And found Colin waiting for her in the family room. Obviously he’d woken with an appetite, as an empty bowl, plate, glass stood on the table.
A good sign, she thought, as was his color, the clear look to his hazel eyes.
“How’s the shoulder?”
He shrugged with the good one, lifted the other arm in its sling. “It’s fine. Mom says I have to wear this dumb-ass thing for the rest of the day, maybe tomorrow, so I don’t jerk it and screw things up. Pain in the ass.”
“She’d give you a bigger ass pain if you screwed things up.”
“Yeah.” He might be a fearless soldier, but he wasn’t stupid enough to take on their mother. “Hell of a fight, huh?”
She let him talk it out. He’d need to, she knew, as most of the men and women she’d visited in the clinic had needed to.
“We were basically on cleanup, you know? Man, we had them on their heels, Fal, on their fricking heels. This is when you were down in the torture chamber, right? Eddie said you were down there.”
He paced as he spoke—a nervous habit she understood, as she often did the same.
“So, a couple of the faeries are working on the locks on the cells because we’ve got it under control, right? You could hear some of them who were drugged to shit and back calling for help. And kids crying. Jesus.”
He paused at that. “Jesus, kids. You just never get over that part. Anyway, this guy drops down, put his hands up. I’m not going to neutralize some dude who’s surrendering, so I move in to take his weapons—he laid them down, for Christ’s sake. And, Jesus, Fallon, one of his own shoots him, and wings me before I could take him out.”
A soldier to the bone, one who’d formed a strong band of brothers—and sisters—in arms, Colin’s disgust came with a lacing of fury.
“He shot his own man. His own, unarmed, man. Who the fucking fuck does that?”
“True believers,” she said simply. “Don’t underestimate the true believer.”
“Well, whatever the son of a bitch believed, I believe he’s burning in hell now. He shot his own man, a man with his hands up. No threat. Anyway.” He gave her that one-shoulder shrug again. “We got them out. Did you talk to Clarence?”
“Yes. He’s doing fine.”
“Good. Good. I saw him go down, but I couldn’t get to him.”
“Most of our wounded have been treated and released. The others need a little more time in the clinic, but they’re going to be fine.”
“Yeah, Mom said. I think I’ll go into town, see how everybody’s doing anyway.”
“Tell Ethan so he can tell Mom and Dad if I’m still sleeping.”
“Sure.” With his free hand, he stacked the plate, bowl, glass, balanced them. Then his eyes met hers, warrior to warrior.
“It was a good mission. Three hundred and thirty-two prisoners freed.”
“Three hundred and thirty-three. One of them just had a baby.”
“No shit?” He grinned. “Good deal. See you later.”
She walked back to her room as he started upstairs. He’d been raised a farmer, she thought, one who loved basketball and bragging and finding little treasures. Once he’d claimed he’d be president. He wouldn’t, Fallon thought as she stripped to the skin. He was, and always would be, a soldier. And a damn good one.
She dragged on an oversize T-shirt she’d scavenged years before and used for sleep with a pair of boys’ boxers. After countless washings the image of the man and his guitar on the shirt had faded like a ghost. Her dad called him The Boss, said he’d been—or was, who knew?—a kind of rocking troubadour.
She didn’t have any musical talent, but she knew what it meant to be the boss.
So she slid into bed thanking the gods no one she loved or commanded had died. And as the voices, the stories, the nightmares of those she’d helped save rang in her head along with their fears, their gratitude, their tears, she ordered herself to shut them out.
And sleep.
* * *
She woke in moonlight with the chill of fall in the air. Fog grazed along the ground, thin smoke that wound through the stone circle. Frost, sharp as diamonds, sparkled on the high grass of the field.
The woods beyond rattled and moaned with the wind.
“Well.” Beside her, Duncan scanned the field, the woods, then turned to study her with dark green eyes. “This is unexpected. Did you pull me in?”
“I don’t know.”
She hadn’t seen him in nearly two years and then only briefly when he’d flashed back to New Hope to report. She knew he’d come back at Christmas to see his family because Tonia mentioned it.
He’d left New Hope two years ago come October, after the battle in the gardens when he’d lost a friend who’d been a brother to him. When she’d struck down her father’s brother, his murderer—and Simon Swift had finished him.
He’d gone to help train troops, to work with Mallick, her own teacher, at a base far enough away to give them both time and space.
“Well,” he said again. “Since we’re here.” He kept his hand on the hilt of his sword as he spoke, as he went back to scanning the woods, the shadows, the night. “I heard the rescue mission hit the marks. Big one,” he added, glancing at her again. “We could have helped.”
“There were enough of us to handle it. More are coming. You…”
He wore his hair longer than he had, she noted, or just hadn’t bothered with a trim. It curled over the collar of his jacket. He hadn’t bothered to shave, either, so his face—all the strong angles of it—carried a scruff.
She wished it didn’t suit him. She wished she didn’t feel this … want for him.
“Me?” he prompted.
“I’m disoriented. I don’t like it.” She heard the angry edge in her voice, didn’t care. “Maybe you pulled me in.”
“Can’t tell you. Wasn’t intentional either way. For me it was summer, evening. I was in my quarters thinking about capping off a long day with a beer. We’ve got a nice little brewery going on base. You?”
Ordering herself to calm, she answered in kind. “Summer, the day after the rescue. I’d just gotten home. I was sleeping. It could be evening by now.”
“Okay then, we’re likely on the same time both ways. It’s not summer here. MacLeod land, my mother’s blood’s land. The first shield, the one my grandfather broke.”
“The dark broke the shield. The boy and the man he became was a tool, innocent. He was innocent.”
Her voice changed, deepened, when a vision came on her. She changed, all but glowed. He’d seen it before. “Here she goes,” he murmured.
“You are of him, Duncan of the MacLeods. I am of him, for we are of the Tuatha de Danann. As our blood and the taint of the blood of what waits opened the shield to magicks, bright and dark, so will blood close it again.”
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
“Let’s get to it then.” He drew his knife from its sheath on his belt, prepared to score his palm.
“Not yet!” She gripped his arm, and he felt the power in her, through him, pumping. “You risk opening all, risk the end of all. Famine and flood, scorched earth and the ash of the world. There’s so much more to come. Magicks rising, light and dark, dark and light. The storm whirling, swords slashing.”
Now she laid her hand on his heart, and he felt too much. Every muscle in his body quivered when her eyes, dark with visions, met his. “I am with you, in battle, in bed, in life, in death. But not this night.
“Do you hear the crows?”
He looked up, watched them circling. “Yeah. I hear them.”
“They wait, it waits, we wait. But the time is coming.”
“Can’t come soon enough,” he muttered.
She smiled at him, and something in the look was sly and seductive and full of power.
“You think of me.”
“I think of a lot of things.” God, she made his mouth water. “Maybe you should snap out of it.”
“You think of me,” she repeated, and slid her hands up his chest until her arms circled his neck. “And this.”
Her body molded to his; her mouth brushed his once, twice. Teasing, alluring. A damn laugh in her throat. He ached everywhere, all at once, and wanted, needed more than he could bear.
“The hell with it. All of it.”
Now a sound like triumph in her throat as he took those offered lips.
She tasted of the wild, and made him crave it. The savage and the free, the unknown, the always known. Desperate, his hands ran up her body, over it—at last—while he changed the angle of the kiss, deepened it.
Crows circling overhead, the stones swimming through the fog, the wind like mad music over field and wood.
Hard against her, his heart beating like thunderclaps, he would have dragged her to that frost-coated ground, taken her at the entrance of doom.
But she knocked him back, and nearly off his feet with a sudden jolt of outraged power.
Breath heaving, he stared at her, saw the visions had drained. What stared back at him was a very pissed-off female.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Do you think we came here so you could move on me and—”
“I don’t know why the hell we’re here, but you’re not going to put that on me. You started it, sister. You moved on me.”
“I…”
He watched the temper change to confusion, then—some satisfaction, at least—some shock and shame.
“I wasn’t myself.”
“Bullshit. You’re always yourself, visions or not.” And he remained so hard, so damn needy he had to fight not to tremble with it. “The vision card doesn’t play for me.”
“I’m sorry.” She said it stiffly, but she said it. “I don’t know why…”
“More bullshit. We both know why. Sooner or later we’ll finish this and see if that takes care of it, or not. Meanwhile…”