Sea Lord (20 page)

marble, and her heart ached in her breast.

Madadh growled and rose to a crouch.

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Startled, she glanced down. The dog’s small ears laid back along its narrow skull. Its yellow eyes blazed.

She followed its line of sight to the empty arch and beyond to the cobblestoned keep. Her chest

tightened in apprehension.

“It’s okay,” she soothed, without any idea whether everything was okay or not.

Madadh took a slinking step forward.

She reached—
no collar
—and put her hand on the dog’s shoulders, feeling its muscles bunch beneath

the fur. “Let’s not be silly.”

Something was going on in the outer courtyard. The tall iron-bound door swung silently open. No

footsteps. No voices. She still had time to retreat to her room. Assuming she could find it in this pile of

stones.

She stood. “Come on,” she urged Madadh, sounding unconvincingly cheery. “Let’s—”

The dog bolted from under her hand and tore across the courtyard.

“
Crap.
” She took off after him.

At the arch, she stopped, catching herself against the cold, finished stone, her heart hammering against

her ribs.

A phantom company of—people?—poured like smoke through the open door. Not people. Ghosts.

Ancient soldiers, senators, centurions, like extras from an old Bible movie, like visions from a nightmare.

Something about the shape of their skulls, the set of their shoulders or eye sockets, wasn’t quite . . . right.

Their robes and bodies flowed and faded in the sun. Through their booted feet, their sandaled legs, she

could see the stones of the courtyard standing out like bones.

Her blood chilled.

Madadh launched like a rock from a catapult through the shifting, shimmering crowd. The air swirled and

sparkled in the dog’s wake.

“Madadh, no!” Lucy shouted as one figure—tall, robed, with leaves of some sort circling its dark

head—turned and raised one hand.

The hound dropped like a stone.

Lucy pressed her hands to her mouth.

The man, if it was a man, looked from the dog whimpering at its feet to Lucy cowering against the wall.

Its eyes glowed like the embers of a dying fire. They scorched her soul.

She felt the brute thrust of its invasion like an ice pick in her skull, like a broom handle between her legs.

Jabbing. Burning. Tearing.
Wrong.

Instinctively, she recoiled into the shadow of the arch, her heart thumping in her chest and the taste of

ashes in her mouth.

11

BART HUNTER CAME HOME TO THE SOUND OF the TV and the smell of burning food. He

dropped his boots by the front door. “Lucy?”

No answer.

Where the hell was she?

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be home. Usually at this hour he was at the inn. A man

deserved a drink after putting in a day on the water. He shouldn’t have to chase after his grown-up

daughter. She was too old, he was too old, to put up with this shit.

But while he was in line to sell his catch—young lobsters, shedders, to stock the co-op’s pond over the

winter—that jackass Henry Tibbetts had joked, “Where’d you bury the body, Bart?”

Like his daughter was dead instead of just taking a couple days off sick.

Like she’d run off.

Like her mother.

“Lu!” he bellowed.

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It wasn’t like her to skip work. Even when she was a little girl, she’d never missed more than a day of

school. Never gave any trouble, he thought with pride and regret.

The TV chattered—some woman with big lips and small tits leaning over a stove. Bart snapped off the

set and heard noises from the kitchen. Running water. Scraping sounds.

He found Lucy in the kitchen, standing in front of the sink, chipping away with a spatula at some

godawful black mess in a frying pan. Cupboards and drawers stood open. Dirty cups, bowls, and

spoons littered the counters among splotches of flour, grease, and tomato. Under the smoke and char

floated a sharper, fresher scent, like a mowed lawn.

Lucy’s head jerked around as he entered the kitchen, her shock of blond hair flying. Something—tomato

sauce? chocolate?—smeared her cheek. Her eyes were wild.

Bart halted. He didn’t ask her what was wrong. They never asked. There were too many possible

answers he didn’t want to hear. “What the hell are you doing?”

She lifted the pan half out of the sink, slopping water to the floor. “I wanted to make dinner.”

His gaze went from the wet floor to the hard, blackened remains of . . . whatever it was, stinking in the

sink.

He frowned, bothered. Bewildered. “Why didn’t you just throw something in the Crock-Pot?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “I don’t know anything.”

Her eyes welled with tears.

Bart recoiled. But under his worry and aggravation, a memory stirred: Alice, right after she’d come to live

with him, struggling in the kitchen. “
But I want to cook for you,
” she’d protested when he came home

to another ruined dinner. “
Like a regular wife.
”

“
I didn’t want a regular wife,
” he would tease her. “
I married a mermaid.
” Maybe he’d fry up some

eggs, then, or boil lobsters. Sometimes they’d skip dinner altogether and go upstairs to make love.

In the old days. In the good days. In the days when she still loved him enough to please him, and he’d

loved her enough to trust her.

The old, familiar pain ripped at him.

He looked at Alice’s daughter, her flushed face, her tear-filled eyes, and shifted his weight uneasily.

He’d never been a good father to her. Hadn’t needed to be. Caleb had raised her since she was in

diapers. By the time the boy left home, she was pretty much taking care of herself. And him, too. Doing

the laundry, doing her home-work, opening cans of soup for dinner. A good girl. No trouble, he thought

again.

But she was in some kind of trouble now. Henry said she hadn’t been into work all week.

“Maybe we should go out,” he said. “To eat. Give you a break.”

Her green eyes—green as grass, greener than he remembered—widened. “Why?”

“You’ve been sick,” he said gruffly. “Not yourself.”

“Not myself,” she repeated.

He wouldn’t take her to the bar at the inn, he decided. They’d go to Antonia’s. “Get a good meal inside

you, you might feel better.”

Her tears dried up as if by magic. “I will feel better.”

He was unaccountably pleased with himself and her. “And tomorrow you get yourself back to school.”

She stared at him, her face a blank.

His mouth dried in panic. Had something happened to her at the school? Something she couldn’t tell him?

She was fired, maybe, or . . . His mind skittered away from all the things that could happen to a girl, all

the dangers he’d never been able to protect her from.

“School,” she said suddenly and smiled. “To learn.”

He jammed his hands in his pockets. “To teach.”

“To teach and learn.”

“Right.” Well, why not? “Better than brooding around the house like your old man.”

She smiled, a hint of mischief in her face. “Get a good meal inside you, you might feel better.”

He chuckled, already feeling better than he had in a long time.

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Conn’s gaze swept from Madadh’s body, limp on the cobblestones, to Lucy’s white, stricken face. For

one second his heart simply stopped, frozen in terror.

Across the courtyard, Gau smiled, taunting him. Playing him.

Fury slammed through Conn like a storm surge, sweeping everything in its path.

His lips pulled back in a snarl. “Hold him.”

Gau’s form flickered. Perhaps it was an effect of the sunlight, but the demon lord appeared almost

shaken. “I am an emissary. You do not have the authority to hold me.”

“My realm,” Conn said. “My rules.”

A sigh rippled through Gau’s cohort. The stench of demonkind lay over the keep like smoke. In that

shifting, shimmering crowd, any one of them could have slipped away. Any one of them could have

seized a second’s opportunity, a moment of human weakness, to slide into Lucy’s mind and possess her,

to settle into that long, lean body, to rape her of her will.

Conn reached out with his senses, all his senses, but he could find no taint of demon in her, no fingerprint

of Hell. Whatever had been attempted, she was not possessed.

His fear abated. His fury did not.

Gau bent his borrowed features into an expression of pained surprise. “You would not jeopardize our

détente for . . . a dog?”

“My dog,” Conn said.

My woman.

He did not look again at Lucy. He would not draw the demon’s attention her way. But he was achingly

aware of her shrinking into the shadow of the arch, her fingers pressed to her mouth.

“You do not have cause to hold me,” Gau objected.

“Pray you are right, demon,” Conn said grimly. “Or even Hell will not protect you from me.”

“I acted in self-defense,” Gau protested.

“Bollocks,” Griff said. “The animal cannot bite a ghost.”

Madadh.

Now that his greater fear was soothed, Conn could spare thought for the dog. He reached the hound in

three long strides, barely noticing the wardens who squeezed out of his way. The hound was young,

strong, only three years old. Only three . . .

Conn dropped to his knees.

Gau sneered. “Your concern is touching. I did not expect such feeling from the great lord of the sea.”

Conn ignored him, his hands doing a rapid check of the dog’s heart, limbs, lungs. Madadh cocked an

anxious yellow eye upward and whined.
Alive.

Conn’s lungs relaxed enough for him to draw breath.

“You see? The animal is merely stunned,” Gau said. “I would not do anything foolish to upset the balance

of power.”

Did the demon’s gaze slide to Lucy?

“Bugger the balance of power,” Conn said through his teeth. “Touch what is mine again, Hell spawn, and

I will snuff you.”

Gau hissed.

Conn found Ronat among the wardens who had followed him from the hall. “Water and blankets for the

hound.”

“Yes, my prince.”

Conn smoothed a hand over the dog’s head and rose to his feet. The hound’s tail thumped weakly on the

stones.

“What shall we do with Lord Gau?” Morgan asked.

Conn wanted to send the demon lord back to Hell. But he would not release Gau until he had confirmed

Lucy was intact.

She still stood in the shadow of the bailey wall, outside the wardens’ protective circle. Her face was

ravaged. Ashen. The delicate skin beneath her eyes appeared bruised.

Conn’s face set. His gut churned. He needed to get her to himself. Somewhere he could hold her, touch

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her, assure himself of her safety. Anger still pounded in his temples like a headache, but controlled.

Or nearly controlled.

He stalked across the courtyard.

She had lowered her hands, holding her elbows tightly across her midsection as if she had taken a mortal

wound. Conn gritted his teeth. She could hold on to him. Wouldn’t that be the normal human female

response to an attack? She should throw herself in his arms. He would not mind.

But first he must get her away from Gau. From all of them.