The Royal Hunter Part 51

"Thank you. For everything. You gave me my family back."Even as he let Archer go, the triangle had all but disappeared. Once again, Archer aimed, dove... and stayed in the cell where he'd been left to die. And would almost surely die now. But he didn't intend to go alone.

Baleweg was already on his knees, his expression revealing the pain being inflicted on him, even though Emrys was standing several feet away. "How dare you interfere with my game!" he shrieked. "I had plans for them, lovely plans. I could have toppled a monarchy."

Archer knew Emrys could easily have followed them with a triangle of his own, but he remained to face Baleweg. The Old One had been right all along.

Ultimately, Emrys viewed this as a game between the two of them, and only them. Well, not if Archer had anything to say about it. "Leave him be," he demanded.

Emrys barely flicked his hand, but this time when Archer hit the wall he knocked his head and nearly pa.s.sed out. It took several moments just to clear his vision, but he could see well enough to see Emrys send Baleweg, who had been trying to stand, back to his knees.

Archer knew he was weak and would take little of this abuse before it did irreparable harm. He clawed his way back to his feet even as Baleweg once again raised his head.

"This is not the way to solve anything," he rasped.

Emrys laughed and aimed at him again. Baleweg collapsed onto the floor and

lay unmoving as Archer staggered to him. He didn't care what Emrys did to him, he wasn't going to let Baleweg take this abuse uns.h.i.+elded.

Even before he got there, Baleweg was stirring. "Don't," Archer commanded.

He turned to Emrys.

"You think to thwart me?" Emrys shrieked. "I think not!" He drove Archer to his knees right where he stood, and held him trapped there, unable to move, unable to do anything to escape. His muscles felt as if they were turning to stone.

"I don't care what you do to me," Archer ground out. "Just leave him alone."

Emrys smirked. "How touching. Yet I have a hard time believing you've developed any real feelings for this one. Hard to care for one so remote." He abruptly released Archer from his invisible bonds, but his body merely collapsed, unable to bear its own weight. "At least he has the one thing you don't," he rasped.

"And what might that be? A conscience?" Archer tried to stand, but with the simple raising of Emrys's finger he felt a pressure that prevented him from moving. To look at Emrys you wouldn't know he was exerting such power. But the more time he spent torturing Archer, the more time Baleweg was given to recover. Could Archer be cunning enough to last long enough to allow Baleweg to save them? And how could he do it? Emrys was no doubt the stronger of the two by far. Archer had no illusions that they'd get away with opening a triangle right in front of Emrys again. And he'd only follow them anyway.

At the very least, the longer they kept him here, the less he could interfere with Catriona's possible medical intervention... and Talia's recovery in Connecticut.

Archer still didn't understand what had happened between Talia and her connection to both Catriona and himself. But he'd witnessed that time during childbirth when the queen seemed to have no pain and had delivered her child. Had Talia been instrumental in that? And if she'd taken on the queen's pain... dear G.o.d.

Emrys released him once again and turned to Baleweg. Archer felt as if he'd been crushed under a pile of stone, his body weak and sore. Physical force wasn't going to make things happen here and he wasn't going to hold out much longer.

So perhaps a different kind of battle had to be waged. "No," Archer said,

drawing his attention once again and bracing himself for another round. "I wasn't referring to your conscience. What you lack is a heart."

Emrys's wrath faded as his eyes widened in amus.e.m.e.nt. "So sayeth the

mercenary? The royal bounty hunter? What do you know of the heart, Devin Archer?" Emrys circled him as he lay on the floor. "Let me guess. Rutting about with that useless brat of the healer has made you think you understand love? How pathetic."

Archer used what was left of his energy to lunge at him, but it was a weak effort that Emrys stopped easily. It took all of his will to grunt, as his body collapsed again, rather than moan.

"Big heart," Emrys said, making a playful tsking sound. "Small brain. Now you see why I value the size of the latter over the former." He swung around to Baleweg. "Now what to do about your ever so untimely little trick?"

Archer slowly moved toward the wall and used it to bear his weight as he

clawed to his feet.

"You can choose to do nothing," Baleweg said, sounding only marginally stronger. "Move on to other pursuits."

"When I'm having so much fun with this one?" Emrys laughed gaily, all signs of his earlier rage gone. "I don't think so." He paced through the bars, then back again. "I'm not very pleased with your meddling, Old One."

"I could say the same of you."

Emrys ignored him, tapping at his lips. "I just have to decide which I'd rather do. Move forward and thwart the hopes and dreams of an entire kingdom by making sure that wretched little screamer and his dear mummy don't

survive..." He swung his malevolent gaze to Archer. "Or trot off to the quaint Connecticut countryside and deal a little blow to that weak organ you're so fond of touting." He strode off again. "No heart," he muttered. "As if I had a use for one."

Archer knew better than to charge him again, though it took considerable control not to say anything. Instead he looked over to Baleweg. "Are you okay?" He stumbled over to him.

Emrys did nothing to stop him. Archer didn't much care what Emrys thought at this point. Baleweg nodded, but up close Archer could see that his skin was pale and his eyes were bloodshot. "Let me take him on, so you can feed off his rage again."

Baleweg looked to him then and Archer helped him to stand. "Is that what you thought I was doing?"

"What else?"

Baleweg shook his head, but said nothing.

Archer leaned close as Emrys strode through the bars again. "Tell me."

"Yes," Emrys said. "Tell us both, why don't you?"

Baleweg seemed to stand taller. "What gives me strength is exactly what we've been discussing. Heart. Love. I fear I've shut myself off from it for far too long, all for the selfish desire of self-preservation. Although I dandied it up under the guise of seeking knowledge and learning." He shook his head. "I knew that if I let myself love anything, you'd merely come along and destroy it. What I didn't realize was that loving, even briefly, gives me a greater understanding of the world than any number of years of pursuing whatever skills might be found inside my mind." He frowned. "And yet, the one and only time I did allow myself to love, the tragedy didn't simply befall me." He

eyed Emrys. "How pathetic," he said calmly, "that human life is the worthiest subject you can find for your own tiny amus.e.m.e.nts."

"Tiny? You consider human life so trivial?""No, but you do. And that makes you a tiny being. No matter how immense your skill, your power, you will forever be a man stunted by your lack of-"

"Compa.s.sion? Morality?" Emrys rolled his eyes. "Talk about pathetic."

"How could you be expected to master those qualities when you lack the very basis of it all?"

"Are we back to that heart thing again?" He smirked.

Baleweg took a small step forward. "Perhaps if I'd started with you, things

would be different."

"Whatever do you mean?" He took a small step backward.

"Had I allowed my heart to open to you," Baleweg said softly. "It is to my

shame that I allowed jealousy to color my feelings toward you."

"Oh, did you want to be my sweet papa?" Emrys said sarcastically.

"Hardly," Baleweg said, his voice cool.

"Oh, please, tell me how you really feel, old man."

"I was never your father. You are the son of an inst.i.tution, unfortunately for us

both. But I could have been a true mentor. However, I was taken aback at the ease with which you learned, how quickly your mind adapted to any and all sort of stimuli or applied thinking."

"And you think that if you'd given me a few hugs along the way, I'd be a better

man for it now?" He puckered his lower lip. "How touching."

"It could have been. We would have been a team rather than adversaries.

Imagine what we might have discovered."

"That's your problem right there." They both turned in surprise when Archer spoke. "Yeah, mates, I'm still here." And he had had enough of this. He folded his arms, hoping his still-shaky legs wouldn't betray him. "Baleweg, you talk about heart, but your bottom line is that you still wanted Emrys here to be your lab pal, your partner in science and all things mind-expanding." He gestured to a bemused Emrys. "Like he said, a few hugs wouldn't have changed things. You'd have had to have felt a real bond with him." He looked to Emrys. "I'm not sure you can bond with someone who has no emotion save his own ba.n.a.l search for anything that will stave off boredom." He laughed when Emrys's mouth quirked. "Let the little brain continue, if you will. I understand how boredom might be a problem for someone like you. I mean, when a guy figures out how to walk through walls, it's hard to find someone to be an entertaining chap to a mate like that. It's easy to see how you'd think yourself above it all, and how that would lead a bloke like you to start thinking of other people as a game. Little pieces to be played with. "Which leaves the only bloke you'd have a chance in h.e.l.l of even pa.s.sing a decent evening ale with as the guy who can hardly stand being in the same room with you." He shrugged. "Makes perfect sense that you'd want to tweak the chap a bit for his hard-headedness. And, since you stopped seeing people as humans long ago, I guess it makes sense that your attention-getting scams got larger and more elaborate as time went on." He looked to Baleweg. "Of course, your opting for the complete dull life package must have driven this blodger nuts. Gave him nothing to play off."

He turned back to Emrys, whose eyes had narrowed considerably. "Until now," Archer continued. "You find his one weak link, the way to finally get his goat for good." He nodded a salute. "Pretty sharp. But now what? I mean, okay, you got him this time, you hurt him good, with the bonus of restructuring the entire future of a monarchy. I'm guessing that will be entertaining as all h.e.l.l for, oh, what, an hour? A few days?" He shrugged. "So now what? How can you top that? I mean, he's not likely to give you another candidate, is he now?" He glared at them both. "Now you'll really have to go out and find a way to entertain yourself. Because we all know this was never about your having a good time, it was about your proving you could hurt him. And you have. So bingo, mate, you win the prize!" He laughed, knowing well it might be his last. "How does it feel to be the big winner?" He turned from them both, hoping like h.e.l.l he was pulling this off. Yet he meant every word he was saying. "You ask me, you're both pathetic. You both lose. You deserve each other."

There was total silence and Archer waited for Emrys to kill him on the spot. But Emrys did nothing. Hope began to well inside him. He'd spouted off because he'd realized what was really going on here, the two of them in an age-old war of basic family dysfunction. Except they happened to have some pretty serious methods of wounding each other. Maybe, just maybe, his mouthing off was actually going to help.

Baleweg was the one to break the quiet. "In order to inflict pain on someone, or wish to," he said quietly, "one would have to care in the first place." He made a tsking sound. "Never thought of it that way."

"I don't care a whit about you," Emrys said petulantly.

Archer thought he sounded for all the world like an angst-ridden teenager annoyed with a stubborn parent. Probably a somewhat accurate summation. "I never imagined you did. Though now I wonder." Baleweg cleared his throat. "Archer is quite right, however. I never gave you a spot of a chance and suppose I deserve everything I got in return. I only wish you hadn't

involved others in your vendetta against me."

"I wasn't getting back at you!" Emrys suddenly exploded. "I never wanted you in the first place!"

Baleweg very quietly said, "Didn't you, then?" When Emrys didn't move or speak, he moved closer. "I am, as Archer said, the only person who could ever truly understand you. It would make perfect sense."

Emrys abruptly let out a long-suffering sigh. "Well, you've certainly taken all the fun out of this little adventure." He whirled around as if to flounce off, but Baleweg reached out his hand and laid it on Emrys's arm. Blue sparks shot around the room and bounced off the walls, and Archer ducked as they whizzed by.