He's A Magic Man (The Children of Merlin) (24 page)

“Whoa, whoa,” he said, holding up a hand as the hulking men closed in. “We don’t need her.” He could practically feel Drew wince. God, he was a bastard. But it was for
her own
good.

“She knows about the sword. Don’t want competition,” Rhiannon snapped. “She comes.”

These people were ruthless. They might kill Drew just because she knew about the sword. She had to be protected from them. There was one way to do that. It would hurt.

“Who would she tell?” He snorted derisively. “A college girl from UCLA? Like anyone’s going to believe her.
Arthur’s sword.
Right.”
Just keep your mouth shut, Drew,
he pleaded silently.
It’s okay to be dismissed.

“Morgan doesn’t like loose ends.” Rhiannon turned and motioned to St. Claire like he was an annoying inconvenience.

“Look, I’m done with her,” Michael said. “I don’t want her hanging around. It killed him to know he was twisting the knife. “Let’s just make it easier for everybody, huh?”

Rhiannon turned, her face angry. Then she rolled her eyes and smirked. “Okay, Magic Man. I guess you’re right. Sorority sisters aren’t exactly a threat.”

As they all trudged off over the sand, Michael turned back to Drew. Walking backward, he tried to give her a look that said how sorry he was, how he didn’t mean it, but how he had to go anyway. Like she’d understand.

The tears in her eyes made him want to throw up. So he turned around, gut churning, and headed after the strawberry blond and her crew.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Drew watched them walk away, too shocked to think coherently. Her stomach started to roll as she felt the bond with Michael almost like a physical pull on her gut. Rhiannon had been the power behind St. Claire’s throne all along. And there was a real possibility she was part of the group who had attacked Tris and Maggie in Nevada, this “Clan” thing. But even if Drew told Michael that, she knew he’d still take any chance to get Alice back. He wasn’t a bad man. No one could resist that bait. Drew was the one who’d convinced him magic really existed. When Rhiannon raised the storm, it had made him sure.

She had no hold on him. Sure, she’d thought....

As he walked away, the connection she’d been feeling for the past hours seemed to rip and tear, taking most of her insides with it. Michael turned back
once,
his face contorted in pain, before he resolutely turned away and kept walking. As the party pushed into the wall of mangrove trees and palms, nausea overcame her and she fell to her knees, retching her breakfast into the sand. The pull to Michael was overwhelming, like a hook into her intestines. Her head pounded. She could feel him striding away. She knew exactly when he reached the clearing of the driveway in front of the cabin. She heaved again and again, uncontrollably. He was still now. Her heaving became sobs, and she fell over to lie in the sand.

As usual, she’d been blinded by her own desires. She’d gone from being certain of her destiny to being certain of nothing at all at warp speed in the last few
dalys
. She was the stupid college girl he thought she was, letting one man after another star in her fantasies as a white knight, right up until they broke her heart. She’d even seen this one coming.

It didn’t help. Her heart felt broken now, her body wracked with the physical pain to match her mental anguish. Her mother was right. She couldn’t fix this. In her blithe confidence, she’d always been sure things would turn out well. Maybe her mother had been trying to break it to her gently. Arbitrary. That’s what life was. Luck of the draw, and she’d drawn a bad hand.

She felt him go at last, receding faster now. Back down the little track. Out to the paved road. The bond between them stretched and thinned. She could feel him all the way out to Highway 1 and beyond. But slowly, the connection faded. Her temples stopped pounding. Her stomach steadied. He was on his boat now. Then he was gone.

And that felt worse than anything.

When she was sobbed out, she sat for a long time, trying to care enough about anything to move. But that was silly. She couldn’t stay here now. She stumbled back to the cabin. Puddles from last night’s rain stood everywhere in the unevenly graveled drive.

What to do? Go back to Miami and take the first flight she could get back to LA.
Maybe not.
The last thing she wanted was to face her family. Maybe she’d go to Paris and earn a meager living translating medieval texts. Her Medieval French was pretty good.

She leaned against the Toyota and looked up at the hot, blue sky. Her head fell forward onto her chest. The weight of the humid day was almost too much to bear. The edges of her vision began to darken and pull in.

She tried to breathe. What was happening here? A strange tingling came over her. She felt as though she was drifting away from her body.

The puddle at her feet shimmered. The muddy water cleared and there was a picture, clear as day, of Michael at the prow of
The Purgatory
,
out at sea. He was in one of his trances. As she watched, mesmerized, he shook himself, chest heaving from the effort, and crawled back toward the wheel. Rhiannon pushed up to him through the men gathered in the stern. “What have you got?” she asked Michael. The words rang in Drew’s head.

“The course,” he said shortly, and went down into the cabin. Drew’s vision went with him. He rolled out some charts on the little dining table. At the edge he wrote some coordinates. It was as though Drew was peering over his shoulder.

Then the vision faded. The water wasn’t clear and shimmering anymore, just muddy.

Damn.

That was a real vision, a vision of the future, because Michael and Rhiannon and company couldn’t have made it out into open water yet. She couldn’t deny that she had a power.

And the man who had raised it didn’t want her.

*****

She turned her head. Jason removed the respirator so she could speak. She couldn’t do without it for very long anymore. “Does she have it?” she whispered.

“Not yet,” Jason said, his voice flat. It was all he could do to look at her, she knew.

“
Age does this to you
,” she wanted to shout. But it would take too much energy. She wanted to punish him for his disgust, but she couldn’t do it anymore. Luckily he didn’t know that. It was only the force of her will keeping her alive now. No one should live this long. Her mind wandered for a moment over leg-o’-mutton sleeves and pinched waists, riding with gentlemen in their carriages in the afternoon.... She was young and beautiful, and they did her bidding because they worshipped her....

“She’s got the Finder though,” Jason interrupted. “Shouldn’t be long.”

She snapped back to the present. The lapses in mental acuity frightened her more than her crumbling body. But she’d have the Talisman soon. “Make sure she calls in....” She was starting to gasp already.
Lungs failing, along with everything else.

“She’s got a sat phone. I’ll tell her.”

“I want to ... know when ... he locates it.” She no longer had breath enough for a full sentence. A machine somewhere started to ping.

“You got it.” Jason’s eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.

“Tell her to ... bring it here....”

“Chicago. Check.”

She motioned for the respirator, and he put it between her opened teeth. Her lips had long ago pulled back from her jaw.

“Out,” the hefty nurse ordered as she walked into the room. “What you doing bothering Miss Le Fay with all your nonsense?” She hustled Jason out of the room. “I bet you had that respirator out, didn’t you?”

“No ma’am,” Jason said as the door closed on him.

Morgan let the oxygen fill her lungs as the respirator wheezed and pumped.
Rhiannon better get here with that sword.
Or she’d what? She’d die.
Unthinkable at one point.
But there it was. Death was so close, even as she was so close to success.

*****

Kemble, Tris, and his father were all dead tired, half from trekking across the country, and half from worry and anger at Drew. His father had been practically psychotic by the end of the flight. He’d kept saying, “How could she think an Italian was the One?” Kemble had had to give Tris his Rolex to take apart and put back together in order to keep him from exploding all over first class. It had been running slow. It was back on his wrist now, keeping perfect time, another reminder of the skill they’d always undervalued in his little brother.

Kemble didn’t have a power, but he had his computer and the plane had Internet. He’d phoned the producer of
Treasure Hunter
while they waited in the airport. Michelangelo Redmond, a.k.a. Dowser, was a drunk and a derelict, but his boat had been the one Brandon St. Claire insisted on using. How could Drew have been so foolish? The producer had given him enough information to dig deeper. He’d spent five hours digging around, hacking various public and private systems. What he had found was shocking. Guy was living really low profile now. Kemble couldn’t even get an address. But there was plenty on his past. War hero. Saved a Delta Force unit outside Kandahar but got captured himself. Spent over a year as a prisoner of war. Hospital records were nauseating. But he lived. Ran some kind of charity with his wife after he got stateside. Wife was dead now.
Heir to a company that made glues and fixatives.
But he hadn’t been heard from in a couple of years.

Kemble didn’t tell his father or Tris. He wasn’t sure even
he
wanted to know so much personal stuff about the guy.
Easier that way.
When they found “Dowser,” Kemble was going to beat him within an inch of his life if he’d taken advantage of Drew. He’d have to ace Tris out for the chance. Tris had been mumbling about various kinds of bodily harm as he played Rubik’s cube with the Rolex.

When they’d landed, it was rent a car, grab breakfast, and trek down Highway 1 through the Keys. It had all taken too long. When they had gotten to the run-down marina on Stock Key, they’d pried out of the old guy there where Redmond lived only when his father had pleaded that he was looking for his daughter and described her. Who could resist that?

Now it was late afternoon, nearly two days after he’d first realized Drew had flown the coop. The Taurus they’d rented jolted down the track overhung by trees that dangled menacing roots over the car. They’d driven past it three times before they finally got the turn. When they entered the clearing, he wasn’t sure this could possibly be the right place. The house (if you could call it that) was dilapidated to the point of structural failure. Not Drew’s style. But there was a 1997 Toyota parked in the gravel.
Maybe Drew’s?
She had to have bought a car, because she would’ve had to use a credit card to rent one, and she’d been very careful not to leave a trail Kemble could follow.
Kudos to her for choosing a reliable brand.
He peered up at the shack. Drew sat in the shadows of the wraparound porch above them. His father leaped out of the still-moving car and ran toward the house, his steps slowing as he realized Drew was holding herself, arms wrapped around her ribs, rocking slowly back and forth.

“I’ll kill him,” Tris muttered and took off after his father.

Kemble pulled up beside the old Toyota. Things were not okay with his little sister. Cold fury washed over him. He was not about to let Tris claim the honor of beating the guy to a pulp.

He got out, watching as his father reached Drew. She didn’t look at up at him. Bad sign. Kemble crunched through the gravel.

His father didn’t try to touch her. “Hi, Drew,” he said softly.

Nothing.
Just the rocking.
As Kemble got closer, he could see she’d been crying, but there were no tears now. Tris hovered at his father’s shoulder, obviously at a loss for what to do.

“You okay, honey?” His father leaned back to look through the screen and the open door to the shack. Kemble raised his brows in question. His father shook his head. If Redmond was here, he wasn’t immediately visible.

“You were right, I guess.” Drew said, finally. She quit rocking and looked up at them.

His father was smart enough not to say anything.

“I’ve been really stupid.” Her voice cracked. “Kemble wouldn’t have been that stupid.”

The look on her face made Kemble take a chance. “Yes, I would,” he offered, a little hesitant. “If I thought I’d found the One.”

His father smiled kindly. “You just seem to think you’ve found them more often than most, honey.”

She looked up sharply then and Kemble relaxed. That was the old Drew.
Don’t let him talk to you like that,
he thought
.
Suddenly all his simmering anger at her for worrying them disappeared. He admired his little sister for going after what she believed was hers.