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Sebastian snapped his jaws in denial, leaping toward her, but Claude snapped hard on his leash. “Not yet,” he murmured. “It’s all in the timing. Midnight, Fray. Midnight.”
The solstice. What dark magic did Claude plan to work at the stroke of that hour?
Claude dropped to his knees, raking his hands across Sebastian’s mane and fur. “Calm for now, old friend. Patience. Ah, but that never has come easily for you.”
“Sebastian, you can still control your own destiny,” she told him in a slow, soothing tone. “He only controls you if you allow it.”
Claude spun to face her, shadowy, gorgeous features transforming into something terrifying. Scales formed along the sides of his jaws and neck; horrible jaws elongated. “Did he tell you that he sold himself to me? To do my bidding?” he asked, still morphing into something hideous and terrible that was caught between man and dragon.
“He is not your prisoner,” she insisted, shaking so hard that the words came out in half gasps. “He has free will.”
“This knight, this once brave Templar, sold his freedom for the very gold you used to bring him back to life. Greed overtook him. Ah, and then it was so easy to wield him by my own hand. To make him mine again, as he always should have been.”
“You made him a killer.”
“I turned him to hi
s true nature. Darkness. Made him like me.”
“You’re a devil.” She jutted out her chin, determined to appear strong. “He told me, earlier. Described exactly what you are.”
Claude only laughed in reaction, scales changing hue across his features, humanity nearly vanishing. “I merely gave him what he wanted. As I did for you, Anna. You sought to free him, and now he is unleashed. Well”—he gave the long yoke around Sebastian’s neck a jerk—“at least as far as we can trust him until midnight.”
Anna stared at the clock over her desk. Only two more minutes until the summer solstice, but she was out of ideas, short on strategy. Yet something kept whispering through her mind, a hidden clue that Sebastian had murmured to her in his last desperate bid to hold on to freedom.
Gold. Something to do with the gold.
Melt me. That’s what he’d said, and it hadn’t made sense, still didn’t.
Now, in the rush of the moment, she swore she heard his voice in the hidden reaches of her mind.
Return me to my metal state!
“Sebastian,” Claude commanded, his voice that of true ownership, “kill her. Now. I sense the hunger in you. Hundreds of years and you’ve not tasted life. How you must have missed the feeding.”
“He won’t touch me,” she countered, almost believing what she said. Cautiously she glanced away from the lion, using her peripheral vision to search for the puzzle pieces. They lay scattered on the floor, the gleam of gold sparkling.
The slap of that long leash bit into the lion’s fur, red forming where the barbs struck his golden hair. “Sebastian. Sebastian Fray. Heed my commandment.”
The cat’s nostrils flared as his eyes narrowed. The clicking of his claws punctuated the silence between them all, and Claude allowed the leash some slack. The lion padded closer toward her, bloodlust evident in his eyes.
To own a man’s name was to own his will. He’d said something like that to her in that final dream, she suddenly recalled. That’s why Claude kept using it, over and over. He owned Sebastian’s freedom because he owned the man’s name.
“Sebastian,” she said with forced calm, “you won’t hurt me. Don’t, Sebastian.”
“He has no care for you now,” Claude told her with a hollow laugh. “Don’t bother trying to appeal to him.”
The lion halted midstride, blinking at her and then turning his massive head toward Claude as if awaiting an order. An explanation as to whom he should heed.
“Take her,” Claude murmured, sounding almost like a lover. “We will be powerful again, the two of us as one. You once let me hand you the world. Kill again and it shall be true forever.”
The lion turned ravenous eyes upon her, pouncing before she could take a breath. She fell beneath his massive body, going down onto the floor with a hard crack of her skull. Blackness engulfed her, the sinewy threat atop her body wavering with that darkness.
Burn me . . . melt . . . Anna. You are the one to save me. . . .
With a shove, she thrust at the massive beast, but he was dead weight; she might as well have sought to push a felled oak tree off her. But then, seemingly remembering his better nature, Sebastian reared away with a guttural cry.
She seized that moment and began sweeping her palm along the hardwood, scrabbling for even one piece of painted Templar gold. As she scooped up a handful of shimmering pieces, she kicked the table that held the burner, and it went crashing to the floor.
