Nightshade (2 page)

A shiver skated through her.

By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairs Bronwyn’s teeth were chattering with reaction and cold. He pulled her more tightly against his body, sharing his warmth.

He had little to share. His body was nigh as chilled as her own, but the gesture comforted her, made her feel more certain of his protection.

Unerringly, he entered the castle and headed directly toward her chambers, as if he was as familiar with the castle as she was.

Her bed chamber was deserted. William had seen to that, sending her women away to ‘attend his beloved wife’ himself.

She clung to him as he lowered her to her bed, unwilling to let go of the comforting safety of his arms. He grasped her hands, peeling them gently but firmly from him. She closed her cold fingers around his hands when he would have released her, peering up at him through the swollen slits of her eyes.

A spark of fear went through her as she caught her first real glimpse of him, and even so the shadowy room concealed as much as it revealed. There was beauty in his face, but only the reflection of it from within for his kindness. The face above her was as harsh and craggy as hewn stone. She dismissed the fear. He’d saved her from William at great cost to himself from what he had said. “Do not leave me,” she begged shakily.

He stared down at the hands that gripped his so frantically.

Something flickered in her pale blue eyes. A frown flitted across his face, making it even more harsh. Almost as if he couldn’t help himself, he twisted his hands in hers and ran one thumb lightly over her own where it rested against his broad palm.

He lifted his gaze after a moment, scanning her bruised and battered face, his expression growing harder.

Embarrassed, realizing the same sources of light--the fire in the hearth and the lit candles--that threw him in shadow, illuminated her damaged face, she snatched her hands away and covered the ugly bruises. “I will not tell them,” she whispered. “I would not repay your kindness to me with treachery.”

His expression was stony as he straightened away from her, lifting his head to scan the room around them. Curious, she glanced around, as well.

It was a well appointed room, but she had grown accustomed to the vulgar display of wealth, the rich wall hangings, the dark, heavily carved wood from which the huge columned bed had been wrought, the chest that rested at the foot of the bed, the enormous armoire that took up much of one wall, the benches, table, and high backed chairs. Luscious, thick woven cloths covered the cold stones of the floor. A fireplace, surrounded by slabs of carved stone took up almost the whole of another wall.

She had thought it a place of beauty before she had realized it was her prison.

“Retribution,” he murmured, rolling the word around in his mouth as if trying to discern the flavor of it. His gaze focused on her again. “Nothing can be taken from me that was not already taken,” he growled, his voice cold now.

Bronwyn shivered at the cold anger behind his words. “But … you said you were damned.”

“Long ago … and I have tossed my only hope of redemption from these castle walls to save a pitiful scrap of humanity that means nothing to me,” he ground out.

She could see that he regretted it now, could see confusion in his eyes and his expression as he wrestled with the impulse that had cost him so dearly.

Moistening her fever dried lips, Bronwyn searched for something to say as he turned abruptly and strode toward the door. “Who are you?”

He stopped abruptly at the door and turned to stare at her. “Once....” He broke off. “Nightshade.”

Chapter Two

Anger roiled inside Nightshade as he vaulted over the crenellation wall and settled on the ledge where he had stood guard over the household of his enemy for so long that he could scarcely remember ‘before’. It mounted, joined by the ever present bitterness as he stared down at the broken body of William of Raventhorne.

“Fool!” he muttered, though he was not entirely certain whether he referred to the carcass below him or himself.

Both, he decided, wondering where the insane impulse had come from that had driven him to heap stupidity upon idiocy. He had been in such a rage, though, that that craven coward had tried to throw the woman from the tower that he had not thought, had not reasoned. He had yielded to the desire to shatter the bastard’s body on the stones below as William had intended to do to her.

Unbidden, an image of the female rose in his mind.

Bronwyn, brown one. She should have been named rose. Her skin was as soft and delicate as that flower’s petals and smelled as sweet.

Desire rose in him, nearly uncontrollable because it had been so long since he had felt that particular infirmity of mortals. Confusion followed, partly because his brain ceased to function with any efficiency when the blood raced from his head to engorge his cock, and partly because he could not understand what had provoked it.

He had lost his humanity when he had been cursed, lost all ability to feel anything except fury over his helplessness, bitterness over his losses, and cold hatred for the man who had deprived him of everything he had ever held dear.

He thought he had.

And yet, he had watched the woman with an unnamable hunger since she had come to Raventhorne, both fascinated and disturbed by the dainty, fragile looking creature with the huge, sad brown eyes.

A wave of nausea went through him, killing the desire. Please, she had begged, clinging desperately to his wrist, struggling with surprising strength in one so frail to save herself. Please.

He swallowed against the uncomfortable knot in his throat. He had tried to close his mind to her touch, her pleas. It was not his affair, not his problem. He had felt as if a great hand had ripped into his chest, though, when he felt her lose her grip. He had acted then, not thought, not beyond his unwillingness to watch her fall to her death, not beyond his revulsion of the vision that rose in his mind of her broken and bloody upon the hard earth below.

Bronwyn.

He lifted his hands to either side of his head and pressed hard, as if he could squeeze her from his mind, her name, the feel and smell of her.

Short of crushing his own skull and pulverisizing his brain, however, there seemed no way of delivering his mind or body from torment.

She had bewitched him, ensorcelled him as surely as the sorcerer who had taken his life from him and made him a monster. She had used her woman’s body, her pretty face, the pleasing tones of her voice … and her delicate scent and fragileness to reach inside him and find the ashes of his humanity to use against him.

Not willfully, of course. He was a monster … stone … cold … unfeeling.

She had looked at him, though, that first day. She had lifted her head and stared straight at him, the first time any woman had looked directly at him since the sorcerer, Gaelzeroth, had given him ‘immortality’.

And she had shuddered to find his eyes upon her, his monstrous face frozen in the grimace of torment and pain that overtook him each dawn as the sorcerer’s curse turned him once more from a living, breathing monster of flesh and blood and bone to stone.

Bitterness rose like bile in his throat as his memories surfaced to torment him, memories he had thought that he had crushed to dust long ago.

Gaelzeroth had chosen his place and method of imprisonment with diabolical care, positioned him so that he had to watch the slaughter of his wife, his sons, and daughter.

Uttering a howl of anguish and fury, he launched himself from his perch, spread his wings and fled his birthplace, his prison, his memories … and most of all, her.

* * * *

“She’s worsened. I can not fathom it. I was certain the fever had broken.”

“Has she been told about Lord Smythson?”

“Nay! And what would be the point? She’s likely to join him in the family crypt at this rate.”

Voices faded in and out of Bronwyn’s consciousness, as if those who spoke in the room around her were moving toward her and then away again. She hurt everywhere it seemed. Sometimes she found herself freezing, sometimes burning.

And each time she managed to lift her eyelids, the room had changed.

One moment the room was filled with sunlight, the next shadowy with candlelight.

She dreamed that she lay crumpled and freezing on the ramparts of the castle, begging for her life, screamed weakly as William pitched her over the walls, jerking and twitching when she slammed into the ground.

She didn’t hit the ground though. She hit something else.

The horrible grimace of the hulking gargoyle perched above the entrance of the castle materialized in her mind and she sucked in a breath to scream. His face changed, though, still harsh, but strangely comforting.

The room was lit with the golden glow of candles when she opened her eyes. She stared at the drapery above her for several moments, wondering what had wakened her and finally turned her head to look toward the hearth.

He crouched there, watching her through hooded, brooding eyes.

A jolt went through her, but it was surprise, not fear. It took a focused effort to hold her hand out to him, to form her lips into a smile. “You didn’t leave me,” she whispered, her throat grating with the pain of speaking.

He stared at her hand for several moments as if surprised. Abruptly, his face twisted and he surged to his feet.

He meant to leave. The thought sparked fear where his presence hadn’t. “Don’t go!” she whispered, lifting her hand as if she could reach across the distance between them and draw him to her.

The gesture made him pause. He glanced at something across the room, studied it hard for several moments, and then moved toward her. “You are safe now,” he said, his voice emerging as a low rumble of sound.

A rustle of movement drew her gaze and she turned her head to discover what it was he had stared at so hard before. One of her maids lay huddled on a pallet near her door. She rolled over and went still again and Bronwyn glanced back at the man who towered over her.

He hadn’t taken her hand. He was staring down at it, she saw, as if it was a snake. Curling her fingers around two of his, she drew his hand to her, struggling with the weight of his arm and finally pressed his palm to her cheek. “Brave knight, I owe you a debt of gratitude. Tell me how I can repay your kindness.”

She heard him swallow. For many moments, he simply allowed his hand to lie limply against her cheek and then his fingers curled, the pads of his fingertips brushing lightly, almost caressingly along her cheek as he reclaimed his hand. “The fever,” he muttered, his voice grating.

Bronwyn frowned, puzzled by his allusion to her illness. “This is a dream then?”

His finely etched lips twisted, but she had the sense that the contempt was turned inward. “Nightmare, more like if you see before you a knight and not a monster.”

Her gaze flickered over his face searchingly. “I see a brave and noble man who slew a monster.”

Anger surged into his eyes. “Then the fever has addled your wits, woman!” he growled. His fists came down on the bed on either side of her and he leaned closer until his face hovered mere inches above hers. “Or is it your sight you’ve lost?”

His ferocity unnerved her, and still she felt no real fear. She lifted a hand to his cheek, tracing the harsh plain. “Nay. There is nothing wrong with my eyes or my wits.”