“I don’t care what you do.” She jerked me forward until my face was a few inches from hers, her eyes, a darker blue than Nikola’s, filled with a fervent light. “I don’t care how you save him, but save him you must. Swear to me you will do it.”
“Even if I knew how—”
“Swear!”
I swallowed back all my protests, all my doubts, all my concern for what sort of effect I might have on the future. All those protestations would be useless—the second I gave in to the desire that had been building ever since I met Nikola, I signed away any ability to act in a dispassionate manner.
“I’ll save him,” I promised. “I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”
Nikola? Can you hear me at all? If you can, don’t go with your brothers. They’re going to try to kill you.
She collapsed back on the pillows again, her skin deathly pale. Instantly, Anna was there, shoving me out of the way to
tsk
over Imogen, and offer her a sip of some pale-colored beverage.
“Go,” Imogen said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And may God go with you.”
Nikola?
Silence remained the only answer, so I gave up trying to contact him, and instead tried to concoct some scheme whereby I could save Nikola, and not leave the future at risk. I left Imogen’s room, wondering just how I was going to pull off such a thing. Ahead of me, Elizabet was approaching with a branch of candelabra in her hand.
“Just the person I need,” I told her, snatching the candles and setting them on the nearest table. “Where’s the stable?”
“Outside,” she answered, giving me a quizzical look.
I gave her a shove toward the stairs. “Show me!”
She looked over her shoulder at me. “But I don’t—”
“Now, sister! We don’t have time to stand around arguing, not while Nikola is in danger.”
Her eyes widened as she hurried toward the stairs. “The baron is in danger? How so?”
“It’s a long story. Come on, show me where the stable is, so I can go find him and help him beat the crap out of his brothers.”
I’ll give her this—she didn’t stand around arguing; she simply bolted like a deer, racing down the stairs to the ground floor, a few tendrils of red hair coming loose from her elaborate, curly hairdo that all the women seemed to wear…those who weren’t wearing more elaborate wigs, that is. Imogen’s maid had tried—and failed—to duplicate something similar on my own head. I had finally convinced her to simply tuck my shoulder-length hair up in a modest French twist, but even that looked out of place among all the big, poufy hair worn by the servants.
“Do you know where this Zauberwald place is?” I asked, panting as we ran down a side corridor.
“No, but I have only been here for three years. Old Ted might know—he’s been with the baron for many years.”
“Old Ted—that’s the guy who takes care of the horses?”
“Aye.” She flung open a door, and dashed inside. I followed, avoiding the inky shapes of furniture as best I could. I ran into something hard, a chair I think, and swore under my breath as I half ran, half hopped, rubbing my shin. Elizabet threw open a pair of French doors and ran outside, turning to the right and heading out into the neat, orderly hedges I had seen from an upper window.
“Wait, I’ve got a stitch in my side and a possibly broken shinbone. Ow. Ow, ow, ow.” I hobbled after her, telling myself the pain was of minor importance when it came to Nikola.
I don’t know how she could see in the dark as well as she could—even with the moonlight, it was still awfully black out—but in next to no time we were at the stables, me completely out of breath, and Elizabet barely winded.
“I…have…got to…get to the gym…again…” I gasped, doubled over as Elizabet called for Ted.
“Aye, then, I’m here, lass, what is it you be needin’?” An old man appeared at the stable door, his back twisted, but a cheerful look on his face. His gaze moved from Elizabet over to me, his eyes widening in surprise. “Oy! It’s the trollop! What you be doin’ with a woman the likes of her?”
“I am really getting tired of being referred to as a slut,” I said, trying to stand up straight and give the man a look that should tell him a thing or two, but I was still out of breath, and my side and shin hurt something fierce. “I need a horse. One with a regular saddle.”
“His lordship didn’t say nothing about—”
“Nikola is in danger, grave danger, and the longer you stand there and argue with me, the more likely it is he’ll be dead by the time I find him, so please, for the love of all that is holy, get me a horse!”
“The master is in danger?” the old man asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Yes!” I threw my hands up in a gesture of disgust. “Horse! Now!”
“The master went out riding not half an hour ago,” Ted said cannily. “How be he in danger?”
“This is like a freaking nightmare! Listen to me, you obstinate old codger!” I grabbed his lapels and shook him, infirmity or no infirmity. “Nikola is going to be killed if you don’t get me a horse, and show me where the Zauberforest is.”
“Zauberwald,” Elizabet corrected.
He eyed me for a few seconds, and I was just about to shove him aside and go find a horse for myself when he nodded his head, pushing me off him before hobbling back into the stable. “I’ll have to tell you where to find the Zauberwald, since I can’t ride anymore, and my boy is off seeing his girl.”
My shoulders slumped a little in relief at his words, although that relief soon turned to impatience as he saddled up the familiar Thor. I was relieved to see that he put a regular saddle on the horse, and tried to ignore the fact that the last time I tried to ride away from the castle, I ended up on the ground far more times than I liked.
“Halfway down the mountain, small trail leading off the left when the road doubles back for the third time, take the fork to the left after that, clearing is past a bunch of trees,” I repeated some minutes later as I got settled in the saddle, my dress hiked up around my knees. “Gotcha. Now let’s just hope I’m not too late.”
That was the refrain that repeated through my head like a chant:
I hope I’m not too late, I hope I’m not too late….
I don’t know whether Thor the horse was used to my method of riding, or the proper saddle kept me upright and in place on his back, but whatever the reason, I was pathetically grateful that I didn’t fall as I urged Thor into a canter. We headed down the road in a flurry of dust, the wind whistling past us while I chanted under my breath. Luckily, there was enough light to see by, and Thor seemed tolerably familiar with the road, so it wasn’t long before I saw the third bend ahead, and the faintest marks in the shadows of trees where Ted had indicated a game trail led to the heart of the Zauberwald.
I turned off the road and onto the path, ducking low over Thor’s neck as we entered the stand of trees, my heart racing, and my breath seeming to catch in my throat.
Instantly, the blackness closed around us, and I was left trying to guide the horse by the glimpses I had of the waning moon. The trees here weren’t tightly grown together, but their fir branches obscured the sky enough to leave it slow going. The scent of pine filled the night air, Thor’s hoofbeats now deadened by the dense carpet of dropped needles. Only a dull thud was audible, and that was mostly drowned out by the sound of the wind in the trees, occasional calls of animals and birds, and once or twice, I thought I heard snatches of conversation.
I sent up a little prayer that I wasn’t too late, and directed Thor to what I imagined was the center of the wood.
Luckily for me, he had more sense than I did, for after about five minutes of my praying, muttering to myself, and desperately trying to listen for sounds of two men killing their vampire brother, Thor suddenly tossed his head, gave a soft, snorting whinny, and turned sharply to the left.
“What the hell, horse?” I whispered, and tried to steer him back on the path that I thought I could still make out.
Thor was adamant, though, and after two more minutes of me trying to get him to go in the right direction, he stopped and dropped his head as if he was going to graze.
“Fine, I’ll do this without you,” I snarled under my breath, and slid my way out of the saddle.
I took one step and stumbled over something large and warm. I knew it was warm because I fell on it, recoiling instinctively until a familiar scent hit my nose.
“Nikola?” I whispered, patting the shape until I recognized it for one of his legs. Fear froze me for a second, until I realized that if he was still warm, he couldn’t be dead.
I quelled the horrible part of my mind that pointed out he could be freshly dead, and I could be, at that moment, lying across a dead man.
Instead, I patted my way up his body until I reached his chest, which I was intensely relieved to feel rising and falling under my questing hands. “Thank god I’m not too late. Are you poisoned, too?”
“I don’t like it, not one bit, I don’t,” a male voice said fairly close by, accompanied by the sound of a large body brushing tree branches aside. “The master, he’s been good to me da and me, and I don’t see no reason to play a trick like this on him.”
“But that is why we approached you to help us, Ted. It is of the baron that we are thinking,” a gruff German voice answered. “He is our brother! Do you think we would want harm to come to him? Imogen told us that this woman who has taken up residence has bewitched his mind. You must help us save him from her.”
Imogen said that? I was stung by her betrayal. I thought we’d bonded! But what a fool I had been to believe her tale. At what point had I talked myself into believing she was on my side? Just because she was concerned about her father? I shook my head at my own stupidity. She’d told me more than once that she’d do anything to save him…obviously, that anything included using me.
“She’d been
poisoned
,” I muttered to myself. Oh, I just bet she had. There was no coincidence in the fact that she’d been conveniently poisoned and thus been unable to go after Nikola. She was obviously working with her uncles to…to what? That stumped me. I didn’t have time to work it out, though. What I had to do was to get Nikola away from there, and fast.
“That has to be one of your odious brothers,” I murmured to Nikola even as I felt for his head. There was a huge lump behind one of his ears, leaving my fingers wet and sticky with blood. “Great. No wonder you’re unconscious.”
“You must fetch the strumpet and bring her to us,” a second German voice said. “So that we might end the enchantment, and free our dear brother from her unholy plans.”
“I am really getting tired of everyone in the eighteenth century believing I’m some sort of satanic slut,” I grumbled softly to Nikola’s unconscious body, wiping my hands on his jacket before gently pulling him toward me. “Nikola, wake up, we have to go.”
“I suppose that would be all right,” the man named Ted (assumedly the stable dude’s son who was supposed to be out seeing his girlfriend) said slowly. “But I think I should ask me da about it first.”
“We have no time, my friend. You see how the moon is high in the sky? We must act now to take the enchantment off the baron. Quickly, you will return to the castle and fetch the whore, and return here as soon as you may. We will perform the sacrifice then, and save our brother.”
Sacrifice?
I clasped Nikola’s head in my hands and shook it gently. “Nikola! Wake up! They’re going to sacrifice something, and I have a horrible feeling it’s going to be me. Oh, for heaven’s sake, now what do I do?”
I didn’t have time to come up with a suitably MacGyver-esque plan; it was obvious that as soon as Nikola’s evil brothers got rid of the groom’s son, they would come back to check on Nikola, which meant I had to get him out of there pronto.
“OK, let’s get you onto the horse, and maybe I can hide you in the forest until you come to.” Thor, who was busily snuffling Nikola’s feet, looked on with interest as I half dragged, half carried Nikola the few steps to his side. Unfortunately, there’s a big difference between dragging a full-grown, solidly built man a few feet and lifting him up onto the back of a horse, and it quickly became apparent that I’d have to find another way to move him.
Sounds of voices speaking in German, growing louder along with the snapping of branches, spurred me into instant action.
“Sorry about this, but it’s the only option,” I whispered to Nikola as I wrestled his coat off his torso, and wrapped it around his head, tying the sleeves around it to provide a buffering cocoon. I ripped off his neckcloth, a thick swath of linen about eight inches wide and a yard long, and tied it around one of his ankles, tying the other end to the stirrup. With another murmured apology, I grabbed Thor’s bridle and turned him so Nikola lay behind him. Light flashed in the trees, the golden light of a lantern as it shone through the branches.
I flinched as I hauled the resisting horse forward, aware that the thumping sounds of the first couple of hesitant steps forward were made by Nikola’s body being dragged across lumps of sod, wood, and rocks, but after the horse shied in protest of the awkward burden he hauled, he walked forward docilely enough.
We’d just made it past a couple of fir trees that seemed to have twined around each other as they grew when there was an angry shout behind us.
“Crap!” I swore, and, grabbing the bridle firmly, bolted forward, praying that I had wrapped Nikola’s head well enough to keep it from being damaged any further.
The yelling was now accompanied by the sound of men running after us. I dodged around another big fir, trying frantically to think of a way to lose them. I couldn’t drag Nikola much farther without risking harming him, and, without help, couldn’t get him onto the horse. As I rounded the tree, moonlight spilled onto the ground in front of me. My heart leaped at the sight of the faintly visible swirling mass of light that seemed to hang in the air in the center of the clearing. “My swirly thing!”
“You! Trollop! Stop!”
I glanced over my shoulder to see the thinner of Nikola’s brothers dashing around trees, a sword in his hand. He was about thirty feet behind us, and I could see, even in the flickering shadow of the trees, the man’s lips pulled back to reveal a horrible grimace of sheer evil.