Chapter Five #2
“Sebastian,” she whispered, clutching his jacket and moving close to him. “We’re being kidnapped. We need to do something. We don’t know him…or what he’s capable of.” She paused to stare deep into his eyes. “I don’t know you.”
He felt her tremble against him. His heart went soft even as his muscles hardened. She was afraid and he hated it. He hated that this was happening on their first night together. He wanted them to get to know each other, but not like this.
“Hey, Lancaster,” he shouted, “we’re leaving. I’m taking her home.”
The magician reached out his hand and said some words and Noelle melted in Sebastian’s arms. He looked down at her, horrified by what he’d just seen. “What did you do to her?”
He looked up at Lancaster, his eyes aflame with the promise of death and destruction. A feeling he’d had only once before, when he killed his abusive father. He lifted his hand, ready.
Ready for what? To speak.
He heard her voice and looked down. She was still asleep.
You can’t go around killing people you believe are bad.
He put down his hand and shut his mouth.
He blinked. What just happened? Did he know magic? What was he about to do? He had no weapon. Was he going to strike the older man? No. He wasn’t himself. He let his gaze settle on Noelle, his anchor.
“She is fine, I vow it,” Lancaster promised. “I need you to carry her.”
“You are forcing us to—”
“I’m trying to save your lives,” Lancaster pleaded, his voice low and hushed. “The more magic I must conjure, the easier it will be to find me. Trust me, please. The knights will be back.”
Sebastian had no choice. He felt as if his insides were rumbling and quaking, breaking him apart and forging a new man, someone colder, someone dangerous.
“Get in the car,” Lancaster urged, pulling open the back door of a shiny black sedan. This wasn’t an Uber. “Get in.”
Sebastian got in. He wondered if the older man had cast a spell over him to make him so agreeable.
He climbed in carefully, letting no harm come to Noelle.
“The brooch brought you to her,” Lancaster remarked, getting in the back with them and observing him.
“It would seem,” Sebastian replied. He gazed at her and felt like he was looking down at Sleeping Beauty. Would his kiss awaken her?
“But it was to meet you as well,” he told Lancaster. “You felt it when we touched.”
“Yes.”
“We are connected.”
“Yes, it seems so. You’re powerful,” the older man remarked.
Powerful in what way? Sebastian wanted to ask but, more than that, he wanted to rest his weary head on Noelle and forget the waiting beast within him. He fought it every day, but it was getting more difficult to contain him. “How are we connected? What kind of magic am I capable of?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember who anyone is,” Lancaster lamented. “As for your magic, you will only know how powerful you are when you perform it.”
Sebastian wouldn’t have believed they were even having this conversion if he hadn’t felt the power in him to fight Lancaster…or—
“But you know who you are? King Arthur?”
Lancaster closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. “This knowledge will get one or both of us killed. I would rather others not become involved.”
Sebastian believed him and it made his blood run cold. He clutched Noelle to him. “What do I have to do with you? Tell me.”
“I don’t know, but my guess is that you are my enemy.” His powerful blue gaze warmed on him. “I wish it were not so.”
Sebastian had a sinking feeling about his true identity, but this was all so unbelievable.
Still, he knew it was all true. He felt different.
On edge, ready to fight, to speak words that would kill and destroy.
Where did these feelings come from? The dark beast within?
Who was he? Did being near Arthur awaken something, someone he truly was?
And if he was so bad, what would become of Noelle?
“We don’t have to be enemies as long as you bring her back to me,” he told the magician with a thread of warning in his tone.
“I will,” Lancaster promised.
“So you have a lot of money?” Sebastian asked, looking around the elegant back of the private car.
“Yes. And if you plan on robbing me, it will not end well for you.” Lancaster’s lips lifted into a smirk.
“’Twas simply an observation,” Sebastian let him know with a smile of his own.
What was this posturing between them? Were they rival…
wizards? It was too wild to believe. Perhaps they were brothers.
It would explain the connection he felt with him.
Was he the evil brother? His gaze slipped again to her.
He didn’t want to be the bad one. He would eventually hurt her, and he didn’t want to do that.
He had changed since coming here, since living with people like Harold who was living and dying with lymphoma, Candace who would rather be eaten by a shark than hear about love.
He’d gotten to know them, and it changed him for the better…
just in time for her, perhaps for something to do with him. He set his gaze on Lancaster.
“Tell me more about what you heard about Simeon being Merlin,” Lancaster suggested, bringing his thoughts back to the present.
Sebastian shrugged his shoulders and told him everything he’d heard, which wasn’t much. “He is not fond of me.”
“I gathered that.”
“So, if he’s Merlin and you both consider me your enemy—”
“No, Sebastian,” Lancaster corrected him. “I don’t consider you my enemy.”
Sebastian liked hearing that. He didn’t know why.
He wasn’t afraid of the magician. He could handle him if he had to.
Odd, that he would even think that. But what if they were enemies and Sebastian had to kill him?
He looked down at Noelle. She would disapprove and disappear from him.
He could have killed the magician a few minutes ago.
But for her sake, he hadn’t. The thing that frightened him a little was how he could have killed the magician. What was this power within him?
“I’m doing this so Morgan won’t order the death of you both.”
Order her death? Sebastian’s eyes burned like embers being stirred. He wanted to laugh. “Let her try, I’ll roast her alive in the Ring of Fire.”
Arthur regarded him for a moment. It was difficult not to blink from under his scrutiny. “You don’t know who it is you are so confident against. Morgan is one of the Nine, though even her sisters stay away from her.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” Sebastian assured him, not knowing where this strength of heart came from. Inside. He wasn’t afraid of many things, but this Morgan was bad enough to strike fear in the king.
“I wish you were an ally, Sebastian. I would like to have you on my side. I see that you would give anything for this woman. I admire that in you.” Arthur appeared as if he had more to say, but his heart was stuck in his throat.
Finally, he seemed to gather himself. “Morgan wants me, and she will stop at nothing to have want she wants. Anyone in her way will perish. I gave up my life to escape her. I gave up the woman I was born to love. I gave up three of my children, and the woman who could have been my heart’s desire—” he stopped to gather himself for a moment.
“I live here in this quickly decaying realm as a normal man in hiding from her. But I feel the storm clouds gathering. The brooch is at work and I suspect it will ultimately do what it was originally designed to do, lead her to me. First, it took my daughter, Kestrel, and brought Elia back to me. Then it took my son, Michael, and brought you back to me. I have one child left. Camelee. I don’t know who will return to me in her place.
I cannot involve myself in her life in any way or she could be hurt, and I would be found. I leave no trace that I am here.”
Sebastian stared at him and found it a little hard to breathe.
Pity coursed through him like never before when he considered all that the king had just told him.
And…the detective he left behind in the eighteenth century was his son!
Incredible. His head was spinning, and his heart was softening toward him. Should he let it? Why wouldn’t he?
“I feel…ehm…I feel as if I…” Sebastian liked him. He wanted to tell him truth. “Should I guard myself against you.”
“You are likely under a spell,” Arthur told him.
Aye. It had to be a spell that would veil the marvel of talking to King Arthur!
“Tell me,” the king pulled his attention back. “For how long have you suspected I was Arthur?”
Sebastian shook his head. “Not long. Everything just fit. Believing it all should have been a problem in and of itself. But it isn’t.
I feel like this is all the truth,” he said honestly.
But he felt much more than that. Ever since meeting Lancaster tonight, his insides roiled within, rousing something dangerous.
He fought it. Looking at Noelle’s sleeping face helped.
“But I think what gave it away was believing Simeon was Merlin. And if Merlin led me to you, he will lead the knights to you, as well.”
Lancaster scowled but nodded his head. “You two and Mr. Simeon are the only people who know my true identity, and there is one other, whom I sent away this morning. After sacrificing so much, I don’t know why I admitted the truth to you.
Perhaps because you already knew, as did Simeon.
Everything is changing quickly for the first time in fifty years. I can feel her close.”