The Serpent in the Stone

CHAPTER Fourteen

Coming out of her fog, Sara leaned against Ian’s solid frame. Her strength began to return in halting, miserly increments.

He curled an arm around her waist and turned to her sister. “Please tell me you’re not going to try anything stupid.”

What’s that about? Sara wondered.

Faith sighed. “I’m sorry about the argument. I don’t know what to do. We have no data, no sources—”

Ian’s arm tightened around Sara. “You have Hakon.”

“I’m almost as tapped as Sara. It’s going to take me at least a couple of days to recover before I can make any contact worth getting. This is just crazy. In three weeks Callander, or whoever else, could do anything to us and make it look like an accident. All the while, we’re helping him excavate the dig and get closer to opening the ley lines.”

“That’s if they even know where the amulet is in the first place,” said Sara.

“Either you’re coming to stay with me,” Ian said, “or I’ll stay down here.”

“I’m not leaving my sister,” she said.

“Then I’ll stay.”

Sara knew he meant to guard her, but even weakened, her body responded as though he’d offered her seduction. She couldn’t halt the images of their night together flitting through her mind.

Faith pushed aside the glasses and binoculars on her table. The large sheet of graph paper lying there rolled up of its own accord. “Bad idea. Flintrop’s gunning for you as it is, and he’s not the kind of guy who puts up with people he doesn’t like. I know how he is, I dated him.”

Ian snorted. “Why?”

Faith threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know. It didn’t work out. A few months later, he dumped me for no particular reason, and acted like we’d never—” She broke off and cleared her throat. “Is this need-to-know, or can we get back to the big problem?”

“Fine.” Ian looked back down at Sara. “I’ll walk you to your tent.”

She nodded, and they started together toward the door.

Faith snatched up the graph paper and crumpled it into one fist. In a flash of silver eyes and a burst of flame, the map withered to ashes in her hand.

Ian tensed, quick as reflex. Sara pushed him out the door ahead of her.

On the way to her tent, she asked, “What was all that about back there? Why were you two arguing?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Does she do that a lot?” He made a flicking motion with his hand, imitating Faith’s burst of flame.

“Often enough.” She cast a look around camp, but no one was outside at the moment. They entered her tent. “She’s right about Flintrop.”

He slid his arms around her. “I couldn’t care less about Flintrop. Do you want me to stay?”

Oh, yes. Her body vibrated with it. “You shouldn’t.”

His lips trailed along her cheek. Heat sizzled from his touch into her skin. He molded his body to hers and kissed her, swallowing her moan. The rigidness of his growing arousal pressed against her abdomen.

Her head spun, but it had nothing to do with fever. “Please,” she whispered, not knowing if she meant him to stop, or to keep going.

He kissed his way down the side of her neck. “I worried about you last night,” he said, his breath warming her ear.

She shivered with pleasure. “I’ll be all right,” she said, then gave a soft cry as his teeth closed over her earlobe. She fisted her hands in his jacket and jerked him closer.

He hissed and pressed his hips into her. The sweet pressure of it rebounded through her and left her breathless. She arched against him.

He kissed her again, again, again. “The inlet. Tonight,” he whispered, then pulled away with reluctance in his eyes.

She stood there for several moments after he left, touching her fingers to her tingling lips as if she could preserve the feel of him.

Weariness won out. She went to her cot and lay down, intending only to get another hour’s rest before joining the crew. But when she woke again, she realized by the dimming quality of the light that she’d slept the entire day.

The sounds of clanking dishes reached her, and the faint smell of dinner made her empty stomach rumble. She hefted herself into a sitting position and touched a hand to her forehead. Well, at least it didn’t feel like she’d bake alive anymore.

She heard the zipper of her tent door being drawn back, and turned to look. Flintrop ducked in with a thermos. “Good, you’re awake.”

“Just,” she said.

He stepped inside. “I brought you some soup. Thought it would help shore you up. Doing better?”

The rumble of her stomach intensified at the thought of food. “Probably look like hell, but yes, I feel better.”

He handed the thermos over and sat on the cot. “You couldn’t look like hell if you wanted to.”

She chose to ignore his comment, and unscrewed the cap of the thermos.

“Lamb called,” he added. “There’s some snag at Eurocon that he’s got to stay and sort out. We haven’t located Becky, even though the boat’s still here.”

Pouring a cup of soup, Sara said, “Really? She must have caught the ferry out. I’m sure she’s all right, but she should have called.”

What Becky really should have done—and was currently doing, if she possessed any sense—was to flee as far as possible from Hvitmar and everyone on it. If she was lucky, she’d already be on her way to the Gemini offices. Safer than they were, and no one would use her like that ever again. Sara felt a pang of remorse for the young woman. She’d had her sister. What about others who possessed paranormal gifts? Who did they turn to?

Had Callander found himself alone and scared as a gifted child, and then gone horribly wrong?

With half her mind on the morning’s events, and the other half wondering how to finish the dig in three weeks under the strain of constant danger, it took Sara a minute to realize Flintrop was staring. “Did you want something else?”

His cobalt gaze mellowed. “Are you sure you want me to answer that honestly?”

She leaned away. “We’ve been over that, Flintrop.”

“We have.” He chuckled. “We never quite addressed what we were going to do once we got past the pastry level.”

“That’s because we aren’t past it, and we are never going to be past it,” she said, raising the thermos cup to her lips. She closed her eyes. A sudden flash of Ian’s naked body and scorching storm-blue gaze insinuated itself into her thoughts.

She choked down the swallow of soup and slapped the empty cup down, then stood. “I’ve got to get out there. I’ve wasted a whole day. Excuse me.”

He rose to his feet beside her, and blocked her escape. Frustrated, her mind still full with Ian, she said, “We’re finished here. If you don’t mind—”

He raised a hand to her cheek. The gesture surprised her into stillness. “Don’t leave. You’ve been sliding away from me for years,” he said. He leaned forward until his breath misted her face. “Stay.”

Her heart pounded. She stared blindly, seeing a different pair of eyes. Focus! She wrestled her senses back to the present. Realization of what Flintrop was asking dawned on her. Before she could react, he kissed her.

Her senses blasted into static. The back of her neck prickled. Her skin hummed so loud she couldn’t think. Sara froze, immobilized, even as her body screamed to fly out the door. His palm stroked along her cheek and down the curve of her neck. “Be with me,” he whispered against her lips. His fingers threaded into the thick hair at the back of her head.

His fingertips brushed over the leather lace of the amulet. With her blood fizzing, she put a hand on his chest and pushed, breaking the kiss with an effort of will. “This isn’t going to happen, Flintrop. I-I’m sorry. Excuse me.” She grabbed a jacket and rushed out of the tent, confused and unsettled and needing to be anywhere but near him.

Dusk had fallen. The crew milled about the camp, packing up tools. Sara fought a moment of guilt at having missed a day’s work, but her feet moved as if they had a will of their own. Rather than turning toward the camp, she walked straight across it, heading for the inlet.

Faith met her halfway across the moor. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’ve just got to get out of here. I can’t think straight.”

“Sara—”

“I’m fine, I swear. I feel a lot better.” A lie, if there ever was one.

Faith looked over Sara’s shoulder. Sara followed her stare to find Flintrop emerging from her tent with a too-composed expression. He didn’t look toward them, walking instead toward the dig. “What did he do to you?” Faith demanded.

“I just need to get out of here, okay?”

Her sister looked unconvinced, but Sara didn’t stay to explain. She strode away from camp without looking back.

Coward. She’d never run from anything in her life.

When she reached the inlet, dusk had passed, and the stars scattered across the sky. The wind carried the sound of surf crashing on the rocks offshore. She hugged herself against the cool evening air, burrowing deeper into her jacket. The temperature seemed to have plummeted in the last five minutes. Her breath steamed in front of her.

She picked out Ian’s darker shape against the starry sky, sitting on a boulder near the water’s edge. She walked faster. Her walk became a jog, and then a run.

He turned and slid off the rock to meet her, catching her in his embrace. His kisses rained across her cheek and down her neck. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he breathed, holding her face in his hands. “You have no idea how much I wanted to stay with you today.”

She threw her arms around his neck and held on, welcoming the feel of his mouth on hers and the way it erased the disquieting hum that had been plaguing her since Flintrop’s kiss. “Can we just stay here like this for a minute?”

He answered by holding her harder against his body. “You’re shaking. What happened?”

“I’m okay. I’m fine now.” She pressed against him, as much to ward off the chill of night as the chill that had settled along her spine.

****

Ian threaded his hand into her hair, letting the silken strands glide through his fingers. He kissed her again, pulling her with him as he leaned back against the rock. He’d known something was wrong the moment she appeared, but as soon as he touched her, everything except the feel of her against him swept out of his head.

She still shivered. God, she felt like ice. He opened his jacket to pull it around them both, willing his warmth into her.

Her hands slipped up the back of his thermal shirt to trail along the hollow of his lower back. Ian forgot his worries. He hissed softly at the touch, then louder when her nails grazed his skin. Urgency radiated from her.

His body reacted like a lightning strike. He dropped to the sand and pulled her down with him, needing to bury himself in her. They grappled at each other’s clothing in a mad rush. Jackets, shirts, and pants fell away unheeded. They came together in a surge that drowned out everything else. Ian rocked his hips against hers with a groan of satisfaction.

She gave a broken moan, pulling him into her, propelling him upward. “Please—Ian, please.”

He sensed the storm raging in her and answered it with a primal growl, meeting her thrust for thrust. A charge built at the base of his spine with each stroke until he could hardly take it, then it burst along his nerves in a shower of sparks. She sank her teeth into the skin of his shoulder, muffling a hoarse cry that echoed his own.

She went limber in his embrace, and drew a long sigh that seemed to come from the center of her being. He drifted back down with her in a tangle of arms and legs and rasping breath.

He kissed her, gently now, then breathed in the scent of her. “Hi,” he whispered.

She dimpled. Her gaze slid away from his to rove along his chest. “I’m sorry. I just…I wanted you so much...I needed...”

“This is me, not complaining.”

Her dimple deepened. He couldn’t resist kissing it.

Sara curled her arms around his neck, and then cringed. “There’s a rock digging into my back.”

With a grin, he rolled until she lay on top of him, then dragged his jacket over them. A rock jabbed him in the back. He flinched and dug it out. “Ouch. Christ. Sex on the beach isn’t everything it’s cracked it up to be.”

“It’s perfect,” she murmured into his neck. With a long sigh, she settled against him.

His body changed his mind for him, already responding to her again. Yep, he agreed. Perfect.

Circling her waist with his arms, he looked up at the blanket of stars. A thin slice of waning moon rode low overhead, spinning out the hours before sunrise.

His nightmare about the Viking’s wife barged in uninvited. In his mind, he heard Hakon’s wife scream as the hooded men broke into their house. A second scream, cut short as they slit her throat. Blood poured down the front of her dress.

Buzzkill, he told the image, but it persisted.

Someone was trying to reconstruct the ley line ritual. Someone who now needed gifted blood to perform it. What would happen if they found out about Sara?

He turned his face into Sara’s hair. Her warmth, the steadying beat of her heart against his, and the faintly musky, earthy scent of her urged him away from the nightmare.

Not her. Not while he breathed.

He must have tightened his hold on her. She tilted her head to look at him. “Something the matter?”

He grinned again, forced now. “Sand and rocks notwithstanding, a man could get used to this naked-woman-on-a-beach thing.”

She smiled, and the nightmare washed away as easy as that.

They lay silent for a long while. Ian let his blood cool while the sounds of surging waves and chirring insects filled the air. When her hands skimmed along his sides and down his belly, he gave a throaty rumble and trapped them with his own. “Unless you plan on spending the night on this beach, I don’t recommend you do that.”

She sat up, tugging him with her into another kiss. His jacket slithered off them to drop on the sand. He made out her curving silhouette against the moonlight flashing on the water, and contemplated spending the night on the beach anyway. In spite of everything going on around them, all he wanted was to pull her back down and repeat what they’d just done.

The breeze picked up, fluttering in her hair. She broke the kiss with a violent shiver. “When did it get so cold out?”

“What cold?” he deadpanned, reaching for his pants.

Kneeling, she clapped a hand over her own pile of clothing, then dressed hastily. She turned back to him as he shrugged into his shirt, and stopped to raise a hand to his cheek. A troubled look crossed her features. “I don’t want to go.”

His gut clenched. He snaked his arms around her and pulled her close against him. “I don’t want you to, either. I’ll come back tomorrow. If you can get away from the dig—”

“As soon as I can,” she said between kisses.

Ian helped her to her feet. He let go of her, trying not to dwell on the reluctant expression in her eyes that made him want to pull her back. A few seconds more of that, and he might be spending the night with her on the beach—and damn Flintrop and the dig and everybody else sticking their noses into other people’s business. Sara held his hand until they were too far apart to do so, then jogged away.

When she had gone, he looked up at the moon again to find it bloodred.

Startled, he blinked and looked once more, but the moment had passed. The moon hung silent and white as a ghost.

****

When dawn broke over the camp, Sara was already bent in concentration over the large mesh box beside the dig, sieving earth. Stones rattled as she shifted the box back and forth, searching. She picked chunks of peat, stone, and grass from the box and tossed it into a wheelbarrow, hardly acknowledging it before moving back to sieving again.

The task was perfunctory, something to put down on paper when—and if—they wrapped up the excavation. It also occupied her mind just enough to keep her from racing to Ian’s camp the way she wanted. Lying naked at the inlet with him in the middle of the night, she’d felt safer than if she’d been at home, locked in her house. Even now, she ached to be with him.

But she couldn’t leave Faith alone here. They needed to watch each other’s backs until this was ended, however it ended. Her sister hadn’t been able to reach Hakon since that last time when she’d tapped herself. If Thomas Callander was plotting something involving the serpent ceremony, he’d decided to bide his time. How could Lamb not know the man he’d hired, the man he’d known for a good ten years, was capable of murder?

And he wasn’t alone. Couldn’t be alone, if he were bent on doing this. No one had the kind of power it would take to open and control the ley lines himself. Stone, stone, grass, stone...

“Good morning.”

Sara spun on her heel, fists raised to swing.

Thomas hopped backward. “Whoa! A little edgy today, aren’t you?”

Forcing a smile, she lowered her fists. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“How should I sneak up on you, then?” He laughed.

She tried not to stare. She’d never seen his eyes change, even once. Did they change, or was it not the same for everyone? Could he lift as much as she could with her gift? Did he feel that shiver when he used his power?

Cameron’s terror-stricken face sprang into her mind. She gripped the edge of the sieve box, and fought back the bile rising in her throat.

“You all right? It sounded like you were pretty bad off, yesterday.”

“I’m fine,” she murmured, no longer able to meet his gaze. “Just working. Preoccupied.”

She felt his gaze on her for a moment, and implored her body not to tremble. She scanned the dig, looking for something he might use against her. What would happen if he suspected she knew about his gift? Would she be strong enough to stop him?

“You’re up early,” came Flintrop’s voice.

She couldn’t keep the relief from edging her tone when she saw Flintrop and Luis coming toward the dig. “The better to wade through a few tons of dirt.”

Flintrop handed her a corn muffin. “We’re eating cheap this morning. Dustin and Michael are making a supply run.”

Frowning, she kicked dirt off the toes of her boots. “Both of them? We need all the manpower we’ve got today.”

“What’s your hurry?” Flintrop angled his head at her. “Iceland all over again. You’re half-dead yesterday, and look at you.” He did look then, and lines appeared between his brows. “Did you sleep at all?”

She turned back to the sieve box, and began shaking it again one-handed while she bit into the muffin. “I got enough sleep yesterday.”

“All right, let’s get a move on,” Faith sang out. She strode toward the dig with a bucket of tools.

Flintrop made a noise of amusement as Luis and Thomas went to start work. “A pair of slave drivers, the both of you.”

Sara eyed him. “You’re in an awfully good mood today.”

He bent closer to her ear. One tawny brow arched. “I’m always in a good mood when I go after something I want.”

She opened her mouth on an acid response, but Flintrop jogged away, whistling, to join the others in the pit.

The crew worked through the morning. Sara felt charged with energy. The faster she worked, the more every nerve willed her to keep going. She barely registered Michael and Dustin’s return. Only when Faith called a halt for lunch did she come out of her trance. Even then, she was the last to leave the pit.

During lunch, Faith sat beside her with a set of charts in her lap, eating her sandwich with one hand, and flipping through the sheets with the other. “We made good time. We can do this.”

“I hope to God Hakon is guarding you at night,” Sara muttered. “I don’t know how we’re going to keep this up for three weeks. I’m jumpy as it is.”

Her sister shot her a look of appraisal. “Even for you,” she agreed with a note of concern. “Just sitting next to you is giving me the jitters. Can’t you tone it down?”

Sara snatched one of the charts off her sister’s lap. Restlessly, she folded and unfolded it. “I don’t like this. I don’t. I can’t think.” The paper crinkled in her hands.

Faith clapped a hand over Sara’s, stopping her torture of the chart. “What’s the matter with you? No bullshit.”

“You don’t think what’s going on around here is enough to make me a little haywire?”

Dustin strolled over, brandishing a wax-paper bag. “Cookies and other sugary bad stuff. Any takers?”

“Sure,” Faith said, reaching for the bag.

“I’m going back to work,” Sara said, jumping up. She marched away to the dig site, feeling Faith’s gaze on her every step of the way.

She worked through dinner in the pit, and then at the sieve box, pawing through its contents by the light of the lowering sun. She murmured along with a half-heard tune from someone’s radio, and rearranged the rough granite rubble without actually seeing it. A flurry of thoughts skimmed the surface of her consciousness, but like the earth and stone in the box, nothing stayed put long enough to be examined. Just work, work, work, and when she paused, she wanted only to get back to work again.

Maybe because if she stopped, even for a second, she’d have to consider how insane this game of spider-and-the-fly was.

“Hey. You’re making the rest of us look bad,” Dustin joked, coming toward her with a lantern.

“Sorry.”

Laughing, he rested the lantern on the post beside the box. “Are you going for a world record?”

“If we’re going to finish the excavation this summer on the manpower we have, we need to buckle down,” she said.

“At the rate you’re going, you’ll finish it next week all by yourself.”

She glanced around. “What time is it?”

“Damn near bedtime. Are the rest of us required to keep up with you?”

For a few seconds, her drive lifted, and she relaxed just enough to smile. “You could help me finish this batch, and we can call it even.”

Dustin rubbed his hands together. “Step aside, and let a real grunt show you how the work is done.”

Sara shrugged, and stepped back from the box. While Dustin worked, she cast a surreptitious look at the sky. Ian had said he’d be at the inlet. He hadn’t said when. She hoped he’d still be there when she arrived.

They’d come together so fast and furious last night. The memory still hummed on her skin. He’d smelled of sunshine and chalk dust, and even though he’d sent her spinning into breathless ecstasy, she wanted him again as soon as they had finished. And what about the way he’d looked at her afterward? The way his arms had tightened around her, as if he meant to keep her there with him, safe and wanted, forever?

All at once, the urge to go to him became too much to bear. She picked up her bucket of tools, then strode toward her tent to put them away.

Flintrop intercepted her on the way. “Sara, have you got anything else from Lambertson on that skull and belt buckle we found?”

“Just the lab results, and what we’ve already catalogued on them. Why?”

“Nothing,” he said, looking displeased. I was hoping we’d have found something else by now.”

“Well, what is it you’re looking for?”

“I’m working on the pitch for Oxford. Can you show me what you have so far?”

Sara felt her chance to see Ian, possibly uninterrupted, slipping away. She stifled a painful sigh and gestured toward her tent. “All right, come on.”

He studied her with a stare like a buzzard. “Got something else to do?”

“No.”

He said nothing, but allowed her to lead the way back to her tent. She discovered then how much easier it was to deal with Faith’s stare on the back of her neck than his.