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  Cards of Love: The Moon

  Sierra Simone

  Copyright © 2018 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Lori Jackson at Lori Jackson Design

  Copyediting: Erica Russikoff at Erica Edits

  Proofing: Michele Ficht

  To Melanie Martin, who gave me my merlinite stone, and to every reader who loved Merlin. Thank you.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  About Merlin and Nimue

  Cards of Love

  Also by Sierra Simone

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Cards of Love is a massive multi-author project, a series of love letters to the mysterious and inspirational world of tarot cards. These can be read in any order, as the only thing the Cards of Love books share is their common inspiration from the world of tarot.

  * * *

  While The Moon is a standalone love story with its own HEA, it takes place near the end of American King, and has many New Camelot spoilers, so it’s recommended you read the New Camelot trilogy before you read this. If you haven’t read the New Camelot trilogy yet, start here with American Queen.

  Prologue

  This dream is not my dream.

  I know this lake, I know the house roosted on its beach, and I even know the woman next to me—and it’s still not my dream.

  I know it because I don’t have dreams.

  I only have memories. On the bad days, visions. But never this—never the blurred delirium of things that are both real and not real.

  The woman wades into the water, her dress swirling around her legs. She turns to face me, and the moon behind her is a ripe bloodfruit suspended in the sky.

  I love her, even though I’ve always known how this could end.

  “Show me,” she says, and her voice is like the lake itself—soft and beckoning and musical. Joyful. “I need you to show me.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “You know I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Then I’ll make you,” she says, still joyfully, and from the water lapping around her waist she pulls out a sword. She will plunge it in my chest and twist until I’m emptied out into the clear water of the lake. She will do it while she’s smiling because she was born smiling and she’ll kill me smiling.

  And still I love her.

  Even though I’ve always known how it could end.

  1

  A hiss in the darkness, then a flame, bright and dancing and unwelcome.

  A match, I think, and then I think, why?

  And then: where am I?

  “You’re awake,” says a voice like water. A voice I love. It still doesn’t help me figure out where I am.

  “Am I?” I ask. “Awake?”

  Like I said earlier, I don’t dream as such, but when I close my eyes, the memories and visions are there, dogging my sleep. And I think maybe—yes, there is also a memory like this. A memory of a dark-haired girl and a cave sparkling with light, the night air heavy with the ecstatic cries we fed it.

  “You are awake, Merlin.” The flame moves, calves another flame, and then is blown out. A candle now glows softly against the face of a woman standing at the end of the bed I’m on.

  Dark brows arch high over clear blue eyes and a long nose curves gracefully down the woman’s oval face, framed by a high forehead and cheekbones, and a beautiful, if narrow, jaw. Her lips are on the thin side, but perfectly sculpted, giving her an expressive, fascinating mouth. Coffee-dark hair hangs in glossy sheets around her face and down her back.

  She’s haunting. Haunting even as a girl, but now even more so as a woman.

  “Nimue,” I say, and for the first time I notice how thirsty I am. I make to sit up—and realize my hands are tied to the bed.

  Nimue sets the candle down on an end table, and it illuminates the space enough to show me that I’m indeed in a room and not in the damp mouth of a cave.

  It means it’s now and not then, which I suppose I should be grateful for.

  After all, I died then.

  A silver key glints from just below the smile of her clavicle, the bottom tip of it pointing to the sweet valley between her breasts I used to know so well. They are small and pert—her body still the lithe dancer’s body she had as a girl—and my flesh responds to the sight of those little handfuls, the memory of them. The fantasy of her dusky nipples dragging along the underside of my aching cock is enough to have my body warming, and that’s when I really become aware that I’m not only tied to the bed, but I’m also dressed in a pair of black boxer briefs and nothing else.

  Well, nothing else except for the padded cuff around my ankle.

  Nimue leans forward to untie my wrist, which leaves the front of her swishy dress gaping forward enough that I can see those nipples now, dark rose and erect.

  I’d tasted them frequently once upon a time.

  Once upon a time, twice.

  In another life, I’d known the feel of her breasts against my lips and tongue better than I’d known almost anything else.

  With one of my wrists freed, Nimue straightens and nods at the other. “You can untie yourself. You’ll find that the chain allows you more than enough length to do everything you need. I’m obviously trusting you not to do anything self-destructive, but should the need arise, I can take away this particular freedom.” She says it cheerfully, almost as if the idea of taking away my freedom delights her.

  The key on her chest glints as she steps back, and I understand that it’s the key that unlocks my cuff—the same cuff that is connected to a ring in the floor by a length of slender chain.

  Anger comes.

  And with it shame.

  And with that, fear.

  I died once this way, and I’d rather not do it again.

  I lunge for my other wrist to untie it, needing to be free, needing to reach for Nimue to kiss her or kill her—but by the time I untie myself, she’s out the door with it shut and locked behind her.

  2

  My mind is a place of many veils.

  Some are thin, gauzy, inviting with their seductive transparency. Through them I can look and infer, I can see partly and guess, I can apprehend enough of the moving shadows and shapes to glean what I need to know.

  Some veils are thick. Layers of heavy embroidered fabric like tapestries on a castle wall. Like the curtains walling off the Holy of Holies—opaque and forbidding. Dividing apart the sacred and profane.

  I suppose it’s natural that I should be on the side of the profane. It has been most of my work, after all, tending after earthly matters. I suppose the legend that grew out of my old life—what some would call my first life—doesn’t have a very earthly reputation. One thinks of wizards as men of magic, of mysteries and the unseen, and not as glorified political advisors.

  Alas.

  Here is what has never been veiled: I once lived another life serving at the side of a king named Arthur. I lied, manipulated, and clawed for peace—and I succeeded, for a time. Then everything transfigured into a fresh hell, and all our work was for nothing.

  I was born as the same soul nearly fifteen hundred years later to a family that recognized my gift. The gift has many names, but the sight is the aptes
t, because at its heart, it lets me see. The past through my memories, the future through my visions. The present through ways that even I don’t fully understand.

  However, this gift is fickle and inconstant; as I said, it veils its secrets from me as often as it reveals them. Which means it is not as simple as knowing everything.

  For example, I didn’t know I was going to die the last time Nimue kidnapped me.

  For example, I don’t know if I’m about to die again.

  The end of this path is hidden from my sight by a curtain thicker than the ancient drapes of the Tabernacle, but as I sit up and look around the room, I think it doesn’t matter.

  Why would it end any better than it did last time?

  I stand up, bracing a hand on the bed as I do, anticipating injury or weakness or something that would account for my abduction, but there’s only the thirst and the cuff around my ankle. I’m unbruised, undamaged, unbroken—which means I was competently and carefully drugged and then transported with care. There is a faint ache in my knees as I fully straighten to my considerable height, but there would be. I’m no longer a young man, you see, although it’s hard to say if I ever was a young man at all. That’s the problem with reincarnation, or at least my reincarnation. All of the others—Arthur and Guinevere and Morgan—were able to start fresh and lead completely new lives without the memories of their last ones. I’m the only one cursed with remembering.

  And from birth, this is the remembering that’s terrified me more than any other.

  Can you imagine? Having memories of your death from the time you were born?

  Nimue didn’t lie. I’m able to go into the adjoining bathroom, which by candlelight appears spacious and modern and equipped with everything hygienically I could desire, save for a razor. I rub an idle hand along my jaw, which is rough with at least a day’s worth of stubble. When I look in the mirror, I can see the silver already salting through, matching the silver that’s begun to fleck my temples.

  No, not a young man anymore. Not that it matters. If here is where I’m going to die anyway.

  I find a light switch—the harsh blear of the overhead bulb after the gentle candlelight forcing a wince out of me—and then decide to clean up. I don’t think I’ve been unconscious for very long, but I’m fastidious about these things.

  Almost feline, Nimue had teased me once, and I find I can’t remember which life that was in. You’re fussier about being clean than a cat.

  I have to tear the boxers in order to get them off my body, on account of the chain, and it’s a waste I don’t appreciate, but it also can’t be avoided. I’m desperate for a shower, which I step inside before the water’s even had a chance to warm up. I tilt my face up to the cold spray and drink until my thirst is slaked, and then I wash myself, enjoying the small, humble pleasure of warm water on my skin.

  It’s funny what being on the edge of death does for one’s perception.

  After I finish, I towel off and brush my teeth. When I return to the bedroom, I find the lights on and see that a tray of food has been brought in—an attractive spread of warm bread and slabs of butter and steaming soup. And amusingly enough, there’s now a kilt laid out on the bed, thus solving the problem of how to clothe myself with the cuff and chain on my ankle.

  I dress, eat, prod at the ankle cuff. It’s made from reinforced neoprene—impervious to water and other fluids, but still strong enough that I can’t pry or tear it off. The chain and eyebolt in the floor are equally strong.

  I have to admire Nimue for her planning. It would take an act of violence for me to escape, and she knows me well enough to know I prefer subtler methods than violence in order to exert my will. I have to wonder though, if she’s planned any violence toward me.

  Given our history—the history only I know and remember, by the way, and which she’s not aware of—I should feel undiluted terror at the thought of her wielding violence. And I am afraid, I really am.

  I’m also hard, and my heart is beating so fast with anticipation that the clamor of it seems to fill the room.

  Some time later, after I’ve finished eating and thoroughly explored the bedroom itself—there’s a dresser full of kilts and several shelves worth of books—the door opens. I can’t reach any closer than four or five feet away from it with the chain, but Nimue still pauses at the threshold before she comes in. In the glow of real light now, she’s painfully beautiful, and my body clenches remembering how she felt against me all those years ago. Nearly a quarter of a century ago.

  Fifteen centuries ago.

  How strange to be the only person to remember such joy and pain. So much of both that fate nailed our souls together. And so much love that the earth shook with it.

  After appraising me for a moment with her cerulean gaze, Nimue apparently decides it’s safe enough for her to come inside the room, which she does without shutting the door. It makes me think that wherever we are, we’re the only ones in this house, which pleases me. After almost twenty-three years, the thrill of being alone with her is a frantic one. I drink in everything about her as she comes closer. Her sky-blue eyes and silky hair. Her long neck and slender hands. The lavender and botanical scent around her, as if she’s just come from a garden.

  She perches on the bed, across from where I sit at the small desk with my empty tray. The light catches on a bracelet on her wrist, and I feel its cool power even from this distance.

  I also feel its irony. I smile. “Merlinite?”

  Nimue glances down at the stones comprising the bracelet: black and white and gray. Stones named after me.

  “It seemed fitting.”

  “Where are we, Nimue?”

  She inclines her head toward a window set deep into the wall. “Have you looked outside?”

  “I have. Nothing but darkness and wind. Not unusual for December anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.”

  “You’re home, Merlin. We’re on Bardsey.”

  Bardsey.

  We called it Ynys Enlli in my first life. The Isle in the Currents—a slope of apple-tree dotted green within arm’s reach of the Welsh coast. Kings and saints are buried in this ground; holy men and women prayed and danced here long before Jesus’s name ever reached our shores.

  I too prayed and danced here.

  I too was buried.

  The fear sounds a discordant note inside my mind again.

  “Why? Why have you brought me here?”

  Nimue meets my stare with a serenity that is very close to satisfaction. I remember in our first life that she was a daughter of a queen, that she herself would go on to become the queen of Avalon. The Lady of the Lake.

  “I think,” says my beautiful, amused captor, “that you have already guessed why I brought you here.”

  3

  I do not reveal the truth of my life lightly, but standing at the precipice of my death makes me reckless.

  “You know,” I state. “You know what I am now.”

  She stands up and does something that’s almost pacing, but with her light, dancer’s step, it’s more like floating. “Yes.”

  “And what you are? And Vivienne? And Morgan?”

  “And Embry and Lyr,” she adds. “All of us.”

  I think about this. There’s only one other person who knows the truth, and he’s currently recovering from a stab wound in the safest place I could find for him.

  Is it possible that she could have remembered? All on her own?

  The idea is almost exciting. It’s a lonely life to be the keeper of so many secrets and an impossibly heavy burden to bear. I gaze at her while she paces, willing myself to perceive if she’s come into her own sight, but it is veiled from me, as are so many other things.

  I sigh.

  “It was a sense,” she says suddenly, stopping and looking at me. “It was this faint sense that there was more. It started years ago, when we first met, and it got stronger and stronger, until one day I just knew that it was something beyond the ordinary. And the more I watched, the
more I saw your hand in our lives. Sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel, but always with purpose. With foresight.” She gives a little laugh. “It was right in front of me all along. Merlin.” She says my name as she shakes her head, as if she can’t believe how long it took her to put it all together.

  “I’m surprised you let yourself believe it,” I say, but I’m not really. Nimue has always been at the threshold of magic—suspended just on the other side of her own veil—and had she been born in a less rational age, she would have found her sight years earlier. Indeed, she was barely a woman when she kidnapped me the first time and held hostage my power and my life. She got both, in the end.

  “I want what you have,” she says simply.

  “You could have just asked.”

  She looks at me. “I’ve asked you only once for something for myself. It hurt enough the first time.”

  Stay. Don’t hurt me like this.

  I love you.

  I am very, very still as the echoes of her pleas ripple through me.

  “Anyway, aside from not being a masochist, I was also certain you’d say no. You’ve kept this a secret from everyone, haven’t you? I’ve dropped hints around Vivienne and Morgan and even Embry…and nothing. No one knows.”

  “Ash knows,” I admit. “He needed to before—”

  “—he died,” Nimue finishes for me, and real pain crosses her face. Pain for her nephew Embry and her adopted son Lyr, who think Ash is dead.

  I don’t correct her. Not yet.

  “And what about Lyr? You left him alone while you decided to dabble in felony?”