Heir of Danger (14 page)

The man spit on the ground, his face drawn in stark lines, mouth a thin angry slit. “I’ve my orders.”

“So you do,” Rogan conceded, still in the melodious, fluid tones that warmed Elisabeth’s whole body, relaxed muscles, and slowed her galloping heart. She wanted to wrap herself in his voice, where she would be protected and the fear wouldn’t touch her. “But your orders didn’t say anything about getting arrested by a
Duinedon
soldier and spending the next few nights in jail. Move along. Let them be.”

The gentle persuasion seemed to be having the same effect on her captor. His grip loosened before falling away completely. His gaze confused as if he didn’t understand why he was agreeing, but couldn’t stop himself.

“Climb up, miss.” The harper held out a hand. “Easy now. No sudden moves or you’ll rouse him. The magic of the
leveryas
will bend him to our will, but its hold is fragile and easily shattered by a strong mind.”

Her gaze fell upon Brendan’s huddled, battered form. One pale hand flung out, the fingers long and beautiful. A musician’s fingers. She remembered them upon her skin, the
heady, quivery heat bubbling up through her at his touch. And the strength in them as he’d shoved her behind him, shielding her with his own body.

“I can’t leave. Not without Brendan.”

“Nor will you,” Rogan agreed.

Just then, a streak of bristling, snarling fur and teeth broke from the trees. Tore across the road, needle fangs sinking into the villain’s ankle.

He roared, eyes wide and round, face twisted in rage.

“Killer!” Elisabeth shouted. “Stop it!”

But the little dog hung on, his jaw clamped viciously upon the man’s leg. Cursing, he drew his pistol.

“No!” Elisabeth leapt to grab his arm, but she was caught back by the harper.

Brendan took that moment to lurch forward, gather his lost blade, roll onto his feet, momentum carrying the knife up and into the man’s throat.

Blood gushed. Elisabeth screamed. The man toppled soundlessly into the mud, clutching the hilt protruding from his neck.

Brendan fell back, panting through his teeth. Blood from his shoulder soaking his sleeve, his arm, dripping off his fingers. Gore streaked his face and chest like a savage’s war paint.

Killer sniffed at him, his stump of a tail wagging with joy.

“Arrah, now,” Rogan muttered, climbing off the box. “Helena! A little help, if you please?”

A woman appeared from the back of the wagon dressed in a short jacket and leather breeches, emphasizing a combination of lean strength and feminine curves. Dark hair pulled off a narrow face, firm jaw, lips pressed white. She
sprang from the box, her gaze traveling over the bodies with barely a flicker of an eyelid.

“Is he dead?” she asked, nudging Brendan with the toe of her boot.

“Not . . . yet,” came the raspy, painful answer as Brendan rolled over, staring up at the woman. His face broke into a cutting smile. “Out of the frying pan. Into the fire,” he muttered just before he passed out.

The clack of beggars’ cups in the square below the cathedral. Monsoon rains against a leaky roof in Algiers. A clatter of muted gunfire.

As he drifted awake, the noises coalesced to a steady creaking rattle, every jolt of the noisy, bouncing torture device sending pain scything its way from his neck to his fingers, flashes of it spearing his vision with streaks of brilliant light.

For a heart-stopping moment he was in the dilapidated cottage south of Glenlorgan where the traitorous St. John had held him for four excruciating days last winter, humiliation and degradation taking on many varied sadistic forms.

A hand touched his forehead. Without thinking, he lashed out, connecting blindly with the nearest body, his mind already plotting escapes, revenge, anything to keep the man away from him before . . .

“Ow!”

“He’s awake!”

Voices. More than one. St. John’s brutes? Did they come for him? He wouldn’t go willingly. Not again. Never again. He lurched up, fists flailing. Pain arced through him, his shoulder burning, nerves raw and throbbing.

“Hold him before he hurts himself.”

“Rogan!”

“He’s torn the stitches. Be careful.”

“Gods, that was a clean jacket.”

Hands held him down. A knee across his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

“Brendan, it’s me. Elisabeth. You’re safe. You’ve been hurt, but you’ll be all right if you just hold still.”

Was it a trick? Was he hallucinating? He surrendered, the price of fighting too high.

The dreams seeped out of him, first the panic and humiliation, then more slowly the despair, the boiling frustration when he knew Sabrina was in danger because of him, when he knew his sister would die because she’d cared enough for him to answer his summons.

She couldn’t die. Not another corpse. Not another ghost. There were too many already. Their voices deafened him. Their eyes followed him in his sleep. “Can’t . . . breathe . . . can’t . . . talk . . .”

“You can get off him now, Rogan.” A woman’s voice. Confident. Cool.

The crushing weight on his chest was lifted, leaving him gasping and retching. He rolled onto his side, fresh needles of pain lancing from his shoulder into his brain.

Hands gentled him. A damp cloth wiped his face. “The bullet’s out, but you lost a lot of blood. You need to rest quietly.”

“Elisabeth?” The memories rushed in like water. The men in the tavern. The fight on the road. Being manhandled into the wagon where someone held him down while someone else dug into his flesh over and over and over until unconsciousness had claimed him.

“He’s burning up.”

“He’ll survive. His kind always do.”

He moved his head. So far, so good. No horrible, gut-wrenching agony. He was in a wagon, a canvas roof above him stretched over wooden ribs. Trunks, cases, blanket rolls, traveling valises packed neatly along the sides.

Elisabeth’s face hovered above him, wearing a fearful, stoic expression, her hair pulled into a hasty chignon at the back of her head, though wisps of curls framed her gray, tired face.

At his foot, a second woman knelt, her mouth pursed in a disapproving line, her dark brows arched over eyes sparkling with triumph.

Jack’s description hadn’t been nearly as exaggerated as he’d thought. Miss Roseingrave was beautiful in a panther-esque sort of way. Lean, dark, graceful, deadly. She’d eat poor Jack alive and spit out his bones.

A laugh boiled up through his chest. Why not? The situation reeked of farce. Club-over-the-head, dangle-from-a-cliff-edge comedy in its most unsophisticated form. They both looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. Perhaps he had. He’d escaped Máelodor only to fall into the
Amhas-draoi
’s hands.

Poetic. Ludicrous. Just his typical rotten luck.

Upon opening his eyes, Brendan’s hand immediately flew to his throat. Not there. The chain. The stone. Gone. “Son of a . . . !” He clamped his mouth shut, feeling around in the blanket. It would be here. Had to be.

Elisabeth looked up, a small line between her brows. “The usual salutation is ‘Good morning, hope you slept well, lovely weather for a drive.’”

“Try having a blasted great hole in your shoulder and see how you greet the day,” he said while riffling through the folds. Checking under the trunk by his head.

“There’s laudanum.” She started to rummage through a bag.

“No.”

“But if your shoulder is bothering—”

“I said no, damn it!”

She flushed, her gaze uncertain. “I was only trying to help.”

He glanced away, embarrassed at his outburst. His
weakness wasn’t her fault. “Laudanum makes me ill. I stay away from it.”

They were alone in the wagon. Who knew when they’d get another such chance to speak without fear of eavesdroppers?

“Where is it, Elisabeth?”

She gazed upon him, expression inscrutable but for a flicker deep in her dark eyes. “Helena says your wound is clean and no sign of infection.”

She was going to play it that way, was she? Fine. He’d allow it. To a point. Whatever it took to get that bloody stone back in his possession. “Helena, is it?”

“It seems silly after all we’ve been through to stand on such proper terms. Who are they, Brendan? What do they want with us?”

“Remember when I said there were people angry with me? Roseingrave is one of them. She’s
Amhas-draoi
.”

Elisabeth frowned, shaking her head.

“They guard the divide between the
Fey
realm and the mortal world. Act as protectors. Warriors and mages of the highest caliber, they’re both feared and respected by the race of
Other
.”

Her lips pressed to a thin disapproving line. “You can’t make normal enemies. Oh no. You have to fall afoul of cold-blooded murderers and a magic-wielding sorcerer army.”

“I strive to excel,” he joked before growing somber. “The stone, Lissa. Tell me you have it. Tell me Roseingrave didn’t find it. That stone is the key to everything.”

She looked away, fiddling with the buckle on one of the traveling cases.

“Do you want me to say I’m sorry? I will. I’m sorry. A
thousand times sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am. I never thought it would come to this point, but you don’t know what it was like back then. The chaos of those days. I needed to hide the stone. Just until things calmed down. Until I could figure out my next move.”

She kept silent, her fingers worrying at the metal clasp.

“If Roseingrave took it—”

Her head shot up, an angry burn in her eyes, chin trembling with emotion, but no sign of crying. “I have the damned thing.”

“You?”

“I kept it safe for seven years, didn’t I?”

“Lissa—”

“Don’t call me that. And don’t look at me as if I’m some sort of simpleton who can’t understand words of more than two syllables. I wept all over you like a watering pot long enough to slip it from your neck before Helena noticed. No doubt she thinks I’m a blubbering crybaby, but it worked. If the stone was so damned special, my life’s destruction counted as nothing, then I knew it must be important. And I didn’t trust them. Not completely. Not then.”

“You do now?”

“Do I have a choice?”

A silence fraught with recrimination and regret on both sides blanketed the wagon. Gods, he hated this helplessness. Being at the mercy of others. He’d spent too long trusting no one to so easily put his faith in another’s hands.

She reached beneath her gown, pulling free the simple chain. The stone hanging dark and lifeless. Unclasping it, she handed it to Brendan. “Here. If I never see it again, I shall count myself fortunate.”

The stone barely touched his palm before the visions crashed through his brain.

A man picking among the fields of dead, cheeks blackened with dirt and sweat, streaked with tears. Finding one body among the hundreds, he dropped to his knees, cradling the corpse as if it were a sleeping child. Lifted his head to hurl a curse to the sky, his face caught by a bloody sun. Eyes burning hot and gold as molten steel.

“It can’t be,” Brendan whispered. “I won’t let it happen.”

Dropping the stone as if scalded, he dragged in a breath like a drowning swimmer. The defeated warrior and his fallen comrade, both fading beneath a pall of smoke and fog and gold-edged mist.

Once again he was in the wagon with Elisabeth. Somewhere on the road between Dun Eyre and Dublin. A distant ringing of bells still echoing in his ears.

“Did you really think you could return to Ireland and not be caught?”

“Let’s say I was hopefully optimistic.”

The wagon hit a bump, the jolt like an explosion of nerve endings from his shoulder to his fingertips. “Does he do that on purpose?” Brendan groused.

Helena Roseingrave gave a smile of half amusement. “Rogan’s no member of the Four-in-Hand, but his other talents make up for any lack of skill at the ribbons. It was he who discovered your trail outside Gort and tracked you down. Lucky for you.”

Luck? She called this luck? Lying in the back of a wagon with a hole in him that hurt like the devil at the mercy of a woman he knew by reputation as being driven, dangerous, and, according to Jack, the world’s best kisser?
Though he doubted he’d ever be in a position to test that last quality.

“He’s a mage-chaser?” He cast a respectful glance at the hunched back of his tormentor on the box. Many
Other
possessed the ability to sense mage energy. Those skilled enough to follow it like a hound follows a scent were rare indeed.

The wagon dropped with a rattling thud into another pothole, slamming his shoulder into the side of the wagon. Spots shot before his eyes, and he almost passed out at the pain. “Bloody hell, that hurt like a m—”

“Shh! You’ll wake your captive.”

Elisabeth lay rolled in a blanket, a folded coat as her pillow. In the narrow bed of the wagon, she’d curled uncomfortably close to him. A peep of red hair and the curve of a pink cheek was all he could see above the blanket, but she gave off heat like a furnace, and if he stretched his hand just a bit to the left, he’d be able to rest it on the swell of her hip. Not that he would. Of course not. This was Elisabeth. He needed to gain hold of himself.