Living Nightmare (31 page)

He let her see his displeasure in his face as well as shoving it through their link. The mental push was harder than it should have been; their link had shrunk more even since yesterday. “I’ve seen you naked a few thousand times.”

Her chin went up as she let her arms fall back into the water. “You startled me. That’s all.”

Angus ignored the lie, sat on the edge of the tub, and began unlacing his boots.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting undressed.”

“Why?” There was a hint of fear in her tone, and Angus wanted to pound his fists into a wall to vent some of his frustration.

“Seven months, Gilda. It’s been seven months since you let me touch you. Our bond is growing weaker by the day, and now the lives of several young women are in the balance. At least one of them is one of our own, and I’m damn well not going to be the cause of her death.”

Angus shed his clothes and stepped into the tub.

Gilda shrank back from him, pressing herself as far away as the giant soaking tub would allow. “Are you still letting Tynan experiment on you?” she asked.

“Yes. Nothing has worked. I’m just as infertile now as I was last year.”

“How can you be sure?”

Anger was getting harder and harder to fight with each day that passed. He couldn’t stop it from coming through in his words now. “Because I jerked off into a cup. Tynan checked under a microscope, and nothing has changed.”

“I told you that if you agreed to these experiments, I wasn’t going to let you bed me. I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Fine. You know I won’t force you, but I’m damn well not going to sit by while our bond fails. I’m going to touch you, and it has nothing to do with sex.”

“No,” she said, standing. Water sluiced down her curves. Her glorious body was just as beautiful to him now as it had been centuries ago. Age and the birth of their children had done nothing to take away from her perfection.

Angus swallowed, trying to ease the grinding sexual frustration he’d lived with for way too long. “No?” he asked, his voice deceptively gentle. The last thing he felt right now was gentle, and if she bothered to reach out for him through their link, she’d know it.

Her chin quivered a moment before she pulled herself together. “If you touch me, I’ll forget my intentions. You’ll seduce me, and I’ll never be able to forgive myself for giving in.”

“You make it sound like letting me make love to you would be a bad thing.”

“I won’t have another child. I won’t watch another child die, or worse, be lured by the Synestryn to kill and destroy everything I hold sacred.”

“I’m not asking you for another child. I respect your wishes. I even bought condoms and learned how to use them. But what I’m not willing to do is throw away everything we’ve worked for—everything we’ve spent our lives creating.”

“It’s too late,” said Gilda. She was shivering now, her flesh rough from the chill.

Instincts embedded in him deeper than his own bones forced him to stand and warm her with his body heat. When his arms came around her, she went stiff, but there was nowhere for her to run away fast enough to escape him.

He felt her body convulse on a silent sob. For years his sweet wife had suffered. Grieved. He hadn’t been able to do anything to fix it, so he’d learned to live with her constant sadness and silent rage until he accepted it as normal.

It wasn’t normal. Gilda used to laugh. She used to tease him and smile and play.

She hadn’t been normal since Maura had run away and joined forces with the Synestryn.

“It’s not too late,” he assured her, forcing his conviction through their shrinking link.

“I’ve done things, Angus. Unforgivable things.”

His grip on her tightened. She was still cold, so he eased her down into the hot water, settling her against his chest. His lifemark still loved her touch, and it shivered toward her as if it had been starved of that touch for way too long.

“What you did to Sibyl and Maura was understandable. Our son had died. You were grieving. Distraught.” And because of what Gilda had done, his girls would never grow up. As much as that hurt, he’d forgiven her, hoping his daughters would follow his example.

They hadn’t.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “There are things about me you don’t know. Terrible things. I’m not sure how much longer I can live with these secrets. They’re eating me from the inside, gnawing at me.”

Angus was careful to hide his shock. He thought he knew everything about his wife, but perhaps he’d been wrong. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

“It is. I’ve taken so much from you. From all of you.”

“What are you talking about, love? The only thing you’ve taken from me is your touch. We’re past that now, aren’t we?” He hoped so. He hoped that her letting him hold her now was a sign her stubbornness was at an end. Finally.

“Once I tell you, you won’t want to touch me ever again.”

Angus tilted her body, hooked his thumb under her chin, and turned her head so she would look at him. “There is nothing you can do that I wouldn’t love you enough to forgive.”

Her dark eyes glittered with tears. “You’re wrong, Angus.”

“Tell me. Tell me what you’ve done that’s so bad, because I think
you’re
wrong.”

A single tear spilled over, and the sadness he saw in her face nearly made him weep. “I’ve tried to live without you these last seven months. I thought the distance between us would make my betrayal easier to bear.”

“What betrayal?”

Angus tried to reach through their link and see what was going on in her head, but he couldn’t get through. All he could feel was her barely constrained panic and a sense of grief so thick he didn’t know how she could stand it.

She looked down in shame. “It was the night Isaac died.”

Isaac. Their youngest son. He’d died in battle, along with three other Theronai. But that had been so long ago. Two centuries. As much as he still ached for his lost son, he also felt a huge swelling of pride for what he’d done that night—for the man he’d grown to become and the countless lives he’d saved. He’d sacrificed his life, but it hadn’t been in vain. The descendants of the humans he’d saved that night still lived on, making the world a better place.

Angus caressed her arm, hoping to comfort her. “Love, anything you did that long ago I already know. Whatever it is you think you did, I’ve already forgiven you.”

“No. You’re wrong. I’ve hidden it. So carefully, so deep, I know you’ve never seen my shame.”

“Then tell me now so I can forgive you and you can heal. Let’s get past this. The lives of our people depend on our strength, our example.”

“Yours, maybe. I’m afraid my example has been lacking.”

“Tell me, Gilda. I can’t imagine a thing you could do so bad I would stop loving you.”

She fell silent. Pulled in a breath. Her body shuddered, as if uttering the words after holding them in so long was a struggle. “The night Isaac died, I was destroyed. I knew the moment I heard the news that my heart would never be whole again. I couldn’t bear the pain, and knew I couldn’t allow it to happen again. I couldn’t lose another child.”

Angus remembered that night, despite his desire to forget. Their link had intensified their pain, as they each not only suffered their own grief, but the other’s as well. Rather than cling to him for support, as he’d ached for her to do, she’d fled—run into the hills and shut down. When she came back, she was colder. Harder.

“I went into the woods,” she said. “I gathered as much power into me as I could hold, hoping it would kill me and take away the pain. I raged at the unfairness of our son’s death. Why hadn’t it been me that had died instead of him? Why hadn’t it been one of the other men? I’d already given so much to this war. How could God take our last living son, too?”

Angus had no answers. He sat in silence, giving her time to work up her courage to say whatever it was she had to say.

“The power in me kept growing and yet I didn’t die. That made me angrier. I knew I couldn’t ever again allow another child of mine to die, so I vowed never again to conceive. I would not give any more of my heart’s blood to this war.”

Her voice quieted, vibrating with shame. “I hadn’t intended for my magic to do what it did. I hadn’t planned any of this, or had a single conscious thought as to what it might mean, but there was so much power, so much grief and rage that it went out of control. The power ripped from my body, doing my unconscious will, shimmering out from the top of that hill in waves so strong I could see the trees shake as it passed.”

“What magic?” asked Angus. “What had you done?”

“For years our people have believed that our men are infertile because of something the Synestryn did to us. I’ve let them believe it, but it’s a lie.” She pulled in a deep breath. “I did it, not our enemy. It was me. My magic spread out over the face of the planet, rendering every male Theronai sterile, because only then could I be sure I’d never conceive.”

Shock choked the breath from Angus’s body. “
You
did that to us? To me?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

How could she have done that? How could she have destroyed their entire race so utterly? He couldn’t fathom why she would have done something like that, even in her grief. He knew she hadn’t consciously planned to sterilize them, but that intent had come from her—from somewhere inside her he didn’t recognize. A dark, selfish place.

Angus needed some time to digest this news, to process it and make sense of it. His entire perspective shifted. Not only did he now know that his ability to have children had been stolen—not by his enemy, but by his wife—he also realized something he never thought possible.

Gilda could lie to him. She’d been lying for years. Centuries.

That was the betrayal that hurt most. He’d given her everything he had, everything he was. He
breathed
for her. She was his very blood. He could no more keep a secret from her than he could stop the Earth from spinning. Lying to her seemed inconceivable.

And yet she’d lied so easily to him, which made him wonder what else she’d lied about.

Angus hated seeing her in this light. He hated looking at her, wondering what other secrets she held from him.

He felt her reaching for him through their link, and for the first time in memory, he blocked her out. Not because he didn’t want her to feel his pain, but because he couldn’t stand the thought of having her inside him right now.

Angus settled her body against the wall of the tub and got out. He needed some time to think. To be alone. Or at least away from Gilda.

He didn’t even bother drying off, just dragged his clothes over his wet skin and left. As he shut the door behind him, he caught a glimpse of the luceria ring on his finger.

The deep storm-cloud gray swirls that had been frozen in place for centuries—the patterns that had been with him so long he’d memorized their every curve—began to move.

The bond he had with Gilda, his Gray Lady, was coming undone. He knew that if it was broken, it would mean his death. The fact that the notion didn’t bother him overmuch told him just how deeply Gilda’s betrayal had cut him.

 

Gilda’s tears dripped into the water. It had grown cold, making her shiver, but she didn’t get out. The small punishment the cold gave her was nothing compared to what she deserved.

She should have known that the weight of her secret would not be relieved by telling Angus. Instead, the hurt she’d caused him weighed her down even more.

He was too good a man for her. He didn’t deserve the pain she’d heaped on him.

He didn’t deserve her—being chained to her for eternity.

Gilda knew what she had to do. She had to pull herself together, use every bit of waning strength she had to rescue Tori, and pray to God that the girl would be compatible with Angus so she could set him free.

Of course, there was only one way she could do that. She’d promised him she’d stay by his side as long as she lived, which meant she’d have to die.

The idea didn’t scare her. She was tired of living with all this grief, tired of fighting, and watching the people she loved die. As hard as it would be to let Angus go, especially into the arms of another woman, she knew it was the right thing to do.

The Sentinels needed Angus. He was too strong a warrior to let go. He would live on and keep fighting for as long as it took to defeat the Synestryn.

Gilda couldn’t.

Now that the decision was made, everything else seemed so simple. So clear.

She got out of the tub, put on her favorite silk gown, and went to say good-bye to her daughter. Sibyl wouldn’t speak to her—she hadn’t in decades—but by God, she would listen.

R
icky answered his cool new cell phone—the one the guy with the creepy eyes gave him. Their meetings were fuzzy, but he remembered the guy saying someone would call.

“Hello?”

“It’s time,” rasped a whispering voice over the line. “Do you understand?”

“Who?” asked Ricky automatically.

“Nika Madison.”

Even though the voice didn’t tell him what it was time for, deep down Ricky knew. He had a vague memory of a suitcase of supplies someone he knew had given him. He couldn’t remember who it was, but he had hidden that box in the back of his closet. He hadn’t even remembered it was there until now.

Instructions flooded his mind, compelling his feet to move. He abandoned the video game he’d been playing and went to his room, ignoring the angry voices of his buddies behind him.

It was only a short walk from his room to where he knew he’d find her.

Ricky suffered a moment of fear that the giant, angry Theronai Madoc might be there, but that fear seemed to evaporate as soon as it came, leaving him numb.