Kiss Across Swords (Kiss Across Time Series) (9 page)

Brody whirled to face her and the despair on his face told its own story. This was worse than she thought. Something was wrong beyond simply failing to bring Veris back to the past.

He grabbed her arm and hurried her into the tent behind them. She found she was tripping over the hem of her dress until she thought to lift the front of it as she walked.

The inside of the tent was astonishingly luxurious and stiflingly hot. She gasped at the still warmth, feeling sweat break out on her temples.

Brody walked a pace or two, then back. The sword at his side slapped his thigh.

He rounded on her. “In case you didn’t figure it out, that was the moment Veris and I…” He took a breath. “Got together,” he finished. He pushed his hands through his short hair. “Or when we were supposed to in our true pasts.”

Taylor wrapped her hands around her middle. “But you didn’t, just then. Because of me. Because he saw me.”

“Right.” Brody kept pacing.

Taylor sank down onto a chest with a flat carved lid. “Oh, God, Brody, this is awful. He said he wouldn’t be back.”

“Right.”

“He thought he misinterpreted.”

Brody nodded. “We had a moment earlier today. He was following up. He wasn’t misinterpreting at all. In the real past, I was alone.” He threw himself into a big wooden chair and put his head in his hands. “Oh fuck, this is a disaster…”

Taylor really was starting to feel ill now and wondered if it was something to do with the baby.

Then a more terrible thought struck her. “If you two don’t ever get together, if we don’t fix this, then what happens? Do I never get to meet you in the future? Do we as a relationship suddenly cease to exist?”

Brody lifted his head and looked at her. It took him a long time to answer. Eventually he said slowly “I suppose…yes. We do. If the time travelling we do is real, like Veris claims and not just in our minds, like the queen seems to think, then yes, we’ll cease to exist as a relationship. Veris and I don’t get together, so you never meet us in the twenty-first century.”

Taylor already knew that the time travel they did was real. The proof of it sat in her uterus.
My baby will cease to exist too
, she thought. She clutched at the edges of the chest as dizziness swept through her. “Then we have to win Veris back for you, don’t we?” she said. Even to her, her voice sounded wobbly.

Brody gave a harsh, hollow laugh. “You’re talking about manipulating the most un-cooperative man on the planet, the man who has never had a true master, remember?”

She pushed forward on the chest. “I’m talking about seducing a man. That’s a different sort of manipulation.”

“I didn’t seduce him the first time. He hunted me. Veris would never consent to being the prey.”

“Well, he’s going to have to consent to it this time, isn’t he?” Taylor snapped. “We’re possibly running out of time. Between the two of us, we know every erotic weakness Veris has. If we can’t seduce him, no one can.”

“
We
?” Brody repeated, sitting up in the chair.

“Fatimids! Fatimids!” came the cry from a dozen voices outside the tent. At the same time, the sides of the tent began to shiver as something slapped it repeatedly.

“Fuck!” Brody muttered in English. He picked up a bow and slung a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. “Stay here,” he said, his voice flat. “You’re mortal. I’m not.” He dropped the tent flap down behind him, leaving her in virtual darkness and with nothing but the shouting and slapping against the tent to listen to.

There was a sharp tearing sound and a clatter nearby and Taylor finally lifted the tent flap to see what had happened.

An arrow lay next to her feet.

They were shooting holes
through
her tent.

Taylor picked up the arrow and stepped out of the tent. It was of no protection to her, anyway. Instead, she ducked down behind a row of bags of seed that had arrows sticking out of the sides of them and watched over the top.

There was a lot of fighting happening on and around wooden equipment close by. There were a lot of bodies swarming over the equipment but gradually Taylor could make out the basic shape and recognized it from history books and movies. Siege engines…incomplete siege engines.

Then she realized what was happening and her memory supplied the rest of the information from her study of history.

This was the first crusade when the Fatimids controlled Jerusalem and the western powers marched on the city and laid siege. They broke the city in July 1099 by cannibalizing one of their ships and building siege engines from the wood. Brody would have to give her the exact date.

But the Fatimids clearly weren’t happy with the idea of the western allies building siege engines and were trying to stop them from completing them. Raymond and his men, including Brody, were beating off the Fatimids and protecting the engines.

Taylor sought for and found Brody’s tall figure among the allies. In his blue and white tunic, he stood out. She was shocked to realize he was liberally daubed in blood and the blades of his sword and knife were red with it. He was fighting as hard as the men he directed, and shouting orders at the same time in a parade ground voice she could hear from her sheltered position behind the seed bags.

The fight stopped abruptly. She didn’t see the Fatimids give up but suddenly, they all laid down their arms and were backing away from the engines.

A group of five of the Fatimids was forced to their knees in front of Brody and another man with red hair and a green tunic that Taylor guessed was Raymond, Brody’s superior. Brody had an arrow sticking out of his left arm. She hadn’t seen that happen. He was leaning on his sword as if he were tired as he spoke to the men kneeling before him.

The Fatimids spoke quietly, never lifting their gaze from the ground at their knees.

Brody moved with lightning-fast speed. He lifted the sword, swung it and decapitated the man and was walking away all before Taylor barely began to react.

She clapped her hand over her mouth, sure that
this
time she would be physically sick. But Brody reached the tent itself and she found she had not moved from her crouch on the ground.

Brody leaned on the sword, looking at her. “You didn’t stay in the tent,” he growled. Even his face had blood sprayed on it.

“The arrows were shooting through the tent. I figured I was just as safe out here, behind these seed bags. They’re like sandbags.” She stared at him. Brody was nothing like she had ever seen before. Not from him. She let her gaze settle on the arrow. “Do you want me to tend to that?”

“No, thanks.” He pushed into the tent. “Mordacai!”

A small man with tight black curls hurried in after him and Taylor followed in behind.

“My lord?” Mordacai asked Brody.

“I need the wound kit and let’s open up the tent.”

Taylor sank back down onto the chest again. “What can I do?”

“Help me get everything off around this arrow,” Brody said shortly, as he worked at his sword belt.

She rose again and worked the belt undone, then eased the bloody tunic off. The hauberk unlaced at the shoulders, but the arrow pierced the sleeve, so Brody shook his head. “It stays until the arrow is out. Just get my gauntlets off for me. Flexing the muscle hurts right now.”

“Just hurts?” she asked.

“Just hurts,” he confirmed. “It’s not fatal. Nothing is,” he added softly for her ears only. “Except spears. The spears here are basically wooden stakes with metal tips. One of those through the chest is a stake through the heart.” He caught her eye. “I saved Veris from one this morning.” He grimaced. “We recognized each other as vampire immediately.”

Mordacai hurried in with a wooden box which he placed next to Brody and hurried away.

“That’s why you liked each other?” Taylor asked.

“No.” He blew out his breath. “It’s Veris. You tell me why you first liked him.”

She tugged the gauntlets off his hands. “Because he’s so large he sucks all the air out of any room he’s in. Because you can’t look away when he’s there. Because he’s Veris.”

“Exactly,” Brody said dryly. “Sometimes, I wonder what he saw in me.”

“You say he and you were fighting this morning?” Taylor asked.

“Yes.”

Taylor thought of what she had seen of Brody out there just now, bawling out orders and leading his men. The ruthless leader who had just summarily executed the leader of the opposing side and barely remembered it now. The man who was now gripping the arrow stuck in his arm with pliers and was…

“What are you
doing
?” she asked, alarmed.

“Pushing it through.”

“What?”

He held out the pliers. “It’s my non-dominant hand and it’s been centuries. You’ll have to do it.”

She backed up a step. “Do what?”

“Push the arrow through and cut off the head, so you can pull it back out.”

All around them, the sides of the tent were falling on the ground as servants unlaced them from the roof and rolled them up. It left a filmy layer of thinnest gauze as the walls.

Brody hefted the big, rounded-head pliers. “Either you do it, or someone from this time who has no idea about infections and cleanliness does it,” he said.

“You can’t get infections,” she said, but took the pliers anyway.

Brody held out his arm. “You’ll be more gentle than anyone else,” he added.

You don’t feel as much pain in vampire form
. It was on the tip of her tongue, but she held it back at the last second. Now was not the time to begin that conversation.

Brody placed his hand on her shoulder and the other on the arm of the chair. Taylor swallowed hard. “I don’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered and took a good grip on the arrow.

“Do it fast,” he told her.

She put hard pressure on the shaft and felt it move through the tissues in his arm. Nausea swept over her, but she gritted her jaw and breathed hard and kept pushing. The flesh beneath was the worst, because it stretched before it gave way. Taylor was nearly hyperventilating when it was done.

Brody, too. But his voice was calm. He pushed the links of the chainmail up his arm to expose the metal head of the arrow, now red with his blood. He gripped the other side of it with his other hand. “Use the heavy sheers to cut it off,” he told her. “You’re nearly done.”

She picked up the sheers, still breathing heavily. With a series of cuts, she sawed the metal head off the arrow. She made sure there were no splinters hanging from the end of the arrow.

Brody pulled it out of his arm. It made a sucking sound.

Taylor clapped her hand over her mouth. “Where?” she tried to say, looking around wildly.

He pointed. There was a covered bucket sitting in the corner. She staggered over to it, pulled off the lid and vomited hard and tiredly into it. When she was finished, she put the lid back on and pulled herself back onto the chest.

Brody was naked from the waist up and wrapping a bandage around his arm. He was scowling.

“You’re angry?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“For heaven’s sake, now is not the time to be coy about anything. If we’re to get out of this, we have to stick together. I’ve got to know what you’re thinking. All the time, not just when it’s convenient for you.”

“You won’t like what I’m thinking,” he told her.

“I’m a big girl. I can handle hearing things I don’t like. Stop being the peacemaker for once.”

He looked up from the bandage, startled. “Is that what I do?”

She bit her lip. “You try to protect me. A lot. Mostly from Veris.”

“I just know what he can be like.”

She leaned forward. “News flash. After four years, so do I.”

“Not really. Not the worst of it. Not all of it. His disappearing act in Europe caught you by surprise.”

She shook her head. “Surprise, no. I knew about them. Distress, yes. But not for the reasons you think. I’m working it out. Just not the way you and Veris work it out. I’m female and I’m human. Of course I’m going to work it out a different way.” She tilted her head. “So what are you going to tell me that I won’t like?”