Shane: Dragon’s Savior – Ménage Erotic Fantasy (Dragon's Savior Book 4) (8 page)

The queen? Keion could see that. But right now he was looking at the wall that they’d all had a hand in putting up. As he’d noticed earlier, the walls were perfectly straight, the windows in line and square. The turret, which he knew was copied on each of the four corners, was just as he’d seen in the drawings. A place to put men should the need arise. He could not wait to see it all complete, to stand there now, high above the grounds, and see it just as his parents had long ago.

Caroline drained four glasses of juice before she moved to the wall. When Asher joined her, they walked around the entire thing twice before coming back to sit with them. Asher looked pleased, even excited. It was then that Keion realized what she’d meant by it being a fortress. The walls were thicker than he’d realized, and he’d bet higher too. She had anticipated that they’d have to go to war sometime. Looking at her sleeping in Shane’s arms, he wondered what else she could do. Hell, what else they could do. He looked around the group.

“Whatever is coming, we needed this to protect us. Or the castle.” Caroline said that’s what she’d guess too. “How does she know this? I mean, did the earth tell her? Does she know something that we don’t?”

“I would say that is all about right. Yes, the earth will speak to her. Not on the same level as it will Essie and Asher or the rest of you, but she can talk to it. Does she know something you don’t? I would say that she knows a great deal more than any of us do. You mustn’t forget that she was touched by the king and queen. They were able to foretell things as well, know that they had to ready you for their death. Did she get a part of that? I would say so.” Caroline looked at Lelani. “She’s stronger than even I was told she’d be. Stronger even than she knows. I believe that she would be considered the most powerful witch ever born. And in that, she’s going to be sought after as if she were carrying her weight in gold. The Herald, they’ll come for her now. Fixing this building, someone will feel this and tell them about it.”

“She said that there were witches here that were trying to make a profit off all of you being here. Is it one of them?” Caroline closed her eyes before answering him. He was almost afraid of her answer. So when she looked at him and nodded, he wanted to go out and find them and make them leave here now.

“Will do you no good, I’m afraid. The damage is done. The Herald won’t be able to enter the land, thankfully, but their troops are here now. They’ll try to harm us in ways that only magic can.” He asked her what they could do now. “I don’t know…I honestly don’t know, Keion. But she will, and it will not be a gentle fight. I have no idea why I think that, but it’s as true as me standing here. It will be a bloody and horrific fight. But it will also be quick, harsh, and violent for those witches.”

Both Shane and Keion carried her back to their home. Lelani didn’t weigh much, but they both wanted to hold her, so they switched back and forth for the opportunity to do so. When they entered the house, Roger was waiting for them. Once they had her in the bedroom that they all would share, he brought them both a lunch of thick sandwiches and a cooler full of a variety of juices.

“Lelani prefers fresh, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to have one of the others plant a few trees in the yard for her. I’ll tend to them.” Shane told him to go ahead. “Also, there is the matter of me sleeping here. I would request the room on the lower level, below the ground. There is a nice door there for me, and my own yard, if you please. I can come and go as I need to. I should also like to have a garden of my own. Not that I don’t like what the others grow, but I have my own tastes, as does my mistress.”

After he was given permission to do whatever he needed, Shane turned to Keion after Roger left them. “There wasn’t a lower level. We didn’t have a basement either, much less an entrance for him to go into his own backyard.” Keion laughed. Things were certainly moving along, he thought.

Chapter 4

Robert tried to think. There were just too many people talking at once for him to get a single thought straight in his head. They had found her, that much he’d gotten. But the part he was having a hard time wrapping his head around was that she’d moved a mountain. Pulling out his gun, he fired two shots into the air before they all settled down again. It ruined the plaster, of course, but right now he wanted their full attention. He was pretty sure he had it.

The witch that stood before him only laughed, Robert decided that he disliked her most of all of the witches that he’d killed over the last six months. She had a knowing look on her face, and he found that he wanted to slap it off her every time he saw her. But he’d not let her rattle him, not again. He needed her much more than she needed him, and he never wanted her to figure that out. But he was pretty sure it was too late for that.

“What do you mean, she moved a mountain? Surely you jest.” She shook her head. “Then explain yourself. I don’t have time for this foolishness. How the hell do you expect me to believe that she moved a fucking mountain, when I can’t get the neighbor’s dog to stop shitting in my yard every day?”

“Perhaps you should kill it as you do most things in your life that you dislike. The castle, the one I told you about, she went out there with the others and finished an entire wall of it by moving the stones into place with her magic. Of course we all felt it…she drained us a little when she took from us. Wasn’t stealing however, which would have gotten her into a great deal of trouble with the higher ups, if there were any. As part of our deal of living there, we were to give when needed. I had to give to her.” He asked her how this was even possible. “Magic. I told you that she was strong, but you’d not believe me when I told you how strong. She is going to be your downfall too, I think. And mine.”

“You’ll tell her who we are?” The woman, her name was Cybil he thought, told him that she more than likely knew them by now, not just by name but everything she wanted to know about them. “I don’t think so. We keep a very low profile, and in that, no one knows who we are.”

“You’re sure about that?” He nodded, but her question made him think. “The Heralds have been around for longer than most buildings in this town. And what they don’t know about them directly has been made up in stories and tales to keep other witches in line. It’s one of the first things they tell us about when we come into our own. Don’t be caught by the Herald. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? You’re a descendant of them, aren’t you?”

Robert leaned back in his seat and regarded the witch in front of him. She knew a great deal for a mere witch. He was ready to have her taken away when she laughed at him. The sound of it, so scary-like, actually made him reach down to cup his balls.

“Rohm was my too many great-grandfather to count back. He and his wife, they had several daughters and one son. But the son was murdered by a witch one night when they were supposed to be burning her at the stake. I’m not sure about that part, but that’s the story.” Cybil shook her head and said that no witch killed him. “Yes, she did. Mary Wayne was responsible for his death, as well as Rohm’s. Everyone knows that story.”

“Lies. They were fed to you and others by Rohm to gather enough men to go after her. To make themselves appear to be stronger than they were. But it never worked; he could never get to her after that night. It was said that a man only had to cross the barrier to the land that she’d been given to protect her to have his male parts shrivel up and die.” He’d heard that as well. He no more believed that than he did a woman was actually burned at the stake because she was a witch. “But Rohm’s new wife killed him, just as the son’s own wife murdered him. They had found out about the others, you see. The women that he’d fuck on his altar and then claim that they’d tricked him. Children, too, were born to them; I’m thinking you might be descended from one of them. Trick her once, shame on them, trick her several hundred times.... Well, I think you understand. He was responsible for Mary’s death indirectly, but unless he did it from the grave, he never lived to see it. His wife, fat with another daughter, gave birth the day after he died, just as Mary’s curse said he would. He would never see another of his children born.”

“My ancestor was a godly man.” Again the laughter. “He did kill Mary. The story goes that he caught her with a man between her legs and killed him. Then he took her to the church grounds and put her there himself and burned her. As should have happened when he captured her after her making claims about his son. She claimed that he raped her, and Michael said that she’d used her powers over him to make her carry his child.”

“There was a babe, yes. And it
was
fathered by Rohm’s son, as Mary claimed. But Mary and her babe were safe on the land given to her by the king and queen of dragons. It is said, and this part I know not if it is true, that the queen had need of her child. She had none of her own and she paid Mary to birth her one. But soon after that, the castle fell and the king and queen were murdered. So Mary’s children—there were two of them—had been blessed with magic by the queen so they were safe, so long as they followed the rules on the grounds given to her that night.” Robert told her that she lied, that there was no way she could know this. “But I do. As does every witch that has ever come after Mary. She lives even now, the daughter of Michael Herald and Mary Wayne. One was recently murdered, as you well know, but the—”

“You speak of dragons and kings and queens like they are real. You said that she lives now, this child of his. You know as well as I do that isn’t possible. She would be centuries old, shriveled up and deep in her grave. There isn’t any way for her to be there unless she’s a ghost too.” She said that she lived and was as beautiful as anyone she’d ever met. “I don’t know why I’m even listening to you. You’re stupid if you believe even half of what you’re saying.

“Believe what you wish, but I know what I’ve seen. It was a full thirteen years after his son’s death before Mary was murdered, and your sire did not do the murdering. She was killed by her own child, her firstborn, by telling the Herald where she was.” Robert was more confused now than when he’d tried to read over his long dead grandfather’s notes. There had been no mention of a child. None either of a dragon king and queen. This woman had no idea what she was talking about. “When you go there, Robert, make sure that you have your affairs in order, your will made out. And that any child that you have is safe as well. The curses that she will put upon you will make you wish you had followed in your sire’s footsteps and died an early death.”

After he had her taken away, laughing and telling him to get his affairs in order, Robert pulled out his family’s notes. He’d found them several years ago in his grandmother’s attic, and had been reading and rereading them since. She’d told him that for a long while his dad had written in the journal, but she’d long since put it away. No one had touched it in many years, but some of the dates on it were thousands of years ago. But it was his grandmother’s words that he remembered now.

“Nothing but stupidity if you ask me. Why do any of us care that someone can mix a few herbs together and come up with a cure for some foot fungus? Or that they think themselves magical at all? There is no such thing as magic, Robert. Remember that if you remember nothing else that I have said to you. It just does not exist; it cannot.” He had asked her for the book and she said she didn’t care. But he’d been forbidden to take it from her home. Her thinking was that he could sell it someday, the ramblings of a fool, for enough money to go to college. “You mark my words. Someday someone is going to pay you a lot of money for that thing. You keep it nice while you’re here and we’ll laugh all the way to the bank about it; see if we don’t, my boy. Magic. Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us that you can pull a real rabbit from your ass. Stupid people.”

Robert had thought her wrong but had never told her that. She was old, set in her ways. She hadn’t even owned a cordless phone, preferring instead to have one attached to the wall with a long cord that got wrapped up in things when you used it. When he went to visit her she’d make him do the oddest things, too. Salt had to be around each window and door, with no break in the lines. He was never to wear his shoes in the house. He was never allowed to eat after midnight either. All these rules. And when he asked her why or why not, she told him that was the way she liked it. It wasn’t until later, when he’d been a grown man, that he realized that his grandmother did believe in magic. Or at least she’d been afraid of it. And each of her rules were to keep any kind of magic from entering her home. She had been keeping herself safe, but he never figured out from what or who.

Opening the book to where the first entries were, he read the words there. Or he tried to. His ancestor, Rohm, could neither spell well nor finish a sentence that made any sense. Most of the time he’d read his entries over and over and have a headache afterwards that would make him sick to his belly. The man had been an idiot.

“Mary Wain cae to hose toda. Sad my boe had taked what she had and filed her belie with a babe.”

He worked at figuring it out and came up with Mary went to Rohm’s house and claimed that Michael Herald, his son, had raped her and now she was having his baby. As he went on, translating it to what he thought it said, he came to the part about the man and woman who had been mentioned by Cybil. There was no mention of them being anything but that, a man with his wife. He had mentioned that he’d felt peculiar, but not why or how it had happened. Then he told about the curse and his son being murdered.

Robert supposed that Michael Herald’s wife might have killed him. He certainly would have been tempted had he known the man, he thought. There were many mentions throughout the book about how others had come forth, trying to claim a bit of the family fortune by saying that they were a child of his. Not that there was much in the way of fortune. Even one of the sisters had said that, saying that he’d ruined them for any husband. Hell, he was one of the bastards, just as the witch had guessed about him.

Yet there was no mention of his daughters, no names associated with the family in the big book that he could find either. It was as if they were never important enough for the writer to even bother with remembering anything about them. Robert had had to unearth a family Bible that had been written in over the centuries before he was even able to trace his own line back far enough to see which daughter had started his family tree. He was indeed a descendant of Rohm Herald, but from Rachel, the second daughter, who had never married as far as he could see. If the younger daughters had had sons, there was no mention of them either. It was as if the entire line had died other than the bastards of either man.

He looked at the clipping of Michael Herald’s death. The person who had written this piece of drivel had had no better spelling ability than Rohm, and whatever they didn’t have in that department, they made up for in prose. According to the obituary, Michael Herald, was a sainted man who had angels on his shoulders and might have had some sort of direct connection with the good Lord himself. Robert wondered if the man’s father had dictated it for the person that had put it in the local paper, and thought perhaps, if the townspeople had been asked, there would be an entirely different accounting of the man. No man, no matter how good they appeared, was as good as Michael’s obit had claimed.

He was still reading through the book when his son came to get him for dinner. Picking the boy up in his arms, he and Mark headed for the dining room. The doorbell was ringing as he went by it, and he answered it with a smile on his face. The woman standing there threw him off.

“May I help you?” She moved by him and into the room where he was. Not by him so much as through him. He rubbed his body where he imagined her touching him, and decided that he’d been reading too much and was going to limit himself from now on. Putting his son down, he ordered him to go to his mother and to call the police. Then he turned to the woman standing by his staircase. “You weren’t invited in. I’d very much like it if you were to leave now.”

“No, I wasn’t, was I? But I’m not really here, anyway. You can see me because I wish it so. However, if the police come and you point me out to them, they’re more than likely going to take you away to a padded cell. Do they do that still?” She sat down on air and he felt his heart start to pound. “Have a seat, Robert. What I have to say is going to knock you on your ass a few times, and I’d rather not have to worry that you’ll not be listening. Oh, and your son and wife, they think that you’ve forgotten something in your office and will join them momentarily. And the police have not been called in. So, it’s just you and I until I say what I have to tell you.”

The chair bumped him in the back of his legs, and he’d had no choice but to fall into it. When he started to rise up, he realized that he couldn’t. And when his wife came into the front hall with him, she walked right by him saying his name, as if she’d not seen him sitting there.

“As I said, we have to talk. My name is Lelani. I’m a witch. Just in case you might have misheard me, yes, I’m a witch.” When she snapped her fingers, he looked down his body to see that he was naked. Then before he could ask her what the hell was going on, he was dressed again. “That was just to show you that I don’t need to be in the room with you to make you see all sorts of things. By the way, I can make you do shit too, so don’t fuck with me. I’m not in the best of humor. Not that I am normally, but today isn’t going to bode well for you should you rile me up more.”