Winter Kiss Page 5

  It was still snowing, the snowflakes falling fast and thick outside the window. He watched them spiral out of a fathomless dark sky, knowing that the world would be blanketed in white silence by the morning.

  He was reluctant to move. He wanted to stay with Ginger, learn her secrets, know her as well as he knew himself.

  But Delaney knew that this moment was just an interval. It had been stolen from his destiny, only because the Great Wyvern had seen fit to give him the chance to reproduce before he died. Delaney was grateful for that gift and grateful for this night, but it didn’t really change anything. It couldn’t. He had a mission, one he had chosen himself, and he had to fulfill it.

  Delaney couldn’t let himself think of what Ginger would think of him the next morning, when she awoke to find him gone without a word. He wouldn’t think about her annoyance when she realized he’d left her pregnant. She was resilient and smart—she’d come to terms with what he was compelled to do, and she’d raise their child well.

  If anything, being with Ginger redoubled his determination to destroy the Elixir. He knew that he wouldn’t ever betray this woman who had shared so much of herself with him. He had to make the world safe for her, and for the son who would result from this night. He had no real choice.

  But Delaney had plenty of regret. He watched the snow fall for longer than he should have. With Ginger beside him, he felt a peace within himself that he hadn’t experienced since his imprisonment. He felt optimism, and a sense of possibilities. He felt the return of his old confident self, a self he had almost forgotten. He reminded himself that this moment couldn’t last, that it was stolen.

  He still wanted it.

  It was the realization that the Slayers would sense the firestorm that jolted Delaney to action. They were already close at hand. He was frightened then, frightened that he had already put Ginger at risk.

  He sent a message in old-speak to Erik, terse and urgent. “Defend my mate in my memory.”

  “Wait for me.” Erik’s reply was tinged with more than an increment of irritation.

  “No. Promise me.”

  There was a pause, a hesitation that made Delaney glad he wasn’t in Erik’s presence. Erik might change Delaney’s mind with persuasive arguments, might weaken his determination.

  The words came finally, sending relief through Delaney’s body. “You know I will. But wait for me.”

  Delaney heard reluctance in Erik’s concession, but it heartened him all the same.

  “You know that I can’t.” He gave Ginger’s name and location to Erik, knowing the details were unnecessary. Between the heat of the firestorm and Erik’s powers of foresight, the leader of the Pyr probably already had a good idea of her location.

  But Delaney had to be sure.

  When Erik would have continued the discussion, Delaney closed his mind against the persuasiveness of old-speak, willing himself not to hear it.

  He had to focus.

  Erik would find Ginger. Erik would come. Erik would ensure that Delaney’s son was raised by the Pyr.

  Erik could answer Ginger’s inevitable questions.

  Erik would see the son Delaney never would.

  Delaney had done what he could.

  Now he had to do what needed to be done.

  Delaney breathed smoke as he lay beside his destined mate, breathed an unbroken stream of dragonsmoke. He guided it to encircle her house; he wove it into a barrier that traditionally would have been regarded as an impenetrable barrier to any other Pyr.

  He knew, even as he breathed his protective smoke, that the old perimeter mark was less reliable than it had once been. He knew that Magnus and his minions had found a way to breach a dragonsmoke barrier, even without the permission of the Pyr who had created it. It was a violation of how the Pyr world had worked for centuries and a bad portent for the future.

  It was a development that came from the Dragon’s Blood Elixir. Drinking the Elixir gave Slayers these unnatural powers, powers that should have been reserved for the Wyvern. Delaney’s determination to destroy the source of the Elixir grew with every breath of dragonsmoke he exhaled.

  If nothing else, though, the resonant ring of a complete dragonsmoke territory mark would summon Erik directly to Ginger’s location.

  He knew it was an excuse, that breathing a dragonsmoke perimeter that might not make any difference gave him more time in Ginger’s presence. He savored every second of it, while she slept, curled against him.

  When Delaney was done, when the smoke was as thick and deep and interwoven as he could make it, Delaney pressed a kiss into Ginger’s tangled hair and was startled at the spark that leapt from his lips to her temple.

  It must have been only the last vestige of the firestorm, its dying embers. The firestorm was satisfied; Delaney knew it. He and Ginger had been intimate and she would bear his son.

  Maybe he had imagined the spark.

  Maybe it was a manifestation of his temptation to stay, to talk to Ginger, to explain.

  But if he waited one more minute, Delaney would lose his will to do what had to be done.

  He forced himself to leave the warm bed, to ignore how Ginger rolled into the hollow where he had been and sighed contentment. He dressed quickly, knowing there was too much at stake for hesitation. He left the house silently, hoping the sound of the car engine wouldn’t wake up Ginger.

  It was cold enough to stop his heart when he stepped outside—or maybe it was something else that made his heart clench when he crossed the threshold—but Delaney knew what he had to do.

  He owed his son a future.

  Lingering wouldn’t change anything.

  In fact, delay only diminished the chance of his success.

  Ginger awakened with a sense that the world was good. She stretched, letting herself awaken slowly. Three of her grandmother’s quilts were piled on top of her bed, as light as a feather but warm enough to tempt her to stay put.

  Of course, there were other reasons to stay in bed today.

  One big reason was named Delaney.

  She’d been right about him, absolutely right. Once again, her instincts had steered her straight and she was glad to have listened to them.

  Ginger kept her eyes closed for a long moment, wanting to hold on to her sense of warmth and goodwill. Delaney was an amazing lover, one who left her both sated and hungry for more. It had been a while since she had greeted the day with such a positive attitude. Gran’s death had shaken Ginger and uprooted her usual optimism, made her wonder whether a world in which she was left alone could truly be a good place.

  Of course, she had pinned a smile on her face and gone about the business of living, but she didn’t know how many friends she had fooled. It wasn’t in the Sinclair genes to break down in public, to surrender, or to admit to a weakness.

  In private, there was no one to witness that truth. Ginger acknowledged there had been a reason, just as Gran had always insisted. She recognized that solitude had sharpened her instincts and made her more prepared to seize opportunity when it—or he—strode through the door. A year ago, she would have let Delaney walk away. A year ago, she would have waited—and hoped—that he’d approach her.

  But now, Ginger knew that life was what you made of it, and that there was always a clock ticking somewhere. When Delaney had walked into the bar the night before, she’d felt as if she’d recognized him on sight. Maybe it was her heart that recognized him. Either way, she’d had to talk to him, even if it meant making the first move. She’d felt good flirting with him.

  And what had come after that had been even better.

  Best of all, it was just the beginning of something Ginger knew would be good, would be exactly what she’d been waiting for. She knew, right in her bones, that she’d made exactly the right choice.

  Maybe she knew it in her genes.

  She stretched, then reached across the mattress, her hand moving under the layer of quilts and over the smooth cotton sheet, her eyes still closed.


  But there was no one there.

  The bed was cold.

  She awakened abruptly, rolled over, and stared around the room. Delaney was gone, and not just down the hall. There was no sound of another person in the house, no smell of coffee brewing, no spatter of the shower running.

  Delaney’s clothes were gone.

  There was nothing left but his scent on the pillow and her memory of his seductive touch.

  Ginger realized belatedly that she’d been awakened by the sound of a car engine. She got out of bed faster than she ever had in her life and rubbed the frost from the inside of the old window.

  Two tracks in the snow were all that marked the presence of Delaney’s rental car.

  They hadn’t filled with snow, even though the flakes were falling fast.

  He couldn’t have gotten far.

  He wouldn’t get much farther without answering to her. The good news was that the girls were in transition and didn’t need to be milked this morning. The chickens could take care of themselves. There was nothing to stop her from pursuing Delaney Shea.

  Ginger wanted some answers before he disappeared from her life. Great sex didn’t happen by accident—she knew that—and her instincts had never yet been wrong.

  If nothing else, Delaney could look her in the eye when he dumped her.

  He owed her that much.

  If not a whole lot more.

  Ginger pulled on a pair of jeans and layered a fleece vest over a cotton turtleneck and T-shirt. She grabbed a thick pair of socks on her way out the bedroom door, spent a minimum of time in the bathroom, and trotted down the stairs with her hair tied in a ponytail. Her boots and jacket were beside the back door, her hat and gloves jammed into the jacket’s pockets.

  The pickup was as cold as ice and she said a little prayer as she turned the key. The old truck was getting increasingly finicky, and cold weather brought out its worst.

  The engine started on the third try, then sputtered. She gave it a teeny bit of gas, just the way Gran had taught her, and it settled into a choppy purr.

  Ha! Ginger swept the snow from the windows and roof, then scraped the ice from the windshield. She glanced down the long lane before getting back into the truck, and decided it would be a good day to travel prepared.

  She ducked back into the kitchen, leaving the truck running, and rummaged in the purse she had dropped on the counter the night before. Her cell phone could have stood to be recharged, but it wasn’t that surprising that she’d forgotten about it the night before. She took it anyway. Her wallet and keys went into her pockets. She grabbed the emergency flashlight as well as an extra blanket. She was heading out the door when she saw Gran’s rifle leaning in the corner, just as it always was.

  She remembered her determination not to use it, and the way Luke, the neighbor’s son who came to help with the girls, had mocked her.

  “What kind of chef doesn’t know where meat comes from?” he’d asked. “What kind of chef doesn’t get blood on her hands?”

  There was something irritating about Luke and it was more than his assumption that Ginger should go out with him, just because.

  Luke had shown her coyote tracks around the barn the previous winter, and she’d suspected he’d been trying to frighten her.

  “A coyote can’t take down a cow,” she’d insisted, knowing she was right.

  Luke had smiled, his condescension making Ginger want to deck him. “You can’t always count on wild things knowing the rules, city girl.”

  “Even in the city, wild things follow their instincts,” Ginger had retorted.

  Luke’s smile had faded. “Around here, sometimes you’ve got to solve things yourself, city girl.” He’d leaned closer. “Sometimes, you gotta get your hands dirty.”

  It had been Gran, unable to rise from her bed, who had set Ginger straight. “A coyote can’t take a cow,” she’d said, coughing in between each word. Then she’d shaken a finger at her granddaughter. “You’re right—Luke is trying to see what you’re made of. But a coyote can take a calf, especially a sickly one or a young one. You can’t risk that predator being here come spring.”

  It had been the first time Gran had said “you” instead of “we.”

  That was when Ginger had known her gran was going to die, and that her gran knew it, too.

  She’d recognized that she had to prove herself, not just to Luke but to her gran. She’d gotten the rifle from the corner, cleaned it just the way she’d been shown by her grandfather, loaded it, and stalked that coyote.

  She’d shot it right through the heart, a one-shot kill.

  Clean, just as Grampa had taught her.

  Then Ginger had dragged the carcass to the spot where Luke always parked his truck in the morning. It had left a long trail of red blood in the snow.

  Luke had never said a thing, although she saw him looking that next morning after he parked and before he went into the barn. Ginger didn’t know what had happened to the carcass.

  But she did know that Luke had never called her “city girl” again.

  And her gran had nodded with satisfaction when told of the news.

  She’d died three days later.

  The fact that she had even noticed the rifle this morning told Ginger that she might need it. She couldn’t imagine why, but she went with her gut instinct, grabbing it and putting a box of ammo in her pocket, just in case. She took the shovel from the porch, too, and put it in the back of the truck, just in case she got stuck.

  The snow was still falling fast, piling up with alarming haste.

  The truck had warmed up and the windows were clear. Ginger slowly backed up. The big tires got traction, despite the depth of the snow, and the headlights picked out the trail of Delaney’s tire tracks. She put the big red truck into four-wheel drive, not even thinking about what it would do to her gas consumption, and drove.

  At the end of the driveway, Ginger got out and looked more closely at Delaney’s tire tracks. She studied the distance between the tires, the width of each tire, the amount of snow in each one.

  Then she headed onto the road. On her quiet side road, Delaney’s tracks were the only set, but that wouldn’t last.

  Ginger Sinclair was going to get her man.

  Chapter 3

  The scent of Slayer and Elixir had led Delaney to the Serpent Mound the week before, and that was his destination of the morning. He’d done a lot of research since locating the site, and could have walked the site blindfolded.

  He certainly didn’t have a hard time finding it in the snow.

  The Serpent Mound was an earthwork, an effigy of a snake winding alongside Brush Creek. The snake figure was four or five feet tall, made of mounded earth and stone, and almost a quarter of a mile long. At one end, its tail wound in a curl; at the other, its mouth was open. There was an oval shape before the mouth and people had argued over its meaning. Was that oval a platform for some forgotten ritual? Was it representative of an egg? Of the sun?

  Current scholarship dated its construction as roughly nine hundred years ago, but the identity of its builders was as uncertain as its meaning.

  But then, Delaney reasoned, archaeologists had never asked the Pyr what they knew of the Serpent Mound.

  It had been noted that the head of the serpent was aligned to the summer solstice sunset and some had declared other intersections between the tail and coils with equinoxes and solstices. Some had suggested connections between the Serpent Mound and other massive earthworks, like Stonehenge. There were theories that its construction was in reaction to observation of Halley’s Comet in 1066 and the Crab Nebula’s light in 1054. Others speculated that the Serpent Mound was allied with the stars in the constellation Draco.

  Draco. The dragon.

  Delaney knew that last detail wasn’t a coincidence. He guessed that Magnus Montmorency, leader of the Slayers, had deliberately chosen this ancient work—protected as a state park for more than a hundred years—as the marker for the sanctuary of the Dragon’s
Blood Elixir. It had been the Romans, after all, who had named that constellation Draco and Magnus had never been able to resist a reference to his own origins.

  Perhaps he had also liked that his treasure was hidden beneath a protected piece of land. The Serpent Mound might be excavated, but the work would never be deep enough to unearth the truth.

  The Serpent Mound was also located in an area of strange geology for the region. The Serpent Mound crypto-explosion structure was roughly five miles in diameter and comprised of faulted bedrock, unusual for Ohio. This kind of bedrock was found at sites of meteorite impact or volcanic eruption, and opinions were divided as to which caused this rock formation—recent scholarship favored a meteorite.

  Delaney knew it had been a meteorite. He knew there were heavy metals buried deep in the earth beneath the effigy, metals with vibrations he could sense. Rafferty, he suspected, would have been highly aware of the presence of these alien minerals, given his strong affinity for the earth. Rafferty would have been able to name them individually, like old friends.

  What Delaney didn’t yet know was that the meteorite’s impact also had opened fissures, crevasses, and faults that stretched deep into the earth. Water had had millions of years to widen those faults, to erode the rock, molecule by molecule. Where once there had been cracks, there were caves.

  A labyrinth.

  And at the core of the labyrinth, directly beneath the mysterious oval mound and deep in the earth, was the sanctuary where Magnus had secured the Dragon’s Blood Elixir.

  Delaney didn’t know any of that, and he didn’t care. He only knew where he was going and why. The Serpent Mound State Memorial wasn’t open to visitors so early in the morning, but Delaney parked his car in the lot anyway.

  He had some walking to do.

  The snow was fluffy, obscuring the landscape beneath its gentle white drifts. The sun was a pale orb in an overcast sky, offering no warmth and little more illumination than the snow itself. It was cold when Delaney stepped out of the car, colder when snow slid inside the collar of his jacket and landed on his bare hands. Delaney shivered. He wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather, but he wasn’t worried.