Elijah (19 page)

To his momentary surprise, it was not Noah who had felt his presence and come to him.

It was Isabella.

She gasped with shock when she saw him and all the blood washing down over the shower tiles.

She hurried toward him but suddenly jerked to a halt, a hand slamming into her forehead as if she were under a mental assault.

“Well then, get up here!” she growled viciously to an unseen conversant. “And bring Gideon with you.”

Then she promptly ignored what had clearly been a voluble complaint from her notoriously possessive husband and moved to Elijah’s side. She shut off the taps and, ignoring the fate of her pretty white gown, knelt beside him in the pool of water and blood that remained yet undrained.

“Hey,” he greeted her, giving her a wan smile. “Jacob’s going to murder you.”

“Yes, well, he’ll have to come up here to do it, and that’s all that matters to me at the moment.”

She snatched a towel off the other side of the shower door and bunched it up against his wound, pressing with all her weight. She was a little thing, top to bottom, so Elijah could barely feel it.

“We’ve been so worried about you,” she whispered, leaning to kiss his forehead, her free hand pushing his soaked hair out of his eyes.

“Can’t a man take a little vacation?” he quipped, wincing when the bathroom door burst open hard, recoiling off its backstop and almost cracking Jacob in the head.

“Damn it, Bella!”

“Oh, would you please give it a rest, Jacob!” she snapped back at him. “When are you going to get it through your thick head that I am just as Imprinted into this marriage as you are? I am really getting sick of this!”

Jacob had never been on the receiving end of his wife’s temper in the entire year they had known each other. It left him so shocked that Gideon had to physically move him aside in order to get past him to his patient.

Bella ducked so the medic could step over her and squat down across from Elijah.

“Well, you look like something the cat dragged in,” he remarked, immediately laying a hand on the warrior’s forehead and closing his eyes in order to assess the damage done to the warrior’s abused body.

Gideon did not understand why Elijah found his remark so terribly funny, but the warrior was laughing so hard that his nurse pinched him in the arm to stop him.

“I can’t keep pressure with your chest bobbing up and down. Besides, Gideon will never be that funny,” she said, giving him a cockeyed look.

“What possessed you to take a shower, Elijah? It could have waited.” Gideon shook his head in bafflement, reaching to move Bella aside so he could inspect the worst wound. “Playing with iron again, I see.”

“Yeah, well, the other kids weren’t playing fair,” the warrior murmured.

Gideon looked up at Jacob, who was standing awkwardly in the center of the room.

“So, are you going to challenge him to a duel, or would you mind donating some blood?”

Gideon asked.

Bella stood up and moved out of her husband’s path, giving him a look that should have cut him
Page 63

to shreds. Jacob moved to his friends’ sides and bent down on one knee. He extended his wrist to the medic, who grabbed hold of it in one hand and Elijah’s in the other.

“I’m sorry,” Jacob murmured to the Captain. And it was clear he meant it sincerely.

“Save it for your wife, friend. She’s more upset by it than I am. You’ve been pigheaded all my life. I’m used to it. She isn’t.”

Color flared into Elijah’s skin even as his donor paled. Despite her pique, Bella was there to help her weakened mate to a seat in the bedroom. Having gotten his patient out of the immediate danger of bleeding to death, Gideon began to heal the wound itself. He had his hands pressed to the rent flesh and was completely focused on his task. Elijah felt the peculiar stretching that came with the knitting of tissue, deep inside his chest.

“You are going to have to tell me exactly how you managed to survive this long with this kind of wound. It is half healed. One would think you would have the sense to stay put until—”

Gideon stopped abruptly, his silver brows furrowing into a frown as he tilted his head and tried to analyze what he was experiencing. When those sharp mercury-colored eyes bore into Elijah’s, the warrior knew without a doubt that the Ancient had somehow gained a clue to what had transpired the past few days. But to his relief, the medic did nothing more then lift a single brow of curiosity.

That was all.

Gideon returned to his task, not saying another word.

Siena walked the length of her throne room slowly, her arms folded across her middle as she paced, her bottom lip between her teeth as she continued to mull over all that had happened to her recently. Any hopes she might have had about maintaining an air of normalcy had flown out the window the moment she had begun to approach the crowded receiving rooms laid out before her throne room. She knew she could never survive under such scrutiny, that she would go mad trying to maintain this sudden secret if forced to face a melee of her subjects. So she had made use of a lesser known and far lesser traveled route to her bedchamber. Since her return was not announced as it always was, no one awaited her there. She was able to dress discreetly and take other steps toward discretion.

The throne room and outer receiving rooms had been emptied at her command, a command that was reinforced with a low growl of annoyance when it was questioned as being unusual.

Siena also knew that the garb she wore, a caftan of aquamarine silk, was also met with questioning eyes, the shining garment somewhat conservative for her as it reached her ankles and hooded her head.

But she was Queen, and it was very clear she would brook no questions and no hesitation to any of her orders. She had sent away all of her ladies and companions, all pages and advisors, leaving no one in her sphere save the two females that stood in the darker shadows of the room watching her movements. She was highly aware of their curiosity, and she could feel their stares upon her. Siena indulged in her court and her station quite richly. It was not at all like her to request such utter solitude. Even her guard remained outside of all the doors, rather than inside.

Siena tried to push it all away, even tried to push her thoughts outside of the sealed doors of the throne room she paced so rapidly and fiercely.

Syreena watched her sister pace, her bicolored features plagued with the same puzzled and bemused expression that had beset her since the moment she had caught the Queen in a most compromising embrace with, of all the beings in the world, the Demon Butcher himself. The man who had murdered their father. True, Syreena was more apt to see what the warrior had done as a favor, just as her sister and quite a few others did, but that one good deed of death would never make up for thousands of others over the centuries. There was not a breed amongst them that had not lost someone close beneath the Demon Butcher’s sword. Siena had to be completely out of her mind to choose such a man as her mate.

That she had chosen to mate at all was astounding enough on its own. Though there was much
Page 64

Syreena did not know about her sister after living a hundred and thirty years in the Monastery of The Pride, she knew Siena was a woman who prided herself not just on her control of all things, but especially of her control over her monarchy. She had heard Siena preach on the ills and evils of hostile, aggressive males, and her loathing toward her own mother for choosing such a man and allowing him to take them into those three dark centuries of war. She had sworn she would maintain her virgin state until her death, passing the throne to a female heir, rather than mate with a male who would greedily claw at half her monarchy.

There was no mistake in Syreena’s mind, however, that Siena had broken all of her own vows, and she had done it with a sweeping glory of irony. Syreena had seen them naked in each other’s arms, the stubborn and passion-cold Queen and the merciless, destructive warrior, kissing with remarkable fervor and clearly mutually marked and bruised from what had no doubt been some very passionate lovemaking. Syreena still couldn’t reconcile the image with what she knew her sister to be, with what her sister had drilled into her these fourteen years concerning the certain evils of men and monarchies mixing.

Perhaps Anya would have had a better insight into the entire occurrence, but Syreena had been sworn from sharing her knowledge with even the half-breed who knew every secret corner of the Queen’s mind and heart. So the Princess was left to her baffled thoughts, trying to reconcile how such things could come to pass, and in such insignificant amounts of time. Of course, Syreena had always ignored her sister’s prejudices toward men, being the one sister who actually craved husband, hearth, and heirs. She knew where all this anger came from and that Siena might be forced to reevaluate her opinions as she grew wiser…or more lonely, but the Princess would never have suspected such a tinderbox as this to light Siena’s fuses and blow all her theories to hell. Syreena’s pity warred with amusement, and she slipped farther back into the shadows so her sister would not sense her thoughts and feelings and grow incensed.

Anya heard Syreena’s movement but kept her eyes fixated on the image of the royal female who paced around the room slowly, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were in need of comfort, her unusual silence worrying her and making her edgy and watchful.

“It is not like her to be so…” Anya tried to put what she was seeing into words, glancing at Syreena for assistance.

“Withdrawn,” Syreena supplied. “We are used to her coming directly to us when something confuses or disturbs her.”

“What do you suppose happened?” Anya whispered.

“I cannot begin to guess,” Syreena lied easily. “She looks pale. If I am not mistaken, she is sunsick.”

“Siena?” Anya made a soft sound of disbelief. “Siena does not feel the sun like the rest of us.”

“Nor do I, but that does not make me immune. Even those of us highly resistant to the normal speed of sun sickness will show the signs of it if exposed long enough,” the Princess said quietly.

Syreena crossed her arms beneath her breasts, seemingly studying the hand-carved pattern of the stone floor beneath her feet.

“It is strange that she should spend all this time in solitude only to come back looking so disturbed,” Anya remarked. “Something has happened to make her thus.”

“I would not begin to speculate. She will tell us in her own time, I imagine.”

Anya looked at the other woman, her foxy eyes narrowing keenly.

“Did you not see anything when you found her?”

Syreena turned her dual-colored eyes on the half-breed. “Such as?”

“I don’t know,” the half-vixen murmured. “I just have this feeling like something is off. She doesn’t…smell right.”

“If you say that too loud, you’re going to find yourself on the opposite end of that leash after all,” the Princess whispered. It made the other woman laugh. “We can only wait and trust she will come to one of us eventually to discuss whatever the matter is,” Syreena added. “For the time being I will not take part in your penchant for gossiping.”

Page 65

“My gossiping has been quite useful to this court on many occasions,” Anya rejoined. She then chuckled softly. “But I will tell you this, as far as the Queen seeking confidences goes, I find myself glad I am not the court advisor and the Queen’s Counselor. Judging by the way she dismissed the court, whatever is pulling her tail is very likely political, and it clearly has her quite put out. Political aggravation falls into your advice-giving milieu. Mine is limited to her personal problems and her fighting forces. And for once I am quite grateful that she has no personal life outside of bitching about you.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Syreena said dryly.

Sienna was aware that her two closest attachés were whispering with their heads together, no doubt mulling over her behavior. She knew Syreena would not break the vow of silence she had sworn her to, so she was not worried about that. She was not prepared to discuss the matter with anyone yet. She was hardly prepared to even face it within her own thoughts.

The Queen continued to pace around the enormous room, occasionally rubbing her hands together, trying to warm them from the chill that seemed to go soul deep.

She was in trouble. That much was all too clear.

For beginners, there was the issue of her detached collar.

The collar was a work of legend and magic, stories of which everyone in the entire Lycanthrope society was raised on from infancy. Every member of the royal family wore the mystifying collars, each differing in shape and style by virtue of the wearer’s rank and importance, from birth to ascension to death. They were a series of complex puzzles, these intricate pieces of jewelry, designed that way for very specific reasons. They expanded and decreased in size when the wearer altered form, never slipping free, always broadcasting the rank of their owner.

The legendary mysteries went deeper still. Firstly, only a member of The Pride could attach the collars. Only members of The Pride knew the secret to joining the complex links. This was so that the royal insignias could not be replicated or forged, or worn by anyone other than the rightful heirs to the throne. Though made of gold, they were enchanted, making them indestructible, so they could not be cut off by enemies or thieves or the monarchs themselves, for whatever reason. To add to the trick, the collars could not be removed by anyone in The Pride, the puzzles never working in reverse and their secrets impossible to unravel.

Siena had heard all of her life how her collar could only come off one of two ways. Either by the wearer being beheaded…

…or under the destined touch of the ruler’s one true mate.

The mysticism claimed that only the touch of a perfect mate for a royal soul could free the collar. The male or female who performed such a task was destined to be wed to the collar’s owner, and there was no arguing the point. Who else could unravel the impossible puzzle that wise men had toyed with unsuccessfully for thousands of years? Only one. A perfect one. A soul as royal and complementary as the collar’s owner.