Nightbred

A dark-haired woman he had never before seen appeared in the mirror closest to him.

“You were my son.” Grave dirt fell from her lips as she spoke, and ghosts danced in her gray eyes. “But I sent you away, and died alone and frightened.”

At least this apparition had it wrong. “You are not my mother.”

“The lady Blanche did give birth to you, my son.” The priest held the woman’s hand as she stepped out of the mirror. “For your safety and her own, she convinced her cousin Gwynyth to hide you at court while she used your existence to blackmail several lovers. Unfortunately she went too far by demanding marriage from a duke.” The priest paused to brush some of the cobwebs from her shoulders. “He buried her alive in one of his family tombs.”

One of the few things impossible to do in the nightlands was lie, and this impossible truth outraged Lucan. “Do you know what Gwynyth did to me? The hell she made of my boyhood?”

“Gwynyth saved your life by naming you her son,” the priest told him. “Had she not, the duke would have seen to it that you joined your mother permanently.”

Lucan watched the dark woman fade away. “I did well enough without a mother.”

“So you did. You with your killing touch and your cold heart.” The priest made the sign of the cross over him. “You who were to become Death. Darkness has no need, my son.”

“I am a man,” Lucan said, “not darkness or death, or your son.”

“I would have been your father, but for your mother, who told me that you were Tremayne’s get.” His mirror image swelled and reshaped its form into a broader, older version of himself with glowing green eyes. “When he brought damnation to me, he denied being your sire, and told me you had been changed. On that night I lost the last remnant of my faith.”

Lucan knew the nightlands made the priest’s words the truth . . . or he believed what he said to be true.

“If by this tedious babbling you are attempting some manner of apology, you are seven centuries too late.” Lucan ignored a sharp crack that shifted the glass floor beneath him. “I have no need for a father.”

“Darkness has no need.” The priest moved his gloved hand over the face of one of the standing mirrors, which darkened to show Samantha shackled inside a small cage. “Your woman has been taken prisoner by your nameless enemy.” He reversed his hand, and Christian appeared, hurled to the deck before Samantha, who assumed a protective position over the girl. “So, too, the child she loves as a sister. Do you know what he does to women, your enemy?”

“Release me.” When the priest said nothing, Lucan seized him by the throat, and a shower of crystal death rained down around them. “Goddamn you, let me out of here.”

Dark metal oozed out of the older man’s pores, covering his skin and robe until he became a copper statue of himself. Lucan held on, snarling as more crystal fell and sliced through his flesh, and the hand he had wrapped around the priest’s throat became engulfed in flame and blackened.

“You are spellbound here by the one who means to take your kingdom from you,” the priest said, his voice grinding over the words like rusted metal. “It is not within my power to free you.”

“So you are as useless to me here as you were in life. How astonishing.” Lucan flung the priest from him as his rage boiled over, pulverizing the crystal blades embedded in his flesh. His images on wall after wall exploded, filling the air with clouds of sparkling shards and stripping the copper facade from the priest.

Lucan destroyed the world around them, until the gray void descended, obliterating everything but him and the priest, their wounds erased, their garments restored.

“You believe I am useless, and perhaps I am,” the priest said. “But this I can tell you, my son: I, too, have terrible powers, and for the love of a woman used them to destroy myself. You will come to a moment when you know these things, and only then will you understand me.”

The priest vanished.

“If that preposterous idiot is punishment for my sins, then I salute your genius at torture.” He was talking out loud to a God he no longer worshipped; surely madness had already begun to set in. Bespelled or not, he had to fight his way back to consciousness, find the women, and attend to his enemy.

Endless as the void seemed, Lucan knew it to be but a veil between worlds. He tempered his anger, gathering himself and focusing his thoughts on one objective: to awaken.

Centuries of self-discipline permitted him to move through that which was immovable, and gradually emerge from the clinging nothingness into a distant sense of his physical body. He could feel all around him his stronghold, his men, the club. With a final surge of will, he came to awareness, although he still remained outside his body, only hovering near it.

The enemy had taken him over, mind and body, and had draped him over an armchair sitting in the center of the dance floor. A bottle of bloodwine dangled from his right fist; in his left gleamed a copper-clad sword. Lucan recognized the weapon as Turner’s finest work: a gift the weapons master had presented to him when he had joined the jardin. He swiped it through the air and drank from the bottle as twenty of his men stood in defensive positions around him.

Aldan glanced back at the impostor. “Someone has broken through the front line, my lord.”

“It is the boy, I wager. Disarm him, but do not kill him,” Lucan heard himself command. “He has knowledge I must have.”

The doors to the club flung open, and Jamys Durand stepped inside, the daggers in his hands wet with fresh blood. The boy turned briefly to bar the door before he moved forward and inspected the interior of the club. He then leveled his gaze on the impostor.

“Where is she?”

* * *

When Thierry Durand had gone mad, Jamys had understood the reason for it. The hideous tortures inflicted on his father by the Brethren were nothing compared with the agony of believing Angelica was dead. The bond between Darkyn lord and sygkenis was absolute; severing it resulted in insanity. That his father in his deranged state had somehow bonded a second time, with Jema, had been a miracle, and the saving of him.

Jamys had known he was doomed from the moment the voice of the same Kyn he had contacted through Gifford had come into his head. You will not interfere, boy. He had struggled even as he felt his limbs growing numb and leaden. To his shame, he could do nothing but watch as Lucan dragged Christian out of the room.

Not even at the mercy of the Brethren inquisitors had he felt so helpless—or enraged.

It didn’t matter to Jamys that Christian was mortal, and the bond between them imperfect. She was his woman, his wife, his love. And for taking her from him, Lucan would die.

The Kyn held Jamys captive in his own body until the sound of the speedboat faded from the air, and then released him as suddenly as he had taken him over.

He takes her to his stronghold, his voice purred. She belongs to Death now.

She is mine. At the instant he regained control of his body, Jamys flung himself out of the bed and dragged on his garments. He ran from the house to the pier, searching the dark, empty waters. As he climbed onto the boat and cast off, he could smell her in the air, her scent permeated with love and terror.

He engaged the engine, and sailed from the island to the mainland, dropping anchor just beyond the shallows and diving from the deck into the chilly waters. He swam to the beach, emerging at a flat run for the nearest vehicle he saw, a sedan sitting at a traffic light.

The driver’s eyes widened as Jamys wrenched open the locked door. “What do you think you’re—” His voice cut off as soon as Jamys clamped a hand on his shoulder.

You want to give me the car and walk to your destination.

“Here, take it,” the man said as he unfastened his seat belt and climbed out. “I’m going to walk home.”

Jamys got in, slammed the door, and drove, swerving between two cars turning in front of him. As brakes screeched and angry voices shouted, he pressed the accelerator to the floor, speeding away.

Lights, cars, and buildings became a blur as Jamys drove north. Dimly he felt the seawater dripping from his clothes to soak the seat beneath him. He carried but two daggers, and as a mortal with an annoying voice crooned a holiday song from the dashboard, he clenched his fist and rammed it into the console, silencing the radio.

Lucan had a stronghold, a garrison, and the most dangerous weapon of all, his killing hands. Jamys had a car, two daggers, and a power that affected only mortals. He could almost hear his father’s voice: Be rational, my son. This is suicide.

The voice was his father’s, but not the sentiments. More than any other warrior, his father would understand this.

Should by some narrow chance you save the girl, she will never be yours, his mother whispered. You are destined to live forever. She was born to die. Forget her. Save yourself.

By betrayal his mother had saved herself when she had been captured by the Brethren. She’d won her freedom by becoming their agent and luring countless Kyn into the hands of the enemy. Knowing they would die slow, hideous deaths by torture, she’d done the same to her entire family. How easy it had been for her to tear apart the bonds of marriage and motherhood. . . .

The car slowed as Jamys recalled how his mother had changed after the trip to Italy. The separation from his sygkenis had driven Thierry to the brink of madness; being reunited with her had brought him back to sanity. Angelica had seemed equally relieved, and in the celebrations that followed, no one questioned what they might have under more ordinary circumstances.

Before the journey to Italy, Angelica had been cool and reserved; after returning, she had lavished her attentions on Thierry, often embarrassing the entire household with her wanton behavior. She began to berate the mortal servants she had always treated well, and took to punishing them for even the slightest mistakes—but never in front of Thierry.

Jamys had been alarmed by the changes in his mother’s character, but when he spoke to his father about them, Thierry had dismissed them as temporary, the lingering effects of the separation. 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">