Darkyn - Night Lost Part 25

If Nick stayed with him, she would risk leading the holy freaks to him. She'd rather never see him again than know she had helped put him back in some bricked-up room to die.

She didn't owe Gabriel anything, either. On the contrary.

Nick felt a little better as she climbed onto the bike. She'd done right by him; no one could say that she hadn't. She'd taken care of him, gotten him to his friend, and now she could take off and know he'd be all right. Being blind, he couldn't help her find the Golden Madonna. He'd only slow her down. He belonged with better people, people like Croft. All she'd do was get him arrested. The holy freaks knew how to use the cops to get what they wanted; they were experts at it.

Gabriel deserved better. He'd get back together with the Kyn, and she could go on with her life. She'd pack up her stuff at the farm and move north. She liked Scotland; maybe she'd try spending the winter in the Highlands. Once the cops lost interest she'd make some other changes and start fresh on her search for the Madonna in the spring.

She got as far as Hyde Park before she had to pull into a parking s.p.a.ce and jump off the bike. Her chest heaved with the pain of breathing in cold, damp English air. This was going to kill her, leaving him like this, without knowing, without a word. Would he ever forgive her?

The Kyn had abandoned him, his sister had betrayed him, and now she was dumping him. He'd been lost for so long, just like her. How would he feel when he realized she wasn't coming back for him?

He'll hate you forever.

Oh, G.o.d. What was she doing?

"I'll go back." She checked her watch and saw she still had ten minutes before he would expect her to return. "I'll ride by one time and look in the window and make sure he's okay. But after that I have to head out of town and forget about him."

Well, she'd head out of town, anyway.

Nick turned around and drove back toward Croft's shop. She couldn't ride by, she realized; Gabriel would hear the bike. She'd have to find a spot by the corner and take a look from there.

One look and that's all. Nick knew that if she did any more than look, she'd never be able to leave him.

The south corner of the intersection nearest Croft's shop had a phone box that gave her some cover while allowing her to see the front of the shop. Croft had rolled up the blinds in the big front window, probably so he could watch for her.

But she wasn't going back.

Nick eyed the telephone. Maybe she would call and tell Croft she was taking off and leaving Gabriel with him. Just so he knew and didn't wait there for her for hours or think something had happened to her. Croft wouldn't hate her for it. Not if she told him how much she loved Gabriel, and how dangerous she was to him.

This is why you don't get involved with anyone, she told herself viciously. Because you don't know how to walk away.

A book hit the inside of the shop window and slid down it to knock over Croft's artful front display. Nick frowned and reached into her jacket, taking out her binoculars. Through them she clearly saw three strange men standing inside the front of the shop.

Two of them were holding Croft by the arms. The third had Gabriel by the front of his s.h.i.+rt.The Kyn couldn't have gotten there that fast.

As she watched, the man holding Gabriel punched him in the face.

Rage exploded inside her. "Oh, f.u.c.k this."

Nick pulled down her visor, grabbed her bat from the back of the bike, and rounded the corner, cutting off a Jag and darting between a delivery van and a cab. She jumped the curb, scattering shoppers as she sped toward the front of the bookshop. At the last moment she locked up the brakes and let the bike skid sideways, slamming the rear tire into the display window.

Gla.s.s smashed and rained down on her as she put the bike in park and jumped off, using the bat to knock out the last jagged section of gla.s.s before climbing into the shop.

"Hey, a.s.shole."

The man who had punched Gabriel stared at her in shock. He had a gun tucked in his belt.

"Yeah, you." She swung the bat at his head, and knocked him back into a collection of Victorian poetry. "Home run."

The other two rushed at her, guns in their hands, but she shoved the bat into the belly of one and clipped the other in the jaw with the grip. Both tottered backward, but not far enough to miss her third and fourth swings.

She saw that Croft was braced against his desk but unhurt. "Sorry about the window."

"My dear girl," he breathed. "Do not apologize." He hurried over and collected the guns the two men had dropped and the one still tucked in the belt of the third. "Guns are illegal in this country," he told the groaning men. "So is pummeling innocent vampires."

Nick went to Gabriel. "Let's get out of here." She took his arm and dragged him through the window.

A small group of startled Londoners had begun gathering, but they backed away as she helped Gabriel onto the bike and swung onto the seat.

"We'll get you, Seran," a man shouted, and Nick saw that one of the men inside the shop had gotten to his feet. "Every Brethren in England are hunting you and your thief b.i.t.c.h now. You can't hide forever-"

Croft stepped up behind him and slammed a large volume on the back of his head. The man collapsed in a heap.

"My apologies, dear boy," he called out to them. "It seems I've been compromised. If you need to reach me, you'll have to contact Geoff. So sorry you couldn't stay for tea, my dear."

"Next time." Nick looked down to see Gabriel's hands on her waist, and took off.

Michael left Phillipe and Leary with the van and took a horse from a nearby stable to ride along the boundaries of Dundellan.

Riding around Richard's stronghold should have calmed Michael, for it had been months since he had indulged his love of horseback riding and solitude. But Marcella's predictions had come true. Over the last days his temper had worn down his will, and not an hour pa.s.sed that he did not feel as if his skin would crawl off his body. Often now he thought if he spent another day without her, he would go mad. In his head Michael understood it was the bond he shared with Alexandra, and the price of it, but in his heart all that mattered was to be with her again.

We are here. I will take back what is mine.Michael led the horse out of the shadows, risking being spotted by the castle guard, but unable to resist looking up at the light s.h.i.+ning from one of the narrow windows in the east stone tower. He had no way to know if Alexandra was being kept in that room or, as Leary suggested, had been locked away deep in the bowels of Dundellan.

A measure of calmness came to him as he focused his thoughts on her, the memory of her face, the smell of her skin. Soon, mon amour. I will be with you again, very soon.

Once Michael finished scouting the property, he put together the signs that all was not well at Dundellan. Richard had twice the usual amount of men patrolling, but they kept to the castle itself and did not stray out onto the surrounding acres. The neglected condition of the land indicated his household staff had possibly been locked in, dismissed, or perhaps killed. He suspected that as the high lord's mind deteriorated, his Kyn guards might begin quietly abandoning him. Perhaps, hearing of Lucan's attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate him, they already had.

Michael met Phillipe back at the van. Inside, Leary sat watching the castle while the addicts they had taken from Dublin, made docile by Phillipe's compulsion over them, looked at nothing at all.

"The patrols are riding no more than two hundred yards out from the castle," he told his seneschal. "Six Kyn guard the delivery entrances at the west and north sides. The windows have been secured but the fences are falling apart. Nothing stands in our way."

"I called Marcella from the mobile," Phillipe said. "She has been monitoring the patrols, and says that Richard's men are carrying standard weapons as well as copper."

Armed to kill both humans and Kyn. "He's expecting someone other than us."

Phillipe brought a small case out of the back, which he placed on the hood of the van. He opened it and produced what appeared to be a Young Fine Gael campaign b.u.t.ton and put it on his lapel.

"This is a radio transceiver," he told Cyprien. "It will pick up and transmit my voice and any others within twenty feet of me."

Cyprien fitted the earpiece. "When you are inside, find Alexandra and help her out through one of the second-floor windows, there," Michael told him, pointing to the least guarded area of the castle. "Whatever happens, do not engage Richard."

His seneschal nodded. "You will wait here for us."

"No." Michael stripped off his jacket, revealing the body armor and weapons beneath it. "I am challenging Richard."

"As a diversion?" Phillipe touched his arm. "Master, there is surely another way."

Michael shook his head. "To defeat him, I must kill him and take his throne."

Leary rolled down the pa.s.senger window. "It's time to go in now," he said, looking anxious. "They're waiting for us."

Nick rode through the night, stopping only for petrol as she headed north. She spoke little and seemed distant. Gabriel didn't disturb her, sensing that she had withdrawn into herself again. He was only grateful that she had returned to Croft's shop when she had. The Brethren who had cornered him there had fully intended to take him back to France and Benait.

He also didn't know how to tell her that he was no longer blind. Seeing her disable three men with nothing more than a baseball bat had left him speechless as well. She had moved like a trained warrior, with no hesitation and utter ruthlessness.

Whatever she was hiding from him, it had a great deal to do with the way she fought.

After several hours, Nick turned off the main roadway and took a series of country roads toward a farming community. Gabriel's vision, always better in the dark, expanded to take in the hedgerows and slumbering sheep herds. She went down a long drive and came to a stop in what appeared to be an old farmhouse.

She tugged off her helmet and tucked it under her arm as she climbed off the bike. "This is my place."

From the stones and portions of ancient walls scattered to the right and left of the farmhouse, her place appeared to be built within the ruins of a far older structure.

"Come on." She took his arm, reminding Gabriel that she still thought he was blind, "Don't worry. My house is in better shape than yours."

Nicola guided him to the door, which she pushed open with her hand.

"You do not secure your property?" he asked.

"I don't live in the house." She led him through an empty kitchen and to a padlocked door, for which she took a key from the heel of her boot. "I live under it."

Gabriel put his hand on Nick's shoulder and climbed down a long incline of stone steps through a cellar and into a sublevel bas.e.m.e.nt that was equally bare.

"I wish you could see this. Stay here." She went to one of the bare walls, tapped it in three places, and pushed. The entire wall made a low sc.r.a.ping sound as it swung out, revolving on hidden bearings. "My stepdad meant to fill in this part with dirt, but he died before he could get to it." She came back and took his hand in hers. "It's okay. It's perfectly safe."

She thought he was afraid of her secret underground dwelling, when he was nearly shaking with anger. "Why do you live down here? Why not live in the house?"

"I have to travel a lot," she said. "I rent out the pastures to neighbors and they watch the house, but they think I live in America and visit only once or twice a year. If I lived upstairs, they'd expect me to go to church and hang out at the horse club and be part of the community. It's more private for me this way."

She wanted him to admire this hole in the ground; to her it was a home. "Then please show me the way."

Nicola tucked her arm through his and steered him through the opening in the revolving wall.

"My stepdad thought this might be where the commander of the fortress hid his wife and kids when they were attacked," she said as they walked down a narrow corridor. "A lot of the Brits didn't like the Romans coming here and taking over, while the Romans brought their families and tried to live normal lives, so I guess this was their version of a bomb shelter. Evidently the Saxons never found it."

She walked him through a room so dazzling that he stumbled, and she stopped. "Hey, you okay?"

"A brief dizziness. Give me a moment." He needed a week, a month, a year, for he could not believe his eyes.

The room was filled with Templar gold. Gabriel recognized the crosses and chalices, for he had pressed his lips to them and drunk the blood of Christ from them during his human life. A stack of ivory tablets, sculptured with figures and animals from the Scriptures that had been gilded with fine gold leaf, sat neatly atop an eagle lectern of bronze; boxes in which the Templars had kept the gold and silver coins of pilgrims visiting the Holy Land had been stacked like milk crates.

It was Aladdin's cave, come to life.

In the corner Gabriel glimpsed one of the few traveling altars his brothers had brought back intact from the Holy Land stand, its polished ash-and-black marble still gleaming, the embellishments showing the martyrdom of Saint Paul, and the image of the Trinity in silver gilt. It had vanished in Paris on Black Friday, when the pope had ordered all of the Templars to be arrested, and it had been rumored to have been destroyed in the flames of a temple burned by its own retreating warrior-priests. And yet here it was, almost as it had been seven hundred years before, when he had knelt and prayed before it.

"Your head clear yet?"

He had to leave the room. "Yes." Blinded now by the sight of the treasures the Kyn had thought plundered and looted and lost forever, Gabriel took her hand and let her take him into the next room.

He expected to see more grandeur, but she brought him into what appeared to be a simple, whitewashed root cellar that had been converted to basic living quarters. A modest dresser and bed were the only furnis.h.i.+ngs; a plain wooden cross hung on the wall over the bed.

"Where are we now?" he asked her.

"This is where I live and keep my stuff stashed," she said, "until I can sell it."

"Sell it?"

"I steal things, Gabriel. Old things from churches and chapels, like the one where I found you. Sometimes I've taken them off the bodies of the dead people I find hidden away, like you were." She sat down on the bed and folded her hands in her lap.

"I don't understand."

"I started doing it in England ten years ago, when I began looking for the Madonna. I went through every chapel, church, and shrine in the country looking for her. I found other things and took them to sell. I moved on to Scotland and Ireland, and now I'm working in France. It's how I make a living."

"So you never took photographs."

"No. I lied to you. I'm a thief." She said each word flatly, without emotion. "I'm a very good thief. In fact, I'm one of the best in Europe. Maybe the world."

What she was telling him and the treasures in the next room did not match. "Do you ever keep anything for yourself?"

"Are you kidding?" She laughed. "I can't afford to be a collector. Everything I make off the stuff I take goes to cover my expenses."

Living in a hole in the ground, traveling by motorcycle, what expenses could she have? "What about the Golden Madonna? Do you intend to sell her after you find her?"

"No." Her face darkened. "I'll bury her with her owner."

He went over to the bed and sat down beside her. "You sound tired. Lie with me."

Nick stared at him. "I just told you I'm a thief, Gabriel. I'm wanted by every cop and Interpol agent in Europe. I've committed hundreds of crimes."

"We have spent more time making love than sleeping these past few days," he said. "Even the greatest thief in Europe must occasionally rest."

Her curls bounced as she shook her head. "Sometimes I think you are crazy."

He pulled her down to the mattress and turned her, tucking her back against him. "For now, I would like to sleep with you in my arms."

Gabriel held Nick and listened to her breathing even out as she fell asleep. Only when he was sure she would not wake did he rise and slip back out to the treasure room to inspect its contents. It took an hour of opening boxes and inspecting relics, but by his calculations, Nick had somehow ama.s.sed a collection of artifacts to rival that of any world museum.

She had not been exaggerating when she had claimed to be one of the best thieves in Europe. There were a dozen kings'

ransoms here if one only counted the value of the gold. Add to it the irreplaceable historical value of the objects and Gabriel suspected the woman who had saved him might be worth millions.

What was very odd was that all of the artifacts, precious icons, and symbols, as well as the pilgrim coins, appeared to belong to the Templars before they became Kyn.

Why hadn't she sold them off? A single box of coins alone would fetch an inordinate amount of money at auction. Why would she lie about keeping them? Did it have something to do with the man who had killed her parents and stolen the Golden Madonna?

Gabriel found the cross his father had given to the Temple master when Gabriel had taken his vows, a simple piece with only a few emeralds; almost paltry compared to some of the other families' contributions. He had been so proud the day his father had given so much.

Gabriel pressed the cross between his hands, and for the first time in years offered a prayer: G.o.d in heaven, help us.