Bram grimaced, his face pained. “No. That is Mathias.”
The words struck Marrok like a stake to the heart. Fear unlike any he’d ever felt swarmed him, thick and choking. “The bastard was in league with Mathias. Bloody hell! I knew it.”
“Either Richard is plotting with Mathias or his past finally caught up with him after he tried to steal Olivia away.”
Marrok sank to Bram’s stylish sofa, dread charring out his belly. “Jesu, Mathias has my mate.”
“Indeed,” Bram whispered.
Aye, he knew exactly what Mathias enjoyed. He’d heard it in Bram’s vision, seen enough pictures of the maggot’s torment of women to haunt him. The thought of him doing the same to his mate, his Olivia…It was a battering ram, shattering and painful. Murderous didn’t begin to cover how Marrok felt.
He dropped his head to his hands.
“I must save her.” He looked at Bram with bleak eyes. Marrok hated showing anyone his weakness, but now, at this moment, the only thing that mattered was having Olivia returned to him safe and whole.
“We’ll try.”
Marrok shook his head. “Try will not do. I am willing to give the bastard the book. Tell the damn bird that.”
Bram grabbed his arm. “You can’t.”
“The bloody hell I can’t! If I wish to surrender it to save the woman I love—” Marrok realized what he had just admitted aloud and fell silent.
If Bram knew his feelings, chances were Richard did as well. Olivia was being used against him.
“Giving Mathias the book is no guarantee he’ll spare Olivia. Surrendering the book puts magickind in the utmost jeopardy. This is the very event I sought to avoid when I formed the Doomsday Brethren. Innocents will die. Chaos will rule. Humans will be slaughtered for sport. Please…”
Every word Bram uttered raked at Marrok’s insides. Once upon a time, he would have rejoiced at the thought of magical beings suffering, but after spending time with Bram and the others, training them to be warriors in the most human sense of the word, he could not stomach being the one to ensure their deaths.
“Those things are happening already,” Marrok choked.
“Yes. I just don’t know what kind of license this would give Mathias to kill. He may know more about the diary than we do. If so, there’s every chance he could bring about Doomsday.”
“But what can I do? I will not simply let my mate die at the hands of an evil butcher. Can you magically bind the book, make it impossible for him to use it?”
Bram froze, then his eyes widened. “That’s it!”
“You can?”
“Not exactly. But we couldn’t write in the diary. Doubtful Mathias will be able to.”
“Aye, but he likely knows he will be unable to write in it.”
“Perhaps, but…” Bram raced across the room. A moment later, a door emerged. Bram climbed in. Before Marrok could follow, the wall solidified again.
“Bram?”
Less than a minute later, the wizard appeared again, this time holding an ancient tome.
“What is that?” Marrok asked.
“Dear old Merlin’s writings. They’re more cryptic than helpful, so I didn’t give them much credence, but…” Bram flipped pages, then stopped near the middle of the book. “Ah, here Merlin says something about him being too much of a man to use the book. All along, I believed he was being a bit of a macho sod. But given what Olivia learned about the diary as an object of feminine reverence and that we failed to wield it, I began thinking. Morganna’s writings are loaded with rants about men and their ferocious desire for power.”
“She wanted to be a man’s sole focus. She hated that I had more desire to make war than to make love to her again.”
“Exactly.” Bram smiled. “Merlin said that she sought to create something more powerful than men. Again, I interpreted this to mean that she planned to make the book awe-inspiring in every way, but I think she meant something else.”
Marrok paused, his mind racing. “She made it impossible for a man to use?”
“Yes. Neither of us could write in it.”
“Why would Mathias seek what he cannot use?”
“At the moment, he has your mate. I’m sure, in his head, if he can trick us into giving him the book, too, he’ll have the world at his fingertips. If not, the Anarki have enough female followers. He’ll find someone whose magic connects with it.”
“How will he know who?”
Bram shrugged. “Sabelle!”
She appeared a few moments later looking disheveled, her swollen mouth sultry and smiling. Bram grimaced, but he managed to maintain the peace and say nothing.
“Write in this.”
Sabelle picked up the pen from the table slowly. “This book? The Doomsday Diary? Are you mad?”
Bram nodded. “Go on.”
Sabelle hesitated. Swallowed. “All right, then. Write what?”
“A wish. A simple one.”
Wearing an expression that clearly said she thought both of them were mental, Sabelle wrote a quick wish that the missing button on her blouse was repaired. A moment later, the button appeared exactly where it should have been and the words on the page disappeared.
She blinked. “Amazing!”
“Write there that you’d like Olivia back with her mate,” Bram pressed.
“Please,” Marrok pressed. “She is in Mathias’s hands.”
“Oh my God,” she gasped, then quickly pressed the pen to the page.
Long moments later, she laid the book on the table between them again. The page was blank, but Olivia was nowhere to be found.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The wish is too big for my magic,” Sabelle said. “I’m likely just not powerful enough.”
“It makes sense. Like casting any enormous spell, it must be your heart’s deepest desire.”
Sabelle sent a guilty glance to Marrok. “I’m sorry. I adore Olivia. I want her back with you.”
“But it is not the most earnest wish in your heart. I understand.” Even if he was bitterly disappointed.
“But Marrok, you must see what I mean? Even without Olivia, Mathias can find some way to use this book.”
“But with someone who’s both female and le Fay, it would be stronger.”
“Yes.” Bram was solemn once again. “For her, I suspect, the book’s power would have no limit.”
“We must keep her separated from the book.”
Bram nodded. “Mathias isn’t daft. He suspects that Olivia plays a role in using the diary.”
“I cannot leave her to him. If the book is useless to him without her…I can give up the book, not the woman. Not my mate.”
With a somber expression, Bram clapped him on the shoulder. “If you give up the book, you surrender all hope of ending your hellish immortality.”
“If something happens to Olivia, I will be in a hell worse than I’ve ever experienced. I can live forever, knowing I had her heart. She is worth any sacrifice.”
As soon as he uttered the words, Marrok realized they were true.
“I think we pretend to give the diary to Mathias. The rest of the Doomsday Brethren will ensure that we get both the book and the woman back.”
“I would not ask you to risk yourselves for me. I’m immortal; I cannot die no matter how badly I’ve wished to. She is my woman, and this is my fight.”
“Uniting to defeat Mathias and protecting the book, regardless of the risk, are the reasons I created this group. You joined, so that includes you. Your mate isn’t immortal, and you know that what Mathias can do to a woman will rip your heart out and haunt you forever.”
Unfortunately, he did. All he could hope now was that he and the Doomsday Brethren could save her before it was too late.
Two a.m. Marrok entered the low-ceilinged tunnel. Dim lights shone overhead, so ineffectual he could not see his feet. In the middle of the tunnel, the lights simply stopped. Beyond lay complete darkness. With a pounding heart and the Doomsday Diary tucked in a pack strapped over his leather jacket, he put one foot in front of the other.
His boot heels echoed as they struck the brick floor. He could feel that he wasn’t alone.
The smell inside the tunnel, dank with an awful mixture of dirt and sewage, nearly made him choke. The thought of Olivia being here twisted his guts. He, who had felt virtually nothing for centuries, was nearly consumed with the anxiety and fury scalding his veins. In order to win, he would have to channel his energy and decimate his enemy.
He had to finish this. Presumably, Bram, Ice, Caden, and Duke had his back both figuratively and literally. None was more than a few feet behind him, concealed outside the tunnel. Of course, they were bound to protect the book at all costs.
“Stop there,” a voice in the darkness beyond commanded.
Marrok halted and felt a strong invisible presence barge into his brain, overbearing, destructive, evil. The intruder tried to scan his thoughts. Marrok blanked his mind and gave a hard mental shove to the intruder.
The voice laughed, and Marrok could feel the icy drips of his amusement.
“I could push my way into your thoughts if I wished.”
Marrok wasn’t here to play. “You want the book more. Show me my mate.”
To his right, one of the soulless Anarki ambled from the darkness, clutching Olivia in his decaying grip. She looked pale and disheveled and, with dilated violet eyes, frightened out of her head. But she was alive.
“Tsk, Marrok of Cadbury. Of course she is alive. I do not make a habit of killing women—at least not right away. There are far better uses for them.”
He’d kill the evil prick if he’d touched or hurt Olivia. He’d hunt that voice down to the ends of the earth and find some way to destroy him. But not now. It took all he had to control his temper and stand mute. For Olivia’s sake, he did.
“How touching, your desire to defend your mate. Don’t you think it’s ironic that you should fall in love with a woman from the very line who cursed you?”
“Olivia is not Morganna.”
“If it pleases you to believe one le Fay isn’t like the next…” Mathias mocked. “Then we’ll get on with business. Hand me the book.”
“Give me my mate.”
The voice hesitated. “A classic impasse.”
Suddenly, the disembodied voice stepped into the light. Younger than expected. Darkness and power rolled off him, a calling card that would flatten most. Marrok towered a good ten centimeters above the man, and likely outweighed him by more than three stone.
But this man was deeply magical, down to his marrow. It vibrated from his very skin, sending chills down Marrok’s spine.
Immortality would help him, Marrok knew, but this enemy held his Achilles’ heel—Olivia—in an evil grip.
“I am outnumbered,” Marrok pointed out. “Nor am I magical. We will have to leave here on foot. While you could zap me away the moment I surrendered the diary.”
“True. Are you alone?”
Before he could answer, Marrok felt a stealthy tiptoe into his mind. Slick. Barely detectable. He purposely pictured Bram back in his office and Ice and Duke squaring off on the training field, foils in sweat-drenched hands. And he thought of absolutely nothing else.
“Of course,” he lied.
“I’m not certain I believe you.”
Marrok shrugged. “Bram saved me when the Anarki called upon my house uninvited. I repaid the favor by teaching his men to fight. We are not friends, but now we are even.”
Mathias appeared to mull that over, then glanced over his shoulder. “Is this true?”
A second figure walked from the shadows, into the dim buzz of light drizzling down. Black hair brushing his shoulders, leather all around, dark sunglasses concealing his eyes to all.
“Shock,” Marrok growled.
He dismissed Marrok with a tight smile. “He and Bram are not friends. About that, he does not lie.”
“Still, Bram wants the book for his own.”
With a nod, Shock confirmed Mathias’s suspicions.
“You snake,” Marrok hurled at him.
Shock shrugged as if completely bored by the conversation. “My family has ties to Mathias and his cause. I’m making Mummy and Daddy very proud. Besides, I owe Mathias a great thanks for a recent favor. It was simple enough to repay him with a bit of information and the agreement to fight you on his behalf. Nothing personal.”
Marrok took it very personally. He might have been able to outwit the wizard since Mathias did not know him. Shock, the traitor, knew enough to make that improbable. Lucan had tried to tell Bram, tell them all.
“Escort our guest to her mate’s side and hold her there until he brings the book to me.”
“Nay,” Marrok protested. “I give you the book once she leaves the tunnel unharmed.”
“I’ve given you my terms. Take them or watch her die.”