Blade's Lady

She didn’t want to die.

Terror exploded deep inside her chest, shoved her heart into overdrive and robbed her lungs of precious oxygen. For a moment she thought she would lose consciousness, and in an act of sheer panic she squeezed her eyes shut and reached out in her mind, seeking the magical inner place she’d found, searching with a sharp-edged desperation for him. Her secret friend.

Ever since Mama had married Henry, Anna’s secret friend had been there when she needed him, and now she needed him very, very badly. Anna wasn’t sure who or what he was. She had decided early on that he wasn’t an angel, although, from the shadowy details she’d been able to make out, he was beautiful enough to be one. There was a hum of energy, of excitement, about him that just didn’t fit with angel’s wings.

He was probably a knight. Her knight.

The sound of her name penetrated the odd, lucid calm that had settled over her. It came again, more urgent this time, and Anna’s lids flickered sleepily. She felt dazed, disoriented, caught between the dizzying delight of that inner place and the relentless, numbing power of the river.

William leaned lower, hanging directly over her, and for a moment Anna thought that he might tumble into the river, too. His powerful hand wrapped around her wrist—the heat of it searing—and she realised with a beat of fear just how cold she had become.

Abruptly, she was hauled up the bank, her body leaden as a puppet’s. William was talking to her, low words of comfort, as he stripped off his jacket and wrapped her in its blissful warmth.

Henry’s face loomed. Fear rocketed through her, and, despite the shattering cold, she went rigid. She could feel the anger emanating from him like the spill of cold air from a freezer. She had long since learned to conceal the “oddness” of her senses, but now the strangeness rose up inside her like a primitive cry of warning.

She tried to speak, but her vocal chords were as paralysed as the rest of her. In a convulsive movement, she clamped her arms around William’s neck and clung to him as fiercely as she’d clung to the log in the river. He kept hold of her.

As if from a great distance, she heard snatches of Henry’s smooth, creamy voice, the rhythm of it rich and soft. Measured. “Tried to save her…as unstable as her mother…needs special care…”

William’s voice rumbled deep in his chest, the word “hospital” little more than a vibration.

A whispery sob slipped past the raw tightness binding Anna’s throat as she burrowed in against his burly chest, burying her face in the rough folds of his sweater. If she was taken to hospital, she would be safe.

For a while.

She needed him.

Seventeen-year-old Blade Lombard clawed his way out of the dream, breathing hard. For long moments he was rigid, frozen, disorientation robbing him of the simple motor skills required to shove himself free of the tangled mess he’d made of the bed.

Moonlight flooded his room with ghostly white light, spilled starkly over the collapsed pile of books on his desk, the football plunked down in the middle of his geography project, the Walkman he blasted his ears with while he did homework.

With a stifled oath, he catapulted to his feet, strode naked to the window and pushed it wide. The chill of the hardwood floor was an anchor to reality he desperately needed as he braced both hands on the sill and leaned out, gulping in the liquid coolness of the night air. A fitful breeze drifted across his skin, bringing with it the familiar scents of his mother’s roses and freshly cut lawn, drying the sweat that slicked him from head to toe.

Blade shook his head in an attempt to clear the lingering sense of urgency, the miasma of despair, that still clung to him like heavy layers of wet clothing.

Even though he was only seventeen, he was already over six feet tall and broad in the shoulders. If he woke up sweating and shaking it should have been from a wet dream, not—his jaw clenched—not because a child had called out to him somewhere inside his head. Not because he could see the dark swirl of the water trying to drag her down, know that she was cold, intensely cold, and afraid.

Dammit, if she really did exist outside his dreams, he didn’t know what he could do to help. He didn’t know where she was, or even who she was.

He was beginning to wonder who he was.

All he knew for sure was that the child had been haunting him for the past year, and that she was alone—so alone he could taste it.

Pushing himself away from the window, Blade quartered the room in a silent prowl, not wanting to rouse his brothers, who had rooms on either side of his, but he was too wound up to sleep again just yet.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing he knew for sure, he thought grimly. If he ever told anyone he heard voices inside his head, and that the little girl had become so real to him that he was worried about her, they wouldn’t just think he was crazy, they would know it.

Chapter 1

Present day, Auckland, New Zealand

It was raining as Anna left the library, a slow drift of icy drizzle condensing out of darkness, swirling with a ghostly brilliance in the yellowish glare of sodium streetlamps.

She slipped on her raincoat as the heavy double doors were locked behind her and the tall, taciturn man who pulled late shift at the front desk flipped up the hood of his voluminous black coat and hunched into the night like a large, disgruntled bird searching for its roost.

Shoving long tendrils of hair back from her face, Anna strode down the shallow stone steps, gripped her briefcase and mentally prepared herself to be gently soaked before she reached the doubtful sanctuary of her flat.

Habit had her searching the shadows, checking the street, the cars. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but that wasn’t how she felt. Tonight she felt spooked, uneasy…haunted.

Despite her tension, a wry smile softened the line of her mouth. Haunted enough to consider that she might actually be cursed with some of the more spectacular preternatural talents of her Montague ancestors, which her grandmother had once regaled her with, along with the glories and history of her ancient, almost extinct family.

Extinct, that was, except for her.

The brief flicker of amusement disappeared. The stark fact that, since the death of her mother, Eloise, just months ago, Anna was the last of the Montague line, and almost the last of her father’s family—the Tarrants—also sat uneasily with her tonight, although she didn’t usually allow herself the luxury of dwelling on either her loneliness or her isolation.

But then, she didn’t often find a notice in the local newspaper declaring her to be legally dead.

A shudder swept her, part remnant of the fear that had shaken through her that morning when she’d read the neat black print, part winter chill. The dank coldness swirled and clung, threatening to penetrate her thin coat and sink in all the way to the bone.

She should have expected something like this. Her stepfather, Henry de Rocheford, had to be as aware as she was of her approaching birthday and what it would mean for both of them. They’d played a cat and mouse game for years, but now Henry had run out of time.

He wanted her dead.

Her stomach lurched. The knowledge still had the power to terrify her.

Henry hadn’t succeeded in killing her…yet, but he’d come close several times. The last attempt had been seven years ago, sending her into hiding. Now it seemed he had found a better way. He was trying to dispose of her, legally, before she reached her twenty-seventh birthday and qualified for control of her father’s massive mining interests—Tarrant Holdings—which had been held in trust for her.

The situation was tangled, frightening…potentially deadly. De Rocheford was a man of great intellect and power, a handsome, charismatic man with all the outward trappings of a gentleman and the resources of the Tarrant wealth at his fingertips. He was her father’s half-brother, and although he had no direct claim on his half-brother’s estate, he now controlled the company by virtue of his marriage to Anna’s mother shortly after Hugh Tarrant’s death.

A passing car sent cold mist pluming off the road, wreathing parked cars in a shimmering, ever-dissolving shroud as the drizzle intensified. Anna quickened her pace, her brisk step sounding oddly flattened, as if the mist and drizzle served to muffle even the sharpest sound. As she passed from the relative brightness of the library car park into the badly lit stretch of sidewalk that bordered Ambrose Park, she had the oddest notion that the night would swallow her whole.

She shouldn’t have delayed in the musty warmth of the library, huddling over her research materials, trying to lose herself in the medieval treasure trove of the Crusades, the beauty and the brutality, the rich splendour and intellect that rubbed cheek by jowl with ignorance and grinding poverty. It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t gotten any further along with the novel she was writing, all she had gained was a headache and gritty eyes that she would regret tomorrow, when she had to spend twelve hours solid on her feet at Joe’s Bar and Grill. Her mind had been consumed with that damned legal notice and her attempt to contact Tarrant’s lawyers earlier in the day.

An attempt that had failed.

Emerson Stevens, the partner who dealt with Tarrant business, most definitely hadn’t been able to see her. He had been killed in a hit-and-run accident just weeks before. The receptionist had been pleasant but officious. If Anna wanted to see anyone else, she would have to make an appointment. Not surprising, Anna thought, since she’d turned up in her waitressing uniform—Joe’s Bar and Grill emblazoned across her chest—and given her name as Johnson.

The shabby entrance sign to Ambrose Park loomed, lit by the solitary spotlight that hadn’t been broken or stolen. The park was pleasant enough to walk across during daylight hours, but at night it was devoid of all charm and more likely to hold vagrants than lovers.

A tingling of the nerves down her spine, a cold jab of awareness, presaged a whisper of sound, the scrape of a shoe on pavement.

Anna ducked, feinted, felt the rush of air as something passed close to her head. Instinctively, she lashed out with the briefcase; it connected solidly. There was a muffled curse, a grunt as whoever had tried to hit her slipped on the slick concrete and tumbled, almost taking her with him.

A booted foot caught her heavily on one knee. She flailed, grabbed for balance, almost dropping the briefcase. Her shoulder caught the edge of one of the unevenly plastered pillars that guarded the broad entrance to the park. She reeled, still off balance, and saw the cold gleam of light travel the length of a gun barrel as the man regained his feet.

Time seemed to slow, stop, freeze her in place while her mind groped past a paralysing blankness; then fear slammed through her, and with a gasping breath she plunged into the darkness.

In abrupt contrast to the blankness of just moments ago, thoughts and decisions now tumbled in a frantic cascade. The park was her best option; the trees were closer than any building, the undergrowth thick at the edges. And it was very dark. He couldn’t shoot her if he couldn’t see her.