Читать книгу Blade's Lady - Фиона Бранд - Страница 9

Sixteen years earlier, Australia

Eleven-year-old Anna Tarrant clung, wet and shivering, to the log that jutted boldly from the riverbank. The brutal strength of the current pinned her against the thick trunk with such force the breath was pressed from her lungs. Water swirled and tossed icily around her face, threatening to push up into her nostrils, into her mouth—threatening to fill her up, then drag her down.

The sound of her name registered above the pounding rush of the river that usually wound, slow and shallow, through the contoured hills of the Tarrant estate. Anna’s head jerked up, eyes straining wildly to see beyond the pitch-black curve of the undercut bank to the night sky, which was thickly studded with stars and awash with the cold light of a full moon. Violent shivers made her teeth clack together like castanets.

Henry de Rocheford. Her stepfather.

He reached down, his hand wavering before her eyes. It was his left hand. She could see the ancient, heavy gold of her father’s signet ring on his finger, could almost read the inscription that went with the distinctive Tarrant crest.

Anna stared at the ring with stark misery, and grief for her father shuddered through her small, thin body. She intensified her grip on the log, refusing to reach out to her stepfather. He would let her go.

He would let her be swept away, pulled down into the dark, strong coils of the river. She knew that because, when she had slipped on the muddy bank further upstream while calling for her missing puppy, Toto, Henry’s helping hand had sent her plunging into the water.

After an eternity of time, Henry’s wavering face and hand were replaced by another’s—William, the gardener. His craggy face was crumpled with concern, eyes wide with fear, not empty, like Henry’s.

Reaching out to William was another thing entirely. Anna was afraid to release her grip on the tree. She was cold, so cold, her fingers numb. She could no longer feel what she was holding on to. Her mind felt slow, stupid. She was afraid that if she let go with one hand, her whole body might let go, and then she would be snatched away. Gone. Like her father. And now Toto.

She didn’t want to die.

Terror exploded deep inside her chest, shoved her heart into overdrive and robbed her lungs of precious oxygen. For a moment she thought she would lose consciousness, and in an act of sheer panic she squeezed her eyes shut and reached out in her mind, seeking the magical inner place she’d found, searching with a sharp-edged desperation for him. Her secret friend.

Ever since Mama had married Henry, Anna’s secret friend had been there when she needed him, and now she needed him very, very badly. Anna wasn’t sure who or what he was. She had decided early on that he wasn’t an angel, although, from the shadowy details she’d been able to make out, he was beautiful enough to be one. There was a hum of energy, of excitement, about him that just didn’t fit with angel’s wings.

He was probably a knight. Her knight.

The sound of her name penetrated the odd, lucid calm that had settled over her. It came again, more urgent this time, and Anna’s lids flickered sleepily. She felt dazed, disoriented, caught between the dizzying delight of that inner place and the relentless, numbing power of the river.

William leaned lower, hanging directly over her, and for a moment Anna thought that he might tumble into the river, too. His powerful hand wrapped around her wrist—the heat of it searing—and she realised with a beat of fear just how cold she had become.

Abruptly, she was hauled up the bank, her body leaden as a puppet’s. William was talking to her, low words of comfort, as he stripped off his jacket and wrapped her in its blissful warmth.

Henry’s face loomed. Fear rocketed through her, and, despite the shattering cold, she went rigid. She could feel the anger emanating from him like the spill of cold air from a freezer. She had long since learned to conceal the “oddness” of her senses, but now the strangeness rose up inside her like a primitive cry of warning.

She tried to speak, but her vocal chords were as paralysed as the rest of her. In a convulsive movement, she clamped her arms around William’s neck and clung to him as fiercely as she’d clung to the log in the river. He kept hold of her.

As if from a great distance, she heard snatches of Henry’s smooth, creamy voice, the rhythm of it rich and soft. Measured. “Tried to save her…as unstable as her mother…needs special care…”

William’s voice rumbled deep in his chest, the word “hospital” little more than a vibration.

A whispery sob slipped past the raw tightness binding Anna’s throat as she burrowed in against his burly chest, burying her face in the rough folds of his sweater. If she was taken to hospital, she would be safe.

For a while.

She needed him.

Seventeen-year-old Blade Lombard clawed his way out of the dream, breathing hard. For long moments he was rigid, frozen, disorientation robbing him of the simple motor skills required to shove himself free of the tangled mess he’d made of the bed.

Moonlight flooded his room with ghostly white light, spilled starkly over the collapsed pile of books on his desk, the football plunked down in the middle of his geography project, the Walkman he blasted his ears with while he did homework.

With a stifled oath, he catapulted to his feet, strode naked to the window and pushed it wide. The chill of the hardwood floor was an anchor to reality he desperately needed as he braced both hands on the sill and leaned out, gulping in the liquid coolness of the night air. A fitful breeze drifted across his skin, bringing with it the familiar scents of his mother’s roses and freshly cut lawn, drying the sweat that slicked him from head to toe.

Blade shook his head in an attempt to clear the lingering sense of urgency, the miasma of despair, that still clung to him like heavy layers of wet clothing.

Even though he was only seventeen, he was already over six feet tall and broad in the shoulders. If he woke up sweating and shaking it should have been from a wet dream, not—his jaw clenched—not because a child had called out to him somewhere inside his head. Not because he could see the dark swirl of the water trying to drag her down, know that she was cold, intensely cold, and afraid.

Dammit, if she really did exist outside his dreams, he didn’t know what he could do to help. He didn’t know where she was, or even who she was.

He was beginning to wonder who he was.

All he knew for sure was that the child had been haunting him for the past year, and that she was alone—so alone he could taste it.

Pushing himself away from the window, Blade quartered the room in a silent prowl, not wanting to rouse his brothers, who had rooms on either side of his, but he was too wound up to sleep again just yet.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing he knew for sure, he thought grimly. If he ever told anyone he heard voices inside his head, and that the little girl had become so real to him that he was worried about her, they wouldn’t just think he was crazy, they would know it.