Noah (6 page)

He grabbed Noah’s mate by her braid and promptly shot her in the head.

“No!” the Demon King bellowed in shock and the sudden collision of despair as the next few seconds played out in a horrific display of blood and undeniable loss of life.

He lurched forward, unthinking of those he guarded.

But it was too late.

That strange distortion of sight suddenly overwhelmed the Demon King once more. Everything faded and twisted, and that rending sensation of being picked apart one cell at a time bolted through him. In all the times he’d adjusted his form on a molecular level, he had never experienced such agony and such a lack of control. He tried to breathe, but had no lungs with which to do so. Not in that moment.

The next instant he could, and the deep reflexive breath that followed carried the overwhelming scent of burning herbs and candles. He lost track of those he held for a moment, but soon was aware of all three of them crashing down hard onto the velvety pillows that covered the floor of Corrine’s sanctum.

Corrine was coughing harshly, and then he felt her grasping at the sleeve of his shirt, clearly just as blind as he was once more.

“What the hell just happened?” she managed to say hoarsely.

That told Noah that this was far from the response Corrine had been expecting, though he’d already assumed as much. He finally found Leah, cradling her close to his chest again as her little body was racked with coughing. He rubbed violently at his eyes, trying to force himself to see. It did little good, so he was compelled to take a seat, with Leah on his lap and Corrine leaning heavily against him, and wait his eyesight out.

Just then a sharp distortion of air blew into them, followed by the unmistakable odor of sulfur and smoke that cut through the aroma of burning herbs.

“Kane!” Corrine cried out her husband’s name, recognizing his arrival even though she couldn’t see him.

“Corr! Noah! What the hell happened?”

Noah felt Corrine’s presence and warmth being drawn away from him. He blinked in the direction of her energy signature and the copper red of her hair suddenly came into blurry focus. He immediately turned his attention to Leah, continuing to blink away the weakness of his eyes as he tried to examine the child for injury.

“Kane, are they injured?” he demanded of the younger Demon.

“No,” Kane assured him as he kneeled to inspect Leah. “Covered in soot, but otherwise no worse for the wear. Are you okay?”

Noah had no idea how he could possibly answer that question. Relieved of his urgent worry over Leah and Corrine, the full implication of what had happened, of what he had just witnessed, weighed on him with a sudden and bright devastation he could remember feeling only at the worst moments in his long life. And yet this was somehow much keener. It sliced through flesh and bone and straight into the depths of his soul.

He let Kane draw Leah from his hold, and then stumbled through the blur of pillows and candlelight until he could touch a wall. He pressed his fingers into the lush velvet covering the wood paneling. The thick pile crushed beneath the onslaught of his clenching fist.

“Noah.”

He felt Corrine’s hands on his back, her empathy all too apparent in the tenderness of her touch. Noah couldn’t bear the comfort. He didn’t want to be comforted. He shrugged her off hard enough to make her stumble backward away from him.

“She is dead,” he said, his voice far rougher with emotion than he would have liked. He ran cold fingers down his soiled face, focusing straight ahead until the detail of the fabric before him came into clarity. The truth of his words was devastating to him, and on so many levels. He laughed mirthlessly at the capricious nature of fate. “Now I know why I have not dreamed of her in a week. Those dreams are…” He swallowed hard, trying to tamp down emotion far too violent to express in front of gentle friends. “They were a connection that needed both sides to be completed. And now I just stood here and let it happen again!” He turned sharply to look down at the redheaded Druid. “You were right. I was so stupid. I wasted six months. If I had come to you when this started, she would have been safe under my protection when she needed me most!”

Corrine closed her eyes, fighting back her sympathetic tears.

“I don’t understand any of this myself, Noah. You can’t be sure—”

“I am damn sure, Corr. Did you look out the windows? The sky went from noon to dawn, moving time backward to the moment this thing occurred. Backward to what I am guessing was a week ago, to the day I ceased to dream of her. And do not tell me there was nothing I could do to change it. I felt that carpet beneath my foot! I could have—I should have
done
something! I could smell the difference between this room and that one. I felt the energy of an entire city beyond it. For that moment, that place in time was as real as this place is right now.”

The monarch finally took a good look at the tall redhead who, in spite of a layer of grime, seemed to emanate power. She had done a potent and amazing thing, a feat beyond all expectations of her abilities, and the aftermath showed in overbright green eyes and an aura that glowed like a Christmas tree.

“Consider,” he said, this time more gently. “How would Kane suffer if Isabella had found you too late, Corrine? I have a right to grieve this loss!” The declaration promptly ended any discussion. The room vibrated with pain and tension, the silent noise punctuated with the occasional cough of Corrine’s niece.

“Yuck,” the child declared. She licked her hand and rubbed it on her clothes in an attempt to clean the soiled palm. Leah was fastidious about cleanliness, though clearly not as much so about germs.

Wordlessly, Noah crossed to Kane and plucked his charge out of her blood uncle’s hands, carrying her across the room. He held the child to his chest with one massive hand, and she instantly hooked her small, skinny legs around his waist, her head dropping onto his shoulder with contentment and the security that her uncle Noah would help her. The way he held her, however, grabbed at Corrine’s heart. Leah was hooked around him as if she were some sort of bulletproof vest, protecting his all-too-vulnerable heart.

Kane moved to hold his distraught wife when her thoughts and emotions impacted against him like a train wreck. He followed her gaze, which was affixed on the door to the room as if Noah were standing on its threshold instead of having already passed through it.

“Shh, sweetness,” he soothed softly, leaning to kiss a dirt-streaked cheek sympathetically. “You’ll see. He’ll be fine in time. Like any death, this will be grieved and then it will be put aside.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Corrine whispered to him on a fast, nervous breath. “The last time someone learned of the death of her potential Druid mate, she went mad.”

“Mary?
Ruth
drove Mary mad, Corrine. From the minute that child was born she was spoiled, sheltered, and held much further above her station by Ruth than was warranted. The mother was to blame for her daughter’s actions because of her carelessness in Mary’s upbringing. That can never happen to Noah. Noah comes from an upbringing that defies explanation and a place I couldn’t even begin to put in plain words for you.” Kane shook his head when he felt her puzzled expression. “Not a physical place. A metaphysical one. Noah was born with something none of the rest of us could ever lay claim to. It’s why he, above all others, is King.”

“That’s why he, above all others, deserved a complementary Queen,” Corrine replied.

Noah knew on some level that the child he was now watching play contentedly before his hearth was responsible for what had happened.

The Prophecy had been clear and unmistakable. The Enforcers would give life to the child who would be the very first of his or her kind to have the power to manipulate the element of Time. Though she was only a little over two years old, Leah clearly had shown the first evidence of her ability, an astounding event even had it been a well-known element like Water or Wind. Even his remarkable power had not come to him at such a young age.

Of course, she had no idea what she had done or the significance of the part she had played. Suddenly certain things began to make sense to him. He spent enormous amounts of time with this special child. Though she’d had no conscious control of what she was doing, somehow Leah had formed that conduit through time for him. Perhaps it was simply a child’s desire to please that had triggered the subconscious ability. Leah loved her uncle Noah with incredible devotion. She strived to do things that would please him. Combine this with the power of his and Corrine’s wills, their need to be successful in their hunt, and it had made the perfect catalyst for a child with an untried power who wanted nothing more but to give him what he wanted. What he needed.

And for a terrible moment, Noah wanted to use her for exactly that reason. The King was a scholar, so he knew full well the implications of altering time, and a person’s presence in time. However, he couldn’t bring himself to care for that long second of self-indulgent thought.

Noah stood up abruptly, pacing over the playing toddler in order to lean close against the mantel. Normally the proximity to such intense heat would comfort him, but this time it did not.

He wanted to burn. Oh yes, he was impervious to any and every form of flame or molten fire that the natural world could offer up, but this wasn’t what he meant. In his dreams,
she
had made him burn. Kestra Irons. He laughed with the dry irony of her last name. The metal iron was toxic to Demonkind. It burned on contact. Just like Kestra.

The fire of passion was no stranger to him; he manipulated it well and with arrogant skill, and he had more than one lover in his history who would attest to that with a longing sigh of remembrance. This thing with the woman who had pervaded his sleeping world was out of reach of all of that. It was transient and lacking cohesion, and yet somehow all the more real. Now made unreal and inescapably out of reach for all the rest of time as he knew it.

Unless…

Noah shivered. He was unused to selfish thought. He was a man who lived every moment of his existence with the well-being of so many others as his first priority. Family. When not family, Council. When not family or Council, the multitude of his subjects. If none of them, then the races of others with which they associated. That was the essence of a good monarch. Everyone else must come first, especially those you loved best.

In that moment, all he wanted was to put himself first.

Whatever the cost.

No matter who had to pay.

Isabella entered the King’s castle without even bothering to knock. It wasn’t so much that she had developed altered manners from living in Demon society as it was that, to Noah, privacy was an alien, if not impossible, concept. Dozens of people moved in and out of his home throughout the night, and he expected it to be so.

Since Noah still had Bella’s daughter in his care, she had even more cause to march in unannounced. She rounded the wall of the foyer, entering the Great Hall and heading automatically for the enormous fireplace that Leah was constantly in front of, whatever the season, whenever she stayed with him. Her steps hitched when the Turkish rug, so well worn from years of children playing upon it, lay as abandoned as the toys scattered over it.

She wasn’t worried, just surprised. She crossed her arms over her middle, her fingers drumming thoughtfully in the curve of her waist for a moment. She was a hunter, like her husband, and all she need do was quiet her thoughts and concentrate on her target. She would find them wherever they were in the enormous house without having to shout or search rooms. Filtering through scent and residual patterns of warmth, she was able to sort out which belonged to her daughter and her liege.

To her continuing surprise, it led out of Noah’s home entirely. This perplexed her because it was nearing dawn. The dawn and the sunlight were things best avoided for those of the Nightwalker races, aside from the incredibly powerful Elders. And while that description fit Noah, her daughter was a very different matter. Though a Demon and Druid mixed child was a unique creature, there was no guarantee that her mother’s blasé human immunity to the sun would be an inherited trait. For Demon children, the sun could make them very weak and ill. It even had the potential to kill vulnerable children not yet in their power. They would fall asleep and simply never wake up. Isabella and Jacob had never had a desire to test their child’s tolerance to sunlight. They would wait until she was older before trying such tricks.

It was unusually irresponsible for Noah to take the little girl elsewhere when daylight was so near, especially because Isabella or Jacob always came and collected her exactly one hour before the dawn. Still, the young mother didn’t worry or panic. Leah was with Noah, after all. The King would rather die than expose her to harm. He was probably already on his way home and just running a little late.

So Isabella turned to flop down into the seat nearest the fire, sighing contentedly as she stretched out a body quite weary from a long night’s work. The closer it got to Samhain and the full moon, the more she and Jacob were forced to hunt down Demons who lost control of their logic and normal temperaments. After a night like the one they had just had, she was always very tired and more than happy to go to bed.

She wouldn’t have to worry about another out-of-control Demon until dusk the next day.

Corrine lay down in bed gratefully, feeling exhausted mentally and emotionally, both of which manifested in her body as weary muscles and achy bones. Kane was already in bed, anticipating the coming dawn that left him so lethargic. She had showered off the soot and soil of the night’s exertions, so she brushed her still-damp hair out into a fan of dark coils, back over her pillow, with a single sweep of her arm. With choreography of thought that came so easily to telepathically connected partners, Kane turned toward her and drew her warm curves tightly against the cradle of his body.

“Sleep,” he murmured gently. “The coming night will provide ample time for you to obsessively worry.”