The Burning (28 page)

Stephan stood in the woods above Maitlands Abbey, a deeper shadow in the night. The wind through the trees around him shushed in whispers he could not quite understand. The bark of the great birch he leaned against was smooth against his back. What he didn’t understand was why he was about to translocate himself into the fourth-floor nursery below him. Kilkenny would be here anytime, perhaps with others. The time to test himself was nearly at hand. He would die or find redemption. Stephan couldn’t stay at the tavern anymore, the most obvious place for Kilkenny to find him. But he could spend his nights at the hunting lodge. Surely the one who had escaped would start his search there. It was isolated, a perfect place to battle to the death, away from human eyes. He was sure no one would go within a mile of the place with all the whispered stories circulating in the villages round about. Days he could spend in Miss Van Helsing’s cave. He had a plan. He should be focused on his mission.

Yet here he was, in the dark and the rising wind, staring at a nursery, knowing he would go. Van Helsing might know he
was there. But the weasel couldn’t stop him. If he accosted Stephan, why, it was just a matter of raising his Companion and drawing the compulsion and Van Helsing would remember nothing. The man had a remarkably weak mind.

Weak? Who was weak? Weak enough to stand here, knowing what he would do.

Why had this slip of a girl gotten so far under his skin?

He clenched his teeth. He was not one to shirk the truth. It was because she knew him. She knew what he was and she was not appalled. She knew everything about him. Well, except for his experience with the Daughters, and that was just as well. She . . . forgave him. He did not deserve forgiveness, but she gave it anyway, naturally.

She was strong enough even for that. She had tried to bandage his wounds, at great personal cost. She was strong enough to try to save him today, from what? A few hours in a cell?

Ah . . . she knew his weaknesses. And she thought Van Helsing might know them, as well. There was a time when he would have wanted to kill anyone who knew the few ways to best him. Strangely enough, with her, it seemed a comfort that someone knew.

And understood. The thought astounded him. Still, she was an outcast, like he was. She had special abilities that made her different as he did. She was hated, as he was. Part of her ability was to see the good in people, even after she knew the worst. And she knew the worst of him. Would she recognize that as a fabulous advantage?

It was he who was weak. He felt something for her. He wasn’t sure what. Friendship? It wasn’t the all-consuming passion he had felt for Beatrix for nearly seven hundred years. Miss Van Helsing affected him physically, but that was just his training with the Daughters getting the better of him. Whatever it was, it ate at him, wouldn’t be banished. It
made him . . . ache. Maybe because he had never experienced just this feeling.

Feeling? God, but he couldn’t allow emotion now. That would weaken him for the coming battle. He was a poor tool at best. He could not afford to weaken himself further.

He swallowed and tried to think about the power he had found at Mirso with the Daughters. He would need that power now, every ounce of it.

MIRSO MONASTERY, SEPTEMBER 1821

“Wake, Penitent.” Her small, petulant voice reached him in his half-conscious state. He couldn’t call it sleep. He turned his head
.

Stancie stood just inside the doorway with a glass ball in her hand, about the size of a Seville orange. It caught the light from the fire. What could that be for? He was beyond fear. What would happen would happen. He felt only a mild curiosity
.

She set it on the sideboard. “We are going to try something different today.” But as usual, she started with her own pleasure. She fancied licking first today, and then one frantic riding of his cock. But there was a sense of expectation about her. When she had finished with him, she knelt beside the bench and began the torment and whispered instructions. He felt the molten lava inside himself. His cock was an aching steel rod, his balls heavy as iron. He muttered the chants as the boiling inside him ramped up. She lifted his head, urging him to chant with greater vehemence. He watched her rub him with increasing urgency
.

“Watch the glass ball,” she hissed into his ear. “Focus all your heat on that ball.” The glass burned at its core. Was that reflected firelight? He stared at the glass, feeling the burning inside himself echoed there in shades of dull red
.

On and on she urged him, long after she would normally have let him rest. His body was taut as a bow string, every muscle tensed. He could feel Stancie’s power ramping up farther and farther as she kept him from ejaculation. He was not even sure ejaculation was possible at this point. Sensation had gone beyond the sexual into something different, more painful, more intense. The glass ball flickered with a more incandescent orange
.

Suddenly, there was another hum besides that of Stancie’s power in the room. The pain of his sensation receded. He still arched his body. Stancie still massaged his cock. The ball began to emit small white flashes. The molten core of him seemed to melt outward, enveloping the entire room in a haze of burning light. The power glimpsed so long ago on the battlements shot through him
.

The glass ball burst into blinding white light. An explosion went off inside his head. Somewhere he heard shrieking. Was it Stancie? Was it him?

Then the light was gone. He collapsed. Blackness enveloped him
.

When he woke the three of them were in the room. He felt far away, empty
.

“What you did was dangerous, Stancie.” Dee’s voice was steel-hard and disapproving
.

“You could have killed him, or yourself,” Freya protested
.

“You are both too timid.” Stancie pouted. “He needed a stronger hand. I gave it to him. And look . . . he has done it.”

“You could have ruined everything, like you did the last time,” Freya accused
.

“You two would take years to make him ready. Father was growing anxious.”

Stephan cracked an eye. He was lying on the stone bench
.
But no chains bound him. They clustered round the sideboard. Dee stared at something on the floor, then looked back at him. He lowered his eyes. “Come,” she said. “Come and see.”

He struggled up. He was so weak, his knees barely held him up as he staggered toward them. They parted. There was a pool of molten glass on the stone
.

Freya answered the question he was not allowed to ask. “You did that, Stephan. It means you are nearly ready.”

“And your training has entered phase three,” Freya said. No one had mentioned there was a phase three. Dread and fear welled within him. Would he ever be ready?

“It means you, Stancie, will let him alone during the day,” Dee ordered crisply
.

Stancie smiled and nodded
.

Stephan stood, chest heaving, trying to lock out the memory. A storm was blowing up. He looked up through the trees and saw the moon at the center of a luminous ring being eaten by the rushing clouds. His body was electrified with memory, filled with energy that expressed itself in a throbbing in his loins. Or was it memory that affected him so? Of a sudden, all he could think about was the girl’s body under his hands, her clear gray eyes that knew him, and did not turn away.
Tuatha, rendon, melifant, extonderant, denering
. He whispered the chants without thinking. Slowly he fought his feeling, got control, suppressed the erection. His test was at hand. He had only one chance for redemption and refuge. He could not afford to jeopardize it.

He gazed down at the dim light issuing from the gabled window he knew was next to her bed. There were so many reasons he should not go down there. He could not deny he was becoming involved with her. She roused him physically and emotionally. Sexual impulses were dangerous in his
current state, except as they were used to draw the power. He could never trust himself with a woman again. He would never know physical love. Not after what had happened . . . He jerked his mind away from that. The girl couldn’t experience a physical union, either. They were a tragedy or perhaps a farce. In fact, they were perfect for each other. But the emotional connection he felt for her endangered his mission even more than the physical attraction. Emotions were something he could not afford.

He must
not
go to her. His night vision made out the garlic braids and the wolfsbane garlands in Van Helsing’s room. The stupid creature had barricaded himself in his room, at least in his own mind. There was no threat of discovery from that quarter.

Very well. Stephan realized the decision was already made. He was powerless to resist the attraction. He drew the power.

Ann sat huddled in her bed, her fears running circles in her head.

She felt him more than saw him. Cinnamon, with a sweet underlying structure of scent, wafted through the room. She lifted her eyes and saw a whirling pool of black. She had not seen that since the first night in the cave. But it didn’t frighten her now as it had then. Stephan Sincai stepped out of the evaporating darkness.

Relief and something more drenched her. She could not say just how she felt.

“Hello,” he rumbled softly. She would know that voice until the day she died. “Do I disturb you?”

“Is it safe for you to be here?”

He gave half a grunt. “You think Van Helsing will venture out of his room?”

“You’re right.” She smiled. “I’m glad you came.”

He looked as though he was not sure he was glad. “I had to thank you for your courage in coming to warn me today, unnecessary as it was.”

“I thought Erich . . . but it turns out he doesn’t know very much about you after all.”

“Unlike you.”

A silence stretched between them, until she felt something would snap. “Please, won’t you sit?” What had changed? Why did she not feel at ease? She had felt more natural around him than anyone else in her life. But now there was some new element she couldn’t quite identify. All her erotic dreams came back to her. She could practically feel his body inside his clothes. She couldn’t afford to indulge those dreams. She would never touch a man in that way. Except her cousin, and that only against her will.

“What is wrong?” he asked sharply.

She shook her head quickly and smiled. “Nothing.”

He drew up the wing chair. “You can’t lie to me, you know. I think I got something of you when you got all of me.”

She clutched her knees to her chest. So, he had figured that out. Part of the problem, she could confide. “Erich sent for a special license. He means to marry me. You . . . you know how impossible that is for me.”

A fierce expression flashed in his eyes as his brows drew down. Some would find him frightening. “You’re of age.”

“And friendless. Who would say him nay?” She tried a smile. It didn’t work. “The village wants me under someone’s control or locked up. Even my uncle wants a way to
provide
for me.”

“Then go to London, now, tonight. I’ll set you up with a lady companion, rent you a house. I’ll come to see you are settled as soon as I—” He broke off.

They both knew that he might not survive his confrontation with Kilkenny.

“When will he come?” she whispered.

“Tonight, tomorrow night. He could have been in Ireland, or France. But soon.” His voice was bleak. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, head hanging.

“Perhaps afterward . . .” She knew he would never forgo the task that would buy him peace, no matter that it would require killing, no matter the wounds he suffered, no matter the outcome. She would never ask it of him. He was doing what he could for the future of his kind, and he so needed the refuge it would buy him. She understood about refuge.

He nodded, briskly. Then he peered at her. “Here I am keeping you from your sleep. And I should go to the hunting lodge. That’s where I’m most likely to meet him.”

She nodded. She couldn’t say anything. Her throat was knotted around a huge lump.

He did a surprising thing. He reached out and laid his hand next to her foot under the quilt, just laid it there, quietly, not touching her. They both stared at that hand. It was strong, and square. No one in Cheddar Gorge but her knew how strong.

After a long moment, he rose in one smooth motion. “You control your own fate, Miss Van Helsing. Refuse him.” His eyes went red as they rested on her in an expression half puzzled, half regretful. The darkness swirled up around him. When it dissipated, he was gone.

The lump in her throat turned into a sob. Tears rolled down her cheeks. So close and yet so impossible. The future had never looked so bleak. Did he realize she was about to lose the very kind of refuge he sought so single-mindedly? She found herself thinking, not about her predicament, but that Stephan Sincai was gone, perhaps to die, and they would never touch.

Stephan shimmered into view just outside Maitlands’s hunting box, Buckland Lodge, with all sorts of emotions churning in his breast. It had taken him three translocations to get
here, and he had pushed his Companion ruthlessly for power. It wasn’t speed in getting here that drove him, he knew, but speed in getting away from Maitlands and Miss Van Helsing. The draw he felt for her was growing stronger. He could not afford to indulge it. Lord knew he was an imperfect enough tool as it was, without damaging his powers further.

The lodge was situated in a grove of sycamores on slightly higher ground that looked out over a sea of grasslands that sloped gently down to the river Axe. As garrulous and rushing as it was coming out of the Cheddar Gorge, down here the river spread itself in lazy splendor among the reeds. There would be waterfowl aplenty for Brockweir guns as well as foxes, hares, and the more traditional pheasants. Now a wind that promised storms tossed the tall grasses in dancing abandon. Stephan looked up at the lodge. It was old, a Tudor affair with brick work and half-timbered plaster, sheltered by a stand of ancient trees. The first floor overhung the ground floor, giving it a slightly menacing look appropriate for the atrocity he had committed here.