Dark and Stormy Knights (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 0.80)

Setting the saw beside her on the table, she stared down at the burnished pieces. They seemed to grow more luminous with every passing second, in fact, and she glanced at the work light, wondering if the reflected light was creating the effect.

“You are done?” Claude’s words were breathless, excited. “The puzzle is completed?”

“See for yourself.” She rolled her chair back from the table, allowing him access.

Claude bent over the table, and she’d have sworn he was panting slightly. “He’s stunning. You are a master of your craft.”

“He’s still inside the puzzle,” she pointed out, hating how fast her heart had begun beating. A creeping sense of dread fell over her. Definitely not the lion from her dream. “It’s minutes until the solstice. How do we free him?”

“We must break apart the pieces now, scramble the image.” Claude reached toward the edge of the puzzle, but she stopped his hand.

“Don’t touch it.”

Claude stood upright again, studying her through narrowed sea gray eyes. “He was first ensorcelled within a chess set. Did you know that?”

She shook her head. “I know nothing. You made sure of that.”

“You knew enough to set about painting him. To realize the Templar gold was necessary.”

She shrugged, not wanting to tip her hand as to how intimately she and the knight were attached. “Call it a lucky guess.”

“From the chess set, I nearly freed him, but he moved into an illuminated Bible, of all things.” Claude laughed heavily. “That didn’t last long.”

Slowly she broke apart the first piece, the lower left corner, and then hesitated. “I’m not sure about this.”

Claude reached past her, blocking her from the puzzle with his large body. “This task, truly, should be mine. He must not have a way of reentering the image once he emerges.”

“Would he want to?”

“Sebastian Fray has a talent for many violent acts, especially moving from one image to the next.”

A name! Finally. She was certain that Claude had used it intentionally, too. That he was preparing some sort of trap—perhaps for her or more likely for Sebastian himself. But she had her knight’s name; all she’d wanted to know, really, or so she’d believed. Now she knew that her desire ran far deeper, was an unquenchable thirst to free a doomed and captive man.

“When you put it that way,” she said, “it doesn’t sound like Sebastian cares too much for freedom.”

Claude didn’t answer, focusing instead on disassembling the puzzle. The pieces formed a shimmering mound beneath his palms as the last bit fell from his grasp. “He is complete.”

That declaration seemed particularly perverse considering that the puzzle she’d painstakingly created lay in broken bits. She was about to remark on that fact when a humming, electric energy began, emanating from the work itself.

A swirling, living image began to take shape within the air, an amalgam of puzzle pieces that seemed to be alive. With a gasp, she looked at the table, but the small heap of cut work remained intact. No, whatever multidimensional tableau was emerging, it breathed with a life all its own, imbued with a dark, otherworldly essence that literally burned the air around her.

She tried to back away but found herself enthralled. Captivated. Even when she heard the lion’s roar, she remained manacled to the floor of her studio as if unseen hands gripped her ankles.

Sebastian became fully solid before she could gasp. Pure gold rippled across his fur, as shimmering and alive as the Templar bullion that had animated him after long captivity. One word said it all: magnificent.

With a ravenous sound, her lion tossed back his head, the mane of vibrant fur standing on end; his eyes were no longer the smoky blue of his human self, but rarest green, filled with shifting hues and accents.

Why didn’t Claude ask me to paint Sebastian just like this? some stupid part of her terrified mind wondered.

That was before she noticed the collar, barbed about Sebastian’s leonine throat, studded into his fur with sharply faceted diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Claude tightened the rein with a snap, inciting a harsh snarl, one that seemed to come from the heart of the beast.

“Yes, there you go,” Claude murmured to the cat in his hypnotic, smooth voice. “You were made for this, Sebastian. To kill. To hunt. I know how you’ve missed it.”

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed on her, his jaws snapping as he rumbled a voracious roar.

“There now. There,” Claude whispered, walking toward her, leash in hand. “I am here to oblige your basest instincts, knight. Here she is. Your first kill of many.”

“No. He’s not like that,” Anna said, backing up against her worktable. “He isn’t what you’re saying.”