Fallen in Love (7 page)

He leaned in very slowly and cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. His eyes were the color of the
starry sky above them. When he guided her chin closer to his, tilting her face ever so slightly, Shelby closed her eyes.

Their lips connected in the sweetest kiss.

Simple, a few soft pecks. Nothing too complicated; they were just starting out, after all. When Shelby opened her eyes and saw the look in his—the smile she knew as well as her own—she knew she’d been given the best Valentine’s Day gift there was. She wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

R
oland rode hard for the city’s northern gates. Though his route would take him past the scene of the worst moment of his life, he did not detour. He was on a mission.

His horse, a stranger to him until a few hours ago—when he’d lifted her from the lord’s stables—adapted intuitively to his needs. She was a snow-white Arabian who looked fine in her black leather knight’s tack. Before Roland had found her, he’d had his eye on a dappled plowman’s horse with ample flanks—a working
horse could travel longer than a nobleman’s horse, and on less feed—but Roland didn’t feel right stealing from the peasant class.

This one—he was calling her Blackie after the single dark splash on her nose—had whinnied and reared when he first mounted her, but after a few discreet turns around the muddy path near the sheepfolds, they were friends. He had always had a knack with animals, especially horses. Animals could hear the music in his voice more clearly than humans. Roland could whisper a few words to a startled filly and calm her like sunshine after a tornado.

By the time Roland passed through the mayhem of the marketplace, horse and rider were a seamless partnership, which was more than he could say for his armor. The set he’d nicked from the lord’s son’s armaments chamber in the castle did not fit him. It was long in the leg and narrow in the chest and it stank of sour perspiration. None of these qualities agreed with Roland, whose body was accustomed to an
hauter
couture.

As he clipped past the gates, careful to skirt the lord’s line of sight, Roland had simply ignored the citizens’ alarmed looks and their conjecturing murmurs about what battle he was riding into. This formal armor—with its damned mail vest, girded with a twenty-pound embellished belt, and the stifling steel helmet that wouldn’t sit straight because of his dreadlocks—was worn solely
for fighting; it was too conspicuous and cumbersome for casual travel. He knew that. He felt it absolutely with every shuddering stride of his horse.

But this suit was the only thing Roland could find that would obscure his identity to the extent that he required. He hadn’t come all this way to be bothered with mortals attempting to seize and imprison a demon they mistook for a Moor.

He needed a disguise that would not hinder his attainment of one goal: keeping Daniel’s medieval past self out of trouble.

Not Lucinda. Daniel.

Lucinda Price, Roland believed, knew what she was doing. And even when she had no idea what she was doing, she always did the right thing. It was impressive. The angels who followed Luce into the Announcers—Gabbe, Cam, even Arriane—did not give Luce enough credit. But Roland had first noticed a change in her at Sword & Cross—a strange heedless certainty that she’d never possessed in any of her earlier lives, as if she had finally glimpsed the depths of her old soul. Luce might not have known what she was doing when she stepped through on her own, but Roland knew she would figure everything out. This was the endgame, and she needed to play her part.

That was why it was Daniel who worried Roland.

It would be just like Daniel to blunder into Luce and
ruin everything. Someone needed to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid, which was why Roland had followed him through the Announcers in Luce’s backyard.

But finding Daniel had been harder than he expected. Roland had been too late in Helston, just missed him at the Bastille, and likely wouldn’t catch him here, either. If he were being smart, Roland would just skip out and try to intercept Daniel in one of their earlier lives.

If he were being smart.

But then he’d spotted the two unchaperoned Anachronisms baldly scheming at the well—in broad daylight, in the center of the city, in their bad clothes and worse accents.

Did they know nothing?

Roland liked the Nephilim well enough. Shelby was a solid, decent kind of person, and not bad to look at. And Miles—he had a reputation for getting too close to Luce at Shoreline, but … wouldn’t any guy in Miles’s shoes have tried? Give the kid a break, was Roland’s gloss. Miles was all golden heart and very little badass.

Roland understood that the Nephilim kids were here out of pure goodwill. They had a soft spot for their friend Luce. And it was clear that Shelby and Miles had high hopes for romance at the Valentine’s Day Faire—for Luce and Daniel, and maybe even for themselves.

They probably don’t know that yet
, Roland thought, and grinned.

Mortals could rarely recognize their true feelings before those true feelings hit them in the face.

It happened this way for many couples who spent time basking in the glow of Daniel and Lucinda. Roland had witnessed it before. Daniel and Lucinda were emblems of romance, ideals that every mortal and some immortals needed to believe in, whether or not they themselves were capable of making a connection so true. Daniel and Lucinda were an idea that informed the way the rest of the world fell in love.

It was a powerful spell under which to find oneself.

Of course, Roland had to razz the Nephilim for stepping through into one of Lucinda’s medieval lives. They should be where they belonged, in their own time, where their actions wouldn’t cause any historic catastrophes.

So he’d chewed them out a little. It would keep them in line until he returned to escort them safely home. Traveling with them was the only way he could ensure that they wouldn’t wind up somewhere even farther away from Shoreline.

But first? He could indulge them. Track down Daniel and make sure he got his sullen self to the Valentine’s Faire. Giving Daniel and Luce a moment of happiness was no sweat off Roland’s back, and besides, it gave him something to do.

And in this particular era, Roland needed something to do.

To keep his mind off other things.

In the cold February gloom, Roland rode past a glebe, where serf-tended crops padded the pockets of the local clergymen. He rode past a Gothic church, with its pointed arches and thorny spires.
God’s house
. He couldn’t stop the thought from entering his mind. It had been a long time since he’d been in one of those. He crossed a high bridge over the swollen, muddy river, and turned his horse toward the knights’ stronghold he knew was about a half day’s ride to the north.

It was not a pleasant journey: rough road and ugly weather. Blackie kicked up high splashes of mud, painting her flanks a dingy gray-brown. And the cold caused the hinges of Roland’s armor to stiffen into near-immobility.

Still, in most ways, there was something sweet in returning to this past. A romantic like Daniel might say chivalry had never really died, but then, Daniel had a complicated relationship with both love and death. Roland had lived among this early brand of chivalry for years. It was nearly over now in the Middle Ages, and it was certainly dead in the present tense Roland had just traveled from. There was no question in his mind.

But once upon a time …

For the briefest moment he remembered a glimmer of golden hair streaming in the wind.

He flipped up the visor of his helmet and gasped for
air. He would not think of her. That was not why he was here.

He nudged Blackie forward and shook his head, trying to clear his mind.

Roland was less than a mile from the band of knights he was seeking. He scanned the horizon: the sweeping dip of vales to the east, a rainstorm behind him and to the west. Ahead, the road wound up and around through twists of hills that formed a protective barrier for the city. Also ahead stood a castle that he intended to avoid. He would ride a wide berth around it. And on the other side of that castle was the road—if it was still in passable condition—that would lead him straight to the Daniel of this era. And to his own medieval self.

In his long-ago memory of this era, he remembered how the strangely clad knight had appeared before them, bearing orders from the king.

The knight had slowed his horse at the threshold of their tents and had passed around a decree commanding the men to abandon their post for two nights to celebrate the new St. Valentine’s holy day, as was God’s will. Only a few of them could read, so most of the men took the good news on faith. Roland still remembered the whoops and hollers that came from his fellow knights.

The knight had not spoken a word—had simply delivered the decree and galloped away … on his coal-black horse.

Strange. Roland looked down at Blackie, stroked her silver-white mane.

If this was Roland’s destiny—to be the angel behind the visor who gave Daniel a Valentine’s Day gift, directing him back to the arms of the girl he loved—then some event would have to transpire that would allow him to swap his white horse for a black one. And someone would have to place a king’s decree in his hand.

Stranger things happened, he knew, nearly every day.

He put his heels to Blackie’s flanks and rode on, sweating one moment, shivering the next.

Eventually, Roland rode right up to the castle. It guarded the northernmost fief in the county, the last outpost on the way to the knights’ camp. He sat astride his mount for a moment, taking in the familiar stonework.

The castle towered before him like a colossus. There were chalk-white chimneys over each chamber, narrow slits to afford a view from each façade. Corbels and cornices decorated the dark-gray blocks of stone, whose magnitude made Roland feel small. The castle’s size boggled his mind. It always had, even for that brief stretch of time when he had passed through its gates nearly every day—and climbed its grooved stones to reach a single balcony every night.

His knees shook against his horse’s flanks. His heart felt as if it had swelled to ten times its natural size. It beat as if every palpitation might be its last. The backs of his shoulders burned, and he wanted to fly far away, but his wings were encased in the full metal jacket on his back and he would not take it off.

Besides, no matter how far Roland flew, he could not escape the terror spreading through his soul.

Inside this castle lived a girl named Rosaline. She was the only being in the universe Roland had ever truly loved.