“The Roman dogs are at our door.” She coughed. “My daughters dead at their hands. Our lands stolen. Why would I live when capture is inevitable and my very life will be used as leverage? My head will be on a pike in Rome before summer’s end. More likely, they’ll use me against our people.” She raked him with a scathing glance and coughed again. Blood marred her colorless lips. “What would you do, O great warrior?”
“The same.” His throat burned. Capture was inevitable. And unbearable. Now, with the final battle lost and thousands of their families and allies dying in the fields around them, the fate that awaited her at the hands of the Romans would be worse than death, not only for her, but very likely for her people as well.
He’d tried to save her from this, but she hadn’t let him. He would have committed any deed, no matter how terrible, to save the woman who’d changed his life when he’d met her a year ago. But Boudica was a warrior first, his woman second. And she would die believing he had betrayed her.
She coughed, her pallor more pronounced. “And yet you would deny me my honorable death?”
“I love you. I’d do anything to save you.”
“And I thought I loved you,” she whispered. And as her eyes closed, the enormous life force that had propelled Boudica, Celtic Queen of the Iceni, evaporated.
The crushing weight of grief squeezed the breath out of his lungs. Collapsing over her, the black night swallowed his roar of pain. He would have vengeance.
Chapter 1
Cadan Trinovante jerked awake, the sheets tangled in his fists. He ignored the vibrating phone that had awakened him from the nightmare and stared at the wide wooden rafters supporting the ceiling above him, struggling to catch his breath. Of all the memories that had faded in his two thousand years of life, the memory of Boudica’s death was the one that never had.
Guilt tugged at him and he reached for the phone.
“Cadan,” he said as he glanced at the clock on the bedside table. The gleam of Edinburgh’s streetlights shone on hands pointing toward one a.m. The yells of revelers stumbling from pub to pub filtered in through the open window.
“Cadan, it’s Warren.”
Cadan merely grunted in response and walked to the window. He listened with half an ear as he stared out at the gothic spires of Edinburgh’s churches and the soot-blackened stone of the surrounding buildings. They rose tall and narrow, pressed cheek by jowl on either side of the sloping cobblestones of the city’s oldest street. Cadan shut out the cool night air and the sound of fading revelry.
“You’ve a new assignment,” Warren said. “Can you be here in an hour?”
Finally. He needed something to keep his mind off the past. The damn dreams had been hounding him more often lately and he was ready to forget, to slip back into work.
“Aye, I’ll see you by two,” he said.
Damn it. He could still hear the revelers below. Living for so long was wearying, but listening to others take such joy in life was just salt in the wound.
In less than an hour, he strode through the great iron-sheathed wooden doors of a building on the campus of the Immortal University. The eyes of the eerie stone gargoyles who guarded the entrance followed him as he entered the cool halls of the Praesidium, named over a thousand years ago when Latin was still the language of education.
Fucking Latin. Fucking Romans.
He dragged a hand through his hair. The short drive to the outskirts of Edinburgh where the university was located hadn’t fully banished his dreams.
His footsteps were soundless on the marble floor of the wide, familiar hallway. It was a habit he’d never broken, though there was no need for stealth here. Terrible, unforgivable things happened when you let your guard down. But this was the safest place for a Mythean in Edinburgh since it was hidden from the prying eyes of mortals, who shouldn’t know of the existence of the supernatural beings who walked among them.
He pushed open the old oak door at the end of the hall and entered his friend’s office, a book-filled room lit by a small fire that smelled of autumn. Warren looked up from his cluttered desk and leaned back in his chair.
“Cadan, thanks for coming in so early.”
“No’ a problem,” Cadan said. He sank into an old leather chair across from Warren’s desk. “Who’s it this time?”
As one of the few Mythean Guardians in the world, it had been Cadan’s responsibility for nearly two millennia to protect those mortal or supernatural beings deemed important to the fate of humanity.
Warren glanced down at a rumpled piece of paper. “Looks like a Celtic warrior.”
Interesting—a man who’d been alive for as long as he. “Why’s the bloke need protecting if he’s made it this long? Destiny just revealed to him?”
And why haven’t I met him before? Though he didn’t get out much, Cadan knew, or knew of, nearly all the Mytheans in Great Britain. The ones who hadn’t gone rogue, at least.
“Well, that’s where it gets a little strange. The warrior hasn’t been alive. The soul has just been reborn.”
“A reincarnate? They’re damn rare. Doona think I’ve ever actually met one.”