Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) (7 page)

Placing a finger over Bael’s mouth, the woman managed to look both condescending and cold with a tinge of regret for show. “Maybe that’s for the best. You can devote yourself to the temple, and visit me from time to time should you like to lie together. But when I marry, it will be to someone worthy of a daughter of Thorsen. I have heard today that Prince Bjorn of the Vale is looking for a wife, and may ask me to be his. Which would make me—”

Morgana cried out as her hands were seized in an iron grip, the water showering everywhere with the force of the movement. Bael’s lip curled into a snarl as he finished the cruel, selfish woman’s words. “A
Princess
.”

Sensing somehow that a struggle would only incite him further, Morgana curled her hands into fists. “I’m not like her,” she declared.

“You’re more like her than you think,” he growled. “You bound me to you against my will. You manipulate me to do what you want.”

She jerked ineffectually, trying to free herself from his unyielding grip. “I may be a Princess, but I don’t care about your parentage.”

It was clear from the look on his face that he didn’t believe her. “Your brother would. Your father would have. And you would bend to their will once they found you a lordly husband with overflowing coffers and pretty manners.”

“You obviously don’t know me very well.” Morgana rolled her eyes. “I find pretty manners boring.”

His eyes flared in the firelight. “You would rather me treat you like the barbarian I am? Because let me warn you,
Princess
, I doubt you could handle the demands I’d make of you.”

Impulsively, Morgana lifted to her toes, bringing her lips as close to his as she could, letting the tips of her breasts, bared by the torn dress, tease the smooth flesh of his chest. “Try me,” she challenged in a throaty whisper as her heart rate spiked in tandem with his.

She didn’t miss his intake of breath, nor could she ignore the violent response of his body to the nearness of hers.

“You’re toying with a dangerous beast,” he warned.

“I’ve already tamed the beast,” she shot back. “Now I just need to persuade the man.”

“
Never
,” Bael vowed before his lips took hers with quelling force.  

Bael’s kiss quickly deepened from possessive to frantic. Though her body tensed in shock, her mouth melted against his.

Her words had released something more frightening than a beast inside him. More like a devil. He twisted his mouth over hers, claiming entrance with his tongue from every angle he could possibly devise. Before crushing her to him, he yanked her dress from her shoulders and followed it down the curves of her lush body until it fell from her hips.

Though her fingers trembled as they clung to the nape of his neck, her mouth yielded to his demands, meeting his possession with sweetness and his dominance with a moan of submission. The kiss didn’t sate his growing desire for a taste of her, as he’d hoped, but ignited a fury of desperate lust.  

She’d submit to more than his tongue before he was through with her.

“Yes,” she hissed against the cavern of his open mouth, as though she’d heard his dark thoughts.

That one word broke any chain that held him in check. Bael ripped his mouth away from her long enough to have her on her back, his eyes raking over her passion-flushed skin. “Remember you wanted this,” he felt compelled to warn her again.

Or was it a threat?

“I do want this,” she reached for him. “I want
you
.”

Couldn’t be. She wanted the gentle, worshiping Berserker who’d made love to her in the lake. She didn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend that she now faced a killer who would fuck her into the dirt.

Bael almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

With a growl, he settled his bulk atop her and kissed her again, pouring fifty years of deprivation into her open mouth. He knew his lips were rough, demanding, and agitated. That his beard abraded her tender skin. But she made soft little mewling sounds of pleasure into his mouth that nearly drove him over the edge before he even took off his trews.

He’d never wanted anything like he craved the pale body glowing beneath him in the firelight. He couldn’t remember a time he’d been so hard. So out of his mind with need. So fucking insatiable with lust.

Reaching between them, without parting their fused lips, he undid his belt and freed himself. Mounting her—heart thundering with the strength of his desire—he positioned the blunt head of his cock against her vulnerable opening.

Her sex was a moist cleft hidden by soft cinnamon curls, and she drew her knee up his waist to grant him easier entrance.

“Take me,” she whispered. “I am yours.”

Mine.
His beast rejoiced.

“Nie,” he growled between clenched teeth. “Take
me
.” He surged forward until his entire length was buried in the succulent flesh of her body. “Take
all
of me.”

Though her body reflexively clamped down on his intrusion, a rush of moisture eased his way as her hands threaded through his hair at the temples, tightening the tattooed skin there.

“I will,” she gasped, lifting her hips to meet his. “I do.”

He couldn’t stop to consider the full extent of the meaning in his words to her. Take me. Take my cock. Take my seed. Take my heart, my soul, my needs, my emptiness.

Take all of me
.

It was too much for any one woman to hold.

But she did.
She held him so sweetly in the cradle of her thighs he thought he might expire from the bliss of it.

And wasn’t that what he wanted?

“Nie,” he said again.

Bael forced his mind to be dark and quiet, to focus on the tight sheath of her flesh already pulling little tremors of pleasure from the base of his spine.

With a savage groan he slid his hand beneath her ass and set a punishing rhythm, pulling back to watch her breasts bounce with each brutal stroke.

His mate’s lips were parted, teeth bared like a lioness in a face glowing with an answering lust that shocked him.

“
Yes
,” she countered with a hiss, and thrust her hips up to meet his with such force that she nearly lifted his heavy body.

The contact was like the bolt of lightning that touched down in the distance. Sensations exploded within him that he had no name for and had never before encountered in his long life. Instead of holding her down and fucking her into oblivion as he’d planned to do, Bael burrowed his arms beneath her and pulled her to him, falling back onto his knees and holding her against him as he plowed her again and again.

She wrapped her arms around his back anchoring herself to him as his every powerful thrust jolted her upward. Their hips connected with starting force, and she made a sound of such wicked encouragement each time that drove him out of his mind.

She screamed her pleasure with astonishing quickness, her body clenched in an endless shudder of ecstatic release. The sublime contractions of her gripping sex pulled a violent answer from his own. He crested on a spiraling cataclysm of sensation, undulating outward like the ripples of a pool until his entire body was locked by crippling pleasure.

He bit down on the delicate sinew where her shoulder met her neck, marking her. Claiming her. Sending her over the edge once more with a feminine cry of surprise and delight as she pulled at his hair in pulsating fistfuls.

Thunder rumbled in answer to their cries, and the electric build of the storm that accumulated over the sea held the whisper of danger on the wind. Though as Bael watched the siren he’d mated come apart in his arms, he could think of nothing as dangerous as her.

***

Bael woke to the sound of a scream. Not a scream of fear, nor one of surprise. This scream carried with it a particular note of gleeful, victorious evil. Bolting upright, he reached for his mate, and barely held her from where she tried to jump out of his arms toward the water.

“Let me go,” she hissed. “The Wyrd Sisters. They found us!”

A specter rose from the water in the shape of a voluptuous woman, she threw out her hand, flinging lethally sharp shards of ice at his mate.

Morgana leapt away, slicing through the water with her own blades of ice conjured with a flick of her wrist. But it only had a momentary effect, each projectile shattering against the other’s with supernatural precision. The specter’s shards seemed to be garnering help and velocity from a gathering tornado reaching down to the Loch from dark and angry clouds.

The women spoke in a Gaelic tongue he didn’t understand. Incantations, threats, spells, or vows of retribution. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was getting Morgana out of danger.

Bael grabbed for his axe, which was never out of reach, and hissed as his hand came away singed.

In the pit of fire he’d built, standing on the bones of their supper, another specter dominated the flames. A slight girl. Her eyes glowed with an even brighter light than the flames comprising her body. She held his axe in her fiery grip, heating the metal to a molten orange. “Touch it,” she taunted in the voice of a child. “Take it from me, I dare you.”

Snarling, Bael gritted his teeth in preparation for his torment, then he roared as he plucked his weapon from the ground and leapt for Morgana.

Though he gripped the leather-wrapped part of his axe, the heat of the metal bled through, blistering his hands. He didn’t care. He’d survived worse. All he felt was his blood pounding to reach his mate. His entire being focused on her.

Just as a sickle of ice flew toward her heart, Bael swung his axe with all the speed he could muster and scattering shards to the gathering wind. But he didn’t stop there. Thrusting Morgana behind him, he flailed at the specter of water with such whirring speed, he turned her to steam with his glowing blade.

The wind screamed that bone-chilling evil sound and the brewing storm unleashed its rage upon them.

Scooping Morgana into his arms, Bael ignored the intense burning in his palms and the stinging lash of the deluge as he bolted into the trees. Never in his life has he run from a battle, but these spectral witches had no blood with which to spill. No bones to break. No hearts to stop.

Just elements.

And blood magick. The darkest and most potent kind.

We’re coming for you.
A crone’s whisper drifted through the scream of the wind, kissing his spine with ice and dread, though he knew the threat was directed less at him and more at the precious woman he carried in his arms.
We’re coming for the Grimoire.

Prepare for the end.

The last word fractured against dying branches and echoed about the forest with eerie force as though coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Babd,” Morgana’s frightened exclamation vibrated against his skin. “She’s air. There’s no escaping her!”

“She won’t get to you,” Bael vowed, and doubled his speed, careful to keep his mate’s limbs from finding an errant branch as he plowed through the forest, desperately forming a plan of action.

A tree root nearly tripped him, and Bael could have sworn he’d seen it lift. Taking more care with his footing, he noticed the ground beneath his boots growing softer as the wind began to die away. More roots and tree limbs conspired to steal his footing, though the ground seemed to want to hold him into one place.

What fresh sorcery was this?

In three more steps Bael struggled against roots, vines and branches. For each one he broke, two took their place, latching to his limbs and locking them down. His axe was stolen from his back, his neck lashed with willow cords.

He fought them, clenching his little mate tighter, his enraged roars drowning her protestations.

A blade nicked the nape of his neck from behind, all flora tightening enough to choke his very bones.

The dark voice that pierced the forest resembled nothing of the three Wyrd sisters from which they fled, but was masculine and heavily accented even though every word was annunciated with lethal clarity.

“Take. Yer filthy.
Viking
hands.
Off
my sister.”

“Where is he?” Morgana demanded, blocking the Pictish King, Malcolm de Moray’s intent scrutiny of the blaze illuminating Moray Castle’s great hall.

Her brother’s cold green eyes slid to her, and a flicker of what might have been affection touched them. “If ye’re referring to yer Berserker, he’s in the dungeon.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” she cautioned. “Berserkers cannot be bound by chains.”

“I reinforced the chains with magic, until I can figure out how best to kill him.”

Morgana gasped, fighting the childish urge to yank on his wildly auburn hair, the exact same shade as hers. “You’ll do no such thing!” She wagged a finger at him. “I forbid it.”

“Ye forbid yer king?” A russet eyebrow crawled up his broad, noble forehead toward a crown of gold shaped with short spikes fashioned to look like young Elk antlers.

“You’re not my king, you’re my brother,” she snapped.

That produced a short sound of amusement from her otherwise stoic brother’s throat. “He seemed to be under the impression that I was duty bound to end his life,” Malcolm observed, leaning forward in his throne until his royal robe fell from his wide shoulders. “Really, sister, warn a fellow before pledging my hand at murder next time. And be happy I allowed ye to waste yer magic healing his burned hands before we arrived home.”

“He used those hands to save my life.” Morgana studied her brother, worrying the skirts of her clean frock, wondering at the change in him. He’d been a handsome, sparkly-eyed youth with a quick temper and an even quicker wit. His hair had been wild and wind-blown like hers instead of slicked back into this tight queue. She’d liked the way his smile smoothed the calculating sharpness of his features and made him seem so young.

That was before Macbeth. Before they’d been taken prisoner and banished from their father’s kingdom. Before the battle Malcolm had waged to win his throne back.

Before Kenna disappeared.

He didn’t look so young anymore. He looked like a dominant man who carried more weight than even a Berserker could hold. Malcolm de Moray wielded unimaginable power, and yet something about him was broken.

Morgana was starting to think that she’d gotten the better bargain in her exile with the English King. Something had happened to Malcolm. Macbeth and his insane bitch of a wife had irrevocably harmed him, somehow.

She’d find out just as soon as they addressed the trouble at hand. And do what she could to heal the bleak rifts she could feel emanating from his soul.

“Any word from Kenna?” She walked away from the warmth of the fire, missing her cousin and closest friend with a physical ache.

“Nay,” Malcolm sighed. “I stare into those bloody flames for hours every day searching for a message. But I know she’s alive.”

“The Wyrd Sister’s storm is gathering closer,” Morgana observed from the casement, watching lightning branch from the angry sky to the south. “What should we do?”

“Let them come,” he rumbled. Standing, he gathered his black robe about him, his crown gleaming in the flames, and held out a hand to Morgana. “We’ll fight them together.”

She went to her brother, his emotions as cold as the grey stones of Castle Moray. Wasn’t he frightened? Wasn’t he angry? “But, Colm, we are only two, we haven’t a third. If we can’t cast a circle, how can we protect the Grimoire?”

“I doona think we can,” he said after a long pause. “But it is our duty to try.”

They both walked to the dais in the middle of the throne room. Upon the pillar of stone lay a thick volume bound in an almost blonde leather. Blue tattooed runes adorned the corners and stretched toward the center of the title. Wards of protection surrounding a word spelled in a language not meant to be spoken.

As Morgana neared it, she felt the little thrill of danger that always jolted through her when in the presence of the Grimoire. Though, it didn’t look as ancient as she remembered, it also didn’t pulse with the same mysterious call she’d felt as a girl when sitting at her father’s feet in this very throne room.

She was grown now, a Druid in her own right, and after all they’d been through, nothing ever held the mystery or magic it had seemed to all those years ago.

Wooden shutters began to rattle; the storm had truly finished brewing and now became the harbinger of evil intent. It battered against the heavy wooden door of the throne room, chilling the air and carrying with it whispers, threats, and maniacal laughter.

“Perhaps we could use Bael.” She thought of her lover, her mate, locked in the dungeon by magical chains. “He could be our third. He has a little Berserker magic.” Also, she wanted him here with her. Though she knew there was not much he could do against magic, his presence, his strength, made her feel safer. Made her feel more powerful.

Malcolm shook his head. “He has no Druid blood. It wouldna work.”

“But couldn’t we try?” she argued. “He could at least use his axe to protect us.”

Her brother studied her with shrewd eyes for a moment. “A Berserker, Morgana?
This
is who ye choose after all the suitors Father paraded in front of ye?”

Morgana shrugged. “I didn’t
choose
him, exactly. I saved him and he sort of ran off with me.”

“Ye care for him.”

“Inexorably.”

Somewhere in the castle a window broke. Lightning lashed about the stones in unnatural strikes. 

“But—a
Berserker
,” he repeated the word like it tasted foul. “They’re so proprietary. They tend to be a violent, jealous, barbaric lot with no morals and even fewer scruples. Ye’re not only a Princess, Morgana, ye are a Druid. One of the Sacred Triad.”

“Really, Malcolm, you want to have this conversation
now
?” She gestured to the forces rattling the door, to the smoke beginning to curl beneath it. “Don’t you think we have more pressing problems to focus on?” Malcolm and Morgana clasped hands over the book.

“I’m just saying,” he continued as though having an argument over an evening ale. “Ye deserve better than a Viking—”

“There
is
no better, Malcolm,” she hissed. “Or don’t you remember, I can feel what he’s feeling. That man you call a
barbarian
has been alive and
alone
longer than you four fold. His emotions run deep as the ocean, and he’s never had anyone upon which to shower them. Why do you think he’s given up? Because a man who feels that much, can’t survive so many rejections. Cannot thrive in solitude. He wasn’t made for that.”

“But, Morgana —”

She silenced her brother with a look. “I know Bael can be a bit vicious and maybe even something of a savage, but he’s
my
savage, Malcolm de Moray, and I accept him as he is, as
mine
, so you must as well. I knew the moment we kissed that he was somehow meant for me, so don’t try to talk me out of it. You know it won’t work.”

“But—”

“Now we have a protection spell to work, and not enough time to work it in. Chant with me, brother.” Morgana was amazed that Malcolm didn’t seem more worried. That there wasn’t sage burning in the corners of the throne room or Ash leaves in the windows. Where were the wards drawn with crushed burdock, black cohosh, frankincense, and heather? “If we survive this, I’m going to have a discussion with you regarding your lapse in protection.”

He merely lifted another eyebrow at her, and Morgana decided she was beginning to hate that eyebrow.

Morgana began the protection chant. “
I am protected by your might, O infinite Goddess of the night
.” Malcolm joined her the second time, their voices truly melding by the third.

The flames in the fireplace flared to an inferno. The stone of the altar upon which the book stood vibrated and those vibrations reverberated through the stones at their feet. The storm raged, hurled, and concentrated on the door until the hinges burst and the heavy oak crashed to the stones.

The flames that had weakened it were extinguished by the tumultuous downpour as lightening illuminated three figures in the arched doorway.

The Wyrd Sisters.

They manifest as maiden, mother, and crone, a blasphemy of the sacred Goddess from whom they drew their power and then twisted it into something dark and self-serving.

They, too, were chanting as they slinked in oily progression toward Malcolm and Morgana. Their language was older, their spells more ancient, yet so far, their powers clashed against the Moray Druids like the waves against a cliff.

“Give us what is ours,” Badb, the crone, lifted a gnarly finger from beneath black robes, indicating the Grimoire. At her gesture, the book slammed open, its pages flipping in the wind with startling speed before landing onto the most dangerous ritual in history.

The Curse of Four
:
The seven seals
.

The ritual that would bring about the Apocalypse.

“Nay,” Morgana yelled. “It was
never
yours. It will never
be
yours.”

The girl stepped forward, more than a child, not yet a woman.
Nemain
. Her angelic face and golden hair made all the more horrifying by the sacrosanct lust in her eyes as she stared at the book. “The Grimoire belonged to
us
centuries before it came into the hands of you Highland Picts,” she informed them condescendingly.

Macha advanced, her body sheathed in a form-fitting gown made of all curves and womanly seduction. “We are the Moray’s of Eyre, and it is our right to enact the Curse of Four and awaken the Horsemen.”

“Why?” Morgana demanded. “Why would you do such a thing? Why end the earth upon which you live?”

“With destruction comes rebirth.” The crone said cryptically, and a chill of terror kissed Morgana’s spine at the vacant darkness in her silvery eyes. “With rebirth comes a realignment of power.”

“It is
not
yer right,” Malcolm insisted, never breaking contact with Morgana. “It is not the time. The earth is not done with her cycle. This I know, she has told me.”

“It is not only our right, it is our destiny!” Nemain drew fire from the inferno in the fireplace and snaked it toward Malcolm, igniting his robes.

Morgana broke the contact of their hands to reach out to the rain, drawing the deluge toward them and drenching her brother until only steam rose from his scorched and tattered robes.

“Fool!” Badb pushed the girl, Nemain, behind her. “The prophecy says there has to be four Druids. Four Elements. We need
him
.”

Macha, the mother, stepped forward and thrust her hand toward Morgana. A dread stole through Morgana’s veins, as did the woman’s dark water magic. Her blood was no longer hers. It belonged to the evil woman with mirroring powers. Macha froze her in place, slowed the flow of her life until she could barely stand. Barely breathe.

Malcolm drew a heavy stone from the ground and hurled it, but the crone knocked it away in a powerful gust of wind. “Try that again,
King
Malcolm, and we’ll stop your dear sister’s heart forever.” Badb approached Malcom, her rheumy eyes glowing with malevolence. “You see, she is expendable. We have our own Water Druid.” She motioned to Macha. “And we have fire and air. What we’re missing… is Earth.”

“Ye know I willna perform the ritual.” Malcom’s voice was cold as the stones beneath them.

“Not even for her?” Badb drew a long, jagged fingernail across Morgana’s throat.

Malcolm’s gaze locked with hers, and Morgana put all her words into her eyes.
Don’t you dare,
they screamed at him.
Just let them kill me.

“You
know
how persuasive we can be.” The old woman cackled as Malcolm’s face drained of color, but he stood his ground.

“Never,” he vowed, in a voice so dark, Morgana didn’t even recognize it.

“That remains to be seen.” The crone turned from him. “But for now we need the book.”

“And men in hell need water.”

“If you do not give…” Macha put her other elegant hand out, and Morgana fell to her knees. “We will take.”

For the first time in her life, Morgana wished she could feel her heart pound with terror. Wished that she could sense the blood surge through her and heat her skin in a flush of emotion and pain. For now, facing the end, she could feel none of those things. It was as though her life slowed to a trickle. She could feel her heart struggling to find its fuel, her lungs trying to force oxygen into the almost non-existent flow. Muscle and tissue screamed for want of it. She was shriveling up from the inside. She knew she should be worried about the Grimoire. Knew she should be mourning for an earth that might never be if they failed. But all she could think about was how she’d never get to tell Bael the one thing he needed to hear before the end.

That he was worthy. That he was accepted. That he could be loved, if he’d allow it.

And now it was too late.