Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night

8

'What the hell are you doing?' Lachlain snapped when he saw Bowe struggling to sit up in bed. It'd been a mere day since he'd been delivered back to the Lykae compound in Louisiana.

'Got somewhere I need to be,' Bowe answered. His tone was weary, and yet there seemed to be some kind of underlying excitement in his demeanor.

'You're no' ready to go anywhere yet.' Yesterday, before Bowe had come to, Lachlain had seen to it that all his injuries were debrided and dressed as best as was possible. The amount of damage done to Bowe had been staggering. Besides missing a hand and an eye, his torso had been pierced with some kind of rusted metal, tearing the bottom of his lung. 'You're in no shape to be moving around so soon.'

'Does no' matter.'

'You'll reopen your wounds.' The idea that Bowe had been able to keep fighting on in this condition was astonishing—if one didn't know what he'd fought for. But after such trials and then such a loss, Lachlain couldn't understand why Bowe hadn't stepped into that pit. If Lachlain had lost his mate, Emma, not once but, in essence, twice, he'd have dived in within a heartbeat's time. Why hadn't Bowe? What drove him? The subject was one of great conjecture among the clan.

'Stop analyzing me, cousin.'

Lachlain exhaled. 'I doona understand you sometimes.'

Bowe eased his legs over the side of the bed, then gritted his teeth against an obvious stab of pain. 'If you have no' after twelve hundred years, then you never will.'

Lachlain knew he was right. But then Bowe had always been singular among the clan.

Like most Lykae, Bowe was impatient and hotheaded, yet he'd also been known to spend hour after hour patiently teaching bairns the fundamentals of rugby, his favorite sport before Americans had come up with their own 'football.' Though Bowe was always the first into a fight, eager to punish slights, once the battle was over he was also the first to forgive those slights.

In the north of Scotland, winters could be harsh, with spring eagerly awaited by the clan, but Bowe always regretted seeing winter, his favorite season, fade. Lachlain supposed he'd enjoyed it because it was stark like him.

At least Bowe had enjoyed it until he'd lost his Mariah in the dead of winter...

'What's so important that you canna rest more or eat?' Lachlain waved at the gel packs of food and strange-smelling mineral replacement drinks beside his bed. Bowe was supposed to partake of them, having just come off such a long interval without food and water, but had scarcely touched them. 'Is this about revenge against Wroth?'

Bowe said nothing, just seemed to be preparing to rise, planting his feet wide on the wooden floor.

'If so, I ask you to reconsider that action. And no' only because of the debt I owe his brother.' If not for Nikolai Wroth, Emma would have... died. At the mere thought, suddenly Lachlain needed to see her, to feel her, even when he knew she waited for him just twenty minutes away with her fierce Valkyrie family. He'd left her safe at Val Hall behind thick curtains, protected from the sun, and happily playing video games. 'Bowe, you have to remember that it was a contest. And the reports we received all said 'the Lykae competitor' was proving ruthless—and that he played dirtier than Kaderin had in three previous Hies.'

Bowe shrugged.

'We heard you mesmerized Kaderin with a glittering object so you could barricade her behind a rock slide. Did you no' trap her alone with three hungry basilisks?'

A flicker of something arose in Bowe's eyes—or eye—that Lachlain suspected was satisfaction. 'And we also heard that when you were on a task in the Congo, you whaled a shovel across Sebastian Wroth's face. Knocked him out and then threw him into a raging river. At high noon in Africa.'

His cousin had obviously taken a savage thrill in that act—and still did.

'This is no' about Wroth,' Bowe said. 'No' yet.'

'Then are your thoughts occupied with the witch?'

At last, Bowe turned to him with interest. 'What have you heard?'

'I know about the curse. And that you can actually die from these wounds.'

Bowe didn't appear to be concerned about that in the least. 'That witch and I have much unfinished business. I'm going to retrieve her from the tomb, since no one else has been able to. Though I doona understand how none could locate that place. In that round of the Hie, the coordinates were given to all the competitors.'

'I'm told the goddess Riora erased them with each round,' Lachlain explained. 'No one took note of that location if they dinna plan to journey there. You trapped anyone who did.'

Bowe scowled at that. 'I was sure they'd eventually escape.'

'And what is the witch to you?' Emma actually knew this Mariketa fairly well because the witch often visited the more rowdy Valkyrie at Val Hall. That didn't surprise Lachlain—nearly every time he'd been to Val Hall he'd spotted intoxicated witches laughing and staggering about the place.

Bowe hesitated, then said, 'She put another spell on me besides the weakening one. A spell to make me feel things for her. I think it's triggered me to think of her as... my mate.'

'You are sure it's a spell?' Lachlain hastily asked. 'What if it's real?' He could only hope. Emma had told him that aside from a bit of a wild streak and a pinch of a witch's natural deviousness, Mariketa had a good heart.

Lachlain didn't know if he could say the same for Bowe's mate from before. He'd met Mariah on occasion when he and Bowe had traveled to convene with her father, the king of a large faction of fey. Lachlain had always found Mariah to be a spoiled sort, and though she'd been beautiful, tall and blond, she'd seemed to show disdain for all the elementals that the Lykae celebrated—food, touch, sex. But Bowe had been content with her, so Lachlain had remained silent about his misgivings. Yet now... 'Bowe, it could be that you were given two.'

'Have you ever heard of that happening?' he asked, his tone growing frustrated.

'Well, no, but—'

'In five thousand years of the clan's record keeping, there's never been an instance of it. Five millennia, Lachlain. I know because I took half a decade to comb through every line of every single record. Every bloody one.'

Lachlain knew Bowe had been dogged in finding a way to have Mariah back, but he hadn't realized he'd sifted through all those records.

Bowe added, 'The witch put one spell on me—why would I no' think she'd hex me twice?'

'But why would she do it?'

He ran his remaining hand over the back of his neck. 'There was a short window of time when she... when she wanted me for herself. She made me kiss her—'

'Made you?' Lachlain raised his eyebrows.

'Enthralled me to do it.'

'How can you be sure you didn't merely desire her?'

'Because I could feel it happening. And I have been true to Mariah all these years... until that witch toyed with me.'

The fact that Bowe hadn't bedded another for so long didn't shock Lachlain. Though the Lykae were notorious for their insatiable appetites, their kind revered few things above loyalty. 'Emma knows the witch and has seen her without her cloak. She says Mariketa is a beautiful girl. Did you no' find her so?'

'She had a glamour on. I canna recall her looks clearly.'

'What did the Instinct tell you?' A guiding force with which all Lykae are born, the Instinct was like a voice in the mind directing the individual toward what would be best for him, as well as for the collective clan.

Bowe hesitated before admitting, 'The Instinct has long been quiet in me.'

Lachlain glanced away. The idea that his cousin had been denied the comforting presence of the Instinct was painful for Lachlain, but he didn't want Bowe to think he pitied him. Even when Lachlain had been tortured, the