Tangled Webs (28 page)

Jaenelle stared at him. So did Daemon.

In Kaeleer, a Ring of Honor was given to every male who served in a court’s First Circle. Worn around the cock, it was a symbol of the Queen’s control over every aspect of a male’s life. It also allowed her to monitor the emotions of her males, and the Rings were usually set to raise an alarm if anger, pain, or fear indicated the male was in trouble and needed help.

Lucivar attached a small bag of healing supplies to the belt. “The Ebony shield is the best protective shield a man can have going into a fight.
Nothing
can get through it.”

“I didn’t realize…” Jaenelle shifted from one foot to the other. “You still wear that Ring?”

Lucivar snorted. “We all do.”

«You do?» Daemon asked.

Lucivar just looked at him.

“The Rings still work?” Jaenelle asked.

“In that the shields you put in them work and the males in the First Circle can sense if one of us needs help, yes.”

«But you can’t read Jaenelle?» Daemon asked, guessing at the reason for his Lady’s dismay at learning the Rings hadn’t been tossed into the backs of dresser drawers. Through a quirk in the way she had made the Rings for her court, the males in her First Circle had been able to read her emotions as easily as she could read theirs.

«Not like we used to,» Lucivar replied, sounding a little too evasive for a man who was usually blunt when answering a question.

Daemon decided not to ask anything else about the Rings until he retrieved his own from the velvet-lined box he’d had made for it and discovered for himself just how much connection the Rings of Honor still had to the former Queen of Ebon Askavi.

In quick succession, Lucivar layered an Ebon-gray shield, a Red shield, and another Ebon-gray shield over the Ebony. All of them followed his body rather than being a bubble around him.

He’s preparing for a killing field,
Daemon realized. “Lucivar.”

Then he blinked as power coated Lucivar’s hands. His brother could do enough damage just with muscle and temper. Boosted by the Ebon-gray, Lucivar could probably drive his fist through stone.

“You see, that’s the thing,” Lucivar said as he called in his Eyrien war blade and began coating the lethally honed steel with layers of Ebon-gray power. “This game depends on the Blood using Craft once they’re inside the house, which works to the advantage of the spells woven in and around the place. Those spells can’t do a damn thing to any Craft that’s done
before
entering the house. So Surreal and Rainier should be safe from physical attack.” He paused. His eyes narrowed. “If they didn’t shield before they walked through that gate, I am going to beat the shit out of both of them.”

“They thought they were going into the spooky house Marian and I made,” Jaenelle protested.

“I don’t care what they thought,” Lucivar said. “They were entering an unknown building. If they didn’t shield, they will regret it.”

“What about you?” Daemon asked. “What are you going to do?”

“Based on those rules, this place was made to hobble the Blood from using Craft in order to fight whatever is in the house, so everything will be designed to push the Blood into using Craft. But it doesn’t take into account what happens to the game when you throw a trained warrior into the mix. This place was designed to hamstring your way of fighting, not mine.”

“Wait here,” Jaenelle said. She ran back to the Coach.

“She’s getting stronger,” Lucivar said quietly as they both watched her enter the Coach. “Moving better. You must be letting her ride you half the time. Gives her leg muscles a good workout.”

Daemon choked back a laugh. Then the humor faded. “What are you going to do?”

Lucivar tipped his head, as if he was conversing with someone. Then he looked at the house. “You said this place was built to kill us—you and me—so no matter what Surreal and Rainier have done to protect themselves and the people with them, not everyone has survived through the night. Anyone who was Blood probably made the transition to demon-dead and is now an enemy, and there must have been predators in the house in the first place. Surreal and Rainier are going to be moving, trying to find the way out. Whoever is alive is with them. So I’m going through the door, and I’m going to find Surreal—and I’m going to kill everything in between.”

Daemon looked at his brother, armed for the killing field. “Are you sure you can avoid those ensnaring spells?”

“Don’t worry, Bastard. I won’t leave you to raise the little beast,” Lucivar replied with a grin.

“I don’t care about that,” Daemon snapped. “I care about losing my brother.”

The grin changed to a warm smile. “You won’t lose me.”

Jaenelle hurried back to them. She handed Lucivar a pack. “There’s water, a couple of sandwiches, some fruit and cheese. Just in case it takes you a while to find them.”

Daemon felt his gut clench when he saw the ball of clay she held out next. The last time he’d seen one of those, Jaenelle had prepared the balls of clay for the game he had played in Hayll to buy her the three days she needed to make a full descent into the abyss while keeping Marian, Daemonar, Lucivar, and Saetan from being killed by Dorothea and Hekatah. “What is that?”

“I asked Jaenelle to make a rough version of an air slide,” Lucivar said.

Daemon looked at Jaenelle and raised an eyebrow in question.

“The coven and I used to use Craft to shape air into a slide,” she said. “We’d add color so the formation would be easy to see, and we had spirals and loops and all kinds of things. This one is a straight slide that’s already primed. Once it’s triggered, people sit at the top, push off, and slide to the end.”

“And the end will be on the other side of the fence,” Lucivar said as he used Craft to set the pack on air before he slipped the ball of clay into the pouch attached to his belt. “I’m not going to look for one of the exits; I’m going to make one. Side wall of the third house is closest to the fence. I’ll blow out the wall on the second floor and open the spell for the slide. You two will take care of whoever has survived once they’re over the fence. Is that clear?”

Jaenelle stepped back. No embrace. No distraction. Not when a Warlord Prince was about to walk into a fight. “We’ll be waiting for you, Prince.”

Lucivar waited until she walked back to the Coach. «If I’m not out by sundown, you destroy this place completely. Take it down, Daemon. Don’t leave one stone standing on another. Is
that
clear?»

«If I have to make that choice, I will find whatever is left of you and haul your sorry ass up to the Keep because
you’re
going to have to explain this to our father.»

A quick grin was Lucivar’s only answer.

Daemon pushed the gate open. Lucivar grabbed the pack in his left hand. With his right hand, he raised the war blade in a salute.

“Take care, Prick,” Daemon said softly.

“My kind of fight, Bastard. I’ll get Surreal and Rainier out of that house. You find Jenkell and take care of the debt on behalf of the family. You make sure the little son of a whoring bitch pays every drop of blood that is owed.”

As he watched Lucivar walk up the path and open the front door, he felt Jaenelle come up beside him and slip her arm through his.

“Do you know the most annoying thing about him at times like this?” Daemon asked.

“That he doesn’t gloat when he’s right?”

He sighed. “Yeah. That’s it exactly.”

NINETEEN

T
hunder rolled through the house, a messenger of fury. It shook pictures and mirrors off the walls, rattled windows, even knocked over curio tables filled with insipid porcelain figurines.

Surreal looked at Rainier and knew that he, too, recognized the dark-Jeweled power that had come to play.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “It’s Lucivar.”

Lucivar? Had the uneducated Eyrien finally found someone to read the invitation to him? Or—and this was an even better thought—had he come to try to rescue the Surreal bitch and her companion?

Oh, this was excellent. Excellent! They were so unnerved by Lucivar being in the house! Maybe he would
finally
get some decent material to use for his book. Surreal and the limp Warlord Prince had made hardly any effort to find the exits. But the Eyrien was a warrior—and a
real
member of the SaDiablo family.

He had to hurry. Yes, he did. He didn’t want to miss a moment of Lucivar trying to pit himself against the surprises in the house.

Lucivar set the pack down next to the wall. He’d issued the challenge. Now he’d wait a few minutes to see if anyone accepted the invitation.

Odd that he hadn’t risen to the killing edge when he entered the house. He danced a heartbeat away from it, but he didn’t have the cold purity he usually had when he stepped onto a killing field.

Which meant this place didn’t offer a true killing field. It was a battleground, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of field Warlord Princes were born to stand on.

He wasn’t sensing enough danger here. There wasn’t enough threat to sustain that state of mind. At least, not for someone like him.

Which meant just being pissed off about someone setting a trap for his family would keep his temper sharp enough. At least for now.

He took another step into the front hallway.

Doorway on his left, with the door halfway open. Closed door on his right. A coat-tree next to the stairs leading to the second floor. A mirror on the wall opposite the stairs.

He took another step.

Why have a mirror there? To fix a collar or smooth a lock of hair after removing a coat? Or was there another reason for a mirror to reflect the side of the staircase?

The stealthy sound came from behind him, on his left. Then there was the rush of a body coming toward him, along with the putrid psychic scent of a malevolent mind.

He spun around, his right arm straightening as he became a pivot for the death he held in his hand. He looked the Black Widow in the eyes as his Eyrien war blade sang through muscle and humbled bone.

The top half of her body fell in one direction, the lower half in another. Guts spilled out on the hallway floor, but not much blood. That meant the demon-dead witch hadn’t been drinking blood or yarbarah and had become too starved to be cautious.

She screamed at him as she pushed herself across the floor, too furious to remember she could use Craft to float her body on air. Intent on reaching her prey, she followed him as he circled toward the room where she had hidden.

His inner barriers were locked tight, and he should be safe enough from any games a lighter-Jeweled Black Widow might try to play. But a man who got careless and underestimated an enemy was a man who usually died.

Switching his war blade to his left hand, he grabbed the Black Widow by the hair, flung her into the room, and closed the door. Then he walked across the hallway and kicked open the other door.

Nothing sprang out at him, so he grabbed one ankle and threw the lower half of the Black Widow into the sitting room.

It went against his training and his temper to leave an enemy at his back. Since she was already demon-dead, the Black Widow was still a potential enemy. But he would need power to burn out what was left of her power in order to finish the kill. That would feed into the spells woven around the house. So he would leave her, and deal with her again if he had to.

Then he stopped and stared at the hallway as a thought curled around his heart.

Three Black Widows had made the spells for this spooky house. It stood to reason that the little prick who had devised this game wouldn’t want to leave any loose ends that could connect him to this place. Lucivar had no doubt at all that he’d just met one of the Black Widows—and he had no doubt he would cross paths with the second. But the third…

Daemon wasn’t a fool. The feel of Tersa’s spells was easily recognized by anyone who had spent enough time with her to know the woman. If she wasn’t safely tucked in her cottage in Halaway, if she was trapped in the house, Daemon would have told him. And if…

Fury washed through him at the thought of anyone daring to harm Tersa.

He grabbed the coat-tree and swung.

The mirror exploded, showering that part of the hallway with glass. One foot of the coat-tree punched through the wall.

Lucivar pulled the coat-tree out of the wall, set it down, and said, “Why use Craft when a little temper will do?”

Wasn’t likely he’d find Surreal or Rainier this close to the starting point of the game, but he’d check the back room and the kitchen before moving on.

One step. Two.

He caught a faint psychic scent, enhanced by a whiff of fear. It was gone before he could track the direction it came from, but it had been enough to warn him that Blood was nearby.

Not the Black Widow. This was someone else, someone who barely registered as Blood to his senses because that person stood so far above him in the abyss. Someone he hadn’t detected at all until he punched a hole in the wall.

He stared at the wall and considered the game. Then he bared his teeth in a feral smile and walked back to the front door.

“Guess I’ll play by your rules after all,” he said softly as he pressed his right hand against the door. The Ebon-gray Jewel in his ring blazed for a moment as he put an Ebon-gray shield around the whole structure.

Somewhere in the house, a gong sounded.

He felt the bite of a spell as it hooked into the Ebon-gray power, but he fed the shield for a few heartbeats longer—giving it enough power to assure that it wouldn’t be drained by the house before sundown. Of course, when he was ready to leave, he’d have to punch through spells that were bloated with his own Ebon-gray strength, and the backlash from that
would
hurt like a wicked bitch. So be it. He’d still be the one walking out. As for the little writer-mouse he suspected was hiding in the walls…

Lucivar picked up his pack and headed for the back room. As he passed the hole in the wall, he said in Eyrien, “You don’t leave until I let you leave. So you keep watching—and prepare to die.”

An illusion suddenly appeared in front of him. The boy had died a hard death, judging by the ripped torso and the missing eye, but he was just an illusion and not
cildru dyathe
, so he posed no threat.

“The worst is still to come,” the boy said.

“No,” Lucivar replied, walking right through the illusion. “I’m here now.”

He secured the door, then pressed his back against the wall—and trembled.

Why use Craft when a little temper will do?

Lucivar had cut the Black Widow in half. The fight was over before it began because
he cut the witch in half.

Without Craft.

Lucivar had swung a heavy coat-tree like it was nothing more than a stick and punched a hole in a Craft-protected wall.

Without Craft.

The hole had compromised that part of the secret passageway, making it vulnerable to the spells that chained the rest of the house. This just proved how right he’d been to install doors to divide these passageways into separate sections that had their own set of protection spells. The witch who had done those particular spells had been a sweet woman until he had tortured her and killed her in a way that made her a suitably vicious predator.

Of course, there was no law against murder, so he’d done nothing wrong. And the information he’d collected in the process would make his next novels wildly successful, surpassing any of his rivals’. Maybe even successful enough that he would be able to acquire one of the kindred as a companion.

There was just one little hitch in his plans.

He was beginning to understand why Surreal and her companion were afraid of Lucivar.

“He put an Ebon-gray shield around the house,” Surreal said. “Hell’s fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness be merciful.” How were they supposed to get past an Ebon-gray shield?

“Maybe Lucivar was trying to keep anyone else from coming in,” Rainier said.

“Or he’s trying to keep someone from getting out,” Surreal replied.
Like us?
she wondered as she glanced at the children. They had come close to pissing out their brains when that thunderous challenge had rolled through the house. Now the four of them were staring at her and Rainier, looking pathetically hopeful that they could be protected.

As if any of them had a chance of surviving now.

“Last night, that boy said the worst was still to come,” she said quietly. “What if Lucivar has been here all along?”

Rainier considered the question, then shook his head. “If he’d come in ahead of us, we would have seen some sign of his presence before now. A fist-sized hole in a wall, if nothing else.”

That was true enough. Once he realized he was trapped, Lucivar would go through the house like a wild storm. They would have been climbing over wreckage instead of moving through untouched rooms. But…

“Someone managed to kill a dark-Jeweled Eyrien Warlord and trap him in the house’s spells,” Surreal said. “Could those spells be strong enough to trap an Ebon-gray Warlord Prince?”

“Based on the rules we read, I think trapping Lucivar and Daemon was at least part of the intention,” Rainier replied. “But even if Lucivar is still just Lucivar…”

They looked at each other.

“Let’s get moving,” Surreal said. “We have
got
to find a way out of here.”

Moments after Lucivar’s Ebon-gray shield closed around the house, Daemon’s Black shield surrounded the property, forming a dome over the house and sinking deep into the land.

Cold rage whispered in his blood, singing its seductive song of violence and death.

Then he felt Witch’s hand on his arm, felt a cold in her equal to his own but still tempered by the fire of surface anger.

“Lucivar found something he wants to contain,” Daemon said too softly. “Something not otherwise bound by the spells put on that house. He locked the house; I’ve locked the land.”

She nodded. “Nothing will leave here without his consent—and yours.”

And yours,
Daemon thought. No matter what he and Lucivar thought, Witch would make the final decision.

Her hand tightened on his arm, a silent command to step back from the killing edge and the sweet, cold rage.

“Daemon, let’s take care around the boy,” Jaenelle said quietly.

That reminder helped him leash the rage and obey. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly…and regained control.

“Why don’t we take a walk around the perimeter and look for something that doesn’t feel natural?” Jaenelle suggested.

“Such as…?”

“A tunnel. A passageway.”

“An underground escape.” Daemon nodded. His Black shield went deep enough to block such an escape, but the search would give them both something to do while they waited.

He looked at the Coach. “Should we bring the boy with us and let him stretch his legs? He hasn’t left the Coach since you invited him in.”

“He’s afraid, Prince.”

“Of us?”

Jaenelle shook her head. “Of being sent back to the orphans’ home.”

He hesitated, then said softly, “We can’t keep him. The Hall is too dark. Our power is too dark. He would never belong. Might not even be able to survive.”

“I know,” she said. “But we can have him as a guest for a day or two while we decide what would be the best place for him.”

Something in her tone of voice. Something that softened his temper and tickled his sense of humor.

“How do kindred puppies feel about young boys who may be half-Blood?” he asked.

Jaenelle just grinned.

Tersa stepped back from her worktable. She had worked through the night, building her tangled web strand by careful strand.

The Langston man had used her to hurt the boys. Her boy. And the winged boy.

She remembered the winged boy from the days when she had been less of a shattered chalice and had lived in a cottage with her boy.

Before Dorothea had taken her boy. Had used her boy. Had hurt her boy.

And the winged boy too.

But the winged one was strong now, powerful now—and still a boy when he came to visit. He thought she believed that foolishness about ale being Eyrien milk? Even someone who walked in the Twisted Kingdom could tell the difference between milk and ale.

He wasn’t being mean, though. He wasn’t making fun of her, thinking she wouldn’t know the difference. He was teasing because he wanted ale, and his smile invited her to pretend she believed the fib.

He understood her. Daemon listened, and he loved her. Jaenelle listened too. And Saetan. But Lucivar rode her currents of words like he rode currents of air, following a path that wasn’t meant for straight lines. So she told him things, taught him things that she couldn’t explain any other way, and trusted him to eventually show the others.

His mother didn’t want him. Couldn’t love him because she hated him. All because he had those glorious wings that looked like dark silk when he spread them wide. What a foolish reason to hate a child.

So, in a way, he had become her boy too.

And Surreal. The girl child who had been forged into a warrior by pain and blood and fear. Never like a daughter, but always a friend. Someone who could accept what couldn’t be made whole.

The Langston man wanted to hurt Surreal too.

Tersa gently touched the frame that held her tangled web.

She owed the Langston man for whatever harm she had done—and she would pay her debt.