AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The emotions had broken the surface for a time, bringing the chilling memories with them, the faces of the dead threatening to destroy his peace. His mind.
For Euna, he would bury them again. Rastus had been right. He needed every trait of the Serpent to bring Doran down. Cameron Sinclair could fight the darkness within him. Or Sin could embrace it.
He chose Sin.
And once he had chosen, there would be no coming back.
Morgan leaned against the doorjamb, the mage energy filling her senses overpowering the wobbly-legged light-headedness. She’d doctored her arm as best she could, using the limited medicines she’d found in the house. The bullet-scored tissue burned, hampering her mobility, but she’d no choice. Doran had captured a pawn. Check. But the queen and two knights moved onto the field of play. It was up to them to match his moves with a check and mate of their own.
“It’s begun,” she announced.
“Doran?” Cam broke off his conversation with Brodie, the guilty flush stealing over the captain’s face and the way he avoided looking directly at her an indication she’d been the object of their discussion.
But it was Cam’s expression that sent her heart straight to her toes. The empty blue of his gaze, the square jut of his jaw, the careful way he held himself as if any slight movement would cause him to crack chilled her to the marrow of her bones. This was not the same Cam who’d left her bed this morning, a man she could have pledged herself to. This man radiated pure feral rage. Assumed the mantle of a creature bound to kill. Knowing only how to destroy. Never how to love.
Cam might return from this mission alive. But she understood now, never whole.
Brodie’s knowing gaze sought out hers, the sorrow she saw there for both of them. For he stood to lose a friend just as she lost a lover.
But regrets would have to wait.
Now was for Euna. Doran. And the reclaiming of Neuvarvaan.
Firmly locking away the grief and the heartache that would come in time, she turned her mind to what she could control. Once they succeeded in freeing Cam’s sister and sending Doran to the deepest pit in the darkest hell, she’d retreat to the sanctuary of Daggerfell and her family’s arms. To nurse her broken heart for a second time.
But this time, there’d be no third chances. She would have Cam. Or she would remain alone. There was no middle ground.
Her hand fell to the basket hilt of her sword, using the comforting presence of the weapon as a way to draw her mind off distractions. “Doran’s letting himself be found. All but forcing us to follow the trail he’s laid.”
“So we indulge him. And we end it. Today.” Cam’s voice as emotionless as his gaze.
“Cam and I’ve discussed it. I’m coming with ye.” Brodie pushed up from the table, the giant Highlander needing only a plaid and a claymore to assume the guise of one of the brutal clansmen of his ancestry. She could almost hear the bagpipes. Smell the heather.
Morgan offered him a curt nod. “If I’m right in my thinking, it’s going to take you and an army of such to best Doran.”
Brodie smiled, though it never reached his eyes, which were grim, lit with shadows of their own. He spread his empty hands. “I’m only one, lass. But I’m a great strapping brute for all that. Together, the three of us may contrive.” He glanced at Cam, his smile fading. “She mayn’t be blood, Cam. But she’s a sister to me, nonetheless. We’ll see her safe.”
Cam seemed to flinch, but in no other way did Euna’s abduction register in the ravages of his face.
Morgan closed her eyes. Whispered the words of the fith-fath. At once her leather breeches and jacket became a simple gown, the raiment of a wom
an hiding the weapons of the Amhas-draoi.
“Come,” she said, wishing she could hide her grief as easily behind such a mask. Surely Cam knew how she must feel. But if he did, he gave no sign he cared. “Doran’s calling.”
Despite the swell of humanity crowding the wharves, warehouses, and shipping basins, few trespassed into the morass of dirt and debris around the entrance to the half-constructed Regent’s Canal. Complications in management had temporarily halted the anthill of construction between the docks and the canal’s terminus in the heart of the city, leaving a cemetery of abandoned machinery, tools flung aside as if the workers were expected back at any moment, coils of heavy rope, mountains of dirt and clay and silt embedded with shards of pottery, broken bricks, rocks blasted from unfinished locks.
Morgan picked her way around one such pile, the size of it dwarfing her. A slide and she’d find herself buried beneath a ton of crushed rock and earth.
“Doran,” she called, the double coil of his mage energy a living thing moving within her skull like a snake. If she closed her eyes, it was all she could see. The earlier red-purple signature now almost completely black, shot with gray and blue and yellow. The Morkoth’s magic binding with his own into one huge supply of power. “I know you hear my voice. Bring out the girl.”
Silence, but she knew the bastard heard her.
“Show me she’s safe,” she shouted. “She’s no part of this.”
She kept her eyes firmly on the battle-scape around her, never once glancing up to where Cam and Brodie held position. Cam with his sniper’s rifle trained on her. Brodie playing backup in the case of unforeseen trouble.
To all who saw her, she was alone. Vulnerable. Easy pickings.
