"What happens then?"
"He'd have to be locked away in our dungeons," Garreth said. They should have known something was amiss with Bowen's first "mate" - since he'd still been able to carry on after he thought she'd died.... "That's why we doona change others into our kind - anyone newly made would have to learn to control the beast, a process that takes decades, if it works at all. We'd be forced to imprison them for all that time before we could even think of freeing them."
"Change others, like Rossiter."
"Exactly," Garreth said, not unmoved by the mortal's plight. "He's no' out of the game yet. Maybe he'll find his orchid - or a pretty immortal who does no' follow Lore rules...."
As the rain poured outside, they talked of other things, plotting what would happen tomorrow night when they arrived at Rio Labyrinto. With each stroke of her hair, her lids grew heavier, her expression soft and sleepy, until she finally drifted off.
Now he lay beside her with his head propped in his hand, lightly grazing his fingers up and down her sleek back. He exhaled, simply savoring the luxury of having her with him, in his bed, in his life.
But she didn't trust him. And that pained him.
When she whimpered, his brows drew together. Again, she suffered nightmares, her low cries building with the tempest brewing outside.
She was of a warrior race, and yet she was terrified, speaking in some old Norse tongue he didn't understand.
Who the hell had hurt his woman? Why did she refuse to tell him? His claws dug into his palms as he fought to control the beast within him, the beast that needed to punish any fuck who'd given her pain.
Chapter 32
When Crom had asked Lucia to come with him and leave Valhalla, she'd eagerly agreed, though she'd known that once a Valkyrie left that plane, she could never return.
Lucia was sixteen and in love. Nothing, not her godparents' warnings or Regin's pleading, could dissuade her. She'd wedded Crom with no reservations, despite his strange customs - they couldn't touch whatsoever until after they'd been married, and they had to wed in a bizarre stone temple with robed strangers all around.
At the altar, after they'd been joined forever, she'd turned to her beloved. And he'd vanished. In his place was one of the strangers with a raised club. He'd struck, knocking her unconscious.
Too late, Lucia had learned that Crom Cruach had never even been at the portal. Instead, he'd been trapped in a fetid lair in the earth, projecting the image of the fair-haired young man.
For as long as she'd been watching the sky, Cruach had been watching her. He'd needed a bride born of gods to beget heirs on, and like so many deities, he could project illusions for women he wanted to seduce.
When Lucia had awakened, she'd been trapped in his prison with her fair-haired man standing over her. Only then had Cruach unveiled his true self to her. His beautiful face had fallen away, revealing the Broken Bloody One.
A cloven-footed monster, Cruach clad himself in scraps of metal strung together, taken from his slaughtered victims' proud shields or armor. On his massive head, stringy white hair hung sparsely around horns that jutted up like giant splayed fingers. His face was ghoulish, his eyes yellow, slitted with red and running with pus.
He was broken, his body misshapen, his bones having fractured and healed at odd angles. But even with his hunched form, he stood seven feet tall. He was bloody as well - his scaly snakelike skin seeped blood and was rotting away in places, exposing those fused bones beneath.
A line of drool had dripped from the corner of his gaping mouth when he'd smiled down at her.
Once she'd been able to scream no more, she'd learned the truth about all his lies. He had told her he'd make her mistress of his castle and shower her with gifts. His "castle" was a corpse-strewn tunnel in a seaside cliff, thick with maggots and stench.
The gifts? Dead bodies and parts of them - ragged limbs, heads with sightless eyes. He intended for her to... eat them.
The adoration he vowed? Each day, his Cromites had prepared her body with vile rituals, marking her skin with blood, drawing sinister marks from the black arts all over her.
There was no escaping him. Cromite swordsmen guarded the entrance to the lair and the tunnel ended in a cliff two hundred feet above the ocean.
Toward the end of her captivity, she'd been so starved, her stomach had cleaved to her spine. "You go hungry?" Cruach had said, waving at the pools of oily blood and gruesome limbs. "When I give you meat and wine, my love?"
Once she'd begun to sicken with fever, she'd heard someone calling her name from down at the base of the cliff and thought it a delirium.
But it was all too real. Young Regin - who'd sensed Cruach's deception and had begged Lucia not to leave - had followed her out of Valhalla. Never to return, cast out forever. Lucia had wept to hear her sister's plaintive cries for her.
"How do I reach you, Lucia? I don't... I don't know how to get up there!"
Never would she have let Regin enter that place - even before Lucia's eventual wedding night....
As she weakly screamed, his followers laid her on his altar, holding her down. When he heaved himself above her, blood spilled from his mouth, from between gritted teeth, pouring over her face, into her eyes. His organ would rip her in two - she'd known he would kill her like this.
So long without food, with her heart racing with horror, she'd lost consciousness.
When she woke, he was roaring with fury, missing an eye. Beneath her claws were chunks of scaly skin. The Cromites had drawn their swords, leveling them at her.
With blood gushing down her thighs, she rolled off the altar into a pile of bodies. Flies erupted from the gore. She breathed them, hacking them from her lungs and mouth.
Somehow she made it to her feet, coughing, tears blinding her as she tried to stagger away through the line of Cromites. Knowing she was trapped, Cruach allowed her to go, snarling with rage at his pain, then laughing because he'd caused her more. "Do you think that was pain, wife? That was a mere hint! I'll teach you what misery is!"
She followed the tunnel to the very end. At the cliff's edge, she gazed out over the horizon, over the ocean. The first clean air she'd breathed in days.
Pure peace awaited her.... He couldn't pass this barrier, could never follow her down. When he yelled for her, she closed her eyes, and she leapt -
Hands snatched her shoulders, jerking her back.
No, no! That's not how it happened! She'd gotten free. Now he had her again!
She swiped out with her claws, desperate to jump... to die.
Chapter 33
"Lousha! Wake up!" Garreth reached to comfort her, grasping her shoulders. At the contact, electrical energy seared his fingertips just as her claws shot out, raking down his chest.
"What the hell?" He leapt back. "Lousha?"
When she opened her eyes, they were fully silver, glinting with tears.
"Shh, doona be afraid." He put his hands up as he neared her once more. "It's just me."
She collapsed back on the bed once more, staring blankly at the ceiling. When she closed her eyes, tear-drops tracked down her face, making his chest ache.
He could never stand the sight of the lass's tears. "Your dreams are getting worse." She'd only been asleep for an hour, a brief afternoon nap, and yet it'd been enough to affect her like this.
"I... I'm fine. I'll be okay," she assured him, even as lightning still flared outside.
He sat at the foot of the bed. "You must tell me what you dream of."
"We've discussed this already," she said, running her arm over her face. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Is it... me?" When she frowned at him, he said, "You have no' had nightmares like this over the last year, have you? But now, every day we're together, they get worse."
She rose up, drawing her knees to her chest. "No, you're making a big deal out of nothing."
"Nothing?" He pointed out the bloody tracks across his chest. "You attacked me!"
"I'm so sorry." She dropped her head in her hands. "I didn't realize it was you."
"I doona care about that! I just want them to end."
"So do I," she murmured. "They will. Soon, I'm sure."
He swooped up his jeans and yanked them on. "It seems the more pleasure we have, the worse they get."
She gazed up at him. "What are you talking about?"
"Just as I need to claim my mate, I need to make her happy. But now, you give me your body to pleasure, and then you suffer." He raked his fingers through his hair. "Maybe the dreams are getting worse because tonight's the full moon? And deep down you fear me?"
Gods, this male was fierce. Not only when protecting her, but when experiencing anything. MacRieve felt things so intensely. "I don't fear you." He was generous, protective, thoughtful. All the things my husband isn't.
"Then what do you fear? Give me an enemy to fight, Lousha!"
That was exactly what she couldn't do. "Lots of immortals have nightmares. The years build up - "
"Bullshite! Doona lie to me."
Lucia rose to dress, slipping on her underwear. "Just drop it, MacRieve."
"Damn you, Valkyrie, it just should no' be this complicated between us. You want me, and I want you. The end."
"Well, I'm not that easy - "
"Nothing about you is easy."
"My life is complicated, whether I want it to be or not." She hastily donned a halter top and shorts and began braiding her hair over her ears.
"So many secrets, Lousha. Will they keep you warm at night?"
She slowed her plaiting. "What does that mean?" Is he breaking up with me?
"It means you need to tell me what you dreamed."
She glanced away with a shrug. "I don't remember."
"Enough with the lies!" He grabbed her upper arms. "Why will you no' trust me?"
Lightning flashed as her own anger grew. "It's not in my nature to trust!" Some secrets go to the grave.... "Did you never think that the more I like you, the less I want to tell you my secrets? And how do you really know that you want to hear them, MacRieve?"
He drew his head back, wolflike, as though he'd been presented a trap he couldn't determine the mechanics of. "I doona understand you. That's no reason to hide things from me. Own your actions."
She flung herself away from him. "Gods, I hate it when you say that!" Easy to say for someone who's never made a tragic choice in his long life!
"One of these days, woman! You asked me if I'd ever thought about giving up on you. I had no' before, but now..."
"Now?"
"You have to meet me halfway, or I will stop chasing you. And when I do, you'll regret the loss."
I know this!
"Will you tell me?"
She thought he was in deadly earnest. He's giving me a choice... and I don't want to lose him.
Damn it, when had he gone from enemy, to necessary evil, to someone she didn't think she could live without? "MacRieve, I - " She swallowed, imagining how she'd tell him. I have a husband. I married the devil. I'm his wife. Lucia av Cruach. Shame made it nearly impossible to breathe, much less talk. She'd begun to care what he thought of her, and his knowing the truth wouldn't make a difference anyway! Her fate was woven -
"We've got company!" Schecter cried from above. "Another ship."
At once, the engines slowed to idling. They could hear running on the deck above them.
"Oh, bluidy hell," MacRieve muttered.
"Why's everybody running? Couldn't it just be another research vessel?"
"This far out? No' a chance." He yanked on a T-shirt. "Pirates, mercenaries, or worse."
"Worse?"
Seizing her hand, he dragged her out of the cabin into the rain. Over his shoulder he said, "This is no' over, Lousha!"
When they reached the observation deck, four of the men were already there, scanning the river. Schecter stood under an umbrella, binoculars crammed against his glasses. Travis peered out with his weary gaze more alert and a shotgun in his hands. Rossiter was at the rail, unshaven, his light brown hair disheveled.
Charlie's hazel eyes were fierce as he stood by his captain, and a machete hung from a strap around the young man's wrist.
Yet there was nothing to see, nothing but a curtain of rain and the jungle closing in all around them.
MacRieve turned to Schecter. "What the hell, man?"
"Give it a second. There's a ship coming around the bend about a mile to the north. They've been trailing us."
Everyone fell silent as they waited. Then Charlie quietly said, "It's Captain Malaqu
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