Mystic Guardian Read online

  A prayer of thanksgiving escaped his lips. Trystan didn’t know what instinct he acted on when he scooped the female out of the sand as if she were one of his troublesome pets.

  Disturbed by the physical awareness of her slender flesh in his arms, he told himself it was her pale beauty that moved him. Besides, it was his duty to find out how she’d penetrated Aelynn’s defenses. His defenses.

  He knew without hesitation that she was an Outsider. Somehow, unbelievably, the Destiny had brought in a stranger. And not just any stranger, if his imagination did not play him tricks. Judging from the long glossy black curls, she was the maiden from the cliff.

  She had been the source of the boom. She’d broken through his barrier. No human could do that.

  Despite her length, the lass weighed next to nothing. His hands brushed her ribs when he adjusted his grip. She was so thin, he had to be wary of his strength lest he crush her. Her breasts were almost unnoticeable against the breadth of his chest. How in Hades had she had the vigor to steal on board the ship?

  He was grateful to feel her heart beating next to his as he carried her down the palm-shaded path. The ship and beach disappeared behind a thicket of foliage.

  Waylan had once tried to explain that the fog surrounding Aelynn was a result of the island’s volcanic warmth mixing with the icy waters of the sea, but Waylan was a man of science and sought physical explanations for a metaphysical phenomenon.

  Since Trystan was the one who channeled the island’s energy to form the foggy shield, he understood that there was far more at work than science. As the future spouse of an Oracle, he preferred to accept his faith in the island’s power without question. He felt the force of the island. He felt its troubled shiver now.

  The well-traveled path from the shore widened. Lined with camellias, gardenias, and other flowering shrubs garnered from distant shores over centuries of the islanders’ explorations, the sandy, crushed-shell path led to a temple and the altar. Trystan said his prayers to the gods as he hurried, but his mind was on the more human fate waiting at the end of the path.

  The Oracle would not be pleased.

  ***

  Lemons. She smelled the fragrance of a long-ago Christmas when Papa had bought lemons and oranges from a southern ship stranded in a winter storm. That had been a magical holiday, and Mariel welcomed the memory.

  But instead of relaxed laughter and familiar voices, angry words hissed nearby.

  “By Hades, what have you done?” a furious female whispered.

  “She followed me home,” a male voice rumbled. “Shall I keep her?”

  Oddly, the self-confident male teasing was comforting, but the woman’s response was not.

  “Are you serious? You know it is against every law of Aelynn to bring an Outsider here. Do you wish to be banished like Murdoch? Tie up your goat before it strips the gardenias. I’ll fetch Mother.”

  Mariel sensed someone departing, and the lemon-scented memory returned. Papa!

  But Papa was dead, struck down by an apoplexy in the middle of a confrontation with the Vicomte Roquefort. She would never have lemons again.

  Her eyelids were heavy, and she wasn’t certain she wished to wake. A worse memory hung on the edge of her consciousness, and she didn’t want to name it. If she was dreaming, she could go back to sleep. She would just snuggle down into this…

  This what? It wasn’t a bed, although it was both soft and firm like a sponge she’d once ripped from the bottom of the ocean. The pillow beneath her head smelled of the exotic spices in Maman’s cabinet, rich and aromatic and tantalizing.

  A breeze lifted her linen chemise from her thigh, and a strangled sound from somewhere in her vicinity shocked her to wakefulness. She was nearly nude and not alone. This wasn’t a dream. Where was she?

  Frantically, she tried to remember. Her aching muscles recalled her effort to swim after the prophesied savior. Had she died in the attempt, and he’d taken her to heaven?

  Jarred fully awake by that thought, she grimaced at the dampness of her chemise against her salty skin. She lay on her back, so if she’d gone to heaven and wore an angel’s wings, she was crushing them. Had she followed a devil and gone elsewhere?

  Warily, with her cheek resting against the soft pallet, Mariel lifted her salt-encrusted lashes just enough to see past her right shoulder. Her first sight was of a large flame on a squat marble column. She almost swallowed her tongue in instinctive fear.

  But she had learned that fire had its purposes. This one remained at a safe distance. She took a deep breath and trained her thoughts elsewhere.

  If this was a bed, it was high off the ground. She recognized the base of two enormous standing stones—menhirs—nearby, and a forest beyond them, much like the stones and forest of home. How could she have washed inland?

  A scarlet flower dipped just beyond her nose, balanced on a long green stem covered in fine foliage. The aromatic air reminded her of the incense in church. A gentle breeze wafted over her near-nakedness, tickling her in places the wind should never touch, raising goose bumps along her skin.

  She reached to brush a wayward curl from her face. Her hands wouldn’t move.

  Panicking, Mariel sought the cause of her imprisonment. Her gaze swept downward to her wrists, where spongy straps bound her to the bed. She writhed to free them, then realized, she could not move her ankles. Alarmed, she opened her eyes wide, turned her head to see what held her feet—and shrieked.

  The golden god loomed at the foot of her tall bed. He’d discarded the golden vest he’d worn when she’d last seen him. Massive shoulders filled a sleeveless linen tunic that barely covered a broad torso dusted with gilded brown curls. Copper bands on his upper arms emphasized the bulge of muscles there. Golden hair brushed his sun-burnished shoulders.

  In her village, the people were small and dark, with glossy black hair like hers, although she resembled them in no other way. Sometimes, she had seen sailors with muddy brown hair with lighter strands from the sun. Until this man had appeared, she had never seen such golden glory. No wonder Maman had called him a god.

  Even his arms were a warm bronze. And his eyes! She shivered as he studied her, and she became more conscious of her position. She was held prisoner, unable to escape his scrutiny, forcefully aware of his smoldering gaze as it touched her face, her breasts, her…

  She gasped when his eyes turned from a smoky gray to a warm golden glow and the place between her thighs turned liquid. He could see all of her.

  And she couldn’t move.

  She was terrified. Sweat beaded her brow. Too frozen to fight her bonds, Mariel lay there like a sacrificial virgin beneath the regard of a man so powerful he—

  “I trust you like what you see.” A dry, elderly female voice shattered the illusion of isolation. “For unless someone else speaks for her, the two of you must exchange rites.”

  She could see the shock hit him in the way his eyes sharpened to ebony and a ripple slid through his massive muscles. But he didn’t release her from his stare.

  “I bow to your wisdom, my lady,” he growled, looking as if he’d never bowed to anyone in his life. “But I merely placed her there so you might heal her.”

  If he would just look away, Mariel might recover her mind and protest, but his gaze had reduced her to trembling incoherence. Her breasts ached from the linen blowing across their oddly heavy weight. And her womb wept with a desire to be filled. What strange magic was this? She had no desire for men or children.

  But the insistent throb between her legs swelled to a physical demand that lifted her hips off the bed. The god uttered a word from deep in his chest and stepped closer. The high bed still concealed his lower half, but primeval instinct and his flaming gaze warned of male arousal.

  “She does not need healing. You placed her there because the gods know the two of you are ready,” the unseen woman noted. “Does she bear a mark?”

  The intensity of the golden god’s gaze faded into puzzlement. “None that
I can see, but how else could she come here and still breathe?” He dragged a shaky hand through his hair and stepped backward again.

  Mariel relaxed slightly, relieved to be freed of a force more potent than the bonds holding her. She still ached with the new and unwelcome knowledge of her body’s needs—to the extent that she actually wondered what it would be like to have those needs satisfied.

  That thought should shock her, but she seemed to be beyond shock now, in a state of semi-consciousness that left her enervated and helpless as she listened to her future being discussed by strangers.

  “No Outsider has ever breached the barrier without rites, so I do not understand the phenomenon,” the elderly voice replied. “She seems to be awake. I assume we are speaking her language since you chose the words. Yet she does not respond. Her silence may be a protective defense of some sort. I would advise you to say the vows and take her as she is now, since the altar seems to have prepared her, but I’m not certain she’s in a condition to repeat the words.”

  “Vows?” The god looked as if the world had exploded in his face. “Of amacara, or marriage?”

  “They both involve the ring of silence. I leave the choice to you, although it’s unlikely you’ll find another amacara now that Aelynn has chosen this one. Of course, there’s always a third choice, you could kill her.”

  Confused by the word that didn’t translate into her language, Mariel wasn’t certain she had heard right.

  The god looked as if he hadn’t either. He shook his head in obvious disagreement.

  “Taking her now would be crude,” he objected. “She deserves some say in her fate. Perhaps she would prefer Waylan or Nevan. They are equally responsible for bringing her here.”

  The old woman stepped closer, and Mariel stiffened with shock to see a woman who looked like her mother bending over her—her mother touched with the white hair and haggard wrinkles of an age that she had not lived to acquire.

  Iridescent aqua eyes weary with the wisdom of the world had replaced the innocent blue of Maman’s.

  “You’d best think again,” the old woman said dryly. “Look at her eyes. You may have found a mermaid.”

  Three

  The primeval male instinct to claim his mate roared through Trystan with a brute force that stunned him. All the blood in his brain shot straight to his groin, leaving him dazed and dizzy. He knew absolutely nothing about the female held captive by the ritual altar except that she belonged to him. And he wanted her. Now. The Oracle was correct in surmising that.

  The shock of finding an amacara—his perfect physical match—after all these years, astounded him. Yet his reaction to her body upon the altar of life could mean nothing less. How could he be matched to a Crossbreed, a creature of mixed Aelynn and Other World descent, a mermaid with no value whatsoever to the island?

  In the blink of an eye, the course of his life had been hit broadside, overturned, and wiped out.

  Amacaras were for bearing the hereditary traits Aelynn needed, children with the special abilities of their fathers and mothers. He had hoped Lissandra would be both legal wife and physical amacara so they could carry their traits into the future through their legitimate offspring. Until this revealing moment, he had underestimated the potent sexual ramifications of an amacara relationship. He lusted after Lissandra, as did every man on the island, but the Oracle’s daughter had never fired his imagination and held him enthralled as this stranger did.

  As far as he was aware, Aelynn granted a man only one amacara at a time, and while they both lived, this—mermaid?—was his. A man with an amacara could take a wife who might bear heirs with the required characteristics. Except, proud and possessive Lissandra would never have him if he took a lover before she proved her ability to carry another Guardian.

  Trystan knew himself to be an eminently practical man, yet he was aroused and ready to spill his seed into a seductive cleft at the mere flutter of the wisp of gossamer covering his rescued maiden. He wanted her long legs wrapped around him as he pumped into her, creating the child that would be his physical heir, if not his legitimate one. He clenched his teeth against an overpowering urge to taste rosy nipples practically pleading to be plucked. Her hips rose and circled and urged him on. The altar gave him permission. Heaven opened before him, or more likely, hell.

  After all these years of allowing him freedom, the gods had driven their spike into his soul.

  He curled his fingers into fists of restraint. She could be his concubine in the Outside World, yes. A man was allowed to have women outside of vows. Given their need to propagate their own kind, it was almost a necessity.

  But the rites of amacara were for the propagation of specific talents. If Aelynn had not seen it relevant to reproduce mermaids over all these generations, then the gods had no use for their gifts.

  He could not let lust lead him astray. Perhaps this was a test of his worthiness.

  “Mermaids are a sailor’s superstition,” he said with all the scorn he could muster for a creature so frivolous she had no purpose but to laze about the ocean. “May I release her? She does not appear to be in any danger of harming herself or others.”

  “Are you sure you would not prefer to settle this now?” Dylys asked, eyeing him with curiosity. “The altar accepts her, as you can plainly see. We’ve not had a mermaiden in decades. The gods must have brought her here for a reason.”

  “Get a mermaid with child? She could swim away and I’d never see my heir again,” he scoffed. “Unless you See that reason, and me as her rightful mate, I don’t think we ought to take away her right of choice.”

  “You are well aware that the future only appears to me if the impact affects many, unless I ask otherwise,” the Oracle reprimanded him. “Envisioning your mate is not worth my energy, especially since you’ve already made up your mind.”

  Irritated by her tone, Trystan didn’t wait for the Oracle to release their prisoner. In a gesture that refused the mating the altar offered, he squeezed the ancient sponge that served as healer’s cot as well as ritual bed: the gateway to both life and death. Most of the inhabitants of the island had been conceived under the blessing of the gods here. Most of the ancients had been brought here to die. Their souls—and their powers—waited to enter the right child conceived under the proper conditions. Or so it was said.

  The sponge released the living bonds holding the intruder. She didn’t immediately understand. Her lowered lashes half concealed the shining green eyes that marked her as the descendant of some Aelynn seafarer. Trystan should have noticed that she was taller and paler than the other inhabitants of her village, but he was accustomed to traveling and seeing people of mixed race.

  Gradually, she awakened from the dazed state of arousal the bed engendered in amacaras. Trystan tried not to think of that. He was a man of faith, not science. He fully believed the altar recognized mates who were meant to be joined. It had never occurred to him to question how this was possible. He was questioning now.

  He’d best not question with the Oracle present. Dylys was already furious with him. He could tell by the way the elder’s eyes narrowed as he helped the intruder to sit up without her permission. He’d overstepped his authority—again.

  “She cannot leave the island without rites. You know that as well as I do, Trystan. She must choose from among you, or she must die. Her life is in your hands.”

  Despite her age, the Oracle walked away with the straight-backed stride that reminded him of Lissandra—who had called him more names than a drunken sailor when he’d brought his unconscious mermaid here.

  That the Oracle’s angry daughter had not returned after fetching her mother boded ill.

  “I don’t suppose you are able to tell me how in Hades you came here, or even why?” he asked the intruder in a tone much calmer than he felt.

  Sitting on the edge of the altar, Trystan’s stowaway—he would not think of her as his amacara—glanced at her unbound wrists with puzzlement, then leaned over to look at he
r feet. Long strands of drying black curls coiled around her breasts and shoulders, nearly concealing the breasts he wanted to touch and claim.

  Cautiously, she eased off the high altar, touching her toes to the crystal sand and crushed shell that comprised much of the island’s floor. Despite his fury, Trystan was fascinated with every aspect of her. She was tall enough to reach his shoulder, but she was little more than a thin waif next to his bulk. He had the urge to feed and shelter her like one of his stray pets, though her stiff avoidance of his person and his own common sense warned him off.

  The oleander that had been dancing over her head seemed to follow her from the altar, and she gazed up at it in surprise. With a defiant glance in his direction, she plucked the flower from its stem.

  The world didn’t explode as she so obviously expected. Hiding a smile at her boldness, Trystan plucked another flower and stuck it behind her ear. Then he crossed his arms and studied her linen-draped form. “You are as well dressed as any bride. Shall we take you to meet your suitors?”

  She balled up her fingers and drove her fist into his midriff.

  ***

  Mariel bruised her hand. And probably shattered her knuckles.

  The golden god merely shook his head in amusement—as strong as Hercules, just as her mother had predicted. His golden mane brushed his muscular shoulders and wafted about him as if with a will of its own. With his massive build and mighty sword, accompanied by his stern jaw, he would appear a pirate were it not for his simple sandals and golden visage.

  Had he and the strange woman actually been discussing marriage? What manner of madness had she fallen into?

  The god had kept his hands off her until she’d foolishly broken that taboo. Now he gripped her upper arm and steered her down a path lined with glossy emerald foliage, more of the lovely red flowers, and some wonderful white ones that smelled of an exotic fragrance she did not recognize.

  “You were obviously speaking when last I saw you on the bluff. Did the barrier take away your tongue when you broke through it?”