.”

She spun round to face him, her voice low, almost a hiss. “I don’t care. Don’t you see? It’s over and done with. It doesn’t matter anymore. You were right to send James away all those years ago. I see that now.”

His scruffy gray brows rose into his hairline. “Do you? Then perhaps you’ll explain things to me, because I’m quite in the dark.”

She looked away, but he caught her chin as if she were a child and made her look at him.

“Katherine, I may be old, my days of romance long behind me, but even I can see you love the boy, and he you.”

“Then you need to clean your spectacles.”

He chuckled, but his gaze remained grave. There would be no dodging the question. Father had the tenacity of a badger and the patience of a saint. Best to have this conversation and be done with it.

“James would have let you die.” Her hands tightened on the heavy wool of her skirts. “He would have allowed d’Espe to kill you without lifting a single finger to help. It’s obvious he hasn’t forgiven you . . . us . . . for what happened five years ago. No doubt as soon as he received your letter, he began plotting his revenge. And everything he said since he arrived was nothing but pretty falsehoods. As hollow as one of his conjurings.”

He nodded sagely, tapping a finger to his chin, his eyes straying now and again to James’s sleeping form in bed. “If that were true, that would indeed be a grievous crime. But might you entertain another possibility? That he chose to defy the chevalier and risk my life, not out of vengeance against me, but out of love . . . for you?”

Now it was her turn to express confusion, but her father held up a hand before she could refute his hypothesis.

“Let me clarify. Duncallan knew Monsieur d’Espe better than either of us. Knew his long obsession with the Imnada as well as the dark powers he’d gathered to himself. As long as you remained within the wards James cast, you were safe. He had made sure of it. And your safety counted for everything.”

“Even against your life?”

Her father wiped his brow with a large handkerchief, his expression pained. “When you love someone, Katherine, you will go to any length and sacrifice anyone to protect them. Even when you know in your heart it is the wrong thing to do.”

She sensed the conversation had strayed from James’s current sins to her father’s past actions. “Is that why you sent for him?”

“You were my little girl, Katherine. A mere child.” He rubbed his chin. “And then you weren’t. It took Duncallan’s kiss to make me realize that. By the time I realized the depth of your connection, you were living with your aunt and he was a newly minted baron amid the social whirl of London. I couldn’t make amends, and so I said nothing. But the lie ate at me always. When I saw a chance to right my wrong, I took it.” He removed his spectacles, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “I want you happy, Katherine. I don’t think you have been—not truly. Not since I sent him away.”

“And his actions in the cave count for nothing?”

“Not nothing. Everything. He did it for you. He’s special, Katherine. Aside from the fact that he bears the blood of the Fey in his veins, he is vested with talent, a quick mind, and a dogged persistence. A fitting husband for my only daughter.” He squeezed her shoulder, his smile tremulous. “But you must ask yourself: Are you a fitting wife for him? Look in your heart. Do you still love him as much now as you did five years ago?”

She stared at James’s sleeping form beneath the blankets. Sweat-dampened hair curling against his neck. Long-fingered, capable hands. A square stubbled jaw. She’d memorized each gaunt valley biting deep into the sides of his mouth, each frown line creasing his forehead, the new scar by his left eye and the old one at his jawline. She tried recalling each moment of their precious hours within his spell-woven Aladdin’s cave. Each caress, each kiss, each whispered promise already seemed like a half-forgotten dream. When he woke, would he be that man who’d offered her a second chance, or would events have conspired to forever deny them a fresh start?

“I love him, Father,” she declared, but he had already left the room, and James slept on.

It was as if the words had never been said.

*   *   *

He watched her coming over the grass, her stride long and easy, hips swaying with just the right amount of come-hither temptation, foxy hair catching the late afternoon sun, her cognac golden gaze drawn into an irritated schoolmarm’s scowl. “James Piers Kenrick Farraday, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Oh, yes, she even had that lecturer’s bellow down perfect. Her father would be proud.

He shrugged, wincing at the pain that shot down his left arm at the gesture. Adjusted his stance to take the weight from his left leg. “Admiring the view.”

She drew up in front of him, windblown and smelling of pine. Cheeks pink from more than mountain air. Freckles dotting her nose. “You shouldn’t be straining that leg so soon by walking all the way out here.”