“I’ll get more if you’ll see to Sawyer. His headache’s real enough. I can see it on him. And he’s carrying some ugly burns. Annika’s hurt more than she lets on.”
“Help Sawyer and Annika,” Sasha said. “I’ll help Doyle.”
“He’s in the kitchen with Annika.” Doyle glanced at Sasha. “I can handle bringing in the rest. You’ve got your own battle scars, Blondie.”
“Nothing major. I’m fine,” she told Bran. “The dizziness only lasted a couple minutes this time, and the rest can wait. I could use a glass of wine if you have it.”
“I do, of course. Let me see to him, then I’ll help you with the rest.”
She walked outside with Doyle, started to pick up more bags, then just stared out into the woods.
“She’ll be back once she’s run it off.” Doyle took a pull on his beer. “But you’d be happier with all your chicks in the roost.”
Sasha lifted her shoulders, let them fall. “I would. It’s been . . . a day.”
“Finding the second star should put a smile in your eyes instead of sorrow.”
“A year ago I was still denying what I was. I knew nothing of any of you, of gods—dark or bright. I’d never harmed anyone, much less . . .”
“What you fought and killed wasn’t anyone. They were things created by Nerezza to destroy.”
“There were people, too, Doyle. Humans.”
“Mercenaries, paid by Malmon to kill us, or worse. Have you forgotten what they did to Sawyer and Annika in the cave?”
“No.” Sasha hugged her arms tight against the quick chill. “I’ll never forget. And I’ll never understand how human beings would torture and try to kill for money. Why they’d kill or die for profit. But she does. Nerezza does. She knows that kind of greed, that blind lust for power. And I understand that’s what we’re fighting. Malmon, he traded everything for it. She took his soul, his humanity, and now he’s a thing. Her creature. She’d do the same to all of us.”
“But she won’t. She won’t because we won’t give her anything. We hurt her today. She’s the one wounded and bleeding tonight. I’ve searched for the stars, hunted her for more years than you can know. I got close, or thought I did. But close means nothing.”
He took another long pull from his beer. “I don’t like using fate or destiny as reasons or excuses, but the hard fact is we six are together, are meant to be. Are meant to find the Stars of Fortune and end Nerezza. You feel more than others. That’s your gift, and your curse, to see and to feel. And without that gift we wouldn’t be standing here. It doesn’t hurt that you can shoot a crossbow as if born with the bow in one hand and a bolt in the other.”
“Who’d have thought?” She sighed, a pretty woman with long, sunwashed hair and deep blue eyes. One who’d gained muscle and strength, inside and out, over the last weeks. “I feel your heartache. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“I know you were meant to be here, to walk this land again, to look out at this sea. And not just for the quest for the stars, not just for the fight against Nerezza. Maybe—I’m not sure—but maybe it’s for solace.”
Doyle shut down—that was survival. “What was here for me was long ago.”
“And still,” she murmured, “the coming here tonight is harder on you, and the getting here tonight was hardest on Riley.”
“Considering we’d just fought off a god and her murderous minions, it wasn’t a ride on a carousel for any of us. All right,” he said at Sasha’s quiet look, “rough on her.”
He put the empty beer bottle in the pocket of his scarred leather coat, hauled up suitcases. “She’ll run it off, and be back by morning. Grab what you can, and I’ll get the rest. We both know you’d be more help to Bran with the injuries.”
She didn’t argue, and he noted that she limped a bit. To settle it, he set the bags down inside, plucked her up.
“Hey.”
“Easier than arguing. Is the house big enough for you?”
They passed wide archways and the rooms beyond them. Deep, rich colors, simmering fires in hearths, glinting lights, gleaming wood.
“It’s magnificent. It’s huge.”
“I’d say the two of you will have to make a lot of babies to fill it.”
“I—”