For the Love of a Goblin Warrior (Shadowlands) (29 page)

There were only two people he could talk to who would understand—his cousins. But that would mean admitting he told Nadine about the curse and goblins. He sat without moving, staring at Dai’s Latin lettering without being able to read a word of it. He picked up the bracelet and felt the weight of it in his hand before putting it on. The words unscrambled and became clear. If only the answer was as easy to see. Once, he’d have never sat alone, dwelling on a problem; he’d have discussed it with Roan. He wanted his tribe back; he wanted a family again. He wanted Nadine.

He rang Dai, and within moments, his cousin was standing in the living room.

Dai glanced around and seemed to sense this wasn’t a social call. “What’s wrong?”

Meryn drew in a breath. How did he explain that he’d screwed up everything? “I need some advice.”

Dai raised his eyebrows as if waiting for the rest of the story.

“I think I should tell you and Roan at the same time.” Because whatever he said wasn’t going to go down well.

“Right. Everyone is at my place.” Dai held out his hand.

“Everyone?”

“Eliza, Amanda, Brigit…now you. You can meet the family.” Dai smiled.

Great, the last thing he wanted was to be admitting his failures in front of everyone. “Maybe I shouldn’t have rung.”

“Meryn, they want to meet you. Whatever the problem, it’s not going to get any worse if you stop for dinner.” Dai turned the things Meryn had once said back on him. He’d once been the one reminding Dai to take a breath. Maybe some of things he’d said had made a difference and had helped Dai…maybe Roan and Dai would now be able to help him.

“Very well, but I need to act tonight.” Meryn gripped Dai’s hand, and the lurch and jolt of translocation followed. This time when he opened his eyes he was back in the tower he’d escaped from. The tower was actually a very nice apartment, furnished very sparsely but filled with people who all turned. They weren’t looking at Dai, who’d just appeared out of nothing; they were looking at him. Meryn forced a smile.

“Meryn, so glad you came.” Roan clasped Meryn’s forearm in greeting. “You met Eliza.” Eliza nodded. “This is Amanda and her daughter Brigit.”

Amanda ran her gaze over him and made a quick assessment before smiling. Brigit narrowed her eyes and took a step forward. “Were you a goblin?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes lit up. “Did you steal lots of gold?”

“Brigit, help me set an extra place at the table.” Amanda steered Brigit into the kitchen.

“I won’t stay; you’re obviously in the middle of something.” Why had Dai brought him here? This was a bad idea.

“Don’t be silly.” Eliza glanced at Roan. Whatever the message she was trying to convey, Roan seemed to understand.

Roan opened up the balcony door, the glass now whole. Meryn remembered using a chair to break the glass and escape. The three men stood outside. Roan leaned against the railing. “What’s going on?”

For a moment Meryn couldn’t speak. He’d come so far since the first night he’d stood here, before climbing down and fleeing into the city…only to be arrested for carrying a sword a short time later. Yet in Nadine’s eyes he was still a goblin.

“I told Nadine about my life as a goblin.” As Meryn spoke, he realized how naïve he must sound, to think he could tell the truth and have someone love him anyway.

Dai muttered what could only be a filthy curse in some language Meryn didn’t speak.

“Why did you do that?” Roan rubbed a hand over his very short hair.

“She already knew about goblins, as a child her mother told her your story.” Meryn glanced inside and watched the women talking. Brigit laughed, the sound carrying outside and cutting open the wounds he’d thought healed. He could see love, hear the affection, and yet he was cold and hollow and had nothing. “Amanda and Eliza know the truth. Why should I expect less?”

“That is different.” Roan crossed his arms. “We don’t talk about the curse or goblins for our own safety.”

“Meryn has a point. Plus, if Nadine already knew the tale, what difference does it make?” Dai ran his finger along the top of the metal railing.

Roan shook his head. “It’s too late now anyway. The words can’t be unspoken.”

Meryn wished they could be—or at least spoken better.

Dai looked at Meryn, the glimmer of magic in his eyes. “What happened after you told her?”

What was Dai seeing? Was he looking for lies? “She ran. I thought that if I explained I’d lived her mother’s story, that would make it right. But I am everything she hates.”

“Not hates. She doesn’t hate you.” Dai blinked and his eyes returned to normal.

“I need to find a way to win her back. That is why I called you. I don’t know what to do. You two have both been there and fought that battle.” Meryn pointed to the door where the women were serving up the meal as if there was nothing odd going on. They knew about magic and goblins, they knew about the men’s past. Roan and Dai didn’t have to lie with every breath.

“Her mother told her
our
story?” Roan was frowning.

Dai glanced at Roan and then at Meryn. “Does she know how the curse broke and what happened to us?”

“Yes, I told her the curse was broken by love long before I told her I’d lived the curse.” Meryn shook his head. He was always going to be an ex-goblin from her mother’s tale.

“No, no. Tell her the real story,” Dai said.

“I did and she didn’t believe a word.”

Eliza pulled open the door. “Dinner is ready if you are.”

“Almost.” Roan smiled at her, then turned back to face Meryn. “She won’t be angry now, and you’ve had time to cool your heels too.”

“She won’t listen to me; she thinks I’m a goblin. I don’t even know if she’ll see me.” His plan so far totaled going to the hospital and praying that she would see him. He knew it was the kind of plan that would fail. Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered coming; his cousins weren’t helping.

“Write it down. She may not read it straight away, but she won’t be able to ignore it forever.” Dai smiled like he’d solved everything.

The idea was good. He could rewrite her mother’s story, filling in the gaps with truth. He was the only one who could give her mother’s tale its proper ending. There was only one flaw. “I can’t write.”

“Leave that with me.” Dai opened the door and went inside to have dinner.

Meryn bit back a sigh and followed. He felt like an intruder on their family dinner. But as he ate and spoke, he kept imagining Nadine there. She’d like to meet Roan, the king her mother had been obsessed with, and no one would have to watch what they said around her, as she knew about goblins. Mostly Meryn wanted what they’d had for those few short hours when she’d been in his arms. He’d never been so human, or so easily wounded. This time he wasn’t going to give up; he’d fight for her. For them.

After dinner, Dai took him aside. With a little magic, Dai got a pen to transcribe whatever Meryn said. After a few false starts, both men were happy with the way it was working and the language it was writing in.

Meryn picked up the pen. Not a large weapon, but certainly deadly if used to stab. He spun it in his fingers. Written words would have to work where talking had failed. And if he failed?

He wouldn’t let himself think of that. If one dreamed of defeat, the battle was already lost. He drew out a clean sheet of paper and recalled everything Nadine had told him about her mother’s Goblin King fairy tale. It wasn’t hard when he imagined her lips speaking the words.

“Start.” The pen stood ready for action, his only soldier in his fight to win back Nadine. In Latin, he began his retelling of
The
Goblin
King
tale.

Eliza and Roan had gone home, and Brigit was in bed before Meryn was happy with what he’d done. He carefully folded up the papers, then Dai took him home.

“Good luck. Let me know how it goes…or better still, bring her around to meet the rest of us.” Dai put his hand on Meryn’s shoulder briefly. Then Dai stepped back and was gone with little more than a sigh of air.

Luck had nothing to do with it. Battles were about planning and understanding your opponent—that, and having the best weapons. Would a few sheets of paper be enough to win back Nadine’s heart?

***

Outside the small apartment, in a nondescript brown building in a dodgy suburb, she hesitated. Nadine cast another glance at her car. It wasn’t new, and it wasn’t flashy either. A small, cheap coupe shouldn’t be high on thieves’ lists. But that didn’t mean some kid wouldn’t take it for a test drive and then set it alight.

It would be fine, and if it wasn’t, at least she had insurance.

She knocked on the door and tried to ignore the peeling blue paint and the faint traces of graffiti that someone had attempted to scrub off, and waited, her gaze flickering over the parking lot and other apartments. Many of the curtains were closed as the residents didn’t want anyone peering into their lives. Solomon was home. She’d rung on the way over, but she hadn’t said why she was coming.

The door opened. Her father stood there in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt. He looked at her and nodded. Then he let her in, as if he knew why she was here without her breathing a word.

His apartment was sparsely furnished with odd pieces. Nothing matched. It wasn’t like the home she’d grown up in; her mother’s touch was missing. But it was still more of a home than Meryn’s spacious apartment. This place was lived in.

“Tea, coffee?”

“No. No thanks.” She glanced around, not sure what to do. On top of the TV was a picture of them as a family. Her mother was smiling at her father. She closed her eyes and turned away as the heartache threatened to crush her again.

Her father looked at her, resignation lined his face. He knew she wasn’t here to chat. “Why are you here, Nadine?”

She took a breath—she could only do this once—and jumped. “Mum used to tell a story,
Le
roi
des
gobelins
. Was it real?” Had the Goblin King been a cursed Celtic King as Meryn said?

“Michaline loved fairy tales. She believed there was truth in all of them.”

Maybe there was more truth to some. “She used to say goblins ran the earth on winter solstice. Have you ever seen them?”

Solomon sighed and sat down on the sofa. “Yes. When we were dating, she made me sit up one night with her to watch the Wild Ride. At first I saw nothing but shadows and moonlight. Then it became clear—an army riding straight out of Hell made up of gray demons.”

“Did you see the goblins take her?”

“I don’t know for sure what happened. Maybe it was goblins, maybe it was humans. Only you know the truth.”

Nadine wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The tears wouldn’t stop now they’d started. “I don’t remember.”

Flashes of her nightmare played in her mind like an old film. The face in the window. The monster that hid in the shadows and crawled around her sleep.

“You do. You just locked it away to protect yourself. Only you can set the memory free.”

In her mind, the glass broke for the last time.

Only it wasn’t her being dragged out the window by goblins in her dream; it was her mother. The person left holding the cross and doing nothing wasn’t Meryn. It was her. She’d watched her mother be stolen and done nothing.

Her legs buckled and she knelt on the floor. It was her fault her mother had died.

It was her fault her father had been imprisoned. If she’d remembered… If she’d done something, anything, she would’ve had a family.

Solomon was at her side, holding her the way he should have done twenty years ago. “I wish I’d been there. I’m sorry, Nadine.”

“I should’ve stopped them.”

“You were a child.”

“I should’ve remembered and spoken at your trial.” She lifted her head. “You’re innocent. We have to clear your name.”

“No. No one believes in goblins. I want to move forward. I don’t want to look back.”

“I’m sorry I never wrote you or came to see you.”

“Prison is no place for a little girl. I don’t blame you for anything.” Solomon smiled even though his eyes were wet.

She hugged her father for the first time in two decades. She knew the truth and had her family back. “You don’t hate the goblins for what they did?”

“How can I hate a creature so damned they gave up all emotion in exchange for greed? They suffer every day in a hell of their own making.”

But Meryn hadn’t given up everything for greed. He’d been cursed along with the king of her mother’s story. “Is it possible for a goblin to get free of the Shadowlands?”

“At solstice?”

“To be a man again.”

“I don’t know. I guess his heart would have to outweigh the goblin’s greed. It would be a rare man to claw his way back.”

Yet that was what Meryn had done. Could Meryn really be one of the men her mother had talked about? “What about the Goblin King and his men?”