Between (29 page)

Vivian picked it up. A chord of music sounded, all of the voices in complex harmony, and then silence. The object felt and looked like stone but seemed to her more solid, more real, than any substance she had ever touched. It was roughly cylindrical, the length of her palm and middle finger, unexpectedly heavy for its size. One end was thicker and etched
with rough dragon symbols. The other end was carved into a complex shape, familiar, but before she had time to sort out what it represented, Gareth’s voice said, “I’ll take that.”

The voices shouted objections with a volume that nearly split her skull.

“No.”

Perhaps her grandfather’s last note had made sense after all:
Beyond the living rainbow the dragons guard Forever.
Could this be the key? She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

Gareth drew his sword. “You will give it to me.”

“I will not.”

Nightmare slow, Vivian backed toward the fountain.

Out of the darkness beside her, a small figure ran toward the Chancellor, wings spread wide, neck stretched long, beak open in a hiss.

Gareth spun on his heel and thrust with the sword.

Before Vivian could release the scream rising in her throat, the sharp blade pierced the penguin’s white breast. In that moment, it seemed that time stood still. She saw Jared’s face, twisted with hate, Poe’s beak gaping open, the red stain growing around the steel that spiked his breast. And then, in all of the agonizing detail of slow motion, Jared lifted both sword and penguin, gave his wrists a contemptuous flick, and the body slid off the sword and hit the ground, limp and unmoving.

Vivian’s legs refused to hold her. She dropped to the cool grass beside Poe’s body, searching for signs of life. “Oh, dear God, what have you done—”

Gareth stood over her. “It’s only a bird. Get up.”

“You killed him—”

“What does it matter, if none of this is real?”

She just stared at him, and under her scrutiny something in his face shifted a little. “You’ll see, when I give her the key.” Bloody sword still in hand, he reached for the black cylinder with the other and wrenched it out of her clutching fingers.

“Come now. It’s a lovely night. Kiss me—”

“Are you insane? You just killed my penguin in cold blood.”

He smiled. “Come—the garden is beautiful by moonlight.”

“Over my dead body.”

His face changed, hardened. “I said get up.”

“No.”

He grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked.

Her feet caught in the hem of the gown as she staggered upright, and she hung for an instant from her hair before she could catch her balance. “Let me go—”

Twisting his hand so that she cried out with the pain, he forced her head back and pressed his mouth over hers, thrusting his tongue between her lips.

She bit down hard, tasting the rush of salt as her teeth pierced soft flesh. He released her, stumbling backward.

“Fucking bitch.” He drew the back of his hand across a trickle of blood on his chin and wiped it on his silken doublet, leaving a rusty smear.

Taking advantage of the moment, she tried to knee him in the groin but was hampered by the gown. He pinioned her by both arms in a grip she couldn’t break, and dragged her back to the bench.

She braced her feet, put all her weight against him.

Releasing his right hand he hit her again, closed fist this time. The world shattered into darkness and fire. He flung her down onto the bench, jolting her bones against the stone, her head striking hard enough to make a flash of stars.

“You are mine—mine—you understand? The Queen herself promised me this. If you fight me, I will hurt you. If you scream, I will hurt you more.”

She struggled, tried to free herself, but he straddled her, pinning her down. Her arms were trapped, her legs tangled in the gown. His weight compressed her ribs. She couldn’t breathe. In her peripheral vision she could still catch a glimpse of black and red.

His breath was hot on her face. As his lips again closed over hers, she remembered for the first time what was in her
pocket. One of the voices separated itself from the others, made itself easily heard.

Calm down. There is a way, but not if you panic.

She stopped struggling, focused on trying to catch her breath. If there was a way, she would find it. He had done this to her once. Twice she would not allow.

But he must not have the key. No matter what it costs you.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered aloud. “I’ll be good. I swear. Just don’t hurt me anymore.”

“I’m not stupid. I don’t trust you for a minute.”

But the iron grasp on her wrists eased, just a little. When he kissed her again, she kissed him back. At the dark side of Jared was a man who needed to believe that every woman wanted him. Wanted to believe. All she had to do was help him with that.

She moaned softly, returned his kisses with lips and tongue.

He loosed one of her hands so he could reach down and free himself from the confinement of his breeches, and she slid her freed hand down between his legs in a slow caress, cupping the heavy, hot weight of him, stroking.

In response, he moved his lips down her neck toward her breast, and freed her other hand.

Pleasuring him with one hand, she slid the other down over her own hip, feeling for the pocket. At first all she felt was an expanse of unbroken fabric and her heart constricted in fear. Maybe the pocket was tucked up underneath her hips; maybe she couldn’t reach it. But then her fingers caught the edge of an opening and she managed to work them inside.

Jared knelt over her, preparing to take her by force as he had done once already in dream.

He didn’t hear the click of an extending blade. Vivian cupped his balls and then squeezed and twisted with all her strength. His body jerked and stiffened on a gasp of pain, and in that instant she sank the blade of the knife deep into his buttock.

With a shriek of pain and outrage, Gareth rolled off the
edge of the bench and onto the grass, doubled over on his knees, both hands pressed to his wound.

Vivian sprang to unsteady feet and bent to retrieve his sword from where it lay in the grass. It was heavy, but two-handed she was able to lift it.

“Why?” he asked, in the tone of a child who has been beaten for no reason.

“Seriously? You killed Poe. You tried to rape me—”

His eyes looked unfocused, his forehead creased in thought. “Vivian, I would never—”

In that moment he sounded like Jared in one of his softer moments. She steeled herself.

“Look, Gareth. For all anybody else knows, you had your way with me and are leaving here a sated and dominant man, although you might want someone to bandage those wounds.”

“Please,” he said. “I’m bleeding.”

“You won’t bleed to death. No major arteries to worry about. First, you are going to help me.”

“What do you want?”

“Information. Tell me what Jehenna wants with the key.”

He swallowed hard, kept silent.

Vivian moved toward him, holding the sword. “Tell me.”

He crawled backward. “Don’t hurt me.”

His confusion appeared genuine. She tried to think what to do, but the voices had increased again in intensity, were a siren song, pulling her away from the here, promising, always promising.
Listen, listen, listen.

Vivian clenched her jaw, drove the energy of her full attention onto the man in front of her. And as she opened her mouth to speak, she felt it all, like a towering wave, like the climax of a symphony, all of the energy of all of those words coalescing into her voice at once. “Tell me.”

As they emerged from her lips, the words felt more solid than anything else in this place, more real than her grief or the blood on the grass.

His eyes widened and focused. “I was to—kill the bird. Give her the key, if I ever found it.”

“In exchange for what?”

“You. She promised me that if I gave her the key, you would love me.”

“And you believed her? Tell me when this happened.”

“I…” He swallowed; his eyes drifted far away. “I—it was a strange place. Many houses, all in a row. The street was hard and black. I do not know this place. A dream, perhaps…” Vivian remembered Jared standing at her doorway with his hands full of roses, Jared who’d arrived only moments after Jehenna left, who had mentioned a key before she knew that there was one to be found.

“What does she want with the key, Gareth?”

“I don’t know. She spoke of the Forever, said she wouldn’t need the dragon anymore. I don’t know what she meant.” His face was slick with a cold sweat; his voice broke on the words.

More gently now, she said, “Give me the key, Gareth.”

“She’ll kill me—”

“She doesn’t need to know.”

“She knows everything.”

His face was so white she thought he might pass out. He wiped one hand across his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. There was no place here for mercy. She used the Voice again. “The key, Gareth.”

Without further hesitation he drew it out from inside his tunic and handed it to her.

“Now, get out of here.”

No need for the Voice with this command; Gareth was more than happy to be gone. He moaned as he got to his feet and hobbled across the grass and away into shadow.

Which left Vivian alone with her dead. Kneeling beside Poe, she laid her hands over his bloodstained breast, tried to summon some magic that would heal this wound, make his heart begin to beat again. If she had the power to make Gareth talk, maybe she could reverse a death.

You couldn’t save one boy poisoned by a dragon, not with a crew and modern technology to help you.

Her breath was a difficulty in her throat, a sharp pain that wouldn’t ease, but her eyes remained dry.

“Good-bye, Poe,” she whispered.

A whisper of sound, steel against leather, drew her eyes upward. Standing before her, the blade of his sword naked in his hand and death in his eyes, stood the Warlord of Surmise.

Y
ou, too?” Vivian asked. She felt inexpressibly weary, and it took all of her waning energy to drag herself up onto her feet and face him.

“What happened here?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“All bloodshed in Surmise is my concern.”

“I suppose Gareth sent you to finish what he’d left undone.”

“I do not answer to the Chancellor.”

“Jehenna sent you, then.”

“Nobody sent me.” His scarred face was in shadow, the naked sword red in the light of the terrible moon. “I asked you before. Now I ask you again. What are you?”

“I am a Dreamshifter.”

“What more?” His hand tightened on the sword hilt. He took a step toward her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“Are you a shape-shifter as well? Answer me!”

“I don’t know what that is.”

He paused, the sword half-lifted. “Don’t lie to me! You survived the dragon poison. You are marked with scales; your eyes have changed. Tell me what you are doing in Surmise.”

There were no words for this, for the pain at her heart that made it so hard to breathe. If he forced her she would use the Voice on him, but it felt wrong, had felt wrong even to command a man like Gareth. Jehenna controlled people. Maybe she, Vivian, was becoming the evil that she hated.

“I should have killed you when I found you,” the Warlord said.

“Maybe. I couldn’t have stopped you then.”

“And now?”

“I think I could. If I must. Please don’t test me. I swear to you I mean no harm to anyone except her. Jehenna.”

She saw his face go still. “You can speak her name.”

“Jehenna?”

His sword arm trembled, and his voice was tight with contained emotion. “Nobody in Surmise can speak her name. Either you are her creature, or you are stronger than she is.”

There were fresh cuts across his cheeks, still bleeding; the pain in his eyes went soul deep. So much here that she didn’t understand, but one thing she was sure of: Whatever this man was, it wasn’t evil.

“Maybe it’s because I’m not from Surmise.”

“Nobody is from Surmise. Our paths cross here, end here. Beginnings all happen elsewhere.”

“You asked me what I am. I’m trying to figure that out. Again, I swear it—I mean no harm to anybody here. I’m sick about what happened to Duncan. It was wrong.”

“And yet there is blood here—on the grass, the bench.”

Vivian held out the stiletto, flicked the switch to release the blade. “The Chancellor—he wasn’t expecting this.”

A long pause, and then the Warlord’s scarred face contorted into what might have been a smile. “I’m surprised he didn’t kill you on the spot.”

“He was shamed, I think.”

No doubting the smile now, but it faded almost at once. “He will seek revenge. Go back, My Lady, to whatever place you came from. You may be strong, but you cannot win against
her
.”

“I can’t go back.”
Before she could stop herself she blurted it all out. “I am the last of the Dreamshifters. Jehenna has stolen the dreamspheres and is using them for evil. I believe she holds my mother captive here, somewhere. If I walk away, then…” She held her hands out, palms up, out of words and hoping he might understand. Deliberately she avoided mention of the key, hoping he wouldn’t notice.