Warrior's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) Read Online Free PDF Page B

prowess than any man Gray had ever known. He trusted the two of them with his life. He loved them like brothers. Even when, in the case of David, he wanted to bash him over the head.
    “Where’s your bride, St. Leger? Maybe she can control you.”
    “Callista likes to try.” David tossed back his whisky and held out the glass for another. “If I know my wife, she’s babbling nonsense at Mac’s son and wishing for one of her own.” He shuddered. “Frightening thought.”
    Mac’s wife, Bianca, had recently given birth, the boy barely over a month old. Gray had watched Mac with Declan; seen a father’s pride warring with the pain of knowing he’d not live to see his son grow to manhood.
    “I believe Bianca and the other ladies headed out into the garden,” Mac volunteered. “Your . . . house guest . . . was quite taken with Declan.”
    “Her name is Meeryn.” He paused. “Meeryn Munro.”
    “I still can’t believe she asked you to return to Deepings.”
    “Pryor seeks to parlay.”
    “You believe that?” David was on his third whisky by now, loosening years of bitter resentment and a simmering anger that was never far from the surface.
    Gray managed to topple into a chair before he doubled over and collapsed. It would do his dignity no good to retch all over the floor or faint dead away. “I have no reason to doubt her, but Pryor’s request comes at the perfect time and gives me the perfect entrée into the holding.”
    “To do what exactly?” David asked cautiously.
    Pause for dramatic effect, then . . . “Lift the Fey-blood curse once and for all.”
    Mac’s eyes seemed to take on a hungry desperate gleam. “How?”
    “With these.” He spread four disks out on the table: silver, gold, copper, bronze.
    “The Keys of Gylferion—you found them all.”
    Four disks forged by the Fey to imprison the traitorous warlord Lucan after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur’s fall. Scattered and lost for centuries, only to be brought together again on a snowy mountaintop in Wales three years ago when the Imnada warlord was inadvertently released from his eternal torment. Then scattered again, this time deliberately, in a last attempt to keep them from the hands of the Imnada’s enemies. Gray had moved heaven and earth to discover their whereabouts. Offered any price. Committed any crime.
    His determination had paid off in these bits of dented, discolored metal laid before them.
    “Lady Delia brought me the last one a few days ago,” he said.
    “How did she lay hands on it?” Mac asked. “It was supposedly locked up tighter than the crown jewels in an Amhas-draoi vault.”
    “Knowing Lady Delia, she seduced it away from its owner,” David said caustically. “That woman could make a dead man stiff, and she damn well knows it. I’ve seen her reduce the most hard-bitten misogynist to a dancing puppet on a string.”
    “You speak from experience?” Mac asked, barely hiding his smirk.
    David held up his hands palm out as if fending offan attacker. “Not me. I’m all about self-preservation. You won’t see me placing my head in the lioness’s mouth.”
    “Lady Delia risked her life to bring me the last disk,” Gray said quietly. “A bit more respect should be owing.”
    “What was her price?” David folded his arms across his chest matter-of-factly, eyebrows raised in wary cynicism. “Lady Delia doesn’t do anything out of the goodness of her heart. She’s all about the advantage, the going rate.”
    “She needed to escape the country. I agreed to assist her.”
    “Finally diddled the wrong man, did she?”
    Gray clamped his jaw so hard he thought his teeth would crack. Yes, she had. And paid for it a hundred times over. He owed her any price she named.
    “Lady Delia’s a loose cannon, Gray,” Mac said with a grim twist to his mouth. “Always has been. Her name is at the edge of every Fey-blood conspiracy, her face hovering just beyond the reach of our informants.”
    “She may