These days, Gareth’s nightmares weren’t even that bad. Everything still went wrong, everyone still died, and Gareth still stood and watched or sometimes tried to help with hands as large and clumsy as bricks. No part of it was pleasant. But he’d grown used to the dreams, familiar enough that a part of his mind recognized them and knew what was going to happen. He couldn’t quite keep himself apart from the horror, but there were worse things.
Waking up was one of them.
His dark room was perfectly still, utterly calm. There were no enemy soldiers here or the ravening demons that had started to keep company with them in Gareth’s sleeping mind. Nothing had happened.
That was the problem. In his dreams, everything had already gone merrily to hell. Waking to find that nothing had, Gareth inevitably ended up staring into the darkness and thinking about all the ways it could. Every time, there seemed to be more. Englefield was quite an education that way.
Not entirely fair. The threats had always been there, though Gareth hadn’t always lived a few feet away from impulsive youths with the power to call them up, and the lessons at Englefield were making the world a better-defended place, or they would.
Fine, high-sounding sentiments. None of them stopped some hateful part of Gareth’s mind from exploring all the possibilities he’d never known about before: crawling things with too many legs, power that could warp a man’s body, hellfire, lightning…
This time was worse than usual. He knew the darkness around him was empty, yet still it seemed to have grown eyes.
Familiar by now with the treachery of his mind, Gareth knew he wouldn’t be able to stop counting the possible disasters. Not lying idle, anyhow. He rose, donned his dressing gown, and slipped quietly out of his room.
Darkness and stillness held the house firmly. If there was a light anywhere, Gareth didn’t see it, but he was decent at moving in the darkness, as a general rule, and quite good at it now, at least on the path from his room to the kitchens. He didn’t walk particularly silently, but he managed well enough, not bumping into any tables or knocking over vases. In the kitchen, Nellie, the cook, had left out the usual late supper, complete with wine. One of the few favors Gareth had brought himself to ask of the servants. He’d have to give them a bit extra for that at Christmas, and that was coming soon enough. Unnervingly soon. Had he really been at Englefield four months?
Had it been only four months?
Time, Simon had said one evening at university, went strangely in other worlds and for beings from those places. At times, Gareth thought it moved quite strangely enough for mortal men in the normal world.
He poured himself a glass of wine, sliced some bread then looked down at the knife. The blade shone in the dying firelight. Steel, not silver. Not cold iron either. Modern steel contained too many other metals, and Olivia had said that iron didn’t always work anyway. Kitchen knives weren’t much good against creatures in the darkness, unless they were the kind of things any sharp edge could hurt.
The demon roamed beyond the walls of Englefield. Simon had said so. And knives would hurt only whatever poor bastard it was using as a host.
Not that Gareth would have been much use even with Excalibur. Perhaps especially with Excalibur. The Royal Medical Society had never really covered sword fighting.
He broke the bread in half, took a bite, chewed, and swallowed mechanically. Around him, the kitchen kept its quiet. There were faint sounds from the dying fire, quiet creakings from the walls as the house settled, and that was all. He might have been the only person left alive.
Gareth took a large sip of the wine.
Quiet had never bothered him before. He’d also never spent so much time considering potential weapons. Absurd. He’d been to war.
But it had been…he couldn’t say an ordinary war. He didn’t know that there were ordinary wars. But Egypt had been a war of flesh and blood, gunpowder and steel. When the latter met the former, the results had been horrific and all too often on his hands, but Gareth had known what to do and done it. The strangest thing he’d regularly encountered had been his power. His doubts and failures had been, for the most part, those of any man.
Now the walls didn’t seem solid enough, and the shadows were too solid. In the daytime, he could tell himself Simon and Olivia had warded the place well. He didn’t see Simon’s face gone green and half-dead, and he didn’t imagine Olivia’s in the same condition or an alien soul looking out of her eyes…
He fought back the urge to break something or to shout. Anything to end the silence.
Gareth finished the wine and made himself eat the rest of the bread, though he realized about halfway through he wasn’t particularly hungry. It didn’t matter. He’d made himself eat often enough in Egypt. The body was a machine: the machine required fuel. Black moods were not a factor.
The food calmed him a little, as he’d known it would, anchored his body a little more solidly to the present time and place. It wasn’t quite enough, nor was a single glass of wine, but there were habits Gareth did not want to risk acquiring. He’d seen them enough before, in other men.
Prayer, strong drink, or bad women.
He tried to put the voice out of his head. There had been no decision this time, no moment of failure. He had to adapt. That was all.
Besides, he’d tried praying on other nights. Like the food, it had calmed him only a little, and the other two recommendations weren’t available. Rather, there were bottles of drink in the library, which Gareth would almost certainly make noise reaching, and there might have been one woman in the village who’d be amenable to coin. There usually was. Her hypothetical existence did him no good at all in his current state.
He thought of Olivia then, remembered her astride him, half-naked, flushed, panting. She’d responded far more thoroughly to his passion than the few other women he’d been with. Natural enough, perhaps, given the choices available to an army surgeon abroad. And he was certain her reactions had been genuine. If nothing else, Gareth didn’t think she’d have given him the satisfaction of knowing he’d pleased her if the pleasure hadn’t overwhelmed her control.
Not the first few times.
The tension at his groin, admittedly, did distract Gareth from his previous lines of thought. It also left him sitting alone at a kitchen table, hot and hard and unable to do anything about it.
Bed would help. Gareth stood up. He’d go back to bed, bring himself what release he could manage, and hope some physical relaxation and the wine would send him back to sleep, and that afterward, his thoughts wouldn’t turn back along either of their previous courses.
Sometimes it actually worked.
He left the fire banked behind him and the kitchen dim, but even so, he had to pause a little way up the staircase and let his eyes get used to the full darkness again. Now, in mid-November, all the drapes were drawn at night. Perhaps an atom of moonlight might have gotten through, had the night not been cloudy. As it was, even waiting helped him only so much.
Upstairs, there were sounds. Not many, not at two in the morning, the time Gareth saw on the clock, but a few. For instance, one of the boys snored loudly enough to be heard through a door. It was something of a surprise the other two hadn’t smothered him in his sleep.
Perhaps Englefield was doing fairly well as a moral force.
There was no reason he should have been able to tell Olivia’s door from the others. He’d never gone in. He’d never had occasion to go in. With the exception of the early days, when Elizabeth had still been prone to uncontrolled levitation, and Simon’s recent crisis, Gareth had never bothered entering anyone’s room but his. He would have told a servant if he’d wanted to talk to Olivia.
For the most part, he hadn’t.
Her door was two down from his, beyond one of the infernal small tables Simon or Simon’s housekeeper had installed as a danger to anyone wandering around at night. Gareth stopped in front of it, put his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, and told himself to move on.
Olivia would certainly be asleep. Gareth had intended the thought as a reproof to himself, a reason why he shouldn’t disturb the woman. She would be tired, and she’d had a long day. Instead, the thought of her sleeping conjured an image as powerful as any she’d produced for her audiences: Olivia curled on her side, white linen in disarray around her body, her dark hair coming out of its braid. Or turned over, perhaps, sprawled on her back or her stomach, unknowing and open to the touch of hands…or lips…
Gareth’s experience with women was limited, and that of sleeping women almost more so. Still, he was under the impression they wore little beneath nightgowns.
He flexed his hands inside his pockets, ran his thumb over his curled fingers, and tried to think of all the reasons he shouldn’t even imagine exactly what he was about to do.
It was late. They both had positions to maintain. Her character was doubtful, or at least her past was spotted. He’d heard something about forgiveness being divine, but Gareth wasn’t sure bedding the woman was the sort of “forgiveness” the Bible prescribed.
As long as he remained at Englefield, some connection with Olivia was unavoidable. He hadn’t managed to resist a certain degree of intimacy. There was no real point castigating himself for that. She’d been willing, and he was human. But did he really want to repeat his error?
He took one hand out of his pocket and tapped at the door.
The sound wasn’t at all loud. Gareth was sure nobody in the other rooms would hear it, and not at all certain Olivia would. Not until the door opened a crack and he saw her face, sleepy and worried above golden-brown wool.
Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting him. She paused, caught between alarm and curiosity. There was no anger on her face, at any rate. And then she said in a whisper, “Gareth. Is something wrong?”
Gareth shook his head and watched as she relaxed, her expression becoming purely curious, and then…less than pure. Her gaze drifted downward from his face, paused at his neck, and showed every sign of progressing farther, but Olivia jerked it back up.
Damn willpower, anyway.
Gareth put a hand on the door frame, just close enough to hers that their fingers brushed together. No very intimate contact, but he heard her catch her breath, and he felt his body tense.
Anything could happen this late at night.
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Let me in.”