Chapter Fourteen
Isobella swayed on the horse, righted herself, then clamped her hands firmer around Edmond’s torso.
They’d been riding for hours, stopping for a hurried bite to eat and a toilet break, but quick to move on.
Her muscles were cramping, and the horse’s back had become no more comfortable than a stone bench.
Fatigue weighed her down, replacing the shock of the battle—the blood, the violence, the death, her own part in it.
She’d killed three men. Used the only spell that had come to mind.
One she’d used all the time at the nursery when grafting plants to a rootstock.
Her thought had been only to hold the men in place and keep them from attacking her, but…
She grimaced as the memory of the men squeezed to death by her tree roots appeared front and center in her mind. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Remi had poked at the vines with a stick, fascinated, if a little wary.
She hadn’t been able to look at them. Just the thought of what she’d done made Isobella nauseated.
She’d never envisioned using her magic for any purpose other than to nurture, but she’d had no choice.
The thrum of her power surging through her veins had been overwhelming and frightening.
As though she’d added her blood to the spell, but she hadn’t.
Was her magic stronger because she was now a werewolf?
Isobella didn’t know, but she didn’t like it.
What had Stef and Gabriel been thinking sending her on this mission?
She wasn’t cut out for this. For the tenth century.
For battles where people lost their limbs, their heads, their lives.
She tended plants, for goodness’ sake. Made the non-alcoholic punch and the salad platters for the coven’s solstice celebrations.
She couldn’t stand the thought of killing anything.
She was a vegetarian. Isobella snorted. Who’d ever heard of a vegetarian werewolf?
Maybe she wasn’t cut out for that either.
Had Edmond’s every blow, every thrust not found its mark, had Aubert not come charging down the hill raining death upon all who got in his way, killing three men wouldn’t have been enough to save her.
Aubert and Edmond had done that. Saved her.
Again. Wasn’t she the one sent here to save them from Faucher?
Now they might have started a war the Langeais wolves didn’t want or need.
All because of her. They were probably thinking they should’ve left her in the chapel, but…
She glanced over her shoulder at Aubert.
For a moment, when the battle was won, and Aubert had dropped his sword, panic in his eyes, frantically running his hands over her, checking for injury, she’d thought of another time, another battle.
When Gabriel had been desperate to know Annabelle was okay.
Sandwiched between Aubert and Edmond, she’d wondered. Thought of Pierre and Louis, and…
Aubert glanced up, caught her staring at him and snarled. Edmond’s body was stiff with tension.
Read the room, Isobella.
Isobella turned away, leaned her weary head against Edmond’s back and closed her eyes. She was alive, and cancer free. That was more than enough to be grateful for.
* * * *
Isobella startled and jerked her head up, blinking.
Night had fallen. The cool air wrapped around her.
Dappled moonlight filtered through the canopy of trees, steeping the forest in an eeriness that’d been absent during the day.
She yawned and scrubbed her face. She must have fallen asleep, lulled by the steady motion of the horse.
She yawned again. It was a miracle she hadn’t fallen— Oh.
She was no longer sitting behind Edmond, but snug in his lap, a muscular arm secure around her waist.
And they’d stopped. Aubert and Remi were beside them, their horses reined in. Had they arrived? Isobella scanned their surroundings. They were still deep in the forest, with no sign of the d’Louncrais keep, a village, or anything. She frowned. Why had they stopped?
Edmond turned to his brother. “Do you feel that?”
Aubert frowned. “I feel nothing.”
“Precisely.”
A horse snorted, and flicked its tail. A bird shrieked, the beat of its wings fading as it flapped away.
Something was wrong. Edmond was as stiff and unyielding as the trunk of an old oak tree, and Aubert scanned the forest, his eyebrows bunched low over his eyes and his hand on the pommel of his sword.
Edmond shifted the reins to his other hand and reached for his blade. “Wolfsbane.”
A growl rumbled up from Aubert’s chest.
Wolfsbane?
A plant with a pretty purple flower, it was deadly to werewolves.
It made them lose control over their ability to shift, forcing the change back and forth between wolf and human until all energy was exhausted and they died.
Perhaps she was too inexperienced as a werewolf, because Isobella couldn’t sense any— No, wait.
She sniffed. The loamy smell, the pine, the resin from the trees, all the scents she’d come to associate with this forest were muted, and the colors, already washed out by the moonlight, had further faded.
Like she was experiencing it through a barrier.
“How long since you first noticed it?” Edmond asked his brother, his words little more than a whisper.
Long enough, if Aubert’s scowl was anything to go by. Could it be a natural occurrence? Isobella eyed the heavy canopy of trees. Wolfsbane needed sun. Isobella tensed, scanning the forest, searching the dark for…what? Faucher? More chevaliers?
A fog rolled in, thick and fast moving and the hair on the back of her neck rose. That wasn’t natural.
Magic.
Movement swirled within the fog, at first indistinct, nothing more than a dark blur.
As the fog rolled closer, the dark blur solidified.
A rider. A hooded figure on a big black warhorse, his long coat billowing about him as he rode out of the gloom.
He was not alone. Chevaliers with blue and white shields materialized behind him.
Isobella spun from side to side. The fog was everywhere, and so were the chevaliers. They were surrounded by them.
Their horses stirred beneath them. So many chevaliers. Too many. They’d fought and won against the chevaliers that had attacked them earlier, but there’d been twenty of them at most. There had to be forty, maybe fifty chevaliers, all armed to the teeth and closing in on them.
Hell.
The cloaked figure reined his horse to a halt. “Hello, Isobella.” He tossed his hood back. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Douglas?” Where…? How…?
Wherever he had landed, it had not been without its dramas.
Douglas was missing a tooth. Isobella had a sudden urge to shove him from his horse, knock out another tooth and wipe that smarmy look from his face.
Instead, she reached for Edmond’s sword.
He thought he could stop her? Not this time.
Douglas would not win this round. One cut, a nick of her finger, was all she needed, and she could whisk them wherever she had a mind to go.
The time-travel spell wasn’t reliable, and it would be hell if the horses got caught up in it too, but Isobella was determined that this time it would take them to Gaharet d’Louncrais. Without Douglas interfering. Physically or with magic.
“Watch him. He’s a warlock.” A competent one, but he was no Cordelia. All she needed was a bit of time.
Douglas? A warlock? What in the name of all that was holy was Faucher doing working with a warlock? Trying to hunt down a witch? And there was no doubt in Aubert’s mind Faucher would know exactly what this Douglas was.
Isobella’s shock pulsed in the air, fueled by something deeper. Betrayal. This warlock, who reeked of arrogance and deceit so strong the wolfsbane could not dampen it, had betrayed Isobella? Their Isobella. Aubert unsheathed his sword. He would cut him down, warlock or no.
Edmond stilled his hand. Isobella, too. His brother was right. He lowered his sword. Taking on fifty chevaliers and a warlock was too big a challenge, even for them.
“I have a spell I can use.” Isobella kept her voice low. “But I need you to hold on to me tight. All of you. And I’ll need my blood to make it work.”
The warlock spurred his horse forward. “Don’t even think about using that spell, Isobella. If I hear so much as a whisper of a chant—”
Isobella wrapped her hand around the hilt of Edmond’s sword. “You can’t stop me, Douglas.”
This time it was Aubert who stilled her arm.
The last thing they needed was for them all to end up beneath the chapel at Faucher’s mercy.
There was another way. He thumped a fist on his chest, over the amulet that rested beneath his tunic.
Edmond’s brief nod was all the acknowledgment he needed.
They would have to be quick and subtle. He urged Remi to bring his horse closer.
“No. Maybe not.” Douglas laughed, the confident laugh of a man who believed he had the upper hand. “But she can.”
Shadows swirled, and like a dark fog lifting from his mind, his vision cleared, and there she was, as if she had been there all along. A woman on a horse, dressed in the nobility’s finery. Not Marguerite, Comtesse de Anjou, daughter of House Allard. This was someone, something else.
The stench of decay, not of body but of the soul, clung to the woman, and a chill sank deep in his chest. Power thrummed in the air, dark and malignant.
It had the hair on the back of his arms rising, and his wolf…
His wolf was retreating, sinking into the depths of his consciousness.
Not the submission it gave to his alpha, but the retreat of a wild beast who knew when it was outmatched.
That it was prey. Never had another being had this effect on his wolf. If evil had a form, this was it.
Who was this woman? What was this woman? A witch?
Isobella gasped. Their mate’s fear galvanized his wolf. Edmond’s too. But there was a cautiousness to his dark side. A warning to not challenge this woman. Rather to retreat and take their mate to safety.
Aubert sheathed his sword in a show of surrender and grabbed Remi’s hand in a bruising grip.
He shared a look with his twin, and Edmond put his sword away, wrapping his arms around Isobella and reaching beneath his mail.
They had never done this. They had never had a need to.
But if ever there was a time the amulets were designed for, this was it.
He reached for his own, nicking his thumb on the sharp edge, whispering the words he had memorized as a child.
“Stop them!”
Chevaliers stormed forward at the witch’s command, but they were too late.
The forest was gone, the chevaliers, the warlock and the woman who was evil incarnate replaced by familiar walls, elaborate wall hangings and the stunned expressions of his pack and their alpha.
They were safe within the walls of the d’Louncrais keep. Horses and all.