The Legacy of Buchanan's Crossing (29 page)

Clint snatched his hand back, focusing on Cayden and his memories of the night they’d spent here. “The pregnancy wasn’t an accident, was it? You made it happen, didn’t you?”

Her voice was low. “While I didn’t cause the condom to break, no, it wasn’t an accident.” She closed her hand around the ring. “The Keeper’s primary duty is to keep, that is, continue, the line of Buchanan’s Crossing’s warders. That’s the purpose of the Joining, and why I’m certain I’m carrying a daughter rather than a son.”

He could not believe what he was hearing. “You used me to make a baby?”

“Buchanan’s Crossing used you, as it’s using me, to serve the Greater Good. While they—” she pointed to Milton and Dean with her chin “—have been using you to serve the basest of evils.”

“Don’t you see?” Milton’s voice was a little high, a little less controlled. “That means she intends to sacrifice the baby. Witches have black magic blood. Only we men carry the white.”

Cayden shook her head. She was breathing her nose now, her words halting. “He’s making this stuff up. Ol’ Milt’s desperate because he’s afraid you’ll put the ring on and know it. As usual, he’s mixed a drop of truth into his cup of lies. Women possess the real magic in a line, while men are basically carriers. There’s no such thing as
black
witch blood, there’s only witch blood. Black and white are choices.” She raised her arm toward him again. It was shaking. Her other arm remained wrapped around her stomach and her breaths were short and fast. “You don’t need the ring to learn the truth your heart already knows, but it will help.” She opened her hand. The ring glowed in her palm more than it should have in the firelight.

The air hummed around them. Cayden’s hair stirred though no wind blew. A heavy sense of expectancy seemed to radiate from the earth below. It had been there all along, a steadily rising pressure he knew deep down wouldn’t stop until he took some kind of action.

It was the same feeling he’d had about Cayden since their first real encounter at HandiMart. He let his gaze travel slowly up her smooth white arm to the torn shoulder of the pretty green dress she’d worn for him, over the swell of those gorgeous breasts pressing against the neckline, farther up the pale column of her throat to her full dark-painted lips. What he saw in her eyes held him: the hurt, the hope, the love.

His heart lurched in recognition. The spell was supposed to have been broken. Yet in spite of everything, all of the teeming strangeness, he wanted her as much—no, more—than he ever had. Wanted her more than just under or on top of him. Everything he thought he’d wanted, everything he’d worked for or dreamed of attaining, would be meaningless without her.

Cayden’s hand felt small and cold and so damn right when he covered it with his, the ring almost hot when he slipped it on his finger.

“It doesn’t seem to be working.”

Clint sounded so disappointed, Cayden couldn’t help a weak grin. “You were expecting trumpets or rainbows?”

“I was expecting
something
.”

Milton Cumberland spoke, reminding her this showdown wasn’t finished, no matter how ready she was for it to be. “What you expect is irrelevant. The truth is unimportant. The fact is, three men of the blood have given it willingly. Once I spill it, along with yours, in the ritual fire you were so kind to conjure for me, the power of the Crossing will be mine.”

She tried to remember if Gran had ever told her whether such a thing was possible. “Clint? Is he telling the truth?”

He stared at the ring on his hand. “Oh my God, it does work! It’s been working, trying to anyway, ever since you first showed it to me. But I—”

“Is he telling the truth?”

The answer to her question was written on his face before he answered. “Yes—” Clint started toward Milton “—except for the part where the only blood getting spilled will be
his
.”

He stopped mid-stride, his outstretched hand suspended in the air.

Milton’s hacking laugh sent a ripple of foreboding through her body. “What’s wrong, Mr. MacAllen? Didn’t you understand your little witch when she said you belong to me? You could no more raise your hand against me than you could fly.”

That’s what Milton thought. She fumbled in her pocket for the amulet Moira had given her. Her stomach flipped over when her fingers found nothing, rolled mercilessly when her other pocket turned up equally empty. She patted the ground around her frantically, wishing she could get up or even crawl more than a few feet.

Milton’s gross hacking started up again. “Looking for this?”

Cayden nearly threw up. The intricate silver knot of the charm that would free Clint from his blood oath glinted in the palm of the very man who bound him. The sudden shifting in her womb increased both her physical and mental anguish.

With a gruesome smile, Milton turned on Clint. “You should not have defied me. For your punishment, you will testify to the girl’s instability and suicidal tendencies when she disappears.”

“Like hell I will.”

“You will, or your dear parents will experience tragedy beyond mere hopeless poverty.”

“As long as we’re bringing family into it, maybe you’d enjoy watching me take your son apart piece by piece.”

Clint strode over to Dean, picked him up by the back of his neck, and shook him. The pin she’d used on the smaller Cumberland had been a gift from Gran, spelled to burst the kind of self-delusion someone asking to be stabbed with it would possess. She didn’t know if it could overcome Milton’s power of persuasion, or if it was too late to make a difference.

Dean squawked and sputtered. “H-how come Clint c-can hurt me, and not you?”

“I arranged it that way.”

Clint had stopped shaking Dean, but was still holding him off the ground in one hand. “Why? Why would you do that?” Dean croaked.

“Because I trust you even less now than when we started all of this. You’re soft, too much like your mother. I should have left you with her. You were a mistake anyway.”

Dean’s voice was a choked whine. “Y-you said, you said she abandoned us, that she was faithless.”

A thought scratched at the back of Cayden’s unraveling awareness just as the old man bellowed, clearly no longer interested in being persuasive.

“She
was
faithless. She didn’t believe in me. She told me the power of this Crossing was love and hope. Precisely the sort of drivel that got us into this mess. What the world needs is someone strong enough to lead it and the power to make everyone follow him.”

She gasped. Clint set Dean down and looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry about me. Stop hurting Dean. He didn’t know. Milton…” She ran out of breath. What could Clint do, anyway?

“He’s a lunatic.”

“Yes, but Dean…”

Clint evidently thought she was reacting to Milton’s fascist ravings. He wasn’t aware the woman Milton was ranting about was her Gran or what that meant regarding the identity of the man whose neck he had his fist wrapped so tightly around. And she no longer had the breath to explain.

Milton went on, apparently oblivious to any of them, “I had to seduce her to get to the Crossing. She was a pretty thing, with her flaming curls and bright blue eyes. You have her eyes.” He glared at his son. “She resisted more strongly than any before her, led me on quite the merry chase. In the end, though, she succumbed to my persuasion. I needed to get her pregnant, needed the blood of the child. I didn’t intend to care for her. Then the faithless whore rejected me. Said she had to wait for the Keeper.”

Clint looked at Dean, then at her, and tilted his head. If he hadn’t gotten it yet, he would. She smiled as she blinked her heavy eyes to take him in, standing there all big and strong, sexier than an intelligent man had a right to be. And thick as a brick when he’d set his mind on a narrow path. But Clint MacAllen would never be anyone’s fool for long.

That thought was as comforting as the sight of him, so she held onto it as her eyes drifted closed.

She didn’t bother to open them when the dead-cold voice said, “These things must be handled delicately, and the hour grows late. How fortunate that in your pitiful reluctance to take the girl’s life, my worthless progeny, you merely caused her to faint so you could draw this bottle of blood. Pity you’re as much a simpleton as MacAllen. Once the power of the Crossing is mine, I’m going to crush and bury her below, same as I did Aileen’s precious Keeper.” Hacking laughter filled her ears. “I couldn’t allow her to keep him.”

Cayden’s eyes blinked open. Her answers were confirmed, for all the good they did her. Clint stood on her right, still gripping a miserable Dean Cumberland in his fist. Milton was on the other side of the fire, holding a bottle of dark liquid, her blood, in one hand, the silver amulet in the other.

The sizzle and the smell when he poured the blood on the fire clawed the inside of her ears and nose. The sky rumbled and the ground beneath her shifted. Power swirled like airless wind through the grove, lightning flashed, and the earth throbbed.

“Oh yes, before I forget, now would be an excellent time to destroy this.” Milton’s voice rose above the droning hum of the Crossing’s power as Moira Sinclair’s amulet sailed through the air toward the fire.

“No!” Her scream of denial was barely a whisper. Had she heard the beat of wings, seen a flash of blue-black through the smoke? She opened her heart to the magic of the Crossing and let love, faith, and hope push the words past her lips so Nevermore could hear them. “Give it to the Keeper!”

The tableau broke into shards as consciousness slipped.

A whirring of wings brushed her face, followed by a soft slap and Clint’s “Got it!”

“Too late!” Milton’s maniacal laughter.

The glitter of a vial he pulled from his coat. The unmistakable yowl of an angry tom cat. An almost inhuman howl of outrage.

Silence.

Sweet, sweet oblivion.

Cayden! She was lying on the ground a step away, but Clint couldn’t convince his feet to budge any more than he could get his lungs to pump air. The earth pulsed. The grove was bright with lightning. The fire blazed. Yet it was completely silent and absolutely motionless. Not even the flames flickered.

In that frozen moment of time, he both felt and saw the intersecting lines of power below, exactly as he had the night he’d made love to Cayden up here. It hadn’t been a hallucination. He knew what it was too, what it meant to the world.

“Cayden.” Her name whistled past his lips, breaking whatever spell the place had been under.

What happened next wasn’t so much an explosion as a sudden tearing, like a page ripping from some angry god’s book. And he had no idea how the story was meant to continue.

“Cayden,” he yelled again through the hot blasting wind pouring in through the rift, doing its best to knock him off his feet.

She didn’t move. Dean was huddled on the ground. He wasn’t moving either.

Milton was moving, though, rolling in the dirt near the wind-fanned flames, the big tom wrapped around one arm, both yowling like there was no tomorrow.

Ignoring them, Clint knelt next to Cayden. Still searching for her pulse, he turned at the old man’s triumphant screech. Milton was reaching for something in his jacket pocket with one hand as he flung the cat off his other arm.

The original vial with the blood of all three men. Had to be. His hand clenched around the small silver knot Nevermore had stolen for him. Milton’s thumb was already uncorking the vial. From what the old man had said, with Cayden’s blood already spilled, Clint couldn’t allow the contents of that vial to follow it.

He launched himself across the edge of the blaze. Unlike the last time he’d tried to interfere with Milton, nothing stopped or slowed his impact. Milton’s hand flew open, and for one dreadful moment, the vial hung in the air over the fire.

Clint lunged for it, managing to catch it and cover the opening with his thumb. But it had tilted enough for a drop to fall. He threw his other hand into the fire and felt the drop hit his hand. Only when he breathed a sigh of relief and got burning lungs for his effort did he notice half his body was in the fire.

Rolling out, he fisted both the charm and the vial and kept rolling until he was no longer smoldering. While Milton sobbed, Clint groped for the cork. Once he had both the charm and the bottle safely in his pocket, he took stock of his surroundings.

The wind had died. The earth had stopped throbbing. Milton was babbling incoherently. Dean was still as a statue, his bloodied mouth half open. The big tomcat was on Cayden’s left. Nevermore perched on her right arm near her wrist. The two glared at each other like boxers between rounds.

Four baleful eyes turned his way when he walked toward her.

He nodded. “You’re right, I fucked up. You can both carve me up later. But you have to let me get her to the hospital now, okay?” They exchanged looks with one another, then the cat stalked off and Nevermore took wing.

To Dean, he said, “I want you to drag your sorry ass and that psycho nut job you call a father down this hill and off this property.” When Dean didn’t move, he shouted, “Now!”

Dean jumped. “What do you intend t-to do about…?”

“Oh, don’t worry, I will deal with you. In the meantime, you’ll want to stay the hell out of my sight.”

Bending down and lifting Cayden’s limp body into his arms, he said, “There’s only one thing that matters now. The only thing that ever really mattered.”