Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (22 page)

She attacked with renewed energy and a honed ferocity. Now he was the one on the defensive, dancing in and out as he dodged her assault. Blades met and parted. She caught him a blow to the jaw, another to the ribs. His smile tightened, but he never surrendered or eased up on her. His breathing became heavy as his teasing died away. Now sweat beaded his temples and glued his shirt to his muscled chest. His gaze lost its brightness, his expression as grim as she knew her own must be.

Her arm ached all the way to her shoulder and her legs shook with the effort to stay one step ahead, one step above. Her hair fell from its bun to fly about her shoulders, and the shirt she’d swiped from the soldier at Deepings had at least two provocative tears. But she refused to give him the satisfaction. Knowing Gray, she’d never hear the end of it. She backed him slowly across the clearing, then just as he lunged, she threw a leg out in a move proven to take him down in a tumble of arms and legs.

Off-balance, he stumbled, lurching forward, his blade spinning away into the grass.

She smiled her success, opened her mouth to shout her victory, and found herself on the turf amid the wildflowers with the air punched from her lungs, her body pinned by the weight of his on top of her, her stolen blade resting against her throat.

“Surrender?” he asked softly.

She blinked up at him, lungs burning to fill. Unable to do anything but nod.

He tossed away the knife but did not move from where he knelt above. His eyes burned as they traveled her from head to foot, and now her lack of oxygen had nothing to do with the blow to her back but with the squeeze of her heart. Her torn shirt offered him more than a passing view of her breasts, though his gaze didn’t linger there for long. Instead he focused back upon her eyes, the blue of his gaze burning like ice and fire both.

His face filled her vision, the sweeping arch of his dark brows, the flop of hair across his forehead, the chiseled angle of his razor cheekbones. She wanted to touch him, to feel his lips upon hers, to curl her legs around his waist and have him bury himself inside her. It was a raw, visceral need that quivered her insides like jelly and made her sex clench in anticipation.

“I was wrong, Meeryn,” he said, his eyes never once leaving her face.

“Were you?” she managed to respond on a sharp panting intake of air. She swallowed a moan as his weight between her legs intensified, the evidence of his arousal nestled against her slit. Sensation spiraled inward until every breath shot a delicious throb from
her crotch to her brain. He would take her here . . . now . . . under the wide sky in a field of flowers. What could be better? What could be more right?

An expression passed over his face, so quickly it was gone before she understood its significance. Only when he rolled off her and up onto his knees did she come to her shaky unsettled senses.

“McIlroy did a good job in my stead,” he said, gravel roughing his deep voice, his gaze impenetrable. “Better, actually. I’m a dreadful teacher. I’ve not the patience it takes to explain what I do, only that I do it.”

Her knees shook, her stomach turned in a thousand knotted circles and she’d a desire to take up the knife she’d dropped and plunge it right into his cold, unfeeling heart. “Yet he was a lot like you in many ways.”

He lifted his brows in question.

“He had the same build, the same blue eyes”—she scrambled to her feet, snatching up her blade with now trembling fingers—“and he ran away when it got too hard to stay, just like you.”

*  *  *

The cottage sat off the main road in a twisting alley running between the back of the tavern stables and a brewery. Nothing to set it apart from its equally nondescript neighbors. Same mossy slate roof, same forbidding granite façade, even the muddy earthen paths leading to battered boot-scarred doors matched in almost every detail. The shapechanger had worked hard to blend into his surroundings until none would suspect that the barman bore a secret. Head down and mouth shut; that was how he’d tried to live his life—until
Gray and his group had enlisted him to their cause.

It had cost him his life.

The fly-riddled corpse lay by a door leading to the yard beyond. Blood and offal spattered walls and floor and ceiling, congealed under the mangled limbs and nearly severed head. He hadn’t just been killed. He’d been eviscerated . . . and then—Gray swallowed back the vomit chewing its way up his throat—gnawed on. Were the enforcers feasting on those they killed now? Was this a warning to those who remained loyal to the rightful heir?

“Gray? Over here.”

Meeryn summoned him to a small lean-to opening onto the kitchen. Another body, this one hanging by the neck from a rope knotted round a high beam. The face purple and black, but still recognizable as the young groom Kelan had set free. Greasy gray entrails spilled from his ripped stomach, a splintered end of bone protruded from his left leg.

“Do you think Kelan and Jamie rode straight into the massacre?” she asked, a hand covering her mouth, her expression a shade of pea green.

“I haven’t found any bodies but the two. Let’s assume that means they passed through before this occurred or after the Ossine had left.”

He returned to the front room, where Doule’s battered corpse lay in pieces like an accusation on the floor. Gray closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping to stave off the pounding in his head. Exhaustion dogged him like a shadow. He moved in a fog, faculties dimmed, sickness a mere shaky breath and trembling hand away.

Meeryn’s revelations about Jai Idrish rang in his head, but it was the memory of the longing in her eyes and the tremoring anticipation in her limbs that built the pressure in his chest until he could barely breathe around the immovable boulder lodged against his heart. He could have sated his greedy hunger. Found his climax and rolled away, unmoved by anything more than physical gratification.

But this was Meeryn. And he knew that if he ever surrendered to the staggering demands of his body, there would be no winning his way back. He would be lost to the force of his feelings. She would pay the price for his weakness.

“Who is he?” She stood behind him, chalk white but for two high spots of color on her cheeks. He tried not to flinch away from her proximity.

“His name was Zeb Doule. His brother worked in the stables at Deepings.”

“That must have been Caleb. Sir Dromon said he’d discovered one of the grooms had been sending messages to the rebels. He had him killed,” Meeryn said, her eyes clouded with sorrow.

“You knew him?”

“I tried to know everyone who worked to keep the estate going. As the duke grew less interested in the running of things, I took over many of the day-to-day tasks. That is, until Sir Dromon insinuated himself into the household. He didn’t appreciate my interference.”

Gray searched the room. No letters. No journals or pages that might lead to others in the group. Not even a scrap in the blackened hearth, though a pile of ash was evidence of a recent burning. “Bugger all, I
have no idea whether Doule destroyed everything he received or if the Ossine found it when they tore the place apart. We could be riding straight into a trap.”

“Is that what upsets you? Not that these men were killed but that they might have left a few stray pages lying about?”

His skin crawled with unspent tension, his knotted muscles twitched. “What upsets me is that their deaths put others in jeopardy. That we’ll have to find a new informant within Deepings willing to pass information out through the proper channels.” A flash of color caught the corner of his eye. He bent, shoving a hand under an overturned chair. Pulled free a shard of rose-colored glass, a bit of notched edge still intact—Doule’s
krythos
, dropped and crushed during the brief futile struggle. Gray put it in his pocket, his headache moving into his neck and down his spine into his shoulders.

“Is that all they were to you? Sources of information?” Meeryn asked, shrill anger hardening her words. “Spies for your conspirators?”

“They were soldiers under my command.”

“I think your years in the army have made you forget where soldiers come from. They don’t spring from the ground like dragon’s teeth.” A storm brewed in her expression. Just what he didn’t need right now when his self-control hung by the thinnest of threads. “Here’s some information for you; Caleb was barely seventeen. He wanted to move to London and find work in the city, but he’d an elderly mother and with his brother gone from the holding, there was none to support her but him. Now she’s lost them both. They had lives and people who depended on them and
hopes for the future. They weren’t just pieces to be moved about a board at your whim.”

The thread snapped with an audible twang. “Do you think I don’t know that?”

“I think you forget as you’re strategizing your next move and mapping out this great new world of yours. As you lose yourself to the slaughter and the secrets.”

A haze reddened his vision. Aching muscles vibrated painfully as if plucked by an invisible hand. Guilt loosened the boulder until the words came pouring out. “Aren’t you the one who’s been carping at me about my duty to the clans since you arrived unannounced in my bedchamber?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“What do you think that means? That I serve as some pointless figurehead who’ll tell the Imnada that the world is bright when in fact it’s burning? That may be your job as N’thuil. It’s not mine.”

The storm in her eyes became a full-blown cyclone. Hands on hips, chin up and braced for battle. “At least I took on a responsibility. You fled it. You’re still fleeing it. Did you think I didn’t notice that no one calls you Lord Halvossa, even though it’s your title? It has been since you were fourteen.”

“Fled it? Two years ago I was bloody well stripped of everything, nearly including my mind. My fucking title was the only thing they couldn’t take from me when they ripped away mark and signum. But it was a label I gained by a fluke of chance. The rank of major I earned. If Sir Dromon wants a damned war, he shall have it. But he’d better understand, this isn’t my first back-to-the-wall fight-or-die battle. The Arch Ossine
won’t be allowed to hide in the shadows while others do his butchering and his dying for him.”

“You say Sir Dromon hides behind his army of Ossine, Gray.” Meeryn’s gaze settled once more on the corpse already bloating in the summer heat, her expression grim. “I begin to wonder if you’re really any different?”

*  *  *

Sleep. She’d heard of it. As fleeting and mysterious as the mythical unicorn, it had something to do with closing one’s eyes, relaxing one’s muscles and, if she wasn’t completely mistaken, it happened while one was lying horizontal, preferably not under a leaky ceiling and out of any irritating drafts. It certainly had nothing to do with chop-gaited, swayback horses, hours of dragging dullness punctuated by moments of sheer terror, all conducted under a sky that poured endless buckets of rain down on her head, except for those rare moments when it gusted those same buckets sideways into her face.

As the sun sank toward the horizon and they skirted one more village for the less comfortable track uphill across a high boulder-strewn down, she bit her tongue just before she caught herself whining a petulant “Are we there yet?” to the unyielding, broad-shouldered back ahead of her.

It wouldn’t have helped. He hadn’t spoken to her for the last twenty miles, not since his curt “Get the hell down and don’t move.” Almost warm and cuddly compared to the icy silence of the rest of this hellish journey.

It was probably the silence that saved her—or the
exhaustion. The pattering rush of falling rainwater from a bush announced the ambush just as Meeryn slumped forward across her horse’s withers half-asleep and the explosion of a musket shot sent a bullet buzzing past her ear like a hornet. This time she was the one shouting “Get down!” and sliding from her saddle for the cover of a low stone wall.

Gray was there before her; a blur of uncoiling tension. He dragged her deeper behind the wall where the brambles scratched at her draggle-tailed gown and caught in her hair. Another blast rang out, dark smoke and chattering birds rising in a cloud from the wood. The bullet bit into a tree not a foot from Gray’s heart.

Footsteps and a drone of conversation signaled the presence of more than one enforcer. Dear Mother of All, if they were surrounded, they may as well surrender now. Gray was chalky with illness, his body aflame with more than typical Imnada heat, and exhaustion dragged at her like anchor chains.

“Wait.” Gray laid a hand on her arm.

Before she could stop him, he slid away through the brush and the saplings lining the wall, barely making a ripple of sound. He was long and lean and deadly, and she was reminded of a snake moving slowly through the grass toward two unsuspecting mice. Not exactly a description normally associated with Ossine enforcers, but then she’d never seen such focused control, every precise motion as Gray slunk toward the far corner of the wall designed for the surprise kill. It was beautiful and frightening to behold, this transformation from the Gray she knew to a remorseless bloodthirsty stranger. Like two sides of the same coin. Only the face on both was as impassive and grim as death.

Two shots gone wide, the enforcers had obviously chosen to wait them out. With the horses scattered and little cover beyond the wall and the scraggly wood beyond, it was a simple matter of patience on their part.

Meeryn had never been patient. She chewed on a fingernail, her heart thudding like a drum until it felt as if it might explode.

By now Gray was lost from sight, not even a breeze-tossed grass blade to signal his trail. Encroaching dusk threw the landscape into a shifting pattern of light and dark, masking movement and camouflaging intent. The air seemed charged, the tension crackling as the moments dragged on with no sound but the swish of the wind and the rustle of the trees.

Then all erupted into chaos.

Gray rose from his cover in a graceful flow of eye, body, and throwing arm. His dagger sliced the air with a killing sing of steel to strike the enforcer in the space between his ribs and over his heart.