Awaken the Curse Read online

  He rolled away long enough to shuck off his heavy robe and then he was back, the ripple of his muscles and the strength in his arms knotting her insides all over again. But there was also deep purple bruising across his ribs and horrible discoloration down over his left shoulder, which was still bandaged. “You look horrible. Does it hurt a lot?”

  “Not as much as my c—”

  “James!” she exclaimed, an unladylike giggle bursting out of her.

  “As much as my head . . . right here.” He pointed to a spot above his left eyebrow.

  She took his face in both her hands and kissed the nasty bump there. “Better?”

  He smiled. “Much.” He curved her against him, his skin blazing, his kisses seductive. “I never stopped dreaming of this, Katie love.”

  “I refused to dream. It was easier.”

  “Until tonight.”

  Tonight. Cade’s attack . . . Father’s murder . . . Anguish threatened to smash through the fragile shell she’d placed around her heart, but she fought back as she skimmed her hands across the broad plane of his chest, the expanse of wide, muscular shoulders. Drowned out worries of tomorrow by memorizing the way his dark hair curled behind his ears and the laugh lines crinkled the edges of his eyes. She would pick up the broken pieces of her life tomorrow. But tonight was for her.

  He caressed her behind her knees, along her inner thighs, at the junction of her legs, before sliding his fingers into her tight, wet center. She gasped but didn’t pull away. Couldn’t even if she wanted to. It was all too wonderful. Too amazing. A delicious coiling need moved up from her center until her blood burned and every second spun into an infinity of wanting. She moaned, the friction setting off fireworks inside her, desire tightening her belly, excitement trembling her limbs.

  He withdrew his fingers and nudged her legs wider, a single question burning stark in his eyes as he lay poised above her. She answered with a lifting of her hips and a teasing smile as she guided him inside her. Inch by delicious inch he claimed her, filling her, completing her. Light danced across her vision. She dug her nails into his arms, rocked to meet his thrusts. Harder and faster he drove, an irresistible force building, pushing her toward a far horizon. Closer, quicker, until the pleasure crested over her like a wave and she would gladly drown in the sweet wild pleasure jolting through her like lightning.

  His body strung taut as a bowstring, jaw clenched in his chiseled face, James locked his gaze with hers. Flames leapt in his eyes as he shuddered, a groan rising hoarse and furious from his throat as together they found release.

  Chapter 4

  “I didn’t want Father to invite you to Wales. I was afraid of seeing you again.” Katherine curled into James’s shoulder, her head nestled under his chin, her hair tickling his nose.

  “That’s funny,” he replied. “I went as far as throwing his letter in the ash bin to be burned for the very same reason.”

  “You were afraid too?” she asked, surprise in her voice.

  “Terrified.” He stared deep into the fire, watching the ripple and curl of mage energy within the heart of each flame. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened had we not been caught that night? Or if you’d agreed to come with me when I left for London?”

  She tilted her head up so she was facing him, forehead crinkled in confusion. “What do you mean, ‘agreed to come’ with you? You never asked me.”

  “Are you mad? Of course I asked you.” A horrible suspicion snaked its way into his sleep-satisfied brain. He didn’t want to believe it, but the monstrous pieces fit. Shoving himself up onto his elbows, he met her curious gaze with drawn brows. “I wrote you the very night your father caught us kissing. When I didn’t hear back, I wrote you twice more.”

  By now she was sitting up beside him, running hand over worried hand through her hair, lip caught between her teeth, anger swiftly replacing confusion.

  “I finally risked both life and reputation and showed up at your door. I’d pumped so much whisky into myself, I didn’t care what threats your father hurled. I needed to see you. Hear you say the words to my face.”

  “What words?” The color had drained from Katherine’s cheeks. Even her lips were bloodless. Only her eyes burned hot as coals.

  “That it was over between us. That a penniless younger son and a precarious future were never in your plans. That it had all been a lie.”

  She pulled away, dragging the coverlet with her, shoulders hunched as if she were in pain. “I don’t want to hear any more, James.”

  But as if something cracked open inside of him, he couldn’t stop. She needed to hear. Needed to know what her father had done. “He told me that you’d left for Bath to stay with your aunt. That you didn’t want to see me again. Then he handed me my letters back. All unopened.”

  “I didn’t . . . James, I never . . .” Her voice caught on a sob. She paused to draw a calming breath and began again. “How could you believe him? How could you think I would do that? I never knew about the letters. I never received them. Any of them. After a week with no word, I assumed . . . I thought . . . When Father packed me off to my aunt, I went. I didn’t care. I felt so stupid and humiliated, I just wanted to be away from Oxford and pretend none of it had happened.” She drew her knees up, hugging them to her chest, her hair falling around her face, shudders running the length of her body. “Father lied to me, James. Why would he do that? Why would he be so cruel?”

  James rose, pulling on his banyan, to pace the floor. It was that or pound his fists against the wall. Five fucking years. They’d lost five long fucking years. He laughed to keep from hurling curses at the sky, the sound jarring and discordant, but at least it eased him back from white-hot murderous rage.

  “James?” Katherine stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, and perhaps he had.

  “I assume your father kept us apart for the simplest of reasons, Katie love—he didn’t know. He saw me kissing you and assumed the worst—that a confirmed scoundrel was dallying with his daughter. He didn’t know how far it had gone between us or that I’d fallen head over heels. He thought he was protecting you.”

  Her hands stopped worrying at her hair. She tossed it over her shoulder, squaring her shoulders. “If he’d known the truth, he would have forced you to marry me. All this time we might have been together . . . like this.”

  “Or we’d have fallen apart,” he conceded. “You were barely seventeen. I was flat broke. The Duncallan coffers have never been flush enough to support a second son. I barely scraped by after I left Oxford, hustling my keep at gaming tables and race meetings. A few years of that life and you may have cursed the day you laid eyes on me. There’s no way of knowing, is there?”

  She shook her head, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. “Is it too late, James? Has our chance passed us by?” Her eyes met his, shimmering like ancient coins in the light, a rosy glow to her honey skin.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  She sniffed, a crooked smile curving a corner of her mouth. “Yes, but I practically forced myself on you. And you are a man, after all. As Enid would say, no right thinking male would hesitate to take advantage of a situation.”

  “I do have some principles, ragged as they are.”

  “Is there hope, then? Can we start again?”

  “As you said a few days ago, there’s no starting again, Katie love. But we can take up where we left off.”

  She threaded her fingers with his, gaze fearful and expectant but bright as stars all at once. He lost himself in those eyes, and when the icy wind blasted through the chamber, smashing his magic like a fist through a mirror, his gaze held those eyes as if gripping a last tenuous lifeline.

  A second wave of magic burned its way along every nerve ending, leaving him screaming as the pain lanced his skull, the shock wave sizzling down his spine until he curled, retching and gasping for air. Oblivion reaching with tentacles to claim him.

  “James!” Katherine’s shout followed him down into a great tunnel,
her hands holding him together lest he break into a million pieces. Her beautiful golden eyes shimmering against the encroaching dark.

  A voice spoke to him from the spinning blackness. You should have listened, Fey-blood. He has come for the disk.

  * * *

  Dream fast became nightmare.

  Katherine struggled into her dress and boots. Gathered her coat back onto her shoulders. Blinked back tears at the destruction of James’s mage-spun chamber. It was as if the past few hours had not occurred. Their confessions erased as if they’d never been. A tenuous future unraveling like thread from a spool. She swallowed the panic swamping her limbs and curdling her insides. Fear would only kill her faster.

  James lay on his side, one arm stretched toward the dying fire. She checked his pulse as she dragged a coat over him against the cold of the barren stone and icy puddles. He wasn’t dead. She had not lost the two men she loved the most on the same day.

  “I know you are within, mademoiselle. Bring me Lord Duncallan’s disk.”

  Monsieur d’Espe? The chevalier was behind this vicious attack? Were he and Cade working together? Or was there more going on than she and James had surmised? “Come and get it!” she shouted back, every ounce of false bravado strengthening her shaky voice.

  “His Lordship is a stronger mage than I gave him credit for, though still weak in many ways. He has made it impossible for my physical form to cross the warded threshold, though even he could not keep out my magic.”

  “Then unless your magic can take this disk from me, you’ll just have to leave empty-handed, because I’m not bringing you anything.”

  A chuckle scraped knifelike along her bones. “I have your father. If you do not want to see him in pieces, you will do as you are told. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

  Another familiar voice called over the wind. “Do as he says, Katherine. It’s not worth your life.”

  “Father? Is that you?”

  Hope arrowed through her and a great weight seemed to lift from her chest. Father still lived. Cade had lied about his murder. She caught back a swift breath, her relief tempered by fear. Father lived, but for how long unless she turned over the disk to d’Espe?

  “Mademoiselle Lacey? Are you prepared to let your father die over a little piece of metal? I had not thought you so coldhearted.” D’Espe’s question oozed against her skin, making her shiver, and she knew what she must do.

  “Don’t believe him. It’s a trick.” From behind her, James’s voice came threaded with weakness, his face blanched white as bone.

  Her eyes darted from the darkness beyond the flickering light of the dying fire to James and back. “I can’t let my father die. I can’t turn my back on him when he needs me.”

  James fought to stand, his back braced against the wall of the chamber as he pushed his legs into his breeches, every movement painful to watch, his jaw clamped, his teeth drawn back in a grimace of agony. “You can’t give him the disk. You can’t let him open the tomb. Not if he’s right. Not if it’s a source of Imnada power.”

  “My patience wanes, mademoiselle,” d’Espe called, a steel edge to his velvet voice. “I know Duncallan carries the disk on him. Bring it to me. Now.”

  She shook her head in anger and confusion. “I have to do as he says. I have to save my father if I can.”

  James straightened, eyes grim. “And if d’Espe succeeds in harnessing that power for himself?”

  “Give me the disk, James. Please.” She reached for the amulet, but he grabbed her wrists to hold her off. “He has my father.”

  “You don’t know that for certain. He could be bluffing.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You might be willing to take that chance with my father’s life, but I’m not.”

  He released her as if she’d burned him, his face painfully devoid of expression. Before he recovered, she grabbed for the disk at his neck, ducking under his guard to shove him hard against the wall. He stumbled, his skull smashing against the rough stone blocks with a sickening thunk. His knees buckled, and he slid unconscious to the floor.

  Stomach rolling, hands shaking, Katherine yanked the chain free, her fingers closing around the smooth edges of the disk. Anger simmered just below her skin. Did James’s resentment run so deep, he could allow her father to be killed without a second thought? Could this be the real reason he’d come to Wales—not to assist her father, but to punish him? A tightness in her chest and an ache in her throat brought on a fit of quick gasping sobs. Had she completely misjudged James? Had desire blinded her to his bitterness and his selfish cowardice? Had she just made the third biggest mistake of her life?

  Forcing her mind and her gaze from James’s slumped body, Katherine walked out into the snow with head held high and shoulders squared.

  Ten paces away stood two shadowy figures, unmoving but for the flapping of a coat and the flicker of a shuttered lamp in the steady wind.

  “Father?” she called.

  “I’m here, Katherine. It’s all right.”

  “Bring me the disk, mademoiselle.” Malice infused the chevalier’s deep voice, chilling her already frozen body. “Once I have it in my possession, you may have your father. We’ll all gain what we most desire.”

  Do not give it to him.

  A new voice pounded against her skull. Insistent. Angry. A shadow moved at the corners of her eyes. Black on black. She turned her head but saw nothing beyond the trailing mist, the dense trees, and the cliffs rising above.

  The Gylferion are not yours to bestow nor his to accept. They belong to the Imnada.

  There it was again. Pain cramped her neck, burrowed into her shoulders as the voice beat against her brain like a hammer upon an anvil. It became an effort to put one foot in front of the other. From dim shapes, the tall, lanky frame of the chevalier d’Espe and the more rotund form of her father materialized like spirits out of the gloom.

  “Where is Duncallan?” d’Espe barked.

  She clenched her jaw, allowing no hint of her lie to penetrate her expression. “Your magic weakened him. When he tried to stop me, I killed him.”

  If the chevalier’s words grated against her ears, his smile froze her blood. “The little bee has a sting on her. I would not have thought it.”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it.” Her heart lodged in her throat, and she felt her father’s questioning stare drill into her. Hating herself, she extended her arm, the disk lying flat upon her palm. “Is this what you wanted?”

  As d’Espe reached for the silver disk, darkness took form, sliding through the trees, gliding like a phantom over the snow. Yellow eyes burning in the night.

  We want what is ours.

  An enormous shape crashed from the trees, jaws gaping on an unearthly snarl.

  The nightwalkers. The Imnada. They were real. They had come.

  * * *

  James came to with a groan and a pain in his skull that radiated all the way down his spine. The room above him spun like a top, and the slightest movement churned his guts. “Katherine?” His shout ricocheted against his fried brain until he wanted to retch.

  No answer.

  He fumbled for the amulet, but he knew already the disk would be gone. She had stolen it.

  Bracing himself against the wall, he ignored the pain in his head and the cramping of his bowels and staggered out of the ruin after her.

  The snow had stopped falling and the wind had died. Broken clouds drifted across a midnight sky, and an enormous full moon shed light over the blanket of white with the brightness of a million candles. No sign of Katherine or d’Espe, but ten paces away a man in an enormous coat and muffler bent over a body in the snow. Fucking hell! Katherine!

  Mage energy flowed from the man’s hands into the body, a river of twining, flowing color and light. Blue to indigo to scarlet to citrine.

  An agonized scream ripped the night, the body convulsing as the magic penetrated.

  “You’re killing her!” James shouted.

 
The man tore his hands from the body, the magic winking out, leaving the night darker, the stench of charred flesh hovering like smoke in the air.

  James’s bowels turned to water, fear closing like a fist around his heart as his faltering steps propelled him through the deep snow. “Katie love!”

  The man turned, revealing a shock of white hair, moonlight glinting off his spectacles. “Duncallan!” the man called. “You’re alive, boy.”

  James plowed to a stop, his lungs on fire. “What’s happened? Is Katherine all right?”

  “Katherine’s with d’Espe. He took her with him to the obelisk as insurance.”

  “Then who—”

  The moon chose this moment to slide free of a wispy cloud, picking out the waxen features and bloodied body of Cade.

  The professor shoved his spectacles up his nose. “I dare not attempt more. Not with such a violent reaction to my healing spells.”

  “What are you doing? He tried to kill us to get his hands on the disk.”

  “The four disks that make up the Gylferion are sacred relics to his people.”

  “Sacred enough to kill for?”

  “Oh, yes. Sacred enough to die for as well,” the professor answered sadly, his hands bloody to the wrists as he pressed a torn strip of cloth hard against Cade’s chest. “They are referred to in some of the earliest chronicles, but even the most scholarly of researchers doubted their existence. It would be like stumbling upon the sword of Arthur or the legendary books of Deresphides. Who would not wish to capture such a priceless treasure?”

  “But we left him tied hand and foot back at the obelisk. How did he get here?”

  “The nightwalkers know every secret way and hidden trail within these mountains. That’s how they’ve survived undetected for centuries.”

  “Shit,” James muttered. “It’s true? The Imnada really exist?”

  “Your proof lies dying before you. The chevalier used a silver dagger on him. The slash to the heart was bad enough, but silver is lethal to the shapechangers.”