Edge of Danger (20 page)

 
“Oh, for—A
wizard.
”

 
“Oh. Okay. I’ll bite. A wizard at what exactly?” Eden asked, keeping her tone even. She had absolutely no experience with mental illness and wasn’t sure what to do.

 
“Jesus.” He rubbed his jaw, clearly exasperated. “I haven’t had to prove myself in—I don’t remember when.” He extended his hand. A melon-sized ball of fire materialized out of thin air to dance just above his palm.

 
She hoped he wasn’t burning himself. “That’s…very nice.” She glanced toward the closed door, hoping someone,
anyone,
would get in here. Soon. “Impressive. Really.”

 
She presumed he had some sort of propane device strapped to his palm, an ignition source, and voilà, magic. It
was
impressive, although she wasn’t sure someone like him should be allowed to play with incendiary devices inside the house-castle.

 
“I’ll just go up to my room, we can talk tomorrow, okay?” A left outside the library door and a fast race across the entry hall and she’d be at the front doors. Outside in minutes. And while clearly, Gabriel would know the grounds better than she could, she was smaller and a hell of a lot more motivated.

 
All she needed was opportunity.

 
The fire on his outstretched palm blinked off.

 
“Well, shit. That was stupid. That didn’t convince you of a damn thing, did it?” He paused. “Remember I told you about Nairne’s curse?”

 
Eden nodded.

 
“She was a witch. When she cursed Magnus Edridge for all time, she made his three sons wizards.”

 
Where the hell was MacBain when she needed him? “
Magical
—er…wizards?” she asked carefully.

 
“Yeah. Magical.”

 
Good Lord. He actually sounded as if he believed his own delusion. “What exactly did the curse entail?”

 
He motioned to the two leather sofas. “Want to sit down?”

 
“I’m fine where I am, thanks.” Clear across the room.

 
“ ‘Duty o’er love was the choice you did make,’ ”
Gabriel quoted flatly, as if by rote as he sat on the sofa facing her.
“ ‘My love you did spurn, my heart you did break.’
Magnus’s rejection cut her deep,” he inserted, crossing his ankle over the opposite knee.
“
She was one pissed off witch
.”

 
“ ‘Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain. Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain. I gift you my powers in memory of me—’
She passed her powers on to us, making every Edge a wizard from that time forward.
‘The joy of love no son shall ever see. When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son, No protection can be given, again I have won. His pain will be deep, her death will be swift, Inside his heart a terrible rift. Only freely given will this curse be done. To break the spell, three must work as one.’ ”

 
The little hairs on the back of Eden’s neck were standing on end, and she rubbed at the sudden chill on her bare arms. “And you believe this…curse?”

 
“It just is.”

 
“Is what?”

 
“Unequivocally, irrevocably—true.”

 
“So you all have to choose duty over love?”

 
“Yeah.”

 
“And if you don’t? What happens if one of you falls in love?”

 
“The woman will die.”

 
“Come on. You can’t
possibly
believe that. It’s a fairy tale. A parable.”

 
He rose, then strode over to the bookshelf and pulled out an enormous, leather-bound book. A Bible. “Come and take a look at this.” He placed the Bible on a coffee table and sat down on the sofa again before opening it.

 
Eden came and knelt on the floor opposite where he was sitting. Her attraction hadn’t faded just because she’d discovered the man was delusional. Unfortunately. But she wasn’t going to sit next to him. “What am I looking at?”

 
The Bible was at least nine inches thick, and musty with age. Gabriel turned it around to face her, and opened it to the first gilt-edged page. Eden peered down at the spidery handwriting, faded by age. She glanced up at him.

 
“Every Edridge and Edge—Marriages and births for the past six hundred years. Check out the notations down the left side.”

 
For half an hour Eden read the entries in the family Bible. For the first five minutes she was aware of nothing but Gabriel’s gaze resting on her bowed head. But he faded from her consciousness as she absorbed the family’s history.

 
Three hundred years of Edridges had apparently led happy, fulfilled lives with the men or women they’d loved. They’d prospered and had large families.

 
In 1503, there was a notation that Magnus Edge had married Finola. She’d borne him three sons. The next Edridge had changed his name to Edge—in the hope of dodging the curse? He’d married later in life. Thirty-two. His wife had died in childbirth. Not unheard of in that day and age.

 
She went on to the next entry, and the next, and the next. If the couple had married for love, a small double heart, a luckenbooth, had been drawn alongside their names. At first those hearts were clustered close together. But over the years the “love” hearts became farther and farther apart.

 
“Well?”

 
Eden looked up. “From Finola and Magnus on, every woman bore three sons.”

 
“And?”

 
“If what the double hearts indicate was true—then every time one of those sons married for love, the woman died. Most of the deaths unexplained.”

 
“The Curse.”

 
“People died from a hangnail in those days.” Eden pointed out mildly.

 
“Not
these
people. Not my mother. She just went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up.”

 
“But they were married for—How long?”

 
“Eighteen years.”

 
“So her death wasn’t ‘swift,’ was it?” Eden said gently.

 
“Swift is relative. And perhaps it took longer because she and my father lived apart their entire marriage.”

 
“They must’ve got together at least three times,” she said dryly.

 
“They spent a week every year together in Scotland. But they were afraid every second of that time together. My father wasn’t going to risk her life.”

 
“But she died anyway.”

 
“She’d been with him for three months that time. The longest they’d ever spent together.” His voice was grim. “She died the morning after her return.”

 
She shivered. Crazy as it sounded, she believed him. And if she believed that the Edridge family had been cursed, then was it such a leap to believe that the witch had imbued the sons of the man who had jilted her with her powers?

 
But a
wizard
? “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in magic.”

 
“My parents were living thousands of miles apart,” Gabriel told her flatly. “I wanted them to be together. God, they loved one another. My mother had us kids on this property. Living in the ranch her grandfather had built, while my father, terrified his love would kill her, lived in Scotland.

 
“I thought—” He rubbed a large hand on the back of his neck. “Hell, I thought if I brought this castle here, my father would be drawn to it, and come and stay. Stay with her. Stay with us.”

 
Gabriel met her eyes. “Eden, I
teleported
this castle, all one hundred and ninety-five thousand square feet of stone. Teleported it here one afternoon after school.”

 
Little waves of excitement rippled through her body. Just because she couldn’t understand something didn’t mean it wasn’t true. But this…

 
“I went to your apartment the other day to make you climax so I could find out how to destroy the bot. I was in your lab while you and Marshall Davis talked. I was there when Verdine came in. I was there the whole time. Invisible.”

 
“You’ve mastered
invisibility
?” Oh, my God. She had to get him to her lab. She wanted to run tests, feasibility studies—If what he was telling her was true, this was amazing, incredible.

 
“Among other things.”

 
“Like what?” She pulled herself up short. For heaven’s sake, she was buying into his delusions.

 
“It doesn’t matter. Listen to me. It’s imperative we have a Rex robot to counter what is, without a doubt, going to be done with the one stolen from your lab. We can do this easy, or we can do this hard. No more bullshit. The next time I’m required to prove who and what I am, it won’t be with a party trick.

 
“The reality is a terrorist group stole your technology, and they won’t be manufacturing children’s toys based on your prototype. Do you get that? From what you told me, this robot of yours, especially in the wrong hands, could feasibly be an almost indestructible killing machine. It could run suicide missions and not die. Am I right?”

 
Yes. God, yes. He was absolutely right. For a crazy man.

 
“Building another Rex would cost close to three hundred million dollars,” Eden informed him, grateful to be on solid ground once more. People confused the hell out of her. Particularly Gabriel Edge, she thought wryly, closing the heavy leather cover of the Bible on the table in front of her. But she knew everything there was to know about robots.

 
“Terrorist or not, it’s cheaper to use a human being to do what you’re suggesting.” She was grasping at any straw she could. Eden knew she was trying to convince herself, not Edge, who was clearly already anticipating the worst. “Terrorists consider human life expendable, don’t they? For that price they could have
thousands
of killers. Why build a robot?”

 
“Because they can. Money isn’t an issue with most of these groups. They’ll mass-produce the Rex and they’ll be unstoppable. Is that what you want your technology used for?”

 
“No.” She pressed her palm to her stomach where birds of prey swarmed. “Of course not.”

 
Was he telling the truth?

 
Was
he a counterterrorist operative who worked for their own government? Or was he a terrorist trying to get a leg up on technology that some other terrorist group had stolen? Or maybe just an eccentric loony escaped from the bin?

 
She had no idea.

 
There were people who dealt with this sort of thing, Eden thought, feeling sick with fear and tension. She had to get to someone qualified to sort this mess out.

 
She was a scientist, and people skills weren’t her forte. He sat between her and freedom. There wasn’t enough room between the furniture for her to pass him. All he’d need to do was stretch out his arm. Eden didn’t think she could bear it right now if he touched her.