Читать книгу Noah - Jacquelyn Frank - Страница 9

One Week Later

The next week, Corrine opened the door after a very gentle tapping called her attention to it. She peeked cautiously around the door, her mouth opening into a surprised O when she saw Noah. Draped slackly over the Demon King’s chest and shoulder was Corrine’s decidedly comatose niece.

“What do you do, suck the energy out of her?” Corrine accused in a heated whisper. “I can never get her to sleep like that!”

“I hope she will not interfere,” Noah whispered back over the raven dark curls that were such a clear combination of both her parents’ traits. “I got roped into emergency babysitting.”

“Because I had to turn them down.” Corrine giggled. “Don’t you ever say no to them?”

“Why would I want to?” he asked with a shrug of the shoulder that wasn’t occupied by Leah’s head.

“Good point. It should be okay, seeing as how she’s asleep. Let’s tuck her in. I take it you haven’t been able to find Kestra through physical searching yet?”

“No, not yet. Besides her name, her hair color, and the fact that she spoke what I think was American English, there is not much else to go on.”

“Well, we’ll take care of that tonight.”

“Corrine?”

“Yes?”

The Demon King hesitated as she turned back to look at him expectantly.

“I have not dreamed of her in almost a week.”

“Noah,” she chided softly, moving to cover his hand warmly where it rested on her niece’s back. “Stop worrying. The closer you get to her, the less you’ll need to dream of her for contact.”

“Are you sure? It feels…I feel like everything about me has suddenly gone vacant. The dreams were driving me mad, but suddenly I find myself wishing I had never complained about that.”

“Relax. Put the baby on the couch and come to my sanctum. Let’s start the ritual and put your mind at ease.”

They were having difficulty this time when, in Corrine’s limited practice before then, it should have been easier. The seeking Druid was sweating from the heat of all the flame around her, not to mention the heat Noah was giving off due to his deep concentration. As he focused singularly on the search for Kestra, it took away from the sense he used to regulate such power overflows. Tonight, the as-yet unborn Druid named Kestra seemed farther than mere miles could measure as they meditated and pushed out with their combined power to locate her. Corrine was driven by her fear of failure. She couldn’t be unsuccessful for the first time with, of all people, the Demon King.

True, whoever Kestra was, she had great potential for enormous power. There was little question. Even Corrine’s experience, slight as it was, had shown her that power attracted power. It was genetics that linked Demon and Druid, when it came down to it, and it was only reasonable that a powerful man like Noah would mesh with an equally suitable partner, one of unfathomable scope of talent, once his real touch “switched” her Druidic abilities on.

Remembering how Kestra had fought with enormous strength of will and fear-driven determination, Corrine was positive that it was the Druid herself who was shunting them away. Though she might not have conscious control over her latent powers, her subconscious might well be tapping in to them in a classic “fight or flight” push. It was clear from the last encounter that Kestra was very wary of Noah. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know his name or face. The untried Druid still must be feeling the fact that Noah was more than a dream, right down to the core of every feminine instinct she possessed. If not, why would she have been so hostile and defensive?

Corrine had avoided touching Noah this time, knowing how uncomfortable he had been when he’d found himself kissing another Demon’s mate. It was an affront to his deeply embedded sense of honor, no matter how much she explained to him that it wasn’t she who had been on the receiving end of the kiss, for all her physicality in the exchange. Her soul had remained untouched. If it hadn’t, Kane would never have stood for it. Neither would she. But now she was afraid that these foibles and acts of decorum were interfering with what they needed to do to succeed. And because she refused to fail at anything ever again when it came to her Druidic abilities, she pushed protocol and permission aside and reached for Noah.

He started violently when her hands, chilled and damp in spite of the heat all around them, cradled the contours of his face. His eyes opened as hers did, and she leaned over the fire between them so that their foreheads touched and her eyes bored deeply into his.

Suddenly the scent of spun sugar exploded into the air, drowning out every herb and tendril of smoke. That central focus of scent lasted for a moment, then whorled around to include others. Scents of the place where she was at that very moment. And that was what they wanted. They wanted to know where to find her. Noah was desperate to find her. Corrine was desperate to give him this wish.

“Unc No.”

Corrine and Noah started as the little voice came out of nowhere and everywhere at once. Their heads snapped to look at the doorway, where Leah still clung to the impossible achievement of turning the doorknob to have access to her aunt Corrine and her “unc No.”

The disruption of their concentration burst into the room like a supernova, a tangible blast of energy that spewed fire and the scent of cotton candy. Corrine screamed, throwing up her hands as flame blasted in her direction.

The flame passed harmlessly through her and Noah both, but hot on its heated heels came the sensation of being torn apart at the molecular level. There was a spectacular rending, tearing through them with agonizing, contorting pain.

And then…

Silence and darkness.

The wail of a child penetrated Noah’s mind, triggering the autonomic response to draw a breath. He gasped, coughed violently, and struggled to rapidly stagger to his feet. His eyes were burning. From what, he couldn’t fathom. He instinctively reached toward the cry of the Enforcers’ child, dragging Leah to himself as his balance failed and he fell back down to a single knee. Blindly, he ran hands over the warm little body of his charge, all the while forcing himself to breathe in a semblance of a regular rhythm. He felt Leah’s pajamas were intact, as were her hair and lashes, both of which would’ve been damaged if the inexplicable flames he’d seen billowing into the room had singed or burned her.

He was grateful to realize she was more frightened than anything else, and he cuddled her closely, shushing and swaying with her as he tried to rub clarity into his burning eyes. He was impervious to fire, so he couldn’t understand why he felt as if he’d been burned. He would never have thought that the ritual to find his mate would in any way be capable of causing harm to anyone. It was inconceivable. He was still struggling with denial and unanswered questions as he groped into the smears of light and dark in search of Corrine.

“Hush, Leah, you’re safe,” he rasped soothingly to the child, somehow managing to sound far more convincing than he felt. Suddenly his hand hit silky soft curls, his fingers weaving into the red strands that came into focus as he leaned closer to them. Everything seemed so loud, hurting his ears. Everything smelled so harsh and tasted so bitter. But it all seemed to calm down just a little when he finally touched the cool, clammy skin of Corrine’s face.

He heard her cough, and she jerked beneath his touch.

“It is all right,” he reassured her as she rasped and gagged for breath. He blindly pulled her against him, instinctively bringing both females into the circle of his safeguard. He might be sightless and disoriented, but he’d be damned if he was going to let either one of them move a millimeter away from his protection.

Noah turned his face to the right when he abruptly realized something very important.

Sunlight.

There was no mistaking the sensation of sunlight. Especially after being taxed by whatever ordeal it was that they had just been churned through, there could be no other cause for the unmistakable lethargy that meant pure sunlight was shining down on them.

“It is dusk,” he argued out loud. “It is night!”

Corrine went rigid against him as she realized why he was in conflict over that point.

“We’re still indoors,” she said with a whisper, her hands brushing over the floor beneath her knees. She recognized by touch bits of the things belonging to her sanctum, until she swept her fingers to the left toward Noah and touched carpeting that was unmistakably deep with pile.

The floor to the sanctum beneath the pillows was only bare, polished wood.

Noah couldn’t remain on his knees a moment longer. He hauled both of his charges up with him as he gained his feet, bracing his legs apart. He closed his eyes to discontinue the reflexive need to visually identify his surroundings. He took a deep, cleansing breath and reached for the power that centered everything that he was. It cast out of him like a net, a wholly different sensory network that blanketed the entire area. He sensed the pure energy of the sunlight, the life forces of a few animals and a dense population of humans.

Kane and Corrine lived in solitude, their closest neighbors all Demons themselves for the most part, and even they were a good mile away. At first it felt no different than anything else he had always sensed with ease and an almost careless ability, but the information Noah’s power was giving to him made no sense. It felt as though he were standing on the edge of a city. A human city.

That was the moment his vision finally decided to cooperate and join his other senses. He hadn’t even realized he’d opened his eyes until they focused on something in front of him.

A room, large and expansive, carpeted from wall to windows. Windows that looked down on an enormous metropolis. It only took him a moment to recognize enough buildings to identify it as Chicago.

And yet…

When he turned his head to the right, he was still in Corrine’s particularly designed sanctum. He focused down at his feet, trying to make sense of the trick of his eyes.

There, as if spliced together, was the line where two drastically different floors met and fused, polished oak and halves of pillows meeting up with plush carpets and pristine barrenness. He stood between this unlikely meshing of rooms, a foot on either side, holding Corrine to his right fully in the room he knew, and Leah on his left, fully in the room that was foreign to him.

For a moment, it felt as if he’d been frozen still in the middle of one of his sister’s teleportations. When a Mind Demon teleported someone else from one point to another, those two points appeared to squeeze together, making it seem as if you could step from the origination to the destination instantaneously. However, Noah knew this wasn’t the case. When the two places of a teleport met, it was in a queer distortion of shapes and sounds and visuals. Nothing was clearly definable until you stepped fully in one direction or another, and the effect of the transport washed away a moment later.

So how had these two places connected in this Escher-like fashion? Modern metropolis suite looking down on a city from on high, and peaceful country setting in rural England?

He didn’t have time to contemplate it any further. The sound of voices slowly faded in around him, echoing everywhere, disjointed as he looked for the people they should have been coming from. Instinctively, the Demon King stepped toward the side of the split that he knew best, the one without apparent variables that could threaten their safety. As he did so, the foreign room seemed to flicker with a strange pattern of sunlight. He glanced toward the expansive windows. He drew in a sharp breath as he realized the clouds and the weather were changing, as well as the position of the sun.

More specifically, it all seemed to be running backward, from west to east across the sky. It only took twenty seconds for it to stop at a point that seemed to be shortly after dawn. As the light faded out to that warm half-light of a bright, promising sun and the remnants of the very last touches of a rose and violet dawn, the voices came closer and people suddenly took their positions in the room.

A woman and a man, one seated on a couch, the other standing almost a hand’s reach away from Noah as she gazed appreciatively at a painting hanging on the wall. Since the painting was partially cut off by the spliced nature of the joined rooms, Noah came to understand that this effect was only being seen by those who had apparently caused it.

Which, of course, meant nothing when the woman spoke clearly for the first time, and a whole new recognition set in.

Noah’s breath caught as she stepped back, turning away from her appraisal of the painting, giving him the full picture of her tall, athletic figure, the curves and shape of which he knew purely by heart, and the saucy swing of a pristine white braid of hair.

She crossed the room with refined movement, a well-practiced gait that had clearly been learned, covering up the more natural slink of her body as he watched the line of her spine and hips. Noah barely heard her conversation with the man whose nervous energy was grating over his senses. He was too astounded, realizing he was actually looking on the fully focused face and figure of the woman he had dreamed of so incessantly.

“Whoa.”

Corrine whispered the word in a mixture of fear and a truly felt sense of accomplishment. She reached out to touch the invisible barrier that marked the change of locations, but Noah stopped her with a firm hand on her wrist. It hadn’t seemed dangerous when he’d straddled both sides of this strange connection from that world to this, but what if the other room suddenly disappeared, and Corrine’s curious hand along with it?

Noah didn’t have time to worry about that. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Kestra swing out with her purse, clocking her companion hard in the head with it. Corrine gasped as she saw it, too, and together they watched as the blonde made an inexplicable dash across the room and flew over a counter and into the kitchen. A short while later, an all-too-distinct series of bangs went off. Noah didn’t even have time to react. A second man had appeared from the hallway a short turn away, just in time to meet up with Kestra as she lurched back out of the kitchen on her hands and knees.

He grabbed Noah’s mate by her braid and promptly shot her in the head.

“No!” the Demon King bellowed in shock and the sudden collision of despair as the next few seconds played out in a horrific display of blood and undeniable loss of life.

He lurched forward, unthinking of those he guarded.

But it was too late.

That strange distortion of sight suddenly overwhelmed the Demon King once more. Everything faded and twisted, and that rending sensation of being picked apart one cell at a time bolted through him. In all the times he’d adjusted his form on a molecular level, he had never experienced such agony and such a lack of control. He tried to breathe, but had no lungs with which to do so. Not in that moment.

The next instant he could, and the deep reflexive breath that followed carried the overwhelming scent of burning herbs and candles. He lost track of those he held for a moment, but soon was aware of all three of them crashing down hard onto the velvety pillows that covered the floor of Corrine’s sanctum.

Corrine was coughing harshly, and then he felt her grasping at the sleeve of his shirt, clearly just as blind as he was once more.

“What the hell just happened?” she managed to say hoarsely.

That told Noah that this was far from the response Corrine had been expecting, though he’d already assumed as much. He finally found Leah, cradling her close to his chest again as her little body was racked with coughing. He rubbed violently at his eyes, trying to force himself to see. It did little good, so he was compelled to take a seat, with Leah on his lap and Corrine leaning heavily against him, and wait his eyesight out.

Just then a sharp distortion of air blew into them, followed by the unmistakable odor of sulfur and smoke that cut through the aroma of burning herbs.

“Kane!” Corrine cried out her husband’s name, recognizing his arrival even though she couldn’t see him.

“Corr! Noah! What the hell happened?”

Noah felt Corrine’s presence and warmth being drawn away from him. He blinked in the direction of her energy signature and the copper red of her hair suddenly came into blurry focus. He immediately turned his attention to Leah, continuing to blink away the weakness of his eyes as he tried to examine the child for injury.

“Kane, are they injured?” he demanded of the younger Demon.

“No,” Kane assured him as he kneeled to inspect Leah. “Covered in soot, but otherwise no worse for the wear. Are you okay?”

Noah had no idea how he could possibly answer that question. Relieved of his urgent worry over Leah and Corrine, the full implication of what had happened, of what he had just witnessed, weighed on him with a sudden and bright devastation he could remember feeling only at the worst moments in his long life. And yet this was somehow much keener. It sliced through flesh and bone and straight into the depths of his soul.

He let Kane draw Leah from his hold, and then stumbled through the blur of pillows and candlelight until he could touch a wall. He pressed his fingers into the lush velvet covering the wood paneling. The thick pile crushed beneath the onslaught of his clenching fist.

“Noah.”

He felt Corrine’s hands on his back, her empathy all too apparent in the tenderness of her touch. Noah couldn’t bear the comfort. He didn’t want to be comforted. He shrugged her off hard enough to make her stumble backward away from him.

“She is dead,” he said, his voice far rougher with emotion than he would have liked. He ran cold fingers down his soiled face, focusing straight ahead until the detail of the fabric before him came into clarity. The truth of his words was devastating to him, and on so many levels. He laughed mirthlessly at the capricious nature of fate. “Now I know why I have not dreamed of her in a week. Those dreams are…” He swallowed hard, trying to tamp down emotion far too violent to express in front of gentle friends. “They were a connection that needed both sides to be completed. And now I just stood here and let it happen again!” He turned sharply to look down at the redheaded Druid. “You were right. I was so stupid. I wasted six months. If I had come to you when this started, she would have been safe under my protection when she needed me most!”

Corrine closed her eyes, fighting back her sympathetic tears.

“I don’t understand any of this myself, Noah. You can’t be sure—”

“I am damn sure, Corr. Did you look out the windows? The sky went from noon to dawn, moving time backward to the moment this thing occurred. Backward to what I am guessing was a week ago, to the day I ceased to dream of her. And do not tell me there was nothing I could do to change it. I felt that carpet beneath my foot! I could have—I should have done something! I could smell the difference between this room and that one. I felt the energy of an entire city beyond it. For that moment, that place in time was as real as this place is right now.”

The monarch finally took a good look at the tall redhead who, in spite of a layer of grime, seemed to emanate power. She had done a potent and amazing thing, a feat beyond all expectations of her abilities, and the aftermath showed in overbright green eyes and an aura that glowed like a Christmas tree.

“Consider,” he said, this time more gently. “How would Kane suffer if Isabella had found you too late, Corrine? I have a right to grieve this loss!” The declaration promptly ended any discussion. The room vibrated with pain and tension, the silent noise punctuated with the occasional cough of Corrine’s niece.

“Yuck,” the child declared. She licked her hand and rubbed it on her clothes in an attempt to clean the soiled palm. Leah was fastidious about cleanliness, though clearly not as much so about germs.

Wordlessly, Noah crossed to Kane and plucked his charge out of her blood uncle’s hands, carrying her across the room. He held the child to his chest with one massive hand, and she instantly hooked her small, skinny legs around his waist, her head dropping onto his shoulder with contentment and the security that her uncle Noah would help her. The way he held her, however, grabbed at Corrine’s heart. Leah was hooked around him as if she were some sort of bulletproof vest, protecting his all-too-vulnerable heart.

Kane moved to hold his distraught wife when her thoughts and emotions impacted against him like a train wreck. He followed her gaze, which was affixed on the door to the room as if Noah were standing on its threshold instead of having already passed through it.

“Shh, sweetness,” he soothed softly, leaning to kiss a dirt-streaked cheek sympathetically. “You’ll see. He’ll be fine in time. Like any death, this will be grieved and then it will be put aside.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Corrine whispered to him on a fast, nervous breath. “The last time someone learned of the death of her potential Druid mate, she went mad.”

“Mary? Ruth drove Mary mad, Corrine. From the minute that child was born she was spoiled, sheltered, and held much further above her station by Ruth than was warranted. The mother was to blame for her daughter’s actions because of her carelessness in Mary’s upbringing. That can never happen to Noah. Noah comes from an upbringing that defies explanation and a place I couldn’t even begin to put in plain words for you.” Kane shook his head when he felt her puzzled expression. “Not a physical place. A metaphysical one. Noah was born with something none of the rest of us could ever lay claim to. It’s why he, above all others, is King.”

“That’s why he, above all others, deserved a complementary Queen,” Corrine replied.

Noah knew on some level that the child he was now watching play contentedly before his hearth was responsible for what had happened.

The Prophecy had been clear and unmistakable. The Enforcers would give life to the child who would be the very first of his or her kind to have the power to manipulate the element of Time. Though she was only a little over two years old, Leah clearly had shown the first evidence of her ability, an astounding event even had it been a well-known element like Water or Wind. Even his remarkable power had not come to him at such a young age.

Of course, she had no idea what she had done or the significance of the part she had played. Suddenly certain things began to make sense to him. He spent enormous amounts of time with this special child. Though she’d had no conscious control of what she was doing, somehow Leah had formed that conduit through time for him. Perhaps it was simply a child’s desire to please that had triggered the subconscious ability. Leah loved her uncle Noah with incredible devotion. She strived to do things that would please him. Combine this with the power of his and Corrine’s wills, their need to be successful in their hunt, and it had made the perfect catalyst for a child with an untried power who wanted nothing more but to give him what he wanted. What he needed.

And for a terrible moment, Noah wanted to use her for exactly that reason. The King was a scholar, so he knew full well the implications of altering time, and a person’s presence in time. However, he couldn’t bring himself to care for that long second of self-indulgent thought.

Noah stood up abruptly, pacing over the playing toddler in order to lean close against the mantel. Normally the proximity to such intense heat would comfort him, but this time it did not.

He wanted to burn. Oh yes, he was impervious to any and every form of flame or molten fire that the natural world could offer up, but this wasn’t what he meant. In his dreams, she had made him burn. Kestra Irons. He laughed with the dry irony of her last name. The metal iron was toxic to Demonkind. It burned on contact. Just like Kestra.

The fire of passion was no stranger to him; he manipulated it well and with arrogant skill, and he had more than one lover in his history who would attest to that with a longing sigh of remembrance. This thing with the woman who had pervaded his sleeping world was out of reach of all of that. It was transient and lacking cohesion, and yet somehow all the more real. Now made unreal and inescapably out of reach for all the rest of time as he knew it.

Unless…

Noah shivered. He was unused to selfish thought. He was a man who lived every moment of his existence with the well-being of so many others as his first priority. Family. When not family, Council. When not family or Council, the multitude of his subjects. If none of them, then the races of others with which they associated. That was the essence of a good monarch. Everyone else must come first, especially those you loved best.

In that moment, all he wanted was to put himself first.

Whatever the cost.

No matter who had to pay.

Isabella entered the King’s castle without even bothering to knock. It wasn’t so much that she had developed altered manners from living in Demon society as it was that, to Noah, privacy was an alien, if not impossible, concept. Dozens of people moved in and out of his home throughout the night, and he expected it to be so.

Since Noah still had Bella’s daughter in his care, she had even more cause to march in unannounced. She rounded the wall of the foyer, entering the Great Hall and heading automatically for the enormous fireplace that Leah was constantly in front of, whatever the season, whenever she stayed with him. Her steps hitched when the Turkish rug, so well worn from years of children playing upon it, lay as abandoned as the toys scattered over it.

She wasn’t worried, just surprised. She crossed her arms over her middle, her fingers drumming thoughtfully in the curve of her waist for a moment. She was a hunter, like her husband, and all she need do was quiet her thoughts and concentrate on her target. She would find them wherever they were in the enormous house without having to shout or search rooms. Filtering through scent and residual patterns of warmth, she was able to sort out which belonged to her daughter and her liege.

To her continuing surprise, it led out of Noah’s home entirely. This perplexed her because it was nearing dawn. The dawn and the sunlight were things best avoided for those of the Nightwalker races, aside from the incredibly powerful Elders. And while that description fit Noah, her daughter was a very different matter. Though a Demon and Druid mixed child was a unique creature, there was no guarantee that her mother’s blasé human immunity to the sun would be an inherited trait. For Demon children, the sun could make them very weak and ill. It even had the potential to kill vulnerable children not yet in their power. They would fall asleep and simply never wake up. Isabella and Jacob had never had a desire to test their child’s tolerance to sunlight. They would wait until she was older before trying such tricks.

It was unusually irresponsible for Noah to take the little girl elsewhere when daylight was so near, especially because Isabella or Jacob always came and collected her exactly one hour before the dawn. Still, the young mother didn’t worry or panic. Leah was with Noah, after all. The King would rather die than expose her to harm. He was probably already on his way home and just running a little late.

So Isabella turned to flop down into the seat nearest the fire, sighing contentedly as she stretched out a body quite weary from a long night’s work. The closer it got to Samhain and the full moon, the more she and Jacob were forced to hunt down Demons who lost control of their logic and normal temperaments. After a night like the one they had just had, she was always very tired and more than happy to go to bed.

She wouldn’t have to worry about another out-of-control Demon until dusk the next day.

Corrine lay down in bed gratefully, feeling exhausted mentally and emotionally, both of which manifested in her body as weary muscles and achy bones. Kane was already in bed, anticipating the coming dawn that left him so lethargic. She had showered off the soot and soil of the night’s exertions, so she brushed her still-damp hair out into a fan of dark coils, back over her pillow, with a single sweep of her arm. With choreography of thought that came so easily to telepathically connected partners, Kane turned toward her and drew her warm curves tightly against the cradle of his body.

“Sleep,” he murmured gently. “The coming night will provide ample time for you to obsessively worry.”

“I know. I just can’t escape the feeling that we shouldn’t let Noah deal with this alone,” she whispered back to him.

“I agree. But day is come and he will sleep like the rest of us. We’ll attend him first thing in the evening.”

“Thank you,” she said, hugging the arms wrapped around her.

“I haven’t done anything,” he chuckled, rubbing his cheek against hers.

“Go to sleep. I’ll tell you why you’re so wonderful in the evening.”

Corrine punctuated this with a yawn, closed her eyes, and quickly fell asleep, still smiling at her husband.