The Warlord Wants Forever (13 page)

“Ivo has demons. Demons turned vampires. They are strong—you can’t imagine it. He is looking for someone, but I don’t think it’s your Bride—they mentioned something about a ‘halfling’.”

“How many?”

“There were three in his party—other vampires as wel. We took down two of the demons but one remains.” He glanced behind him. “Where’s your Bride?”

After a hesitation, he explained everything, seeking the same unburdening he felt when he spoke with Myst. His brother’s expression grew stark.

Long moments of silence passed before he said incredulously, “Wroth, you took away the free wil of a creature that has had it for two thousand years. A good wager says she’s going to want it back.”

“No, you don’t understand. She’s calous. Incapable of love. It eats at me, her deception, because it’s the only thing that makes sense.” More to himself, he muttered,

“Why else would she want me?”

Murdoch weakly grabbed Wroth’s wrist. “For al these years I’ve seen you continualy choose the best, most rational course, even if it’s the most difficult. I’ve been proud to folow your leadership because you’ve acted with courage and always—always—with rationality. I never thought I would have to inform you that your reason and judgment have failed you, Nikolai. If she’s as bad as you say then you have to…I don’t know, just help her change, but you can’t order this. Get back to her. Explain your fears to her.”

“I don’t think I can. You saw her, Murdoch. Why would she so quickly acquiesce?”

“Why don’t you just ask her?”

Because I don’t want to show her again how craven I’ve become with wanting her.

“And about the other men—this isn’t the sixteen hundreds anymore,” Murdoch said. “This isn’t even the same plane. She’s immortal, not an eighteen-year-old blushing bride straight from a convent. She can’t change these things, so if you want her, you have to adjust.”

Wroth ran a hand over his face and snapped, “When did you get so bloody understanding?”

Murdoch shrugged. “I had someone explain a few rules of the Lore to me and learned we can’t apply our human expectations to the beings within it.”

“Who told you this?” When he didn’t answer, Wroth didn’t press, not with al the secrets he’d been keeping. “Wil you be al right?” he asked.

“That’s the thing about being immortal. It’l always look worse than it is.”

Wroth attempted a grin and failed.

“Good luck, Nikolai.”

Outside of the room, he spoke with those watching over Murdoch and emphasized what would happen to them should his brother worsen, then contemplated tracing

back. He was almost glad when Kristoff caled a meeting about this newest threat, grateful for the time to cool off before he faced Myst again.

Kristoff didn’t hesitate to ask, “Why didn’t your wife tel you about the turned demons?”

“I don’t know. I wil ask her when I return.” He wondered as wel. Had she known? No, she’d been teaching him everything she knew—teaching him constantly.

Why would she do that if she only planned to leave him?

When he cringed, he realized Kristoff was stil studying him.

“Something to add?”

He owed Kristoff his life and the life of his brothers. Three brothers and for Myst herself, he owed his king. He would withhold information on Myst’s kind but relate the rest. “I’ve learned a good deal about the Lore from her and want to discuss it with you, but I left my wife feeling poorly. I’d like to get back to her.”

“By al means,” Kristoff said, his face unreadable. “But tomorrow we’l talk of this.”

Wroth nodded, then traced back to Myst, frowning as a hazy idea surfaced in the turmoil of his mind. Had his brother’s heart been beating earlier? But before he could contemplate this further, Wroth’s attention was distracted by Myst’s sleeping form. He gazed down at her, chest aching as usual. Sometimes he damned his beating heart because of the pain that seemed to folow it.

Murdoch was right. She couldn’t change what she was, and he’d wronged her today. If only he could think more clearly where she was concerned instead of reacting visceraly. Primitively. Before, he’d never understood when men talked of madness and love in the same breath. Now he understood.

He only hoped that when he asked her to forgive him his weakness, she could.

After undressing, he climbed into bed with her. He puled her close to him, running his hand down her arm, burying his face in her hair and smeling her soft, sweet scent.

Finaly at dawn, he passed out with exhaustion. When he dreamed, he opened his mind to her memories, to what had become his nightmares. They superseded al his other visions of battle and famine because these hurt him the most. See her in a sordid light. Punish yourself.

See them al.

T he dream of the Roman appeared first. Wroth impatiently waited through the usual scene, seeking to see more. Did he truly want to? Could he ever turn back from this?

Too late, it was done. He knew that he’d unlocked the floodgates and that these dreams were going to play out, each spinning to their gruesome, perverted endings.

Myst slowly lifted her skirt up. Yet then Wroth felt something new—chils crawling up her spine as she peered down at the Roman with his wet lips and furious stroking.

She was ashamed at her disgust and closed her mind off it. She was the bait. She’d be whatever it took to free her sister.

“I’l possess Myst the Coveted…”

No one possesses me but in their fantasies. I’l kil you as easily as kiss you…. The Roman sought to make her his plaything just as he had Daniela for these past six months.

Suddenly Myst glanced up and Wroth saw through her eyes. Lucia had Daniela in her covered arms, the girl’s body limp and burned over most of her icy skin. Daniela had been tortured, Myst realized, by this animal at her feet, by his very touch. The familiar rage erupted within her. Control it…. Just a moment longer…. “And I’l be yours, only yours,” she somehow purred.

When Lucia signaled, Myst nodded, extracting her foot, his lips producing a loud sucking sound that made her cringe. She tapped the man’s bulbous nose with her big toe.

In a tone dripping with sexuality, she said, “You probably won’t live through what I’m about to do”—her voice had gone to a breathy whisper belying the words and confusing the man—“but if you survive, learn and tel others that you should never”—a tap with the toe—“ever”—tap—“harm a Valkyrie.”

Then she punted him across the room—

Another scene began—the one with the raiding party, the one he’d always dreaded seeing the most. The men were nearing; he could hear her feigning heavy breathing, a stumble. Al a part of the game.

One tackled her hard into the snow. The others pinned her arms. She was pretending fear, weakly struggling. While others cheered, a burly Viking knelt between her legs and told her, “I hope you live longer than the last ones did.”

Lightning streaked behind the man’s head and the wind seemed to folow it—a few looked around uneasily with nervous laughter.

“The last ones’ names were Angritte and her daughter Carin,” Myst informed him. Carin, so young, simple in the mind, had for some reason immediately recognized Myst for what she was. “Swan maiden,” the girl had whispered, uttering one of the Valkyries’ more beautiful names.

Both the careless mother and her innocent daughter had been kiled, smothered under the weight of these men as they brutalized them. “I wil live longer than them—and you.” A change came over her, like a bloodlust, thoughts turned feral, the rage…

The frown on the attacker’s face was the last expression he’d ever make. She rose up, easily shaking off the powerful men. She had loved Carin for her very innocence and joy, and these beasts had stolen these things from Myst, from the world, which was poorer from the loss….

As lightning painted the sky, she mindlessly slashed her way through them. When al but one were feled, she told the one she alowed to live, “Any time you think to hunt down a woman or to force her, wonder if she’s not like me. I’ve spared you, but my sisters would unman you with a flick of their claws, their wrath unimaginable.” She wiped her arm over her face, found it was wet.

She crouched over the man and could see her reflection in his eyes. “There are thousands of us out there. Lining these coasts, waiting.” Her eyes were silver, and blood marked the side of her face. He was frozen in terror. “And I’m the gentle one.”

She turned from him, dusting off her hands and said to herself, “This is how rumors get started.” But her swagger disappeared at the site of the rough gravestones atop the hil by the sea—Carin’s beside her mother’s. “You stupid human,” she hissed at the mother’s. “I’ve cursed you to your hel.”

“Why did you disobey me? I told you to take Carin inland in the spring when they come down. Stay far from the coasts,” she said, her voice breaking on a sob as she flew to the girl’s tombstone. She curled up against it, her face resting against the crude inscription. Then she hit it, her blood trickling along the new jagged fracture.

She stayed like that, unmoving for days, as vilagers held a vigil at the base of the hil, offering up tributes fit for a goddess for her protection and benevolence. Wroth shuddered at the physical pain Myst didn’t seem to feel—her hand frozen in blood to the stone, her muscles knotted, and skin raw from cold. On the third day, her sister Nïx found her and lifted her from the snow as easily as a pilow. Tears were ice on her face.

“Shhh, Myst,” Nïx murmured. “We’ve already heard the tales of your revenge. They’l never harm another maid. In fact, I doubt that league of men wil ever trouble this coast again.”

“But…the girl,” Myst whispered, awash in confusion, tears streaming anew, “is simply gone.” The last word was a sob.

“Yes, dearling,” Nïx said. “Never to return.”

Myst was weeping. “But…but it hurts when they die.”

Nïx pressed her lips to Myst’s forehead, murmuring, “And they always do.”

Wroth’s chest ached with Myst’s sorrow as no physical wound had ever hurt him. She’d run from the men because the ones who would chase a “helpless” maiden were the ones who would die. Wroth wanted to stay with that memory, to make sure she recovered from this helish pain, but another familiar dream began. Snow outside, packed so high it covered half of the window. The meeting around the hearth. “…teach her to be al that was good and honorable about the Valkyrie…”

Myst closed her eyes against a memory—the one he’d struggled to see—that she could never erase, never aleviate. She remembered and she vowed again that she would be worthy.

She was in the middle of her first field of battle, there as a chooser of the slain. She’d been sent young, barely fifteen, because she’d been born of a brave Pict who’d plunged a dagger into her own heart. Myst was supposed to be like that.

But she wasn’t. Not yet. She was sick with terror.

One hundred thousand men, cut to pieces, blood like a river up to her ankles. “They were al brave,” she said, peering around her, dizzily turning in circles as electricity roled from her in waves. Sounding lost, she whispered, “How am I to choose? A beggar handing out coins…” She began trembling uncontrolably with fear.

He wanted to be there to protect her, comfort her.

Another memory. New to him. Could he withstand another?

Myst ran to him when he returned to Blachmount from some errand, and as he’d squeezed her up into his arms and kissed her, she’d thought, “I just ran to get in his arms.

I just…Whoa. Whoa. Uhn-uh.”

Wroth remembered she’d clambered down from him, looking flushed and panicky, joking about the Xbox, saying she felt “a little like Bobby Brown” for introducing him to the addictive game.

Now he knew why she’d panicked. Myst, along with al her sisters, had been taught that she would know her true partner when he opened his arms and she realized she’d forever run to get within them.

Wroth woke to his own yeling, thrashing over, clutching for her. Everything he’d thought about her was wrong. His chest hurt with the loss and anguish she’d experienced.

“You’re free. Myst…”

The bed was empty.

He shot to his feet, scanning the room, finding a bloody note on the table by the bed, under the cross. A heart for a heart…

Dread settled over him, numbing his mind, even as panic was sharp, stabbing at his body like a blade. He half-staggered, half-traced into the study, eyes faling on the safe wal. To his horror, he saw no safe, but as he neared, growing more sickened, he found blood on the stone that had housed it, clawed away in a frenzy. She’d dug through it to get to her chain, to her freedom.

Wroth fel to his knees, head bowed as a guttural sound of pain erupted from his chest. At the first opportunity, he’d offered her torture, only to folow it by stealing her freedom from her.

And then…

A heart for a heart. She’d made his beat. Had he broken hers?

He’d lost her. And he’d deserved to.

T he coven met around the safe, al of them waiting for Regin to swing the Sword of Wóden to cut through the vampire’s mojo-protected metal. Wóden’s sword cut

through anything. Wel, anything but the chain, as Myst and Regin could attest to after one scary experiment that nearly made Myst a good deal shorter.

The sisters were stil debating who would accept the responsibility of the chain because Myst was no longer alowed, not as long as Wroth lived. But no one wanted the thing, and kiling Wroth seemed a bingo solution to them.

Regin raised the sword above her, and even the wraiths flying outside that they’d hired to guard Val Hal against intruders—like Wroth—seemed to slow their circling to catch a window. With a dramatic breath, Regin sliced through the safe as easily as powder, though sparks flew. When al was clear, Myst wearily reached forward to colect her torment.

She frowned to find a smal, ornate box of wood inside as wel. Al of her sisters seemed to realize at the same time that it was about the size of those velvet jewelry boxes

—because the room went quiet, then they dove for it like a wedding bouquet. “Shiny, in the box, shiny,” one of the younger sisters whimpered. Myst was closest and snagged it and even if she hadn’t been able to she would’ve bitch-slapped anyone who made a run with it.