King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,92
Bad was relative for Rose.
The day she thumped her rucksack down on the table in the front of the recruitment office, the two troops there looked up at her with mixed confusion and amusement. She lifted a hand, and produced a knife. Gave it a twirl. “I brought my own weapons. I’m here to join the Rift Walkers.”
They looked at one another, and chuckled.
Twenty minutes later, she stood up from her crouch in the center of the sparring mats in back, potential recruits spread out around her, groaning and rubbing at sore spots.
No one was laughing, then.
The Rift closed. The chaos continued.
Five years later, Rose Greer, Rift Walker, Golden Knight, remembered a book, and a table, and a lesson. Something useful bobbed to the surface of her constant, numbing grief. And she remembered a saint. And a stag. And a legend.
Beck was gone…
Until he wasn’t.
TWENTY-FOUR
5 Years Later
Wales
The room where the ritual would take place was round, stone-floored, columned. It reminded her all too well of the room in Anthony Castor’s mansion where her entire life had shrunk down to a single purpose: retrieving Beck. He hadn’t died; hell had taken him. And according to Brother Eustace, and her years of research, a soul could be taken back.
They’d shown her the stag up on the porch, the sad, dry, withered bit of wood that Thomas Cromwell had divested of its rider so many centuries ago. But down here, in the ritual room, there stood another. Proud, and gleaming, his knight-cum-saint astride him, arm raised, sword held aloft. It wasn’t the gentle clergyman who would venture down into the depths, but the warrior, the knight in service to King Arthur.
No part of it was lost on her. For the first time in years, that empty, aching longing in her gut felt settled. Things felt right. This would work, and if it didn’t, nothing else bore thinking about.
“Rose.” Lance pulled her aside as Brother Eustace and his colleagues lit the candles and the incense. He was doing that thing with his face: the tipped chin, and the raised brows, like he thought she was rash, or insane. Or when he doubted her sincerity. “Are you sure about this? This is – remember what happened last time?”
“This isn’t like last time. This isn’t opening a portal. Saint Derfel is going to fetch him, and all we have to do is wait.”
He wet his lips, and darted a glance toward the robed monks. He was worried; she saw the sheen of sweat at his temples and on his upper lip. He wore his hair longer on top than when she’d met him, pretty, dark curls, sticking to his damp forehead now. “Rose,” he started again. He laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Mademoiselle?” Brother Eustace called.
She touched Lance’s hand. “I know what I’m doing.” And removed it from her shoulder. He pulled back with a wounded look, one he quickly tried to hide.
Poor Lance. He’d never really understood, though she knew he’d tried to. But he’d never felt about anyone the way she felt about Beck – not even about her.
She stepped around him, and walked to the gathering of robed men, at the feet of the stag.
Brother Eustace looked at her with warmth – and with something like awe. “The sacrifice?”
She withdrew the dagger from its sheath inside her jacket. The rubies winked in the candlelight. The monks took a collective breath, and shrank back a step.
“We will begin the prayers,” Brother Eustace said in French. “But the sacrifice, and the request, must come from you. It has to be the thing you want most in the world.”
She nodded.
He patted her shoulder, and they all withdrew. A low, almost musical chant began: Latin prayers. An invocation.
A faint breath of wind stirred in the room. The candle flames flickered.
“Jesus,” Gallo whispered. “This is–”
Someone shushed him – Tris, probably.
Rose lifted the dagger, and pricked the fingertips of her left hand, one after the next. The blade was so sharp that it didn’t hurt; she only felt cold, where her skin had been cut.
She turned her hand over, and let her blood drip down at the feet of the stag. Her belly clenched with anticipation. Please work. Please, I need him back…
She lifted her face, and regarded the stone countenance of the saint. She had to say the name. “Saint Derfel,” she said, in English. “I have a request for you, if you’ll honor it. I need a soul back – a damned soul in hell. I need Arthur Augustus Becket.”
For a moment, nothing changed. There was only the low, Latin chanting, and the rush of her own pulse in her ears.
But then…
The statue moved. It was no statue at all anymore, and Rose stumbled back from it, clutching the dagger a moment before she remembered – and then she slid it across the floor, toward the sinuous, blue-glowing smoke that was a man astride a stag. A stomping snorting, circling stag. The man of blue smoke leaned down, and scooped up the weapon with grace and ease. Raised it, examined it. Then he met her gaze, and she felt like her heart was being squeezed; lifted and examined, too.
The stag bellowed, turned, and dove. Headfirst, it shot down through the stones of the floor with curls of blue mist.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” Gallo chanted. “It really worked, it really–”
The stag returned, trumpeting, tossing its head, spectral antlers misting where they struck the ceiling. The beast circled a few times; Saint Derfel turned to her, a faint smile on his ghostly lips.
And then it was a statue again. Solid, unmoving stone.
And on the floor…
It was smoking, she saw first. Steaming. An indistinct, onyx shape that didn’t look human.
Rose stared at it, and became aware that the chanting had stopped. No one uttered a sound – but she could hear breathing. Ragged, and deep, but regular. Coming from the black shape at the foot of the statue.
“Rose–” Lance started. She felt him grab at her.
She ducked away and crossed to the shape. Circled it. Her heart was racing. And she knew, she knew…
It was him. Naked, curled up on his side, arms and legs drawn in, flanks quivering, ribs heaving. She knew that skin, and those muscles; would have known the shape of him anywhere.
But his hair was wrong: still too long, and silken, gleaming in the candlelight, but jet black. And there was…something amidst it. Something hard, and solid.
A flicker of movement caught her eye down by his feet. She thought it was a snake at first, the way light glimmered on sleek, flat scales. But the head was not a head, but a sharp spade, and the flexing, coiling black length was…
A tail.
And in his hair, those were…horns.
“Beck,” she whispered.
His eyes snapped open, gold as before, but gleaming. His mouth opened, and his sharp canines were even sharper, and longer.
He struggled upright with a low, rumbling sound in his chest like he’d never made before. And the black, leathery shape around him was not a cloak, but wings.
They opened, and fanned. Nearly too wide for the room, sleek, and deadly, and hooked at the top.
Rose stared.
Lance whispered, “What the fuck?”
Beck rubbed his eyes with black-tipped fingers. Yawned. Stretched. He tipped his head back, shook his hair off his shoulders – and, yes, those were horns, thick, and spiraled, curving back over his ears like a ram’s.
He opened his golden, lion eyes, and found her. His gaze cleared.
He smiled. “Rosie. Hello, sweetheart.”
He held out a hand to her.
And she placed her hand in his.
THE END