parts of an image: the green sparkles became a long, thick stem—the yellow delicate petals of a flower with the brown circling within them to become its center.
Dragon wiped his eyes clear of tears, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. “A sunflower?” His lips felt as numb with shock as his brain.
The image of the shimmering sunflower began to waver and change. The yellow flowed down in a cascade that became golden blond. The brown lightened to the color of sun-kissed skin, and the green melted down within the skin, swirling and morphing into shining orbs that became eyes that were turquoise and familiar and dear.
“Oh, goddess, Anastasia! It is you!” Dragon’s voice broke as he reached out for her. But the image lifted–a glowing tease just beyond his fingertips. He cried out in frustration and then stifled the sound of his misery as his mate’s voice began to spill around him like a musical stream over water-worn pebbles. Dragon held his breath and listed to the ghostly message.
The image smiled once at him before it lost its form and returned to smoke and then nothingness.
“My oath!” Dragon shouted, surging to his feet. “First Nyx and now you reminding me of it. Do you not understand that it is because of that cursed oath that you are dead? Had I chosen differently those many years ago, perhaps I could have kept all of this from happening. Strength tempered by mercy was a mistake. Do you not remember, my own? Do you not remember? I do. I will never forget…”
As Dragon Lankford, Sword Master of the House of Night, held vigil over the body of a fallen fledgling, he stared into the burning pyre and let the flames take him back so that he could relive the pain and the pleasure— the tragedy and the triumph—of a past that had shaped such a heartbreaking future.
CHAPTER TWO
“Father, you cannot disown me and banish me to the Americas. I am your son!” Bryan Lankford, third son to the Earl of Lankford, shook his head and stared disbelievingly at his father.
“You are my third son. I have four others, two older and two younger. None of them are as troublesome as are you. Their existence and your behavior make it quite simple for me to do this to you.”
Bryan ignored the shock and panic his father’s words threatened to break loose within him. He forced himself to relax–to slouch nonchalantly against the wooden door to the stall closest to him as he beamed the Bryan Lankford smile at the Earl, that disarmingly handsome grin that women found irresistible and made them want to seduce him, and men found charming and made them want to be like him.
The Earl’s dark, unchanging expression said that he was well aware of the Bryan Lankford smile—and utterly unaffected by it.
“My decision is final, boy. Do not disgrace yourself further by unsuitable begging.”
“Begging!” Bryan felt familiar anger stir. Why must his father always belittle him? He’d never begged for anything in his life—he certainly was not going to start now, no matter the consequences. “I do not beg you, Father. I simply am trying to reason with you.”
“Reason?
“Father, it was only a small altercation, and with a Scotsman! I did not even kill him. In actuality I wounded his vanity more than his body.” Bryan attempted a chuckle, but the sound was cut off by the return of the cough that had been plaguing him all that day, only this time it was followed by a wave of weakness. He was so distracted by the betrayal of his body that he put up no resistance at all when his father suddenly closed the distance between them and with one hand fisted the cravat at Bryan’s throat, ramming him against the wall of the stable with such force that the little breath left in his body whooshed from him. With his other hand the Earl knocked the still-bloody sword from Bryan’s failing grip.
“You blustering little braggart! That Scotsman is a border Laird. His lands adjoin mine,
“Maidenhead!” Bryan managed to choke out. “Aileene’s maidenhead was lost long before I found her.”
“That is of no consequence!” The Earl tightened the strangle grip with which he held his son. “What is of consequence is that you were the dolt caught between her knees, and now that weakling king has all the excuse he needs to look the other way when thieving clansmen from the north sweep south looking for fat cattle to steal. Whose cattle do you think they will be after, son of mine?”
Bryan could only gasp for breath and shake his head.
With a look of utter contempt, the Earl of Lankford let loose his son, allowing him to fall, coughing violently, to the dirt floor of the stable. Then the nobleman motioned to the red-coated members of his personal guard who had been blandly watching his son’s disgrace, singling out the pockmarked senior member of the squad. “Jeremy, as I already ordered, bind him like the miscreant he is. Choose two other men to accompany you. Take him to the port. Put him on the next ship to the Americas. I want never to see him again. He is no longer my son.” Then he motioned at the stableman. “Bring my horse. I have wasted enough of my precious time on this foolishness.”
“Father! Wait, I—,” Bryan began, but another coughing fit cut off his words.
The Earl paused only long to look down his long nose at his son. “As I already explained, you are expendable and now you are no longer my concern. Take him away!”
“You cannot send me away like his!” he cried. “How will I live?”
His father jerked his chin at Bryan’s sword, which lay in the dirt not far from him. It had been a gift from the Earl when his precocious son had turned thirteen, and even in the dim, dusty light of the stable the jewels that encrusted the hilt glistened. “Perhaps that will be of more use to you in your new life than it was to me in your old one. Allow him to take the sword,” he addressed the guards, “and nothing else, with him! Bring me back the ship’s name and its captain’s mark as proof that he has left England—have him gone before sunrise tomorrow and there will be a purse of silver waiting to split between you,” the older man said, and then strode to his waiting horse.
Bryan Lankford tried to shout at his father—to tell him how sorry he would be later, when he remembered that though his third son was, indeed, his most troublesome, he was also his most talented, intelligent, and interesting—but another coughing fit gripped the seventeen-year-old so thoroughly that he could only gasp helplessly and watch his father’s horse gallop off. He couldn’t even fight as he wished he could when the Earl’s guard bound him, then dragged him through the dirt of the stables.
“It’s about time a little crowing cock like you was brought low. Let’s see how you like being common.” Laughing sarcastically, Jeremy, the oldest and most pompous of Bryan’s father’s guards, tossed him into the back of a poultry cart, before bending to pick up Bryan’s sword and, with a calculating look at its glittering hilt, shove it through his own waistcloth.
