Seven for a Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

was wishing for something thoughtful to do with his mouth. “I am avoiding the topic,” he admitted.
    “I noticed.” She had had as much cold egg and toast as she could stomach. It didn’t take much to surfeit her these days. “According to Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus, berserkers served as the hired guards of kings. They were renowned for their ferocity and dauntlessness, and those who would not serve lords were dreaded mightily. Some took the wolf as their patron. Those dressed in wolfskins and dined on smoking wolf-blood. It was said weapons blunted themselves on their hides, that no arrow could pierce their hearts, that they would fight without armor and tear the throats from the mightiest warriors with their teeth.”
    If he were human, she thought his face might pale. As it was, he unfolded his hands and rubbed them across his cheeks, eyes, and eventually—vehemently—through his hair. “I remember.”
    “And yet you’ve never heard of an Ulfhethinn.” Maturity brought some wisdom. She kept the archness from her voice when she said it, and was actually rather proud of her level tone.
    “Never.” When he looked at her between the columns of his forearms, she saw the rumple at the corners of his eyes and knew it was the closest he could come to a smile just then. “But I have met my share of werewolves, of the moon-cursed sort who pass their sickness on a bite, like hydrophobia. And you should know, Abby Irene, that they are terrible.”
    “The stories endure—”
    “The stories do not begin to do them justice.” He glanced over his shoulder, while Abby Irene did him the dignity of not presuming he was checking for Phoebe, but rather making a point of not shocking the servants. “Do you recollect the Beast of Paris?”
    She had not heard him speak on it since Jack’s death. By his drawn expression, he would have preferred not to speak on it now. She reached out and laid the back of her left hand against his hip where it touched the small table, and thought by the twist of his mouth that he drew some strength from the contact.
    A dying sorcerer comforting a wampyr by the laying on of hands. In all the wide world, would wonders never cease?
    When his hand fell to his side, it fell over hers and clasped it, as if by accident. Would it be easier for him when she was gone, and so was Phoebe, and all of them who had known Jack passed from his existence, into the realm of memories where Sebastien so reluctantly delved?
    It is the secret to his survival.
    If she could forget everything she had lost—Richard, Henry, two homelands, her life’s work—would she become immortal, too? Sorcerers lived a long time, by habit and preference, but now at the end of her life, she rather thought ninety years or so would suit her. If she could set right some of the things that had not developed as she would have preferred them.
    There are always unintended consequences. Something Sebastien had tried to explain to her and Jack both, so many years before.
    She did not think she wanted to live forever. Not now that King Phillip was dead, and Prince Henry with him, and all of England’s royal family that remained was in exile with the new Phillip, the old Phillip’s son. In New Amsterdam, for bitter irony.
    She supposed it was a kind of ironic justice, that her own treachery had created the safe haven that now sheltered her dead lover’s nephew, England’s King-in-Exile.
    She swallowed all that and said, “How could I forget?”
    He grimaced. “Then imagine if you will the twin of it for destructiveness, a wolf which may be harmed by no mortal weapon. With the size and cunning of a man and a lust for human flesh that will not be assuaged. Have you ever seen a flock of sheep when the wolves have run among them?”
    She shook her head and squeezed his cold, firm hand. “I’ve never lived anywhere where the wolves were anything but a memory. I’ve seen what a dog can do to a rabbit hutch, however. And I’ve