Savannah's pulse kicked as she entered and softly closed the door behind her. The beautiful old blade--and the mysterious, golden-haired warrior who'd once used it with lethal skill--had been haunting her thoughts all this time. She wanted to know more. Needed to know more, with a compulsion too strong to resist.
She tried to ignore the little pang of guilt that stabbed her as she bypassed the bin of clean curator's gloves and sank down, bare-handed, in front of the container that held the sword.
She lifted the lid of the long box, gently laying it open. The length of polished steel gleamed. Savannah hadn't had the chance to really look at its craftsmanship yesterday, after it had fallen so unexpectedly into her hands.
She hadn't noticed then how the tooled steel grip was engraved with the image of a bird of prey swooping in for a brutal attack, its cruel beak open in a scream. Nor had she paid attention to the blade's gemstone pommel, a blood-red ruby caged by grotesque metal talons. A cold shiver ran up her arms as she studied the weapon now.
This was no hero's sword.
And still, she couldn't resist the need to know more about the man she'd watched wield it in her glimpse from before.
Savannah flexed her fingers, then gently rested them on the blade.
The vision leapt into her mind even faster than the first time.
Except this was a different peek at the weapon's past. Something unexpected, but equally intriguing in a different way.
A pair of young boys--tow-headed, identical twins--played with the sword in a torchlit stable. They could be no more than ten years old, both dressed like little seventeenth-century lords in white linen shirts, riding boots and dark blue breeches that gathered at the knee. They were laughing, taking turns with the sword, stabbing and lunging at a bale of straw, pretending to slay imaginary beasts.
Until something outside the stable startled them.
Fear filled their young faces. Their eyes went to each other, dread-filled, panicked. One of them opened his mouth in a silent scream--just as the torch on the wall of the stable went out.
Savannah recoiled from the blade. She let go of it, shaking, gripped with a marrow-deep terror for these two children. What happened to them?
She couldn't walk away. Not now.
Not until she knew.
Her fingers trembled as she brought them back over the blade again. She set her hands down on the cold steel, and waited. Though not for long.
The window to the past opened up to her like a dragon's maw, dark and jagged, an abyss licked with fire.
The stable was ablaze. Flames climbed the stalls and rafters, devouring everything in their path. Blood bathed the rough timber posts and the bale of yellow straw. So much blood. It was everywhere.
And the boys...
The pair of them lay unmoving on the floor of the stable. Their bodies were savaged, broken. Barely recognizable as the beautiful children who'd seemed so joyous and carefree. So alive.
Savannah's heart felt trapped in a vise, cold and constricted, as this awful glimpse played out before her. She wanted to look away. She didn't want to see the terrible remains of the once-beautiful, innocent twin boys.
Ah, God. The horror of it choked her.
Someone had killed those precious boys, slaughtered them.
No, not someone, she realized in that next instant.
Some thing.
The cloaked figure that held the sword now was built like a man--an immense, broad-shouldered wall of a man. But from within the gloom of a heavy wool hood, glowing amber eyes burned like coals set into a monstrous, inhuman face. He wasn't alone. Two others like him, dressed similarly in hooded, heavy cloaks, stood with him, parties to the carnage. She couldn't make out their features for all the shadows and the flickering, low light of the flames twisting up the walls and support beams of the stable.
Not human, her mind insisted. But if not human, then what?
Savannah tried to get a better look as the image of the boys' attackers began to waver and dissolve.
No. Look at me, damn you.
Let me see you.
But the glimpse started splintering, visual shards that broke into smaller pieces, turning this way and that. Slipping out of her grasp. Distorting what she saw.
It had to be a trick of her unsteady hold on her gift.
Because what she was seeing from this vision of the past couldn't possibly be real.
From within the deep hood of the one now holding the sword, the pair of glowing eyes blazed bright amber. And in the instant before the image vanished completely, Savannah would have sworn on her own life that she saw the bone-white glint of razor-sharp teeth.
Fangs.
What the...?
A hand came down on her shoulder. Savannah shrieked, nearly jumping out of her skin.
"Take it easy!" Rachel laughed as Savannah swung her head around. "Don't have a damn heart attack. It's just me. Jeez, you look like you just saw a ghost."
Savannah's pulse was hammering hard, her breath all but gone. She had no voice to answer her roommate, could only stare up at her mutely. Rachel's gaze went to the sword. "What are you doing in here by yourself? Where did that come from?"
Savannah cleared her throat, now that her heart had finally vacated the area. She pulled her hands away from the blade, hiding them so Rachel wouldn't see how they shook. "I...I found it yesterday."
"Is that a ruby in the handle of that thing?"
Savannah shrugged. "I think so."
"Really? Far out!" She leaned in for a better look. "Let me see it for a second."
Savannah almost warned her friend to be careful, that she wouldn't want to see what Savannah had just witnessed. But that gift--a curse, today--belonged solely to her.
Savannah watched as Rachel picked up the blade and admired it. Nothing happened to the girl. She had no inkling of the horrific past secreted in the centuries-old weapon.