Son of the Morning Read online

  “Yes,” Conrad said impassively. Otherwise, there was no logical reason for her to return to Minneapolis. The danger was too great.

  “Perhaps we should let her try.” Parrish smiled, his eyes bright with anticipation. “Let her come to us, Conrad. We’ll be ready.”

  Chapter 13

  “NIALL, I DREAMED ABOUT YOU AGAIN LAST NIGHT. FOR ONCE, you weren’t either fighting or having sex, just sitting quietly in front of a fire, cleaning your sword. You looked—not sad, but grim, as if you carried a burden that would break most men. What were you thinking about? What makes you so alone? Do you think about the Templars, all the friends who died, or is there something else that made you so hard? Do you resent being a renegade, when your brother is a king?”

  Grace lifted her hands from the keys, disturbed by what she had just typed. Dreaming about him was one thing, writing to him was another. It was unsettling, the way she felt as if she were truly communicating with him, as if he would read her words and reply. She knew the constant stress of the past eight months had taken a toll on her, but she hoped she hadn’t totally flipped out.

  She had tried to resume writing in her electronic journal, but somehow her brain refused to seize on the everyday detail that she had recorded before. For one thing, she had no routine life, and without a routine there couldn’t be anythingunroutine. She would stare at the empty screen, her fingers poised over the keys, but in the end she had no comment to make about the day. She had no appointments to keep, no news to share, no one to share it with in any case. She went through the days silent and numb, coming alive only with hatred for Parrish or when she was translating the papers.

  But however illusory Niall was, he was far more vivid than anything else in the grayness of her life. He seemed real, as if he were just on the other side of the door, unseen but undeniably there. His myth, his history, was her one bit of color. Through him, she still lived, still felt the hot rush of vitality and passion. She could talk to him as she would never again be able to talk to anyone living. The division between before and now was too deep, too drastic; there was too little left of the shy, bookish, rather innocent woman she had been. In her own way, she was as unreal as Niall.

  She felt her aloneness all the way to the bone. Not loneliness; she didn’t pine for company, for a sympathetic ear, for gossip and chatter and laughter. She was alone in a way she’d never before imagined, as solitary as if she were an astronaut come untethered from the mother ship, drifting unnoticed in an emptiness so vast it was beyond comprehension. She had found a whisper of companionship with Harmony Johnson, but remaining would have been too dangerous to Harmony, and during the six months she’d been back in Minneapolis she hadn’t truly talked with anyone. She woke up alone, she worked in mental if not physical isolation, and she went to sleep alone. Alone. What a desolate, empty word.

  In her dream, Niall had been alone. Alone inside, as she was. He could be surrounded by people and still be alone, because there was something untouchable in him, something no one else even knew existed. The golden glow of the fire had outlined the hard, pure lines of his face, shadowed the deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. His movements had been deft as he saw to the cleaning and repair of his weapon, his long fingers tracing over the razor edge to find any chips that dulled its effectiveness. His manner had been absorbed, deliberate, remote.

  Once his head had lifted and he sat very still, as if listening for or to something that hadn’t registered in the dream. Black mane flowing over his broad shoulders, his black eyes narrowed, he had been the picture of animal alertness, on guard and wary. No threat had materialized and gradually he had relaxed, but she had the impression of a man who could never truly ease his vigilance. He was the Guardian.

  She had wanted to touch his shoulder, and sit silently beside him by the fire while he tended his tools of war, giving him the comfort of her warmth and presence so that he knew he wasn’t alone after all—and perhaps, in doing so, she too would find comfort and companionship. But in this dream she had been locked into the role of observer, unable to go closer, and in the end she had awakened without touching him.

  “If I were with you…”

  Startled, she stared at what she had typed. The words hadn’t been consciously planned; her fingers had simply moved on the keyboard and they had appeared. Suddenly frightened, she closed the file on her journal. Her hands were shaking. She had to stop thinking of Niall as if he were alive. The fixation on him was too vivid, too powerful. At first concentrating on him had seemed reasonable, a way of keeping herself sane, but what if it were having the opposite effect and she was losing herself in fantasy? After reading her journal entries, any psychiatrist would be forgiven for thinking she had lost contact with reality.

  But reality was seeing her husband and brother murdered, crouching in a cold rain too terrified to cross a street, going hungry and being cold, sleeping in storage buildings and fighting off attackers. Reality was freezing in horror at the sound of Parrish’s voice. What did she have left except the escape she found in her dreams?

  She looked at the stack of documents, at the pages and pages of notes she had scribbled. “I have work,” she murmured, and the sound of her own voice was reassuringly normal. She might feel as if she were coming apart at the seams, but she still had the work. It had saved her for eight months and would continue to save her for a few days yet, though that damn Gaelic had nearly defeated her.

  Just another week or two of work, and then the tales of the Knights Templar and the Guardian, of Black Niall, would be ended. When she wasn’t spending hours struggling with the translations every night before bed, the dreams of him would stop.

  Unexpected desolation swamped her at the thought. Without Niall, the spark that made her feel alive, even if only in her dreams, would be extinguished. There would be no more translations, because she was too well known by sight in her field to get a job with another archaeological foundation, even under an assumed name. There would be no more intriguing puzzles, not that any other work she had done had come close to fascinating her as much as did Niall and the Templars.

  She would have nothing but vengeance. The need for it burned inside her, but she sensed that beyond vengeance there was nothing but bleak, gray nothingness, assuming she survived. She would be on the run for the rest of her life, her identity gone, nothing to look forward to, and never knowing the joy of having Ford’s children and growing old with him, cradling their grandchildren, perhaps watching Bryant succumb at last to love and matrimony.

  Being insane was better.

  She pulled the Gaelic papers to her, opened the Gaelic/English dictionary, and picked up her pen.

  As usual, she was drawn almost immediately into the magic of the papers, the sense of reading something enormously compelling and important.

  “Mankind shall not know the True Power,” she read some minutes later. “The Cup and the Winding Cloth shall blind them to the sun, the Throne and Banner denied, but the True Power shall be used by the Guardian in the Lord’s stead, to pass through the Veil of Time and protect the Treasure from Evil.

  “None save the Treasure can defeat Evil, and none save the Guardian shall use the Power.”

  It read like a Bible passage, but she was certain nothing like this had ever been in the Bible. The Cup… that could refer to the Chalice, and the Winding Cloth could well be the shroud in which Jesus had been wrapped after the crucifixion. The Shroud of Turin was supposed to be Jesus’s shroud, but it was surrounded by controversy; there were references to its existence long before the fourteenth century, which was when carbon dating had placed its origin. Of course, the earlier references could have been to another shroud, perhaps the real one… which did nothing to explain how a fourteenth-century forger could have created a cloth bearing an impregnable negative image of a crucified man, five centuries before photography had been invented.

  “The Cup and the Winding Cloth shall blind them to the sun,” she read again. If the Chalice still existed