Blackbirds & Bourbon (16 page)

“What time is it?” I ask, stretching carefully. I’m so damn sore. So deliciously sore and I wouldn’t trade the feeling for anything. Though a cup of coffee laced with some Irish whiskey would be—

“Almost sunset.” There’s an edge to Jack’s voice, something broken and sharp.

“Are you all right?”

“I can’t do this. I can’t.” He’s mumbling, not speaking to me, but to himself. I sit up, feeling apprehensive. I tell myself it’s because the last time I had sex with Jack, things didn’t end so well. But this is different. Isn’t it?

“Do what, Jack?” My fingers slide from his shoulder to his silky, tangled hair, but he pulls away to stand up and pace.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” His voice is hard and almost cold. “Why I bound you the way I did?”

Of all the questions I have, that’s the one I don’t want answered. What does it matter, anyway? He’s not that man anymore. The one who made a vow to end a threat. He said as much. Didn’t he? Something cold settles into my gut. I pull the sheets around me, trying to ignore how familiar this feels.

“I get it. You needed to make sure you were always stronger than me. A weapon that could bring me down if and when I went nuclear.”

His nod is impatient. Jack seems angry. Brittle. A man in imminent danger of shattering.

My throat starts to tighten. I lick my suddenly dry lips. “You’re kinda killing my afterglow here, Jack.”

He doesn’t smile; in fact, his handsome face is as expressionless as stone. “What an appropriate word, killing.”

“No.” I shake my head at the look in his eyes. “No, I don’t believe it.” Though my pounding heart is begging to differ in a big way. It senses danger and wants out of here—like now.

“What if I told you my vow to the Dark Council wasn’t just to bind you to me, but to finish it completely? To finish
you
completely, princess. I’ve been sworn to kill you since you were ten years old.”

I stare, unable to speak or move. I knew that if Jack ever told me the reason for his spell, it would be bad. I didn’t expect it to be this bad.

Jack knew from the first time he talked to me how this would end. The cabin spins around me as I try to catch my breath. And I fell for him. Twice.

Twice a fool.

I’m
going to pass out, I know it. Fucking weak-ass harbinger of death I am. From a long way away I hear Jack’s voice. Rough. Urgent.

“Stop it, princess. Snap out of this. I’m not going to kill you, goddamnit!” He’s shaking me, his hands hard on my bare shoulders.

I blink and finally everything starts to settle, color seeping in through all the grey.

Jack is kneeling next to the bed, between my legs. His eyes are on my face, his hands falling to rest on my trembling thighs. “Seph, listen. I made that vow before I knew you, after I was shown…things.”

“Things?”

His eyes skitter away from mine. “It—” His voice thickens, then clears. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get away from here, somewhere far, far away—”

“Still reaching for that fairy tale, Jack?” I whisper. He looks back at me, his eyes hard, but I can see the panic behind them.

“Why not? Why the fuck not? Don’t we deserve that, at least for a little while?”

“If you don’t plan on killing me, tell me what’s got you so twisted. What were you shown?”

He studies his fingers on my skin, his head bowed, voice low. “That veiled woman you saw me with, the one from the Dark Council?”

I nod shortly, not likely to forget that encounter.

“Well, she’s like your sister Ana, but instead of scrying for the present, she can scry for the future. And she can show it to other people, get inside their heads and make them see what’s coming.”

“And what’s coming?”

He gets to his feet, whirling away, but his words find me, like poisonous little arrows. “You are. Just like the prophecy warns. The magic gets away from you somehow, takes control and everyone sort of…dies.”

“Sort of? Define ‘sort of.’”

“No one’s alive, but no one’s dead, either.”

“Okay, are you saying I cause a zombie apocalypse?” I might find that morbidly cool on any other day, but right now, there’s only this terrible sinking feeling in my gut.

“Pretty much.” He curses and kicks the wall. “I can’t believe she didn’t show.”

“Who?”

Clenching his hands, Jack says the last thing I expect. “Oriane. She promised me that if I got you this far, she’d be able to keep you safe.”

“Come again?” The blows keep raining down. So Mom’s not only been visiting my sisters but Jack, too? “When was the last time you saw my mother?”

“Almost four years ago.”

“Okay, maybe you should start from the beginning.”

“The beginning?” Jack leans his head back against the wall, chuckling mirthlessly as he stares at the dusty wooden beams of the ceiling. “That could take a while. And you may hate me even more when you hear it all.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be until sunrise.” I force a smile. “And as for hating you, that’s so nine years ago, Jack.”

He laughs again but won’t look at me. Instead, he closes his eyes. “It really started the first time I saw you. At your christening.”

Well, now. “I guess our relationship really does put cradle robbing in a whole new perspective, eh?”

He opens one eye to glare at me. “Are you going to let me tell you this or not?”

There is something about Jack’s attitude right now that makes me uneasy. He seems to be calming down from his freak-out earlier. Which should be good, but it’s not. There’s a look on his face I don’t like. One of acceptance and cold resolve. Something inside me shivers, but I wave him on.

To my surprise, instead of continuing right away, he pushes away from the wall to come and kneel beside me. Extending a forearm, palm up, he traces the black runes worked into his skin with a finger. “You’ve always been curious about these, haven’t you?”

I shrug. “Sure. They’re always trying to zap me. Do I finally get to hear why?”

He nods slowly, dropping his hand to my thigh, caressing my bare skin unconsciously. “Because they’re not exactly tats, Seph.  And they haven’t always been black. They used to be blue. They’re a protective spell, one I was born with. The day I saw you in your cradle, they turned white-hot and burned me almost to the bone.”

“A warning?”

“Yeah.” He sighs. “And the only thing I could think of that would warrant that kind of a warning was the prophecy.”

“You decided I was the one who fulfilled it?”

“I did. Until then, no one had taken it very seriously. There are lots of prophecies, you know. And very few true ones. But that particular one… It had always haunted me, like a bit of music that gets stuck in your head. I told Cerunnos. He’d never heard it before. Which is odd, in and of itself. He’s always hated witches. A prophecy so clearly about them, and your family in particular? Well, to say he was intrigued would be an understatement.”

He’s looking at me like he expects a reaction, but I shrug even though I get it. Jack’s the reason the Dark Council came after me, like Cerunnos said. It hardly seems to matter now, not after everything else. What’s done is done.

“So, those attacks when I was a kid?”

“All him. Quite a few of us weren’t okay with him attacking a child. Especially me. But then she came.”

“The veiled woman?”

His shoulders hunch. “Yeah. And after she showed us all what you were capable of, everyone got on board in a hurry. That’s when I came up with my plan. Cerunnos liked it. He agreed we would wait. Oriane was getting too suspicious and he was afraid she’d go to the Council to investigate all the ‘accidents’ you were having. I swore to work the spell and kill you before the prophecy could fulfill itself.”

“And then you waited until I was almost of age.”

Jack nods, his throat working, his fingers tightening on my thigh. “You know what happened next. I didn’t want to go through with it, Seph. But I had no choice. If I hadn’t, Cerunnos would have found someone else to do it. There was no way I could allow that. So I finished what I started.”

“And you made sure everyone knew it.” I understand now, he had to make sure the Dark Council knew he had taken the first step. “But then you left. I take it you were supposed to kill me that night?”

“Yes. But I put Cerunnos off with every trick I could manage. I said that your mother was too strong. That we had to weaken her position in the Council first. I was your Achilles’ heel, there was no need to rush. It wasn’t as if you’d shown any signs of unusual power yet. If we struck without proof, Oriane could retaliate with impunity and perhaps bring the rest of the witches down on our heads, too. Hell, maybe the Council itself would come after us. On and on. Cerunnos likes his shadows, so it worked. For a while. But about four years ago, things got really bad for me. Cerunnos was lining a lot of other things up and starting to suspect I had a soft spot where you were concerned. He was tired of waiting.”

“So that’s why you stopped those visits.”

“Not entirely.” Jack’s smile is weary. “I stopped the visits because your mother caught me outside your window one night. She confronted me, and I …cracked. Spilled everything. We talked for a long time. She’s a bit different, your mom.”

He gives me a sidelong look.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” So Mom did know all about this before she left, and I am the reason she took off, just like Ana and I thought. Wait a minute. The ‘Beau’ from her diary,
could that have been Jack?

“Oriane said she had a plan,” Jack’s words yank me out of my daze “but that it was going to take a long time to put in place. She swore that if I could keep you alive until the Yule before your twenty-seventh birthday, everything would be all right.”

He glances out the window, where the last of the light is bleeding over the lake water.

“So that’s what I’ve been doing, and believe me it hasn’t been easy. It’s taken everything I have to put him off all these years. But Cerunnos is tired of waiting. He gave me ’til midnight tonight to finish this. To kill you. He’s had that veiled bitch tailing me for the last week, reminding me of what’s at stake. Filling my head with the future.” He shudders. “And if I don’t, he has a fail-safe.”

“The inquiry?”

He nods, then pushes away to get to his feet. “After the inquiry tomorrow every FTC assassin of the realm and mercenary and bounty hunter will be headed your way… and probably mine.”

“But…what if I win the Council inquiry? There’s still a chance of that, isn’t there, even without the stone?”

Jack stops in the middle of the floor, his back to me, fists clenched at his sides, his shoulders taut and straining his shirt. “No, princess. There’s no chance. Cerunnos has been working on something else for a long time now, something that helped distract him from you and the prophecy. Something that changes everything.”

“What?”

With a curse, he slams his fist into the wall, sending bits of wood flying into the air.

I jump. “
Jack
?”

“There is no Council anymore, Seph. There hasn’t been for at least a year. Cerunnos has been steadily pushing out those who didn’t align with his beliefs. Everyone that’s left are either his puppets, too frightened to fight the takeover, or biding their time.”

Like Merry. Shit. This is what the gnome had been hinting at that day in T&T. That the Dark Council and the Council were now one and the same.

“The Council exists in name only, a front for the bulk of the FTC world, so that the measures Cerunnos plans to start taking will look legitimate, at least until it’s too late.”

“Measures like binding my magic?”

The look he gives me is bleak. “Exactly. But that’s just the start. If you knew what that bastard—”

“I do.” Jack blinks at me. “Merry spilled a lot of beans the other morning, including his racial-cleansing tendencies. Shit. There has to be something we can do. Surely there is opposition to this bullshit! From what Merry hinted, there has to be.”

“There is, princess. There are plenty willing to fight, but they won’t risk it in time to help you. And to be honest…” He turns away again, stabbing his fingers through his hair.

It hits me in his continued silence, hard, like a nasty blow to the base of the spine. “They don’t think I’m worth saving, do they?”

Those broad shoulders lift. “Because of what you did to the werewolves and that damn prophecy, most of them think it’s best if you don’t get saved at all.”

I just stare, my fingers fisted in the torn sheets wrapped around my body, my head spinning as I try to take it in.

There’s no point in going to the inquiry. No point in letting them have their little farce. The truth stone was my only chance and it’s gone. Except—

I jump off the bed so fast I stumble and almost fall, putting my hand on his back to steady myself, feeling the tension humming through his muscles like a live current.

“My mom was here, Jack.”

“You saw her?” He whirls, looking stunned.

“No. But she gave Carly this for me.” I lift the stone still around my throat.

“What is it?”

“An absorption stone.”

“How the hell is that supposed to help? It might stop the first wave of magic someone throws at you, but after that it’ll be useless. That’s not a plan, it’s a joke.”

I sigh and let it fall. “I know. Maybe it’s the best she could do, Jack.”

“Well, if that’s the best she can do after all these years, it sucks.”

I can’t disagree, but we can’t count on her doing anything else. If she did have a plan, it must’ve gone to shit, or she’d be here. “What are you planning to do, Jack?”

He shakes his head, crossing the room to get his boots. “I’ve got to go back, try to feed him another bullshit story. I’ll see if Stephen can get you somewhere safe in the meantime. Or maybe Styx.”

Right then I realize how desperate things are, if Jack is willing to go to Styx for help. I wrap my arms around myself and sink back on to the bed as he continues.

“At least for now. Buy us a few days. We—”

“If you go back there without killing me, Cerunnos will destroy you.”

“I’m not so easy to kill, princess.”

“Neither
was
Georg.
” I glare at him, tears burning my throat.
“And you’d be breaking a vow.” Just like Georg had.

“Already broke it, princess.”

“No, you’ve only put it off. But once the actual deadline expires—”

“I’m not going to fucking kill you, Seph!”

“What do you think happens if you ignore the vow? What happens to
you
?” But I know. Our world doesn’t forgive those that go back on their word. One way or the other, magic always finds a way to make them pay.

“Whatever happens, I’ll handle it.”

Bullshit. I saw Georg die. I won’t see the same thing happen to Jack.

Not because of me. This whole Council revelation has my head reeling. The end of FTCs, of humans? That shit still doesn’t seem real. But
Jack
isn’t fucking going anywhere. Not if I have anything to say about it.

“So now you’re okay with that apocalypse you saw? With me going batshit and destroying everything?”