Of Midnight Born Read Online Free PDF Page B

fire was but burning coals now, and he could hear his cousin’s relaxed breathing. Rhys was truly asleep. His cousin’s blithe ease at sleeping in the ruins of a haunted castle, protective crucifix or no, reawakened Alex’s suspicions. He narrowed his eyes at this country relative who had already tricked him into trying to milk a bull—he’d been lucky not to get his skull kicked in—and who had persuaded him to wade in stagnant water infested with leeches. And an encounter with a patch of stinging nettles had led to a serious fistfight.
    This time when he closed his eyes, he kept away theimages of broken bones. Instead he drifted off to sleep imagining the grand revenge to be had if Rhys ever came to visit London. It would be a wonderful thing if he could be knocked into the filthy Thames.
    When Alex awoke again it was to chilled darkness, and he did not know for a moment where he was or what had stirred him. A streak of light, present but for an instant, flashed by the corner of his eye. He turned his head, then rolled onto his back as another streak, then another flashed across the deep blue-black sky above.
    His lips parted, and his eyes widened in amazement. Streak after streak—five, ten, twenty at a time—burned their way across the heavens, their white light illuminating the castle ruins like silent fireworks.
    “Rhys!” he whispered, not turning to look at his cousin, unwilling to take his eyes off the miracle above. “Rhys! Wake up!”
    Not waiting for a response, he stood and stumbled his way to the remnant of stairs, climbing them up onto the tallest fragment of wall, where he stood atop the uneven stones. It was the highest point of the ruins, above even the tops of the trees that crept up the flanks of the mountain. He tilted back his head and took in the blue-black sky.
    Stars fells down by the hundreds in a cloudburst shower of light, illuminating the mountaintop and the valley below.
    Another glow of light, larger than the stars, closer, brought his gaze back down. He caught a quick impression of long pale hair floating in the breeze, a white hand reaching toward him, and a glowing face with eyes like empty wells, black with pain. Startled, he lost his balance, the stars above briefly filling his gaze once more as he fell through empty air.
    He hit stone, and then there was nothing.

Chapter Four
    Maiden Castle
    August, 1832
    “Serena must be rubbing her ghostly hands in anticipation,” Rhys said.
    Alex’s index finger lightly touched his temple, and the streak of white in his midnight black hair. The scar from where his head had struck one of the stone stairs twenty-odd years ago was hidden there, at the edge of his hairline. “Sometimes I almost think you believe that story.”
    “I didn’t, you know. Not until I woke up that morning and found you with your skull cracked and a broken arm. It’s a miracle you ever got off this hill alive. It’s beyond me why you would choose to live here now.”
    Alex sat atop one of the crenelated parapets of the tower of the rebuilt castle, oblivious to the sheer, hundred-foot drop at his back. He could see for miles, over downs and small pockets of woodland, sheep-dotted fields and hedgerows, the river and the gray village of Bradford-on-Avon, which nestled along its bank. And he could see the sky, all of it, a glorious blue dome stretching from horizon to horizon and into the endless realms of space beyond.
    A breeze through his hair drew him back to earth, and he smiled at his cousin. “You still think it was Serena who pushed me from that wall.”
    “It makes no sense to me how even an ignorant child of the city like you could have come to such grief without help.”
    “Ah, but the wonder of the stars…” Alex said, sweeping his hand above him at the sunlit heavens.
    Rhys snorted rudely. “There’s not a romantic, fanciful bone in your body.”
    “Why, darling, what an unfair statement to make,” Beth Cox said, her bonneted head appearing