Chapter 45
ALEX
Her name on Nick’s lips, a cry of ecstasy and despair combined, shuddered through her half-delirious mind and Alex opened her eyes to see fire.
Not the one in the fireplace. No, this was something else, far bigger, as tall as the trees, crackling and dancing, laughing at her.
A bonfire. A huge bonfire. Like the one people still lit at Hallowe’en, like the ones they lit millennia ago to celebrate the days when the world of the living and the dead were closest, when spirits could reach out again and touch…
Nick was spread out beneath her, his bare skin painted with a language she didn’t know, his arms bound above his head, his head thrown back and his eyes closed.
And they weren’t in the house, not any more.
They weren’t anywhere that still existed in this world, but somewhere else, somewhere long destroyed.
They were in a forgotten chamber, a tomb, a structure of ancient stone, and he was going to die.
He was a sacrifice and he was dying, even as she moved on top of him, even as he filled her with life and desire.
Alex’s hands pressed to his chest, to the painted whorls and spirals that decorated it, white and blue and black smeared beneath her touch. Tears leaked from the corners of his clenched eyelids and he knew… somehow he knew… what she was doing to him…
No, not her.
No, not her. This wasn’t her. She’d never hurt him. Never.
But she couldn’t seem to stop.
‘Make him ours,’ the voice hissed in the back of her mind and it wasn’t even Blaise anymore. Not now. This was a voice as old as the stones from which Wildewood Hall was built. And she would make him hers. Theirs. She had to.
Alex bent to kiss him. He tasted of blood, but that didn’t stop her.
She wanted him. Oh, how she wanted him. Everything about him. Even if she ripped him apart to have him. He would die here. She knew that.
And like it or not she was the weapon that would kill him.
The guardian of the wild woods would die and become… other. Become the god, its new vessel, its new toy. It would be free at last.
‘And oh, the fun we’ll have,’ it cackled in the back of Alex’s mind. ‘The things we’ll do. The three of us. Oh, the pleasure-pain and the agony of release, and all the glory of blood and seed you’ll both pour out for me. You and all you touch.’
Around her wrist, something tightened, insistent and alive, a touch of green and growing things. Alex stared as the grass bracelet Maeve had given her unfurled strands of new life, tendrils which wound tighter against her skin, flowers which opened as if to the sun.
Nick gasped her name once more.
Tell me you’re mine, she’d demanded. And Nick said her name. Her name! Not Crom. He’d called out to her.
‘No,’ she whispered. She didn’t even know where that word came from let alone what it might mean.
This wasn’t something she could stop. She was just one woman, already given over to its vile touch.
Her family had made this bargain long ago.
For power. For wealth. For this piece of land. She was a de Wilde.
‘No,’ Alex said again, this time more certain, more sure of herself. ‘I’m not…’
She was Alex O’Neill. She’d given up the de Wildes twenty years ago.
The entity laughed, a bitter mocking laugh which made her flinch.
As her motion stilled, Nick tore free of the bonds holding him.
His hands closed on her hips, digging into her skin, a bruising grip which would not be broken.
He cried out again, words she didn’t know, couldn’t hope to know.
It wasn’t English, or Irish, but something from long before any of those languages had names, let alone a place here.
He pulled her to him and fucked her as if his life depended on it.
She cried out as a wave of sensation swept through her, as her body clenched around his and she came, her mind shattering and reforming only to shatter again.
‘Give yourself to us,’ Crom howled in the wind and the rain and the roar of the fire.
This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right.
‘No! I’m not a de Wilde. I’m Alex O’Neill and you will not take me!’
Green tendrils of the bracelet binding the two of them together burst into flower, the growth moving faster now, rushing up around them. The grass rose, hungry and all-consuming, and the wild woods closed in on them, smothering and swallowing them up. The world around her tore itself apart.
And all of a sudden she was back in the room, with the storm still battering at the windows and the fire dying in the grate, and Nick underneath her so still and quiet. He gazed sightlessly at the stucco ceiling.
Oh God, what had they done? What had she done to him?
‘Nick?’ Her voice came out as little more than a whisper. ‘Nick? Are you—?’ She couldn’t say okay. He didn’t look okay. ‘Nick, please talk to me.’
He heaved in a breath, let it out so slowly. When he finally spoke, he sounded dazed. Lost. ‘Alex?’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s me. I…’
A slow smile spread over his lips, the lips she had kissed, and tormented. The lips she wanted on her again. A lazy smile, too knowing to belong there. She watched it develop with a dawning horror.
‘Alexandra,’ he said, in a low drawl that didn’t sound like Nick at all.
Alex tore herself away from him, grabbing her clothes where they were scattered around them both, pulling them on as fast as she possibly could.
Nick propped himself up on one elbow and watched her, in no hurry to mimic her dressing. Why would he?
Naked, bathed in firelight, hair still damp from the storm…
Alex almost fell over as she pulled on the jeans again.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, his voice teasing, mocking, and not like Nick’s voice at all.
‘Come back. We have so much to finish, you and I. Endless experiences to explore. Your guardian is mine. The witch may have created him to protect this place, but you broke him for me, Alexandra. You lured him in and shattered him to pieces. You made him bleed.’
She needed silver and salt. She needed daylight. She needed…
Oh God, what had she done?
Nick swung his legs around so they were beneath him and he crouched there, silhouetted in front of the fire, like a great cat about to pounce. ‘There’s nowhere to run to, Alexandra,’ he told her, still smiling. Like it was all a game.
And maybe it was to him.
‘Nick…’ she whispered, but she couldn’t keep the hopelessness from her voice or her eyes. Because that wasn’t Nick, was it? Not anymore.
And she knew full well what it was.
He shook his head slowly and the smile widened still further until he was showing his teeth. Almost like a snarl.
Not a guardian, not anymore.
A hunter. Feral and dangerous. A predator.
And she remembered, all those years ago, in the darkness.
The cold arched roof of stones closing over her and the stench of mulch. The darkness pressing in on her, suffocating her. Dad’s hands falling still, limp on the rich and hungry earth.
Down in the undercroft where her father had found her and tried to help her. Where Crom had taken him and made him its creature.
The gleam of gold beneath rotting foliage. Eyes that didn’t see, but saw everything, the mouth hanging open, hungry and waiting.
The idol, waiting for her, ready for her to free it. For all this to happen.
The taste of blood in her mouth, choking her, and the world blurring through tears and terror.
Just like now.
‘Are you going to run?’ he asked, amused at the whole idea. ‘If you run, my sweet Alexandra, I’ll have to chase you. Isn’t that what happened all those years ago? Your father told you to run. And look how that turned out.’
‘Run, Alex! You have to run!’
And she had run, out into the night, out into the trees. Because the trees were the only defence against this being, the final line of defence. The trees and the spirits wound through them. She’d called out, begging for help, praying for their guardian…
But the guardian was gone. Nick was… Nick was gone.
There had been no guardian back then. No Nick. Just her father. She had run and her father had followed and…
But he had been trying to protect her. He had always protected her. From the family curse. From the ghosts. From Blaise Chambers and the thing that haunted this house…
Hadn’t he?
‘You have to run! NOW!’
He had been lost too. He had been… been… chasing her… hunting her…
He had come after her. Not to protect her. Not anymore. Her father had already been gone long before he pursued her into the woods.
‘You were always mine,’ Blaise growled. ‘You always will be. I will find you in any lifetime, in any form. Eternity binds us together, Alexandra de Wilde.’
Something struck the windows behind her, and she heard the crash of glass breaking, and suddenly the night tore into the ancient building, the wind and the rain and the darkness in a maelstrom of chaos.
She spun around to see the debris strewn across the carpet and the furniture, and a tree branch like a huge grasping hand reaching into Wildewood Hall, as if it was trying to grab her. She backed up towards the doorway leading to the hall, barefoot and wearing only a t-shirt and jeans.
‘Where are you going?’ Nick’s voice teased in that terrible sing-song way.
The storm was upon them. And the wild woods didn’t have a guardian anymore. She had handed him over to their enemy, who had made him its own.
There was only one thing to do.
You have to run, Lex. You have to get out of there.
It sounded like her father. It sounded like Theo.
The voices on the edge of hearing, but there all the same.
But they were gone. Theo was gone. And her father had died twenty years ago, because of her.
He had been trying to protect her and it had taken him.
Because of her. It was all her fault. It had always been her fault.
She hadn’t been fast enough. She had never been fast enough. They had gone to the wild wood.
Tears burned in her eyes and she fixed her gaze on Nick until the image blurred and twisted.
It was Blaise Chambers crouching there, rising slowly, holding out his hand.
He didn’t believe she’d bolt now. Because he was right.
Where was there to go? Maeve had taken the idol out of its containment and Alex should have put it back.
But she hadn’t. In the darkness, in the earth under the house, the roots of the wild wood had tried to smother its power.
It was loose now, in the undercroft, filling the whole house with its power.
She had let it tempt her, seduce her, and then she had let it use her to seduce Nick. He was gone. And this was all her fault. Again.
The house was Crom’s and the forest was Nick’s and now Nick belonged to Crom through Chambers’ possession of him…
and she had nothing. Not to mention that the wild woods hated her family, every last one of them.
She had betrayed whatever thin trust it had been willing to build through Theo, through Nick, through her feelings for him.
She had given him over to its eternal enemy.
There was nothing and nobody at all to help her now.
She didn’t have any choice. There was only one thing she could still do.
Alex ran.
And the moment she bolted for the door, Nick leaped forward in pursuit, letting out a savage roar of triumph that the hunt was on at last.