If he meant to be mocking her, he hid it very well. “All right,” she said with a nod. “I will wait for you here.”
“Good.” He grinned. “See if you can make up with Brautus; that should keep you busy.”
“Oh, Brautus will come around,” she promised. “It’s really you he dislikes, not me. He thinks I’ve given you far too much consideration here, that I’ve treated you far better than you deserve.”
“And so you have.” He sounded almost cheerful, the Irish rogue again.
“Yes, but Brautus doesn’t know it,” she retorted, blushing as she smiled. “Once he sees you’re not some scoundrel after my castle, he should take to you well enough. Everyone else seems to like you.”
He took her into his arms. “It isn’t your castle I want,” he said softly, almost a growl, as he bent to kiss her. For half a moment, she thought about the others watching and what they might think. She was the lady of Charmot, after all; she should think about her dignity. But as soon as she felt his lips touch hers, every such thought was forgotten.
“So what is it?” she said, speaking just as softly as he broke the kiss. “What is it you want?”
His answer was to press her closer and kiss her more deeply, the only answer he could make. “Keep the gate barred and the drawbridge up,” he ordered, letting her go. “We should not be long.”
“Not to worry, sweeting,” she promised with an impish smile. “Brautus may be furious with me, but he and I have been holding this fortress together for quite some time now. I think we can manage one more night.”
Something about her words made him shiver, demon that he was. “Just be safe.” Kissing her softly one last time, he turned to the men who were waiting, pretending not to notice what he and their lady were doing and making a poor job of it. “Come, Kevin,” he said. “Let’s see this done and come home.”
Isabel watched him mount Malachi as if he had been born to ride him, watched the men of her father’s castle follow him without a moment’s question. You can help him, Orlando had promised. You can save him from this curse. The little wizard, riding his new pony, stopped at the gate and turned to wave to her, and she smiled and waved back. She would help Simon. She even knew how.
This time the gates of the chapel swung open as soon as Simon knocked. “My lord,” Father Colin said, coming out to greet him. “Kevin sent word what had happened.” He stared for a moment at Simon’s face, his eyes clouding with confusion, but after a moment they cleared with no further sign he recognized him at all. “Please, all of you, come inside.”
Three fresh graves had already been dug in the churchyard’s consecrated ground. “We cannot know what manner of Christians these stran
gers might have been,” the priest explained to Simon as the bodies were laid to rest. “But all in the village know the miller’s son, Jack, was a godly man.” An older man and woman who must have been Jack’s parents stood beside his grave, the woman sobbing in her husband’s arms. “Their only son,” Father Colin finished with a sigh.
Simon felt sick just watching, the guilt he felt writhing inside him. These good people had done nothing to deserve their pain, yet he had brought it to them even so. Could even the Chalice be worth such a price? Even if it existed, even if he could find it, why should he think himself worthy of the salvation it was supposed to offer? He turned away as the priest began the funeral mass, picking up a fallen shovel, the sacred ground suddenly burning under his feet like the sands of the desert as he walked away with Orlando following close behind him, carrying a lantern he had brought from the wagon.
It seemed a century since he had stood here in this garden, but in fact it was only a matter of weeks. This was where he had made his first kill at Charmot; this was where the curse he had brought on this plain had begun. The corner where he had buried Michel and his men was just as Isabel had described it to him the night she had made him promise to protect her castle; the ground in one grave-sized plot had obviously been disturbed. Moving closer, he could see it had sunk in even deeper, until it looked only half-filled with earth.
“So there it is, wizard,” he said. “Do you still think Isabel imagined it?”
“No,” Orlando admitted. “But I still don’t know how it happened or what manner of creature is inside.”
Simon glanced back at the others, still engrossed in the funeral. “There’s only one way to find out.”
All the time he was digging, he expected Michel to rise up, but the ground under his feet didn’t stir. After a few minutes, his shovel struck what was unmistakably a corpse, making a nasty, squelching thud. “Stand back,” Simon ordered as a terrible stench rolled up from the grave. Orlando nodded, but he stayed where he was, holding the light.
Simon laid the shovel aside and bent down in the grave, bracing himself for a pitiable sight as he brushed the last of the dirt away with his hand. But what he saw still made him cry out in shock. Staring up at him in the dim light of the lantern was his long-lost patron, Francis, the duke of Lyan.
“Holy Christ,” the vampire rasped in his own native Gaelic, a language he had not spoken in years, the words burning his tongue as he stumbled backward, almost falling on the corpse. “Sweet Mary of God… this cannot be.” The duke had been buried in the cursed mountains where he died; Simon had dug the grave himself. And even if he had not, his body had been without life for ten years; it should have rotted and crumbled to dust long before now. Yet here was the face Simon had loved so well he had followed it across the world, lifeless and pale but intact. He brushed more of the earth away and found that the head had been cleaved from the shoulders, and a wound gaped in the chest over the heart. He stepped back and looked up at Orlando, who still stood at the edge of the grave. “How can this be?”
“Kivar,” Orlando said. “It must have been Kivar.”
“Why are you so shocked, my love?” a woman’s voice spoke from the shadows. “You put him there yourself.” Susannah emerged from the trees, even more beautiful in cursed death than she had been in life, her Maying gown translucent in the moonlight. “You told me,” she finished with a beatific smile.
“I told you?” Simon said, climbing from the grave.
“Two nights past, in the grove,” she answered. “Do you not remember?” She came closer, madness gleaming in her eyes. She had not just been taken by a vampire; her innocent mind had been broken. “Don’t you remember your promise, my lord?” She laid a hand on his chest, an obscene parody of her old flirtatious smile on her lips. “You told me that you loved me.”
“Susannah, I did not,” Simon said, taking her hand.
She frowned. “You promised I would be lady of Charmot.” She bent her cheek to his hand like a kitten begging a caress. “I didn’t want to kill Lady Isabel, but you said you must.”
“Susannah, listen to me,” he said, putting a hand on his sword. “I never saw you that night. I never made you any promise—”
“You made me what I am!” She smiled, holding her pale arms up to the moonlight as if to admire their beauty. “I am perfect now, you said.” She looked at him in hunger that could almost seem like love. “You said I will never die.”