She quivered with it, shocked, angry at the intensity, at her inability to shove it down again.
She’d run after all, she thought, but before she could move, he whirled, the sword on his back out of the sheath and into his hand with a bright shiver of metal.
His eyes met hers. Hers, keen, caught the embarrassment, then the annoyance in his before he controlled it.
“You’re lucky I didn’t have the bow. I might’ve shot a bolt.” He lowered the sword but didn’t sheathe it. “I thought you’d be inside by now. It’s past one in the morning.”
As if she had a curfew.
“Bran dealt with the door, so you can get in on your own. And as you didn’t think of it yourself, Sasha opened your bedroom door, shut the ones to your balcony.”
He wanted her to go—she could plainly see—and her preference was to give him what he wanted, as she wanted the same. But he looked unbearably lonely standing there, the sword shining in his hand, with his family buried under his feet.
She moved toward him, through the headstones, over the uneven grass.
“I’m not after company,” he began, but she simply stood, as he did, looking down at the grave. Lichen had grown on the headstone, pretty as the flowers beneath it.
Aoife Mac Cleirich
“My mother,” Doyle said when she sat beside him. “I came back and stayed until she died. My father, there beside her, died two years before her. I wasn’t here for her when she lost him.”
He fell into silence again, finally slid his sword back in its scabbard. “At least you can’t talk me blind or argue.” Doyle lifted his brows when she turned her head, stared coolly. “You do just that, at every possible opportunity. You see there she was sixty-three when she died. A good long age for the times she lived in, for a woman who’d birthed seven children. She outlived three of them, and each who left the world before she did left a hole in her heart. But she was strong, my mother. A strong woman.
“Beautiful,” he added. “You saw that yourself from Sasha’s drawing. But that wasn’t the image of her I’ve been carrying with me all this time. That one was of age and illness, of a woman ready to move on. I don’t know if it’s good or not to have the image replace that of her young and vibrant and beautiful. Does it matter at all?”
She leaned against him a little, a kind of comfort. Without thinking, he laid a hand on her head. And she let him.
“I believe there’s an after. With all I’ve seen there’s no choice but to believe it. And that’s a hell for me knowing I can’t reach it. But it’s helpful to know they have. Or sometimes it’s helpful. It’s easier not to think of it at all. But today . . .”
He broke off a moment, took a breath. “You see there, how Annika laid the flowers and the stones on every grave here. On my mother’s she put them down in the shape of a heart. Christ but Sawyer’s a lucky man. He’ll have a lifetime of sweetness. So Annika came out and gave them this respect, this sweetness, this remembrance. How could I not come and stand here, even knowing they’re not here?”
He looked down, stared at his own hand a moment, then quickly lifted it off her head, stuck it in his pocket. “We need sleep. I’m going to work your asses off come morning.” At her snort he gave her a thin smile. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”
He turned with her, walked back to the house and inside, switching off the kitchen light as they walked through.
Up the back steps, he as quiet as the wolf.
She veered off to her room, gave him one last look before nudging the door closed.
He walked to his own, wondering why he’d said so much, why he’d felt compelled to say so much. And why now he felt lighter of heart for having done so.
In his room he opened his doors to the night, lit the fire more for the pleasure of having one than for warmth. As a matter of habit, he propped his sword beside the bed, within reach, with his crossbow and a quiver of bolts beside it.
He expec
ted no trouble that night, but believed, absolutely, in always being prepared for the unexpected.
He stripped down, switched off the lights. By moon and firelight he lay in bed, let his thoughts circle for a moment. But since they circled to the wolf, and the woman inside it, he shut them off as routinely as he had the lights. With a soldier’s skill, he willed himself to sleep.
He often dreamed. Sometimes his dreams took him back to childhood, sometimes back to wars, sometimes more pleasantly back to women. But the dreams that chased through sleep flashed and burned. The witch’s lair, his brother’s blood, the shocking pain of the curse hurled at him that for one agonizing moment had seemed to boil him from the inside out.
Battlefields littered with the dead, more than a few by his own hand. The stench of war, so much the same whatever the century, the weaponry, the field. That was blood, death, fear.
The first woman he’d allowed himself to love, a little, dying in his arms, and the child she’d died for stillborn. The second woman he’d risked, a century later, growing old and bitter with it.
Dying, the pain of it. Resurrection, the pain of it.
Nerezza, the hunt, around the world, across time. Battling with five he’d come to trust. More blood, more fear. Such courage.