Chapter 15 #2
Once Darro told them all the spiders had been destroyed and the zed enchantment had been broken, Ben happily stripped out of his sour-smelling suit, and helped Una and Ulf out of the soaked burlap bags he’d put over their clothes.
“At least the vinegar kept us from being bitten,” he said as he looked all over the hunter’s face. “I was so scared I’d lose you. I’d rather become a zombie than see that happen to you.”
“Lass, would you give us a moment?” Ulf asked, and then dragged Ben by the hand into the storeroom at the back. Kicking the door shut, he advanced on him with a dangerously serious expression.
Ben held up his hands in surrender. “I probably should have let you go after Els instead of making you stay with me—oof.”
The hunter jerked him away from the crate he’d collided with and sat him down on a stool. “Stop talking, Benedict. ’Tis my turn now.”
He nodded and tried not to cringe.
“I love you both, but I’m weary of waiting,” Ulf said.
“I dinnae care what the clan thinks, or what the other vassals say. We chose each other, and ’tis unlikely we shall hold another binding ceremony.
If the world’s coming to an end, then I want my husband and our wife in our bed with me when that happens. ”
“You know Elspeth wants to be formally married,” he reminded him.
“I dinnae care.” He took hold of Ben’s red curls in a tight grip as he leaned down, letting his mouth hover a scant inch above his.
“I want you naked in my arms, so I may touch and kiss and fack you senseless. Then her. Then watch you two together. Then love as three, all at once. Just as we’ve ever and always wanted. ”
“I know.” Ben understood how a brush with death could make someone hypersexual, but the hunter had always been like this. “It’s been hard on you, too. We just have to be patient a little longer.”
“I’ve no more patience, Benedict. Indeed, I’d fack you right here, were she with us.
I intend fack you both this night, no matter what you prattle.
” He kissed him hard. “You’re mine, both of you.
Now you go and get her, and explain, and make her understand.
When I see her again, all I intend to do is love her—and you. ”
Ben nodded, and hugged him for a long moment before rising and walking out into the workroom, where the maid was standing over an empty bucket. “Una, where was the last place you saw Elspeth?”
“Near the laird’s chamber.” She grimaced as she squeezed her wet apron into the bucket. “If you dinnae need my aid, healer, I’d like to go bathe and change.”
“I’ll go with her and assure she arrives safely at her chamber,” Ulf said as he joined them, taking a moment to put his hand on Ben’s neck and draw him down for another, gentler kiss. “Meet me in our chamber with our wife, aye?”
“Aye.” He kissed him back, and then hurried out of the workroom.
On the way downstairs Ben stopped to check on some of the more dazed-looking vassals and clansmen, but all of their injuries proved minor.
As he treated them he thought of the woman he adored, and how she would probably react to Ulf’s insistence that they sleep together.
Elspeth had taken several lovers over the last few years, most notably Kelso McKeran, who had died during the MacBren’s previous attack.
He suspected she had offered herself to that clansman because he had a reputation as a vigorous, demanding lover.
In a strange sense Ben understood that. I avoided sex because I couldn’t have her and Ulf, while she bedded Kelso to keep from thinking about us.
Ulf had admitted to being intimate with both men and women, but never more than one.
He had always dreamed of finding a husband and a wife so that he would not have to choose again.
Ben knew with his intense sexuality and voracious appetite that it was cruel to make the hunter abstain while they waited for Elspeth to find a solution to their problem.
Ben’s own problem was his modern attitude toward her reticence.
For him if she said no, it was no, and he wouldn’t pressure or seduce her into changing her mind.
Maybe I can persuade her, he thought. She had to be thinking of us tonight, too, and we’re running out of time.
He directed everyone not on duty to go to bed and rest, and then went into the kitchens to ask if any of the women there had seen Elspeth. Two of the maids burst into tears and ran out, while another sobbed into her hand.
“Is she… Is she dead?” he managed to say.
“No, Healer. She’s in the great hall now,” Doon told him. When he went in that direction, she caught his sleeve. “Matters, they’ve grown a wee bit complicated. Mayhap you should wait a bit, until she comes out again.”
“What matters? Did something happen to her?” he demanded.
The cook grimaced. “No’ her, lad.”
Ben couldn’t wait another second to see his woman, and ran the rest of the way to the hall.
He stopped just inside the arch when he saw the laird and his wife speaking to a clansman who had an arm around Elspeth’s shoulders.
The chambermaid glanced back at him, her expression miserable, which spurred him to join them.
“Is everyone all right?” he asked, turning to look over Elspeth, and then regarded the man beside her. The shock of realizing who he was made Ben step back. “How are you here?”
“I’m a lucky man,” Kelso McKeran told him with a broad grin before he bent down and kissed the top of Elspeth’s head. “I escaped death at the hands of the MacBren, as you see.”
Ben hadn’t seen Kelso die, but he knew he was fated to do so in each reset of the cycle of events. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
“I took an arrow in the eye for the laird.” The big man winked at Tasgall. “Only now I’m back, before my time, remembering all that came before. ’Twas love for my woman gave me another chance, I reckon. Now I vow naught shall ever part us again.”
Bodach strode up to one of the clansmen he’d sent to the rooftop to bring back the armorer. “Well? Where is he?”
“I dinnae serve you any longer, bastart.” The guard drew his sword and thrust it at him, making Bodach stumble backward. “Now you shall suffer all that you inflicted on us, and more.”
He didn’t bother to debate that, but turned and ran.
Every McKeran he passed reached for their weapons, so it seemed the first one’s claim was true.
Shattered soul globes littered the passages.
Someone must have found a way to destroy his matriarch spider, which Mirry had warned him would break the spell and release all the zed from his control.
He had to get through the spell trap, dose another spider, and then–
A powerful force seized him like a giant, invisible hand and rammed him through the nearest wall into the next passage.
Bodach knew the melia’s enchantment had finally detected him, and braced himself to be hurled out of the spell trap, as he always was.
This time, however, he did not exit, but was bounced between the walls.
This is not the enchantment.
Like a rag doll, over and over, he hit the stones, his flesh scraping away and his bones cracking. By the time he was flung out through the barrier, he was a bleeding, broken mess.
I cannot die, Bodach thought as shadows crowded in around him, close and suffocating, like a black casket. I am immortal. My red crystal will heal me.
He went into the airless darkness, his mind becoming an endless, featureless black sea in which he drowned. When he finally fought his way out of that dark water and opened his eyes, he saw one of the mortal females he’d left in charge of his prisoners leaning over him.
“You’re awake,” she said, sounding relieved as she pressed a damp cloth against his forehead. “You’ve been out for so long, Master.”
He pushed himself up to see he occupied a pallet in the main room of the dungeons, which stank of dead flesh. Against one wall he saw the charred body of the other female mortal, and suspected the occupants of the cells would be in the same condition.
“Tell me what happened here,” Bodach commanded her.
Somehow Dax Ballar had escaped his cell, and she had gone upstairs to look for him when the entire castle shook as if experiencing an earthquake, and things began flying through the passages and crashing into the walls and floors.
She had locked herself inside a storage closet until the tremors and the noise stopped.
When she had hurried back down to the dungeons she found the other woman and all the men burned to death, and Bodach unconscious with terrible injuries.
“Then you started to heal, Master,” she said. “I could see your skin regrowing, and hear your bones snapping back together. So I put you here and kept you warm.”
Looking into her eyes he realized she was no longer under his control.
The backlash from the use of Mirry’s magic and breakdown of the enchantment must have destroyed her enthrallment as well as killing all the other mortals.
She could have fled at any time, and brought back the authorities, but instead she’d stayed with him.
“Why did you do this?” Bodach demanded, grabbing her by the throat.
“Do you expect me to be grateful? I am the most powerful dark Fae in this realm, and you are nothing.” He gave her a hard shake, making something in her body snap.
“I could make you spend eternity being whipped every day and raped every night by hideous monsters beyond your imagination.” He waited for her to say something, but she kept her head hung low.
“Well? Aren’t you going to beg me for your life? ”
The stink of her bowels and bladder emptying told him why she couldn’t, and he released her to see her sprawl on the floor, her head at an unnatural angle.