Frostfire

If he understood anything, it was the rage.

Someone called his name, the name he had almost forgotten, and it sounded so strange to his ears that he stopped and sought out the source.

“Guy of Guisbourne,” Gabriel Seran repeated. “Stay where you are.”

He glanced at Lilah, who looked back at him, her cold eyes filled with confusion. “I will not fight you, Seran. Only give me leave to bid my lady farewell.”

“Oh, so now he goes noble,” Seran’s white-haired companion muttered.

Gabriel looked from Guy to his woman, and nodded.

“Walker?” Lilah moved toward him as if in a dream, and then she was running, her hair streaming behind her like scarlet silk ribbons, and when he caught her, she uttered a raw, terrible sound, the sound of a heart breaking, the sound of a wounded animal. “You’re alive.”

“Hush.” He held her close, kissing her brow, her hair, every part of her face he could reach. “Lilah, I love you. I have loved you from the moment I looked into your eyes, and all I regret is that I was too much of a coward to tell you.”

Bewildered animals began to mill around them, slinking off into the trees, followed by the equally confused werebeasts.

“I knew you did. I could feel it.” She smiled up at him. “Took you long enough to tell me, though.”

“I would like nothing more than to spend the rest of my life telling you,” he assured her, “but I must leave you now.”

“Leave me?”

“My people have laws,” he said softly. “Laws I have broken too often. Now the time has come that I must pay for my crimes. I am not afraid of death, Lilah. I am only sorry that I must leave you like this.”

“But you can’t.” Tears filled her eyes. “Walker—Guy—don’t you remember? Where you go, I go.”

“I will be waiting for you, my heart. I swear it.” He kissed her brow, and then turned to look at Gabriel. “My lord, please let her be taken away now.”

Ethan and Nathan Jemmet joined them, and Nathan picked up Samuel as if he weighed nothing. “I’ll take him to Dad,” he told his brother.

Ethan nodded and, after exchanging a glance with Guy, put his arm around Lilah. “Come on, honey. Let’s go back to town.”

Guy kissed her one last time, and then walked over and knelt in front of Gabriel.

When Gabriel drew his sword from the sheath on his back, Guy heard a scuffle, and glanced back to see Ethan sprawled on the ground and Lilah marching toward him. She knelt on the ground beside him, seizing his hand and snapping Ethan’s handcuffs around his wrist. Before he could stop her, she snapped the other side around her own.

“You have to kill me, too,” she said, brushing her hair back from her neck.

“Mademoiselle, you are not Kyn,” Gabriel said kindly. “I am not permitted to kill humans.”

“Then you might want to see this, lover.” Gabriel’s sygkenis tore open Guy’s shirt, revealing the chest wound that was still bleeding. To Guy, she said, “Open your mouth.” When he did, she angled his head back and made a tsking sound. “His wounds are open and his palate is closed.” She sniffed him. “He smells nice, but he’s not Kyn.”

Gabriel lowered his sword. “Nicola, we both know this is Guy of Guisbourne.”

“Do we? He looks a little like him around the eyes, but Guy was nowhere near this big.” She gave his shoulder a friendly slap. “I’d say he has a good fifty, sixty pounds on Guy. Add that to the still-bleeding wound and the lack of fangs, and I think you get a human, right?”

“Miss Jefferson.” Guy wasn’t sure what to say. “I am not a coward.”

“See, that proves it.” Nick wagged her finger at him. “Everyone knows what a horrible, selfish, cowardly coldhearted bastard Guisbourne was. You, you’re kissing a girl and telling her you love her and spouting all kinds of mushy stuff. You’re crawling with human cooties.” She turned to Gabriel. “Well, my lover? What do you think?”

“I think you may be right,” Gabriel said, and frowned at Guy. “What did you say your name was, human?”

“It’s Devereaux,” Lilah said quickly. “First name, ah, to be decided at a later date.”

Guy turned to her. “You would give me your name?”

“Why not?” She grinned, lifting their arms and rattling the chain between their handcuffs. “I am very attached to you.”

Still not completely convinced of his reprieve, Guy looked at the Darkyn lord and his lady. “What will you tell Richard?”

“The truth,” Nicola said. “Guy of Guisbourne is dead, the weather in Denver sucks, and small-town America is a lot livelier than I expected.” She glanced at the men lying in the road. “Now let’s see how many survivors we’re going to have to brainwash before we get out of here.”

Guy stood, and took Lilah in his arms. “I owe you my life.”

She kissed him. “Then spend the rest of it with me.”

Ethan and the townspeople began the cleanup almost immediately, but when Guy and Lilah came to help, the sheriff sent them to his office.

“Just to be on the safe side, you two should stay out of sight,” he said as he handed off one of the injured to his brother. “These people might have backup coming to see what’s taking them so long.” He nodded toward several burned bodies. “We’ll tell them that you were caught in the fire.”

Guy knew Lilah had questions, but when they reached the sheriff’s office, she simply led him into the back room and sat down with him on the cot there, wrapping her arms around him and resting against him as if that was all that mattered.

Hopefully it was, he thought as he set her away. “I wanted to tell you who I was before this. I should have told you, that first night.”

“I kept things from you, too,” she reminded him. “The past doesn’t matter to me. I know who you are.”

“You may change your mind.” He took her hand in his. “There is no place for secrets between us anymore.”

She nodded. “Then tell me everything.”

In the beginning telling her of his life as Guy of Guisbourne made him feel as if he were skinning himself alive. He forced out the story of his human life in England, and how he had fallen in love at first sight with Marian, the serenely beautiful daughter of one of his father’s allies. He told her of his cousin, Robin of Locksley, Marian’s childhood friend, and how violently he had reacted when he had learned of the betrothal Guy had forced on her.

“We both loved her, perhaps beyond reason, but in her heart there was room only for her devotion to Christ.” After centuries of denying it, he could say it now. “I refused to release her, so Robin stole her away on our wedding night, and I went mad.”

He described the frantic months he had spent searching for Marian, and the vengeance he had taken on Robin. Then the dull, gray years he had spent alone, bitter and uncaring, the plague that had taken him and transformed him into one of the dark kyn, and how his mother had used it to imprison him.

“She stole my birthright from me and gave it to my half brother,” he said. “I spent years in the dungeons, feeding on my mother’s enemies, while he took my place in the world. When I escaped, I fled to Italy, and there plotted to take back what belonged to me. But before I could return to England, my half brother instigated a war among the Kyn. When it was over, everyone who had fought with him—my entire family, all of my men and their kin—were put to death as traitors. Once more I lost everything that mattered to me.”

He didn’t spare her any of the details, admitting to the callous manner in which he had recruited Saracens from the Middle East, surrounding himself with men who had been the worst of the Kyn’s mortal enemies. He told her of the duality of his existence, wavering between meaningless depravity and equally empty violence. How often his anger had driven him out into the world, looking for any mortal battles to join, and how little fighting in those wars had meant to him. He described how he and his men had at last been driven from Italy to America, where he met Jayr, Robin’s daughter by Marian who had been changed to Kyn as well, and how the old, ugly jealousy had compelled him into an alliance with a madwoman bent on destroying the Kyn by wiping out humanity itself.

“In the end we had to strike a truce between us in order to stop her,” he admitted. “Robin nearly died in the attempt, and I was obliged to help save him. After that, I went to Marian’s grave to say good-bye, and found it empty. I had thought she might have survived, that she might have been changed like her daughter, but no. Her bones had been removed by her family and reburied under a church in England. When I finally found them, I knew there was nothing left for me to live for. And so I went to war one final time, in the hope that I would be killed in battle.”

“Which brought you here, to me,” she murmured.

“Yes.” Telling her of his past was as if he had crawled out from under a terrible, crushing weight, but he doubted that Lilah felt the same. “I have never been a good man, Lilah. I deserve to die many times over for the things I have done. Nicola and Gabriel may have spared me for your sake, but they do you no favor.”

“If you were still Guy of Guisbourne, maybe I’d agree,” she said slowly. “But that man died in Afghanistan. He died the moment you tried to save Walker Kimball’s life.”

He caressed her cheek. “Do you truly believe I wished to save him?”

“I know you did.” She turned her face and pressed her lips to his palm. “Because you saved my life, too.”

Tina crawled around the SUV to the driver’s side, and watched until no one was looking in her direction. Then she stood and opened the door.

“Sister, wait.”

She turned and saw Valori standing behind her. “Don’t you dare try anything.”

“I can take you back to Italy, and speak for you,” Valori said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I will explain things to the council. They will forgive you, and protect you, as long as you take your vows again. You can have your life back, Teresina.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">