Laura and Dani turned to find her leaning against the doorway, a sad smile upon her lips.
“I nearly lost him once. I need to be with him.”
Dani dropped her arms and quickly walked to Tara to put an arm around her in comfort. “Ramsey was most explicit in his instructions. Hell, all of them were. We’re to stay here.”
“Our magic can help,” Tara raged.
Laura ran her hand along the back of the bridle-colored leather Chesterfield couch, her finger pausing at each tufted section. “Neither of you have seen what a selmyr can do.”
Ronnie walked into the room and stopped, her face lined with anxiety. “No, but I have. They move so fast.”
“As quick as the wind,” Laura added.
Ronnie nodded. “And vicious. They were on Arran before he knew what happened. I could only stand there helpless as they bit him and drank his blood like a damned vampire.”
“Charon wouldn’t let me see my mother and what they did to her.” Laura sank onto the rounded arm of the couch and wrapped her arms about herself. “By the way he and the Dragon Kings acted, I suspect the scene would’ve been a grisly one.”
“It’s good you didn’t see it, then,” Ronnie said. “Trust me, Laura, it’s something I’ll never get out of my head. Nor how they then turned to me. It was only Arran’s quick thinking that got me out of there alive.”
Dani blew out a harsh breath. “There has to be something we can do. It’s not right that we’re not beside our men.”
“No,” Laura said with a shake of her head. “The Kings made it clear. The selmyr feed on magic. If we go out there and try to use our magic, they’ll come straight to us. The more magic we use, the more they’ll feed. The Kings have been able to keep them at bay, but the Warriors are putting themselves in danger just to get a chance at killing Jason.”
Tara looked down at her nails and scraped a bit of peeling gunmetal blue polish off. “Ramsey would have my ass if I were to leave the mansion.”
There was something in her voice that caught Laura’s attention. The way the other women looked at her with grins pulling at their lips told Laura something was definitely going on.
“Is Larena guarding us?” Ronnie asked.
Laura frowned as she recalled briefly meeting the beautiful female Warrior an hour before. “She left with the others. I heard something about them needing her invisibility.”
“That’s right,” Tara said as she dropped her hands. “They couldn’t get ahold of either Phelan or Malcolm, so they took Larena.”
“Which means no one is guarding us,” Dani said.
Laura looked over her shoulder as she heard a roar of a dragon. Charon was out there, waiting to ambush Jason while trying to keep away from the selmyr.
It was an impossible task the Warriors had given themselves. Charon wouldn’t have put the plan in to motion if he wasn’t sure they could gain the advantage, but it was a dangerous chance they took.
“I can’t sit here waiting to know if Ramsey is coming back to me,” Tara said.
Dani caught Laura’s eye. “Ian is my world. If he’s in trouble, I want to be there for him.
“And if seeing you puts him in harm’s way because you’ve taken his mind off the battle?” Laura asked.
Ronnie smiled sadly. “It’s obvious you care for Charon, Laura, but maybe it’s because you haven’t seen how very close to death he’s come.”
“But I have,” she argued. “He faced Jason and his group alone for me. I watched as magic was used against him and Jason put the drough blood in Charon’s wounds. I watched Charon die. Don’t tell me I don’t know what it feels like.”
Dani took Laura’s hands and turned her to look into her eyes. “We know all of that. It’s just … loving a Warrior is maddening, frustrating, and frightening. They’re protective of the ones they care about, and sometimes that doesn’t allow them to see we can help.”
Laura knew they meant that in order to feel as they did, she had to love Charon, and because she didn’t feel as they did, she obviously didn’t love him.
How very wrong they were.
She loved him so much, it hurt. To know he was out there putting his life on the line once more made her want to scream. But she also knew he needed to be focused to carry out his intricate plan.
He couldn’t do that with her there. Regardless of how much she thought she could help or wanted to be by his side.
Instead of arguing with the Druids, Laura pulled her hands out of Dani’s grasp and faced the window once more. The silence that followed was drowned out only by the storm.