Lord's Fall

TWELVE

As he spoke the words her gaze flared, and her lips trembled. For one split second he stared at her, utterly mystified. She had never seemed to mind before that he hadn’t said the words.

She couldn’t be upset that he had said them now, could she? Fucking hell, he was no good at this romance shit.

In the next moment he realized that mirth filled her eyes, not sadness.

He growled, “What.”

She told him, her voice trembling with laughter, “You just sounded so surprised when you said it.”

He took a slow, deep breath and let it out gently. “I am,” he said.

He kissed her again, savoring the light play of her lips before deepening it to explore the lavish intimacy of her mouth. She groaned and rotated her hips so that his cock pressed against her pelvis. They rocked together, fully clothed, both remembering how it was to be together and promising each other more. His hunger spiked higher, and he palmed one of her breasts.

She pulled back slightly to mutter something, her warm breath against his cheek. He had no idea what she said but it sounded urgent and sexy. Then she kissed him hard, and her eager, feminine aggression caused everything within him to glow hotter than the forest fire and brighter than a newly minted coin.

“Take it off,” he whispered.

She knew what he meant and removed the dampening spell that cloaked her body’s natural luminescence.

She was simply dazzling. She was his beacon to what others called decency, not because she told him how to act but because she made him want to try.

They shouldn’t be doing this. They didn’t have time. But he slipped one hand under her sweater anyway to tease at her nipple, rolling the soft, delicate jutting flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Her eyes glazed with passion, she thrust up with her hips and he hissed as the friction drove him out of his mind crazy. . . .

A sharp rap sounded at the door, and he snarled as he lifted his head.

Pia grabbed him by the ears. It startled him enough to make him pause.

Their eyes met.

She said, “Count to ten.”

Hm, he had heard of that technique before. One, two, three . . .

She called out, “Yes, what is it?”

Eva’s voice sounded through the door panel. “The High Lord requests that Dragos attend him downstairs. I guess those Elves that were spelled aren’t doing so well.”

He expelled a breath between his teeth. It sounded like steam hissing in a kettle. “I got to ten,” he told her. “It didn’t help. Stay here and follow your own advice. Eat something and rest.” He raised his voice. “I’m coming.”

He rolled away from her, careful to avoid putting any real weight on her abdomen, then stood and strode out of the bedroom.

Eva stood just on the other side of the door. She gestured to the unit’s magic user, who waited across the room by the hall entrance. “Miguel knows where to go. He’ll show you where they are being held.”

“Fine,” he bit out. “Let’s go.”

Just before he turned away, he saw Eva glance into the open doorway of the bedroom, and her eyes grew very wide. Realization flashed. Fuck. He spun back, even though he knew he was already too late.

Eva asked in a hushed voice, “Uh, princess? Are you aware that you’re illuminated?”

It was an idiotic mistake.

Pia had lifted her head off the pillows to watch Dragos stride away, her body thrumming with frustrated hunger again. She felt like they hadn’t made love in months, not days. He should always dress in black, because he sure did give Satan a run for his money on being wicked hot. He moved so fast and light on his feet, it would be disturbing to see in such a large, muscular man if it wasn’t so damned sexy.

He was already preoccupied with what lay ahead of him, and she was distracted with lust and just plain stupid. She realized it as soon as Eva looked in the bedroom and her black gaze went wide. Even though Pia threw the dampening spell back on that very instant, it was too little too late.

Remember that slow-moving train wreck? The one you were just bitching about the other day? And who was driving that train again, dumb ass?

You, that’s who.

She launched off the bed and moved faster than she ever remembered moving in her life. As she leaped toward Eva, she called out sharply, “I’ll take care of it, Dragos.”

She reached the doorway, registering every shift in Eva’s expression, the simple astonishment shifting to shock at her urgent speed. In the next instant, Pia had her hand fisted in the front of Eva’s shirt. Eva grabbed her wrist reflexively, glanced at Dragos and froze.

Pia looked at Dragos too, at his calm, expressionless face and the death in his gold eyes. I am mated to the biggest psycho of them all, she thought. She said strongly, “I said I’ll take care of this.”

His attention shifted from Eva to her. There was no way to tell what he was thinking. She shifted her body so that she came between Dragos and Eva, and she pointed toward the hallway door and Miguel, who also stood frozen. “Go.”

Dragos tilted his head at her in wordless acknowledgment, turned and left, taking Miguel with him.

She took a deep breath and only then realized that she was shaking. So much to do, so much to do. Build a relationship, stop Armageddon, save a Wyr here and there. It really did never rain but it poured.

James, Andrea and Johnny had been in the other rooms, but they weren’t any longer. Something that had been said, or perhaps some instinct for danger had roused them. They stood tensely in the doorways of the other bedrooms, Andrea and Johnny in one, James in the other. Quickly she calculated the angles of the doorways in relation to each other. None of them could have seen into her bedroom, and Miguel had been standing by the hall door, so he hadn’t seen anything either.

Pia told the others, “Go back to bed. Now.”

Slowly, they backed into their separate rooms, even though she could tell all their fight-or-flight instincts had kicked into high gear.

Only when they shut their doors did she turn her attention to Eva, who hadn’t moved or spoken. It was the first time she had ever seen Captain Psycho truly subdued.

Pia loosened her hold on Eva’s shirt and pointed silently into her own bedroom. As the other woman stepped inside, she followed and closed the door behind her.

She asked quietly, “You haven’t by any chance been talking telepathically with any of the others in the last few minutes, have you?”

“No,” Eva said, very low. She turned around, her sober black gaze fixing on Pia’s face.

Even though she was pretty sure that Eva got the full implication of what had happened, she still said, “You realize you saw something you weren’t supposed to see. Your life is on the line here.”

Eva said, “I got that.”

The tension in Pia’s body wouldn’t let her stand still, and she started to pace. “This isn’t your fault,” she said, still keeping her voice very soft. “This is all my fault. I was careless and preoccupied. This should never have happened, and I’m so sorry, Eva.”

“This is about your Wyr form, isn’t it?” Eva whispered. “Why you don’t talk about it, or identify what you are.”

She moved to the window and looked out, rapping out a hectic, uneven rhythm on the pane with her fingers. The shadowed river was beautiful, but one end of the pile of covered bodies was visible, and she couldn’t keep her gaze from drifting to them. So much unnecessary death, so much pain.

She looked at the silhouette of the ravaged tree line as she tried to formulate how she should answer. Eva was quick and clever. Even now some part of the other woman had to be whispering, What is she? What? And running through all the possibilities in her mind.

“The problem is that people talk,” she murmured. “One person might swear that they’ll keep a secret, but then they tell their best friend just one thing. ‘I trust you not to tell anyone,’ they say. ‘Oh, I promise, I won’t,’ their best friend says. And everybody is quite sincere at the time. Then the best friend tells someone else. Someone they trust. Someone who says, ‘I promise, I won’t say a word.’” She laughed, the sound abrupt and humorless. “You know I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t done that very thing myself and had it backfire on me. Now I’m mated to one of the most visible figures in the world. The gryphons know what I am, along with several of the Elves. Fuck, don’t even get me started on the Elves. I have no idea how many of them know.”

A hand settled on her back. “You keep getting your fancy knickers in a twist, don’t you?” Eva said. Her voice was gentle, even after everything that had happened.

Pia turned her head. The shock had eased somewhat from the other woman’s face. “He will kill you if you breathe a word of what you saw. He will kill you if you even think of breathing a word.” He probably would have killed Eva already if Pia hadn’t stopped him. All because he had been preoccupied, and she had gotten careless. She said, “And I don’t want your life on my conscience.”

Eva gave her a crooked smile. “I’m not going to say anything, Pia, and not because the Old Man scared me shitless, even though he did. I’m not going to say anything because you’re ours to defend. Besides, I owe you for Johnny’s life.”

She shrugged irritably and grimaced. “Nobody owes me anything.”

The other woman chuckled. It sounded indulgent. Then Eva sobered. “You realize, don’t you, that the others know you did something important, even if they don’t quite know what it is. And I think Johnny’s been too busy to really think about what happened, but sooner or later he’ll remember and get to wondering.”

“He was passed out by the time I did anything,” Pia said.

“He’ll remember being wounded.”

She blew out a heavy sigh and looked at the tragedy outside again. “Yeah, I guess we all remember when that happens.”

“I guess we do.”

Pia thought of the Elves that Dragos had gone to examine. She wondered how bad off they were, and what Dragos would find out. If he could do anything for them. He was not a healer, but he was probably the world’s foremost expert on beguilement.

Her eyebrows rose. Maybe he could beguile Eva into forgetting what she saw. He had tried to beguile Pia more than once, but it hadn’t stuck. What if, for whatever reason, it didn’t stick on Eva either? Then Eva might feel betrayed and resentful, and that was never a good combination in someone when you needed them to keep a secret.

Maybe it was smartest to just trust her, but damn, that was another uncertain road to travel. She tapped the glass a few more times. Maybe she had better think about it some more and talk to Dragos later.

In the meantime, he had given her good advice.

She said, “I’m so hungry I could eat my boots.”

Eva stirred. “We better get some food to that baby before he chews a hole in you.”

“There’s a concept I could have lived without,” Pia muttered.

A vision of the baby monster breaking out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien came to mind. Yeah, she needed that image to stick with her for the rest of this long, weird pregnancy like she needed another hole in her head.

Eva went into the common room. Pia dug through her pack for the handful of soy protein bars she always carried with her, then she joined the other woman. She settled at one end of the couch while Eva brought her a bowl of nuts and fresh fruit from table by the window. After plowing through several protein bars, most of the nuts and half the fruit, she was finally able to make herself stop.

Eva ate a couple of MRE meals she carried in her own pack. Even though they had taken pains to keep their conversation low, somehow the others sensed that it was okay to reappear. They did so quietly, bringing their own supplies of food to eat.

Then the door to the apartment opened, and Hugh walked in.

He said, “Hey, kids.”

“Yes!” Andrea leaped across the room to smack both his upheld hands and throw her arms around him. Johnny leaped on the pair, and all three staggered, laughing.

James grinned, and Eva said, “Good job, bucko.”

The gargoyle shrugged loose of Andrea and Johnny, walked over to Pia and dropped her cell phone into her hands. His plain, bony face crinkled in a smile. “I don’t mind telling you, answering that phone when the Old Man called was one of the braver things I’ve done. He did not like the sound of my voice coming over on your frequency.”

It was just a phone. See, like she said. Biggest psycho of them all.

“Thank you, Hugh,” Pia said.

“No problem.” He threw himself on the couch, dug through his own pack for food and ate with all the others.

Pia drifted, listening to the psychos talking smack with each other. They had a rough-and-tumble camaraderie that reminded her of the sentinels, and in spite of all the issues that waited back in New York, listening to them made her homesick. Like the sentinels, this group was used to facing death and danger, and they had a kind of emotional ballast for dealing with violence that she might never achieve.

You’re gonna have to toughen up fast, chickadee, she told herself. There’s more violence on the road in front of you.

Because she had no intention of letting Dragos cross over to the Elven Other land without her, and while he had backed away from Eva when she had told him to, he had still carried death in his eyes when he left.

And call her crazy, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t planning on having tea and cookies with Gaeleval when he caught up with him.

Dragos strode with Miguel through the halls, his sharp gaze taking in the damage to the building along with the nervous reactions of the Elves that they passed. The scent of fear and stress littered the air along with the stink of ash and blood, and the fires in wall sconces flickered in a macabre echo to the forest fire.

Once he might have enjoyed seeing his old enemies when they were so devastated. Now he thought of Pia’s distress when she had looked at the pile of bodies. He frowned, and an Elf who was coming toward them from the other direction shrank back against the wall until they had passed.

Miguel led him down a flight of stairs. There was a minute change in air pressure and scent, along with the lack of windows. He was unsurprised. Underground was the best place to have holding cells. As pretty as this place had once been, it was still the seat of the Elven demesne and they had to house prisoners somewhere.

They reached a spelled and bolted door where a pair of armed Elves stood guard. The guards regarded Miguel and Dragos with stony faces but unbolted and opened the door right away. The sound of screaming boiled out as soon as the door was cracked, along with the quieter undertone of people engaged in intense conversation.

Just as Dragos had expected, beyond the door was a block of cells. This cell block was probably where people were held until judgment had been passed. There would be another, more permanent place where the Elves would hold criminals sentenced to prison terms, but this was a solid temporary holding area.

At the moment the cells were packed with bedraggled, bloody people, all in some state of half dress. Calondir stood with a cluster of armed guards and a few other Elves. Their focus was turned inward to an area that they circled. That area was also the source of the screaming.

A few of the guards turned to face them as they entered the block, but their attention was fractured and they looked distressed. One of the guards tapped Calondir politely on the shoulder, and the High Lord turned to face them as they approached.

Dragos studied the occupants of the cells sharply as he and Miguel walked past. They stood passively, staring into space, their faces blank and hands idle at their sides. When he came closer to the High Lord, a couple of the guards moved between him and Calondir, while the rest of the circle moved back, not, he could tell, to allow him access to the screaming male that sat bound in a chair, but to move further away from him.

He bared his teeth at Calondir. Some foolish, naive creature might have called it a smile.

Calondir didn’t even try to return a false response. Instead he said abruptly, “Those who were captured are all like you see in the cells, and our healers cannot bring them back to themselves. This is the third person they’ve tried.”

Dragos asked, “What happened to the other two?”

“The healers had to stop when their heartbeats became irregular.”

He nodded. “Move,” he said.

A couple stepped back timidly, but one stood stiffly defiant. Dragos regarded the Elf through lowered eyelids as the healer hissed, “My lord, we’ve barely begun to try. If you could only give us more time to experiment . . .”

“We don’t have time,” Calondir said bitterly. “Do as Cuelebre says. Move back and let him examine Threidyr.”

Fortunately looks couldn’t kill, and Dragos did not have a single finer feeling for the Elf to hurt. When the way had been cleared, he stepped forward and Miguel followed.

They had tied the male to a simple upright chair, his arms strapped to the wooden arms. Urine and vomit stained the Elf’s clothes, although his screaming had faded when the healers had stopped doing whatever it was they had been trying to do to him. He stared dully into space, his face as slack and blank as all the others in the cells. Dragos noted that the bonds were carefully positioned to restrict but not injure. Their goal, then, was to recover the Elf, not to dig for information.

But his goal was not necessarily the same as the Elves’.

Careful to avoid the body liquids that smeared the stone floor, Dragos squatted in front of the Elf to examine him more closely. He took his time, and gradually the resentful muttering around him fell to silence. He ignored them, concentrating on the shards of Power in and around the male’s aura. The dragon took note of the male’s own Power first. Once he had identified it, he moved on to studying the rest.

The Elf’s aura held a lingering taint of the Machine that was interwoven with another, third identity. Much as he was interested in locating the Machine itself, he was less interested in the aftereffects of its use. Instead, he filtered that out carefully until he could concentrate all his attention on that last thread of Power. The dragon savored the taste of it like it was the blood of his prey.

And in a way it was.

That’s who you are, he said silently. Amras Gaeleval, adept at persuasion and beguilement, and fire. It appears that we might have a few things in common, you and I. And no matter how you might change your looks, or where you go and what you do, I will know you again now.

Anywhere.

He could kill the Elf in the chair with the twist of his mind, and he could kill the others in the holding block too, quicker than they could do anything in retaliation but inflict incidental damage. He would not be who and what he was if he didn’t at least consider the fact that he had unprecedented access, not only to Calondir but also to several key remaining Elves in this demesne.

And the unforgiving part of him that knew how to nurture a grudge wanted to. Oh, it wanted to.

Instead, he said, “I can try to remove the lingering beguilement from him and the others, but you must understand I can only try, not promise. Both Gaeleval’s Power and the Machine he used are threaded into their core identities. Gaeleval had to go deep to establish the kind of control that would make them turn weapons on their own family and friends.”

“What would happen if you can’t remove it?” Calondir asked.

“Oh, I can remove it,” Dragos said. He straightened lightly from his crouch and turned to the High Lord. “The question is whether or not it will break their minds if I did.”

“My lord!” the healer exclaimed. “I beg of you, do not allow this. Give us more time to try!”

Dragos regarded the healer indifferently. Then he said to Calondir, “Personally, I do not care which you choose. But if you give your healers time to study this, they will only come to the same conclusion I just have. The beguilement cannot be completely removed without some risk to the victims.” He met Calondir’s sharp gaze. “You will lose more people here. That is a fact, unless you want to leave them as they are, in which case you will have lost them all, for the only thing you have contained here are their bodies.”

The Elves began to talk over each other and argue. Dragos turned away.

As he did so, the male bound in the chair whispered, “He knew you would come, Beast.”

Dragos spun back around. He ignored the others’ reactions as he stared at the Elf. The bound male’s gaze was blank as ever, and a thin line of drool spilled from his slack lips. “Why does this not surprise me?” he murmured.

A woman’s voice spoke from one of cells. “He saw you when he spoke his manifesto, just as you heard him.”

Another woman, across from the first, said, “Then he saw your mate and unborn son.”

At the mention of Pia and the baby, a fiery red haze obscured Dragos’s sight. “Yes,” he said between his teeth. “And Gaeleval tried to take them like he took the others.”

Dead, he thought. You are dead.

Another male from down the hall said, “They would have been a worthy addition to his cause, their lights turned to new purpose and grand change.”

“Grand change,” he said.

Taliesin, the god of gods, was god of the Dance, of change. Dragos prowled down the hall, looking at the caged empty shells of the Elves’ bodies. Someone who stood by Calondir was weeping. Dragos quoted softly to himself, “‘Lord Death himself has forgotten that he is but a part of this fractured whole.’” He pivoted and stalked back to the High Lord. “Calondir, which of the Deus Machinae did Numenlaur possess in the war?”

“Taliesin’s,” Calondir said. He was pale, his expression drawn stark. “Camthalion of Numenlaur was the one who insisted we rid ourselves of the Machinae. We all agreed to the pact then Numenlaur closed itself off from the world.”

Threidyr, bound to the chair, whispered, “The guardian fulfilled his duty and barred the passage with a flaming sword so that none could enter. Thereafter he stood vigil at the gate for an age, until the time came to pass that this all must pass.”

“I think I’m hearing a little manifesto starting to creep back into the conversation again,” said Dragos. He looked at Calondir. “At a wild guess I would say Numenlaur did not live up to their part in the pact.”

Calondir said, “Camthalion was so persuasive and insistent, I always thought that of all of us, they would have been the ones to keep to their word.”

Dragos rubbed his mouth as he considered Gaeleval’s mouthpieces. It did not surprise him that Numenlaur might not have fulfilled their part in the pact. What was more surprising to him was the possibility that they might have held on to Taliesin’s Machine successfully for all of this time.

Holding on to an item that belonged to the god of change would have been a challenging task. How would Taliesin’s Power have affected the minds in Numenlaur over all these many centuries? What changes would it have caused physically? The longer it had been held in stasis, the more dangerous it would have become, and the more drastic would be the change it now induced.

“You know they’re going to starve if you don’t remove the beguilement,” Dragos said. “They’re shells right now, just mouthpieces. They won’t remember to eat.”

“Beast,” hissed one of the women in the cells. “For the first time in your existence, you are truly vulnerable. Be careful what you meddle in. Nothing shines forever.”

“Go home,” three of them said.

Then others picked it up until the whole group spoke in eerie unison.

Go home, go home.

This time when rage took Dragos over, nothing would hold him back. Nobody threatened Pia and the baby and lived to tell of it. Nobody. He looked at all the empty shells of people in the cells. “That’s it,” he said. “You’re done.”

He began to whisper, picking the echo of it up with his Power. It reverberated off the walls, the ceiling and the floor, slipped through the bars in the cells and soaked through the invisible bonds in each person’s mind.

Someone in a cell halfway down the hallway laughed sharply. A few others sobbed. At first Calondir, his healers and the guards looked confused, but when a woman began shrieking and throwing herself violently against the wall, a few raced forward to stop her from hurting herself.

“My lord, stop him!”

“No,” Calondir said. He told Dragos, “Break the beguilement.”

Throughout it all, the dragon whispered, whispered, whispered. Breathe on your own, he told them. Be who you were. Act, live. Separate.

He spoke of freedom and remembrance as he tugged at the threads of Power from Taliesin’s Machine. When he pulled out those threads, there was nothing left to sustain Gaeleval’s spell.

Half were unconscious when he finished, and he knew that three were dead. Their bodies would be more fuel for those who hated and resented him.

As far as he was concerned, he had learned what he had come to learn. He gestured to Miguel and turned to leave the Elves to their chaotic reactions. As he did so, a runner came down to the block, bearing more news.

The Wyr had arrived.